How Does The Human Mind Work? - Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University and an author.
The human mind is a mystery. If it wasn't for the fact that we experience it, the universe would give us absolutely no indication that consciousness existed. After an entire career studying psychology, Professor Bloom has some answers to the psychology questions we've all asked ourselves.
Expect to learn whether you actually remember everything that you've ever experienced, whether we know why consciousness evolved at all, why we should remember Sigmund Freud, why babies are way smarter than you think, whether attachment theory is rubbish, if psychology can tell us how to live a good life and much more...
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#psychology #mindset #consciousness
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00:00 Intro
00:25 What Do We Know About Human Consciousness?
07:42 The Usefulness of the Human Memory System
15:47 Does Our Tribal Nature Make Us Racist?
21:22 How to Improve Attention
25:57 Should Freud Be Taken Seriously in 2023?
35:51 How to Find a Balance Between Thoughts & Body
39:00 Why Behaviourism Theory Has Become So Unpopular
47:26 How Much Do Babies & Dogs Actually Know?
51:56 Relationship Between Language & Thought
57:10 Biggest Differences Between Male & Female Psychology
1:02:34 Is Attachment Theory Nonsense?
1:12:55 The Need to Reform Education Around Heritability
1:19:37 Can Psychology Help Us Understand How to Live a Good Life?
1:25:35 What Will Psychology Unravel Next?
1:27:42 Where to Find Paul
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Video Transcript
It's not what we think it is.
And sometimes when people tell me, you know,
oh, psychology is just common sense.
Tell me something I didn't know.
Well, I got a list.
And memory is one thing on the list,
where a lot of people think what happens in memory,
it's like you hold up your iPhone
and it's just recording the world.
And all this stays in this hard drive.
And then later on through hypnosis
or a kind therapist, it could all come out.
It's just there.
And this is total nonsense.
What do we actually know about human consciousness?
Do we know why it evolved or what its function is?
No, we don't know why we're conscious as opposed to zombies that are fully functional.
We don't know how the brain gives rise to consciousness. We know it is the brain.
I mean, the best science tells us that consciousness emerges from our very physical brain.
But one of the great puzzles and psychology is how this three-pound piece of meat,
what he meets gives rise to love and hate and the feeling of first kiss and slam
your hand in a car door and being on a podcast. There's a lot we do know about
consciousness. We know how it works in attention and perception. We have
theories of differences in conscious experience but the big questions at
this point, Aloudus?
I've heard that one potential explanation
for the reason that consciousness comes about
is that it's kind of a byproduct of us being able to have
quite a complex theory of mind of other people
that when you have a large social group
and I need to be able to predict what Paul thinks
about me thinking about that person
and what they think about him thinking about me
that you end up having a lot of layers of abstraction
and that basically consciousness is potentially
kind of like a side effect, like how a light bulb gives off light, but it also gives off heat,
that all of the fancy mental imagery that we get is just kind of dressing on the side of that.
I think it's possible. One issue here is there's two senses of consciousness at least,
but two is an individual to have one. One is sort of what's in it's called
access consciousness, which is the idea of information being available to us. You can
monitor or re-canalize that. And I think that's really necessary for high-level reasoning,
for language use, for making sense of what other people are doing.
So I'm not right now directly conscious of my blood pressure or heart rate.
It's unconsciousness fine, but I'm conscious that I'm talking to you,
and I know you we met before.
And the fact that I'm conscious of the music, I talk about it, I get a reason about it.
And we have good theories of that.
The more mysterious thing is what's called phenomenological consciousness, the feel.
And some philosophers think you could have one without another.
Like we could have, we could be fully reasoning and maybe AIs are like this, are will be like this what they have
