Episode 1: Dr. Kelly Lambert on Intelligence, Adaptability, and the Brain

What if part of the solution to improving mental health isn’t just found in a prescription bottle—but in how we engage with the world around us?

In this fascinating conversation, Tina Motley sits down with Dr. Kelly Lambert, behavioral neuroscientist, professor at the University of Richmond, author, and internationally recognized researcher known for her groundbreaking work on effort-based rewards, brain plasticity, and even teaching rats to drive.

Together, they explore how modern life may be unintentionally working against our mental health, why meaningful engagement matters, and what neuroscience reveals about depression, resilience, hope, and the brain’s remarkable ability to change throughout our lives.

Dr. Lambert challenges conventional assumptions about depression treatment and introduces listeners to the concept of “behaviorceuticals”—intentional behaviors that can positively shape brain chemistry, improve wellbeing, and support mental health recovery.

 In This Episode:

-Why modern convenience may be contributing to rising rates of depression -The science behind effort-based rewards and why earning something feels different than receiving it

-How meaningful engagement creates a greater sense of agency and control

-Why physical activity and hands-on activities impact brain health

-What neuroscience reveals about dopamine, serotonin, and reward pathways

-The surprising limitations of antidepressant medications

-How Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) compares to medication in many cases -Why anticipation and hope can reshape the brain

-Dr. Lambert’s fascinating research teaching rats to drive

-The role of positive anticipation in resilience and emotional wellbeing

-How “behaviorceuticals” can support mental health

-Why mindfulness may help reduce mental “noise”

-The importance of neuroplasticity and lifelong brain growth

-How awe, nature, and meaningful experiences contribute to healing

even the authenticity of our engagement and interactions with the world around us, and that is dampening the brain.

Full Transcript of Episode 1

Welcome to the Fig Tree Framework, a biopsychosocial spiritual approach to mental health, where mental health meets mind, body, and spirit. Hosted by Tina Motley, recorded and produced by Richmond Podcast Studio.

So today I’m here with Dr. Kelly Lambert, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Richmond, not only has Dr. Lambert taught mice to drive, she has made some fascinating discoveries along the way that have quite an impact on mental health. So, I’ve what I’ve appreciated a lot about your work is that you do offer a different approach. According to the CDC, one in eight, or roughly 34 to 40 million Americans are taking pharmaceuticals to treat depression, but you see this a little differently, and so you’ve made several comments, but one of which is how modern life may actually be working against our mental health, so what does that look like and mean?

Yeah, nice to be here, Tina. As our lives have become more sedentary, I mean, we sometimes we think about advancements and such translated into we don’t have to work as hard, we don’t have to build our own houses or make our own clothes, or so often make our own food, we can press a button and have Uber Eats, and you know, things delivered, and Amazon Prime daily, so we don’t have to exert as much effort as my certainly, when I look at my grandparents, and I’m older than you are, but when I’m from Alabama, and I think about the privilege that my grandparents seem to perceive having a garden, it wasn’t, “Oh my gosh, I have to plant this, it’s they just really enjoyed that and seemed to associate their effort and, and all the energy and planning that went into it to the bounty, you know, that they would preserve food, freeze it, can it, and as we, as they served it through the year, I could just tell they still had that, that pride, so as we’ve become more, become more advanced, that means that we’re exerting less physical effort in what our rewards and our resources, and our.. I’ve spent a lot of time more with rats than than mice, but they’re kind of humbling, and they school me a good bit, but the research suggests that we make, as we make these connections between our effort and what is produced in the world around us, that it gives us a heightened sense of control, and that sense of control and agency can dampen stress. We all have stress. I don’t, I don’t know how to construct a life without stress. Stress is good, it gets us out of a lot of little trouble. It’s just bad when it becomes chronic, or when we perceive that we don’t have agency in our world, and our brain gets, and our mind gets confused and scared, and anxiety starts to come on board.

Right, so you talk a lot about effort-based rewards and how the brain responds differently for the things that we work for versus the things that come easily or with no effort, and so can you unpack a little bit about what’s happening in the brain and why that matters for depression?

 Yeah, and I’ll give you a little bit of context about how I became passionate about looking into this. I was writing on the side, kind of. I enjoy writing textbooks. I’m an undergraduate professor, and I was writing a textbook many years ago, clinical neuroscience, and I wanted to dig in. There was a whole chapter on schizophrenia, whole chapter on depression, and just tell the students what we knew, what we know or knew at that time about behavior, what’s going on in the brain, what treatments work. When I wrote that depression chapter, it dampened – I didn’t have clinical depression, but it dampened my mood because I got so frustrated. One is the. Drugs that we have SSRIs are popular version and I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be used but the and I’m sure they help some people, so I’m not a clinician, just want to go ahead and say that I treat rats, not humans, but the rats give us insights and I am, I am a student of the brain, but when you, you look at the history of some of those drugs, they were kind of accidental or serendipitous discoveries, you know. This, we’re giving this to patients for tuberculosis, and, oh, by the way, they’re smiling a little bit more, so maybe we give this to the patients on this wing of the hospital who are depressed, and yeah, it does seem to help. So, didn’t have this theoretical grounding. Now we were able, or they were able to say, “If this works, let’s give it to some animals to see what it’s doing, and we learned about how it’s impacting, in the beginning, different neurotransmitters more than serotonin, but it’s become more specific, so it’s okay to have an accidental discovery, but a lot of these drugs for psychological illness, they were just somebody, someone noticed something, and then we kind of backtracked, and we didn’t have that, the research, that the perspective, but then when you look at a lot of the research, the foundational research, it’s surprising how close the treatment or efficacy rates for many SSRIs are to what we call a placebo, someone taking a drug, thinking or medication, they think it’s medication, but they don’t know, and we talk about having double blind studies and studies, and and there’s a lot of side effects that come with some of these drugs, so if the, if the improvement or efficacy rate is not great, it works for some people, you know, maybe 40 50% depending on what research you’re looking at, but then the placebo is just a little bit lower, and then you factor in this is an expensive drug. There doesn’t seem to be an exit strategy, which is brilliant for pharmaceutical command. I don’t mean to throw them under the bus, but it is a really good business plan if you have to continue taking something for the rest of your life, and now we know there’s increasing evidence that there is. It’s been called a discontinuation syndrome. It’s kind of withdrawal, so a lot of people, as they are dealing with some of these side effects, many side effects with the drugs, and they want to try to get themselves off. You can’t just stop taking this drug, you have to wean yourself off, and not just half a pill, half a pill. It’s a science now about, you know, about weaning yourself off very systematically, and this isn’t really facilitated by pharmaceutical companies or even doctors, so there’s a, like, a community of people on the internet that are sharing their weight and things in their bathroom and sharing information, and in the UK, especially, there’s a heightened sense of let’s try to regulate this, and there’s some issues, so my desire to learn more about this came out of frustration, thinking, although I respect what’s been done up to this point, I think we can do better, and I think individuals who are experiencing these symptoms, either of depression or the side effects of these medications, they deserve better. So I just went back to the drawing board after writing the book, and respectfully and dutifully reporting what the literature suggested, and just started to look at sometimes I call myself a brain whisperer. If you look at the symptoms of depression, a lot of them are kind of the signature characteristic is related to profound sadness or an inability to experience reward or pleasure. One of my favorite neuroscientists, Robert Sapolsky, describes depression as an inability to experience or appreciate a sunset, and I think that really captures that. So, there’s this pleasure type of aspect, there’s also a cognitive kind of distraction, worrying you’re not on your game cognitively, cognitive wise, and then there’s some regulatory mechanisms that may be related to sleep or metabolic weight gain, weight loss, the sense of anxiety, so I kind of focused in on that pleasure, reward, feeling good aspect, and started to track that. Now there’s a, an area of the brain that people always talk about that’s related to reward, it’s called the nucleus accumbens, it’s. It’s approach avoidance, but yeah, reward drugs of abuse, such as cocaine, they’re certainly facilitating the neurochemical system dopamine that goes through that, but what was surprising to me was that there are connections to the middle part of the brain involved in movement, called the striatum, and I hadn’t really thought about movement being some thing that could give us some insight about depression, but it started to look like that certain movements could could be associated with pleasure or reward or sense of satisfaction, and when I thought about the importance of our ancestors before we could press a button and became so advanced, you know, our survival depended on getting up, getting out of that cave, or whatever, and foraging and hunting and building and organizing and being very vigilant, because nothing was was guaranteed, so it certainly makes sense that the brain needed a way to reward and to reinforce our actions that led to the resources that were critical for our survival, so we’ve mixed up our ecological, you know, niche here in the world that we live in, but we’re still still carrying around the brains, pretty much of our ancestors, we tweak it, you know, across generations within our lives, and it’s very flexible, but that basic core, the hardware, hard, you know, how it’s hardwired is still there, and also there’s some connections to that, that reward movement, a circuit to the prefrontal cortex that’s involved in our cognitions that help us make decisions about what to do, so I could see a circuit emerging that involved movement that seemed unique, and then when I went back to that brain drawing board, as I was thinking about movement, you know, I was reminded that we have about humans have about 86 billion neurons, that’s a lot. We should be able to do a lot with this. I sometimes wonder how many I have, but we’re supposed to have that many, that much. But most of those neurons, 78% are in a brain structure hanging off the back of our brain called the cerebellum, and the cerebellum does a lot, but it’s mostly known for its role in motor coordination, movement. It’s involved in conscious learning, and some of those things I already mentioned, the striatum in the middle of our brains, individuals with symptoms of Parkinson’s disease or Huntington’s disease, that’s a disease of that middle part, big structures that regulate and make our movements more fluid and help us initiate movements. And then on the outside cortex, we have a big strip on either side called the motor cortex, and that allows me to voluntarily lift my arm or move my fingers, I gesture too much, but it’s related to our speech area of the brain, so it told me that a lot of the brain’s real estate is devoted to movement, a lot much more than cognition, so as we’ve created a lifestyle that we think is, you know, so luxurious, if we can just ask someone, or have someone, or AI, or something do all of our work for us. The brain’s just kind of blowing in the wind. It’s like, what am I even here for? It’s not able to recalibrate, it’s not engaged, and you could see how a less engaged brain, and through all this we lose our agency, you know. There’s a lot in my life, like I’m talking to this computer. I don’t know how the inner workings of this computer work. If something happens, I’m dependent on our IT or someone to fix that for me, and so many things in my life I don’t have the knowledge to repair it, and just going back a generation or two, a lot of people, you know, you repaired things that broke, you knew how things worked, you didn’t have such a narrow area or lane of expertise, so long-winded answer, Sina, is that it looked like our lives, if movement and engagement are critical and important for our brains, as we’ve become, as our lifestyle has become more sedentary and passive. I think that is problematic for a brain and makes it vulnerable, and where it would express symptoms similar to what we call depression,

right? So, do you think maybe what we’re seeing culturally with depression is a lack of meaningful engagement in life,

1. And then the sense that meaningful engagement is that you’re understanding, you know, how the world works, and that you’re really putting yourself out there, and that’s with the environment, and socially we do interact with things, we have a world around us, we interact, maybe we’re interacting more socially, but it’s at a different depth, a different level than if I was in the room with you. There were probably a different relationship. This is better than nothing, but I think there is compromise in the depth and the intensity and even the authenticity of our engagement and interactions with the world around us, and that is dampening the brain. It’s not getting as much sensory experience, you know, but we can learn a lot from failing. That didn’t work. This didn’t work. What happens with this? So, yeah, I think that it probably makes us more vulnerable for something like depression,

right? So, if somebody’s listening that maybe feel stuck or struggling with depression, you know, what are tangible things they could do to improve brain health?

 Yeah, and always have to say, because I’m not a clinician, it’s important to talk to a professional in the mental health industry, and maybe counseling, clinical psychology, psychiatrist, so everything needs to be done in that context, but my research of the literature and in the lab suggest that incur increasing your engagement is going to allow your brain to construct new networks, new pathways that will get you out of that rut, and that is not always easy. Some of the therapies out there, cognitive behavioral therapy, that fares just as well as antidepressants, as far as improvement, but you don’t have the side effects, and it’s not, not as expensive, you’re taking this, but cognitive behavioral therapy is learning about the connections between your, your brain and your cognition, and where that maybe you have a sense of control and behavioral activation therapy, you know, just saying I’m going to go to the gym and these people are going to call, make sure, and you kind of have almost the therapist comes kind of like a coach, and you know more about this than I do, but to get yourself out there, because if symptoms are of depression have emerged, it suggests that something’s not right. It’s important to acknowledge something’s not right. Our body, when it, when it’s invaded by pathogens, we have a fever, and that fever is to make our body’s temperature a little bit more hostile for those pathogens, so that we get rid of it. Now, when the fever becomes excessively high and persists, then we need to check it out, and maybe you know, take some medication. We don’t necessarily need to rush right to the medication with a fever, it’s there and it’s doing what it needs to do to figure out what the pathogens are, but as it persists, we need to to jump in with depression. Something’s not right, and my book, Lifting Depression, I talked about my what I call transient episode of losing my mother to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when she was just like 51 years old, and and I understood, stood that it was perfectly appropriate for me to have a low mood for all the, you know, I look at the brain as a contingency calculator, and it’s figuring out what I need to do, and what are the odds of doing this. It’s like all those odds are rewritten when you suffer a loss like that. Everything you thought about in the future, holiday gatherings, being with our grand, my daughter, all of that needed to be recalculated, so I probably needed to take some time to regroup, but it didn’t mean my brain was broken, it was just responding to a very significant event, so I went, sometimes I use the analogy, if you break a bone or you pull a muscle, you can take pain medication, so you don’t feel it, but you want to be able to use that muscle and brain at some point, so you’ve got to start doing that hard physical therapy. I’ve got to go to the gym and do these repetitions, I’ve got to start walking, not use the crutches, and, and so, with the brain going and putting yourself out there and doing the things that maybe you don’t feel like doing is going to forge new pathways, new circuits, new associations. New levels of engagement, so you’re not stuck in that neuro circuitry rut after you reflect, and I don’t want to dismiss that depression isn’t a real thing, or that it’s not debilitating, it is, but to kind of isolate ourselves and then to I just say, I’m just more impressed with the brain. It’s so complex. The idea of taking a pill to fix it is just bizarre to me. Now, we do know there are deficits in neurochemicals, such as dopamine with Parkinson’s disease, so some of those drugs that enhance that are somewhat effective, but certainly don’t cure in the brain, because the brain’s always changing, and there’s there are so many neurochemicals that are related to depression, not just serotonin, and if we talk about my animal models, where effort-based rewards, we can talk about some of the neurochemicals that I think are important, but it’s very multifaceted, so it’s kind of condescending for the brain to think, oh, take this pill, and it’s going to fix the neurochemistry behavior, is so much more complex and sophisticated, so the behavioral therapies, or whatever works to get you out there to start to rehabilitate the brain, and that’s what you’re doing when you, when it’s taken a hit, an emotional hit that leaves people, and with these symptoms of depression, you know, reflect, regroup, and then engage to try to figure out new, new paths, and reflect on what you’ve learned. The theme of my lab is experience-based neuroplasticity. This means that the brain changes throughout our lives, as I tell my students, brains changing from the womb to the tomb, and that makes us responsible for what we’re doing with our brains and our bodies. If we’re just sitting around very passive, brain’s not engaged, it’s not building reserve. First little hit it takes, it’s going to be hard to recover, and meaning, as you mentioned, and I don’t know if I heard the answer that, but the more interactions, the deeper the level of engagement seems to be related to meaning, and something that’s rewarding, that’s hard. I mean, meaning is a little difficult for me to assess in rats, and I acknowledge that humans are gloriously different than rats in many different ways, but we share a lot of foundational similarities that allow us to begin to study these things, but through relationships a sense of accomplishment. I was just writing about, I’ve done some work with mothers, mother rats, and thinking about maternal brains, and I don’t think there’s anything more impressive on the planet than a maternal brain, and how brains change, not to take care of ourselves, but a whole new organism, and even a rat seems to sacrifice her life to take care of her little pop, and she shouldn’t have. She’s not worried about, you know, social services coming in or anything, or what she’s going to look like online if she doesn’t do this. Just at our core to take care of something else, so that gets that meaning, even for a rat. But I think meaningfulness. there’s a wonderful research now with awe, and something that takes us out of ourselves can be very therapeutic. Sometimes we have the microscope too focused on the inside, and it gets us trapped a little bit

right? So some of the things you talk about are how behavior, behavior may be as it intersects with environment, can actually produce some of these neurotransmitters that some of these pharmaceuticals are producing. I think the word that you’ve coined is behavior suiticals. What does that mean?

Yeah, so when I was writing that chapter and starting to write my book, lifting depression, and seeing how valuable lifestyle and the behavioral focus therapies are, but yet they weren’t elevated, they didn’t seem as medicinal as good as taking a pill or surgery, and our Western society pills and surgeries, that’s medicine. Not let’s sit down and talk about it. Let me go run a mile. Let me cook a meal. That is not considered medicine, but everything in the literature suggested that a complex behavior changes neurotransmitters, neurophysiology, and therapeutic ways of the behavior, it could go both ways, that plasticity, so behavior suitables is the intentional use of behavior to create healthy brains or to treat mental illness, and that may be used in combination with drugs, we need to do medication or the. Additional pharmaceutical medication, we need to do all of that research as well, so I’m not dismissing it, but we need to respect behavior, so I thought, let’s just make it sound like medicine, behaviors, and so that’s where that came from.

Okay, so you also talk about the hands and how the hands are pretty significant in relation to that part of the brain. Why, why the hands?

Yeah, and just as a side note, I can go back and follow up on behavior suiticals to talk about which neuro chemicals can change. You want to get to that, but the hands, thanks for asking. So the hands have been described, they’re great tools, but they’re kind of.. they’ve been described. Carl Zimmer, who’s a science journalist, I think you talked about the hands being our windows to the world. So, I’ve been talking about interacting with the world, and so, how does our brain and body do that? Well, humans have developed a lot of our brain territory. When I was going back and doing my brain whispering, that motor cortex, a lot of motor cortex is devoted to the movement of our hands, like more than my whole leg, my thumb more than my back, so it’s not proportionate to the amount of space territory, it’s proportionate to how important this body part is. So, there’s a lot devoted to the face, so that you know that’s important in communication and eating, and then hands. So, we’re engaging a good bit of that motor cortex with the hands, and also, so my right hemisphere controls my left hand, and vice versa. So, if you’re using both hands in a coordinated way, or even not coordinated, you’re engaging both hemispheres. So, it’s a great tool just to allow us to pull the environment into our inner worlds and see how we, you know, bounce off or influence the external environment, but it’s also engaging a big part of our brain as well, so that gives us a sense of control. My effort-based reward idea and engagement is more thinking about doing something like maybe, and again, it sounds so lighthearted and non-scientific to say, do a hobby, but if you, if you break down something like a hobby, like knitting, and I’ll kind of go through that neurochemistry right now. I have said that that repetitive use of your hands, not only does it engage those brain activities, but repetitive behaviors also increase serotonin, and that’s what the SSRIs are targeting. So, you may be giving yourself a dose of serotonin doing that, and also, if you’re knitting, and I’m just saying, I actually don’t knit, but it could be anything – it’s not a one size fits all, and cooking, gardening, whatever, woodworking. but if you’re, when, if you just sticking with the example of knitting, as you’re counting the stitches or focusing on that, it’s probably distracting those worrisome thoughts of, you know, how was that when I said this at work? I think they took it the wrong way, where we kind of, you know, this rumination over, especially I think females do that more than males, so it distracts some of those worrying thoughts, kind of reflects and focuses on something outside of you, and as you plan to do this hobby, you’re getting your materials together and anticipate doing it, dopamine comes on board, and that’s the neurochemical of that pleasure center ventral striatum area that’s probably involved in those that is, and those feel-good types of responses. And as you anticipate the product, it’s a hat for my son, or I’m going to donate this to this population that makes you feel good as well, so lots of opportunities for dopamine, and then if sometimes you do hobbies in groups, and after I got something on my feed, haven’t read the article, I think was in Wall Street Journal about how activity hobby groups are becoming active, you know. We there, I know there are places we do pottery together or paint just together, so that can increase oxytocin. Oxytocin has a lot of roles. It’s certainly involved in childbirth and in lactation, milk let down, but also, as we, if you have a nourishing affiliative touch with another human being, probably even petting your dog or something, oxytocin increases, and that reduces stress hormones, and may also enhance kind of meaningfulness, meaningful connections. And then there’s the stress hormones, so if you’re doing something you enjoy doing that you have a sense of control over, I can’t control what’s going on at work, I can’t control if AI is going to take over our society, but my goodness, I can knit a hat, and just that baby step fundamental that helped me in the lifting depression, I started vacuuming with this crazy rainbow vacuum cleaner, and I could see that I had some impact on my world. I don’t even like to vacuum, my husband vacuums most of the time, but it sucked up all the dirt into this tank of water, and it made me feel like I had some control over my home, and I was protecting my family from Durham, I mean, it was that fundamental that kind of got me to, you know, that that was my, the kind of repetitions of physical therapy that got me back. So, we’ve talked about dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, reducing stress hormones, cortisol, as we learn new things, neuroplasticity come on board, they’re all kind of markers, so it’s a whole cocktail behavior suitable cocktail that we have control over, you know, with a, with some of the drugs, I think of it as kind of a chemical cage, we’re kind of trapped into thinking we need this drug, and we may again, all those conversations need to be associated with a mental health professional, but when we become dependent on a drug and not our own agency, that doesn’t seem as healthy to me,

right. So, what I’m hearing you say is perhaps community being with other people and doing something, being actively involved, maybe even with your hands, but what I, what I also found fascinating about some of your research with the rats is that the dopamine was was being released just from anticipating the joy, and I wanted to talk about the joy, because that’s kind of more recent for you. That was also fascinating to learn about. So, if you could unpack that a little bit, like that the anticipation is producing the dopamine just as much as the result, I’m assuming. And then that joy actually triumphed. They chose joy over completing the task. So, tell me, how all that’s relevant to depression.

It’s very humbling how many life lessons I’ve learned from rats, but yeah, so the research that you initially talked about actually wasn’t done in my life, just the research looking at the pattern and when dopamine is released, but the direct recreational or psychoactive direct cocaine people, it’s addictive because it makes you feel good early on, then it turns into something different, but it’s tap cocaine, is what we call a dopamine agonist, it acts like dopamine in our brain and agonists.

Okay,

so it’s like a dopamine pill, and I’m being very simplistic, so if you do a study with rats and you prepare them where they have a little cannula that goes to that area of the brain I’ve been talking about, the nucleus accumbens, and it delivers cocaine, you will see, and then you have a fancy way of measuring natural release of dopamine. You’ll see that dopamine increases when the cocaine hits the brain. Nothing surprising about that, because we’re adding to it. But what was surprising, and one study fascinating to me, was when you start to monitor the natural release of dopamine as the animals approach the bar or the lever to hit to get the cocaine, the dopamine starts to increase as they anticipate getting that, so it seems like the brain is interpreting the anticipation of cocaine equally to cocaine itself, and so this anticipation, I think, becomes a very valuable kind of vehicle for making the brain feel better as we plan or look forward to something that this could be beneficial. So, how I got from that, and the joy with the rats, my lab has part of our science outreach, but we’ve done some pretty serious science with it. Is, as you mentioned in introduction, we’ve taught rats to the skill I’ll say of driving a little car, we call them rodent operated vehicles, or ROV, so they’d have to get into this car and press a lever and it drives, and the currency in the lab is Froot Loops. They love little Fruit Loop cereal, so they have a sweet tooth, so they’re good model for us in that way. So it’s a pretty.. it sounds easy, maybe to teach a rat to drive a car, but it’s pretty complex. It’s complex for us training them and complex for the rats and. So we’ve been doing this a couple of years and they’ve been on Netflix and it’s a great way to start to think to talk to people about environments and plasticity and such and the students love it, so during several years ago, I can’t believe it’s been so long since the pandemic, but this is where this started during the pandemic at the University of Richmond, like other institutions, students were sent home, and we had some rats trained up to do driving, and we wanted to keep them engaged. So, a couple of us, my trainees, would take turns coming into the lab to take care of the animals, engage with them, train them, or whatever. I remember one day walking in, and I know we were all had a low mood because we had a lack of engagement during the pandemic, even though a lot of people started baking bread and stuff, so that’s great, but just the social isolation, so I was kind of in a down low mood situation. I remember walking into the lab and the our rat drivers, they maybe they’ve done this before. I just wasn’t noticing, and that’s one something that happened that may be beneficial during the pandemic. We started to notice little things more, but the rats, they ran out to the front of the cage, and they were kind of climbing up and down and actually reaching out. It looked like they were excited to see me. Now, as a neuroscientist, I’ve been trained to not be anthropomorphic, that means to lay out, you know, to give human emotions to animals, but they have emotions, but they.. it looks similar to when we would ask our dog, “Do you want to go for a walk? and they’re jumping up and down, that’s what these rats were doing, and I’ve spent so much of my research and time mental real estate, thinking about what we’re talking about, depression, those negative kinds of mental states, depression, fear, chronic stress, anxiety, and that is so important to know about. But I remember just looking right then and there at those rats jumping up and down, seemingly excited. I don’t know. Can I use the word joyful with rats? Some people are in the literature, and I said, “Whatever this is, I want to study it. I want to know more about it. And so we, at that point, started to develop what we call unpredictable positive event responses, uppers in the sense spelled wrong, and this in keeping with our behavior suitical theme, where we want to extend anticipation for positive things in our rats. So that’s the research I can tell you some of the things we’re finding with that.

Yes, I would love that.

Yeah, so, so the protocol, not to get too much in the weeds, but you know it’s science. This is the most fun science. Well, drive teacher rats to drive cars is pretty fun, but so the rats are exposed to three positive things, but they have to wait for it, so they get a Lego block, and they wait 15 minutes to get the fruit loop, and I’m in a psychology department, even though I kind of work with the biologists, but it goes back to some of those basic learning principles, associations, conditioned associations, and such. So they knew when that, when that Lego is put in the cage, oh my goodness, it’s coming. It’s coming. So, 15 minutes, so you can see them running around, you’re picking up the block, but they have to wait. And then they are taken to what we call Rap Park every day. We put them in a little transport cage, and they go to this enriched environment. They live in pretty much an enriched environment, but extra enriched, like Disneyland. But they have to wait in that transport cage for three minutes, kind of like kids waiting in a minivan before they can go to Disney before it opens up, and they’re running around during those three minutes, seeming, you know, checking the boxes of how we define behavior, these short bursts of behavior that’s associated with an event, checking that box, and then just a simple thing, because we can only do so much every day. We give them a sunflower seed that is still in its shell, so they have to take the time to take the shell off. Now, we always need a control group, or a couple of control groups in science. So, I was interested in whether or not the anticipation of these rewards would lead to any changes, but it could be just having those good things in your life could lead to changes. So, our control group was a group that got all of those things, the enriched environments, the fruit loop, the shelled sunflower seeds, so they didn’t have to wait for it all at one time. So, they were exposed to everything, but they didn’t have to wait for it, and then to add to the anticipation, we would do these things for the upper group at different times during the day, so they never knew when it was coming, and then they had to wait, so they’re just kind of in this heightened anticipation, and so we’re still, we’ve just had one publication come out, but we’re still. Working on data, but we found in the first study that if you give the rats an optimism test, which you can, where they have to interpret an ambiguous cue, either positively or negatively, that we saw a shift with upper training, and that study with the males and not the females. The females remain more reality-based. I don’t know if that generalizes to humans or not, but a shift in this kind of cognitive strategy, this attitude of optimism, but we saw what could be interpreted as optimism or positivity, and the females as well, they would explore more, spend more time, as if they thought that a reward was somewhere, so it heightened these positive exploratory kind of optimistic strategies. If we look at vocalizations, rats have an ultrasonic vocalization that we – they can scream at us and we can hear it, but they have the secret language that we need special microphones for, and they have certain ranges, but they have a like fearful defensive range, lower kilohertz, and then a higher range for these chirpy, happy chirps that some people even likened to laughter, and we see more of these happy vocalizations. I’m probably over generalizing those positive emotion generalizations in the upper trained rats, especially as they’re waiting to go to Rat Park, and it increases as the training. We do this for about four or five weeks, so it’s intensive, intensive positivity training. And recently, and we found some enhanced learning strategies in these positive trained animals, and recently we’ve looked at some markers of neuroplasticity, kind of the brain fertilizer called brain drive neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, and we see heightened levels of BDNF, which is amazing, better maybe than a pill. So we’re still working on trying to map out how it may be changing their sense of control and lowering stress, that’s what we’re working on this summer, but it made me appreciate in our society, and maybe it’s me too, have a strong respect for work, hard worker, and you don’t get anywhere unless you work hard, and yes, we need to train the brain, that’s important, but the brain also needs some positive emotions too, and it’s not just for relief, it is actually restructuring. I’m hoping to launch a Substack today, brain sculpting, I use this description, we can sculpt our brains in healthy ways and change the anatomy, so that it’s more likely to respond in a positive way subsequently. If you are exposed to positive experiences throughout our lives, I’ve started to think about, you know, we know that is, we want to help children avoid chronic stress and trauma, and I think you work in that with counseling, and we know there’s been a lot of work, or emphasis on what we call adverse childhood experiences, or aces, and how that’s correlated, you know, the number of these events, a divorce or an incarcerated parent, death of a parent, that’s correlated with a lot of negative health outcomes later on, cardiovascular disease and depression, and such, but looking at not only my work with some of the emerging work, and even going back and looking at some historical work with something called this positive anticipation, or hope that I almost wish that we could look at not only asking a child about trauma, but what are you looking forward to, and being very concerned if a child doesn’t have anything that they’re looking forward to, and realizing this is probably going to have an impact on their, especially mental health, but probably other health factors down the line as well. So, I think that we need to take this a lot more seriously than we have before, because it is restructuring and sculpting our brains in ways that will allow us to be more resilient and have a more high sense of agency, and when we have some of these feel-good emotions, it’s kind of like medicine, you know, it’s good for our immune systems, good for our brains, and more neuroplasticity. So, again, I guess maybe I like to find things that aren’t so respected and try to elevate them, but positive, the rat, and this is a rat that’s telling me that that joy is important, that’s ongoing,

yeah, and what a treatment, you know, what a, what an antidote to it all, so we are living in. Dopamine hit world, right? People are talking about this all the time. We get dopamine hits from social media, and so the type of reward is important, right? When it comes to what we’re selecting to be reward, how do we avoid the trap of becoming addicted to the reward?

 Yeah, you know, I’m going to put my professor hat on and say something that is initially important is understanding how the brain works and understanding that when you take a psychoactive drug like cocaine or when you sit in front of a go to a casino, and you see all the bells and whistles and things that happen, and get a reward. It’s almost like a Skinner box of money that the brain is paying attention to that, and it starts to distort reality a bit, because again, we’re carrying around our ancestors’ brains, so it’s like our ancestors saying, “Oh my goodness, there’s fruit in this tree, and I may die unless I have nutrients, and I need to remember where this fruit is, and I need to visit it often. Our brain is saying, “Oh my goodness, this feels good, this must be good for us, so I need to revisit this as often as possible, so that can help us be vigilant about the trap, because once we fall into that trap, we don’t have all of our neural capacity to deal with it, so the preventative part, just like with, you know, we talk about prevention more with other diseases like cardiovascular disease. Let’s not wait until the heart attack to figure out what the health of our heart is. We need to be thinking about our diet and exercise and all of this stress long before we get to the heart attack or the stroke. So, educating and understanding about how, yes, it may be fun to go to the casino or to work do this video game or to do this, but I need to be mindful about limiting it, because once my brain is hijacked, and this is really scary, and I can’t take the scariness away from it, once our brains are hijacked at that very fundamental level, that dopamine nucleus accumbens area that takes over, so our whole prefrontal cortex. Let’s think about it, contingency calculating all of that, that’s out the door. We’re stuck with our lizard brain at that point. It doesn’t mean that it can’t change, but takes a lot of rehabilitation therapy, reflection, training. training to get yourself out of that, so the importance is understanding and avoiding getting ourselves in that rut to begin with, and then understanding how important it is for our brains to be involved in a lot of different engaging or activities, so that we’re learning, and our brain is not stuck in everything, changes so fast. So you may be an expert at one thing, and then 10 years from now, that’s not even around anymore. So it’s not becoming an expert in something, it’s being able to have maintain this flexible brain, so that you can change, you know, in an adaptive way, and my definition of intelligence is not what you make on an intelligence test or something like that, or what your vocabulary is. It’s about this flexibility, the ability to change when the demands of the environment change. I’m on it. I’ve noticed that this is happening. I’ve been reading up, I’ve been doing this. I’m ready for this. That’s intelligence that leads to survival. That’s the way species survive. They don’t go into their little room and press buttons. That doesn’t keep us alive. So, yeah, I don’t even remember what the question is. Okay,

this is also so helpful to understand it from this level, so dopamine,

yet that’s what it was. So, just, yeah,

yeah, to be careful, yeah, mindful. That’s something I had asked you the other day. In our field, you know, mindfulness is such a buzzword, and people are, when there is evidence that it’s helping depressions and anxieties, and I loved your response to that. So, I don’t know if you recall, but why do you think mindfulness is helping?

 Okay, I can’t remember.

Remember, you were talking about noise, right? Like, I was just emailing with that friend, now Mike Merzenich. Mike Merzenich, he’s developed this brain HQ, and I recommend this, not endorse, I don’t get anything, but it’s a way to fine tune your sensory abilities. It uses computers and all the bells and whistles, so, but kind of like getting you to the gym, and so he’s very big on training and. And as we age, some of our sensory, you know, I’ve got these glasses on, I didn’t wear these before, but vision, hearing, some of these systems start to be compromised, and we can’t interact with the world as well if we can’t see and hear, so he has these, the software to help us to increase our visual field, to help us see things that are blinking really fast, and just amazing things that we thought we’ve lost, but now we have. So he was done, has done some research looking at training and, and how to make a brain better. But then in one of his talks, he, or maybe it was something that he wrote, he introduced this idea of, okay, there’s a lot of influence on how to make us a better, healthy brain, but how could you mess a brain up and make an unhealthy brain? And his response, and he had the data to support it with rodent research, was to make it put it in a very noisy environment, so it couldn’t discern that, oh, when I hear this sound, that means food is coming when I hear this sound. I need to be vigilant, because that could be a predator. When there’s just a lot of background noise, our brain can’t make these critical associations, and we have an area of our brain called the hippocampus, involved in learning and memory, and one of its functions is this idea of pattern separation, so I’m sitting here next to a window, I could look out the window, and I see if I see something moving, I know that that’s a bird, or if our ancestors, if they’re walking through the terrain and they hear a rustle of the leaves, that could be a snake, so you’re able to discern all of these environmental stimuli, so that you can understand and interpret it, and the brain is gaining information, but if you mask that, and we can’t tell what is important and what isn’t important, the brain is just, you know, it’s like static, and that makes us less able to be mindful or have a heightened sense of agency or control or to establish accurate contingencies, so that we can decide I need to do this versus this, or if I do this, this could happen, I need to think about that, so I think that, and noise could be interpreted in different ways, but if it’s hard for the brain to determine what is important, what is meaningful, I, you know, at some level in my book, well grounded, I talk about this, this term, brain bubbles, and if, and this could be for a lot of different reasons, and our brains become distorted because we this privileged life, and everybody tells us we’re great and we’re beautiful, we’re smart, and best idea ever. Then the brain’s not able to discern what a good idea and a bad idea are looking good or not. If you have friends, you want friends that’ll give you the real deal sometimes, or something that, that, that will, so, if you’re in that bubble, it’s going to distort the information, but also poverty could put you in a bubble where you can’t see the positive of anything, and everything was very fear-based or political, maybe that’s distorting every single thing you see is through this lens or mental illness that distorts our lens as well, and that’s when the brain starts to get into trouble, when it can’t. Some of its lifelines have been cut, and it’s not able to recalibrate itself in the way it should. So we need more of this real interaction, less noise, whether or not it literally or figuratively, so the brain can determine this is important, this is good, this is adaptive, this isn’t

right, right. So, with just a couple of minutes left, is there anything else you would want listeners to know about the behavior-based approach,

you know, just to reiterate that when we engage in a behavior, even a simple behavior, it’s activating a good part of our brain. We probably plan to do the behavior, we’re assessing it, we’re executing the behavior, we’re evaluating how that went, so you know, appreciating, and that’s the neuro education, you know how complex and sophisticated our brains are. Even if we feel like our brain’s a bit broken, it’s still able in most cases. I haven’t seen a brain that has stopped being plastic. I don’t know what that would be as long as we’re living, so I think there’s a lot of hope there. And another something I don’t want to be too narrow, but behavior also involves exercise, and that is increasing glucose and oxygen to the brain, and that increases. Is neuroplasticity better than probably anything? It may not heighten our sense of control, like working with something and seeing the outcome. So we want to, we want to engage in all these behaviors, and I’ve been talking about our ancestors’ brains that we’re carrying around, and our ancestors didn’t live in a building like a studio like this or my home office here, they were out there looking at the trees and the sky and nature, and our.. that’s kind of like our environmental comfort food, and I’ve mentioned awe before, and I’ve been interested again. I’m not sure if I can study awe in rats, but I think maybe I’m seeing it with some, some of these experiences. But it’s interesting to me that, you know, awe is something difficult to define, but it’s seeing something vast that is external, and it seems to get ourselves out of me, me, me, me, and wow, I’m this little something in this vast world, and there’s something I think therapeutic, we were talking about getting out of a rut that that can jolt us out as well, where we have this default mode network that’s good, that’s always kind of assessing and very much involved in mindfulness, and that has its role too. What is going wrong? What I need to do, but sometimes we need to get out of that, and that default mode network is decreased when we’re looking at this vast landscape, or something like that. So, there’s not a one size fits all, or a magic bullet pill. Having a healthy brain is hard and intentional, and we need to be better users of this hardware and software that we have.

Sure, but I think the hope that I hear is we’re not sitting around waiting for some internal change. We can actively engage with our environment and change our brains and our daily choices and our daily lives, that we do have control over that, not just depending on a pill, right? And it’s the cheapest medicine I have,

 right? Right. Thank you. This has been really helpful. I appreciate you. I appreciate the work you’ve done and the contribution to the field. I’m sure you’re going to continue to contribute to the field, so just I appreciate it, and thank you for your time.

Thank you, Tina, for elevating behavior type focus therapies, behavior suiticals, just to give people a different perspective,