 Okay, guys and guillettes, girls and guillettes, today we are going to discuss common sense. Is common sense nonsense? Or does it tally well with what psychology tells us? Psychology, as you remember, has a pretension to be a science, and while it is not a science, by any extension or interpretation of the word, still it is much more systematic, much more methodical, and much more deep than most people's intuitions and so-called common sense. The other day I received a comment online, followed by an email. Keith Campbell is arguably the number one experimentalist when it comes to narcissistic personality disorder, together with Jean Twench. Otto Kemberg is the father of the field, father of the modern field of personality disorders. Most of what we know about borderline personality disorders come from him, and a lot of what we know about pathological narcissism can be traced back to his pioneering work in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. And the comment and the email that I had received said, and we are not watching Campbell and Kernberg online, is that they don't have a clue about narcissism. I try to watch their videos following your mention of them, so I try to watch their videos, and this guy gets it wrong all the time. And then she gave me a list of who these guys should watch in order to learn about narcissism. The list contains many coaches, self-styled experts, victims of narcissistic abuse and so on and so forth. So, Campbell, Kernberg, you have been warned. Your knowledge is utterly, utterly erroneous, and you should immediately get to work and upgrade yourself so that you finally can reach the level of several of the online coaches mentioned in the email that I had received. So you need to look forward to something to do during the pandemic. But this is a great example of how intuition and common sense fail us. You see, not everyone feels that he is a great physicist. I mean, if I pick up ten of you and I ask you, are you good at physics? Are you physicists? There would be the odd grandiose narcissist who would consider himself a bit greater than Albert Einstein. But nine out of ten, or statistically actually 97 out of 100, would tell me no. We don't know much about physics, and we need a physicist to tell us what's going on. But if I were to pick the same hundred people and ask them, do you know anything about psychology? They would be reversed. Only three out of 100 would say that they don't know much about psychology. 97 out of 100 would say that they know a lot about psychology. And how do they know a lot about psychology? They observed, they introspected, they fought a lot, they analyzed, they synthesized, they read self-help books, they listened to online coaches, and they observed the sopranos on television. Here's the problem. Every advice given online, even by self-styled experts, and most of them are self-styled and not experts, is not only wrong. It's harmful. Most of this advice has detrimental consequences to your mental health, to your functioning, and to your future relationships, in the medium term and in the long run. And why this advice is so destructive? Because it's wrong. It's wrong because our intuition and our common sense have extremely little to do with facts. You see, our intuition and common sense are there to help us uphold our self-image, our view of ourselves. We don't really see the world. We don't really see other people and we don't see reality. We mold them, we play with them, we reframe them, we change them, we construct narratives. And this is called psychological defense mechanisms. And we use these defense mechanisms to allow us to survive without modification and without narcissistic injury and without pain and without hurt. Because we need to believe that we are good people. We need to believe that we're intelligent. We need to believe that we are liked, maybe even admired. We need to believe these things. We need to believe that people around us like us and love us and have our best interests in mind. We need to believe that people are empathic and essentially good. We need to believe that we are special in some sense, in some vocation, in some niche. We need to believe these things. And so our intuitions, our common sense judgments, our opinions, they are built to support all this. They're not built to give you a true picture of reality. That's my job. That's why you hate me. You hate me because I keep telling you the truth. And you don't want the truth. You do not want the truth. That's another myth, another lie you're telling yourself. Lie number 999. I actually seek the truth. I don't recoil and I don't flinch from the truth. I'm a truth lover. Nonsense. No one is. So I want to give you two examples of advice that is very, very common online and is seriously bad for you. Many, many coaches, experts, counselors and even psychologists with real or fake doctrines. Hint, hint. Many of them would tell you that venting is good for you. It's good to vent. It's good to offload your pain, your hurt, your sense of injustice, your misery. It's good to share with others what had happened to you as a victim, what had been done to you, how your abuser had abused you for no reason. You will feel better afterwards. Everyone reassures you. I have watched, I don't know how many videos, where this is the main core. That's the main piece of advice. Share. Share. Tell. Disclose. Vent. Let it go. Allow yourself to be angry. Allow yourself to be furious and to rage. Well, here's the problem. Research conclusively shows that venting has the exact opposite effect than intended. Exact opposite effect of what you're being told. Venting does not calm you down. Actually venting enhances, positively reinforces your anger. Venting causes you to become more angry and for a much longer period of time. Venting ossifies, grudges, causes rumination, destabilizes your inner precarious balance, makes you feel extremely bad. Develop what we call negative emotionality and negative automatic thoughts. Causes you to catastrophize. There is absolutely nothing good about venting, not a single thing. The punching bag advice is bad for you and for the punching bag. I will mention two sources out of hundreds. Jeffrey Lor, LOHR. He is a psychology professor at the University of Arkansas. In 2007 he co-authored a very famous study. The title of a study is the Pseudo-Psychology of Venting in the Treatment of Anger, Implications and Alternatives for Mental Health Practice. It was published in the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice in 2007. The second study I would like to mention in this context is a 2013 study, a little more recent. Anger on the Internet, published in Cyber Psychology, Behavior and Social Networking. It's an academic magazine. The researchers in this study, they discovered that users on rent sites, because there are sites where you can go to rent, to rent and to rave and to complain, and to vent and to express your anger and your rage against your boss, against your spouse, against your lover, against your children, against you name it. And the users of these sites were more anger-prone in general and more often participated in negative behaviors such as verbal and physical fights, as well as reckless behaviors such as reckless driving, reckless drinking, shopaholism. They also developed all forms of addiction and so on. The more they vented online, the more they shared their pain, their hurt, their anger, their rage, their sense of injustice, their passive aggression, the more they did this, the more entrenched they became in these extremely negative feelings. It didn't help them. It drowned them. It drove them under. So instead of simply letting off steam, they were actually fueling the fire of discontent and unhappiness. That's a prime example how most of the advice that you receive online from alleged experts is utterly wrong. Let's take another example. You're constantly told, especially the empaths among you, those who like to feel morally superior and totally victimized, because it makes you feel good to be morally superior and totally victimized. Most narcissists feel good in this condition. So, you're constantly being told that empathic people read others well. If you have empathy, you can read other people. You can understand them better. You can tap into their minds. You can connect with them. You can comprehend their motivation, their intentions. You can resonate with their emotions, with their fears and hopes and priorities and preferences. You can absorb their pain and hurt and ameliorate it and reduce it somehow. You can help them, etc, etc, etc. Here's the only problem. The more empathic you are, the less well you read other people. Truly highly empathic people, HSPs, highly sensitive persons, don't read people well at all. They have almost a total failure rate in reading other people. They are very much like autistic people. So, highly sensitive people are almost indistinguishable from people with autism spectrum disorders, as far as understanding other people. They don't understand other people well at all. They misread them. They attribute, they misattribute intentions, wrong motivations. They misbehave. They read social and individual and body language cues catastrophically wrong. Why? Because they have high empathy. High empathy precludes understanding the other person well. The higher you are in empathy, the less you understand other people. And the less you connect to them, the less you are able to help them. Exactly opposite what all of you are being told online. By self-interested psychology professors, coaches, real doctors, fake doctors, and a million others who are after your wallet and money. Many of them are real academics and they know very well what I know. That they're lying to. They're lying to you about empathy. Again, academic sources. I refer you to studies by Jacob Israela Shvili. Israela Shvili is like Israel plus Ashvili. Jacob Israela Shvili currently is at the University of Amsterdam. Studies by Disa Souter and by Agneta Fisher. And one such study that I will mention totally randomly out of hundreds. Different phases of empathy. Fillings of similarity. Disrupt. Disrupt recognition of negative emotions. It was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 87, March 2020. And here are the conclusions of one of these major studies. Number one, recognition of emotions. I'm quoting. It's not some vat name. It's Akadim. It's the science of psychology as opposed to the nonsense of common sense and other con artists. Here are the conclusions. Number one, recognition of emotions becomes less accurate. Less accurate when having had similar negative experiences. Actually, if you share the same experience with someone, you recognize their emotions less accurately. In other words, in other words, if you're a victim of narcissistic abuse, you should absolutely avoid other victims of narcissistic abuse because they are likely to read you very inaccurately. And if you try to approach them for support and support and understanding, you will end up badly. You will end up in a conflict and dissonance and fights and trolling and flames and a big mess. Many of you have had this experience. Let me repeat this counter-intuitive conclusion. Recognition of emotions becomes less accurate when you have had a similar negative experience to someone. Number two, personal distress evoked by a negative story inhibits recognition of the storyteller's emotions. Personal distress evoked by a negative story inhibits recognition, prevents recognition of the storyteller's emotions. So if someone tells you how she had been abused by her spouse, that minute you shut off. You shut off. You develop distress and you do not recognize her emotions. You are unable to help her even if you had been, especially if you had been a victim of abuse yourself. Finally, another conclusion. Being instructed to take another person's perspective does not help to recognize emotions better. If you're instructed to take someone else's perspective, it doesn't help you to recognize his or her emotions better. These are all meets, nonsensical meets and yet these are exactly the packages that the packages are offered to you by online self-styled experts and coaches. This is exactly what they're telling you. Stick together, share your experiences, vent, tell each other things, you know? Sick company of other victims. These are absolutely catastrophically wrong advices. If your relationships end up the same catastrophic way all the time, time and again, you most likely need to work on three issues. Number one, anticipated hurt. Your certainty that everyone is going to hurt you sooner or later. It's a persecutory delusion. It's a kind of the acquired paranoia. Number two, if you have constant failures in your relationships, you probably interpret every behavior as hurtful. So you anticipate pain and then you interpret every behavior as intended to hurt you. This is called hypervigilance or hypersensitivity. It's another form of paranoid or persecutory ideation and it's a lack of skin. You have no protection, like in borderline personality disorder. And number three, pre-emptive aggression. I'm going to hurt him before he hurts me. I'm going to dump her before she dumps me. I'm going to cheat on him before he cheats on me. I'm going to do bad things to her before she does bad things to me. These are the only three things you need to work on. Anticipated hurt, interpreting every behavior as hurtful and your own pre-emptive aggression. So I gave you two examples of myths, myths, commonsensical nonsense that are propagated online by literally everyone I know. And they are utterly wrong according to psychological studies. And now let's transition to narcissism. And after narcissism, I'm going to mention yet another eight myths. Another eight beliefs, wrong beliefs, false beliefs, beliefs that run contrary to the best evidence we had gathered in studies, some of them gigantic studies with a million plus people. Many of the things we think we know about psychology, about other people, about the inner world of others, about motivations and intentions and behaviors, many of these things. If not majority of these things, many of them are wrong. They're not wrong. Allow me to correct myself. They are dead wrong. And they cause you to perpetuate your own suffering and to make bad strategic and tactical decisions and to behave in ways which are counterproductive, self-defeating and self-destructive. All of this because you prefer your intuition and commonsense and the intuition of commonsense and commonsense of other victims, coaches who used to be victims, victims who became coaches and self-styled experts who capitalize on your gallability and your vulnerability. You prefer to believe these people. And as I said, you prefer to believe these people because the truth hurts. The truth hurts. The truth is that you had contributed to your abuse as much and very often more than your own abuser. This is something you don't want to hear. You don't want to hear this. Okay. Albert Camus was a how else Jewish author. He was born in 1913 and he died a year before I was born. He probably died a year before I was born in order not to witness my birth and I can't blame him. But he was best known for wonderful, amazing literary works, amazing novels. I recommend The Stranger, The Plague, which is very, very pertinent, very relevant nowadays. The plague describes a Black Death at kind of a bubonic plague in Algiers. He was a philosopher. He was among the fathers of the philosophy of the absurd. So he was closely linked to Jean-Paul Sartoy. And so he was also among the fathers of modern existentialism. And he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. And here's something about Camus. For Camus, our astonishment at life results from our confrontation with the world that refuses to surrender many. Our astonishment occurs when our need for meaning shatters against the indifference, immovable and absolute of the world. As a result, absurdity is not an autonomous state. It does not exist in the world in itself, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world. This world in itself is not reasonable. That is all that can be said, Camus said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity, whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on men as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together. So I quote this wonderful phrase again. There's an irrational and wild longing for clarity in the human heart. You victims of abuse, you want clarity. You want certainty. You want someone to make sense of what had happened to you. But here's the thing. What had happened to you is meaningless. It's senseless. It doesn't carry any coded message. It doesn't imbue your life with a direction or a goal or a meaning. It just happened to you. And you must make sure it never happens again. And to make sure it never happens again, you must find out the truth. As we know it in the science or attempted science of psychology, not the truth. As you hear from others in an echo chamber, others were exactly in your position. They don't know much more than you do. They pretend to know because they want your money. In November 1940 Camus confided to his journal. He wrote in his diary. Understand this he said. We can despair of the meaning of life in general, but not of the particular forms that it takes. We can despair of existence for we have no power over it, but not of history, where the individual can do everything. Important for you victims of abuse. Your history is in your hands. Camus continues. It is individuals who are killing us today. Why should not individuals manage to give us peace? We must simply begin without thinking of such grandiose aims. He could have been discussing narcissism, of course. And this leads me to the question of the first, as I promised in this video, I'm going to be a myth buster. I'm going to bust myths. So the first myth is that one can separate the issue of sexuality and gender from mental health. Like if an autist comes to you, or a narcissist comes to you, or a psychopath comes to see you as a professional. You're not supposed to pay attention to the gender. Someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, what does it matter if he has a vagina or penis? It doesn't matter. We keep saying. That's not entirely accurate, as you will see soon. I'm going to discuss a recent study on autism now, which demonstrates conclusively that mental health issues, including mental health issues that I deal with in this channel, have a lot to do. When I say a lot, I mean a hell of a lot to do with your sex, not sexuality, with your sex and with your gender. But before I go there, because this has to do with autism, I clarified in my previous video, I do not and never did claim that autism is caused by bad mothering, by a dead mother, by a mother who is not good enough mother. I said this. Refrigerator mothers is a notion that had been debunked long ago. It was prevalent in the 60s and 70s before we knew better. Autism in all likelihood has very pronounced genetic components and it's probably a brain disorder. I'm very hesitant to say it with certainty, because we do not know what causes autism. I repeat this. We have no idea what causes autism, what is the cause of autism, what leads to autism. The etiology of autism, we are still studying this and we don't know. We know for sure what does not lead to autism. For example, vaccines. The intellectually challenged anti-vaxxers who claim that vaccines lead to autism. Well, it's yet another conspiracy theory, which is a great demonstration that IQ is not distributed evenly. One of the myths that I'm going to debunk shortly. In August this year in the prestigious academic journal Nature Communications, a mega study of autism had been published. The study showed that there is a strong link between gender identity, autism, ADHD and other mental health disorders. It showed that people who do not identify with the sex that they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic. Six gender people, people whose gender sits well with their sex. So the sex is female and the gender is woman. If you as a woman feel comfortable with the fact that you're a female, then you are cisgender. So cisgender people are six times less likely to develop autism than people who don't feel comfortable with their sex. Gender diverse people report autistic traits and suspect that they have undiagnosed autism. Gender diverse is transgender, non-binary, gender queer, people who have what used to be called gender dysphoria. People who have the equipment of a male but they feel like a woman or the equipment of a female and they feel like a man. And then they do something about it or they don't do something about it. But at any rate there's a discrepancy between their biological, physiological equipment and their gender identity and these people are called gender diverse. And they amazingly, amazingly tend to develop autism much more than other people. And the reverse is also true. Autistic people are more likely than neuro-typical people to be gender diverse. Gender diverse people are more likely to have autism. It seems to be a very powerful connection. And that's not the only connection because we found connections between autism and schizophrenia, psychosis. Between autism, a very strong connection between autism and depression. Mind you, there's a big school in psychology that claims that narcissistic personality disorder or pathological narcissism is actually a depressive disorder. It harks back, this thinking goes back to Melanie Klein. And there's also a strong connection between autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD. Many of these co-occur with autism. Bizarrely, the previous edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual did not allow to diagnose autism with anything else essentially. But today with the new edition, edition 5, we can and we do. Gender diverse people have higher rates of all these conditions, schizophrenia, depression, ADHD, autism, certain personality disorders. And the highest association was with depression and estimated 30 to 80% of children with autism, 30 to 80% also have ADHD. And 20 to 50% of children with ADHD also have autism. First born children of women with ADHD face a six-fold risk, six times the risk of also having ADHD and double the risk of having autism compared to the general population. It's another study from 2014. So the recent study was conducted on 640,000 people. Good enough for you. And it involved the television documentary, British television documentary in 2017 about autism. The guy who managed all this or handled all this was Simon Baron Cohen, his professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. And one of the preeminent voices and most original voices on autism. Gender diverse people also report on average more traits associated with autism, as I said, sensory difficulties, pattern recognition skills, and most crucially, lower rates of empathy. They utterly, I mean, they read utterly wrongly. Another person's emotional state. Let's get it straight. Autism, ADHD, six other mental health conditions. They're all linked to a massive reduction in empathy to the point of vanishing. But this is exactly the state of victims of narcissistic abuse, people with CPTSD. They also have severely diminished empathy. To the point that technically we can diagnose many victims with narcissism or even psychopathy. I call it the narcissistic psychopathic overlay. You see, it's all interconnected. It's not so clear-cut empath, narcissistic. It's nonsense. The human mind is so multifaceted, so kaleidoscopic, so amazing, so malleable, so neuroplastic. The brain is so neuroplastic. You can't say, I'm the victim, he's the abuser and a story. It's not true. He did something to your empathy, and you did something to his empathy. You do something to other victims when you interact with them in your state of mind. You reduce their empathy. You create an empathy-free environment, actually, we discovered. Groups of people who had a common negative experience in such groups, empathy is much lower. You don't have to believe me. Go to any forum of self-styled empaths. I mean, they put to shame forums of narcissists and psychopaths. The nastiness, the lack of empathy, the brutishness, the cruelty and the sadism are unbridled and amazing, amazing levels. Now, the next myth. There is a belief that attention deficits and ADHD, more specifically, they are forms of dissociation. People say, well, abused children, for example, dissociate. They want to forget the abuse. They want to repress the trauma. So they forget all kinds of things. They have a discontinuous existence. And of course, I say the same and I have many videos dedicated to the connections between early childhood abuse, trauma, post-traumatic conditions, among which I number narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. I think they're all interlinked. However, dissociation does not cause attention deficit. It causes an improvement in attention. People who dissociate are much more attentive. And so in my work, I speculate that abused children failed to develop object constancy. Mother was not there for them. Or mother was very frightening. Or mother was very hostile or cold or detached or narcissistic, self-centered, selfish, or mother forced the child to become a parent, parentified the child, or she used the child as an instrument, or she idolized him, objectified him, whatever. Whatever the reason may be, the child did not feel safe enough. The mother was not a safe base. She was a dead mother. So the child could not develop object constancy. Because he couldn't develop object constancy, he could not pay attention to a single object or another person. He had no training in paying attention to other people. He had no focus of attention, no praxis. But dissociation actually enhances attention. It also enhances multitasking capacity. Think about it. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're playing at the corner. You have to divide your attention if you have an abusive mother. If you have a mother who can just storm into the room and beat the hell out of you, or curse you, or verbally abuse you, or stand you up in the corner, if you have a mother who is a source of terror, a source of horror, a mother who is unsafe base, a mother who causes you nightmares in living daylights, if you have such a mother, you must divide your attention. You must have divided attention. One part of your attention will be focused on playing the game, the toy, watching the cartoon on television. And the other part of your attention would be a mummy. Is mummy coming? Is she angry? Is she depressed? Is she going to beat me up? Is she going to break my toys, tear my books, etc.? You must divide your attention. So people with abused people, people who have been abused as children and developed the association actually have superior multi-tasking capacity and divided attention tasks. There's a test called the Stroop-Colour Word Test. Stroop sounds like stormtroopers, like something from the Holocaust. The Stroop-Colour Word Test, SCWT, it's a test we administer to people to see how attentive they are, how long they can maintain attention. And we found using the Stroop Test that high dissociators, people with high levels of dissociation actually, they are faster. They complete the test better. The test is very clever. It shows you a color and there's a word describing the color, but the word isn't another color. So they would show you the color blue and then there's a word blue, but the world is painted in green. So there's a discrepancy between the color and the word that describes the color. Because the word that describes the color is colored differently. So people with high dissociation scored much better on this test. There's a study by Freud, F-R-E-Y-D, Marto Velo, Alvarado, Hayes and Christman. They sound like a gang in the Wild West, cattle wrestlers. So this Gang of Five in 1998 discovered that there is no slowing of overall reaction time for people with high dissociation. There is a bit of something called Stroop interference. I'm not going into it, but generally there's no slowing down of reaction time. The Prince and Freud, 1999, they discovered that high dissociators are worse in selective attention tasks, but much better in divided attention tasks, multi-tasking. Becker-Blease, Freud and Pierce in 2004 discovered that abuse leads to a distinctive attention style. When a child is abused, he develops a special attention style, the one that I mentioned a few minutes ago, but not ADHD. No ADHD for abused children with dissociation. The writer R-U-Y-T-E-R at Allies discovered that high dissociators are advantaged in both selective and divided attention. And finally, Dohey, Irwin and Middleton discovered that high dissociators are a bit slower, but there's no attention deficit. So, you see, it's an example of an intuition. Nine out of ten people will tell you, well, if I constantly forget things, if I have to shut off things, if I have to repress things, if I have to ignore things in my environment, probably it will affect my attention badly. I will develop attention deficits. My attention span will be affected. Wrong. Not true. Myth. Let's go to the next myth, which has to do with me personally. Therefore, my favorite. The myth is that IQ is distributed normally. You also saw this famous graph. This is called a Gaussian distribution or a normal distribution. Gauss was a mathematician in the 19th century, and he discovered this distribution. Distribution simply means you have many, many numbers, and you arrange them on a graph. How's the graph going to look? And a normal distribution is low numbers would be on a tail, high numbers would be on another tail, and the vast majority of numbers would be in the middle. So, like the middle would be very tall, and the left side and the right side, you would have a tail. So if someone has an IQ of 50, probably he's not watching this channel, but other channels, so if someone has an IQ of 50, he would be on this tail. Most people don't have an IQ of 50, so he will never be in the middle, he will be on the tail. And if someone has an IQ of 190, hint hint, he will also be on the tail. Most people, thank God, don't have an IQ of 190. So the majority of people, the big number of people, will be in the middle, so the middle will look like this. Got it? Got it. That's called the normal distribution. Here's the clinch, here's the myth. IQ is not distributed normally. So why if you go online and you read articles, and you read books about IQ, and why everyone says IQ is distributed normally? Like 67% of the population have IQ between this and this, 39% of this. Why do we have this shape? We have this shape because the test results are tweaked. Yes, we fake them. This faking has a very nice name, because in Akadem, when we commit a crime, or when we do something really, really unethical, we give it a name. And the name is very highfalutin, and because the name is highfalutin, it makes us feel good with ourselves, because everyone outside our arcane club. So what we do with IQ test results, we fake them, we tweak them, we change them, we make them fit. Listen well, we make them fit. The predetermined shape, the normal distribution. And this mathematical technique is called standardization. We standardize the test to fit a Gaussian distribution. In other words, first we decide how our IQ results should be distributed, and then we shoehorn, we push, we pull, we change, we reframe, we fake a bit, you know, for the numbers to fit our preconceived notions. If we were not to standardize the test results, we would have had two huge tails and a very, very small bump in the middle, which is reminiscent of the sexual performance of some narcissists I know. So we would have a huge tail here, a huge tail here. In other words, many more people have much higher IQ than we give them credit for. I have 190 IQ. This has been repeatedly established in tests over 20 years, three types of tests. So it's probably true. According to the Gaussian distribution, there are only eight other people in the world with this IQ. It's so extremely rare. But of course it's nonsense. It's nonsense because it's not the result of the IQ test. It's not reality. It's the outcome of the standardization of the testing results. We convert them to normal distribution. And we change the difficulty of the question. And we use the raw test scores as output scores. And we feed them into a normal distribution. We use something called Z-test. And we have a null hypothesis for those of you who are into mathematics. So we have a null hypothesis, and we have standard deviations within a Z-test. And then we apply the Z-test. And we flatten the curve in effect. Actually, we don't flatten the curve. We curve the flat. So we curve the flatland. So actually, what I'm trying to say, most people have much higher IQs than we think. And of course, much lower IQs than we think. Majority of people have much lower IQs than we think. Just look around you. And much higher IQs than we think. I took a raw dump of IQ test results, admittedly from the 1940s and 50s. That doesn't matter. This was Stanford-Binetes, which is no longer used, and is very prejudiced, very problematic. But this is all I had. I took these results, and I denormalized them. I made a renormalization, but without standardization, without assumptions concerning standard deviations. And it seems that about 10% to 15% of the population, if we were not faking the results, 10% to 15% of the population have an IQ higher than 124. At least 10% to 15%. I mean, there would have been an added 10% to 15%. They would have moved. They would have shifted from the middle to this state. Similarly, of course, something like 30% would have shifted to the left. Now, many people are not going to like this result. And perhaps this is the reason that we are still falsifying IQ tests, because it would have been tremendously to use a Trumpian word. It would have been tremendously politically incorrect had we looked the numbers in the face. Why? Because a typical chimpanzee has 50 to 60 IQ. An adult chimpanzee has the IQ of a five-year-old. And not pleasant to say, so does one-third of the human population. If we don't play with the test results, if we don't fake them via standardization, Z-testing, normalization, standard deviation, and many other statistical games we play, I think there's a lot of political correctness. Fake science, pseudoscience. That's why IQ tests are highly unreliable. They reflect absolutely statistical assumptions that adhere to social, societal mores and values, which are very period-specific. They do not reflect reality. People with 190 IQ are much more common. There are way more than eight people with 190 IQ. If you are interested in the number, about a thousand. And people with 60 and 50 IQ, the exact equivalent of a chimpanzee, many, many, many more than you know. Now, who wants to hear that? Next myth, positive psychology works. Everyone tells you, everyone in his dog, they're telling you, if you experience a negative emotion, you're angry, you're sad, you're grieving, you're afraid, fake a smile. Fake a smile, cover up your emotions. Well, research is dead set against it. I'm referring you to an article titled, Negative Emotions, Key to Well-Being, Negative Emotions, Key to Well-Being, published in Scientific American. It shows that if you suppress your emotions, you raise your stress level, and it causes you to dwell on the negative emotions for much longer. If you accept your negative emotions and express them at the moment, make peace with them, embrace them, accept them as part of yourself, they go away, they go away fast. There was a TED talk by Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy, and she shared a piece of research, and she said that if you power pose, if you stand or sit with your body, as expanded as possible, shoulders back, you know, superwoman pose and so on, it lowers your stress hormones, increases your testosterone, the power hormone, and makes you look and feel more confident. Jordan Peterson picked up on it and included this piece of advice as, I think, the first rule in his book, 12 rules, he has written a book, 12 rules for life, antidote to chaos, I think this is rule number one, pull your shoulders back, pull your shoulders back, you get a hormonal boost, you look much more confident, you're going to conquer the world and end up bedding the most beautiful girl in the room. Wonderful advice, unfortunately, totally wrong. In 2015, a group of researchers replicated Amy Cuddy's study. They used five times as many participants. They couldn't find a hint of a clue, of a shadow, of an indication that her results are real, not only valid but real. There is very strong suspicion that she and her colleagues either made a massive error in interpreting the results or much worse, they faked the results, they manipulated the data to yield a statistically significant result. Peterson has, must, rewrite the first rule because it's based on faulty signs, probably, probably, fake and false results. The next myth, opposites attract. It's a myth that when you're dating you're likely to be attracted to people who are very different from you. I can't tell you. I can begin to tell you what mountain ranges and continents of research there are to dispute this. It's completely, utterly, unmitigatedly untrue. Not a single word is true. I refer you to psychologicalscience.org. They have a section called myths where they summarize research for this particular myth. What was it is true? We are drawn to potential partners who are similar to us. Similarity also guarantees the longevity of the relationship. The success of the relationship depends crucially on how similar you are. The more similar you are, the more things you agree on, the more communication preferences you share, the more hobbies, the more avocations, the more common activities, the more you bring up the children similarly, the more you agree on money, etc. The more similar you are, the longer your relationship. This is one of these myths that had destroyed 50% of American marriages. These people were looking for opposites. He completes me. We are two parts of one. He is my better half. He is my different half. This is nonsense. You must look for someone who is your echo, who is your mirror, who is your reflection, who is you with other genitalia in case you are heterosexual. There is another myth like this. Cohabitation before marriage, if you share premises, if you live together before marriage, your marriage will last longer. The more you get to know someone before you get married, the more your marriage is guaranteed to last. Wrong. Dead wrong. Cohabitation is totally correlated with divorce. The longer you have known your partner, the longer you have known your partner, the longer you have dated your partner and especially the longer you have cohabited with your partner. Before marriage, the more it predicts your divorce. Higher divorce rates are intimately correlated with lack of intimacy before marriage. The less you know your partner, the less time you spend with him and if you've never lived with him, never shared living quarters with him, then your marriage will succeed. Marriage is founded on matchmaking lasts much longer and far more stable than love-based unions. Most of what we think we know about dating relationships, marriages is wrong. Our ancestors forefathers great-great-great-great-grandfathers like me, we knew better. We knew to tell you don't date. Don't live with him. It's not okay to have sex before marriage. Let us find for you the right partner. These are all excellent advices if, if your main concern is to have a long, productive relationship, marriage, for life. If your concern is just your fondness, which is legitimate, then these factors are not relevant. But if you're serious about your life and about your partner and about your relationship, you're going the wrong way. Next myth. The more people you put together, the more creative they become. Brainstorming is guaranteed for creativity and creative solutions after months or, as I love to say, bolder dash and bladder dash. According to the American Institute of Graphic Arts and a million other research institutions, if you brainstorm in groups, you are less creative and the group is less creative and the number of solutions and the quality of solutions much lower. This is because of three reasons. One is called anchoring. Anchoring is a cognitive bias. When we begin to consider other options, we suddenly realize that we have a solution of our own by contrast. When we consider other people's solutions and ideas, we realize that we have our own solutions and ideas and we get anchored like the anchor of a ship. And we get stuck. We get stuck on our ideas and our solutions and our way of doing things. And everyone gets stuck on their ideas and they think these are the best ideas and all the others are stupid. And they fail to come up, they fail to negotiate, they fail to come up and it creates very bad dynamic. Groups are very bad places to hatch creative way forward. The second effect is group think. Group think simply means that pure pressure, intentional peer pressure, body language peer pressure, peer pressure mediated via body language. Peer pressure that is circumstantial. Something happens outside the group that affects all the members of the group simultaneously. Hatcheries cause members of the group to think the same way. And when everyone begins to think the same way and they verbalize it you are very afraid to think differently. It prevents unique ideas from being heard or spoken aloud. There is pressure on you. Pressure on you to conform to join in to fit in not to rock the boat. And the third reason that groups are very bad places hatcheries or wombs is pressure. In groups you feel that you are being tested that you are being observed. This is precisely the reason why it is an exceedingly bad idea to introduce cameras into courtrooms. You feel that you have to come up with a good idea on the spot. And everyone around you want to do the same. They want to impress. It becomes about impressing rather than communicating. It becomes totally grandiose and narcissistic. It puts incredible pressure on some people and then they can think. It stress levels and anxiety levels in groups are much higher by the way than alone. Next myth left brain, right brain no such thing, of course. The brain is totally redundant. Every part of the brain can replicate every other part of the brain. If tomorrow you lose half your brain the other half will take over. Usually without too much of a problem. We have had numerous such cases. In wars, accidents, babies born with half brain most extreme case had something like 10% of its brain. The brain is redundant. Everything happens in multiple locations. There are copies of copies of functions copies of content copies of memories a copy of your entire identity. There is no dominant side. Totally false. I refer you to lifeScience.com There is an article there left brain, right brain myth where they summarize the research. Everyone uses both sides of the brains equally and equal time. And the only thing that is true the only thing that is true is that certain abilities and capacities for example speech they are more located in one hemisphere for example speech is more located in speech processing, language is more located in the left side of the brain. Visual processing which also is linked to artistic and plastic arts creative efforts that's more on the right side. But here's the glitch in the each and the niche they communicate all the time there's like a zillion connections between the parts and they hand over functions all the time. So while the maybe the language center Broca there's an area called Broca which is central but many of the language functions are in outside Broca's area in the left hemisphere but when you talk huge amount of traffic and communication with the right side of the brain and many language functions and speech functions are temporarily transferred to the right side for example if you have to talk about some visual about some image or photo you can't there's no such thing language is in the left language it's like the cockpit in an airplane you can't say the cockpit is this and the airplane is this they're intricately intimately connected they're one and the same the brain is a single unitary entity everything works on everything all the time all functions are carried on both sides all the time a million pathways like under the senate in the United States they have these underground enormous kilometer long corridors it's the same Capitol Hill ostensibly congress in the senate they're all connected it's only one thing midlife crisis next myth in reality there's no such thing in a study published in a series of studies published and summarized by NPR on the 14th of March 2016 go to the archive of NPR you will see a great summary and it's titled forget the red sports car so to cut the long story short our studies showed that only about 10% of the population suffer a crisis in midlife this crisis is connected to specific events like parents dying or losing your job or divorcing or your wife cheating or something it's not a crisis because you have reached a milestone or a certain age it's a crisis because something happened and then if you divide life into decades every decade has crisis ask any adolescent ask any child ask anyone 20 years old who's dating every decade in life and Gayo Shi wrote the book passages and the book new passages to say exactly this that every decade has its own set of crisis so isolating a specific decade is a crisis it's nonsense also because the attributes of the midlife crisis are wrong, not true we couldn't find them in studies people who are going through their 50s and 40s and 50s they are supposed for example to be much more afraid of death or they are supposed to redirect their view instead of forward and backward like they are reviewing their lives none of this we couldn't find a hint or a trace of any of these fables and confabulations they are wrong, they are not true actually most of the crisis in the 40s and 50s most of the crisis multiple have to do with the reasons I mentioned we all undergo challenges and we all do the stereotypical midlife crisis things but it's not a coherent or cohesive syndrome set of cognitions and emotions the next myth is personality and IQ are stable in adulthood that's absolutely untrue even personality disorders change personality disorders are supposed to be rigid structures that's the definition of the diagnostic the statistical manual rigid structures of personality but they are not rigid 50% of all people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder lose their disorder after age 45 that can no longer be diagnosed for instance most of the antisocial behaviors of psychopaths disappear after age 40 antisocial behavior ameliorates in psychopaths in starting with the fifth decade of life the only structure that is totally rigid almost doesn't change ever is narcissists narcissistic personality disorder it's the only case I am aware of where there is no discernable change between age 20 and age 60 the psychodynamic landscape is identical the reason is the narcissist does not exist there's no personality, no self it's a piece of fiction it's a story a piece, it never changes and like gun with the wind, the movie it never changes a work of art is forever the Sistine Chapel the Last Supper, Mona Lisa they are stuck, they never change so narcissistic personality disorder is a piece of fiction it's a work of art it's a literary creation it's a piece of literature, it's a novel of course it doesn't change in a study made published in July, in the July-August 2003 American Psychiatric Association newsletter, page 14 they took personality data from 133,000 people good enough for you as a sample, I should hope and they found that personality changes all the time over the entire life span people for example become more agreeable more willing to cooperate with others as they age, by the way another myth the myth of the traculent irritable, irascible old men actually old men are far more agreeable than young men, and far more cooperative number two women become less neurotic, less emotionally sensitive and emotionally dysregulate as they age, which would explain why BPD borderline actually disappears number four men and women become less open less eager and willing to try new experiences as they age, all the people are far more conservative and number four conscientiousness work ethic, detailed orientation increases with age the best workers are old people examples of how personality changes these are fundamental things these are factors in personality and they change and above all the myth the mother of old myths to paraphrase my favorite classmates Saddam Hussein 10% we use only 10% of our brain capacity this myth began in the late 19th century late, yeah 19th century a group of wannabe psychologists, because psychology was a proto proto wannabe science a group of researchers compared the learning abilities and accomplishments of a child prodigy to the average person and they found that child prodigies are much more intellectually stimulated than the average bloke which I don't know why they buy that to make the experience, I mean a child prodigy is a prodigy because she is much more intellectually stimulated, yeah it's like saying that they discovered that both men and women breathe air anyhow this amazing earth shattering discovery was generalized and expanded in the 1900s when other researchers who did not understand how the brain functions we still don't understand how the brain functions and don't let anyone tell you otherwise we have no idea no blue idea how the brain functions or any part of the brain or any neuron or neurotransmitters or anything whatsoever, we are at the stage of cataloging we are cataloging we are cataloging pathways we are cataloging biochemistry, biochemicals we are just cataloging, we know nothing about the brain and at that time they knew even less, a lot less so these psychologists researchers who knew nothing about the brain but were sufficiently grandiose hubristic and arrogant to say that they did they noticed that many different parts of people's brains appeared inactive so they said, ah well the difference between prodigies and regular people is that prodigies are using more of the brain and regular people are using less of the brain and they gave the number 10% by the way, totally arbitrary no foundation to this number they just gave the number 10% well, sorry to tell you, it's utterly wrong modern research a bit more modern, like 100 years later and I refer you to the article do people use only 10% of their brains published in scientific America modern research shows that throughout the day we use, hold your breath, 100% of what you have now it's very true that the majority of you don't have much but whatever it is you have you use, 100% throughout the course of the day notice, at any given moment you may use 10% or 20 or 2 but when you look at the entirety of the day, 24 hours use every corner, nook and cranny, every syllable neuron, every synapse, every axon everything, 100% everything is used, every part every function so while the sections that control essential processes breathing, autonomous functions, senses these sections are active, non-stop other parts I don't know, parts that are responsible for language fear response fear response is what you have when you're watching my videos problem solving, all these are activated only when necessary so they're not always active, normally why would they be always active it's like your apartment, you know you get up in the morning, you go to the toilet at that moment only 2% of your apartment is active the toilet, I don't know what you're doing there I don't want to know, please don't go into details in the comment section but then you exit the toilet, you go to the kitchen, you make coffee oh, kitchen is a bit bigger that's 5% of your apartment then you go throughout your apartment throughout the day, you circulate every corner of your apartment so 100% of your apartment is active and depends on your lifestyle of course, in some people most parts will be more active than others but all parts are active in all people we make full use of all the abilities in our brains those of us who have them so this was today's video and I hope you had great fun and I promise to pass on the message to Campbell and to Kernberg that they have no idea what is narcissism and they should really learn from coaches online and others and it's never too late to start I mean, Kernberg in his 80s, 90s he's still young it's never too late to start and I'll put him in touch with some of the self-styled experts there I'm sure they will put him on the straight and narrow they will fix his thinking and Campbell should stop with these idiotic experiments because he got narcissism completely wrong says the woman who wrote to me bloody hell what am I talking to ok, kiddos and kidettes go drink something, go to the toilet relieve yourselves and I know I created a lot of negative emotionality do not punch a punching bag punch me next time you see me in a seminar after the pandemic BC before corona AD after distancing and in between the BC and the AD yet another Jew not Jesus this time Saint Wagner, much better looking with much fewer holes where it comes