Mark Changizi
Appearances
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
we ended up with another cone sensitivity right next to the other one. They're exactly side by side in a really weird, peculiar way. Why would you want to have a third cone sensitivity the same part of the spectrum? It's just like 15 nanometers away.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
All right. So I realized later that when you look, you know, I've noticed that one of the things that matters is blood under the skin, blushes, blanches, health modulations. All of these kinds of emotions, signals that humans and other primates are doing on bare skin is shown by virtue of the blood of the skin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And it's by virtue in particular of the oxygenation, deoxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin. And it turns out that when you're looking at the completely arbitrary and weird spectrum of hemoglobin, which is a bunch of, it has a little W in one, this one part. So it goes like this, and there's a little W. And when it's, that's when it's oxygenated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And when it deoxygenates, that W in that little region turns into a U. And so these little peaks right there in the W part If you wanted to be sensitive to this oxygenation, deoxygenation, you actually have to have two cones right there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So the little W peak in the middle, as it goes down in terms of you and the other parts that go up, you have to sense that you have to have a peculiar spots of two cones in this exact spot.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So I was like, oh my God, exactly where you'd have to put cones to be sensitive to the only spot where you could tell that it's getting oxygenated versus deoxygenated is exactly in the spots where we have our cones.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So this is an empath sense. In short, our color vision, our primate color vision is an empath sense. It's only by virtue of that that we can see these blushes and blanches. And it's only by virtue of that that you can actually see veins at all. The veins, of course, are the deoxygenated parts. And the more fleshy red parts are the more oxygenated parts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
This stuff is completely invisible if you're colorblind, if you're a colorblind doctor, even going back to Dalton. He had complained about his complete inability to see if someone had infected one eye versus the other. No idea. If they've got blood or stool on their pants, they can't tell the difference between whether it's blood or stool. These things go back for a long ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
As soon as you're color deficient, you're missing one of those. Now it's just you can't distinguish these things at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
We, that has been very hard to test because, but what we do know is that there's a long history of medical doctors who have known problems in just detecting blood state related diagnosis, symptoms that are recognizable by blood state.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But actually doing controlled experiments where you're able to do this with, it has been very hard. So no one has quite that data. There's a lot of, my dad's colorblind and he's emotionally dense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, I mean, you can certainly mimic on screen, you could try to mimic the spectral difference in some sense so that... First of all, just to back up, one of the interesting side effects of this is that your camera doesn't show you color vision. Your TV doesn't show you color vision. All the cameras that we use are still in some sense to color vision because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Their third receptivity is way out, you know, it's distributed way out there. So none of those cameras that we take these pictures of are able to sense these oxygenation modulations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, so this is what makes it deeply difficult. It also means that literally we're not seeing all of the states that we experience in real life. The glow of youth, when you see glow of youth, you're talking about the glowing of oxygenated blood on the skin. None of that's available.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right. And it's not just on or off. I mean, different motions will lead to different kinds of gradients on the face. And of course, it's not just the face, the whole body can flush.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And the other primates, the rump becomes so exaggerated that they literally, the UK would take some of these, the females when they were having estrus out because it was almost embarrassing for the kids to come and watch. So, you know, it's multidimensional. It's certainly, it's color related, but it's not just red, red, green, but there's actually, you know, where you have more
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
like if i squeeze my hand and let go you get yellow blue differences um now it's not because when it's squeezed out it's more yellow when there's more blood it's all things equal more blue but if it's oxygenated blood then it's blue and red so it's more purple if it's deoxygenated blood it's it's green and blue and so bluish green so in fact you end up by virtue of concentration variations blue yellow and oxygenation modulations red green you can get any possible hue at all
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Which is why if you're a painter and you're trying to actually paint human faces, when we go back and look at their paintings, which I could never do, you're like, oh my God, they're using all the hues. Yeah, right. Because we don't typically consciously notice it. We just look at the skin and we think of it as sort of this matte, you know, like a doll. But in fact-
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, some pink, but of course it's not. And you're really seeing the blood. Skin is not, if you've ever, you know, if you get a bruise, the first thing you notice is that it's, of course, total discoloration. And so you're really seeing a dynamic view into the very state and function and health of the individual. It's completely a highly transparent surface.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And we're not consciously aware of it, although we're certainly reading it all the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Is it a theory that- Well, mostly, I don't know whether it's mostly health or mostly emotion. It's certainly emotion, state, and health.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So, you know, the first thing I think people think about with spectral skin signaling is blushes, right? And blanches and flushes. But that's really just the beginning aspect. you know, this barely touches the surface. So you can imagine someone's angry and they can get a red face, which is very different from when somebody blushes and they get a, with embarrassment.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And people actually, if I'm in front of a stage and something happens that's slightly embarrassing, and the audience is over there and I'm looking this way, you actually blush more on the side that's facing the audience. Your body- Oh, is that right? Yeah, this is known. This is a drum and some- Wow. Wow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So they These are strong arguments that these are signals, not just automatic side effects of some kind of implicit side effect with no purpose.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And it's an honest signal because it's out of your control. So honest signal just in this context is a sort of a technical term of art. So we mean by honest signal that you have no control over it and it wears its meaning on its sleeve in some sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That's right. And so, I mean, other predictions that come out of this, by the way, it should be the case that if this is true, then the primates with color vision, as opposed to the primates that didn't have three color vision, the primates with color vision should have more naked spots. They should have bare faces.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And in fact, when you look, the primates with color vision are the ones with naked faces. They often have naked rumps, naked genitalia, because all of these things are signaling. The ones without color vision are furry-faced like your typical bunny rabbit, typical dog. Nakedness and color vision, three-color vision, are opposite sides of the same coin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's certainly possible, but it wouldn't have driven... There's no reason... To think that fruit would have driven those particular wavelength sensitivities of the middle and long wavelength sensitive cones.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah. And there's all kinds of things where we leverage our color vision, which is peculiarly for empath kind of health senses. But we obviously use it for lots of things probably in nature beyond that and in culture. Yeah. It's all over the place. Yeah. But that doesn't amount to an explanation for what drove it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right. Well, so everything might be multipurpose, but the odds of there being two competing or multiple competing desiderata that are determining the design, that they're close to one another, are going to be typically fairly rare. Typically, one of them might be 10 times more important than the other.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Or a thousand times more important. Usually, in my experience, it turns out that one of these is the principal drivers. It can explain first-order, even second-order properties of the thing. And yeah, there can be other third or fourth order stuff, but that's mostly irrelevant. So you can get away with explaining. So for example, another one, why we have forward-facing eyes. Standard story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And the fun thing of all of these explanations, whether it's pruning fingers, it's still probably in the Wikipedia page. It says it's a side effect of osmosis or some bull crap, right? It's still there to this day, these old narratives. And then for forward-facing eyes, it's always something about predators want forward-facing eyes. Except that every fish is a predator eating a smaller fish.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
All the birds are predators. They all have sideways-facing eyes. By our standards, they're all sideways-facing eyes. Even all the carnivores, the paradigmatic mammalian meat-eaters, predators, have sideways-facing eyes relative to us. I mean, they still have forward-facing eyes in terms of the big picture of things. So there's a lot of variability in forward-facing eyeness across the mammals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And the question is, why is there this variability? And so there's been multiple kinds of... One is stereoscopy, better stereoscopy. But you even get stereoscopy in a bunny rabbit. Bunny rabbit has a very thin binocular field, and it can see stereoscopy within a thin binocular field. But it also gets the benefit of seeing everything. It can see directly behind it, below it, above it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So you've got this full panoramic vision, whereas we've chosen to lose... Right, a lot. Half of our visual field, or a lot of our visual field, just to have better stereoscopy up in front. Now, so one of the bad sorts of, you have these two currencies, like the standard argument is, oh, I've got this great wide stereoscopy field of better 3D vision up front at the expense of losing everything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
How do you balance those things? How is that an argument that I would want more of of apples to have while getting less adverbs in the back and not even obviously comparable things that I can trade off. So my argument was like, first of all, stereoscopy is not, it's the least important 3D sense. We have all of these, there's many, many three-dimensional senses.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, my background is sort of mathematics, and I went into cognitive science, and I was really more of an evolutionary biologist. And so one of the areas that I've worked and have a bunch of discoveries happens to be vision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
One is just what kinds of objects they are, how far down towards the horizon, Are they? How they overlap? Things, yeah, occlusions in front of other things. If I just do this with one eye, even with one eye, I'm getting amazing. Right, right. Much better than stereoscopy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
All of these things, if you're a perception psychologist who creates stimuli that have competing cues of two different kinds, and they say, which one's Trump? Stereoscopy loses always. All of these other ones trump. They win if there's competing. Oh, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so none of the... Stereoscopy always loses. And if you've played first-person shooter video games, you're... Yeah, you have both eyes open, but you're being fed one image on screen. And these things are so immersive. You never are confused as to where the guys are that you're shooting, right? They're always really unambiguously in one particular spot, yet you're a cyclops, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So it had occurred to me back then. I said, I don't think it has anything to do with stereoscopy whatsoever. And it turns out it's all about one currency. This is again to this idea of why... Why aren't there three, two or three or more equivalent kinds of functions that are all competing? And then it's just some ugly mess and it's not a good design hypothesis at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's going to be sort of ugly kludge that happens to – it's almost never a kludge. And so in this case, the reason that we have forward-facing eyes and the more forward-facing they are is to see better in clutter. And so what I mean by that, animals that evolved with leaves all over the place. When there's leaves, if your eyes are more widely separated than the clutter leaves, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So, for example, if you've played this game, if I hold my finger up in front of you, it's very thin, and I look at you, but not my finger, I see two copies. Unless I've got a dominant eye, but for those of you who don't have a dominant eye, you'll see two copies of your finger, and each will be semi-transparent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right. Now, you can see through it. Right. So what one eye is being blocked with, the other eye is seeing the world beyond that. And so your brain has evolved to just create two copies of it. And you're not confused like, oh, my God, I've got two figures. No, you know what's going on. It's just you have this perception that combines them and creates semi-transparency so that you can see beyond it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So I have other things in other areas of sort of evolutionary biology, why we have as many fingers and why animals have as many limbs as they do, why you get pruney fingers when you're wet. They're actually optimized to be rain treads so that when you You don't want a hydroplane. So they suddenly have the optimal pattern so that you can channel the water out as quickly as possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Now, even my whole hand, I'm almost missing nothing, even with my whole hand in front of me. There's a little bit of a core in the middle, but I'm capturing most of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So for objects that are not as big as this interpupillary distance, the separation between my eyes, then when you're an animal with those kinds of eyes in a forest with leaves that are typically smaller than that, you actually get, I call it x-ray. You actually can see, it's probabilistic summation. You actually can see much, much more of the environment beyond than when you're a cyclops.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So, and in fact, I noticed this playing video games back 20 something years ago, when I would be, you know, because you're a cyclops and you're hiding in bushes and I'd be trying to snipe people. And then when you're in a bush, you can't see anything. Of course, these are fake bushes, I get it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You can't see anything because you're just looking at these, but where in real life, you're in a bush, you pretty much see the entire world outside of it. You can, you know, peek from outside of your bush. Oh yeah, that's interesting. So you had to keep shaking to get different shots than someone shoots you because they see you wiggling in the bush.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
In real life, you're designed to be in these cluttery environments and to see perfectly well beyond that. Without having to move, too. Without having to move. And yes, you're losing what's behind you. But then you can start calculating how much of the environment can I see if I'm a forward-facing animal with this X-ray ability. That is, my eyes are bigger than the leaves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Versus a rabbit, let's say, effectively, who has a full panoramic view. Yeah, he can see entirely behind him. But you can actually then calculate how much of the world outwards can you see. He's actually – I can see up to – if you think about it two-dimensionally, I can see up to – One, two, three, three and a half times better than him if you think about it as a two-dimensional grid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But in fact, it's more of a three-dimensional grid. Then you have to sort of think about spheres, sphere packing problem. And so I can see only the front half of my little sphere is. But if the little – the world is sort of built out of these spheres of these little –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
surrounded by lots of clutter, I can see the six spheres in front of me fully, and I can't see beyond that, and only half of mines, but I can see now six and a half times more of the, there's like simple models that you can build of simple models of forested kinds of environments where you can show that now you can see really almost an order of magnitude more. It's see the most.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's not a little bit more stereoscopy here, but a little bit less seeing. No, it's just see the most. And so animals have, depending on their environment, they have more forward-facing eyes, the greater the extent to which they're in cluttered, forested kinds of environments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so one desideratum, see the most, suffices to explain all the variability that we find across mammals in terms of how forward-facing eyes work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I guess they're… Yeah, I would say they are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So these are the sorts of things that I was always dealing with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Even there, even in the African plains. So even when you have animals in the same habitat, you have some animals that find microniches, for example, cats, who like to hang out in the clutter and wait for their prey. And then let's say the gazelles who don't want to be anywhere near that clutter because they can't see crap when they're inside it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So they will find micro environments within even habitats that at first glance, we kind of don't think of them as very cluttery, but animals that are good at clutter will find those cluttery spots and leverage them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That's right. So always I was interested not in the specific mechanisms by which our brains work, but on the ultimate sort of design questions for why it would have evolved that way. So functional. Yeah. It's all about function.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And strangely, I mean, this is more on the political side, strangely, even though the biological world claims to believe in Darwin, when you're actually there in the evolutionary biology world, almost nobody believes in natural selection.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Way before there were social animals, every animal would have had emotions, right? So these are just rough and ready. One way to think about emotions is just states that you're in that feel like something that motivates you to engage in certain kinds of behaviors, right? And they would have all been dead-eyed shark-like creatures.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
They're filled with lots of emotions, filled on the inside with emotions. But they're not social animals, so they never had to signal to anybody anything, right? So what really, what Darwin was concerned about, it was like, okay, that's great. There's all these animals with all these emotions and it feels like something to be them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And there's like all this internal stuff and there's no reason for them to tell anybody. So why are all these social animals signaling so much to one another? What's the point of it? What does this language mean? So what...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
What we do here is just ask, if you're social animals and you don't have a language of any kind that we're so used to, you need to have, what is the optimal language stimulus signaling system such that you can carry out negotiations and compromises and you can negotiate and someone can back down or someone can raise and someone can do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So let me give you an example where people can come to a decision and come to an agreement Without ever saying a word. We do this when we play poker. So I know something and you know something. I've got cards, a certain hand. You've got cards, a certain hand. And we don't know. And imagine that we can never talk about it. Like it turns out I could say, actually, it's, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But imagine I've got these things that I know in the world and you've got these things that we're arguing over. Zucchini bread keeps it. Arguing over some particular thing that we want to split. And here we want to split the pot, whatever, the ante. There's the ante in there. We want to get the ante out. And I can't talk. And we can even play online where we can't even talk, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
There's not even any emotional expressions there. But what I do to make my case is I just slide in a certain amount of stake. I stake something and then you stake something. And it could be that after a while, I go, okay, I think he's, Jordan's pretty confident. I'm going to, I'm going to fold. As I'm agreeing, okay, your hand is stronger than mine. We've come to an agreement.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I never signaled anything. I never spoke anything. Um, but we nevertheless managed to solve a potential conflict because it could call, call would be to say, screw you. I'm going to like, we're going to go all in. And that means in this, in the case of poker, just laying down to see whose cards are better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so figuring out who, you know, whose cards are better in real life might be, oh yeah, I'm a better fighter than you or whatever it might've come to blows or whatever it might be. Or, um, Something that we don't want to have to get involved with all the time. We'd like to make our lives much smoother in terms of the utility- The path to negotiation. Right. So poker is how you do it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
They nod to it, but if you actually do a paper that argues, here's why it evolved to be this way, here's the functional reason for why it's this way, they'll say, you're doing a just-so story. You're not allowed to make hypotheses about evolution. Design, that's a just-so story. That's teleology. I was like, you're missing the entire point of natural selection.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so what we're able to show is that you need to have the ability, you need to have a signal that says, I think I'm really confident or really, really confident. And you do this by shoving in social capital chips, shoving in reputation. So when you signal- pride, or I also signal that I don't think you're confident at all, I have disdain for you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So either I'm signaling that I'm really confident or that your claims are not very, you've got a bad hand. Either of those things amounts to a certain amount of stake or betting social capital. But I can also show humility And now I'm sort of pulling off chips. I say, okay, I'm not so great. Or I show respect to you. I'm also pulling out chips off the table. So you can't do that in actual poker.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But you can just start working out. You need to be able to both make claims strong and weak or pride and sort of humility about my own confidence and also respect or disdain concerning yours. And then you can start to work out, I also need to have the ability to acknowledge what you just claimed. Okay, you're saying that you're really confident that I'm, and I'm not confident. Well, given that,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, I mean, I think you're overthinking it. Here, for this argument, we don't have to think about it being honest signals like for color vision. Even if we were – I mean, and we're not consciously doing these. We have evolved to just do these signals often implicitly without really – and that's really when we're good is when we're not consciously thinking it through. But –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
The reason that you're willing to believe me when I show confidence that I'm the one who should get most of the cake that mom laid out, let's say you're my brother, is because we're part of a social community and I'll get humiliated if it turns out that mom tells people that I'm wrong. The reason that it works is because I care about what I staked I care about the reputation. They're at risk.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And the social community is always watching and gossiping and I'll lose reputation. The reason that it's all about these reputations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Darwin's discovery is that, yes, there's design. That's not an issue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so that means- It sometimes manages, somehow with humans, it seems to sometimes work even with one-off, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Like, because we're so instinctively doing, but, you know, we've been instinctively designed thinking that we're part of a single community that we seem to get off, you know, we get on pretty well and we're all nice to the baristas and everybody's nice to one another, even though we could be real jerks, right? Yeah, definitely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So it seems to hold over pretty well, but yeah, it definitely brings up more troubles in bigger cities where there's fewer interactions with the same people. Sure.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, I mean, sexual selection has things that are not leading to perfect natural selection design. But let's set that aside for the moment. The whole point is not that there's not design. The whole point is that there need not be a master designer. That is, you can explain all this design, all the seeming teleology, without a designer. That's the whole point, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But what they want to reject is not just a designer, but they want to reject design itself. And so there's an immense...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And I haven't... There's two different... This is a... And here we work out the... In some sense, argue it. Here's the fundamental and minimal... signaling system that is absolutely needed for two creatures to engage in these kinds of staking conversations. You have to have exactly 81. It's a four dimension of signals. Now, the optimal way to use it
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's like asking what's the best way to play poker. Now, there's more than one way to play poker. It's deeply complicated. This is one of the most complicated. It's the most complicated game that exists as long as there's no limits. Poker is super complicated. So there's certainly more than one way to play. One way is to say, no, you go first. No, you go first.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And you're never more confident than your actual levels of confidence. You're not blustery. And that kind of, you can build up a reputation over time, and you probably are helping your friends also build up their reputations, which is kind of what reciprocity is. As opposed to the blustery kind of, who just bluffs his way to the top and is just mean to everybody around him.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Reject teleology. No, like my eyes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
He's a chip bully, right? He's a chip bully. He's got a big stack of chips in poker, and he's just pushing everybody out. They bet something, he shoves it in his fold. Yeah. We got out of fear. There's other ways, and you can rise to the top that way as well, but it's probably fragile. The question is for how long.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But key here is what is the language that you need? And it turns out the language, once you work it out, it's exactly the space of emotional expressions that we have. The emotional expressions that we have are exactly what's needed to engage in exactly the kind of generalized poker game that social animals that don't have language need to actually communicate and stake things and carry out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's bizarre, right? And so it's a very small community and it becomes across this, you know, they attack sociobiology, you know, we also in the same kind of basis.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Oh, they probably are. All I'm saying is that my ability to, I didn't try in this book to work out what are the, what would be nice about to say, and here's the optimal way to use this, or here's, let's say, several optimal strategies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
No, that's true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So that's like... But less so, because in poker, when you earn currency money in poker, it's spendable anywhere, right? But social currency is inherently often spendable only within the particular community that you're involved.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You start wanting to be, it happens not just when you enter into human behavior and human psychology, it happens even generally when you're talking about even rain treads, you know, rain tread, you know, pruning fingers like I did or any of the stuff that I do. That is a just so story and it is not allowed, right? Now, it's true that you can't study design the way that you study mechanisms.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Oh, this old thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You can't do a lab experiment in quite the same way. You have to ask it in different kinds of ways. You have to say, if this is really designed for what I'm claiming it's designed for, let's say, you know, if the pruney fingers are designed to be rain treads, well, then here's, let's derive what the optimal morphology would be. What should the wrinkles actually look like?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I mean, language is a whole other story, but one thing this does is, and I'll get to language in a second. The way that often we think of language is that you've got this really, you know, rigorous grammar, you know, these propositions, and then emotions are these little colors that they've added. Like there's a little bit of flavor and color.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right. But really, I think it's the other way around. The real language that we speak, even on Twitter, even when it's just text, is ultimately, it's all of this stuff. It's all of these emotional expressions being done in very complicated ways. And nowadays with GIFs, if you look at the GIFs that we use, the animated GIFs, they're all deeply, they're ways and memes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
These are all ways of getting across your emotions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right. Really, it's all emotional expressions sprinkled with propositional-like content attached to it rather than propositional content sprinkled with emotions. This is the wrong way to think about it. Most of what we're doing, all of these things are amounting to pushing in chips because I've said that I'm so right about something for these reasons or I think you're so wrong for these reasons.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I'm pushing in chips, social capital chips when I tweet. Right. Or I'm saying, I'm not really sure, but maybe it's this. So I push in one tiny little chip.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's a market. It's a marketplace. And that's what... This is how... That's why free speech is necessary. Free speech is really a marketplace of ideas. Literally, because... One of the interesting things about social capital is a decentralized currency, right? Now, most of us didn't know anything about decentralized currencies until Bitcoin came along.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And now we've got all these cryptocurrencies, which are decentralized currencies. And the... One of the interesting things about decentralized currency is because there's no bank with some boss looking at the ledgers of who sent money to somebody else. That's not going to work because the whole point of a decentralized currency is that it's not in any one person's hand.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So that's one kind of prediction, looking at the morphology of the shape. Another might be if it's really the case that it's for design, well, it should only occur in animals that, you know, have wet, dewy conditions. Whereas certain kinds of animals that are never in wet, dewy conditions shouldn't have this, you know, this morphological feature shouldn't appear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Instead, it's spread across many, many- It's an unfalsifiable ledger. That's right. So there's this notion of a blockchain. And a blockchain is just like, OK, today, Doug sent Susie 0.3 Bitcoin. And it's just a list of all the Bitcoin transactions that occurred. And it's in everybody's computers everywhere.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And when there's a new block added to the chain, there's some particular work that has to be done called proof of work or there's proof of stake. There's different kinds of ways of adding it such that once you've built up, let's say, a year's worth of these sort of Bitcoin, let's say, transfers, it's practically impossible to go back and mess with the history of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And the reason it has to be like this is because it's decentralized and there's no other way to do it. So, well, reputation is another decentralized currency. How do you get it so that within a community, social community, you can make sure that when I had an argument with you and you won, I don't go around later and say, oh, actually, I won that argument. I totally humiliated Jordan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I could just start lying about the past, about what happened. It's like me saying, no, actually, you gave me the Bitcoin. I didn't give you the Bitcoin. We call it double spending. I give you Bitcoin, but I still have the Bitcoin because the ledger is not keeping track of the fact that I gave it to you. This would undermine a currency. Nothing would work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So the same problems that decentralized currencies have that lead to blockchain is why we end up with social narratives. Social narratives are the answer that we already had up and running. Social narratives are the human social group's way of remembering, okay, this week,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
uh mark lost social capital to jordan and susie lost it to betty and there's like we keep track and we keep track of these little stories the most stories that we remember are one stories about like the argument that we had mark was being a douchebag but it's also really about the mark lost social capital to jordan because of those things those things are helping me remember how much social capital that i lost so
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And there's often people that are good at gossip. These are the people that are good at minors. These are like, or proof of, well, one is proof of stake. They own a lot of, they're already high reputation people in the community. These are like people who own a lot of Bitcoin, say, or some other currencies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And then they can say, we have a higher vote as to whether a new block comes onto the chain. And they're worthy of listening to because they care about the validity, whether that currency stays good. So gossipers are typically high reputation. ranked reputation people in the community, and they spin stories about what happened, sort of accumulating.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
There's different kinds of predictions you can make, but they're often phylogenetic predictions, morphological predictions. Sometimes you can do behavioral, do they actually behave, perform better in wet conditions when they're wrinkly versus when they're not wrinkly and all the kind of combinations of these things. You can't typically do the mechanism kinds of experiments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
They come up with simpler versions of whatever happened that helps it, remember, it gets added to the chain. And often gossip is really easy to check that it's preserving what actually happened in the community, but it's really hard to come up with good gossip. Good gossip that elegantly explains the happenings of the week
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Like a really condensed narrative, easy to verify, hard to come up with. Only certain kinds of individuals are good to come up with. So these are a lot similar to what's called proof of work. Proof of works are things that are really hard to do this work to glue one block to the next, but they're really easy to verify that it's a correct solution.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So you end up with these sort of analogies that we've already been using for hundreds of thousands, well, millions of years, well, at least hundreds of thousands of years, that we ended up with these social narratives that in order to have a reputation currency that is preserved over time and we can't muck with, build these blockchain-like social narratives. And that's great.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But the downside is that once a narrative gets up and running, just like once a blockchain gets up and running, you can't muck with it. And so if it creates something false... you're stuck with it for generations potentially.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So this is one of the things that, that I talk about a bit here and I'm trying to work into a next book, taking seriously some of these kinds of emergent phenomena that you have to deal with when you have decentralized currencies like these blockchain like properties or which are what social narratives are. Um, have these downsides of being almost unalterable. Right, right. Permanent mistakes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Permanent mistakes that go on and on forever. You know, the Jews deal with this. I think the Jews got added to as being the evil, you know, goblin-type group that's controlling and puppeteering everyone 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, and it just never goes away. It just keeps on – it just keeps getting added to the same kind of narratives, keep moving on.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So there's all these terrible things, but there's also all these great things because you wouldn't have reputation systems that work. None of our social – none of the public square would work. None of the social interactions would work at all without it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's just a whole different kind of thing. So you have to do it differently. But the strange, weird thing in incredibly far-left communities as they are is that they somehow have thrown Darwin out entirely, and you can't talk about natural selection, which was an incredibly bizarre thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, I hear that a lot. I've argued against that often. And the reason I don't think that's right is every day you have countless encounters with folks in real life at the coffee place or wherever it is, cars signaling to one another and we emotionally signaling in our cars all the time. And you don't know these folks and you're You know that you don't know these folks.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And what's usually, though, there that's not there on the web is full, rich, socio-emotional interactions that are allowing you to go through your day. Yeah, you're embodied. Yeah, you're really able to get along well, I think, because all of your emotional expressions are there. I think that online— And, well, and your habits, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
No doubt, no doubt. But then, and let me give you an example online where things work terribly. Unlike X or Twitter, where we typically don't know people in real life. In Facebook, everybody, you kind of know who they are, like, at least back in the day, you know that that's Doug's friend, that you, whatever, that you kind of have some idea who these people are in real life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And people are even meaner on Facebook. It's one or other than these little comment arguments. They're just vicious and vile. And they're so mean, even though they know each other. I think that what's I think that really what matters in both of these worlds is having some notion of identity that extends over time and you need to be able to socio-emotionally express yourself as best you can.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So on Twitter, I think really what matters is pseudonyms are fine. You know, I can't say it's pseudonymity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
They're stable. You know, some of the best accounts are these folks. Once you've built up 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000, it takes years to get to this point. You've got a voice. No one knows who they are, but they don't want to lose their account.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
They're an individual in that world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And that's true, right, yeah. They're real people as far as they're concerned. They really have something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, often these people are nobodies in real life. And they, I mean, they could well have... be jobless, living in their parents' base. Who knows? No one knows, but they've got something really good to say as far as their followers are concerned, and they care, and they have a lot to lose if they were to start saying things that ruin their reputation and they lose their followers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So I think that what's important is that continuity over time, and pseudonyms are fine. It's the anonymous folks. It's not anonymity that's fine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And frankly, 99% of the people who have their real names are, I don't really know if it's real names. I'm never going to meet them in real life. It's so abstract that it's academic. Really what matters is their identity there. Even their real name there amounts to a pseudonym, as far as I'm concerned, practically speaking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, I mean, the folks that have, you know, let's just say a dozen followers, they certainly have very little to lose because they can just restart a new account, and for some reason they... If those 12 followers stop following them, it's like, screw it, I'm going to start over again.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But they're a lot like the town drunk, for example. They could cause a lot of havoc, and they can enter into conversations that sort of cause havoc. But no one really would be listening to them. I suppose you could argue that they're getting their... They're getting to say something with the same status as somebody else with a lot of followers right there in the stream. Yes, that's the issue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And that may not even be true. It could be that Musk has it so that often when they're just not even visible and say there's more and you've got to click it and then it opens up some others that it is suspicious whether you even want to hear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So they may be doing some mechanisms that hide the very low reputation, low follower count folks, which is probably a good idea at some point because you need to have these people earn their – earn your way to being listened, worth listening to, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So I think there's that and a thousands of other issues in terms of how to optimize social networks and public squares. given that it's no longer, you know, 100 people in your village or maybe 500 people in your village or kind of high school.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So there's been an evolution towards that. Like, you know, now in the last three or four or five years, you can do different kinds of emotional expressions on Facebook. You can choose to laugh or smile. There's a lot of these, you can just respond not just with a like or not like, and even a like is effectively an emotional expressive response.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And we manage just in the prose that we use, of course, we're using constantly emotional responses that amount to an emotional response, even if you don't think of it as much. You're either showing confidence in yourself or disdain in the other. These are emotional expressions because you're staking or pulling off stake.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Almost at all times, that's how you show confidence to real people, not p-values. We do it through staking stuff. That's how we do it. So the way that hopefully the designers don't need to fix it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
In real life, the public square has local spots where people, let's say, in their local village argue, and then maybe the best couple of them go to the bigger city, and they argue with other people from different villages in the big city. And these are just – and then some – it ends up hierarchical, the public square in the old days. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And in principle, if you look at the hierarchy that happened organically through something like Twitter, I think you're going to see similar kinds of hierarchies. Well, I think you do. I think you do already. So it self-organizes so that it's not just a bunch of everybody talking to everybody, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It ends up self-organizing into a kind of representative democracy kind of way so that you end up dealing with this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I'm skeptical of their ability to do any amplification because they have no followers, so no one is seeing them. Now... You may not. Sometimes I see them just because even though I don't follow them, I do go through my comments as well. So I do end up seeing some of them to the extent that they're not themselves de-boosted. But they, in principle, should have very little effect. Right. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Unless the algorithms are somehow accidentally augmented.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, you certainly have to be, I mean, someone like Musk has to be aware of bot farms that create bots that can then leverage and hack, you know, diagonalize against whatever their systems are so that they, turns out when you have tens of thousands of comments in the right way, it ends up
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
ends up doing something to the algorithm that ends up boosting the wrong – it ends up allowing them to boost things just on the basis of a whole bunch of no-follower bots. You can imagine having the wrong kinds of algorithms. So those are the kinds of things they have to be aware of. And no matter what they do, it could be that – I haven't thought about this kind of problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It could be there's ways of sort of always finding some new crack and they've got to come up with new measures.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And not to mention that I'm probably twice their age and I've got a little bit of gray and just – Younger men typically just behave a little differently to older guys. There's just something that happens in normal life when you see someone.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So I don't know whether there's some way to... I've thought a lot about how can you...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
allow much more full expressive, you know, because I don't know what full expressive capabilities are, how can you add them so that you can actually, for example, not just like or not just happy, but you can actually pull up a two-dimensional array and actually just pick from at least the two dimensions, a full four-dimensional space, but at least a two-dimensional quick space to give you a much more exact, you know, but still it's not going to be the same.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's going to be still some technical... So...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's the risk of a fight. Yes, definitely. Always there's the call, and without the call, poker wouldn't exist, right? Poker wouldn't exist if I knew that you couldn't call. There was a risk of us turning our cards over.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
The entire game of emotional expressions is trying to avoid the call, but the fact that the call is there is an ever-present, that we could fight about it, and lawyers are involved. The entire game of lawyers is each of them potentially willing to call and let's go to court, but they're all trying to bluff that they're totally willing to go to court, but no one wants to go to court.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
They all want to pretend like they are. That's all emotional signaling to avoid the fight, to hopefully settle and come to an agreement without having to go to court.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, it's not sacrificial because I'm saying that I'm really confident or I have to show disdain for you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Which shows that I think I'm going to win.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Yeah, or signaled willingness, you know, a lot of us, of course, bluff.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, I was going to quickly – we sort of skipped language. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the real – and this is not just language. This is writing language and music and all of the things that make us human 2.0s, as I call ourselves. So in my second book, Vision Revolution, in addition to some of these color and four-facing eyes and why we see illusions, which we didn't talk about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
The reason that we can read at all, so if you think about it, reading, we didn't evolve to read. You know, it's just 2,000 years old at best. Often our great-grandparents didn't even read. Most of us have illiterate or great-great-grandparents. Reading is much too recent, and yet we seem to have visual word form areas.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I mean, neuroscientists know that we didn't evolve, but they've named some of the areas of our brains even, you know, basically reading areas. And we know that they're not actually reading areas. So how did that happen? In fact, we read so well, it really is like an instinct. We read often more than we listen to all day long. Reading is, and we're so amazingly good at it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Even children are great at it by four years old, and they're barely being read to. They're not having much practice compared to being spoken to. So it's almost as if it's an instinct. So how is that possible? And so what I argued 20 years ago is that over time, cultural evolution itself shaped the look of writing to look like nature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I mean, I, I, my pet assumption has been that, uh, their, um, hair stands on end or they get the, you know, if they feel backed up against the wall, when you get to human behavior, uh, this, you know, Steven Pinker and blank slate arguing this as well. Um,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So we already have visual systems that are incredibly good at processing natural scenes, object recognition. And so all that culture had to do was invent writing systems that looked like nature. In our case, so for example, you've got L junctions. Just whenever there's some kind of contour in the world, meaning the tip of another contour.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You've got T-junctions whenever something goes behind something. There's my contour here, goes up against this contour. Those are the two main ones. There's X-junctions, but X-junctions don't happen in a world of opaque objects. It's very rare, in fact. And then you can look at all the different kinds of junctions that have three contours. Let's say Y junctions and K junctions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And it turns out there's 32 of these different kinds of topologically distinct junctions with three contours. And then you can ask, well, how commonly do these things happen in natural scenes of just opaque objects? Either you can look at like different kinds of varieties of scenes as well. It just turns out it doesn't really matter where you look.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's all the same as just a world with opaque objects strewn about. It's basically that drives the same relative probability of which of these junction types happen. And then you can just ask, well, if this idea is right, then you should find that across human writing systems, writing tends to have the junction types that are found in nature. In those proportions? In those proportions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And that's the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Right. This is a 2006 paper by an American naturalist. So the idea is that we read, we can only read, which is part of what we take to be central to our human nature, even as the ability to be literate, right? I mean, of course, it's not part of our human nature. This is culture which is harnessed. Especially silent reading. Not to mention science.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
This is a cultural evolutionary process which has harnessed a visual object recognition brain for reading by tricking it, not because we've evolved for it, but instead evolving writing to fit us. Now, the same idea I argued in the next book in Harnessed That spoken language is like this as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So spoken language, instead of writing evolving to look like nature, it's spoken language evolved to sound like nature, in particular sound like solid object physical events. When there's solid objects... That's a consonant? That's a consonant. Well, a plosive in particular. There's a plosive like puh, duh, kuh. And then you've got fricatives... Well, this doesn't make any sound at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You got sliding sounds. And then you have, when either of those things happen, the things vibrate, they ring. And those are like the sonorants. Sonorants are things that ring, vowels and any kind of like ya and wa and also just A-E-I-O-U. The basic notion of a syllable is a hit in a ring. It's either, you know, sa is a slide and those objects are vibrating or a ba is there's a collision.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
The idea that there's any notion of instinct or a human nature is against something – they really want to push back on that because they want to think of us as infinitely malleable and subject to socialism and whatever policies that they have. They can shape us however they wish. And so even when we're in things like pruning fingers, it's as if they've taken –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Like a bell. Yeah, it's like a bell. Something hits and they're ringing thereafter. And then this is just – what you can then start working out when I do the book is like, look, there's all these grammars of what solid object events do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So you can actually work out – they typically are going to start with a consonant or a plosive or a fricative because those are just the – more often with a plosive because that's what starts the event. And it will typically end in certain kinds of ways because that's what physical events – amongst solid objects do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And you can start working out all of these many dozens of kinds of regularities and then ask whether across human languages you find the same morphemic regularities at that level.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
In that case, because the rolling maybe you can't hear, but if you're imagining sliding bricks, it could be buh, buh, sh.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And there'd be a consonant at the end. Oh, yeah. But you can work out many kind of mathematical regularities that happen in exactly those systems and are peculiar. And then across humankind, you can show that, oh my gosh, over and over again, these same regularities of solid object physical events are found as universals across human life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So the story in both these cases, and then music, let me, before I make that kind of summary thing, music... also sound like speech, but of course it's fundamentally different. It's utterly evocative. We could listen to music all day long in the car, in our houses. My music is on literally all day long. We just enjoy it so much.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Why would I enjoy listening to these weird sounds that some people have thought, well, they're like mathematical things from Plato's realm. This is always bull crap. This doesn't make any sense. We didn't evolve to like mathematically beautiful things. We evolved to like things that are human. Those are the things that we want to touch and be with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And the humans are the most important stimuli in our lives, which is why colors are so important. Colors are ultimately emotional and evocative because they're about human skin and bodies and emotional health, so forth. And the sounds of music, I hypothesize, and this was, I guess, 15, 20 years ago, are the sounds of humans moving in your midst.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
In fact, this has been an old idea, even since the Greeks said music has something to do with movement or some sounds of, but trying to make it rigorous. So working out, okay, what do humans sound like when they move? Well, one of the most basic things is there's a gate. There's the footsteps. Sure. And that's just the beat.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And then, of course, there's loudness modulations, which is the fortissimo down to pianissimo. And there's the scales at which those things change. And you can work out what are the scales at which those things change.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That's right. You wouldn't be able to dance. So it's not like some accidental side effect that you're able to dance to it. No, it's literally designed to be the sounds of a human mover moving evocatively in your midst. And another thing that happens when things move through the world is you actually hear their Doppler shifts. Now, Doppler shifts, you know, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And the faster it is, it's bigger Doppler shifts for faster moving things. Now, even the movements of humans, which are a little bit, they're much smaller kinds of Doppler shifts. But my claim in that book was that the kinds of patterns that you end up with the Doppler shifts, which are exaggerated Doppler shifts as if it's moving faster, still have the fundamental signature of movement.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
of human movement. And so, for example, if you're moving faster, there's a bigger difference between high pitch and low pitch because of the Doppler shift. But also, if you're moving faster, the tempo of the song is going to be faster. It's going to be a higher, faster tempo, right? Those two, the faster moving things will have a bigger difference between top and bottom.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
that kind of prohibition of human psychology and push it into any realm at all and have a general admonition not to do any kind of design or research that concerns the design of animals themselves. So I'm not sure what else it could be, but at any rate, it's a bizarre thing because the only way that- Well, there's something else too there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
In music, that's called the tessitura, the difference between the top and the bottom. But also, so the prediction here is that Um, faster tempo things correlates with higher, bigger tessitura sort of in real world movement. Is that true in music?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Do higher, bigger tessitura songs actually tend to be more bigger, faster in tempo or, and vice versa, which is not what you want when you're the piano player. When, when someone says, Hey, here's a much faster song. You're like, great. Hopefully it's a really small tessitura. Cause I can just, no, in fact, The faster the song, the tessituras get wider and wider, for example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So these are these kinds of predicted regularities between these different kinds of patterns of modulations of loudness. beats and rhythmic things that are connected to the time lock to the beat, as well as to... So, there's like 80-something different kinds of regularities you can show. For example, how fast do humans turn? And so, we got data from soccer players.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
How many steps do they take to turn 90 degrees? And so... At the top of the high pitch is when it's coming directly toward you. Low pitch is when it's moving directly away from you in a tessitura. So typically, people, when they turn 90 degrees, take about two steps to do it on average. They can go, obviously, faster if they just go one way real quickly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And so to go from toward you to away from you quickly would still be about four steps. And so that would be about four beats. It typically takes a measure. So you can actually look across thousands of songs and ask, is it usually the case that you move a half a tessitura in about two beats.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And in fact, you can show yet, these in fact determine the baseline time ranges of how quickly melodies move through the test stores, things like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
It's not always just one guy or gal walking. It's often complicated duets and different things. And in some sense, what I work out in the book is sort of the baseline boring dialogue. here's the baseline kind of things that humans do. Any good composer is deviating from that baseline to create interesting stories, right? Sure, of course. So I'm not the artist type.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
I'm trying to like, here's the typical baseline. That's what determines the average across all these songs, none of which would be potentially very good if they actually stuck to the average that I'm finding, right? So they're all deviating from that. Right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But the bigger story about these kinds of cultural harnessing of us, I call this harnessing, by looking like nature, sounding like nature, is that we often think of ourselves as the speaking animal, right? Or as the music animal or the artistic animal. This is what often we define what it is to be human by a lot of these things, the arts and the ability to talk, the ability to be literate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But up until just a couple hundred thousand years ago, and it's exactly unclear, we didn't have language at all. We certainly didn't have writing. We didn't have music. We may have had some vocalization stuff that people did, but probably a million years, we may not have even had that. All of the things that we mistakenly think of ourselves as human aren't human 1.0 at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
All of the stuff that we take to be human today are really human 2.0s. These are things that are products of cultural engineering that now is harnessing us and giving us all these modern powers. So, you know, it always was remarkable. You've got chimpanzees with their encephalization quotient, you know, and it's a little bit bigger than these other great apes and so forth. And then you've got us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Again, it's a little bit bigger on a log scale. But it's not... you're not looking at it, you're going, oh, this totally explains the difference between us and chimpanzees. No, chimpanzees are like super dumb compared to us because look at all the stuff that we can do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
We can ride, drive cars, and we can like do math and all the crazy stuff that we can do in our real lives makes us seem like we're literally off the page and, you know, miles away. So how can you make sense of the fact that we're only just a little bit higher and yet we're, it's because biologically our human one point ourselves are just this little bit higher.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
You know, when in this world, you know, but just expressions, we're just a little bit smarter, you know, but what we have is all, which is why we can understand other animals, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
That's right. And dogs and we get along great. Um, it's the cultural technology that's fundamentally changed who we are. So, uh, The first big one, of course, was the language, which has made us the language ape, but we're not the language ape per se at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
This is a cultural product of this evolution, cultural evolution, co-evolving, not co-evolving, just evolving for us to plug into our brains and give us language when we never had one. harnessing object event systems to make it so that we can suddenly communicate with one another. And then music is evolving to the sounds of human movement recognition systems.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And then much more recently, writing evolving, culturally evolving, just to look like natural objects allowing us to read. All of these things are exactly who we take to be human today, but none of this is our human 1.0 selves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
So I feel like this is a – so, for example, typically for language, you've got two sides. You've got – and they're gorillas, like Steven Pinker and Chomsky. Chomsky's been on and off of this for years. But roughly, you've got the language instinct folks – That we've evolved over millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to really have a language instinct.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
There's part of our brain that's designed for language. And I think that's wrong. And the other side, all these years was like, no, we're infinitely classic, infinitely malleable. We do all these things we never evolved to do, like riding horses, whatever. Like there's millions of things we do. We're just infinitely classic. Well, that's totally wrong as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And in fact, Pinker's one of the best people that argues against that. Neither of these are right, right? So my view is like completely, it's like, no, this is a kind of zoo-centrism in my opinion, because each of these are violating zoo-centrism. Zoo-centrism is the hypothesis that we're animals, for God's sakes. We're not special having a language- Right, you assume continuity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
There's just continuity. We're not special and have a language instinct that makes us human like nobody else's language instinct, but we do. And we're not special- In the blank slate, all these other animals, they're filled with instincts, but we, we're blank slates. We're like totally have all these general plastic mechanisms. No, that's just another violation of zoocentrism. We are just animals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
And to the extent that we now seem to be something fundamentally different is because of cultural evolution. Another blind designer, blind watchmaker that has got up and running. several hundred thousand years ago, mildly, that's been designing all this tech for us and giving all these new powers. And the fun, of course, language is a big one. Writing is another huge one.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But all around us right now, there's so much more we can't even put our finger, like the phones, all of these things are constantly evolving to raise us to be becoming more and more intelligent and farther from the other great apes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But a preserved zoocentrism would be the way I'd like to say it. So I'd like to think of this, if you really want to be the Galileo of biology and say, look, no, there's nothing special about the Earth. The world doesn't move around the Earth. The Earth is just one part of the... Same thing for us. We're not special. Then this allows you to say it. There's no language instinct. It's really...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
We're just animals. And to the extent that we seem not to be, it's because of culture. But we're truly a zoo-centric creature. Right, right, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
But most of them don't really have to think about Darwin because they're doing mechanistic experiments. They're not doing hypotheses about its design. I'm one of the rare people back in the 1920s, You had the ethologists who did a lot more thinking in terms of the design and the function, really thinking about their evolutionary connection. But that's gone way away.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Everybody's dealing with really complicated experiments with mechanisms. They don't have to think about it. So they've somehow developed this knee-jerk reaction that you don't have to understand design and purpose. But you cannot understand any machine without understanding what it's designed for. So I often use an example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
If you were to find a stapler out of the middle of nowhere, natives find a stapler for the first time. And they want to try to understand it. There's not much to a stapler. There's like four parts or whatever, six parts. But you might work out all the mechanisms. This opens this. There's like seven things, let's say, and they do these sorts of kinds of actions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, that's not an understanding of it. You might start saying, well, maybe it's a weapon. And you start shaking it around like nunchucks. You open it up. Well, now you can work out how does it break when you hit someone in the face? Is it bent? Maybe that's part of it. There's tons and tons of mechanistic behaviors that it has that have nothing to do with what it's in fact for.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
how it deforms when this happens. There's lots of infinite numbers of kinds of mechanisms that are involved with it that are completely irrelevant, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Only by understanding the mechanisms in the context of what the function is for, this is where the computational heart, you've got function, you've got the algorithm level, you've got the mechanistic implementation level, you have to understand all these systems by understanding it by all of these parts all cohering together in one. In relationship to function.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
In relationship to function at the top. And so they're throwing out the very thing that allows you to understand, even if they are only interested in mechanisms, which my eyes glaze over with mechanisms, you can't understand mechanisms without inherently understanding the functions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Well, I mean, ecological, capital E, ecological perception, ecological vision with Gibson ended up biting onto a whole lot of philosophical baggage that I never bought into. I consider myself a lowercase e, ecological vision person, in which case you can't understand what vision or anything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Horny mechanisms are doing it unless you understand what it was functioning for in the natural environment for all of those millions of years. And so let me just give you some specific examples. So one of the things that I had noticed was that people had talked about color for 100 years and color vision. First of all, to back up, we primates, we and some other primates, have a third dimension.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
Your dog just has gray scale. And yellow-blue, two dimensions. All the bunny rabbits, horses, just have two dimensions. But some of us primates have a third dimension, red-green. And so for 100 years, they thought, well, maybe it has something to do with finding fruits in the forest. And there was never any good evidence for this at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
There's incredible varieties and variability in terms of the kinds of diets that they would have.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
not to mention just even generation to generation is going to experience radically different kinds of diets of fruits but they all have the same um pegged the exact same um kind of color vision and it's a weird this is across primate groups across all trichromate primate groups all the old world uh trichromats have so dog um dogs and bunny rabbits have one low wavelength sensitive cone down in the 550s and then the other one um sorry um in the in the 400s 450s or so and that's sort of the
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi
blue cone and then the other ones we have one in the 550s or so for the dogs that's around here so you've got two and then what you'd expect if you're going to have a third one would be that suddenly it may be over here you'd have the uniformly distributed like rgb for your cameras they're uniformly distributed across the spectrum which is sort of a poor man's spectrometer you've got three across the spectrum you put them uniformly but in fact ours is this