Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Basically, the moment I got to college, I started looking around for labs that I could do neuroscience work in. I originally approached that from the angle of looking at interactions between the brain and the immune system, which isn’t the most obvious place to start, but I had this idea at the time that the contents of your thoughts would have a direct impact, maybe a powerful one, on non-conscious systems in your body. The systems we think of as homeostatic automatic mechanisms, like fighting off a virus, like repairing a wound. And sure enough, there are big crossovers between the two. I mean, it gets to kind of a key point that I think goes under-recognized. One of the things people don’t recognize or appreciate about the human brain enough, and that is that it basically controls or has a huge role in almost everything that your body does. You try to name an example of something in your body that isn’t directly controlled or massively influenced by the brain, and it’s pretty hard. I mean, you might say like bone healing or something. But even those systems, the hypothalamus and pituitary end up playing a role in coordinating the endocrine system, that does have a direct influence on say, the calcium level in your blood, that goes to bone healing. So, non-obvious connections between those things implicate the brain as really a potent prime mover in all of health. One of the things I realized in the other direction too, how most of the systems in the body are integrated with the human brain, they affect the brain also, like the immune system. I think there’s just, people who study Alzheimer’s and those kinds of things, it’s just surprising how much you can understand of that from the immune system, from the other systems that don’t obviously seem to have anything to do with the nervous system. They all play together. Yeah, you could understand how that would be driven by evolution too. Just in some simple examples, if you get sick, if you get a communicable disease, you get the flu, it’s pretty advantageous for your immune system to tell your brain, “Hey, now be antisocial for a few days. Don’t go be the life of the party tonight. In fact, maybe just cuddle up somewhere warm, under a blanket, and just stay there for a day or two.” And sure enough, that tends to be the behavior that you see both in animals and in humans. If you get sick, elevated levels of interleukins in your blood and TNF-alpha in your blood, ask the brain to cut back on social activity and even moving around, you have lower locomotor activity in animals that are infected with viruses.…

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