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tv   The Stream  Al Jazeera  May 30, 2022 10:30pm-11:01pm AST

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go, she ation and bureaucratic delay. the iron gate dam is going to be torn down. the process will take several years and will be the largest dam removal in us history. when this dam and the others along the klamath river are finally removed, native americans and others who depend upon the river hope that it will once again flow free and clean and full of salmon, all the way to the sea. from here at the mouth of the klamath salmon travel up stream to spawn, after their mysterious journeys in the pacific ocean were intertwined and every way with the klamath river and without the klamath river. there, there are york people, a river to be restored for generations to come. rob reynolds al jazeera on the klamath river. an unusual story for you now, a man in disguise as vandalized, a wild most famous painting, is
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a climate campaigner. and he was actually dressed as an old woman and smeared the mona lisa with cake. other visitors to parish his love museum recorded the incident thanks to protective glass, though the vinci's masterpiece was not damaged. he told visits his people are destroying the earth. ah, quite look at the main stories this allen out easily does a meeting in brussels and a show of solidarity with ukraine. but divisions of much of a new sanctions on russia members are struggling to reach consensus for the proposed embargo in russian oil. the main obstacle rush at hungry is leading a group of countries that rely heavily on rushing energy. and as so far, refused to agree. france has called for an investigation to the death of a french journalist, killed an ukraine, sla hand screech and ukrainian official se federico cook him of was killed when
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rushing, shelling hit a vehicle. that was evacuating civilians as but no immediate response from russian authorities. and israel's defense minister is called for to outright nationalist group to be declared terror organisations. groups are the forefront of violence against palestinians during a parade through jerusalem's own city. on sunday, the stream is a program coming up next. but we now leave you with memories of our colleague sharika and i will actually ah, abuse with another one in the future. i don't need a from with him and get to me as an honest emergency of if you don't have use, right? yeah. most of the new for those and we said at the home and a view to what he
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said or to well be held that the put up with all the guys i'm allowed to continue. yeah. obama possible booking for the week? i know you're the one i don't deposit in. i will see bobby, how shot out and walk a shooting . avita a
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high on semi ok to down the street and we are thinking about rethinking. how does our brain work and how can we make it? what a little bit better. you may already be doing. some of the techniques we're going to be talking to you about. this is a picture of it pretty much sums up the last week of me preparing for this show. i am not intending to do all the heavy lifting by myself. i am bringing on the guests immediately so you can meet them and they can tell you who they are and what they do. hello, annie jean at dominic. so good to have you on a introduce yourself to our stream audience, sir, i'm anywhere p. paul, i'm a writer, a science writer who writes about learning and cognition. and i'm the author of a book called the extended mind, the power of thinking outside the brain and you in spite our entire conversation. thanks for that. hello gina. great to have you on the stream. tell everybody who
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you are and what you day. hello. nice to be here. thank you. my name is gina poll. i'm a nurse scientist at new c l. a. and i do research on the function of sleep for learning and memory. great to have you and dominate. welcome to the stream, introduce yourself to our international view. my name is dominic backer. i'm a professor of psychology at b r university, which is in pennsylvania. and i'm an expert on group dynamics and out people's identities shape how they think feel and pay. so i'm going to give a couple of rapid fire questions. it will help me to prepare for this show. i know you're going to know the answers like this. all right, dominate. what is the mind to mind generally refers to the box. we have the emotions, we feel the perceptions we have in the world, how we make sense of things as a key distinction to be made with regard to the mind such that some of it are things we're conscious of. so we are aware of our thoughts or feelings what we,
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what we believe about something. but a lot of the mind is also non conscious or very rapidly processed conclusions we reach without necessarily having realized how exactly we reached it. so that's the model. gina, what's the brain the brain is the or again, by which the mind thinks and acts and interacts with the world is the organ through which we sense everything and it is the organ through which we do everything. it is our brain is our mind. okay. and the best metaphor that you have either created yourself or you've heard all you've read about how our brain actually works. well, we tend to think of the brain as like a work horse that we just sort of keep logging in. to like gets the job done. but i like to think of the brain as more like an orchestra conductor that's at the heart of everything. it's bringing in resources from here and there and creating,
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you know, beautiful music. all right, so you've read, i guess. and you know, i know this topic, what would you like to ask them about? how do we get more out of our brain? if you and ye cheap, you can be part of today's discussion of comment section is right that i'm expecting your brilliant questions. no pressure, the shape starts right now. and i mean, let's talk 1st of all about how you feel that most of us use our brain. it was science. why to say you, you write a lot about the way that we think the way that we use. i thoughtfully that we use our brains, how to most of us use, i well, to go back to this question of metaphors, i think many of us think of our brains as like a computer that we just feed information into. and then the output, you know, is the result, or we think of it as like a muscle that it's something that we have to keep exercising to, to get stronger. but the reason the metaphor of the orchestra conductor is more helpful is that we actually don't sync with our brains alone. we think with our bodies, with the spaces in which we learn and work with them that are interactions with
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other people with our tools like our, our smartphones and other technological devices. so that really broadens the idea of what thinking is when we acknowledge that all these other resources are part of the thinking process. dominic, i see you nodding, go ahead. i completely agree. i think the idea that, and is exploring in your book, especially that so much of our thinking exist outside of the individual mind or the individual brain involves other people as well as technologies and devices. this is a super interesting one, and research is exploring how outsourcing, at least a lot of thinking, the review affects the conclusions that people reach or the way in which their, their minds work. i'm just thinking thing and in my system will come out thinking about how we're thinking it just happens unless something happens and then we have an injury or we have something that's not quite firing, right? why do you think that is? it's almost like we take our brain to yeah,
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we do take our great brains for granted. and it's only when we do have a head injury or something happens to our physical brain, oregon that we realized so much of who we are so much of our personality and what we know our memories, our consciousness really lies in this few pounds of flesh. but this brain is not disconnected from the world, at least most of the time. we have our senses that flow into our brain through our bodies. and that includes our sense of space and nature, our sense of others and our ability to connect and reach out to them. so i think it's a beautiful book and a murphy. it's really well read, well written. it was a lot of fun to read. it was well researched and i take my hat off to you. i enjoyed every minute of reading it and that's not usually the case when i'm reading
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things related to related to my field. i usually don't read books and so this one was really, really delight. thank you. and what makes you writing extended mind the power thinking outside the brain? what, what was the, what was the inspiration? what, what did you think? like i need to write a book about how we need to think outside of the mind outside of the by well, so i have 2 sons who are school aids. and i got very interested in how they learn in the science of learning. and in my research and reporting on the science of learning, i started to notice a bunch of different fields that were all looking at how these outside the brain resources factor into our thinking. and then i happened to come across a journal article by 2 philosophers that proposed this idea of the extended mind, which is the idea that we don't just think with our brains alone, we actually extend our thinking process. the c is out into the world with our
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bodies, with spaces, with other people. and that to me, tied together a lot of the research findings that i was finding so interesting. at part of your reset she discovered piece of running and looked at. got go ahead tina. go ahead. i just wanted to say i see annie, that you are talking with your hands, which is part of the recommendations of your book. so yeah, i haven't started adopting that to even though we're seated here, we're not taking a walk which would be even better. at least we are using our bodies. and what that does to our brain is it puts it in a mode where we can learn better. actually we can, we learn best through teaching. and then when we're teaching it for actors, we are learning even better. our brain is in the state called the fate of state, which is about $5.00 to $10.00 waves per 2nd that occur in our hipaa campus, which is our rapid learning structure in our brain associated learning. so when we
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put things together and when we move, our hipaa campus goes into a feta state, which is really best for learning. so let me show you one of the people who inspired and if to write a book and this gentleman's called peter ryan, a, he's a neuro ethics professor from the university of british columbia. and he explains what, what gina was just explaining that how our brain can then use of the things to help us think better on operate better pieces, because a much better explanation than i have. so here is mentioned the following scenario . a few weeks ago, you made an appointment to see the dentist say for next tuesday, tuesday morning. you wake up and you realize it out today so that i can see that that is, but you're not sure. was it? the appointment at 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock. well fortunately, you also noted this time with disappointment in a diary, either
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a paper diary or in your fold. for example, you go and you check that diary and you find out that the appointment is at 2 o'clock. what you've done is actually a very smart thing for several reasons. first of all, biological memory is unfortunately, toria slee unreliable for details like this. on the other hand, the diary is a perfect source of storing and record recalling that kind of information. but more importantly, what you've done is you've offloaded the cognitive work of remembering onto the diary rather than taxing your biological brain with that same task. and by doing so, we open up space for that biological brain to do what it does best make decisions. abstract thought, creativity and that is the future. so our extension could the app body talking with hands,
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which i do want to time as surroundings using the surroundings. like a diary, peter was saying that it could be relationships. collaborations with people don't it. can you give us an example, going to make everybody give us an example. so we can see that happening in our daily life as i to stipulate. like i'm going out of fashion and i'm going to die. if i don't move my hands, i don't have it. sure, well, i'll continue with the technological example so. so the example of a smart phone, we now all carry them around and increasingly use them not just to make phone calls and also keep track of dates, but for taking photographs. and the more we walk around the world and take photographs more, we are potentially outsourcing the memories, out of things that we've seen and events we've experienced. and there's actually research now on the effects that can have on your memory for events, say your turing museum. and you see art and as you walk around,
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instead of simply looking at the art, you take photographs of the art and especially your favorite pieces, how that affects your memory, then for that event. and what you find is that if people are using a phone or a camera, generally, to record the event, they're in some ways outsourcing the memory and the experience of the event. and it changes the way they remember changes the way they can later on. recollect what they saw and the reason it does so at least in part is because as you take those photos, you're paying attention to the situation in a different way. so by using that technology and outsourcing the memory, you're also potentially outsourcing a part of the experience and thus affecting what is like in the moment and, and then what do you experience later on? i have lots of each in questions for you. guess i'm going to get you to austin pretty quickly if you can. and some people are not getting quite what brain capacity means. is it possible to run out of brain space? well, you know, you brought on peter runner who just gave that that very interesting example
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a minute ago. and it was peter who introduced me to the idea that the biological brain, it may be running at full capacity at this point. meaning we are using every bit of our brain to deal with our really complicated modern world. and that the only way to transcend the limits of the biological brain which evolved to do, you know, very different things. and what we ask it to do in our modern world of symbols and abstract ideas. the only way to transcend those limits is to bring in these external resources and like the body like spaces like other people. just, i mean to, to offer an example of my own. there's an interesting phenomenon known as transacted memory, whereas where, which refers to the fact that in a group, you can share membranes such that each individual has access to the memory of all the people in the group we, nobody can know everything, but everybody in a group can have their own specialty and when you know what other people know you
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have asked to what? well yeah, and it's fascinating anyhow, when you talk and recollect an event with your friends, they might have a very different recollection of something than you do. and the act of recollecting together helps you bring up that memory, and then incorporate all of your friends recollections into your memory. and then when you re consolidate that memory, which occurs in while you sleep that next night, you re consolidate their memories in with your own. and hopefully as a group, you all will remember more accurately than anyone memory. jim wants to know, gina, what causes forgetfulness, and how could he avoid it? well, when this occurs,
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if 1st of all you didn't have all systems working in the 1st place when you were trying to remember, for example, when you were paying attention. so, neurotransmitter called of c to colleen in your brain, helps you remember things in the 1st place. and acetylcholine comes online when your brain is in that data state that i talked about before. and when we are actively attending to something, another thing that helps our best, remember, better in the 1st place is to tag a memory with another transmitter called norepinephrine. and that's something we're researching in my laboratory right now. what does norepinephrine do to help us tag our memory so that we consolidate them? well, while we sleep, and then don't forget them later. just and i hope that answers your question. let me bring it in, chris. chris wanted to talk about how he changed the way he was thinking, doing the coven pandemic. i am now and particularly doing locked down. i'm really
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intrigued, guessed by how you think our brains have changed to look down. and when we are, i said, a said he's chris festival, like a ton of people around the world. when the pandemic it, i became cognitively overloaded with having to work full time from home and my son having school from home as well. i had a lot going on just like everybody else. and i needed different ways to kind of get through my daily process. so i sort of doing different things. i'm still doing today. why going for walks every single morning while i work through different projects and my mind, or i'm listening to audio books or podcast. and a lot of this was covered in, and he's great book the extended mind. i've also set up kind of like my home office area. and collaborative work is also help me out a lot just thinking a little bit more clearly. and even though we've been in this pandemic for a long,
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long time is going a little bit easier because it's an app, right. how are we doing? what have you noticed? yeah, i think a lot of people can identify with chris is saying about feeling overloaded during the pandemic and having to work, you know, from morning till night without a break, without a chat with colleagues or with that at a community. you know, and i think that kind of puts the lie to the idea that the more we exercise our brains and where we use it, the stronger it gets. i think a lot of us actually found much less intelligent during the pandemic. and i would argue that another reason for that is that we were cut off from many of our usual mental extension in our colleagues or classmates. and we weren't busy, i knew and stipulating places we weren't maybe using our body so much because we are sitting in front of the screen for many hours a day. so i think that helps explain why a lot of people didn't feel like they were at their best mentally during that i it's definitely happened to me. i want to say that part of your book was about
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natural spaces and giving out in nature, which is what the last speaker just talks about. and i thought that was really fascinating. one of the things that natural spaces about is the piece of the wind and then leaves and the sound of running water that helps de exhaust us. and one of the reasons why i say that, is it anything that con, our brain, and that source of north and f and that had talked about before. norepinephrine is a neurotransmitter that a little bit goes a long way, a little bit helps you learn really well too much is what happens when you're stressed out. and when you're stressed out, you're not connected interest in it's too strong. and what nature does is help the stresses, it helps, it helps that source of nerve connected to calm down. so we can learn. and actually i think that the notion of the extended mind is also really useful. as we think
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about the pandemic for conceptualizing how it is, we collectively make sense of a brand new event like this, right? this is a challenge that most people have never experienced anything like before, and you can't figure it out on your own. you have to rely on other people. and, you know, for example, we've learned over time how to understand graphs of disease spread or that the transmission of cobra in your, in your local area or hospital usage rates. all sorts of information that ordinary people most the time haven't been paying attention to. and now at the beginning it was overwhelming and over time it becomes less. so for a couple of reasons. one is that we actually do learn how to cope with new kinds of information, right. over time, we get better at it. the other thing is, as part of an extended community on mind, we get better presenting information to others. so policy makers and epidemiologists and people in science, communication, and so on, as well as the news media are now much better at showing people the information in
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ways that are understandable and that they can use in their lives than they were at the beginning. and that's a process the suspended mind isn't just a tool we, we, we have inevitably at our disposal. we have to build it and we can make it better. i think a martin border. he's a philosopher, a science at duncan university. and, and i'm, he really tactless, it's like the of happy leading max out our brains right now. what is possible leaving an app range? and i know the back of that i would like some practical solutions that, or i guess can give us about how we work smarter his mouth. many philosophers have argued that the human brain will never unravel certain mysteries about the universe just because of the way our brains evolved. just like the minds of a dog will never understand. prime numbers, let's say the human minds is bound to have certain biological limits to now
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disposition sounds, smallest and humble. but the trouble is that it's always thinking of human intelligence in terms of a single isolated human brain without a health off mind extensions and gotten the stretches and collaboration. but this is exactly what makes human intelligence unique. human intelligence is open ended and probably unlimited. with that, that's what i like to think, but my life proves otherwise. i, i want to talk to t t about some personal things that people can do to really extent what their brains are capable of. for instance, i'm going to play a little video of a walkman exercising in japan and tell us why this is important and what we should be doing. and i like to extend our brain regarding exercise and move me. ah, what can on the construction site this site actually went viral?
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ah, most very common. i mean wise movement important. how does i extend that? right? yeah. this really lovely that they are a program of exercises that millions of people in japan do every morning and have been doing for decades and is a couple things going on there. me one thing there outside, 2nd of other moving and dr. po told us how important that is for thinking. and 3rd of all, they're moving together. they're engaged in synchronized movement which helps bring a group of people together and helps get them on the same page. like if you're moving as one, if your bodies are moving as one helps, your brain kind of act is one. that's why i'm going to keep the musical thing going . thank you for the exercises for, for that needs construction workers. and we're going to gina singing q the singing gina, why are you singing q as q i in order to set up a paper turned in and people about opens activated by this paul,
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the things i way research please create the beat for l e o l t o by the city rule reshaping network storing memory is a way a to learn efficiently. yeah. a tell me why that wasn't just a trick. i can i sing my entire research for each episode of the stream, and then i'm going to be better hosting, or is that you actually will. so your, your whole audience will be better. these are these because they help people remember better, that 44 beat is in the data stream frequency. and a song just helps us, especially squeezing it together. when i'm giving lectures, i often have my audience sing that song after being here about no one. again, your client, they all sing it together and you can snap their finger and their hands. and this
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is nice, dominic, i'm going to give you her rethink picture right here is an office that i know pretty well. how do you make this office environments? how to make it a better offers environment thinking, performing well. because right back here, this is my desk. i work in a grayness, it's a very tragic office. dominic, what we need to do to extend the thinking that was going on in this office. great question. it is a tragic office, i'm sorry, and i would say the most important thing in the office is the people. and i would worry less about the space or the fact that i know people in the office. well, whether they're in the office or not can, you know, put some paint on the walls, but i think the relationship between the people and their sense, particular of being a common unit as working together toward that sort of common mission and set of
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goals. we know to be crucial for both people be excited about the work, but also being productive and cooperative. and so building a collective and common identity regardless of the space around you would be my primary recommendation. all right, this is been such a fascinating conversation. we've only scraped the surface there so much more that you can find out. i absolutely knocked gina. gina wants to talk some more here at the end of the show. i have my most. may i please have your name please. yeah. do you know, you know, it's going to be on the news and out, is there any 2nd now i can look at my laptop extended mind. i mean murphy pool. you can find more about the book. you can buy the book, go to add a mathy post twitter site dominick the power of us. he has a book as well and fall a gina just because she's amazing and she may well sing you editing. thanks to watching everybody i see next time take ah
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