[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] good evening. On behalf of the institute of neuroscience and Human Behavior. It i welcome you to this open my presentation. We are honored and proud to have with us this evening a scientist who needs no introduction to this audience. Our director of the seminole institute and author, american mania and the well tuned brained, neuroscience and that life well lived which is the book that peter will be talking about this evening. Welcome, thank you so much for coming to speak with us this evening. It is is a treat for so many of us. We even have people here from oxford, and we are just delighted to welcome you this evening. In discussion will be another scientist who is the professor of psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and the director of the neuromodulation center. He is also off faculty advisor. So we would like to thank you all for being here and sharing your expertise with us. A few housekeeping items, after the presentation we will have a discussion, you will receive if you would like to ask a question, please pick up an index card that will be passed around by some of our board members. Write your your question on the index card and we will come by to pick it up. We will not be taking any questions directly from the floor. So if you would like to ask a question please be sure to use the index card. After the q and a, you have the opportunity to purchase a copy of the book and have it personally signed. Before i introduce doctor y brow, i would like to say a few words about the friends in our open mind program. As most of you know the friend sponsor the open mind as a Public Service to the community at no charge. What you may not know is there is a cost to putting on these programs. We are a ucla support group but we still have to pay for the rental of the auditorium, honorarium for our distinguished speakers, many who come from out of town and we pay airfare, and lodging. If you have not already done so in the spirit of the holidays and the spirit of giving, we hope that you will support our organization. We really need your help so we can continue to bring these programs to the ucla community and the Los Angeles Community as a Public Service and not charge for them. Giving tuesday which is the national day of giving is on december first, it is is the perfect opportunity to join the entire nation and support an organization that has given you excellent programming this year that i know you have all been coming, if you feel it has been beneficial then please support us. Now i would like to introduce the doctor, in addition to being the director of the Semel Institute for neuroscience and Human Behavior at ucla, his also a distinguished professor and executive chair of the department of psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the david school of medicine. Also the ceo of the psychiatric hospital. He is an International Authority on emotion and its disorders, particularly depression and bipolar illness and the effects of thyroid home hormone on brain and behavior. Doctor offers a prescription for genuine Human Progress and takes us on a fascinating tour of selfdiscovery join extensively upon his decades of experience as a psychiatrist and has a Broad Knowledge of newer neuroscience and Human Behavior. [applause]. Thank you vicki and good evening everybody. It is good to see you here. This is quite an evening for me. One does not usually get celebrated by ones own institute, i feel very grateful, a little humbled with all these bits and pieces here. They had to move my desk out of my office because we cannot quite figure out one doesnt know about ones own place. So this new book is one that began, at least i started thinking about it after the episode of the financial meltdown in 2008. It intrigued me, when we think about our great country and we wonder how could we possibly ever imagined that we could exist primarily on debt and speculation. It is intriguing because it you may want to look at it more precisely perhaps as a neural psychiatric behavior issue. So i began to wonder whether we could dissect outs from that particular debacle something that might make sense and would take us out of the moral realm and put us in a constructive realm of how we might see this into the future and avoid it. It doesnt look as we have as we run into another bubble it seems to me but it was a worthy cause and it allowed me to bring my interest together. To find out in our own mind why it is that we do not do better. We have such material success but somehow it does not quite work in terms of Human Progress. One of the things that strikes me is in my lifetime the population of the world has increased, it has doubled actually. But the economic output has increased by eight fold in the same 50 or 60 years. That is extraordinarily striking. So one wonders given that we as a nation are only 4 of the population of the world but we consume in Something Like 25 . One wonders why it is that we are not doing better than we are. Because yes of course we are rich, but if you look at the statistics in terms of our social parameters and other things, we are sort of in the middle of the pack. One wonders how could that be. Is there strange correlation here between what we do and the fact that we have certain personal Health Problems and we worried about being violent, and objected lee, et cetera. So in that 50 years if you look at the world at large there is no doubt that health and our wealth have improved enormously. Most of the children that we bear these days in the world to maturity, we are literate in general, we are very successful, yet when you look at the u. S. We have many things that plague us. One one of which is for example that we have a great deal of obesity. We actually actually are one of the fattest countries in the world, over 50 of people are now obese, especially males, white males. So i think we have to ask ourselves questions about how did this come about. I think it may be so in this analysis that i will talk about tonight what i would like to present to you is the idea that it does not need to be, we can actually do things differently and have something which if we look forward into the future we would be able to avoid many of the pitfalls that we have found. There are now 7 billion of us living on this planet which is a larger burden to the planet than any other large animal species that has ever existed on its. In some senses you have to think of the age that we have now entered as the age of man, we have had 10000 years of reasonably stable environment and it is now shifting. You do not have to worry so much about whether we caused that shift or whether in fact that it is just shifting, but shifting it is. Therefore we have to think about how we can do something about it. It becomes in the age of man our responsibility to think forward and to ask ourselves why is it that certain things have gone off the boat. As ogden nash said, the american humorist import before he died in 1971, he said progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long. [laughter] so that is really the impractical terms what the book is about. I think if we wish to reshape the future we need to first understand ourselves and reshape our own behavior. That is the fundamental thrust. If we could accomplish that in this great country, we would give Great Service to everybody. Because there is no doubt that people look to the u. S. For the future and yet we ourselves are not very good at looking at the future. I asked two questions to myself when i started this book and i left them to you tonight. Why is it that human beings tend to consume excessively when living in a resource rich environment . Think about that. The more we get the worse our health gets in many ways. Why, despite our growing consciousness and awareness of these things of ecological problems, obesity, stress, lack of trust including debt, we know about all of these things but we do not change them. We worry about them but it seems as if we are powerless to change our behavior. Why is that . These are two interesting behavioral questions which are open to reason and open to analysis that we can bear upon what we know about advancing neuroscience. Im not just talking about molecular biology, i am talking about what we know about the way in which human beings behave towards each other and how the brain works. One of the things as i began to think about these things that became apparent is that one way of thinking about it is we are caught in a mismatch, there is a biological evolution proceed slowly of course, and so does cultural evolution but they do so at different speeds. Cultural evolution is much more rapid than biological evolution and it is probable that if you analyze that, in fact we have found ourselves now and a stick because some of the things that we have been so creative in inventing had created for yourselves a biological problem which we cannot fixed just by pretending that new technology will bring us to a better place. So what im going to propose to you tonight is that in evolutionary terms we have promoted a mismatch. There are three elements i will talk about. Ancient is the actual that seek shortterm reward, i will tell you about that. Material affluence of our society and the third thing which is an efficient habit driven brain. All of these things of themselves are somewhat positive but put them together it is a perfect storm. What has happened is that we find ourselves in the middle of this perfect storm without really understanding it and it is washing away much of our better selves. So that is the fundamental thesis of the book. Im only going to talk about the first half, i will then touch on the second half. The first half is called who do you think you are . The second part is, how to live. Simply i think what we run into and this is where the title comes in, the human brain is not well tuned for our modern culture. If you think about biological evolution as a darwin conceived it and we have now validated it in several ways it is a gradual process in variation, selection, variation of a species, selection of, selection of the biology that is presented to the environment and then replication of that variation. It is something we have very little control over. We might think we can reengineer the human frame but actually we are passive in that regard. So we no longer control our biology than does the darwin finch that he wrote so eloquently about in his writings of the late 1800s. It has no grand purpose at all. Human culture on the other hand it does have grand purpose, at least least weve use it with grand purpose. We think of it as progress. As a Movement Toward some better place. What i would suggest to you is that is not necessarily where we end up. Think about the obesity i mentioned earlier, if you mix modern culture, fast food, no exercise, time, stress, with ancient biology you end up with obesity. On the one hand you could consider the ability to move up rapidly, to eat quickly, to not have to worry about opening the garage door as being progress. But it obviously has an effect on our physiology. So lets look at a slide and ask the question about the way in which this could possibly have come about. This is just eight i have to remember to speak carefully into the microphone and because a cspan. This is an interesting slide because it shows the geological record, mammals first began to appear somewhere towards the end of the dinosaur era, some 60 million years ago. The apes of men and individuals we might now consider primate were about 20 million years ago. Then we came a long, somewhere around around here and homo sapiens are only perhaps 200,000 or 300,000 years old at the most. Then we reach the age of man, i was the 10,000 years years earlier, the age of man really began when we moved from hunting and gathering to living together in various cultures, mainly through agriculture but nothing very much change. The interesting point is here, this is the inflection point. You see we moved rapidly in terms of our numbers. We move from scarcity into abundance both in terms of numbers and in terms of our culture. So this is the interesting part of the story. So what actually happened then, actually what i think happened was we discovered liberty of which i will talk about in a moment. We also discovered science and fossil fuels. That is the secret to what has happened in the last two or 300 years, years, the change in the energy supports. Lets look at the biology. You can only really understand the human brain if you think about it in terms of evolution. What i just spoke about, if you think of it as a cantaloupe melon, it melon, it is about the same size, in the middle of it is all the seeds and that is the ancient brain. That is essentially the lizard brain. The brain that taught us how to be competitive, to survive, the shortterm brain. Around that and it is called the limbic brain, in fact it doesnt mean border, so if if you think of the first part of the flesh of the cantaloupe melon that is the first structure and that came about approximately when the mammals began to be found on earth. The mammals of course brought to our understanding attachment and social behavior. Lizards tend to eat their young, we do not do that, at least not anymore. The fact is that the way in which we care for each other is a big evolutionary advantage. So that is the next layer here. In the brain it is reflected in this area that you see there. From there on the words it is really just continued and of growth of the brain. That is what we call the cortex and the frontal the cortex be in the outer rim of the frontal lobes being things that delivered for us, the extraordinary things that make us human. Imagination, the ability to reason and especially to abstract reason. At hobbs said as youll need in a moment, there is no dog that does not know horse that it when he sees it and there is no dog that does not know a man when he sees it. We are extremely creatures. Also we are driven and competitive just as that primitive brain was all along and the attachment of the layer on top of it changes that way in which we are competitive and selfinterested, but it doesnt obscure it. So that things need to move together if theyre going to be compatible in terms of the behavior that we experience. When everything is working together it is a nextdoor to machine, but when they do not Work Together and we see that frequently a psychiatric disorder, things fall apart. For example, you can imagine the outer cortex, the frontal cortex is the seeds of reason which is what happened during the enlightenment years, but the core of it is passion. So that relation ship between reason and passion become something similar in my mind and i tell my students its like a horse and a writer. The horses the passion and when it starts to bolt up the writer does not have a good bridal and away goes the horse and so does reason with it. Its also a little bit like the title of my book which i take from when he went in 1722 he wrote a book for his students called the at the series of exercises for the students. But it also on the frontal piece teaches you how to choose because in those days the obstacle wasnt notoriously out of tune, just a changing weather pattern or moving it for a few days the thing would go out of tune. So bock and his constant recognize that if youre going to have an instrument like that that you are going to play melodious late you needed to know the instrument too. So we really understand the world and metaphor. So the way in which i think think of this book is that it is really like a well tuned to brain being, if you really want to know how to manage life you have to not only understand the interaction of the musician of the mind to but you also have to know about the instrument. So today as in the first part of the book i am talking about the instruments. When we play this instrument well it is extraordinary. Lets go back to that inflection, lets go lets go back to the point where the biology which is been there for millions of years, supercharged in in the last two or 300,000 years met essentially the discovery of fossil fuels. Until then we were completely locked into the worlds cycles cycle of energy which is essentially driven by the sun. It is what we are discovering now is that mr. Goes to sleep. We are thinking nothing much will be growing, maybe something in california but the fact is we have a cycle which is based upon the energy of the sun, that disappeared when we discovered fossil fuel. The people of that era we call the enlightenment thinkers. The enlightenment thinkers were individuals who were just like we are but they were fascinated by the country around them and they were somewhat reticent of the Catholic Church and basically say human beings could manage by themselves. Thomas hobbes for example who we see down here in this corner, he had lifted the english civil war, watched a few other people die and he was convinced that there is no way in which human beings could manage by themselves. We either needed a king who is very strict or we needed a guard. He thought life as he said was nasty, buddhist, and shorts. Another man, a dutchman in the early 17 hundreds, the dutch were much more attuned to trade than the british. Mandeville would come over when he was in his 20s and he liked the english sense of humor. He started to say that actually vice was a good thing. They were helpful because they employed a lot of people. He had luxury and into itself and vanity them industry. Its the fundamental nature of the capital of enterprise he was talking about. He was pushed aside by the english establishment and said this is ridiculous, we cant possibly have people doing what they want to do, just will not work. This was a time of the government essentially control just about all trade. David hume, the next one on our list he was, he believed that it was a slave of the passions. He was much more understanding of the dynamics of mind, in fact to the prophetic fellow. These people knew nothing about anatomy of function of the brain but they were extraordinarily capable of introspective and understand it the way in which human being thoughts. So david hume was very influential. In fact he was particularly intellectual on this younger man here, adam smith. He was the patron saint of american capitalism. It was also someone suggested to me i think it was meg, but the reason why we did not get into the euro is because of this thing here which is in english 20pound moat in which we have a picture of adam smith. It says the division of labor and manufacturing and the great increase in the quantity of work that resulted, we