Personality Lecture #16

Discussion thread for Personality and Its Transformations - Lecture #16

study group discussion

Discussion as part of our Study Group.

my notes

  • 01:00 - part of an indicator of progress of science is that theories that were around 60 years ago are no longer right

  • 01:30 - the working theory - motivations set goals, or rather they define a perceptual space in which you see the world and act towards some goal, some endpoint, that is specified the motivational system (a hypothalamus system often, but not always), they also tune your perceptions to things that you believe relevant that goal, and tune your motor systems / behaviour towards the goal - as you think about food, your body begins to prepare for food

  • 03:00 - it is useful to think of a motivated state as a micro personality, albeit a simple one as it only has one thing in mind

  • 03:00 - many emotions track progress towards goals << is that their purpose? >>

  • 04:00 - the mental equivalents of pain are; grief, disappointment, frustration, loneliness - depression and people are grieving usually have somatic pain as well

  • 06:00 - if you give opiates to people, it seems to subside their depression, dampening their pain, and perhaps those who are prone to negative emotions, will be more prone to opiates

  • 07:00 - predatory aggression circuit and the maternal solicitude circuit seem to have evolved to be at the opposite ends of the distribution (the agreeable distribution) - compared to other mammals, men are quite caring to children and women are quite predatory to children

  • 08:00 - panic seems different to the anxiety/fear system - panic is about escape

  • 09:00 - book: affective neuroscience, fantastic about motivation

  • 10:00 - men do rough and tumble play with kids, and kids love it, it is an excellent mode of socialisation, as it teaches the child the distinction between aggression and too much aggression - rough enough to be exciting, yet not enough to ruin the game, without rough and tumble play, you do not seem to know where your personal boundaries are, where you begin and where you end, and how much you can take and how much you cannot, children who have missed out on rough and tumble play are socially and behaviourally awkward << as the child grows older, the more it seems one revokes play from the child, as they seem more of an adult who should be responsible, perhaps there is a way to make responsibility playful, perhaps that is success - musk seems to do this >> play with teachers then pushes into a dominance dispute

  • 14:00 - Swanson’s elaboration on the fact that half of the hypothalamus is devoted to exploration

  • 16:00 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinal_locomotion

  • 29:00 - memory is keeping track of what is new and what isn’t

  • 34:00 - the behaviourists were right to the extent they were looking at a limited lower system - but there are many systems that interact with each other

  • 42:00 - organise and integrate your motivations and personality, and do it with other people doing the same

  • 43:00 - positive emotions (extraversion), negative emotions (neuroticism) - positive emotion seems to be what happens when you’ve put a motivational state to its limit (the state after eating after you were hungry) - once you satisfy a motivation, a different one will catch your attention

  • 53:00 - if you can’t solve a problem right now, focusing on a different problem is an exploratory move

  • 54:00 - when an obstacle occurs that you did not account for, one of your suppositions fell through, leaving a hole in your meaning, this is met with anxiety or fear, that can cause spiralling meaning-correction, and once calm, exploration circuit arises to find solutions - which reaction seems equated to per unit of positive emotion to per unit of threat

  • 57:00 - serotonin high is satiating/satisfaction << is the opposite true when serotonin is low? >> - dopamine is related to exploration circuits << perhaps why this is associated with games >> emotions are happiness/play/enthusiasm/novelty << covered at 45 minutes, but seems contradictory >>

  • 1:02:00 - how to test if you’re an alcoholic

  • 1:04:00 - boys and girls have the same neuroticism, until puberty, where girls increase and boys decrease - this difference never goes away - women’s biology/emotions are not tuned to the woman, but tuned for the woman/child combination << is a woman without a child a monster? >>

  • 107:00 - when there is a deviation, the hippocampus looks inside you and outside you, if they are matched (you know what you are doing, and where you are) then it inhibits the amygdala and hypothalamus - the reticular activating system is what alerts your cortex when you need to become conscious - a lot of your systems are held back like horses behind the gate of a rate course, when something negative happens, they open the gates a bit, this is exciting and also release dopamine, as one way to solve a problem is to switch problems (exploration), one way to look at it, is to be prepared for whatever the hell you need to do next (alertness) - hippocampus detect anomalies, inhibits or activates lower systems, and gets you ready to go