The Science Behind Why He Won’t Change | Dr. Justin Nussbaum | S4E11

[00:00:00]I'm like, take a hammer, smash the hope into a million pieces.

[00:00:03]Because if there is a strong genetic component to this and empathy can't be learned, then what is the best you could possibly hope for that he performs empathy for you?

[00:00:17]There is a belief that keeps women stuck for years, right?

[00:00:20]If I can understand him enough, maybe I can just explain him into change, right?

[00:00:24]I can say something that'll make it different.

[00:00:26]If I can understand his childhood, his trauma, then I can understand why he lies, why he cheats or withdraws or manipulates.

[00:00:34]We want to be able to help him.

[00:00:36]But today I want to break down this fantasy and introduce some science.

[00:00:41]So I have an absolutely amazing guest that I want to have a conversation about really what shapes personality and what research says, what it supports, what it doesn't support.

[00:00:52]Because when we talk about personality disorders or narcissistic personality disorder specifically, it's confusing for people.

[00:00:59]There's science that says one thing.

[00:01:01]It's science that says another thing, and people get really confused.

[00:01:04]But I don't think science is really that subjective.

[00:01:06]So my guest today lives in the science.

[00:01:09]So Doctor Justin Nussbaum is a biology professor and a neuroscientist who studies human behavior, among other things.

[00:01:17]I want you to introduce yourself because I think you know you'll you'll do it better. You'll do yourself much more justice.

[00:01:22]Tell us who you are. Sure.

[00:01:24]So my background is I started off in biomedical research, actually working in labs, doing anything from.

[00:01:32]I studied addiction genetics for a while, trying to correlate variations in the actual sequence of people's DNA with how easily they get attached to addictive behaviors.

[00:01:42]Nicotine addiction and smoking was an early part of my research.

[00:01:46]I eventually pivoted to dementia and the genetic and biochemical underpinnings of Alzheimer's disease.

[00:01:54]And the thing that that all of these things have in common is there's a genetic aspect of what you inherit from your parents that gives you a, effectively, a set of tools to work with and how you respond to the environment that you're born into.

[00:02:08]And then there's the environment itself.

[00:02:10]And so it's a very interesting sort of interplay that we study.

[00:02:15]I tell people, if you want perfect job security, study neuroscience because we're never going to figure it all out.

[00:02:21]But we do understand a lot of how the brain works.

[00:02:25]We know that behaviors and genetics are deeply tied to each other.

[00:02:29]So my research career was built on trying to figure out how do these genetic factors play into the structure of people's brains, how do they behave?

[00:02:38]How do they respond to world around them?

[00:02:40]Eventually, I moved into doing a combination of research and teaching.

[00:02:44]And now, yeah, that is kind of my life.

[00:02:46]I teach, I do some research, I do some consulting for people from a lot of different areas of academics and business that are trying to understand science and how it impacts a lot of different aspects of, of life.

[00:03:00]So I find this conversation very interesting, because there seems to be a pretty big disconnect between the hard science, the genetics and neuroscience side of things versus the social science side of psychology and psychiatry, and trying to get those two fields to come to a better understanding of the facts, as is where I'm hoping to go with this.

[00:03:19]Yeah, I love that, I totally agree.

[00:03:21]And for those listening, I'll tell you what connected us is a book called The Nature and Nurture of Narcissism by Doctor Peter Salerno.

[00:03:28]Phenomenal book for those that haven't read it.

[00:03:30]But there's this myth that narcissism is from trauma.

[00:03:35]And so if we can fix the trauma, we can fix the person.

[00:03:39]We can make them stop being abusive.

[00:03:41]I think most people know that there's no cure for narcissistic personality disorder, but there's still a lot of therapists, psychologists who believe that treatment can make them exponentially better or somewhat better.

[00:03:55]It's really varied.

[00:03:56]So what you're touching on is so interesting, because I think this disconnect between what I see as sort of, you know, the science, the facts versus how people feel and what they want.

[00:04:06]And we wish that it could be healed with trauma.

[00:04:09]I think ultimately something I say a lot.

[00:04:11]Abuse is a choice.

[00:04:12]It's not from a personality disorder.

[00:04:15]It's not from alcoholism. It's not from trauma.

[00:04:18]It's it is from choosing to be abusive, which is a bit oversimplified, but trauma matters to it.

[00:04:25]But I just I want to talk more about what scientifically supported versus I think what's become kind of a cultural narrative.

[00:04:32]And there's there's a real bridge there.

[00:04:36]The lived experience of so many women who are trapped in these dynamics are that they want their perpetrator to, to change because it's their partner or their husband, their spouse.

[00:04:46]They want it to be from trauma.

[00:04:48]I think therapists and psychologists also want it to be from trauma because then it's fixable.

[00:04:54]Do you agree?

[00:04:55]I do, and I think probably a good starting point to answering those questions, if you're up for it, is probably explaining how we even ask that question because, you know, is something genetic or is it environmental?

[00:05:09]It's not. It's really not an opinion.

[00:05:11]There are ways to answer that question experimentally.

[00:05:13]You can do very legitimate hard scientific research to answer those questions.

[00:05:18]And this I want to be careful because I'm not trying to downplay the importance of psychology research.

[00:05:25]But there are methods that you can use in genetics that are more objective than in the social sciences.

[00:05:32]Not that there's anything wrong with social sciences, but there is a limitation because you can't treat humans like lab mice.

[00:05:37]It's unethical.

[00:05:38]You can't do a formal experiment, because if we really wanted to find out if narcissism was genetic, we would take a bunch of random people.

[00:05:45]We would randomize them into two groups.

[00:05:47]We would give half of them lovely, wonderful childhoods, and we would give the other half of them horrific, traumatic childhoods and see who became a narcissist.

[00:05:54]And then you would go to prison because you can't you can't do that.

[00:05:57]Right.

[00:05:58]And so we can't ask the question that way.

[00:06:01]So when, when scientists try to ask this question, is this trait heritable, heritable meaning can it be inherited or is it just a fact of the environment that you're born into?

[00:06:12]The gold standard way to do that is to study twins, specifically identical twins, because it gives you a fantastic we call it a natural experiment.

[00:06:21]In science.

[00:06:22]The goal is isolate a variable like make one variation, the thing that we're studying.

[00:06:28]And if you don't want to look at genetics, if you want to look at environment, the perfect natural example is identical twins who are separated at birth and are raised in different environments.

[00:06:38]They're rare.

[00:06:39]They are for a geneticist, they are just they're just the most wonderful thing that you could ever find from a research standpoint, because they have the exact same DNA, but they were raised in different households.

[00:06:49]And so if genetics doesn't matter, then they shouldn't really be any more or less similar than any two other people who are raised in different households.

[00:06:58]And if genetics do matter, we should see them having much higher similarity for these traits than two random people otherwise would.

[00:07:07]Right? Does the does the setup make sense? Yep.

[00:07:10]It does. Okay, okay.

[00:07:12]So the short story is there are some things like easy things for people to imagine being heritable.

[00:07:17]Your the color of your hair is nearly 100% genetic.

[00:07:22]Your environment does not really matter.

[00:07:24]Other things like height for example, in the United States the heritability of height is roughly 90 to 95% genetic.

[00:07:32]Right?

[00:07:33]Your your DNA for the most part determines your height.

[00:07:36]But interestingly, if you go to a country like like a rural part of Africa, for example, heritability can go down.

[00:07:44]It might only be 50, 60, 70%.

[00:07:46]Does it make sense? Why? Tell me why.

[00:07:49]All right, so height is not just about your DNA.

[00:07:51]To grow you have to have calories and you have to have nutrients.

[00:07:54]If two different children that are identical twins are separated, and one gets put into a wealthier household that has more access to food, and the other one gets put into a poor household that is more sensitive to food scarcity, there's a famine not in a food available.

[00:08:08]That child won't reach its full potential height because it didn't have the nutrients that it needed to grow.

[00:08:14]And so you don't expect it to be the same.

[00:08:16]And so that this, this heritability number is not locked in place.

[00:08:20]One way that I say to think about it is the worse the environment becomes, the less genetics matter.

[00:08:27]And so could you take a person who has the DNA to be very tall, put them in a very poor, food deprived area, and they won't be very tall?

[00:08:37]Sure, that's entirely possible, right?

[00:08:39]In the same way, is it in theory possible that someone who has genetics that are sort of middle of the road, as far as resilience to trauma goes?

[00:08:49]Could you put them in a great environment where they might develop relatively healthy psychological tendencies?

[00:08:57]Sure.

[00:08:57]Or you could put them in a horrifically traumatic environment and it'll skew them the other way.

[00:09:02]And so in that sense, heritability is almost never 100%.

[00:09:06]And it's almost never 0%.

[00:09:08]It's a number somewhere in the middle.

[00:09:10]And the environment will push a person towards one end of that spectrum or the other.

[00:09:16]So to your question, are personality traits heritable?

[00:09:20]Absolutely.

[00:09:20]Are they 100% heritable?

[00:09:22]No, almost nothing is right.

[00:09:25]The things that black and white. It's not.

[00:09:28]And so when you want to collect the data you basically say okay, in the best case scenario we find these identical twins, obviously as many of them as we can find.

[00:09:37]Ideally, you know, a hundred or more pairs, and we start measuring traits in adulthood or childhood, I guess.

[00:09:44]And you ask, okay, compared to a control group of random people that are not related, you can also do a different kind of control of twins that were raised in the same house because they should be very, very similar, same DNA and same environment.

[00:09:57]And then you can do a bunch of complicated statistics that we don't have to get into to sort of separate those two variables.

[00:10:03]How much was it the environment, how much of it was the DNA and the best data that we have right now say that most personality traits are somewhere between about 50 and 70% heritable, which means roughly 30 to 50% environmental. Wow.

[00:10:22]I love sense.

[00:10:23]Yeah, no, that makes sense.

[00:10:24]And like, I love numbers and statistics and science.

[00:10:27]It's always been, you know, my thing when I've been creating content on this topic for years.

[00:10:32]And when I first started, I believed it was trauma based, because that's what I would read everywhere.

[00:10:37]And it was first Doctor Gregory Lester's work that was brought to my attention.

[00:10:42]And I started reading about the genetic component connected with Doctor Peter Salerno, learned more about it, read his book.

[00:10:47]Phenomenal. But I do find that people kind of over attribute behavior to life story narratives.

[00:10:55]I think it's a little bit easier for people to believe.

[00:10:57]And again, it means that it's fixable.

[00:10:59]It tells us we believe that it tells us it's fixable.

[00:11:03]So I can I can appreciate the desire for that.

[00:11:06]And as a survivor myself, you know, we want the person to be better.

[00:11:10]Even if we leave them.

[00:11:11]We want them to be better for our children or for the world or.

[00:11:14]But some people are who they are.

[00:11:17]When you look at the traits that make up the narcissistic personality disorder.

[00:11:22]Do you see room for change in any of those traits?

[00:11:25]Okay, so this is this is getting there's I want to be very careful to make sure that everyone knows where the line is drawn between me talking about science and evidence and data, and where it gets to the point where I have to make some assumptions and maybe some conclusions.

[00:11:40]So my gut feeling is that, sure, people can change, but there has to be a strong incentive for that change.

[00:11:50]And so it's kind of like there's a lot of complication here.

[00:11:54]An example that I like is if I asked you, you know, is is dying in a motorcycle accident, is that genetic or is that environmental?

[00:12:03]Almost everyone would immediately say, that's environmental.

[00:12:05]You got to the motorcycle. That was your environment.

[00:12:07]But there is a very, very strong genetic predisposition to risk taking behavior.

[00:12:12]Some people don't mind taking risks. They like the thrill.

[00:12:15]They like the adrenaline rush.

[00:12:16]They're drawn to things like roller coasters and motorcycles and skydiving.

[00:12:20]Some people have a genetic predisposition to be risk avoidant, and they are less likely to do that.

[00:12:25]So did they die because a motorcycle on the highway was their environment, Or did they die because their genetic predisposition created that environment for them by creating the desire to ever be there in the first place?

[00:12:38]What a question.

[00:12:38]So with yeah, so with personality disorders, you know, I have the question of does the phrase reverse causation.

[00:12:47]Does that make sense.

[00:12:48]Like if you ask if I show somebody a graph and you have an x and y axis and I show a nice straight line where they go together, did x cause y or did y cause x, or is there some completely separate thing that's causing both of them very, very hard to pick that apart.

[00:13:04]And so I ask, okay, if somebody has severe narcissistic personality disorder, option one is it's just genetic and it is what it is.

[00:13:12]And they're narcissists because their DNA encodes that trade.

[00:13:16]Option two is their family life was awful and it made them develop the personality disorder.

[00:13:24]But what about the possibility of option three?

[00:13:27]Anyone who's been a parent knows that having children can be very stressful.

[00:13:30]If you have a child who has, you know, if we say an innate genetic predisposition to have these traits, is it possible that having a very, very difficult to raise child can feed back on the parents, stress them, and in some way, the child's tendency to have those traits creates the stressful family environment.

[00:13:51]By making the parenting situation so intolerable that the parents don't respond well.

[00:13:55]And if the parents have the same genetic predisposition as the child, then they can start feeding off of each other.

[00:14:00]And so if there was trauma during childhood, it's not easy to say, oh yes, the trauma caused the disorder.

[00:14:08]It's possible that the disorder could in some sense be creating the trauma by creating that difficult dynamic between parents and children feeding back on itself. Right.

[00:14:17]It's complicated to understand.

[00:14:19]You're explaining it in a really great way, though, like this is and I appreciate that because again, there's so much misinformation about this.

[00:14:26]I have this discussion with my wife all the time.

[00:14:28]She is very obsessed with her cats and trying to understand their behavior and their their health problems and all these things, and they are over and over again.

[00:14:36]However hard do you think it is to be sure that you understand cause and effect, it is ten times harder.

[00:14:42]It is so incredibly difficult to be sure.

[00:14:45]Not just that these two things are both happening, but that one of them is causing the other one, and which one is causing the other.

[00:14:52]And it's possible that they could both be causing themselves and creating a positive feedback loop and amplifying themselves.

[00:14:57]You just it's incredibly difficult to do so when when we look at the hard data and if I, if I do this, this twin study and I find that narcissistic personality disorder has a heritability of in a published paper, you would say it would be a decimal somewhere between 0 and 1.

[00:15:17]So heritability equals 0.6.

[00:15:18]That translates to we can explain 60% of the presence of NPD based on genetics.

[00:15:27]So if I just looked at the person's DNA and I predicted who will have NPD and who won't, I would be about 60% accurate, which suggests that the other 40% is coming from environment in some way.

[00:15:42]So is it all genetic? No.

[00:15:46]Is it all environment?

[00:15:47]No. And I also would encourage people not to think of this as a black and white cut and dry, yes or no question.

[00:15:53]Right. It's not.

[00:15:55]Do you have a genetic predisposition or don't you?

[00:15:58]It's how severe of a disposition you have, because a psychological trait like a personality disorder is not like the color of your hair.

[00:16:06]It's not a this gene causes this trait for something complex like this.

[00:16:11]It's typically tens, hundreds of genes, like several hundred genes, have been linked to human height.

[00:16:17]Oh, wow. There's no one gene that is the tall gene.

[00:16:20]Which makes sense.

[00:16:20]That's why people aren't simply tall or short.

[00:16:23]There's a huge there's a bell curve of variation.

[00:16:25]So just like there's a bell curve for height or intelligence or whatever it may be, there is a bell curve for sensitivity to personality disorders.

[00:16:36]Somebody on the extreme end of that being very, very sensitive, my intuition is, yeah, they're probably not fixable.

[00:16:44]Right.

[00:16:44]Someone who is more on the low middle end of that bell curve probably is more likely to respond to some sort of therapy or treatment, but we don't know for sure because again, you can't ethically do that experiment with humans.

[00:16:58]And so we have to try to piece together the data.

[00:17:00]But my intuition is that in the field of psychology and psychiatry, I think that people have tricked themselves into thinking that they're seeing patterns that aren't real, because very uncomfortable with the idea that there is a genetic underpinning because it makes it feel like it can't be changed.

[00:17:17]Yeah. It's interesting.

[00:17:19]I've heard some of some very big experts on narcissistic personality disorder reject the idea that it has anything to do with genetics.

[00:17:29]I've heard people say that it is trauma based.

[00:17:31]They were traumatized as children, which breeds this feeling in I mean, experts as well, but in survivors and the victims of these people to feel like if they could just heal, if they could just get therapy and heal that trauma, then they won't be narcissistic anymore.

[00:17:46]Or I've also seen people talk about it's actually not that they were traumatized, it's it's that they were coddled.

[00:17:53]They were given too much as children and treated, you know, too well, for lack of a better phrase, coddled by their mother, specifically their mother, of course.

[00:18:02]And I think both of those things have possibilities to be true.

[00:18:06]I speak to people, the women who've experienced this, and they tell me that he was traumatized, or they'll tell me that he wasn't traumatized and his mother was overindulgent of him and and all kinds of things and everything in between.

[00:18:19]And at the end of the day, so many people are just ignoring the genetic component.

[00:18:23]So when you even have some of the top experts in the world ignore the genetic component, I think it does a lot of damage to survivors.

[00:18:31]I agree, and I think like this is it all gets very contentious, but I, I find it fascinating.

[00:18:37]So if there are there a handful of wonderful books on this, the history of medicine is filled with examples of doctors, physicians being very, very confident that they know what treatments work, what don't, what causes this, what doesn't.

[00:18:53]And in the 20th century, so throughout the mid 1900s, when clinical science clinical trials, actually doing experiments and using controls and placebos came about, a very, very large number of people were proved very, very wrong.

[00:19:07]Because the hard truth is, if you follow your intuition, psychologists, if anyone should know that humans are just we are pattern seeking creatures.

[00:19:16]We want to explain things.

[00:19:18]And so when you see an outcome and you think you see a pattern, it is so easy to say, this must be causing that.

[00:19:25]And there is just a never ending list of false correlations, correlations that are not causation.

[00:19:33]You know, I use examples of like someone who didn't know better if you went out on, you know, looked at cars on the road and tried to understand why do cars fail, why does the the car mechanically fall apart?

[00:19:44]And you noticed are the cars that are rusty tend to have more engine problems?

[00:19:48]Most people know rust on the car has nothing to do with how the engine does.

[00:19:52]It's just an indicator of age and It's a false equivalency.

[00:19:54]They're not connected to each other in any way.

[00:19:56]Even the correlation would be fantastic.

[00:19:58]And I feel like this is much the same.

[00:20:01]Is the trauma causing the outcome?

[00:20:04]But is the genetics causing a behavior that facilitates trauma?

[00:20:08]And so you see it go along with the personality disorder.

[00:20:11]But they never were really intrinsically linked to each other in a cause and effect kind of way.

[00:20:17]So I think getting people like getting people in your field to pay attention to the fact that we have better data now, we don't have to just go on a hunch.

[00:20:25]We don't have to go on intuition.

[00:20:27]Human intuition is notoriously awful at finding cause and effect.

[00:20:31]And so now that we have this hard data, you know, this might not be very polite, but I would ask people in the field to ask themselves, you know, just because you don't really understand a new method or a set of data, is that a valid reason to ignore it?

[00:20:44]You know. Great question.

[00:20:45]So just put that out there. Right.

[00:20:47]So I think that, you know, if if they want to serve their patients and their population as well as they possibly can, if someone has a better method, you know, do you bury your head in the sand and assume that what your field has believed for the last 100 years or so is absolutely correct and it's dogma?

[00:21:05]Or do you open yourself up to the possibility that there may be a more accurate way to address these questions?

[00:21:10]That's kind of outside of your field, but it can definitely inform what happens within your field.

[00:21:16]Yeah, I think, you know, psychology is science.

[00:21:19]And I get that sometimes we don't have the answers.

[00:21:22]Science doesn't always have to be black and white and have the exact answers.

[00:21:26]But I think when studying something like personality disorders and personality traits, whether people can change, heritability, all of these things, think it's important to know that there's a lot of gray.

[00:21:38]And I think one thing that you were talking about is this sort of spectrum narcissistic personality disorder exists on the same kind of spectrum.

[00:21:45]So some people can have strong traits and some people can have the disorder, and even within that, some can be severe and not.

[00:21:53]Women also get very caught up in like, well, maybe he's not a narcissist, maybe he's just whatever that means, just abusive at the end of the day, something that Doctor Romney has said that I love, which is all domestic abusers are narcissistic, meaning that in her view, they would sort of fall on the spectrum because you need to have no empathy and a lack of accountability and a lot of the traits that make up the disorder.

[00:22:17]But I think that we want so badly to believe that everything can be explained away as a wound.

[00:22:24]And sometimes I think what people are seeing is a stable personality structure, right?

[00:22:30]Not not a temporary response.

[00:22:32]What traits do you think tend to be more stable over time?

[00:22:36]Okay.

[00:22:37]So this this gets into something that I find very interesting.

[00:22:41]And in most like even in medicine, I find people tend to separate what I would call physiology, you know, hearts and lungs and, you know, organs that are very sort of mechanical or biochemical.

[00:22:55]We separate those from the brain and we treat the brain like it's special.

[00:22:58]And so, you know, you ask, all right.

[00:23:00]Why does this person have heart failure?

[00:23:03]Why does this person have diabetes?

[00:23:05]No one really has a problem with explaining that on a very molecular level, you have type two diabetes because, you know, receptors on cells in your liver are not responding to insulin correctly.

[00:23:16]And how do we deal with that? It's a very molecular answer.

[00:23:19]Whereas as soon as you get into psychology, I think people are made very uncomfortable by the idea that those same explanations can explain what's going on in the brain.

[00:23:29]And so the way that I will say the brain is different is the brain is more flexible than other organs, right?

[00:23:36]If you have a problem with your liver or your heart, they can be a little bit flexible.

[00:23:44]Make a little bit more of that enzyme, repair yourself with some, you know, cell division, make some new tissue, whatever.

[00:23:50]Brains are a little bit more adaptable because, you know, the brain is built on connections.

[00:23:55]It's in some ways it's like a computer chip that can rewire itself.

[00:23:58]But there's a limitation to that rewiring.

[00:24:01]So, you know, when you learn something like somebody who's watching this podcast right now, at the end of of watching this interview, your brain will be slightly different than it was at the beginning, because you had to adjust your neural connections in your brain just to form the memory, to even remember what happened in this conversation.

[00:24:18]Other organs don't quite do that in the same way, although they can a little bit.

[00:24:22]There are also other extremes that you just can't change.

[00:24:25]Like if somebody has a stroke, And they like the the right side of their face is just drooping.

[00:24:30]They've lost the connection between the part of their brain that controls those facial muscles and the muscles themselves.

[00:24:37]And if those if that part of their brain effectively died when it didn't have oxygen during the stroke, they're never getting it back.

[00:24:43]There is a limitation to what the brain can do.

[00:24:45]You can't really grow new neurons.

[00:24:47]You can just change the connections between those neurons.

[00:24:50]So is there flexibility a little bit, but it's still limited by structure.

[00:24:55]So I guess what I'm saying is tell me if I'm incorrect.

[00:24:58]My understanding is that people in your field have this idea that the brain basically plays by different rules, that it's not just biology, that there's some like almost mythical personality that exists outside the actual neuroanatomy of the brain is am I understanding that correctly? Yep.

[00:25:15]You are. Okay.

[00:25:16]All right.

[00:25:17]So I'll be if you can pardon me for being a little bit blunt.

[00:25:21]I think that's just crazy.

[00:25:22]I don't understand it at all.

[00:25:23]And I think I can try to prove this from two points.

[00:25:26]So your brain is two things, its structure and its chemistry.

[00:25:30]No one argues if somebody has a traumatic brain injury or a stroke, they're going to lose abilities that they will probably never get back.

[00:25:39]Right.

[00:25:39]If I have a stroke in part of my brain that controls a certain set of muscles, once the inflammation calms down and it's been about a week or two, if you don't have that function back, you're not getting it back.

[00:25:48]You can learn to compensate a little bit with other muscles, whatever, but you'll never be completely normal again because that part of your brain can't regenerate.

[00:25:56]And so in that sense, that proves the structure part, this part of your brain does this thing.

[00:26:02]If I get smashed in the back of the head by something and my occipital lobe is damaged, I'm never going to have perfect vision ever again.

[00:26:09]That is the part of your brain that receives input from your eyes.

[00:26:11]It's not coming back.

[00:26:13]Okay, so there's the structure part of it, which was in large part determined by your genetics.

[00:26:18]Then there's the chemistry half.

[00:26:20]If I change one chemical in your brain, right.

[00:26:23]If I give someone morphine, I can take away their pain.

[00:26:27]If I give someone psilocybin, I can make them hallucinate and see things that aren't there.

[00:26:31]If I take away a certain neurotransmitter or a hormone or whatever, I can dramatically change someone's personality momentarily while I've adjusted their brain chemistry.

[00:26:41]Okay?

[00:26:41]And so no one really argues brain structure.

[00:26:44]Yeah.

[00:26:45]Massive changes if we damage a part of the brain.

[00:26:47]Right brain chemistry, massive changes if we adjust their brain chemistry.

[00:26:51]But then as soon as I put the two together and say, okay, a person's brain, their psychology is a product of those two things.

[00:26:59]What is your structure, your hardware.

[00:27:00]And then the chemistry side is more the software of what programs are we running?

[00:27:05]What neurotransmitters are we feeding to those neurons in the moment?

[00:27:09]I don't think anyone argues with that.

[00:27:11]Right. Right. Okay.

[00:27:13]But then as soon as I say, as soon as I say, all right, a stroke or a trauma can change your structure that affects you.

[00:27:20]Drugs can change your chemistry that affects you.

[00:27:23]As soon as I point out.

[00:27:25]Yes, but the DNA that you're born with also affects your brain structure in your chemistry that can set your personality.

[00:27:31]Then everyone's like, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, wait. I don't like that.

[00:27:33]But it's the same thing.

[00:27:35]So whether it's a stroke or a trauma or a drug or your inherited DNA that determined those structures and chemistries in the first place.

[00:27:44]Why does it matter?

[00:27:45]They're both affecting brain structure and brain chemistry.

[00:27:48]Why does one easily click into like, yeah, that makes sense.

[00:27:52]Trauma, drugs, whatever.

[00:27:53]But as soon as I say it's your DNA causing it, if you try to argue with people that know your DNA has nothing to do with your brain structure, I mean, why are humans?

[00:28:02]Why are our brains so different than the brains of other animals?

[00:28:05]Our DNA is different. That's it.

[00:28:07]And so the only answer to me is the genetic explanation just simply makes people uncomfortable.

[00:28:11]And they don't like admitting that it makes sense.

[00:28:14]Yeah, but if you go into a genetics or a neuroscience research lab and you started like having this conversation, everyone would be like, okay, and what's the point?

[00:28:23]Like, of course, it's just it's not controversial at all.

[00:28:26]I find it so interesting that there's this group of people that just find it like, well, this is a fact.

[00:28:30]And some people are like, well, hold on, let's, let's debate this.

[00:28:34]Let's talk about this. It is it is interesting.

[00:28:36]Yeah. Have just like EuroCity. Have you ever read a book?

[00:28:39]Are you familiar with Steven Pinker? No.

[00:28:42]Harvard. Psychologist.

[00:28:43]Neuroscientist. I would highly recommend it.

[00:28:46]It's it's a it's a hell of a book.

[00:28:48]It's a pretty I wouldn't call it dense.

[00:28:50]It's interesting.

[00:28:51]It's engaging, but it is a large book called The Blank Slate.

[00:28:54]And it's basically his pushback against people in the field of psychology, thinking that babies are born as blank slates, and their environment just shapes them into exactly who they're going to be.

[00:29:05]And it's a it's an older book now.

[00:29:08]It was written maybe 20 years ago, but even 20 years ago, there was enough evidence to show you are not born a blank slate.

[00:29:17]You are born as a genetically programed computer.

[00:29:21]That can be adjusted, for sure, but it's kind of like saying, you know, I have, you know, whatever.

[00:29:27]We're I'm having this conversation on a rather powerful MacBook Pro, and that's very different than the, you know, whatever the basic Dell computer that I had in middle school, you know, 1999.

[00:29:41]And no one would say that if I try to put the same software on both of those computers, that I'm going to get the same outcome.

[00:29:47]I'm going to be very, very, very different.

[00:29:49]And so you are absolutely born with a computer, a brain that can be adjusted, it can be tweaked, but it has limitations.

[00:29:57]There are some things that you can and can't do, and some people are born with brain structure based on their genetics.

[00:30:05]That probably makes it very, very difficult for them to have empathy and be the thing that people want them to be.

[00:30:13]And on the flip side, it's probably likely that some people are born with traits that make that impossible for them to not be empathetic, that make them almost saddled with the burden of having so much empathy that they can't let go of it and care more about themselves.

[00:30:25]And every trait is there somewhere.

[00:30:28]When you ask a geneticist, is a certain trait heritable?

[00:30:32]They would immediately be like, that's not the question.

[00:30:35]Every trait is heritable.

[00:30:36]The question is how much? That's so interesting.

[00:30:38]And I mean, empathy is one of the biggest talking points, I suppose, about narcissism.

[00:30:42]And they there have low or none.

[00:30:45]And that would certainly be my experience.

[00:30:47]But it's like we want to teach them to have empathy.

[00:30:51]Why can't they be taught like why can't we teach them to have empathy and teach them to not have like reward seeking tendencies and to take accountability?

[00:31:03]I mean, it's not that accountability is the trait itself, but why do you think some of these things are just set DNA?

[00:31:08]Is that just the simple answer?

[00:31:11]so in my mind, most people don't process human behavior in this way.

[00:31:15]And it's going to sound kind of cold.

[00:31:17]But as a as a neuroscientist, I think of everything that humans do as responding to sensory input.

[00:31:25]Right?

[00:31:25]You take in a sensation, your brain processes or integrates that information, tries to figure out what you're seeing.

[00:31:31]And it's it's much like running code.

[00:31:35]So like I know like as an example, like like people can learn things when I see a spider, I see an annoyance.

[00:31:44]I don't really want it in my house, but it's not immediately going to bother me.

[00:31:47]Clearly, you respond differently.

[00:31:49]I have learned that it does not matter how small the spider is.

[00:31:53]My wife responds with panic, fight or flight.

[00:31:56]Epinephrine through the roof cannot handle it.

[00:31:59]She would, she would.

[00:32:00]It would push her to [...] to have to hold a spider.

[00:32:02]She just couldn't do it.

[00:32:03]She pass out.

[00:32:04]And so everyone's brain is wired to respond to a certain stimulus in a certain way.

[00:32:11]Could I be trained to be afraid of spiders?

[00:32:14]Probably.

[00:32:15]If you locked me in a small compartment and let tarantulas crawl all over me, I probably would develop that fear.

[00:32:21]could she be trained to not care about spiders?

[00:32:24]I'm skeptical. It's pretty hard phobia.

[00:32:25]I don't know if she could be rewired.

[00:32:27]And the point is like back to the structure and chemistry thing.

[00:32:31]When my brain sees a spider, it registers as I don't really want that thing all over me, but I'm not necessarily scared of it.

[00:32:38]the emotional processing center of your brain is clearly different than mine.

[00:32:43]And so when you see the thing that you're afraid of, you get this huge rush of neurotransmitter release that activates neurons that tell you this is a dangerous situation, I have to be very afraid of this.

[00:32:54]And the reason we respond differently is the wiring is just different.

[00:32:59]And so someone who doesn't have empathy.

[00:33:01]I think what people have to understand is that wiring part of their brain just isn't there.

[00:33:08]I can admit, like, I probably shouldn't say this on a podcast like this.

[00:33:11]I am not a particularly empathetic person.

[00:33:14]I am a I think I am a sympathetic person.

[00:33:17]I can understand this person is struggling.

[00:33:20]They're having a very difficult time.

[00:33:22]I should be considerate and help them through it.

[00:33:24]But like in an empathy sense, I don't feel it the way that I think a lot of women feel it like I my understanding is like, I think that a lot of women see, you know, someone struggling, having a hard time, they can relate to it and understand. Yes.

[00:33:37]Like I feel that way too. I don't have that.

[00:33:40]I'm smart enough to see it and no.

[00:33:42]That person is struggling.

[00:33:43]But I really don't have the empathy.

[00:33:46]And I'm not convinced that there's anyone or anything that could really make me feel it on an emotional level, because I just don't think that connection, like the part of your brain that processes emotion, is a very, very specific part of your brain.

[00:33:58]It's not diffuse.

[00:33:59]Does that make sense? What I'm saying. Yeah, it does.

[00:34:01]Like your brain isn't a computer.

[00:34:03]Your brain is thousands of little mini computers that are all linked together, and they each have a certain task.

[00:34:08]There's one part of the brain.

[00:34:09]The only thing it does is recognize faces.

[00:34:12]If you have a stroke in that part of your brain, you will see your own parents, your spouse, your children, and you will not know who they are. Wow.

[00:34:18]Because it's that precise.

[00:34:20]There's an even more specific example of all right.

[00:34:22]So there's neurons have axons.

[00:34:25]They effectively act like wires that connect parts of the brain.

[00:34:28]If someone damages the connection between the facial recognition part of the brain and the emotional processing part of the brain, things get really weird because they see the person they recognize.

[00:34:38]That's my mother looks like my mother, but they feel no emotional response because those two part of the brains or brain has been unlinked, they've been disconnected, and so they'll actually develop a delusion where they insist that person is an imposter pretending to be their family member, because how else could they explain that they see this person and have no emotional connection to them?

[00:34:58]And so neurology effectively proves if you disconnect two parts of the brain, they can't talk to each other anymore.

[00:35:05]No differently than if I cut the cord between my computer and my printer.

[00:35:09]They can't talk to each other anymore.

[00:35:11]And so a person who can't feel empathy has some sort of genetic neurological disconnect between the part of their brain that understands the situation and the part of their brain that feels the emotion.

[00:35:21]They can't feel it, I think I mean, knowing that that's like but but I want him to or but you know, where people go is sometimes he's empathetic towards other people.

[00:35:32]And to me, no, it's that he's performing empathy even kind of what you talked about.

[00:35:37]You know, what it looks like to be empathetic.

[00:35:40]You might not feel it, but you can display the behavior of it.

[00:35:44]And I think that someone who is truly narcissistic, they know image management, right?

[00:35:48]They care what people think so they can perform empathy for other people.

[00:35:52]And I think that serves a lot of goals.

[00:35:55]One in that other people won't recognize that they don't have it and that you feel crazy.

[00:35:59]You feel like you're the one that he treats badly and that that that means there's a problem with you when actually he just doesn't have empathy.

[00:36:07]Yeah, actually, I think a great analogy or very similar situation neurologically, it's not hard for someone to imagine if I got a surgeon that knew what they were doing, and they could go into my arm and they could cut all of the major nerves that connect my spinal cord to my arm, just cut them in half.

[00:36:25]I could take this pen, stab myself through the hand with it, and I would feel nothing because the connection from the touch pain receptors in my hand to my brain have been cut, the wires gone, and the same sense that if I go in the wall and I cut the wire, I can flip the switch all I want.

[00:36:40]Those lights are not coming on.

[00:36:41]And so if you can easily imagine disconnecting sensory stimulus, pain, touch from brain processing, why is it really different to imagine within the brain?

[00:36:53]Okay, prefrontal cortex understands the situation.

[00:36:57]You're having a bad day.

[00:36:59]This was emotionally difficult for you.

[00:37:00]This person at work mistreated you. Whatever.

[00:37:03]There's the emotional part of my brain that knows what that would feel like if they can't talk to each other, how is that really different than not feeling my skin because I cut the wire to the touch sensation portion?

[00:37:13]It's the same thing.

[00:37:14]It's just harder to imagine because it doesn't feel as tangible, I think.

[00:37:20]Right. It's all wiring.

[00:37:22]And like back to my example before of the person who can't or who can recognize faces but can't feel emotions about them.

[00:37:29]If that same family member that they can't feel emotions when seeing starts talking to them, boom, all falls into place because the auditory route is still connected to the emotional center.

[00:37:39]Everything seems fine now, but if it's purely visual, the disconnect is still there and they can't link those two parts of the brain.

[00:37:45]So computers are detached, wires are down, right?

[00:37:48]No Bluetooth. Not going to happen.

[00:37:50]And so I think processing this as a neurological hardware software issue, I don't know, do you think a lot of the people that you work with might not like this?

[00:38:00]Because it all feels sort of mechanical and unemotional and it makes humans feel like robots.

[00:38:06]You know, maybe I try to think back to even, like in when I was still very attached to someone with this disorder.

[00:38:14]I think I wanted to hear that it was trauma so that they could change.

[00:38:19]And so when I learned that it was genetic, I don't know.

[00:38:23]I think a lot of people react to it differently.

[00:38:25]I know people reject the science behind it, certainly.

[00:38:28]And I again, I know why.

[00:38:30]But to me, I found knowing that it has a strong genetic component really freeing.

[00:38:35]But I also think that some people find like you're stealing their hope, which personally I think is a phenomenal thing to do to me.

[00:38:41]I'm like, take a hammer, smash the hope into a million pieces.

[00:38:45]Because if there is a strong genetic component to this and empathy for one example can't be learned, then what is the best you could possibly hope for that he performs empathy for you?

[00:38:56]you. It's not that he actually feels it.

[00:38:59]It feels so inauthentic.

[00:39:00]I think I want women to get away from the hope.

[00:39:03]I think that the genetic component explains it, but it doesn't excuse it.

[00:39:07]Some women accept it and they're like, oh, so he can't help it.

[00:39:10]Poor thing. What?

[00:39:12]That is not what we're saying.

[00:39:13]I'm not saying that I don't feel bad for people with the disorder.

[00:39:17]I mean, I suppose I do empathy without obligation.

[00:39:19]I feel bad over there.

[00:39:21]I don't want I don't feel bad that I would let them into my life and let them hurt me.

[00:39:25]Yeah.

[00:39:26]I think that, like, okay, this is very like personal opinion.

[00:39:28]I would still I can understand feeling bad for the person, but it doesn't mean that you have to accept it in the same way that like I do a lot of analogies, I hope they're landing.

[00:39:39]I love it, I, I think of it like, okay, so imagine a person who is born with a genetic defect that makes them completely blind.

[00:39:47]They cannot see.

[00:39:48]Can you feel bad for that person?

[00:39:50]Of course. Does it make a whole lot of sense to try to change it?

[00:39:53]If it's unchangeable, it does not make sense right now.

[00:39:56]Imagine that that person said, I want to be a commercial airline pilot.

[00:40:00]Or are we all cool with that? Not me.

[00:40:02]No, it's it's unfortunate.

[00:40:04]I don't like the fact that they're limited in that way, but it doesn't mean that everyone else has to risk their safety just because we feel bad for the person.

[00:40:11]And so it's not necessarily their fault.

[00:40:14]But that doesn't mean we have to tolerate a very, very unsafe situation.

[00:40:18]And so just like no one should feel obligated to put a blind person in the cockpit of a 747 and trust the lives of the entire set of passengers, don't think anyone should be obligated to take a person with inherited narcissism and put them in a relationship and say, well, this is just what we have to deal with.

[00:40:35]Maybe they're just not a person for whom close, intimate relationships are a realistic or emotionally safe thing to do, So feel bad for them over there.

[00:40:45]Like I just I totally agree with you.

[00:40:47]It's so many of these abusers will just say, but this is who I am.

[00:40:51]You know, you're trying to change me. You have to accept me.

[00:40:54]I do not have to accept behavior that harms me just because someone has a personality disorder.

[00:41:00]And I use an example.

[00:41:01]Actually, speaking of analogies, I have a child with ADHD and my abuser also had ADHD in addition to NPD, but it became this like but I can't remember because I have ADHD.

[00:41:12]Well, I can't do that because I have ADHD.

[00:41:15]Listen, I don't care. Good for you.

[00:41:18]Many people have it.

[00:41:19]My mother has it.

[00:41:20]I didn't even know she had it until I was like 35.

[00:41:22]Because she doesn't talk about it. It's not this.

[00:41:24]This crutch that she uses to to explain away all the things she can't do.

[00:41:29]Where I find that abusive men will use ADHD and or made up other things to sort of, well, this is who I am.

[00:41:37]It's not the responsibility of another person to accommodate your disability or anything.

[00:41:43]It's not their job.

[00:41:44]Now, someone might choose to help you make lists because you have ADHD in a healthy relationship, but I'm not going to choose to accept weaponized incompetence and call it ADHD.

[00:41:59]Thank you so much.

[00:42:00]It was such an incredible conversation.

[00:42:02]I'm going to link that book that you put in the description as well.

[00:42:05]And also Doctor Salerno book, because I think that that research is great and we'll continue to promote this, this topic that is just so needed to be talked about.

[00:42:14]So I appreciate your time. Thank you so much.