Here we go. Joe, thank you. Thank you for being here. Really appreciate it.

It's pleasure to be here. This is a fascinating subject. I'm really looking

forward to talking to you because the conscious mind and how we how we

evolved our conscious mind how we have our conscious mind I mean that is one of the

more unique things about being a person it It is. How did it happen? Well it's only a 4 billion year story is

the subtitle of the book. So shall I tell you how I got into it and how I ended up thinking about that problem?

So I've been working on how the brain detects and responds to danger for most of my scientific

career. A little bit before that I'd actually

studied consciousness and these people who have their brain split apart to

control epilepsy called Split Brain Patients. So I got interested in

consciousness and also in how behaviors that might be produced non-consciously affect what we know about ourselves.

So we see ourselves doing something and then we kind of consciously build that

into our narrative of what we are, but a lot of what we do, we do non-consciously. And when we interpret it,

that kind of solidifies the fact that you have a non-conscious

system that's controlling your behavior when in fact you didn't do it but that

system did so you got to make sense of it and generate an explanation and narrative.

So that was where I got started and I tried to figure out, well, what would be some kinds of

non-conscious systems?

And said, well, maybe emotion systems or producing behaviors that we don't fully understand.

And I started studying that and ended up figuring out how this part of the brain called

the amygdala receives information about the environment and then controls

orchestrates all the responses, fight flight kinds of responses to help you

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