[MUSIC]. We're now I'm going to revisit the very beginning of my lectures many hours ago. So as those of you who have been with the course the whole time will remember, my work started 50 years ago on learned helplessness. And what we found in learned helplessness was that animals who had inescapable shock became passive and highly anxious, relative to animals who had no shock, or animals who had the same shock but could do something about it. That's where my career started. And the theory that Steve Steve Maier and I put forward was that animals and people could learn helplessness. They could learn that nothing they do matters and once they learn that, when they got in to new situations, they would be more passive. They would panic more and the like. That was wrong, it was 180 degrees wrong. And Steve Maier, in the last decade, has discovered why. And it turns the field, not only of learned helplessness on its head, but it turns psychotherapy and education on its head. I'll tell you the bottom line, and then I'll tell you how Steve discovered it. The bottom line is that helplessness and panic is the default mammalian reaction to prolonged bad events. So if you're a reptile and not a mammal, this is the low part of the brain we have. And something bad occurs, you're attacked by another reptile, you don't have a lot of cognition or voluntary coping. The best thing you can do to survive is to curl into a ball and hope, metaphorically, that by the time you get out of the ball the bad thing will have gone away. So the default mammalian reaction, coming from reptilian reactions, when prolonged bad events occur is to give up and to panic. What we have is a cortex that tells us that good things may happen in the future, that we can control bad events. And the cortex gives us a whole behavior repertoire of things we can do to control bad events. So what is vouched safe to us is cortical stuff, brainy stuff about good possibilities in the future. That's what we have that reptiles don't have. 50 years ago the technology of looking at brains of rats, to say nothing of people, was so primitive that we couldn't really ask what was going on in the brain. But in the last 15 years, the technology, at least in rats, has become very sophisticated. So we know now what was going on in the brain during learned helplessness. This tells us thatt we got it backwards. Here's how we know that. Deep in the limbic system of rats is a 50,000 cell tiny little structure called the dorsal raphe nucleus, remember that, very important, the key to the future, the dorsal raphe nucleus. This is a way station which when it's active, is necessary and sufficient for producing helplessness and panic. That is, if you directly stimulate the dorsal raphe, you get helplessness. If you block the dorsal raphe but produce inescapable events which normally would make rats helpless, you don't get helplessness. So the dorsal raphe is the crucial mechanism so that when it's excited, helplessness and panic occur. So what's learned, what does learning have to do with this? Well, up in your ventral medial prefrontal cortex, that of the rat medial prefrontal cortex, in the human there is a circuit that there are a set of discrete structures that go down to the dorsal raphe. And when the ventral medial prefrontal cortex is stimulated, that turns the dorsal raphe off. When a rat learns it can control shock by turning a wheel, that turns on the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which turns off the dorsal rephe. So learning that something you can do matters turns off the default response of helplessness. But it's even much more exciting than this. So think about this circuit that goes from the ventral medial prefrontal cortex down to the dorsal raphe, that when it's excited, it will turn off the dorsal raphe. Well, eliminate experience, that is, give rats escapable shock, so they're turning a wheel to escape shock, but turn off the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. And we've got discrete ways of turning that circuitry off? What should happen? Well, it turns out, even though these rats have learned they can control shock, but you've turned off the circuit, those rats are going to be helpless. Conversely, give rats inescapable shock, so they're just sort of lying there like that. But turn on the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, those rats will not be helpless. So what we have is a circuit that in normal rats, if you can learn you can do something, it will normally turn off helplessness. But you can short circuit all of that and that circuit itself is necessary and sufficient for turning off the dorsal raphe. That means that when bad events occur, when trauma occurs in your life, you can never annihilate it, it's always going to be there. What you can do is to buffer against it. You can learn mastery, you can learn control, you can reframe the bad event to obviate the occurrence of helplessness. Therapies that try to undo the past are useless. Therapies of the sort we've been talking about, which build mastery and control and perception are our best armor against bad events.
