Athena:	00:03	Have you been zombified by stress? Welcome to the zombified podcast, your source for fresh brains. I'm your host, Athena Aktipis. I'm a professor at ASU in the psychology department. I'm also the chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance and...
Dave:	00:22	And I am Dave. I am the media outreach program manager for the psych department at ASU and a big brain fan, as always.
Athena:	00:30	Yes, we love bringing on this podcast [Laughter] ...brainsss!
Dave:	00:35	And today. We have a really a really great brain. Ah, so Mark Flinn, I was not able to sit in on in this podcast, but I've met him before and he's a brilliant guy. And so why don't you tell me about what he's going to be telling us about.
Athena:	00:49	All right. Well mark talks about something totally crazy, which is this idea that Witchcraft and Voodoo and all of this sort of stuff that people think of as like metaphysical nonsense, that actually it has a real basis in manipulation of our stress system and that like when people feel like there's witchcraft happening against them or they're like, they think they're practicing witchcraft, like what they're actually doing is messing with people's stress systems.
Dave:	01:18	So essentially he's saying witchcraft is real?
Athena:	01:20	Well, except it's not what people think it is. It's not like a metaphysical thing. It is a real thing that is based in our physiological responses to largely social stress.
Dave:	01:34	Interesting.
Athena:	01:35	Yeah.
Dave:	01:35	Um, and I see you-a here that he admits to being a witch himself?
Athena:	01:40	Yeah, Yeah, a good one though. So... [Laughter]
Dave:	01:43	I think this is going to be really interesting. I can't wait to listen to it.
Athena:	01:46	Yeah. All right, well let's jump right in with Mark Flinn.
Dave:	01:51	All right.
Intro:	01:53	['Psychological' by LEMI plays]
Mark:	02:30	Stress is, is very important. So there was a real paradox. It seemed as if responding to purely psychological stressors in your social environment was a mistake because there is no physical demand and so why mobilize your physiology for what appeared to to be set up for a physical demand.
Athena:	02:55	So this is a sort of Robert Sapolsky argument? Zebras don't get ulcers kind of. It's a mismatch. Humans are getting stressed when we shouldn't?
Mark:	03:03	Right. But it is so pervasive and so intricately designed in terms of how it, how we respond to our social environments. On the one hand that doesn't look like a mistake. And then, uh, secondly, given the extraordinary importance of social relationships for humans. And, yeah, I think arguably the best explanation for why we have such exceptionally large brains was really unusual abilities in terms of empathy and language, social foresight, um, those kinds of abilities.
Athena:	03:47	Well, brains are one of our favorite topics on this show. You can imagine.
Mark:	03:51	They are delicious. [Laughter]
Athena:	03:53	So, so the human brain is kind of, you're saying it's designed to deal with these social stressors just as much as it's designed to deal with any physical stressors.
Mark:	04:04	If anything, way more so. Orders of magnitude more so. So if you look at what your brain is actually up to, you know, there are some routine functions that a lizard is able to do and we can do that just fine, too. But what's really extraordinary exceptional about our gigantic brains is all the complicated social sorts of computations. The social chess game, um, that is playing out, consciousness scenarios that involve social relationships, social interactions, and our very long childhoods, seen, uh, to be wrapped up in learning, mastering those kinds of very difficult things to do in your social world.
Athena:	04:59	Hmm...
Mark:	04:59	So, yeah, it takes a very long time, a lot of experience, um, friendships, networks.
Athena:	05:05	Hmm... So it's not just that our brains automatically wire up the right way to be able to deal with all this stress that we actually need a lot of input from the environment to calibrate that. [Mark agrees]
Mark:	05:19	And the reason for that, the reason why we're so creative is because the social world is so dynamic. So you're always looking for a better mouse trap, but everybody else is so you can't stick, you can't set a brain up in a set way. It's got to be very dynamic and adjustable. It's constantly fine tuning itself, constantly looking for new solutions to solve the social chess game. So, um, yeah, that requires a very flexible, adjustable system involving lots and lots of learning.
Athena:	05:57	Then it must be open ended in a way that can sometimes lead to vulnerabilities to right?
Mark:	06:02	Absolutely. Yeah. I mean that's... yeah. What we would consider to be pathologies cause there's so many different open ways you could, you know, go in, particularly if you don't have a social network that gives you the landmarks that help you ground yourself, that you know, really sets bearings for you individuals who you can trust. So you know, they will give you honest feedback about you and where you are and whether what you're doing is appropriate for your position in your social network.
Athena:	06:38	Hmm. So basically you're saying we humans, we're kind of trying to figure out how to make it in our social world and that starts in childhood and we need to be getting feedback from people who we trust and who think have our best interests at heart kind of in order to calibrate our systems, right? So that we grow up emotionally and mentally healthy.
Mark:	07:01	It starts even earlier. It starts in utero. So a fetus is getting feedback from it's mother. They have this beautiful chemical language going back and forth across the placenta where the fetus is monitoring what's going on in it's mother's life based on her hormone levels and other inputs. Um, so from a very, very early age is beginning to build a model of the social world that specific to itself and it's mother.
Athena:	07:31	And so how is it doing that? Because obviously you know, it's not necessarily encoding it in it's neural circuitry at that point because it's neural circuitry isn't even established immediately.
Mark:	07:42	Right? No, but it's establishing... [Laughter]
Athena:	07:45	Or is it in the like the epigenetics? So do we know how the, the fetal environment is affecting those developmental trajectories? Is it...
Mark:	07:55	Yeah. I'll tell you this is kinda of state of the art. So, you know, it's a bit black boxy in that, um, we can look at different maternal environments and then look at outcomes. And so there seem to be some important patterns there. The very interesting work done with mice that is epigenetic, um, where if your mother was under stress, that then will be passed on to the grand offspring in a complex way because of how the, how you adjusted in utero to your, your mom's stressful environment.
Athena:	08:34	Does that have to do with the HPA- axis, the hypothalamic adrenal pituitary? Is that right? [Laughter]
Mark:	08:42	Good enough that, yeah. [Laughter]
Athena:	08:47	No? What is it? What is it? What is HPA? Pituitary adrenal? [Laughter]
Mark:	08:48	Well, you know, it's yeah... it's hypothalamic anterior pituitary adrenal.
Athena:	08:53	Okay.
Mark:	08:54	So, yeah, there a complex circuitry where your, your senses perceive a threat that then releases a cascade, starting usually up through the limbic system and then down through the, the hypothalamus and the pituitary, which releases a hormone corticotropin, releasing hormone into the bloodstream, which goes to the adrenals, which causes the release of cortisol.
Athena:	09:26	Mhmm...
Mark:	09:26	But there are a lot of modifiers. So, you know, one myth-a couple myths here that we ought to deal with, one of which is that, um, we can understand these hormonal systems in isolation. So, you know, we can just look at cortisol. The cortisol interacts with the whole suite of other hormones and neurological situations.
Athena:	09:54	So you have to look at it as a whole big picture like a complex system.
Mark:	09:59	Exactly. So there's a recipe and so a lot of research I think has maybe not been as productive as it could have been because it looked at one hormone in isolation rather than the broader context. [Athena agrees] The other problem was, you know, experimental work can be, you know, very powerful scientific tool, but particularly when you're dealing with evolved systems, it's also very helpful to look at them in the context in which they have that they're designed to deal with, i.e. a child's everyday world than the natural environment. It's just hard to do. [Athena agrees] So, you know, to, to watch children to see what's going on in their lives and monitor hormone levels and other physiological mechanisms. How are you going to do that? Well, um, we really lucked out about 30 years ago in that new techniques for measuring hormones could be adapted to use noninvasive techniques. I collect saliva. Sometimes we collect urine too, but, you know, that's no big deal.
Athena:	11:15	Right.
Mark:	11:15	Ask a child to, you know, spit in the cup...pssh...without trust.
Athena:	11:18	They spit anyways. So it's like... [Laughter]
Mark:	11:19	Yeah. Yeah. More or less... I think it can get a little bit onerous when, you know, I'm asking them to spit in a cup six times a day, but, you know they...
Athena:	11:29	They get to practice their spitting skills [laughter] that I am sure they find uses for.
Mark:	11:32	Their drooling skills. Yeah. You know, they get, they get rewarded in their own ways. It's, it's, so yeah, my research in Dominica basically involved watching children in their everyday natural environments and family environments are super important part of that. So, you know, one of the, one of the things we picked up on pretty quickly was just how important a child's family environment was. So when we're watching the hormones go up and down and what kinds of things that are going up and down and in response to their social environments are exceptionally salient. And in that context their, their family environments. So, um, mom and dad, grandparents, siblings, at all, can have a very significant influence on what's going on in a child's physiology.
Athena:	12:32	Hmm.
Mark:	12:32	So in general, we humans can influence each other's physiologies.
Athena:	12:38	Mhmm, and that's where we kind of get into the voodoo and the witchcraft and what the mechanisms actually are that underlie that.
Mark:	12:44	Right. If I've been clever and have figured out and build upon generations and generations before me developing little ways of influencing the minds of others and theoretically that's what we humans have really been up to. You know, uh, manipulating one another in ways that are in our best interests for sure. You know, pulling the strings on your stress system could be a way that I could influence you.
Athena:	13:23	Okay. So can you give some examples of in Dominico what kinds of witchcraft or um, more generally these sort of practices where individuals are influencing each other? What kinds of things happen in- at your field site?
Mark:	13:44	Um, let me start with saying that, yeah, this is really a universal human phenomenon. So any culture you might go into, you will see variants of ways in which individuals influence one another's physiological system. So evil eye or, uh, gosh, you know, I mean, there's just, and some of them are what we would call culture bound syndromes. So they're more...
Athena:	14:11	What does that mean? A culture bound syndrome.
Mark:	14:14	Yeah. Well, you know, it's a little tricky to find it. Basically the gist of the idea is, um, each culture society might have its own specific kinds of psychological problems. So, you know, depression in China might be different than depression in Dominica or the United States. And sometimes we give, uh, specific labels to those differences. Um, so in, in Dominica, you might feel that you, someone has put a curse on you and that's going to raise your anxiety levels something...
Athena:	15:03	How would you learn that someone put a curse on you? Is it something that sort of is gossiped about or someone will tell you that they've put a curse on you.
Mark:	15:09	It could be but you know, you just situate yourself, think about yourself in your social world. You've got friends and you've got enemies. Your kind, your brain is constantly monitoring you know, what you, you think people are doing to you. You know, not to be paranoid, [laughter] but you're all doing that. And, so you might, you know, have normally existing concerns about it-
Athena:	15:36	And it, like feeling like people might be talking behind your back about you, that kind of thing.
Mark:	15:40	Sure, you know, someone's competing for a position at work that you might want. And so they are kind of working behind the scenes to, to, to derogate you or you know, you could be competing over a potential romantic partner with someone. That's, that's a common source of...
Athena:	16:00	Hmm. So is, is witchcraft and voodoo is kind of an extension of this competitive deceptive strategy that just manifests in a lot of these small scale societies as sort of a belief in the supernatural.
Mark:	16:17	Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. So, and as you might expect, there are all these different cultural variance, just historical antecedents that are gonna result in the specifics of the rituals and the way in which you're manipulating others, um, is, you know, going to be culture specific. So.
Athena:	16:39	So back to Dominica. I feel like somebody's put a curse on me.
Mark:	16:43	Yes.
Athena:	16:43	Because people are looking at me funny or I think someone's competing with me for something or otherwise...
Mark:	16:52	Well, yeah, you might... Someone's wife might be concerned that their husband is finding you attractive so they don't want you to steal their husband away. And so they might go see someone who could help them in that regard, who's got special powers. Um, and could put a curse on you so to speak. And you might be feeling anxious. This could manifest itself in the...
Athena:	17:26	Raised heart rate.
Mark:	17:28	Yeah. Your, your, your health. I'm going downhill in some cases. For example, if you are predisposed to diabetes, Oh gosh, you know, you, you, you might be eating a little bit more because you're anxious and various other things that you're doing might compound the problems that you're having with diabetes and the actual stress itself can cause issues with different metabolic disorders. So you might find yourself, you know, with full blown diabetes and, and have to have a foot cut off, you know, there's clear evidence that the curse worked. Yeah. I mean, who could deny it?
Athena:	18:09	Yeah. So why are there practitioners? It sounds like a lot of this could be done just by, you know, people feeling that someone has, you know, bad intentions towards them or is, you know, doing something...
Mark:	18:23	Well that's the start of it.
Athena:	18:24	Okay.
Mark:	18:24	But then I think if the niche is there for a specialist, a powerful controller of this, you know, sort of supernatural world, then people are going to come to them, they're going to give them money or eggs or something.
Athena:	18:46	Do they actually have some special powers? I'm not saying necessarily supernatural powers, but some particular abilities to understand or manipulate the social world that they're kind of capitalizing on in terms of being a practitioner of witchcraft.
Mark:	19:02	Yeah, I mean, uh, you don't have to be a practitioner to be a witch. So let me go off on a tangent and just a bit. So for example, the first week or two that I was in the village, I was walking down a path to my research assistant who was postmistress the, the mail would come in in a bag and she would distribute it to the villagers. And they were all waiting in her yard for the mail to come. And I walked down the path and I think they were hoping that I was bringing the mail. I walked under a mango tree in her yard and heard a little sound above me and just instinctively stuck my hand out. And as luck would have it perfect mango fell right into my hand without any juggling or it just put right in my hand. And everyone was watching this event.
Athena:	19:58	It's cause that everyone else is waiting for their mail.
Mark:	20:00	Yeah. They're just kind of in a little amphitheater there and you know, then they're all watching me because I'm the new guy and Dr. Mark and you know, some of them had met me, but anyway, a new person in the village. So natural curiosity. I handed the mango to a little four year old girl who, and, the outcome of that, the gossip was that wow... Dr. Mark is a very powerful witch. He can call the mango down out of the tree, right to his hand. That's a, that's a pretty good trick. I don't think they'd seen that one before, but you know, I was an outsider and you know, maybe I have different witch- witching powers than what they're accustomed to, but I was a good witch, so I gave the mango to a little girl who would otherwise not be able to get such a wonderful treat for herself. I didn't keep the mango for myself. I didn't give it to an adult to curry favor with them. It was a free gift to someone who really couldn't do anything for me. So the interpretation of that was Mark is very powerful witch, but he's a very good witch.
Athena:	21:09	Sounds like a good way to start the field site.
Mark:	21:10	Yeah. One of those things. Yeah, it's serendipity worked out very well. In general, if you are successful, if you're wealthy, if you're powerful socially, you must have some, you know, witchy powers that enable you to, to have that kind of success. So there's a sense that the supernatural world is important for everyone. We all influence it. So it's not just a, you know, a hogan practitioner who can control this or influence it. Some individuals are more successful at it, they have more knowledge, they're just more effective witches. And a...
Athena:	22:06	But being a witch is not necessarily a bad thing, like you said, it's.. .it's just...
Mark:	22:09	No, not at all. We are all witches. We are all influencing one another. Um...
Athena:	22:16	We are all zombifying each other one way or another. [Mark agrees] [Laughter]
Mark:	22:19	Yes. We are all eating one another's brains one way or another. [Laughter] That's what we're up to and that's what our brains are there for. They're there to be eaten.
Athena:	22:30	What do you mean by that? [Laughter]
Mark:	22:32	Well, I mean that's, we, we evolved these big brains to be social. I mean, it's not like we're putting our brain up on a platter for someone to come up and take, you know, we have all these defense mechanisms and, but yeah. Yeah. So being human is, is really a giant...
Athena:	22:50	About sharing our brains.
Mark:	22:52	Yeah. That was-sharing is one way. Yeah. We, we manipulate these, you know, neurologically, you know, information going back and forth. Uh, and that plays into these existing physiological systems. So you can stress someone out. You know, we all went through junior high school or middle school...[Laughter] and that's a period of intense acquisition of social networking coalitionary skills.
Athena:	23:24	And all these systems are coming online for doing the social stuff, right? And they need to get calibrated, but everyone's systems are all coming online at the same time and they are spending eight hours a day with each other.
Mark:	23:34	Yeah and it's so tricky. You know, the coalitions, you know, by definition you're giving something up, but you're getting something in return. And, you know, I want you as a friend, but someone wants you as a friend. So we're competing over friendships in order to out compete someone else. So you know, all the complexities and the, you know, it's such a multiplayer system and it's constantly shifting. [Athena agrees]
Athena:	23:59	Yeah. Junior high is kind of like Game of Thrones, right?
Mark:	24:01	Oh... yeah... sheesh... [Laughter] Well, I mean, Game of Thrones and novels and movies, the topics... why do we find them interesting? They play out scenarios for us, you know, that's, that's... [Athena agrees]
Athena:	24:13	Manipulating other people.
Mark:	24:16	Right.
Athena:	24:17	Yeah.
Mark:	24:18	So, yeah, there are interactions between the HPA system and our immune systems. So that linked to health is multifaceted. And one of the areas in which it's influential is how your immune system responds because it's involved in regulating the immune system. So, you know, cortisol is a, it's a player with multiple skills inside our bodies. It's doing a bunch of different things.
Athena:	24:51	So when you get stressed, your cortisol levels go up and then that has a lot of different effects both on your brain and your body, including your immune system.
Mark:	25:00	Yeah. So, you know, we've got all these other components that are regulating that. So if you're running a marathon, you know, you want to be directing the resources primarily to your leg muscles to be running. Um, but it is borrowing from Peter to pay Paul there. So you're going to shut down or take resources away from other things that you're not needing right then. And in the case of psychosocial stress, you're anxious, you're elevating your, your stress levels, uh, in part to help you solve these mental problems. Um, and you know, that's a bit of a conundrum, because, stress hormones like cortisol can have complicated effects on how your brain works and we don't really have it all sorted out. So it's not like it's a genius pill by any stretch. In some ways it's diverting your ability to think about certain kinds of things in certain contexts. But the complexities of that are sort of state of the art stuff that we're really just trying to sort out now; in part because we really haven't had the evolutionary logic behind addressing these kinds of questions. Yeah. It tended to be very mechanistic. And when you're just looking at a mechanism without thinking about what it's designed to do, you can go down a lot of dead ends before you start to figure out what it's really up to.
Athena:	26:35	So could you give us the sort of quick, you know, what is the sort of evolutionary way to, to look at the stress system. How does that differ from a...
Mark:	26:44	A mechanistic one?
Athena:	26:45	Yeah.
Mark:	26:46	Yeah. Um, well, you know, nothing's perfect. So natural selection, as amazing as it is, you know, we wouldn't have eyes that could see now the way we do with natural selection hadn't refined it bit by bit. Our response to our social environments. I think we need to think about in an equivalent way as being intricately designed system to help us succeed socially. Uh, it's not, you know a mistake of the system being set up for something else. I mean, it's set up for a lot of things, but we need to be investigating much more intensely how particularly longitudinally, how the, the stress response works to help us modify the way we understand our social worlds, help us figure out our own particular little social niche.
Athena:	27:55	Mhmm. With the ultimate goal of helping us to survive and reproduce and take care of our kids better. And all of those things that natural selection should be favoring.
Mark:	28:07	Right? But, you know, um, the way in which we do that is eating one another's brains. [Laughter]
Athena:	28:14	All right, so you're saying we're evolved to be zombies.
Mark:	28:18	Um, yeah.
Athena:	28:18	Or is evolved to zombify others.
Mark:	28:20	For sure. Yeah.
Athena:	28:20	And then as a byproduct we're..we become zombified.
Mark:	28:25	Yes, we're all zombifying one another. [Laughter]
Athena:	28:28	And so let's take us back to witchcraft and the idea of like being a good witch or a bad witch. Does that have to do with the sort of underlying alignment or misalignment of evolutionary interests of goals? Like you're a good witch if you're using your, you know, social influence powers in a way that, um, is actually aligned with the interests of the person who you are zombifying?
Mark:	28:59	Of course.
Athena:	28:59	And a bad witch is...
Mark:	29:00	I could... I could be doing something wonderful for you and you would perceive me as a good witch, but your enemy over here, seeing that I'm doing something nice for you, would perceive me as a bad witch. So yeah, it's all in terms of reproductive interests, bottom line there. [Athena agrees]
Athena:	29:15	So it's sort of relative to the perceiver and their goals kind of if-
Mark:	29:22	Yes. I mean there are, you know, in my example of the, the mango giving it to a five year old, you know, I think that was kind of a universally perceived beneficence act. So an individual's, you know, we, I do ask these things, but in, you know, as a harmless way as possible, you know, how they sort of perceive others in terms of their doing nice things versus doing not so nice things. And, uh, you know, some people are more generally perceived as being kind, beneficent sorts and others um, you know, maybe not so much, more selfish. But that's all you know, more fine tuned, too. So, and I, when we started out using what are called psychological instruments, questionnaires about things like temperament and personality, um, you know, I had multiple people tell me what they thought about a person and it was striking to me how people had different perspectives on things. So someone might rate you very high in kindness and someone else might not. And so we have to be aware of what the whole big social context is in terms of attributes like that. [Athena agrees] And by extension, attributes like witchiness.
Athena:	31:02	Yeah. So what is 'voodoo' and how does it relate to witchcraft?
Mark:	31:10	Well, I mean, it's sort of a historical gig. So, when you look at the mix of things that came over from Africa with slavery and then the context of what was happening in the new world, you know, its own new system, but based on lots of other histories, I mean that's the way it always works. You know, you build from the old you, you-to make some new things, but, um, gosh, I mean I'm not really the right person to maybe ask that. There are all these experts. [Athena agrees] And you know, the history of voodoo.
Athena:	31:52	Right. Right. But it's primarily in the Caribbean and it's a result of sort of mix of different cultural ideas about witchcraft. [Mark agrees]
Mark:	32:04	It's that particular cultural variant of a manipulative system and yeah. You know, you can go around the world and look at, you know, in Latin America, why do you get Nervios?
Athena:	32:19	Why you get what?
Mark:	32:20	Ataque de nervios.
Athena:	32:21	What's that?
Mark:	32:21	Um, it's basically an anxiety attack. Um, but it can be, it's thought to be induced often by something that someone else does to you. So, you know, they might look at you the wrong way or, or something that then causes this.
Athena:	32:40	And so mechanistically what, what's going on there?
Mark:	32:44	Same kind of thing, where someone is making you feel as if there's something wrong in your social world and you're perseverating on that concern and it-
Athena:	32:57	Yeah, like ruminating?
Mark:	32:57	Yeah.
Athena:	32:57	And it's just kind of getting, going in your brain and it just raises your stress.
Mark:	33:03	Right. And we're open to that because of this system that is so flexible to, to figure out what's going on in the social world. So, um, right. We are open to that kind of, you know, we could call it, I suppose, a pathology. Yeah. Maybe it's not. Maybe that really is something you should be worried about. Um, you know, it's, it's a bit of a smoke detector. That has spun off a bit much, but you know, all depends on the context.
Athena:	33:34	Yeah. Well, I mean it sounds like in general, it probably makes sense to have this system that can kind of, you know, get activated that there's some issue, something you should be attending to, something you should be trying to fix. But, but maybe that can also get exploited. If you have individuals who are knowing how to kind of raise your anxiety.
Mark:	33:55	Well here we all know how to do it. Yeah. We just do it in, you know, different ways to everyone at different times. I mean, any kind of social interaction has that dynamic going on. [Laughter]
Athena:	34:04	Hmmm... so, when we're, you know, really close to people or when they have some power over our outcomes or they're competing with us over things that, you know, where we have sort of incompatible goals that we have some vulnerability to, to that.
Mark:	34:24	Yeah. Trust is a really interesting phenomenon. So, you know, you want to be able to open your brain up to those who have your best interests at heart so that they will know how to best help you. [Athena agrees] But of course that does as you put it, open you up to exploitation. [Athena agrees] So things like falling in love, um, you know, a variety of shifts and changes in social relationships. They are, boy, you know very stressful.
Athena:	34:53	Hmm but, yeah. You're probably more vulnerable, the more social you're brain is, right. The more you think about other people's intentions, the more you model their mental states and where you're influenced by seeing their emotions. So, so you've got the system that on one hand could be a great asset for enhancing your reproductive success, but it could also be really exploited if you're, you know, if somebody pushes your buttons, so to speak.
Mark:	35:28	Oh yeah and the system can crash. I mean, you're building up this algorithm based on your experience and then something can happen that shatters the model. Some, you know, your mother does something that is just like, oh my gosh, you know, I'm not, I would not have predicted that. And so you've got to break down the algorithms and rebuild them and stress enables that.
Athena:	35:51	Oh, interesting.
Mark:	35:52	Yeah, so it's really key for the breakdown to rebuild. The problem is if you break down and break down, break down, and you don't have the landmarks and the support system you need to build a reasonable model of the social world. You're a mess.
Athena:	36:08	Interesting.
Mark:	36:08	Because you know stuff is, you can't predict what's happening because your model isn't good. A child in an unpredictable family environment, an alcoholic father who has erratic behavior. I mean, kind of, there's a predictability to the unpredictability there, but even still, um, you know, consistency, devotion, commitment, trust; that allows you to build a model and it also allows you to explore in creative new ways because you've got that secure base. So, you know, attachment theory and how that helps you manage your social world and your anxiety levels, all of that I think just fits very nicely into this.
Athena:	36:54	Yeah. Yeah. So I always the show, what's your version of the Zombie Apocalypse? That's like the apocalypse of, you know, in this case like witchcraft and, you know, humans manipulating other humans. Like what, what does that look like? If we take this capacity, we have to influence others and stress them and actually have a manifest with physical symptoms and we, you know, ramp it up. Like what does the world look like? What's that world?
Mark:	37:24	So I get to be science fiction?
Athena:	37:25	Yes, yes. Yeah, totally.
Mark:	37:27	Oh, right. Yeah. So, um, you know, think about Google and Facebook and social media. I mean, and, and, uh, artificial intelligence, adaptive learning. So what we are doing is equipping these new information processing systems with the algorithms that are needed to exploit us. So, you know, the, the tools that we now have to exploit one another are getting extremely powerful. Think about elections and politics, how you can influence millions of people.
Athena:	38:05	So say a little bit more about the, the Google, the Facebook, like what are the mechanisms that are being tapped into there that have to do with the sort of social influence?
Mark:	38:16	Well, uh, like a human but not as good at it. They are trying to mind-read us to figure out what it is that we want, what we might want to buy, you know, and then-
Athena:	38:29	Stress us out in the right way to- [Laughter]
Mark:	38:32	Sure. Exactly. Yeah. Um, there are now, you know, the opportunities for giving, you know, the silicon world more, ways to tap into our physiologies. So we're wearing an Apple Watch and it's measuring our pulse rate. Now, you know, it's-
Athena:	38:57	That's exactly the kind of information which needs to figure out how to manipulate you, right?
Mark:	39:00	That's right. Yup. Exactly. And there are whole bunch of other very cool remote sensing kinds of things that we're going to be able to do. You know, we can, we can look at faces and how, so we can have cameras on the streets and everywhere and they're monitoring what are our facial expressions are in real time with our monitors. So, you know.
Athena:	39:25	I mean, this is the kind of data-
Mark:	39:26	An amount of big data that could be acquired about what's going on inside a human's head is just exploding. And then figuring out the ways to influence and manipulate it um, those, that's all exploding. [Laughter] So, uh, yeah, it's...
Athena:	39:42	So if we play this out, like kind of into the darkest and most apocalyptic version of us being zombified that we're not, it's not just sort of the, you know, interpersonal humans manipulating each other but machines are actually...
Mark:	39:59	Yeah, we've lost the arms race. So humans have engaged in an information processing arms race now for millions of years. We have these gigantic brains, four times, three times bigger than that of our closest relatives within a very short evolutionary span. So the selective pressures to add neurons, 100,000 or more neurons per generation is basically what it boils down to. And uh, so we've been engaged in this informational arms race to be able to out-think one another in the social games. Now we're using, we're developing very sophisticated new tools to be able to be successful in that realm. So on the one hand, initially a relatively small number of people are going to have extraordinary power over influencing the minds of other humans. So the, yeah, we're really consolidating power, this power that humans have been wrapped up in, you know, for our evolutionary history, why we have our big brains. Yeah. The most important thing that we've evolved to do is now being concentrated by these new tools and you know, increasingly few numbers of individuals and at some point-
Athena:	41:28	We're sort of outsourcing some of that information processing to the machines and it's a small group of individuals who have that.
Mark:	41:36	But yeah, who are benefiting from that knowledge. So, you know, in, in the simple way now you could say that, you know, it's the owners or the stockholders of companies like Google or Facebook or, that are, you know, benefiting. But, um, yeah, it's I think a short run then for the machines to have won this arms race over the biotic. Um, because there are constraints on the biotic, as astonishing as our human brains are as delicious [laughter] as you can see them. Um, you know, the silicon world is going to take off because the constraints are less there. Of course they'll be engaged in a similar arms race to keep pushing it to, you know, more and more...
Athena:	42:36	Hmm. So when we're interacting with our electronic devices and they're like, you know, helping us navigate, helping us, you know, stay in contact with our friends, helping us easily purchase the next thing we want to purchase on our Amazon app. I mean, they are helping us accomplish our goals. Right. So it's not...
Mark:	42:55	There are tools.
Athena:	42:55	At least right now, it's not a totally-
Mark:	42:59	Exploititive.
Athena:	42:59	Exploititive... it's sort of, you know, I mean we're giving it our attention and, and bandwidth and you know, letting it sell us stuff. And in return we get a bunch of services, but we also end up what on average spending three or four hours a day engaged with our phones, which we might not be actually setting out intending to do.
Mark:	43:20	Yeah. And then, you know, pulling back a bit, there are some very interesting medical uses for monitoring devices. For a physician to be able to monitor your physiology and what's going on. You know, predict a stroke or heart attack or um, yeah, diabetic shock, etcetera. So there's a whole bunch of wonderful things that might come out of it, but those are also systems that would provide invaluable data to the exploiters.
Athena:	43:50	Mmm. So, moving forward, how do we, I mean, are there things that we can do with this knowledge about how we can be sort of zombified and have our stress systems activated and being manipulated that way? Like, are there ways that we can take that knowledge to hopefully have a less apocalyptic future when it comes to being, you know, manipulated by other humans or by, you know, uh, by machines that are the sort of extension of, uh, other human brains?
Mark:	44:20	No.
Athena:	44:20	No? But we need to end by a positive note. [Laughter]
Mark:	44:25	The apocalypse is envitable. [Laughter]
Athena:	44:25	Oh, there's gotta be something.
Mark:	44:31	Well it'll, it'll, it certainly is, like a cultural change and evolution is going into hyperspeed so...
Athena:	44:43	So are, so we've got, I mean, presumably, you know, humans, right? We've evolved to be able to influence others to be able to zombify others.
Mark:	44:51	That's what we do.
Athena:	44:51	But we've also then evolving to not be influenced by-
Mark:	44:55	And exploited.
Athena:	44:55	Right? So some antizombification systems, but those, that kind of, you're saying this can't necessarily keep up with the speed of?
Mark:	45:05	It's an arms race. You know... It was like the arms race to develop a nuclear weapon and um, you know, say what you will, but you know, there was mutually assured destruction when you had equality of ability to annihilate one another. And that was served as a great restraint. Whether or not there's going to be an equivalent, mutually assured destruction in the informational arms races that are now going on, um, is uncertain. I would say knowledge of these things is less and less public, more and more behind doors that most of us will, will never have access to. So the egalitarian distribution of knowledge about what's going on in the directions that are happening. Um, I would say that's a, that's a big, that's maybe a core issue of this generation to resolve.
Athena:	46:01	So having more transparency about how these systems are working.
Mark:	46:05	Yes.
Athena:	46:05	And what the algorithms are doing that underlie them.
Mark:	46:07	Yeah and somehow figuring out a way to, um, damp down the winner takes all aspect of that informational arms race. If we can have that kind of restraint foresight, which is asking a lot, I mean it's like going against our nature that it's designed to win those arms races.
Athena:	46:31	Right.
Mark:	46:31	To say, okay, you know, we're, we're, it's going to be better for us all if we just kind of damp that whole thing down and keep it.
Athena:	46:42	Right.
Mark:	46:42	More or less evenly distributed.
Athena:	46:44	Yeah. Well, but how about on a sort of individual level, like, you know, as a person trying to have a little bit more control over your own happiness and your own success in your day to day life, given the fact that we are zombifiable by other people and by algorithms that are in place to-
Mark:	47:10	That's a great question.
Athena:	47:10	Manipulate us?
Mark:	47:11	I, you know, I mean there's a whole industry out there of sort of self help and biofeedback, but you know, we are learning more and more about these systems and how to keep track of them. So I would like to think that, you know, being able to wear a physiology monitor. So, you know, our, our brains have evolved to obviously keep track of what's going on with the physiology being influenced by it. But, um, given that we are now in novel environments that these systems didn't really evolve to, to contend with, um, there might be advantages to being more aware of our physiologies and how the influence of others on our physiology affects us that we could, you know, more consciously work at that.
Athena:	48:06	So if, you know, oh, every time I hang out with this friend, my heart rate goes way up and, or are you talking about something different?
Mark:	48:17	Yeah, no. Yeah. Yeah. It would be that sort of thing probably. More and more sophisticated.
Athena:	48:21	Or when I go on this app, my heart rate's all over the place. Maybe I should delete it. [Laughter]
Mark:	48:26	Well, maybe, maybe you shouldn't. [Laughter] Maybe it's a fun heart-rate. Yeah, it's stress.
Athena:	48:34	But just kind of becoming more aware of how you're responding to the things in your world, whether it's social others...
Mark:	48:41	Yeah.
Athena:	48:42	Or interacting with the technological world?
Mark:	48:44	Yeah. At this point, it is just really still such an unknown. So, you know, things like cortisol, uh, boy, I mean, there's so many things about it that we don't understand in terms of how it influences various aspects of us and I wouldn't want your listeners to walk away with the impression that stress is bad for them. I think, um, it should be viewed as one of our tools for adjusting for managing things that are going on and when it's working right. Um, and you know, our environments are good environments, positive environments for us, you know, our stress systems are, are activated and providing resources for things that we love to do. So, you know, my cortisol levels go up when I go wind surfing or I play volleyball, my cortisol levels go up during sex. So, you know, why would you...
Athena:	49:51	Right.
Mark:	49:51	Then somehow think that, oh, [nagging voice] "Cortisol is bad for you". You know, you got to think about the evolutionary design of these systems and learn.
Athena:	50:01	Hmm. So stress is kind of helping your body allocate resources in a way that is ideally helping you to accomplish your goals?
Mark:	50:11	Yes.
Athena:	50:11	But sometimes that system can kind of get manipulated or influenced or otherwise dysregulated and that's when it's a bad thing for us.
Mark:	50:21	Yeah. That and yeah. Um, you know, we don't want to be in the middle of the road when a semi truck is about to run us over. [Athena agrees] So, you know, our cortisol is going to go up in that context. Um, might not help us fast enough but- [Laughter] If we survive, it would have certainly a imprint that you don't want to be standing in the middle of the road with large, fast moving objects coming at you.
Athena:	50:46	So stress isn't all bad.
Mark:	50:53	No. Stress is not bad and, and the environment throws curve balls at us and so we need to figure out how to, you know, change and adjust to those curve balls. You live in a..
Athena:	51:09	Stress is really what lets us make those quick shifts in our...
Mark:	51:12	Yeah. And allows us to focus if we're living in a place where, um, it's possible that someone who's going to walk out behind their car with a gun and start shooting at us and we've experienced this before and we've seen our little brother die as a consequence of this. Um, it makes sense for our brain and our sensory systems to be way more tuned in to that possibility and to be planning and thinking about, you know, where this might happen in our walk home from school. Than if we don't-
Athena:	51:44	If we're lucky enough to have grown up in an environment where that wasn't an issue.
Mark:	51:48	Right. You know, we're going to be focused on, on different sorts of things and yeah. So stress is helping us...
Athena:	51:53	Manage.
Mark:	51:53	Manage. [Athena agrees]
Athena:	51:56	Great. Well Mark, thank you so much for joining us.
Mark:	52:03	It was delightful.
Athena:	52:04	Pleasure having you.
Outro:	52:15	['Psychological' by LEMI plays]
Athena:	53:22	Thank you to the Department of Psychology and to ASU in general for supporting this podcast. I am super grateful for having the strategic initiative funds from the President's Office for the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative, which helps to support this podcast and also to the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, which is a totally awesome center that I am really, really happy to be a part of. And uh, they love zombies, so it's perfect. Also want to thank the Aktipis Lab, otherwise known as the Cooperation and Conflict Lab, for all of their help in envisioning and contributing to this podcast in more ways than I could possibly imagine and to the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. If you want to follow us, we're on Twitter and Instagram at zombifiedpod, on Patreon we're just zombified, and our website is zombified.org. Thank you to Tall Rom who does our awesome sound, Neil Smith for all the illustrations for the podcast, and in general just thank you to all of the brains that help make this podcast happen.
Athena:	54:42	And finally, to everyone who has shared their brains with me, this podcast is not just a result of my brain and Dave's brain and the brain of our guests, but it is brains and brains going back into the history of humans that have basically influenced this podcast in one way or another. Um, because we all affect each other's brains. So actually on that point, the thing that I wanted to offer today, the part of my brains that I want to share with you has to do with this issue, this idea that humans share brains. This came up in the interview with Mark Flinn. And I just really love this idea that Mark brings up that part of what being human is, is actually that we need each other's brains to solve problems, to get information and to take care of ourselves and take care of those we love.
Athena:	55:49	So where we talked about this a lot, um, and Mark and I kept talking about this even after we finished recording the podcast. And I'm starting to think that maybe part of what makes humans unique is not necessarily our brains themselves, but the fact that we share them and the way that we share them with others, the extent to which we kind of use other people's brains and outsource our cognition to them. And uh, you know, basically we're operating in this giant network of, of brains that we share and, and utilize. And I think this is cool for a couple of reasons. One is just, you know, it's, it's brains and that's one of the most important topics of the podcast. But I think it actually has a lot to potentially contribute to how we think about what we're doing in science. And that science is not just about, you know, sort of isolated brains trying to figure out problems, but it's actually about, you know, bringing our brains together, bring all this information that we have in this distributed network of all of our brains and figuring out how to communicate about it and, um, be able to move forward at the intersection of disciplines that are really complex.
Athena:	57:14	And I think this is a really interesting and important problem, you know, that sort of meta-problem in science of how do we share our brains more effectively. And there's another aspect of this that I think is pretty interesting, which is I wonder about what this means for how we're interacting with technology. So, you know, if it is the case that we are evolved to kind of outsource a bunch of our brains to others and know, utilize other people's brains too, um, then does that actually make it easier for us to use technology in the way that we do where we kind of outsource some of our brains to digital computation? Like, you know, you Google something or you ask Siri or, or whatever. Like are we actually in a way kind of pre-adapted to outsource that to other brains whether they are actually made of organic material or if they're made of silicon?
Athena:	58:25	Yes. So are we basically pre-adapted to use our iPhones as an extension of our brains because of this? Interesting question. I don't know the answer. Um, and I also don't know the answer of, you know, to how we're gonna bring all of our brains together to do science better. But I think that it is a really important problem and something that we should all be thinking about and trying to move forward into a new era of science where communicating is one of our priorities. Thank you for listening to Zombified your source for fresh brains.
Outro:	59:03	['Psychological' by LEMI plays]