in this video Dr Jordan Peterson explains how our emotions and the way we see the world are tied together and then they look at it and snakes in the in those big snake in the wild and who doubt it they have this special snake they call a snake Rod the look at the thing and some of them will just look at the snake for like 24 hours so you know partly they're afraid of it apparently they want to explore it so what they do they get close to it and the fear increases and then they
back up and the fear decreases and the Curiosity increases and so what happens is they move back and forth until they're right on the line where they're afraid but they're curious and so then they're stuck and they're looking at it and you you experience that all the time actually because when you are engaged in something that's meaningful that's where you are and that's like the line between Order and Chaos you know because you want to solve it it's important maybe you're I don't know maybe you're reading papers about um some illness that you hope to
work on or study it's like well you're worried about the damn illness you know all you're doing is confronting it through the paper so you know you're fairly well sheltered from it but you don't want it to exist and you'd rather it wasn't around but you're curious so you're going to get engrossed in it and most of you to the degree that you're immersed in anything are partly immersed because you perceive it as a problem so you know that's like existential anxiety in a sense it's like it's just part of being there's problems that have
to be solved they produce anxiety they're complicated you find this you find a way of approaching them so that the anxiety doesn't overwhelm you and so the curiosity is optimized that's an incentive reward activation and then you're awake because the anxiety keeps you awake and so does the Curiosity and you think yeah this is a good place to be and it is a good place to be because you're you're optimally protected right there and you're optimally learning so yes that's a good place to be you could think about that as an answer to the nietzschean
problem of how you create value you don't exactly create it you find it there's problems that need to be solved they automatically engage your emotions both positively and negative you've got to find the right balance so and it's something like contending you know it seems to me that human beings have to have something to contend with or they can't tolerate themselves you know because life seems like a stupid joke if you don't have something worthwhile to do but you could have something worthwhile to do and so then maybe it's not so stupid and and absurd
and tragic and that's at least a good way to think about it so you've got satiation on the one hand on the positive side and the behaviors would have considered that an unconditioned response too they really thought about that as reward initially you know so you take a ratty's hunger you feed them something reward now Skinner he used to train routes right and he was the he was he was a very uh what would you call it very well well renowned behavioral psychologist and he could train rats to do damn near anything and what he
would do is starve them to three quarters of their body weight because then they're damn motive they were basically you know hungry rats they were hungry Lonesome rats because they lived that ice isolated existence which rats don't like and then they would starved down to three quarters of their body weight so when when the behaviors used rats as a model for people they actually used hungry Lonesome rats as a model for rats as a model for people and you might think well what kind of model is that but it turns out it's pretty good model
because you're a lot more like a scared hungry rat than you'd like to that like you'd like to admit which is probably empathize with oh the poor rats by the way the more you thought that the more agreeable you are so how many people were feeling pretty sorry for those rats yeah so how about men how many men were feeling sorry for those rats oh yeah about three yeah there's a big gender difference in an agreeableness between men and women by the way so uh just so you know we'll talk about that more so now
the behaviors also thought that you had this primary set of Rewards call them unconditioned and then you had to learn that some things predicted them like uh all classically Maybe rat would push a lever and get a pellet as soon he's pushing that lever like Nat he's pretty happy about pushing that lever okay and he learned the conditioned association between lever pushing and getting a reward but it turns out that because that's been around for so long you also have a system for it so it's not just a learned Association to what satiates you it's
a whole system and that's the dopaminergic system and it the serotonin system seems to be the thing that satiates so you know if you have a big turkey dinner it's like up goes the serotonin levels it's like you don't have to do anything and serotonin is a calm a calming and regulating neurochemical which is why antidepressants stop your neurons from taking up serotonin before you've had a real chance to use it to regulate your nervous system so but dopamine tells you hey good things are on their way and that's pretty much what people run on
and you could think about that as hope so incentive reward is sort of like hope or promise I think promise is a better term so there's pain and satiation and those are really ancient systems and then there are newer systems that are and anxiety and promise and those are related to those more fundamental negative and positive emotions and those things regulate you while you're on your path now there's one more level of complication because you think what can happen on you the way to your goal nothing irrelevant okay so that's that's the irrelevance that enables
you to not see the gorilla and almost everything around you is irrelevant and I think that's partly why people don't like to have their little maps of the world destroyed because if your map of the world is Thoroughly demolished everything becomes relevant and you do not want everything to become relevant it's just too much for you so you wake up and you're naked and it's dark in the middle of a jungle it's like everything's relevant you're not going to like that it's going to burn you out quick and so most of the time you have
to be protected so that almost everything's irrelevant and then you can focus on the few things that you're capable of handling and you do that so you're in your little map then as you move towards it your emotions play and the negative emotions appear when things are not going well and the positive emotions appear when things are going well that's basically how your emotions work now you've got your satiation and your your pain then you've got your threat and your promise and then on top of that you've got a more complicated thing which is novelty
because that's the other thing that can happen when you're on the way from point A to point B something you didn't expect so what and you don't understand so you're walking down the street and uh there's someone laying their face down on the sidewalk and you know they're just they're disheveled and so well what's your emotional response well you didn't expect it so you're going to be taken aback a bit that's anxiety it's like you're moving towards your goal the anxiety stops you now you could think of the space you could think of the space-time
area around that person as unexplored territory now you don't want any unexplored territory in your map because God only knows what's going to happen there okay so what are you supposed to do well maybe you cross the street you think well that person's drunk or maybe you think well they're a homeless person maybe they're lying on a sleeping bag you think well they're just asleep you know you're going to be losing you're going to stop and then you're going to observe and then you're going to use little cues to try to put your map back
together and your map is what's going on here and what should I do about it and so it's partly this interplay between anxiety and curiosity now you can just step around and continue but maybe that'll upset your moral map what kind of person am I you know maybe I should have done something about it or maybe you think there's no damn way I'm going to get involved in this because you know who knows what will happen if I step in there and you know fair enough because who knows what will happen if you step in
there the point is is that it's like your map which has made everything irrelevant it's got a hole in it and now some of what's complicated is shining through and that thing that's shining through so that's like what the phenomenologist talked about as shining forth that thing that's shining through it's like you don't know what to do about it what should you do well you you should do what you do do and what you what you do is you prepare to do everything and that's an emotional response to novelty it's like it's like well if
you don't know what to do you should prepare yourself for anything and that that's stress Google okay
