El siguiente video es una de las últimas publicaciones acerca de serotonina, jerarquías y valores de Jordan Peterson en su canal de YouTube.
Fue grabado durante un evento en Australia en Febrero del 2019.
Es una charla interesante acerca de:
- El rol en nuestras vidas de la serotonina y la dopamina, neuroquímicos que produce naturalmente nuestro cerebro.
- Cómo nos sirven las jerarquías en nuestro mundo abstracto.
- Cuán importante es vivir nuestras vidas con objetivos y estructuras jerárquicas bien definidas.
El video se puede ver con sub títulos en español usando los controles de YouTube para activar subtítulos:
- Primeramente se deben activar los sub títulos
- Seguido se debe elegir «English Auto Generated»
- Se debe elegir «Auto Traducción»
- Elegir «Español» o «Spanish» del menú de idiomas de auto traducción
Al final del video están los puntos claves (serotonina, jerarquías y valores) que apunté en el idioma original de la conferencia; mientras lo estaba viendo.
Pueden ser traducidos usando https://translate.google.com
Key Points
- 16:15 Personality test https://www.understandmyself.com/
- Extroversion
- Neuroticism
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- Openness
- 21:20 The serotonin system monitors your position in a social hierarchy
- It’s a master control of the neurochemical system
- It’s like the conductor of an orchestra
- Antidepressants decrease the rate at which neurons re-uptake serotonin, so serotonin can work a bit longer
- In addition, your brain exaggerates negative emotion and suppresses positive emotion
- 22:10 What happens when you’re being depressed
- All you remember about the past is negative
- All you can see about the present is negative
- Nothing about the future is positive at all
- When you’re depressed, something changes inside you neurophysiologically that changes the way you view everything
- 24:10 The system in which all other neurological systems in your body depends on is the serotonin system
- 28:50 The serotonin system sets your brain up during embryonic development
- The serotonin system is the base of your neurophysiology
- It counts where you are in your hierarchy
- It decides how much negative emotion and positive emotions you should feel on average because of your position
- Example: you’re lowest in your hierarchy, barely clinging to the bottom of reality, then your brain says: Look, it’s hard where you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, you don’t have many friends, it’s precarious down there… So, any little thing that goes wrong, any little error you make that may be the end of you. So, you better be on guard and alert and if something bad happens it better hurts because it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
- If your serotonin levels fall because you suffered a hierarchical defeat, then the positive emotion system gets flattened so good things no longer feel good because it’s dangerous to take any risks in the position you have fallen.
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32:00 The manner in which one of your fundamental neurochemical systems is tracking your position in a hierarchy is crucial to the maintenance of your emotional stability
- 42:47 Norbert Weiner cybernetics professor at MIT
- One of the founders of computational science
- Pioneer in the generation of autonomous self-correcting systems
- 43:40 We perceive the world as a place to go from one location to another
- 44:27 When you think of someone as being integrated, as having character, what it means is that all the parts of what they do fit somehow into an integrated whole
- 44:45 If you have a value system that’s well-structured, then all the little things you do are part of the big thing you’re doing, whatever that big thing is.
- 45:00 You’re a creature of action, you have to be a creature of action to act because if you don’t act, then you fall apart and you’re overwhelmed by despair and negative emotion, and you starve, and you die. So, not acting, not an option.
- The positive emotion system is there to facilitate your movement to a better place.
- If you’re not moving forward to a better place, then you don’t have any positive emotion.
- This means that if you don’t have a value system you don’t have positive emotions because your value system is what determines one thing is worth doing more than another.
- If one thing isn’t worth doing more than another, then you don’t have any place valuable to go, and if you don’t have any place valuable to go then you don’t have any positive emotion.
- So people criticizing hierarchies politically are proposing to view the world in a way in which you don’t know what to look at. A world in which you don’t know where to go next, what to do next.
- The proper question is «what should the hierarchy be?», not whether there should be one.
- Some negative consequences of the existence of hierarchies are:
- No matter what hierarchy we set up to pursue whatever goal one could have, some people turn out to be better at doing that, and some people turn out to be worst.
- The people who turn out to be worse pay a heavy price for being worse.
- The people who turn out to be worse, are the majority, so many people pay a fairly heavy price.
- The left in the political spectrum has some valid points regarding hierarchies:
- Pay some attention to the people at the bottom of the hierarchies because it’s a rough place to be in.
- Keep the hierarchies fair so the people can move up.
- Keep them focused on their tasks, so they’re doing useful things and aren’t corrupted by the people who are only seeking power.
- That’s fine
- No hierarchy, THAT’S A BAD IDEA!!!
- 59:30 A macro command like «set the table» is only something that has meaning when the micro-processes that are motoric have already been mastered
- This the way we’re constituted: you have many skills (things you can do with your body)
- Action-oriented skills and perceptual skills
- Once you have them as part of you, other people can refer to them
- So other people can understand you, and vice versa.
- Because we call to share a hierarchy of skill and perception that’s built from the bottom up to a very high level of abstraction and also a very high level of isomorphism, meaning that it’s the same for everyone.
- 1:00:35: It was already established that you have to do things
- You have to do things somewhere, you better be on the right path.
- So, you need something to tell you whether you’re on the right path.
- That’s what the emotional system does, positive emotions, and negative emotions let you know that.
- The path is defined by the goal, so you need a goal.
- 1:01:10 If your life is not the way you want it to be, it’s possible that your goal is not what it should be.
- The importance of having a proper goal is that it can change the way the world manifests itself to you.
- Example of the guy who finds his wife’s affair and feels bad first, but then realizes he didn’t like her anyway so it turns out to be the best day of his life.
- 1:06:30 You aim at something, you have a goal, you go.
- You see that you’re making progress towards the goal
- That’s a good thing, that makes you happy
- That triggers your dopamine system. The same one triggered by drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, and opioids activates which is why people take those drugs.
- The dopamine system tells you that you’re moving forward in the manner that you should be according to your plan.
- It doesn’t mean you have a good plan. It means only that you’re on the right path.
- Having a plan is better than having no plan.
- A stupid plan is way better than no plan.
- So have a plan, and implement it.
- Have your successes and failures along the way.
- Learn specifically about your successes.
- Learn specifically about your failures.
- Then move the goal, to an even better place.
- 1:09:38 The engagement with which you do something is the evidence that you’re doing something good with your life:
- You’ve got a pathway.
- You’ve got an aim.
- You’re moving forward.
- You’re engaged.
- Excellent! Says your dopamine system located in the hypothalamus.
- It’s not something new. It’s ancient stuff inside our bodies.
- 1:10:50 It’s important to notice when you’re engaged in something
- If you’re trying to put your life together, watch yourself for a couple of weeks.
- See if you get engaged in something.
- For example, if you’re doing something and you don’t realize the past of time.
- Good! You’re in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.
- There’s something about that that is right.
- Practice being in that place.
- Ask yourself:
- How did I get here?
- Where am I exactly?
- How could I stay here?
- How do I come here more often?
- 1:13:05 It’s also worthy to notice when you’re doing things that are making you feel really awful.
- Ask yourself:
- What were the routines that constituted that ill-advised set of actions?
- Ask yourself:
- 1:14:40 What could constitute a good pathway?
- This is Jordan’s hierarchy
- He writes, phrases, paragraphs, chapters, books…
- It’s all coherently laid out to some high order aim
- The aim is:
- To share his clinical knowledge
- To educate people
- To set things straight
- Himself by writing carefully
- The culture by saying what has to be said
- Other individuals by communicating with them
- To live more harmoniously in the culture and in the world
- The hope is that by doing this that seems to be a good thing, the world responds as if it’s a good thing.
- This is Jordan’s hierarchy
- 1:16:50 Regarding the building of hierarchy structures
- It takes a lot of work to build up separate skills into complicated neurological structures to undertake a set of complex activities.
- The motivation to do it is a reward because the reward helps build neurological structures.
- The hope of someone who does that is that now all that work that went into building that hierarchy structure results in something that other people will appreciate as well.
- That’s why it’s important to have a shared social reality.
- That’s why the postmodernist went off the rail so badly with their insistence that the world was the only language
- 1:18:30 The definition of a functioning political system is:
- We organize a very complex moral game
- Then we master it through reciprocal interactions with each other
- We internalize it so it regulates our emotions
- Then we act it out in the world and if there’s a concordance between the way we acted out and the way the world responds, then we’re Ok.
- There’s nothing more disturbing than to act a high order moral good and not be taken as such by the external world.
- 1:24:30 Wake up enough so you can set the structures around you right
- It’s your moral obligation as a citizen.
- It’s your responsibility and your divine duty from our western cultural perspective because in you as a sovereign individual rests the fate and the health of the state.
- Otherwise, why would you get to vote?
- QUESTIONS:
- 1:35:39 You want to be careful about reducing something complex to a single explanation.
- That’s generally the purview of ideologues.
- They have one idea and it just covers the world.
- The world is quite complicated to be covered by only one idea, unfortunately.
- 1:36:04 The purpose of religious ideas is to remind us who we are.
- We need to know who we are.
- The most important idea that’s ever been generated is that made and women are made in the image of God.
- A culture that isn’t predicated on that belief is doomed to absolute catastrophe.
- The purpose of religious ideas is to wake us up.
- To alert us about the vital importance of the responsibility that goes along with being in this world.
- Because we shape the world, we move it towards heaven, or towards hell, and we do that with every conscious decision we make.
- The world moves in the direction that we determine.