Dr. Aldrich Chan 00:00
Intelligence doesn’t need to be conscious. 60 to 80% of the information that’s ongoing in our in our brains is actually completely unrelated to perceiving the world around us. It’s about 46.9% of the time that our mind wanders unintentionally.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:17
Most of the time that, you know, our mind is wandering. It’s not this we think that we’re thinking all the time, but it’s kind of running underneath,

Dr. Aldrich Chan 00:29
right? Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:30
outside of our conscious awareness. It takes some of the mysticism away from intuition if we think about it as this idea and capacity to process complex information that might be outside of our conscious awareness.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 00:43
Lots of people, unfortunately, cling to their old identities, or they cling onto resentments, and they are unable to let go.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:52
If they were paralyzed by this idea of all the things that could happen, versus okay, how can we explore this? It’s going to work out, regardless of how it works out, there’s going to be opportunities for growth. One

Dr. Aldrich Chan 01:04
of the biggest fears that that I tend to see in my clinic quite a bit is the fear of uncertainty. When we don’t know, again, it’s can we be happily not knowing? Can we be okay in this unknowing?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:15
I know, it’s it’s totally complicated and individualized. How long does it take for someone to transform?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 01:22
Transformation is really now about embodied transformation, and what prevents transformation is usually

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:38
Dr. Aldrich Chan, welcome to the show.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 01:40
Thank you so much. It’s an honor being here.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:42
Now, I actually found you because I was looking online about consciousness, which, you know, in my line of work, we really think about hard science, and I can’t help but experience many of the high performers that I work with, you would think that they would feel amazing and that they are conquering life, but I I don’t find that to be the case. I think that people really struggle, and that’s how I actually found your work. And you’re a neuropsychologist, and you work and you test people’s brains, and I just thought you had some great theories.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 02:21
Well, excellent. Thank you. Happy to come here and share whatever wisdom and knowledge I have.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 02:26
Tell me about what you are seeing and what you’re doing in your clinic, and and how that can help just people in general.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 02:34
So, a neuropsychologist is somebody who assesses brain functioning, to put it very simply. So, it begins with the research side of things, so imagine you’re in a brain scanner, and I am asking you questions in relation to your memory. Maybe I’m reading out a list of 15 words and having you try and remember them. While that’s going on, we’re looking at how blood is flowing within your brain. We know what areas are most active, what areas might not be as active. And then we can compare that data, how your performance is, and how that relates to your brain functioning with thousands of other brains that we’ve looked at, and performances that we’ve looked at. And once we have all that normative data that we can compare, then it goes to the clinical side of things, where I can now test people without the use of a brain scanner. And so someone comes in, and I give you that same memory test, I give them other tests that look at executive functioning, look at attention. People, for example, concern that they might have ADHD. Well, the question becomes, for example, what type of attention is impacted? There’s simple attention, there’s selective attention, there’s sustained attention for a duration of time, there’s alternating attention, and then there’s divided attention, paying attention to two different things at once. And sometimes people come in thinking they have an attention issue when really it’s a memory problem, and vice versa. And so, you know, what the profession and what the work really does is it really helps clarify and pinpoint what specific cognitive challenges someone might have, and by knowing what those might be, what they can do to remedy them, right? So it informs the recommendations, and it also highlights the strengths, of course, which is just as important.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 04:11
When I was at WashU, we ran as part of our fellowship, we ran a Memory and Aging Clinic. Okay. And there was a neuropsychologist that went, you know, in before us and would spend 45 minutes to an hour with the patient for the baseline assessment. And, you know, it just makes me think. So, by that time they came to the clinic, they were having memory impairment. But if you can catch memory issues early or attention issues early, are are you finding that there are ways to improve that?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 04:42
Right. So, right now where the science is at, my understanding is that the medications and the practices people can engage in, lifestyle changes included and diet changes and all that sort of thing can help prolong their state, but this stage that you’re talking about is called mild cognitive impairment. And at my time at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, I worked at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Aging. We also were actually a specialty clinic looking at mild cognitive impairment and particular neuropsychological variables with high correlations in distinguishing whether someone was simply losing memory due to normal aging versus somebody who was, well, has a more insidious process happening in the background, something like MCI. And one of the interesting findings actually is the variable that we found important was it’s called proactive interference, which is how old information can influence new information that’s being learned. And we can quantify that through these memory-based tests. And it has very high sensitivity and specificity. I believe it’s even better than a scan in in detecting whether someone might be undergoing this early-stage process.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 05:53
You know, it’s, it’s really interesting. You’ve got two core frameworks. And, again, these are original frameworks. They are structured in your book. And it’s called The first framework is the SAD theory.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 06:08
Yeah, so the the SAD theory, it stands for separation, alienation, and and discord. And so the first phase, separation, This is really, being a neuropsychologist, I did come up with a neuropsychological theory, and so the the separation phase is is is how we’ve separated, quote unquote, from from nature. Now I don’t actually believe we’re separate from nature, but we have this experience of separation. So the question is, how did this experience come to be? Now, if we think about the some of the oldest cave paintings, about 64 to 68 million years ago, there are these cave paintings, and the reason I’m bringing this up is because it’s evidence for the first time that there’s some possibility of symbolic a symbolic experience, right? And so the capacity to symbolize, to me, is is also going to point to and the capacity to draw this this cave art, you need to represent the art, you need to recall it in autobiographical memory, and so that accesses a network that we call the default mode network or the the DMN. The easy way to think about it, I have acronyms for all sorts of things because of my You’re one of

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 07:19
those people. I know that.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 07:20
Yeah. It was I was influenced by my old one of my old teachers, Dan Siegel, who’s who’s still a teacher and colleague and friend. But I call it the MOTS Network for mental time travel, others, and the self. And so it affords us the ability to simulate a future scenario. It allows us to go back in the past and retrieve a memory. It also allows us to self-reflect and also provides us the ability to to think about what another person might be thinking or experiencing. Social cognition, so mental time travel, others, and the self. And another thing that it relates to is mind wandering. And so, when your mind is wandering, I’m sure there are times that anyone listening or yourself where you’re talking to somebody and maybe they’re boring you, and so your mind starts to wander off, and then all of a sudden you’re like, Oh, what did that person just say? Right? In that in that case, what just happened? You disconnected. You separated from the immediacy of space and time. And that’s the default mode network. And some really interesting research from Killingsworth and Gilbert in I think it was 2010, they estimated that it’s about 46.9% of the time that our mind wanders unintentionally, which is a huge percentage of time, right? And so, to me, the DMN, yes, it provides us with very important functions, but it also allowed us or provided us or created the opportunity for us to become separate from nature. Now, the DMN is one. The other network is called the central executive network, and this relates to areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is an important region, as well as the posterior parietal regions. Those regions allow for executive functioning. It’s goal-directed activity. And so, that also requires us to suspend the immediacy of space-time to analyze the environment, to think about and strategize for the future. And so, to me those two networks, when we think of them globally, again afforded us this separation from nature. But the interesting part to this, and it’s important for me to say, is that separation doesn’t mean that there may be a problem, right? Just because we’re separate So, if we think about, I like to use the metaphor of a band or an orchestra, right? When a bunch of different people are playing music in harmony, everything sounds great, that’s wonderful. Everybody is separate, but they’re connected in harmony. But in other circumstances, because of the separation, someone can also hit a wrong note, or someone can be playing a completely different song while the whole orchestra is is moving forward, right? And so, in that situation, it can lead to alienation and discord, and that’s when those other two phases come about.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 10:04
So, the SAD theory, why did you create it? And I know that we’re we’re only on one part of it, but these are original frameworks. And what I’ve seen from the people that come on this podcast, which is it’s such an honor and privilege to be able to learn from, is that there was a need or an open white space within the field. And, you know, that allows for creativity. Was there a reason that you created the SAD theory? Where did it come from?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 10:32
Yeah, there are there are three three big reasons. So, the first one is my my patients, the people that I see in practice. When I assess individuals, you know, lots of times we operate on this sort of deficit model. We focus on this condition, this deficit, this decrement, this is impaired, that’s impaired, that’s, you know, borderline functioning, all these all these terms and and sort of judgments that sometimes are not so helpful when you are attempting to assist somebody.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 11:05
They were really stuck in perseverating around whatever their perceived problem was.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 11:12
Yeah, so it become it’s it becomes a stigma in sorts, right? Oh, I have this condition, I have ADHD, or I have autism, I’m on the spectrum, or, you know, I’m impaired or there’s a problem with me, there’s something wrong with me. That tends to be the sort of thoughts that that might come up for them, and has come up for lots of people who who are diagnosed with these conditions. And sometimes, they’re even diagnosed with these conditions without good evidence to support them, which is really frustrating for me, but it’s also my job to to rectify that. Part of the big reason here then is coming up with a framework that can reconceptualize and understand conditions from a different perspective, one that is more factual, but also, well, more factual, period. So, yes, we still are going to identify those weaknesses, but we’re also going to highlight the strengths, and when we couch it in an evolutionary framework, so ADHD, for example, no longer becomes, you know, there’s something wrong with you. It’s more so the fact that society has changed so drastically from the original conditions that we evolved in that our nervous system is simply not optimally engaged with the current environment. And so I say, you know, in my feedback sessions, I often integrate some of these ideas in my classes as well when I talk about, for example, ADHD, who do you think discovered the use of fire? Decided to run up to a a tree that was struck by lightning and says, Hey, let’s put this branch next to this fire. Was it the typical, you know, person, the neurotypical person who has good impulse control and was holding themselves back, or was it the person with, quote, unquote, poor impulse control that ran up to it and said, Let’s test this out. Let’s rub these sticks together. Right? So, these creative ways of thinking led, I imagine, to more creative outcomes, and that is actually what we find quantitatively as well. People who do suffer or not suffer—I don’t want to say suffer—but people who have the condition ADHD may, in fact, they demonstrate more exploratory thinking, and it leads to more creative outcomes. And there are certain advantages to different conditions. ADHD is just one of them. Dyslexia, people on the spectrum, there are all sorts of benefits to these diagnoses as well. It’s just the context is is is not optimized for them, for those to to shine.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:38
Hm. So, what I’m hearing you say is part of the reason that you created the SAD theory, which is separation, alienation, and discord of how humans drifted from nature, and also I want to get back to how we define nature, right? Is it human nature? Is it the trees? But really, it sounds like you were in clinical practice, and you were seeing patients defined by whatever their belief was, and then that was stigmatizing and then shaping their trajectory of how they both felt about themselves, but also the input that they were how they were functioning in the world. Is that right?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 14:15
Yeah. Yeah, they would limit themselves, and justify some of their limitations based on the the condition or the diagnosis that they had.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 14:23
What I’m What I’m hearing you say is that also that they The idea of having ADHD, something like that, while it’s positioned in a negative way from our understanding, that it might not have evolutionarily been designed that way.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 14:36
Yeah. Yeah, it may have been very Actually, it’s likely very beneficial in an unpredictable environment, right? Such as the discovery of of of fire. But

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 14:45
that’s That’s really fascinating. So the SAD theory was to provide this framework for redefining and then thinking about things, and then obviously, probably how to get after it, and and not fix it, but but understand it. So separation Is that And you define separation as separation from nature.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 15:03
Mhm. Yeah. So by nature, I I When lots of people think of nature, they think of the natural world. They think of a world outside of themselves, right? I think that’s already a problem, because humans emerge from nature. We’re a part of this of this world. Elements on the periodic table, you can see the ones that exist within humans, and the the truth is is that there’s not nature is out there and and there’s something different in here. I really see them as as one continuous spectrum.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 15:35
So if I go outside, and I look at my garden, which I don’t think you should because it’s very disappointing, but right? Yes, we have cactuses out there, we have we have plants out there. Physically, I’m never I mean I’m I’m not part of that entity.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 15:51
Are you sure about that? Well, I think so. If we think about the trees right outside your house, there’s a there’s a process of of and the air that we breathe is intimately connected to the trees outside on your in your front porch. There are atoms that are continually being interchanged and exchanged between yourself and the environment that you’re in. The food that you eat, right? That comes from the land. I I imagine you eat quite healthy, right? So organic, free-range, all that sort of stuff. All of that comes from the living world, and we need that to sustain ourselves. And so we are a part and parcel of nature. We experience ourselves as isolated, and sort of in our heads. And again, my theory for that is that separation portion of the SAD theory, and the the rest of it really relies on the or lies on the premise that the the of the seven principles being also a natural organizing principles in nature that humans also experience.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:49
I mean, I think it’s I think it’s fascinating. The separation piece, you have There Is there more to that? So that’s the separation of nature, and I mean, it’s kind of esoteric, right?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 17:02
I don’t I don’t see it that way. Okay. I mean, if we think about the separation portion, so we could talk about two specific functions, right? Or there’s working memory and there’s inhibition. For example, the the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex relates very much to inhibition as well, but the working related to working memory, so it inhibits or stops the immediacy of what’s happening so that we can retreat into our minds and think about maybe what I’m going to say next or whatever the case is. And then the the orbital frontal cortex behind the orbits, that’s about inhibiting specific motor reflexes that come up. And so inhibition is very well-known and it’s important a very important function, but it allows us to, well, stop what’s happening now so we can, again, move into an abstract world where we can think about what to do next and then bring ourselves back into the present moment to apply those reflections in practice, right? To then eventually go back into the abstract world. And so it’s not, again, not necessarily that the abstract world that we have, the symbolic world that we have in our minds, is a is a negative thing, but I think that because we’re misaligned or mismatched with nature, we’re suffering the consequences, which we we could get into deeper if you’d like.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 18:16
I I do. And then is alienation the next? Have we completed everything that we need to know about separation?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 18:24
I think we’ve gotten the gist. If if readers or or anyone watching this wants more, they can always check out the book. Alienation, I think it’s historical, but it’s the the bigger part to this to me is evolutionary mismatch theory. This is where it really fits in for me. And evolutionary mismatch theory is it’s it’s something I’ve already alluded to before. It’s it’s the idea that our nervous systems are adapted to a world that no longer exists, and for us to determine whether there’s a mismatch. And I’ve had a my own chance to to speak with a a leading evolutionary scientist on this, anthropologist on this, sorry, Nikhil Chaudhary and his team. But basically, there needs to be, first of all, a a mismatch, a difference between the way that we are operating in our worlds versus the way somebody in a hunter-gatherer society is operating. So there are actually several hunter-gatherers that are still alive today, and there’s actually been a whole lot of work by amazing work done by lots of anthropologists looking at the way they live and how societies are, and also how what’s going on now that some societies or many of them are transitioning into this falling into Westernization and globalization. So the first thing is: Are there differences between these societies? The second thing is: Do these differences lead to quantifiable then the third part is when you go back to that society, are these difficulties not present in those traditional hunter-gatherer societies? Now, of course, the one argument some people make is that well, hunter-gatherer societies today are probably far different than the ones before, and while there may be some differences there, they’re they’re probably our best approximation to how people were living before circa 10,000 BCE, which was the agricultural revolution.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 20:14
It’s What I think is so interesting is that humans take a long time to adapt in a meaningful way, right, as opposed to say, again, maybe a fly or something that has a a shorter lifespan. Again, I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but I think at some point with the tech boom, that we somehow adapt. Again, I’m curious as to your thoughts because if we’ve been able to adapt to our environments always, and now we have this new environment, which is, unfortunately, detached from nature. You know, as us sitting here under these lights and and being exposed to phones, do you think that we are adapting?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 21:02
Not entirely. So first let me let me just punctuate the severity. Right, so, greater than 99% of the spe- our human species history has been spent as hunter-gatherers, and so there’s only that little 1% sliver that we’re living in a modern world. Now let me just re-couch this into a 24-hour timeline, right? If this were a 24-hour timeline, the agricultural revolution that happened circa again 10,000 BCE, that happened in the last 7 minutes, the industrial revolution happened in the last minute, and then our digital age is the last 2 seconds. And so it’s it’s a very very tiny bit. Now, the the changes that you’re talking about, the adaptations, there are two ways that we can change and adapt, right? We have neuroplasticity, and we also have phenotypic plasticity. So neuroplasticity is, of course, how our brains can reorganize and change and and and adapt to the environment that we’re in, and then the phenotypic plasticity refers to epigenetics, which is how our experience can modify gene functioning through DNA methylation and histone modification, and there seems to be intergenerational transmission of that as well. And so those are major ways that we can change, but given the amount of time that we have spent in a particular environment, we are, well, I don’t think that we’re adapting very well. So there are a few important, we could say, categories that are that are more and more well-studied as they relate to mental health conditions. So, and this comes from Nikhil Chaudhary’s and and his colleagues from Cambridge, and so, for example, social relationships and community is a major one, that’s a big difference and mismatch. Another one includes child-rearing practices, alloparenting. Another one is education, there’s also egalitarianism, equality throughout, and then there’s present orientation, which basically they’re sort of immediate return versus what our society is very delayed return. We could get into those more in a bit, but I think some other ones that they don’t note that I think that Nikhil separately, when I talked to him, agreed with me on, you know, movement, diet, and exposure to the natural world. Those are all extremely important areas as well that they’re finding lots of more and more evidence for to support the the mismatch.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 23:38
It’s concerning, isn’t it? We both have kids, and I just I wonder how we’re going to be able to form a life and behaviors for them, because there it’s certainly tech is going to continue to increase.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 23:51
That was actually the second reason I didn’t mention as to why I put this book together was the birth of my son. So that was a big part. What world am I bringing him into? And I became so much more conscientious and and aware of society, we could say, and and the comings and goings of of technology, and so forth.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 24:13
I want to come back to that because I want to come back to your thoughts on reality, but we still have to get to the D, yeah, in DISCORD.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 24:23
Yeah, so the the final one, DISCORD, that’s now about the belief systems that lots of us are are functioning on, and that we’re, I guess, lots of people are inculcated into, really. I think a a big one that I that I bring up time and time again is the separation of mind and body, right? This idea that somehow all of our virtues can be pinpointed to our our soul or to our mind, but then, you know, everything bad about life is, you know, related to our biology in some way.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 25:00
Explain more. Tell me more.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 25:02
Yeah. So, I mean, I’ve had. I could share. Clinically speaking, I could share, you know, there are frequently, you know, well, clients will come in and they come in and they feel very conflicted, right? They have, for example, this I don’t know, let’s say a compulsion towards some sort of, let’s say, a sexual desire, or let’s say an aggressive thought or experience, and they’ll attribute that to, Oh, it’s just it’s my body. It’s it’s just who who I was, how I’m biologically wired. And then, you know, when it comes to all the person’s values and and, you know, aspirations, that’s all attributed to, well, his soul, his mind, the true self, right? And this automatically, unfortunately, creates a never-ending war within oneself, this unending war between mind and body, and some people start treating their bodies less with with less less care than they should, even though everything they do, everything we do, is realized and expressed through our bodies, and we know now more than ever that the mind cannot be simply the the brain. It’s just insufficient to explain it all. We know the gut brain, for example, which has become very popularized, has more nerve endings moving up to the brain than the brain does to the gut, and changes in gut microbiota relate to changes in mood, cognition, and even personality, and when you look at different conditions, you can see, you know, different types of bacteria and so forth, and colonize and colonies in different numbers, right? And then there’s also information about cardiovascular challenges leading to executive dysfunction, and so it’s all it’s all interconnected, and we can’t separate one from the other. It’s it’s best treating them both as one. I think that leads to a much healthier outcome.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 26:49
You said something that I had been thinking a lot about. So I’m actually working on my third book, and part of this is about strong women. And I was thinking about the areas, the domains in their life that they really have to get right. These drivers, right? So we know that you need a strong musculoskeletal system, muscles, the organ of longevity. We know you need a strong brain, good metabolic health. And then I was thinking about the things that are inherent biological drivers, thirst, hunger, but love and attraction were also one of those drivers. It seems that it’s clear it’s not an emotion, it’s not sadness or anger, but this. And and why do I bring this up? Because you had mentioned, say, someone comes to you and they feel aggressive, or they’re driven towards sexual desire, or whatever it is, that is there this biological drive that, while it expresses in the body, that is that is normal and perhaps different in men versus women?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 27:58
So so there’s two things I wanted to say. So I’m going to answer the question. I did want to say, though, there are are two competing models in emotion theory right now that’s very, very popular, and the one I still am more close to comes from somebody named Jaak Panksepp, and actually, in his system of emotions, CARE is actually a primary emotional system, and so is so is LUST, and so is PLAY, actually, which which are very interesting systems, that, well, we could just talk about later or whatever the case is, but I’m just to mention that there that that the CARE system, for example, would be most closely connected to this experience of love. So there is a system for that, and and it is considered quite primary. Now, it is different, we could say, to some respects. We in in in males and females. I’m just to the to the extent that, you know, the care system, at least from a from this evolutionary biological perspective, it’s thought to have emerged for a a mother’s care for her child, basically.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 29:08
It’s exactly what I was reading, is that right, but that there is this desire that because of being able to raise a child that it seems as if it’s not an easy thing, that there, you know, obviously there’s attachment theory, but there’s this biological drive that it seems again, and this came from you talking about the, you know, are we separating the mind and the body too much? And, you know, again, I just am so curious as to how that plays out in our in the way that we think. So, in the way that we think, are our thoughts coming through action, meaning if someone’s desire to partner with someone, right? So, I have two kids. Let’s say I’m driven by love not as an emotion, but as this biological necessity to be with my husband, and there’s this ability to connect because we have to then subsequently raise children together, am I less likely to have some kind of discord than, say, my husband or someone else not relating to? So, for example, I might be very driven by one of those again, biological needs versus, say, someone else, or, and if, again, this is maybe a little existential, but if I am less connected to my body, am I less likely to make those types of choices?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 30:36
Oh, I see. Okay. Well, yes. Yeah. You know, in fact, there are, you know, changes to the to the human brain and and when you have a child. And it also happens to fathers to a certain extent, of course to the fathers who care about their kids, not to the ones who abandon them.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 30:54
But it’s interesting that one could even do that. Definitely, as we begin to think about the human brain and mind and how that then presents as the the entity of the human.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 31:04
Mhm. Mhm. Yeah, it’s almost like what they called an innate releasing mechanism, as anthropologists would call it, where a specific condition would emerge in the environment, and it automatically triggers this, you know, heightened connection with the people around us, a greater protection towards our children and family, and and for for for fathers, you know, reductions in testosterone and and other neuro neurochemicals related to to lust and so forth.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 31:35
So the discord, what I have here, as I understand it, is this mind-body dualism, and I think that you’ve said this before, that the social media exploits and reinforces these systems over time.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 31:52
Historically speaking, one of the the major splits, and I’ve mentioned the agricultural revolution a few times now at 10,000 BC, because that’s when hunter-gatherers stopped hunting and gathering, we could say, or it diminished quite a bit. And so what happened in that situation was the the urge for conservation emerged and was was was quite pleasantly satisfied by this potential to for the for them not to move anymore in order to have food. So they can grow their crops. They can farm. But what also led, what this led to is more sedentary living. It also led to greater population, which led to a greater spread of disease, right, which also led to malnutrition, and it led to all sorts of consequences that were unforeseeable, unanticipated. And I think what’s going on now is the same thing with the digital age, with technology and and this age of misinformation, if anything, right? Like we’re exposed to more tragedy in the world than we were ever evolved to experience, right, just via the news and and you know, what we usually knew about at least from a hunter-gatherer perspective is what was going on in our tribe and maybe a neighboring tribe, you know, not necessarily what’s happening all the way in Europe or in Asia and so forth. So, you know, the the media in in attempting to you know, get more views and get more attention throw more polarizing ideas out there, and polarizing information, and tragic information, and so, yeah, that is going to sustain some of these perhaps negative belief systems about humanity and about maybe even oneself.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 33:37
I was just talking to my husband because it was Friday night movie night at our house. Mm. And when you go through the previews, and people might think this is silly, but the news is really dark.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 33:47
Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 33:48
But also the movies and all of the things that we’re seeing, we’re exposed to so much more in a in a way in which I I don’t think even consciously we’re aware of and how that can be very insidious into what that means for how we feel about ourselves and others. And I know that a lot of this stuff is new language to our listeners: the default mode network and you know, this idea of mental time travel and and how our minds wander. Do you think that this is at the root of what goes wrong?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 34:27
I think it’s at the root of what a lot of what goes wrong. I wouldn’t say it’s an all-encompassing theory. I I wouldn’t be so bold to say that, but I do think it relates to a lot of the symptoms and that if we’re capable of finding ourselves in harmony with natural principles, that life can be a lot easier and we can be more empowered. Just to throw it out there to make it a little practical because I love this Netflix idea that you brought up, so some people might wonder like, Okay, well, how does any of this How can we use any of this information to our benefit? and and And let me ask you, Gabrielle, when you guys are looking for a movie on Netflix, has it ever been a case where you spent way too much time scrolling and looking for a film to choose?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 35:09
That’s the joke in our house. So we spend the first half an hour of movie night trying to find something to watch.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 35:15
Right, right. So so here’s something kind of interesting. So, for example, we evolved to have and hold only about four bits of information in our minds at a time. Now, historically, they’d say seven plus or minus two, but that’s including the ability to rehearse that information and other variables. But really, it’s really just about four. And so, one of the things that’s happening in that phenomena that it seems to occur to everyone is that we are overloaded. It’s choice overload. There are too many choices that they present us, and so it takes forever. And so one of the things that you can do very easily in this situation is pre-select four to six movies. You know, movies that throughout the day, oh, this person recommended this movie, said this could be good, oh, I saw this one had an interesting title, you know, just write down a list and then choose, you know, four to six of them, and then within the family, you can look at the previews of these and figure out which one you want to watch. It simplifies things a lot, and you’ll see it makes things a lot smoother.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:14
I love that recommendation. Actually, that’s what we started to do, believe it or not, because that we had to solve for it. By, usually by Wednesday, everyone has to submit what their what their their choices are going to be because we’re not going to do that. So by Friday, we have that, and that’s probably the same for everything, whether it’s dinner places, food choices, clothing, whatever it

Dr. Aldrich Chan 36:38

1. I would call that an action that is aligned with natural principles.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:42
What else can we think about in terms of natural principles, some of these other principles, because that again, that’s foreign to me. I didn’t realize that my brain can only have four bits, probably only three bits of information.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 36:53
Sticking with the mismatch theory, right? One of them is time orientation, which is present orientation. So, in hunter-gatherer tribes, they tend to be what I mentioned before is immediate-return hunter-gatherers, and what that basically means is that their actions lead to pretty direct feedback. So if they go hunting and let’s say it was a failed hunt, okay, they failed the hunt, they have to eat the food that they foraged. us now, we’re functioning more so on this delayed We humans we we suffer from something called temporal discounting, meaning that we discount or reduce the value of events happening in the future. And this is very quantifiable. So whenever something is further on in the future, we’re less motivated to actually well, fulfill that obligation or responsibility. So let’s say somebody is trying to Well, in your profession, maybe someone’s really trying to lose weight, right? Or they have diabetes and they’re they’re trying to reverse diabetes or they’re trying to do something in order to reach that goal. You may find that they have some issues with motivation. Or discipline or it takes time to to acquire that. And so, part of the issue is that maybe if it’s if they’re very obese or or or very very unhealthy, it’s the the goal is way too far out, and they just can’t materialize it in the present. And so with that delayed return, instead what you would want to do is create immediate returns throughout the process. So basically immediate rewards and immediate ways, or faster ways, for them to get feedback. That’s very constant and very, you know, even daily or weekly.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 38:39
So for example, if someone wants to lose weight, and this is something that we see in our clinic all the time, is that it’s hard because it’s project into the future. Or if I study now, or do this work now, or save now, then I’ll be better off later. And typically, technology, that’s what gamifying apps, you they’ll get an immediate feedback. I think that that’s what Maybe That’s

Dr. Aldrich Chan 39:03
actually one of the reasons why it’s so addictive. I think that’s a good use of technology. I’m not super against technology, I think we just have to be very cautious about how we move forward with it. I think that’s a great way to use technology.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 39:14
Yeah, there are other ways that we can collapse our future self to our present?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 39:20
The best thing you could do is is try and creatively come up with a way to bring up the potential emotions that you might experience in that moment. So we want to improve intrinsic motivation, motivation coming from the inside versus extrinsic motivation. And going back to the networks, actually there’s a difference in how your brain registers these two. Extrinsic motivation is actually a little more DMN-related, more about the stories that we tell ourselves from external world, whereas the intrinsic motivation is more visceral. It it activates an area called the insula that relates to another network called the salience network, which allows us to toggle back and forth between the DMN and the Central Executive Network.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:04
So how do we practice or improve the extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation? If we want to because ultimately we have to ask ourselves the quality of our lives, the quality of our lives related to our relationships, our environment, but all of these components are likely really important.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 40:26
So, I think a big part is again bringing up the the emotional experience of what it’s like to complete it, but I think another good strategy is helping them identify what their core values are and linking them to their core values. So, the way I like to identify values, and this actually goes back to my first book, Reassembling Models of Reality, is through what I call vital signals, and basically these are psychophysiological responses in relationship to what’s categorized as self-transcendent experiences. So, when you’re watching a movie, sometimes we feel moved, right? There’s a there’s a I’ll give you an example. There’s a scene in the in The Dark Knight one of my clients brought in, and he’s you know he’s in this prison, and he’s it’s this big, you know, big big what is it? It’s like a cave, and he’s stuck, and he has to climb his way out of there, right? But he keeps falling and falling over and over again because he keeps bringing baggage on and and and having that safety net until finally to bring the fear of death back into him, he takes the bag off and then he climbs in and and makes it to the top. This was very moving to a particular client of mine. And so I you know, you know, as we were discussing this, I asked him what was it that was so moving about that that scene. And he he had some issues with addictions historically, and so what moved him so drastically was not only his the Dark Knight’s resilience, but also his ability to let go of of clinging on to what was old or what was safe, and that was that was what was necessary for him to move forward. And so that’s an example of identifying that value and then linking it to, well, what are the the concrete sort of exercises or activities that you that he wanted to engage in that would help him get out of that hole that he was in.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 42:25
When you work to identify values, do you think that it’s where someone is spending their time? Meaning, if someone values family or connection or honesty, there’s all these different things, would you say that the evidence of what someone values is how they are spending their time, or is it more repetitive behavior?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 42:52
So, I think lots of people think they value things that they don’t actually value. That’s one thing also that I think’s important to think about. So, like for example, as somebody who’s who’s very health-conscious and believes they need to be healthy and that’s important to them, and then they’re smoking cigarettes, let’s say, you know, know, at that point the question is, well, is it truly something that you value, or is there something more dominant within you that you’re not conscious of? So, that’s also a big part of sort of discovering what is it that they If there If there is a dominant belief that’s sort of consuming them and keeping them from their value, so is time spent necessarily a reflection of their value? It can be if there’s no dissonance involved in that time spent, but if there is dissonance, I would, you know, ask the person to consider what’s what’s going on. Is there a conflict in their system of values, and and is well, is there something else to be uncovered?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 43:51
And do you find that when you work with clients over time that they have to course correct what they really value, and then how they’re executing on that?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 44:00
Yeah. Yeah. A big part of it is also the fact that people change. We all change with time, and so sometimes values change as well. And we also have different values for our work life versus our social life versus our intimate life, and and so on and so forth. And so it’s important for them to be aware of of what many of those valid core values might be.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 44:24
And it’s probably different for everybody. But do you think that there are some things that are always going to be there, and then other things For example, maybe someone values time with their friends, and then they are in their 40s, and then they have a child, and maybe they don’t value time with their friends anymore. But do you think there are a core set of values that people always have? Again, how many I mean, you probably have seen thousands of patients, right?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 44:53
Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I I I do believe there are. And actually, this moves into the territory of of moral intuitionism. Oh, yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:01
I wanted to talk about this. So we were starting to To be fair for people, we started the conversation off-camera, and you have studied Daoism.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 45:11
Yeah. Yeah, as a contemplative practice,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:13
which is to be like water. And obviously, I’m butchering this. You’re going to You’re going to tell me how that’s different. But right now, everyone’s talking about Stoicism. And Stoicism is really this idea of logic, how probably to not be like water, more like an immovable stone statue. And they’re two, I would say, competing philosophies. But you had said to me, Hey, but actually, there are similar crossovers, and this is how we somehow got on the conversation of of moral intuition.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 45:43
Yeah. Yeah, so so so I’ll repeat what I said in in some brevity, but there’s lots of commonalities. They’re both philosophies based on nature. The core difference between the two is is how much Daoism favors intuition over reasoning, and to that extent, part of the research that I that I did was looking into whether there is proof that intuition can outcompete analysis or logic in some way, and the other portion to it is, as I just mentioned, are there intuitions that we’re born with that may relate to our moral compass, you could say, and both of those I think are quite fascinating. So, the first one is, what is intuition, right? That’s a that’s a big question. Lots of people think that intuition is is is BS, that there’s no that that it’s not really good for anything. But the truth is that that the science seems to contradict this, and there are many theories as to what intuition might be. We don’t fully understand it. So I think it is a nonlinear, rapid, complex process that synthesizes information from multiple domains in the brain, leading to a somatic experience of sorts. So, there’s António Damásio, a famous neuroscientist, and I believe his wife was involved as well, came up with the somatic marker hypothesis. And it’s basically they would put people to play this neuropsychological game—it’s called the Iowa gambling task—and they wanted to see how people made decisions under uncertain situations. And what they ended up finding is that, and there’s a way to to win in this gambling task, but people weren’t able to logically figure it out, and what they found was that an area of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is part of the DMN, by the way, becomes highly active when people make a decision in these uncertain situations. So, let’s look at real life. Have you ever been in a situation where you were, there was nothing inherently dangerous about the place you’re in, but you felt that there was something off, your bodily told your body told you that there’s something wrong with this place or this or something off with this person or whatever the case is, and so you so you left or you did something to escape the situation. And I think most people,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 48:10
everybody, would

Dr. Aldrich Chan 48:10
say yes, it’s happened. So, the question is, how does that happen? And so, this is the idea. And so, the vmPFC, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is a convergence zone where multiple regions of the brain are feeding it information. Another sort of expression of intuition are aha! moments, and what one area of the brain that comes very lit up is the right superior temporal gyrus, but basically what what what’s happening there, like the person wasn’t thinking about whatever problem they were trying to solve, in fact, they were probably doing something completely different, and then suddenly, aha, something snapped into place. Intelligence doesn’t need to be conscious. It doesn’t need to be metacognitive: think to think about thinking. Intelligence can be very spontaneous. Think about people with photographic memories, or people on the spectrum who can tell you what happened on June 1st, 1922, on this newspaper, right, like tell you an exact line, like then you ask them, How did you do that? They’re like, I have no idea. That’s intelligence, though, right? And so this is where intuition is really coming into play. And so now we look at studies that were looking at, well, let’s let’s compare intuition and analysis and see where does one outcompete the other. And so I’ll tell you the the gist of it, and if people want more information, again, they could find it in the book. I have all sorts of charts and tables. But basically, if a problem is simple and you know all the variables, analysis will beat intuition. If the problem is complex, but you still know all the variables, analysis will beat intuition. If the problem is uncertain, simple or complex, but the variables again are just unknown, intuition will outcompete analysis. And so it tends and and I think for for many of us, our lives, most of the time the var- all the variables aren’t necessarily known. So that gives a a very big place, an important place for for intuition to to to stand by.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:10
Could someone get or train their intuition?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 50:13
That’s a good question. So it depends, I think it depends on what the intuition is being used for, quote-unquote, cuz another way to to think of of of intuition, and I didn’t define it this way, but you can look at it, some people look at it as a predictive system that we learn from the environment, right? So, I I When you I play guitar, right? So, I love playing guitar, and when I was learning guitar, it was very difficult to play a lot of classical music, but as time went on, things got a lot easier, right? And so, information, as you’re first learning it, it starts off difficult, and then it gets it gets moves over Activation in the brain moves over, shifts from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere when you start to get more procedural about it, and some people would say that this procedural memory can also be a part of intuition. So this is where the definition gets a little blurred. But if that’s the situation, then yes, you can train, quote-unquote, your intuition to do more things. But it always starts off, it always starts off messy before it moves into smooth territory.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:22
I I like what you said, though. It’s, you know, it takes some of the mysticism away from intuition if we think about it as this idea and capacity to process complex information that we that might be outside of our conscious awareness.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 51:38
Mhm. Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:40
Which makes me also think that we process more information than we even realize, and whether it is

Dr. Aldrich Chan 51:47
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:48
that sounds like something you’ve read about, or

Dr. Aldrich Chan 51:51
Well, I mean it’s it’s I don’t think people understand how amazing our brains are, right? Like, just briefly to to throw it out there, right? So, 100 billion neurons, each neuron has about 10,000 connections, that leads to about a 1,000 trillion connections throughout the brain, which means that the amount of brain patterns that exist outnumber the amount of atoms in the universe.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:18
How do we even relate to each other?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 52:21
That’s a good question, and it’s a big mystery. It’s through a lot of filtration. So we use about 20% of of the energy that our body produces, right? But what that amounts to in in in electricity is 20 watts of continual use of electricity that that that makes our brain function. 20 watts. That’s enough to light up a little 20-watt light bulb. Now, people in, I think it was Project Blue Brain or the Blue Brain Project, they tried to quantify how much electricity it would take to power a supercomputer that would mimic what our brains can do or our minds can do, and they came up with about 10 gigawatts, which is like enough to power millions of houses. I think it’s like 10 to 15 million average American houses. And so there is so much mystery still left to the brain, and it’s so energy efficient and fascinating. And all the time, you know, every single moment that’s passing by right now, we are we are creating this this beautiful high def- at least to us it seems high-definition world, right, that a computer could not do unless it spent, you know, x amount of of power and complexity. And so there’s just there’s there’s just so much mystery still left to it, which is which is actually, if you want to talk a bit about reality, it’s one of the reasons why Hoffman, Donald Hoffman, would suggest that we don’t see reality at all, that everything is just filtered to the extent that it’s literally 0% of reality is seen. It’s because it would simply take way too much time to to render all of reality with 100% accuracy, that we see what suits our survival.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 54:07
You know, I I’d mentioned that when I was at WashU, Marcus Raichle was there, and he he said something similar. I mean, it again, it was neuroscience speak, so it was a little it was totally over my head. And he was talking about the default mode network, and that most of the time that, you know, our mind is wandering. It’s not this we think that we’re thinking all the time, but it’s kind of underneath, Right. Yeah. outside of our conscious awareness. And

Dr. Aldrich Chan 54:38
I know in in one of his papers, he says that he estimates that 60 to 80% of the information that’s ongoing in our in our brains is actually completely unrelated to perceiving the world around us, which leads to the question: What is our What are our brains actually doing? And so there are all sorts of predictive circuits in our brains, and our brain, we co-create reality.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:02
You know, there’s that there’s this esoteric way about thinking that, you know, you — and I don’t know if people would consider it esoteric, but more on the lines of, and you’ll have to correct my language, more self-help. But if you look at the neuroscience, it’s not total it like they’re not separate. I know we call it social science, or these ways of of self-helping, of self-help, and and thinking positive, but from a scientific standpoint, there seems to be evidence behind some of these more self-help processes.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 55:39
Information isn’t just coming in, and our brains are just passively receiving that information and then creating the world around us. Instead, information is coming in, but our brains are actively manipulating that information at very, very early levels. And Anil Seth and his colleagues have found that they’re even interacting, for example, at the primary visual cortex. So even before information comes in, before it’s visually becoming interpreted by our brains in V1, the very first layer, it’s already being influenced by expectation- and prediction-based systems in the brain. And so what we see is being completely changed into, again, what suits our survival most. And I think a nice metaphor for this is this sort of computer analogy where, you know, you’re looking at a computer screen, and this is Hoffman’s idea. You’re looking at a computer screen, and everything’s user-friendly. You have these folders, you can open these folders, you can open up important documents, but at the end of the day, that’s not the reality of the situation. Behind it’s all this ones and zeros and coding and electrical circuitry that’s completely different from what you’re seeing, right? So it’s a user-friendly interface, in in sort of his words.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 56:49
So the idea that you can co-create your reality is, I mean,

Dr. Aldrich Chan 56:54
That’s what I mean by that. So we we don’t we don’t have the ability, for example, like I see you, and I and I can I visualize you in in this particular way, I can’t change the way I suddenly see you. What I could change would maybe be like instead of focusing on details, I could expand and focus on the whole, or, you know, think about you as a person and integrate those sorts of qualities, and that’s definitely things we can do. We could change how we view things, but not necessarily what we see.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:20
How we view things. Okay, that would make sense. Not what we what we see. You know, I I think about my daughter, and when you have a child, you, at least for me, you can’t help but reflect on your own growing up. And when I think about her experience of the world, and then she might be very upset, or she thought someone was mean when we were all sitting there, and no one else had that experience, this idea of co-creating, it seems like you’ve got to get that hardware right, you know, from the beginning. If we’re processing all of these things, and it seems as if the time in which we lay the foundation of how we think, we have very little agency over our own lives, because we’re young. And so this lays down the foundation of how we process information, whether we believe in ourselves or we don’t. And then, as you get, say, midlife, then you can reflect back and then, oh, okay, now I need to change this baseline computing. It just seems, you know, it seems backwards.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 58:20
Right, yeah. Interestingly enough, the networks for self-reflection that would allow us to sort of change the way that we think, or think about what we’re thinking, even it kind of also goes back to the DMN, and the DMN tends to stabilize around nine to 12 years old, and that’s when it starts to really where you can probably talk to them more about or harness the capacity for self-reflection to alter some of the narratives that may be going through their minds. Before that time, developmentally speaking, it tends to be a little more unstable of a network.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 58:58
And do you think that it’s nature or nurture?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 59:01
Oh, it’s always a mix of the two. Yeah, I would never say it’s one or the other.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 59:06
What I’m saying primarily here is that so I have two kids. They’re both raised the same, and they experience things totally different. And I just watch them process it, and, you know, there’s there’s probably some genetic way in which they interpret their relationship, or, for example, being vulnerable to to sadness. Maybe one I mean, I think that there are certain genes that maybe would highlight that someone would be more vulnerable to something like sadness versus someone else.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 59:38
Yeah, I mean, there’re definitely genetic predispositions for for everyone, and, you know, where things get really challenging to fully grasp is the epigenetic component, right? But, as you said, you know, well, you know, it’s about only 35% of our brains are developed at birth, and so a huge percentage of our brain remains to develop as we get older, and that that development is happening, of course, in direct relationship with the experiences that they have, and these experiences, yeah, they’re molding the foundations of of neural networks, but it’s also potentially impacting things at an epigenetic level, depending on the intensity, frequency, duration, and so forth of the experiences.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:00:25
There is something that that people say that if if people experience trauma, right, there is this kind of intergenerational transmission. Is that is that validated?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:00:36
Yeah, there are more and more studies coming out supporting that there are epigenetic changes. So the genotype will remain the same. Remember, it’s the phenotype, the expression of the genes that can be altered in some way.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:00:47
What about the positive aspects? You don’t hear people talking about how they’ve developed these positive traits, and they’ve done these things, and then they trans- transmit that.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:00:58
Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s that’s what I mean by the deficit model. The whole world of research is so focused on that that there’s not enough that’s focused on the more resilient aspects. But if if the negative side is true, it’s I think it’s valid to suppose that the other side can also be true as well, that there are epigenetic transmissions that may be more positive in nature, that some people who, I don’t know, survived a famine, or survived the Holocaust or something, may not come out more vulnerable, but their children may come out more resilient in some way, or or maybe they only become more resilient when those epigenetic markers are triggered in relationship to a particular experience, because not everything that’s transferred through the generations is activated. It requires that condition in life for it to become, well, triggered and alive, right? So that’s what I could say to that.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:01:51
The seven principles of nature, The Return Path, you you have a remedy, and it’s CPR WEST, and this remedy stands for creativity, process, relationship, wholeness, equilibrium, spontaneity, and transformation. You frame each principle as an invitation to a way of being. You know, it was interesting that Daoism is the way. You know, when I was watching Yoda, baby Yoda saying the way, and it was really it was really funny. I heard my daughter say, Well, Mom, but this is the way. I wish I’d remembered exactly what they were saying about it, but can you walk me through that?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:02:36
Yeah, of course, of course. So, to me, all of these principles are natural principles. For example, we could start with the first one with creativity, and there’s much to say about many of these, so just let me know when we want to transition to the next one. But creativity, nature is creative. We are always—and we could think about creativity in the productivity sense, but I’m actually not even talking about it in that particular way. It’s more so about the fact that we are in in perpetuity creating and being created. And what’s kind of existential and fun to think about is that we’re at the edge of creation at all times. And what’s in front of the edge of creation is just nothingness. And it’s just, you know, it’s it’s just really interesting to think about that, if you let that sink. When

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:25
you say nothingness, what do you mean?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:03:26
So, so nothingness is is understood differently in in classical Daoism. It’s understood as, we could say, a fertile expanse of potentiality. So a better way to think of it is no-thingness, it’s nothing material, but there may be something formless that is still there, and and and actually that idea of nothingness I think informs a lot of of, well, of Daoist thought and and thinking, and I think a lot of that applies well to what it means to be in harmony with the principle of creativity, because if we accept, but I think it’s fairly easy to accept that that we are continually being created, we are a process of becoming, right? That change becomes the action of creativity, but lots of people unfortunately cling to their old identities, or they cling to a particular emotion, or they cling onto resentments, and they are are unable to let go, or they’re, you know, and and, well, in those scenarios, what would be more natural would be being capable of of adapting more fluidly with the particular situation, integrating and accepting it, right? And so I I think that one of the biggest fears that that that I tend to see in my clinic quite a bit is the fear of uncertainty. It’s something that plagues lots of people. Here’s where science and Daoism can can work together so well. In uncertainty, in research on uncertainty, there are two types of uncertainty. There’s first-order uncertainty and second-order uncertainty, and the first-order uncertainty, the variables are known. You know what the probabilities are.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:05:09
Is that what Can you explain to me what the first order means?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:05:12
Yeah, so the first order, first-order uncertainty specifically is just when we’re confronted with an uncertain situation, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but you know that there are only, let’s say, three different things that could happen in this situation, right? And if you know those situations, with a very high degree of probability, they classify that as first order. And in that situation, foraging for for more information, or, you know, using whatever analytical tools that you would like to use can be beneficial for that situation. Second-order uncertainty. Now we’re confronted with an uncertain situation, but we really don’t know what the variables are, what the probabilities of those variables are. Let’s say it’s I don’t know, a medical treatment that’s novel that someone hasn’t taken before, and it worked on a small percentage of people, but it may be the last thing that you can you can try, right? That would be an example of second-order uncertainty. And so second-order uncertainty can be very well not confronted, but a Daoist approach can be very useful to to working with that. And the Daoist approach, the way that I talked about it, is by using a discovery-oriented approach. So typically, what would happen in that situation for lots of people? Threat detection, right? Frontal lobes are are active. They’re looking for threats: what if this happens? What if that happens? What if this happens? Their amygdala, their fight-flight system is highly active as well, and and and their you know, the person is is is scared, and they’re anxious, and they’re freaking out, right? Okay, that’s that’s one perspective. So they they some people will just burn out looking for solutions, and at the end of the day, something else happens and and all that effort was for nothing. The discovery-oriented approach is inhabiting a state of uncertainty intentionally, inhabiting a state of unknowing. And this state of unknowing is, well, thinking about uncertainty differently. Number one, what does uncertainty bring to us? It makes you more alert. It makes you more open. It makes you consider what the possibilities are. It can lead to more creative responses, and without uncertainty, there’s no adventure, right? So that’s one way. So instead of the deficit model of uncertainty, how about thinking about uncertainty positively?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:35
So would a an example be like if there’s a business owner and the business owner is trying to scale, for example, and they are looking to hire new people, but they have an old team, and they know that they have to evolve, but

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:07:52
it’s Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:52
That’s a

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:07:53
great example.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:53
if they they were paralyzed by this idea of all the things that could happen versus, Okay, how can we explore this? It’s going to work out, regardless of how it works out, there’s going to be opportunities for growth, and would would that be some a non-deficit model? So, it’s almost like as if someone is looking at it positively.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:08:15
Yeah. So, it’s it’s looking at it positively, like recasting what is uncertainty, and then approaching it from a a curious standpoint, right? So, instead of trying to solve it, instead of trying to find a solution, some things simply don’t have a solution. You need to live through it, and to live through it, you can live through it anxiously or curiously, like a scientist would as they’re trying to examine different variables or understand information. So, what can I learn from this, from from what’s happening from moment to moment?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:08:44
That’s That’s good advice, cuz the time is going to pass,

Speaker 1 1:08:46
Right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:08:46
regardless.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:08:47
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And there’s a great parable that comes from the Huainanzi, which is also this old classical Daoist manual for an emperor. And actually, I compare that to to Marcus Aurelius, a a Stoic, except the Huainanzi was composed of many voices. But may I share this story? It’s it’s it’s brief, and this is a popular one actually, so you may have heard it before. But I think I think it couches uncertainty quite well in these situations. So, there was a family of Chinese diviners, and they were famous for their divining abilities. And one day, this the father diviner, he had a he had a horse, and it was a beautiful horse. And the horse ran away. When the horse ran away, the villagers came over and expressed their sympathies, but the diviner looked at them and said, No, this will be very fortunate. This will be very fortunate. And so, the villagers left, scratching their heads, What’s What’s going on here? This This guy’s very strange. He’s mad. And then what happens, let’s say 2 weeks later, that horse comes back and brings with it a few other horses. So, the villagers come by and they’re like, Wow, this is amazing! This is great news, right? And the diviner looks at them and says, No, this is going to be very unfortunate. This will be very unfortunate, right? And so they leave again, scratching their heads. And then what comes next? Well, the the diviner’s son is training one of the horses and gets thrown off the horse and breaks his leg. And so the villagers come by, express their sympathies, Oh my God, this is so such bad news. The father says again, No, no, this will be very fortunate. This will be very fortunate. And then a month later, the the army came by trying to recruit the son, but the son had a broken leg, so they didn’t recruit him. And what they heard in the news later on was that nine out of 10 people died in that war that the son would have been recruited to. And so the villagers were expressing how excited they were and happy and how lucky they were, and they said, No, this will be unfortunate.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:10:49
I have heard that story.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:10:50
Right. It’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:10:51
a really good story, cuz Yeah. we we don’t know.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:10:55
Yeah, so we don’t we really we don’t know. And when we don’t know again, it’s can we be happily not knowing? Can we be okay in this unknowing? And I think that’s something that society sort of sort of tells us in indirect ways that it’s not good not to know. I’m always told, Don’t say I don’t know when someone asks you a question. You know, come up with a different response. And it’s it’s unfortunate cuz it’s a mode of being that has led to to such stringent criteria for perfectionism that it can lead to all sorts of psychological problems, especially in children in in schools.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:11:34
So the the not knowing that is part of, if I’m understanding, that it allows someone to be open to also creativity?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:11:43
Yeah. Yeah, when you don’t know, you’re open to exploration. You become a little more playful about things, you’re you’re open to silly ideas, and sometimes the silly ideas are great ideas. Sometimes the serious ideas suck.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:11:53
Process and equilibrium, principle two and five, and this is what I have here is that nature is dynamic and not static, balance is allostasis, not homeostasis. Can you walk us through a little bit of the science there, and and what or how someone can think to maintain this, what you express as this dynamic equilibrium?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:12:20
Yeah, sure. Okay, so let’s let’s start with a simple definition of of process. Process is a continuous, patterned flow of change that maintains and transforms the natural world and ourselves, right? So it’s just this ongoing, perpetual movement. The world is dynamic. It’s not static. It’s a verb. It’s not a noun, right? And I think people forget that. What process is about, what it invites us, is is is it invites us towards attunement. It invites us to attune to what’s happening in the moment, right? But what’s happening in the moment is not necessarily always going to be a good thing. You see, you can go on on two edges here. You can be misaligned in two ways. With process, if you are misattuned, one way is you become way too abstract. You’re just abstract, you’re just always in the DMN, or you’re always in your mind, in the central executive, you’re always thinking about things, and you’re completely out of place with what’s happening in experience. On the opposite spectrum, you have someone that is far too concrete, and they’re just glued to the present moment, and they have no perspective, and they have no plan. They have nothing, and and in those cases, you know, some people like to say, Oh, I just go I like to go with the flow, you know, and it’s like it’s almost like an excuse, but it’s a misrepresentation of what flow actually is, which is a we could talk about that in a bit, which relates to process. So it’s about being balanced. How do you be How can you be immersed in the moment, yet with discernment, yet with perspective? That’s the sort of ideal. And so, what is the science behind this? What did I speak about in this chapter? So, one of them was, we talked about it actually, it’s intuition. The other one is, well, it’s actually engaging yourself in states of flow. And which, by the

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:14:16
way, is not easy

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:14:18
to do. No, not at all. I mean, you just sound

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:14:19
like, Okay, well, having a bad day? Well, get into flow. I mean, that is not easy.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:14:26
No, no, it’s not. It’s not. It’s not easy, and that’s, you know, in in Daoism they called it a state of wu wei, or mou wai in Cantonese, but basically it’s the Western version of of of it. And it’s it’s interesting what they find in these studies of flow, because we talked about briefly about intuition, right, and it being helpful in these unpredictable situations, more helpful than analysis. Well, flow states, you know, are states where also we’re not consciously necessarily. Well, one could say we’re extremely consciously engaged, but we’re not we’re not thinking from a meta-perspective in these flow states, right? And in fact, what’s happening when they look at brain scans of people in flow states? So, for example, I’m forgetting the the the author’s name, but basically, they looked at jazz pianists, and they had these jazz pianists, they would first play scales that that they knew, and then they would improv, right? And improvisation can often lead to flow states. And what they ended up finding was a basically a shutting down of a lot of the the cortical regions of the brain and this high activation of the the the subcortical regions. Now, some areas in the cortex were still active, but very little compared to when the person, for example, was not in a flow state. And most of the time when people are in flow states, they are feeling like the world is this sort of spacelessness or timelessness, or basketball players will say they’re in the zone, and they’re performing at their best, right? And that is fascinating, right? Because again, this is the opposite of analysis. The person isn’t analyzing every shot they’re doing when they’re doing it. Or as a musician and when I’ve played live shows, if I’m playing solo, if I think about the solo I’m playing, I’m screwed. Like, I’ll hit the wrong note, and it’s actually happened once before. It was very embarrassing, but you know, it’s so it’s a it’s it’s a very, you know, important experience. And to me, that is flowing, a flow is attunement with process. That’s the ideal state to aspire for, one could say.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:16:36
In the process, you’d mentioned this idea of misalignment. Does that go back to values? How does someone know if they are functioning in a well-alignment in that process?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:16:50
Yeah. So I I think a a big part of this, it could be both there’s both the subjective and objective side, right? So the objective side is burnout. For example, if someone is working way too hard and you ask them, why are you still in this job that you hate, and they come up with this list of reasons, and clearly they’re sort of living in La La Land in their own minds and they have maybe some reasonable justifications, but the truth is that the gravity or the weight that is of of impact to their well-being is so clear to you, for example, that it’s not worth it, that they should switch, but they won’t do it, right? For maybe there are other fears involved, but that would be an example or of someone who’s far too much in their minds. So

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:33
something that is impeding or impairing someone to be able to make the next right move.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:17:37
Right. Right. Anytime there is interference with their social life, their personal life, professional life, that’s really the the core indicator of whether misalignment has is occurring or not.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:51
Relationship. I think that that’s Relationship is next? Yes.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:17:55
Yeah, yeah. We talked a little bit about this also, just when you asked about the when we talked about the tree and how we’re we’re connected to everything around us. You know, there’s so many interesting studies with relationship because I think and and the important thing for me here is that, at least in my mind, I think most people are well aware that we are more connected than we’re not. The problem is that that is an intellectual experience and not an emotional or an experiential happening, right? We don’t experience that truth. And so for me, what the classical Daoism does, it brings in the practices that can lead you to that more experiential, that as an experiential truth. But in the chapter, I look at the different ways, how are we actually really connected from the neuropsych perspective? And there are many interesting, fascinating studies. Obviously, there’s attachment, which we sort of touched on a little bit, And and again, the idea of your brain being again barely developed when you’re born, and everything is happening in relationship to others. It already serves as a core foundation to it. We also have mirror neurons, right, neurons that fire with the mere observation of another person performing a task. V. S. Ramachandran did some fascinating studies that sound esoteric or sound woo-woo, but are completely not. For example, like imagine you are watching somebody touch my arm, right? My arm is being touched. And right now you’re watching me, and there’s nothing going on, right? You’re getting Because you Right, but you actually have neurons firing, but there’s a signal telling your brain that it’s not your arm being touched. But if we anesthetize that arm, what’s going to happen is that as you’re watching my arm being touched, you can literally feel your arm being touched. And so it’s it’s We really are just separated by skin, and so kind of jokingly call them the Gandhi neurons or empathy neurons, right? But we’re all very connected. There are these hyperscanning studies looking at brain imaging of two brains at the same time when they’re interacting with each other. Lots of EEG studies on that also, finding that when people are engaged in a in a deep, meaningful conversation, their brains really do synchronize. And here’s something I do think is very important. It’s This idea of The Selfish Gene, well, it’s been propagated, this idea, and by Dawkins. And part of this is that it’s an incomplete picture. And here comes the work of David Sloan Wilson, who talks about multilevel selection. Basically, the idea here is that the that virtuous traits can be selected for over selfish traits.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:20:23
By who? By people?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:20:25
Yeah. So in groups, actually. So The Selfish Gene is really focused at an individual level, but as we move up the levels into into groups and tribes, into greater groups, in societies, David Sloan Wilson’s works focus on on on finding that it is true that there are some acts that are selfless, that have no benefit to a person in a particular situation, but it will be selected for and passed down. When you say

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:20:48
selected for and passed down,

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:20:50
Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:20:50
do you mean it will that it’s a specific gene?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:20:54
Yeah, natural through natural selection. Isn’t

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:20:56
that amazing?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:20:57
Yeah. Yeah, and it changes the story because, again, people are fed this idea that we’re just like humans are terrible in so many ways, but I think we’re such mysterious, fascinating creatures.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:08
Yeah, I love this idea that there’s a or a virtuous gene, or probably many.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:21:15
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there are many that that are very prosocial in different ways. And so I just wanted to add in the moral intuitionism part because again, lots again lots of people think that morality is a social construction, but it’s not and not entirely. That’s not It’s only, again, part of the picture.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:34
What do you mean?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:21:34
So when we look at morality, if we think about fairness, if we think about justice, if we think about ideas of goodness and virtue, right? Again, lots of people think that we’re just taught that as we get older, but actually they’ve done lots of experiments now. I know Somerville has and her colleagues have done some, and and there are many others looking at babies, between, you know, six-month-old babies, three-month-old babies, and when you look at babies, you will find overall that there are lots of little behaviors that they’ll do that they that that indicates that they, for example, let me just give you an example. Like they’ll show a six-month-old different stuffed toys, and one of them is basically a helper, and the other one is trying to like solve a situation, a problem, and then you have one that like interferes with it, and they they show this little game or this little story to to little infants that that are pre-verbal. And then afterwards, they show them the the different stuffed toys, and which one do they almost always end up choosing? It’s the one that was helping, and they almost always did not choose the one that was interfering. Or when you show them videos of two kids, and one kid gets more food versus another kid who doesn’t get as much food, they’ll be staring much longer time at the situation where there’s an unequal distribution of food. And these sort of morality studies, they go all the way back to even like rats and other like animals that that’s that are so so fascinating. The the the the most fascinating one to me was a study with with rats, and they they basically so first of all, if you put a rat in an open space, they feel threatened, right? Because they get exposed and they’re more they’re more likely to get killed, and so what these experimenters did was that they put a rat in a trap in the center of the large of open space, and then they put another rat, a free rat, in there to see if that free rat would actually help the trapped rat, okay? And And the trapped rat is squealing and trying to get out, right? And what they find is that most of the time, the rats will risk their lives, quote-unquote, to save the trapped rat. Then they did a second situation, condition where they had they put a another little area where there’s chocolate chips. So they said, Will this free rat ignore the trapped rat and go open this and selfishly eat the chips on their own and leave the trapped rat there? And what they found again was that they end up freeing the trapped rat, and both of them open the cage to eat the chips together, and that happened the majority of the times. And what’s more is that it happened even more if the free rat was at one point a trapped rat, showing that empathy was learned in some way. It’s and and so there are many of these studies that really point towards the fact that humans are have are maybe better than than were than were you know expressed in in in certain media outlets, we could say.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:31
I mean, I I love that. I love that, the relationship principle. The and I will just add one more thing is I worked in psychiatry. I trained as a psychiatrist for two years before I went to other training. And one of the things that really struck me was this idea that two people in a relationship were one nervous system. They weren’t two. It it’s just seemed wherever one person goes, the other person goes. And I think that we begin to see that just in general as nervous system connections.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:25:08
Yeah. Yeah. My my my old mentor, Lou Cozolino, he calls that he calls this the social synapse, like between the two synapses of neurons between us. And then this is sociostasis, how we use each other to regulate each other. And every interaction can lead to all sorts of either regulation or dysregulation, right? And so

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:25:28
Yeah, that’s a that’s a really powerful tool I, believe it or not, had not thought about is, for example, I have a really good girlfriend of mine, her name’s Elsita, and whenever we hang out, which I try to get her to hang out with me at least once a week, immediately, I I tell you, my nervous system just downshifts, and I’m sure we all have down downshifts my stress, but thinking about not just spending time with friends, but spending time with people that you care about wisely, I I think makes a ton of sense, you know? Right.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:26:01
Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:02
The You have a wholeness and transformation, or your again, we’ve got the equilibrium, spontaneity, transformation. So I suppose that we are now at

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:26:15
Well, wholeness. Yeah. Wholeness is the idea that, well, the world presents as a unified, a a singular unified ex experience of existence, right? It doesn’t divide things. Our abstract minds divide things. As soon as we come up with a word for something, it creates a sort of I imagine like a sort of fissure or a crack in the wholeness of things. And so, the importance of this is is very It’s very important, actually, in the field of psychology, because, in psychology, you know, especially with clients with that anyone works with, lots of times the issue is the inability to hold the good with the bad, right? And it’s important to be able to to do so because, as as Jung said a long time ago, humans weren’t meant for perfection. That was meant for the gods. We’re meant for wholeness. We’re meant to be able to be human, to be to have both the good and the the bad qualities. But to be aware of your negative qualities is going to be far better for you than to be unaware of them. When you’re unaware of those qualities, they get projected onto the world, onto other people, and sometimes you act naively, whereas when you’re aware of them, you can harness them in ways that can be beneficial to your life. And so, wholeness is, again, it’s about integration. That’s what it invites. It’s about bringing the pieces together, understanding that our perspective is just one perspective. So, one of the posts I think you liked actually, so I’ll mention it. It came from It’s It’s my my idea of emotional truth versus emotional facts. And so, lots of people who are in relationships, when they get into arguments, it’s easy for one person to think that their version of the story is right and kind of even forget that the other person has a version of a story at all. It’s more helpful for both people to, if you’re in a relationship and it’s a good one, the first, don’t, give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that we’re both coming in with incomplete narratives. And that’s it, right? And so, we come in with these incomplete narratives. And once the two have shared, then can it lead to, you know, something perhaps more productive or useful, because sometimes you can be mad at something that doesn’t exist at all. Every relationship is partially fictional, and will always be. And that’s part of the fun of being human.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:39
This is what I’m hearing you say is this is prioritizing the relationship over the self, the

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:28:45
Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:45
the protecting the relationship piece.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:28:47
Yes, exactly.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:49
We do not have transformation next. We have wholeness, we have equilibrium.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:28:54
Yeah. So, equilibrium is an interesting one. That’s the probably one that’s the most deceptive one. only deceptive to the extent that I don’t mean, you know, people think of equilibrium, they think of two things that are in stasis, that are completely balanced out. So, to me, again, not even just to me, but if we follow the rules that the world is a creative, relational process, things are constantly moving, then there’s some asymmetry that’s involved. And this asymmetry points, at least to me that I think might be interesting to the viewers, towards this idea of eustress, that the optimal balance for humans is not for us to stagnate, but it’s for us to be in optimal movement and motion. And so eustress is the what we is basically reflects quote unquote good stress or positive stress. Most people think of stress in a negative way, but we do find that humans function optimally under some level of of stress, mild to moderate levels of stress, to be specific. Now, the next question people usually ask me is, What is that? How do you know the difference between mild to moderate levels of stress and when you are not in those domains? And the answer to that is that it’s it’s quite psychological to the extent that if you believe that If you’re feeling stress, yes, that stress system will be active. Your sympathetic system will be active. You will have adrenaline, norepinephrine. You will have cortisol release, and that’s natural for whether you’re excited or sad, or in states of eustress. So those feelings will be the same. The question becomes, psychologically, do you feel like the stress that you’re faced with is something you can actually confront successfully? And if you think you can prevail in the face of that hardship, you are still within the domain of mild to moderate stress. As soon as you think it’s overwhelming, or I don’t have the resources to handle it, that’s when we start moving to major stress. That said, some people miscalculate their abilities, and if they do have quote unquote interpreted major stress, if they reinterpret it, or view it from a different perspective, it’s possible for them to move that back into that mild to moderate levels of stress.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:00
I agree with what you’re saying. You know, how do you get people there?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:31:05
So I think a big part is with this wholeness principle, it goes back to that. They’re all connected, by the way. It’s not like one separate from the other. But it’s about bringing in other perspectives, bringing out different frameworks for understanding things, and also for them to experience safety as they are confronting their vulnerabilities.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:23
Do you walk them through, so your clients or patients, do you walk them through, or do you have tools that you put in to place for them?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:31:33
Yeah, I mean it’s more about the process than than the content. I would totally agree with you, yeah. A big part it’s you’re sort of again, you’re trusting into I’m trusting intuition a lot in practice these days, and is I read a whole ton and I write a whole lot, but at the end of the day, when you’re when you’re with someone, you have to tailor your treatment to who’s presenting to you. And yeah, in those moments, it’s the process of of questioning, of empathy, of really trying to see yourself in their shoes and understand what they’re coming from and what the context is.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:04
There There always seems to be a lynchpin. I know for me, there’s always a lynchpin. So I work with a coach, his name is Jim Kacholka, and he will come and it’s like a razor blade. I’ll be ruminating over something for I don’t know, could be two days, and then it’s one sentence, and it just is it just

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:32:25
Yeah. It just It can just It dot It just landed. It And

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:27
again, there’s no I don’t know what that There’s no process for that, it’s just The

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:32:33
establishment of of clarity amongst the you know, a whole bunch of ambiguity Yeah. can automatically calm the nervous system down. It’s the same thing with like when someone is experiencing an emotion, and the mere act of labeling the emotion actually results in a limbic response that it’s reduced. Spontaneity to me invites stillness, which is might be which is counterintuitive,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:56
I suppose.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:32:57
Yeah. Yeah, it could be, which is good cuz lots of things in in classical Daoism is is all about paradox. But yeah, so you know, the first part to spontaneity is that first is to distinguish it from impulsivity. I think lots of people think they are the same thing, but they’re not. Impulsivity is somebody, you know, blurting out a response in class that has nothing to do with the topic. Impulsivity is decontextualized. Spontaneity is respecting the context, and it comes from intuition. When I say stillness, it’s about, you know, being able to calm the chatter down in your mind to allow whatever natural response would emerge from from the person in the first place. And the other part that is important is play, and play is also a primary emotional system in the work of Jaak Panksepp. And you know, you might wonder why is play an emotional a system? It’s very strange to think of it that way. But let’s think about what play does for for our children, right? When your child is playing with a lot of other kids, they will automatically form social hierarchies. They will learn to develop empathy. If a kid is hitting another kid too much, they’ll get casted out of the group, right? They will learn social skills. They will learn roles. Let me play doctor. Let me play Navy SEAL, I don’t know, let me play whatever. And and so they sort of practice these different roles. And so play is very, very important for for development, and is also a system that’s just as important for for adults to have. So,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:34:32
How do How do adults practice play?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:34:34
A lot of it is is, well, the moments that you find yourself joyful and spontaneous. Maybe when you’re working out, maybe sometimes I don’t know if you find that to be play, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:34:47
No. Zero. No, I do. I do, actually. I find I’m my most creative.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:34:51
Okay. I’m sure you play with your kids.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:34:53
All the time.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:34:54
Yeah. Yeah, but even when you go out with your husband, I don’t know what activities you do for fun.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:34:58
Rucking.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:34:59
Sorry?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:00
Rucking.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:35:00
Rucking, okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:01
Pull-ups.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:35:02
Okay. Right. So everyone

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:35:05
That one’s not fun. Everyone has their own version. Everyone, I’m sure there are other people.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:09
But that is by what you’re saying is probably picking up maybe a new hobby, like guitar or something like that?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:35:15
Sure. Yeah, things that people can feel okay being sloppy about and and just not censoring themselves in any way, activities where they don’t feel judged, where they can just be themselves.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:28
And the last one, which makes the the most sense, is transformation.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:35:31
Yeah. I mean that’s the that it’s also a a closer for creativity, like a loop in the sense that transformation is really now about embodied transformation. It’s about realizing the creativity, the process, the the relationship, the wholeness, the all the all the different principles into one into one act. And what prevents transformation is usually resistance on one end, and on on another end, you know, it may be something like a a premature transformations. So some people jumps jump too quickly into a change that they’re not ready for.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:36:09
You know, as I think about all of these these tools and kind of the framework in real life, now I know that there is not going to be one answer, but how long does it take for someone to transform? And I have my own thoughts on this, and I know it’s it’s totally complicated and individualized, but

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:36:31
It really depends on so many variables: the person’s disposition, their personality types, their openness to change. I mean, is there a specific context, maybe? I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:36:43
mean, you know, I have lots of contexts. You know, I was I was thinking about you know the 45-year-old who is listening to this, and who maybe they want to operationalize your tools, and and obviously they’ll read the book, maybe they’ll come see you, but you know, could they? And I’ve seen this happen, which is I’ve seen people transform just it’s almost in an instant. It’s like the veil is ripped off their eyes, and and they never can go back to maybe a way or a thinking.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:37:17
I feel like, at least from my understanding, those when that happens, there’s usually a very transformative event that’s experientially meaningful, right? So there needs to be the intellectual stimulation, but also the emotional satisfaction that’s involved with whatever the person learned, whatever insight they’ve they’ve gleaned. Sometimes this could be a self-transcendent experience, like I mentioned before. Something like the someone is is moved to tears by, you know, watching someone else, I don’t know, climb Mount Everest or something, or whatever whatever the situation is. Sounds very

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:37:56
difficult, but you meditate daily, is that is that right?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:38:02
Yeah, it’s been a little more challenging with my little one. I’ve been trying to to teach him to to do some fun snuggle breathing practices, which he does once in a while. But yeah, I do meditation, but it’s not just sitting meditation. It’s also moving meditation, standing meditation. There’s all sorts of different types that people aren’t, I think, familiar with. They usually think of someone just sitting down with their eyes closed, which I do do sometimes. That’s called nappitation. Nappitation, right? Which I do every day,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:38:31
nappitation. Right. So I have a last question for you, and this is more for me, I suppose. If there’s a parent listening to this right now, and obviously, you’ve been in this field for quite some time. You’re analyzing people. You’ve done work with pathology, and you’re moving into this space, I think, of just bringing more positivity to the world.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:38:55
Sure.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:38:56
If, as a parent who’s listening to this, is there one piece of advice that you would give?

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:39:03
If I were them, I’d be much open to alloparenting, which is something that lots of hunter-gatherers do, and we’ve done for a very long time. Accepting help from others is very important. We weren’t meant for two working professionals to raise a child. It it really does take a village to raise a child, and when you do allow other people into your life, of obviously trusted people, grandparents, I don’t know, aunts and uncles, you know, there’s lots of benefits to that. First of all, you’re exposing them to lots of other people, which does increase their exposure to bacteria and so forth, but that can increase their immune system. You increase their social skills. That’s something that lots of anthropologists have mentioned, that a lot of hunter-gatherers have great social skills at a very young age because of exposure to lots of people. Also, you can potentially prevent poor attachment if you have two bad parents or one parent’s bad, well, you have other alloparents that can be supportive and can be there. The amount of times I’ve had clients come in and tell me how terrible their parents were, but, you know, they’ve somehow become resilient, and then I hear, Oh, it’s because they were, you know, they had their grandparent that was there 30% of the time, or whatever. In fact, if you look at these hunter-gatherer populations, or the Hadza specifically, there was a statistic showing that only 40% of the time did their child actually spend with their biological parents. 60% was with many other villagers. And so, again, I think exposure to other people so that you don’t burn out, right? That’s, it’s so common. It’s easy to become dysregulated. And the other part I would say, a piece of advice, is to remember that not until a child is two years old are they basically akin to a baby born in the animal kingdom outside of humans. And so they don’t know really what’s going on. They’re not deceiving you at that, at that such a young age. They really, you know, they have needs, and you’re there to meet them. And quick responses to their cries doesn’t spoil them. In this case of attachment, it’s nurture that wins out. It’s not survival of the fittest. It’s survival of the nurtured, as my, as Louis Cozolino would say, but it rings very true. And so I would say all of that. I would say also that when it comes to education, that to let them explore on their own. Sometimes you don’t need to be a helicopter parent, constantly, you know, micromanaging. Let them learn from older kids, let them make mistakes, and I think it’s, again, important to let them again, learn independently as well as through, you know, maybe, I don’t know, the Reggio Emilia or Montessori or whatever, you know, models. Or the school

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:41:54
of hard knocks. That’s true. School of hard knocks, right. Dr. Aldrich Chan, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I know that people are going to get a lot out of it, and just the way that you think, and the way that you speak, and I’m going to link the book, and again, thank you so much for your time.

Dr. Aldrich Chan 1:42:11
Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s been a true pleasure.