502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
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What is the focus of Mark Changizi's research?
You can find information about the tour at jordanbpeterson.com. It's about this new book, which is about biblical stories, but you should also understand that I'm doing the same thing with these stories that I did with the other tours that I had conducted before, and the other books for that matter, which is to take high-level abstract ideas, in this case foundational narratives, to explain what they mean, but also to explain why knowing what they mean can make a real practical difference in your life. You know, I want to bridge the gap between the abstraction and the reality so that you can put into operation the principles that I'm discussing so that it does produce a tangible improvement in how you attend to things and how you act. So come out to the lectures if you're interested in continuing with that. Today, I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Changhisi, who...
as an author of this book, Expressly Human and a number of other books. And I wanted to talk to Mark for two reasons. One was because we share an interest in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, especially with regards to perception, emotion, language and mass group behavior. And so I've been trying to wade through the literature on perception Mark is very interested as an evolutionary biologist slash psychologist in the function of evolved traits like perception. And one of the hypothesis that we discussed, which is a very interesting one was his explanation, rather unique explanation for the evolution of color vision. He believes, for example, that we have additional color vision, not so much so that we could detect ripe fruit, for example, which was one hypothesis, but so that we can better attend to the emotional signals that people display as a consequence of alterations in their circulation, especially displayed facially.
So we have color vision so that we're better at detecting signs of health or ill health as a consequence of skin tone, but also detecting and reacting to emotional displays. And so join us if you're interested in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, emotion, language, communication, and the behavior of mass groups. So I think we'll start our discussion by talking about perception. And you've studied visual perception for a long time. And so I'd like you to outline, if you would, what you understand about visual perception. And then we can contrast our viewpoints and see where we can go with that. And I think we'll segue into emotion and language from perception.
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, my background is sort of mathematics, and I went into cognitive science, and I was really more of an evolutionary biologist. And so one of the areas that I've worked and have a bunch of discoveries happens to be vision. So I have other things in other areas of sort of evolutionary biology, why we have as many fingers and why animals have as many limbs as they do, why you get pruney fingers when you're wet. They're actually optimized to be rain treads so that when you You don't want a hydroplane. So they suddenly have the optimal pattern so that you can channel the water out as quickly as possible. So these are the sorts of things that I was always dealing with.
We're very sneaky, us people.
That's right. So always I was interested not in the specific mechanisms by which our brains work, but on the ultimate sort of design questions for why it would have evolved that way. So functional. Yeah. It's all about function. And strangely, I mean, this is more on the political side, strangely, even though the biological world claims to believe in Darwin, when you're actually there in the evolutionary biology world, almost nobody believes in natural selection.
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