Daniella, thanks so much for joining me.

I am a huge fan of your work, been following it for years, and it's a pleasure and privilege to host you today.

So yeah, thanks for joining me.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

My pleasure.

I thought I'd break this episode into five parts, the first part being Foundations, and within this I labeled it the Science of Emotion and Memory.

So I think let's get started with that.

And thereafter we'll move on to things like from circuits to consciousness and and beyond.

So the first question I have is you've devoted your life to and your career to studying the neural mechanisms of emotional learning and memory.

Could you share perhaps how your journey from animal models of schizophrenia symptoms to human studies of fear have shaped the questions that you asked today?

Yeah, it's been a long journey.

It started really from interest in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science and psychobiology.

I don't know the brain basis of behaviour.

That's where I that's what I studied in my undergrad and that's kind of naturally led to cognitive neuroscience.

So I did start with animal models of schizophrenia, but that was an animal model of emotional learning.

So it already incorporated the fear learning component.

And then I switched to humans and I can't say it was really planned it it just the way it it went about.

I guess I just persisted with the the topics that seemed interesting to me.

And it always revolved around emotion, in particularly fear.

OK.

And when when you think about a fear memory and when it's first formed in the brain, what what would you say is actually happening when this occurs, let's say at a neural level and thereafter will slowly branch out into what it's repercussions have on a social level?

Yeah.

So the, I think the most fundamental thing is the Organism identifying something that is important and relevant in the environment to the Organism and that can be in many domains.

So in this sense, you can put all sorts of emotions.

In the case of fear, it's a threat to the survival of the Organism, something threatening.

So the Organism is identifying that and then the brain gets into a mode.

It can be a predictive mode because it's preparatory, so it prepares the brain to or the Organism to address that concern.

One of your central findings is that emotional responses are flexible.

So when somebody encounters something fear driven, let's say something that leads to a post traumatic stress type of disorder.

I know you're not a psychiatrist, so just a disclaimer of everyone out there.

How do you think that plasticity of the brain and reducing this, let's say emotional non hard wired feeling that's it just doesn't make sense.

But let's say the fact that it's not hard wired.

How does someone then apply this from a behavioral standpoint?

So because in your work you focus primarily on fear and the fact that it's such a formative experience, but thereafter you also work on memory and how we can change this, how malleable we are.

So it's a perfect blend, I think of these two different components and how it can change our experience of reality.

You perhaps unpack that.

Sorry, it's a bit of a long winded question.

Yeah, no, it's something that's really fascinating that we see in the course of evolution.

So it starts from reflexive responses.

These are hardwired.

There's a just like a very in our refer to our responses.

There is, let's say, you know, threat or kind of predator.

And then the Organism is a set of responses, sometimes just like one particular response to to that situation.

And with evolution, we kind of evolved to 1st learn that and but to build on that additional, for example, stimuli that are, as I mentioned, predictive.

So now you can prepare ahead of time.

No, you don't need to wait for the encounter itself.

So you have these preparatory responses and then environment is changing.

So you do need to update.

You move from one environment to another.

Conditions change.

And so that's a very important capacity to flexibly modulate.

What is it that you learned?

Because otherwise every bad experience that you have will kind of change your life forever.

And we don't want to have that.

So we need that flexibility.

So we have this rapporteur responses that we can modify flexibly, you know, with time and with condition and with additional information.

When I was doing my dissertation, I wrote a lot about computational psychiatry, a lot of work from Cole Preston, working on prior information, Bayesian brains, inference.

When when you look at those models is, is that something you incorporate quite a bit in your work when you're working with emotional effective science, neuroscience or are you approaching this from a different angle?

Yeah, it's actually very close.

So I myself in training, I'm not a computational neuroscientist, but I do incorporate computational models and computational thinking and I consider emotional behaviour as algorithm, algorithmic processes.

So it's all about what the brain is computing and how we execute it.

And we could use computational models to make prediction or to define very accurately what are the components of of the learning and what the brain is processing.

When, when I was going through your work, something that I had the urge to ask you at some point was within this from circuits to consciousness.

As I said, Part 2 would be that, that in neuroscience we're uncovering so much over the past few decades.

We've we've figured out so many things.

There are a few people trying to figure out the connector and there are a few people trying to figure out what consciousness is.

How close do you think that we are to connecting these mechanisms, neurosciences understanding of emotional control and mechanisms of what we call subjective experience?

Do you think we're able to encapsulate that within a neuroscientific approach?

Wow, you know, biggest question of of the field, but.

This podcast, at some point we have to touch on it.

The mind body problem is the.

Yeah.

So I do have kind of an optimistic response, but it it's very, very early on.

But what I can say is that we have made an effort to construct what we call the human affectum.

And this is an algorithmic, actually algorithmic collection of all the component of affective phenomena in humans.

So this it's not a model or you know, a theory, it's actually a framework that is a just provides kind of a skeleton to incorporate all the theories or actually a platform to create new theories.

But it gives this fundamental description of what is an Organism, what is the purpose of the Organism?

And in this way what is the purpose of affect or emotion.

And by answering this, we can incorporate many, many theories and explanations from the neurobiological level to consciousness.

So it does include feelings and how feelings are incorporated into it.

And considering feelings, feelings are the content of consciousness.

So what we do is, is investigate the content of consciousness and the structure of of that information.

And from this we can learn something about consciousness, you know, why it exists and how it is organized.

So I think actually by incorporating affect into consciousness can lead us step further to understanding the link between the body, the brain and and the mind.

Daniela, are you familiar with the work done by Professor Mark Solms here in Cape Town at UCT University of Cape Town?

Just by by name, but what exactly?

So it's interesting because what you're talking about with effective science combining with a consciousness research, he's he's theory of consciousness, he calls it the felt uncertainty principle.

He works closely with, with people like Karpis and etcetera.

But he wrote, he wrote a book called The Hidden Spring, and it's pretty cool because basically what he tries to say is that feeling or affect is fundamentally what needs to be within consciousness, trying to understand what consciousness is.

So he tries to take it back to the brainstem as the fundamental source of this feeling because everything that we experience has to be felt.

And so affect forms a fundamental basis of what consciousness is, according to his theory of consciousness.

I just thought I'd bring that up.

Sorry, it's just a sidetrack.

But with that being said, if someone asks you, Daniela, what is consciousness or how do you respond to that?

Yeah, I think it's felt experience.

It's, you know, subjectively felt, it's felt, right.

It's felt experience.

That's kind of I think the the main way to to incorporate it.

And I completely agree with that approach because in a way, every felt experience has valence.

And in in this sense, affect is incorporated because there's no, I mean, we tend to separate cognition and affect as if, you know, perception is affect free, but it's not.

It's like every, every moment, every thought, every felt experience is valenced, even if it's, you know, close to 0 or, you know, neutral or something.

It's kind of, you know, so that's a level, that's a level of valence.

I think these, you know, these domains are very, very interconnected and I think a great deal of what slowed us down is this like a division of fields and domains and then being studied separately.

It's it's the cortical fallacies, what some people refer to it as just the this obsession with the fact that this visual system has dominated us for so long.

We must somehow incorporate this into every theory of consciousness.

But you're right, I think, I think that that feeling, that fault experience, that subjective experience has to be incorporated into any theory of consciousness within these systems.

I mean us as feeling individuals or beings.

It places us in an intriguing world.

We're social species.

We have to interact, we have to engage.

The social navigation becomes so important.

And your lab has worked quite a bit on the social space.

What you call Can you see exactly what social navigation means for most people and how we can understand these complex human relationships within the social space?

So I think the easiest way to begin to understand it is think about spatial navigation, right?

We walk in space and we do have the machinery in the brain to map the physical environment where we are in a particular place.

So there are neurons place cells, you know, that fire in a particular location or grid cells that fire regularly in a pattern that creates kind of a grid of the environment.

And one idea is that it's not a machinery dedicated only to the physical space, but to organise information more generally.

And in this sense it can be also abstract information can be other sensory modalities.

For example, you can navigate in auditory space or olfactory space whenever you have dimensions and social space also has dimensions.

So it's actually an excellent case of navigation because if we take fundamental dimensions like power and affiliation, which is you know, how much we get close to each other and dominance, power relationships.

These two components are are fundamental for you see it across species and in many psychological theories that describe relationships.

So whenever we interact, first of all interaction is is required.

It's not a snapshot of your network or you know Facebook friends or something.

When we interact, we establish that relationship or location of you relative to me, for example, on these two dimensions.

And as the interactions continue, then there is a path created because people move in relative power and affiliation.

So if you model it like that, you can now have coordinates like real coordinates and you can have a geometric structures and vectors and angles to the social space.

And we theorized that, but then we found that the brand is indeed tracking that we could see changes in the brand that track with the coordinates.

And that I think also relates to to survival and well-being because social others are part of the of the environment and the organisms and work is existing in an environment and interacting with the environment to make sense of the environment and to survive.

Well, you briefly touched on this, but I mean the fact that this is a 2 dimensional experience you and I experiencing right now with each other, we're moving closer and closer to that being a permanent version of reality.

With the way social media works today, how people are constantly stuck behind a screen, engaging online, how do you think this is changing or perhaps causing malfunctioning responses because of these new environments?

How is this impacting our brains?

Obviously I'm not talking from a mental health perspective because you're not a psychiatrist, but actually from the neuroscientific research, what's happening?

Yeah, I think there's a misconception of what our relationship is.

So if you let's say just read posts and post them yourselves and you feel, let's say your status is changing, that's a whole different thing.

That these are not social interactions and there's no movement there.

There's movement of maybe something else like, you know, 1 dimensional liking status or or something like that.

But for a social space to to be represented and for navigation in social space to occur, there has to be actual interactions, like one-on-one interactions that are not a one time interaction.

So in this sense, for example, let's say I know that someone is really powerful.

I don't know the president so that that president is is not in my social space at the moment because we didn't interact.

And actually when we interact that person, although I expected to that person to have a lot of power, wouldn't necessarily, you know, have it maybe like bodies and all that.

So the interaction itself defines the location in the dimensions.

So I think there's a lot of in with social media, there's a illusion of interaction and it it doesn't have the benefits and it's not encoded in the same way.

So I don't have direct empirical evidence, but from what I see from my experiments the the tracking by the brain machinery of of navigation, which is the hippocampus and related regions only occurs when you actually interact, not when you hear social information and or or being passively engaged.

I think that's one of the things that surprise people most is when when you show them the neuroscience beyond what's different from an interaction in person versus what we experience.

I think there were a few studies done years ago that show how we even perceive people differently.

If someone puts on an outfit that let's say they put in a costume of a big on the street, how much, how much less certain parts of their brain react in response to even seeing them.

So just a mere change of an outfit can dehumanize a person.

So.

So there's so many small things about reality that we don't really understand.

And because of our heuristics, certain adaptations, processing power very limited.

It's quite scary to consider the fact that as a social species, we're becoming far less social, and yet we think we're more social than ever.

Does that concern you?

Yes, it's very concerning because the the illusion is very convincing.

It's like, if you think about it, we have relationship with ourselves, right?

And we can quite easily create mental representations of others in our brain and have interactions with that mental representation.

So we do have it in real life because I do represent you in certain ways, like you said, depending on your outfit and how you behave and my prior knowledge.

But I constantly update this based on the interaction.

And ideally, you know, I'm not captive in stereotypes and so forth.

But this is all augmented in online interactions because of the limited information that you have.

So you complemented a lot with your own mental model and this is what you have interaction with, you know, just like a whole bunch of fictional characters that you created in your mind and you you have interactions with them and you also, you don't have a lot of information of how they perceive you, which is very, also very important input that you need to understand a relationship.

Daniela When it comes to species interacting, we know that a lot of interactions can lead to permanent outcomes.

So some if someone gives you a traumatic childhood experience growing up, you'll always remember that experience is a fundamental life changing one.

We briefly touched on the fact that memory and malleability are very much interlinked.

Do you think that someone risks, let's say you change a very traumatic memory and we sort of use some sort of a strategy within psychiatry, whether whether it's myself as a doctor trying to work on someone with CBT, dialectical behavioral therapy, whatever.

Does that risk the person almost losing out on a core memory that perhaps would have otherwise LED them down a different philosophical part?

How do you how do you see these people changing memories?

Or that's that's a pretty deep question.

It's a very complicated ethical issue.

So we, yeah, we, we kind of, I think we all agree that that memories shape us and, and make us who we are.

And there is the concept of growth from trauma, that people become something they never imagined they would be.

So that's a positive value kind of that arises from it.

But but then you wouldn't want to have trauma just because of that, right?

So the, the thing about changing memories is bringing them to the adaptive range.

The the talk about modifying memories in the context of trauma is only when the memory makes you function less.

Well, it's like some people, right?

They suffer and they can't work and it it ruins their social relationships.

It's a has a very serious price.

And in this sense, you want to modify that memory such that you could function with the memory.

So it's not about erasing, it's about living with it in a way that wouldn't you know, interrupt with your, with your daily function.

And in many cases, you could remember the content.

So it's not about erasing the content of the of the event.

It's actually making sense of the content and then having the emotion a bit.

Not, I would say, disconnected, but tolerable when you remember, because all of these processes are are the ones that interfere with with the experience.

Of course, one can take it into let's shape people, people's memories and, and modify and it could go to these, you know, terrible scenarios.

But I think this can happen with with every science And I also, I don't think we're there yet because it it's very subtle what we managed to understand and to modify.

Yeah, I think we thought, I think that's more for Black Maria episode at this point.

It's it's, it's very science fictiony to a point where people, people can postulate as much as they want, but the tech isn't, isn't there.

But I mean, in if we think about that differently, we can think of certain medications that do that within our, within my field, let's say, and and yet we still don't understand the basis of how these things work.

So, so it is one of those fields where there's it's very touch and go.

Daniela, when you look at someone experiencing something, whether it's a felt experience, a subjective core experience, do you find yourself seeing that more of a more as a brain event or bodily event?

Or do you find that to be more of a psychological or a non physical event?

All of the above, like I, I don't separate it at all.

And also I think it's incredibly important not to break it down because as I mentioned early on, it's always important to remember that who is experiencing the, the entity that he's experiencing is an Organism.

So the Organism is not just a neural pathways or nervous system, it's the the body, right?

It's the entire thing.

You have the sensory information coming to input to the body.

And in addition to that, the Organism is embedded in the environment.

So it really matters where the Organism is because it changes, you know, the relative survival ratio or whatever.

The Organism will even compute.

Also, the senses are important.

Different animals have different senses, so even if they're in the same environment, they will each have a different environment depending on what they sense.

And in addition to that, to have an environment, the Organism has to operate, it has to interact with the environment, has to perceive it, which is an action in itself, and create the environment such that the Organism could interact with it.

So you see it's a very iterative, convoluted process that incorporates all of these.

There's the Organism in it's entirety and it's and it's interaction with the environment.

All of these are the experience.

Yes, it's very similar to the approach taken by the four East Cogsai.

Yes, exactly.

Yes.

Embedded.

Embodied.

Yes.

And the enacted and extended the mere fact that we've got a cell phone.

So it forms part of who we are at this point.

And without our cell phones, we're actually a lot Dumber than we think we are.

And we just everyday.

Are there any parts, Daniel, when you when you guys are working in the lab, when you guys are doing your research, how often do you guys ponder the philosophical questions?

I mean like the what is consciousness?

What is free world?

Do you guys ever sit down and discuss this?

Is it something that comes up or is that just for the couch philosophers at home?

And so surprisingly, we, we do it quite a lot.

And so because we did write the human Affectum.

So human Affectum is an exercise in incorporating philosophy into science.

And it's also a really nice example of how philosophy really helps you organize.

What is it that you learn, even organize the field and especially putting all the researchers on the same platforms such that they and also give them joint language such that they will be able to communicate.

And because that experience we in our paper is that we had a table that expands kind of all the like components of assumptions that go into scientific research like metaphysical assumptions, pragmatic considerations, also theoretical virtues.

What is it that you yourself perceive as a good theory so that all these like, you know, something like 7 rows and we put the affected field into that.

So the exercise we started doing with the graduate students is have them fill out this table, basically identify their different assumptions, philosophical assumptions, you know, mechanistic operationalization, construct pragmatic and, and do that in their own field, in their own thesis topic.

And that was a really wonderful experience because it's a simple exercise, but it kind of fundamentally change how you think of your research.

It really helps you organize.

It also helps you communicate and also makes you aware of many things you took for granted or either didn't think about or once you think about it really enlightens your understanding of what you do.

So I'm, I'm like, I'm a really big fan of incorporating philosophy into science.

And this year we're going to do the course again and maybe we'll write something to share, you know, the, the syllabus with, with other people if they're interested.

I think that's a brilliant approach.

It's, I think it's very underrated within science when well, when you do do that, you realize the normativity and the, and the amount of biases and fallacies we have when we think about our own field.

And it's, and you're right, it gives us that common language to sort of dissect what we're talking about, how we're discussing it, why we have the similar bias that we might have and, and, and then move beyond it.

So I, I do think it's almost like a tool for science and and it can only augment it.

Yes, like once you do it, you can't believe you didn't do it before.

And it's like, how did we even survive without it?

So I, I do hope we will do it more and more and we'll be more aware of it.

Another nice benefit is that sometimes when you think they're competing theories, or I don't know, maybe you have like a nemesis theory, you actually don't argue at all because you really study different things.

So there's no competition whatsoever.

You're actually really complementing each other.

So that really changes also the kind of social dynamics in the field.

Speaking of those social dynamics, when you look at the field of neuroscience right now and your work and the work people like you are doing in the field, is there anything in particular that excites you right now?

It's it's 2025, there's so much going on.

We're exponential growths in neuroscience research.

What excites you the most?

Wow, there's a a lot so well, one thing is that from my experience, we that we started doing, but people have been doing for quite a while now is studying the human brain with inter cerebral recordings because we have access with epilepsy patients that while they're being just, you know, waiting to for it.

So epilepsy patients, they will come to the hospital and kind of stay there for about a week.

They will have electrodes implemented and wait for a seizure to happen.

And this helps the neurosurgeon identify the source of the seizure and then map it and target it in an invasive procedure later on.

But for a few days, they're just there with electrodes in their brain.

And so they, they volunteered to do some studies.

And that gives us really unparalleled access to the human brain, something that we could just do with animals.

But the added value of doing it in humans is that now you can do things like the social navigation and you can look at just them talking, you know, natural language, even interacting.

So this, this is just kind of, you don't see a lot of that.

It's the beginning, but this is very exciting and you can combine that or do it separately with virtual reality and augmented reality.

So experiments become more and more naturalistic and closer to the real life experiment, real life experience, which is very important, especially in relation to trauma.

For example, we had a study where we asked people with PTSD to listen to our recording that describes their own personal trauma versus a regular memory.

So you can imagine someone is in the fMRI scanner and we can look at the room when they while they listen to something like that, you know, someone just talking, but describing a personal experience, then we can compare it to non personal experience and also, but it's, it's very, very naturalistic and it's their own personal memory.

And this is something you couldn't study before because what we do, usually we bring everybody to the lab and they all have the same experience, which is very controlled, like looking at the stimulus on a computer, making that stimulus scary.

But it's all very controlled and organized.

But really what you're interested in is the personal trauma.

So now we can begin to see how it gives us access to that.

And because we have this sophisticated also analytical methods and machine learning and we have ways now to manage complicated data and massive data and we just begin kind of to see the, the use of it in science.

So I think that's, that's really exciting.

That's why I said like, you know, I said like because I was just imagine, you know, like many, many studies now for the, the next 10 years.

Back when you started, did you did you ever think that AI would begin to assist neuroscience in the way it has in the last few years?

No, not at all.

It's like a I didn't, I didn't even imagine that it was really just the the plain old science with control conditions and simple conditions and clean, you know, out of any you.

It's kind of interesting because there's a phenomenon of interest and what you do in one approach is kind of strip, strip everything out of it such that you can isolate it and look at it.

And now what we do is, is really tuck it in the, the mass of life.

But if we do manage to track it or we believe it exists, like for example, that computation that I mentioned, like geometric structure of social navigation, we should be able to track it out of all the mess.

So it actually, if it exists, it should arise with, with all of this noise because it's ordering the noise.

So I find it very, very compelling.

And I still think that there's room for both, right?

There's like the classic way and kind of the new way.

I also see many students, which is very nice to see that they combine advisors.

So they have like advisors that do like more naturalistic stuff.

And then the, the more kind of conservative advisors that do the more organized stuff because they themselves see that you do need both kind of, you don't need the, the very clear and organized analytical thinking of an experimental design, but also the, the flexibility and I guess somewhat creativity of incorporating the, the experience.

Another thing that is important is that we used to think that you translate animal work to human work.

It has to be exactly the same.

And that had a lot of problems because it's very hard for it to be exactly the same.

So even with fear conditioning or you have a stimulus paired with, let's say, an electric shock, and you do it in animals and in humans, still humans, you know, they have expectations.

They are really influenced by the context.

They kind of overthink.

They're really influenced by the instructions that you give them.

So it will never be identical.

But I think if there's a principle of, let's say, navigation, you could find it in humans in a whole different way, but it will still be exactly the same computation.

You just arrive at it from the human experience.

So it doesn't have to be exactly identical, as long as the what you really isolate is the computation itself or the representation that you're trying to capture.

When we think of these, I mean it's these soft skills that sort of separate us from from machines at this point.

When you think about how far it's come and where it's going, do you think we'll ever reach a point where some sort of an electrical or silicon system can reach the complexity of a brain?

I mean, it's 20, it's 2% of our body's mass, and yet 20% of our body's energy is consumed.

And at what point will a system be able to do that at a more efficient rate and sort of produce these experiences similar to us?

Do you think that's possible firstly, and and what are your thoughts on when that might happen if so?

Yeah.

Well, there, there the technical aspects of it that, you know, the current systems, they just get heated and that's it's a big problem.

I know that there's, you know, nanophotonics, it's supposed to be much more effective in terms of, you know, saving this like temperature problem.

So maybe maybe something will be there.

But in terms of, I don't know, if you're asking about something that is more similar to the brain, it might have to be, you know, with organic matter.

Or if we want, if you want to talk about conscious machines, as long as they're not embedded in the environment and have to produce their own material like an Organism.

And there will always be kind of this fundamental barrier between considering what is conscious and what not.

Yeah, I think that's some people call it mortal computation.

That's sort of the fact that we will die and we have to sort of live to we have to do things within this universe to survive and keep ourselves alive and thrive is a fundamental part of being the conscious being at this point and and most systems don't have that or most mechanistic ones.

Yeah.

I mean you, you could say that this is the like the perfect question of purpose that that I mentioned early on.

This is what the Organism is doing and this is where you find kind of consciousness and, and affect and the content of consciousness.

It's exactly for that, you know, to, to exist, to reproduce your own material, to be independent, a separate unit from the environment, but interacting with the environment and whatever you do is for the sake of continuing to be right.

And for this, you have representations of the environment and you can, you can have abstraction, which is this added ability that we can find, you know, more confidently in humans, maybe in other animals as well, which really expands your, your field of relevance of what you can interact with in the environment.

These are kind of all levels of, of evolution.

But so, so these are, this is where you find consciousness.

It's like for, for that purpose, you know, you could say.

So if we don't have it in machine, then I think it will be difficult to to conclude that it's similar to conscious Organism.

But I don't know it's, it's a really complicated debate.

So.

Yeah, no, it's it's one of those things that keep me up at night.

What are one of the other things would be free will.

What The channel explores that quite thoroughly.

What are your thoughts on that from a neuroscience perspective, do you believe?

I mean, I know it's a complicated question and even asking if do we have free will is quite simplistic.

But when you think about will freedom of choice and just having this, what do you think about free will?

It's funny, it's like everybody, you know, come with their own like real solution to like the most complicated.

The problem is that if if you think you have a solution, you probably don't understand the problem, right?

So you're always risking it.

But I think there's like something to do with probabilities.

I guess it's, I guess it's weird thing to say, but there's a problem with determinism, right?

That there's one thing leads to another and there therefore we don't have free will.

It's kind of it's all determined.

But we do find situations in the world where they call it like the land of equal probabilities where equal, you know, it's like, but you still need to make a choice.

So yeah, I'm just like, I'm wondering if the fact that we make a choice from equal land of landscape of probabilities is the sense of free will or.

So it's a sort of, yeah.

But it's, it's really just like my, my science fiction theory, right?

That's where I stand.

But I, I think I would be curious to see where it goes in terms of choosing from that.

That's the kind of the, the essence of free will, right?

The fact that you have a choice.

But growing up in Israel, did you find that you always wanted to be a neuroscientist?

Was that something that was always on your mind, or was that something that just happened while delving into the philosophy of mind over time?

I think, I mean, I don't know who is the person that really plans their future.

I don't think it exists really.

It's just in retrospect and it's sometimes it seems like everything was planned because one thing builds on another.

It's like just so nicely crafted, but it's like absolutely not.

It's like you really take it day by day.

I had in each stage I had no idea if even and how I Will Survive the next and whether it would lead to anything else.

Also it it, it's not like I had like a world view of I want to study this and that just like every moment I was interested in something.

And and I think because you follow your passion, then you're consistent.

You see, you're not first consistent.

It's like you just do whatever at the moment is the most important to you.

And because it's you and you, you do have some, some passions and interests, then then one thing leads to another and become a very coherent actually path.

But yeah, no, I mean, I was really interested in, in astronomy and astrophysics.

That that was my passion as a child.

And I always thought I would go in that direction.

There's there was no science like space program or something when I grew up.

So I just, you know, I ended up, I found myself sort of in the, the field of neuroscience, which was like the next best thing, you know, in terms of being complicated.

Yeah.

In retrospect, it does reflect what what I was always curious about.

But it just you, if you just follow your passion, you'll find your path as opposed to plan your path ahead of time.

We're exactly the same in that, because when I was younger, that's the same thing that happened to me.

I wanted to be an astrophysicist.

And then eventually he found myself going down the route of mental health and medicine.

And then because I felt like the mind was studying, the brain would be the closest thing to that, which is strange because it's, but yet it is.

It's fundamentally a universe in itself.

Yeah.

I mean, I can.

I can.

I think I did have one, at least one philosophical approach that that I was aware of early on, which is how I treated fear because my interest in fear was about related to freedom because I just felt it's very limiting.

You're trapped in your fear and also trapped in memories.

So I found or thought that overcoming fear is really about liberating liberation, kind of just removing obstacles.

That that's how I I treated fear, you know, Speaking of free will, you know, you don't want something to dictate.

It's like something external that dictates whatever you do.

So it's really about freedom.

And, and has that changed over the years or do you still find that sort of liberation when you talk about breaking away from fear and like helping people with that with your work and research?

Yes, it even expanded because now it it goes to everything.

It's about our emotions and about our memories.

So I did have a fundamental change in how I think about memories because, you know, you grew up thinking that memories are who you are and you don't even doubt them.

It's just like a story that you're stuck with.

And it's just like repeating, you know, you always have this like memory in mind and, and it's who you are and it's your life experience.

And now it's like it's nothing, nothing at all because first of all, it's just it's a choice.

You know, whatever you remember is a choice and how you remember it is a choice.

And, and also it's a possibility.

It's not, you're not entirely sure that this is what happened.

So in a way, just like you predicted the future, you always, you almost like predict the past.

You can have an hypothesis about the past.

So it's an option now.

And so it's not, it's not self defining anymore.

And also the fact that emotions are are information in a way and also they could be flexible.

Then you also started having a relationship with your memory and with your emotion as opposed to just operating at every given moment.

If you have a memory, then it gives you information.

It's like, why do I remember it now?

It actually tells you a lot about your situation now as opposed to what actually happened before.

That's the most important information that it it gives you and emotions.

It's like if you're afraid, it's like, because people can say, yeah, but I can't do it because I'm afraid.

And that's it.

You know, it's like, no, but it's not.

You can still have a relationship with that fear, right?

You can, you don't necessarily have to feel like that or you can do something despite of that or so all of these like self defining aspects of your life are not defining anymore.

And in a way, you become this first spirit, that kind of liberated creature that you kind of create yourself every moment in a way by interacting with these entities.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's crazy because when you think about when people talk about prior information dictating the posterior outcomes or conclusions, yeah, what you're saying is almost like it's it's actually, we have these posterior conclusions that we keep making that actually dictate the posterior conclusions.

So this choice is all the way down.

I'd never stop.

And every, at every point we want to stop and actually ask another question.

We can fundamentally change the conclusion in an instant, actually.

Or maybe not in an instance of the time at least.

Yeah.

And, and also another thought I had that is also a more recent insight of sorts is that so first you, you have the story of your life, right?

And then the next stage is like, well, maybe it's not the story of my life, right?

You can start to doubt the story and you kind of see that it's modifiable and it's flexible.

It's not the absolute truth.

And you really learn about the moment and who you are now and what, what you need.

And then the next stage is, is not committing to any story.

It's actually living with multiple stories.

And I have kind of a, you know, pet theory like like with the consciousness and the free that it's actually very adaptive to have a wide range of options.

So the more stories you have about yourself or the possibilities, the better.

Because if you just, you know, commit to 1 storyline, it's very restrictive.

If like two or three, it's fine.

But if you it's like at any given moment, it's like you treat everything as like possibilities and, and one is like more probable or more coherent or makes sense or something.

But you're kind of very flexible with that too.

Yeah.

So, and that makes sense because when you think of certain theories that were told back in the day, when you think about certain narcissists or pathological liars and you see how prior to the invention of proof or like photography, videography, you could get away with so much.

And, and it was often a trait that helped them evolutionary to get through lots of things.

You could lie your way through anything.

There was no form of evidence out there.

People weren't keeping track.

And then over time, as the as digital media progressed, as this proof, as we have notes and and prior information, now it's not actually not working as much.

But you can tell how having that ability to almost lie on demand, being able to be malleable as a character, be a chameleon, do whatever you need to do, would actually benefit you in so many ways.

Because you can literally drop into a different country, pretend like you're from there.

Yeah, yeah.

But but there's a there's a caveat.

So I'm glad you you gave that example because it's, it's not what I meant to so, so I'm glad you you went there so that now I can clarify.

So it's not about inventing your life as you go.

It's it's actually, I believe that this is how you become the most authentic and true to yourself.

You see, I mean, there's still a you there that because there's still the end, the you that have the interaction with the memory.

It's just what the only thing I'm saying is that it, it doesn't, it's not forced upon you anymore or it becomes information rather than a ready made or because you, you never chose it in a way if you just have your storylines like my childhood was like this and this one did this to me.

And then that's what I am now.

Now it's like, you know, well, maybe not, or maybe I can look at it differently, or maybe now I have more information or maybe I can find a way not to be afraid.

But you, you see, you just like become more like an, an artist with a lot of material.

Yeah, it's kind of like a refresh.

It's kind of like reframing because it's almost like uncaging yourself and remembering a lot more as has actually happened to you.

Let's say the day that you had a traumatic experience, they might have been the most beautiful sunset that occurred the same night.

And you could always rewire that into a different thought, like, OK, that day was more about this beautiful sunset or I am I close to but what you're talking about.

Or yeah, because what I want to say is that it's not less true.

Yeah, so, so unlike the the confabulating person, I mean, that person is doesn't have even a stable self, right?

It's like you don't know who that person is.

They're just like moment by moment.

Actually they they are, they're like changing by the moment depending on the moment.

And and I'm talking about actually resisting that.

You see, because it's like you, you're not your emotions in your emotions are not something that are just there.

It's like I have this emotion.

You see, you sort of free yourself and now you have like a lot of choice, or at least you interact with it as opposed to it's like floating it's.

Almost like you're detaching from yourself, but you're detaching from that moment rather so, so unlike the confabulator, the psychopath, you know, you're not becoming new people each time, but you're, you're aligning your stories to parts that you kind of want to go on and that have actually happened.

And you're just navigating through that territory rather than the one that brought you down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think I like to think about it.

I like the artist example because it's like you just have more material to work with to shape your life.

Is it is it ever been a concern that you get so caught up in the artwork you forget what the canvas look like when it started?

I think not, because I think this process actually makes your core stronger because you, you access the core, which is the the thing, you know, that it interacts with all the things and consider them, you know, and, and also it's, it's not a lot of it sounds very cerebral, but it's, it's not, it's not entirely like that.

It's really about, you know, like like music when you sort of improvise and, and you, you have like a way to kind of so you listen and then you go in a certain way, but but you keep listening and then you go in another way.

So.

Like jazz in that.

Result.

Yeah, yeah.

It's more like that.

Tell me, Daniella, with within this field, such a diverse neuroscience is such a diverse field, a lot of people don't realize it.

I mean, it forms bases of so many different things.

It can be economics, it can go down to the subatomic level.

It can go into chemistry, whatever.

Which parts about neuroscience or the brain are you most passionate about right now and and what are you most looking forward to in the future of neuroscience?

I'm kind of, I'm excited about, well, the mind.

So I would say mental actions because I'm kind of leaning toward a view that really merges cognition and affect.

So I wouldn't say I'm interested in affect.

It's, it's really about this subjective experience or felt experience and you have these different components.

So the, it's really all of the above.

So there's the neurobiological, they're literally, even before that, the very physical, you know, network of an Organism, which is like how units interact and produce materials so that it's like the, the very, these very basic systems.

And then on top of that, you start to have the mental actions, which is perception, attention, sensory information.

It's like the components and layered on it is is affect which is the experience of the entire Organism.

So in a way the cognitive processes that we studied them separately now are the components that comprise the the agent as a whole.

And the agent as a whole has this like global computation that can then constrain the the cognitive aspect.

So for example, if you have the concern of, of threat, if you go back to fear as an Organism, it will constrain your, all of your processes.

So you will perceive things differently.

You will be attuned to different types of information in a different way.

All of your, your body and processes are adjusted.

So you can think about it as like these global computations versus local computations.

And they're, they're all interacting.

So I would say I'm looking forward to to working in that more global interactive space where the different researchers are communicating because they're all in the same context, you know, of the Organism in this particular affective States and the affective states are, are inseparable.

They're not like this additional process, you know, sparkled on a on a cognitive process.

It's it's just considering the entire Organism A computation that has the agent as the the carrier of the computation.

Yeah, it's and, and when you think about this fault experience, I mean this feeling of reality.

And I mean, because it's easy to think of someone thinking or having a thought, but feeling, I mean, we're always doing it.

We feel, we feel our way through everything.

Which other species do you think if if it was not a human brain that you were studying now, what would be the next best brain you'd love to to sort of get your hands on?

You could possibly want to study that that you find intrigues your most except for a human.

Yeah, I think there's actually more that we don't know.

I I read this book like, you know, many people read it from Ed Young, this immense world.

It's a mind boggling and it's a it's a little bit even scary what you what you kind of find in these like different other options of consciousness.

Even I read like this, this little actually title that like some people really like cockroaches and they think they're like way more intelligent and they can like even look at you, you know.

So I think we don't know a lot, but it's like from what we know, I'm really curious about actually the very social species, like elephants I think are just like amazing and dolphins and, well, octopuses now we also know a lot more.

So, yeah, all the things that you can have like a relationship with and you feel there's someone there with dogs, obviously.

So yeah, this would be my first chance.

Will be an elephant, I think.

And I think that's, that's one of the nice things about having feeling or affect as this as a more core principle within this framework you're talking about is because it's sort of allows us to have more species on our, on the hierarchy, let's say evolutionary, because we often just anything without a cortex, we sort of we're done with it.

But actually, when you think about it, a lot of species can feel their way through reality without this, without a prefrontal cortex, without any cortical aspects as well.

So even though we might not understand the way an octopus works or anything without a cortex is a is still feeling it's way through reality.

So we're giving more things consciousness with that approach in essence.

Yeah.

And I wouldn't necessarily separate thoughts and feelings, everything.

When you have a thought, it's a felt state.

So it's a felt experience.

So yeah, I think in this way, the more I dived into affect, the more it seems like actually encompassing actually all of cognition.

So it, it become, become less, you know, more and more kind of inclusive of, of everything and, and became something else, not another process, but that global process that I, I mentioned.

If you, Danielle, if you had to have a sort of a Mount Rushmore favorite neuroscientist, who would they be?

Who inspired you most?

Or who do you recommend people check out?

Except for yourself, of course.

Oh, I had.

Jeez, you caught me there.

I have to think about it.

Oh, no pressure Does anyone who inspires you, people you think about, people who maybe got you into it.

I know one of mine is Oliver Sacks.

He's someone I really love and actually like.

Probably one of the reasons why I do this podcast.

I don't know if you're familiar with Oliver.

I'm assuming you are.

Yeah, I mean, he's amazing.

He like is a person that sees the humanity in people.

It's just like I feel like I'm inspired on a daily basis from, from many, many also, you know, from physicists and mathematicians, so.

Brought in that let's make it like who are the scientists who or philosophers who've inspired you or shaped your worldview to a point where they they really shaped your career and who you are?

I I have to think about it.

It's fine.

It is like a great many and kind of it's hard to choose, but it's like I feel I have I have an answer for that, but but I want to think about it like more deeply.

That that's completely fine.

If if any recommended reading, though, Daniella, do you think that if someone's looking at to get into this field, do you think that you can think of any books that you'd recommend people who want to fall in love with neuroscience or and and just falling in love with the mind in general.

Is that something you also need?

Some thoughts?

Well, I think Oliver Sacks definitely will be top of the list.

And well, I, I really look up to my a postdoc commenter, Joseph Ledoux is like the fun of the founding fathers of the emotional brain.

And yeah, I think, well, he would definitely be a person that inspired me a lot because he's very poetic about how he views the the brain and emotion.

He keeps evolving.

He has an amazing way of expressing himself himself.

He's also a musician.

So you it's very pleasant to read what he writes, almost like listening to music.

There's some this like lightness, but but extreme depth and I think he did a lot.

He pretty much one of the, you know, first few that that started shaping the field of the emotional brain and emotional neuroscience and brought us where we are now.

So yeah, I would say I would recommend him.

He's he has several books, very recent ones.

He's also working on a memoir.

So I think there's more to read.

And now he's, he's really dealing with consciousness.

So for him also emotion led him to to consciousness.

So I would start with him and I would say he's he's definitely one of the scientists that inspired me most.

Yes.

And Danielle, just a round off if, what work should we look out for in your from your lab in the future that's really exciting you at the moment.

And and then from there, we'll slowly round off.

I'm excited about where the social space will take us in terms of the neural mechanisms, if you can dig more and more to find neurons and how they encode this navigation in abstract space.

So we're heading there.

And also more into naturalistic experiences of of threat and fear and trauma.

And to use that, I'm going to use language models and more sophisticated machine learning based analysis to analyse naturalistic behaviour, especially related to fear.

Daniles, was there anything about your work in general that you feel you've you've always wanted to talk about it never got the chance really express and tell people of the excitement that perhaps you'd like to or or do you feel that I might have not asked about that's really cool and people should know about.

Yeah, I think the, the reconsolidation aspect, we, we didn't mention the, the word, but you know, modifying memories and, and navigating social space.

I think now I'm also merging them, starting to merge them to see how the affect is incorporated into the social space or social behaviour is a form of affective experience that needs to be modified and updated.

So it's, it's about identifying these like core, core memories and then finding a way to modify them and then track the change.

And I think the human effect, which we we published just recently, I'm very excited about that and want to see how where it will lead us and I hope it will be useful for the field.

I'll definitely put a link to that below as well.

Thank you so much, Danielle.

I really appreciate your time.

Before we end, is there anything about the brain you ping?

If you if you were to conclude this, what is the one thing you'd like to tell people about the brain that they should know and remember at the end of this conversation, or the human experience with your knowledge in mind?

Yeah, I would say the the most interesting aspect that people should be aware of is the malleability of it, the the flexibility of it and the degree of choice that we have.

So like breaking free from the self defining memories and emotional patterns and starting to interact with them to find who you are underneath.

Beautiful.

Thanks so much, Daniela.

I really appreciate your time.

This was an absolute pleasure and you keep up the great work.

You guys are incredible and it's always a pleasure to watch you guys from the outside and see the incredible work that's being put out.

So keep it up and thank you for my side.

Yeah, Thank you.

Thank you.

It was a great conversation.