La dopamina “etiqueta” experiencias buenas inesperadas. Transcript: Speaker 2 Yeah, well, dopamine is part of one of the oldest strategies in terrestrial biology. It’s really about learning. It’s about tagging things that are important in the environment that you want and then using those tags to find it again. And it’s really that simple. It turns out, one, that it feels kind of nice to find a thing that you want. Therefore, you seek that thing again because it feels nice again and you want to feel nice. Now, that’s an anthropomorphized way to understand those bilateral worms. But the point is that dopamine is a method of sensitizing your brain to stimuli that you need to survive. And if that’s very abstract, that’s because that’s covering a lot of ground. That can be a lot of different things to a lot of different kinds of animals. Ultimately, at the same time, it’s sort of the same thing to all of those animals. One of the ways to understand dopamine and its role in learning is that its release is stimulated by unpredicted, positive things, by surprises that are like happy surprises. (Time 0:01:44)
Relación entre aburrimiento, comida chatarra y dopamina. Transcript: Speaker 1 Kat asked me the other night, what is boredom? And I’ve been thinking about that. And I think maybe the answer is that it’s moments in which we really are between pulses. And that’s what makes us restless. And when we say, oh, I’m bored, it’s because we’re not engaged in something that has the potential to give us a little hit of dopamine. So what happens when we are completely comfortable where we’re not searching for a hit, but everything is predicted. And so we’re not getting our little pulse of dopamine. So what do we do? Well, we have to find something that is unpredicted, that is positive. So we eat some food. Well, the food is not surprised. You just pick it up off the store, out of the store, anywhere else. The surprise then can be if it’s sweeter or fattier or richer. Okay. And so, yeah, so we get a little hit of dopamine from McDonald’s. You know, it’s a very popular thing to do. Go to McDonald’s. And so that’s fine. You start out and you have a Mac. But then you expect it. If you go into McDonald’s, you expect and you get this Mac, well, what’s predicted, it’s not that big, not much fun. You don’t get that much stuff. So you go to a Big Mac. Right. And then pretty soon, you go to the Big Mac, and then that’s predicted. And so what do you got? You got a Whopper. Okay. And I mean, I think that can stand. We could go on in most of American food industries based on this concept of appealing to people’s sense of everything is predicted by coming up with some big new whopping surprise. And that’s richer and richer. And that’s why the country is getting fatter and fatter. (Time 0:07:20)
Cerebro es como un músculo, crece con el ejercicio. Transcript: Speaker 1 Well, one thing for sure is that the brain, all of the brain is responsive to exercise just the way muscle is. You use it and things grow. I mean, if you a violinist who practices, you know, many hours a day, they’re the areas of their brain that controls their finger fingering enlarges, you know, and this same thing is True for, you know, taxi drivers who in London who have to memorize the whole map, street map of London, the area of their brain in in largest too. And it’s the expense of other areas that have to shrink because the skull is full. And then when they retire, and they’re no longer exercising that map, running that map, it goes back to where it was. And their old other parts of the brain that had shrunk down grow back and they regain certain skulls. So there is a trade off here again in the brain. (Time 0:13:02)
Pinturas en cuevas en Indonesia hace 43000 años. Transcript: Speaker 1 Well, we should. I mean, we should have time for those things. And as we, where we evolved as foragers in small communities, there was quite a lot of free time. And for hanging around the fire, telling stories, we know that early cultures and practically the first thing that humans did is they migrated, as they found a cave. And the first thing when they moved into a cave was paint it, you know, there are these cave paintings all over the world. The famous ones are in France, these Lascaux caves. They’re 11,000 years ago. But the ones in Indonesia that have been found are from 43,000 years ago. So that was very shortly after we left Africa. (Time 0:18:32)
arte historia homo_sapiens
Probablemente había artistas especializados en las tribus antiguas. Transcript: Speaker 1 And, and obviously, you know, it wasn’t just anybody in the community. There must have been people with special skill who are doing this. And to do it, of course, they couldn’t go by pigment down at the store. They had to find ochre of some metal and they grind it up and then they had to get little bones, probably hollow bones of birds. And the way they did these, as you, as you, of course, know, is to put their hand on the, on the wall and below this ochre between those is sort of like a stencil. And this is a very high level of skill. And if you think about it, you realize, well, whoever was doing this, men and women, we don’t know, and spending time preparing the materials, gaining the skills, making the paintings, Somebody was feeding them. And because they weren’t out, not thinking and gathering, they were doing this decoration. And what it means is, I think of it as the equivalent of the national endowment for the arts. I mean, there was some community support for these kinds of activities. (Time 0:21:06)
arte competencias historia homo_sapiens
Actividades artísticas y rituales son muy costosas, deben tener función evolutiva. Transcript: Speaker 1 Then the question is, well, why, since we evolved to be, have efficient bodies and efficient brains, why did our brain invest in these sorts of skills? I mean, we have, for music, this is the same thing, we have parts of our brain that are devoted to skillful paintings, skillful music, skillful storytelling, skillful all kinds of men Of the arts. To have invested so much brain in these artistic activities means that it must be very fundamental to our survival as a species. And so what is the role? And I would include in this what I call sacred practice, which isn’t just about going to church, it’s about activities that have an emotional content and a spiritual content that draws Us together. I think all of these activities draw together members of the community and relieve the sorts of tensions that would naturally arise when people are living close together who have big Brains and are smart and can cause all kinds of mischief. So I see these artistic activities and what I would call sacred practices, which include fairly elaborate sex too. If you watch animals, when they copulate, it’s like pretty brief thing and they walk off and shrug their shoulders. It’s not exactly the kamasutra. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we’ve invested a great deal of effort and imagination and time in these activities. (Time 0:22:18)
arte evolución función homo_sapiens ritual
Pinturas más antiguas de humanos los muestran bailando. Transcript: Speaker 2 One of my favorite things about those Indonesian paintings, I mean, some people think that one of them in Indonesia and Borneo might be the oldest so far recorded or known drawings of Human figures. And what are those human figures doing? They’re dancing. They’re very obviously dancing. They’re holding hands and dancing and they have these big elaborate headdresses on. These are not just human figures for some kind of, I don’t know, they’re in class. Yeah, this is, they are doing a thing and it’s an important thing. (Time 0:24:01)
baile evolución historia homo_sapiens música