Jordan Peterson sits down with theorist and researcher Mark Changizi. They discuss the biological reasons for mass hysteria on the societal level, why we evolved to have color vision, and how we understand and interpret the patterns of the natural world. Mark Changizi is a theorist aiming to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel, and see as we do. He attended the University of Virginia for a degree in physics and mathematics, and to the University of Maryland for a PhD in math. In 2002, he won a prestigious Sloan-Swartz Fellowship in Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech, and in 2007, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2010, he took the post of Director of Human Cognition at a new research institute called 2ai Labs and also co-founded VINO Optics, which builds proprietary vein-enhancing glasses for medical personnel. He consults out of his Human Factory Lab. He curated an exhibition and co-authored a (fourth) book — “On the Origin of Art” (2016) by Steven Pinker, Geoffrey Miller, Brian Boyd, and Mark Changizi — at MONA museum in Tasmania in 2016, illustrating his “nature-harnessing” theory on the origins of art and language. This episode was filmed on November 22, 2024 | Links | For Mark Changizi: On X https://x.com/MarkChangizi/highlights On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/markchangizi Website https://www.changizi.com/?_sm_nck=1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Thank you.
Hello, everybody. I'm going to start today with a couple of announcements. The first is that I published this book, We Who Wrestle With God, Perceptions of the Divine. It came out November 19th. It's number one on Amazon right now, which I'm pretty happy about. And it's also the basis for a tour, which I started in November, continues through December, then January through April as well.
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.
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