 Good afternoon. On behalf of the McLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience, I'm delighted to welcome you to the second lecture in our 2015-16 lecture series on neuroethics. This lecture series was organized by John Mansell, who is the director of the Grossman Institute, Peggy Mason, a professor of neurobiology, and Dan Solmezzi, part of the McLean Center. Professor Solm's name was first proposed to our organizing committee by a mutual friend, Jonathan Lear, the John Neff Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the new director of the Newbauer Collegium for Culture and Society. Before I introduce Professor Solmezzi, I just want to acknowledge that two of my teachers in medical school are in the audience today. Dr. Bob Replogel in the back and Dr. Harry Trosman up near the front. Just raise your hands, because you're partly responsible for what happened. Professor Mark Solmezzi is chair of the Department of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He is the world's leader in connecting psychoanalytic theory, including subjective thoughts, feelings, and memories with modern neuroscientific knowledge of the objective anatomical structure and function of the brain. He does this through empirical research studies. One of Professor Solmezzi's major discoveries involved describing the forebrain mechanism of dreaming. In fact, it's said that Professor Solmezzi invented the term neuropsychoanalysis, and since 2000, he has co-chaired the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society. Professor Solmezzi has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, six books, including the landmark The Neuropsychology of Dreams in 1997 and a later book called The Brain and the Inner World, which has now been translated into 12 languages. But perhaps one of his most extraordinary achievements is that he has served as the authorized editor of the forthcoming revised standard edition of the complete psychological works of Freud, that's 24 volumes, and the complete neuroscientific works of Freud, that's an additional four volumes. Those 28 volumes, I'm told, have now been completed and are just ready for publication. Today, Professor Solmezzi will speak to us on the topic psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Mark Solmezzi. Thanks very much. Oh, wow, that does work. So thank you for that very fulsome introduction. Comical part is my title. I think I sent about five different titles and they're all equally vague, so let me tell you what I'm actually going to talk about more specifically. If any of you have read the abstract, you will know. I'm wanting to argue that you can derive an ought from an is. David Hume famously said in regard to ethics that empirical facts have nothing to do with it. You cannot derive an ought from an is and I'm wanting to introduce you to some empirical facts which I think are of fundamental importance to an understanding of where our ethics come from. Now, I'm starting with time frames. You might wonder why you see my family tree on the screen and the reason is many of us, I should imagine, believe we derived or gained our ethical value systems from our parents or from our family culture or from the social culture within which our families are embedded and mine, if you could only see it, dates back to 800. So we are more than a thousand years old as Solmezzi and so you might think that my ethics derive from a tradition roughly a thousand years old. Or you might say, you know, let's not be so parochial about it. Let's transcend individual families and individual cultural contexts and go to where the very idea of culture and civilization began. That is to say in the fertile crescent when we first domesticated animals and planted crops. I'm always surprised how few people realize that this happened so recently, only 12,000 or so years ago. The dramatic transition from us being hunter-gatherers to us being farmers. People who lived therefore in settlements in the same place for extended periods of time and with this came the growth of larger social groups than hunter-gatherer groups with the size of the groups, the permanence of the ownership of land and of livestock and whatnot came the need for the establishment of social systems, systems of rules to govern in the relatively artificial way these relatively artificial ways of living. So perhaps we could say that our ethical codes are date back some 12,000 years. Or we could, since I'm South African, I must tell you that this is the oldest cultural artifact that has yet been found and was found just down the road from where I live in Blombos Cave. This piece of ochre which is etched in a way that is abstract, non-utilitarian, found together with these beads which presumably formed necklaces or something of the kind. This is considered the oldest cultural artifact that exists. So that's dated somewhat controversially to about 70,000 years old. So you could say that we humans became human in the sense of symbolic systems 70,000 years ago. Perhaps that's how far back we can date the primal origins of our ethical systems. Or you could go back to the various hominid species which depending on how you define humanness, the hominid species go back some two million years and in fact again in South Africa, forgive all my nationalist patriotic insertions into my talk, we've recently discovered a new hominid species, Homo naledi in South Africa and that's not yet been dated but it's two and a half million years. We could at a stretch say our humanness goes back that far and at a real stretch therefore one might claim that our ethical value systems are that old. Or you could speak of when we diverged from chimpanzees, we're going back much longer periods of time. Or you could even say when we, us primates parted off from other mammals. In fact mammalian species are 200 million years old and most of what I'm going to tell you today is about systems in the brain, instinctual emotional systems in the brain which we share, you and I share with all mammals. And I'm going to argue and this is the crux of my talk, I suppose I shouldn't tell you the punchline at the outset but here it is. The crux of my talk is I'm going to argue that we have value systems built into our upper brain stems and limbic systems which we share with all mammals these same systems exist in all mammals therefore they're 200 million years old and I'm going to hope to persuade you that we cannot understand the origin of ethics in the full blown philosophical human cultural sense of the word without understanding something of these 200 million year old systems. But I'm going to begin my presentation by going even further back and talking about this structure over here in the upper brain stem known as the periaqueductal gray or P-A-G. I've enlarged it on this slide so that you can see it but in fact it's the size of a jelly bean in the human brain. I say I'm going further back than the 200 million years that mammals have, I was going to say walked and swum the surface of our planet. This structure is 525 million years old. We share it with all vertebrates. So the periaqueductal gray which in us is jelly bean sized in exactly the same place in all vertebrate brains that is to say fishes, snakes, lizards share with us this structure. And I think that an account of where our ethics come from needs to begin with this structure. The periaqueductal gray receives inputs from many other upper brain stem and lower brain stem systems which are body regulating and body monitoring structures. The hypothalamus, some circumventricular organs, area postramer, a nucleus solitaris, para brachial nucleus, all these body monitoring structures project strongly to periaqueductal gray and it's no accident that these body monitoring structures do so because what the projection onto periaqueductal gray makes possible is some sort of monitoring in real time here and now as to how you're doing in terms of the biological value scale which relates to survival and reproductive success. So the very starting point of my argument is that there is an ethical system that is embedded within the very nature of evolution and that is that it is good to survive and to reproduce. Our values in the sense of all living creatures having this value system built into the very design of the organism is the essence of the argument that I'm going to present to you but don't be alarmed, I'm not going to claim that this is the beginning and the end of ethics but the periaqueductal gray, if you stimulate it on its dorsal columns, what it generates is intense unpleasure. Human subjects will tell you, it feels bloody awful to have dorsal PAG stimulation. They feel excruciating pain, horrendous fear, everything horrible and unpleasant in the world. If you stimulate ventral PAG, the opposite occurs. The patient is deliciously and deliriously happy, orgasmically, delightfully pleased with the fact that you are stimulating their PAG on the ventral surface. Now this structure with these two functions or capacities to generate feelings of pleasure and unpleasure is thought and this is theory, what I'm telling you now and I must differentiate this from everything else that I'm going to tell you, this is theory. The theory is that the dawn of consciousness relates to the fact that being able to feel how you're doing, remember that the projections from these body monitoring structures onto PAG gives the PAG direct access to how you're doing in terms of all of your vital needs, all of those narrow parameters within which you have to remain in terms of oxygenation, hydration, core body temperature and so on. The overall aggregation of how you're doing in terms of the value systems built into all of these need detector mechanisms where it is good to be at the set point of how much oxygen your body needs. It's bad to deviate from it. The badness of the deviation away from that ideal mean core body temperature consistent with staying alive, deviations from it is measured in terms of feeling states. Feeling states that is to say the further you go away from the biological set point, the more you feel unpleasure and the more you move back towards that set point, the more you feel pleasure and here again I say the theory is that that is what consciousness is for. The dawn of consciousness 525 million years ago if we're going to date it to the age of the PAG, the dawn of consciousness was the emergence of the organism's capacity to be able to monitor in real time how it's doing within the scale of values. So that anything and I've only spoken about temperature of the same applies as I say to all of these basic need detector mechanisms mainly located in the medial hypothalamus but not only there monitoring how you're doing in terms of all of these different systems and giving the organism a real time sense in the literal sense of the word a feeling of how they're doing in terms of that value system which I said gives rise to the basic design of the organism which is it's good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to and this is what feelings are for. Feelings, good feelings say do this, it's good for your survival and reproductive success. That's why it evolved the feeling states at all and the pleasurable feeling states attached to the behaviors which enhance your chances of surviving to reproduce and unpleasurable feeling states the opposite. That's what feelings of pleasure and unpleasure are for. So I wanna pause again and make sure that I've made clear the rather simple point which is that there already we have values. We have a value system which I've repeated several times now it is good to survive, it's good to reproduce and we have mental states, feeling states which attach to that value system and make the organism able to govern its behavior in relation to that ethical system. I know there's a lot more to ethics than that. Now, higher than above the PAG and arising from the PAG all of these systems I'm going to tell you about now have their origins in or direct connection to the PAG and these are instinctual emotional systems which are 200 million years old or more which we share as I've said already with all mammals. I want to introduce this is not surprisingly not general knowledge and I think it's incredibly important knowledge. So I want to make you aware of what these instinctual emotion command systems are that exist in all of your brains here and now I hope and also remember these are systems you share with all mammals. So these are systems you share with your dog and your cat and moocars and piggies and laboratory rats whereby hangs another ethical tale. So let me introduce you to them. The first I'm going to tell you about seven systems and I must speak fast because that's a lot of knowledge. The first of these arises from the ventral segmental area and it projects primarily to nuclear succumbents over here but also to amygdala, to ventromesial frontal cortex to anterior singular gyrus and to prefrontal cortex in general and this system is the mesocortical mesolimbic dopamine system. The command neurotransmitter of the system is dopamine acting at D2 type receptors and its main function is suggested by the words, the names that are given to the system. Some people call it the reward system, the brain reward system, it's probably a bad name for it but that's the most widely used name. Others call it the seeking system, that's what Panksep calls it. Others call it the wanting system, that's what Berridge calls it. It's also been called the curiosity, interest, expectancy system. It is in a nutshell a foraging system. I've told you already about the medial hypothalamic need detector mechanisms. When you're in a state of need, no matter what that need may be, it activates the sore cells in the ventral segmental area of this system and what it makes the animal do, the animal including us, is to go out into the world and look for whatever it is that it needs. I'll say again, regardless of the need, so whether you're hungry or thirsty or anything of the kind, including sexually randy, it activates this system because, and here is a general principle, that because no matter what you need in terms of the biological scale of values that I've referred to, which states that it is good to survive and to reproduce, all the things you need in order to survive and to reproduce. That is to say, in order to regulate those structures which I spoke of earlier, that are monitoring your vital needs, you can't say, I'm hungry. Okay, good, fixed. The only way you can meet the need represented by the drive demand coming from hunger is to go out into the world and eat something. Likewise thirst, likewise sexual desire in the sense that it's meant to lead to reproduction. You can't say, I think I'll reproduce now. There it goes. You can masturbate, but not many babies are gonna come from that. So the philosophy is that you have to, the principle is all these biological vital needs, they require you to go out into the world and to find the objects that can meet your need. And that is why, dear colleagues, that is why life is difficult. Another little bit of advice. But it's jolly good that we have a system like this which no matter what you need is, says go out into the world, go forth and multiply. Whatever you need, it's out there. Now, the feeling state that attaches to activation of the system is something like enthusiasm. It's a sort of energized, enthusiastic, optimistic state of mind that goes with the activation of the system. And what I'm saying to you, please remember, I told you one little piece of theory about the dawn of consciousness. The rest of this absolutely, simply empirically demonstrable. I know none of you have ever done anything so naughty as to snort cocaine, but if you did, or if you've seen one of your friends or your brothers or sisters in that state, then you'll know what the system does because cocaine activates it beautifully. It makes you excited, makes you energized, a little bit sexy, optimistic, interactive. No, there's a party tonight, I'm gonna be there, not exactly sure what's gonna happen, but I'm gonna be there, I'm gonna be there, and check out, I'm gonna have a good time. That kind of energized, optimistic, interactive, irritating frame of mind comes from activation of the system. Now, there are also other things that happen. If you're over-activated, you go psychotic. If you're under-activated, you are, for all the world, depressed. But the important point I'm wanting to make for now is that arising out of this very basic value system that I've mentioned now so many times that I won't repeat it, are these other values, which I think we need to know about if we want to understand the origins of our ethical systems. This system, you could say, has the value that it is good to go out into the world and to interact with objects. You could even say this in an evolutionary, biological sense, is the origin of the work ethic. You gotta get up in the morning and do stuff, and it's bad not to do that, it's bad in terms of the value system that I'm introducing you to. But here is a subset of that value system. It's good to feel energetic, it's good to feel optimistic, and it's good to feel motivated to go out into the world and to work to meet your needs. Why? Because, that's why I said it's jolly good that this thing evolved, because if you didn't have such a value system built into your brain, you would just sit on your couch like a potato, and you would not survive, and you would not reproduce. So we have this value system, which I said in a kind of slightly facetious way, the origin of the work ethic. It can be understood in simple evolutionary, biological terms. Now, this dopaminergic system, which also has a lot to do with addictions, and there's a great deal more I could say about it, I'll just move on and tell you that that's a wanting system. I told you, Berridge calls it a wanting system. It's an appetite system that makes you forage, think of a dog in an open field, you just plonk the dog down, what does it do? It twitches its whiskers, sniffs the air, wags its tail and explores, and he's like, what's there? What's here? That's what that thing does. But that's a wanting, it's a desire system. It's an optimistic, enthusiastic, energized, you could even say risk-taking system because that's another matter about the addictive aspects of that system. But what I'm wanting to emphasize now is that it is different. That appetite system, that wanting system is different from the liking system. That what you want, what you desire, that energized, enthusiastic searching is quite different from the, ah, that does it. That's what I wanted. The scratch, the thing that actually scratches the particular itch that drives this other system in the first place. So through seeking, through foraging, through wanting, you engage with the world and then you find the things more or less randomly. You find the things that meet your needs and bingo. Then you learn, and I've given you a little map of what learning mechanisms, this is how you learn what is good for you in the world. And I mentioned learning because obviously what I'm talking about are instinctual systems. These are hardwired, inbuilt systems. Every mammal has these systems built into their brains. They do the same things in all mammals. But of course, that doesn't mean that everything is instinctual. Those instincts drive us to go into the world to learn and that's where the higher aspects of what is good for you as opposed to the general sort of inclination that whatever it is that's good for you is out there. That's the bit, that's the value system, as I say, that's built into your brain. This go forth and multiply, interact with the world. Be energetic, ethic, which as I say is there from the get go. Now, those are very nice things to have. It's nice to have a wanting system. It's nice to have a liking system. It gives rise to two different types of pleasurable affect that optimistic, energetic looking for something, looking for a good time, exciting, and the ah, that does it, the consumatory pleasure. But while you're going out into the world on the basis of your inbuilt biological ethics, as they say, shit happens. And so one of the things that happens is while you are out searching for your lunch, somebody else might be searching for you as their lunch. And so you have also built into the brain a innate fear system. Just to be clear about what I mean by instinctual systems, I know that most of you know only too well what an instinct is, but just to sort of demystify the word, the term, it's a very straightforward and obvious matter how these systems evolved. If you think about, for example, if you didn't have a fear instinct, if you had to learn when you walk to a cliff face and you look over the edge and your seeking system says, gosh, that's interesting, you know, let's see what happens if I jump off here. This is the dopaminergic, energetic, enthusiastic, curiosity and interest says, let's try this one. And of course you will learn what happens when you jump off a cliff face, but it will be the only thing or the last thing that you learn because when you get to the bottom you'll realize that was a bad idea and you will be removed from the gene pool. You will not survive and you will not reproduce. So those of your ancestors, by the way, the chaps I've just spoken of were not your ancestors for obvious reasons, your ancestors, our ancestors were the ones who had an innate inclination to withdraw from cliff faces. And that's what I mean by an instinct or fear that it's built into our brains because it works. Those who had the opposite inclination were removed from the gene pool. Those who had this trepidatious attitude towards certain kinds of stimuli that they withdraw, that they freeze or that they flee, which is what the fear system does. It's the behavioral stereotypes that the system gives rise to is freezing or fleeing. I hope it doesn't see me. Shit, it's seen me, you know. Those things you don't learn. You don't learn how to behave when somebody's running at you with a knife or when somebody's got a gun in the classroom, you freeze or you try and get the hell out of there. These are inbuilt behavioral stereotypes and a whole lot else about the orchestration of the body. You know, the facial expression and the increased heart rate, shadow, increased respiration rate, the movement of the blood supply goes from the internal peristalsis and whatnot to the musculoskeletal system because that's where the blood is needed. Therefore, you have the famous diarrhea from anxiety. All of these things are built in. This is what the fear instinct, the fear system automatically does. But to come back to the essence of what I'm trying to convey to you, we have built into our brains a fear system. It's not something that you have to learn about. You have to learn what to fear. There's some inbuilt stimuli as to what to fear like, as I said, heights, confined spaces, open spaces, spiders, snakes. If you're a rodent, you take one cat hair and put that feline hair into the cage of a rodent newborn on the day of its birth, it will freeze. It doesn't discuss it with its mother. It just knows cats are bad news and it freezes. So we share with all mammals this affective state to which we then add other objects that we have to fear by dint of noxious experiences with them. In our species, luckily, mommy and daddy can say, don't do that, Mark. And so we learn what else to fear in addition to the innate built-in stimuli. But the important thing is it is a certain kind of value system, the fear system. And with that innate value system that I emphasize again, we just simply have, it's just there because we're mammals. We, certain ethics flow from it, like it is bad to scare people or it's bad to scare little animals. It's a bad thing to do. Why is it a bad thing to do? Because we know what fear feels like and we know what fear is all about, absolutely innately from the get go. And I'm not claiming, again, I must emphasize that the whole of ethics can be reduced to that. I'm coming toward the end of my lecture to specifically human things, but I hope you get the idea about where an ethical precept has its roots in, an innate instinctual affective system in the brain. Here's the rage system, again, absolutely built into every mammal's brain. There's a facial expression, like that, bearing of the teeth, like that, raising of the forelimbs, if you've got nails, us men don't, but women have nails that come out and you attack and you try to destroy the bastard. That's what rage, what it's about. You put something between yourself and the object of your need, the frustrating object, one way to respond to it is to get rid of the bastard. And the rage system is built into our brains and tells us how to do that. Again, you can see extrapolating from that where values in relation to violence and what not come from. Now I'm moving to a much more complex and much more, I think, telling example of the thesis I'm trying to persuade you of. This system, by the way, each of those systems has the same anatomy that connects the same nuclei, the same pathways, uses the same neurotransmitters and neuropeptides in all mammals. That's why I'm saying, and they do the same thing in all mammals. This one too, this system, in fact, we share not only with all mammals, but also with birds. Birds and the avians and mammals diverged 200 million years ago. So this is more than 200 million years old. This again comes with different names. It's called the attachment system, bonding system, the panic system, the grief system. If you amalgamate all of those words, you get some sense of what the system does. It is basically, it derives from the fact that baby mammals and birds don't feed themselves. They have to be fed by mommy or somebody like mommy and this system encourages the juvenile animal to stick to the adult that feeds it. You all probably know, although I say you all probably know, I keep forgetting that everyone else is getting younger and they don't know necessarily what we know, but Conrad Lorenz did those famous experiments with the geese and where the little gozzlings attached to him, imprinted, was the word they used to him because he was the guy who fed them. And so they thought, well, this is mommy and so they all followed him about. We all mammals and birds do this. Early on in life, we learn who's looking after us and then we differentiate that person from everybody else and we attach to them. And this system, if you separate it from, I'll just call her mommy, of course it can be anyone. It can be Conrad Lorenz, but let's just say mommy. If you are separated from mommy, you're a juvenile mammal who is attached to mommy, now you're separated from her. This system, which by the way is new opioid mediated, this system will generate feelings of separation distress or panic and it will release a behavioral stereotype. The instinctual behavior that's known as separation distress or protest behavior. The animal, all mammals, each in their own way will emit distress, separation distress vocalizations. In our species, it sounds something like muah, muah, or as you get older, mommy, mommy, you lost it, me. And you'll wonder about looking for her and this wondering about looking for her that seeks to both the vocalizations and the wondering about searching for the lost attachment figure. This behavior is the constellation that together we call protest behavior or that we call separation, the separation distress response. That only lasts for a relatively short period of time and it varies from one mammal species to another and from one situation to another, exactly how long, but it's a relatively acute response and it then shifts into what we call the despair phase of the separation distress cascade. So you go from protest to despair. In the despair phase, so I've told you that this panic anxiety, the separation anxiety, the separation distress that I've described, this protest, it's as the mu-opioid a receptor binding decreases so the animal feels more and more panicky and so it behaves in the way that I've described and then due to dinorphin, kappa opioids, the response of them to the low mu-opioid levels, this in turn leads to a shutdown of the first system that I spoke to you about, a shutdown of this one and that is what moves you into the despair phase. In the despair phase of the separation distress cascade, the animal gives up, it slumps and it just lies there and it gives up hope. It no longer has the enthusiasm, the optimism, the energy that I spoke of in relation to the seeking system, it just lies there and does nothing. It is for all the world the normal behavioral phenotype for depression and the reason we believe, and here again is a little bit of theory, you must always be careful of evolutionary psychology just so stories, but the evolutionary psychology just so story about this one is that it is initially enhancing of your survival and reproductive success chances but to announce, to vocalize so that mummy can hear you and to search so that you can find her up to a point. If she hasn't heard you and you haven't established reunion within a relatively short period of time, then the chances, the value of behaving that way is reduced by dint of the fact that you wander too far from home base. So if mummy does come back, you won't be there and you announcing your vulnerable isolated state as a juvenile mammal to predators, hello, I'm alone, come and eat me and you're using up valuable metabolic resources which you need more than ever because you're a mammal and you need mummy to feed you and mummy's not about. So save the resources that you have. Those are the stories as to why this really horrible feeling that we all of us know from personal experience, this despair of depression, sadness, the listlessness, the lack of energy, the giving up hope, the non-belief that anything good is ever going to happen, the anhedonia, that is to say, the failure to find pleasure in interacting with the world. This whole constellation which as I said is the normal phenotype for the pathology known as depression, it's built into the brain in order to enhance our chances of surviving and reproducing on the basis of what to do in a case of social separation and loss. Again, I hope you can see the value systems that arise from what I've been telling you. It is bad to separate a baby from its mother or from its caregiver. This is not something you need to learn. It's not something you need to be taught at school. You just know it's a bad thing to do. This system tells you it's a bad thing to do. Why? Because it makes you feel separation distress. It makes you feel panicky. This is a horrible feeling. And you don't want to engender this feeling. And the same could be said on the same sort of principles about the despair phase, about the sadness and depression. So value systems derived from these innate instinctual effects. The next one I'm not going to show you a slide. I couldn't in fact find my slide for that when I was putting this together. There's a system also that operates reciprocally with this new opioid-driven attachment system, which by the way is not only used for attachment of juveniles, of neonates to their mums. It's, this is the attachment bonding system for life. So the same system is used for your attachment to morphine and heroin if you're of that persuasion. But all pair bonding, mummy, daddy, family, friends, football team, nation, it's, so the losses that we're talking of, speaking of the separation, which can give rise to the despair I spoke of earlier, it's also in love relationships, which are the picture of an addiction. I can't do without it, oh my God, it's not the separation, it's protestant, it's not the separation, for what? Because only that person will do. That's how this system works. It's not unique to the mother-infant bond. But the reciprocal system I was about to introduce to you is a nurturance system, which has its own chemistries, estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, oxytocin, all of these chemicals which are greatly increased in pregnancy and in fact in sexual intercourse. But in pregnancy and by childbirth, these prepare the organism for nurturant behaviors. And maybe here I can quickly mention, because I know I'm a white South African and you probably assume I'm a right-wing arsehole. I must tell you, I'm not saying it should be like this, that there should be maternal behaviors built into our brains. I'm just saying, sorry, they are. And it's good that we know that these systems are there. It's not to say that we should then reify and idealize them so that we know, if we want to have social systems which transcend these base instinctual mechanisms, then it's good that we know that they're there. There is, I'm afraid to say, and I know it never wins me friends and influences people, but there is a nurturance system in the mammal brain and it is much more powerful in females on the average than in males. And there too, you can see the values that come with it. For babies crying, there is an innate instinctual disposition to pick it up and to comfort it, and that's the kind of behavior that that system activates. Oh, that I've already told you about. That's the separation distress system in humans, here it is in guinea pigs. Now this instinctual behavior is the big surprise and I think from an ethical point of view, perhaps the most interesting. And that is play. Rough and tumble play mammals need to do it. When I say need to do it, I mean like an instinct, we need to do it. If you deprive, for example, a rat, juvenile rat, of 15 minutes of play today, it will play for 15 minutes more tomorrow to make up the lost time. The mammals need to play. And it's obvious from all the other, in relation to all the other instincts that I've spoken to you about. That's play in rats, by the way. That's play in us. Same thing. It's clear why fear and separation distress and foraging, why they might be good for our survival and reproductive success. But why on earth should play be an instinct? Why should there be so much pleasure attached to playing? And you say to any kid, what do you like to do most? They say play. You say why? They say, because it's fun. Why is it so much fun? Why has built into our brains this need to play and this massive load of pleasurable affect that attaches to it, this joyous, pro-social giggling and laughing, you all know what I mean by rough and tumble play. You put the two animals like these ones, you put two of them together and the one will eventually invite the other one to play. In dogs, for example, they go down on, they put their four legs down like this and then they wag their bums in the air and they go like that. And that means, that means do you want to play? And then when the invitation is accepted, the other dog runs and then you chase it and then you pin it down and then you tickle it and then the ventral pins, dorsal pins, I showed you some pictures of them over there and they laugh in their own manner. With ultrasounds, you can hear the rats laughing. In fact, you can Google rat laughter. There's a nice video of what I'm telling you about with the ultrasonic diggling audible. So the one chases the other, they have this pleasurable pinning of each other and then they reverse the action and then they go in the other direction. This is rough and tumble play. It's great fun. They love to do it as I told you, they need to do it. In humans, of course, it gets elaborated in more symbolic forms, but the basic idea is the same. Like cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers or doctor, patient, parents and kiddies, a teacher and victim, in all of them, you'll notice there's a sort of a power relation and it's got to do with, and if you put two animals together, they will play juvenile mammals and one of them will tend to dominate over the other. And now here, things start to get tricky. Before I proceed, I want to pose explicitly a question that's been implicit in what I've been saying to you, which is, why do we have to do this? What on earth advantage biologically does this thing bestow on us? This, what I've told you about the hierarchy, the dominance element in play, it begins to answer the question. Although let me go back a step and tell you, I already mentioned, you ask any kid what do you like to do most? They say play, you say why, they say because it's fun, but if you empirically observe play episodes, the majority of play episodes end in tears. It's very, very important in terms of trying to understand what on earth is this behavior all about. That's our first clue. The second clue has to do with this dominance thing I spoke of. There's a really solid rule and it varies from one mammal species to the other, but there's, in rats it's 60, 40. We call it the 60, 40 rule, which states that the two rats will carry on having fun as long as the dominant one doesn't dominate more than 60% of the time. And even the submissive rat will enjoy the play as long as it doesn't have to be the submissive one more than 40% of the time. That's the 60, 40 rule. So they still have fun as long as the balance goes to 60, 40. If it goes over that, if you say, I'm the cop, you're the robber, I'm putting you in jail, and now you're staying in jail for the rest of the day, you know? This is not fun. This is, in fact, no longer play. It's torturing your brother. And the same thing applies to all the other games I spoke of. The doctor-doctor can quickly become sexual abuse. The cowboys and Indians can become really hurting, aggressively, the other kid. Nobody wants to be the submissive victim in play all the time. That's called bullying or something of the kind. So as long as you get to be the teacher or the doctor at least 40% of the time, there's still something in it for you. I want you to notice that what I've said so far is that it becomes not play anymore or not fun anymore, and that's when it, in fact, becomes one of the other instincts. So when fear is proper fear, it's not play, it's real. Now it's fear. Or now it's sex. Or now it's aggression, you know? These are, the play ends when it's not as if and when it becomes actual, fear, rage, et cetera. And this 60-40 balance likewise, so what I'm telling you is that you reach a threshold beyond which the play becomes unviable. And we think that this is what play is for. It's for, it's a pro-social activity in which you learn what can you get away with and what can't you in relation to the group, in relation to the other. And the other's effects and feelings come into play and so you learn to titrate your regression, your sexuality, your fear-inducing behaviors and so on, or your fear-tolerance behavior. And in this way, play plays an important part in the establishment of viable social groups. And I'm afraid to say, especially in the establishment of social hierarchies in establishing the pecking order. And we all say play is such fun and so on. If I remember playing at school, on the playing fields were a bloody scary place, where anything could happen. And certainly you found where you fit it into the pecking order very quickly. And just in case you don't know, I'll tell you that I very quickly decided this was too, I will rather just stay in the classroom near the teachers. That's how I became clever. Actually, I want to work more rather than go out there because I couldn't manage it. So this is what we think play is for. But I hope that you can see in this basic instinctual system, something which is obviously of profound importance for what we call ethics. In terms of titrating your behavior in relation to others, the establishment of social order, social hierarchy. And off to the juvenile phase, into adolescence, the competitive element of play becomes more and more apparent and then it becomes Wall Street. So what about humans? Of course, those systems which we share with all other humans, I mean with all other mammals, we humans have something more than that and this is my closing remarks. We have not more cortex, by the way. We don't have the biggest brains, whales, elephants have bigger brains than us. We don't have more cortex, they have more than us. We don't even have a better cortical, sub-cortical ratio. Even rats have a better cortical, sub-cortical ratio. The thing is the ratio of prefrontal cortex to other cortex. Prefrontal cortex is our evolutionary pride and joy. That's what makes us human. So what is it that prefrontal cortex does? Well, in a nutshell, it inhibits the outputs of these instinctual emotional systems that I've told you about. So that when I say it inhibits the outputs, I mean it inhibits the feeling states, the affective feeling states, especially ventromesial frontal cortex. Whoops, what happened there? Especially ventromesial frontal cortex. It inhibits the feeling and it inhibits the behavioral stereotype that the feeling compulsively motivates. And by doing that, it frees up the possibility for dosilateral prefrontal cortex to think. So rather than just automatically do, you inhibit the action and then you have the virtual action that we call thinking, imaginary action. If I did this, what would happen? If I did that, what would happen? If I did the other thing, what would happen? And this gives us an enormous flexibility over innate instinctual behavioral patterns. We're not the only ones with prefrontal cortex, but we've got the most. So all of this inhibited instinct, which enables us to think, plan. Like for example, my headmaster is a true story. My headmaster irritates me. So my rage instinct says, hit the bastard. Thankfully, thinking says no, don't. This is not such a good idea to hit your headmaster. The outcome will not be good for you. So rather think of something else. And so eventually I came up with the solution. When nobody's looking, I'll go and let down these tires. So that is still aggressive, rage-driven behavior, but it's what a psychoanalyst calls sublimated. This is what thinking is for. This is why it's such a good thing. Thinking is a very good thing and we have every reason to be very proud of it and our ethical systems, the ones that came, as I said, presumably 12,000 years ago where we started codifying rules of engagement. The law, all of this, derives from thinking, from our logical grammatical abstract cognitive capacities attached as they are to this crowning glory of our cortical development. But it also comes at a price and I want to end with that. The price is because of the inhibition of these instinctual emotional systems, which is very good that we can inhibit them. This is what gives us free will as opposed to instinct. By the way, some of us call it free won't. It's the capacity to not have to act. So free will is or free won't is a very good thing, but it makes us unaware of our own motivations. It's by blocking them out, of by suppressing the consciousness, the affect, which compels us to act in these instinctual, stereotyped ways by the freeing up of the mental space for thinking, also makes our motivations uniquely opaque to us. So this is one uniquely human capacity that comes with this flexibility of thought, as good as it is, sublimation, as I said, we Freudians call it. It's the price of it is this, gosh, why am I here? What is the meaning of all of this? If you were to ask the person who made that piece of ochre in Blombos Cave some 70,000 years ago, why did you make that? I strongly suspect she wouldn't have the foggiest clue why she made it. She'll just say, I don't know, I just felt like it. Or more likely, which would be a more uniquely human thing, she'd make up some nonsense story. She'd say, oh, it's because if you do this, then it rains, which of course is a confabulation. That's another uniquely human capacity. We make up stories. We don't know why we're doing what we do. As I say, that's the price. One last comment in this vein before I end is that this also applies to all of our ethical systems. So the ethical systems, the proper ones, the civilized ones, the cultural ones, the codified ones, the ones that are written down, they are remember at best 12,000 years old, actually much less than 12,000 years old. 12,000 years versus 200 million years. In South Africa, we have a phrase, farting against thunder. And this is, I think, a good phrase to describe the ratio of these codified systems and this little cork bobbing on this ocean of evolutionary time. Those codified systems, great as they are, I'm all for them, there are very fragile things compared to the forces that they're meant to control. That's why another uniquely human capacity is hypocrisy. These codes, they're there, they exist. We admire them and should, but we shouldn't overestimate the capacity of them to actually regulate what we really do. A last word as a white South African, I'll tell you that the prologue to the human rights thingy, the United Nations Bill of Rights. The prologue was written by a countryman of mine known as Jan Christian Smuts, who was a white supremacist and he wrote the prologue to the United Nations Bill of Rights. I think that speaks volumes. In fact, just look at the United Nations altogether and you'll see the difference between our ethical aspirations that have drawn up our prefrontal loads and the real ethical systems, those evil biological ones underneath. And that's why, as I said, I think it's very important that we know about them. Thanks very much. Evolutionary. You went into a lot of wonderful detail on the instinctual systems and then I felt like you made a huge leap to the prefrontal systems there and I don't really understand the connection and specifically I don't understand why that system should create a lack of awareness of the other systems. So if you think back to what I said right at the beginning about those simple homeostatic mechanisms of the need detection and the deviations from how much safe water you need, it's felt as unpleasure and that feeling state is what motivates you to do the behavior that rectifies the need. That is to say, what did I say? Thirst, I can't remember what I was talking about. So that means look for water and when you get it, you know, lap it up. So that removes the unpleasant feeling of thirst. Now, the, oh gosh, I'm remembering your question asked. For a moment I forgot your question which is illustrating the point that you don't always know what you're doing. So the suppression of the feeling state suppresses the innate stereotype. The feeling state is what makes the animal do the thing that that feeling state gives rise to. So the suppression of the feeling state, that is to say the suppression of the consciousness, the suppression of the feeling that announces to you in consciousness why you're doing what you're doing. The suppression of that also suppresses the behavioral stereotype that goes with it. And you see it with patients, I mean those of you, I don't know how many of you on neurologists or neurosurgeons or neuropsychologists who work with frontal lobe patients, especially the ones with orbiter basal frontal lesions, they have no impulse control and you see all these instinctual stereotypes popping out all over the place. So that's why you have to be unaware of what the affect, of what the feeling, the conscious state is as to what drives you. That at least is the theory. That's what we think about why the suppression, but that the frontal lobes, especially the ventromesial frontal lobes to press those systems is unquestionable. And that's the explanation as to how it relates to consciousness. Then as I say, secondarily, you open up. There is no capacity for thought if you act instinctually. So thinking is kind of like the opposite of acting. Thinking is not acting. It's virtual acting is what defines thinking and it requires an ambition of action to be able to think. Think before you ink as I was taught when I was at school. When it comes to instinctual systems, the action and the feeling are the same thing. The feeling is, that's what bestows meaning for the animal on the scenario. That's how you recognize, I know what this is, because it feels like that. That means freeze or flee. I know what this is because it feels like that. Hit the bastard. So the feeling state is the meaning of the situation which is what releases the motor stereotype. If you remove the feeling, you're removing the compulsion. It's a beautiful talk. Psychoanalysis is in your title. I think you should say something about psychoanalysis. And I was thinking how you've covered Melanie Klein and her views of psychoanalysis. I assume that there are other aspects of psychoanalytic thinking that your talk touches on. And if you would... Thank you. You're absolutely right that psychoanalysis is in the title because everything I said to you is a kind of translation of basic psychoanalytical tenets via what we've learned in behavioral neuroscience. I started out as a behavioral neuroscientist who felt frustrated by what was missing in the neuroscience of my day, which was the late 70s, early 80s. And then I trained as a psychoanalyst. So I'm both a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst. And I have then spent the rest of my working life translating the one way of thinking into the other because ultimately they're both... Psychoanalysis is the subjective perspective on the object of neuroscience. It's the same part of nature just looked at from two different observational points of view. So I can translate very loosely but you've already done it for me. We are, first of all, animals. This was the starting point of psychoanalysis that human beings are a species of animal, of mammal, of primate, just like all the others. And therefore we have instincts. We have drives, we have instincts. I've showed you where they are and how they function. Thereby skimmed over everything that was covered by Freudian drive theory and by the pleasure principle and the need to then refine all of this. It's the reality principle and so on. There's even the Nirvana principle in there by the way in relation to the set points. But as much as that covers the same ground as Freudian drive theory, it also serves as an important corrective on Freudian drive theory. Freudian drive theory was largely sucked out of the Freudian thumb because there was no data. And Freud was the first to admit that we have to have a drive theory and an instinct theory because we are animals, there must be drives and instincts governing us. But sitting behind the couch, listening to people, talking to you is not the best method for finding what the basic biological driving mechanisms of the human brain are. So neuroscientific techniques, especially from animal neuroscience studies have shown us what those basic systems are. And I think that that's extremely important in that knowledge for psychoanalysts. Actually for psychiatrists generally. I think that the whole of the DSM enterprise could be reconfigured on the basis of the instinctual emotional systems that I've spoken to you about. There's a hell of a lot I could tell you about each of them in relation to psychopathology. And I really do believe that's the future of psychiatry. But very importantly, it's the future of a psychiatry which is not purely psychopharmacological in the sense of just add salt or just add pepper and then it'll be okay. These are systems which in their very nature respond to certain kinds of social situations. They are object relational systems. The feelings mean something in relation to what's happening to the animal. You can't work with those systems independently of what we call psychology or what's covered by psychological concepts. But conversely, it informs psychological concepts radically to understand. But to come back to Freud. So the Freudian drive theory was clearly it doesn't square with what we now know. Although we can recognize what Freud saw like when Freud spoke of a libidinal drive with general all-purpose pleasure seeking appetitive tendency. That's the seeking system. It does pretty much the same work. By the way, when Freud discovered or invented the libido theory, he was using cocaine quite a bit. And I think that he might have got some sort of intuition there of this force because it was strengthened in him at that time. But the post-Freudian theories like Fabin and Winnicott and Bolby in particular argued that not everything is libidinal. Not everything in the instinctual life of the human infant and indeed adult can be explained in terms of this libidinal drive. And that is absolutely borne out by the evidence that there is a separate, for example, attachment instinct. It's an instinct. It's quite as its own neurochemistry, its own neuroanatomy, its own behaviors that are attached to it, et cetera. So that's important for correctives. And you mentioned some others and certainly I would agree with you about play. Winnicott is a psychoanalyst who spoke of the enormous importance of play and what he called transitional phenomena and transitional states which are kind of a broadened concept of play. And you can see how it fits with what I was saying. You know, why this should be so terribly, terribly important? This as if thing called play where you find the limits or you stay the value of having such a powerful motivational tendency. And it plays out throughout development and indeed in the psychoanalytical consulting room. What we call transference is not real. You know, the capacity to think about what you're doing to recognize it's as if you are my father even though you're not real. I think that there are many ways in which we can conceptualize even what happens in free association dreams and the analytic setting in these terms. So lastly, you know, what I said at the end about how we are opaque to ourselves. Sublimation, I really mean it. I don't use the word facetiously. I think that that really is what happens, you know, that we have these basic instinctual tendencies but they're not enough, they're not serviceable by themselves. So you have to learn from experience and this is, you know, what Freud called ego, reality principle, that the inhibition of those tendencies, the value of the inhibiting of those tendencies and the complexification and rendering more flexible of our options. All of that is what ego is for and what the reality principle is all about, learning from experience. So much in life is utterly unpredictable in the environmental niche that you find yourself in utterly unpredictable by these basic instinctual forces. So this sort of like explains a lot of what Freudians, you know, call and also why things are rendered unconscious. These more primitive tendencies of why they're rendered unconscious. So thank you for allowing me to point out that everything that I've spoken about from a neurobiological point of view is covering the same territory as what psychoanalysts have observed over a century from a subjective point of view and the great value is to be able to bring those two things together so that we can finish the job, don't fight. I have a very general question about the implications for the extremely interesting considerations you raise for thinking about ethics. When philosophers say that is never implies an ought, what they usually mean is not that you can't tell a scientific or perhaps historical or anthropological story about the origins of our ethical thought beliefs commitments, but that such a story can never constitute a justification or an establishment of the truth of our ethical beliefs. So these philosophers wanna distinguish very sharply between accounts of origin and justification or accounts of validity. And they think that ultimately you can't justify ethical thought on a non-ethical foundation. In some sense, ethical thought is gonna have to be self-justifying. Maybe roughly now this lead to the way that we might think mathematical thought has to be self-justifying. So my question for you is just do you accept such a sharp distinction? Do you see the considerations you raise simply on the side of origins? Do they potentially have any implications for understanding or evaluating the validity of different ethical systems comparing them from a justificatory perspective? So I mean, first of all to say, just by, with reference to my credentials, I am no philosopher. But there is a really important distinction between scientists and philosophers in terms of the drawing of distinctions. The distinction that you draw is, I think, it's understandable why in terms of a didactic system, one would want to draw that distinction. But if you look at it in terms of how it works in nature, I don't believe that the distinction is entirely valid. Let me illustrate what I'm saying by reference to a sort of silly example. Why do you never see science saying, do not eat the snakes? Because nobody would have any desire to eat snakes in the first place. But you do have science saying, no smoking or thou shalt not kill. These commandments are only necessary because they are regulatory systems with reference to innate tendencies or likely tendencies. So you can't understand the codes without understanding what they are codifying, what they are regulating. And I don't think you can understand what they're regulating without looking at the origins. And this is the relevance of the stuff that I've been saying for the other end of the spectrum. And that's why I was saying at the end about, for example, the UN Bill of Rights. You have to understand this thing, this thought in relation to the thunder that it's meant to regulate. I mean, what I was thinking of in particular was you. I may have misheard you, but you referred to the ethical systems that arise out of these very fundamental features of all mammals as evil. I heard myself. You know, that needing to be counterbalanced by something else. So that's an evaluative judgment. I was wondering, it's an ethical judgment. From what standpoint that was being made and whether ultimately a complete picture, terms of the kinds of considerations you wanna raise would fold that in and we could be able to assess that too. So it's interesting, you refer to that remark of mine because as I said, that's a thought wrong word. You know, I think that that doesn't actually do, that isn't the correct use of the word in order to illustrate the general point that we're talking about. The side that I'm on is not that these base instincts are evil. These base instincts are the roots of the ethical systems both in terms of what we want to do, positively what is meant to be good, like it's good to work. And I'm using it in a very kind of, I'm overgeneralizing when I say that. It's bad to separate babies from their mothers but also in the negative sense, that it's bad to run at people with knives. This relates to the feeling of fear. At its most rudimentary fundamental level, I really don't of course for one moment think that you can reduce the whole of ethics to these systems. I just think the relevance is pretty obvious that to know these things has massive implications I would think for how we understand why we have the ethical codes that we do, what the contents of such codes concentrate on, and also why we are so hypocritical when it comes to them. Why we simply don't behave the way that we say we want to. You know that the year we're looking at neural ethics and I consider this thought by Dr. Solms to be very helpful in terms of establishing a combination of what we're about to hear in the next 20 or 21 talks over the next three or four years. So when it comes to neuroethics, I think the brainstem localization of many of these basic affective systems is terribly important. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.