533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Episode 533: Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Release Date: March 27, 2025

In Episode 533 of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson engages in a deep and enlightening conversation with Dr. Baland Jalal, a renowned neuroscientist and author at Harvard University. The discussion delves into the intricate workings of the human brain, exploring topics such as neuroplasticity, sleep paralysis, the nature of dreams, and the intersection of neuroscience with cultural and philosophical constructs. This comprehensive summary captures the essence of their dialogue, highlighting key insights, notable quotes, and the overarching themes that emerged.

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1. Introduction to Dr. Baland Jalal and His Work

[00:51]
Jordan Peterson introduces Dr. Balan Jalal, emphasizing his expertise in sleep paralysis, dreams, and neuroscience. Dr. Jalal's contributions to the field and his role in developing the Neuroscience course at Peterson Academy set the stage for the ensuing discussion.

Notable Quote:
"What we do to understand each other is... simulate you on my own neural architecture and then draw the appropriate inferences from that."
— Jordan Peterson [13:48]

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2. Overview of Dr. Jalal’s Introduction to Neuroscience Course

[02:05 - 04:15]
Dr. Jalal discusses his experience filming the Introduction to Neuroscience course for Peterson Academy. He highlights the course's comprehensive nature, blending fundamental neuroanatomy with abstract concepts like human nature and the genesis of art.

Key Points:

• Course Structure: Eight-hour curriculum covering basic to advanced neuroscience topics.
• Teaching Philosophy: Emphasis on understanding brain function within a contextual and functional framework, avoiding rote memorization of anatomical names.
• Professional Experience: Positive filming experience in Miami, highlighting the supportive team environment.

Notable Quote:
"I try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep. I used to when I biopsychology neuroscience course that was incredibly boring."
— Dr. Baland Jalal [04:00]

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3. Neuroanatomy and Brain Function

[08:30 - 19:22]
The conversation transitions into a detailed exploration of neuroanatomy, focusing on specific brain regions and their functions.

Key Topics:

• Temporal Parietal Junction (TPJ):
  [09:05 - 19:22]
  Dr. Jalal explains the TPJ’s role in integrating sensory modalities and distinguishing the self from others. He elaborates on experiments like the Rubber Hand Illusion, demonstrating the brain's malleability in body ownership perception.

• Rubber Hand Illusion Experiment:
  [10:39 - 16:09]
  Detailed description of how synchronized stroking of a hidden real hand and a visible fake hand can create the illusion that the fake hand is part of one's body. This phenomenon underscores the brain's dynamic nature in self-perception.

Notable Quotes:
"We look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object."
— Dr. Baland Jalal [00:00]

"The temporal parietal junction is a hub for sensory integration and is involved in the self-other distinction."
— Dr. Baland Jalal [18:06]

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4. Dreams, Nightmares, and Sleep Paralysis

[26:12 - 102:24]
A substantial portion of the podcast is dedicated to understanding the neuroscience behind dreams and nightmares, particularly focusing on REM sleep and sleep paralysis.

Key Insights:

• REM Sleep Dynamics:
  [40:18 - 44:42]
  Dr. Jalal describes REM sleep as a state where the brain is active, especially the limbic system, while the body remains paralyzed. This combination facilitates the exploration of emotions and scenarios without physical risk.

• Emotional and Cognitive Processing During Sleep:
  [45:01 - 56:03]
  The discussion covers how dreams serve as simulations for real-life scenarios, aiding in emotional regulation and problem-solving. The role of the hippocampus and amygdala in processing memories and emotions during dreams is highlighted.

• Cultural Influences on Dream Content:
  [71:01 - 83:37]
  Dr. Jalal shares insights from research showing that cultural narratives significantly shape the content of nightmares. For instance, individuals in Egypt and Italy report more vivid and culturally specific monsters compared to those in Denmark, where sleep paralysis is often dismissed as purely physiological.

• Therapeutic Approaches to Sleep Paralysis:
  [88:24 - 89:56]
  Introduction of a four-step therapy method developed by Dr. Jalal to mitigate sleep paralysis experiences, focusing on cognitive reappraisal, emotional distancing, positive emotional focus, and mindfulness detachment.

Notable Quotes:
"Sleep paralysis is a terrifying experience. You have this REM paralysis... and then you look around and I had one of these experiences."
— Dr. Baland Jalal [66:50]

"Dreams are a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly... undertaken safely because you could explore different perceptual configurations in the safety of dreams."
— Jordan Peterson [00:14]

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5. Neuroplasticity and Behavioral Adaptation

[05:08 - 36:25]
The conversation delves into the brain's neuroplasticity—its ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections—and how this underpins behavioral adaptation and learning.

Key Topics:

• Neuroplasticity in Learning:
  [05:36 - 18:10]
  Dr. Jalal emphasizes the brain’s adaptability, discussing how learning processes involve integrating new information into existing neural networks, allowing for both incremental and profound changes in behavior and perception.

• Hemispheric Lateralization:
  [31:13 - 36:25]
  Exploration of the distinct functions of the left and right hemispheres. The left is associated with positive emotions and logical processing, while the right deals with negative emotions and novelty detection. This lateralization explains varying responses to stress, learning, and adaptation.

Notable Quotes:
"The brain is something extremely fluid and dynamic, not fixed."
— Dr. Baland Jalal [09:05]

"The right hemisphere is more emotional, big picture oriented... whereas the left is involved in positive emotion and logical processing."
— Jordan Peterson [32:30]

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6. Archetypal Psychology and the Hero’s Journey

[36:09 - 96:48]
Peterson and Dr. Jalal explore the intersection of neuroscience with archetypal psychology, discussing how dreams and mythical narratives reflect underlying neural processes.

Key Insights:

• Dreams as Archetypal Simulations:
  [36:25 - 57:33]
  The discussion posits that dreams allow individuals to engage with archetypal figures and scenarios, facilitating personal growth and the reconciliation of internal conflicts. This aligns with Carl Jung's ideas on dreams as a space for exploring anomalies safely.

• Prophetic Dreams and Cultural Narratives:
  [57:16 - 84:00]
  Examination of how cultural narratives shape prophetic dreams and the manifestation of mythical figures in dreams. The role of memes and cultural storytelling in influencing dream content is emphasized.

• Therapeutic Implications:
  [75:03 - 96:48]
  The application of dream analysis in therapy to address fears, traumas, and behavioral patterns. Techniques such as confronting and redefining the “monsters” in dreams are discussed as methods to alleviate recurring nightmares and PTSD symptoms.

Notable Quotes:
"An archetype in some ways bridges the gap between the personal and the cosmic."
— Jordan Peterson [62:31]

"Dreams tap into circuitry that's more mystical than the circuitry that we normally... relates to emotional updating."
— Dr. Baland Jalal [55:14]

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7. The Modern University System and Neuroscience Education

[105:22 - 107:23]
In the concluding segment, Dr. Jalal and Peterson briefly touch upon the state of modern universities, particularly Harvard’s Department of Psychology, and the importance of integrating neuroscience education with cultural and philosophical understanding.

Key Points:

• Integration of Disciplines:
  Emphasizing the importance of bridging scientific research with philosophical inquiry to foster a holistic understanding of human behavior and cognition.

• Peterson Academy’s Role:
  Highlighting the offerings of Peterson Academy in providing courses that intersect neuroscience with broader cultural and ethical discussions, aiming to cultivate well-rounded thinkers.

Notable Quote:
"Join us on the Daily Wire side... we're putting a tremendous amount together right now on the scientific and cultural front in relationship to the overlap between brain function, neurochemistry, physiology and behavior."
— Jordan Peterson [105:22]

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Conclusion

Episode 533 offers a profound exploration of the human brain's complexities, particularly focusing on how our neurological processes underpin experiences like dreams and nightmares. Dr. Baland Jalal provides valuable insights into the dynamic nature of the brain, the impact of cultural narratives on our subconscious, and innovative therapeutic approaches to sleep paralysis. Through their dialogue, Peterson and Dr. Jalal illuminate the intricate dance between our biological makeup and the cultural constructs that shape our perceptions and behaviors.

Final Notable Quote:
"With Peterson Academy, you're getting much deeper insights into, well, the nature of the problems that you might encounter and also into the nature of their... the universe of potentially viable solutions."
— Jordan Peterson [105:22]

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This episode serves as a compelling intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and cultural studies, offering listeners a richer understanding of the mechanisms behind dreams, the formation of the self, and the profound ways in which our brains navigate and interpret the world around us.

Transcript

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object. So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self. The feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly. This is very weird too, everyone.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So you have this REM paralysis. Obviously, you're paralyzed from head to toe. During REM sleep, you're dreaming away. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?

[Jordan Peterson]

Something was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak. And I knew I had to wake myself up. Like, I tried to throw myself off the bed sometimes I could yell to my wife, she'd have to come and shake me, and then I'd wake up.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So I was sleeping in my room, and then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me until it was on my chest, strangling me.

[Jordan Peterson]

What did the monster look like?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Well, I'll tell you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Dr. Balan Jalal. He's a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a visiting researcher at Cambridge University Medical School. He's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other such publications. The Telegraph and the BBC described him as one of the world's leading experts on sleep paralysis and. And the terrors and opportunities of dream, fantasy and adaptation that accompany that condition. What did we discuss? Dr. Jalal's intro to Neuroscience course at Peterson Academy. The relationship between neuroanatomy, brain function, perception, emotion and behavior. The function of the dream state, the role of culture and conception in dealing with emotion, particularly fear, and the changing landscape of the modern university. It's quite a trip. Join us. Well, thanks for coming in.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Well, thank you, Jordan. Dr. Peterson, love to be here.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let's talk about Peterson Academy first. We just released a course of yours, Introduction to Neuroscience. So I'd like to know. I think it would be useful to talk a little bit about the course, but I'd also like to know about your experience doing the filming and your reflections on the process and the project itself.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, it was a lovely process. Let me start there. So I flew in to Miami. Great reception overall. Nice people around. Ben, Nancy, Vincent, everybody on the team. Lovely. The shooting was great. So, yeah, top professional, really like that. And then the course itself, it's a Eight hour course on the brain and sort of going through initially starting from sort of the basics of the brain, the different structures of the brain, then going all the way to sort of higher abstract things like human nature and sort of the nature of how art emanates in the brain and things like that. So it kind of has the nitty gritty of a introductory neuroscience course, but then also taking in some more sort of poetic aspects of the brain. So it's kind of all that mix.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So it's an approach to the cultural from the bottom up, from the biological up. Right, right, right. How much anatomy, functional anatomy and so forth is in the course?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

I make sure that the basics are there. So for a basics neuroscience course as an introduction, you gotta have the basics there. All the brain structures, the cortex, the brainstem, all the different names. But I try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep. I used to when I biopsychology neuroscience course that was incredibly boring. I had all these names thrown at me and it was.

[Jordan Peterson]

And you just had to force memorize them.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It made no sense.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So what's the cerebellum doing? You know, what's this doing? You just had all these names, you had to memorize them and that was it. But I really make sure to describe the function and have an overall context for each.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I found like, I found that I got extremely interested in neuroanatomy even at a detailed level when I was reading scientists who associated the area with the function.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's very important.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, it was also extremely useful philosophically in one of the advantages if you're a conceptual thinker to studying neuroanatomy and neurobiology is that it puts limits on what philosophical propositions are plausible and possible.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

I really like that. So like it's. It's like you have to play a game with two different sets of rules then. Right. It has to make sense conceptually. So that would be philosophically. But then it can't violate the principles of neuroanatomy and neuroscience that are already established. It's a very good way of initial triangulation.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah. The way that I like to do is, is that I know that in this course I'll cover this. Right. But then I kind of. And I kind of see and explore how I can sort of weave this into a sort of a n in a story and then kind of put things in as we go along. And I feel like this makes sense to put this aspect here and put that aspect here. So it doesn't come in this sort of very ABC kind of dry way. So that's my approach and see how I can let things unfold in a natural way.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so you said that when you went to do the recording that the process worked well.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Very well.

[Jordan Peterson]

What about it worked well?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

I was very impressed. So I was very impressed by the whole. The whole process, the way things were arranged. Obviously, we were put in a very nice hotel and we felt pampered, honestly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Good.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's a very. You feel pampered. You feel everything is just on point and. Yeah. And then the shooting itself, people around you, they take care of you, bring you food, they, you know, it's just. It's just very. You feel pampered. So it's great. So.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, yeah. Well, you know, we. I think we realized the importance of that, really, When I did the first Exodus seminar for the Daily Wire, we brought nine thinkers in, and we spent a fair bit of time on the hospitality side. And one of the things I realized, and I knew this in part from working at a university, was that a lot of the professors that we pulled in for that seminar, I wouldn't say they're exactly well treated at their institutions. And that's foolish, because I invited the people who I did invite to the Exodus seminar because I thought they were great and I wanted to hear what they had to say.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And there's every reason to make that obvious in every. In every detail of treatment.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so, you know, one of the things I offer people who we offer at Peterson Academy, people who come and lecture, because people ask me, well, you know, what lecture do you need? And that's not the right approach. My sense is, is that we. I find people whose views I want to know and share, and then I want them to do what they think would be best, because I wouldn't bloody well invite them if I didn't think they knew what they were doing.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And I don't want to put constraints on them. And then if we find the right people, we can sort out the curriculum rather than sorting out the curriculum and then forcing the participants, the professors into it. That makes no sense at all to me.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely. And that was my approach, too. Right. So I would talk about my own research. What are some of the nicest experiments that I. That I love about my work, and sort of weave into that, to that neuroscience curriculum in that way. Right. So we talk about, for example, ocd. And then you take, maybe you might mention the orbitofrontal cortex, which is overactive in ocd. What's the function of the orbitofrontal cortex, the structure in the brain, or the striatum and the basal ganglia in the context of Parkinson's. But again, taking in some of some work that's very. Some experiments that are fascinating. So it's kind of taking that natural approach that sort of my own research or works of colleagues, and just weaving it in a more natural way, I think.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so I'm curious. Everybody who studies the brain in some depth, Right. Has their own approach. It's like exploring a continent, let's say. They have their own approach. And so when you're. When you lay out the architecture of the brain, let's say the basic anatomy. Tell me how you do that. I would like to hear how you conceptualize the brain. So do that, if you would.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think the way that I. My view of the brain was inspired by my mentor, V. S. Ramachandran.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, yeah, right. You worked with Rama. Yes. He's a stunningly effective public speaker.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

He's extremely, stunningly effective. Charismatic. And when I went to California in my early days as an undergraduate, I ended up in his course. So I took his course. So let me take you.

[Jordan Peterson]

When was that?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

That was in 2010. 11. Around 11. 2011. So I started there, became a research scholar in his lab eventually, and I think becoming very good friends with him, ending up in his laboratory, going on long walks on the beach all the time, and just spending time with him and getting his view on the brain and sort of adapting that as my own view was something that influenced me and his approach, obviously. And the approach that I've adopted is one where you sort of look at the brain holistically. You acknowledge that the brain is hyperplastic. So there's all these modules that are highly dynamic, and the brain is extremely malleable. And so we look at the brain as something that extremely. As a fluid process that's malleable and not fixed and said in its own ways. It has this fluidity to it. That's kind of my view of the brain overall, that it's a dynamic object. But beyond that, let me also explain some of our experiments. The way that we approach science and probing the human brain is through experiments where we look at conceptual experiments in neuroscience. For example, there's the rubber hand illusion. You probably know that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Lay it out and explain it to people.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So the rubber hand illusion is this illusion where you have a chap. He puts his hand right here, and then you have his right hand underneath a Table Me, Balan, the experimenter, will stroke and tap the hand of the experimental subject. I'll go stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap, tap, stroke, stroke underneath the table. And I'll stroke and tap the table in front of Joe, the subject. I'll go tap, tap, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, tap, tap. And about two minutes of me doing this, he will feel touch sensations arising from the table. And I don't mean this in kind of an abstract metaphorical sense, I mean this literally. He will have touch sensations, somatosensory regions of his brain becoming active from this process.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, that's a very strange element of human perception. Right. It must be strongly associated not only with our ability to map sensation onto our bodies.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

But also with our ability to use tools. So I know, for example, we're very good at it. Like, if I pick up a screwdriver, it takes me virtually no time to use the tip of the screwdriver in a manner that very much approximates the tip of my finger. Right, right. And then when we go in a car, essentially what we're doing, especially once we're expert drivers, is that we expand the dimensions of our kinesthetic perception, or bodily perception, to include the car. Right. So you're feeling with the tires, you're feeling with the brake. Right. And that's. Well, part of my understanding of that is that that's very tightly associated with our tool using. Tool using proclivity. Because a tool is a bodily extension.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's an embodiment. Right. So in two minutes, I turn this subject into a table. Right. And then more than that, if I, me, Baland, was to take a hammer and go like this on the table, he'll feel pain sensations. Right. So the pain regions of his brain will light up. If I was to look in his scanner and look at the neurons there. So it shows you that in that way you can take something, you can, first of all, you can create a sensation of this table belonging to you, but then being part of you, big part of you. Right. Becomes embodied part of you. But then beyond that, you afflict pain now to the person, to the table, in fact. And then you will feel.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, that would all. Well, that would also be part of social perception, I presume. I read a paper not, not long ago, if I remember the details carefully, they were looking at the difference either. I think it was. I think the dimension was agreeableness. Right. But it might have been psychopathy.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Which would be the opposite of agreeableness. Let's say that more Agreeable people. So less psychopathic people feel, have more pain activation to the perception of other people's pain.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you could imagine that part of the utility in being able to morph your pain sensitivity even to represent something objective, like a table.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's also a variant of my ability to map my own body, let's say, onto your body. So that the empathy that I feel for you isn't conceptual.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's a. And I've really been thinking about this in terms of how we understand each other, because it looks to me like what we do to understand each other is. I notice what your aim is partly by watching your eyes. I infer your aim. Once I infer your aim, I can inhabit your perceptual space, because if I know your aim, I know the objects that surround you, but I also know how your emotions are configured because they're configured in relationship to the aim. If I can adopt that aim, then I can embody those emotions, perceptions. I can read off that embodiment. And then I. That's. So the understanding is actually my simulating you on my own neural architecture and then drawing the appropriate inferences from that. And it looks to me like children probably develop that ability. Some of it's nascent, I would say. Some of it's there.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's very interesting. So we actually, we were the first group to show that people with ocd, who has very fixed sense of self. Right. So they wash their hands all the time, washing and scrubbing. When they do this illusion, they have a much more sensitivity to it. To the extent that there's a control condition for this illusion where you. So the. So the illusion. For the illusion to occur, you have to stroke and tap, tap, tap, stroke and stroke and tap in a synchronized manner. That's important. Right. So that's key.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So you're linking the visual perception to the kinesthetic perception.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely. Absolutely right. But in people with O. So the control for this, by the way, is if you do it in a random sequence, like tap, tap, stroke, stroke, but everything is just random. Right. And you do, again, the touching and stroking is random, then the illusion will not occur or it will be slightly. So you'll have a slight illusion there, or most of the time, no illusion. So this is the key control for the illusion.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So let's just walk through this. So everybody understands clearly. So you have someone with their arm on a table, let's say their left arm. Their right arm is under the table.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So they can no longer see it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now what you're doing then is you're. You're interacting with their hidden arm physically.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Physically.

[Jordan Peterson]

But they can't see that. They can feel it. At the same time you interact with the table.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Where they can see it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you're sinking their visual perception with their kinesthetic perception.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

But it's not. But their kin is. Or their visual perception isn't focused on their own hand.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now they start to react to the table like it's a hand.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Correct.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, now you're extending this to the OCD situation.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so elaborate on that.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely. And I just. I just want to. Just one point here is that I mentioned a table. So the original experiment was done with a rubber hand.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

But I'm using table because it's more. It illustrates the experiment better. And you can have a table as well.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. People would start responding to a rubber hand as if it was their own.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So instead of a table, you would just have a rubber hand that looks like your own hand, and then you stroke and tap the rubber hand right.

[Jordan Peterson]

In front of the person with their other hand hidden.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Correct.

[Jordan Peterson]

They start to respond to the rubber hand as if it's theirs.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then flinch. If there's a threat, they flinch.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

There's a threat to it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Okay. Okay.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that can be extended to something as inanimate as a table.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Correct.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Or in fact. In fact, you can do it in era. So you do know Rich Magnelli. He's. Yes, yes, yes. A common friend. Right. Over at Harvard. Right. So one day, Magnelli and I did it in the air. So I did on. On Rich. Call him Rich. So stroke, stroke, tap, tap. In the air. And he felt the rubber like his own hand was floating in the air. It was kind of spooky.

[Jordan Peterson]

Wow.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

He went, my God, What's. What's happening? I feel my. I feel my hand is floating in the air.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. You know, that must also be associated with a really profound. With our sense of what constitutes ownership.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, because the idea that something is yours or that something is mine, there's no reason to assume that that isn't an extension of something like embodiment. It's certainly the case that, you know, if people's cars are attacked, let's say, or kicked.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

They respond to that very much as if it's a bodily assault. Right. And I. So it. It. It begs the question how much of our embodied concept of ownership, like that concept on which we Platform. The philosophical and philosophy. Philosophy and conception of Ownership is actually the underlying scaffold for that is the. Our ability to extend our embodiment to even inanimate objects.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because then they start to become part of us.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right, right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And part of what you're pointing to with your emphasis on brain plasticity, and that is that identity itself, even in terms of perception and pain sensitivity, is fluid and dynamic to a degree that you wouldn't. You wouldn't immediately.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely. And I do want to differentiate between plasticity and then the dynamic nature of the function and of the modules of the brain. So, for example, you have. In terms of the rubber hand illusion, it shows that, for example, we have a structure called the TPJ right here. Temporal parietal junction is a fancy name for that. That structure is important for taking all the sensory modalities. Touch, hearing, feeling. Right. So smelling and sort of unifying that into a whole.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that's a cortical area.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's a cortical area.

[Jordan Peterson]

Where is it located?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's called the tpj. So it's temporoparietal junction. So it's kind of strategically located between the different sort of occipital somatosensory region and the.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So is it a religion that overlaps physiologically between the different sensory integration systems?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Exactly. It's like a crossroad, so to speak.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Is it the same area that's used for silent reading?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Silent reading? I'm not sure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, well, the reason I'm asking about that, from what I remember, is that the region that we use for silent reading is the space is the overlap between the auditory and visual cortex, which makes perfect sense. Right. Because we're basically, when we read silently, we're using our eyes as ears. Right, right, right, right. And those overlapping areas. Okay, so this area is a place between many of this, between a variety of the different sensory.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Between different sensory integration. It's a hub for integration. And interestingly, actually, it's also involved in the self other distinction. So we have a distinction of the land here, Dr. Peterson over there, and then that's why we can't tickle ourselves. That's why we can't tickle ourselves. Right. But that part of the brain, if you zap that, sometimes the self other distinction can break down. So you feel like you're merging into another person. So that's very interesting. So it has that function. It also has connections to the frontal lobes, which is involved in, obviously in empathy and seeing the perspective of somebody else. So, like theory of mind, what is Dr. Peterson thinking right now, what is his agenda right now, what is his motives? So that ability is also involved. This comes to a psychopathy point actually, because if you have the temporal parietal junction being involved in body construction, so it's involved in self and constructing a body image which is expanded in the rubber hand illusion, but also involved in seeing your perspective as well. So it's, it's very dynamic and experiencing your perspective, experiencing somebody else's perspective.

[Jordan Peterson]

So.

[C]

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[Jordan Peterson]

One of the things I thought while you were discussing that is the theory of mind, theories of autism that autistic people lack theory of mind. But I've never really liked that theory because autism is a really fundamental disorder. Like autistic people generally don't like people and they don't like to be touched, right? That's not conceptual. Like mammals like to be touched. If you don't like to be touched, then something's gone wrong at a level that's like under mammal. It's really deep and profound. It's not some, what would you say? Alteration in philosophy. But one of the things that is characteristic of autistic people often is that they don't look at people's faces, they.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Don'T look at eyes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So how.

[Jordan Peterson]

So then you could imagine it's not exactly a lack of theory of mind. It's that if I don't watch your eyes, I can't infer your aim. If I can't infer your aim, I can't mimic you on my own platform. So I wonder to what degree. I don't know if these experiments have ever been done. I mean, I'm. It isn't obvious to me exactly why autistic people don't watch the face. Yeah, it's very mobile and. And changing. And that is something that seems to upset autistic people. Like, they often don't like furniture moved in a room that they're familiar with. But I wonder what would happen to their ability to experience empathy if they were focally trained to attend to eyes, to learn to perceive the face properly.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

I probably could be trained. So I know Richard Davidson.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

He's done some studies looking at amygdala activation in autistic children, and they do have an amygdala that's dancing with activity whenever they look at eyes. So they have that, but it's not entirely known why. It probably has to do with the fusiform face area. So there's a region of the brain specialized for recognizing faces, and so it has to do with that.

[Jordan Peterson]

But this is properly oriented faces.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Properly oriented faces.

[Jordan Peterson]

If they're upside down, it doesn't work.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It doesn't matter. To be frank, this area of the brain is also involved in dry classification of objects. So not only faces.

[Jordan Peterson]

Musical instruments, probably. I think so.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So it's like it goes from. But it's not that it's more dry. So it goes like a guitar from piano or something like that. It doesn't have that specification to have specificity, you have to go higher up in the system. So it has this more banal quality to it. And so obviously in visual processing, you have a hierarchy of where it becomes more complex with each step of envision and then the highest. So then it goes to a point where you start classifying objects in the world. That's the fusiform phase area. And then after that you go to Wernica, which is more meaning and purpose. And then you go to things like the hippocampus, which is involved in things like memory. So it goes from more simple stages of visual processing to dry classification faces. Dr. Peterson's from Alex, from Kim. Knowing different people. So that's that part and then going to higher centers. So that's kind of that process.

[Jordan Peterson]

So let's go back to Ramachandran. Yeah, I was really interested in his work for a long while, especially on hemispheric lateralization and neglect. And now some of the experiments that you described emerged because of Ramachandran's investigations into neglect. Right. Originally. So neglect, for those of you who are watching listening, is a very strange phenomena. So if you have a stroke and you have. Correct me if I get any of this wrong because it's been like 20 years since I thought about it. Right. Parietal damage.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, right, yeah. Damage, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You'll lose your perception of the left side of your body. But more than that, this is where it gets very weird. You lose the perception of left itself.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And I've tried to imagine it sort of like, you know, how everything that's behind you when you're looking forward, it isn't like it's missing, it's just simply not there at a level that's even more profound than missing. And I suspect what happens to people with right parietal damage is that the absence that characterizes your lack of perception of what's behind you extends so that now it's three quarters of the world instead of half. Anyways, weirdly enough, you lose your ability to perceive the left side of everything. And I have no idea how to conceptualize that. But one of the consequences of that is that people with profound neglect will wake up and they'll become aware of their left arm and. Or their left leg after they've had a stroke and they'll try to throw it out of bed because they think it's someone else's. Or. And if you get them to draw a clock, for example, they'll draw half a clock and cram all the numbers into the right hand side. And if you give them a plate, they'll eat half the food. I still can't figure this out, because how do you think that works? It's like if I pick up my phone now I look at the phone. So now the phone is foregrounded, but I'm not aware of the left side. Now if I'm looking at the room now, do I miss the left side of the room? And in the room, do I miss the left side of all the objects? Like, I just don't understand how the hell that works perceptually.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right, Exactly. It's. They somehow don't attend to it. Right. They can draw a flower the whole day, but they only draw half of the Flower. And you keep telling them, and they say, well I did my best, I'm drawing it. But they can't attend to that part of the brain, mind you, the parietal lobes is involved in spatial orientation, knowing not only the body, where it is in space, but also the spatial layout of the room. Right. So it has that component. So that's, it's a really strange disorder. And in order to understand how they are, you know, experiencing this at a subjective level is really critical. It's a mystery of sorts.

[Jordan Peterson]

Ramachandran also did experiments with irrigation, didn't he?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Irrigation. But before we go there, I just want to. So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule, another fancy name there, right. So just above the temporal parietal junction is specifically involved in creating a body image as well. So the tpj we talked about taking information from various sensory modalities and then, and then whispering information to the superior parietal lobule. This area just above it, it's a neighbor, right? It's involving creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body. Right. So when people have a stroke to that part of the brain, as you mentioned, they will sometimes throw their hands out, say this arm doesn't belong to me, it belongs to you, or it belongs to my dad, or it belongs to, you know, this person or that person. So literally they will become delusional. You can play chess with them, you can have conversation. Nothing, nothing is wrong in. Otherwise they're not delusional, they're not psychotic or anything like that. But after they had the stroke affect this region of the brain, they will just say that this arm doesn't belong to me. Or sometimes they might even say, you might ask them, you say, well, they might deny the paralysis. So that's anosognosia, right? So you say, Joe, your arm is paralyzed. They will say, no, it's not paralyzed. Well then touch my nose, Joe. And they'll say, okay. And they will take the lifeless arm and lift it like this and say I'm touching it, doctor, I'm tossing it. Literally taking it up like that. So yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's almost as if I wondered too if that's an. Is it a lack of capacity to update as well? Like it seems to me that what must be happening is they're using a pre stroke representation of their body, right? And the tissue that's been destroyed normally would update that. Because I remember too, with Ramachandran's experiments When he irrigated. This is very weird to everyone. Ramachandran would irrigate the ears. So pour water in, cold water in the ears of left ear, if I remember correctly, left ear of the people who had neglect. And it would make them shudder. Now, that disturbed their vestibular system, which is involved with. With bodily orientation, and it would shock them into the realization that they had a paralyzed left side. And they would break down emotionally catastrophically with the realization that they'd been so badly damaged. Yeah, yeah. But then the effects of the irrigation would wear off and they'd snap back into this. And that's why I think it's not exactly a delusional state. I think they're stuck with the body representation that existed before the stroke and what's being eradicated. The systems that could update that, the right hemisphere systems, they don't exist. So there's no way of fixing. There's no straightforward way of fixing it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So one way to approach this or sort of think about this is that, you know, the left side of the brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different functions. Just want to make it clear to the listeners, I know you know this, right? But so they have different functions. So intriguingly, it's only then in the right side, if you have the stroke in the left, they will not have this delusion. That's the funny part. Right. So it's only in the right. So this tells you that something going on about self in the rights, that's obviously.

[Jordan Peterson]

Or alteration of self.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Alteration of self. Right. Interestingly, if you have a stroke to the prefrontal on the left side, you will develop catastrophic reactions to anything. So you might have a conversation and start crying in the middle of the conversation without any, you know, obvious reason. If you get a stroke in the right prefrontal, you will have become delusionally optimistic. So you'll go out and buy a Rolex if you can't, you know, and get, you know, become manic effectively. So it shows us that the left, left hemisphere is involved in positive emotion and the right is involved in negative emotion. And in fact, today, when you use things like tms, transcranial magnetic stimulation, you might zap the left hemisphere in people with depression and make it more active, and you end up with less depression. So the brain has these functions that are very lateralized and highly unique to each side of the brain.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, so Elkon and Goldberg, I really like his model of brain lateralization, novelty versus routinization. And I know Ramachandran developed a theory that was either parallel or influenced by Goldberg. I can't remember. But what that would imply if the right hemisphere is associated with novelty recognition. So it recognizes anomaly.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yep, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

It makes sense that it would signal negative emotion, because the first thing that should happen when something you don't expect occurs. Because that means the routine you're running doesn't map the territory. Well. Right. Because what I'm trying to do is, whenever I run a perceptual routine, I have a goal in mind, and I'm presuming that my perception is adequate to the task.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

If something anomalous occurs, like if I tell you a joke and you don't find it funny, or maybe I tell you a joke and you get offended by it, then obviously the way I've mapped you is wrong. The way I've mapped the joke is wrong. God only knows how much error I've made that's going to be signaled by the right hemisphere.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Anomaly, negative emotion. Okay, then you're going to attend to that. Now, the problem with depressed people is they attend to it catastrophically.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, like, if I make a. Say if I'm depressed and I make a mistake like that with you, we're sitting here talking. Yeah. I make a little joke, and you either don't find it funny or you act offended. Even if that only took a brief amount of time, a depressed person would think, well, I'm. That didn't go over very well. Obviously, I'm not very funny. Yeah, obviously. I don't understand people very. I don't understand this person very well.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, that's because I really. I really don't understand anyone very well.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

I didn't understand people very well in the past.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And I don't understand them well. And I'm very unlikely to learn how to do that in the future.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

People who are unable to learn like that socially, they're not very useful people. Some people are so useless that it would be better if they weren't around at all. I'm one of them.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And so I'm wondering if the. So you could imagine the right hemisphere, when it's analyzing something novel, opens up that entire space of potential consideration.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

My suspicions are that the left prefrontal cortex probably puts a box around that continually, you know, because the right level of analysis. If I make a joke with you and it falls flat, I should note that. But I shouldn't leap to catastrophic conclusions to begin with. I should just note it like it should now become a What would you say? An object of potential future significance. And I've noticed in my clinical practice that people who are well regulated emotionally won't undergo a detailed investigation into an anomaly until it repeats, let's say, three times until there's a pattern. Whereas depressed people, they'll leap to the worst possible conclusion almost immediately. And that does look like something like that left hemisphere, left prefrontal hemispheric dysfunction that you described. So you could imagine that the right hemisphere notes the novelty, elicits negative emotion, then opens up the search space, which could be indefinite. The reason your joke didn't go over might be because you are the kind of unpopular loser who wreaks havoc wherever they go. But that shouldn't be your first conclusion. Right? So you, you lose the left hemisphere system and that whole cataclysmic reaction is dysregulated.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

I like that. I mean, it makes sense. Right. So the right hemisphere is more emotional, big picture oriented, as you say. And it could be that it goes into this infinite loop of possibilities in the. This big space land where there's no way it can really get fixed. There's no anchoring. Right. So that's, that's correct.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so. So I would say I'd like to know your thoughts about. So I'm very interested in archetypal psychology.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And Jung had a very specific. Carl Jung had a very specific hypothesis about dreams, which I really like and is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today. Because you're interested in dreams.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

And you've talked about them as simple simulations. So his idea about dreams, it's a brilliant idea, is that it wasn't hemispherically localized for him because he didn't have the neurotomic anatomical knowledge. But so imagine that it that you encounter an anomaly. Okay. That's the place you could say that. That exploration that we just described.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Which is, you know, is there something wrong with me socially? Is it generalizable? Am I a cataclysmic person? All of those are fantasies of a sort. Right. And you could think of the fantasies as attempts to remap the anomalous situation. And then like a shallow remapping would require just a tiny alteration of fantasy, but a large remapping would mean a whole reconfiguration of character. Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly and that it could be undertaken safely because you could explore different perceptual configurations in the safety of dreams without Exposing yourself to any danger. So you could imagine that. So the right hemisphere signifies, detects anomaly and it begins this exploration process. But it's using, it's using the landscape of fantasy, which would be simulation, to start, to start to explore. And you could imagine too that one of the ways that that might be triangulated would be imagine that your right hemisphere has aggregated a couple of different anomalies.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Not enough to be cataclysmic about them, but to have them sort of there as mysteries. Okay. Now you search through the fantasy space and one of the new fantasies explains like several anomalies simultaneously. My guess is that's something like fantasy related insight.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because you'd see that in therapy, you know, where someone will lay out a couple of different problematic scenarios.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then contemplate the commonalities and sometimes they'll stumble across something that. Oh, I see, I'm looking at this whole thing wrong. It's a restructuring of the theory. And then those three anomalies are all accounted for. And that's going to give you a sense of conviction. Right. Because now you have a theory that accounts for the new, the new information. And the dream is part of that process. It's the birthplace of that. The birthplace of that renovalization of conception.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, yeah. No, that's interesting. So I think definitely in terms of using the right hemisphere in dreams, there's gotta be something there. So I'm not sure how much this has been explored in terms of the right hemisphere only. Yeah, that's definitely because dreams is so much about emotional updating and emotional. Creating a sense of making sense of an emotional landscape. Right. So in dreams, for example, there's. It's heavily populated by people. Right, right. REM dreams, for example. So each night you cycle through different stages of sleep, stage one, two, three. And then you have deep sleep and then you have REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep where your eyes go from side to side. During this stage of sleep, you're paralyzed from head to toe. So you have structures in the brain called the pons and the medulla in the lower part of the brain that paralyzes your entire body so you won't act out your dreams and hurt yourself. Right. So this is. So want to lay the foundation before.

[Jordan Peterson]

I. Yeah, to your point.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that sets up the stage for exploration without risk.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right. So now you can, you can engage in this laboratory of testing, a testing space without any fatal consequences. Right. You can do whatever you want and don't hurt your sleeping partner or yourself. So you have that paralysis. First of all, you're in a physiological straitjacket, so to speak, Right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And you can explore deeply enough so that you could actually reshape not just your conceptions, but your perceptions. And that idea counts for some of the bizarreness of dreams. Like if you're exploring. If you're exploring at the level of perception, it's going to seem bizarre, obviously.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So I just want to. I just want to sort of go through this. So first of all, you're paralyzed in REM sleep, right? From head to toe. You can't move. Your eyelids can move because of a different circuit, by the way. I just want to add that. So this is a different circuit for the eyelids. Now, interestingly, the emotional part of the brain, the limbic centers behind, tucked behind your ears, become hyperactive. So you have that, your prefrontal lobes and the CEO of the brain becomes less active for some reason. So that part of the brain dials down, right? Motor regions.

[Jordan Peterson]

Restriction of inhibition.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Restriction of inhibition. And so everything in the world becomes less focused, Right. So you can.

[Jordan Peterson]

Less constrained.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Less constrained. So you don't think in a logical, straightforward A, B, C like manner, right. So if I wake somebody up from REM sleep and, and say, well, and tell him the word sun, he will think of chair instead of moon, right? So he doesn't think in a logical serial manner. He will think in an unrelated manner. In fact, he will be more likely to say sun and chair versus when somebody's awake. And I ask him, well, what do you think of now? When I say sun, they might say moon. They are more likely to relate unrelated words. So they think in a.

[Jordan Peterson]

Which is what you'd expect if it was an exploratory process.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Exploratory process, Right. So the prefrontal lobes turn down, right. The emotional part of the brain dial up, right? So you have that. You paralyze from head to toe. Now, this is a perfect cocktail for strange things. Not only that, but also the chemicals in your brain that have to do with logical and linear thinking. No. Adrenaline. You have adrenaline in your body when you're anxious or you're excited, you have adrenaline. You have noradrenaline in the brain, but also in the body. But noradrenaline is a. Is the cousin chemical of adrenaline. Now this chemical.

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[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It turns out there's a structure in the brain, in the brain stem called the locus coeruleus. Yes, exactly. Your pronunciation is brilliant. 32, 2000 cells, pitch black. In the brain stem. They will stop, you know, secreting noradrenaline during REM sleep. So that means your way of thinking about the world is unfocused. It's unprocessed. It's like, spacey. It's creative.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Unconstrained. Unconstrained by prior conviction.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

Prior learning.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right. So this is a perfect cocktail. Now for craziness, the vestibular part of your brain become hyperactive. You know, the central motor regions of the brain that have to do with automatic sort of behavior become hyperactive.

[Jordan Peterson]

Even though they're paralyzed.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Even though you're paralyzed. So that's why dreams, you can sometimes feel like you're running, but you can't control your legs. You feel like some monster is. It's chasing you, but you can't move, or you feel like you're controlled like a puppet on a string. And that's because the parts of the brain, it has to do with automatic movements sporadically. The neurons, they're fire, so you cannot control your movement. So you have all that and then you have the emotions. And it seems like then it's just perfect for what you're saying then that the right Hemisphere type of thinking of exploration and emotion. It's hyperactive.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So it's a safe place for simulation, for exploratory simulation that can be so extreme that it converge on the bizarre. Yeah, but why not. Why not explore the Outer Limits under safe conditions? Well, I've also. I remember that if you wake people up from REM sleep, the most common emotion they report is anxiety. And that makes sense too, if you think about this as part of the. The. What would you say? The reconfiguration in the face of novelty process.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because the most appropriate first response to something anomalous is anxiety. Yeah, it's to. Because technically what anxiety does is stop the operation of. It stops current operation.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that's like a pred. A prey. Yeah, it's like a prey animal response. Freeze. Why? Because what you're doing has either not worked or exposed you to danger. So now you're not where you're not where you thought you were. And what you're doing isn't doing what you thought it was. Okay, now what? Stop.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's anxiety. Then. Then what? Then explore. So like if you throw a rat into a. A new cage.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

The first thing it does is freeze.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Then what it starts to do is to look around. I guess, to begin with, it doesn't even want to move its eyes. Right. Because it doesn't want to attack, attract the attention of a predator. So it freezes and crouches down. And then if nothing additionally terrible happens, it starts to thaw. It starts to look and starts to sniff. And then it'll start to explore and remap the territory. But that seems to be what's happening at the dream level conceptually, as you imagine that you're encountering a landscape of anomaly or novelty that's signified by the right hemisphere. The emotion that's elicited is anxiety with a subtext of curiosity.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Because both of those two things would be at play. And then the fantasy landscape can be elaborated so that even perception itself can be reconfigured because of the error. If you're betrayed by someone, you could say something like, I can't even look at you the same way. Right. And that means that the betrayal has forced a reconception so profound that perception itself has been altered. Like you could find someone attractive. This happens often when people are dating. You could find someone attractive or unattractive on first meeting. And then as you get to know them, maybe you thought they were attractive to begin with, and that just goes away.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Or you felt that they weren't that attractive to begin with. But as you get to know their character, let's say, then the perception itself shifts. It's not merely the theory of mind or the conception you have of them. Right. You literally look at them differently. Maybe it's because in part, you. You actually see. I don't know if you reconfigure the. What would be the patterns of interaction in their face. You know, like someone graceful, for example. You're obviously perceiving something like a gestalt. And there's something charming and beautiful about that. My guess is if you see a person of high character across time, you can see their integration and that. That would make them. That would allow you to perceive their attractiveness in a way that you might not have been able to do superficially.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely. That's very interesting.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Well, to go back to the whole dream thing, right. So one of the things is that it's populated by a lot of people. And that's again. Right. Hemisphere is actually involved in decoding social, like facial expressions, for example. So that's one thing that obviously autistic people have problems with. But for some reason, there's a lot of faith, there's a lot of people, and a lot of interactions in dreams. So you interact a lot with a lot of people. And usually actually these interactions are negative. And this shows us that for some reason it's advantageous to dream of negative things because you're more likely to train your circuits in your brain to be able to. So to put it shortly, like, if I have an encounter with a serial killer, killer in my dream, and I sort of overcome that, I'm not killed by it, right. By that serial killer. I can navigate that situation in a appropriate manner. I'm more likely to survive in real life. So it shows you that dreams has a lot to do with survival and training the circuits in the brain, making them solidify the ones that can help me survive more. So that's a huge part of.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Well, and it. Well, and it would make sense too, that what you should. Look, the more sophisticated you are in your social perception, right. The less likely even encounters with dangerous people are to go wrong.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

I'll tell you a story about that.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So I had this landlord when I lived in Montreal, and he was an ex president of Hell's Angels in Montreal. And he'd been in prison and he was a rough guy. And we couldn't communicate that easily because he spoke jewel French, which is very hard to understand. Even if you're French. And I spoke English and there was quite a big class difference between us. And I was from western Canada and she was from eastern Canada. And so. But we got along, you know, he lived right beside me and to the degree we could communicate, we did. And he did some artwork. He worked in neon, as it turned out. And I bought some of his pieces and we kind of got to know each other insofar as we could. Now the problem, his name was Paulo. The problem was that now and then he would go on a bender. And he could drink. Well, I can. Unlimited amount of alcohol over a three day period, like 90 beer, you know, like. And he would drink himself to a point where it was not even obvious how conscious he was, but he was still upright.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then he'd drink up all his money. And then he developed a habit of coming to my door at like three in the morning to sell me like a toaster or a microwave because he needed money because he wanted to keep drinking. And so I did that a couple of times. He showed up at like three in the morning. Now he's a big guy and he's tough. I went out once with a. To a bar with him. He put me on the back of his motorcycle, which is a 750 Honda, if I remember correctly. He put his wife's helmet on my head, which is a little tiny helmet, and away we went. He said, if the cops come after me, I'm not stopping. Just so you know. Yeah, it's like, well, that was the beginning of a very interesting evening. And he got into all sorts of fights at the bars because people would come up and like challenge him, essentially. Stupid people. And that didn't go well for them. So he was touchy, let's put it that way. Well, I talked to my wife about this because she didn't like the fact that I was giving Paulo money for his, like, toasters and so forth. Because she knew that he was trying to quit drinking.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So. And then it also scared her that he would come over like at 3 in the morning. So one day he came over at three in the morning and he was standing there sort of swaying and looking at me. And I had to tell him that I wasn't going to give him any more money starting then. And I had to tell him why. And so I said, look, we know you're trying to quit drinking, and when you come over and I buy your toaster, then you go and drink. And I can't do that anymore because it's not good. And he looked at me for, like, 10 seconds. And I know why he was looking at me. He was looking at me to see if I was playing morals, superiority games. Yeah, yeah. In which case, the interaction wouldn't have gone very well.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because as your social perception becomes more sophisticated, the probability that you can navigate well in a complex and potentially dangerous situation increases radically.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So if you can practice that in a dream.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now, that should mean that you should concentrate on elements of social behavior that didn't go your way, that you don't understand.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that would take you into a landscape of. Well, hard to tell, but possibly into a landscape of malevolence. That would explain, for example, why people go and watch horror movies and movies about serial killers and so forth. It's like you want to sharpen yourself up.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

And that's a good point. So the fact is that you know when you. When you dream that your brain takes you on this exploration. Right. And it looks at various social scenarios, for example, that evoke emotions in you. So it takes Dr. Peterson and put him in a room with Kim and Joe and see how he reacts. If the reaction is not an emotionally evocative one, it will literally take you and show you another scenario until it hits on a scene that evokes your emotion, that gets you riled up, and then it explores.

[Jordan Peterson]

So it has to be.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Okay, yeah, it has to have that element, and then it will go down that path more and explore it more. It'll say, this is interesting.

[Jordan Peterson]

I see. So it presents scenarios.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Until one evokes a limbic reaction.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now, but that. But is it also searching for emotional reactions that are primarily negative, or is it intensity?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Not necessarily. So it does. There's a huge dopaminergic aspects to dreams. So it's been shown that if you have a lesion to a part of the brain, the implant inferior parietal lobule, again, it's a region just below the superior parietal lobule. It's involved in creating images, but also. So if you have a stroke there, for example, you won't dream. Or the mesolimbic dopamine centers is a fancy name for the part of the brain where you have dopamine going to the prefrontal cortex. If you have a lesion there, you won't dream as well. So bliss and dopamine, as well as images, is involved deeply.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So it's emotional intensity and valence.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Intensity. Valence, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. But it's tilted somewhat towards the negative of tilted somewhat. We are generally as human beings, tilted somewhat toward the negative.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely. So.

[Jordan Peterson]

So okay, okay. So your brain is playing with various scenarios.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

And if one evokes an emotional response. So you see, the thing is, if it evokes a negative emotional response, that would indicate that your adaptation is weak at that point. Right. Because you're much more likely to be anxious about a situation that you haven't mastered.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So you could imagine that the evocation of negative emotion is indication of weakness in conceptual structure.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So now the dream is playing with various scenarios around that.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Evo evocation point.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah. So one. It's very interesting. So one thing that I want to make clear as well, it's that, you know, obviously, as you know, there's a corpus callosum, that there's a bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing the two hemisphere to communicate. Right. So you have the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. So these hemisphere, if you literally cut it, you'll have two consciousness in one person. Right. So it seems like dreams is also right hemispheric dominance for another reason, because the things you will see in your dreams are like poetry. Right. It's visual metaphors that you just can't explain in language. Right. So it's like going through an art museum and looking at things, but in a very poetically, beautifully non language way. Right. So you can't describe it necessarily. And obviously the left hemisphere, the regions of the Wernica and stuff like that is involved in language and understanding language. But it seems like the poetic aspect of dreams is very much a right hemispheric thing as well.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that should be associated with both the novelty, routinization, dichotomy. So the question is, well, how do you approach something that's novel? Well, if it's novel, if it produces anomaly, if you don't understand it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You haven't encapsulated in language.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's not root routinized enough so that you have a propositional description of it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you could imagine that during the day when you're conscious, you're running. Well, routinized, propositionalized routines.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

But some of them don't work out as well as others.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so now imagine the right hemisphere is sitting in the background mapping the failures. Okay. So now you have like a collection of failures. It's something like that. Now it's nighttime, you shut down the propositional side and you open up the metaphoric side, and it's starting to explore that land. It's exploring, I think it's exploring unexplored territory. Fundamentally, that's the best way to conceptualize it. But it's also like the land. It's the same as the landscape of insufficient adaptation. Right. And so. And that should be associated with negative emotion.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right? Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And now the question would be, what would be the utility of those metaphoric fantasies? Well, part of that's okay, so imagine that around any perception there's a cloud of connotations. Right. That are first order. We already talked about that. So like a first order connotation for you would. If I saw you would obviously be male. Right. So and then imagine that outside of that there's second order connotations and third order. And finally things that are so distinct that they don't seem to bear any conceptual relationship. Well, as you open up the metaphoric landscape, that connotation width should expand.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then you could imagine that what you're trying to do is to explore a new network of connotations that would map the territory more effectively. Right?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah. And I think what is also interesting about dreams in that whole thing is that it seems to tap into a circuitry that's more mystical than the circuitry that we normally. By mystical, I mean it seems like some of the receptors involved in mystical experiences when you take psilocybin and things like mescaline and DMT and stuff like that, the serotonin 2A receptors. So one theory actually talks about how. So obviously serotonin is another neurochemical in the brain. The part of the brain that produces that, the dorsal Rapha nucleus, also shuts down its production of serotonin. So you don't have serotonin in your dreams either in REM sleep. And so you end up in this space without noradrenaline and without serotonin. But it seems like for some reason that the serotonin 2a receptors become dialed up. So that part of the serotonin 2 receptors become tickled for some reasons and sometimes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that is also happening in a psilocybin experience.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It also happened in psilocybin been experienced.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So that accounts in part for the overlap between the mystical experience and the dream experience.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

The mystical experiences and the dream experiences. So there's something there that is. That's hyper cosmic in dreams that you can't. It's ineffable, you can't describe it in language and even. And it's highly personal and it has salience for you. So one thing that I notice about dream is a lot of people come and talk to me about their dreams all the time. They'll go, baland, you know, I had this dream. I saw this and that. And they. They're very emotional about it. And it's highly personal and cosmic. Right. But, you know, I kind of go, oh, that's interesting. But it's not really that interesting, but it has that significance for you as a person. And that's kind of about the dream thing. It has personal salience, kind of the type of personal salience you can get from a psilocybin experience.

[Jordan Peterson]

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[Dr. Balan Jalal]

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Dr. Balan Jalal]

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Dr. Balan Jalal]

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Dr. Balan Jalal]

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Dr. Balan Jalal]

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Dr. Balan Jalal]

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Dr. Balan Jalal]

That'S preborn.comjordan.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so what do you think? Account? Okay, so you said something paradoxical about that, right? That it's a weird combination of intensely personal and cosmic, which means intensely universal. It brings those two things together.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's a strange conjunction because those two things are actually quite far apart.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

The more personal something is, in some ways, the less cosmic, the less universal it is. Yeah, but the dream unites those two.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It kind of unites them. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

I wonder. See, an archetype in some ways bridges the gap between the personal and the cosmic. So here's an example of something you can do with a dream that's very effective. So imagine that you have a client who's chased by something awful in a dream, and that repeats. And then you ask them what they do, and they say, well, I run away or I try to hide. Okay. So then you say to them, well, here's what we're going to do instead. I want you to sit there, close your eyes, then make them relax so that they get into a state where they can visualize. Visualize.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Say, now bring that dream to mind.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Now close your eyes, bring the dream to mind. Now tell me what's happening. So they'll replay the dream and say, now. Okay. Now, at the end, instead of running, tell me what happens if you turn around and ask the criminal or the sadist or the monster.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

What it's up to or what happens if you approach it instead of running.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and then the dream will continue in their imagination most of the time. And generally, what occurs in a consequence of that is that dream goes away. Now, I think the reason for that, and I think this is akin to this bridging of the gap between the personal and the cosmic, is because their personal response to being chased is to run.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And hide. So they're prey animals.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now, if you. If you transform that into voluntary explorers, then the. You're. What you're doing is you're inculcating an element of the hero myth into the dream landscape. It's like, no, the right strategy when you're threatened isn't to run. The right strategy is to turn voluntarily and to commence the process of exploration. That is what a hero myth is.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

That's very interesting. So let's go on that whole thing. Right, so the monster in your dream represents your hyperactive amygdala and the limbic centers of the brain being hyperactive up to 30% more active in the dream landscape. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So that's that overplay of emotion.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

That's the overplay of the emotion. And by the way, the hippocampus also turns out the memory part of the brain is also hyperactive in the dream REM world. So you have the memory spilling in, into this. This narrative about a monster chasing you. So you give it identity, you give it name, you give it all these negative features.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so you're contextualizing the emotion.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

You're contextualizing based on the hyperactive hippocampus, Then it's chasing you. And you can't run away because we said the motor, central motor generator of your brain stem is making it very hard for you to move. So you don't have the. So movement normally occurs in the motor cortex of your brain. That gives you voluntary movement, but because that part of the brain can't compete with the central motor, automatic part of the brain firing and making your behaviors all, you know, sporadic and automatic, so you can't get away. Now, what you said was interesting. You said if you turn around and approach the monster, the monster will be. It will become diminished in strength. And that's interesting because we know in the real world, if you walk, simply by walking, you will turn down the activity of the amygdala because you're telling your brain or your. Yourself that you are approaching. You are engaging in approach behavior instead of withdrawing behavior.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right. Which. Which puts. You see, that shifts your identity in relationship to the thing that's chasing you.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

You're changing. You're saying, now I'm no longer the. The prey here. I'm the predator. I am the one that is being that. That is doing the haunting, you know, and so in that sense, it would make sense that the monster would just vanish. So that's very interesting. But I also want to touch on that whole. On monsters, since we're on the topic of monsters. So this condition, paralysis, and I talk about it in my. My Peterson Academy course, there's a whole lecture on sleep paralysis. So are you familiar with sleep paralysis?

[Jordan Peterson]

I experienced sleep paralysis repeatedly.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Is that right?

[Jordan Peterson]

For years. Yeah. Especially if I slept on my back. That doesn't happen anymore, but.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

But I'm very familiar with sleep paralysis.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Do you see any monsters? Can you explain? I'm curious.

[Jordan Peterson]

Most of my experiment experience was being unable to move. And. No, I knew what sleep paralysis was. So even when it happened to me in my dreams, usually my experience was that something was happening to me and I was frozen and unable to speak. And I knew I had to wake myself up. Like, I'd try to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife. I mean, literally in my life, I would yell, and she'd have to come and shake me, and then I'd wake up. But, no, I didn't have the monster. Monster element to it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

But I had clients who did. In sleep paralysis. I think the reason that didn't happen is because I knew what was happening.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the mo. The monster, too. Just out of curiosity, so you could imagine that with this interplay between the hippocampus and the amygdala, if the emotional systems are more active. Okay, so now there's lots of emotions being triggered.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now the memory systems are interacting with those emotions, they're going to flesh them out. Yeah, Right. So here's the emotion. Here's the thing that would be most likely to manifest that. So if it's a panoply of emotions, it would be an amalgam of emotion evoking stimuli. And there's no difference between an amalgam of emotion eliciting stimuli and a monster.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Those are the same thing. That's what a monster is. Yeah.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So a monster is your worst nightmare come to life.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's your worst nightmare. Right. It's whatever you dream, whatever is lurking in your unconscious mind, that's coming to the fore. Right. And so during sleep paralysis, interestingly, you didn't have any of the monsters.

[Jordan Peterson]

No.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

But it turns out about 40% of people will see monsters. Sleep paralysis is a terrifying experience. So you have this REM paralysis. Obviously, you're paralyzed from head to toe. During REM sleep, you're dreaming away. Occasionally, for some people, they might start feeling like they can, you know, they can see their surroundings. So they might open their eyes and then they realize, my God, I'm paralyzed. I can't move, I can't speak. And it's terrifying at this point. And then they look around and I had one of these experiences. So let me tell you by my own experience. So I was sleeping in my room as a teenager in Copenhagen, and I grew up in a ghetto, like, neighborhood in Copenhagen. And I was lying there sleeping, and then I woke up paralyzed, unable to move or speak. And then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me. And he came closer and closer until it was on my chest strangling me. And I saw my legs flying up and down. And mind you, at this point, I was like, is this real? It was as crisp as this conversation you and I are having.

[Jordan Peterson]

What did the monster look like?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Well, I'll tell you, okay. So at this point, I just saw my legs flying up and down, and it was choking me, and I couldn't do anything. I was literally trying to kill me. Now, on this occasion, I didn't see a monster. I didn't see a monster on this occasion. But I've had sleep paralysis since then on many occasions. And I've had various monsters. So I've seen, like, one was Colonel Gaddafi. You know him, eccentric figure. He was hovering over me when I was in Egypt. I was living in Egypt for a period of time in my early undergraduate years. I was a little bit out there. And I saw during the Libyan revolution of all people. Gaddafi was in my bedroom, hovering over me, you know, attacking me. So that can happen during sleep paralysis. And that was.

[Jordan Peterson]

So he's a. He's the monster of the oppressive patriarchy.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yes, absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

I had a way. My wife had a dream like that about Richard Nixon.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Dressed in a general's outfit.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So he. He was another figure. Like, you could think about him as the monstrous form of the patriarchy.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

My wife kissed him.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. So that was how she reconciled that conflict. Oh, yeah. Well, you can think about. It's a funny move. Right. Because the monstrous element of the patriarchy is. It's the negative side of the social order.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's something everyone has to contend with. That is. That's a class of monster. Right. Like giant. It's the same thing as giant.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And in hero mythology, of course, one of the categories of monster that the hero fights is giant.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's dragon. There's very. And dragon is a different. That's more like a representation of the terrible aspect of nature. That's a good way to think about a dragon. Okay. So you said you were in Libya.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Well, I was in Egypt. Egypt, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

What was happening around you around that time?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

There was a spring, the Arab Spring and the Libyan revolution. All that was going on. Going on. And I was watching CNN all the time.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, you should never do that.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

That I should never do. Right. So I was doing that. I was sort of watching the news and, you know, I was influenced in some way. So that's really interesting. So our research now in about seven countries has shown that whenever you have a cultural narrative for it, like stories of witches of space aliens or whatever, you will have those lurking into your unconscious and you will see that manifest. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So those are categories of the monstrous.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Those are your Carl Jung archetype figures appearing. So, for example, in Egypt, we showed that the evil genies of a lady, you know, Aladdin, the cartoon, you will have that appear in front of you. So, you know, they will have bloody fangs and everything will be creepy. Very scary monsters you will see in Egypt. In Italy, for example, in the Pandafica region of Italy, you will see these giant cats or witches. So that's very common. And in the US Space alien abduction is very common in the US So you might see that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so what that would imply is that. That you could imagine that the cultural. Okay, so let's say the core of the revelation is diffuse emotional activation, much of it negative emotion.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Now the question is, what's the Most basic form in which that could take perceptual shape. Okay, so the cultural narrative would be like a first order elaboration of the core of that fear. So then it's not surprising at all that that's what your mind would latch onto when it was trying to clothe that emotion in perceptual reality.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's very interesting, actually. So it turns out if you go first order and the basic level, most people will just see shapes and shadows, so they won't even see the monster clothed and have all these details. So it turns out, right, that's the truly unknowable monster. That's the V1. That's, you know, the occipital lobes in the visual cortex responds to lines and basic shapes. And as we move.

[Jordan Peterson]

I see. Oh, that's so cool.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So the first order is it first order. It's simply the brain says, look, I don't even care about the details. I feel fear right now. I just want to hallucinate the basic.

[Jordan Peterson]

Just the sketch.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

The sketch, Right. So you have the sketch and then.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so then as you explore, does it move up the visual.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Then moves off the visual hierarchy? Right, so we know then that you have a part of the brain called the mt. The motor part of the brain has to do with movement, so that's the next in the hierarchy. Then you have a part of the brain that has to do with, as we said, putting faces and depth and color. And so that comes as we move along the visual hierarchy. And then finally you reach the wernica and the meaning part of the brain and the hippocampus. And you go, my God, this. This is Freddy Krueger from Elm Street. He's attacking me right now. And he has this agenda and intentions. So. But most of the time, people will see these shadows and shapes. And that's it. And that's it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Are they most terrified at that level?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's very terrifying. Usually. The one reason for this is that usually when you don't have an identity, it's even more scary because you don't.

[Jordan Peterson]

Know what to do.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So, okay, so then you imagine that. Oh, that's so cool. So the. Then you imagine that adaptation would proceed in this matter. So when it's only shapeless form, Right, you have no idea what to do because there's. There's no concrete action you can take against a shapeless form.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so now you. You could imagine using this in behavior therapy to deal with fears. It's like, okay, first of all, because you're trying to get it to take form. Well, why? Because the more form it takes, the more delineated the strategy can be for dealing with it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you're saying, okay, so first of all, you're doing a walk through the visual hierarchy.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You got just the shadows and the basic. And then you get the basic motion. And then what's the next level?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

You get depth. For example, you get color.v4 area in the brain with color. So you might add color. That could be another.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. And then it takes a face.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah. And then it takes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And an identity.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It takes a face identity. And then you hook up the emotional part of the brain. So it gets. Gets emotions. Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

The next thing you'd need above that would be a behavioral strategy.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So if this named and faced figure now makes itself manifest, what do you need to do it? So see, this is partly what you do if you're trying to treat someone for post traumatic stress disorder is you help them specify very clearly.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So give form to the nature of the fair by not. That's not enough. It isn't enough to know your enemy. Right. That's better than not knowing your enemy because that's even more terrifying. But you want to lay out a behavioral strategy in relationship to that enemy that either quells the threat.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

So how do you deal with a criminal, let's say, or like the optimal strategy would be to take the enemy and to transform him into an ally. Right. That's like. That's the highest possible level of adaptation.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because who needs an enemy? And partly what you're doing, like in therapy, you can go through someone's history and you can see where they might have had a repeated traumatic experience, like in a relationship. Then you have to find out what is it that's absent in their representation of relationship that's exposing them time and time again to that threat because it means there's something in their perception and their strategy. It's because imagine this. Imagine that you were selectively blind for only for white vans that were approaching you from the.

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[Jordan Peterson]

Left. It's not much of a deficit, but your recurring experience would be once every two years you get run over by a white fan and you have no idea why.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So that's the account of the lack of your perception and the repeat experience.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

So now you have someone who has a repetitive trauma. You think, well, you've got a hole in your adaptive structure. Okay. Now you want to characterize that. So give it form. And you want to append a. It's a perceptual and behavioral strategy to it, and that'll. That's what'll make the nightmare go away. And it's really remarkable. My experience clinically was that it all. It took very few repetitions of a repeating dream.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Where you inverted the strategy. The dream would. The, the dream would almost. My experience was that if you did that once, the person wouldn't have the recurring dream anymore. Right, right. And it's because you might say at some very deep level, they had conceptualized themselves in that situation as nothing but a prey animal.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You do the same thing with exposure therapy with agoraphobia. Right. As you get people to imagine what upsets them and then begin to confront it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So. And the generalization element isn't the specific strategy of confrontation, it's the idea that they could be the one that confronts.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting. There's two points on that. I want to, I want to go into that. It's very, very fascinating. So first of all. Well, we've shown that when you have a specific cultural narrative for it and a name for it. Right. The more terrifying and salient it becomes. So for example, if you live in Egypt and you say it's these evil genies, they come at night, they choke you, they strangle you, they kill you, then you will first of all, have this experience much more frequently. So up to one third of more frequency to the experience. That's the first thing.

[Jordan Peterson]

If there's a cultural narrative.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

If there's a cultural narrative. So we compared Egypt to Denmark, my home country. So we compared these two countries, and it turns out when in Denmark, by the way, people say most of the time, it's just the brain, it's stress, it's nothing terrifying. Like there's no higher explanation for it. Right? So it's just physiology, Right. In Egypt, you have the opposite, right? The complete opposite. More frequent, more fearful. So 50% of Danish people will say, I think for Egyptians will say, I will die from this. This is fatal. So this is Egyptians, okay? So they have that. They say the paralysis lasts much longer. So they will say the paralysis is intense, it lasts much longer. So it seems like through their cultural beliefs, the experience has become much more salient, much more profound and impactful.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's got elements of psychogenic epidemic to it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely. And we said, is this true? Is this actually the case? And we went to Italy and we looked at the Egyptian, the Italians, with. With these terrifying explanations of sleep paralysis, and we saw the same pattern. The Italians would also have these long episodes. They would have them frequently, and they would be extremely fearful.

[Jordan Peterson]

So it's like a contagious maladaptive conceptualization.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Absolutely right. And so it turns out we have a theory for why that occurs. So imagine little Lisa living on this fictitious island in Simbuktu, for example, and she has this conversation with her grandmother over, you know, dinner, let's say the grandmother says, at night, you will have this monster. It comes and attacks you, chokes you. It looks like this and that it has all these features. She now goes to bed, right? And she has never had, by the way, she's never had sleep paralysis before, right? For the first time, she will have sleep paralysis. Now. She will wake up the next day and she will have sleep paralysis again. A few days later, she'll have it again. And then a month later, it's become chronic at this point, and she'll go tell other people about it, and they will have it too. Then you might be asking, why is this the case? What's going on? And this is the idea. We think that first of all, the grandmother implanted these ideas into her brain about what sleep paralysis is. When she's now sleeping in her bed, she will have nocturnal arousal, meaning the emotional part of the brain will be hyperactive during the REM stage. And she will engage in this Hyper conformatory behavior where she will monitor any paralysis sensations, saying, is something holding me down? Is something choking me?

[Jordan Peterson]

Now she's got a scary explanation for it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

She's looking for an explanation for this now. And then, whenever and because of her emotional centers being hyperactive, whenever she feels something, she'll go, my God, this is it, this is it. And she'll open her eyes and then the emotional, the hippocampus and all the narrative part of the brain will spill over into the experience and she will literally see whatever her grandmother was telling her. Now you might say, why then does it happen a few days later? Well, that created profound fear. And so a few days later, she will have anxiety and stress, which will predispose her. We've shown that anxiety and stress predisposes you. So she will have it again two days later and three days later. And at this point, she'll go, my God, I'm possessed.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's good.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's no longer just one episode. This monster is chronically possessing me and it's coming after me.

[Jordan Peterson]

And a funny thing is too, it is a kind of possession.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It is kind of a possession.

[Jordan Peterson]

The grandmother transmitted, the spirit transmitted, just.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Like a virus, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, it's a monstrous meme.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

As a meme. Right. But at this point, what's interesting is that we've shown that people who have this episode, they will have more anxiety and more PTSD like symptoms from. From this. Right. So at this point, she might have these small T's of trauma of the monster coming and attacking you and then creating an overall trauma, so it becomes almost a traumatic experience.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you could imagine how that would increase the probability that it would spread too, because she might tell a friend.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

That's what I'm saying.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

So she goes around and tells her friends about it. And it turns out then that if you live in a culture where this, you know, like Egypt, it's twice as common versus Denmark. So we said that for an individual person, you will have it three times more than the person who has sleep paralysis. But beyond this, it's generally twice as common in cultures like Egypt and Italy and so forth. So there's this element to it that's very, very interesting. And I want to take you to an experiment that your colleague Rich did. Rich magnally. That sort of encapsulates all this. So he showed that people who think that sleep paralysis is a space alien abduction. So these guys will say, well, I was sleeping in my bed and this gray came down on a spaceship. It attacked me, it choked Me, it took out my semen. It was also a lot of sexuality going on. And obviously we know from REM sleep the hypothalamus and these parts of the brain are hyperactive. The sexual parts of the brain are hyperactive. So you have sexual arousal during sleep paralysis.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

You had the monster coming down, taking their semen and all that. Then they will have like a succubus, like the Middle Ages, like a succubus.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

But then at this point, what's interesting is that these guys, when they listen to the audio script of their encounters of themselves narrating, so they'll listen to themselves saying, oh, I had this experience and this happened and that happened. Their physiological reactions to that, their gsr, their sweating and their heart rate and blood pressure will be as profound as somebody who went to war. So somebody with actual PTSD who went to a war situation, the physiological reactions they have is comparable to somebody who was sleeping in their beds and having sleep paralysis. So for me, this shows me this might be one of the most interesting phenomenon in.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you can see. Well, you know, you want to look, you know, from psychotherapy that the simulations that produce the most psychophysiological response are the most curative.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, for example, when Ed Nafoa was treating people with ptsd, and I think she did this as well as anybody's ever done it, she would have people, this is counterintuitive in some ways. So imagine that the trauma was rape, right? In. In instituted, she'd have them bring the rape incident to mind in as much detail as possible, voluntarily. That's the critical element, voluntarily. And then she did psychophysiological measurements, and the participants who were, who showed the highest levels of psychophysiological response to the reenactment were the ones that got better, faster. Right now, it was still damn hard on them while they were doing it. But it makes perfect sense that the more hyperrealist simulation, the more learning would be associated with it, obviously. And you could see how that could be pathologized. So then the question would be, this would be the tricky question for a therapist is like, well, what do you do with a client that has a repetitive alien abduction experience? Because now that's a person who needs a strategy.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Well, so we, I developed a therapy for sleep paralysis. I don't know, maybe you're interested in that. I could lay it out. All right, so it's a four step solution that I came up with. So I, from my work around the world, I thought I got to have Some. Some method to help these people, right? So how could I help them? This was my thought, how can I help these guys? Right? And so one thing is that I noticed that, for example, prayer and meditation and prayer and thinking about positive things was helpful in a lot of instances. People would lay down and think about, you know, whatever God they believe in, and that would actually help them. So that got me thinking about the attention system and the emotional parts of the brain and how I can bring that into the experience, given that you have limited attentional capacities. And so if you're lying there and thinking about ghosts, because your emotional part of your brain, the amygdala, is hyperactive. And, you know, the amygdala has a lot of projections to the visual parts of the brain, so it can tell you what to see in the world. So we know this. So it can spill over and penetrate the visual scene. So we don't want that. So I thought, how can I bring in the positive affect to the experience and make it more, you know, more. More benign? So it has four components. It goes. The first component is cognitive reappraisal. You know, these terms meaning simply you say, look, this is not a monster. This is just the brain. It's not terrifying. Let me change my thoughts about it. So that's the first point. You do that when the experience strikes and you close your eyes too, just to filter any, you know, visual inputs.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you're doing that with people when they're bringing the experience to mind, when.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

They have the sleep paralysis episode. So these are the four steps you apply directly during sleep paralysis. Obviously, you learn them when you're awake. And I train you and you practice. You practice.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Okay, so this. Yeah, great, you made that point. So you have that first thing you do, the cognitive reappraisal, saying, well, this is just your mind and brain playing tricks on you. Next step is emotional and psychological distances distancing. You go. So since it's just a brain, simply given that it's common all around the world, there's no reason for me to be scared of this. So you kind of distance yourself from the event. So that's the second part, Right. Thirdly, this is where prayer and meditation and affect comes in. You put all your attention on a positive emotional object in your mind. So you bring to mind could be God, somebody who believes in God. It could be your mother's face, it could be anything emotionally salient. And you focus hyperattentively on that, because.

[Jordan Peterson]

Then that's why Mary is an antidote to the Demonic, right, Exactly. You bring the notion of mother and maternal care as the antithesia.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Good point. So you bring in. So in that way, given that the limited attentional abilities of the brain and the frontal parietal regions and all that, so you focus intensely on this object, let's say God. And then fourthly, you meditate and meditate, meaning you do a mindfulness kind of detachment. You say, I feel spasmy and pain in my legs and I feel heavy, but I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm just going to let it fly. I'm just going to just leave it alone. And this turns out these four steps, if you apply it during sleep paralysis, we did a pilot study, a small study, that showed it reduced sleep paralysis about 50%. So that's a significant amount. But obviously we have to do more studies. It's a very small study, but it's a first step. It's the first empirical study on this as a treatment for sleep paralysis. So I was very excited about that. But we need to do more research. But I think. What do you think?

[Jordan Peterson]

I walked the Via Dolorosa with Jonathan Pageau and we were talking about its significance. And so you could imagine that. Imagine that one of the things that you have to do in life is to. What would you say? Reconcile yourself to the monstrous.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

While walking the road of the crucifixion, does that because it enables you to voluntarily simulate intense suffering in the face of malevolence.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Now you could imagine that. That because it's voluntary, rather than something that's imposed on you, you're switching your framework from victim to accept. It's very strange accepting participant. It's like turning around to confront the monster. It's the same thing. So you could imagine. We talked already about the figure of Mary, let's say as. Or briefly as the. As the maternal, as. And as the antithesis of the monstrous. That's pretty obvious. But you could also imagine that. But practicing your ability to accept the reality of malevolence and suffering, that's a meta strategy for dealing with the monstrous itself. It's something like that.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

That's a good point.

[Jordan Peterson]

That would be my guess.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

That's a very, very interesting point. You brought something to mind right now that I wanted to ask you about. So obviously I've seen your latest work on we who wrestle with God and all this. So do you have any thoughts about prophetic dreams? The kind of metaphors? Do you have any. Have you written about this, for example?

[Jordan Peterson]

I wrote a little Bit about it in the story of Noah. Yeah, right. Well, so Noah is an archetypally good man.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

But in the sub, in the culturally and personally limited sense, in a way, Noah's as good a man as you could expect some to be for the conditions of his time and place.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. We know from the anthropological literature on elders that people who are singled out as elders in, let's say, traditional communities are people who other people are motivated to go to for advice when things aren't going well. Yeah.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So now you might imagine, well, what sort of person would you have to be to be the sort of person who people would go to for advice when things aren't going well? Well, you'd have to establish a reputation of either having had things go well for you so you could avoid the catastrophes, or having withstood a variety of catastrophes and still be highly functional. Okay, so then that would make you a certain kind of person. Well, the insistence in the story of Noah is that if your orientation is upward, your intuition is valid, or if your intuition is valid, you're a prophet because you can see things coming when blind people won't see them.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Them. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So why wouldn't. Like there's no difference between forethought and prophecy except time span.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So you might say, well, a mature person is capable of forethought.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Now if you are mature and maximally, optimally configured in your moral aim, your capacity for forethought would extend. You'd be able to see things coming long before other people. And maybe some of that would reveal itself in like, visions. Those are fantasies. Yeah, they could be prophetic visions. They could come in dreams, you know, Imagine that your dream. Imagine now you're the sort of person who's dispensed with the first order monsters. Well, your dreams are still going to be doing something.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

They're going to be concentrating on more sophisticated forms of anomaly.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Then maybe you master those. Well, then now you're up another level. Yeah, right. Those are the sort of people that would be prophetic.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because look, one of the ways of being a prophet is just by looking at things that other people won't look at. Yeah, right. Because even in the landscape of media, if a story comes out about what's monstrous, most people will just. They won't look into it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

They'll deny it.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, imagine instead you delve into it like you delve into the character of the monster in the dream.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, are you less prepared or more? Well, obviously far more. And I don't know. I don't think there's a limit to that.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's also an insistence in hero mythology that you go to the heart of darkness.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right, right. No, it's very interesting. And one reason that I bring this up is I used to live in Egypt, as I told you, and I was much inspired by the prophetic dreams of Joseph. I thought they were very striking, the suns and sun and the moon bowing down and all these kind of things. So I think there's something. Something very, very interesting about the whole that. That realm of explanation and how that sort of spills and trickles into narratives in religious scripture. So I thought that was, well, like one of the.

[Jordan Peterson]

One of the. You might say that one of the strong functions of the religion is the religious is a meta strategy for dealing with the monstrous. That's not all it is, but that's one of the things that it is. Like, how do we contend with. Not you could imagine, how do I contend with my neighbor who's being a pain?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, then how do I contend with the class of neighbors who are being troublesome? Well, then how do I contend with the fact that people can be malevolent? Then how do I contend with the existence of malevolence itself?

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Those others are. You're getting deeper into the question with each of those iterations.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

By the time you get to the point where your question is, how do I deal with the existence of malevolence itself? You're in the religious realm.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

I would say that by definition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was, weirdly, the case when I. When I was working as a clinician, when I was dealing with people who were profoundly traumatized.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So they had their reasons. The language always became religious when we were talking about. You can't escape it because if you've really been hurt by someone who really wanted to hurt you, you've been touched by something like the spirit of malevolence.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And when you're having a discussion about the nature of the spirit of malevolence, the language takes on, like, religious connotations and depth of its own accord.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

It's quite interesting. So there's a phenomenon I'm sure you know of is temporal lobe epilepsy. So these guys will have epileptic seizures. So they will have that selectively in the temporal lobes. So they will, and this is the emotional part of the brain, become hyperactive. And so they will see everything in the world as almost like they're living In a dream, everything is poetic. Everything is highly salient. When I look at it, this pen right here, it's highly salient. It's emotional, it's godly. It's quite an interesting.

[Jordan Peterson]

Dostoevsky had temporal lobe epilepsy.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yes, yes. So it's just quite. And also Ramachandran and I wanted to study it more. We didn't get into it. We focused on some of the OCD's work instead. But it's interesting. So these guys will become hyper religious as well. They will have hypographies, they will write all the time. So they will develop this tendency to write and. Yeah, just become hyper poetic. And quite an interesting phenomenon. And some people have argued that in the temporal lobe you have the, the God center of the brain, so to speak, in that region. That's where it all emanates in terms of the emotional landscape. That, that, that, that where, where that belief.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, one of the things, you know, if we have a further conversation at some point, I'd like to talk about the like, neurological conceptualization of, of the religious by definition. Like, because I think we're at a point in our understanding of neuroscience where we could have a conversation like that. So, like, one of the hypothesis, for example, would be imagine, I think, that perceptions are the axioms of thought.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Now, and so an axiom is a very deep presupposition.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You can imagine in any conceptual structure that there are shallow elements of the conception.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then layers, kind of like the visual system layers. And that there are axiomatic elements of the conceptual system. Okay. If an axiomatic element is accidentally shifted, you're traumatized. If it's voluntarily shifted, you're a hero. Right, right. As the level of depth of the inquiry maximizes, the inquiry becomes more religious in its nature.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's a definition. Yeah, yeah. And so then you could imagine that the salience of the investigation magnifies in proportion to its depth.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so that would account for the experiential element of awe, for example. And, and yeah, so that, that's something that would be very entertaining technically.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Technically. So it's very interesting. And I think with the whole, with temporal lobe epilepsy. Right. So the whole landscape becomes hyper, you know, so the regions we talked about, the fusiform face area before, the regions from the cluster of cells in the fusiform and the emotional part of the brain become hyperconnected and hyperactive. So there's kind of a kindling going on. So that's why when you look at A dry object like a pen, it becomes hyper cosmic and emotional and spiritual. Right. But that's interesting. There's also the opposite in a way. So if you have what's called Cotard Syndrome, everything in the world is dead. Everything in the world is. It's almost like depression, in fact, but everything in the world. And you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, my God, I am dead. I'm a dead person. And the doctor will say, what do you mean you are dead? They say, I'm dead. And then they say, what about if I take a needle and poke you and. And, well, are you dead? And they will say, well, yeah. And then the doctor might go like this. And they bleed. And they say, well, how come you're dead? You're bleeding. Can dead people bleed?

[Jordan Peterson]

They say, yes, apparently. Apparently, since I'm dead.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Since I'm dead. Right. So it shows you that something intriguing is going on in the brain. When these centers are hyperactive, everything becomes salient. If they're underactive, you are dead. You know, in fact, if that part of the brain, the face area in the brain and the emotional part of the brain is hyperactive, there's another syndrome called Fregoli syndrome, where you go around and you say, everybody in the landscape looks like my uncle Joe, for example. So you go around and say, well, this looks like my uncle Joe, and this looks like my uncle Joe. And the reason is that you have hyper emotionality. You are hyper emotional. Right. Because of that vision, the emotion part of the brain in the face part of the brain are hyperactive and they're hyper connective. The connectivity is in overdrive. And then you feel like, I shouldn't have emotions. That's how your brain. I shouldn't have emotions when I go around in the landscape and looking at people.

[Jordan Peterson]

But I do.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

But I do. Therefore, your brain jumps to these absurd conclusions and go, yeah, yeah, you know, these are all my Uncle Joe's.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, you see the same. We should close with this and we'll move to the daily wire section. But you see, the same thing with the onset of paranoid schizophrenia is that, say someone is watching television.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And part of the speech becomes hyper emotionally significant.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So now it stands out.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. And the more. More intelligent schizophrenics are more likely to become paranoid, by the way, because they build up the conceptual structures around the perceptual anomaly. But it's the perceptual emotional anomaly anomaly that's the core of the pathology. It's like, well, why Is that so significant? Well, because you get this emotional hyper response. It's like it evokes anxiety and wonder. It's awe inspiring. Yeah, it's like. Well, it's like this is. It's particularly significant to me. It's a message. To me, it's a message. What is a message from the television station? Is it a message from the satellites? Is it a message from the Pope? There's no denying the reality of the experience.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So then the paranoid conspiracy, let's say, is overlaid on top of that as an explanation for something that can't be challenged because it's so visceral.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

It is dreamlike in the sense that you just described. And one of the things you also alluded to was that we actually base our sense of reality on that valence. Yeah, right. So it's hyper real if everything's over valence and it's dead if nothing has significance. Significance is the marker of the real.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's very different than objective reality. Okay, we should stop. Here's what we'll do. On the Daily Wire side, you're at Harvard and you're working really in the same area in the Harvard Department of Psychology that I was in the 90s. And so one of the things I'd like to talk to you about is your experience there and your thoughts on the university system in general. So let's do that for half an hour on the Daily Wire side.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Sounds good.

[Jordan Peterson]

So all of you who are watching and listening, you can, well, you can continue your investigation into exactly the topics that we described today, obviously at Peterson Academy, because I'm lecturing there and my guest is lecturing there. It's Introduction to Neuroscience, correct? Yeah, yeah. And so that's one of the newer courses in our offerings. And so if you're fascinated by this sort of thing, it's so useful to know the anatomy and the neuroscience, as I said, because it gives you, you much deeper insights into, well, the nature of the problems that you might encounter and also into the nature of their. Of what? The universe of potentially viable solutions. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we're putting a tremendous amount together right now on the scientific and cultural front in relationship to the overlap between brain function, neurochemistry, physiology and behavior. And like profound philosophical conceptions, it's great to work at that interface. And so the courses that, that while this Introduction to Neuroscience course is one that focuses exactly at that nexus, we have several like that. So in any case, join us on the Daily Wire side. For another half an hour, we'll talk about the state of the modern university, focusing in this case on Harvard and the Department of Psychology there, although you've been at other universities, too, and we can bring them into the mix. So join us on the Daily Wire side. Thank you very much.

[Dr. Balan Jalal]

Thank you very much.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, really good to talk to you. Thanks to the film crew here today in Scottsdale and to the Daily Wire for making this possible. And finally to all of you for your time and attention.