 Okay, I think we'll make a start. Welcome, everyone. My name is Dave Houghton. I'm a Professor of National Security Studies here at the Naval War College. And as you can see and from the PowerPoint, we'll be talking about making decisions in American foreign policy with a particular reference to Kosovo in 1999 and to the Bin Laden raid in 2011. And both of these, I think, are interesting case studies to look at in terms of the theory that I'm going to talk about today. Just a brief summary of what I'm going to cover. The somatic marker approach is the basic theory I'm going to use to make sense of the two case studies. And those are Madeleine Albright and Kosovo Decision Making in 1999 and Bob and the Bin Laden raid in 2011, with particular reference to Bob Gates as the Defense Secretary and the head of JSOC, William McRaven in 2011. So I'll talk about these two case studies. And briefly, I want to talk, first of all, about the theoretical approach, which then hopefully you'll see how it relates to the two case studies. Before I do that, though, the somatic marker approach is part of an explosion of interest in emotion and decision making that's been going on in academia and in military studies for a good 20 years now, I would say. We used to, in political psychology, there used to be an emphasis on the cognition on how people think rather than how they feel on the study of emotion. And that's changed in recent years because emotion is really taken off as a topic study in decision making. And as you see in the image of the slide, that slide depicts Jennifer Lerner, who's a decision scientist at Harvard and was at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and moved over to Harvard a few years ago. And she became the first ever Navy decision scientist, first ever decision scientist in the military. And you see her talking to former CNO Admiral John Richardson in the image, but she is part of this wave of interest that's been going on in the study of emotion and applying it to decision making. How do we make decisions then? There's a traditional view and a view that I'm going to present today in the presentation. And the traditional view is very much a common sense view of how people make decisions. If you think about the common sense view, what's sometimes called a rational actor model around in academia. It's basically an analytic model of decision making, which people, first of all, look at the situation they're facing. They weigh up the costs and benefits of different or degenerate options, a list of options, first of all. Then they weigh up the costs and benefits of different options. And then they select that option, which is best, which delivers the greatest benefits of the least cost. And economists call that maximizing subjective utility. Basically, it really only means picking the best option. The rational option means picking the best option, given you're weighing up at these costs and benefits. And that's a very standard common sense view of how we make decisions. It's how we would all like to make decisions. It's how we think that we make decisions, but it's often not how we really make decisions, which I'm going to talk about now. One model of how we make decisions is presented in the somatic marker approach of, there's a neuroscientist called Antonio Demasio, who's written a number of popular books in the last few years. For his first, his most innovative book, I would say, was Stakeouts Error, which looks at the role of somatic markers in American, not in foreign policy, but somatic markers and how they make, have an effect on decision making. It doesn't specifically look at foreign policy, but that's what I'm going to do today. What he does in the book is to argue that somatic markers, which are powerful emotional memories, basically, or tags. These markers are things which we develop over time, over years and years, we develop these somatic markers. These are essentially powerful emotional recollections or memories. And as we go through life, people, products, events, situations become charged with emotion as a result of experience. As we go through events in our lifetimes, things become charged with emotional charge. And we call those things emotional. We call them somatic markers. I'll say why in a second. Here's one quote from Descartes' Error from Antonio de Marcio himself. There's a really good summary of the whole approach. I'm going to read it to you here. De Marcio says in Descartes' Error that the key components unfold in our minds instantly, too fast for the details to be clearly defined. But now, imagine that before you apply any kind of cost-benefit analysis to the premises, and before you reason towards the solution of the problem, something quite important happens. When the bad outcome connected with a given response option comes to mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. And because that feeling is about the body, I gave it, I gave the phenomenon, the technical term, somatic state, which soma is Greek for body. And because it marks an image, I called it a marker. So that's just one prominent quote from it, which suggests what the theory is going to be about. Well, here's a summary also of the same kind of argument put in simple dyke-erratic form. According to the somatic marker approach, people, products, events, situations will have you become charged with emotion or marked in inverted commas as a result of experience. And bodily, the theory works like this. First of all, we feel an emotion in our bodies. It all starts with the body. And bodily feelings are interpreted then in the mind psychologically. We interpret feelings as good or bad in the mind. So we go from physiology from the body to psychology to what goes on in the mind. It all starts in the body with these bodily feelings. And then these are interpreted in the mind as good or bad. And psychologists call this positive or negative valence. So we develop good markers or bad markers, depending on the situation. And here's the vital part of the theory. We reproduce or re-experience the original bodily feelings in a later event. So when something comes along, we remember the pleasant or unpleasant feeling that we experienced in some event or with some person or with some product or some general situation. It gets reproduced and re-experienced in a later event. So the original emotional experience comes back and we re-experience it. So that's the essential theory. And hopefully it'll become a lot clearer as we go through the examples exactly what the theory is about. I don't think it's particularly complicated, but I'm used to this approach. So I would say that I would not. But I think it's a relatively straightforward theory because it's saying that we have emotional experiences and those affect decision-making because we re-experience the original emotion. Well, I'll show you how you apply this to politics. Before we do that, though, let me tell you what usually happens when we don't have emotional markers, when we don't have these somatic markers. According to DiMazio and those who follow this approach, people who have damage to their emotional centers and their brain can't make decisions. And I'll give you here the case of Tammy Myers, who is, this case is related in the book called The Brain by David Eagleman, which is part of a PBS series, which is a popularization of the argument which is presented in the PBS series The Brain. But what the Tammy Myers case shows is that if you can't emote, you can't experience emotion, you can't make decisions. And the argument goes like this. If we look at people who have damage to their ability to experience emotion, they often cannot take decisions. And in Myers's case, what happened was that she had a motorcycle accident and she went over the handlebars or something and recovered afterwards from the injuries she sustained. Physically, she recovered, but psychologically, she didn't because what happened was that once she recovered, once she left hospital and she went back into normal life, she found that she couldn't choose products in the supermarket, which is an interesting thing to happen. But she found that she could not make a lot of choices. The decision making became really difficult for her. And in particular, if you put her in a supermarket, she couldn't shop because she couldn't make decisions about which products to buy. And what Eagleman says is that she has no somatic markers anymore. What the accident did was to erase her memory of likes and dislikes. And so she could no longer, because she didn't have these markers anymore, she couldn't make decisions about which products to have. So people who lack these markers, who lack emotion, cannot, if you put them in the supermarket, they can't choose which products they usually like the most. So for instance, say if you like Diet Coke over Pepsi, you are no longer able to choose the things that you like because you don't know what you like. Your emotional memories are wiped out when you have the kind of accident that she had. She had damage to a prefrontal cortex in her brain, which is the area just above, just above between our eyes and then slowly above that is where the prefrontal cortex is. And she had damage to that. And as a result, she just couldn't feel any emotions or feelings anymore and couldn't make decisions. So when these things are missing, if you can't emote, if you don't have emotion, you can't choose, which is, runs kind of contrary to the popular view, because most people would say emotion is bad for decision making. Most people would say emotion leaves us astray. And it certainly can do. But what the example shows you is that emotions are actually necessary for decision making, because if it goes, you no longer have the ability to make decisions. So how do you apply this to politics? How do you use this in a practical sense? This is the important bit for political behavior, because I'm interested in political decision makers. I'm not primarily interested in psychology or neuroscience, but there are interesting implications that all of this has. And if you think about American foreign policy, if you think about the history of it, there are positive markers and negative markers, or what we call positive and negative markers, because there are experiences which are commonly regarded as successes. These are dos which we would like to repeat. Things like the Marshall Plan that was regarded as a great success, the opening to China in 1972, and the next to the Kissinger that was regarded as one of the big successes, the Camp David Accords and the Jimmy Carter in 1978, the peaceful end of the Cold War, and the peaceful reunification of Germany in after 1990, 1991. The dated Accords, you usually see this as a great success story in American foreign policy, but then you have the don'ts, then you have the negative markers, the things which are usually regarded as failures. Things like the Bay of Pigs. Almost everybody would say, look back at that, we don't want to do another Bay of Pigs invasion. We don't want to make decisions the way that we made it then. Vietnam is another example of a negative marker. Most people have a negative marker about the experience of Vietnam, at least those who reflected on the lessons of Vietnam tend to have a negative experience of that. The Iran hostage rescue operation, the good example we'll talk about in a second. The Black Hawk Down operation in 1993 under Bill Clinton, under the Clinton administration, another don't. So it seems to me that you can easily apply this to political decision making because we've got a history in American foreign policy, in particular, a well-developed literature on all of these dos and don'ts, these dos and positive things, and the don'ts, the negative things. So what I'm going to do today is to apply the theory to a couple of cases. The first will be Madeline Albright, who the timing is entirely coincidental, and I was hoping to interview Albright at some stage, and of course she passed on yesterday, and so that of course will never happen. Unfortunately, Albright is no longer with us, and she's somebody who is regarded as a national treasure for decision making, particularly in the Bosnian case and the case of Kosovo. We'll talk about Kosovo and how you apply it to that, and Madeline Albright, the Secretary of State. And we'll also talk about the case of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, and how he argued in the Bill Arden raid that the raid should not go ahead because he remembered being part of the Iran hostage rescue operation. So I'll talk about that in a second. But first of all, let's talk about Albright first. And the argument here is relatively simple. But if you look at her life history and the things that she went through before she got to the Kosovo experience where NATO got involved in bombing Kosovo, bombing the Sarajevo, the Serbian Sarajevo, in order to get Malosovic, Slobodan Malosovic, the dictator of Serbia to relinquish his hold on Kosovo. And that worked, that was successful. And but earlier, Albright had been through the experience of Srebrenica, which was a very powerful emotional experience for her. She visited the site of Srebrenica massacre right after it happened. And she saw in Srebrenica about 7,000 Muslim Muslims had been killed by the Serbs at Srebrenica. And the massacre occurred. And these were all men and boys, I think, who were killed. But they were left only to die, but left in an open grave. They were buried. And Albright went to Srebrenica afterwards and saw the aftereffects of that, the unburied bodies and the skeletons and the skulls and skeletons of people who'd been killed at Srebrenica. And that had the powerful emotional effect on her. And she argued that the way to get out of this was to have NATO engage in bombing of Bosnia, of bombing of Serb areas in Bosnia. And that became Operation Deliberate Force in 1995. Srebrenica happened the same year, 1995. And then you got, as a as a response to that, the NATO bombing in Deliberate Force in 1995. And as a result of that experience, Albright tended to view that very positively because she'd been arguing for this bombing to occur right from the beginning. She'd been arguing for NATO intervention right from the start. And the administration had been, the Clinton administration had been resisting what she was suggesting up until 1995, when they actually did it. And so it must be very satisfying. We know there was when the bombing actually went ahead. And when that forced Slobberdam Velosimics, the dictator of Serbia, to come to the negotiation table and to begin what became the date and peace accords of 1995. So this was a positive experience for Albright. Not with standing Srebrenica was obviously negative. But positive experience was the idea that bombing can work. She took the lesson from this, that if NATO is, if NATO decides to do this, if the Western allies of the United States decide to do this, we can go ahead and enforce dictators to the negotiation table. And the date and peace accords happened in 1995, negotiated by Richard Holbrook. And that's a very positive experience for Albright. So in other words, it's a do. It's one of those things you want to repeat. And in 1999, she got a chance to repeat what's the NATO bombing. Because in 1999, there was another massacre at Rakatch in Kosovo in 1999, that reactivated the memory. And what we find is that you see this reactivation of memory in somatic marker theory, where people go through these experiences and it gets reactivated years and years later, in some cases, the marker gets reactivated. And you remember the things that happened to you, positive or negative. And that happened in this case. For Albright in particular, Rakatch, the Rakatch massacre reminded her very much of Srebrenica, which of course, as I just said, she'd been to Srebrenica afterwards and seen the aftermath. And it reactivates that memory in the mind, that marker, as I call it, is reactivated in the Kosovo case. Now Kosovo was in the important respects, quite different from Bosnia, but for reasons I'll go into at the end, but it reactivates the marker and reactivates the memory. And that was Albright talking in her memoirs about the secretary, about the experience of Bosnia. And that was something very, as I say, very positive for her, which she takes over into the Kosovo case, which later affects the decision making, that powerful emotional experience as makes a difference on how she decides in the later case. Here's an image from 1996 of the aftermath of Srebrenica, which was from a year later. And she actually went to Srebrenica when you could actually see, you know, fresh bodies, fresh corpses, rather. And she saw the aftermath of this up close and personal, and obviously had a big effect on her. And when Rackach happens in 1999 in Kosovo, it reactivates the old memory of Srebrenica and what they'd done to punish Milosovic for his perished behavior in condoning the genocide, what was called ethnic cleansing, euphemistically at the time. So that's the Albright case, and happy to take any questions about that later on. But I think probably what interests most of you would read the Pentagon case, as they call it, the case of Robert Gates. And McRaven is interesting in terms of this theory, particularly well documented, because there have been so many memoirs written by the participants about the Bin Laden raid. It's particularly useful to academics and the students of military decision making, because it's so well documented, probably even better documented than the Kosovo case. But if you look at Gates's life experiences, the things he'd been through, the Sematic Marker approach applies quite nicely to Gates's experiences too. In 2011, this is a case of a negative experience, obviously the case of Bosnia effect in Kosovo is a do, but this case is a don't, it's a negative marker, were negative lessons withdrawn. But if you look at Gates's life experiences, one of the powerful things he goes through in at the beginning of his career in 1980, was the Iran hostage rescue mission at Desert One. Gates's job within the CIA, which he was working for in 1980, as deputy to Stan Turner, who was the CIA director at the time. He was working in that capacity as a deputy to Turner. And in 1980, he's given the job of helping to select the refuelling sites, which became known as Desert One, in the Iran hostage rescue mission or Operation Eagle Floor, Eagle Floor as it was called. Now that mission obviously went badly wrong. All sorts of things happened in it. I won't go through all the different things that went badly in that operation, but almost everything you can think of that could go wrong, did go wrong. Murphy's law applied to that particular case. And Gates, throughout his career, always remembered 1980, always remembered the Iranian rescue mission going badly wrong. And it was a particularly powerful experience for him. And obviously a highly negative experience that he doesn't want to repeat. He helped to select the Desert One refuelling sites in 1980. And all of that was pretty much part of what went wrong in that year when the Iranian hostage rescue mission went to head. He felt a particular guilt, I think, for what had happened there and for the things that went wrong. And they had a huge effect on him, as we'll see in the moment. But interestingly, 30 years later, in 2011, an event comes along which reactivates the original emotional experience. And that event was the Bin Laden raid. Because if you look at the decision making that went on in the Obama administration where Gates was the defense secretary for a while, he actually opposed the raid going ahead at all. He thought we should bomb from the earth or bomb from a drone. We should attack Bin Laden's residents using a drone or we should fire a missile from the sea. He didn't think we should send in real live Americans to engage in the raid through what we actually did, of course. He was against the raid. He was in favor of taking a shot at Bin Laden from the drone and destroying the residents, the place he was living, the house he was living. And interestingly, the Iran raid experience was something he talked a lot about during the Bin Laden decision making. It reactivates the old marker, the old somatic marker, as we've been suggesting. And it has a big effect on his decision making in 2011. Here's a quote from the film Desert One, which is really interesting reconstruction of the operation of the floor. If you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend taking a look at the look at the documentary film Desert One. And there's a quote in this, which I won't read out, I'll let Gates say himself because I've got the quote on audio. So he spent the whole day in the White House situation room with Turner monitoring developments from thousands of miles away in Tehran. And when he finds out that the mission has failed, it had to be canceled and then disaster occurred when a C-130 transport aircraft collided with one of the minesweeping helicopters that we used in the mission. Disaster struck. And this was obviously a very powerful and negative experience for Gates. And it was so powerful that he literally cried over it, just cried on his way back. He was driving home from CIA headquarters as he relates there. And it feels so strongly about it that he begins crying and having stopped the car at one stage and just cried, just wept over what had happened. And it's something it doesn't often talk about, but that quote is really useful, I think, in terms highlighting the relevance of the theory to the case study, because it shows, I think, how powerful his emotion is, how much he was invested in the success of the mission, when it doesn't work, when it goes badly wrong. It was a major emotional experience for him. On the other hand, and this is really a counterpoint, Gates's experience had been really negative of previous raids. He was thinking of the Iran raid when they were talking about potentially raiding bin Laden's house. And William McRaven, who was head of the, he was the DaySolk commander at the time, had a different view from Gates, because he was overwhelmingly positive about the raid. He thought he should definitely go ahead, and he said that he should go ahead, because we've done this thing, these kind of things, over and over again over the years. We've done dozens of raids that like this in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And he told Obama, we can definitely do this after he looked into painstakingly went into different aspects of the raid. But he said, we can definitely do this because we've done it so many times before. So for him, it's not a negative experience, raids for him have been overwhelmingly positive. And here's a quote from his from his memoir, Sea Stories. So very negative experience for as far as Gates is concerned. And he brings out that emotional, he related that experience of Iran during the decision making for the bin Laden raid. And he said, basically, we should not do this because none of you were around at the time, but I went through this very powerful experience. And I know what it feels like. I know how bad you will feel if this rate goes wrong. And for him, the only option was to strike from the air. Now he acknowledged that if we did that, we wouldn't have intelligence about any valuable intelligence would be destroyed. And we wouldn't know if there were, for instance, any other any other plans that the land had to attack the United States again. Bray said, we should destroy that intelligence because the risk of mounting a raid is just too great. And I know what it feels like he said, you have to go through that experience and believe me, you don't want to go through this again. This is not the kind of experience you want. And but then McRaven makes the argument and Admiral Mullen also made the argument backing up McRaven that they've done these kind of operations many times before. And now they had JSOC, of course, which they hadn't had in 1980. That was a big difference. We didn't have a special operations capability. Really, in 1980, we had to create a kind of pickup team and unite various different elements of different services and different equipment. So there wasn't a long established tradition of mounting these kinds of operations in 1980. Whereas in JSOC, that was created years later, of course, but that was created in part because of Iran. And McRaven made that point. Nowadays, we can do this kind of thing. We couldn't do it in 1980, but we can do it now. So highly positive experiences from McRaven, positive markers, he was saying in terms of the theory. So it helps you explain the unusual division in the decision making between Gates and Admiral Mullen, because Gates and Mullen were almost always in agreement. They almost never disagree with one another. They made a point of going to Obama with a collective recommendation and not saying, for instance, that I think this and he thinks that they usually went in united into meetings. And it was very rare for them to actually disagree with one another in a meeting. And they did that in front of Obama because Gates was obviously saying because of that experience of Iran, I'm not in favor of a raid and you should not go ahead with this because it will be disastrous for your presidency as it was for Jimmy Carter. But Mullen disagrees, he says, I back McRaven, I back Admiral McRaven and JSOC has done this kind of operation many times. So the two disagree with one another. But I think that's the real reason why they disagreed because they had these contrasting emotional experiences. And Mullen had a much more positive view of raids and rescue operations and any kind of raid involving human beings. His experience was much more positive than Gates was. So to end with, what are the conclusions of takeaways? I think the big takeaway is partly that feelings matter in decision making. You might say, of course, feelings matter in decision making. Isn't that common sense? My son presented this theory to my son one stage a few months ago and he said, he said basically, of course, feelings matter in decision making. I had to explain to him, but in academia, there actually is no theory of how decisions are made based on feelings. How exactly does that work? There isn't really a theory of how this is done. And it might surprise you to learn that, but there is one. And the closest thing we have is this. No one's ever done this before. As far as I can tell, no one's actually ever applied the somatic marker theory to these particular cases or to other cases. It's never been done before. And so feelings do matter in decision making. That's not very surprising because we've long known that, but we haven't studied it. We've never had any theories which allow us to examine that in detail. One of the things that markers do, though, is that they're very blunt devices. As the devices of what's sometimes referred to as intuitive decision making, the devices have been making very fast, very quick decisions. But what you gain in speed is sacrifice inaccuracy. And so they're quite blunt devices when these are used. And they don't necessarily point us in the right direction. Demacio argues that markers actually do point you in the right direction. They almost always work. But I think the record is somewhat mixed. Because if you look at the Kosovo and the Iran cases, particularly the raiding case, Gates always said afterwards when the raid went ahead and when he was shown to be too pessimistic, he went to Obama and apparently told him, I think I'm being too risk averse. I think I'm being too cautious. I think that emotional experience of Iran may be too risk averse and too cautious. And I shouldn't have been that cautious. He argued to Obama. So later on, he changed his view about it when it turned out to be a big success. And I suppose you could add the bin Laden raid making around that as one of the positive markers in that list that we have before. But Iran had made him very pessimistic about special operations capability. And he later came to the view that it made him too pessimistic. So these markers are very blunt devices. And in this case, the raiding market proved a bit misleading because it convinced Gates that not only that it was right, but that if it went, it didn't go well, that it would destroy Obama's presidency. And that of course didn't happen. But the market was a very blunt device. And it exfused some of the dissimilarities in Kosovo as well. If you look at that case in depth, Bosnia, there was an analogy made between Bosnia and Kosovo. But that was a rather blunt comparison because Kosovo was worth a lot more to Molosevic than Bosnia had been. The Bosnian areas in which the Bosnian Serbs lived were areas which Molosevic wanted to hold on to. But he definitely did not want to lose Kosovo because Kosovo is a religious and historical center for the Serbs. It has a history of being enormously important to them religiously and historically. And to lose Kosovo was political suicide. Molosevic did not want to lose Kosovo because he knew what eventually happened or would happen, did happen, did happen. But he expected rightly that losing Kosovo would cost the presidency of Serbia, which he eventually did. And losing Kosovo was very damaging because of that religious status that it has for Serbs. But Molosevic is first to say he didn't care as much about Bosnia. He cared a lot more about Kosovo. And that's the reason why the NATO bombing lasted 78 days in the Kosovo case. It was over after, I think, less than two weeks in the Bosnia case. Liberate force was over very much quicker than the war in Kosovo that drew out. And people started to ask, is NATO bombing going to work in this case? So the comparing the two things led to an overestimation of similarity between Bosnia and Kosovo. And that's because these emotional markers were causing you to feel certain things. But the very blood devices, they don't deal with similarities and differences and pulling those things apart. Another lesson is that negative markers may be more powerful in their effects than positive ones are. If you think about negative experiences in American foreign policy, for most people, it's easy to remember the negative stuff that is the positive things. And psychologists have studied this phenomenon and have argued that negative things are very often more powerful than positive ones are. Negative memories are more memorable than positive experiences are. And the various theories as to why that happens. But it's a fairly robust finding in the literature that negative markers, in this case, applied to this theory are more powerful than positive ones. For instance, Srebrenica, that was a searing experience for many decision makers, particularly for Albright. But think about setting Srebrenica against a positive experience. Srebrenica was very, very powerful, but set that against the experience that, say, policy X has worked in the positive sense. It doesn't have the same emotive force. The negative things seem to promote stronger emotions for some reason. And maybe that's quite understandable. So negative stuff may be more powerful. Another lesson, I think, which may be unexpected, is that buildings and rooms matter in decision making in ways that we haven't really studied before. In the Bosnia and Kosovo case, for instance, with Albright, she often made the mark during the Kosovo decision making that the buildings were in during Kosovo were, in many cases, identical to the ones that made the decisions about Bosnia and obviously the White House situation room came to play here in terms of decisions being made there. But if you look at the building that the Allies were in during the Bosnia war, they were all based in Lancaster House in London. And Albright had tried to persuade the Allies to go along with the NATO bombing. And they were quite reluctant to do so, but she tried to persuade them to do that at Lancaster House. And when Kosovo came around, she found herself in exactly the same building again. And I think that happens psychologically because surroundings evoke memory. They help us to remember things. And memories are incredibly important in this theory. But you also see it in the Gates case, because in that case in 1980, he'd been in the White House situation room when the news came through that the mission's gone disastrously wrong. It was in exactly the same room with Obama when it was when they were all making decisions about, do we go ahead with this bin Laden raid? So that's rooms and buildings matter in ways which we haven't looked at in enough depth. And finally, another takeaway is the analogical reasoning, drawing analogies in other words, maybe more of a bodily process or emotional process than it is a cognitive process, something purely in the mind. I think that when we draw analogies with things, it's a process that happens very, very fast. The experiences I've had with this one experience, I went through the always sticks in my mind this the morning of 9 11. And I remember dropping my kids off as a nursery. I was in Pittsburgh at the time and dropped my kids off at the nursery. And I was with my father-in-law, who is now passed on, but he lived well into his 90s. And he remembered the last time that a building had struck a big building in New York City was in the late 1940s when the Empire State building was hit by a wayward military plane. And I won't get into the reasons why that happened, but he remembered that from the late 40s. And immediately when we turned on the radio on the way back from the nursery, as with with my father-in-law, the first thing he said when we found out the when the radio said the first plane has hit the World Trade Center, one of the towers has been hit. First thing he said was this reminds me, almost entertains the things about this. This reminds me of that plane in the 40s that hit the Empire State building. And the operative thing to this story is that it was drawing analogies is something which happens very, very quick. He didn't painstakingly say he was driving at the time. He didn't painstakingly sit down and say, what are the similarities and the differences between these two cases? It just occurred to him. It just popped into his mind. And often that's what analogies the way that they work. They just pop into our minds. And it suggests in many ways that it's a bodily process that we draw analogies because we feel the same things that we felt in the original experience. So analogical reasoning may be a bodily emotional process more than is a cognitive process where we sit down, we pull apart the differences and the similarities between two cases. We don't do that. It just pops into our minds straight away without bothering. And I think that's because we feel the same things in a later event that we felt in the original event. And I've studied analogical reasoning for years and years, for about 30 years. And I think one of the lessons I've drawn from this is I always used to think of drawing an analogy as the kind of cognitive process where you match the features of one situation with another. But it happens too quick for that to happen in the human mind. I think it's probably more bodily process rather than anything else. It just makes you feel the same way that you felt. And in my father-in-law's case, he feels the same way in 2001, 9-11 that he felt when he went through the original experience in the 40s where he was working in the Empire State Building at the time. And so that's why he was so familiar with that case. I think it was 1948 or 49 or something like that. But it immediately pops into mind into his head. And it seems something automatic and bodily about the process. So anyway, I'll leave it at that. And there are other things I could say, but we could leave that for questions if there are any. Anybody got any anything they want to ask? I know there was one or two items that came up in the chat, but I wasn't able to, if he did put something in the chat, I wasn't able to read those messages because when you're presenting on this, it's hard to, actually, I can get the chat messages. You don't always see the things which are said while you're talking. Anything that anyone wants to ask me, anything that occurs to you and put your hand, do the hands up function on the Zoom if you want to ask a question.