Shaping Culture and Self at the Meta Level

Simone: [00:00:00] So we would also argue that when it comes to crafting culture or changing behavior on a very big meta scale, one of the things you can do that's very meaningful if you are someone in the media or you are a government is like literal, this is it is, it is propaganda. But create more archetypes for pro social behavior, for types of behaviors that you want to elevate.

Simone: And this is actually something that we saw back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. There were literal propaganda slash instructional videos by organizations like Coronet Films that were distributed throughout high schools and middle schools that showed ideal behavior through these little vignettes.

Malcolm: You can have a huge volume of media, all with the exact same model being shown to people and the exact same types of toxic behavior.

Simone: Like the trope of the wife. Or girlfriend who's always like rolling her eyes at and sort of like pulling her husband down a peg like, Oh, like my husband and very

Malcolm: few depictions of wives that aren't like secretly smarter than their husbands now [00:01:00] and they're

Simone: like snide toward them and dismissive.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hey Malcolm, one of the things that I really, I love about you and loved about you since the moment I met you, was it honestly, you more resemble like a superhero or like fictional character, like a caricature of a person than like a real human. And I love that that has evolved into something of a more nuanced life philosophy or even like psychological philosophy of yours.

Simone: And I think it'd be really fun to talk about

Malcolm: it. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to dive deep into this. And I think the, the point we're going to get to in this is that I, I hate to say this. I choke on these words, but I think representation actually does matter in media. And we'll get to why representation matters and it doesn't matter in the way that progressives think it matters.

Malcolm: And, and that the way they're optimizing on representation is probably not the best way to optimize around representation. But the representation actually has a huge effect on our emotional states and the way we construct our self narratives. [00:02:00] So, first, let's talk about how human emotional states work within this theory.

Malcolm: So, a theory of mind, when you use the term theory of mind, what you're talking about Is our ability as humans to mentally emulate the mind of somebody else or mentally model the mind of somebody else and predict what they are going to think or do next. This is very useful for, for all sorts of things.

Malcolm: Like when you are having an argument with someone in your head after you stopped talking to them and you are emulating their positions in that argument, this is what you're using. You're

Simone: using your brain. Or if you're hunting an elk and you're trying to... Imagine what the elk will do next so that you can properly track him.

Malcolm: Yes, yes. But it's something that we, I mean, with humans, it's where we do it more often is when we're like... Fake arguments you're having with someone in your head and then you come up with the right answer a while back and then you think, okay, how are they going to respond to that and everything like that?

Malcolm: We just do it very naturally. And one of my areas of research when I got to be a [00:03:00] neuroscientist was in schizophrenia research, specifically translational neuroscience as it relates to schizophrenia. And I did some fMRI studies on this, but I always had a weird idea of what was going on in schizophrenia.

Malcolm: So one of those common symptoms and skip different in schizophrenia across. Types is auditory hallucinations, right? Where you might hear whispers or somebody talking to you. What I hypothesize might be going on, and this would actually explain a number of other schizophrenia symptoms is that they have a hyperactive theory of mind running in the background all the time.

Malcolm: So, using transmagnetic stimulation, you can do something where you hyper activate a portion of a person's brain, so it can become activated with less of a threshold. So, an example here would be like, you hyper activate the part of their brain that's associated with like the letter A. And then you show them the letter A, and they'll say A.

Malcolm: And they won't mean to say A, but they'll just be forced to say it because the neurons around that area were firing, it was already hyperactivated, [00:04:00] and then it just forces a full saying of it. So in schizophrenia, what I think is it's this theory of mind system which is hyperactivated and activates accidentally all the time.

Malcolm: That's also what causes magical thinking. This is if you see an arrangement of items in a store window. And you assign agency to it, like it's trying to tell you a message, right? It's also what would describe paranoia, right? Okay. What really is paranoia? It's applying agency, like a theory of mind to some external force, like a government or something like that.

Malcolm: Oh, that helicopter, that's must mean that this other entity is thinking X or Y, right? And just so many weird and seemingly disparate schizophrenia symptoms can be seen from this. Hyperactive theory of mind. So this theory of mind is very important to how all humans work. Now what we hypothesize is that the primary way that we as humans process emotions is through having a theory of mind of ourselves, quietly running in the background of our brain, and then [00:05:00] correlating our environmental circumstances against that theory of mind

Simone: and determine

Malcolm: how emotionally we are supposed to react and then outputting that emotional state. This is why, for example, if you're a little mad about something, and then a friend comes to you and they're like, you should really be a lot more mad about this than you are.

Malcolm: Can't you see how bad what they did is and you begin to get really angry about it all of a sudden.

Simone: So, if I can recap, basically, most people, subconsciously, have a model of who I am, like their character sheet of I am this fancy woman, or I am this powerful man, or I am this, creative, quirky artist, and then when life circumstances happen when you are about to react, there's this internal question of, well, how would the quirky artist react?

Simone: And then that's how you react. And that's why Malcolm is saying that, sometimes people can even prime or prompt this of well, you should be outraged. And then suddenly you're like, I should be outraged. Cause we're not that

Malcolm: clever. We're not that conscious. We're not that kind of thing. We're not that [00:06:00] stable as, as, as sort of internal characters.

Malcolm: But this

Simone: is meaningful. And why this theory of Malcolm's is really meaningful and why I love it a lot If this is true, and based on like our anecdotal experience, we have, we find it to be compelling. It means that if you change the way that you view yourself, if you recontextualize yourself, if you change that character sheet.

Simone: You can also change the way you react to things. So for example, if you view yourself as a delicate person with severe trauma in their past and high anxiety issues and all this other baggage, obviously when bad thing