Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Huberman Lab

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Episode: Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain

Author: Scicomm Media
Duration: 02:07:45

Episode Shownotes

In this episode, my guest is Dr. Allan Schore, Ph.D., a faculty member in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, a longtime clinical psychotherapist, and a multi-book author. We discuss how early child-parent interactions shape brain circuitry, impacting our ability to form

attachments, manage emotions, and navigate conflict and stress. We cover how the development of right-brain circuitry related to emotional processing and the unconscious mind regulates physiological responses, influencing adult friendships and romantic relationships. We also explore how improving your ability to listen to the emotional tone—rather than just the meaning—of words is a vital skill for fostering better relationships with yourself and others, and how it plays a role in reshaping brain circuitry. Additionally, we explain how circuits in the right brain hemisphere drive creativity and intuition and discuss activities to access the unconscious mind. This episode delves into how the unconscious mind regulates emotions—both your own and others’—and shapes our sense of self. By the end, you’ll have new knowledge and tools to build more secure, meaningful, and impactful connections of all kinds: professional, romantic, familial, friendships, and beyond. Access the full show notes for this episode, including referenced articles, resources, and people mentioned at hubermanlab.com. Use Ask Huberman Lab, our chat-based tool, for summaries, clips, and insights from this episode. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman David Protein: https://davidprotein.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Allan Schore 00:02:37 Sponsors: David & Eight Sleep 00:05:49 Thoughts & Unconscious Mind 00:07:36 Right vs Left Brain, Child Development, Attachment 00:13:19 Attachment Styles & Development, Emotions & Physiology 00:18:12 Intuition, Arousal, Emotional Regulation & Attachment 00:23:13 Psychobiological Attunement, Repair; Insecure & Anxious Attachment 00:28:33 Attachment Styles, Regulation Theory; Therapy 00:34:20 Sponsor: AG1 00:35:51 “Surrender,” Therapy, Patient Synchronization 00:39:46 Synchrony, Empathy, Therapy & Developing Autoregulation 00:45:07 Mother vs Father, Child Development; Single Caretakers 00:50:51 MDMA, Right Brain; Fetal Development 00:55:58 Sponsor: Function 00:57:46 Integrating Positive & Negative Emotions, Quiet vs Excited Love 01:03:33 Splitting, Borderline; Therapy & Emotions 01:09:24 Tool: Right Brain, Vulnerability & Repair 01:15:32 Right vs. Left Brain, Attention 01:19:26 Right Brain Synchronization, Eye Connection, Empathy 01:25:39 Music & Dogs, Resonance 01:30:58 Right Brain & Body; Empathic Connection, Body Language 01:36:47 Tool: Text Message, Communication, Relationships 01:42:18 Right Brain Dominance & Activities; Tool: Fostering the Right Brain 01:50:10 Defenses, Blind Spots 01:53:14 Creativity, Accessing the Right Brain, Insight 01:59:31 Paternal Leave, Parent-Child Relationships, Attachment 02:05:16 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures

Summary

In this episode of the Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Allan Schore emphasizes the transformative impact of early child-parent interactions on brain development and attachment styles. He discusses the crucial role of the right hemisphere for emotional processing, affect regulation, and how childhood attachment experiences shape adult relationships. Dr. Schore highlights the importance of psychobiological attunement, therapeutic relationships, and the interplay between implicit emotional regulation and effective communication. The episode provides actionable insights for strengthening personal relationships by leveraging the unconscious mind and understanding attachment mechanisms.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Alan Shore.

00:00:17 Speaker_00
Dr. Alan Shore is a clinician psychoanalyst, and he is the world expert in how childhood attachment patterns impact our adult relationships, including romantic relationships, friendships, and professional relationships, as well as our relationship to ourselves.

00:00:34 Speaker_00
Dr. Shore is on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine.

00:00:42 Speaker_00
He is also the author of several important books, including Right Brain Psychotherapy and Development of the Unconscious Mind.

00:00:50 Speaker_00
Today's discussion with Dr. Shore is an extremely important one for everyone to hear, to understand themselves and to understand the people in their lives. Why? Well, We all go through the first 24 months of age.

00:01:02 Speaker_00
You wouldn't be listening to this if you hadn't.

00:01:04 Speaker_00
And during that first 24 months of age, your brain develops in a particular way depending on how you interacted with your primary caretaker, namely your mother, but also your father or other primary caretakers.

00:01:18 Speaker_00
In that first 24 months, your right brain and your left brain mediate very specific but different processes. For instance, today you'll learn from Dr. Shore that your right brain circuitry

00:01:29 Speaker_00
That is, specific circuitries on the right-hand side of your brain are involved in developing a very specific type of resonance with your primary caretaker that transitions from states of calm and quiescence that you both share simultaneously to states that are considered upstates of excitement, of enthusiasm, of being wide-eyed.

00:01:48 Speaker_00
And the transitioning back and forth between those states, as Dr. Shore explains, is critical to our emotional development and how we form attachments later.

00:01:57 Speaker_00
So if you've heard, for instance, of avoidant attachment, or anxious attachment, or secure attachment, today you'll understand why those particular attachment styles develop, how they translate from early life to your adolescence, teen years, and adulthood, and in fact how those childhood attachment patterns, which of course we can't control for ourselves, but we can control for our children,

00:02:17 Speaker_00
how we can modify them through very specific protocols in order to achieve better relations with both others and with ourselves. It's indeed a very special conversation.

00:02:27 Speaker_00
And to my knowledge, unlike any other discussions about relationships, neuroscience, or psychology that certainly I have heard before, and I fully expect that for you, it will be as well.

00:02:37 Speaker_00
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:43 Speaker_00
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:02:54 Speaker_00
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00:04:04 Speaker_00
Again, the link is davidprotein.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.

00:04:16 Speaker_00
Now, I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night.

00:04:21 Speaker_00
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00:04:27 Speaker_00
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00:04:34 Speaker_00
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This is Eight Sleep's biggest sale of the year. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Alan Shor.

00:05:49 Speaker_00
Dr. Alan Shor, welcome. Nice to be here. To kick things off, I have a simple question, which is what percentage of our thinking and our behavior do you think is governed by our conscious mind versus our unconscious mind?

00:06:05 Speaker_01
You understand that I was trained in psychoanalysis, and I'm a psychodynamic psychotherapist in addition to a scientist and neuroscientist.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
So the unconscious has been something that I have been aware of and have been writing about, and it's a central part of what I'm writing about to this day.

00:06:19 Speaker_01
Essentially, as we're going to see, I'm suggesting that the right brain is the unconscious mind. So when you ask how much of things really are conscious and how much are unconscious, I'm also looking at that neurobiologically in terms of

00:06:33 Speaker_01
how much of activity is going on in the right brain. The right brain is always processing information, always, especially emotional information at levels beneath conscious awareness, especially when you're in an emotional interaction.

00:06:48 Speaker_01
So how much really are things conscious? I would say that when it comes to the basic motivations of why we do what we do, 95 to 90% of that is unconscious, and there has been data to show that that is the case.

00:07:03 Speaker_01
At most, although we think that our conscious mind literally is making all of these decisions, underneath that, at all points in time, the unconscious is operating.

00:07:13 Speaker_01
It used to be thought that the unconscious only comes forth in dreams at night, but we now know that this right brain is reading unconscious communications between us. Communications, is it safe to be with you? Do you understand what I'm saying?

00:07:28 Speaker_01
Really the critical ones always operating and much more important than we had thought itself.

00:07:36 Speaker_00
Let's start thinking about and talking about this right brain versus left brain thing. And what I'd like to know is when we come into this world,

00:07:46 Speaker_00
how much lateralization, as we call it, how much right versus left brain specialization is there at the time when we exit the womb, when we take our first breath?

00:07:58 Speaker_01
The answer to that is pretty clear at this point in time. And incidentally, some of these questions about the unconscious are provided by neurobiology. But essentially, here's what we know.

00:08:11 Speaker_01
There was discoveries that were being made in the 80s and the 90s about the human brain growth spurt. The human brain growth spurt occurs from the last trimester of pregnancy through the second until the third year of life.

00:08:26 Speaker_01
All of that time is a period of right hemisphere dominance. And actually, there have been six major studies in neuroscience laboratories around the world that have shown that the right hemisphere is dominant during that period of time.

00:08:41 Speaker_01
In fact, there's a recent study in Mexico where they looked at two to three months, six to eight months, nine to 12 months. At each point in time, they noticed that the right hemisphere was accelerating its growth, the left was not.

00:08:55 Speaker_01
So the right is dominant very early. In fact, there's evidence to show that even in utero, there is a right lateralization. Now remember, the lateralization is part of all

00:09:07 Speaker_01
systems, and what is lateralized in not only the cortical areas, but the subcortical areas, et cetera. So if you take, let's say, the amygdala, there's a difference between the right amygdala and the left amygdala, and again, the right hemisphere.

00:09:20 Speaker_01
So the answer to that is very clearly now. The left hemisphere does not come into a growth spurt until the end of the second year and into the third year, up until that point, which means everything about attachment is about right brain dynamics.

00:09:40 Speaker_00
Does that mean that everything about attachment is occurring in the first, you know, 24 months?

00:09:46 Speaker_01
Yes, absolutely. And it's occurring during that brain growth spurt while the right hemisphere. So essentially what you have now is that in the baby's brain, that baby's brain is now in a right brain growth spurt.

00:09:59 Speaker_01
And the mother now is shaping that baby's right brain through the attachment mechanism, through her regulation of that brain. So she helps shaping that brain for better or for worse. And incidentally, that means also not only secure attachments,

00:10:15 Speaker_01
but also the matter, because it's for better or worse, it's also the early evolution of insecure attachments, and we'll talk about what those insecure attachments, all of those really are being shaped by the right.

00:10:29 Speaker_01
What's more, there's evidence to show that it goes right hemisphere, then it goes left hemisphere, and then it goes back and to left and back and right along the lifespan, so although you have,

00:10:43 Speaker_01
a tremendous growth spurt more than any other time in the first two and a half, three years of life. Think now about adolescence, where you have another growth spurt. Is adolescence marked by a right brain growth spurt?

00:10:57 Speaker_01
It's marked by the initially right and then it goes left. So essentially with puberty and with the onset of testosterone and androgens and estrogens, it shifts now into another growth spurt at that point in time.

00:11:13 Speaker_01
which means, just for the record, now the attachment relationship, which is essentially going to be about how we regulate our emotion, because I'll be talking about attachment is about the communication of emotions, right brain to right brain, in the first two years of life, and about the regulation of emotions in that same period of time, et cetera.

00:11:35 Speaker_01
But ultimately, that leads to the strategies that we have for affect regulation. An attachment is essentially affect regulation, affect communication and affect regulation.

00:11:47 Speaker_01
So now what you're looking at, if you have a mother and an infant, they are communicating with each other, right brain to right brain, and how are they doing it? by face, voice, and gesture.

00:12:00 Speaker_01
The mother is now reading the expressions of the baby's face, the visual, the auditory, the prosody of the voice, and then the tactile. So she's picking up these kinds of communications that are coming out of that baby, tactile, gestural, visual.

00:12:18 Speaker_01
And she's now picking up those communications now. She's resonating with those communications. And Nancy is going to regulate those communications. And that's essentially what it's about. In the end, what we have is strategies of affect regulation.

00:12:32 Speaker_01
How we regulate affect for the rest of our lives depends upon the attachment relationship of the first two years, which is a right brain to right brain connection.

00:12:43 Speaker_01
Now there have been hundreds, thousands of studies on attachment, as you're well aware of at this point in time.

00:12:50 Speaker_01
But the key to it, literally, I began this in 1994 with my first book, I think, Regulation and the Origin of the Self, The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Remember, Bowlby was studying attachment in the 60s.

00:13:06 Speaker_01
But the problem of emotion really was not picked up. And early on when they were looking at attachment, they were looking at behaviors and they were looking at cognition. So if you know the attachment literature, remember the strange situation?

00:13:19 Speaker_00
Yeah, just to remind listeners, I've talked about this on previous podcasts. I'll provide a link to that segment, but a strange situation can briefly be described as parent and usually mother and child come into the clinic.

00:13:31 Speaker_00
They deliberately leave the baby with a caretaker. This is sort of a pseudo daycare type situation. Mother leaves, and then there's a lot of attention paid to how the infant or young child, toddler, whatever age they were looking at reacts.

00:13:46 Speaker_00
Are they nervous? Are they able to engage in play?

00:13:49 Speaker_00
And then they look at the return of the mother and how they react to that and there was this classification of behaviors along the lines of secure attached insecure attached there was a Categorization of kind of an amalgam of different things these so-called D babies that were kind of a bunch of other things and this is where we hear a lot nowadays about

00:14:11 Speaker_00
secure, insecure and anxious and avoidant adult relationship styles. There's been a lot written about that and talked about that. We don't have time to go into all that in detail, but this is what Dr. Shore is referring to.

00:14:22 Speaker_00
I'm really intrigued by this idea that there's a right brain, left brain dominance that takes place throughout the lifespan.

00:14:29 Speaker_00
Has it been carefully mapped into adulthood such that we can say as a function of chronological age, you know, when somebody hits their early 30s that they're more right brain or left brain dominant, or is it more developmental milestones as opposed to chronological age?

00:14:43 Speaker_01
I think it's developmental milestones there. You know, I'm thinking that, remember Eric Erickson talking about different stages of life and how you have a hierarchy here, literally, because the attachment is a hierarchy.

00:14:56 Speaker_01
It starts subcortical and then it goes to cortical. So what he said was that there are changes along the line and that it fits with that.

00:15:07 Speaker_01
The attachment relationship is there at later points in time, and really what it does, it guides us through our relationships with other people.

00:15:15 Speaker_01
It certainly guides us through strategies of what to do with stress, and that way that we deal with that stress is now going to depend upon how the mother is regulating that baby's stress during a critical period.

00:15:29 Speaker_01
Now, the term critical period is an important one here too, because again, at the first two years of life, it's the right brain is in that critical period there.

00:15:41 Speaker_01
But that leads to strategies of affect regulation of how we deal with stress, but also how we deal with novel situations. And again, all of it has to do with emotion.

00:15:52 Speaker_01
Now, I jumped there because I talked about there was attachment models move from behavior to cognition, to emotion. Essentially, the first book that I wrote was on the neurobiology of emotional development.

00:16:08 Speaker_01
In 1994, when I came out with that book, that was about the same time that Antonio Damasio came out with his book.

00:16:15 Speaker_01
And really, it was not until the mid-90s, partly because of the neuroimaging, which was coming during, you remember, the decade of the brain, that emotion really now became a matter that science was looking at for the first time.

00:16:30 Speaker_01
The point that I'm making here is that attachment is not psychological. It's psychobiological. And there was always this rift between the psychological and the biological.

00:16:41 Speaker_01
But when you're talking about emotions, you're not only talking about psychological events, you're talking about physiological events that are associated with those events.

00:16:50 Speaker_01
For example, the physiology of the stress response, the physiology of the sympathetic nervous system, which is energy expending, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is energy conserving. So the mother is a regulator,

00:17:04 Speaker_01
And the way that she's a regulator of that baby is that she's tracking that baby's arousal levels. She's tracking that baby's emotions as they change in time, moment to moment.

00:17:17 Speaker_01
And then she's synchronizing with that, and that allows her now to be able to regulate it. So we're going from recognizing that baby's emotions synchronizing with those emotions, and then being an affect regulator.

00:17:33 Speaker_01
So the mother, who is securely attached now, is a good affect regulator of that baby. She not only is an affect regulator of the negative states of the baby, because negative states and negative affects are adaptive, by definition.

00:17:49 Speaker_00
Baby cries, mother nurses baby.

00:17:51 Speaker_01
You bet. And that's a signal she's sending there literally. And the mother then intuitively knows, intuitively knows. She's not using her left brain to figure out what to do with that baby. She's doing it intuitively.

00:18:03 Speaker_01
And intuition is a right brain function. And she's regulating that baby implicitly. Now, Let's go back over implicit to explicit, okay? You're seeing a lot now about the shift from explicit to implicit.

00:18:21 Speaker_01
Something that is implicit goes on at levels beneath awareness.

00:18:26 Speaker_01
So when she is intuitively knowing what to do, that right now this baby is down-regulating too much and she wants to bring that baby up, she'll now use her tone of voice literally to raise that baby up into a more excited state.

00:18:41 Speaker_01
Or if the baby is dysregulated, sympathetic hyperarousal. She knows how to downregulate that. And she'll downregulate that by her facial expression, by the tone of her voice. Now, her tone of her voice is now trying to soften and to quiet down.

00:18:58 Speaker_01
So essentially, what attachment is is the regulator of arousal, of emotional arousal. And that emotional arousal also includes the autonomic nervous system. So what we have here is the regulation

00:19:14 Speaker_01
attachment of the limbic system, the emotion processing limbic system, positive and negative, and the autonomic nervous system. So they are limbic autonomic circuits, and those circuits are in the right brain.

00:19:30 Speaker_01
Now, on this matter, as it turns out, the right brain has a control system of attachment. Now, since the right brain is there first before the left, because there's no speech

00:19:45 Speaker_01
at two years, she's regulating this baby at two months, six months, 12 months, all of it is occurring non-verbal. She's doing this implicitly, not explicitly. The left hemisphere processes explicit stimuli, conscious stimuli, rational stimuli.

00:20:05 Speaker_01
That's not there. Everything is being done implicitly beneath levels of awareness, and again, that allows it to be the regulation. So attachment theory, my attachment theory, regulation theory, is essentially attachment is interactive regulation.

00:20:25 Speaker_01
Stay with me now. Ultimately what we have are two forms of regulation. What we're doing is we're regulating the self, right? I mean, it's the subjective self. which is in the right hemisphere. The left is objective self. The left is verbal, conscious.

00:20:47 Speaker_01
She's regulating the right hemisphere, and she's doing that, again, by tracking the baby's emotional states, as I said.

00:20:55 Speaker_01
But again, what the child learns now from that is that her right brain is becoming more and more complex from the first year to the second year.

00:21:07 Speaker_01
And it's going to turn out some of these functions that are more complex are being also stimulated by the mother. And ultimately, by the end of the second year, that baby can regulate its emotional states by itself in its right brain.

00:21:29 Speaker_01
We have two forms of regulation. You can regulate your states by auto-regulation, by yourself. In other words, you're not with other human beings at this point in time. You have an efficient right brain which can regulate.

00:21:43 Speaker_01
And incidentally, what we're talking about here is the regulation of the amygdala by the right orbital frontal cortex. The right orbital frontal cortex is the highest level of the right hemisphere.

00:21:56 Speaker_01
It also has the most sophisticated and the latest evolving parts of the brain are in the right frontal cortex, not the left. The right orbital frontal Not the left dorsolateral cortex is the key to this.

00:22:12 Speaker_01
So what we learn from attachment here, again, is how to, both in a secure attachment, how to auto-regulate your emotions when you're apart from people.

00:22:22 Speaker_01
In other words, when you go to a quiet place at this point in time, you're regulating yourself down, so to speak, and you're getting a nice regulation of the amygdala by the right overall frontal cortex.

00:22:33 Speaker_01
Or interactive regulation, which is now you go to another human being, We go to another human being under times of stress in an optimal situation. We also go to another human being to share joy states.

00:22:50 Speaker_01
And remember, I said that the mother is upregulating joy states and downregulating negative states. So in a secure attachment, you have somebody now who can do both. In certain forms of insecure attachment, that's not going to happen.

00:23:07 Speaker_01
The avoidant attachment, is always auto-regulating his states.

00:23:13 Speaker_00
So just so I'm clear, in avoidant attachment, the baby, which is now let's say two and a half years old, three years old.

00:23:24 Speaker_01
That's already a toddler.

00:23:25 Speaker_00
That's a toddler, excuse me. The toddler is auto-regulating more often than seeking another to help sort of do coordinated regulation.

00:23:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, what I'm saying in this secure attachment, And let me back up a step on that. The key to attachment is psychobiological attunement. You know the phrase.

00:23:47 Speaker_01
Notice psychobiological attunement, that the mother is regulating not only the psychological aspect, but literally is regulating the physiological aspect of that, which means that she's regulating the autonomic nervous system.

00:24:01 Speaker_01
Think about porgous social engagement system. What we have here is the capacity in secure attachment who have, and then the second part of the attachment is repair. Now let me go back. Psychobiological attunement. Sometimes she misattunes.

00:24:22 Speaker_01
Sometimes she misreads the baby's states for one reason or another. What happens in a good enough caregiving is that the mother who was misattuned now returns to that baby.

00:24:36 Speaker_01
now re-synchronizes with that baby, now reconnects right brains to right brains with that baby. And that repair is the key here. So you have misattunement and repair.

00:24:47 Speaker_01
So the key to a secure attachment is not only psychobiological attunement, but it's also the repair of the misattunement. And that allows the baby now to expand that situation and being able to use that now to order a case. That's a secure.

00:25:07 Speaker_01
But if she misattunes, for example, and doesn't repair, let's say, or she's not that good at psychobiologically attuning, let's say as an avoidant mother, because avoidant personalities are uncomfortable with real closeness.

00:25:23 Speaker_01
Another term for an avoidant personality is a dismissive personality. And what they are dismissing is the need for interactive regulation, so they're always auto-regulating.

00:25:35 Speaker_01
Or you have another time in which you have another form of attachment, an insecure anxious attachment, where that person is always interactively regulating or is always going to others to help them regulate, but can't auto-regulate.

00:25:53 Speaker_00
I think this is a really important thing to hover on for a moment, just given some context about hundreds of thousands of questions that I get about avoidant versus secure versus anxious-attached, and you stated it all incredibly clearly, but I want to make sure that we double-click on this, as they say.

00:26:13 Speaker_00
The idea that if a child and mother did not coordinate their autonomic- Use the word synchronize. Synchronize, did not synchronize their autonomic regulation in the proper way that there would be a non-secure attachment.

00:26:29 Speaker_00
I'm using that language for a specific reason, makes total sense. But this idea that if the child, which soon the baby, which is a toddler at three or so,

00:26:41 Speaker_00
is avoidant, then they're going to have to learn to auto-regulate and they're going to seek others to help them regulate less than a secure attached. And the anxious attached, baby, toddler, adolescent, adult, will do just the opposite.

00:26:58 Speaker_00
They're going to have a hard time self-soothing, but they are going to feel, let's say these might be the kind of people that don't well tolerate a text message not getting responded to at a very short latency, for instance.

00:27:12 Speaker_00
And we all, depending on context, we have this, right? But I find this to be incredibly important, which is why I wanted to go back through it, because I think nowadays,

00:27:24 Speaker_00
We hear so much about anxious and securely attached, avoidant, et cetera, in the context of adult romantic relationships, but I hope that people are realizing the truly incredible importance of your work, which is that the same circuitry and mechanisms that are used to establish

00:27:40 Speaker_00
infant mother attachment are repurposed later in life for adult relationships. I think that when we hear that, it makes sense, but I don't think that most people know that.

00:27:53 Speaker_00
They assume somehow that there's circuitry in our brain and body for adult romantic attachment that is distinct from our attachment circuitry that we had with our parent.

00:28:02 Speaker_00
And I think your work speaks very loudly that they are in fact the exact same circuitry.

00:28:07 Speaker_01
All of this is happening in the right brain. And incidentally, attachment relationship is retained as an autobiographical memory in the first two years of life, even before there's a left hemisphere, and that under later stress situation

00:28:23 Speaker_01
That will be the key there. Incidentally, the attachment, whether it's secure or insecure, is also the key to positive and negative transferences. That's where it's communicated.

00:28:33 Speaker_01
Let me go back and say a little bit more about one other form of attachment, and that you mentioned the type D attachment.

00:28:39 Speaker_00
The D babies. Disorganized.

00:28:42 Speaker_01
Disorganized babies. So you have secure, you have two types of organized insecures. okay, the avoidant and the anxious, and then you have a disorganized, disoriented one.

00:28:56 Speaker_01
Now, ultimately, that person, under stress, is not able to autoregulate or to interact and regulate. So what they will do at that point now, now I'm now thinking about, let's say PTSD, various borderline personality disorders, that person now

00:29:18 Speaker_01
literally can't go to the other for autoregulation or indirect regulation, that person now will use a defense literally to shut down the attachment system, and that's exactly what dissociation is. Dissociation just shuts down the attachment.

00:29:35 Speaker_01
So in the anxious attachment you have a continual activation of the attachment system, which means a continual activation of the right hemisphere all of the time, and in the insecure

00:29:49 Speaker_01
a dismissive attachment, you have a deactivation of the attachment system, which would be a deactivation of the right brain.

00:29:56 Speaker_01
So in the end, a secure attachment is an efficient one, but it's an efficient one that can switch back and forth between them.

00:30:04 Speaker_01
Not only that, it also, at a later point in time when the left comes online, it can also communicate much better with the left hemisphere than without that.

00:30:15 Speaker_01
Regulation theory is essentially a theory of the development of the self in an optimal situation, but it also talks about the psychopathogenesis of the self, the early origins of psychiatric disorders and personality disorders.

00:30:33 Speaker_01
I'm thinking about not only schizophrenia and depression, but I'm now thinking about narcissistic personality disorders, borderline personality disorders. Maybe we'll come back to more on that. And then, ultimately, the repair of the self.

00:30:45 Speaker_01
So regulation theory is about the development of the self, the psychopathogenesis of the self, and then the repair of the self. Because these attachment situations are now going to play out under all periods of stress.

00:30:58 Speaker_01
The right hemisphere is dominant for the stress response. The right hemisphere is dominant for the sympathetic nervous system, the energy expending, and the right hemisphere is dominant for the parasympathetic nervous system.

00:31:14 Speaker_01
So again, all of that will play out at later points under stress. And when those systems break down, that's when the patient will form symptomatologies and come into therapy. And in therapy, the therapist now, the key, I'm jumping here.

00:31:33 Speaker_01
No, this is great. Because there's a right brain to right brain interaction between the mother and the infant. There's also a right brain to right brain interaction between the therapist and the patient. And the key to both of them is regulation.

00:31:51 Speaker_01
Person is coming in in a dysregulated state. The key to that is regulation. And the key to any form of therapy, whatever the form of it is, again, is interactive regulation, and it's a therapeutic relationship.

00:32:08 Speaker_01
The thing which is the best indicator of whether somebody will do well out of therapy and whether a clinician will do well out of therapy is how well they can deal with the therapeutic relationship.

00:32:22 Speaker_01
And a really good therapist literally knows how to bring back those attachment things there because now the person is starting to feel safety and trusted and, incidentally, Attachment is about safety and trust, which is very much autonomic.

00:32:37 Speaker_01
But again here, the key to therapy is being able to form a therapeutic relationship with the patient. So the key here is, can the therapist form, co-create a therapeutic relationship with an avoidant patient, with a secure patient?

00:32:57 Speaker_01
with anxious patient, with a borderline patient. As you can imagine, the toughest thing is going to be able to do with the borderline patient or the schizophrenic patient. So, what you have here is that the attachment dynamics are building out.

00:33:11 Speaker_01
So, in the very first session, what's happening, the therapist is listening to the verbalizations of the patient in order to diagnose and understand the symptomatology. But the therapist is also listening beneath the words.

00:33:29 Speaker_01
And the patient is tracking the attachment relationship underneath it, tracking the arousal and the arousal dysregulation underneath that, tracking it in his own body, so to speak, et cetera. And again, that is a different type of listening.

00:33:45 Speaker_01
Again, the therapist is listening to a left brain, but more or less, the therapist is listening to the right brain. And the question is, how does the therapist do that?

00:33:55 Speaker_01
And in order, just for the record, for the therapist to be able to get to the attachment dynamics, which are right lateralized, the therapist has got to switch out of the left into the right. And there's a term for that.

00:34:06 Speaker_01
The term for that is surrender. Surrender. You cannot consciously, purposely put yourself into the right. You've got to let go. You've got to let go.

00:34:17 Speaker_00
Think, let it be, so to speak. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink with adaptogens.

00:34:28 Speaker_00
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00:35:42 Speaker_00
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00:35:53 Speaker_00
And I just want to make sure I understand, this is surrender on the part of the therapist trying to, yes, listen to the narrative that the patient is sharing, but also paying attention to the underlying emotional state. Is the person quaking?

00:36:10 Speaker_00
Are they angry? Is there feelings of, you know, despair, shock, disgust. So they're carrying this in their parallel tracks. And then is the goal of the therapist, if they're an effective one, to then soothe the patient?

00:36:29 Speaker_00
Or is it to allow the patient to have some sort of catharsis, some release of this? Like at what point does the therapist intervene and try and coordinate and show the patient a different way to think about and feel about the topic matter?

00:36:45 Speaker_01
What I'm suggesting here is that essentially the therapist is listening left brain to left brain, but the therapist also is always listening beneath the words, etc. And he's listening to the right brain to right brain communications.

00:36:57 Speaker_01
And the patient now who is depressed is coming out with right brain communications. There's sadness in the voice. The face is clearly dysregulated.

00:37:05 Speaker_01
And essentially, as the therapist is tracking that, the emotional arousal, whether it's into hypoarousal and depression or hyperarousal into anxiety, the first thing there is to synchronize with that patient so that my physiology is syncing with their physiology.

00:37:27 Speaker_01
And now, through the right insula, Interceptively, I now literally am feeling in my body what the patient is feeling in their body. I now understand that patient. from the inside out.

00:37:46 Speaker_01
And incidentally, what I'm picking up in my body about the dysregulation of that patient may be very different than the verbal report that that patient is giving at that time. But the key here, literally, just like the mother,

00:38:01 Speaker_01
is synchronizing with that baby's crescendos and the decrescendos of that autonomic state, of those emotional state. I'm picking up those points where they are shifting into and out of an emotional state. I'm synchronizing with that.

00:38:16 Speaker_01
And then ultimately, when I'm in sync with that kind of thing, then at that point, purely implicitly, I'm now starting to slow the tone of my voice if I want to reduce that arousal down, or I'm up-regulating the voice.

00:38:32 Speaker_01
At that point in time, I am now interactively regulating, and we are now synchronized together.

00:38:37 Speaker_01
So essentially what's going to happen is that as we synchronize, as they're going to dysregulation, we're now synchronizing together as we're going down into regulation.

00:38:49 Speaker_00
So the therapist can literally and somatically show the patient what auto-regulation is like or what coordinated regulation is like.

00:39:03 Speaker_01
And you'll see it on my face. Face, voice, gesture. You'll see it on my face. You'll see it in the tone of my voice. You'll see it in my gestures. Those three sensory modalities are now going back and forth between us.

00:39:18 Speaker_01
So the key of the first session, literally, is not only to diagnose. Really, it's to start to begin to synchronize with that patient and to form a therapeutic alliance with that patient.

00:39:31 Speaker_01
And at the end of the first session, the patient may say, I don't know why, but I'm feeling better. And I have some idea that you can understand, but it's got to be more than that, what I am feeling, literally.

00:39:46 Speaker_00
So often nowadays I think we hear that adult romantic relationships can provide a healing of some of the failures of childhood attachment. And there's also a phrase thrown around a lot that we need to learn to parent ourselves.

00:40:09 Speaker_00
This is more of a pop psychology, online, social media thing, you know, that people need to learn to mother and father themselves at some level to self-soothe and to, you know, who knows what that means. I'm not gonna try and define it.

00:40:21 Speaker_00
It's not operationally defined. So the question I have is to what extent do you think the process that you just described with a therapist can start to rewire some of the, the capacity to auto-regulate or coordinated regulate.

00:40:40 Speaker_01
Essentially here, what you have is over time, partly because of this synchrony.

00:40:47 Speaker_01
First of all, let me spell synchrony with a capital S. What I mean by that is in the last five years, a huge amount of information has come out about this idea about interpersonal synchrony. The term synchrony

00:41:01 Speaker_01
comes from the Greek, synch meaning the same, chrony, time, same time. So that literally two people literally are synchronized. We are feeling something in the same moment, and we are feeling it spontaneously between ourselves.

00:41:17 Speaker_01
We are feeling that kind of situation. So again here, the key to the mother really even more than the auto-regulation, the key is interactive regulation, number one. Number two, it's occurring at an implicit level.

00:41:30 Speaker_01
The mother literally is doing this without any conscious awareness. She's doing this intuitively. The right hemisphere is intuitive and it's imagistic. It's not rational and logical.

00:41:40 Speaker_01
The key to any disorder, whatever it is, is the regulation of a particular state. The regulation of rage, the regulation of loss, the regulation, the dysregulation of shame or disgust. So essentially what you have is

00:41:56 Speaker_01
the regulation of all of these emotions, but that regulation I want to point out is all implicit. And here's where the skill of being with patients over long periods of time is the key here.

00:42:09 Speaker_01
Because the key to making changes in the patient is not what you say to the patient or what you do to the patient, It's how to be with the patient.

00:42:19 Speaker_01
You understand the difference, how to be with that patient, especially while that person's being is in a dysregulated state. Now, by definition, when they're coming in on the first session, they are in a dysregulated state.

00:42:33 Speaker_01
So again, it's implicit, it's not explicit. If explicit regulation is an intellectual understanding of my symptoms, Implicit is an unconscious understanding at a physiological level, at a psychobiological level of that.

00:42:56 Speaker_01
And incidentally, synchrony is right, is the mechanism underneath empathy. Now, we know empathy literally has to be there, but empathy is a right brain function. And there is a difference. I said there's a difference in the hemispheres.

00:43:17 Speaker_01
There's a difference between emotional empathy, where I am feeling what you are feeling, and we are sharing the same feeling. And I don't have to think about that. Literally, I know at that point in time we are in the same place.

00:43:33 Speaker_01
There's a difference between emotional empathy on the right and cognitive empathy on the left. Cognitive empathy is an understanding. It makes no changes. because essentially what we're attempting to do is make the changes in the right.

00:43:47 Speaker_01
Now the changes in the right are going to be in the right axis. They're going to be the orbital frontal cortex, which is the executive regulator of the right brain. The dorsolateral cortex is the executive regulator of the left brain.

00:44:04 Speaker_01
The orbital frontal cortex now starts to form new connections with the cingulate, the insula, and the amygdala. And that's where you're now going to see the changes. But again, the changes are due to the regulation.

00:44:20 Speaker_01
So you'll see the person now starting to come into more regulated states. And the key is synchrony. So what's happening here, there's a strong therapeutic alliance, safety and trust. And in that situation now,

00:44:37 Speaker_01
The more synchrony that is there between the two, the more interactive regulation there is between the two. And first, there will be synchrony between the patient and the therapist.

00:44:48 Speaker_01
Then there will be synchrony and interact regulation between that person and maybe other people, maybe a wife, a partner. And ultimately, in the symptomatology will change. Because remember, the symptomatology is dysregulation.

00:45:03 Speaker_01
And the whole key is to change it to regulation.

00:45:08 Speaker_00
There are a couple of questions I have before we move forward about mother-infant attachment as opposed to father-infant attachment, so that's one. And I'll ask these again in a moment, but I think you'll see where I'm going here.

00:45:21 Speaker_00
And then I'm fascinated by the idea that these circuits get established early in life, then are repurposed for adult relationships. They can be modified in the way that you just described. but that they cross gender lines.

00:45:40 Speaker_00
So, for instance, a female baby can form these patterns of attachment.

00:45:49 Speaker_00
with their mother, female caretaker, but then assuming that baby grows up to be a heterosexual woman and she has attachments to men, then these things can be reactivated across gender lines, right?

00:46:03 Speaker_00
So this formation of the circuitry is not gender-specific, although it sounds like it's important that it be the mother to child in some way. You keep saying mother-child as opposed to caretaker.

00:46:15 Speaker_00
So to just spell them out one by one, first question, are there any data about the formation of the circuits in the baby where the mother is either not available, if it's an adopted mother, if it's a child raised by extended family?

00:46:31 Speaker_00
I mean, there's so many different configurations, but you get the point.

00:46:34 Speaker_01
All right, here's what I'm suggesting. First of all, there has been some conflict on this, but after 30 years on this, I believe that there is a primary attachment figure.

00:46:49 Speaker_01
And the primary attachment figure is the person who was the interactive regulator of that baby when that baby is under stress.

00:46:57 Speaker_00
Between age zero and two.

00:46:58 Speaker_01
Yeah. Or let me say it even another way. The primary attachment figure is the person who provides the right brain for that baby when that baby's right brain is dysregulated.

00:47:09 Speaker_00
Could be dad, could be mom. Could be.

00:47:11 Speaker_01
Yes, it's true women are better at reading nonverbal cues than men are, but it could be. And incidentally, we now have some evidence that's showing that men do have right brains.

00:47:27 Speaker_00
For a second there, I wasn't sure if you were joking. But I don't know, maybe that's reflective of a natural right brain.

00:47:32 Speaker_01
All right, now that being the case, what's happening here is that in the first year or two, the mother's right brain, the person who is the right brain, which in most cultures is a woman, but does not have to be.

00:47:45 Speaker_01
It could be a stay-at-home dad who literally has a good right brain, and maybe a couple are figuring out that literally he'd be better in that position, but it needs that right brain.

00:47:54 Speaker_01
But other than that, what happens here, when it goes now into the second year, toward the end of second year, and the father comes online, got me? At that point in time, the father now becomes a primary attachment figure also.

00:48:07 Speaker_01
But he has some differences the way that he's dealing with that baby. He's usually more arousing with that baby, and that the play is more arousing with that baby.

00:48:15 Speaker_00
So more activation of the sympathetic autonomic. So sort of more up, let's call it, up-level play.

00:48:24 Speaker_01
Exactly. You're dealing with more upregulation and being able to tolerate more hyper-aroused states.

00:48:30 Speaker_01
Because in the second year, one of the things that the father will do with the infant is, with toddler, infant first year, toddler second year, rough and tumble play, for example, rough and tumble play. So the father is that.

00:48:41 Speaker_01
So the father literally is now teaching the child literally how to take risks, but the father is now moving more towards autonomy and independence.

00:48:52 Speaker_01
The mother was there at the beginning about interactive regulation, and so the father is playing that role.

00:48:58 Speaker_01
And I've also suggested that just as the mother is shaping that baby's right brain in the first year, the father is now shaping that baby's left brain towards the end of the first year, second, and into the third year.

00:49:16 Speaker_01
that he's shaping that baby's, his left brain to that baby's left brain. That being the case, he may also, earlier on, have had good experiences with that baby early on in life.

00:49:30 Speaker_01
And a good example of that would be a father who was tender, tender, yet at the same time is instrumental and is teaching things about the world. So one brain is shaped by the mother figure, the brother by the father figure.

00:49:49 Speaker_00
What about under situations where there's really just one primary caretaker? This is increasingly common nowadays.

00:49:56 Speaker_00
And in some countries, like in certain Scandinavian countries, people opt to do this and elsewhere, of course, but this isn't always a divorce situation. Sometimes people decide to have children on their own.

00:50:07 Speaker_01
You know, I think what's happening in that kind of situation is the person is initially providing the right brain, and then that person is now providing the left brain. So let's say a single woman with a child, her right brain is there on the git.

00:50:26 Speaker_01
But then in the second year, and incidentally, there may be father figures or family members who also can step into that. But essentially, her left brain is there also. Remember, we both have right brains and left brains.

00:50:41 Speaker_01
But again, that's a different kinds of skill in a left brain, which would be, you know, the more autonomous situation.

00:50:51 Speaker_00
What are your thoughts about some of the modern exploration of compounds that can facilitate more right brain synchrony between therapist and patient? I've done a few episodes about MDMA assisted psychotherapy.

00:51:06 Speaker_00
These of course were just recently not approved by the FDA. So these are not legal. Nonetheless, there are interesting clinical studies showing that these are in pathogens.

00:51:19 Speaker_00
One could imagine that they could be useful in the proper context to improve patient therapist right brain synchrony and accelerate some of this process.

00:51:34 Speaker_00
It seems like it would also require both the patient and the therapist taking the compound, and that seems like it would have all sorts of ethical issues.

00:51:41 Speaker_01
Dr. Jeffrey Rosenbaum Yeah, yeah. Remember, it's the relationship in the end that is the key there. I'm also somewhat aware of that literature, and you used the word empathogen, you know, which is not quite…

00:51:57 Speaker_01
straight out empathic, but mimicking those kind of situations there. My thought is that that might be more efficacious if it were specifically involving right brain dynamics with a person who knew how to work with those right brain.

00:52:17 Speaker_01
What you're getting there are very early forms of the behaviors which are subcortical. The attachment is also regulating the subcortical areas, and those are the key ones. And incidentally, we are paying too much attention to the cortical area.

00:52:30 Speaker_01
We literally have to shift, because the subcortical areas are the foundations of the human, and everything is built on top of that. I'll come back to in utero in a second if I don't get on that.

00:52:40 Speaker_01
In fact, I have some people who have worked with me, have also been using right brain type psychotherapy with those patients, and I think that that will be

00:52:53 Speaker_01
really interesting possibilities of seeing changes where you have the relationship, you know, in addition to that.

00:53:02 Speaker_01
And also some understanding about how the right brain works, because one of the problems that you have where there is still some resistance to the idea that the right brain is just a simpler version of the complex left hemisphere, but that's not the case.

00:53:17 Speaker_01
This right brain is working completely differently. So I'm thinking that In that case, a better situation. Before I forget this, I want to just throw one other piece in. I said that the right brain is in a growth spurt from the last trimester.

00:53:38 Speaker_01
In the last five years, ten years, there has been a real interest in utero development, and evidence to show that you're even seeing lateralization in the fetus.

00:53:52 Speaker_01
And so, and there's even evidence now, scientific evidence to show that the early memories in utero are stored in the right amygdala. So they're down there, so to speak. So we're not paying more and more attention to what is happening there.

00:54:07 Speaker_01
Because at birth, literally what you have here is the deeper parts of the right brain are evolving in utero, the insula. and the right amygdala, the central amygdala, and that's setting up.

00:54:21 Speaker_01
And you also have synchronization across the placenta, whereby they are regulating each other's autonomic nervous systems.

00:54:29 Speaker_00
Can adrenaline pass across the placenta? I should know this. I know adrenaline doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, but the brain makes its own adrenaline. But do we know if adrenaline crosses the placental barrier?

00:54:40 Speaker_01
Well, first of all, most of the studies have been on cortisol. And high levels of cortisol, they're going to cross it.

00:54:46 Speaker_01
So if you have, let's say the amygdala, which is in a critical period of growth, the right amygdala, and the cortisol levels are very high, that's really going to not be an optimal situation for that amygdala to evolve because you're going to have a continuous stress response there.

00:55:02 Speaker_01
And essentially what that means also, that if the mother is in a very stressed state during a utero, some of that literally now is going to impact the lower areas of the brain. So as far as adrenaline goes, I'm not sure on that. I don't see why not.

00:55:20 Speaker_01
Although hormones certainly cross, you know, we're looking at not only changes in neuromodulators, especially incidentally, the key here that we're trying to regulate are the neuromodulators, excuse me, dopamine, reward, noradrenaline, adrenaline.

00:55:40 Speaker_01
It's those, which also early in life literally form neuroplastic, so they will form circuits. That's what we're attempting to regulate here, to downregulate very high levels of neuroadrenaline and upregulate dopamine, et cetera, et cetera.

00:55:58 Speaker_00
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00:57:46 Speaker_00
As I recall in your book, Right Brain Psychotherapy, there was a description, beautiful description of, you know, these upstates and then these more calming state coordination between mother and child. And I started to, I actually read this book

00:58:02 Speaker_00
when I was living in Topanga, I would walk on the road, I don't recommend this, there are no sidewalks in Topanga, and I would read the physical copy, and I recall very distinctly thinking about this image of the baby and the mother, and the baby is a little bit hyper aroused, is upset, and so the mother would make sort of sounds, not necessarily words, like,

00:58:25 Speaker_00
these kinds of things or humming or, you know- Lullabies. Bouncing lullabies, these sorts of things. That's the prosody. The prosody. And then the related release of things like serotonin, perhaps oxytocin as well. We can talk more about those.

00:58:39 Speaker_00
But then also how critical it is for the mother to be able to regulate the baby's transition to upstates.

00:58:46 Speaker_00
Like looking at the baby as it comes out of a nap and saying, you know, good morning and really wide eyes, lots of gesturing, lots of gesticulating that is, you know, bringing the voice level up and the baby, you know, really waking up in a kind of a steeper slope of arousal and how important that was.

00:59:04 Speaker_00
And then that being slightly more related, and this makes perfect sense to norepinephrine, adrenaline at low healthy levels and perhaps dopamine as well. Is that the right way to think about this?

00:59:16 Speaker_00
And if so, is that what's going on when we form adult friendships, adult relationships? Are we oscillating back and forth between the ability to hang out and relax and soothe each other and the ability to kind of get excited about something?

00:59:32 Speaker_00
Is this the basis of all relationships and relating?

00:59:36 Speaker_01
Yes, yes. The key here is emotional regulation again, and again, it's implicit emotional regulation. One of the central tenets of my ideas here is that, first of all, there has been too much of an emphasis on the downregulation of negative states.

00:59:56 Speaker_01
Remember the original attachment theory, the secure base, the baby would come back in a stressed state, she would downregulate the negative states.

01:00:04 Speaker_01
But really, attachment is about the downregulation of negative states and the upregulation of positive states. Still, at this point in time, the importance of positive states in the human experience are overlooked.

01:00:18 Speaker_01
Positive emotions, joy, enthusiasm, excitement. Positive states literally are the key, and there are hormonal aspects to that, as you just point out. For example, dopamine, et cetera, et cetera. And this goes for therapy also.

01:00:32 Speaker_01
In therapy, it's not only just the down-regulation and the sharing the down-regulation, but it's also sharing the up-regulation of positive states, because that's, you know, that's a critical piece of it also.

01:00:45 Speaker_01
But there still is that bias, to look one way. Now, in the Right Brain book, I'm also talking about two types of love. Quiet love and excited love.

01:00:57 Speaker_01
This was the famous psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who was a pediatrician, who was one of the great psychoanalysts of the 20th century, and he made the distinction between quiet love, which would again be the down regulation of noradrenaline, and excited, which is into a parasympathetic state, so you're going from a hypersympathetic state into a parasympathetic state, quiet love, and then excited

01:01:24 Speaker_01
which would be also passionate love, which is the high arousal state out of it, so to speak. And they are both important, and ultimately they both need to be integrated.

01:01:35 Speaker_01
And you may have a situation whereby one can do one, but ultimately they have to come together. Let me make this important point. In the end, we have negative emotions for adaptive reasons. It's there. Let's say shame.

01:01:50 Speaker_01
Shame is meant to dose down very high levels of arousal. And if one can't do that, very high levels of arousal, let's say in narcissistic personality disorders, you need to be able to. So we need to have access to both positive and negative emotion.

01:02:07 Speaker_01
But the real key to a secure attachment is the ability to integrate both positive and negative emotions.

01:02:16 Speaker_01
So with a really good securely attached mother, when that baby is in a down state, literally, she can literally ride down with that baby and synchronize. And when it's an upstate, she can really ride up with that state.

01:02:30 Speaker_01
In the case of narcissistic personality disorders, let's say, for example, and I'm jumping here, we've got an insecure attachment. It can be an avoidant attachment or the other one, depends on what kind.

01:02:42 Speaker_01
There are two different types of narcissistic personality disorders. You can have anxiously attached narcissistic- No, no, but you can have two different types of narcissistic personality disorders.

01:02:50 Speaker_01
A vulnerable attachment and an egotistical attachment.

01:02:53 Speaker_00
You said a vulnerable attachment?

01:02:55 Speaker_01
Vulnerable attachment is, again, an anxious attachment.

01:02:59 Speaker_00
These people constantly need praise.

01:03:01 Speaker_01
Yes, sound familiar, but also egotistical attachment. But my point out of that essentially here is the stresses in life are there, and that the negative stresses are there, but we can learn from those negative stresses also, et cetera.

01:03:20 Speaker_01
And ultimately what we need to do is to be able to know how to integrate. If we can't integrate the positive and the negative, will end up with splitting, you know the term.

01:03:32 Speaker_00
Yeah, because I believe that's a primary feature of borderline personality disorder. Yes. Which I think we should also touch on.

01:03:41 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:03:41 Speaker_00
Yeah. So my understanding about splitting is that it's the, I love you, I hate you phenomenon brought on by not just an internal switch, which is sometimes seen in like bipolar,

01:03:57 Speaker_00
but rather somebody with a borderline personality disorder will see something like, and be like very upset, like suddenly, like the fact that a glass is empty of a drink meant that they didn't think enough to like refill a glass or something, whereas a few minutes before it was perfectly fine, it was not an issue, right?

01:04:17 Speaker_00
There needs to be a trigger and then they split, is that right?

01:04:20 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, so essentially, you know, the splitting usually, the splitting goes out externally. That person is all bad, I am all good. So now you have that splitting, etc. You can't see anything of a goodness in that person at this point in time.

01:04:35 Speaker_00
Does it sometimes go the other way? That person's all good, I'm bad?

01:04:38 Speaker_01
It could also be that, all good. But you also have internally splitting. You have an internal split between a good self and a bad self.

01:04:45 Speaker_01
And internally, there's an internal object relation that we all have as we internalize these external relationships so that there's a good self and a bad self, literally, and that they cannot be integrated, so to speak.

01:04:58 Speaker_01
And that that part of me, I hate that part of me versus I love that part of me. Or in terms of borderline, usually what you see at the very beginning is that there's an over-idealization of the positive values of that therapist.

01:05:15 Speaker_01
And then there are some stressors and misattunements and ruptures that are repair. And now all of a sudden, what was totally good now becomes totally bad.

01:05:26 Speaker_01
And incidentally, that could be, if there was not a strong therapeutic alliance, the point at which the person will drop out.

01:05:34 Speaker_00
Are these people with borderline personality, I don't know if you still call it a disorder nowadays that gets a little bit into the

01:05:42 Speaker_00
let's call it borderline, with borderline, do they exhibit the same sort of splitting idealization and then the idea that somebody is terrible and they want nothing to do with them in the context of work relationships, friendships?

01:05:56 Speaker_00
Does it extend out into other domains of life or is it unique to certain types of relationships?

01:06:03 Speaker_01
I think it's a way of seeing the world. The way of seeing the world essentially is very different from the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere sees the world through emotional relationships.

01:06:17 Speaker_01
That can become a trait that can be really hard and fast. Let me put it another way. In the case of narcissistic personality disorder, the baby is all good. The caregiver primary caregiver is always thinking very positive about that infant.

01:06:40 Speaker_01
But when that infant now all of a sudden becomes depressed, the interactive regulation stops at that point in time.

01:06:49 Speaker_00
The caregiver doesn't want anything to do with that.

01:06:52 Speaker_01
So at that point in time, now, everything is unconscious. If you and I are together, and there is a misattunement between us, what possibility, let's say in a dismissive attachment, is all of a sudden I will disengage.

01:07:14 Speaker_01
We got too close, and at that point in time, maybe I'm acting out my early attachment dynamics, because what the baby is doing is expecting what the mother will do next. And at that point in time, there's a misattunement like that.

01:07:34 Speaker_01
And so in the case of a dismissive personality, that person will emotionally disengage, okay? Become very abstract at that point in time. And at that point in time, I can't feel you. I hear what you're saying. And so

01:07:53 Speaker_01
At all points in time, you have this situation of coming closer and moving apart, coming closer and moving apart. And this will be acted out in the therapeutic relationship also.

01:08:04 Speaker_01
And so that every time the person is, the anxious person is stressed, they'll come in closer to you now. Now they're more demanding about what they need from you. Look at the tone of my voice.

01:08:16 Speaker_01
while the instigator avoidant now is now going to deactivate it. And at that point in time, my voice will now get flat. You can't even hear the affective tone of my voice.

01:08:27 Speaker_01
So I'm telling you that we always pick up, at the level of our own physiology, how emotionally close or distant that person is at this point in time, especially at points of stress. whether I'm coming in or I'm moving out. Let me go back to this.

01:08:51 Speaker_01
All of this is occurring at an implicit level, which is why you said something about reparenting, et cetera. Too much is on a conscious level there. If you really want to make these changes in a personality, they have to be changes in the right brain.

01:09:09 Speaker_01
And that's why all therapy now is looking into emotion, all therapy. no matter what form of therapy, it's laying on top of the therapeutic relationship and emotion per se.

01:09:23 Speaker_00
I'm pausing because I'm just taking all this in and thinking about what are the ways that people can start to tap into this right brain health or lack of health and ways to repair their right brain circuitry, so to speak,

01:09:47 Speaker_00
without a therapist, or is that just simply impossible?

01:09:51 Speaker_01
No, it's not impossible. No, it's not impossible. We all do grow, and incidentally, our right brains do grow. But again, the key here, I'm suggesting the whole idea about interpersonal neurobiology.

01:10:12 Speaker_01
I was the editor of the Northern Syria Interpersonal, which is the two-person situation. There has been too much of an emphasis on order regulation and not enough emphasis on interactive regulation.

01:10:24 Speaker_01
The real key to changing a right brain is finding people you can be close with, finding people you can be open with, finding people you can be vulnerable with,

01:10:39 Speaker_01
That literally you can show your shortcomings and opening yourself up to those people as they open up to you. It's literally to form that right brain to right brain communication system with someone else.

01:10:54 Speaker_00
I think I just got it. I think, if I'm not mistaken, what you're describing is interactive dynamics that

01:11:04 Speaker_00
create or elaborate on circuitry that exists in all of us, but that for some people might be atrophied because of the lack of proper nourishment, emotional nourishment early in life, but that we can engage these circuits, these right brain circuits.

01:11:21 Speaker_00
But then when we're not around these people,

01:11:24 Speaker_00
there must be something about the right brain circuitry that provides a sort of a soothing function so that we must know at an implicit level that like we can do this, like we know how to attach in healthy ways to people, we have a close friend we can rely on, we have maybe friends plural, we

01:11:41 Speaker_00
we maybe repaired a relationship with a sibling, this kind of thing.

01:11:45 Speaker_00
So it's not that these circuits need to constantly be engaged every moment with the barista, but that we somehow at an unconscious level, it must be that we come to realize that this circuitry has re-elaborated or is elaborated in a way that we know, quote unquote, we can do it.

01:12:06 Speaker_01
You know, remember, part of the problem is being able to take in, to take these things in here. But the key to emotion, incidentally, let me throw out an important, another important term, in terms of, let's say, a therapy situation.

01:12:19 Speaker_01
I've said, essentially, therapy is about literally reworking emotion. And the most, the key to mental health and physical health is also a right brain, a right brain emotional situation here. The key here is that,

01:12:35 Speaker_01
There are heightened affective moments in a therapy session. I'm going to go therapy, then I'm going to come back to your question. We've now formed the therapeutic alliance.

01:12:47 Speaker_01
The stronger the therapeutic alliance is between us, more empathy between us, so to speak, the more we can share. I'm now going to start to drop some of my defenses, because the defenses are there to block affect, negative affect.

01:13:03 Speaker_01
and begin now to take a chance now to open myself up to somebody else. But in a therapy session, somewhere around the middle of that session, the person comes in,

01:13:14 Speaker_01
out of the world in a left-brain state, somewhere in the middle of the session, they start moving into affect. And now the person is starting to talk in a more affective level.

01:13:25 Speaker_01
And now talking about a memory or some sad situation or something that just happened in a relationship with a couple. Now, you even start hearing my voices now. The voice tone changed. And these moments, which only may last, believe it or not,

01:13:43 Speaker_01
50, 60 seconds are heightened affective moments. These are moments when all of a sudden we are both in the right and we are both synchronized and the affective now is out there, so to speak.

01:13:57 Speaker_01
And that's the possibility now to get this change in these heightened affective moments. So to be in an interpersonal relationship with someone and to co-create with that person

01:14:09 Speaker_01
a heightened affective moment in both of us, which we are sharing at that point in time, by taking the risk to be open at that point in time also. These are the moments in life that you really go into your autobiographical memory.

01:14:25 Speaker_01
I remember my occasion with that person, I can bring back the whole context, because remember the right brain acts with images, images. So I can bring back that image now, and I can remember the closeness that I felt at that point in time, et cetera.

01:14:43 Speaker_01
These are put into the right brain. So we are always putting into our autobiographical memory these heightened affective moments. So to have those shared affective moments with other people, these are really whereby you're making changes in the right.

01:15:01 Speaker_01
And these are much more important, I want to suggest, than, you know, intellectually. Now, there have been certain fMRI, I'm now going to, I'm going to move into a little bit of a different place here.

01:15:16 Speaker_01
What I'm suggesting is that these right brain to right brain communications are always going on. certain people literally can't read them as well as other people can, and they can't read the face of voice, and they can't synchronize well.

01:15:31 Speaker_00
Can I stop you and ask one question, which is, let's say that, let's take this conversation for instance. I'm listening to your words very carefully.

01:15:40 Speaker_00
If I make an effort to listen especially carefully to what somebody is saying, the content of their words, Is there a competition between left and right brain such that I'm now not getting as much right brain listening? Yeah, okay.

01:15:56 Speaker_00
This to me feels like the surrender aspect, whereas I can, and I do this during these interviews slash discussions where I'll sit back sometimes and I'm still listening, but I widen my gaze.

01:16:09 Speaker_00
I don't look around, but I widen my gaze and I'm trying to just feel something coming in. I'm not a therapist, obviously. No one would ever suspect that I was, but

01:16:20 Speaker_00
I only do it for a few seconds, and then I re-engage, and I used to think that it was like a relaxation of sorts, but inevitably I feel like it's a different way to, the conversation takes a different direction.

01:16:35 Speaker_00
Is that more or less what you're talking about?

01:16:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's a colossal shift. I mean, Stanley, the corpus callosum, you can shift from the left into the right about a hundred milliseconds. So essentially you have to be in one hemisphere or the other.

01:16:48 Speaker_00
So if I'm listening very carefully to like exactly what you said, and I'm tracking everything you said, like we're in a courtroom situation, then my right brain is suppressed.

01:16:58 Speaker_01
Okay.

01:16:59 Speaker_00
Is that right?

01:17:00 Speaker_01
Good feet, good feet. Now watch where I go here.

01:17:02 Speaker_00
Okay.

01:17:03 Speaker_01
The right hemisphere is dominant for attention. Okay? I mean, this baby and this mother, literally, she's focusing our attention on that baby's face, tone, voice. But there are two different types of attention. strong neuroscience to show this.

01:17:19 Speaker_01
The left brain operates by narrow attention, narrowly focused attention. The best example of narrowly focused attention is you are following my words one after the other.

01:17:33 Speaker_01
But there's another type of attention which is used by the right brain, which is called wide-ranging attention, which comes right out of Freud. which he also called, maybe you'll remember this, evenly suspended attention.

01:17:48 Speaker_00
I haven't heard that, but that's beautiful.

01:17:49 Speaker_01
It's the same thing, which is much wider than that. And that form of attention is the form of attention that the right brain has. Because the attention at that point in time is not only of

01:18:07 Speaker_01
what's coming from the outside, but also attention to what's happening in the inside, my own inside, the changes in my own physiology at that point in time also. So yes, there are these two different forms of attention.

01:18:22 Speaker_01
And essentially, the only way someone who was just narrow all the time, let's take a personality who just lives in the left hemisphere.

01:18:33 Speaker_00
a hyper-linear person.

01:18:35 Speaker_01
Exactly. Hyper-logical, hyper-rational, cannot really see the big picture, but literally that kind of a situation. So essentially, that kind of a person is always looking at the narrow aspects of it and cannot see the broader context.

01:18:52 Speaker_01
the broader context because there's a context that's being set up.

01:18:56 Speaker_01
Right now between you and I, there's also a context that's being set up and that context also has to it a kind of a feeling of safety and trust as we literally just go off wherever our thoughts are with some idea that literally you'll be able to follow that and you'll come back with me at the same time.

01:19:17 Speaker_01
So the context, the emotional atmosphere between us changes when you go left into the right like that. The point here is that it used to be thought that the only way you could understand the brain was by looking more intracychically into one brain.

01:19:37 Speaker_01
If you understood how one brain worked, and everything was intracychic. But then there's the interpersonal part of it. And so essentially, we're moving now from a one-person intracychic psychology to a two-person interpersonal psychology.

01:19:51 Speaker_01
You see what I mean by two-person? I got the mother here, got the baby there. I got the patient here, I got the therapist there. And between them, literally they're going back and forth at all periods of time,

01:20:03 Speaker_01
right brain-to-right brain communications underneath the conversation. So neuroimaging, hyperscanning, neuroimaging, you're familiar with hyperscanning. another paradigm shifting thing that is occurring now in neuroimaging.

01:20:17 Speaker_01
For the first time, we can now scan two people, NIRS, EEG, whatever you want, while they are in the middle of a basic interpersonal interaction, a numberable interaction between the two of them. These studies have now been done.

01:20:35 Speaker_01
And what they did was that they found is that the two brains

01:20:40 Speaker_01
especially when they're into emotional states, and when they are looking at each other face to face, and they're concentrating literally on how to empathically be with that person, et cetera, emotions, so to speak, they find that the right brain of one will synchronize with the right brain of the other.

01:21:01 Speaker_01
And the part of the right brain that synchronizes with the other is the right temporal parietal junction. a lot of evidence now on the right temporal parietal junction. I said right brain to right brain. So now the eyes are coming.

01:21:24 Speaker_01
And remember, the eyes are—I mean, direct eye connection really is the most powerful form of communication.

01:21:29 Speaker_00
I always remind people these are two little bits of brain outside your cranial vault.

01:21:33 Speaker_00
As weird as that might seem, they are two bits of brain, your retina is central nervous system and you're looking at, that's about as close as you can get to looking at somebody's brain state as anything.

01:21:42 Speaker_01
Well, you know, the eyes are being controlled by the autonomic nervous system. So you got the, you have an autonomic nervous system, the autonomic nervous system synchrony here, so to speak.

01:21:54 Speaker_01
but essentially what's occurring at this point in time, face, voice, gesture. The face is processed in the posterior parts of the right hemisphere, face processing, right hemisphere, face processing.

01:22:09 Speaker_01
The posterior parts of the right hemisphere, the sensory areas of the right hemisphere process the voice, the melody of the voice, the tone of the voice. That's different than the semantics of the voice.

01:22:20 Speaker_00
So this is prosody. This is what the Italians do so well.

01:22:24 Speaker_01
Right, right. And the posterior parts of the right hemisphere also will process gesture and tactile. All of that comes together, is integrated together in the right temporal parietal junction.

01:22:42 Speaker_01
So when two people literally are empathically synchronizing with each other, when we are sharing the same emotional state. The patient says at this point in time, my God, it's rage. I never realized it was anger.

01:23:02 Speaker_01
And at that point in time, the empathic therapist who is synchronizing, we are both literally now in that right temporal parietal junction. But the right temporal parietal junction is what sends the communications

01:23:19 Speaker_01
and receives the communications, got me here? So essentially, that's where our linkage is and we are now literally in a right brain to right brain communication.

01:23:32 Speaker_01
And what they found was, during a real psychotherapy situation, where the patient comes in and they're there because they have interpersonal relationships problems and emotional problems, and they're face to face and they're eye to eye,

01:23:48 Speaker_01
and they're tracking each other like that, you'll find that synchronization. So the synchronization between my right temporal parietal and your right temporal parietal is a right brain to right brain communication.

01:24:03 Speaker_01
That right brain to right brain communication is always occurring in that kind of a context. And therefore, the most important new change in psychoanalysis is that the unconscious is more than just happening at dreams.

01:24:21 Speaker_01
It's happening at all points because the unconscious we now know is a relational unconscious. It communicates with another relational unconscious, right brain to right brain.

01:24:34 Speaker_01
And this has really changed so much now in our understanding about what psychotherapy is about also. And certainly I want to point out the major Change mechanism in psychotherapy now is not insight. It's not cognitive insight.

01:24:51 Speaker_01
It's more the ability to have an emotionally laden conversation with another human being. and to make emotional connections with another human being, which is why the therapeutic relationship really is the factor of the change.

01:25:05 Speaker_01
And that's very different than the old days, was your unconscious is here, the analyst is there, I'm now going to interpret what you're doing as you are sinking down into the right, but I'm going to stay up left and interpret it.

01:25:19 Speaker_01
That's why there was a real limitation to that. And that's why psychoanalysis really changed now also to a face-to-face contact, not just the couch also.

01:25:31 Speaker_00
Fascinating and makes total sense based on the newer imaging tools, revealing synchrony, et cetera. I have two questions that can be asked in parallel, music and dogs. Why music and dogs? Well, some of what you're describing

01:25:51 Speaker_00
reminds me of the state shift that occurs when I hear particular pieces of music for which I'm not paying attention to the lyrics or in some cases, the lyrics matter. I'm listening, but they don't make any sense.

01:26:07 Speaker_00
Like if they were read out as a paragraph, it wouldn't make any sense. but it feels like there's some fundamental truth there. So this is, I could state specific musical preferences, but it's highly individual.

01:26:19 Speaker_00
So for some people it's classical music, for other people it's music that contains lyrics, but there's this feeling like, yes, like there's a truth there and I feel that truth, even though the content of the words, let's take, couldn't help myself, like a Bob Dylan song, for instance, he's certainly could be considered a poet, right?

01:26:38 Speaker_00
And if you read the lyrics just as a paragraph, you'd be like, this is nonsense.

01:26:42 Speaker_00
But the way that it's sung, the meaning behind it, the timbre in the voice, the prosody, et cetera, and presumably the emotion that he was feeling at the time when the music was recorded communicates with us and we enter a synchronous state.

01:26:55 Speaker_00
And then in parallel to this, I mentioned dogs where sure, they have a left brain and a right brain, but I think with animals generally, if they're domestic animals and we have a very close relationship to them,

01:27:08 Speaker_00
we can really feel a resonance with them and presumably them with us. And for anyone that's experienced it, some people might be chuckling now, but it's nothing short of profound, right?

01:27:19 Speaker_00
The extent to which we really feel like they see us and we see them and there's a bond. Clearly not the same magnitude as a parent-child bond, but nonetheless. So music and dogs, do you think it's tapping in to this same right temporal parietal

01:27:36 Speaker_01
Well, I think that it's, first of all, the right temporal parietal junction is the posterior and the right orbital frontal is the cortex. So the whole right brain there, so to speak.

01:27:47 Speaker_00
Okay, so we're going, we're basically going from anterior to posterior, just there's structures the whole way back.

01:27:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, the orbital frontal is the regulation part of it. The temporal parietal junction is the communication part of it. So the whole key is the communication of emotion and the regulation of emotion.

01:28:03 Speaker_00
Where is the surrender switch?

01:28:05 Speaker_01
The surrender is the colossal switch out of the left. into the right.

01:28:09 Speaker_00
So not so much paying attention to the content of the words, the logic behind them, the logical flaws that might exist, the analytic part, but rather how the words sound, how the words feel, literally.

01:28:22 Speaker_01
Yes. And clearly one of the, first of all, there has been a lot of neuroscience done on music. And incidentally, most of that is right brain, showing right brain activation in music. The key here, even more than that, It's particular music to me.

01:28:44 Speaker_01
It has a particular meaning to me, subjectivity. And a lot shows that music is essentially a mechanism of affect regulation. But I want to suggest to you that pets are also a mechanism of affect regulation.

01:28:58 Speaker_00
Dogs everywhere smiling.

01:29:00 Speaker_01
Absolutely. And maybe by the same things, I want to suggest, I think that the communication between dogs, and I've had four dogs myself,

01:29:08 Speaker_01
is that literally it's tactile, it's the touch of that animal, it's the prosody of the voice because literally that dog understands the prosody of the voice and also to some extent I think they can read our faces.

01:29:24 Speaker_01
But more than that, there's one other sense which I haven't brought up which is part of human relationship and that's smell. Okay, and this is overlooked in human relationship.

01:29:36 Speaker_01
But in real intimate contacts between human beings, the smell is really a key there. You know, think about sexual arousal. So dogs are really very strong on our smell, etc. But if attachment is reunion after a separation,

01:29:53 Speaker_01
You come home, there's that dog sitting there, literally, and immediately you're down-regulating the day.

01:30:00 Speaker_01
You have now taken off the whole left hemisphere and all the whole stresses of all of that, and you're now shifting left into right, and we use the mechanisms that are available to do that. And music is one of the ways to do that.

01:30:13 Speaker_01
So in some sense, music is an auto-regulation, although music can be live music, and then it's more than that. So that's the case.

01:30:21 Speaker_00
or playing music with others.

01:30:22 Speaker_00
This is something I'm incapable of because I have no musical ability, but playing music with others, you can see that when we talk about the chemistry of a band, it's so incredible to witness that and then to feel it in mass with thousands maybe of other people.

01:30:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, there have been studies to show that during a performance There is a synchrony, there are synchronized states between the performer and the audience.

01:30:51 Speaker_01
And it's certainly, they're all, you can have thousands of people literally in that same synchronized state at that point in time.

01:30:57 Speaker_00
You mentioned earlier Stephen Porges' work, and we know that brain and body are connected in both directions.

01:31:05 Speaker_00
And I should know this, but I don't know if the right brain has preferential communication with the parasympathetic or sympathetic or other aspects of Well, Vegas is parasympathetic, but I think it's probably both.

01:31:21 Speaker_00
I think the more we discover about the Vegas, it's likely to be mixed sympathetic, parasympathetic, but I'll catch some heat for that, but that's okay. But bodily sensing is a real thing.

01:31:32 Speaker_00
Like there are ways that our diaphragm and our core relax when we're happy. I mean, all of this is obvious to anyone, but I'm just curious how right brain links up with bodily states.

01:31:44 Speaker_01
The right brain is more connected into the body than the left brain. Incidentally, do you know the name Ian McGilchrist?

01:31:52 Speaker_00
Yes, I know the name and many people have commented on our YouTube channel that I need to talk to Ian. I have gotten that far, but I've been busy.

01:32:05 Speaker_01
Get him, get him.

01:32:07 Speaker_00
Great, Ian, we'll send you an invite.

01:32:09 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, There has been ongoing dialogue between us for some time, but Ian talks about that the right brain literally is much more connected into the body, and incidentally is also more dominant for will.

01:32:27 Speaker_01
Unconscious will is more important than conscious will. which you kind of, at the very beginning, we were talking about the left versus the right.

01:32:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, so I'm curious as to, you know, how people can start to sense these right brain, left brain shifts. We talked about how paying a little less attention to the content of words and a little bit more to how a conversation is feeling,

01:32:54 Speaker_00
independent of the word content might be part of it.

01:32:58 Speaker_00
We hear a lot these days about how body posture matters, like if people are closed up with their arms crossed, I don't know, but sometimes I'm just a little chilly, so I'll cross my arms and sometimes I'll cross my arms and lean in and I know that I'm in a much more attuned state.

01:33:12 Speaker_00
So I don't put too much weight on that, but maybe I should put more weight on that. What are your thoughts?

01:33:18 Speaker_01
There's a classical work by an analyst by the name of Manuel Hammer, and he was talking about how to reach the affect.

01:33:27 Speaker_01
And what he suggested is that there are certain moments in the session when literally my body, in order to pick up the communications of the patient, I lean back.

01:33:38 Speaker_01
I'm not leaning forward into, I lean back and let the atmosphere literally come over me, so to speak.

01:33:45 Speaker_00
I love this.

01:33:45 Speaker_00
And I'm just as, forgive me for interrupting, but I love this because people, especially on social media, they take a piece of information like, you know, if you're leaned back, you're disengaged, you're leaned forward, you're engaged, but you could also just turn it right around and say, if you're leaned forward, you're impending, and then the person doesn't have space.

01:34:01 Speaker_00
And so it becomes a, frankly, it becomes a bunch of BS.

01:34:04 Speaker_01
But notice here what I'm talking about, what the therapist is attempting to do is to make an emotional connection, an empathic connection. And in order to make an empathic connection, You're leaning back.

01:34:15 Speaker_01
You're leaning back and literally as you lean back, all of a sudden, you're able to pick up things and hear things that you didn't see before, so to speak.

01:34:25 Speaker_01
And frequently what happens when you're in an emotional connection like that, images will come to your mind. Images which really represent the emotional experience that the other is having.

01:34:37 Speaker_01
And at that point in time also, what you'll find is that just as you're picking up that person's image, he's picking up your person image.

01:34:46 Speaker_01
And what Hammer says is that what we have here is something that's like an affective wireless between the two, because it's going back and forth between the two of us, just like a right brain to right brain communication, affective by Freud said,

01:35:05 Speaker_01
The human unconscious acts like a receptor and it picks up the communications of the unconscious of another human being. Freud said literally human beings can pick up the unconscious without it going through the conscious mind.

01:35:22 Speaker_01
So again, in that kind of a context, that all makes sense. The other thing I want to say about all of these behaviors that are going on now when there is an emotional communication. The key is spontaneous behaviors. Spontaneous.

01:35:40 Speaker_01
Not thought out behaviors. Spontaneous behaviors. When there's spontaneous behaviors, there's more trust in them being, you know, in the first place. But there's not a mind that is attempting to present anything.

01:35:54 Speaker_01
And when you have two people revealing their spontaneous behaviors to each other, Even if they're not sure how they're going to be affected, that also is a matter for synchrony.

01:36:05 Speaker_01
In order for there to be synchrony, there has to be spontaneous two-way communications, turn-taking communications.

01:36:13 Speaker_01
And incidentally, as we talk about this conversation, what is set up in the attachment between the mother and the infant, the infant makes a cry, the mother responds, is that they are now taking turns. There's turn-taking behavior.

01:36:29 Speaker_01
And in a good relationship, what you find is more or less smooth turn-taking behaviors. And incidentally, you and I, who I've never met before, are not doing too badly in these spontaneous turn-taking behaviors between us.

01:36:46 Speaker_00
I appreciate you saying that. I feel the same way. Text messaging has become a dominant mode of communication these days. I've hosted a few guests expert in emotions in the brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett, for instance, and others.

01:37:03 Speaker_00
And she and others have talked about how the emojification of emotions, you know, just like a smiley face or a crying face or, oh goodness, or, you know, mind blown.

01:37:14 Speaker_00
These things are convenient as is shorthand text, lack of punctuation, et cetera, but, Today's conversation also highlights the extent to which text messaging is pretty much devoid of most everything that you're talking about.

01:37:29 Speaker_00
A green bubble or a blue bubble, seen or not seen, read or not read, depending on how you set your settings.

01:37:38 Speaker_00
The latency, the turn-taking, sometimes people layer in multiple conversations and you're going back and forth about a couple of different things and then like your food order comes.

01:37:49 Speaker_00
Sure, the human brain can handle this, but this seems either not good, neutral, that is, or bad for building and reinforcing communication.

01:38:03 Speaker_00
It actually concerns me, but of course I'm now 49, so I can say things like, now that I'm 49, I can say things like that, you know, but it concerns me because I think that you can imagine the young brain and the older brain essentially

01:38:19 Speaker_00
not being good at interpersonal dynamics because of text messaging.

01:38:24 Speaker_01
I agree. I agree. First of all, let me mention that one of Ian's ideas is that essentially the left hemisphere is becoming more and more dominant today, not only in this country,

01:38:45 Speaker_01
And he sees that as really as a huge problem because the title of his book is The Master and His Emissary, and the emissary, which is the left brain, betrays the master.

01:38:54 Speaker_01
So he sees that one of the problems we're dealing with right now is that there's the left hemisphere is there and that these right hemispheres, even metaphors, are problematic.

01:39:06 Speaker_00
So I have a rule. I don't argue over text. I don't like to argue over text. I don't like to argue period, but I don't, you know, I'll pick up the phone. I'm of the generation where we called one another.

01:39:20 Speaker_00
I find text to be completely devoid of what I'm really seeking in terms of connection. And I think that there's an entire, I know there's an entire generation of people that grew up communicating mainly through short message.

01:39:38 Speaker_00
Jonathan Haidt and the author of the Anxious Generation has been encouraging young kids to put away their phones and get out and interact more, encouraging parents to let their kids be more what they call free range kids and do this kind of thing, arguing that there's far fewer dangers in the physical world than there are in the online world for young brains.

01:39:56 Speaker_00
He makes a convincing argument. For those of us that are seeking to have better connection, Maybe even do some healing of the right brain circuitry that you've been talking about today.

01:40:09 Speaker_00
Do you think that there's a hierarchy of effectiveness such that, you know, like text would be perhaps at the bottom? a voice memo, maybe next level up, I'm thinking here, a phone call.

01:40:23 Speaker_00
You know, there was a time when we wrote handwritten letters and those felt very meaningful. I kept handwritten letters from people that I cared about and that cared about me.

01:40:32 Speaker_00
The handwritten letters sort of proves that it doesn't have to be a real-time exchange, but there's something about handwriting. A typewritten letter, by today's standards, would also be a significant thing.

01:40:47 Speaker_00
There really seems to be something special about a letter, a face-to-face conversation.

01:40:57 Speaker_01
point of the letter and the attempt of the letter literally was to make a connection.

01:41:03 Speaker_01
I can remember in my childhood going away to camp and we would write letters back and forth and the words that were being used there were literally about making a connection and filling you in, which also meant that I had to reflect about myself and what was happening with me and how I felt about that and I was sharing all of that

01:41:24 Speaker_01
you know, with another person. That has really gone into the background and things have become much more impersonal. But I want to point out that for a certain type of personality, texting fits perfectly.

01:41:37 Speaker_00
These are people that walk around with left brains that are hypertrophied?

01:41:44 Speaker_01
People, you know, living in the left. Living in the left, that's right.

01:41:49 Speaker_01
I just want to point out there are other ways literally of feeding the right brain of what it needs and one of the other ways also is going out into the world, is traveling, is being in nature, sharing those kinds of things also.

01:42:03 Speaker_01
Those are also in addition to the in-person situations here. Yeah, we're seeing changes here, we're seeing changes here, and I'm not so sure too many of these are good.

01:42:18 Speaker_01
Let me throw out, I made a little list of the areas which are now being studied, which are showing that clearly this is right brain dominance in these activities.

01:42:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, please share.

01:42:34 Speaker_01
Stop me at any point. Essentially, the argument that I'm making in this new book on human nature is that the highest levels of human nature are in the right brain. So essentially, intuition

01:42:51 Speaker_01
Now remember, intuition is there for all kinds of professions. One of the things that a fireman gains over time is literally how to read a fire. So intuition, purely right brain, and intuition literally is drawing on body sensations also, et cetera.

01:43:12 Speaker_01
Imagery. Creativity. A lot of evidence showing creativity, the ability to process things, something novel and something new. Metaphors, imagination, studies, humor, music, poetry, art, Morality. Compassion. Spirituality. And the best for last, love.

01:44:04 Speaker_00
That's a spectacular list, making the right brain circuitry at least among the most exciting circuits, certainly important circuits.

01:44:15 Speaker_01
I threw an ad for the next book.

01:44:19 Speaker_00
I love right brain psychotherapy. Love, love, love it. I own a hardcover copy. I've owned it for a couple of years now. I highly recommend it. We'll put links to your books in the show notes.

01:44:30 Speaker_01
Get to development of the unconscious mind also.

01:44:32 Speaker_00
Okay, will do. What are some activities that allow us to, quote unquote, drop into our right brain circuitry a bit more?

01:44:44 Speaker_00
One that immediately leapt to mind, as you mentioned nature and interacting with nature, and we were talking about music, is walking. And earlier we talked about, you educated us on rather, this notion of wide range attention, this,

01:45:05 Speaker_00
evenly suspended attention that is associated with the right brain, this kind of widening of gaze as opposed to narrow gaze and narrow attention that is associated with left brain circuitry.

01:45:16 Speaker_00
When we're out in nature and when we're ambulating, when we're walking, provided we're not looking at our phone, one hopes, or looking for something specific like a bird that we've spotted, we tend to be in panoramic vision.

01:45:32 Speaker_00
I'm a vision scientist, so I can't help myself. You know, what we call magnocellular vision. This is like big pixels. Yeah, taking it all in. And it's more spherical than kind of a cone of attention.

01:45:46 Speaker_00
I would imagine that might be more right brain associated. What are some things that you, if you,

01:45:55 Speaker_00
suggest to your patients, like, hey, you know, until our next session, you know, do you encourage them to journal, free associate journal, to listen to music, to take walks, or do you restrict the activation of this right brain circuitry to the session and then let it just show up as it were?

01:46:15 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:46:15 Speaker_00
Yeah. So you let them sort of just default to what's happening.

01:46:20 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. Two points here. First of all, on therapy, I think there's been too much of an emphasis on technique in therapy. And really what the right brain research is showing

01:46:46 Speaker_01
is that it's the right brain process that's the key here more than the technique.

01:46:54 Speaker_01
And so that being the case, due to my own training, psychotherapy has shown to be more effective in making long-term changes and even changes after the treatment is over than other forms of therapy like CBT. So I think there's been too much on that.

01:47:13 Speaker_01
On the matter of other experiences, The right brain is also dominant for processing novel information. Anytime something new comes up, the right picks it up first and you get a burst of noradrenaline out of that also.

01:47:31 Speaker_01
So the pursuit of continuing to have a curious mind, an open mind, I think is part of that and seeking new experiences in different parts of the world.

01:47:47 Speaker_01
There's an economic piece of that also, but with new challenges, bring up new challenges that we have and to essentially, if possible, feed curiosity. Curiosity. Einstein even said something essentially along those lines there.

01:48:10 Speaker_01
So, new experiences with new people, new challenges, new places to see, you know, travel I think is, you know, one of those and it turned out to be one of the great fortunate gifts that came from all of this.

01:48:25 Speaker_01
You know, I was a therapist only for about 45 years and I came into this late. I wrote this book late and literally it's led me into new relationships and new friends. Who starts making friends at 45 and 50 years old?

01:48:44 Speaker_01
But again, novelties and sharing that, you know, I think is also another way of doing that. Plus, you said this, I'll repeat it, exercise. Exercise is a key here.

01:49:00 Speaker_01
I happen to be interested in energy and in mitochondria, and there's a scientist, Navio, at San Diego, who has written on this, and he's talking about the healing process, and part of the healing process literally is exercise.

01:49:18 Speaker_01
It's fundamental to healing of whatever, physical and mental, and also restorative sleep. So, taking care of our body,

01:49:29 Speaker_01
One of the things that we learn early in our experiences, mostly taught through the bodies, literally how to take care of our bodies, and as you're all aware of, you don't see that in certain pathologies, and you also have certain, and I'm talking about more than just self-destructive, like cutting the butt.

01:49:51 Speaker_01
Ultimately, the ability to be able to look inward and to be able to reflect back upon the self, and to be able to see even what we want to see and don't want to see.

01:50:10 Speaker_01
Now, I want to just make a quick reference to defenses, because defenses can be adaptive and maladaptive, and they're important, and they're there. For example, we have defenses against overwhelming affect.

01:50:26 Speaker_01
Dissociation is defense against overwhelming affect. But we also have defense like repression. which is part of all human beings. And repression can be normal and adaptive, or it can be maladaptive.

01:50:38 Speaker_01
And it's maladaptive literally when the repression is very strong, essentially. What you have there is that the left hemisphere is just shutting out anything coming over from the right. That's what repression is.

01:50:51 Speaker_01
The left hemisphere is just shutting that all out. So part of this is becoming more aware of those defenses that we have also. And I want to make this point also. There are certain parts of ourselves which we cannot see.

01:51:08 Speaker_01
We can only see them when we're getting feedback from somebody who knows us and can see those things in us. And even if at the time they're uncomfortable,

01:51:19 Speaker_01
But we need that feedback from somebody we trust to be able to see, which is why this ability literally to completely change one's psychology is highly problematic.

01:51:30 Speaker_01
Because remember, what you're attempting to do is to change the right brain, which is why intimate relationships, close relationships with whom we can share things is really a key there also. Everybody has blind spots.

01:51:49 Speaker_01
And the way out of that, again, is trusting enough to take in negative feedback, you know, at times also.

01:52:00 Speaker_01
My own feeling is that when something hits me, let's say a disappointment hits me, and one of the things I learned early about my own emotion, because in order to study emotion, you have to study your own emotion, et cetera,

01:52:18 Speaker_01
That for me, literally, when something comes, I just let it come and move wherever it's going to go, and feel it just at all of its intensity and strength. And even after sharing it, literally, letting it penetrate down, so to speak.

01:52:37 Speaker_01
And ultimately, at some point, it'll come back into another shape and a form. But our emotions are adaptive. And again, I want to point out, one of the major fallacies is that negative emotions are bad and positive emotions are good.

01:52:53 Speaker_01
Positive emotions are good, manic emotions, et cetera. Negative emotions are bad.

01:53:00 Speaker_01
We are wired for all of these emotions because they have adaptive value, and we need to be able to be familiar with all of those different types of emotions, you know, that come our way in our lives.

01:53:14 Speaker_00
I have a friend, he's a songwriter, and he told me that He has this process whereby he writes music every day, but he starts his day by painting or drawing. I think he's sold some paintings and drawings, but that's not his main vocation.

01:53:33 Speaker_00
But he told me that he draws and paints as a way to sort of grease the gears to songwriting. And then I learned that Joni Mitchell did this too, or something similar.

01:53:46 Speaker_00
And I can't help but wonder whether or not they've unconsciously tapped into a mode of bringing right brain circuitry up in terms of its activity.

01:53:57 Speaker_00
Neither of them are known as painters or artists, but of course, musical artists and quite accomplished ones at that. Does that tool or technique make sense?

01:54:10 Speaker_01
Yeah, it does. Essentially it's creativity, you know, which again is the ability to see something novel in a new way, to look at the same thing but through new eyes.

01:54:19 Speaker_01
So I think those are ways of literally – artists know literally how to surrender out of the left and get into the right and you're seeing these mechanisms of surrender.

01:54:30 Speaker_01
But let me share into something else more autobiographical about what you're saying. When I decided to, I knew that I was going to write something, you know, at a certain point in time. And so for 10 years, I went into a period of self-study.

01:54:46 Speaker_01
And literally I went to a library, Cal State library near me, and I just went through the stacks. Do you remember what it was like to go through the stacks? And I started to move into psychology, into neurology, into chemistry.

01:54:58 Speaker_01
But then I found myself doing something else. I went back to the piano. I took piano as, you know, as a teenager. It led nowhere. But as an adult, I went back to the piano. We have a piano in the house. It came from my in-laws.

01:55:12 Speaker_01
Because I wanted to know something in my fingers. I didn't want to know something in my logic. I knew that the way that I usually would understand things would be rationally and logically. But I wanted to be able to play and be able to play again.

01:55:29 Speaker_01
purely so that it was in my fingers. And I also wanted to be able to visualize. So I got to a point now where I started to be able to now to be able to see a cell.

01:55:41 Speaker_01
And I could visualize mitochondrial moving now up into the dendrites at the cell membrane. So that visualization capacity, as well as the musical capacity, was my intuitive way of starting now more and more to get me to lean into the right.

01:55:59 Speaker_01
to be able to learn how to be in the right.

01:56:01 Speaker_00
Amazing. I love this. And I'll refrain from sharing my, you know, personal use of such a sort of, I guess we call them avenues into the right. But I want to make clear, I understand you're in the stacks of books in the library.

01:56:20 Speaker_00
It feels and sounds like a like a cognitive endeavor, a left brain endeavor.

01:56:25 Speaker_00
but then it just came to you, I want to play the piano, or through the research that you were doing, this 10-year self-research, amazing, by the way, I'm like so struck by that, then did it just come to you in a flash?

01:56:40 Speaker_00
Like, I want to play the piano again. And was it because playing the piano contrasted so much with looking through the stacks or they were aligned?

01:56:48 Speaker_01
For me, that was exploration. It was exploration. It was all new information. And I found that I could master more than the field that I was trained in. Let me give you one other experience that is a lot of evidence to show.

01:57:05 Speaker_01
The aha experience is right brain also. So there are times when literally insights will come quickly and suddenly and they'll seem to come out of nowhere. And all of a sudden the muse is there. So that was an aha experience.

01:57:19 Speaker_01
And when I thought about it, it just made all kinds of sense. I mean, there was a purpose to it because again, I needed to get past doing that.

01:57:28 Speaker_01
Let me tell you something else that I decided to do very early on as I was setting off into this 10-year period. I decided never to memorize anything.

01:57:39 Speaker_00
Tell me more.

01:57:41 Speaker_01
It's a lot of effort that gets nowhere. Literally what I wanted to do is I wanted to understand it in the way that I could understand it. So there's a lot of wasted time in memorization, and that being the case,

01:57:56 Speaker_01
As you can imagine, I have a rather enormous memory. I know where things are, I know where they are, I know how to get them. I know what's important, and I know how to put it into a place where I can get, I know where that article is.

01:58:08 Speaker_01
And incidentally, when I'm working, originally I would write everything down, and the writing had an effect of putting that more into my memory. Even now when I'm studying, I'll take papers, I'll Xerox them and I'll read them at my desk.

01:58:26 Speaker_01
I will not read and study right off the computer. In other words, I was learning my own technique of learning.

01:58:35 Speaker_00
So important. I often get asked, you know, what's your note taking process? How do you prepare a solo episode?

01:58:40 Speaker_00
I do these long solos that, you know, I have only a few pages of notes, but I could describe it, but the process is so specific to the way that I learn.

01:58:48 Speaker_00
across the whatever 6, 8, 10 weeks that it takes me to prepare for one of those, sometimes more, that it wouldn't really translate. Like it doesn't matter.

01:58:57 Speaker_01
Yeah. But there's a process of introspection there about literally how do I learn and how can I literally absorb the information so that it goes in deep. The left hemisphere essentially is a surface hemisphere.

01:59:12 Speaker_01
The right hemisphere is the one of depth, so to speak. And what goes into the right, for example, if you have an experience, an emotional experience that's really important, that goes deep into your autobiographical memory.

01:59:24 Speaker_01
That's much deeper than you're attempting to memorize something, you know, at that point, at any point in time.

01:59:31 Speaker_00
given the extreme importance of this right brain circuitry and of this autonomic synchrony between mother and typically mother, primary caretaker that is, and infant, what are some things that are known from the literature as critically important about that stage in terms of amount of time spent with the child

01:59:57 Speaker_00
you know, oftentimes parents are working, there are nannies or any number of different things. There are a lot of different structures nowadays for families and balancing work and family.

02:00:07 Speaker_00
But is there anything known about how to, I hate to use the word optimize, but maximize the health of the relationship?

02:00:14 Speaker_01
Yeah. I don't think that this culture compared to other cultures really provides for that kind of time. I think that people are stressed. because of that. And now I'm going to talk about maternal leave and paternal leave in other rich countries.

02:00:33 Speaker_01
The paternal leave is three months and maternal leave is six months or more in Scandinavia. So these other countries have figured out this time of life is critical. That if you really want to affect a personality,

02:00:52 Speaker_01
and help shape that personality to be a moral person or, you know, to have values, etc. The time literally that to put in is the earliest years. That's when it's there, so to speak.

02:01:05 Speaker_01
And without that kind of leave policy, in this country, most people go back to work at six weeks. Six weeks is at the beginning of the critical period of the right brain. The autonomic nervous system is in a critical period at six to eight weeks.

02:01:24 Speaker_01
The amygdala is coming into a critical period. The basolateral amygdala, the insula, and the cingulate are in a critical period at that point in time. This is before the child has formed an attachment. or the separation.

02:01:40 Speaker_01
So I see this as literally, and as I'm well aware of, there's now talking about this more and more. In fact, the recent debate, there was discussion of this also about this problem.

02:01:53 Speaker_01
The London School of Economics had a study about what is the best predictor, the best childhood predictor of adult satisfaction in life. And the best predictor was emotion. And the second was the child's conduct.

02:02:10 Speaker_01
And the third and last was the child's IQ. We have things upside down here. We are focusing too much on executive functions that come online at the third year.

02:02:25 Speaker_01
And again, what I'm suggesting to you is that the whole foundations of our personality are starting in utero. through the second and the third year, and then, you know, with the father, et cetera.

02:02:37 Speaker_01
That's where we literally should be putting the money, and the money should be there so that it provides the time. Every other culture has figured this out.

02:02:46 Speaker_01
The UNICEF took a poll in 2021 of 36 countries, rich countries, we came in last in emotional well-being, childhood well-being. Shame.

02:03:01 Speaker_00
It is a shame. What's wonderful, however, is that you're highlighting these issues.

02:03:08 Speaker_00
So many people are hearing about this and I encourage anyone, everyone listening to really take in the ordering of importance of what Dr. Shore just shared, that IQ third on the list, emotion regulation, number one.

02:03:26 Speaker_01
Conduct.

02:03:26 Speaker_00
Conduct. Yeah. So the idea that we need to train our kids up as little memorizing computers is clearly the wrong idea.

02:03:37 Speaker_00
Clearly there's important information that needs to be committed to memory to be a functional human being, but that we're missing not just critical knowledge transfer, but critical emotional transfer.

02:03:49 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:03:51 Speaker_00
And for that reason, and for so many other reasons, I really want to thank you for coming in today and having this conversation.

02:03:59 Speaker_00
It's unlike any conversation I've had on this podcast for several reasons, not the least of which is that you have this incredible

02:04:07 Speaker_00
knowledge of the neurobiology, which for me is a delight, and I'm sure for the listeners too, but also the clinical experience, which is so rich.

02:04:16 Speaker_00
And it's clear you've also done your own work in exploring these ideas, and you've been here for and participated in the evolution of this whole right brain, left brain thing, the advent of neuroimaging and how that's really shed new light.

02:04:30 Speaker_00
I just love, love, love the way that you braid all this together in terms of actionable things with patient and therapist, but also just in terms of one's understanding of self.

02:04:40 Speaker_00
I'm certain people are gonna take this knowledge into their lives and into the world, and it's been really enriching for me, and I'm certain it's going to be immensely enriching for them. So thank you for the work you do.

02:04:51 Speaker_00
Thank you for taking the time to come here today. And I'm excited about your new book, so keep us informed as to when that comes out. Maybe we'll have you back on for another discussion if you're willing.

02:05:01 Speaker_00
And just, you know, just thank you so much for entering this left brain, right brain dance and dynamic. It's been thoroughly enjoyable.

02:05:11 Speaker_01
Absolute pleasure for me too, Andrew. Absolute pleasure. Thank you.

02:05:16 Speaker_00
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Alan Shor. To learn more about his work and to find links to his books, please see the links in the show note captions.

02:05:25 Speaker_00
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02:05:57 Speaker_00
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02:06:05 Speaker_00
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02:06:57 Speaker_00
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02:07:00 Speaker_00
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02:07:37 Speaker_00
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