 If you grew up in an environment where the probability, the base rate of a loud bang being a gunshot was very high, then when you move to a new environment, it's perfectly rational, perfectly rational to predict that those loud bangs are gunshots. The thing is that when you move to a new environment, what you have to do is forage for information to tune your predictions. Scientists call it your internal model. Your brain is running a model of your body in the world, and you have to update that model, and that means learning new stuff. But if you're metabolically encumbered, if you have a lot of stress in your life, if you actually have a metabolic problem in your body, you will have a hard time learning new stuff. You'll have a hard time updating that model. And so again, I would say it's not because people lack the will. It's because there's something interfering with their ability to learn, and that's the important thing to focus on. So we've heard the phrase, can't teach an old dog new tricks. Oh yes, you can. Oh yes, you can. Yeah. It just takes a lot of energy. What does neuroscience say for us to actually rewire these pathways if we've grown up in these environments or had certain patterns of behavior that have been tuned to the environment we were in previously? Well, I think learning is like driving, really. It's like learning any skill. You have to give a lot of energy and effort at the beginning, and then eventually, over time, stuff becomes pretty automatic. So if you grew up in an environment, you're not responsible. Here's the sucky thing about the way things are with the brain. You're not responsible for the world that was curated for you as a child. It's not your fault, and it's not your responsibility as a child. Other people, adults who take care of you or don't, are curating a world for you, and your brain is wiring itself to that world. But here's the sucky bit. As an adult, it may not be your fault. You may not be culpable for the wiring that you have, but you are responsible for it. The reason why you are is because nobody else can change it, but you. That feels unfair, and it is unfair, but it's also the way things are. Also, I would say it's very easy for me as a scientist to say, well, you just have to curate new experiences for yourself. You just have to expose yourself to new information. You just have to practice but a lot of people don't. I grew up in poverty, and I know how hard it is to claw your way out of it. I'm a woman, so that was a mark against me. But I'm also in this country, you would call me white, so that was a benefit. I had some advantages, but a lot of people don't have a lot of choice in their lives. But I guess what I'm trying to suggest to people is that even though very few of us have as much choice as we'd like or want, we all have more control than we think we do. That means that it's not as easy to change that wiring as we're making it sound. It's actually pretty bloody hard, but it's like any kind of skill. You have to invest a lot of energy, practice a lot, and then eventually it becomes pretty automatic, but it takes a while. Sometimes it feels bad because think about when you're exercising. For me, maybe it takes me, I get to about 20 minutes into a workout, and then I'm feeling not like I just want to stop. I'm not feeling good. I'm not one of these people who has a runner's high or whatever. I've never been that person. I wish I was that person, but I am not that person. I'm the person who wants to stop. I'm the person who doesn't even want to run to begin with. I know that sometimes feeling bad doesn't mean that something's wrong. It just means you're doing something hard. I think about the Marines, pain is weakness leaving the body. I love that. I love that saying because it's really, you're doing something hard. It feels like shit, but you have to push through it. In the end, you will be stronger and healthier for it. It's the same thing about retraining your brain, so to speak. When you're learning something new and you're learning a new skill, it sometimes doesn't feel bad. It doesn't sometimes feel good. It can feel bad, but it doesn't mean that you're doing the wrong thing necessarily. It doesn't mean something's wrong in the world. It just means you're doing something hard.