Dr. Ethan Kross
speaker
968 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Dr. Ethan Kross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I may, in fact, do some bad things, right? I may, you know, use unhealthy tools, substances that really can very powerfully, you know, substance abuse I'm talking about, that can modulate my emotions, but has some negative consequences. So it's about what are my goals for me for my emotional life? And do I possess the tools that allow me to accomplish those goals?
I think that is a formula for the good life. Hey, here are the goals that I have. And if these are healthy, productive goals and I have the means to achieve them, that should bring me a sense of satisfaction. Sometimes our goals, of course, aren't optimal and we use that maybe controversial word, but we do change our goals throughout our life.
But it's about finding the right set of goals for us as individuals and then identifying the tools that we can use to bring those goals to fruition.
Yeah, I mean, they're mechanistically, you know, we understand the mechanisms that are... underlying the benefits of these tools. They are easy to implement and not always, but for a lot of them, they're easy. And I think that's in part where their power resides. We are still trying to understand how the brain functions. As you well know, you've contributed to this.
I've worked on this a little bit myself too. The brain is a remarkably complicated organ and we still have a lot to learn. I'm a big fan of trying to understand how phenomena like emotion play out at different levels of analysis, at the psychological level of thinking and feeling, but also at the biological level in terms of patterns of neural activity and hormones and so forth and so on.
And so I think there's great hope that we will be able to eventually down the road, Try to help people manage their emotions through multiple different sources of intervention, through the pharmacological level, through the behavioral level, through the interpersonal level. But it's a messy, messy space right now.
And I think one of the big problems is, and this is in part gets to bigger questions about science and how science is done. it can be hard to cross levels of analysis. And there are multiple practical constraints that become active here.
So having the large enough samples and the right collaborators to look at how different kinds of interventions interact with one another, work in different populations. And so we tend not to do those more complicated designs because they're a lot harder to do.
They take a ton more money, a ton more time and effort, and oftentimes scientists are on timelines and their incentive structures that guide the kind of work that they do. But big picture, down the road, I think the big questions are about how do these different kinds of interventions interact with one another.
The good news is, though, that for any person who is watching or listening who's motivated to manage their emotions right now, there are many things you can do to start. And it begins, step one, learning about what these tools are. and then starting this process of experimenting with the tools. I don't use that word experimenting lightly.
I wouldn't advocate experimenting with agents that have serious side effects of the sort that some of the biological interventions you articulated earlier do. Those kinds of tools I think should be used in the context of medical supervision.
But a lot of these other tools that we're talking about, small changes in how you think and behave and interact with your environments, those are things people can start doing right now.
So a couple of responses to that. So first of all, I think step one is recognizing that if you are hearing another voice, like if you can hear your dad's voice in your head, It's not your dad who is in your head. That is a simulation that you are engaging in that your brain is capable of producing. And so that I think can be informative for people who are curious about these inner worlds.
Here's something that I hope listeners and viewers will find exceptionally liberating as I have found liberating from just knowing the science. So actually I talk about these intrusive thoughts in shift. Yeah. They are incredibly normative. And so there's research which looks at like, how frequently have you experienced an intrusive thought over the past week or month or two months?
The proportion of people who experience these dark thoughts is exceptionally high. I don't remember the exact percentage, but it is in my book and it is like near ceiling. I will do an exercise with my classes, my undergraduate classes, where I will ask them to anonymously... whether they've experienced like a dark thought over the past week. Almost all of them are capable of generating them.
And some of these thoughts are really, really dark. I will often experience a very dark intrusive thought when I'm exercising at the gym. You're looking at me with curiosity and a bit of concern right now.
So if I'm carrying like a heavy dumbbell from a bench to a rack, I will sometimes have a thought of dropping it on the face of of another person on a mat. It's terribly dark. It's a terrible, terrible thought. So why am I experiencing that? It is most likely the brain's simulating worst case scenarios to prevent me from doing it. Of course, I don't wanna drop a dumbbell on someone I never have.
And so that's one explanation for why this is so normative. It's your brain's way of constantly, there's a theory that we're constantly simulating all sorts of possibilities for what could happen. And most of these simulations, the probability of them coming to fruition are exceptionally low, infinitesimally small. But on occasion, some of the wacky ones do escape into awareness.
And that's when we get the dark thought about harming someone or doing something illegal in a pretty aggressive, egregious way, or in my case, dropping the dumbbell on the person stretching on their face. And so here's what I find liberating. Me understanding that this is just how my brain works. Well, that doesn't mean now that I'm something wrong with me as a human being, right?
That I'm morally corrupt in any way. My brain's going to sometimes produce these kinds of dark thoughts. I'm not going to act on them. And as long as I'm not acting on them, it's all good. It's almost like when people learn about the physiological response to anxiety, they're before they know what is happening, that can often be an incredibly distressing experience.
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