 Wonderful, how's the audio? Is this good? And I'm assuming I just push the red button here to advance Okay, there we go Okay, before we begin stand on up we got to move Not enough movement this weekend Okay, just some flutter kicks On your toes Yeah, open up your ribs a little bit just a minute here for the body, you know And some backstroke don't be shy. You got to be disinhibited Very nice, give me some squats touch the earth. Oh, we got some shy people disinhibit If you can't be physically free here, I don't know where And Relax, okay, just shake up shoulders a little rolling and very good. Okay. Have a seat We need more movement Because I'm the crazy one here Okay, so I want to tell a little bit of a story about how I came to this study a few years ago. I went to Africa and I really wanted to go to Gombe, Tanzania to see the chimpanzees Which I did and it was great got to see my nearest relatives in the wild but on the way there I stopped in Dar es Salaam and Went to a hotel. This is a standard tourist hotel and I was in the lobby talking to one of the locals one of the fellows who worked at the hotel and He struck up a conversation. It was asking me about why I was in Africa. Why I was there and He was mystified that I was there by myself. I said, well, I'm here to write a book and I'm doing some research And he's a well, what about your family? Well, they're back home. He says well, why didn't you bring them along with you? And I had a hundred reasons why I didn't But he couldn't understand it and he asked the question over and over and over again How can you travel around the world without your family? and at that moment I felt very odd and very Abnormal even just to be behaving in this way and it really got me thinking about tribe and About the social dimension of paleo. So that's what led to this whole thing So a little bit of context starting out with the primates predicament Why do we feel so odd in the modern world my body feels just completely At odds with this predicament that we have now and of course a lot of people now have been talking about the mismatch and It shows up in books by this very name the mismatch between our Legacy program and our ancestral heritage and the conditions we find ourselves in Everybody's talking this talk now and you see these kind of phrases all over in in many different fields now and this is modern day Botswana and I love this is I took thousands of pictures in Africa This is my favorite one because it shows the ancestral environment or the classic Ancestral environment obviously there were many depending on climate and so on But this is the classic one the semi-wooded mosaic grassland I want you to put yourself on the ground there in your imagination in habitat What's it like say it's a million years ago? What's it feel like how are you gonna make a living? How are you gonna stay alive? How are you gonna find food? How are you gonna find water? This brings up what I think is the very essence of paleo. What is the essence of paleo? I think it comes down to one word and that word is not food That word is exposure Because this is what you're going to experience your naked body Exposed to heat cold wind lightning strikes thunderstorms wildfires and most of all predation Right because for most of our history most of our time on this planet. We have been cat food That's not an exaggeration. Most of our time as hominids. We have been small stature Not hunter-gatherers, but hunted-gatherers So now put put yourself in this picture. How do you avoid? Being consumed by a carnivore by the way There are many many more predators in Africa in ancestral times than there are today and More ferocious ones larger ones So how do you avoid it being consumed? What do you do naturally when you show up in a new environment? You gang up right you get you cluster up And that's our protection because we don't have the tools We don't have the defenses, but we can gang up we can form a tribe and that's what makes the difference That's what keeps us alive a big tribe of humans Can fend off most carnivores? So this is just a tribe of hides and bushmen that I went out hunting with this is our Historical norm. This is the status quo going out in small groups. You don't you do not go hunting You do not go exploring by yourself It's crazy your life expectancy in this type of environment by yourself would be measured in hours days, maybe Maybe you make it a week not very long so In comparison to the modern What we call the alien environment and this of course is alien in so many ways and if we had more time We'd go right down the list as Joel Salaton was talking about the Abnormality of the modern world the breadth and the depth of that is Astonishing when you when you start listing all the qualities of the modern world and how different they are. It's unbelievable And it leads of course to all the diseases of civilization that we know so well No need to belabor those and the way we feel the experience of living in the modern world the Just the anxiety the depression that comes from the mismatch And it all comes in we are so confused about how to live in this modern world so many people come into us the experts People don't know how to eat anymore. People don't know how to move their bodies anymore We need to consult experts for just about every dimension of our lives now and in a way We are the most disempowered people ever So that's all part of the mismatch So what about paleo? What about the paleo? World view what about paleo? Cognition what can we say about what our lives were like and our experience was like back then? What's going on for him right now? He's using his whole body and his whole brain to experience that world in order to hunt Successfully so both sides of his brain horizontally integrated mind and body Vertically integrated That's the historical norm and that's what's very different from the way we behave today now We're we're horizontally disintegrated. We're vertically disintegrated and we feel it We only use like the left upper corner of our brains anymore to really get a sense of Paleo cognition the the essence of paleo life. This book was really fundamental for me The reenchantment of the world he makes a distinction in here between participatory and non participatory consciousness and When you start thinking about this you realize that participatory consciousness is the historical norm for 99.99% of our time on earth We have been immersed in habitat and everything that we do is about living in Habitat and using our bodies to participate in and to know the world we learn our body our world through our bodies through that physical experience, but now this new thing non participatory consciousness Which is basically science which means stepping back and isolating ourselves and Insulating ourselves away from the world and of course, this is the guy that made a lot of that happen If you study Descartes, you know that he's famous not not just for this distinction between mind and body that we hear So much about when Descartes was a young man He set out to become this great philosopher and he said I'm gonna doubt everything I'm gonna doubt everything that I know including The sensations that I feel in my body in other words. He said I'm gonna distrust All that sensory information that's coming into my brain because there might be some alien being out there Who's pumping this false sensory information into my brain and how would I ever know and? so that That assumption that model became the paradigm for how we operate in the modern world it's of course very powerful and Gives us some very powerful knowledge, but it's also very destructive non Participate in consciousness. This is participate in consciousness These tribal people from New Guinea when they do a dance. It's all about immersion all about experience making every cell in your body Seeking out that experience in habitat Same thing here participatory consciousness Shamans all over the world immerse yourself in nature same thing Another way that this play is out is not seeing yourself in isolation From habitat, but actually being part of something larger a lot of you who have studied physiology Will have heard of Claude Bernard a famous physiologist who talked about the interior Mil you right that the Fluid that bathes all the cells in our body well now people are starting to talk about the Exterior mil you the habitat the environment that we live in and even to the point now where some people are talking about Habitat as functioning as external organs to our bodies, and this is not just metaphor This this makes a whole lot of sense The air the water plants they keep us alive So anyway, this all goes into what I call primal holism this paleo worldview that includes all of these elements now When I went to massage school a few years ago a lot of people were talking about the holistic model and usually that came down to mind body and spirit and Practitioners would say well, I take a holistic approach because I consider mind body and spirit But the more I read of anthropology and native peoples I realized that was just half the story because whether you go to Australia or Africa or talk to Native Americans all these six elements come up over and over again So this I think is the holistic model that really is paleo And Today I want to talk. I mean we could spend an entire academic year just on this but today I want to talk about tribe So tribe social neuroscience the other word that's really big right now is interpersonal neurobiology Which is sort of the same thing attachment and Ubuntu By the way, how many people have heard this word Ubuntu? Okay, okay. We've got some connection here So social neuroscience Interpersonal neurobiology your body is bigger than you think your body is bigger than it appears of course poets have Kind of pondered this idea for a long time, but now it's turning out to be physically true John Dunn no man is an island and this of course has been dismissed for hundreds of years as mere poetry Just mere metaphor and now we know it's much more than that And this is some of the literature that's starting to come out in social neuroscience and Interpersonal neurobiology very hot topic this these days in everywhere from education to the corporate world People are starting to wonder about these large scale interactions and influences between people and For me it comes down to this the body is an open system and it's much more open than we realize We're very used to taking the cartoon approach where the body is an open system in the sense that we can ingest solids and liquids and gasses and Expelled solids and liquids and gases and that's those are the openings right and if we get those solids and liquids and gases just right Then we're going to be healthy Well, it turns out that we're much more permeable than that Being hyper social animals. We are permeable to stories ideas memes Culture all of this stuff goes into us all the time and it literally changes our bodies This is beyond dispute now We know this to be true and of course all the placebo no sebo research shows this to be true Your body changes under the influence of these stories that we tell each other So our health and our performance are things that we create in common. It's not an individual enterprise Clever Hans how many people have heard clever Hans? Okay, family the most famous horse in all of psychology Back in the 19th century This guy takes his horse around from village to village and makes us clam He says my horse can do arithmetic problems and I'm going to prove it to you So he poses an arithmetic problem to the horse and the horse will tap out with his hoof the right answer And it was reliable and it happened over and over again from village to village and Finally they called in these guys from the university and they did a series of experiments and They discovered if the owner was not there The horse couldn't perform and if the owner didn't know the answer to the question The horse couldn't perform either So it turned out that the horse as a highly social animal Was able to read the very small gestures in facial expression and posture of the owner And so as the horse began to tap the horse could tell the anticipation in the owner's body and Stop tapping at the right answer Amazing story, you know, it's amazing veterinary story, right? But it goes beyond that because we now know that we all have this capability We are all clever hounds and we can we are all that sensitive to one another It all starts with mirror. How many people have been tracking mirror neurons? Okay, this is fascinating because In the cortex of the brain we have these neurons with a dual function They are motor neurons. In other words, they can stimulate movement in the body Lot of motor neurons in the brain. That's that's pretty interesting, but they also Respond to the observation of movement and Intention and posture. So if I look at your bodies right now, I'm going to stimulate some of those mirror neurons And what it does it allows me to run a simulation of what you're experiencing right now in your bodies I'm actually feeling what you are feeling because I'm a hyper-social animal and you're feeling some of that from me as well So all primates have these mirror neurons and it's fascinating. This is how children learn to move But it's more than that. This is how we Read one another So Cosolino here very interesting statements. He starts out this book Pointing out the fact that we are hyper-social and we're so hyper-social that it no longer makes sense To study human brains in isolation and all these these pictures You see now in textbooks and all over the internet of individual human brains and all dissected out and fMRI and everything else It's a little bit misleading because a human brain works best in Conversation and cooperation with other brains. That's actually the unit of human intelligence Not the single brain and of course the brain is a social organ and the body is a social system The tribe is a sensory organ imagine what it feels like you got on a hunt and You know, there's dangerous carnivores You know, you're in a dangerous environment Well, wouldn't it be nice to have an extended sensory system and wouldn't it be nice if the other guys in your tribe We're smart and observant and wouldn't it be nice if you could kind of tap into that Now most of us have not been in this situation Some people have been in combat some people know that if you go out on patrol in a hostile environment You get the same sense and I've done a lot of mountain climbing And I know that you pay a lot of attention to your partner your partner becomes a sensory organ So Dr. Daniel Siegel talks a lot about this resonance system It's not just the mirror neurons in the brain Because the mirror I observe your body my mirror neurons start to fire and they stimulate deeper into my brain into the limbic system The emotional center of my brain That's pretty interesting But it keeps going deeper all the way down into my guts into my viscera. So now I can have this full body Experience of your body That's why it's called the resonance circuitry my basically my whole body is just a resonator For your emotional experience and vice versa. So we use our bodies to read one other. That's fascinating stuff and it It does not bode well for what's happening in the modern world right now because with all the sedentary living and all the people Who grew up just doing this and not training their bodies? What happens here that whole resonance system begins to atrophy and Therefore I think the big problem with sedentary living is not so much the diabetes and obesity and heart disease I think it really is going to lead to some serious social decay and social dysfunction People in dance and theater know that to be true. You train your body. You train your body to be more sensitive to other bodies That's what we need to be doing Okay, so here's the here's the feedback system you feel you have a social experience of somebody else's body That also feeds back into your brain and modifies the circuitry of your brain Amazing and it's not just people friends to wall a lot of people will know this name famous primatologist works with chimpanzees a lot And here's what he's observed with chimps So the great buzzword here is embodied cognition. We think not just with our heads Not just with our brains, but with our entire bodies and the bodies of other people this book here Connected what they've done is they trace human behaviors and diseases through networks and a lot of this is like Statistical tracking and a lot of it's pretty boring actually, but what they've discovered is that behaviors can travel long distances through networks and It works like this you're it's not too surprising that your friends might influence your behavior They might influence whether or not you smoke cigarettes or whether you gain weight or lose weight That's not too surprising because you see your friends all the time, but it's also the case That your friends friends will influence the state of your body and your behavior If your friends friends gain weight or start smoking or stop smoking that can have an impact on you But it's even more than that It's your friends friends friends people you never see If they change their behaviors, that's eventually going to get back to you in some form or another We are that sensitive and Here's just one example. There's a million examples But halo effect if somebody in your family has gastric bypass surgery you might very well lose weight as well You know, maybe it's just simple mimicry of behavior, but I think there's more to it even than that Health follows a social gradient where you are in the social hierarchy Makes a big difference of your health and it's not just where you actually are in the social hierarchy That makes a difference. It's your perception of where you are Do you perceive yourself to be of high rank? If so your health is probably better Do you perceive yourself to be of a low rank? Your health is probably going to be worse This is Unbelievable stuff and it tends to get back most people explain this as a stress response because if you perceive yourself below rank That's a stresser And of course it all gets back to this yet. We are hyper social because of this reality. This is paleo reality And it's a matter of life and death Whether or not you are accepted into the group into the tribe or whether you reject it And we play this out in the modern world in the silliest ways, right? even just Somebody will make a just a minor comment about your behavior or whether or not you're included in the group Do you get invited to the party or not? And we behave as if it's a matter of life and death because our bodies take it that way We don't want to be left behind on the grassland. It's too dangerous I'm gonna go over so There's a million of examples about of this type of thing. Oh, this one's particularly interesting We use the same circuitry in our brain to register social pain of isolation and rejection as physical pain same circuitry and We were born forget born to run, okay? Born to attach. This is really where the action is And I'm gonna tell you why we are born premature All born premature even if you're born like on time, you know at the end of your nine-month period You're still born premature because think about it. You can't function in the world You can't even stand up. You can't grasp anything You can't go anywhere you cannot function at all you were born premature and the reason is because your head is so big Your brain is so big and mom has limitations on how big a child can pass through her So you're born premature That's nature's strategy for making this possible. So what's the downside when you're born premature and helpless? So what do you do? Well, you better attach to somebody right away You better have a cute face and big eyes and make gurgly noises and cooing noises And you better find a way to attach to some caregiver usually mom And if you are successful at making that attachment Then you're gonna be much more likely to survive and here's the predicament because we're here What's what's the life expectancy of this infant on the grassland? In Africa, we're talking minutes Hours right so you better attach to a caregiver as soon as possible That's why when you take infants and you put different symbols in front of their face This always gets a response Versus abstract symbols the human face is the most significant object in the universe to an infant That's your life line all gets back to stress it all gets back to the autonomic nervous system We're running the background programming in our body all the time asking this question. Is the universe friendly? Attachment is so important because if you successfully attach to somebody that becomes the primal Relationship and the model for all the other relationships you're ever gonna have in your life. I need to feel felt This is what the infant wants, but this is what we want throughout life We want to connect with other people. We want to feel felt. We want that resonance with other people We need each other and Here's the payoff Here's the neurobiology in action if you have a secure attachment with a caregiver Here's how it plays in your body over time Growth hormone goes up your resilience goes up impulse control pro-social behaviors all the good stuff come from this It also psychologically provides a secure home base because if you're securely attached to a caregiver You're willing to go out and explore the world Because you know you can come back to that secure attachment Something bad happens to you you can come back and that's a feeling that lasts throughout life They've been able to measure this and quantify it and test it It's just remarkable what they've done is they can bring in mom with the infant into a room and Observe what happens when mom leaves and then mom comes back They can observe how attached the child is to the mother and then they can describe secure attachment and insecure attachment and make predictions from that and They found through this research that Individuals who are securely attached Are much more successful later in life, and it's not just career, but it's health outcomes as well It's a much better predictor than all the other predictors We have including things like SAT scores and all the numerical stuff. This is the best predictor so Ubuntu now this is something that Africans have known for a long time right because when you grow up in a highly exposed natural environment You know tribe is what's keeping you alive So Ubuntu I first ran into this phrase in the museum in Johannesburg, and this was a Display about the Bushman and it caught my eye There's the language in the Bushman language. We are people through other people it's a question of social identity and Also formed the basis with Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. They used this philosophy of Ubuntu when Post-apartheid era in South Africa It's actually written into this legal document that that really transformed an entire country And here is a traditional Bushman family. It's no surprise that they would think this way. You don't go out on your own Here is an expression of Ubuntu. This comes from I believe a Native American tribe, but it's It's classic Ubuntu. We are people through other people I am who I am because of who we are If the people are sick I too am sick only when everyone is healthy will I too be healthy? That's a paleo perspective Doesn't mean just rolling over to whatever's happening in your group It's more about social consciousness. It's more about social mindfulness It's not about Western Individualism this whole John Wayne thing and this belief that we can make it as individuals That's a really odd point of view and of course we see it all over the health and fitness industry and Here's where I think that modern health and fitness industry kind of defeats itself because with so much emphasis on the individual We lose out on all the benefits that come from being in tribe So it's kind of this weird photoshopped artificial paradise here that I Think when you get right down to it doesn't make a whole lot of sense Maslow, what did you put at the top of the pyramid? Individual self-actualization. This is not Ubuntu. This is a Western concept here This is Ubuntu All right, this is attachment You can depend on your tribe. All right, that's the message here This is not Ubuntu. All right. I'm number one I'm an individual Really? No, nobody's an individual This is more reality. This is paleo So here's how I put it all together Over on the left here. Everybody talks about diet exercise diet exercise. Yes. I don't even use the word Exercise anymore. I use the word movement. I think exercise is optional, but movement is essential And I don't use the word diet anymore I use the word food real food sure that that's simple and both of those are I think are pretty mature ideas You know these disciplines are pretty well worked out now over here stress a lot of people talk about stress management. I Don't even use that term. I use stress education I think that's going to be a hot new field this whole idea of mindfulness meditation is going to become more important But the fourth one here attachment Ubuntu and the quality of our relations if we don't have our relations lined up, right? If we don't have secure trusting Relationships then the rest of that stuff that doesn't work so well either So in practical application in your worlds and in your practices I can't really tell you how to go from you know focus on individual to a more Ubuntu perspective But I can't suggest that we widen our circle of attention Because our body our physiology we are a process inside of a social process inside an ecological process that's who we are we're always in motion and Here's another Ubuntu perspective Reorientation away from the self That's a spiritual perspective And get to focus off me Get to focus on we And here I was in the Kalahari a few years back and here's my stuff and Thank you very much We have time for a few questions Hi, I just a minor clarification question when you mentioned that Individuals who are more securely attached to their mother later predict a wide variety of successes in life, right? Was that the kind of infant who when their mother leaves? Immediately immediately dissolved into tears and crying and couldn't handle it or the ones who are braver in novel situations because that was my familiarity with that test right that the infant strange situation what is considered secure attachment is the mother leaves and There might be some protests from the child The mother comes back and here's that here's the defining moment is when the child embraces the mother Hi mommy hi mommy and then goes back to plan What is known as insecure attachment or and there's several varieties of insecure attachment avoid an attachment anxious attachment? Where the child becomes like hyper clinging and won't go back to plan or avoids the mother entirely as if Angry that mom left so those varieties of insecure attachment it all gets subdivided in a million ways But that's the basic distinction for most of us is secure and insecure Thank you also just a just another thing if our brains are outside ourselves and Defined by our interaction with other people would that make us individual people neurons in a in a social brain? that's a great metaphor and People are starting to talk about another part of that metaphor is to talk about the social synapse and two people come together It's very much a synaptic type of interaction So yeah, I think there's something there a whole book in fact With the you know recent amount of individuals who've turned to attacking members of their own tribe like we saw in Colorado recently and Evidence that of detachment from their tribe in the first place before attacking what essentially would be members of their tribe Do we see in hunter-gatherer societies where people have been rejected from their groups coming back to inflict damage or harm as Kind of retribution or is that a novel I? Don't know. I really I haven't read anything on that and I suspect It probably didn't happen that much, but you know, there's always been crazy people Just want to say throughout this conference I've been getting a lot of Education from my head, and I just wanted to thank you for educating my heart. Oh Thank you very much Thanks, I really enjoyed the talk as well. Just one question. I wonder if The the situations at work that that try to improve efficiency are ending up to maybe cause some detachment like in other words You know work sometimes someone will email someone who's this far away rather than go talk to them And I wonder about if that push for efficiency is connected to what you're talking about. Oh, yeah I Think the workplace is doing a lot of damage to social relations Because we're we're not doing as much face-to-face as we really need to I think face-to-face Like a conference like this I think I mean we could in theory have done this entire conference online And that would have been efficient and fast and everything else, but there's no substitute for face-to-face That's what we got to maintain. It's very important. I Love what kind of the whole we thing is so there's a conference coming up in your cold. I could do it And I want to change this that we could do it What about people who haven't Had a good attachment to their mother and how do we transfer that? Attachment for the primary relationship into the the tribe or how do we what's what's been your observation experience with that? well if For people who are insecurely attached from infancy They've got an uphill struggle and somehow whether it's through counseling therapy or just experience in the world Somehow they have to learn how to trust other people more completely and it's it's a challenge I mean that a lot of people start off, you know a couple steps back because they didn't have that secure attachment And it could be a lifetime of work. So that's where good therapists I think come in I was just curious if you had any observations from shame in or other other more primal healers how they might Approach that or suggest. I don't know although I suspect it's it's very much about keeping the focus I mean you have to imagine there's a great thought experiment that goes with this if we are a tribe and this is the web Tribal number here imagine going through your entire life The only faces you ever see are the the people in your tribe and you never see a mirror And you never see a photograph of yourself How different your consciousness would be? Your entire social world would be pretty much the same and you get to see people growing older and dying and You would be so completely knit with the people in your tribe And that's I think the paleo orientation that would be emphasized the knitting the completeness Thank you Well again, let's give our thanks to Frank for in situ