Amherst Reads Transcript

Lisa Raskin: Good afternoon, I’m Lisa Raskin, professor of psychology and neuroscience here at Amherst, and I have the honor of speaking here today with Dr. David Kessler. I’ve known David for many years, I had the privilege of being in the administration when… David, you were on the Board of Trustees from 1999 to 2011, is that right?

David Kessler: Two terms, twelve years.

LR: Wow. [Laughs] That’s great. Well, we overlapped for… I dunno, maybe four or five of those years, and I remember spending a lot of time talking to you on the instruction committee. And it was terrific.

DK: Same here.

LR: Thank you. Well, thank you so much for participating in Amherst Reads. Most people don’t really need an introduction to you, but if you don’t mind I’m just going to give a very brief synopsis to our alums as one of our very extraordinary accomplished alums. So, Dr. Kessler is a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology and biostatistics at the School of Medicine at UC-San Francisco. You – he – was the dean of the School of Medicine and vice chancellor for medical affairs at UCSF from 2003-2007, dean of Yale’s School of Medicine from 1997-2003… we all know that you, David, served as a commissioner for the United States Food and Drug Administration from November 1990-March 1997. So in other words, David Kessler is a hero. Just want to make that clear. [Laughs] As commissioner of the FDA, you were enormously successful. You acted with speedy approval on new drugs and promising therapies. Under your direction, you announced new programs regulating the sale of tobacco for children, and new nutritional labeling for food. A lot of people say that you singlehandedly… you singlehandedly, I don’t want to say took down, but singlehandedly changed the tobacco industry. According to the New York Times, you revitalized a beleaguered agency that had become mired in bureaucratic disarray. You have a range of experience in research, clinical medicine, education, administration. You graduated from Amherst in 1973, but I don’t actually know what your major was. Were you… biology?

DK: No, it was a time when we didn’t have majors. We were allowed to be… remember this, independent scholar?

LR: Oh, you were an independent scholar! Oh, that’s great. Well, later on, I want to ask you some questions about that Amherst. Phi Betta Kappa graduate of Amherst, you received your Law degree from University of Chicago in 1978 where you were a member of law review, and your MD from Harvard Medical School in ’79. Your internship residency in pediatrics was at John’s Hopkins. You’re the author of numerous research papers, including now three important books. The End of Overeating I read twice, I loved it. Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, it was an instant New York Times best seller. And before that, A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry. You’re the recipient of so many awards I couldn’t even begin to list them, but I will list a few. American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, American Academy of Pediatrics Excellence in Public Service Award, and my favorite is the 2008 National Hero Award, from the School of Public Health at UC-Berkeley. With that introduction, it’s just wonderful to have you, and we’re going to be talking today about your newest book, Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering. I so enjoyed reading your book, just as I enjoyed the previous two. Absolutely beautifully written, and extremely absorbing, and I love the way you pull together literature and neuroscience and psychology and philosophy, it’s just remarkable. So, I just thought I would begin by asking you to explain to others the concept of “capture”, for those who haven’t yet read the book and don’t have a background in any of those fields I just mentioned?

DK: You know, the hypothesis is that there is a common mechanism that underlies many of our emotional struggles, and mental illnesses. That in itself, I understand, is a pretty… bold statement. Simply put, a stimulus. It could be a place, a thought, a memory, an object, a person. Something takes hold of our attention, and there’s a shift in our perception. But the theory of capture really is composed of the three elements: there’s a narrowing of attention, something seizes our attention, there’s a connection, there’s a change in affect. It’s not that I just attend to something different – it makes me feel differently, and there can be, doesn’t have to be, a perceived lack of control. We may sense a mental shift, but we don’t necessarily understand where it comes from when it happens. So the experience occurs outside our conscious control, and we sort of surrender to it before we even perceive that it’s going on.

LR: I was going to ask you something about how much of it you thought of it was conscious and how much was unconscious? Not unconscious in the Freudian sense, but… unconscious as in a thing that’s out of awareness.

DK: I think it starts out of awareness. There’s an automaticity to the process. Of course, you know, why do I attend to certain things? There can be… you know, the simplest level, something becomes salient. What do I mean by that? Something becomes important, something has meaning. It could be just the brightness, a color, a shape, a motion, a novelty, can all give an object salience. So if I’m a bird and I’m flying overhead, in order to be able to detect food, motion becomes very salient. Something that is all of a sudden coming at me, something that looks very different – maybe there’s a physical aspect to that salience. But it’s also salience in powerful desires, immediate or distant goals, attitudes, major life events. So anything that can have meaning from it can become salient.

LR: Salience means something very important to both of us, but for those who don’t know what that means, it’s something particularly grabbing or particularly important.

DK: Right. And how does something become particularly important? So obviously, a bright light, there may be a biological mechanism, or something differentiates it, a color. But the salience of a stimulus is heavily influenced by how, in essence, it relates to what’s important to me. What’s my personal experience? So past learning and past memory, what do I remember, what do any of us remember. We remember what’s salient, something that sticks out, something that’s out of the ordinary. And especially what has meaning for me. Because what’s salient for me may be very different from what’s salient for you. So past learning, past experience, past memories, shape what I’m going to attend to. And I think that if you understand the neuro wiring… we’re still learning how it actually works, because we’re really talking about the emotional core of our brain, but I think there’s an automaticity based on that past learning and past memory. I’m very good, whether it’s learning exactly what the circuits a, whether they’re motivational circuits, I can attend out of all the stimuli that are bombarding me, I can only focus on certain things, we can only attend to certain stimuli. We can’t attend to the thousands of things in our environment that every second. So I’m going to be able to pick out, attend to certain things that are important to me because of past learning and past memory. And I think, I cue into those stimuli, I think there’s an automaticity. I think that’s how the process begins. So--

LR: In--

DK: Sorry.

LR: No, I was just thinking. There’s a conscious awareness of stimuli, then an unconscious awareness of stimuli, then there are those stimuli that don’t even get processed. But you know, so many stimuli I think do get processed unconsciously because they are meaningful to the subject. And then, because we are bombarded with stimuli, and yet some of it does fall to the periphery, some of it we know we’re looking at, and other things… I mean there’s so many studies now that show, people are looking at something and they don’t see it, and yet they recognize it later. They say they don’t see it, and then they recognize it later.

DK: And these are moments when that cue, where my attention is grabbed. And it could just be a second or even less, a millisecond, where it does come into conscious control. But something grabs me. And I think that is one of the key aspects of attention, that things are grabbing us because they have meaning, because of past experience. At least that’s the hypothesis. But it’s not… I don’t think capture is just the grabbing of attention. Because then, why would it really affect us? We could then move our attention. I think it was… remember, we all learned, about a reinforcer. And what’s a reinforcer? What we all learn, the rats press the lever for rewards… this was, you know him very well, the great Gerome Kegan, the developmental psychologist at Harvard, who you… I think studied with, right?

LR: Rose studied with him. But I did what is called Developmental Psychobiology, which is the development of the brain and behavior. So my next question was gonna be, how early does this start.

DK: But you know, what Kegan told me, was that… what really makes a reinforcer is something that can change how I feel. And that moment really still sticks with me. Because… you always thought the rat will press a lever for sweetness, well, the sweetness can have an affective component, and it can make me feel better. Things can make me either, things that I attend to, are things that I think will either make me feel better or feel worse. So… I mean, I will remember those things, those things are memorable, are things that can have an effect on how I feel. Both positively and negatively.

LR: I think I would say that of the elements that you talked about, first is the narrowing of attention, second would be the change in the emotional state, and third would be the perceived lack of control. Like I can’t resist. You hear people, and you wrote about this in your second book, I can’t resist that sugar. I can’t resist that nicotine. And so there’s the lack of control, which comes after the narrowing of attention and that change in the emotional state.

DK: My hand grabs and reaches for that chocolate chip cookie, before I even think “do I want that chocolate chip cookie?”.

LR: That’s right, that’s right. I’m just gonna say something that, I heard this and you probably have heard it too and you’ll love it: between the stimulus and the response is freedom. Isn’t that great?

DK: Now that’s… that’s key.

LR: Yeah!

DK: We’re talking about… the different areas of the brain. It’s not that I really lose control, I can change what I want to do, but there are circuits, these automatic circuits. But there’s always a moment, I think, maybe, if I’m right, where the more rational… the higher cortical levels, the higher cortical circuits, allow me to at least possibly change course. So I mean, I’m stimulated, I’m aroused, I feel a certain way, I’ve not yet acted, my hands have not yet reached, I’ve not done anything. But can I alter that stimulus response? But the question is, some stimuli becomes so strong, and so powerful, and those circuits become in essence… the more we engage in that experience, the more learning that occurs, those circuits become… it is Hebb’s Rule, right? There’s things that constantly are fired, wired together, and that… there may be in certain instances, very strong stimuli, after repeated experiences, there’s that opportunity for freedom… probably we sense there’s very little opening. But that’s the hope, in this. Right?

LR: I actually recently started teaching Introduction to Psychology, which I never taught, I always taught the Bio-psych part. But now I teach the broad class, and I begin by asking my students: who in the class thinks he or she has free will? And I don’t mean free will independent of a God, I mean free will. That all the decisions you’re making are decisions you’re making because you’ve thought about them. And some kids actually say that they do, and I say: forget it. By the time that you are… by the time they are their age, they have had so much experience. That isn’t to say there isn’t any, but the time they get to their young adulthood, they have not only had their behaviors reinforced in a certain way, their neurons have been connected, joined in a certain way, and if you think about how long it takes for an aplysia to learn one reflex, one response, just multiply that by a billion and… changing human behavior would seem pretty difficult. So you’d think.

DK: You may want to tell our listeners about aplysia.

LR: Oh thank you, yes. Oh, well, like, they’re snails. And the Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel was the first person to publish articles showing how neurons change in response to a stimulus and response, and reinforcement, he used those snails because they have a finite number of neurons that can be identified and actually reported from. So that’s how we know… that’s the beginning of the neural basis of learning, which is what we’re really talking about, it’s shaping behavior.

DK: It’s certainly the learning circuit. It’s certainly the memory circuit. And there’s probably certain motivational circuits. You know, for the neuroscientist who may be listening, are we talking about D2 receptors or D3 receptors, and what are the inhibitory effects on those dopamine neurons… and I think also, probably, they just gain attention. They certainly help reinforce what becomes salient to you.

LR: And the amygdala, which is sort of the limbic system which, as people would say is kind of part of the animal brain, and mediates aggression and even attachment, is a structure that changes with experience.

DK: So you just said something very significant. Because you talked about both aggression, fear, and then also the counter – was it learning?

LR: Mostly fear, but certain limbic areas of the hypothalamus do respond to attachment.

DK: Oh, attachment, that’s right. But attachment can be positive, right?

LR: Oh, yes.

DK: So we used to think of the amygdala as only the negative sort of experiences. The things that are salient that are negative. The things that give me fear. But what we learn, and this was from our work on eating, the people who have this condition hyper-eating, people who are constantly reacting to food, they have excessive activation of the amygdala both when they’re cued and as they’re eating. So salient things cannot just be negative, but they can be positive.

LR: That’s how we grow up and have attachment to our significant other, family members, mothers, fathers. That bonding happens immediately and is crucial.

DK: So is capture… again, the focus of the book, capture is on both the negative, the things that cause us distress, but also can be the positive things. If it’s attachment, what about love?

LR: Right.

DK: What is that? How does love capture my attention? It makes me feel a certain way. You know, one of the hard parts that I encounter with… the idea of capture started with nicotine, because I had to learn everything about addiction, and what is addiction. Right? I mean, it’s cue-induced wanting. Based on past learning or past experience, whether it’s a drug or a food or a certain behavior I engage in, and it can affect how I feel and the next time I get exposed to that same cue of that drug or that food, I arouse those same circuitry and then I get caught in this cycle. So everything really grew out… it started with nicotine, why does that cigarette, why do I pick up that one and then seven hundred and eighty thousand more for the rest of my life? And why does that nicotine have such power? Why does that chocolate chip cookie, so I went to food. And doing the book, I wanted to explore this concept of capture, this seizing of our attention, this change in how we feel, and what were the limits. So the book started out… I wanted to explore the thing that was most important to me was to try and show how we’re all vulnerable to capture. That was the first… this is not, it’s not that we’re broken. This is the way we’re wired. And the book… after I did the eating book, and sort of focusing on this concept, I became very interested, as you know, one of our fellow colleagues David Foster Wallace and his depression, because he wrote about his depression. And he didn’t understand the neural circuitry.

LR: You didn’t know him, right? Or did you know him?

DK: I didn’t know him. He was about a decade after me.

LR: Uh-huh.

DK: But I got to know his parents well, I got to know his sister well, and I got to know many of his classmates very well. And you see this… depression with a capital D, sort of starting in late adolescence but certainly… he left Amherst twice. So I became very interested in whether depression involved a sort of continual focus on negative thoughts and experiences and memories, to the exclusion of all else. And how someone who’s depressed really gets captured by these negative thoughts and experiences. And narrows his or her attention, focusing… focusing on only the most negative stimuli. And then what he did in his writings is he really explained this sort of feedback cycle. ‘Cause I focus on the negative, that makes me feel sad, makes me feel bad, then I end up focusing on what makes me feel sad and what makes me feel bad…

LR: And you have the thought that’s negative, and that creates the emotion, and then you live in the emotion, so you think it’s real.

DK: And not only do I live in that emotion, that emotion then… that sadness then captures that attention. I’m broken, I’m a failure, I’m never gonna feel better. So there is how that output of that cycle then becomes the input, or the next round, and then it’s self-sustaining.

LR: Exactly. Yep.

DK: So I was very interested in depression, or capture being the basis of depression. And then anxiety. What captures us in anxiety, going over a bridge or getting near a ledge or fear of being a fraud… expectation that something is going to… so certain things are going to capture me. Then I became very interested in the eating disorder. The fear of getting fat… if I take an apple and I slice it in eighty pieces and… I can exert such control over myself so that the fear of getting fat that captures me, it’s the control, how I can just feel good about myself because I can exert this amount of control, I’m in control. You know, in trauma, the harm that was done to us, being abandoned… takes precedence. Hypochondria, you know, what’s hypochondriasis?

LR: You focus on, you know, one particular mole on your face or something.

DK: Absolutely. So you see this in a range of aspective conditions. So the question became: is it possible that this mechanism, or these circuits, are involved in a range of disorders?

LR: I love what you’re saying, that it’s a hypothesis, the underlying basis for many many many… much mental suffering we see, if not all. That is one hypothesis of bringing everything together, and not only in negative situations, but also in exalted situations, as you say.  

DK: Right, so the positive aspect… there’s the positive aspect, but there is still… if you look, if the self for David Wallace, is focused on the self, on the fraud, I’m no good, I’m really just… yes I can write well, but I really am fooling people. And you see this being captured when it really focuses… the one thing you can’t get rid of is yourself.

LR: For better or worse, I think.

DK: Right. So you have that… certain things you can just walk away from, a chocolate chip cookie I can walk away from, nicotine or tobacco I can walk away from, but myself--

LK: Yes, exactly.

DK: I am always there. So I can focus on myself internally, but I can also, I think, end up focusing very much on external stimuli. You slighted me, you made me feel bad… and I think I can be captured by an abiding sense of rage.

LR: So it’s an addiction, almost, to your own feelings of feeling bad.

DK: I think if you look at psychopathy, or psychopathic behavior, it was always viewed as a lack of conscience. An absence of anxiety or guilt, and a failure of empathy. But those focus on only what’s absent in the mind of the psychopath. But I think if you really – and I spent time, look at the journals, you know, what data can you look at and what’s reliable…

LR: Right.

DK: So the book really focused on people’s own writings, on their own words, what they said and not my interpretation of that. But if you look at any of the mass shooters, they all felt very bad--

LR: Very angry.

DK: --about something that just made them enormously angry. So one of the concerns was… am I just, is this too broad? But there really are, I think there are neural circuits underlying this mechanism, and I think that the mechanism is neutral. The mechanism is… it can be… I can get attached to things that are positive or things that are negative, it can go either way. But the fact is, I think we’re all gonna get attached to certain things, so what captures me can end up with many different kinds of outcomes.

LR: No, I think it’s fantastic. It’s a fantastic hypothesis, and you made your argument so well throughout the whole book, you know, spiritual capture and violent capture and capture and depression. I use the The Darkness Visible, in one of my courses – Styron’s book, Styron, William Styron who’s been in and out depression his whole adult life. And I remember you reference the moment when… you know, he’s a heavy drinker and he gives up alcohol, and he makes a decision to commit suicide, and he happens to be listening to Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody, and his feelings for his mother made him so… just stopped him. They were so strong that he decided to commit himself to save himself. And that’s a really interesting example, of capture kind of going both ways. He’s completely overwhelmed by his sadness and his feeling and his lack of self-esteem, and his feelings of self-worthlessness, and then he’s reminded of his mother and it’s changed. And it’s like instantly changed.

DK: Between, as you said, stimulus and response—

LR: Yeah--

DK: -- as you said, is this moment of freedom. But you know, what is that? My sense is that in that really is the hope… I mean, is there freedom from capture? If you look at that moment, and  Ruth Styron, his widow, was very kind and talked to me--

LR: Rose.

DK: Rose Styron, sorry. Was very kind, and talked to me.

LR: That’s great, she must be such an interesting person.

DK: Oh, she’s just enormously kind, and… what’s interesting is, in that moment, where is the freedom? And as bad as he felt about himself, that he would not be able to write again, that he had not written the great book in several decades, regardless of his enormous productivity… you see something else that was even more meaningful captured him. Listening to Brahms, his mother, that had its own evocative appeal. So I think that the most important secret about capture, if I could say that, one of the most effective ways to be released from being captured is to find something else that is more meaningful, replacing one form of negative capture with a positive one.

LR: That’s how you end the book, is by saying the involvement of other people or in community or in art, getting outside of yourself… I think about people who have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and one of their worst symptoms is they worry about being anxious. They’re anxious about being anxious. Which means that they’re just completely self-involved, you know. Why are you worried about going outside? Because I’m worried that I’ll be anxious. But if they could lose themselves in something else, in the flow of life or love, they would be released. Which is how you are ending your book, a bit, antidote to capture, to negative capture.

DK: I think that’s probably… can I just distance myself? Can I just quiet the stimulus? Can I just go from something that’s negative, to neutral? Or do I really have to replace it with something that’s positive? And I don’t know the answer to that. I guess if you look at certain… certainly Eastern thought, if you look at Buddhism… that just quieting the stimulus, or is there… or even quieting the stimulus has a positive valance to it.

LR: Yeah, I would think that. And I was going to ask you how you thought this related to mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn work, because it does… it seems to me… and I’ve been studying mindfulness myself, and doing it, and the discipline that you have in meditating, and you activate these areas of prefrontal cortex and interior singular cortex that would be able to inhibit negative associations in the amygdala. The discipline of just focusing on the here and now, allows you to have some pause in between that stimulus and the response that you would ordinarily make which might be self-destructive.

DK: I think a lot of people use “mindfulness” in many different ways… and that’s why… he was very nice, John Kabat-Zinn, to talk to me in the book. And, you know… is mindfulness, some people think it’s being captured by certain stimuli in itself. I’m being mindful, I’m appending. Or is it really letting go?

LR: Yes. Right, right. Yes, yes. I think it has to be both. I think letting go is physically important.

DK: Where you don’t allow that aspective component to exist. I think it is one approach. I think if you look, probably for many people… if you look at AA, what is AA? What really gets substituted for those who are successful? And this data is still out, I think. There’s a sense that it works, there are some trials of how Alcoholic Anonymous works, but what are you really… are you substituting that fellowship, that sobriety? Something takes the place that’s more important. That moment when you heard that music, that sense that I can be free of drink, I can help someone else, there’s something more important.  There are a lot of different approaches, whether it’s AA, whether it’s spiritual, or whether it’s psychotherapy. I mean, what’s psychotherapy?

LR: Yeah, that’s exactly…

DK: How do I change how I look at a stimulus? That’s cognitive-behavioral therapy. The one thing that I have not been able to figure out at all, that I don’t touch in the book, it’s sort of… I just can’t sort it out, is attention deficit.

LR: Oh, interesting, yeah.

DK: And what is that? Is that something where I’m captured constantly by different things?

LR: Well, could be. Those children – or even adults – are highly distractible. So they’re just captured either by too much, or they lack the focus to be captured by the positive. And interestingly, children with ADHD, they love television, they love computers, so if there’s a highly salient stimulus, they’ll be sucked in.

DK: Right. So it’s not that they lack attention… it’s just that what they attend to may not be what we, as a society, at that moment or their school teacher or what their environment calls for.

LR: Right. That’s right. Because they can’t sustain it, and that’s not acceptable, certainly not in public schools.

DK: But I think there are certain things they attend to, very strongly. I think it’s also true in Asperger’s.

LR: I was just thinking of that. Kids who get fixated on machines, washing machines, or trains, or something. And they know everything, and every detail, so it’s a real over-focus.

DK: Exactly, so where is this over-focus or… is it an under-focus? Where I can’t connect with you, I can’t look you in the eye? Is that a fear? Or in fact, are they just hyper-sensitive to certain stimuli that either can make them feel better or feel worse?

LR: Right, right. I think the jury’s out on that. But it certainly could be… the hypothesis could be used that capture is important in these disorders that we’ve just mentioned.

DK: And then what’s the implications for psychiatry?

LR: That’s what I was about to ask you. Really, in terms of mental health being such a public health issue, it seems like it’s not getting better… do you see a way you could describe the concept of capture to people in a helping profession?

DK: People always go “alright, it’s very nice explaining—“

LR: Now fix it, right.

DK: Now tell me how I fix it. Right? And that’s the hard part. And if you say, look, you have to be captured by something that’s more important, it’s easier said than done. But there’s almost a sense that… if you could change, especially… both on the sides, if you look at David Foster Wallace when he was an adolescent, when he was at Amherst, I mean, that student. Who is having these bad thoughts. And those bad thoughts isolate them, they can’t talk about it because they’re embarrassed. Then they go “why am I having these bad thoughts? I must be bad. But I can’t share what’s going on in my head, because people will think less of me”. And then they sort of end up becoming more and more isolated. If you can get to them at an early stage, and be able to explain to them that they’re not bad, that we all get captured by certain things…

LR: We all have these thoughts, yeah.

DK: We all have these thoughts.

LR: It’s a matter of degree.

DK: I think if we can just explain that, and get to people at… especially young people, at the right time. Can we alleviate at least the pain that accompanies? And the isolation? Because my sense is, once these bad thoughts take over, once this isolation is programmed further and further into my head, becoming socially isolated, and then going in… my sense is medicine can quiet down these circuits, certainly, but they also have side effects. And these side effects can become salient. And it’s very hard to sort out what’s from the medicine, and what’s from underlying it… And the medicine can attenuate the bad feelings, but someone with social phobia still has to learn then to live in life. And without some reeducation, that wouldn’t happen just with medication, I mean studies show that medications and therapy is the best way to handle… to the extent that we can see any improvement in mental health and psychiatric clients.

LR: My sense is that much of the antidepressants sort of quiet the circuitry, then psychotherapy allows me to sort of change the context, to find something else so that I can be captured by something else, or at least understand how to manage the negative…

DK: I think that’s the important thing, if you can turn down the noise and quiet those thoughts, then you can understand what you are saying to yourself, which is what you’re saying about David Foster Wallace. And it sounds very Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but you’re telling… what are the voices in your head, what are you saying about yourself? You understand that you can change those thoughts. So here’s a question for you… you know, being able to understand how our minds work… isn’t that a key part of a liberal arts education?

LR: Oh, I love you’re saying that. Absolutely. In all disciplines, absolutely, it’s what… and also challenging what we think, and the way we think about it, and being courageous enough to challenge assumptions that we’ve always had. I think that is, to me, central to a liberal arts education. And to an Amherst education, which you had. [Laughs]

DK: You know, it’s interesting, because you asked me what my major was… and I spent almost all my time in the sciences, in senior year. But in doing this book, what I found was, sure the sciences are absolutely essential to understand the neural circuitry, to know how neurons respond, and any theory, any hypothesis has to be grounded in those… in that neural biology. But in fact, other disciplines… the privilege of going back and understanding how great writers… I mean, one of the great things was to be able to try to see whether this mechanism exists, because no MRI, no magnetic resonance imaging, no experiment on a snail is going to allow me to understand the subject of feelings that are associated with capture. And yet, you go and you see… one of the great privileges, and what the book focuses on… these great writers who are able to explain much better than I could ever explain what they’re feeling and what’s going on.

LR: And your descriptions of them are just brilliant. Talking about capture, it’s so engrossing the way you write about Virginia Woolf and… and I love the fact that you went back to [indistinguishable].

DK: Right, so, in theology… in the theological tradition, did… there has to be a form, at least my sense was, there was a form of capture, as basis for theological and spiritual experience… So what I was very interested in was, did the theological… the great theologians over the centuries, did they understand this? Or were they just living? When you’re in it, it’s happening to you.

LR: Right, right.

DK: And then if you look… I was very interested, obviously – you can sort of have some relevance… not to get political, but what captures us in this political cycle?

LR: Right. I was thinking that very thing, and I didn’t know whether I could ask that. [Laughs]

DK: So that’s when I went to professor [indistinguishable].

LR: This ideological half-thinking that you mentioned he talked about.

DK: So what does that mean? I’m captured by certain ideas that have resonance, even though… because they have meaning for me and they affect how I feel and they become part of me, does the circuitry also respond? So when you look… this is probably… the great philosophers… I mean, Plato came pretty close when he looked at the disparate parts of the mind, Socrates… Do I do things that are not in my own interests? So they grappled with that. So if you look at philosophy and theology and political science and sociology and psychology, they’re sort of… you need the learnings across disciplines.

LR: Right. You’re absolutely right.

DK: And the question is, as David Wallace said, what does it take to make us human?

LR: Right, right. And as you say, understand subjective experience, and religious conversion and the passion that people experience.

DK: The implications of it… if in fact there is a common mechanism, let’s assume that… we’re only half right. We’ll learn more about the neural circuitry as the years go on, and others will understand attention and affective experience. But if these fields are really connected, the implications to those who… I think, suffer the most, is to show that they are not broken.

LR: That this is our natural tendency, to be captured.

DK: Right. Are there differences, are some of us more susceptible? Are some of us less susceptible? You know, it used to be, depression… this was our neurotransmitter system was broken.

LR: And you know, also now with epigenetics, the idea that… studies looking at the genetics of depression and other correlations in families and schizophrenia and so on, but then the idea that now that the environment can turn genes on and off… is really about the capture from the environment of what your natural predilection is.

DK: And it’s so hard to know. My sense is that… we’re such effective learners, as a species. If we really could measure every experience, every attentional moment, every affective response to that attentional moment over a lifetime… I mean, obviously, that’s not to be. But if you could measure that, you could probably then explain why certain things capture me and not you… because what I’ve attended to over a lifetime. No doubt, we are all sort of… even if this is a common mechanism, we are all sort of… there are different thresholds. Why am I more… why do I respond more affectively to certain experiences, and you may not? Is there a genetic basis? Why am I more outgoing? Why am I more inwardly going? Maybe there is something. It’s not that there’s a gene that tells me what I’m gonna be captured by, I don’t think there’s a gene to say whether I’m going to be depressed. But--

LR: I think you would see that… and again, studies show, you would see that in babies. You can even see… you can see the difference in infants’ response to stimuli, that might kind of set them on a course that would… they’ll be captured by one thing or another going forward, depending on how they respond to stimuli, and how the world responds to them, it’ll be shaped one way or another, but it’s probably both the learning and the inherent… even differences in sensory perception, when you’re an infant.

DK: And going back to the question about a liberal arts education. I think for many of us, we enter Amherst with… being captured by certain ideas, and thoughts, and the question is… is there… does the Amherst experience teach me to be free of some of the… whether they’re biases or negative things, or broader experiences that I can experience, so that in essence, when I leave I’m captured by different things than when I entered?

LR: It’s fascinating. You’re so brilliant, David, it’s so interesting.

DK: Th…The real question is, what did we get right? That’s the question. It’s interesting, because people read the book and they say they like the story, some get the book, some don’t get the book, etcetera, in sort of the Amherst tradition, the goal is to show it not to lecture about it. So it’s to show these various--

LR: That’s right. Exactly.

DK: But you make the reader work. And the question is, that’s still the unknown… book’s been out a couple months. Did we get this right?

LR: Well, you certainly make a strong argument with a thread connecting the dots, and for making the thread across all of these experiences and disciplines.

DK: But it can’t be this simple, can it? I mean, in some ways… is this really underlying mental illness? Can It be…

LR: I think as you talk about it, you’re not saying that it does, you’re saying it’s a theory that encapsulates all aspects of it. And I mean… you talk about the history of the individual, the individual differences in the brain early on, so… that’s all part of it. You’re not saying that this explains everything, but there’s this theory that holds it together.

DK: But does that theory even… is there validity in that theory? And… when you live it, when you write it… I see it. But… there’s no way I can empirically prove it. I mean, you can’t take Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace and scan them and look at exactly what neural circuits… that’s not possible. So how… the goal is over the next decade, people will take the theory and try to understand attention and what grabs attention and affective response and try to--

LR: Well, the very comforting thing you’re saying is that we all have these circuits, to have these circuits is not to be broken but rather to be our species. And we will all get captured by one stimulus or another, depending on our history, but that we could understand it that way, it’s self-forgiving in a way. And people who do get obsessed with the cookie, or obsessed with the cigarette, or obsessed with bad thoughts about themselves, then tend to make it worse by beating themselves up about that. But to say that… this is who we are. Because of our neural circuits, our neural circuits tend to do this, and you will get captured one way or another, so go easy on yourself and try to understand it that way. I think that’s very comforting.