Stephen Asma is the author of ten books, including Why We Need Religion, The Emotional Mind: Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition (with Dr. Rami Gabriel), The Evolution of Imagination, On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears and The Gods Drink Whiskey. He is the cofounder of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. He was a professional musician in Chicago for many years, playing with such legends as Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy. Check out his YouTube channel, Monsterology.
His paper, “Adaptive Imagination: Toward a Mythopoetic Cognitive Science.” He makes the case for Imagination Studies in “Imaginology,” and for the primacy of imagery in thought in “Imagination is Ancient.” Find more of him here.
AI Summary. In this installment of Peter Spear's series of conversations with fascinating people, he sits down with Stephen Asma, a professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago and the author of many thought-provoking books, including The Evolution of Imagination.
Asma, who was mentored by Mark Johnson, the co-author of Metaphors We Live By, shares his journey from aspiring fine art painter to philosopher, discussing his blue-collar roots and his passion for exploring the middle ground between the sciences and the arts.
Throughout the conversation, Asma delves into the importance of imagination as the core operating system of the human mind, discussing the historical neglect of imagination in cognitive science and the need for a more balanced approach that incorporates both the rational and the mythopoetic aspects of cognition.
Asma also touches on his popular podcast, Chinwag, co-hosted with actor Paul Giamatti, where they explore a wide range of topics, from celebrity interviews to discussions on cryptids, UFOs, and the nature of historical narratives.
I start all these interviews with a question that I borrowed from an oral historian friend of mine. She helps people tell their story and uses this one question. Before I ask, you're in total control and can answer any way or not answer. The question is: where do you come from?
Oh, that's interesting. Where do I come from? I'm from a blue collar background originally. My father was a steel worker and my mother was a nurse. I grew up in that world of manual labor, which is how I decided I was going to get a Ph.D. because I really hated manual labor.
More interestingly, I suppose I'm from this middle territory between the sciences and the arts. I respect the sciences - I studied a lot of biology and my PhD was in the philosophy of biology. But I've always been a visual artist and a musician. This middle territory gets a lot of lip service but doesn't really get a lot of institutional validation that I wish it would. That's where I'm coming from.
Did you have an idea when you were a kid, a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up? You mentioned the PhD, but what did you want to be?
I wanted to be a fine art painter. I knew that was not a good career move. I was one of these people who could draw at a really young age and people would say, "Oh, you can really draw." That created a feedback cycle where I would get the validation and then do it more, slowly getting better and better at it.
I thought I could maybe be an illustrator because they can make a living. Turns out it's just very hard to make a living as an illustrator, even back then. It's even worse now. I was on my way to be an illustrator and then I took philosophy classes as an undergraduate and fell in love with it.
I tried to read Kant's Critique of Reason and realized I would never understand this on my own. I needed a teacher. Therefore, to study this stuff, I'd need to switch my major. I thought I could keep drawing on my own, but I needed teachers to help me study philosophy. So I switched from the incredibly lucrative career of illustration to the even more lucrative career of philosophy. It was clear that I wasn't going to make any money, but that's how I shifted to philosophy.
Once you get in the flow of philosophy, you realize you have to go all the way for the PhD if you're going to work in the field. So that's what I did.
Where are you now and how do you - it seems like you've got so many different things going on. When people ask you what you do, what do you say?
I guess I say I'm a professor first, because I'm a full professor at an art school in Chicago called Columbia College and have been there for a long time. I feel like that's my main focus, but then I've written ten books, so I could just as easily say I'm an author. Although I identify with the thing that pays the bills, which shows my working class background.
So it's professor first, author, and now I'm saying podcaster because of this Chinwag podcast thing. (with Paul Giamatti)
It's amazing. So much fun. When did you discover that you could make a living doing this, being a professor? When did that sort of click in?
I was one of these people who played music to get through college. I was a pretty proficient guitar player. When I was at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, about an hour from Chicago, I had a blues band and we would go into Chicago and play the blues clubs.
We built up a bit of a reputation because we were really young but playing all this classic stuff from the 50s and 60s. People were like, "Oh, it's the real thing." We got lucky one day waiting in line to see BB King play in DeKalb. The promoter, who knew who we were, came out and said BB King's bus broke down on the way and he needed like an hour to get here. He asked if we could go up and play a set of music. That was a pretty big moment for us.
We played for about 3000 people, got to hang out with BB King and got to know him. Then we became the house band at Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago. I used to play with Bo Diddley all the time and Buddy Guy. I was really lucky - it was like being in the right place at the right time. I played with all these great blues giants, most of whom are dead now.
That was at the same time that I'd finished my PhD and was looking for jobs. Then I got a job as a professor in Chicago and had this terrible choice between continuing as a musician, which was super fun and really adrenaline-fueled, or continuing as a professor, because I couldn't do both due to the hours and travel. I chose being a professor.
What do you love about the work that you're doing now? What's the joy in it for you?
The professor job is super fun because the students always keep it fresh. Every couple of years, it feels like it's a very different kind of student with the development of being online all the time, with the changes from COVID. Really every five years or so, it feels like I'm teaching a totally different kind of person. That's exciting and fun, sometimes annoying.
A lot of the books that I wrote were mostly these kind of didactic books, like "I'm going to teach you what Buddhism really means." I enjoyed that, but now I'm tired of doing these teaching books and didactic projects. Ever since before I met Paul Giamatti, who I do the podcast with, but certainly since Paul and I have started this partnership, I'm enjoying more play in my work and more creative work, where I'm not trying to teach something or correct somebody's bad logic. I do that in my day job, but what I'm really enjoying is this creative, playful stuff that I can do now.
It just feels like walking the walk on imagination, doesn't it?
I think in a way I was always walking the walk in the sense that I've always continued drawing and playing music, but it's now becoming instead of a hobby in the background, it's coming to the foreground and it's really the thing I try to focus on the most.
My first experience of you, I think it was Monsterology. So on LinkedIn, is that possible that I would have run into Monsterology there?
Yeah, because I made this YouTube channel during COVID when everybody was just trapped. I might've put it on LinkedIn or something. I'll include a link to this YouTube channel with these wonderful videos of you and your illustrations. It's just beautiful work. Where did that arise? How did the idea to bring the study of monsters to life connect with what you do?
I had written a book about natural history museums early on called Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. I was really interested in the way in which, compared to other sciences, biology is a very visual science. You think about anatomy and there's this wonderful, rich visual tradition in biology.
I remember reading Darwin's autobiography and he said, "The only thing I regret is that I can't draw very well." I thought that sort of tells you something about the whole field.
I got fascinated with natural history because it is both a visual and scientific tradition. I got really into these museums, and part of the museums have a lot to do with when quote-unquote "monsters" occur. These are just genetic or developmental deformations through teratogenic substances, like you have conjoined twins, you have kids born as cyclops. A lot of this stuff was exploited and eventually became what came to be - if you survived, you ended up in a freak show in the Barnum era.
I was very interested in the places where biology and monster culture collided. That led me to write a book called On Monsters for Oxford, which was a continuation of this interest. I was just like, "What are cultures most afraid of?" The book examines the ancients, the medievals, the moderns, all the way up through Frankenstein, the werewolf, the Wolfman, viruses that are monstrous, robotics and AI. The book looks at all that stuff.
It's amazing. I was watching "Giants and Titans" and you were drawing a Nimrod coming out of the Tower of Babel.
Thanks for watching. Thanks for being one of the 10 people watching my channel. I appreciate it.
You're very welcome. Imagination - when did that become something that you wanted to talk about? I guess there's a couple of ways. Just yesterday you published an article where you're inviting imagination to let its freak flag fly, as you said. But you you also have this very academic articulation of imagination. You tell the story in two cultures. You've got the academic articulation and now you're letting it fly free. I'm just curious, where did this begin and what are you doing with mythopoetic cognition?
Part of my training is in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. As a philosopher, I'm very interested in how the mind works. In that area, the imagination has been ignored for about a hundred years. It used to be on the map - people would talk about the imagination. Aristotle talks about it, Immanuel Kant talks about it, even Jean-Paul Sartre talks about the imagination.
But then you get the rise of kind of behaviorism in psychology, and eventually you get computational views of the mind, which is the mind as a computer. It's very hard to understand what the imagination is if that's the way you're studying the mind. So it was ignored for the last hundred years, I would say.
Part of my work is to bring back focus on the imagination as a cognitive ability and how it evolved. But then I have this other way of actually doing imaginative work, like painting, drawing, making music. My work is trying to find a balance between these two things.
Now there's actually work starting to happen on what the imagination is in the brain. It's super interesting and really important. But a lot of people who do that work, interestingly - I know a lot of them - they're not actually creative people. It's a rude way to put it. They're not engaging in an artistic practice in a sustained way. That's probably the better way to put it. So they get too far away from the activity of imagination.
On the other hand, I know lots of musicians and artists who are very good practitioners. They play amazing music, they do poetry, they make art, but they don't know anything about this other side, which is what's the brain doing when they're being creative.
I think the work I'm doing now is trying to find a balance. I'm just doing the brain stuff for a while, and then I'll just do this more weird creative stuff that doesn't have to answer to anybody. I feel like those two methods or interests of mind feed each other. They help to illuminate each other. So that's how I got into writing a book on the imagination.
Daniel Kahneman is how most people that I bump into understand or think about - system one is a way of just thinking about the irrational or the unconscious. I always feel like anytime that we, as a culture, talk about this part of ourselves, it's always dismissive or pejorative - it's unconscious or irrational, it's always dismissive. It's very rarely affirmative. That's what's beautiful to me about what you're doing.
I had an idea of a question: If a behavioral scientist and a mythopoetic scientist were walking down the street and they ran into each other, what happens? Do they get along? What do they say to each other?
There's an explosion. It's an important point about the difference between the current cognitive scientist and this mythopoetic approach that I'm arguing for. Kahneman and others who work in this area recognize that there's two kinds of cognition - hot cognition, cold cognition, system one, system two.
My view is that the popular mainstream cognitive science privileges system two, cold cognition, higher level thinking that is by and large propositional. It requires that there be some kind of knower and known, a subject and object. It has to have some kind of syntax that somebody like Chomsky would recognize. It has to have certain properties where it can apply to the world, but also have a kind of recursion so that it can keep going out and making more knowledge. All of that is true.
The amazing thing about the human mind is it's very good at that kind of thinking. Now you'll see the dominant views, I think, in cognitive science. It used to be much more "We're going to do these neural network algorithms where we have target successful output, and we have this input, and then we have this black box of trained, conditioned connectionism." We put the input in, and the output is that we can see what kind of stuff you scroll on TikTok and we're going to give you more of the same.
That's all true and it works really well with computational models. Now people are talking about that's how the human mind is - it's a predictive processor, it's always looking for what doesn't match, it tries to then find a way to make sense of it and adjust its prior beliefs. Again, all standard mainstream cognitive science.
Those folks look at the imagination and even stuff like the emotions and they don't quite know what to do with that stuff. They're like, "That doesn't fit into the algorithmic view of the mind that we have."
So here I come along as the mythopoetic cognitive scientist and I'm saying, "You guys have the wrong end of the stick. You are talking about something that evolved very recently in the human mind, which is this language-based propositional logical mind. But for literally hundreds of millions of years, the entire evolution of mammals, we've been building this other kind of problem-solving mind, which is much more closely connected to the emotions and is closely connected to visual perception and images generally."
This is mythopoetic mind. If mammals have been evolving roughly for 200, maybe 300 million years - obviously after the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, that's our time to shine and we explode in ecology - that means that our hot cognition system, this old brain, what you might call a limbic brain, is so much older at problem solving and understanding the world than this new brain, which is arguably only as old as language, which might be only 100,000 to even maybe 1 million years old if you really want to push it. But that's quite recent.
For me and the mythopoetic people, we think that stories are much earlier forms of thinking and organizing the world than logic is. When human beings evolved, we evolved telling stories, either through imagery on a cave wall or in the early days of language. I suspect it would have been a lot of storytelling in some way, using metaphors, images and myths. The world then is made up of good guys and bad guys, heroes and monsters. If you look at the earliest literature that we have, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's got heroes and monsters in it. These metaphors are foundational, I think, and that's because the imagination is the original operating system for human beings.
It's still at work in our daily lives, reading information about the external world and also generating information and projecting that out into the external world. That system, again, is very old and it's much more a part of our regular experience than this kind of computational mind that most mainstream cognitive scientists want to talk about. That's a long-winded answer, but you get the idea.
It's beautiful. What are the implications of this? You mentioned that there's been a rise - it's shocking to hear that the imagination falls off the map for a generation. Somehow that's what we do, right? We lose things and then rediscover them. But what are the implications of people now paying attention to imagination, that it's connected to emotion? We're realizing this is closer to how people move through the world.
I think it's exciting because people are starting to realize they've left out things like the imagination and the affective systems or the emotional systems. You'll see cognitive science is trying to now put that into the work they're doing. But what's unfortunate is that their paradigm, which is this computational approach of algorithms and predictive processing, isn't allowing them access to a lot of this reality, like emotion.
Here's an example: If you look, I go to lots of conferences and give talks and watch other people give talks. If you went 10 years ago, you would have seen nothing on emotional AI. Now, every other paper is about emotional AI. You go to the paper and get all excited, "Oh my God, they're going to talk about the emotions." No, that's not what they're talking about.
What they mean is, "Okay, how can we train an AI system? A perceptual system, a robot, or like a large language model. How can we train it to spot emotional faces?" And what they mean is you have to train the system so that when it sees a face that's angry, it recognizes that face needs to be marked as angry. It doesn't understand what angry is. How can it? It's just a computer. It doesn't feel the salient biological body feelings of being enraged.
They're trying to train AI so that it would be smarter at finding, okay, just like there's voice detection AI, like in airports - this is a national security issue. And they're looking, trying to train AI so that it can spot when voices are being raised and maybe stress or tension is happening. And then maybe it can direct the security to that area. That's what they mean when they talk about finding room for the emotions in AI. They're looking for ways that the AI can just find a conditioned response to an angry or a happy face and then have an output response like "notify security."
They're not actually trying to build a system that has feelings because no one has any idea how to do that without a nervous system, without a body. So it's an interesting sort of weird bridge that may not be able to be built between the algorithmic kind of intelligence and the feeling state kind of intelligence.
Here's another example: I have my students read Plato's Republic. And then we talk about films that have the ideas in it. It's a fun class - you've got to do everything you can to get people to read philosophy. So we watched this great Martin Scorsese movie Goodfellas, and I was saying to the students, "Okay, how do we just apply Plato's theory of the breakdown of a character to this film, which is also about the breakdown of character, like how do you become a bad person? How do you become a tyrant? It happens slowly and it's a development."
So I asked the students - when we read it, there's all this kind of fun stuff in Plato. He talks about a monster. He says, "Imagine you've got, you're made up of a monster. Like the lower part of you are all these crazy creatures and beasts." And it's almost like John Carpenter's The Thing. He describes snakes and fangs and everything. And he says, "That's your appetites. Those are your desires. Now imagine like a lion. And he says, that's your heart. And he says, imagine a little person, that's your mind, your reason. And this is all bundled together like a chimera or a hybrid creature. And that's what the human psyche is."
Now that story really sticks with students because it's got all kinds of activating mythopoetic drama in it - crazy imagery, it's fun, it's exciting. So when I asked the students to make the connection to Goodfellas, they're able to do it very easily because that movie, if people aren't familiar with it, is about how somebody can let their desires and their cravings get totally out of control. And the next thing you know they're doing more and more cocaine, more and more women, more and more violence until eventually they're just in jail.
I asked Chat GPT, "Okay compare, find the Platonic Republic ideas in Scorsese's Goodfellas." It's a pretty high-level test. And I got this response back, and the response was all about Plato's myth of the cave and trying to connect the myth of the cave to the movie. It was something, I mean it made sense. But what did the AI do?
It simply scraped the entire internet to see what is the most talked about thing in the Republic. And it's in book seven, and it's called the myth of the cave. That's what everybody knows from Plato's Republic. So the AI is like, "Okay, look for the frequency of terms or tokens, and then just make something about the high frequency terms."
But my assignment is about book nine of the Republic, which nobody reads. It's hardly on the internet at all. The AI can't see that because it's looking for something very different. What's salient to it is just frequency of appearances on the internet. Whereas what's salient to us, to my students, is our feelings. Did I feel curious? Was I afraid? Was I excited by this? That makes things important to us.
So salience for biological animals is always connected to the nervous system, whereas salience for computational algorithms is just stuff like frequency, occurrence of tokens. It's totally different ideas of salience. That's a big problem.
In one piece, you said "Calm down, there's no conscious AI." You make this point that without a feeling based motivational system, all information processing has no purpose. You talk about seeking and wanting and the drive being everything.
Yeah, that's an idea that I learned from one of my later in life teachers who was really a mentor to me, Jaak Panksepp, who is considered the father of affective neuroscience. He created the field. Then others like Antonio Damasio, I think, were a lot more famous, but Damasio was hugely influenced by Panksepp's work. They have a similar vision.
One of the things Damasio says is he had a patient who had damage to this sort of motivational system and the feeling system. In this particular case, it was the amygdala in the brain - everything's connected. One thing he was asking this patient, who was extremely smart and really good at information processing, he said, "What day do you want to come back for your next appointment?"
I think I'm remembering this right. The patient was like, "Yeah, I could come back on Monday next week," and then proceeded to explain why that was a good idea. And then they were like, "But I could also come back on Tuesday." They went through every day of the week and just proceeded to give all the arguments for and against coming back at that time, but could not commit to anything. There was nothing tilting the patient towards one option rather than another.
Damasio was like, "If you look at this, and there were empirical studies of this, people can't even make a decision about what cereal on the shelves they're going to pick without some kind of feelings about it - oh, I had that as a kid, or I had that and it was awful."
Information doesn't actually motivate behavior. It's this other system, the motivational system, which is sometimes called the conative system, based on a word that somebody like Spinoza used called "conatus," which means striving.
So if you don't have a motivational system, which is chemical, it's largely driven by spikes of dopamine, then the person or even the animal - we share this system with other mammals - it doesn't get up and forage. It doesn't go look for things. It's what we would call depressed. So that system is hugely important.
I feel like - I didn't know that, "conatus," it was in that piece. I feel like I read somewhere else, isn't "motive" in the same family as "movement"? It's like the same linguistic family. When you're talking about motivation, you're talking about action.
Yes, exactly. I think that this is something that certain philosophers forgot about too. They really start to think about the mind as just this passive thing - it receives information.
Then philosophers like William James, the pragmatists like John Dewey, and also continental philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, they were like, "No, the mind is also about doing something. It's about moving through the world."
Only occasionally and rarely do you sit reflectively and meditate on stuff. Mostly the mind is about getting through the world. I think that's also been a bit of a problem for the cognitive science folks now - they think of the mind largely like it's a chess-playing sort of process where you passively sit and work out logical options. But that is just a rarefied little slice of what the brain and the mind does.
Most of the time you're working on the fly and you need that hot cognition stuff to be really important. So yeah, I think of the mind primarily as something that's about action. And only in very rare situations is it about this kind of purely theoretical abstract reasoning. I'm glad we have that system, don't get me wrong, but it's not what the mind is doing most of the time.
What's your - do you have a preferred metaphor for the mind? I feel like in a lot of ways we are trapped in this computational culture. We talk about things and imagine things. Do you have a different way?
That's a great question. It's unfortunate because I think the computationists have a better metaphor because it's so worked out and we understand computing and machines really well. But the mind is - I don't think the mind is a machine.
The place to look for how the mind works is really, I think, to the animal world and to biology. But that's not really a metaphor. It's the thing itself. So I do think if I have to give a metaphor, I think the creative process, something like drawing or making music, is a great way to think about how the mind works overall.
I think of improvisation as the key idea of the mind because in improvising, you've got that sort of hot cognition stuff - where if somebody just starts throwing rocks at me I know what to do, or I have some sort of basic moves I can make to get out of the way because my body has learned to improvise.
But then there's the kind of great improvisation where you can almost build a second nature. If you study jazz music, it's a very complex and elaborate kind of understanding of harmony and rhythm and melody. But if you practice enough, you can get it into your body so that it's a kind of embodied form now. You don't have to think about "What am I going to do next on this chord? I've got to improvise the solo."
That's a way in which human beings can take learned information, even stuff from the cold cognition system, and make it part of the hot cognition system. That applies in music, but also if you were to just ask a field surgeon who's working in a war zone - imagine somebody on in a war zone trying to patch up bodies, they don't have the best equipment, they've got to make do with what they've got.
That kind of improvisation, if you take it up to Walt Disney or Hayao Miyazaki creating characters, all of that stuff from the highest sort of rarefied atmosphere of fine art, all the way to the field surgeon trying to save lives - that is all a kind of improvisation.
I think that's a better way to think about the mind than as a chess player, somebody who's playing chess, or as a computer. Because computers are not good at improvising unless you give them very strict parameters. So I think maybe improv, maybe like the jazz player, is my metaphor for how the mind really works.
I love it. When I came up in my world of market research, I was really taught that the mind thinks in images. It was very informally taught to me and I was pointed to Lakoff and embodied cognition. All that stuff was there.
Oh, yeah, great. His co-author, Mark Johnson, was my dissertation advisor, one of my dissertation advisors. He was my teacher. That's why I connected on this.
Oh, my God. So what was the influence of that?
Exactly this. He wrote Metaphors We Live By with George Lakoff. Then he was my teacher in my Ph.D. program and I've stayed in contact with him ever since. His theory was speech and meaning doesn't have - it's not literal first and then it creates metaphors later like window dressing. The metaphors are first and the images are first and then the literal language comes later. Anyway, back to your point about marketing.
Yeah, in my approach, which I learned, is that through free association, you get closer to the metaphor through language. By getting closer to the metaphor, interacting with the metaphor, you're then talking about motivation and emotion. So it's a more effective way of trying to understand what someone's experience feels like for them.
Yes.
Mark Johnson - oh, here it is. Look at this. You're going to love this. [I have a bookshelf above my computer. I reached up and pulled down the book.]
Isn't that amazing?
The Meaning of the Body, Aesthetics and Human Understanding by Mark Johnson. I feel like the title of that book alone is perfect.
He's awesome. He's really - and he had to carve this space almost by himself with George Lakoff and a couple other people. Now everybody understands this argument and there's a lot of people who have embraced it in their own way in the embodied cognition circles. He's awesome.
When you're marketing stuff, that's right. You're thinking about "I need to form an association in this person's mind-body that will draw them to this service or this product or this thing." And that's probably not going to be a logical argument. That's going to be a feeling state.
Yeah, that's exactly right. I was thinking about Lakoff. I think at one point - I usually use, I feel like he called it "imaginative reason.” That's why I was curious - why is it so important to recognize that we do think in images? You talk about thinking with images and thinking with the body. It seems shocking - I guess I'm just accustomed to it, but how radical an idea is that? How different is it for people to think about it that way?
It's a very interesting point about the communities because the community you came up in knows damn well that the image is crucial. Because it so obviously works. But the community that I came up in, which is this philosophy of mind, cognitive science group, they got intoxicated by it - before the computational model came on and got very strong starting in like the 80s, I would say. Even before that, philosophy had been, for almost a hundred years, certainly since the Vienna Circle and the logical positivism of the 1920s, they had all been arguing that the only thing that's meaningful is going to be in language. It's going to be a proposition. Everything else is not meaningful. It's not knowledge.
So there was a terrible bias in that community against images, which is just tragic and stupid and derailed philosophy, I think, for a hundred years. As a visual artist, as a practicing visual artist, I knew all along the power of images and I kept looking at my colleagues going, "You guys have no idea."
I will say this, though - this is an interesting point: There is a neurodiversity element to all this, which is there is the phenomenon of aphantasia, when you do not think with images. Your mind does not think in general about the world by using images. It turns out, we're just now learning over the last five years even, that is - it's not a disability, it's just difference.
There's a lot of people who have this kind of mind that does better with language and does better with math and logic. It turns out that they are way overrepresented statistically in the sciences and in places like analytic philosophy.
So if you go to those folks and say, "Yeah, but images are everything and stories," they're gonna be like, "What are you talking about?" So it's not that one is correct and the other is wrong. It's just that they think differently.
I talked to this guy, Craig Venter, who's very famous for cracking the genome code. He was the guy that devised the technology to be able to read the genome very quickly. He's a very decorated biologist at University of California, San Diego. I was talking to him and he has aphantasia. He was like, "Yeah, I don't think in images. I think in terms of like principles and logic."
He and I could not - we talked for a while and we could not figure out how the other was thinking. It was really weird. I was like, "What do you think of when you think of your kitchen?" We were talking about this and he can't understand what the image-based mind is like, and I have a very hard time thinking without images. So there's that.
I want to - there's a couple of things I want to - the overlap, a Venn diagram of our worlds, and in the middle is the placebo effect. I was just reading, you were just - I think, was it in today's thing about "get weird imagination," your essay - were you talking about the placebo effect?
Yes, I do mention the placebo effect. I'm fascinated by it. The way I came at the placebo effect is from the point of view of biology and then how the mind works. Historically the placebo was used to demonstrate the failure of the mind to do as well as the actual medicinal compound that you're testing.
It's true that the real compounds work better than a placebo, but what people started to notice only in the last really 10 years is that, oh my god, the placebo works way better than we thought it did. And in some areas it works like as well as some of the organic compounds or medicines or whatever you're giving.
There's some really interesting work on this that shows that what really matters is not the sugar pill versus the actual medicinal pill. What matters is all of the contextual narrative framing that happens when you administer these two things.
So if you - this is like a kind of a crude example, but let's say you go in and you see a doctor and the doctor has a white coat and they sit you down and they talk about, "These are the effects and this is what you're experiencing and this is what you might experience." And then there's all the sort of rhetorical accoutrement - there's trays and test tubes and syringes and all of that stuff. It makes a huge difference on the effectiveness of the placebo. The way you frame it in context tells the mind, "Okay, this is gonna help me." That's what they're discovering.
If you take away the context of the narrative, then the placebo doesn't perform as well. It really is just like a sugar pill.
So they'll do these things with people where they'll do acupuncture - and acupuncture has been shown to actually help things like a bad back in certain situations. But they'll do fake acupuncture. They'll take people and they won't actually - the person can't see that they're not actually inserting the needles. And yet their back feels better for days.
A lot of this stuff was dismissed as, "Oh, wishful thinking." But it turns out that if this theory of mine is right, which is the theory of Mark Johnson and Lakoff and Damasio, what's happening is your mind has learned words and terms and language because you have a simulation system. Like the brain is primarily a simulation system.
We have these mirror neurons. So when I see you - if I hit my thumb with the hammer, then obviously I have pain. It turns out sort of two different areas of the brain light up. One is where the actual firings from my thumb all the way up are processing the brain. But the other is I just viewed it with my eyes and that's lighting up a certain - I think it's the anterior cingulate cortex, but don't quote me on that.
But two areas of your brain are lighting up. And they discovered that if I just watch you smash your thumb with a hammer, I also get - not like the same, but one of the parts of my brain also lights up and I actually feel a little bit of your pain. In other words, there's a mirroring of the world, so I can mirror your experience a little bit.
I don't just see that you're in pain and draw a logical inference - "I should help Peter. He's in pain." No, I actually have a quick, hot cognition mirror of your pain. It's not as severe as your pain, but it's there.
So what happens is words and concepts are basically training our brains with feelings. When you hear "Pepsi" or "Adidas," or you see the logo, it's not just like you see that thing and then you draw a logical inference - "I once really enjoyed Adidas shoes." No, what's happening is the logo is triggering your emotional system directly. You're having an emotional response. And that's what I think is why it might be working really well in marketing of brands.
We're right near the end of time. I wanted to have a chance to hear you talk about Chinwag, the podcast you're doing with Paul Giamatti.
Chinwag is something that Paul Giamatti and I started about a year ago, when we started publishing the podcast. We've interviewed so many interesting people - there's people that you would recognize who are celebrities, like Tom Hanks and Stephen Colbert, but also wonderful experts like the expert on psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins, dream experts.
We interviewed Peter Godfrey-Smith who does great work on octopuses. So it's a little bit of fun, ridiculous stuff on UFOs and Bigfoot, and also real experts in science, all mixed together. The idea is this is the kind of conversation you would have with your friends at the pub. Hopefully it has some facts in it but you're also just having fun.
We're on tour and we're doing live shows. We just played at Harvard, which was really fun. Paul and I pick topics that are really out of our own imaginations or out of the cultural imagination. It could be something like cryptids, creatures that may or may not exist. It could be UFOs. It could be interesting stuff like how do we write history? Is it always biased by our contemporary times?
We're having a lot of fun doing the podcast. I think people who are interested in the imagination might find it really intriguing.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to include a bunch of links. I was listening to one on Bigfoot today.
We're both obsessed with Bigfoot, I don't know why. Part of what I think we're interested in is not does Bigfoot actually exist? That's in the background, but why are these beliefs attractive? Why are we drawn to them? Why does the imagination settle around certain kinds of creatures and certain kinds of ideas? Why is the imagination drawn to them? That's really more of the interest.
It also feels like there's this line where things get super uncomfortable, where you're supposed to not talk about these things or it's not safe to express them in a way. This is echoing my conversation with Jeffrey Kripal and his articulation of "super humanities" - that we leave things off the table. But why do we do that? And how does that shift?
I totally agree. This is one of the things that Jeff Kripal's work and my own interests really dovetail. We just interviewed this guy at Harvard, Dr. Avi Loeb, who's the guy that's thinking maybe there's alien tech that may have come, or maybe there are things that we could analyze.
There's that crazy comet that went through the solar system very fast. We only caught it as it was leaving - 'Oumuamua, I think it's a Hawaiian name. And he was like, "Why not at least consider the possibility?" This is how I think too - why take that off the table? You don't have to believe in it, but as scientists at least consider it.
I think Kripal's work and my own work is also looking at - actually William James had a word for it. He called it "the unclassified residuum," which is the stuff that science doesn't want to look at. But really, this is a place where these anomalies are oftentimes where scientific revolutions occur. They start as an anomaly, but eventually they build. So I think we should be looking at everything with a scientific mindset.
It's so interesting. Do you have a few more minutes or no? The blurb on your first book about natural history museums talks about categorization, which is essentially what we're talking about, right? That we get overly attached to the categories that we have about something that it becomes - it makes us blind to anything that doesn't fit. Is that -
No, I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of evidence that it's intuitively clear too. You categorize the world in a certain way, and then it's very hard to break that category.
I remember when somebody was explaining to me that a tomato is not a vegetable, it's a fruit. And I was a kid, I'm like, "No, it's a vegetable." And they're like, "No, it's a fruit." And it totally breaks your category. People for the longest time thought whales - they swim in the water, they must be fish. And of course they're mammals.
So there are very strong attachments to the way you historically categorize the world, and they're hard to break through.
What's next for you other than Chinwag and more teaching?
I'm working on a graphic novel which is exciting to me. I don't know whether - it's very hard to break into this world, but I've got one chapter done and I'm really excited about it.
I'm trying to do something that's very creative and again, not - but there's also a lot of stuff about religious viewpoints. It's about a guy who goes to the afterlife and he has to go through different levels of the afterlife, like the Judeo-Christian version, the Hindu version, the Buddhist version, the Muslim version, the occult version.
So it's got a lot of actual learning in it, but it's really just a creative drama, it's an adventure story. So I'm working on that.
Also, I'm working on a more serious book with some graduate student co-authors, and we're looking at trying to make a bigger argument for the importance of images in thinking. So how do we think with images? And we're trying to write a pretty academic book. So I'm keeping busy.
Again, I'm so appreciative of your time and it's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you, Peter. Appreciate it
