The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
533. Dreams, Nightmares, and Neuroscience | Dr. Baland Jalal
Thu, 27 Mar 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with researcher, neuroscientist, and author, Dr. Baland Jalal. They discuss human embodiment, the rubber hand experiments (which push embodiment beyond the physical), the deeper functionality of dreams, sleep paralysis, and a potential theory to explain alien abductions. Dr. Jalal is a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a Visiting Researcher at Cambridge University Medical School where he obtained his PhD. Dr. Jalal's work has been featured in the The New York Times, Washington Post, The Today Show, The BBC, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, NBC News, New York Magazine, The Times, The Telegraph, Forbes, Der Spiegel, Reuters, Fox News, Discover Magazine, VICE, and PBS (NOVA). He writes for Time Magazine, Scientific American, Big Think, and Boston Globe. The Telegraph and BBC described him as “one of the world’s leading experts on sleep paralysis,” and he was ranked the "top-rated expert in sleep paralysis in the world" on Expertscape based on scientific impact in the past 10 years. This episode was filmed on January 17th, 2025. | Links | For Dr. Baland Jalal On X https://x.com/balandjalalphd On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/balandjalal/?hl=en Read “Transdiagnostic Multiplex CBT for Muslim Cultural Groups: Treating Emotional Disorders” (2020) https://a.co/d/d1nZUwP
Chapter 1: What are the dynamics of the brain and self-perception?
So we look at the brain as something that's malleable and not fixed. It's a dynamic object. So the parietal lobes and the superior parietal lobule is specifically involved in creating a subjective sense of a self. The feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right?
Jung's idea was that the dream was a place of exploration for the remapping of anomaly. This is very weird too, everyone.
So you have this REM paralysis, obviously. You're paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. You're dreaming away. Are you familiar with sleep paralysis?
Something was happening to me, and I was frozen and unable to speak, and I knew I had to wake myself up. Like, I'd try to throw myself off the bed. Sometimes I could yell to my wife. She'd have to come and shake me, and then I'd wake up.
So I was sleeping in my room, and then I had this creepy feeling of a monster from the corner of my room approaching me until it was on my chest, strangling me.
What did the monster look like? Well, I'll tell you.
Thank you.
Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Dr. Balan Jalal. He's a neuroscientist and author at Harvard and previously a visiting researcher at Cambridge University Medical School. He's been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other such publications.
The Telegraph and the BBC described him as one of the world's leading experts on sleep paralysis and the terrors and opportunities of dream, fantasy, and adaptation What did we discuss?
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Chapter 2: How do dreams function as a remapping of anomaly?
So it kind of has the nitty-gritty of an introductory neuroscience course, but then also taking in some more sort of poetic aspects of the brain. So it's kind of all that mix.
Right, so it's an approach to the cultural from the bottom up, from the biological up.
right right right how much how much anatomy functional anatomy and so forth is in the course i make sure that the basics are there so for a basics neuroscience course for as an introduction you've got to have the basics there all the brain structures the the the cortex the brainstem all the different names but i try to keep it simple so people don't fall asleep well i used to when i did my first biopsychology neuroscience course that was incredibly boring um i had all these names thrown at me yeah and it was yeah just out of
You had to force memorize them.
It made no sense. So what's the cerebellum doing? What's this doing? You just had all these names. You had to memorize them. That was it. But I really made sure to describe the function and have an overall context for each.
Yeah, I found that I got extremely interested in neuroanatomy, even at a detailed level, when I was reading scientists who associated the area with the function.
It's very important.
It was also extremely useful philosophically. One of the advantages, if you're a conceptual thinker, to studying neuroanatomy and neurobiology is that It puts limits on what philosophical propositions are plausible and possible. I really like that. It's like you have to play a game with two different sets of rules then, right? It has to make sense conceptually, so that would be philosophically.
But then it can't. violate the principles of neuroanatomy and neuroscience that are already established. It's a very good way of initial triangulation.
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Chapter 3: What is the relationship between sleep paralysis and dreams?
Yeah, the way that I like to do is that I know that in this course, I'll cover this, right? But then I kind of see and explore how I can sort of weave this into sort of a narrative and a story and then kind of put things in as we go along. And I feel like this makes sense to put this aspect here and put that aspect here so it doesn't come in this sort of you know, very ABC kind of dry way.
So that's my approach and see how I can let things unfold in a natural way.
And so you said that when you went to do the recording that the process worked well. Very well. What about it worked well?
I was very impressed. So I was very impressed by the whole process, the way things were arranged. Obviously, we were put in a very nice hotel and we felt pampered, honestly. Good. You feel pampered. You feel everything is just on point. And yeah, and then the shooting itself, people around you, they take care of you, bring you food. You know, it's just very, you feel pampered. So it's great.
Yeah, well, you know, I think we realized the importance of that, really. When I did the first Exodus seminar for The Daily Wire, we brought nine thinkers in, and we spent a fair bit of time on the hospitality side. And one of the things I realized, and I knew this in part from working at a university, was that a lot of the professors that we pulled in for that seminar
seminar, I wouldn't say they're exactly well treated at their institutions. And that's foolish because I invited the people who I did invite to the Exodus seminar because I thought they were great and I wanted to hear what they had to say. And there's every reason to make that obvious in every in every detail of treatment.
And so, you know, one of the things I offer people who we offer at Peterson Academy, people who come and lecture, because people ask me, well, you know, what lecture do you need? And that's not the right approach. My sense is that I find people whose views I want to know and share.
And then I want them to do what they think would be best because I wouldn't bloody well invite them if I didn't think they knew what they were doing. And I don't want to put constraints on them. And then if we find the right people, we can sort out the curriculum rather than sorting out their curriculum and then forcing the participants, the professors into it. That makes no sense at all to me.
Absolutely. And that was my approach too, right? So I would talk about my own research, some of the nicest experiments that I love about my work and sort of weave into that neuroscience curriculum in that way, right? So we talk about, for example, OCD and then maybe you might mention the orbital frontal cortex, which is overactive in OCD. What's the function of the orbital frontal cortex?
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Chapter 4: How does the rubber hand illusion illustrate embodiment?
Correct.
Okay, now you're extending this to the OCD situation.
Yes. Okay, so elaborate on that. Absolutely. And I just want to, just one point here is that I mentioned a table. So the original experiment was done with a rubber hand, right? Right, right. But I'm using table because it's more, it illustrates the experiment better, I think, and you can have a table as well.
People would start responding to a rubber hand as if it was their own.
Right. So instead of a table, you just have a rubber hand that looks like your own hand, and then you stroke and tap the rubber hand, right, in front of the person.
Right, with their other hand hidden. Correct. They start to respond to the rubber hand as if it's theirs.
Right, right, exactly.
And then flinch if there's a threat to it.
They flinch if there's a threat to it, right?
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Chapter 5: What role does the brain's plasticity play in perception?
superior parietal lobule, this area just above it, it's a neighbor, right? It's involved in creating a subjective sense of a self, the feeling that I occupy this body and not somebody else's body, right? So when people have a stroke to that part of the brain,
As you mentioned, they will sometimes throw their hands out, say, this arm doesn't belong to me, it belongs to you, or it belongs to my dad, or it belongs to this person or that person. So literally, they will become delusional. You can play chess with them, you can have conversation, nothing, nothing is wrong. Otherwise, they're not delusional, they're not psychotic or anything like that.
But after they have the stroke affect this region of the brain, they will just say that this arm doesn't belong to me. Or sometimes they might even say, you might ask them, you say, well, they might deny the paralysis. So that's anosognosia, right? So you say, Joe, your arm is paralyzed. They'll say, no, it's not paralyzed. Well, then touch my nose, Joe. And they will say, okay.
And they will take the lifeless arm and lift it like this and say, I'm touching it, doctor. I'm touching it, literally taking it up like that.
Yeah, well, I wonder too if that's an... is it a lack of capacity to update as well? Like, it seems to me that what must be happening is they're using a pre-stroke representation of their body. And the tissue that's been destroyed normally would update that.
Because I remember too, with Ramachandran's experiments, when he irrigated, this is very weird too, everyone, Ramachandran would irrigate the ears, so pour water in, cold water in the ears of, left ear, if I remember correctly, left ear, of the people who had neglect, and it would make them shudder. Now that disturbed their vestibular system, which is involved with bodily orientation.
And it would shock them into the realization that they had a paralyzed left side and they would break down emotionally, catastrophically with the realization that they'd been so badly damaged. But then the effects of the irrigation would wear off and they'd snap back into this And that's why I think it's not exactly a delusional state.
I think they're stuck with the body representation that existed before the stroke and what's been eradicated. The systems that could update that, the right hemisphere systems, they don't exist. So there's no way of fixing it. There's no straightforward way of fixing it.
So one way to approach this or sort of think about this is that, you know, the left side of the brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different functions. I just want to make it clear to the listeners. I know you know this, right? But so they have different functions. So intriguingly, it's only in the right side.
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Chapter 6: How do dreams contribute to emotional processing?
Okay, so you're contextualizing the emotion.
You contextualize it based on the hyperactive hippocampus. Because then it's chasing you and you can't run away because we said the motor, central motor generator of your brainstem is making it very hard for you to move. So you don't have the, so movement normally occurs in the motor cortex of your brain that gives you voluntary movement.
But because that part of the brain can't compete with the central motor, automatic part of the brain firing and making your behaviors all, you know, sporadic and automatic, so you can't get away. Now, what you said was interesting. You said if you turn around and approach the monster, the monster will become diminished in strength.
And that's interesting because we know in the real world, if you walk, simply by walking, you will turn down the activity of the amygdala because you're telling your brain or yourself that you are approaching, you're engaging in approach behavior instead of withdrawal behavior.
Yeah, right, right. Which puts you, see, that shifts your identity in relationship to the thing that's chasing you.
You're changing and saying, now I'm no longer the prey here. I'm the predator. I am the one that is doing the haunting. And so in that sense, it would make sense that the monster would vanish. So that's very interesting. But I also want to touch on monsters since we're on the topic of monsters. So there's a condition called sleep paralysis, and I talk about it in my Peterson Academy course.
There's a whole lecture on sleep paralysis. So are you familiar with sleep paralysis? Yes.
I experienced sleep paralysis repeatedly for years. Yeah, especially if I slept on my back. That doesn't happen anymore, but I'm very familiar with sleep paralysis.
Do you see any monsters? Can you explain? I'm curious.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of social interactions in dreams?
Okay. And then it takes a face. Yeah.
And an identity. It takes a face, identity, and then you hook up the emotional part of the brain so it gets emotions.
Okay. The next thing you'd need above that would be a behavioral strategy. Yeah. So if this named and faced figure now makes itself manifest, what do you need to do? So, see, this is... Partly what you do if you're trying to treat someone for post-traumatic stress disorder is you help them specify very clearly, so give form to the nature of the fear, but that's not enough.
It isn't enough to know your enemy, right? That's better than not knowing your enemy, because that's even more terrifying. But you want to lay out a behavioral strategy in relationship to that enemy that either quells the threat, so how do you deal with a criminal, let's say, or like the optimal strategy would be to take the enemy and to transform him into an ally, right?
That's the highest possible level of adaptation. Because who needs an enemy? And partly what you're doing, like in therapy, you can go through someone's history and you can see where they might have had a repeated traumatic experience, like in a relationship.
Then you have to find out what is it that's absent in their representation of relationship that's exposing them time and time again to that threat, because it means there's something in their perception and their strategy. Because imagine this, imagine that you were selectively blind only for white vans that were approaching you from the left. That's not much of a deficit.
But your recurring experience would be once every two years, you get run over by a white fan. And you have no idea why. Okay, so that's the account of the lack of your perception and the repeat experience. Okay, so now you have someone who has a repetitive trauma. You think, well, you've got a hole in your adaptive structure. Okay, now you want to characterize that. So give it form.
And you want to... It's a perceptual and behavioral strategy to it. And that's what'll make the nightmare go away. And it's really remarkable. My experience clinically was that it took very few repetitions Of a repeating dream. Yep. Where you inverted the strategy, the dream would almost, my experience was that if you did that once, the person wouldn't have the recurring dream anymore. Right.
Right. And it's because you might say at some very deep level, they had conceptualized themselves in that situation as nothing but a prey animal.
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Chapter 8: How can dreams help navigate complex social situations?
The grandmother transmitted the spirit to her.
It's like a virus, right?
Yeah, a meme. It's a monstrous meme.
It's a meme, right? But at this point, what's interesting is that we've shown that people who have this episode, they will have more anxiety and more PTSD-like symptoms from this, right? So at this point, she might have these... small tease of trauma of the monster coming and attacking you and then creating an overall trauma. So it becomes almost a traumatic experience.
Well, you can imagine how that would increase the probability that it would spread too. Because... She might tell a friend, for example.
That's what I'm saying, right? So she goes around and tells her friends about it. And it turns out then that if you live in a culture like Egypt, it's twice as common versus Denmark. So we said that for an individual person, you will have it three times more than the person who has sleep paralysis. But beyond this... It's generally twice as common in cultures like Egypt and Italy and so forth.
So there's this element to it that's very, very interesting. And I want to take you to an experiment that your colleague Rich did, Rich McNally, that sort of encapsulates all this. So he showed that people who think that sleep paralysis is a space alien abduction, So these guys will say, well, I was sleeping in my bed and this gray came down in a spaceship. It attacked me. It choked me.
It took out my semen. It was a lot of sexuality going on. And obviously we know from REM sleep, the hypothalamus and these parts of the brain are hyperactive. The sexual parts of the brain are hyperactive. So you have sexual arousal doing sleep paralysis. Right, right, right. So you have the monster coming down, taking their semen and all that.
Then they will have- Like a succubus from the Middle Ages. Like a succubus, right?
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