533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
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What are the dynamics of the brain and self-perception?
So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object. So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self. The feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right?
Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly. This is very weird too, everyone.
So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?
Something was happening to me, and I was frozen and unable to speak, and I knew I had to wake myself up. Like, I'd try to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife. She'd have to come and shake me, and then I'd wake up.
So I was sleeping in my room, and then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me until it was on my chest, strangling me.
What did the monster look like? Well, I'll tell you.
Thank you.
Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Dr. Balan Jalal. He's a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a visiting researcher at Cambridge University Medical School. He's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other such publications. The Telegraph and the BBC described him as one of the world's leading experts on sleep paralysis and the terrors and opportunities of dream, fantasy, and adaptation What did we discuss? Dr. Jalal's Intro to Neuroscience course at Peterson Academy, the relationship between neuroanatomy, brain function, perception, emotion, and behavior, the function of the dream state, the role of culture and conception in dealing with emotion, particularly fear, and the changing landscape of the modern university. It's quite a trip. Join us. Well, thanks for coming in.
Well, thank you, Jordan, Dr. Peterson. I'd love to be here.
Let's talk about Peterson Academy first. We just released a course of yours, Introduction to Neuroscience. Right, right. So I'd like to know, I think it would be useful to talk a little bit about the course, but I'd also like to know about your experience doing the filming and your reflections on the process and the project itself.
Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, it was a lovely process. Let me start there. So I flew in to Miami. Great reception overall. Nice people around, Ben, Nancy, Vincent, everybody on the team, lovely. The shooting was great. So, yeah, top professional, really like that. And then the course itself, it's an eight-hour course on the brain and sort of going through, initially starting from sort of the basics of the brain, the different structures of the brain, then going all the way to sort of higher abstract things like human nature and physics. sort of the nature of how art emanates in the brain and things like that.
How do dreams function as a remapping of anomaly?
So it kind of has the nitty-gritty of an introductory neuroscience course, but then also taking in some more sort of poetic aspects of the brain. So it's kind of all that mix.
Right, so it's an approach to the cultural from the bottom up, from the biological up.
right right right how much how much anatomy functional anatomy and so forth is in the course i make sure that the basics are there so for a basics neuroscience course for as an introduction you've got to have the basics there all the brain structures the the the cortex the brainstem all the different names but i try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep well i used to when i did my first biopsychology neuroscience course that was incredibly boring um i had all these names thrown at me yeah and it was yeah just out of
You had to force memorize them.
It made no sense. So what's the cerebellum doing? What's this doing? You just had all these names. You had to memorize them. That was it. But I really made sure to describe the function and have an overall context for each.
Yeah, I found that I got extremely interested in neuroanatomy, even at a detailed level, when I was reading scientists who associated the area with the function.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the dynamics of the brain and self-perception?
0:00–3:17
2
How do dreams function as a remapping of anomaly?
3:17–5:09
3
What is the relationship between sleep paralysis and dreams?
5:09–16:09
4
How does the rubber hand illusion illustrate embodiment?
16:09–27:29
5
What role does the brain's plasticity play in perception?
27:29–1:01:33
6
How do dreams contribute to emotional processing?
1:01:33–1:11:48
7
What is the significance of social interactions in dreams?
1:11:48–1:18:41
8
How can dreams help navigate complex social situations?
1:18:41–1:40:39