Dr. Baland Jalal
Appearances
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object. So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self. The feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, right, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
They flinch if there's a threat to it, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Correct. Or in fact, you can do it in air. So you do know Rich McNally? Yes. He's a common friend, right? Yeah, yeah. So one day McNally and I did it in the air. So I did it on Rich, call him Rich. So it's stroke, stroke, tap, tap in the air. And he felt the rubber, like his own hand was floating in the air. It was kind of spooky. Wow. He went, my God, what's happening?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I feel my hand is floating in the air.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And I do want to differentiate between plasticity and then the dynamic nature of the function of the modules of the brain. So, for example, you have, in terms of the rubber hand illusion, it shows that, for example, we have a structure called the TPJ right here, temporal parietal junction is the fancy name for that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
That structure is important for taking all the sensory modalities, touch, hearing, feeling, right? So, smelling and sort of unifying that into a whole. That's a cortical area? It's a cortical area. Where is it located? It's called a TPJ. So, it's temporoparietal junction. So, it's kind of strategically located between the different sort of areas. occipital somatosensory region and the temporal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It does, exactly. It's like a crossroad, so to speak, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Between different sensory integration. It's a hub for integration. And interestingly, actually, it's also involved in the self-other distinction. So we have a distinction of the land here, Dr. Peterson over there. And then... That's why we can't tickle ourselves. That's why we can't tickle ourselves, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But that part of the brain, if you zap that, sometimes the self-other distinction can break down. So you feel like you're merging into another person. So that's very interesting. So it has that function. It also has... connections to the frontal lobes, which is involved in obviously in empathy and seeing the perspective of somebody else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So like a theory of mind, what is Dr. Peterson thinking right now? What is his agenda right now? What is his motives? So that ability is also involved. And this comes to a psychopathy point actually, because if you have the temporal parietal junction being involved in body construction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So it's involved in self and constructing a body image, which is expanded in the rubber hand illusion, but also involved in seeing your perspective as well. So it's very dynamic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Experiencing somebody else's perspective.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, thank you, Jordan, Dr. Peterson. I'd love to be here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
They don't look at eyes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It probably could be trained. So I know Richard Davidson, he's done some studies looking at amygdala activation in autistic children, and they do have an amygdala that's dancing with activity whenever they look at eyes. So they have that, but it's not entirely known why. It probably has to do with the fusiform face area. So there's a region of the brain specialized for recognizing faces.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And so it has to do with that, but this is- Properly oriented faces only, right? Properly oriented faces, exactly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah. And to be frank, this area of the brain is also involved in dry classification of objects. So not only faces- Musical instruments? Probably. I think so. But it's more dry, so it goes like a guitar from a piano or something like that. It doesn't have that specification. To have specificity, you have to go higher up in the system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So it has this more banal quality to it. And so obviously in visual processing,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
you have a hierarchy of of of where it becomes more complex with each step of envision and then the highest so it goes then it goes to a point where you start classifying objects in the world that's the fusiform phase area and then after that you go to vernica which is more sort of meaning and purpose and then you go to things like the hippocampus which is involved in in things like memory uh so it goes from more simple stages of visual processing to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
dry classification faces Dr. Peterson's from from Alex from Kim knowing different people So that's that's that part and then going to higher centers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, it was a lovely process. Let me start there. So I flew in to Miami. Great reception overall. Nice people around, Ben, Nancy, Vincent, everybody on the team, lovely. The shooting was great. So, yeah, top professional, really like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, exactly. They somehow don't attend to it, right? So they can draw a flower the whole day, but they only draw half of the flower. And you keep telling them and they say, well, I did my best, I'm drawing it, but they can't attend to that part of the brain. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Mind you, the parietal lobes is involved in spatial orientation, knowing not only the body where it is in space, but also the spatial layout of the room, right? So it has that component. So it's a really strange disorder. And in order to understand how they are experiencing this at a subjective level is really critical. It's a mystery of sorts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
irrigation irrigation but before we go there i just want to so the parietal lobes and this and then superior parietal lobule another fancy name there right so just above the temporal parietal junction is specifically involved in creating a body image as well so the the tpj we talked about taking information from various sensory modalities and then and then whispering information to the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
superior parietal lobule, this area just above it, it's a neighbor, right? It's involved in creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right? So when people have a stroke to that part of the brain,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
As you mentioned, they will sometimes throw their hands out, say, this arm doesn't belong to me, it belongs to you, or it belongs to my dad, or it belongs to this person or that person. So literally, they will become delusional. You can play chess with them, you can have conversation, nothing, nothing is wrong. Otherwise, they're not delusional, they're not psychotic or anything like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But after they have the stroke affect this region of the brain, they will just say that this arm doesn't belong to me. Or sometimes they might even say, you might ask them, you say, well, they might deny the paralysis. So that's anosognosia, right? So you say, Joe, your arm is paralyzed. They'll say, no, it's not paralyzed. Well, then touch my nose, Joe. And they will say, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And they will take the lifeless arm and lift it like this and say, I'm touching it, doctor. I'm touching it, literally taking it up like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So one way to approach this or sort of think about this is that, you know, the left side of the brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different functions. I just want to make it clear to the listeners. I know you know this, right? But so they have different functions. So intriguingly, it's only in the right side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
If you have the stroke in the left, they will not have this delusion. That's the funny part, right? So it's only in the right. So this tells you there's something going on about self in the rights that's obviously different.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Alteration of self, right? Yeah. Interestingly, if you have a stroke to the prefrontal on the left side, you will develop catastrophic reactions to anything. So you might have a conversation and start crying in the middle of the conversation without any obvious reason. If you get a stroke in the right prefrontal, you will have become delusionally optimistic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you'll go out and buy a Rolex if you can't and become manic effectively. So it shows us that the left hemisphere is involved in positive emotion and the right is involved in negative emotion. And in fact, today, when you use things like TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, you might zap the left hemisphere in people with depression and make it more active and you end up with less depression.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I like that. I mean, it makes sense, right? So the right hemisphere is more emotional, big picture oriented, as you say, and it could be that it goes into this infinite loop of possibilities in this big space land where there's no way it can really get fixed. There's no anchoring, right? So that's correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, yeah. No, that's interesting. So I think definitely in terms of using the right hemisphere in dreams, there's got to be something there. So I'm not sure how much this has been explored in terms of the right hemisphere only. But that's definitely because dreams is so much about emotional updating and emotional creating a sense of... making sense of an emotional landscape, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So in dreams, for example, it's heavily populated by people, right? Right, right. REM dreams, for example. So each night you cycle through different stages of sleep, stage one, two, three, and then you have deep sleep, and then you have REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, where your eyes go from side to side. During this stage of sleep, you're paralyzed from head to toe.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you have structures in the brain called the pons and medulla in the lower part of the brain that paralyzes you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
your entire body so you won't act out your dreams and hurt yourself right so this is so i want to lay the foundation before yeah yeah to your point right and that sets up the stage for exploration without risk right so now you can you can engage in this this laboratory uh you know of testing a testing space without any fatal consequences right you can do whatever you want and you don't hurt your sleeping partner partner or yourself so you have that paralysis first of all you're in a physiological straitjacket so to speak right so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, yeah. So I just want to sort of go through this. So first of all, you're paralyzed in REM sleep, right? From head to toe, you can't move. Your eyelids can move because of a different circuit, by the way. I just want to add that. So this is a different circuit for the eyelids. Now, interestingly, the emotional part of the brain, the limbic centers tucked behind your ears become hyperactive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you have that. Your prefrontal lobes and the CEO of the brain becomes less active for some reason. So that part of the brain dials down, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Restriction of inhibition. And so everything in the world becomes less focused, right? Less constrained? Less constrained, right? So you don't think in a logical, straightforward ABC-like manner, right? So if I wake somebody up from REM sleep and say, well, and tell him the word sun, he will think of chair instead of moon. So he doesn't think in a logical, serial manner.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
He will think in an unrelated manner. In fact, he will be more likely to say sun and share versus when somebody's awake and I ask him, well, what do you think of now when I say sun? They might say moon. So they are more likely to relate unrelated words. So they think in a logical way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Exploratory process, right? So the prefrontal lobes turn down, right? The emotional part of the brain dial up, right? So you have that, you're paralyzed from head to toe. Now this is a perfect cocktail for strange things. Not only that, but also the chemicals in your brain that have to do with logical and linear thinking, noradrenaline.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You have adrenaline in your body when you're anxious or you're excited. You have adrenaline. You have noradrenaline in the brain, but also in the body. But noradrenaline is a cousin chemical of adrenaline. Now, this chemical... It turns out there's a structure in the brain, in the brainstem called the locus coeruleus. Yes, exactly. Your pronunciation is brilliant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
32,000 cells pitch black in the brainstem. They will stop secreting noradrenaline during REM sleep. So that means your way of thinking about the world is unfocused. It's like spacey, it's creative, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Absolutely. Or prior learning. Right. So this is a perfect cocktail now for craziness. The vestibular part of your brain become hyperactive. You know, the central motor region of the brain that has to do with automatic sort of behavior become hyperactive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Even though you're paralyzed. So that's why dreams, you can sometimes feel like you're running, but you can't control your legs. You feel like some monster is chasing you, but you can't move, or you feel like you're controlled like a puppet on a string. And that's because the parts of the brain, it has to do with automatic movements.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Sporadically, the neurons, they're fire, so you cannot control your movement. So you have all that. And then you have the emotions, and it seems like then it's just perfect for what you're saying then, that the right hemisphere type of thinking of exploration and emotion is just, it's hyperactive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's very important.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Absolutely. That's very interesting. Well, to go back to the whole dream thing, right? So one of the things is that it's populated by a lot of people. And that's, again, right hemisphere is actually involved in decoding social, like facial expressions, for example. So that's one thing that obviously autistic people have problems with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But for some reason, there's a lot of people, a lot of interactions in dreams. So you interact a lot with a lot of people. And usually, actually, these interactions are negative. And this shows us that for some reason, it's advantageous to dream of negative things because you're more likely to train your circuits in your brain to be able to...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
To put it shortly, like if I have an encounter with a serial killer in my dream and I sort of overcome that, I'm not killed by it, right, by that serial killer. I can navigate that situation in an appropriate manner. I'm more likely to survive in real life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So it shows you that dreams has a lot to do with survival and training the circuits in the brain, making them solidify the ones that can help me survive more. So that's a huge opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And that's a good point. So the fact is that, you know, when you dream, your brain takes you on this exploration, right? And it looks at various social scenarios, for example, that evoke emotions in you. So it takes, you know, Dr. Peterson and put him in a room with... with Kim and Joe and see how he reacts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
If the reaction is not an emotionally evocative one, it will literally take you and show you another scenario until it hits on a scene that evokes your emotion, that gets you riled up, and then it explores that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It has to have that element, and then it will go down that path more and explore it more. It'll say, this is interesting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Not necessarily. So it does, there's a huge dopaminergic aspects to dreams. So it's been shown that if you have a lesion to a part of the brain, the inferior parietal lobule, again, it's a region just below the superior parietal lobule, it's involved in creating images, but also it's, so if you have a stroke there, for example, you won't dream or the mesolimbic dopamine centers,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
This is a fancy name for the part of the brain where you have dopamine going to the prefrontal cortex. If you have a lesion there, you won't dream as well. So bliss and dopamine, as well as images, is involved deeply in... Okay, so it's emotional intensity and valence. Intensity valence, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Tilted somewhat towards the negative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So it's very interesting. So one thing that I want to make clear as well, it's that, you know, obviously, as you know, there's a corpus callosum, that there's a bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing the two hemispheres to communicate, right? So you have the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So these hemispheres, if you literally cut it, you'll have two consciousness in one person, right? So it seems like dreams is also right hemispheric dominance for another reason, because the things you will see in your dreams are like... poetry, right? It's visual metaphors that you can't explain in language, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So I can, it's like going through an art museum and looking at things, but in a very poetically, beautifully, non-language way, right? So you can't describe it necessarily. And obviously the left hemisphere, the regions of the Wernicke and stuff like that is involved in language and understanding language. But it seems like the poetic aspect of dreams is very much a right hemispheric thing as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So that's my approach and see how I can let things unfold in a natural way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, and I think what is also interesting about dreams and that whole thing is that it seems to tap into a circuitry that's more mystical than the circuitry that we normally tap into. By mystical, I mean it seems like some of the, receptors involved in mystical experiences when you take psilocybin and things like mescaline and DMT and stuff like that, the serotonin 2A receptors.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So one theory actually talks about how... So obviously serotonin is another neurochemical in the brain. The part of the brain that produces that, the dorsal rafin nucleus, also shuts down its production of serotonin. So you don't have serotonin in your dreams either in REM sleep. And so you end up in this space without noradrenaline and without serotonin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But it seems like for some reason that the serotonin 2A receptors become dialed up. So that part of the serotonin 2A receptors become tickled for some reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It also happened in psilocybin experiences.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
The mystical experiences and the dream experiences. So there's something there that's hypercosmic in dreams that you can't, it's ineffable. You can't describe it in language. And it's highly personal and it has salience for you. So one thing that I noticed about dream is a lot of people come and talk to me about their dreams all the time. They'll go, Baland, you know, I had this dream.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I saw this and that, and they're very emotional about it. And it's highly personal and cosmic, right? But, you know, I kind of go, oh, that's interesting, but it's not really that interesting. But it has that significance for you as a person. And that's kind of about the dream thing. It has personal salience, kind of the type of personal salience you can get from a psilocybin experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It kind of unites them, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
That's very interesting. So let's go on that whole thing, right? So the monster in your dream represents your hyperactive amygdala and the limbic centers of the brain being hyperactive, up to 30% more active in the dream landscape, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
That's the overplay of the emotion. Yeah. By the way, the hippocampus also turns out the memory part of the brain is also hyperactive in the dream REM world. So you have the memory spilling in into this narrative about a monster chasing you. So you give it identity, you give it name, you give it all these negative features.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You contextualize it based on the hyperactive hippocampus. Because then it's chasing you and you can't run away because we said the motor, central motor generator of your brainstem is making it very hard for you to move. So you don't have the, so movement normally occurs in the motor cortex of your brain that gives you voluntary movement.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But because that part of the brain can't compete with the central motor, automatic part of the brain firing and making your behaviors all, you know, sporadic and automatic, so you can't get away. Now, what you said was interesting. You said if you turn around and approach the monster, the monster will become diminished in strength.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And that's interesting because we know in the real world, if you walk, simply by walking, you will turn down the activity of the amygdala because you're telling your brain or yourself that you are approaching, you're engaging in approach behavior instead of withdrawal behavior.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You're changing and saying, now I'm no longer the prey here. I'm the predator. I am the one that is doing the haunting. And so in that sense, it would make sense that the monster would vanish. So that's very interesting. But I also want to touch on monsters since we're on the topic of monsters. So there's a condition called sleep paralysis, and I talk about it in my Peterson Academy course.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
There's a whole lecture on sleep paralysis. So are you familiar with sleep paralysis? Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Do you see any monsters? Can you explain? I'm curious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's whatever you dread, whatever is lurking in your unconscious mind, that's coming to the fore. And so during sleep paralysis, interestingly, you didn't have any of the monsters. But it turns out about 40% of people will see monsters. Sleep paralysis is a terrifying experience. So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And occasionally for some people, they might start feeling like they can, you know, they can see their surroundings. So they might open their eyes and then they realize, my God, I'm paralyzed. I can't move. I can't speak. And it's terrifying at this point. And then they look around. And I had one of these experiences. So let me tell you about my own experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So I was sleeping in my room as a teenager in Copenhagen. And I grew up in a ghetto-like neighborhood in Copenhagen. And I was lying there sleeping. And then I woke up paralyzed, unable to move or speak. And then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me. And it came closer and closer until it was on my chest, strangling me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And I saw my legs flying up and down. And mind you, at this point, I was like, is this real? It was as crisp as this conversation you and I are having right now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Well, I'll tell you. Okay. So at this point, I just saw my legs flying up and down. And it was choking me and I couldn't do anything. I was literally trying to kill me. Now on this occasion, I didn't see a monster. I didn't see a monster on this occasion, but I've had sleep paralysis since then on many occasions. And I've had various monsters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So I've seen like one was Colonel Gaddafi, you know him, eccentric figure. He was hovering over me when I was in Egypt. I was living in Egypt for a period of time in my early undergraduate years. I was a little bit out there. And I saw during the Libyan revolution, Of all people, Gaddafi was in my bedroom, hovering over me, attacking me. So that can happen during sleep paralysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yes, absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Egypt, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Around that time, there was a spring, the Arab Spring and the Libyan Revolution, all that was going on and I was watching CNN all the time, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
That I should never do, right? So I was doing that. I was sort of watching the news and, you know, I was influenced in some way. So that's really interesting. So our research now in about seven countries has shown that, you know, whenever you have a cultural narrative for it, like stories of witches, of,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
of space aliens or whatever, you will have those lurking into your unconscious and you will see that manifest, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Those are your Carl Jung archetype figures appearing. So for example, in Egypt, we showed that the evil genius of Aladdin, you know Aladdin, the cartoon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You will have that appear in front of you. So, you know, they will have bloody fangs and everything will be creepy, very scary monsters you will see in Egypt.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So I was sleeping in my room, and then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me until it was on my chest, strangling me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
In Italy, for example, in the Pandathica region of Italy, you will see these giant cats or witches. So that's very common. And in the US, space alien abduction is very common in the US. So you might see that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's very interesting. Actually, so it turns out if you go first order and the basic level, most people will just see shapes and shadows. So they won't even see the monster clothed and have all these details. So it turns out... Right, that's the truly unknowable monster. That's the V1. That's the... You know, the occipital lobes in the visual cortex responds to lines and basic shapes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And as we move... Oh, I see. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. So the first order... It's a first order. It's simply the brain says, look, I don't even care about the details. I feel fear right now. I just want to hallucinate the basic. Just the sketch. Just the sketch, right? So you have the sketch.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Then it moves up the visual hierarchy, right? So we know then that you have a part of the brain called the MT, the motor part of the brain. It has to do with movement. So that's the next in the hierarchy. Then you have a part of the brain that has to do with, as we said, putting faces and depth and color. And so that comes as we move along the visual hierarchy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then finally you reach the vernicum and the meaning part of the brain, the hippocampus, and you go, my God, this is Freddy Krueger from Elm Street. He's attacking me right now. And he has this agenda and intentions. So, but most of the time, people will see these shadows and shapes
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's very terrifying. Usually, the one reason for this is that usually when you don't have an identity, it's even more scary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then what's the next level? When you get depth, for example, you get color, V4 area in the brain with color. So you might add color. That could be another.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And an identity. It takes a face, identity, and then you hook up the emotional part of the brain so it gets emotions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, it's very interesting. There's two points on that I want to go into that's very fascinating. So first of all, we've shown that when you have a specific cultural narrative for it and a name for it, right, the more terrifying and salient it becomes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So, for example, if you live in Egypt and you say it's these evil genies, they come at night, they choke you, they strangle you, they kill you, then you will, first of all, have this experience much more frequently. So up to one third of more frequency to the experience. That's the first thing. If there's a cultural narrative. If there's a cultural narrative.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So we compared Egypt to Denmark, my home country. So we compared these two countries. And it turns out, in Denmark, by the way, people say most of the time it's just the brain, it's stress. It's nothing terrifying. There's no higher explanation for it, right? So it's just physiology. In Egypt, you have the opposite, right? The complete opposite. more frequent, more fearful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So 50% of Danish people will say, I think for Egyptians will say, I will die from this. This is fatal. So this is Egyptians, okay? So they have that. They say the paralysis lasts much longer. So they will say the paralysis is intense. It lasts much longer. So it seems like through their cultural beliefs, the experience becomes much more salient, much more profound and impactful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Absolutely. And we said, is this true? Is this actually the case? And we went to Italy and we looked at the Egyptians, the Italians, with these terrifying explanations of sleep paralysis. And we saw the same pattern. The Italians would also have these long episodes. They would have them frequently and they were extremely fearful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Absolutely, right? And so it turns out we have a theory for why that occurs. So imagine little Lisa living on this fictitious island in Timbuktu, for example, and she has this conversation with her grandmother over dinner. Let's say the grandmother says, at night, you will have this monster. It comes and attacks you, chokes you. It looks like this and that. It has all these features.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
She now goes to bed, right? And she has never had, by the way, she's never had sleep paralysis before, right? For the first time, she will have sleep paralysis now. She will wake up the next day and she will have sleep paralysis again. A few days later, she'll have it again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And then a month later, it's become chronic at this point and she'll go tell other people about it and they will have it too. And then you might be asking, why is this the case? What's going on? And this is the idea. We think that, first of all, the grandmother implanted these ideas into her brain about what sleep paralysis is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
When she's now sleeping in her bed, she will have nocturnal arousal, meaning the emotional part of the brain will be hyperactive during the REM stage. And she will engage in this hyperconformatory behavior where she will... monitor any paralysis sensations saying, is something holding me down? Is something choking me?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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 Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
She's looking for an explanation for this now. And then whenever, and because of her emotional centers being hyperactive, whenever she feels something, she'll go, my God, this is it. This is it. And she'll open her eyes. And then the emotional, the hippocampus and all the narrative part of the brain will spill over into the experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And she will literally see whatever her grandmother was telling her. Now, you might say, why then does it happen a few days later? Well, that created profound fear. And so a few days later, she will have anxiety and stress, which will predispose her. We've shown that anxiety and stress predisposes you. So she will have it again two days later and three days later.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And at this point, she'll go, my God, I'm possessed. It's no longer just one episode. This monster is chronically possessing me and it's coming after me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It is kind of a possession.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's like a virus, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's a meme, right? But at this point, what's interesting is that we've shown that people who have this episode, they will have more anxiety and more PTSD-like symptoms from this, right? So at this point, she might have these... small tease of trauma of the monster coming and attacking you and then creating an overall trauma. So it becomes almost a traumatic experience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
That's what I'm saying, right? So she goes around and tells her friends about it. And it turns out then that if you live in a culture like Egypt, it's twice as common versus Denmark. So we said that for an individual person, you will have it three times more than the person who has sleep paralysis. But beyond this... It's generally twice as common in cultures like Egypt and Italy and so forth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So there's this element to it that's very, very interesting. And I want to take you to an experiment that your colleague Rich did, Rich McNally, that sort of encapsulates all this. So he showed that people who think that sleep paralysis is a space alien abduction, So these guys will say, well, I was sleeping in my bed and this gray came down in a spaceship. It attacked me. It choked me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It took out my semen. It was a lot of sexuality going on. And obviously we know from REM sleep, the hypothalamus and these parts of the brain are hyperactive. The sexual parts of the brain are hyperactive. So you have sexual arousal doing sleep paralysis. Right, right, right. So you have the monster coming down, taking their semen and all that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Then they will have- Like a succubus from the Middle Ages. Like a succubus, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But then at this point, what's interesting is that these guys, when they listen to the audio script of their encounters of themselves narrating, so they'll listen to themselves saying, oh, I had this experience and this happened and that happened.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
their physiological reactions to that, their GSR, their sweating and their heart rate and blood pressure will be as profound as somebody who went to war. So somebody with actual PTSD who went to a war situation, the physiological reactions they have is comparable to somebody who was sleeping in their beds and having sleep paralysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So for me, this shows me this might be one of the most interesting phenomenon in the time of science.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right. Well, so I developed a therapy for sleep paralysis. I don't know. Maybe you're interested in that. I can tell you about that. All right. So it's a four-step solution that I came up with. So from my work around the world, I thought I got to have some method to help these people, right? So... How could I help them? This was my thought. How can I help these guys, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And so one thing is that I noticed that, for example, prayer and meditation and prayer and thinking about positive things was helpful. In a lot of instances, people would lay down and think about, you know, whatever God they believe in. And that would actually help them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So that got me thinking about the attention system and the emotional parts of the brain and how I can bring that into the experience, given that you have limited attentional capacities. And so if you're lying there and thinking about ghosts, because your emotional part of your brain, the amygdala is hyperactive and you know the amygdala,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
has a lot of projections to the visual parts of the brain so it can tell you what to see in the world. So we know this, so it can spill over and penetrate the visual scene. So we don't want that. So I thought, how can I bring in the positive affect to the experience and make it more, you know, more benign? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So it has four components. The first component is cognitive reappraisal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
You know these terms. Meaning simply you say, look, this is not a monster. This is just the brain. It's not terrifying. Let me change my thoughts about it. So that's the first point. You do that when the experience strikes. And you close your eyes just to filter any visual inputs out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
When they have the sleep paralysis episode. So these are the four steps you apply directly during sleep paralysis. Obviously, you learn them when you're awake and I train you. And you practice. You practice, right? Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. So this is, yeah, great, you made that point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So you have that first thing, you do the cognitive reappraisal, saying, well, this is just your mind and brain playing tricks on you. Next step is emotional and psychological distancing. You go, since it's just a brain, simply given that it's common all around the world, there's no reason for me to be scared of this. So you kind of distance yourself from the event.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So that's the second part, right? Thirdly, this is where prayer and meditation and affect comes in. You put all your attention on a positive emotional object in your mind. So you bring to mind, could be God, somebody who believes in God. It could be your mother's face. It could be anything emotionally salient.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And you focus hyper-attentively on that because then- That's why Mary is an antidote to the demonic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Good point. And then, fourthly, you meditate. And meditate meaning you do a mindfulness kind of detachment. You say, I feel spasmy and pain in my legs and I feel heavy, but I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm just going to let it fly. I'm just going to just leave it alone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And this turns out, these four steps, if you apply it during sleep paralysis, we did a pilot study, a small study that it showed it reduced sleep paralysis about 50%. So that's a significant amount, but obviously we have to do more studies. It's a very small study, but it's a first step. It's the first empirical study on this as a treatment for sleep paralysis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So I was very excited about that, but we need to do more research. But I think-
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
That's a very interesting point. But you brought something to mind right now that I wanted to ask you about. So obviously I've seen your latest work on we wrestle with God and all this. So do you have any thoughts about prophetic dreams? The kind of metaphors, do you have any, have you written about this, for example?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think the way that I, my view of the brain was inspired by my mentor, V.S. Ramachandran.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right, right. No, it's very interesting. One reason that I bring this up is I used to live in Egypt, as I told you, and I was much inspired by the prophetic dreams of Joseph. I thought they were very striking, the sun and the moon. bowing down and all these kind of things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So I think there's something very interesting about that realm of explanation and how that sort of spills and trickles into narratives in religious scripture.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
He's extremely stunningly effective, charismatic. And when I went to California in my early days as an undergraduate, I ended up in his course. So I took his course. So let me take you there. When was that? That was in 2010, 11, around 11, 2011. So I started there, became a research scholar in his lab eventually.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's quite interesting. So there's a phenomenon I'm sure you know of. It's temporal lobe epilepsy. So these guys will have epileptic seizures. So they will have that selectively in the temporal lobes. So they will, and this is the emotional part of the brain, become hyperactive. And so they will see everything in the world as almost like they're living in a dream. Everything is poetic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Everything is highly salient. When I look at this pen right here, it's highly salient. It's emotional. It's godly. It's quite an interesting phenomenon.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
had temporal lobe epilepsy yes yes so it's quite and also Ramachandran and I wanted to study it more but we didn't get into it we focused on some of the OCD's work instead but it's interesting so these guys will become hyper religious as well they will have hypergraphies they will write all the time you know so they will develop this tendency to write And yeah, just become hyper-poetic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And it's quite an interesting phenomenon. And some people have argued that in the temporal lobe, you have the God center of the brain, so to speak. In that region, that's where it all emanates in terms of the emotional landscape that belief.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Thank you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Technically, yes. So it's very interesting. And I think with the whole temporal lobe epilepsy, right? So the whole landscape becomes hyper, you know, so the regions, we talked about the fusiform face area before. The regions from the cluster of cells in the fusiform and the emotional part of the brain become hyperconnected and hyperactive. So there's kind of a kindling going on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So that's why when you look at a dry object like... like a pen, it becomes hyper cosmic and emotional and spiritual, right? But that's interesting. There's also the opposite in a way. So if you have what's called Cotard syndrome, everything in the world is dead. Everything in the world is, it's almost like depression in fact, but everything is in the world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
And you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, my God, I am dead, right? I'm a dead person. The doctor will say, what do you mean you are dead? They say, I'm dead. And then they say, what about if I take a needle and poke you and, well, are you dead? And they will say, well, yeah. And then the doctor might go like this and they bleed. And they say, well, how come you're dead? You're bleeding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Can dead people bleed? They say, yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Apparently. Since I'm dead. Since I'm dead, right? So it shows you that something intriguing is going on in the brain. When these centers are hyperactive, everything becomes salient. If they're underactive, you are dead. In fact, if that part of the brain, the face area in the brain and the emotional part of the brain is hyperactive,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
There's another syndrome called Frigoli syndrome, where you go around and you say, everybody in the landscape looks like my uncle Joe, for example. So you go around and say, well, this looks like my uncle Joe, and this looks like my uncle Joe. And the reason is that you have hyper-emotionality. You are hyper-emotional, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Because of that vision, the emotion part of the brain and the face part of the brain are hyper-active. and they're hyper-connective, the connectivity is in overdrive, and then you feel like, I shouldn't have emotions, that's how your brain concludes. I shouldn't have emotions when I go around in the landscape and looking at people. But I do. But I do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Therefore, your brain jumps to these absurd conclusions and go, these are all my Uncle Joe's.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
and said in its own ways, it has this fluidity to it. So that's kind of my view of the brain overall, that it's a dynamic object. But beyond that, let me also explain some of our experiments. So the way that we approach science and probing the human brain is through experiments where we look at conceptual experiments in neuroscience.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So for example, there's the rubber hand illusion, if you probably know that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So the rubber hand illusion is this illusion where you have a chap, he puts his hand right here, and then you have his right hand underneath the table, right? And so me, Balan, the experimenter, will stroke and tap the hand of the experimental subject. I'll go stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap, tap, stroke, stroke underneath the table. And I'll stroke and tap the table in front of Joe, the subject.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
I'll go tap, tap, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, tap, tap. Yes, sir. And about two minutes of me doing this, he will feel touch sensations arising from the table. And I don't mean this in kind of an abstract metaphorical sense. I mean this literally. He will have touch sensations, somatosensory regions of his brain becoming active from this process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's an embodiment, right? So in two minutes, I turn this subject into a table, right? And then more than that, if I, me, you know, Balan, was to take a hammer and go like this on the table, he'll go, you know, he'll feel pain sensations, right? So the pain regions of his brain will light up if I was to look in a scanner and, you know, look at the neurons there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
So it shows you that in that way, you can take... First of all, you can create a sensation of this table belonging to you, but then... Being part of you. Big part of you, right? It becomes an embodied part of you. But then beyond that, you afflict pain now to the table, in fact, and then you will feel... Yeah, well, that would also be part of social perception, I presume.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
It's very interesting. So we actually, we were the first group to show that people with OCD who has very fixed sense of self, right? So they wash their hands all the times, washing and scrubbing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
When they do this illusion, they have a much more sensitivity to it to the extent that there's a control condition for this illusion where you, so the illusion, for the illusion to occur, you have to stroke and tap, tap, tap, stroke and stroke and tap in a synchronized manner. That's important, right? So that's key.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
But in people with, oh, so the control for this, by the way, is if you do it in a random sequence, like tap, tap, stroke, stroke, but everything is just random. Right. And you do, again, the touching and stroking is random. Then the illusion will not occur or it would be slightly. So you have a slight illusion there or most of the time, no illusion. So this is the key control for the illusion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Correct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Yes. Okay, so elaborate on that. Absolutely. And I just want to, just one point here is that I mentioned a table. So the original experiment was done with a rubber hand, right? Right, right. But I'm using table because it's more, it illustrates the experiment better, I think, and you can have a table as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Right. So instead of a table, you just have a rubber hand that looks like your own hand, and then you stroke and tap the rubber hand, right, in front of the person.