 If everyone could take a seat. Thank you so much. I've been asked to introduce the next three speakers. We are beginning with Nando Polusi PhD. He's a founding member of the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society and a clinical psychologist with a private practice in New York City, employing cognitive behavior therapy with insights from evolutionary psychology. He wrote a regular column entitled Neanderthink, I love that, for psychology today, exploring the psychological implications of living in a modern world from evolved strategies to mismatched theory. Thank you. Thank you, Jill. So the founder of cognitive behavior therapy, CBT, Albert Ellis, once let me in on his operating principle and that is that all humans are crazy. Where aren't screwballs of the worst sort, crybabies who will suffer forever, and that was on a good day. I worked under him and along with him for about 20 years and here he is singing an original song about the hopelessness of marriage at my wedding. He believed we had to dispute our irrational beliefs and that's true enough but it wasn't sufficient because even after lots of therapy humans would backslide into this emotional muck and the model was like an emotional plaque on your teeth, you know, you brush away the musts every day with formal disputes. So when I asked them why, why are they so crazy, humans as if we were exempt, he'd yell they just are. In other words, it was sort of a mystery or it didn't matter. He even wrote a monograph called Backsliding and a book called Overcoming Resistance to Deal with This and the solution was to do more therapy and self-therapy. So CBT has as a premise that we have automatic thoughts that are distortions and irrational beliefs that if we erase them or we replace them we'd be rational but there's just one problem with this otherwise helpful approach and the problem for CBT is the solution for life itself which is evolution. Over millennia selection sculpted not only our bodies and our mentation but also our minds and mentation is what I meant. So here's where we are, this is a quick cartoon showing what I think is going on and the CBT model is that you can rewrite the scripts of your thinking and it's become popular and self-help as a premise as well but many of the emotions we have are not just the result of conscious thinking, they're implicit. That's because most of the thinking has been done for us through natural selection. So these emotional smoke alarms that relate to evolutionarily salient issues and situations they're like detectors, alarms going off sometimes but some of them are fine-tuned and nuanced and some of them are blunt and clanging so what I posit is that if they are adaptations and a result of either a mismatch we'd better know what's going on and you know matters of survival and affiliation, matters of mating and status, these emotional reactions might seem like distortions when we're upset but they might serve a deeper rationality. So some of these are classics, jumping to conclusions, they might make us uncomfortable especially if they're related to connecting emotionally with others or figuring out distinguishing friend or foe which is sort of an implicit backdrop so they might cause us some distress. Now I have to say as a licensed psychologist in Manhattan the way we define rationality is your agreement with me but the research coming from evolutionary psychology even though it's often misrepresented because there are various strands, there's not just one monolithic approach, it's basically an attempt just to understand our minds and emotions and our biases in light of the selection processes that shape them. So if you're messing up your moments and your life, therapy is good. It uses what Daniel Kahneman calls slow thinking so the so-called fast thinking is intuitive, the slow thinking is a deliberative rational approach. But here's a catch, slow thinking is, how do I put this, slow, it's clunky and can overshadow your confidence in fast, that is evolutionary thinking. It's like driving forward while only scanning the rear view mirror. It might make you smarter about the past but not necessarily about the present or the future. So for example it's ultimately meaningless to say that one needs a general unconditional acceptance of yourself and others because what you want is a selective supple muscular response to challenges of adapting to the everyday environment. As you live in a tamped down emotional state, I get a lot of psychological insight not from psychology these days, it's mostly from evolutionary thinking and also Nasim Taleb's concept of optionality which gives clients real tools for understanding dynamical circumstances and choices. Well the focus on the self in psychology is like driving at night, we're driving again, with the headlights turned toward yourself instead of out on the road ahead. So how do we change that? So my concept is that when therapy is useful it's because it's aligned with an evolutionary salience. The biologist Dobzhansky said nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution but I posit that the same is true for psychology and psychotherapy we just don't know it yet. So there's feeling better and there's getting stronger. So if we distinguish between evolved function and the manifest epiphenomena that psychologists look at, some silly behaviors might serve a deep rational function. It's like stay hungry, stay foolish. So we have answers to why and if not answers then we have clues. So it's not that it doesn't matter, we have some clues about why we do certain things. So we need not to medicalize or compulsively run from the entire palette of our impulses and our emotions but to embrace our ecology with a clear eye and I follow best practices in cognitive behavior therapy, I'm a supervisor in it and I use research from evolutionary psychology because it's well established there are thousands of studies, I'm sort of scavenger as a heuristic, as a meta theory, it's like a magic I3D that suddenly illuminates what someone is doing and I always check it out with clients. So here's my positions. Some circumstances are evolutionarily familiar meaning that we're adapted to the situational nuances without conscious deliberation and many circumstances are evolutionarily novel meaning that our ancestral adaptations may or may not be so good but we better distinguish them so that we don't indulge in protective pessimism and research shows that that does have a lot of disadvantages as Alex mentioned and it has disadvantages on flexibility, creativity, it makes us more negativeistic than we have to be. So I have a very technical slide I want to show you. Evolutionarily familiar challenges are defenses, they require our defenses or adaptations and they provide sort of a compass for responses and behavior and some are novel and these are not hard categories by the way, this is just sort of my sense of the heuristic and how I distinguish defenses from disorders. So for example, you might have some anxiety about, let's say, approaching a desirable potential partner that's evolutionarily familiar but if it's in an elevator and you're kicking Jay-Z, it could be evolutionarily novel although that's also sort of familiar. If you're immobilized and you're phobic, it could go into a disorder, I have disease there. Now if you distinguish things in that way, you might see that some so-called inappropriate emotions might be defenses not disturbance, some so-called appropriate emotions like calm and serenity might actually be a detachment from the fine-tuned unconscious calibration that we have. So I feel like sometimes like I'm a punk rocker kicking a hippie but jealousy, anger, depression, are universally labeled as inappropriate even when they evolve to solve problems of survival and to detect evolutionarily salient and believable information. That's not to say they're right but we'd better not use a hammer on every emotional male that we don't like. So curing us of general irrational thinking might be flawed when it comes to understanding emotions because irrational thinking is not something we have, it's something we practice, it's ongoing. My clients want to feel good and do better in life and standard social science is still coming up with just so stories about why that happens and they're still asking the same questions, do we dispute the musts, what's primary musts or distortions, what's appropriate, do we give homework, how do we get reimbursed for this? So even though evolutionary hypotheses that I posit can be wrong and I'm open to getting them challenged, there are an improvement over the ad hoc villains of social science like culture, patriarchy, capitalism, upbringing, sexism, refrigerator moms, underfunded schools and violent cartoons. So let's look beyond the mechanism and look at evolved function. People are focused on the mechanism, you know, I'm depressed, I'm upset but when we examine the evolved function what we avoid is the problem about a problem so people sometimes get upset then they get upset about getting upset, they get depressed, they get depressed about getting upset. So the mind isn't a chalkboard on which you can easily rewrite for a reason. It's designed to be believable. We send signals to others and receive signals. Now I have to say I like the happiness research in general. They're coming around to evolutionary psychology explanations although my sense is that what we want is not just happiness per se because if you agree that clinically it's not just how good you feel in the present but how you feel good. It's some things are really good for you but hammering the smoke detectors might be the same thing. You're not distinguishing feeling better from getting stronger and more resilient. So this is a common view that you probably know, the common view of evolutionary psychology. The African savannah or most of our ancestors for 90% of our history emerged. This is near my office in midtown and this is at night 24-7. So the mismatch is not better or worse necessarily so what we want to avoid is the accusation of the paleo fantasy. This is just one version of evolutionary psychology and it's not dispositive. So you don't have to commit to any specific ancestral hypothesis to accept evolutionary thinking about our circumstances. There's another quick cartoon about something we definitely lost. So what I want to say is that the systematic differences between our ancestral environment and our current are not neutral. That's why the paleo fantasy attacks are incorrect because we do know things about our ancestors. We know something about their environments. We know they lacked agriculture, they lacked contraception, they lacked high tech medicine, rifles, mass media, mass produced goods, money, police, armies, communities of strangers, the internet, smart phones, anonymous congestion and easily available high fructose corn syrup 24 hours a day. What critics of paleo don't understand is that these are not neutral differences so I want to say it's not that we can't handle evolutionarily novel circumstances for a while. Even tigers can adapt to jumping through flaming hoops on cue with booming music and lasers but as Robert Schimel said about Siegfried and Roy it's just a matter of time before a tiger says this shit ends tonight. Our desires and our designs aren't always what's best for us. So we can turn mysteries into theoretically solvable puzzles. That's part of the science of finding out why we do what we do. So this is research from evolutionary psychology. You can see how it can be applicable in a clinical setting. We may have superficial rationality versus deep. Decision making often has evolutionary goals that are implicit. Evolutionary focus is on proximate goals like what do you say in a specific circumstance, what do you not say, how do you behave and it neglects the bigger picture. So human decision making is designed to achieve very several sometimes competing evolutionary goals so you might not cure yourself of all irrationality but as David Sloan Wilson said evolutionary thinking makes you smarter. You naturally start to think in trade-offs not absolutes. You use population thinking rather than strict categories of disturbance not disturbance and appropriate appropriate. You're not tripped up by perfectionism not because it's better or makes you happy but because it's a meaningless concept in evolutionary terms. So we accept the random upsides and look for opportunities to experience risk and change rather than seeking compulsive safety and comfort. So I wrote about this as Jill said in psychology today in the columns called Neanderthink on various topics and we started a group, non-clinicians interestingly. This is pronounced apes, it's association of applied evolutionary psychology society. So we look at feeling displaced from your tribe, one minute. So let me just quickly go. These are some of the subjects that we've discussed in evolutionary psychology. You can see these have a lot of sex differences. We overlap psychologically but it's not the same. Mate value, we differ on charm and IQ and desirability. We better deal with that. Attention deficit disorder, let's go. You can try this on yourself, social signaling. If you know what you're dealing with you can say as Steven Pinker did, my genes can go jump in a lake. So a wedding is a good place to learn about human nature and the other figure at attendance in my wedding besides my wife was Charles Darwin here, the first evolutionary psychologist seen presiding over us and thank you. Those of you who are going over to Wheeler to hear Skyler go ahead and we'll have time to take two questions in the interim. Okay? Thanks. Yes. Yes. Lifestyle changes. I always ask clients what they have for breakfast, what their sleep patterns are, do they take vitamin D, do they get out, do they meet other people? Yeah, the evolutionary and ancestral approach just brings all that in. It's not just what's in here because evolution doesn't stop at the neck. It's everything. I was wondering, so some people can experience trauma and not get PTSD and some do. Are some of us evolutionary, evolutionarily just kind of programmed to be more responsive to trauma almost? Not programmed but disposed. So I like to look at getting less traumatized. So you're right. Some people are a bit more vulnerable to certain types of stimuli and what I look at is how do we get out of that and understanding it from an ancestral point of view and how we differ today is a key part of that. We're going to end it here and take a little break and then come back in a few minutes. Thanks.