Dr. Baland Jalal
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Baland Jalal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object. So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self. The feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right?
So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?
So I was sleeping in my room, and then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me until it was on my chest, strangling me.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, Jordan, Dr. Peterson. I'd love to be here.
Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, it was a lovely process. Let me start there. So I flew in to Miami. Great reception overall. Nice people around, Ben, Nancy, Vincent, everybody on the team, lovely. The shooting was great. So, yeah, top professional, really like that.
And then the course itself, it's an eight-hour course on the brain and sort of going through, initially starting from sort of the basics of the brain, the different structures of the brain, then going all the way to sort of higher abstract things like human nature and physics. sort of the nature of how art emanates in the brain and things like that.
So it kind of has the nitty-gritty of an introductory neuroscience course, but then also taking in some more sort of poetic aspects of the brain. So it's kind of all that mix.
right right right how much how much anatomy functional anatomy and so forth is in the course i make sure that the basics are there so for a basics neuroscience course for as an introduction you've got to have the basics there all the brain structures the the the cortex the brainstem all the different names but i try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep well i used to when i did my first biopsychology neuroscience course that was incredibly boring um i had all these names thrown at me yeah and it was yeah just out of
It made no sense. So what's the cerebellum doing? What's this doing? You just had all these names. You had to memorize them. That was it. But I really made sure to describe the function and have an overall context for each.
It's very important.
Yeah, the way that I like to do is that I know that in this course, I'll cover this, right? But then I kind of see and explore how I can sort of weave this into sort of a narrative and a story and then kind of put things in as we go along. And I feel like this makes sense to put this aspect here and put that aspect here so it doesn't come in this sort of you know, very ABC kind of dry way.
So that's my approach and see how I can let things unfold in a natural way.
I was very impressed. So I was very impressed by the whole process, the way things were arranged. Obviously, we were put in a very nice hotel and we felt pampered, honestly. Good. You feel pampered. You feel everything is just on point. And yeah, and then the shooting itself, people around you, they take care of you, bring you food. You know, it's just very, you feel pampered. So it's great.
Absolutely. And that was my approach too, right? So I would talk about my own research, some of the nicest experiments that I love about my work and sort of weave into that neuroscience curriculum in that way, right? So we talk about, for example, OCD and then maybe you might mention the orbital frontal cortex, which is overactive in OCD. What's the function of the orbital frontal cortex?
The structure in the brain, or the striatum and the basal ganglia in the context of Parkinson's. But again, taking in some work that's very, you know, some experiments that are fascinating. So it's kind of taking that natural approach, that sort of my own research or works of colleagues and just weaving it in in a more natural way, I think.
Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think the way that I, my view of the brain was inspired by my mentor, V.S. Ramachandran.
He's extremely stunningly effective, charismatic. And when I went to California in my early days as an undergraduate, I ended up in his course. So I took his course. So let me take you there. When was that? That was in 2010, 11, around 11, 2011. So I started there, became a research scholar in his lab eventually.
And I think, you know, becoming very good friends with him, ending up in his laboratory, going on long walks on the beach all the time and just spending time with him and getting his view on the brain and sort of adapting that as my own view was something that, you know, influenced me.
And his approach, obviously, and the approach that I've adopted is one where you sort of look at the brain holistically. You acknowledge that the brain is hyperplastic. So there's all these modules that are highly dynamic and the brain is extremely malleable. And so we look at the brain as something that extremely, as a fluid process that's malleable and not fixed
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