[MUSIC] There's a important experiment called the Gorilla experiment in which you're looking at a screen and people are on a basketball court, and they're passing basketballs back and forth. And your job is to count the number of passes. Easy enough? In the middle of this, a gorilla walks across the basketball court. 50% of the people don't see the gorilla. They don't see the gorilla. They don't perceive, now what's going on here? Well it turns out what's going on is extremely interesting. And it has to do with the visual system. So the visual system in your brain is a column of cells, at the base essentially is something called V1. And V1 gets what goes on to the retina. V2 is right above V1 and it's an abstraction. It only has a portion of what the retina gets. And this goes all the way up to something called IT. What IT is, is an Alain detector. It basically only has Bill Clinton, or Hillary, or Alain. Now, so it turns out the visual system is a column in which it there's increasingly abstract information. Most interestingly, if you count the number of connections going upward to IT, they're only one tenth as many as the connections that go downward. That's a way of saying that the instructions that go downward to what V2 should get are about what side are IT. That is it says, this is basketball. That's what's going on at IT. In the next saccade your eyes move three times every second, that's called a saccade. It says in the next saccade, amplify stuff that's about basketball, and inhibit and discard stuff that's about gorillas. That is to say, what's going on in perception right now when you change the saccade and the reason that I'm not jerking around in your perception right now, is that, your IT says, stabilize. It's Seligman giving a lecture, there's no gorilla. So that's a way of saying that even the visual system is not about the present, it's about the future. It's a hallucination about the future. And memory is also a hallucination about the past in sevice of the future. For those of us who work in psychopathology, in anxiety and depression, this completely shifts the tables. So, what I learned to do and what I taught as a teacher of therapists, was to teach people about, bad event happened in the past, well, let's see if we can undo that. Your boss yelled at you today at work, well do you really think that was because you're incompetent? Maybe he had a hangover. So you manipulate the past and the present to deal with depression and anxiety. But perspection tells us that depression is a disorder of the future, not a disorder of the past or the present or the world. When you're depressed, there's something called the cognitive triad In depression. Which is negative thoughts about the self, negative thoughts about the world, and negative thoughts about the future. This few says that what's really going on in depression is the third thing, negative thoughts about the future. And that depression is a disorder of faulty perspection. And that therapies that are oriented toward better planning, and rosier views of possible futures that teach us to generate more scenarios of possible futures, and to evaluate them better should be the key to therapy for depression. Similarly anxiety is clearly about expectations that bad things are going to happen in the future, yet the entire basis for the therapy of anxiety has been about the past and the present. So, to reformulate psychology as being not about perception and memory, but to start with the way we evaluate and create scenarios of the future is the place to start. Looking at its phenomenology, looking at its biology, and then going backwards to understand perception in memory will be more fruitful than the deterministic approach we've taken for the last 120 years that has been a colossal failure. That said if we understand memory and perception, then we'll understand the future.
