Richard Restak I think has probably been here for six or seven books. He's been coming for at least a dozen years, and every time that he has a new book coming out I just get so excited because we learn so much news about what's going on inside of our brains that nobody would have ever imagined two decades ago. Richard Restak and I had a conversation last time he was here about how much knowledge that he had gained since graduating from medical school and as I can remember, I mean it's just, hundreds of times more information and research that's out there in neuroscience than there was when he was doing his own graduate work in neuroscience. And he's still now discovering all these now aspects and for this evening, has more to do with the social aspect of our brain, which has enormous repercussions of how that our environment is going to influence our brain and its structure in ways that we never even thought about. So I want to welcome Richard Restak, he'll talk about The Naked Brain, he'll talk for twenty to twenty-five minutes, then take questions, if you have questions, please go to the microphone there, and then after the questions I'll line up people here on my left-hand side to sign copies of the book. One other thing, and that is, if you don't have a copy of the book in your hand I'm going to pass these sheets around, I've got about 25 xerox pictures of page 16 in the book, which is a very intricate drawing of the specific physiology of the brain, which Dr. Restak thought that it was important for everybody to kind of focus on when he's talking. So I'll pass these out as he begins talking. Thanks for coming. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Don't anyone panic if you don't get a copy of that, actually I'm not going to necessarily refer to that, I just wanted to say if you wanted to look at aspects of the brain that I'm going to talk about, there's 5 or 6 different things that are checked on the diagram. So we''l just-- if you have it, fine, I will mention some of these structures and the diagram will give you a background of what we're talking about. I appreciate the nice introduction Barbara always gives me. She asked a question a few minutes ago when we were getting ready to come out here about which is advancing quicker, our knowledge of the brain or technology. And of course that the technology is the horse that's leading the car. As we learn about the brain through technology, so we keep that in mind, evolutionary-wise, in terms of the evolution of neuroscience. It started out with treating illness, treating the abnormal brain, if you will, and now because of technology, because of the development of CAT scans and MRIs and all the things we're reading about, we're now moving to the point where we're looking at normal brains. Normal functions. Which brings us to social neuroscience, which gives us the insight that although we're all sitting here, we're all individuals, we're all sitting with our brain encased in three coverings...still, our brain is a social organ, if you will, it responds best to interactions with other people. We learn to read other people, we learn to know about ourselves, really, through interactions with other people. The social insight, I should say it's an insight in the brain, social structure. How did we come to that? Well you remember Harry Harlowe's work with monkeys, which showed years ago, he took a Rhesus monkey and had a deprived infant monkey fed by or just actually just had a mother surrogate, as he called it. He had one of them that was a cloth mother, and the other was a wire mesh mother, and even if the wire mesh mother had the bottle, the monkey would still sooner be with the cloth mother. This gave us the hint that touch and tactility was important. The second insight was a study done about amphetamine, showing that if you gave amphetamine to animals, monkeys again, that they would respond pretty much the same, because it affect the same part of the brain in each of them. Then somebody looked at it more carefully and they discovered the response behaviorally was quite different. The monkeys that were dominant became more dominant, those that were dominant, that were passive, became even more passive, if you will. So it showed that even the drug, the medication that you use, the response depended on what the social background was. And this was the whole beginning of it. And as we develop these technologies like MRI and CAT scans, we begin to study what happens when people begin to interact in terms of hostile interactions, good interactions, and things like that. So now we've got to the area of social neuroscience. And generally we call it the Neurosociety. I've found a good way of giving you an idea of how neuroscience can be applied to everyday life. It's to talk about a specific situation. I'm going to pick on two people here, I'm going to do it just at random, and I'm going to ask them a question and I think it's very typical, and then we'll talk about what that tells us about the brain. Now I'm not going to necessarily give you the parts of the brain that are involved here, you get that from the diagram or from reading the book. I just want to get the main message across. So here it is. I've brought a thousand dollars with me, and I've given you the thousand dollars, okay? And the deal is, it's called the Ultimatum Game, if you can share that money with one other person, let's say the woman sitting beside you, that you keep the thousand dollars. But if you offer her something of that and she won't take it then the money comes back to me. Okay? Now he's got my thousand dollars and he just offered you two hundred dollars. Did that satisfy you, would you take the two hundred? You would? How many people would take the two hundred? Pretty much the minority, because it's not a fair offer. He's got $800, you've got $200. You must be an economist. Because of course that is the rational thing to do, isn't it? She comes into the bookstore, and now she's going to leave with $200 that she didn't have. Barbara would probably hope she spends the $200, in any case, she's got the $200. Most people won't take that because it's unfair. So what happens is, in a case like that, the amygdala, which is a part of the brain having to do with emotion, fires up, if you will, you look at an MRI, and you see this business, it's like it's unfair. So you took it, but let's imagine that you didn't take it, okay. And now it's called the Ultimatum Game because you don't get a second chance. It's not bargaining, or somebody says I won't take 200 but I'll take 250. Let's imagine he had said to someone else the 200 and they said No, I won't take it. Which is what has been found in the studies. People say no. So now I've got the thousand dollars back. So now I pick someone else, and I say, No I'll pick him again, I'll give it back to him. This time he's going to say, Well, I don't want to lose that money again, so I'm going to be generous and I'm going to give her $300. Most people won't take $300. Now, are we talking here about rationality, or are we talking about emotion? We're talking about emotion, aren't we? Because the purely rational response would be to take whatever you're offered. Because what difference does it make, you've never met him before I assume, and vice versa, so who cares? He's got $800, you've got $200. Well, what happens it, this is an example of the fact that we have this sense of fair play in the world, which can even work to our disadvantage, which can even work to the fact that we will sacrifice. Now in the case of raising the ante a little bit, most people say, well I won't take $200, then I say, suppose I give somebody $100,000. What will you do. And he offers $20,000 to someone. Well, he still might not take it, because he's got $80,000. But if you keep amping it up to a million, eventually, someone's going to say, well, hmm, $100,000, I'll take the $20,000 and he can keep the $80,000. Now are we talking about rationality or are we talking about emotion? Now the studies that have been done that I report in the book show it's happening in the brain. At a certain point the pre-frontal cortex definitely comes online and starts to take over and does what you did without any prompting, realizing, take the $200, who cares about the $800. It takes a while for that to happen. And in some people it would take even a greater amount of money before they changed their idea. So you have an example there of the fact that you can apply this into a new area called neuroeconomics. And there is in fact a neuroeconomics. And I was thinking, well, are there any examples of neuroeconomics other than what I've put in my book? I'm reading the newspaper this morning. Now, I'm not buying property or selling property, and I have no particular interest in real estate, but in the real estate section, there's an article called For Sale By the Owner's Ego, and the general drift of it, for those of you who didn't read it, was that people are asking too much for their home, they're not looking at the fact that we're in a recession, in terms of home sales. And we have sentences like this. "Imaging technology is allowing scientists to peer inside people's brains while they wrestle with financial decisions. These studies have illuminated a few key concepts. Many people will pass up sure profits for looser ones. Some will turn down profits if they believe someone else is unfairly profiting." Like the example we talked about. "They'll walk away from a sale if they feel the other buyer is getting too good a deal at their expense." Then it's quoted here, by Kevin McCabe, who's a professor of economics of law and neuroscience, and he teaches the course of Neuroeconomics. So this is already starting to percolate into the general society. What I was calling the neurosociety. What I mean by neurosociety is that the principles of neuroscience and what we're discovering about the brain are being applied to everyday life. Now, someone reading that article, it's interesting what effect it could have. It could have the effect of saying, "Gee, um," well they give a really interesting example here. In the dropping market, the private people selling their homes dropped about 2.2%. Those that are the builders, who are building and trying, they might drop as much as 15-20% in the last year. See, they have a professional involvement in it. They want to see when someone has their own home, there's this amygdala that's firing off, that's saying, look at all I've done with this house, why can't I get all this money that I think I should have. So there's an example of the fact that you've got the emotional, the amygdala, the limbic system, working to the detriment of the person, because the functional frontal lobe is not working. So it's interesting that the thing is starting now to become sort of like, I think soon in the next year or so, we're going to hear this in marketing and economics, and there's plenty of studies of marketing, for instance, that show you can change people's memory about the past that will make them more likely to buy a product. I talk in the book about a specific example, where people were coming out of theme parks, and a new product was given to them, it was a toothpaste. And the idea was that the good feelings that people had from their time with the park would carry over, so that when they got home, they would think positively about this product. Whether they saw an ad for it or saw it in a store, they want to buy it. It's called "memory morphing," you're piggybacking these situations so that you get the positive thing that-- that's a marketing thing. There's been studies done as well about people who are what we call faithful buyers of a particular product. Before we even get to that, if you're sitting looking at a screen, and someone is flashing words like "car" or "perfume" or something, it'll be picked up much quicker when it's in the right side of space, which makes sense, because the left hemisphere is language and it tends to respond to words, it sees the word "car" "perfume" picks it up a millisecond quicker than if you put it over here. However, if you're pushing something like Sony or some compact, or some car, Ferrari, or something, it's actually picked up quicker when it's in the left field, so it's like the right hemisphere is picking up the emotional center. So that was the first thing they noticed. They said, well some of these brands are processed by the brain a little differently than the other simple words, so that gave us a little hint. So they thought, well let's get people who are really-- we've all met somebody who's really excited about a particular product, like they only buy Sony or they only buy a certain car, they're faithful to this all the time. Well they got some of these in an FMRI scan, they got sort of a profile, if you will, of them. They said, now let's give them a test, a C-11 test. Which is a psychological test. And they had a sort of profile on that. So what the marketers then do is, they can tell the likelihood of someone becoming a faithful adherent of a certain product by the paper and pencil, because they don't have to put them in an MMRI. See, they've developed, they've used the FMRI, and linked it with this particular pencil and paper test. Which gets around the argument when people say, well how can marketers ever, you know, how's that going to enter our life, they're not going to put everybody inside an FMRI, well that's true. But on the other hand, they may be able to tell from responses, sending out particular inquiries, things like that. So that will tell you how someone will be responding as a buyer of things, a customer. So we've got into marketing, neuroeconomics, and the courtroom as well, already the neurosociety is determining whether or not people are responsible for actions, are they guilty of what they're accused of, because perhaps they have a brain scan, a CAT scan which shows if there's some frontal hyper-profusion, which would indicate that the frontal lobes are not functioning as they should be in the executive part of the brain. The part of the brain where we make decisions about right and wrong, and personal responsibility, things like that, so it's applied in the courtroom. Extrovert, introvert. We all know people who tend to be introvertish, they tend to spend time by themselves, or with their close family, and other people are glad-handers, they want to get outside and meet people all the time, spend time with them. Well they actually have different brain responses as well. When they're looking at something, like a particular positive smile, as opposed to a scowl, and it's presented so fast that you can't consciously see it, they will, you can tell from the brain response how much time they're attending to it, and the extrovert will spend more time with the positive thing, and the introvert will spend more time with the negative scowl. The other insight that is sort of driving social neuroscience, what I call the neurosociety, is the fact that most of the things that our brain does are not run through consciousness. They're subliminal. If you remember back in the fifties there was a book by Vance Packard called The Hidden Persuaders, and that was based on the idea that when you look, you're watching a movie and they might be suddenly flashing "Get a Coca-Cola," or "Get popcorn," but it would be so fast that you wouldn't see it. And the idea was, would this force people to get up and in fact buy popcorn. Well, it doesn't. So they say subliminal advertising doesn't work. The reason was, they were asking too much of it. What the advertisers now want to do, there's no way to force anybody to do anything, they want to increase the likelihood that someone is going to do that, and they have plenty of experiments showing that that happens. The most famous one that I mention in here is people looking at Chinese Ideographs, symbols if you will, and unless you speak Chinese, you can't tell one from another. So they said to somebody like myself, who doesn't read or speak Chinese, we're going to show you a couple of these, and just tell us if you like them or not. Is it something that appeals to you or doesn't appeal to you. To which the people responded, on what basis am I going to choose? I don't know what they are. Just look at them and tell me whether or not you find them appealing or unappealing. Unknown to the participant, for one millisecond, they quickly flashed either a smiling picture or a scowling picture. The person doesn't realize that they saw it. Well, it correlated that about 76% of the people tended to judge this Chinese figure as positive or negative depending on what was subliminally shown. So this is now the goal, it's not so much forcing people, it's just a subtle little influence you can have which increases the likelihood that people will do things. So that's what's behind the marketing things. Now, if you think about why we purchase things, of course, unless we're very impulse- driven people, and some of us are, but hopefully not too many, most people will-- once again, suppose I show you a picture of a Ferrari and the Ford Taurus, which will soon be history. Most people here would be more excited about seeing the Ferrari and not surprisingly, the brain would be much more active. We'd see not only frontal areas and limbic areas, we'd see a lot more activity. But that's not going to cause somebody to bankrupt themselves to go out and buy a car, because we have parts of the brain that inhibit us. Unless we're, as I say, impulse-driven characters. So it shows there's some limits to it. But memory morphing can be done, and change people's memory in such a way that things are more positive than they seem to be. I mentioned a study in here, and it's just propaganda marketing stuff on this one, and I found this an interesting study, that people were given an opportunity to try out a new soda that was going to be put out. Sort of an orange soda, it was supposed to compete with colas. And people involved in the experiment were told that it was millions of dollars going to be spent on advertising. See what you thought of it, you're one of the first people to test it. So they then put a little bit of vinegar in it before they gave it to them. Well, as a result, it didn't taste too great. So they recorded that it didn't taste very good at all. So they said, well, okay, before we give you the money, let's just have you look at what other people thought of this soda. So then they had actors on videos saying how great it was, and what it reminded them of, and then people had second thoughts and they wanted to taste it again. They thought it'd be different. This is the memory morphing that you do, where you change actually what happened. We're all guilty of possible experiences of memory morphing. I'll give you an example, and I learned about memory morphing first-hand. I was in Hawaii with my wife about a year and a half ago giving a talk, and we went to dinner at a place where they had a beautiful parrot. Barbara knows I'm interested in parrots. And you know, I was looking at the parrot at dinner. A couple of weeks later, my wife showed me a picture from our trip. She showed me a picture of me on the balcony of the room we had, and on the balcony was the parrot. And I said, "I don't remember that," and she said, "Don't you remember, after we had dinner, we talked to the manager, and he said, 'Oh, take him up to the room and get a picture and bring him back down.'" So yeah, I think I had a glass of wine, a cocktail or four, I thought, how can I blot out something like that? And then she laughed, because she had used one of these Adobe photoshops. She put the picture of the parrot and the picture of me on the balcony together. But for a period of time, I was convinced that somehow this had happened but I didn't remember it. And this is what we will all do. There's experiments again and again, and I mention in here that if you suggest things to people, they will tend to remember them as suggested, and people will believe for instance, that as a child they were lost in a mall and rescued by their grandfather. It never happened, but if it's suggested it did, then they'll remember it. The most amazing experiment, was they took a picture of a man's uncle, the picture of the uncle when the uncle was, let's say forty, and there's another picture of the man himself when he was about eight or nine. And they morphed those together, put them in a hot air balloon. They said, do you remember the time you and your uncle went on a hot air balloon and all this stuff, and well of course it never happened, and not only did he remember it but he started elaborating on the experience, how exciting it was, he could remember the trip out to the airport, I mean where they got on this hot air balloon. So this is what's called memory morphing, where you can morph one's memory, and people remember things that didn't happen. I guess the most famous example was the study in here, they got together a special ad for Disneyland. And they had written on there that any children that were brought there by the parents would have an opportunity to meet Bugs Bunny. Well, everyone was really excited about that. And lo and behold, 16% of the fathers and mothers remembered that when they had been there as children, they had met Bugs Bunny. Well, of course, nobody met Bugs Bunny, because he's not a Walt Disney character. So they couldn't have met him, it was impossible. But just the suggestion of this particular ad was enough to make them remember it. So you have these kind of things, and then you have a marketing drive, and for marketing, the possibilities...you can imagine them for yourself, where this kind of thing will lead you. So we're reading into the neurosociety, and this is an introduction to it. As I mentioned in the book, I'm providing a series of snapshots of how we're beginning to look in new and different ways at our most personal attributes, such as trust, truth-telling, love, sympathy, empathy, ethics, competition, dominance and obedience. These are essentially the areas that I take up in the book, and it's an early thing. As I say, social neuroscience is a fledgling discipline, similar to aeronautics at the time of the Wright brothers. I mean, it's just starting out. It's just starting to get into the culture, just starting to, I think, have a powerful impact. But it's also going to have limitations, as I spell out in here. We're not going to be able to force people to buy things that they'll want or do things they don't want to do, but we might be able to subtly influence them in both positive and negative directions. So what I'm going to do now is take some questions. And if you don't have any I'll ask myself a few questions.
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