Hello and welcome. It is March 3rd, 2024, at least where I am, and we're here in active guest stream number 73.1 with Lachlan Kent, mental gravity, and I guess all that comes along with it. So thank you for joining, to you for a presentation, and then we'll have some questions from live chat. So thank you and to you. Thanks to all of you. My name is Lachlan Kent. I'm here in Melbourne. It's Monday morning at 6am. So I work at RMIT, at Tech University here where I do very applied practical research into mental health promotion and prevention. And I think one of the major barriers to progress in my field is that we don't have a really solid scientific theory of what constitutes mental health and wellbeing. And by contrast, how to define mental ill health for even the most common conditions like anxiety and depression. So I've been working for a number of years on the theory of mental wellbeing effectively based on the foundational and universal experience of gravity to try and get to the root explanation of why positive and negative mental states have a kind of vertical dimension to them. Depression, for example, is a painful downstate. Anxiety is a painful upstate. Joy is an upstate as well, but it's pleasant, not painful. And mindfulness or calmness are pleasant downstates. So I think there's kind of explanatory power in those distinctions when we look at how gravity shapes biology, cognition, and phenomenology.  Next slide, thanks Daniel. Before I start though, I'd like to acknowledge the unceded lands of the Boonarong people of the Eastern Kulin Nation where I'm presenting from today. And I respectfully acknowledge their elders past and present. And next slide again. Okay, so today's talk we're going to go through a few sections. We're going to start with a nice accessible anecdote, a parable. We're going to talk about Barbie, the Barbie film and Barbie's Fall. And we're going to give a quick overview of the theory itself and then really focus on one of the key concepts and controversial concepts. I think for mental gravity, the idea of a centre of mental gravity and then relate that to active inference, sort of give a summary of where I come from and then take questions. Okay, so let's start with a kind of parable of mental gravity, Barbie's Fall in the recent films starring Australian Margot Robbie. So maybe you've seen it, but even if you haven't, it's not a very complex premise for the film. So here we are at the start of the film and Barbie sort of coasting along in her usual happy mode. So life's good. She has a strong sense of self and the world is inherently predictable. She's happy and this is depicted in the film as her floating kind of joyously sort of light and carefree. But next slide. Thanks, Daniel. But then the whole narrative arc of the film revolves around her fall. She starts uniformly positive. But then there's no spoilers. This is in the trailer. She experiences an identity crisis. So instead of being happy all the time, she starts feeling negative emotions. Something unpredictable happens that causes her to lose her sense of self and on account of the loss she experiences, kind of an emotional breakdown. She says, this is the lowest I've ever been emotionally and physically. If you could just click once there. And to really nail home the metaphor when Barbie falls. These are the lyrics of the really beautiful melancholic song by Billie Eilish. It's, I used to float. Now I just fall down. I used to know, but I'm not sure now what I was made for. What was I made for? So it's an existential crisis for her that goes to the kind of core of her being. She was sad because she lost something that can be replaced or even someone that like dear to her. She kind of lost herself. And when people get depressed or have an identity crisis like this, we often say things like they're going through a mental breakdown. So depression affects hundreds of millions of people each year around the globe. It's kind of a universal phenomenon that needs scientific explanation, but we still really have no idea what we're talking about. Really, I think there's an intrinsic meaning here in the fallen status of depression. They can fulfill a sort of much needed scientific explanation. You just click through to the next slide, Daniel, please. Okay, now here's a spoiler. Although you won't be surprised, Barbie ends up kind of happy again at the end. She goes from really high, so it's sort of defying gravity to low where she's overwhelmed by gravity to somewhere kind of in between. It's more balanced and more grounded where she's kind of managing gravity better. So both the song and the film end on a hopeful note. So Barbie recovers from her fall when she rediscovers a new sense of self. And the song now goes, I think I forgot how to be happy. It's something I'm not, but something I can be. It's something I wait for, something I'm made for. So mental gravity to me is not just about falling. It's also about what people are for and what life is for. So we have to have ups and downs.  But we all want the positives to sort of outweigh the negatives. That's another gravity-based metaphor. We want to be up more than we're down. So mental gravity is also about how to recover from falls or maybe how to prevent injuries from falling like depression. So it's really a theory of mental health and well-being, of emotional positivity, of sort of human value of what we're made for. If you just click through to the next slide, then you'll, thank you. Okay, so that's the pop psychology version. Now for the proper scientific explanation, the next slide, thanks. Right, so far in the last sort of 12 or six or 12 months I've published two papers on mental gravity, the first of which was pretty technical and focused solely on depression. The second of which is shown here, it's a bit less technical and more broadly focused on positive and negative mental health. So it was in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. And as you can see from the figure, or hopefully you can see in the figure, it framed the theory in terms of external environments at the top, internal environments at the bottom, and kind of intermediate socio-emotional environments in the middle. So we're going to take a quick tour through this summary figure. And let's kind of start not at the top, but in the middle, in the socio-emotional environment where we found Barbie at a low sort of mental and physical emotional state. If you just click through a few times there, Daniel. And then next slide. Okay, so the central idea in mental gravity is that there's a continuum of emotional states that range from up, high and ecstatic to fallen, down and depressed. So it's not a binary, of course. Verticality isn't always positive. There are sort of intermediate states. So being up can also be a negative if you're unbalanced and say anxious about falling. And being down can feel good if you're balanced, stable and calm, like in mindfulness, meditation or just regular relaxation. So these emotional states are a combination of physical states derived from complex interactions with the external environment and mental states derived from similarly complex reflective interactions within the internal environment. So there is a kind of mapping between physical and mental states that mental gravity seeks to explain. So assuming this is a human universal throughout cultures and evolution, how does this mapping come about? What are the neural structures that regulate it? And what does it mean to have gravity in or of the mind? Next slide. Thanks, Daniel. Okay, so let's start with where it comes from. So the principle underpinning mental gravity is called cognitive gravatropism. Now gravatropism in plants and animals is the ability and kind of the drive to maintain alignment to and elevation within the gravitational environment. So for example, plants grow vertically. Animals have musculoskeletal structures to maintain verticality and balance. Fish float using air sacs, birds fly with wings, etc. So these structures and functions that regulate verticality have positive adaptive value for survival and evolution. So maintaining gravitational uprightness and stability is a homeostatic function like temperature control or pH or nutrition, whatever.  It's as simple as that. Now cognitive gravatropism is where that positive adaptive and homeostatic value has been internalized and co-opted as a kind of mental template for value in other domains, namely socio-emotional expression or experience. It's kind of the value of the self in socio-emotional terms. So this template means that we think, talk, feel and act in ways that are also gravatropic because being mentally up and aligned is generally preferable to being down and misaligned. This effectively means that the mind has a vertical dimension that people strive to enhance through socio-emotional structures and functions. Thoughts, behaviors and emotional expressions kind of all act in service of a drive to optimize mental verticality. So this shows up in language as metaphor. In English, happiness is up, unhappiness is down. Consciousness is up, unconsciousness is down. Health is up, ill health is down, more is up, less is down. So cognitive gravatropism is what makes these metaphors meaningful and kind of universal and they also appear in other cultures and languages and even in pre-verbal infants. So mental gravity predates language in development at least. Next slide, thanks Daniel, which brings us to where gravatropism comes from. So we're at the top, we're in the external environment so it's interactions with the external physical environment during childhood development. Gravity has been a constant through human evolution and hasn't changed but its effects are not constantly felt throughout early development. So embryos begin life suspended in amniotic fluid floating in a state of neutral buoyancy. But this doesn't last long. As fetuses grow during pregnancy, gravity becomes more and more salient as their mass increases, their buoyancy becomes negative I think until finally the gravity support of their mother's womb is kind of taken away when they're born into a gravity laden world. So babies and children then have to learn to control their body under gravity so mastering all kinds of postures and movements. So children strive through effort to approximate that embryonic foundational effortless experience of buoyancy by maintaining increasingly complex states of verticality and balance as effortlessly as possible. So this learning involves a lot of falling obviously which is the opposite of buoyancy. So there are complex neuro anatomical structures that help children adapt and adopt that sort of complex balance function. So the vestibular system which includes the posterior insular cortex regulates verticality through graviception to maintain bodily balance, control gait and all the other physiological functions required to optimize bodily states with respect to gravity. And so up to this point it seems like we're just talking about physical states, right? Well actually no, not even at this foundational level because graviception, the sensing of gravity, the perception of gravity also impacts higher order cognitive processes related to selfhood. So the feeling that we are our bodies, our body is deeply rooted in the fact that our body has a center of gravity. So the egocentric perspective from which we view the world is anchored in the feeling that we can exert control over a distributed body weight. But the mental doesn't actually stop there so it goes to the next level. So by interacting with physical gravity children also learn to simulate those interactions without feedback from the external environment. So you can just imagine yourself moving and the effects of gravity on your body. Now whereas physical gravity with feedback is mediated by the posterior insular cortex in the vestibular system simulated physical gravity is mediated by the anterior insular cortex. And as you may know the anterior insular is part of the salient's network that regulates attention, inter-reception, effective responses to homeostatic signals and most importantly for mental gravity, socio-emotional expression. So this is how physical gravity states have been co-opted or mental gravity. So the anterior insular cortex takes gravity that begins as an external physical and embodied physics and applies it then to the internal inter-receptive effective environment. You can just click once there Daniel please. So hopefully you can see a little pink ring around physical states is that where you're up to? Yep. So that's where the physical states in the socio-emotional environment derive from. That's how gravatropism has been copied from the external world and applied internally as a template for socio-emotional meaning. And just click once more thanks Daniel or actually twice more. But what about the mental states derive from the internal environment? Where do they come from? So are they just inter-receptive like the anterior insular? No, that's just the present state of the physical body. So Barbie didn't have a fever or have an upset stomach. She had an emotional reaction to an event that deviated from her long-term kind of entrenched prize expectations and world model. So the internal mental states must reflect long-term states of the self as derived from autobiographical memory and this is where the rubber really hits the road for mental gravity. Next slide thanks Daniel. You'll click a couple of times. So here we are looking at the sort of top to bottom in the middle of the figure. So physical gravity states are the present state of the embodied self as regulated by the insular cortex. So both posterior and anterior. Mental states however are not restricted to the present and so are not physically embodied. So their source is from the past in the form of autobiographical or narrative sense of self. So it's not the what and where kind of embodied self but the more diffuse who sense of self that is disembodied in a personal story or a narrative. So in the diagram that's what's represented down the bottom in the internal environment. So that's life's ups and downs. And thanks to cognitive gravatropism these mental states have adopted the structure of physical states. Just as it feels good to be physically up and stable in one's body because it has a positive adaptive value. It also feels mentally good to have a higher and more stable sense of self. So self-esteem, self-worth, self-regard. So these are the basis of mental health and well-being because they are higher, more pleasant value states than their opposites. So health and happiness are up, ill health and unhappiness are down. If we just click once there please Daniel. So when Barbie's life story dips unexpectedly she feels low in terms of self-worth on a scale of verticality value as I call it. And then click again please. And so she experiences a down state of having fallen and once more. And she simultaneously feels low mentally and physically. Now to this point none of this is counter-intuitive or controversial I don't think. Some of you may be thinking at this point, so what? This adds nothing explanatory because it doesn't give us sort of a causal mechanism. It just describes a process without really nailing down how it happens. Well this is where it gets possibly controversial but definitely counter-intuitive. This next bit is the stretch point. So next slide please Daniel. So my radical proposal is that the narrative or remembered sense of self also has a center of gravity just like the physically embodied present sense of self. So think of it like this, we all agree that the mind has a structure. So memories accumulate, associate by learning and self-organize into a complex network of nodes and connections. Well if we take that structure literally and not just metaphorically if we assume by cognitive gravatropism that the structure has a vertical dimension so some nodes are higher in the network than others are hierarchy then we can also assume that this structure can collapse. So if the network undergoes sort of rapid or radical reorganization such as when Barbie encounters the shock of negative feelings those high parts of the memory network structure may no longer be supported by the lower parts. So the center of gravity, the point at which gravity exerts vertical force on the network will therefore fall and the person will experience a lower mental state than they had enjoyed previously. Actually Daniel, are we on the socio-emotional state? Is that what the heading is there? Cool. So I realize that that may sound utterly ridiculous on first hearing. It's not something we're accustomed to thinking about. So we like abstract conceptualizations of the mind, not concrete ones like this. We like to imagine the mind as kind of a diffuse, ethereal and immaterial object that has no discernable physical properties, especially rudimentary physical properties like mass. But I think the principle of cognitive gravatropism sort of forces us to change our conception of what constitutes the mind. So it's obviously a non-physical, immaterial and purely mental object but that doesn't preclude the possibility that it has analogous physical properties. In fact, if embodied cognition is true then it makes sense to assume that the disembodied mental world retains some properties that mirror the physical world. Next slide, thanks Daniel. Okay, so let's look at the concept of the center of mental gravity in a bit more detail because it all kind of hinges on this point. Okay, next slide. Thanks. So this isn't a new idea and it's actually not mine. So philosopher Dan Dennett in 1992, so he coined the term the self as a center of narrative gravity. He used this as a metaphor, but it was a serious metaphor to convey the idea that the self is not a mental object you can place kind of within a memory content but rather a point around which everything else revolves. And by everything else he meant autobiographical memories. Okay, here's the analogy. So the body's center of gravity is not a fixed location. It depends on the body's posture and movement. Well, the same goes for the sense of self. It's not fixed in one place on one concept. It's an abstraction. It's a point in mental space. And like the body's center of gravity, it can move depending on how the narrative is changing and what new memories are accumulating around that central point. Okay, that's one way to conceive of the center of mental gravity in conceptual terms or philosophical terms. Another is in neurobiological terms and the default mode network. Just a click once, please Daniel. So more recently Christopher Davy and Ben Harrison from the University of Melbourne here in my hometown so talked about the default mode network as the brain's center of gravity. So leaning on Dennett's idea of narrative gravity, they observed that the default mode network represents that narrative or even integrated sense of self. So it generates a high order abstract representation of selfhood derived from autobiographical memory. So it integrates memory to abstract out the central protagonist, the self. And they also showed on a neurological level how the default mode network performs this integration by kind of placing itself at the center of the global connectome network. And just click once there, thanks Daniel. So in another paper these same authors put forward the idea that the self exists along a dimension from experiential to narrative poles. So the experiential self is basically homeostatic states as regulated by the salience network and the narrative self is autobiographical states regulated by the default mode. So this connection between those two is very important for mental gravity in associating those gravity simulations performed by the anterior insular to the narrative processes performed by the DMN. And next slide, thanks Daniel. So this idea of centrality of the DMN is backed up by many neuroscientific studies of structural and functional connectivity. So along with the cognitive control network or central executive network, as I call it, nodes of the DMN are the most globally connected regions of cortex. So this places the DMN at the top of cortical organization because the nodes are most dissociated from lower level primary sensory motor cortex. And just to click through there Daniel, thanks. So in terms of topological organization, this means that the DMN is positioned at an extreme of the cortical hierarchy because it processes self-related information that is sort of detached or unrelated to immediate sensory input. It processes long-term trends in memory and narrative. And one more click please Daniel. So as argued by Cahart Harris and Friston, this placement of the DMN at the top and center of the cortical hierarchy means it's functionally central for free energy minimization and the phenomenology of selfhood, the ego. And next slide, thanks Daniel. So if the mind has structure including contents that are arranged vertically and prone to falling then it makes sense to also speculate that memory has a kind of mental mass upon which gravity is exerted. Just one click through please Daniel. And so that's where the anterior insular cortex comes back into the picture. So it is a key node of the experiential self because it sits atop the hierarchy of neural processes that extend from the peripheral nervous system to the brainstem and subcortical regions that are making up the brain's central autonomic network. But remember it also regulates the simulation of gravity and so the assumption is that simulated graviception acts upon an imaginary mental mass. So Barbie kind of imagines her mental narrative self falling even though her body is not falling. But then because she has imagined it kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe it's self-evidencing, I'm not sure, her body then follows suit and she feels physically low. So gravity is part of how the present self interprets information derived from the narrative self in terms of gravitational homeostasis. So remember that embryos begin life floating in amniotic fluid. So that is a foundational state of co-homostasis inside the mother's womb that's referencing Anarchinica's work with Nick Wilkinson and like temperature and pH and all other homeostatic set points or attractors, deviations from gravitational homeostasis yield negative affect. So feeling heavy feels bad. Feeling light feels good. So Barbie begins the film floating through Barbie land but then when she encounters negative affect for the first time she feels heavy and low physically and emotionally. Not that she had a childhood at all but her narrative has deviated from that embryonic foundational sense of self. So her state of gravitational homeostasis is way outside her prior distribution but it's not physical gravity that caused her to lie down. It was mental gravity. And next slide, thanks Daniel. Okay so that brings us to the second last section. So the relation to active inference. So that idea of violated gravity priors brings us to the free energy principle and active inference. I'm not an expert at all but I think there are some connections that can be made between mental gravity and themes within the active inference field. And next slide, thanks. So the tenets of mental gravity map nicely onto the basic heuristic of active inference. So just one click there please Daniel. So external states would map onto the bodily interactions with the external gravitational environment centered on the vestibular system and posterior insular cortex. And just one click through. Sensory states would map onto the activity of the anterior insular cortex the experiential and embodied self which combines homeostasis and affect with simulated graviception. And next click, thank you. So internal states would map onto the default mode activity so the inner workings of the mental narrative self with its center of mental gravity. And one more click. And active states would be the combination of sensory and internal states via socio-emotional expression in thought, language and behavior. So there are the descriptive similarities but I think there are deeper conceptual parallels as well relating to that radical idea of a center of mental gravity. And next slide, thanks Daniel. Yes, thank you. So this study by Kang et al. exemplifies what I mean in free energy terms about the centrality of the DMN. So they looked at energy landscapes of brain states using estimating using pairwise maximum entropy of resting state fMRI. So they identified multiple local minima some of which mediate multi-step transitions towards the global minimum. So what is the global minimum? So it says here co-activation of the prefrontal cortex and default mode network is captured as the global minimum. So as well as being central, the co-activation of the internally oriented DMN an externally oriented central executive network kind of represents the baseline of the brain's energy landscape. So in healthier unpleasant states, healthy or pleasant states the DMN and central executive network act together to maintain a sort of stable mental baseline. But what happens when that baseline becomes unstable or moves away from a homeostatic set point in pathological or painful states? Next slide, thanks Daniel. So a recent study by Pristin and colleagues demonstrated that in depression when I would argue the baseline kind of drops there is a shift away from the central executive network and towards the default mode and salience networks so in conjunction with sensory networks and this cerebellum. So the self has become even more central in an unbalanced way that people experience kind of as a fall away from that external world and into themselves. So rather than feeling connected to the world by a sort of permeable boundary it is as though their sense of self has become their entire world so their past becomes all that there is the future out there recedes away from a never ending past in here that they cycle through in root nation. So next slide, thanks Daniel. So that's what's depicted here in this figure in my earlier paper on mental gravity with reference to the continuum of mental gravity states. So up the top of the figure on the right the self world boundary is kind of where it should be in positive up or down states like joy and relaxation. So the salience network is paying at least some attention to the world and so there, or directing attention to the world and so there is a clear distinction between self and non-self. In depression at the bottom however when people feel down and low on account of a fallen sense of self there's a sense in which the increased centrality of the DMN narrative self enlarges kind of the weight felt at their center of mental gravity which then pulls the salience network which is kind of at the boundary down and within that self world boundary. So anxiety is included in that diagram in the middle but I'm skipping over that at the moment. So now gravity in physics is equivalent to space time curvature so mass distorts space and time. So I make the case in this paper that this literal depression of the mental self is akin to space time curvature across all levels of phenomenological, cognitive and neural dynamics. Next slide, thanks Daniel. Now this is where for me it gets very interesting for active inference and the free energy principle because the physics of space time the general theory of relativity can be considered part of the gauge theory framework as argued by Sen Gupta et al in this paper from a few years back. So mental gravity if considered a form of curvature of neural, cognitive and phenomenological space time could also be integrated within this gauge theory neuronal gauge theory framework. Just one click through please Daniel. So consider this quote from their paper. So crucially the cognitive homologue of precision weighting is attention which suggests gauge fields are intimately related to exogenous attention. In other words attention is a force that manifests from the curvature of information geometry in exactly the same way that gravity is manifest when the space time continuum is curved by massive bodies. So for me there's a clear connection between mental gravity as a principle that connects external and internal environments via social emotional expression and mathematical frameworks underpinning active inference that are already kind of flirting with the analogy between space time curvature and physical gravity and psychological properties or processes. And next slide thanks Daniel. So as an aside before I finish up I also think there is a way to implement space time curvature of general relativity in the brain in a way that is consistent with the tenets of mental gravity and space time curvature of cognitive and phenomenological fields especially for depression. So this is a work in progress with Dennis Levy-Hahn. We don't agree on everything and he certainly doesn't agree that mental gravity is implicated here but he's the author of a relativistic model of the space time connect time so there's more to come on this front. We'll keep working. And that's kind of it. That's a lightning tour of mental gravity. So my theory of kind of what we are made for. So the main objective is to provide a model of mental wellbeing of being up and stable. This is what I believe we are made for according to gravatropism and gravitational homeostasis. So you can call it what you like, human flourishing, happiness, meaning in life, however you want to phrase it. So that's it. Thanks Daniel. All right. Thank you. And thank you for you and the audience for bearing with some slide fun as we discovered minutes before the beginning. But well done. Okay. Well, people watching live can add any questions but while they are adding any questions in the chat just how did you get to this project? How did you get to active inference which just kind of led you to being here now? So originally the connection happened sort of in my undergrad where I was studying psych and physics at the same time when we were doing sort of black hole physics in astronomy and astrophysics and we were talking about depressions in space time and then an hour later we were talking about, you know, depressions in psychopathology. And I think it was really a linguistic thing that got me first and like, oh, okay. We're talking about very similar things here that people seem to feel down and dark and slow and heavy and we've just been modeling that mathematically in physics. I wonder if there's a way to use that maths to model something about brain structure or function. And then during my PhD, I connected with Jakob Hovi here in Melbourne who's doing self-evidencing and I think studied under Carl back in the day and so he introduced me to active inference and predictive processing. We published a paper on that as part of my PhD and so I started thinking about, okay, there's something about priors and, you know, human experience of gravity that is probably expressed somehow in mental states, in mental wellbeing and that's kind of what drew me to it. All right, cool. Well, I'll look forward to any questions in the chat but I just kind of wanted to reiterate what I thought was one of the core points. Posture is basic to moving animals and you pointed out that that gravitational homeostasis is like pH or nutrition or sleep. It's a fundamental moving set point situation. If you want to get over a small fence, you might want to briefly have the distribution of your physical center of gravity move up. You might like plan out different routes just like you might plan for your implicitly or explicitly like your glucose levels to fluctuate and so that kind of like skillful competency definitely connects to the fields and leaven work in the competency and generalized state spaces. So then that kind of navigation plus gravitational homeostasis becomes co-opted analogously to how the linguistic does like evidenced by your most recent answer but the gravitational homeostasis becomes co-opted as part of navigational, which is a cognitive or narrative degrees of freedom in generalized state spaces and there's just so many ways to go and it was awesome how you laid it all out. So again, thank you for presenting. Thank you. Where we go from the center of gravity Bayesian mechanics, what kinds of older data sets or theories do you think are like worth revisiting or what kinds of approaches does it open up? I've worked with Paul Badcock who works on the hierarchically mechanistic mind as well. He's in Melbourne here. So he's worked with Carl and others to define sort of evolutionary and developmental nested time scales for active inference and I think that that kind of nesting of present experience within developmental experience within cultural and evolutionary experience I think is a way to approach it. So Georg Northoff who was maybe going to join us here today but hasn't been able to make it. So he would talk about nested time scales in even a theory of consciousness that nestedness is a necessary part of experience and deviations from nestedness lead to pain so those homeostatic set points are nested. So I think there's work to be done there in the experience of time is really where it started for me. The experience of time dilation in depression to me is analogous to gravitational time dilation so masses curve space time so that time slows down. It was very good empirical evidence that in depression people experience a slowing of their conscious experience so not like their internal clock is running slowly it's not like they miss judge times all the time I think there are really fine technical ways to elicit changes or distortions in their time perception but their subjective flow of conscious experience definitely slows down. So in mania the opposite of depression that experience of time speeds up. In anxiety another upstate it's also sped up kind of chaotically. So I think there are ways to I think pull out what's your experience of time and then how do we sort of recover that how do we re-nest that through whether it's postural or I think maybe better to have mindfulness meditation that uses simulated gravity so asking people to imagine themselves floating so I do a lot of yoga and part of my practice is imagining the body light so that's all postural and it's trying to imagine all the movements a bit like Tai Chi that there's no weight you're just moving freely and so that seems to me to improve mood I think because that center of gravity the physiological center of gravity has then fed back on the emotional state on the narrative sense of self because they're connected the anterior insular doing that simulation it's connected to the default mode and there's some feedback there I think time and sort of perceived imagined body weight are two ways to sort of attack the problem Alright awesome I'll go to a question in that chat upcycle club rates how does the concept of mental gravity influence the perception of time and space in astronauts versus normal folk Okay that's pretty complex so because they go from a state of regular gravity to microgravity in space and then back again so studies have been done showing that there's sort of visceral changes visceral and physiological changes in space that lead to again it's not a change in perception of time but there's all space so the perceptual field remains pretty unchanged but when people come back to earth and they're sort of re-acclimatizing to gravity there is a tendency to experience anxiety and depression now that could be related to the fact that they've just left the space station and they're back on earth and they're feeling a bit let down by it but there's ongoing work happening that I think they've just done actually some psychophysical experiments with the perception of time and they're not noticing I don't think anything major other than sort of the sensory motor stuff that people are having to like when babies are born they have to recalibrate how they move for gravity there's an adjustment period where people have to re-acclimatize and retrain the sensory motor network to let go of the gravity expectations I'm not actually hugely conversant in that it's somewhere that I need to learn more about because the work that's been done it's formative but yeah, we're getting there cool one thing that that mention of the microgravity and the callback to the developmental part made me think of and you referenced Annette C. Unica's work then is like in the single cell water environment there's a neutral buoyancy so that means that all subsequent gravitational homeostasis can be attributed to self and movement whereas nutritional homeostasis has a weaning off of and never a complete weaning off of but gravitational homeostasis really remains but also from the very beginning as something that it can be inferred reliably over evolutionary timescales that it is under that mammals agency yeah, exactly that's a universal constant and we're now pushing the boundaries of it by getting ourselves into microgravity where no animal other than I suppose fish get neutral buoyancy and I think there's an argument that Nick and Anna make in their paper on buoyancy in utero that what we're trying to do all the time is approximate neutral buoyancy with posture and movement that it's the feeling of load that is a deviation from that ideal state that's the prediction error that we're trying to minimise is the feeling of load and there's a person in America who's a gastroenterologist who's working on gravity in the gut and linking that to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression through irritable bowel syndrome and his idea is that a failure of the gravity support mechanisms in the gut leads to changes in the gut microbiome that we then interpret as a change in G-forces it's like the gut is a G-force accelerometer a bit like your vestibular system senses changes in the head and that also has proprioceptive visceral senses for acceleration and that's why we say when we're nervous or anxious we've got butterflies in the stomach it's like the gut has become light and that's from top-down predictions a bit like Barbie saying I've had this fall and now I'm lying down your expectation when you're nervous is that you're under threat and that there's some change in the gravity acceleration that you're feeling in your gut so in conversation so talking about how the gut-brain connection could be another way of exploring mental gravity as not just brain and nervous system or central nervous system but also your peripheral nervous system and visceral feedback and that works for predictive processing because inter-reception is very top-down dependent Wow, makes me think of yes butterflies in the stomach and also heart or stomach sank like a stone, sank like a rock which is to say the prior experience no resistance under the constraints of normal free-falling things it went down at this acceleration and to ask about that linguistic angle like are there any metaphors that aren't consistent it seems like in day-to-day conversation it would almost be taken as a strange metaphor if something were inserted kind of like Kandinsky who asserted that warmer colors were associated with light and with higher notes of music and like cooler, slower, darker and lower notes and it was like well if that when violated surprises people then that speaks to the nature of that associated prior but I mean are there any linguistic examples or anything that not that I've come across, no because I assume that it's pre-verbal that children have natural associations between higher space and certain characteristics so more we have a metaphor that more is up so we're saying greater value higher value is more things and babies will attend to higher space when there are fewer things than when they're lower so that violates their expectation they expect more detail in higher space so it's I think it's universal in English across languages and because it predates language so I'd be very surprised if there was a contradictory metaphor the one that there are behavioral expressions that are kind of contradictory so I think of when people say win a tournament so they've exerted all their energy and they win often they'll fall down, they'll collapse in sort of joy and so that's kind of a behavioral contradiction so I think taking it too simplistically is going to be a problem because counter examples will be easily found but I think there are ways to frame that in terms of mental gravity it's a very complex interaction with the gravitational environment so lying down feels good sometimes so what they're expressing or what they're experiencing emotionally at that point is kind of being overwhelmed by the volume of emotion that they're feeling so it's still an expression of something gravitational it's just kind of inverted so I don't want to be too simplistic about it and say up is always good, balance is always good and play in risk moderate risk taking, falling is good so we've got to be very nuanced about the language that we use great, alright question from Dean Tiggles the response to being embedded in a gravitational and influence setting seems to be quite distinct from being embodied so what does a buoyant mindset look like? always good question mark yeah, I think it always feels good but whether that's always so homeostatically feels good whether allostatically that is always good, I'm not sure so if allostasis is about the prediction and anticipation I always think of sort of MDMA at this point so there's a tradeoff so people will take MDMA to get high and to have a super ecstatic super buoyant it's almost like gravity doesn't exist they can dance for hours but then two days later they're going to hit the wall and have a huge come down so I think it feels good in the moment because that's the anterior insular homeostatically saying this is great this is cool but then the DMN is maybe going to anticipate and say this isn't going to be great for our narrative there's going to be a longer term cost to this experience as well so yeah, it might feel good in the present but that doesn't mean it's going to feel good in the long term and we've got Anna joining us have we? Yes did that answer the question though? Did that get to the heart of that person's question? I hope so Anna are you here? Hey Anna, how you going? I'm okay, how are you? It's very late here, I don't know what time is there but it's Sunday evening We're in a three sector conversation which is equidistant but also some of the most fun to coordinate as we know Yeah Do you want to say anything or ask anything Anna or we can continue talking or reading other questions? I don't have questions for now so go ahead Okay cool, yeah another bottom area was you talked about up and down but under a closed planet structural model above is out and down is in it is gravity so it doesn't it's that we can have a meter stick coming perpendicular or normal and talk about up down in a reference point but isn't that the whole question about whether you're up is my up and whether your toilet flush is the same way and all these questions like that is your left, my right, all these things Yeah I think for neurologically the representation of out is into the external environment so that's the central executive network that's the main mediator there so we're connecting with the external world that way our default mode is our internal world but we also have to imagine what other people have inside their internal world so there's what's someone else's narrative so that has to then connect with other people's up and down so I think being able to then so children start very ego centric and very not mind readers at that point so then to be able to not only disembodied their own sense of gravity or their own centre of narrative gravity to then apply that to other people involves another turn, another okay that other person is out there and they have an internal world as well how do I engage with that and that takes then behavioural coordination in the external world so behavioural control empathy and self-control or compassion and self-control go very much together so in that sort of relative space of multiple minds, multiple centres I'm just centred in my own but I need to connect with others I need to be able to regulate my behaviour if I'm manic and self-interested and everyone's up is my up then that's dysfunctional I think or socially and emotionally not going to connect with people well that's why we kind of term it I don't like saying pathological but that's why we term it as socially dysfunctional and unsustainable in a way they're not embedding themselves in that social environment in a way that acknowledges that other people have different orientations that their up might be my down just to kind of like echo a part of that when there are polar opposites it's a polarised antipodal situation one's up as the other one's down but even someone standing relatively next to you has a partially diverging perspective except when there's the construction of the flat playing field like an ice rank or something that's been then secondarily engineered to be even flatter than the local curvature like a linear accelerator for particles is extra flat which allows extra measurement accuracy coordination but then as it goes further and further out it becomes like a larger and larger project to maintain all of that yeah Anna yeah so I since I read your paper like I said next time we're going to see I'm going to nag you with a question about this because I wonder how much of this like narrative between you know up is light and good and down is bad so it's coming from this like inherited inherited ontology where you know the light and God is somewhere in the you know the sky and the devil and how is in the earth right is down yeah so basically want to escape the how and the death because we are all going to die and you know earth to earth ashes to ashes you know we want to just like go up and that's good in that sense right because well nobody wants to die and I think I love that because you know Pico de la Minarambola and all this Renaissance people when they were fighting against the church who is like stating that the earth was in the middle of the universe and actually everything was revolving around earth and they were refusing the idea that you know actually is the sun is not the earth and then they were saying well if the how is in the middle of the earth and everything revolves around earth so everything revolves around the half the universe that kind of life ring the bell ding ding ding you know the heads of those people like higher up in this like I think for now moment on they kind of like realize it okay so maybe there is something about the sun which is like you know the heat but my question to you is like how much of this do you think is kind of like related because in a sense like the food is coming from the town I mean the food is coming from the earth right so everything that actually allows us to survive it's not so so don't you think that somehow this likes we have like some side effect of some very old ontology that we inherited where you know that is in the sky and it's good and death is here and it's bad right with earth but that's the question because as I said it's like if we don't have the carrots and the carrot is not coming from the sky it's coming from underneath us right so how do you reconcile that so I think like being absolutist about it is a problem and saying that up is always good no matter what down is always bad no matter what I think even in our behavior or even in like a mature approach to life balance of up and down is required you don't want to be happy all the time there's no adaptive value in that you have to go through trials and tribulations so a kind of child like I want to grow up and I just want to go to the stars and you know be super light and be sort of divine I think is kind of you know counter counterproductive in a way and I think we have words of being grounded and of being mindful that are very down oriented so I think there is a value in things that are here that are stable that are connected that are in balance like a lot of environmentalism is about humanity in balance with nature so that's possibly even more ontologically prior than monotheism and the idea that you know everything up is good yeah I agree with you but you know just like when when I'm very tired like for instance right now just like lying down is actually good so I just want to stop and write down I don't want to go up so it's as you said it's like it's a balance and we need to be careful not to smother in a sneak in without realizing some it's from the kind of like you know dualist ontologies like we have God the things good in the sky and bad things are here that's just like a copper mechanism is I don't think that holds because we actually need to lay down actually half of our life is like we're lying down because you know we need to sleep yeah so I think there's a kind of a way out of that sort of paradox and like in monotheistic religions they're talking about the afterlife in a sense like that's like if you had a bird's eye view of your entire life it is if you'd never gotten up if you'd never been vertical you wouldn't necessarily be you know classified as having lived so it's a necessary condition to get up but it's not sufficient it's not doesn't suffice the whole you know all the contents of that life so you can say well if the religious people want to talk about that then that's an afterlife reflection it's not a lived embodied way to be that is more about balance and the complex like we were saying the complex nuanced you know if I fall down it's like you can cry from laughter and tears you can fall down from depression and ecstatic joy so it's about understanding those those complexities that makes it real world and not mythical so yeah in the paper I can't remember which one I say this is what mental gravity is not it's not about the fall of man it's not about you know some mythical sense it's not about quantum gravity it's just about trying to define and model all our complex and social emotional states using gravity as that prior experience the template yeah I'll ask a question from the live chat upcycle club rates in terms of embodied information processing the brain processes information at different granularities how does this impact our conscious experience of mental gravity well I look at sort of spatial temporal granularities there so spatial temporal scale so I think a lot about time and the nestedness of temporal scales so at the lower level you've got fine grain temporal scales so fast time scales and that would be for me analogous to the anterior insular network that has been shown to be very much related to the perception of faster time scales at around 125 milliseconds so it's very present oriented so that is one level of granularity the default mode network is much more agranular so it's much more thinking about longer term trends and for mental gravity so when there's centrality you've got nestedness of those time scales they're sort of able to harmonise with one another even through neural oscillations like you've got that's Giorg Northoff's work which is looking at spatial temporal alignment of those time scales so that's when you're feeling good and you're feeling not overly centralised I think that's when the power of the DMN becomes too over-weighted a healthy or a light state of being is when there is alignment between spatial temporal scales so yeah it's the difference it's the connection so if there's a dimension of the self from anterior insular and what should do it this way anterior insular to default mode then the nestedness of those scales is very important wow very interesting on like a little bit less of a neurobiological note that makes me think about estimating time estimating like double click speed all the way on through seconds and minutes and hours and days and you know there's decades that take weeks and weeks that take decades all that kind of discussion and a day on earth is like this long in this other thought and then those kinds of compression and dilation are used to point towards the direction of a distribution it's kind of like saying yeah from this GPS coordinate to there you go this many east and that many north and then similarly in cognitive or narrative spaces it's like oh I was looking for this kind of album but a little bit more of that and from like this period or with Baster beats yeah exactly so that kind of like rate and gravity connection it's also so in coordinates yeah it's very clear and there's Paul Badcock's work so the hierarchically mechanistic mind who did work with Carl so he's also done work on the social adaption theory of depression so there's mapping there between his thoughts about the nesting of sort of evolutionary time scales through to ontogeny and then fast neural time scales and the disturbance of that in depression so the social and emotional disturbance of that alignment in depression depression is a way of sort of calling out to other people that you need help so Barbie is saying I need other people I'm not just happy in myself I'm calling out to others I need support to get myself vertical again and yeah there's a nice synergy there with Paul's work as well yeah that's awesome I was thinking of a few other like you mentioned a person collapsing at the end of a sporting event and how that's a combination of like muscular fatigue and the desire to have the homeostatic set point be down because they want to be resting closer to sleep or the symbolic meaning of it and all that and then I thought about the float tank experience and fun house rides amusement park rides like spinning and the dipping and then weight lifting as kind of an integral through time potentially reducing the perceived load yeah so how would you just say at these early days for the gravity research program like how do you take a phenomena and just sort of as you've probably done many times like try to work through it in this gravitational way I think multi-disciplinary approaches is the only way to go so I've got the guy in America doing gut brain stuff so gut gravity there's also Mark Whitman who I published a paper with on consciousness on time consciousness he's very much into floatation tanks and using that to alleviate anxiety and depression I also think that psychedelics there's something about going on a trip there's the phenomenology of you know expansive space and time that happens within a psilocybin trip that we can talk about that as the therapeutic angle is something about spacetime curvature or the re-centering of self and altered state of self altered state of consciousness so I think there are multiple ways to look at it so different interventions different conditions and different sort of emotional states that we're trying to model without you know forcing people into doing weight lifting and saying it's all about this one monolithic way of doing it like Anna was saying it's not just about sacred spaces that tend to be expansive as well so churches and larger spaces even forests natural blue and green spaces have that expanse to them that's sort of therapeutic in a way I think there are multiple ways of looking at it it's like I suppose it's like predicted processing that's a way of looking at things that you can apply to different fields I think mental gravity is something like that it's very foundational it's kind of central and implicit in many fields of work so I'm hoping to work with Mark on flotation with Brennan in America on the gut brain stuff with Anna about and Nick on you know co-homeostasis and the development of graviception in utero I think there are many many ways to look at it awesome yeah Anna thank you so much Lafayne this is really really interesting I have a question related to the to the fact that so I understand that verticality is super important but don't you think that there's also that connected verticality is connected with the fact with the local motion with the fact that people can when they are vertical they can basically just like you know go there in the world and find food you know self and make sure that and that's that's not necessarily because it's not enough just to stand right no yeah vertical it's like if you're still standing vertically it's not going to get you very far the same way because they still like laying down it's all the same right so how do you see this like verticality in relation to being static and being active so I think the active component is like it related to motivational control so explore and exploit behaviors so being able to explore if you're vertical you have greater degrees of freedom of movement than when you're lying down so it's easier to get horizontal if you're vertical but you also need a low center of gravity need to maintain a balanced center of gravity in order to do that so more agility more ability to move side to side is about maintaining a low center of gravity when you're vertical so that they're kind of working in combination so I spoke to Nick Wilkinson about this and he's like okay when you're born you're starting at this I can't do anything I can't move I can't get myself up I'm dependent on my caregivers for all exploration of the environment I can only see I can't interact yet then over time as we develop that motivation to explore comes along with our ability to maintain verticality and prevent fall so we start by falling a lot but that's because we haven't learned that that low center of gravity is what we need to regulate and I think it's the same for mental gravity you need to be vertical but maintain a low center of gravity when you're vertical that's most sustainable and better for like exploring yourself exploring you know your own narrative if you're high and unstable you may might be in a manic or anxious or overly upstate that's not adaptive either so there's I wouldn't want to say it's a U-curve that it's there's an optimum state in between because it's really complex but it's a bit like that there's a combinatorial way of approaching gravity that means it's not just about verticality and it's not just about low verticality or misalignment about horizontalness it's about a combination dynamics of of the two that's an amazing point and I think points to kind of a key engineering tradeoff which is the bigger the building the taller the building more further out the building goes the higher you can see and then the higher the center of gravity becomes which then under even small shaking of the land or like tower of Pisa status that becomes unstable so then skyscrapers are built there's a heavy weight to move the center of gravity down to dampen all these kinds of things that allows like taller narrative construction so that's super interesting and then I thought about insects and not just flying insects because there the verticality is not associated with sleep like an ant nest mate will be active at a given elevation and then stop and rest but they're not going down whereas mammals even ones that are on quadruped locomotion they still do go down when they're cowering or like curling up but in the insects they they can't go you know outside of the ones they like do and all of something like that but just in general a ground walking insect doesn't go down so that really isolates out the affordances and kind of possibilities for movement because I think and I made a great point that humans the verticality becomes also associated with like being able to move basically so being down it's like you're caught on flat feet it's not even just being standing up to be like in a little bit more of a poised posture to react to basically anything even to catch something very light like thrown at you so that's very interesting how the phylogenetic priors which go far deeper than any of our at least symbolically describable or understood cultural priors which also are very relevant and recent but these kind of bilateral or going on land or having aqueous components those are even deeper and like you said they're pretty verbal and then for sure this version of mental gravity is uniquely human I think I don't know if we can generalize it I think there might be different homeostatic ways for those animals are talking about it but I think this our up-down associations I think are pre-verbal non- they're pan-cultural but I don't think they're inter-species necessarily maybe for fish there's something about neutral buoyancy as well but the insects for the birds who knows but that might be one of the characteristics of their spatial temporal consciousness who knows yeah like for a fish there's a possibly strong environmental correlation between like the density and the temperature and the light and so there's affordance in principle to move up but then they find themselves in a niche that might be like seasonal but still captures this kind of like density light nutrient envelope because that's their niche oh yeah ecology it really is like that and about finding the right level of fly when it's time to fly but not fly when it's not time to fly all that yeah so you can do experiments with that in fishing a tank that you accelerate to different g-forces and see how they behave differently and what associations they make with nutrition or not just buoyancy but you know light like you're saying there are probably priors from you know evolutionary priors phenotypic phylogenetic priors in there that you can elucidate yeah wow that's very interesting and bacteria other single cell in even just small tubes there could be gradient centrifuge with with constructed nutrient gradients that's awesome experiment on the active inference side you showed the particular partition with the internal and external and the sense and the action states the four states so the three states the sense internal action are the ones that are defining the agent or the organism and so I was thinking like what is a heavy sensory experience heavy metal a heavy cake something in that and then what's a heavy action possibly it doesn't need to be even any more literal than heavy deadlift or it could be a very burdensome task that's hard to to push and then heavy internal states so it almost has a heavy in light not valence axis but just in this kind of multi-dimensional space of active inference agents and models there is kind of a separate heavy in light for these three different parts of the particular thing so I think that also just speaks to the applicability it's not saying that those three states of the thing are like the same because they have to be welded together by gravity it's actually that gravity is like an analogy frame or a metaphor that at the very least can be used and is used normally and you could also invent speech things and just see which one sounds more normal which one sounds more like a language model wrote it and just use never seen before gravitational language versus anti-gravitational language just see what the effect is maybe people prefer one or the other if it's like fantasy well there is work being done at my university at RMIT in Melbourne by someone who used prosody so the upward and downward inflection of speech so pitch modulation to analyze speech of depressed and non-depressed people as a kind of biomarker so how people talk the naturalness of their prosody is kind of could be diagnostic in a way because it shows what sort of emotional valence is being used when they talk up and down there's really a flatness of tone in depression that people can sense and people are expressing I think because of this like you say what's the metaphor it's kind of like cognitive load we think about depression as you know the self has become too salient there's too much self-referential information that's a drain on cognitive capacity because it in itself is cognitive load so the ability then to think about the external world is limited so I think there are again multiple ways to look at this and multiple ways to test it and intervene and you know the therapeutic benefit so I think prosody as a what's the weight of behavioral expression I think there's posture there's facial expression there's prosody there's heaps of eyes looking at active states as well so then to connect it to writing first off it's very fascinating that language models can through the statistics of language without using things like the prosody and the timing just from transcripts learn so much about generating other realistic sounding transcripts so it's like what information is in the prosody and the timing that's just very interesting but it can be a very I mean it helps us think about what those kind of communicative techniques are and the symbolic basis of language is more of a latecomer than the kind of resonant nature of communication on these types of on that level on that vertical dimension I suppose you'd call it yeah and so Nick Wilkinson who's worked with Anna talks you know he's very interested in working on sort of soft robotics so how do we train an agent not based on you know a desired state that we train forward but based on like that co-homostatic neutral buoyancy that's the set point that's the attractor that you're deviating from and then all the implementations of that regardless of physiology is translatable then so that what you're trying to approximate with standing you know quadripedally is neutral buoyancy but supported with different structures and functions so I think there's big application there not just in terms of language models but in terms of robotics as well yeah all of the features of embodiment in environments that we know like if it was a muddy environment or if it was a slippery one whatever the embodiment were saying you have to stay upright in this environment and move is kind of enough of a affordance to test and explore the features of that landscape if it has like gravel or whatever situation it has that's kind of what it has to come back to otherwise like you said to get up no more is to die yeah exactly super interesting Anna do you have any last comments or questions yeah so I do so first of all I want to comment very quickly when you just said because I think this is super important so there is right now we are in the middle of like some sort of like shift in the perspective and I think it's for the best in a sense like instead of starting with something highly sophisticated from the adult centric perspective we'll look at basically how organism get there and then we see that basically as I said well the needs to be like you know embedded into environment in a certain states that have been designed by millions of years of evolution right so it's not it's not propositional attitude content that we can kind of like logically extract from some abstract formula it's something that is done through trial and error and actually this is something that changes all the time because while we change the environment we also change posture and with all the pollution that we have right now in the world maybe we're going to adapt and develop new organs or something yeah so this that's I think that's something very important but I really like to paper and I really like the way you know bring like the the basis back in the core right like in under the spotlight but my question is to you so that's that's a very beautiful way to understand like psycho pathology in terms of like you know heaviness and I was actually thinking that light and light means both light in sense like maybe but like in sense like you know dark not dark so that's also beautiful but so how you include basically the social component in it so the role of the other in terms of like this dynamic of the gravity because we are interestingly enough people who are depressed or something they disengage also from social interactions so it's like some sort of like flatness and heaviness but not just heaviness but also like disengagement from the active exploration on the environment be it physical like you know going to the gym or social like going to need friends yeah so what is the role of the other in your model for this like up and down structure so I think that I would go back to Paul Badcock's work about the social risk hypothesis of depression that it's a bit like okay you take MDMA to have an extreme high knowing that two days later you're going to have an extreme low I think his argument if I have it correctly is that depression is kind of similar that it's actually a call out to other people to say I'm going to be horizontal I'm laid out I don't have any energy I need you to help me bootstrap and get back to being vertical but that can become pathological not by any sort of neural dynamics it's not a brain disorder in that sense it's a social disorder because that care is not forthcoming or it's not it's not appropriate or it's not effective so I mean we look at a lot of the social determinants of mental ill health that's the field that I work in really day to day is how do we promote and promote mental well-being and prevent mental health conditions by modifying risk and protective factors so that risk that I suppose the depressed person is taking is they're saying I'm the only hope that I have left I have none for myself is that someone else will come and bring me back into connection with the world I can't do it I've run out of energy it's like a the idea that depression is failed anxiety there's an anxious phase prior to depression of reaching for connections reaching for stability and then when that has failed then it's like I have nothing left so I think it's a way of de pathologizing the individual destigmatizing individual and looking to their environment to say how is society how are other people letting this person down how have they been let down by the world around them so I think it naturally implicates others and even though the individual is focused on the self the effort from you know a therapeutic angle needs to be from the external whether that's the natural you know green and blue spaces can be therapeutic to connect to the natural world or connect to the social world that's that's super important thank you and not necessarily sometimes we let people down but in most of the case also we put people down you know it's like put me down yeah let me down yes the other can be for the better and for the worse right also on the gravity and the multi player multi agent strange attractors so there's like the three body problem binary stars all these asteroid belts all these different stable configurations or unstable configurations or chaotic or rhythmic all those different movements and then on the perspectival part there's the world at the center self at the center ego centric view which is our kind of undeniable objects related visual system and then there's the kind of other centrism like the sun everyone on the earth will reference the sun as the center point or there's kind of in principle like a omni-centrism but that's always alluded to as like kind of in principle true but then it doesn't ever license any kind of perspectival analysis except hypocritically because a sensor has to be chosen even if it's like a purely homogenous gas then the center of gravity is just the center of the space and so it's like there's so much there with how diffuse the material is and then well the gas clouds that are really far away they have centers of gravity so just because the mist is very ephemeral at the time scale that we're moving doesn't mean that for like a redwood tree or for something like a bacterium it doesn't have a totally different materials property so we can't really say like how the niche is by itself it's not like the desert is just hot because it still might be too cold for some other adjacently living creature. Yeah exactly so there are gravity models of economics as well so it's not just like we're talking but we're extending the physics of gravity for the first time into the mental domain they've been using gravity models it's Newtonian gravity that's how sort of cities or states trade with each other where you're analogizing mass to the size of the population and then the transfer of force is the transfer of goods or services or people or whatever so I think there's a way to apply this at different scales as well to say okay if society is coherent and nested and based on sort of topographical or topological features of that society you can start to say well where are people going to fall down in this area here is where you're going to see an increase in anxiety and depression which is what we're seeing now we're seeing okay we're using metaphors like society is fracturing or there's this over centralization of power in the top the 1% of the population so the people at the bottom are struggling so I think there are ways to also take this the mental gravity idea and apply it at different social or societal scales as well awesome yeah well Anna if you have any last comments or questions and then otherwise you can have the last word on like where we go or what do we do Anna first then Lachlan no I don't have any last words so I'm going to go back to the last word thanks for joining Anna thank you so I think to sum up I think okay mental gravity this is one aspect of sort of bio gravitation that we can look at I think the conversations that I'm having with people sort of around the world in different domains in different fields there is a way to make a kind of a discipline out of this or at least a network of people who are interested in the effects of gravity on whatever it is whether it's the gut whether it's the brain whether it's development whether it's psychopathology consciousness whatever so my call out is to people if you're interested and if you want to make contact I am thinking of trying to sort of become a node in that network and try and bring people together people like Nick Anna is interested given his work he's going into robotics or he's interested in going into robotics so I think there are many different fields that can come together to say okay we're all talking about the same thing how can we sort of formalize it get some agreement and some principles and I'll be working from at least a point of connection and discussion so that's hopefully where I'd like to see this go not just in theoretical advancement but in socially I think we can bring some of these ideas together and Daniel thank you for having me thank you for contacting this has been great it's forced me to really get my ideas in order and be able to communicate them so thank you for the opportunity and to the active inference institute thank you thank you yep alright thank you see you all next time thank you bye


The Loupedeck software has just been updated to version 5.2, and they have made some improvements to the usability of the application user interface. So I'm really pleased about that. Still a little ways to go in my mind, but never mind. I'll talk about that a little bit more towards the end as well. So let's have a look at the release note, shall we? And it's pretty short, really, but it does belie the improvement that has taken place. So first of all, a redesigned action panel for a better and easier action management. That's going to be the main focus of this video, really, because that's the place that it was really lacking in before. And so, as I say, there have been some improvements made there. Color customization for the round buttons. So we'll have a look at that as well. The next two don't really apply to me as I'm a Mac user rather than a Windows user. Feature improvements to the sound custom action, Windows only. New open application custom action, Windows only. Although there is something that's a little bit similar to that, as I can see it for the Mac as well, though. So we'll take a look at that. Easier login and authentication process. I've got to say, I didn't really notice much difference between this and the previous version, and it wasn't something that I noticed was lacking. But if they've improved it, then we've got to be happy about that, haven't we? So there is that. So let's have a look, though, at this redesigned action panel and what has changed there. I did kind of get all excited about this when I first saw that it was in the release notes. And then when I came over to the action panel, I thought, well, it looks pretty similar to the way it did before, actually. And so my heart sank a little bit. But as I've dug in, it's raised a little bit again. So they have actually made some improvements. So what we had before is, first of all, these down this column here are the different plugins. Previously, they were in a row along the top. So they changed the position of it. And when I say my heart sank a little bit, it's because it still seemed to me that they had a very similar layout to the way that they got before. And this was one of the issues that I had with the previous versions of the software. If you want to assign, for example, a keyboard shortcut to one of the buttons previously, and still it is here now like this, but there is an easy way it will come to, you would have gone down to, let's say, keyboard. And let's say you want to type the keystroke, I don't know, command K. This one's for Keely. Command K. Then you'd have to go down this list and alphabetical order is logical at times. But it's not logical here because as I scroll down looking for the K key, and this is the way we had to do it before, you go through all of these different things. And first of all, they all begin with the word key because it's telling you it's a keystroke. But here, like we've got the E key. And then you would think what comes after E? It would be F. Well, actually, no, it's N then equals then escape. Then you've got FG. No, it's F1, F10, F11, F12, F13, and so on. So although technically, yeah, they've just been ordered alphabetically. It's not the most logical way to do things by any stretch. And I always thought, wouldn't it be so much simpler if we could just drag and drop an action like you can do in Stream Deck, and then you select and the action would be keystroke, and then you select what the keystroke that you want to be is. And so it was never really obvious exactly how you would do that before. And this I feel just sort of clutters up the space. You could obviously also search, but let's say we were searching for the K key and I just typed K in there. Well, unfortunately, it has very kindly highlighted every K in every action because every action begins with the word key. So sometimes the search works and sometimes it falls down on things like that. So anyway, this is the way it was done before. I don't know why they've left all of these actions still in here because now there is a much simpler way to do that. And there's a couple of ways of accessing it. So first of all, clicking up here in the custom, we did have this custom before. I feel like they've really simplified the layout of this now, though, because as well as having all of your stored custom actions, so ones that you've created before are down here, they do have these kind of shortcuts as well at the top to all of these common things that you might want to do. And it really does cover a lot of the uses that you might have for the loop deck as well. So for example, here we've got shortcut. So the example that I was just talking about command K, if I just click on shortcut here, it brings up this extra panel at the bottom, which is where we're going to create the shortcut. So I could come down here and I could just type the letter K. Do I want to add a modifier? Yes, I want to put command. So now that is now command K. And let me just type in here. Let me just put in Keely here like that. So then if I could add an icon to it as well, I won't bother with that just for now. So then I click on create and then I close that down. And you can see now in my custom stored actions, we've now got this custom action, which is command K basically. And I could now drag this and drop it onto any particular button. We've also got a really easy access to go to a web page. So if you want to create a shortcut for a web page, we can do that there. Let's just do that like that. So now we've got a shortcut to the take one tech web page, click on create, and then also an application. So this is one that was a bit of a sticking point for me before was if you come into the desktop actions, the ones related to the system, we've got this activate here which sounded like, you know, activate an application and indeed it could activate audition, illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and so on all the creative suite apps. But there wasn't one just a generic, you know, open any other app. There was a way to do it, but it was a bit laborious. But now we've got in here this one down here run application. So now if I wanted to run, well, let's just pick an application of the folder. It's just happens to go on to Premiere Pro. So click on that. That now is going to open Premiere Pro. One thing that is a bit of a shame, it doesn't pull in the application icon like you get in, in Stream Deck when you select to open an application, it just automatically pulls in the application. So click on create. And there you go. So now what I've got is I've got a few different app, a few different actions that I've just created very simply from here as well as the run for run application. You've also got a macro so we can create macros and also the dial adjustments. We had these before. This is what was in the custom before. We've also got text. So if you want to create a text snippet, press a button and it will just expand the text snippet. Again, like we've got on Stream Deck. That's easy to access now and then sound. So we can come and just pick a particular sound file and then it will play that as well. So we've got those very simply in there. We're going to create those custom actions. Then they are stored down here and then we can drag and drop. But what they've done is they've actually gone one step further. That's already an improvement on how it was before. But then what they've done is they've added this ability to just click on any button and actually we've got a shortcut in here to do all of these things as well. So macro shortcut, run, web page, sound, text and so on. So if I did want to just run a web page from this particular button, then it's literally just open up that panel down there, type in the website, click on OK. It's then automatically assigned it to that button. So you can actually just go through here creating actions directly from the button. So in some ways that's even more streamlined than I was hoping for. That is a great improvement to the user interface. It's one of the biggest sticking points I had. It was the reason why I could never really recommend this device to friends and family. I'll always recommend the Stream Deck. It's so easy and intuitive to use. However, this was a bit of a sticking point that I felt like. It was just, I just knew I'd be getting tech support questions with it because it baffled me for a while, but this is an improvement. Let's have a look at some of the other things that they've improved then and then we'll get onto where I think they still need to do a bit of work because I'm still not going to be recommending it, I'm afraid. So one thing that I mentioned in that little intro was you can change the color of these buttons. It's these buttons down here. Previously, they just automatically assigned whatever colors to these buttons, but now you can see we've got this little color picker. Just hover over any of these buttons. Click on here and then we can just choose any color that we want for the button. So that's just a nice little bit of customization and the way that that changes is if I just show you, there you go. So we now got the little red button is just there. It's the color that's showing up in the center where the number is on the button. That's where that actually shows up. There they show it obviously around the outside. It would be nice if the buttons did glow like that around the outside, but actually it's the number in the middle. But anyway, that's how you change the color. So what else have they changed on here? They've also got the dial adjustments as well. So we can create a new one of those and assign it to the dials. It isn't much easier as well now to actually just drag and drop these and move them around. Whereas before it was a little bit more tricky than that. But one of the areas where I think that this is still just well, really falling down for me. I'm sorry to bring a little bit of negativity into this, but technically we've got all of this power here for all of these different applications. And I think that the way that they've got this set up in terms of the plugins and the access to them, the profiles and the workspaces and pages is a little bit unnecessarily bloated and also prohibitive in terms of setting it up exactly as you want to use it. What am I talking about? Well, comparing to Stream Deck once again, and I'm sorry to keep making the comparison, but I feel like Stream Deck have nailed so much that this is falling short on. It's a worthy comparison. In Stream Deck, you've got different profiles and then you've got multiple pages within those profiles. So a profile being a particular use case you've got for it and then pages being different sort of pages of here. Like over here, I've got page one. I've got these icons. I've got these icons on page two, page three, page four and page five. So I've just created a little blank one here. So it means you can swipe through and I can do that with my finger, just swiping on the device to swipe through pages. And then this is just a single profile. Well, in Stream Deck, in a loop deck rather, they've also got these things called workspaces. And to me, a workspace is more like a kind of profile within a profile. So although I'm in what I've called Alex profile, I've just created another one in here called Zoom. It's actually just blank, but it's effectively almost just like another profile. So I can just swipe between those different pages. Now, if I want to use some of the other applications that I've got plugins for the loop deck. For example, we've got plugins for After Effects, Adobe Audition, Final Cut Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop, and all those kind of things. And in fact, they all come built in and these profiles have been custom made for you, which in theory is great, isn't it? If I go over to the, let's just take Adobe Audition. So I'm now in the Adobe Audition profile and we are in the Adobe Audition profile. And we're in the Home workspace. And in the Home workspace, we've basically got these few actions. Now I can then go over instead of Home, I could go into Editing. So if I was doing some editing, then it would go into the Editing workspace. And as you can see in the Editing workspace, we've got nine different pages of actions. So I can just swipe through all these and we can see all the different actions that we've got in the Editing workspace. And then we can go over here. We can go to the Track States and Mixer. So as you're changing around in the application, it's opening up all of these different things to you. You can see how many, surely hundreds, over multiple pages and in multiple workspaces, you've got hundreds of different actions that you can use with Adobe Audition. And indeed, if you come over to the side here, you can see in our list of plugins, we've now got the Adobe Audition plugin there. And look at all these. These are all the actions that in theory, we can trigger with our loop tech. So that is great. It's just like, isn't it, in the Stream Deck where you can download a plugin, you can open the plugin and you've got all of the different actions at your disposal. The only problem is with Ecamp with, I should say, sorry, with Stream Deck, if I have the Ecamp Live plugin or I have the Soundboard or I have the Zoom plugin, I can still create any profile that I want and use all of those different actions. However, if I want to create my own custom profile and use these Adobe Audition actions that have been created here, I can't actually access them. So if I come back to my main profile, let's say I just want to create my own profile that's got a few actions for Adobe Audition, few actions for Ecamp Live, few actions for something else, spread over a few different pages. Well, guess what? I can't actually access those Adobe Audition plugin actions. You would think if I came up here to where the little plugins toggle thing is up here, you would think I'd just be able to toggle it on or off just like I can toggle these ones. These are a few of the built-in ones for MIDI, Spotify, Twitch, Phillips Hue and so on. I can toggle those on or off here just like you can do in the Stream Deck, for example. So in Stream Deck, I can come over to the little toggle and there you go. I've toggled OBS off, but if I did want to see those, I could toggle them on and then they would just appear at the bottom. I can come in here, I can toggle them off and they disappear again. So we've kind of sort of got that functionality in the Loop Deck because I can toggle these ones on and off. But where are the Adobe Audition ones? Where are the Adobe Photoshop? Where are any other plugins? You can come up to this little cog wheel up at the top here which is the overall settings for plugins. Click on that one and that brings in the add-on manager for all of the different plugins, the add-ons. And you can see here that it's telling me that all of these things are ready. I've apparently got the Ableton Live is ready, the Adobe After Effects is ready, the Audition is ready and so on. So these things are all technically ready to use and yet they are nowhere to be seen and certainly nowhere to be able to access them from here just in this profile that I'm creating themself. They've kind of really just sandboxed all of these different actions that they've created within these profiles that they've created. Now, the way that they are envisaging you using this is you're going to have this thing called Dynamic Mode switched on and it's under this heading called Application Profiles. So under Application Profiles, if you have Dynamic Mode switched on then as you are switching from one application to another it will be switching the profile to the profile relevant to that application and then you'll have access to all of those actions which is fine if that's how you want to do things but I just personally don't want my street, my loop deck I should say, switching based on the application I'm using. I want to be able to set it up as I want it with whatever actions I want to have in there so that I can have full control over it. Why is that such an issue? Well, I spend a lot of time on Zoom calls and I'm often using some of these creative apps whilst I'm on a Zoom call. So it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that I want to be able to have my Zoom controls on the screen whilst I'm on a Zoom call and just because I've opened up one of the creative apps I don't want it just automatically hopping over to all of the actions for that particular app on my loop deck. I don't necessarily want it to change profile. I'd just like to be able to set it up the way that I want it with all of those actions and the fact that they are all technically there somewhere they're all in the software it knows what all of these actions are but I'm just not able to physically assign them to any profile I want. Just seems a little bit short-sighted and by a little bit, a little bit I mean a lot. It's actually led to me not really using the loop deck. I use it only for e-cam live basically and so I have this set up as my profile for e-cam where I can control audio volumes my audio levels I should say and then it's really more of a companion to my stream deck and in fact, if we have a look at this it's mounted above my stream deck so this has got some extra scenes in e-cam live that I use. I've got this one to end my recordings these control some of the levels in e-cam itself but the stream deck does most of the heavy lifting and it certainly does all of the heavy lifting as far as my productivity is concerned and why is that? It is because not because it is necessarily better as a device than a loop deck it's because of the friction involved in actually setting things up. If I want to set something up just quickly and know that I can just easily hop in and out of different profiles with as I come with the stream deck it's so much simpler for me to do it in there and so when it comes down to it having both devices has been great using those dials but I still always defer to or revert back to the stream deck and when it comes to recommending one of these devices to people should they get a stream deck? Should they get a loop deck? If you need the dials for precision control of certain things in creative apps if you have a user of creative apps definitely recommend the loop deck for that if you're just really focused in on those apps all the time certainly the dials are handy for that but for just general use it's going to be stream deck every time for me so I'm really looking forward to future updates because I feel like they've made some steps in the right direction but they just still need to sort out some of these usability issues in my mind it's very telling that I know quite a few people who have bought loop decks and more than half of the people that I know who have bought loop decks have sent them back so it's not just me who feels this way unfortunately so it is a bit of a shame but as I say it's all steps in the right direction so I hope that you've found this little overview of some of the new features helpful and hopefully it is a sign of more future positive steps to come now I'll leave a link to some of my other videos related to loop deck and stream deck over on the right hand side as well so I'll see you in there


You and one of the famous little pranks he used to play, by getting him a t-shirt as many people as possible. A memory of you and obviously, we did this special award which we are ongoing, which is the spirit of Mini Bash. You and Gilmore, obviously it's got the turtle on top here, quite treasured. And last year as well, right, yes I did see that, yeah. And the bit of wood is quite symbolic that it came from you and Mankite as well. So that's how it arrived for us, and so we've just kept it just done all the time. And actually the pick is Linda. It's a surprise guys to receive the spirit of the Bash, the You and Gilmore Memorial trophy. I've been really humbled about that. I hope you've really enjoyed the following of this Mini Bash and we've all had a really good time. We've made a difference, I'd call it my memorable. And we look forward to seeing you guys in March 2015, and we'll do it all over again for the Main Bash.