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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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And an identity. It takes a face, identity, and then you hook up the emotional part of the brain so it gets emotions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She now goes to bed, right? And she has never had, by the way, she's never had sleep paralysis before, right? For the first time, she will have sleep paralysis now. She will wake up the next day and she will have sleep paralysis again. A few days later, she'll have it again.
And then a month later, it's become chronic at this point and she'll go tell other people about it and they will have it too. 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.
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?
She's looking for an explanation for this now. And then whenever, and because of her emotional centers being hyperactive, whenever she feels something, she'll go, my God, this is it. This is it. And she'll open her eyes. And then the emotional, the hippocampus and all the narrative part of the brain will spill over into the experience.
And she will literally see whatever her grandmother was telling her. Now, you might say, why then does it happen a few days later? Well, that created profound fear. And so a few days later, she will have anxiety and stress, which will predispose her. We've shown that anxiety and stress predisposes you. So she will have it again two days later and three days later.
And at this point, she'll go, my God, I'm possessed. It's no longer just one episode. This monster is chronically possessing me and it's coming after me.
It is kind of a possession.
Showing 121–140 of 177 · page 7 of 9
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