EP 208 . 30 Dec 20
This week Audiogyan turns 4. On this anniversary episode, I would like to thank all listeners for tuning in and all the guests who have spent their valuable time & effort on this show.
This episode is brought to you by MUBI, a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe. Get a whole month free! – MUBI.com/Audiogyan. Well, we have 3 films on MUBI made by today’s guest. “Right here, right now“. “Continuum” and “The insignificant man” which is exclusive on MUBI.
Yes!!!!!!! We are celebrating this 208th episode with Anand Gandhi. I am super thrilled and excited and at the same time a bit nervous to have Anand on the show. I am just introducing him for the record in case if this audio is found 100 years later. Actually, it’s always a challenge to introduce great minds like him – I would simply call him, a philosopher, filmmaker, explorer, game designer, and one of the most important thinkers of our time.
Welcome to Audiogyan with Kedar Nimkar a podcast the document insightful conversations with Indian designers, artist musicians writers thinkers and creatives of all types this week audio and tons four on this anniversary episode I would like to thank all the snow is for tuning in and all the guest would spend their valuable time and effort for the show this episode is brought to you by movie a curated streaming service showcasing exceptional films from around the globe get a whole month free at movie.com/ Audiogyan. We have three films on movie made by our today’s guest ‘Right Here, Right Now’, ‘Continuum’ and one exclusively on movie which is ‘An Insignificant Man’
Kedar Nimkar:
We are celebrating this episode which is the fourth anniversary with Anand Gandhi. I’m super thrilled and excited and at the same time a bit nervous to have an on the show. I’m just going to introduce him for the record in case this audio is found maybe hundred 200 years out in the future and actually it’s also a challenge to introduce great minds like him. I would simply call him a philosopher, filmmaker, explorer, game designer and I referred to him as one of the most important thinkers of a time so thanks Anand for giving your time it’s a real honour to have you on Audiogyan
Anand Gandhi:
Thank you to have me and thank you for your very kind words.
Kedar Nimkar:
So frankly my expertise or the domain knowledge any area you pick is not as developed enough to ask any question but I have two genuine questions. One is broadly about when I first saw you live in one of the talks you mentioned about Zen proverb, I wanted to ask you about that, has your definition change over time about that because it has completely change my perspective to life and the second one is of the cognitive gym which you’ve been talking about in the recent videos that I saw. If you can start by telling me what is what is the cognitive gym, how essential is it?
Anand Gandhi:
I think it’s really though the most of exciting project I’ve been working on the last few years to really find this tool order or rather a toolbox of a set of techniques and hacks and tricks and exercises that make the process of expanding your consciousness, that make the process of enlightening yourself, the process of really grasping the nature of reality, the relationship that the individual human has with their environment accessible to all and cognitive gym is really one such is it is really the paradigm for this entire toolbox. Now I’ve given a lot of examples elsewhere, I’m gonna repeat some of these examples assuming that people are coming to this conversation today have not necessarily seen these examples that are given elsewhere so let me let me jump right into giving some stories, into giving a couple of anecdotes from from the environment from nature.
So let’s look at an experiment conducted a couple of decades ago by a behavioural scientist called Tinbergen. Within an hour of emerging from its shell a herring gull chick starts looking for its mother beak which is usually a large yellow coloured beak with a big red dot on it. The chick starts pecking at it demanding to be fed. In this very famous experiment, the Nobel prize-winning apologist Tinbergen presented a seagull chick with a disembodied beak of an adult herring gull but the chick still pecked at the beak expecting to be fed by the beak notwithstanding the fact that there was no bird attached to it. So Tinbergen enquired into this further he isolated a recipe of sorts, a visual recipe with a visual ingredients and created a synthetic beak, a rectangle elongation, tapering tennis, high visual contrast between the dot in the base colour of the beak, the red dot that was replaceable with dots of other colours he realised later as long as the contract was maintained. It’s slight exaggeration of this visual recipe he made a fake beak and offered this fake object to the herring gull children and they pecked at it even more excitedly. Not only did they peck it, they pecked at it with greater excitement than they were pecking at their mothers beaks.
When the contrast was exaggerated, when the size of the dot was bigger, when the base of the beak was broader in the end, was more tapering, any of these ingredients when they were amplified against one another and hence the contrast of these ingredients were amplified, not only did the chicks continue pecking at these objects with even further greater excitement and every time he would amplify it the chicks would get more and more excited about it, they would be hyper excited in their pecking. Each passing generation of amplification they would peck at it with unprecedented wild enthusiasm.
Kedar Nimkar:
Did the experiment involve just aesthetically improving or functionally improving also?
Anand Gandhi:
There was no function, the beaks had no function whatsoever. These objects did not feed the children, the object did not carry any kind of a robotic mechanism to feed the chicks. There was absolutely zero or negative function in fact, these were just synthetic toys if anything and as it turns out the toy as the toy beak was far more exciting for the chick than it’s own mother who would actually otherwise feed the chick at the end of it.
So lets take another example that I give very often which is male barn swallow, a bird little bigger than a sparrow and they have light reddish brown chests, slightly maroon chests. The female of the species preferred ones with greater colour intensity and in barn swallows this is an indication of genetic fitness. In the study scientists darkened the chest of previously rejected males with a felt tip marker, males who were rejected by females in there in the region because their feathers were pale and this simple cosmetic hack made them instant hits with the females. They were suddenly producing more progeny, suddenly attracting more females than ever before.
Let’s study another example, another example which I share very often which is Julodimorpha beetles, bejewelled beetles which have been observed attempting to copulate with beer bottles, mistaking the beer bottles called Stubbies thrown in their environment by humans mistaking them for the most attractive female beetles ever. They find these bottles because of the tubercles on these bottles, they find these bottles more attractive than the most attractive females around them. Now what is really going on in these examples, what is exactly going on in the hearing gulls or barn swallows or beetles? Let’s think about what’s going on. Data and algorithms to process data are resource intensive, you look at any computing system in the world, there are what are what are the two most resource expensive objects in a computer? Data and software, the processing power the software takes, they are resources intensive even in biology. So life has evolved to optimise the little storage space and processing energy with highest fitness results. So stimuli needed to recognise and engage in life sustaining actions of eating or feeding or finding mating partners, of attracting mating partners, of conducting all kinds of actions that will sustain life have evolved to have a unique to species fingerprinting system because if you had to process all data around you all the time you’d never have that much energy. So instead of processing all the data all the time you process fingerprint data, you look out for fingerprints like in the herring gull the fingerprint in that case is a dot on the beak or the specific kind of shape that the beak takes. It’s enough for the herring gull chick to recognise the moving dot it doesn’t need to store information about the entire bird
Kedar Nimkar:
And that’s how even we try to practise unit economics does or is it is different?
Anand Gandhi:
That’s how we practise everything in our life. Now think about think about barn swallows with the felt tip marker and think about makeup, why is it that makeup works. The fact that makeup works should tell us something about how we respond to stimuli. The fact that the male’s of our species can produce can produce six packs on their on their abs or females can
Kedar Nimkar:
Make the lips look much much brighter
Anand Gandhi:
Yeah, lips look more saturated, more red or cheeks look red with blush and that would have an actual impact and response or towards the gender that they are trying to attract. And not only that, in humans it becomes more complex, in humans fertility, in science fertility are also used for creating kinships and peer relationships. So women may not care about attracting male partners but may care about participating in a discourse of kinship, may want to create a sense of belonging or peer hood with other females and could use make up towards that purpose.
But the fact that we use stimuli and we can we can apply stimuli to our bodies, to produce effects are not very dissimilar from the way the felt tip marker on the chest of the male born swallow produces experiential, behavioural responses in the female of the species or the way that Julodimorpha beetle gets attracted to the bottle or the way the herring gull chicks get hacked by synthetic toys, it’s not different at all from the way humans respond to stimuli to synthetic stimuli around them and that really is the fundamental premise behind our relationship with all our modern environments from not just the most obvious ones, not just make up and pornography and cinema and not just toys and merchandise but also subtler behavioural stimuli like kinship signalling, politicians try to give you a sense of belonging and create an even other for you to hate, politicians create a sense of, not good politicians but politicians who want to rule by dividing people give you an easy kin to identify with and give you an easy other to hate.
These are behavioural stimuli that have evolved for environmental purposes and have can now be used to hack into our behaviours in a way that is very similar to the way we can hack into the behaviour of a female barn swallow by putting up a felt tip marker on the chest of a male barn swallow. What is really going on here, lets dial back a little now that I’ve given you a couple of examples.
Kedar Nimkar:
Actually one quick question, what you are talking is all at a level or at a plane of instinct right? I don’t know but instinct seems to be very primordial in our nature so we are talking about only that or there is some evolved sense when we introduce imagination and these sort of concepts?
Anand Gandhi:
There is, you can retrain your instinct and that is really what the process of civility, the process of enlightenment is, to constantly retrain our instincts but before we try to solve a problem we ought to understand the problem, that is really what we need to do. So before we form that cognitive gym in it to understand why do we need to enter that cognitive gym in the first place, so this is the premise for understanding that.
So humans evolved in an environment and resource economy that is very different from the modern life of most individuals and groups today. We evolved in forest and Savanna environments so challenges involved in hunting and gathering led to the evolution of calorie consumption incentivization, calorie conservation and accumulation strategies which basically means that because food was extremely hard to find in forests, in savanna environments, hunting was difficult, gathering was insufficient always, our bodies evolved to reward any kind of calorie consumption and also reward any kind of calorie conservation. And that’s why our bodies store all the calories, as many calories as it consumes. And our body also rewards us for eating more because we evolved in environments where the food that we gathered was very rare and hunting was even a rare opportunity. The scarcity of mating partners led to evolution of partner retention strategies signalled by warning signals like jealousy and aggression in the birthplace of humanity 250,000 years ago, the total population on the planet total human homo sapien population on the planet was in a couple of 1000s. So there because mating partners are always scarce life evolved to have behaviours like jealousy and aggression. Jealousy is is the behaviour that signals potential loss of partner and through that potential loss of partner signalling we produce partner retention strategies, we find all kinds of methods and ways to stop our partners from being lost to us. But in an environment of partner and resource abundance, which is the environment that we’re living in today, these may just be a set of vestigial responses. So the software that evolved in the scarcity of stone age is now being applied in the affluence of network age. That’s the biggest problem in front of us as a species.
First, let’s understand the problem very clearly, that we come from a place of profound scarcity and we live in a place of profound abundance. We come from a place where there are 5000 human beings and mating partners were scarce 250,000 years ago. Today, there are 7 billion of us, do not necessarily face a scarcity of mating partners and having more children is not the most important challenge in front of our faces. So the real challenge in front of our species is how to how to ensure that opportunities to do a dignified life and and longevity and wellbeing are available to all humans, these complex problems are far more important and urgent than the problems that we evolved to solve as a species which is how to get food and how to get a meeting partner. So while scientific, social and technological evolution have led to augmented environments of abundance, certainty, comfort and longevity for a large number of human beings, the gap between the body’s biological expectation of the environment and the actual environment has never been wider. Our body expects real scarcity in our environment but our actual environment, for most of us at least, provides certainty comfort and longevity because of technology, because of politics, because of living in, most human beings are alive today in nation states that have some some kind of a constitution and law enforcement. So their fundamental rights are not going to be stolen from them very easily. And hence there is greater certainty of life. That is greater access that most human beings have today to food than ever before. And a greater access that most human beings have towards finding meeting partners than ever before. So our body expects scarcity at every level and our body is confronted with abundance at multiple levels. So from junk food to pornography, from fake plastic trees to art and design, from resource and meeting partner certainty to the lack of injury proneness, from dark concrete walls to fully lit nights, from Sports to politics, our environment is laced with supernormal stimuli, the equivalent of the beer bottle stubs for the Beatles, or the equivalent of felt tip markers for barn swallows, the equivalent of the beak toys for the herring gull.
We see these supernormal stimuli in every part of our environment, in junk food, in plastic decoration, in mating partners, certainty, we don’t we don’t have injury proneness as much as we would face it in our natural environments. We have dark concrete walls, and all the lights are fully lit. So our experience of light is extremely different from what our bodies are designed to, to, to respond to, from Sports to politics, we so we have built an augmented world of certainty for most human beings, which is a good thing. So let’s not start, not for a moment am I prescribing that we need to go back to nature. But let’s understand that we have built a completely different world upon the natural environment that we live within. What our bodies are designed to respond to a natural environment. So how do we close this gap is really the question now. Because what happens in this reversal, is that once sustaining and protective evolutionary strategies become excessive because they’re not being used and they become the core causes of many emotional distress disruptive behaviours and diseases of today.
So while anxiety is extremely useful for an ape resting on a tree looking at tall yellow grass below and witnessing black dots in the yellow grass and experiencing anxiety, because these black dots don’t seem to make sense and the anxiety causes the ape to figure out what these dots are and soon that intense curiosity and fear of these unknown black dots makes the ape come up with an answer that the black dots seem to be a leopard. And that exactly saves the apes life. But the same black dots on somebody’s shirt seen on an Instagram profile would also create, unknowingly, responses in us. And today we are living in an ocean of such triggers. Some of them are good. Some of them are trigger our smoke alarms. What we don’t know is what triggers our smoke alarms, in what contexts. Now we are getting closer to the to the idea of the cognitive gym, right?
Kedar Nimkar:
I’m following so far. And if I understand there has been some point in the history of mankind to bring this certainty because they want this now. You’re saying that it it is just like in abundance today.
Anand Gandhi:
Increasingly for more and more people. Now what is the function of civilization is to really shorten the gap between the haves and have nots, to really ensure that that most human beings, ideally, all human beings have access to food, shelter, certainty, longevity, well being, and dignity of life. Right? That is really the purpose of all civilization, that’s the purpose of life in general for humans, to strive towards creating a society that is just and certain for all. So in that case we have come a long way. Even within the last century itself we have made a lot of progress in in terms of the number of people who now have access to food and just terms of human percentage, percentage of the species that has greater access to food, greater access to education, greater access to inventing methods of wellbeing for themselves and their cane, we have come a long way. You know, slavery has been abolished in most parts of the world, women have voting rights, we in every, in our political technology, in our social technology and our social contracts in our in what is right What is wrong in our ethical contracts, we have come a long way, and there is still a long way to go ahead. Everything we are talking about is towards that desperation. So addiction to junk food and the emotional responses to art approves that stimuli isolation and regrouping into new recipes of dense supernormal stimuli can hack into our fixed action patterns by affecting changes in our hormones and neurotransmitters.
I just gave you an example of that, that black dots in a certain environment may mean something to you and hence trigger your hormones and neurotransmitters to produce a certain kind of behavior which would have saved your life. But the same smoke alarm, if it goes off on a normal day when there is actually nothing to fear may get debilitating. And that is the reason why we are seeing a rise in anxiety cases, in depression cases in our environment today. Because we are really exposed to an oceans and oceans of stimuli, which are just brute force exposed to us, we are exposed to endless stimuli on a moment to moment basis.
Most of it our brain recontextualizes, and does not get triggered by but some of it gets some of it gets interpreted without a contextual filter. And those may trigger our smoke alarms that have evolved. And when I say smoke alarm, a smoke alarm is basically any kind of pain or a trigger response or a fixed action pattern response that we have evolved as a species to protect ourselves from danger. So pain is our way of protecting our tissue from tissue damage, right. It’s a warning signal, is a smoke alarm that our body produces to save ourselves from any kind of injury to get any deeper, from losing a limb or from losing an opportunity to live. Emotional pain, just like pain is also a smoke alarm which slows us down, which allows us to take stock, which allows us to kind of understand our place in the world around us and to reconfigure our place in the world around us. Loss of a mating partner that causes profound emotional pain in most of us is our body’s way of allowing us to take stock and and reconfigure our strategy of living a life ahead lives ahead. So smoke alarms are are our body’s way of slowing us down so that we can heal and kick back with resilience.
Kedar Nimkar:
But what is the need now, because of this certainty, you’re saying at a micro level, still people are facing those at a day to day level?
Anand Gandhi:
No, no, I’m saying that there is no need now in a lot of us, that it’s a vestige, it is a residue of a software that evolved in force, for instance, our environments, it’s a residue of a software that evolved in stone age but it’s continued to be used by our bodies in the abundance of space age. So a lot of us who are privileged enough to have sufficient life resources and sufficient access to living life fully still continue to have the smoke alarms. And that is really the cause of I mean, that is really what we call anxiety and depression today. So now the question is, we fix our additional consumption by going to the gym, the calories that our bodies store and gather and accumulate for hunting days that are never going to arrive, that are never going to arise, we use these calories up by going to the gym,
Kedar Nimkar:
Or maybe just consume less carbs.
Anand Gandhi:
That’s the second solution right. So there are two solutions. One is that you consume less sugar. So you do not you did not give your body anything to accumulate too much. Or if you consumed calories, you use those calories up by creating synthetic physical exercises, physical exercises that are not actually going to result in food. Again in forests in savannah environments there is no need to walking around, you’re gathering, you’re hunting, you’re you’re on the move. And still in pre agrarian times and agriculture is only 10,000 12,000 years old. So in the 240,000 years before that we were nomadic. We are a nomadic species, we were always on the move from one place to another. Always hunting, always looking for food, always looking for safer environments. So our bodies expected to use up these calories or our bodies hence rewarded the consumption and storage of these calories. So today we found a simulation, we created a synthetic simulation of all the actions that we used to perform in forest environments, call this the gym. Similarly, our body is also expecting to use up our hormones in a certain way, our bodies produce our bodies continue producing hormones in a certain manner, what is producing emotions behaviours, expecting scarcity which produces behaviours in us that are better suited for us in savanna environments. So what is the emotional or cognitive equivalent of a gym is really the question when of the cognitive gym, can we have a simulation of a behavioural simulation that rewires our body, and makes it, body and mind, makes it makes it right for our modern environments, makes it perfectly suited for our modern environments. I call these hacks, I call the set of tools and exercises the cognitive gym.
Kedar Nimkar:
And it is just a question that you have arrived at or is it something which is designed today, as we speak?
Anand Gandhi:
No, we have been designing this is in fact, we have the answer. We do feel that we have at least quite a few answers. And we are moving very, very close towards creating some some kind of an application based solution. At this point, our gym is a is really a virtual, immersive gamified environment made by isolating and regrouping recipes of stimuli that actually trigger fixed action behavioral patterns, and balance out these imbalances produced by the disparity between our Paleolithic genes and our modern environments. Okay, so while we are shockingly similar to birds and bees, the first significant difference arises from our ability to store a massive amount of new memories in our brains. That’s one question that you are asking. Right? So life was very different in forests, in Savannahs millions of years ago, predatory threats were high, food was scarce, so were mating opportunities like we established earlier, we are genetically and anatomically the same species that we were 200,000 years ago, more or less, we are still Homo sapiens, and we are homosapiens, 200,000 years ago, right? Which means our behavior is still guided by the IF THEN response algorithms that evolved in these environments.
Kedar Nimkar:
But sorry to interrupt, but I don’t know whether I’m making sense. But there’s this Daniel Kahneman who talks about two levels in which we operate also know one is a short term thinking, which is more instinctive. And then there is a long term analysis also, like how would you fit those concepts in this? I mean because what we are talking about is instinct, which is like very, very natural, and you see a lion and you run away, right? But if you take some time to process, what is two plus two, it will take some time. So how does that fit in?
Anand Gandhi:
So that’s where where the first significant difference arises, which is our difference between our species and every other species and the difference that we as a modern Homo sapiens have with the cave homosapien and that significant differences, the ability to store a massive amount of new memories in our brain which allows us to retrain and rescale our genetic impulses, which you are calling instinct, and modify our bodies and behavior to a large extent. So we are born with physical and emotional abilities. But as we grow up, we learn when and where to use them. And in what proportion. Our genetic personality starts getting layered by modules of memories and their connections formed within our lifetime. The other ability that we have that accumulates exponentially is to augment our strength, skills, memory and intelligence non biologically which is where we use technologies like language. Aapka ek genetic code hai genetic which is a bunch of words a bunch of sentences, not necessarily ordered to make all the meaning all the meaning in the world. That interacts with the environment through the first nine months of your birthing stage and then the first 24 months as your, you know, prefrontal cortex is formed and as you collect the first memories of your life. So you keep adding stacks of information, stacks of memories upon the genetic memory, the way the the interaction between the genetic code that you’re born with and the environment causes very specific epigenetic phenotype manifestation. Not only your eye color or hair color or your body shape is guided by that, but also a lot of your behaviors are hard wired at that stage.
So this is a very big subject and we can go very, very deep into this. But the idea is that there is such a thing as isolating stimuli, and regrouping stimuli. By stimuli I mean, it could be visual stimuli, it could be colours, forms, textures, sounds, it could be all chemical stimuli, it could be smells and fragrance, the things that you touch and feel around you pressure, all kinds of stimuli, you can isolate them and regroup them to create extremely specific triggers in people. That’s really what all these examples tell us.
Kedar Nimkar:
So I think on what we’ll do is maybe, I mean, I would assimilate or like just listen to this again and again, and try to understand the more subtler aspects because even in case of Ship of Theseus you have to watch multiple times to understand the multiple layers that you’re trying to express toh yeh to aur bhi heavy duty hai. So maybe we will park this for now. And because this is like an endless conversation, and someone has to really follow you through and through to understand the nuances of it. And then hopefully we do like one more episode to understand the other side when the when the game is ready, when thoughts are manifested into sort of real actions and real situations. Does that sound good?
Anand Gandhi:
Sounds very good. Yeah, I think let’s park it aside for later, but let’s definitely come back to it in sooner than later.
Kedar Nimkar:
Thanks a lot Anand for giving your time it was an honour to have you on the show and yeah, we will do something soon.
So that’s it from audio again this year. Do tune in to Mubi to watch Anand Gandhi’s ‘Right Here, Right Now’, ‘Continuum’ and ‘An Insignificant Man’ and many other classics and cult favorites. Get a whole month of great cinema for free Mubi.com/Audiogyan. Thanks for listening till the end and have a great year ahead. Take care. Bye.
And that’s it from today’s gyan session. Catch us on iTunes, Saavan, Stitcher or any podcasting app you use to reach us on iTunes and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Stay tuned for more gyan on audiogyan.com. Till then bye!