Rick Hanson

First off, I wanted to say it's a pleasure to be here.

And Josh, I've been a longtime admirer of your work.

And I find it really quite haunting to feel within ourselves experientially.

I say this as a longtime therapist and a longtime mindfulness kind of teacher and also someone for a long time who was a very shy and dorky kid, very young going through school, who felt quite terrified by the groups and the alphas around him.

And I was, you know, a living laboratory of some of the things we're going to be talking about here.

The longing to be part of an us and the fear and dehumanization and eventually often on a slippery slope, aggression, callousness and cruelty toward them.

So as context here with your specific question, John, and then I'll back up into maybe a bit more of

the ways in which it's quite remarkable to appreciate, drawing on a metaphor from the great affective neuroscientist Jock Punxsut, bless his memory, that we are each a living museum.

We are each living in a body, as Joshua was pointing out, that's the result of three and a half billion or so years of life on the planet, evolving in 600 million years or so of an evolving nervous system, including the last only three million of those years in which the brain tripled in volume.

which has a lot of implications.

So one example, if you do experiments with people and you show them faces for maybe a 10th of a second and you ask them what they see, if you speed up that interval or shorten it, increasingly people cannot name what they see.

On the other hand, if you contrast a angry face, a threatening face with a loving, sweet, inviting face,

flashed on the screen for a 20th of a second or a 10th of a second below, any kind of conscious recognition, people will report, I didn't see anything.

But if you have shown to them the angry face, their heart will start beating faster.

there will be a physiological response that is biased toward the recognition of threat, which is a part of a larger negativity bias in our brain that has enabled our ancestors to survive and pass on genes that passed on genes, which bias us toward recognizing threat and reacting to it and over-learning from it, for example.

Other one.

On the other hand, when people experience, for example, there's a recent meta-analysis and psychological bulletin that talked about how perceived social support is a major factor of physical health, mental health.

improved performance in educational and occupational settings, and a major factor in reducing risk-taking behaviors in both Western and non-Western cultures.

Wow, perceived social support.

So we need to have the actual social support and the perception of it.