Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Equine Assisted World.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times best selling
author of The Horse Boy, The Long Ride Home, and The Healing Land.
Before I jump in with today's guest, I just want to say a huge
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It really helps us get this work done.
As you might know from my books, I'm an autism dad.
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So without further ado, let's meet today's guest.
Welcome back.
I'm your host Rupert Isaacson, and I've got Dr.
Chantel Pratt with me today who's a neuroscientist.
And as you know, in our work movement method, horse Boy Method Tacking, we like
neuroscience because we tend to be working with the brain and the nervous system.
So it's sort of logical for us to look to neuroscientists who hopefully understand
about such things for mentorship.
So I'm excited to have Chantel on today.
Chantel's also a horse, woman and has dived into that side
of neuroscience as well.
So we get to ask her some questions about horses', brains but also about.
The interaction between a human brain and what goes on with horses, because
those of us who are involved in the therapeutic and equine assisted
world need to know these things.
And because the science is rapidly developing all the time and changing,
we sort of rely on people like Chantel to keep us up to snuff.
So Chantel, welcome.
Thank you for coming on.
Who are you and what do you do?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Thank you so much for having me.
You might have noticed that I laughed a little bit when you said Dr.
Chantel Pratt.
It's true.
I am a doctor, but I'm also a first gen college student.
My husband and I both were raised by people with high school
educations and I still, I mean, I think I got my PhD in 2004.
But it's still more often than not someone's making fun
of me when they call me Dr.
Pratt.
'cause I've just crashed into a.
Hole with an ice cream cone or something like this.
But nonetheless, yes, it is true.
And and I really deeply believe that science is an important way for asking
and understanding these big questions that at the end of the day feel
almost more ethereal or I was going to say metaphysical, but like when you
were talking about myself as a horse person and myself as a neuroscientist.
I thought like both of these are really hard things to understand and I, I
just wanna start by say, I'm gonna give you my credentials and what have
you, but I just wanna start by saying that probably because of how long I've
been studying these things, and I'm talking, looking at pictures of brains,
you know, doing the numbers you know, working with baby and, and older horses.
And I have a huge amount of humility and I, and I probably am much more
aware of all of the things I don't know than the things I do know, because
these are really complicated questions and really intense, immense goals.
So.
That being said I am a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a linguist at the
University of Washington in Seattle.
My research for over 25 years has been looking at individual differences in
how the brain gives rise to the mind.
So I am a cognitive neuroscientist by training, which is a fun thing
to say when somebody asks you at the bar, because they either will leave
you alone, pretend to understand what it means or ask the question.
But, you know, neuroscience is a huge field and some people
are really, you know, trying to understand it at the chemical level.
And some people are very interested in the nervous system from the
neck down, the, you know, the, the body and the spine and all of that
important stuff, vagal and et cetera.
And I have really been focused on the sense-making aspects of the brain and.
Not just the sense-making aspects of the brain, but how our individual biology
and experiences give rise to the way that we connect the dots when we try and
understand the world and our place in it.
And this is huge.
You know, we were talking to, I was, I started by saying I have a
lot of humility about this, but I just wanna point out that our, our
brain is about 86 billion neurons.
It's one of the most, if not the most complex systems studied by humans.
It's totally crazy to get into the idea that your brain is studying itself.
So all of the limits we have in understanding the thing are, you know,
it, it's, it's a closed loop system here.
But even though the brain is complex and powerful, it's, it's finite
and it tries to understand and operate in this infinite world.
This infinite world full of energy that is constantly changing by
taking discreet bite-sized chunks of information and then connecting the dots.
We're constantly trying to figure out what's going on now based on what's
happened to us in the past, and we're constantly trying to predict
the future, but we really don't like our understanding of the now.
The past and the future is just largely inferential.
It's largely connecting the dots and people see, think, and feel
differently because they have different brains and different experiences
that have shaped those brains.
Rupert Isaacson: Tell us about your book and the studies that went into
that book because this is really, seems to be at the heart of your
work is, is looking at individuality.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And what that means.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: So yeah, so tell us about it.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
My book is called The Neuroscience of You, how Every Brain Is Different
and How to Understand Yours.
And, you know, the book was created with the goal of helping people
understand themselves first and foremost.
I think you know, I've been arguing that theories about how the brain gives rise
to the mind that are one size fits all, which is the vast majority of research
that exists don't fit anyone very well.
It's just like one size fits all T-shirt, right?
It's down to your knees or, or not.
And and importantly, I think in that process of helping people
understand themselves, I hope I am laying a foundation for, for helping
people to relate across differences.
So if we think that there's one way to learn.
Well, if we think there's one way to be intelligent, if we think there's one
style of decision making that is good, we, we operate in this totally false
paradigm that makes us see differences as better, better or worseness, right?
We, we, we naturally line up like, oh, I'm smarter.
I'm better at math.
I have a good memory.
I am, and, and the truth is that the human humans are social primates.
Our brains evolved to solve problems collectively in groups, in small family
groups mostly, or small tribal groups.
Because of this and because their vast power and because we can never understand
the infinite ever-changing world, these differences are features, not bugs.
We, we, there are trade-offs in the different ways that we can be.
And the book talks about things that vary from introversion and extroversion
and how that's explained by our dopamine reward system to whether
we are like strongly right-handed, strongly left-handed ambidextrous.
And what this says about how jobs get assigned to our two hemispheres, always
looking at trade-offs, always looking at the match rather than saying, this
brain design is better or worse, looking at what is this brain design well.
Well designed to do what is the match between what I am asking
my brain to do and my natural predispositions and the things I've
learned from my previous experiences.
So, I mean, I'm, I'm about, when we get off this podcast, I'm going to
start week 10 of a class that I'm teaching here at the University of
Washington with 30 undergrads who have gone through the book, done a lot
of me, what I call me search, right?
Done a lot of tests to figure out how their brains work.
And probably the thing that I'm proudest about is to hear people move
from saying things like, I'm bad at attention, or I'm bad at memory, or I'm.
This way and that way to saying like, there's a trade off, or I know
that I'm better at this than that.
And just that the sort of self-acceptance and awareness that comes from
understanding, from moving from a sort of strength deficit idea towards thinking
about the match between the environment and what you're asking your brain to do.
Rupert Isaacson: Of course, the environments that we find ourselves in are
largely determined by economics, right?
Yeah.
And so the diversely,
express,
ishness of the human species, which I presume must be
across all mammalian species.
Mm-hmm.
Presumably comes about because any natural environment has an infinitude of.
Potential things that can happen.
Mm-hmm.
And you might be, you might specialize, so you might be more
hunter or gatherer if you are.
Mm-hmm.
Within hunter gatherer, you might be more, you might be more
running hunter or bow hunter.
Mm-hmm.
Or tracker.
Mm-hmm.
You might be more medicinal plant person.
You might be more really able to discern between plants that almost look the same
as each other, doppelganger type plants.
Mm-hmm.
Or you might be the person that can really get up well in the
trees and shake down the nuts.
So you could see, you could definitely see why all of these.
This infinitude of brains would evolve.
Mm-hmm.
In any kind of, and I think
Dr. Chantel Prat:
more so, more so in, in animals that exist in packs.
Right.
So I think that there are revolutionary so I think that like, you know, I, this
is not a brain thing, but I, I always compare the human brain to the pea
cocktail where it's like, okay, you can say this pea cocktail is better or worse
than this peacock tail based on how long it is or how colorful it is, or, you know.
So I think in like, less collaborative animals, there probably are things
that are more adaptive than others, but there are always differences.
Right.
I guess the way selection, selection has unfolded for humans, you know, we
selected four differences for sure.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
So we also have the ability to pool our knowledge.
Right.
So
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Correct.
Rupert Isaacson: And make strategies.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: That seems to be our, our biggest superpower.
We're sort of.
Victims of our own success perhaps.
Yeah.
But you could also see how we've arrived in the kind of culture that you and I live
in at a point where economically now we've almost specialized our environment to a
point where only certain types of brain can thrive in an easy or straightforward
manner, and other types of brain
get undervalued.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: And for real reasons, because within that more narrow economic
confine, indeed there are only like these three or four types of brain that,
you know, really do well with that.
And all those other ones, perhaps not so much.
And this leads us into, or here's a, is a question.
Does this lead us into a false set of assumptions?
About normality.
Mm-hmm.
And where we think normality is being able to conform to that narrow
economic construct, whereas in fact, that narrow economic construct
itself is, is an abnormality.
Mm-hmm.
In the sort of greater history of mankind.
Mm-hmm.
And therefore, we're actually mistaken, but we're sort of
right and wrong at the same time.
And then if you come along with someone like me who would say, well, my experience
of maths at school in the way that I was taught means that I think I'm bad at math.
Later on when I had to homeschool my son in math, I realized that being bad
at math was actually kind of a good thing because it meant, meant I could
empathize with somebody who was No.
And, and I could, I could look at.
How to break things down.
So I had to understand it first, and if I could understand it with the
difficulties I had, then there was perhaps a sporting chance that he might Mm.
Or they actually turned out to be better than me, of course.
But
I guess the question I'm asking is, do you still feel in this day and age of
the recognition of diversity, which is different to when we were kids, that the
sort of narrow idea of what's normal and what's not normal and what's a, a good
brain and what's a bad brain, or has, has that now not all broken down a bit?
Or am I just living under completely false solutions because I work within
this field and think that people are actually, are, are people still stuck
in these ideas of normal and, uh mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So there's two, two things I want to address.
The first is about this particular economic, the definition of good
being based on what makes money or what functions in the way
we've set up Western societies.
Mm-hmm.
And then you started to answer the question by talking
about teaching your sons.
I think it starts in education.
I think the big problem is actually how education is set
up, not how industry is set up.
And I think that our educational systems are largely.
Set up.
I mean, it just boggles the mind because education is set up from a time in which
only the teacher had the knowledge and like, you know, you're supposed to sit
and sit still and listen because you have to transfer in this laborious way,
knowledge from one brain to another.
And we're so far, we've, we have evolved as a society, not as a brain, because
where the brain is coming from, written language is still new and hard, right?
So when you think about chat, GPT and all this stuff, like we've come so far,
but yet we still have this model in which kids are supposed to sit still
and passively absorb instruction.
And that is so far from how any brain evolved to learn and problem solve.
That I think you know, the challenges when it comes to value and what
we value start much earlier than, than in the economic cri.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And you talk, there is a correlation between that and industry, right.
Because of course, making kids sit down, shut up and
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Behave
Rupert Isaacson: was part of preparing them to go work in factories,
Dr. Chantel Prat:
sit in front of a Yes.
Sit in front of a computer and,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
Yeah.
So I mean, does not one create the other?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes, but not necessarily.
I think what, and I think both to your question about where are we
now, I think both are, coming to understand and appreciate differences.
Mm-hmm.
For different reasons.
So like I would argue, and, you know, I do.
So, I am on the advisory board for Ariana Huffington, who founded the Huffington
Post, has a company called Thrive Global, and it's about wellness in the workplace.
And we're creating a training there about diversity in the workplace
and specifically about the benefits in decision making that come when
you have different brains with different backgrounds at the table.
So I think I would argue that there is an economic advantage to
considering many different brain types.
To having people who think, again, as we evolve to think and make decisions
in groups, to valuing people with these different brain types at the table.
And when you create work environments that support different kinds of thinkers
and deciders, and you incorporate their ideas, you also create products
that work for more kinds of thinkers.
Mm-hmm.
So there, and, and and so I think we are at a sort of turning point where, you
know, I, I've been spending more and more time with C-level execs who understand.
That diversity is not only about sitting around a table with people who look
different than you and think the same.
That's not it.
That's not the magic sauce.
It's sitting around a table with people with different experiences and
different brain types that they can bring into this decision making space
and learning how to appreciate these different perspectives and find something
that will work well for more people.
That there are a lot of advantages in that space
Rupert Isaacson: is industry actually now Refinding the
hunter-gatherer model because industry itself has become so diverse.
You know, it used to be.
Mm-hmm.
A factory was sort of a factory and it ran with an assembly line and you know, you,
and it's now looking very, very different.
And in a few years, robots will do all that anyway and.
Are we at the point now this interesting point where we're returning to a sort
of hunter-gatherer economy, but that's post-industrial, where we actually
now suddenly realize, oh my gosh, yes, we do need to create products
for all these different brains, but this is actually, again, quite new
within the, since the Industrial revolution, things were more homogenized.
Yeah.
Interesting that, that you're there.
What, what do you say?
You're working with these CEOs and so forth.
What are they saying about this and what are they, and then how
are they able to make their work environments possible for Yeah.
People with these different brains.
That's not just lip service saying, well, we're gonna hire Right.
So people Right.
Exactly.
Gonna hire so and so.
Exactly.
But they're gonna just go and shred paper or whatever.
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Exactly.
And so I think that that's, that's the real work.
So your, your vision of returning to hunter gatherer is quite
interesting because that's the work is that, naturally.
I think because of the way that we understand one another, there's
all this really interesting social neuroscience work that shows that if
we're in the wild and we're moving around choosing our friends, we
choose people who work like we do.
Like you can predict.
They did this crazy fascinating study on an island in South Korea where they
created a social network of like 700 villagers and then stuck them in a scanner
and measured their brain connectivity and showed that you could predict who
would be friends with whom based on how similarly their brains were wired, and
that this explained, you know, friendships above and beyond things like age.
Politics, personality, so long as they live close enough to
have come into casual contact.
When we're choosing people to spend time with, we choose people who work like us.
And I think that's because our sort of default to mirror neurons and so forth
and so on, allows us to make easier intuitive inferences when somebody
works like us now in the workplace.
I think that often how this translates is when they say somebody
is not a good fit culturally.
Like there are all these kind of like code words when you're in hiring and you might
say it's not a good fit for the culture or, and I think that that's a feeling that
comes when the person you're interviewing has a different brain, a different
thinking, feeling, behaving style.
And I also think that we are more likely to think someone who comes up with
the same solution as we do is smarter.
Because you can understand that solution.
You agree with it.
And so you're like, oh yeah, this is a great person I have on my team.
It's like duplicating Triplicating myself, cloning myself.
And so people need concrete examples and evidence.
It's hard.
It's certainly harder to create communication styles to create
management systems that go away from assumptions about how people think,
feel, and operate towards, you know, more personalized, individualized
spaces that support these differences.
And they need concrete examples for how this is gonna make them money, right?
And how the decision making will look.
'cause it's not gonna feel.
Like, oh, this is great.
You're brilliant.
I love you.
It's gonna feel weird.
Like, and so that's where I think the, my book has helped give some
kind of engineering examples.
Like, this is how brains work.
These are the weaknesses that are associated with all these kind of fast,
instant, probabilistic decision making.
This is what you're missing.
And so getting people to feel curious about the brain across
the table that is saying something that you might think is asinine
or doing something that you might think is asinine.
That's, I think, the magic and the secret sauce, because every brain does things
that they think are perfectly reasonable.
Every brain, every single brain is moving through the world trying
to find good things and avoid bad things based on their, their
engineering and their experiences.
So instead of thinking, why is this idea asinine, asking questions about
how that person got to that place.
Is this kind of opening experience for sort of,
you know, sort of reconceptualizing better or worse, right or
wrong with what am I missing?
Yeah.
What is this person highlighting that I missed?
Rupert Isaacson: I just wrote down, I just wrote curiosity underlined.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes.
It's curiosity is the magic.
It's my favorite thing that I learned about in writing my book.
And it's the secret sauce I think.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I agree.
And I, you know, without curiosity, there's no innovation.
Without innovation, there's no long-term thriving economically.
Right.
Because conditions change.
So one has to, whether it's in hunter gatherer context here, there could be
a drought, there could be some natural thing that causes the shifting of changes.
Mm-hmm.
Natural resources.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously market forces, you know, we're seeing some disruptive
market forces going on as we as, as we speak here in March, 2025.
It's an interesting time.
Oh, boy.
If you're not curious, I mean, yeah.
How can you, how can you thrive in these things?
Right.
I want to bring you back though, to, you talked about mirror neurons.
Mm-hmm.
Mirror neurons are something which you hear a lot of people talk about.
Mm-hmm.
But I've got a, I've just caught a neuroscientist on the end of my screen.
Tell us exactly what neuro, what, what mirror neurons are.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Well, I can tell you exactly how they were discovered and then I can tell
you about the ambiguities of them.
Right.
So a mirror neuron.
At its core is a neuron in the brain that responds, that is both
involved in generating an action in the person themselves and when they
observe someone else doing an action.
So it was first discovered in Italy in a monkey lab where they
were actually trying, so they had electrodes in this monkey's brain
and they were doing they were, you know, I don't know, putting fruit.
On a tray in front of the monkey.
And what they wanted to see is like what part of the motor cortex
executes a specific grabbing response.
So there's a lot of motor pro, a lot of brain is involved in just motor
programming and what they found, so they had, you know, these motor cortex
neurons isolated for this monkey's hand.
And what they found was the experimenter who was a human, by the way.
Obviously, I guess, I mean, would be really cool.
I
Rupert Isaacson: should be surprised.
I mean, it
Dr. Chantel Prat:
would be really cool to have monkeys.
But anyway, it was a human, that Italian monkeys, no, that exactly.
They're very social and very, very smart.
But the, when the human put like the, you know, the fruit, the treat
on the tray, they used the same grasp, the same motion that they
were trying to study in the monkey.
And they found these neurons started firing these neurons that were supposed
to be for motor programming started firing when they saw someone else.
Do the action that they are supposed to do.
So we know that there are populations of neurons in the human brain that
are both involved in the per, it's really important for language.
For instance, there are neurons in, around, in and around the sort of speech
bro's area that will listen to speech sounds and they sort of activate the
motor plan that would create those speech sounds and that helps them
understand where, where are the brain?
Are
Rupert Isaacson: these located
Dr. Chantel Prat:
mostly in the frontal cortex?
So they're mostly in the, I would say, both sides of the frontal cortex.
Now what happens is, I think so, so the criteria for something to be a
mirror neuron specifically is that I both generate a behavior and.
I respond when I see other people doing that behavior.
Okay.
And, and that's, and so like, you know, in the original research on animals,
we had an you know, an electrode in the brain and we were really
specific about what was going on.
Now there's, I think that the research has gotten fuzzier because when
you're looking at human brains and you don't have electrodes in them,
there are a lot of parts of the brain that do a lot of different things.
And so, you know, the mirror I, to the best of my knowledge, mirror
re neuron research has become controversial in some areas.
So like, one of the things that I think is quite evocative is the idea that mirror
neurons are involved in empathy and and.
One of the reasons I think this is evocative is how hard it is to
just, is empathy a single thing?
How hard it is to define empathy, how hard it is to catch a brain being empathetic.
And so usually when they study, you know, you have to think about this.
If you're thinking about flow or like creativity or things that are really
cool that we actually wanna understand.
If we can't time it to the precise millisecond, if we can't catch it
in action, if we can't cause it, how sure can we be that we're studying it?
So with with empathy, often what they do is watch somebody get hurt.
It's like a physical pain, empathy, and it, and then you're looking at
like, activation in the sort of somatic somatosensory areas and you know.
Similar.
Like you see somebody get hit with a ball or something and you
look for like the feeling of pain.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: They get hit in the army.
Clutch your arm, right?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Right.
And you I do, I definitely feel, yeah.
You know, that's why I, like, we have, I, I probably shouldn't talk about this,
but like we have a divide in my family about nut shot videos and whether or not
they're hysterical, I like feel it, I don't, obviously don't have testicles,
but like I feel the pain from those so viscerally that I can't, they're both
Rupert Isaacson: painful and funny.
I'd say that they're both right.
But my husband
Dr. Chantel Prat:
and my daughter think they're hysterical and will cry and just
watch like endless snapshot videos.
So I'm like, okay, is that something different about our mirror neurons?
Like, I don't know.
It certainly crosses gender.
So, I don't know what's going on there, but, but that's a very
specific kind of empathy, right?
So I, you know, to the extent that that generalizes to cognitive pain, you
know, to emotional pain I don't know.
But, but the, you know, when it comes to.
How we understand one another and how we understand our horses.
I think this is fascinating 'cause the, you know, the idea is that
mirror neurons is kind of a way of understanding through simulation, right?
Like, I watch you do an action, the part of my brain that would execute that action
activates and I think ow or whatever, you know, but I think this is why we're drawn
to brains that work like ours in the wild.
'cause this isn't mirror neurons are intuitive, instinctual.
It's, it's not learned.
It's why little kids cover their eyes and think they disappear.
You know?
This is our, the easiest way of understanding one another, I think.
And so.
If you and I have totally different wirings and I'm watching you behave,
and I'm simulating it, and I'm thinking, this is asinine, my brain is different.
So when my brain walks through, thumbs up, when my brain walks through, what
it would be doing in that case, and I have all these different priors and I
have all these different wirings, and I think that makes no sense whatsoever.
Then it's like stepping into shoes that are a different, you
know, walking a mile in someone's shoes that are a different size.
So that's where I think the, the more, what Paul Bloom, I think, wrote a book
called Against Empathy, a, a Case for Rational Compassion, where he talks
about understanding in this more what we call theory of mind way, which is a more
abstract clue based use the information to reverse engineer somebody else.
And I think that kind of theory of mind understanding is not as warm,
it's not as a effective effective, but it allows you, I think to
understand people who work differently.
Than you do, like you might and, and with the horses, I think it's
interesting to, to consider how much we're feeling with a horse and
getting it wrong because the horse has a different experience than we do.
Yeah.
Versus using the bits and of, you know, the bits we've learned
about how horses work to kind of rationalize what might be going
Rupert Isaacson: on just quickly, just to beat the, the
dead horse on mirror neurons.
Mm-hmm.
I, am I correct in, in thinking that a mirror neuron is not just a mirror
neuron that a mirror neuron does?
Lots of, might do other things, might have other jobs it does as well.
Of which the imitation
Dr. Chantel Prat:
right
Rupert Isaacson: thing, it's just one function, but they could
equally do other things as well?
Or is it dedicated?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I don't know the answer to that.
So I think that I mean they have at least two jobs.
One would be executing the behavior in you.
Mm-hmm.
Like you don't only, so I guess maybe that answers your question, that
part of the brain in the monkeys is firing when they're trying to
grab a, a, a grape, whether they're seeing someone else do it or not.
So it is involved in social imitation and learning, but it has a, a
primary job in controlling your body.
Rupert Isaacson: So if we're involved in the sort of therapeutic writing end of
things, which obviously a lot of people listening to this show are what I presume
that trying to optimize people's mirror neuron development would be a useful
thing because it helps them to learn how to thrive in a confusing world by kind
of learning which behaviors to emulate.
Mm-hmm.
What's the best.
Advice that you would give to somebody working in Sayan equine assisted
field who wanted to help somebody optimize their mirror neurons?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Do optimize them for other people or,
Rupert Isaacson: well, for both.
I mean, 'cause I should imagine cross species, if you are, if you talk
to a lot of autistic people, for example, they'll say, well, it does
feel like I'm dealing with another species when I'm dealing with you.
Mm-hmm.
So whether I'm dealing with a horse or whether I'm dealing with a
neurotypical human, whatever that is.
And then similarly for neurotypical humans, when they're dealing with
people on the spectrum, it can feel like dealing with, it can feel
like dealing with another species.
And this is where the communication breaks down.
So how can we help ourselves out neurologically Yeah.
As the practitioners so that we can help our, our, if you like, service users.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm-hmm.
So my instinctive response is that.
To the best of my knowledge, and I will admit that I'm not an expert in this,
the mirror neuron system is pretty
I'm so hesitant to use the word innate, but I guess what I would say is I would
sca rather than trying to train the mirror neuron system per se, I would
be trying to train explicit behaviors.
Like if the mirror neuron system is working atypically, because this is
something you see in, in infants.
You see them imitating facial expressions.
You, this is something that's been milestones,
Rupert Isaacson: et cetera.
Those milestones are not happening, right?
Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Right, right, right.
So, I mean, it, it, it's either been unfolding or not unfolding typically
up until the point of intervention.
So, you know, my, what I would be doing is making the things that
might be implicit to us explicit.
To the learner.
I think that that's a more tractable learning technique.
Right.
Put that in
Rupert Isaacson: terms that somebody walking around an arena with a
kid on a pony in Staffordshire
Dr. Chantel Prat:
mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: On a Tuesday night.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So you want them stand and
Rupert Isaacson: put into practice.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So again, is, are we trying to get them to understand the
pony or the, the instructor?
Rupert Isaacson: That's a good question.
If you're in the equine assisted field, or if you're considering
a career in the equine assisted field, you might want to consider
taking one of our three neuroscience backed equine assisted programs.
Horseboy method, now established for 20 years, is the original
Equine assisted program specifically designed for autism, mentored by and
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We work in the saddle with younger children.
Helping them create oxytocin in their bodies and neuroplasticity in the brain.
It works incredibly well.
It's now in about 40 countries.
Check it out.
If you're working without horses, you might want to look at movement
method, which gets a very, very similar effect, but can also be
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If you're working with families, you can give them really tangible exercises to do
at home that will create neuroplasticity.
when they're not with you.
Finally, we have taquine equine integration.
If you know anything about our programs, you know that we need a
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in the body of the person that we're working with, child or adult.
So, this means we need to train a horse in collection, but this
also has a really beneficial effect on the horse's well being.
And it also ends your time conflict, where you're wondering, oh my gosh, how
am I going to condition my horses and maintain them and give them what they
need, as well as Serving my clients.
Takine equine integration aimed at a more adult client base
absolutely gives you this.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Because for the pony, like I would say, do you notice what his ears are doing?
Like, what do you think that means?
You know, and how about how does that look compared to this Pony's ears?
Like, you know, what can we learn from this?
And like with the instructor or with, you know, Billy, you could say like, you know.
When you said, Hey, shut up, or whatever just happened, like,
you know, what did you notice?
You know, you know, did you see this thing and you can like point out and now
Rupert Isaacson: what if, what if the per, that all sounds highly reasonable, and now
what if the person doesn't have the kind of brain that can receive information in
that way, sort of top down instruction.
Mm-hmm.
So what if they're, what if they're like severely autistic or mm-hmm.
Away with the fairies in whatever way, and you want to help to bring them into
this type of empathetic cognition.
Mm.
So that, not so that they can be changed, but just so that they
don't get their ass kicked mm-hmm.
Too heavily by the world that they're in.
How could we, what, what, what are some things that spring to mind for you?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So the thing that, to help kickstart that
Rupert Isaacson: process, theory of mind effectively.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
The thing that makes sense to me, based on my understanding of the
brains of people with autism is that you've got a, the thing that you want
them to learn about, you've gotta restrict distracting information.
So you would need to simplify the world to the extent that
you could make the learning item of interest the most salient.
So I hear you saying like, I'm on a horse and I, and my brain is not verbal,
or it's not programmable in this way.
And part of that is because you're the, you know, the things that they pay
attention to are not as predictable as the things that we pay attention to.
Like, you can you in a neurotypical, individual, you can, there are
certain things like social cues, like language, like faces that take
priority a lot of times over things that would be very salient for someone
with autism, like repeated motion.
Of course.
That's, you know, that's what we're working toward by, or like, machines,
anything that's predictable is something that might help attract their attention,
which is kind of the exact opposite of the noisy, chaotic human face and, and voice.
So I guess, and I'm sure people have done this because it seems obvious the,
the learning should be happening in a situation that is as free
from other kinds of distraction as possible to make the, the.
The cue, you know, so when I think of mirror neurons, I think of a match between
what you're seeing and what you're doing.
And to the extent that such a thing could be trained you would want
to just eliminate every, every other kind of as many other kinds
of distracting things as possible.
So I, I've, I've read about, for instance vocabulary development in autism.
And it's fascinating because, you know, in a typically developing brain, mom can take
a pen and go point to it and say, pen.
And there are all these, you're listening to mom's face, voice the point.
There are all these social cues that point you to this.
The attention on this object and, and a typically developing
kid with autism is like.
Listening to the finger, the butt, the way the socks feel, and the shoes,
like you might learn any amount of this sensory information might be capturing.
Right.
Your attention.
Rupert Isaacson: You know, it, it, it's really interesting when I was
first having to get involved in this 'cause I had to 'cause of my son.
There was,
and there still is a belief among some people that say
a wall with art on it or something like that would be too distracting.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm.
Rupert Isaacson: And then, and so people would be working in these
really very sterile environments.
Mm-hmm.
White walls, frankly depressing.
Aesthetically.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: But I found of course, going out into nature.
With my
Dr. Chantel Prat:
kid.
Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: Opened everything up.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes.
And that makes,
Rupert Isaacson: and there were multiple distractions, but those distractions
seemed to work for us, not against us.
Mm-hmm.
So my question with that is,
Dr. Chantel Prat:
oh, this is a good, this gives me a good idea.
Okay.
Keep going.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Is, is this is this because a, those distractions didn't have a
bad sensory effect because mm-hmm.
They're the distractions that our organism is set up for.
Mm-hmm.
I mm-hmm.
You know, the wind, the, the light, the trees or whatever.
Mm-hmm.
So therefore they're not really distractions.
Mm-hmm.
They're just sort of our habitat.
Mm-hmm.
And then do our brains that automatically respond better to those.
And then the other thing was, of course, it was all in, in movement.
And that brings me back to mm-hmm.
What you were saying earlier about with factories and, and schools.
The brain didn't evolve.
To learn and problem solve that way sitting still.
So I wanted, so I made a little note to myself, say, ask
about movement and the brain.
So nature movement.
Okay.
And then what I would do, of course was look for what seemed
to motivate him from the, that's
Dr. Chantel Prat:
exactly what I wrote, I wrote,
Rupert Isaacson: and then just go in that direction.
That's exactly right.
And the reason I did it though, mm-hmm.
Was not because I was intelligent.
The only reason I did it was because I'm not intelligent and because I know
that I'm not intelligent in that way.
I went for mentorship from Temple Grandin who told me to do that mm-hmm.
As an autistic person.
Mm-hmm.
So I, as a journalist went, well, she's autistic and she's successful, so she
must know what she's talking about.
So therefore I will do what she says because that just seems rational.
And I did and it worked.
Mm-hmm.
But I, yeah, I definitely found that following what other, what
sometimes behavioral therapists would've called distractions, I
found were not distractions at all.
Mm-hmm.
They were motivators.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
That's right.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
That's right.
So, so what's going on with there, with the brain?
And
Dr. Chantel Prat:
so there's some, my gosh, like there is a person here at UW called, his
name is Gregory Bratman, and there's a team that are studying nature wellness
interactions and in so many different ways sort of nature and mental health.
And like the first thing that I thought about when you were talking
about walls with no art and versus nature is this idea of soft.
One of the things that seems to be true is that when we are in nature,
we are inherently softer in our focus.
We are more like the horses, right?
Mm-hmm.
Like we have this wide picture, and I do think that that's very settling.
It's restorative.
Mm, for the nervous system, right?
Because we also have something called like attentional fatigue.
And I think, you know, as you were talking about the white walls and, and
things like this, I thought, okay, what is, how do you get from distracting
to like stressful amount of pressure in one area, which will then fatigue
your brain and your nervous system?
And I think this kind of soft focus which you also get, we know
this is true from moving, right?
You, the rhythm, rhythm of walking relaxes the nervous system and it opens
up creativity and opens up like the ability to think and reason and learn.
So that's the first thing is that this is, is that the, the way we
focus in nature, we need to be aware, we need to be alert, we need to know
where we're putting our feet, which is kind of cool and interesting.
But the, we're not necessarily hyper-focused on something
that will fatigue the brain.
We have a, a, a kind of broader awareness, which seems to be from
a mental health point, restorative.
And you're right, that's, that's how we are meant.
We, we are animals.
And that is how we are meant to exist.
It is, and I think it's in this space of normal value what's good and what's bad.
I, I worry so much about how removed we are from how, how many things
that we think are bad about our brains that are just absolutely the
way that we are designed to exist.
Our brains have not.
Evolved nearly as fast as our society.
The pressures that our society has put on them have
Rupert Isaacson: what?
What do we think is bad about our brains that, that we could be wrong about?
I think
Dr. Chantel Prat:
a attention is the biggest thing.
Like, you know, my students like, and I think that this is a great, I also wanna
talk about your, your question about do we think we've diversity is accepted or not?
I think it depends.
Attention is a huge thing.
Like many, many people, like you're, you are saying I'm not intelligent, but
I think that's because you have a very specific idea of intelligence that's like
sitting in front of books like I am right now and digesting things and, you know,
and remembering them when they have like, no tangible purpose in your real life.
Or like, you know, how, how well did you absorb numbers on the chalkboard when
someone gave it to you without a context?
And, and when it comes to, I just think that there's a very straightforward way
that your brain defines intelligence.
Your brain defines intelligence as learning the things that will
move you through the world and help you find good things, period.
Right.
And so having the ability to like undergo six hours of class a day
for 25 years of your life before you finally get a job where you make money
and can then buy the good things is like not, that's not very natural.
That's a lot of delayed gratification.
Right.
So, I'm completely, I'm, I am, I'm thinking about nature.
What, what did you ask me?
What's it, the brain, well, well,
Rupert Isaacson: that you talked about attention.
So, yeah.
Attention.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So a lot of people feel they hate, like I I, at the beginning of this class, I
would hear my students saying, I hate.
A DHD.
Do you know how many of my, like in my students, I'm at the University of
Washington, it's widely considered one of the 10 bus public schools in the world.
Mm-hmm.
I think that could be changing, but and so these students are at
the top of what society would call high functioning intellectual.
And I probably have about 25% of the students in my class, this
upper division, like neuroscience class with diagnoses of A DHD.
And I think there's something in that, right?
So either we can say, and, and if you look at incidents of A DHD,
it really depends on the country.
It depends on the time period.
It, it could be something that's increasing because of,
you know, digital stimulation.
It could be something that's di being more widely diagnosed because of awareness.
But the fact is that one in four.
Students have this diagnosis means that it's not rare, it's not atypical,
and it also means it can't be bad
Rupert Isaacson: of a thing.
Right.
Otherwise it can't that, that bad of a thing getting into
University of Washington.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Exactly.
And in some ways but, but, but the students will say, I hate that.
And then I say, okay, well let's talk about the opposite.
Do they say why
Rupert Isaacson: they hate it, by the way?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I think they hate, well, they, they will say like, I don't know why I
can't be motivated to sit and do something for a long period of time.
Okay.
Or how, or or that I then get hyper.
You know, they're aware that they also get hyper-focused and like
down a rabbit hole for something that they say like wasn't important.
And so one of the things that we've learned in my class is like, when
you are, you know, what widely.
In both this kind of economical world and in the classroom, what's widely considered
valuable or good is the ability to pay attention according to some goal, right?
Like I am, I'm telling you, pay attention to what I'm saying.
'cause we're on a podcast right now and that means whatever, or you know,
I'm telling you, pay attention to your homework or I'm telling you, pay attention
to dropping your heels or whatever, right?
And the ability to, but like.
When people are paying, paying attention first, it's expensive for everyone.
That's why it's called freaking paying attention.
It uses the frontal globes.
When you're paying attention, what you're actually doing is you are
overriding everything you've learned from trial and error experience.
Oh, that's interesting.
Okay.
So like everything you've learned about how to stay alive,
how to find the good things.
Mm-hmm.
You can override that to now focus on a specific piece of the world
and ignore the other pieces of the
Rupert Isaacson: world.
Mm-hmm.
For a specific outcome.
Right.
For
Dr. Chantel Prat:
a specific outcome.
It, it costs a lot from an energetic perspective and you are literally
distorting the world as it is, and you are less likely to see
something that you're not expecting.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So, you know, if you don't have someone with a DHD in your, a hunter gatherer
group and you happen upon a cave with eyeballs popping out of it, you're dead.
Yeah.
You're over here counting blueberries like you're supposed to and see how
many are in the basket or whatever, and.
You're not even seeing the eyeballs in that cave.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, no, absolutely.
And that, that's always been my thought about a DHD is that, you
know, having, having lived with hunter gatherers you can see how the human
brain has to be able to operate in effectively multiple parallel universes.
Correct.
And at the same time hyperfocus.
Mm-hmm.
And at the same time allow itself to be distracted.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
And isn't it convenient if you have different people who are
good at those things and can communicate with one another?
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Right.
So you can defer to, you are better at the blueberries than I am.
So when it comes to blueberries, I'm deferring to Chantal.
So then maybe I can give Chantal the chance to go down the blueberry rabbit
hole because we'll benefit from that.
And I'll watch out for bears.
While she's doing that because she knows more about blueberries than I do.
When it comes time to do the thing that I'm good at, she'll do the
same, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But, and then, you know, the, the need to change on a dime and pivot.
Mm-hmm.
So if you're hunting conditions change like that, the wind changes or the animal
hunts you back, or you realize mm-hmm.
Another animal was hunting you while you're hunting or whatever it is.
And so if you can't then pivot very, very fast, well you can't get food.
So, you, one I've often wondered when people talked about A DHD,
like, is, does a DHD, why is there a deal on the end of it?
Why is it a disorder and a deficit?
Mm-hmm.
So it's only a disorder and a deficit, presumably if it no
longer fits the economic model.
So That's right.
Yeah.
And in
Dr. Chantel Prat:
fact, the diagnostic criteria, I talk about this from time to time because
I study attention and attentional differences in the lab, and there are
a number of tests you can do about distractibility focus goal, you know,
orienting all the, you can break it into a million different boring tasks.
There's no criteria.
There's no, if you get this score, you have a DHD.
It is not, that's not how you get diagnosed.
You get diagnosed
Rupert Isaacson: objective.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
It's if you, yeah.
Is this, is this impairing your ability at home work or whatever.
Right.
In context.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So that's about functionality.
It's not about typicality.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, right.
And then that depends on what's being valued at home, presumably.
Correct.
So if, if the home culture is that, I as an 8-year-old boy should
Dr. Chantel Prat:
sit, still
Rupert Isaacson: behave like a Philadelphia lawyer.
Yes.
You know.
There might be a small percentage of boys that can do that at eight.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: But if you're not one of them,
Dr. Chantel Prat:
then you start to feel like there's something wrong with a dysfunction.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Then it means that we've gotten very narrow in
Dr. Chantel Prat:
mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: What we perceive as an economically viable thing, right?
Yes.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Instead of, yeah.
So diversity, you talk about diversity and one and one, one thinks about
it as diversity of people, diversity of brain types, but there's also
diversity of economics, right?
Surely Yes.
You know, we need multiple skill sets, people with multiple correct.
Skill sets.
Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
And, and, and Temple Grandin is big about she is so, you
know, tuned into that as well.
And like, we're under training for really important skill sets when we had dinner.
Two weeks ago she said that her new passion is going around looking at
all the certificates everywhere in the world that have not been checked,
like the elevator certificates.
Yes, she does.
And I was like, I don't like elevators to start with.
You're not helping me at all.
She's like, they're everywhere like you.
She came, she
Rupert Isaacson: came and spoke at the conference that we did in September, and
she, the first thing out of her mouth when she got on the floor, she says, I just
checked the elevator coming up here and it's out of date by, and we're like, okay.
All using the stairs.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Comforting.
But hey, awareness is, is key
Rupert Isaacson: indeed.
What part of the brain, just quickly about attention, what part or parts
of the brain govern attention?
Hmm.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So I would say the attention is a, an interaction between the frontal lo?
Well, it depends on the kind, right?
So there's natural, or I call it organic attention.
Some people call it distractible.
But I love it because squirrel is, you know, that's the kind
of prototypical distractibility.
But hey man, squirrel is an organic attention.
That's thing.
Well, squirrel is
Rupert Isaacson: also edible.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah, right.
I mean, why wouldn't, I mean, you know, that's why wouldn't I look at
Rupert Isaacson: sport?
I might be able to eat it in a hunter gatherer context.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Or you might be able to make friends with it here.
Theyre, or maybe it's going quite aggressive.
Steelers of lunches might be your competition.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
So there's two things.
One is that you have a frontal lobe that holds the goal in
mind if you're paying attention.
And two is that you have these basal ganglia, which are my favorite parts
of the brain, which are the the dopamine rich reward centers that
learn based on previous experiences, where to find the good things.
Now, the basal gang, my husband has a, a, a really cool computational model
about this called conditional signal routing, which by the way, we found was
working quite differently in autism.
And the idea is that when you have a goal, the frontal lobe can help change
the rules for what good looks like, right?
So like if you know, you know, ice cream is good and so, and you feel hungry
and there's ice cream, you're like, this is a high probability reward.
But if you're like.
Energized enough to hold in mind that you wanna live to be 100 and that
you haven't eaten any vegetables.
The frontal lobe can tell the basal ganglia, Hey, like right now, actually
fiber, things that grew from the planet are good in a, like, in a
way that aligns with these goals.
And you can, and you can make a different decision.
Rupert Isaacson: So it's, so is your basal ganglia, your impulse and your
prefrontal cortex, what you're talking about there, that that could override that
impulse for kinda to change what's good?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm-hmm.
Kind of.
I think that basal ganglia are a lot smarter than just impulse.
I think they're at any, given the frontal lobe gets all of this, I think
of the frontal lobe, like the CEO that gets all of this credit for making
decisions, but the basal ganglia are already filtering behind the scenes
based on your previous experiences to say this information is pretty particularly
important for making your decision.
Rupert Isaacson: Where are they located?
The basal ganglia right
Dr. Chantel Prat:
in the middle of the brain.
Rupert Isaacson: Why are they called ganglia?
Right.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I don't know.
I think that means multiple.
They, yes.
I think I would imagine them like,
Rupert Isaacson: like octopus alien,
Dr. Chantel Prat:
we had a, we had Halloween costume
Rupert Isaacson: type.
Yeah.
With Dangly
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Dang things.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
We had a Halloween costume collective.
We were called the Basil Gang.
I think it means multiple ganglion.
I think it's a thing, but I don't honestly know.
And then there's this, so it seems also within this frontal and then
in inner basal ganglia system, there's also a left and right.
Ideas, and I think this is super interesting.
The left seems to be more goal focused and predicting the future, whereas
the right seems to be more focused on the now and noticing abnormalities or
things that move and so forth and so on.
So, for instance, there's a, a disorder called the visual neglect
or hemis hemifield neglect.
If you get damage in the in the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere can still
kind of like figure out what's going on.
But if you miss the noticing hemisphere, you might just like
ignore an entire half of your body.
So there's this different kinds of awareness in the two hemispheres,
which is quite interesting.
And if you have people bisect a line, so we did this in my class, just give a, give
people a bunch of lines and have 'em draw a a line where you think the middle is.
You can get and, and then measure how close you are to center.
You can get some idea of whether you have this more or you know, if your
right hemisphere, if your right, if the line is to the left of center,
it means that your left hemisphere is driving your noticing more.
And if the line is to the right, you can, you can say that you
have like a more organic brain.
So a DHD people are more, are more driven by the right side.
Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
And we live in a bit of a left brain society, so therefore Yeah.
Therefore they've, it's a disorder suddenly.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Right.
Whereas, but it,
Rupert Isaacson: in another culture it would be a, a a, an asset.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Right.
Exactly.
And I think that that applies to a lot of different skill sets and a lot of
different ways of being that we're, you know, sort of under appreciating.
And you know, going back to your question about I.
The first question, which I feel like I never fully answered about, are we, where
are we at in the acceptance of diversity?
I love that neurodiversity is searched for four times more frequently on
Google now than five years ago.
I, I think that there is a general awareness that probably one in
five people have some kind of, what, what will be diagnosable
as atypical brain organization.
And I love, you know, these stickers that say neuros spicy and this kind
of acknowledgement that I think that there is a general increase of awareness
and a general increase in people claiming that they're neurodiverse,
you know, like making it public.
Having the neuro spicy sticker.
And understanding that this is not a personality deficit, this is just
the way my brain works, is kind of a claiming, stepping into that recognition.
However, I think there's work to do, number one, I think that, that, that
understanding that this is not like a personal weakness or a deficit,
this is just the way my brain works.
I think that there's room for that in the typically developing population as well.
I think, like I said with my students, people who hate, don't
understand why they're distractible, don't understand why they're not
motivated to do boring things, don't understand why they forget forgetting.
This is important for learning as remembering.
Like I just think there are a lot of things about our brain designs
that we really, that we perceive as character flaws because of
this kind of societal value of a particular thing that's very abnormal.
And I think there are certain.
Labels that are more popular than others, like a DHD is so metal and rock and roll
and yeah, I'm neuros spicy, but like when I talk to people who are on, who
have autism spectrum disorder, many of them don't wanna be the person on that
panel or don't want their employers to know about it and are worried about
being stigmatized and are worried, you know, so like, it, it's, I don't think
we're there yet when there's like a cool disorder and a not cool disorder.
And, and again, I think that nor I just think the work comes to
it with normalizing differences.
We're all different and people with.
Asper or an autism spectrum disorder label are just as different from
one another as people without it.
Like, you know, so assuming that that per that label lets, you know,
oh, I'm gonna, I don't know, like people make very weird assumptions.
And when they want me to talk about neurodiversity in the workplace, they
want me to say something like, eye contact is aggressive or like that.
It doesn't, it's not true for everybody.
Or like, not everybody thinks in pictures, not everybody.
This, you know, there's, there's diversity within and, and between these labels.
So I think normalizing differences and rethinking about deficits as of
just a mismatch between the thing that we're asking our brain to
do and what our brain is good at.
And to your point, strength building, working with the nature
of our brains, working with the things that we're passionate about.
'cause literally no one.
It gets lit up by doing boring things no one does.
And that takes us back to curiosity.
Do you know that when your brain feels curious?
It is.
First of all, it requires safety.
You cannot feel curious when you're not safe.
And when your brain feels curious, it emits dopamine in anticipation
of an information rewarding.
The same interesting basal ganglia that looks for food.
Treats the human brain treats information as a reward when it's
something you're curious about.
And when that dopamine comes online, it's dopamine is something that is not actually
for reward, it's for motivating learning.
So it motivates you to work and it re, your brain gets rewired more quickly.
So I guess like when you started talking about your son and then you
said you worked with what motivates him?
My second answer to that person who's got a kid on a pony is
learn about that kid's what?
Lights them up and put it into that.
We, there's, so there's a study that was actually done in, I think it was
Nigeria that's so brilliant and so easy.
They were teaching kids math and they gave them, and this was like
secondary school math, and they gave them a 10 minute interest survey.
Where do you like to shop?
What do you buy?
Who are your friends?
What's your name?
And then they did this math instruction where they personalize
the problems or, so yeah, Rupert went to the store to buy whiskey.
IPA.
Yeah, there you go.
An IPA and and you know, and then you do the math in that.
And of course you, and I know this because we're parents the kids who had a a, the
math wasn't taught differently at all.
It was just taught in a context that the kid cared about, which meant that
you get curiosity kind of by periphery.
Sure.
And they learned more.
And so this is like, in my writer's group, I had a friend tell me, you're like one of
those moms who puts vegetables in dessert.
'cause I'm curious about the brain and I don't wanna be.
I'm like, yes.
That's the secret sauce.
Rupert Isaacson: It's interesting.
We have a whole thing within horse boy method of movement method of, of before.
We see someone trying to, as you say, get as much info as we can.
Mm-hmm.
And we want to know all the motivators we want to know Yeah.
If they're into Pokemon, well, what aspect of Pokemon, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Who are the characters?
What are the, you know, and we'll, we'll tailor it all around that.
Yes.
Yeah.
But also what, what do they hate?
Yeah.
And we find that that's as important too, so, oh yeah.
That's sensory, right?
So mm-hmm.
They hate this sense, so we're gonna great these things, we can, that's back, perhaps
back to your point about distraction.
Mm-hmm.
We can then try to eliminate as much as possible those smells, those
noises, those characters, those types of things from the environment that
we are gonna work in, so that mm-hmm.
And if we then maximize the things that are the motivators, well then
presumably we've got a better chance.
But one thing I, I often see with in the therapy world, sadly, is
a lack of curiosity and mm-hmm.
I think within the horse world, this can be particularly endemic, sadly.
Mm-hmm.
That we horsey people are quite bossy and quite opinionated.
Mm-hmm.
And we don't like change.
Mm-hmm.
So we hate admitting that maybe we need to rethink something or,
you know, we'll usually dial on nail of how we've always done it.
Mm-hmm.
And obviously that's not massively helpful when we are dealing with our horses.
It tends to make us stuck.
But of course, if we're then trying to take a therapeutic approach, that
lack of curiosity is going to shoot us in the foot fairly massively.
Mm-hmm.
Presumably that lack of curiosity can't be really endemic because
humans are curious apes.
Mm-hmm.
So here's a question.
Do we have curiosity trained out of us?
Mm-hmm.
And can we retrain it?
Yes.
And what part of the brain do we need to target for that?
And how?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm.
So.
There are sort of state and trait differences in curiosity.
Some people are more curious by nature than others and there
are also different kinds of curiosity or perceptual curiosity.
People who wanna feel things.
Mm-hmm.
And epistemic curiosity, which blows my mind.
It's, it's strange as much as it's true of me, that people wanna know things, wanna
know that jellyfish could essentially be eternal 'cause they can like go, you know,
go back a stage developmentally, it's like, how will that ever help me in life?
But it's so fascinating, you know,
Rupert Isaacson: because it makes you optimistic.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
You're like, oh, somebody can do it makes you, it generally, generally optimistic,
Rupert Isaacson: which means you assume better outcomes, which
means you probably will get them
Dr. Chantel Prat:
right.
And so there in the jellyfish example you have highlighted, where curiosity,
like where does it come from and can we, is it trained out of us?
Absolutely.
Yes.
I think, and depending on the discipline, sometimes it's very explicit.
Like, don't ask questions, do what I say.
And, but we, I think we know the recipe.
I think there's a pretty good recipe for curiosity.
And and my favorite is a model by Gruber and Ranana Char.
Char and Ranana was one of my professors in grad school, and
it's called the PACE Model.
So it's easy, PACE.
So number one is predict.
So, if you think you know the answer, if you think you know what's right,
you're not going to be curious.
Right?
It's, and that's like to that point of we get stuck in mm-hmm.
In habits.
If something surprises us if something doesn't go as planned or we find
ourself in a new situation, that's where we have the first opening.
That's where I think, like for me, like humility about what I don't
know, keeps me like always curious.
So, so prediction, failure is the first trigger.
It needs to be something you don't know everything about.
But also if it's something you know nothing about, you're probably
also not curious 'cause you're trying to make connections.
You know, you wanna integrate everything, everything into your knowledge of
the world and your place in it.
Then the, the important part, I think is the assessment number two, am I safe?
You know, and if you're a hunter gatherer and you find something unexpected, if
you make a wrong turn on Google and you find yourself in the wrong place,
if you're in a situation and your conversation is not going as planned,
the question is, am I physically safe?
Am I psychologically safe?
And I think this is something that corporations haven't been
spending enough time with when it's like, best answer, right?
This, you know, it's like in order to make people feel curious, it's not like, be
curious and be the best or you're fired.
Like, that just doesn't, you know, that kind of like environment
does not promote curiosity.
So in the training out of curiosity, it's like how do we treat answers that
are different than what we wanted?
Are we like, no, that's not right.
Are we focusing on deficits or are we like, oh, tell me what, you know,
what made you think about that?
Like, where did that come from?
What do you know that led you to that answer?
So psychological and physical safety are precursors.
You need to ha be in a place that you can't predict.
You need to think.
You don't know the answer.
You need to feel safe.
And then once, once your brain has sort of, gone through those two
steps, you experience curiosity.
And the point of curiosity is to motivate exploration.
That's the E.
So curiosity, explore.
And what's beautiful about this is you know, I would say these first
two predict and assess are what, what my trainer, Gabby Nora, who I love,
calls getting your horse or yourself into the learning frame of mind.
I.
You know, they've got, and I think it's true of your, of your kids, your
students, you want to do the work first before you do anything to get
them into the learning frame of mind.
They've gotta feel safe, they've gotta feel engaged,
Rupert Isaacson: gotta build relationship.
The environment's gotta be right.
Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yep.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
And then you have this curious learner who will learn, who
will the rewire more period.
Like if I gave you 10 questions, I asked you trivia questions
and I asked you, which are you the most interested in learning?
And then I gave you the answers to the all 10.
You will learn, you'll remember the ones that you were most curious to
learn better because your basal ganglia has said, this is interesting to me.
This is an information reward and it's predicting a reward.
It's motivating you then like, one of my favorite studies actually had people risk
electrical shock to learn a magic trick.
Rupert Isaacson: Wow.
Because there is, I would do that.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah, exactly.
So would I, and there is this aspect of curiosity where it is
potentially dangerous, right?
When, when you're in the unknown, and especially with perceptual curiosity and
trying drugs and things like this, right?
It's like there's often a risk reward benefit.
And when we're curious, we're super motivated to find
information and we'll do work.
Well, we also know
Rupert Isaacson: that, that we can't avoid risk.
So we need to, like, if you hunt and gather, it's risky, right?
So right.
Being on planet earth is risky.
So we need to dance with risk.
We need,
Dr. Chantel Prat:
right?
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Right.
And so that, that curiosity in this, in this in this study, the
more curious they were to learn the magic trick, the more likely they
were to take a risk to get a shock.
Like, okay, it's a 20% risk.
Okay, it's a 40% risk.
Like when do you say.
How, no, I don't really care about the magic trick that much.
Right?
But what was inter, but that basal ganglia, that filtering part of the
brain that's sending information to the frontal lobe that I said
is smarter than just impulse.
Rupert Isaacson: Right?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
When people took a risk for a electric shock, the basal ganglia turned down the
volume on the part of your brain that might simulate what the shock feels like.
It turned down connectivity to the hand.
Rupert Isaacson: The basal ganglia has that power.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes.
It has inputs from everywhere in the brain and then it sends repetitive
things to the frontal lobe.
It turns up or turns down the world.
That's the kind of filtering.
Interesting.
So, so when it's like, no, we really wanna know this, like I think that this magic
trick is really important and we're not gonna think about what the shop would
feel like when you make this decision.
So.
You know, it's, I mean, it's a major motivator.
So in your learners, I think and, and of course like, you know, back to
our idea about what's gone wrong in schools and what goes wrong in horse
training, I think all the time too.
It's like, if you make this thing feel incompetent, wrong, threatened,
if you, you know, if a, if a, if one of those eight year olds who doesn't
wanna sit still and be like, behave like a lawyer already thinks there's
something wrong with them, they already feel threat in these environments,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
We
Dr. Chantel Prat:
have, we've, we've already shut down the curiosity that makes learning not
only fun, you know, I think to your specialty, I think something that
is like completely overlooked is.
We're meant to learn to find the good things.
And like learning has taken on this serious, you know, whether it's learning
to ride horses or learning to do math, it's taken on this serious reputation,
which is in and of itself antithetical to how we were designed to learn.
We are designed to learn.
Learning is supposed to be fun.
We're supposed to like, the fact that we feel excited about something
is our brain's way of saying, we think this is gonna be useful.
We think this is gonna be interesting, we think this is gonna be important.
And so everything else created equally.
Something you do to make learning fun will also make it more effective.
Rupert Isaacson: If you're a horse nerd, and if you're on this podcast,
I'm guessing you are, then you've probably also always wondered a little
bit about the old master system.
of dressage training.
If you go and check out our Helios Harmony program, we outline there step by step
exactly how to train your horse from the ground to become the dressage horse
of your dreams in a way that absolutely serves the physical, mental and emotional
well being of the horse and the rider.
Intrigued?
Like to know more?
Go to our website, Helios Harmony.
Check out the free introduction course.
Take it from there.
Talk to us about the relationship of movement with this and
Neurotrophins, BDNF and so on.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
This is a little bit farther out of my area of expertise, but I do know that
we evolve to solve problems on the go.
Right.
So moving the body, again is something that regulates the nervous system and puts
us into a state of alertness that helps us focus on what it is we're learning.
The challenge then becomes presenting information while walking or presenting
information, and then going to move through the world to cogniti.
Well, what's
Rupert Isaacson: interesting with that is, is so for example, the
two other languages that I sort of speak are French and German.
I learned them on horseback.
So I'm balancing, I'm problem solving.
That makes
Dr. Chantel Prat:
perfect sense.
Got
Rupert Isaacson: the, yeah.
The BDNF is going the, that brain derive neurotrophic factor thing.
But also I'm motivated to be there.
Yes, I wanna be on the horse, right?
And I'm motivated to learn this vocabulary about horses because I'm
just intrinsically interested in it.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Right?
Rupert Isaacson: If I was,
Dr. Chantel Prat:
that's right.
If
Rupert Isaacson: I was a cooking guy, I'd wanna be moving around a kitchen, right?
Mm-hmm.
Learning the same thing.
But it seems to me that movement.
You, you, you've talked a lot about the difficulties of sitting
still in a DHD and mm-hmm.
Want on the go.
So
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I think movement also changes.
You know, you get fatigue.
You, you know, if you have the same exact perspective, if you're
doing the same task, you're wearing out the parts of your brain.
You're using up neurotransmitters.
That's, you know what I mean?
So I think like movement cognitively and movement physically
changes your perspective.
You're
Rupert Isaacson: neurotransmitters.
That's interesting.
Okay.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
It's kind of like a a, that's
Rupert Isaacson: brain fatigue effectively.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Correct?
Yeah.
It's kind of like, I mean, we don't have camera flashes so much anymore, but kind
of like in the olden days you used to see a camera flash and you have a blind spot.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
For a second.
That's temporary, but you've like run those those neurons out.
Of neurotransmitters, temporary.
It was like a really intense, focused in one part of the
brain or one part of the retina.
And it can't work anymore.
It's like, whew.
It has to wait to rebuild and, and get going.
So, I mean, I think we have biological, energetic needs in our brains, and
whether we're sitting still or cognitively focusing on one thing, I think we
also fatigue those, those networks.
Rupert Isaacson: Makes perfect sense.
So one of the challenges of working with children who have been diagnosed
with one thing or another thing mm-hmm.
Is I find twofold, one, and I wanna ask you some questions around this because
I think a lot of people listening will be having these challenges too.
Mm-hmm.
First challenge.
You have a kid that's been told they need therapy.
I have never yet met a kid that wanted therapy.
I've met lots of kids that would like to play.
Mm-hmm.
I've met lots of kids that would like to do interesting stuff.
Mm-hmm.
I've met lots of kids that would like to have fun, but I've never had a kid walk
up to me and say, you know, Rupert, what I really would like today is some therapy.
Mm-hmm.
And so if I'm saying to a kid who's a developing brain, day in, day
out for a decade, you need therapy.
Let's go to therapy, let's go to the therapy session now.
Oh, it's time for your such and such therapy.
It's not that the therapy's a bad, it's just that it's sending a message to
the kid that they need therapy at all.
Mm-hmm.
Which has to be not a confidence giver.
Right.
That's the first thing.
The second thing, of course, is that if attention where we began and
the value placed on sitting still to learn.
Even though it may not be natural mm-hmm.
Gets to a point where you then say to the child, not only do you need
therapy, but you need drugs, we're going to alter your brain with these drugs.
And then indeed, if you stop taking those drugs, there will be a negative effect.
'cause there'll be some sort of withdrawal.
Mm-hmm.
And then the child's in front of me, how much of this child authe,
authentically am I dealing with?
How much am I dealing with the medication?
Mm-hmm.
How much or how little is that medication blocking the
authentic experience of the world?
The, of the brain's ability to process.
Mm-hmm.
Information.
Some would say, well, it's the medication that's allowing him to process.
And others would say, no, actually it's blocking.
And the child's sort of an innocent in it.
They're just sort of
Dr. Chantel Prat:
mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: Trying to get through.
And then you have perhaps that child grows up and is medicated
till the day they die and is never experiencing the world without that.
Mm-hmm.
I'm not necessarily anti-medication in terms of if you're in a crisis, I mean,
shit, you need an antibiotic, right?
Mm-hmm.
But what I find alarming about behavioral modification medications is
that there's never an exit strategy.
It's not like an antibiotic that they say, take this for 10 days,
and then when the symptoms go away, you know, stop taking it or you'll
wipe out your gut floor or whatever.
They just say, no, stay on this stuff for the rest of your life.
Effectively, there is no, I, I've never heard of anyone being given the
exit strategy when they're put on.
So that's the brain and the nervous system.
Mm-hmm.
That's the thing that you are working with in your field.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: If we give a, a kid that's having trouble
sitting still a drug to sit still,
what, what does that do to the developing brain?
Do we even know?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I would say some.
We know something, but probably not enough Uhhuh.
And, you know, I have one thing we know, I guess one thing we
know for sure is that they, drugs do not work well for everybody.
Mm-hmm.
And what does it mean to work well again?
Right.
This is, again, compared, I think that there's a lot in what you're saying.
One is like, how do we involve the children in these decisions about.
Interventions, whether they be therapeutic or behavioral and, and like, does the, are
the parents just overwhelmed and they need the kid to function in the society that
they've been born into and they're hoping for the magic pill that suddenly makes
the kid look like the neighbor's kid.
Right.
Yeah.
Which I think almost never works.
And what is the, how does the kid feel about this?
I think it's quite interesting because in particular receiving a diagnosis
and then the interventions that occur accordingly from a like self sense of
self perspective, it seems different when it happens in childhood and adulthood.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely, a hundred percent.
And I've met plenty of adults that want wanted therapy 'cause that seems
to be an adult sort of decision.
Adult self expression.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
And adults that get diagnoses, and they're not crushed by it.
They don't feel other, they feel relieved and they're like,
oh my gosh, now I have a plan.
Right.
And I, you know, there's like a, a, a, a way moving forward and I think,
you know, for a lot of these drug interventions, there are adaptations.
Like your brain does always, whether, you know, whether it's antidepressant
or whether you're taking Ritalin or you know, or you know, anti-anxiety meds.
Like it's, you are intervening with this neurochemistry and your brain
will try to adapt accordingly.
It will try and move around that system mm-hmm.
In ways that like create, adapt adaptations and tolerance
and and so forth and so on.
So, you know, some kids do feel a lot better on, they feel better, I think.
Like, I guess I wanna know how you feel and do you feel better and do you feel
better able to meet the demands of your day on these medications or do you not?
And is that coming from the kid or coming from somebody else's
definition of what it means to be good?
And are we sort of like, like is this akin to like, we're modifying our, our
children to fit into this like, cookie cutter template of, of what normal means?
So for me, I think understanding how the kids feel, but also this
identity around being labeled, you know, to our point of other and
being told that there's something wrong and that you need to fix it.
I think I would love to see, kids involvement.
And what, what is it that you would like, what do you find easy?
You said you asked the kid what they like and what they hate.
What is it that you find easy, right?
What is it that you find hard?
Is there anything you'd like to get better at?
Rupert Isaacson: Well, right, I mean, that's the first question is usually
is what do you feel like doing?
Yeah.
And I've, I've got some intel about what you like.
I've sort of set a few things up, but you might want that
one, you might want that one.
You might want that one.
And it might be completely different to what I think.
So as much as possible, if you can answer me, I'd, I'd love to know.
But we never call, if someone comes out to a horse boy place, for
example, we never call it therapy.
It's a play date.
It's always a play date.
You, you, that's cool.
You're coming.
And, and
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I'm sure it actually is too.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, it has to be, otherwise it won't work.
But it, it, I, it's just we realized very early that to even use the word
therapy was kind of depressing, you know, for a lot of, a lot of the kids.
But the.
Doesn't mean what you do can't be very therapeutic, but
that's not the kids' problem.
That's sort of up to us to sort of deliver under the table if you like
Dr. Chantel Prat:
it.
It's funny that you said play date because I had this aha moment for my
own self and with my own horses and, and I think this is relevant because
in both of these cases, I think you have to think about short-term
learning and long-term learning.
Yeah.
And it's kind of like, I don't wanna use the battle in the war.
Right.
But like, are you learning how to do X but also learning that you are broken?
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
And not good enough and you know this, or are you learning how to
work with the grain of your nature?
Learning how to.
You know, be successful with the tools that you have.
And, and how does that change your, your sense of self?
And I, you know, this is the thing that, it's just so sad to think
that like by kindergarten, kids already have a sense of, do I fit in?
Am I good in school?
Does my teacher like me?
And how much that scales up to what they, you know, again, to curiosity versus
threat to trying, like, nobody tr I have yet to meet a person who is super
excited to try something that they're quite sure they're gonna be crap at.
Right.
So like, it just, yeah.
Well,
Rupert Isaacson: particularly if you feel that you might be,
there might be some adverse reaction to being crap at it.
Yeah.
Like, it being crap is fun.
It's like, I'm gonna try and jump off this face.
Yeah.
That's fun.
Yeah.
I'm gonna land on my ass like a jackass.
That's funny.
And then laugh your ass off.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: But,
Dr. Chantel Prat:
so I had this when I was working with my, my horses the other day.
I had this just new idea of success.
'cause I'm thinking about the long term.
I'm not, for me, I don't really care if I can, you know, ride a high
school dressage test ever with them.
But I am quite curious to see what I can learn to do with them.
And then I thought like, my idea of success is that every training
feels like a play date with mom.
Right.
Because I think that that sets me up for the long term.
Like, if, if the only thing my horse learns is that learning
is fun, then what can I not do?
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Exactly.
And if I do find that it's stressful for me or the horse, can I change it somehow?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Right.
Rupert Isaacson: You know?
And, and what are the options for changing it?
Can the person who's teaching me.
Do it another way.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Right.
Rupert Isaacson: If not, do I need another teacher?
Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
And I think that it's important in this space to acknowledge that it's
always a little bit stressful to be doing something you don't know.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, not, yeah.
So is all stress it's a little bit necessarily bad because No, exactly.
Right, because Exactly.
And, and there can be fun involved in stress.
I'm just thinking about myself if I'm, I like to cross country jump,
so if I'm heading in a cross country jump, I'm always shitting myself.
'cause I've had some bad wrecks.
I know what can happen.
And but I love it.
So I've got my sympathetic nervous system going, but it's also excited and kind
of, maybe that's basal ganglia, Uhhuh
Dr. Chantel Prat:
uhhuh.
Rupert Isaacson: And it's quite, 'cause you remember
Dr. Chantel Prat:
all, all the times that you, you made it more than you wrecked.
Rupert Isaacson: Exactly.
And it's just such good crack, you know?
Yeah.
So all of those things come together where there's a trade off between the fear.
And the curiosity and the excitement and so on.
But if it were to go beyond a certain point, like if you were to put me at
a fence that I just know I'm not gonna get over, you know, then well sure
there'd, there'd be no enjoyment in it.
Or if I felt that there'd be some really adverse shaming or something.
If, if I, if I didn't make it or if I backed away from it, maybe that one,
that would be more like my upbringing if I said, oh, just not feeling it today.
So I, I was pushed to go at fences.
The culture was to be kind of brave, but not wise.
So I learned that, and my fear of being censored as a coward overrode my
knowledge that I probably would wreck and I probably should back away the, the
conditions were not right for whatever.
And I was more afraid of the judgment that would come.
You know, so, but that comes back a little bit to my mind, to the drugs thing because
if it, if I'm seeing an overwhelming number of kids who are on these drugs,
it's not like, oh, it's just one or two.
Because it's not just the kids that come to me, it's like
half their classmates or more.
Mm-hmm.
It's so many.
And at that point, you're going, do they just, every single kid
that's on actually need, like what?
Like so many, like this percentage how do we survive as a culture
at all before this then?
Mm-hmm.
If this is like such a problem that we gotta have all these medications
that, like how do we possibly come up with internal combustion
engine or anything, you know?
Yeah.
Or the wheel.
Mm-hmm.
But we did.
Mm-hmm.
And in, in other parts of the world where they don't have those things or do
those things, why are they not all just.
You know, failing because they're not right.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
So we must be creating, therefore, a society where things that are not
disorders are perceived as disorders.
Right.
And, and
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I also think also a, a society where we're looking for easy fix and magic fix.
And I think right, there's a com, you know, whether you're selling someone
eye cream or a pill for their kid that, you know, at the root of this is
a belief that you're not good enough,
Rupert Isaacson: which comes back to not safe, right?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: So the subject of drugs brings me to something
else I'd like to ask you about.
So, states have altered consciousness.
Mm-hmm.
So we know that altering the consciousness is actually part
of the human species thing.
We've been doing it.
A long time.
It seems not just by taking mushrooms and ayahuasca, but also in those places of the
world where those things don't grow, where there are no psychotropics, you know,
repetitive dance to go into a trance, to go into an alter state of consciousness.
Mm-hmm.
So presumably states of altered consciousness actually can
be very good for the brain.
Mm-hmm.
And presumably some forms of them can be less good for the brain, but it seems
that the brain actively seeks this out.
Mm-hmm.
And that it's, it functions as part of our healing systems.
Mm-hmm.
Do you know much about what parts of the brain are involved with that?
With the seeking out of altered states of consciousness and.
What parts of the brain seem to benefit and so on.
Have you
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
An
Rupert Isaacson: idea.
Can you talk an to us a bit about that idea?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I have an idea and I'm also looking at the clock.
'cause my class starts in 20 minutes.
I'm gonna tell you though.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
And this is really, this could be the first of two or even three.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
Have we got a lot more ground to cover?
And I haven't even begun to ask you about horses yet.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: Horse brains.
Yes.
Let's do it.
So we've gotta get there.
So listeners, we will get to all that stuff.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes.
But today we're going
Rupert Isaacson: to do what Chantel has time for.
Okay.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes.
Thank you.
So, okay.
So I think.
First and foremost, perceptual curiosity.
Right?
I think that the same reason we look for different exper tastes, sensations,
perspective, and so forth in the real world gives us a perspective
and broadens our sense making.
Makes sense.
So that's what, what draws us to it.
But I just read this paper that I am kind of obsessed with that's about
dreams and and it's, it, you know, some of the people in my lab didn't like it
'cause it uses AI and computers as a, as a way of explaining why we need this.
So you're like, what's the healing benefit?
So, the idea with the dreams was that we take our sort of
narrative story structure.
The part of the brain would be called the default mode network.
It's kind of where our mental model of the world and our place in it
resides after, you know, hundreds of thousands of memories and facts
and learning and personal narrative settle into this default mode
network, which is where we store.
The way we understand is that
Rupert Isaacson: located in a particular geographic area of the brain.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
The whole, it has, it's located in pretty much all lobes of the brain, but yeah,
it's kind of in the central parts of the brain, the temporal lobes and these
parts of the brain turn on when you mind wander, turn off when you're on, on task.
So, and they're, you know, very characteristic.
You can, I could tell your brain from my brain easily by looking at our
sense-making kind of default mode network.
So the idea is that when we dream, we take.
You know, the reason dreams are kind of like fantastical and, and like
they have like combination of things that are just normal and things that
are like totally weird, but they're always story-like, because your
brain is trying to avoid overfitting, which means I've sampled a lot of
experiences over and over, but there's this space in between that is unknown.
And so I might make a wrong conclusion because I haven't gone there.
And what I, I think I find this just so evocative, this idea that,
well, when you sleep, your brain puts noise into that story system
to help you explore the in-between.
Like have you ever had a dream where.
You're hanging out with your son and you're like walking through the forest
and everything is totally normal, except your son is actually not your son.
Like the person doing business.
As this person, you're, you're perfectly willing to accept that this person is
ex, although they're like the wrong gender, the wrong age, it's just
like a completely different person.
Yeah.
So they're like, it's like you have known actors and agents, but they
get all scrambled up and then you just tell a story and your brain
goes through this set of experiences.
So I, I believe that like, some of our hallucinogenic experiences, not only
are they like increasing plasticity with serotonin, but they're also like,
you know, they're, they're exploring the in-between these, they're allowing
you to experience something maybe you couldn't ever really experience here.
Rupert Isaacson: Got a question?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: You just said something.
Why so why does serotonin increase plasticity?
I.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
It's a great question.
We don't know, but we know that the that these, a lot of the hallucinogenic
drugs that seem to have mood rehabilitation affects work on serotonin.
What we don't know is like
Rupert Isaacson: silvan or psilocybin rather.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, exactly.
But we don't know why, like serotonin re-uptake inhibitors,
like antidepressants.
We don't know why they don't make you hallucinate, why they don't have the
same kind of like learning effects.
Oh,
this is my alarm.
Just telling me I have a couple
Rupert Isaacson: minutes.
Okay, well that is our pause mode.
And
Dr. Chantel Prat:
that, I mean, so that is like, so it blows my mind.
Like I said, it's only a theory, but this is, to me, these two things make sense.
The desire to see, feel, experience, different things and that these
altered states of consciousness to some extent, depending on your
own, the adventure you've chosen, allow you to experience things.
You couldn't.
Really experience in this world.
And that like dreams, there's this idea of what you learn
allows you to predict the future.
But we have, we tend to sort of have similar experiences over
and over, and that, that leads to something called overfitting where
you develop like, superstitions and you've like correlated two things
together that aren't really related.
And so your, your meaning model likes to like, let me just inject repeated thoughts
Rupert Isaacson: becoming beliefs, right?
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah, yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
Interesting.
So, and it's interesting your point about why Yeah.
Why doesn't the artificial serotonin take thing work in the same brain
smic way as the real mm-hmm.
Thing.
'cause I guess 'cause it's not the real thing, you know?
I think
Dr. Chantel Prat:
so,
Rupert Isaacson: and I guess mother nature
Dr. Chantel Prat:
gave us those magic mushrooms for a reason like
Rupert Isaacson: oxytocin, right?
You know, a shot of oxytocin.
Gotten through the natural ways is wow.
And give Pitocin through the nose.
Bring down some breast, breast milk.
But it won't make you feel That's right.
Eureka.
No.
Yeah.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: We're clever monkeys, but I guess nature's always best.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Right, right.
Rupert Isaacson: Listen, there's so many more questions and I wanted to get
into the quantum aspects of the brain.
There've been some interesting studies in the last year on this.
I wanted to get your take about the microtubules within myelin
and all that stuff, and I wanted to go into the horse brain.
Thing people talking about and
Dr. Chantel Prat:
how we understand horse brains.
Right.
Well, we'll have to do part two.
Rupert Isaacson: So let's do part two.
So yes, we will ask if horses have prefrontal cortexes or, and if they don't,
why do they seem to behave as if they do?
And we, we'll, I want to ask all these questions.
I'm sure that the listeners want to hear them.
So shall we reschedule a part two?
Yes, please.
And then what We don't get to that.
We'll do an part three.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Yes.
And then what we don't get to that.
We'll do an part four
Rupert Isaacson: super.
When
Dr. Chantel Prat:
I come to live with you in Spain, I don't know if you're with us
that well, there is also drive day,
Rupert Isaacson: Coming up horse boy Drive Day in Ireland, August 9th to 11th.
Just put it in your diary.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Oh my gosh.
Rupert Isaacson: A big old piss up.
At Kco, which is the big horse boys center, just outside Dublin.
We'll be camping out and
Dr. Chantel Prat:
it would be like the real life aver version of our Irish
singing in the lobby of the uk.
Rupert Isaacson: That will be it.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
With some brain starts and some ponies.
Some actual ponies.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Oh, that'll be so cool
Rupert Isaacson: there in the field.
Yeah.
So.
Also for listeners, if this is, if you're listening to this before
August, 2025, it will be August 9th to 11th Horse Boy Tribe Day.
You can find out on our website.
All the really cool people will be there m Cool because of who they are and what
they do and they're worth talking to.
Hopefully Chantal Pratt might join us.
If not, she'll come down to Spain where other listeners can join us too.
Alright, listen, thank you so much.
The neuroscience of you right?
Is the book that people need to pick up and the exam will
be during our next podcast.
So, you know, just memorize pages one 50 to 2 25.
You should be fine.
Okay.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
But only if you feel curious about it.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna read it.
Brilliant.
Okay.
Thank you so much.
Dr. Chantel Prat:
Thank you.
See, I will see you next time soon.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: We'll, we'll take
Dr. Chantel Prat:
care.
Rupert Isaacson: We'll book it for the next few weeks.
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