Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2023

The Current Transcript for April 10, 2023

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

PAUL BLOOM: Despite what you might hear, the emotions, the feelings, our gut instincts are not noise in the system. They're not those sorts of things so we want to get them aside so we can think rationally, right? Central to a life well lived.

MATT GALLOWAY: The Canadian psychologist Paul Bloom has built a career studying what makes us human. His new book, Psych, is a head spinning look at what we know and don't know about the brain and the mind. In an hour, we revisit our conversation probing the mystery of how this thing in our head can give us consciousness and whether artificial intelligence like chat GPT will ever match human thought. Also this morning.

SOUNDCLIP

BRIAN LAPOINTE: People come down to the Riviera Maya for those beautiful white sand beaches and clear turquoise waters. And when they step out of their room and they smell that stench and see these mounds of rotting sargassum, they're going to check out.

MG: It is so big you can see it from outer space. And when it washes ashore, the seaweed can be catastrophic for local ecosystems and tourist economies. In 30 minutes, how to tackle an 8000 kilometre long belt of sargassum drifting through the ocean. We begin, though, behind the wheel with new questions about when you are too old to drive. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

OLDER DRIVERS

Guests: Dr. Shawn Marshall, Bill VanGorder

MG: A month ago, you might have found Damien Tomsett working at one of his two jobs, living life as a typical 29-year-old. Now, Damien is grappling with life altering injuries that have left him with skull fractures, brain bleeding and memory issues. A few weeks back, Damien was hit by a car while crossing at a crosswalk in Halifax. The driver of that vehicle was 89 years old. Now, Damien Tomsett’s mother Sarah March is calling for more regulations of older drivers in that province.

SOUNDCLIP

SARAH MARCH: I know my mom drove into her nineties, much to her chagrin, but I think probably, and I'm 60, I think probably at about my age, somewhere in there, they should start doing maybe every five years checking for vision, hearing, reaction time, just making sure that those skills are still there. So many things can make an impact on your ability to drive. Medications that you may be taking. We know that certain things slow down as we age, but I also want to see that pedestrians are safe.

MG: Only four Canadian provinces currently have mandatory screening for drivers over 80 years old. This case, though, has renewed debates about whether more testing would actually improve safety on our roads. Dr. Shawn Marshall is a leading researcher in this area. He's division head of physical medicine and Rehabilitation with the Ottawa Hospital's rehabilitation centre, and he has studied the driving abilities of older people and developed a screening tool to help family doctors identify those most at risk. Dr. Marshall is in our Ottawa studio. Dr. Marshall, good morning.

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: Good morning.

MG: This is a heartbreaking story. Sarah March says that Nova Scotia should consider mandatory driving tests for older drivers. I mentioned in the introduction that only four Canadian provinces currently have mandatory screening for drivers over the age of 80. Do you think those mandatory tests should be nationwide?

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: I think that certainly, you know, a sad story. Whenever anything like this happens, this is what we're all trying to avoid. And I think our group, our Candrive research group and working with older groups, I'm not sure that this is the way to go. What we do know about driving is that as described earlier, it takes many skills, cognitive skills, visual skills and assembling them together. But screening isn't necessarily always effective. And I think we have to look at kind of the implications of screening. It's not as simple and straightforward about timing, what's old, you know, how people's functional abilities change and health changes that occur. And I think that one of the most important things you need to realize is the vast majority of drivers who are older are actually very safe drivers and our research would support that.

MG: What do we know? And if you step aside from this specific case, what does the research tell us about the risks of older people driving? And you said something really interesting there, which is what is old. And that's part of the question here. But what changes as we get older when it comes to skills that might diminish that we need to drive safely?

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: Well, you know, that's a very good question. I think that certainly when we look at driving, there's many factors that come into driving in and of itself. For instance, your behaviour tends to be probably in younger drivers, a bit more likely to be risk taking, whereas older drivers tend to be more risk averse. The skills that are needed for driving are everything from cognitive skills to even the physical skills to operate the vehicle. And in fact, interestingly, we often adjust to those things. So for instance, we have the ability to adjust how we drive in the environment that we drive. So for instance, older drivers will tend to avoid driving at night for instance if they are having some vision difficulties and those sorts of things. And we drive with the idea that we all want to be safe. And when I talk to older drivers and older driver groups, most of us connect with that idea of wanting to maintain safety. So yes, health changes occur as we age, but it's different for every individual. And we know people physiologically age at different rates.

MG: At what point do we start to see some of those cognitive skills begin to decline such that they would impact your ability to drive?

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: Yeah. So that's a great question. So when we started off, our research started with the we do know and we looked at trends, older driving crash rates increase, when we adjust per kilometre driven. And that probably starts around probably in the age 75 range. So one of our research questions focussed on looking at drivers as they age and what happens to them.

MG: And so if that's the case, go back to what you said earlier, which is that perhaps these standardized mandatory tests would not be as useful as some people believe. Why wouldn't we test people at define an age and go up from there to see whether those abilities are diminishing?

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: Yeah. That's a great question because, you know, for instance, there's a few factors involved. One is, you know, the timing. If it’s done every five years, well, our health can change within those five years. Like how often do you do it? I think a very important thing to point out is that we have different driving abilities. And for instance, when we're often talking about, you know, more senior drivers and that sort of thing, they often have many years of experience behind that, whereas other people aren't. And even skills within, you know, screening. So I think that screening may not be effective when we're looking at these things. Driving is also a functional task. What your health condition says about you doesn't say how you're actually going to drive. So for instance, people's physical abilities, you're able to do things. We often see in disability, people might have for instance impaired walking. But if they walk with the proper aid or have proper conditions, they're able to functionally do this. Screening has also risks of identifying those who have the ability to drive. And we know even from research from other countries, removing the ability to drive for older drivers, when we get more restrictive, can actually cause injury or harm to those people who are more likely to be injured as pedestrians or difficulties for their lives in being able to access the things they need to access. So inappropriately. Screening people out for driving is a significant risk.

MG: Stay on the line with us because I want to bring somebody into our conversation who has a couple of different roles in something like this. Bill VanGorder is national chief operating officer and chief of advocacy at the Canadian Association for Retired Persons, also known as CARP. He's in Halifax. Bill, good morning to you.

BILL VANGORDER: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Reluctant to ask people about their age, but I want to ask you because you just had a birthday recently, right?

BILL VANGORDER: I did and I'm not shy about my age. I'm 80.

MG: Happy birthday. And at 80, are you still driving?

BILL VANGORDER: I certainly am.

MG: Do you have any concerns about driving?

BILL VANGORDER: I certainly have concerns about keeping an eye on my ability to drive, but I am not concerned at the moment about any less ability to drive than I had 15 years ago.

MG: Are there things that you, I mean, times that perhaps you don't drive? Do you drive at night or in, you know, trickier weather less now than you did perhaps in past?

BILL VANGORDER: I've always been a careful driver and I'm still a careful driver. And driving when conditions are not suitable is something I've always done, not just at my current age. So driving at night, not a problem. Driving if it's pouring rain when you can't see the markings on the road, no, I don't. But I haven't done that for many, many years.

MG: What do you think of the idea of a mandatory test? And we have to figure out at what age that test would come into place. But a mandatory test for drivers as they get older, as we get older, to see whether we still have the abilities necessary to be on the road. What do you think of that idea?

BILL VANGORDER: Well, I was prepared to list all kinds of concerns. And Dr. Marshall has done that very, very well. Testing just on the basis of age is ageism. It's unfair, it's discriminatory and should not be allowed at any time. But if we could, and testing is not necessarily something that works, as Dr. Marshall said. And that's one of the reasons that we don't have a similar driving test right across the country, because the experts can't agree. And remember, still, the rates of accidents are still higher among younger drivers than they are older drivers.

MG: Can you understand why there are people who would ask for such a thing? Again, we heard earlier from Sarah March. Her son suffered life altering injuries crossing a crosswalk. He was hit by a driver who is 89. And she said that this mandatory testing should come into place because of her own family's experience as well.

BILL VANGORDER: Well, I understand that. And what a terrible thing to have happened. And all our sympathies are with her. But it's not as easily done as that. You know, I've been involved in discussing this issue for over 20 years being involved in senior's advocacy in this province and across the country. And the kinds of concerns that Dr. Marshall outlined we've heard over those years. It's not a simple one, a one-step solution to keep our roadways safe from everybody and by everybody.

MG: You said very clearly that you believe it's ageism to call for a test like this. And there are people who are listening who would say, as the doctor has said, that cognitive abilities can decline as we get older. I mean, I think we all understand that and we're all going through that. People might ask how is acknowledging that and putting that into the context of being, you know, in control of a heavy vehicle on the road, how would that be seen to be ageist?

BILL VANGORDER: Well, it is ageist because if we're not looking at the other end of the scale where younger drivers tend to often have less good judgement, not sure of themselves, not as experienced. Is testing a good idea for driving? Yes, absolutely. That's why we test people at the beginning when they get a license. But we need to test people all the way through that process and not just assume that because they're a certain age, they're somehow less able or less safe in their driving than other age groups.

MG: What is the better way forward here? How should we make a decision as to whether as somebody gets older, they're still fit to drive?

BILL VANGORDER: Well, the ideal would be to have regular rare testing and recalls that are regular age from the very beginning. And of course, then you get into the cost factor of that and that's why governments backed down from doing it. Certainly, we need more education. Many of the provinces have education programs for drivers of all ages with ones that are specifically for seniors. Education is probably a much better approach than absolute laws and tests that eliminate people for reasons other than what we're really trying to accomplish in the long run.

MG: Let me play something for you. This is from Therese Oldfield. She's an occupational therapist and she does fitness to drive assessments. Have a listen to her take on this.

SOUNDCLIP

THERESE OLDFIELD: Some clients come to us and are upset at the fact that their family physician or specialist has reported them to the ministry and their license has been suspended and don't really have the insight to understand the impact that their medical condition could have on their ability to drive. Typically, clients may report to me that they got their license at 16 years of age, they've been a driver for numerous years and never had an accident or a ticket. We do realize as assessors the impact that the decision has on their lives. However, as we age, our physical, our cognitive, our visual and visual perceptual abilities change. And it's important that we continue to monitor these skills to ensure that our roadways are safe.

MG: Bill, I'll ask you about the impact that taking someone's license away can have in just a moment, but what do you make of what she says, that in some ways, I mean, this applies to all of us. We think we're better drivers than we actually might be and that we may not be the best people to make that assessment?

BILL VANGORDER: Yes, that's true. But that's true of all ages, not just of older Canadians.

MG: And so if somebody were, I mean, I ask you this in the work that you do at CARP, if somebody were to have their license taken away, if they were removed from the driver's seat of the car, what is the impact, as you understand it, that that would have on somebody?

BILL VANGORDER: Well, the impact is tremendous. The freedom to drive is one of the freedoms that people most jealously regard and for their own life and safety, especially rural Canadians who would then not be able to even drive to the drugstore, drive to the grocery store, get to their doctor's office, the feeling of exclusion, not being able to be with friends, not being able to get around your community is one of the worst things that you can do to anyone. And we saw that happening during COVID when people were stuck in their own homes and what that did to people's mental health, including seniors.

MG: And so as we're talking about this, I suppose just finally, what should we be thinking about? If we're trying to make the roads as safe as possible and ensure that everybody out there has the skills necessary to be safe on those roads, what should we be thinking about?

BILL VANGORDER: Well, first of all, we should be doing more research, as Dr. Marshall was, to see if we're finding the right tests, to make the right screening tools, asking the right questions. And then we should be doing it at all age groups or some way to make sure that everybody at any age, if their medical condition changes in any way that would impinge on their ability to drive, then that's when we should take effect. But not just automatically say she's old, she can’t drive.

MG: Bill, great to talk to you. Thanks for taking our call.

BILL VANGORDER: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Bill VanGorder is a seniors advocate in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Dr. Shawn Marshall is in our Ottawa studio and he has been listening in. What do you make of what we heard from Bill?

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: I think that Bill raises a number of really, really important points that driving is complex, it has to do with experience and it's important to everyone. And I think the approach, I don't think we can disagree that as we age, we're more likely to encounter health conditions that can impact our ability to drive. And I think that I know that in our research and from my understanding with working with patients is that all of us agree that when our health impacts our ability to drive, that pretty much all of us agree that we don't want to drive and put ourselves, our families or others at risk. And I think that the way of looking at this is looking at screening probably in a clinical sense of targeting those who are most at risk and often working with primary care providers, nurse practitioners, family physicians, specialists at trying to identify those more at risk. And I think our research is focussed on that. And what we found within our research is, you know, showing what most of us know, most older drivers are safe and in fact, they have occlusion rates that are quite within the realm of acceptable.

MG: I guess I would just ask about what Therese was saying and again, this applies to all of us, that we aren't the best judges in many ways of our driving ability. And way back, it seems like the dark ages, when I got my driver's license, I was told, you know, driving is not a right. It's a privilege having a license and that you need to earn that ability. And so if we don't know whether we are the best judges of that, shouldn't that be put in the hands of other people?

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: Absolutely. And I think that more when the health condition can impact one's ability to drive, that's probably when we need to look at it. Some people do. Most of us are very confident in our ability to drive. And when we were younger, if you're making errors or whatever, we assume it's not due to health condition. We assume it’s due to behavior, experience, skill. When it’s older, when age starts to come into play, it’s probably seen as more likely a health condition. Experience is there, skills probably should've been derived by that time in point. So we're looking at kind of what things can affect that. And that's where screening kind of within the health care system can be effective, identifying those who are more at risk and not necessarily immediately saying oh, remove license or do a test. But it directs people say to the occupational therapist we just heard from in saying, listen, we need to evaluate this further. That's the fair way of looking at it. But we're targeting a specific population, those who are more at risk and identifying those versus carte blanche trying to identify all the drivers who might be at risk. Recognizing that within our research in a recent study we completed, you know, over 75% were certainly within the risk category and only a fraction, less than 3% were in a higher risk category. So again, looking at trying to screen for those who are truly at risk so we can have a conversation and transition people, you know, away from stopping driving or looking at alternatives to driving.

MG: Just in the last couple of minutes that we have, one of the things, again, it goes back to you thinking about what is old. And I say in quotation marks. We had a conversation last week on the program about subjective age and this idea that age can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. When you come out of this discussion, what should we be thinking about when it comes to making sure that we're making these decisions without, to Bill's point, making ageist decisions, making just assumptions?

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: Yeah. I think that, first of all, you know, we used to think that 65 was old. I think now we have many people working beyond that age. I think that we do know that a health burden in populations tends to start increasing beyond age 70, 75. And I think that what we need to think about is not everyone has those health conditions just based on age alone. There is an increased propensity for risk. And I think it's the health condition and its impacts that are likely to impact a functional skill such as driving. And it can be cumulative, everything from your physical skills to your cognitive skills. And I think that we also have to look at how people have different levels of functioning. So some people are blessed with better health than others, but certainly we need to recognize that your health impacts your function. And I think we need to recognize too as I think brought up earlier, is it can have very devastating consequences to you, your family and even access to what you need if driving is unwarrantedly removed. So I think that these are things that we need to take and to balance. There are harms done by sometimes implementing things without thinking them through and having the research to support them. And those harms can be restricting people who need access to driving and mobility, particularly in a country like Canada where driving is, you know, part of our culture because we don't have the transportation systems to meet the needs of older people and their mobility in the community.

MG: Shawn Marshall, glad to talk to you about this. Thank you very much.

DR. SHAWN MARSHALL: You’re welcome. Thanks.

MG: Dr. Shawn Marshall is head of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Ottawa Hospital's rehab centre. He's lead researcher for a national study of older drivers. Your thoughts on this. Is a standardized test the way to go? Is there a way to do this that is not, as Bill was saying, ageist? Let us know. Email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. You're CBC News is next. And then.

SOUNDCLIP

BRIAN LAPOINTE: If you're out at sea and you encounter it, it's actually quite beautiful. But when it comes ashore, that's when it becomes a big problem.

MG: A big problem indeed. We're going to talk about a huge mass of seaweed coming ashore in parts of the Caribbean, Mexico and Florida. We'll talk about why it's a big problem coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

SARGASSUM

Guests: Brian Lapointe, Ajit Subramaniam

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, the mind is a complex and mysterious thing, and it holds endless fascination for the Canadian psychologist, Paul Bloom. He has dedicated his life to better understanding how we think and feel. My conversation with Paul Bloom coming up in just under 30 minutes. But first, tackling a massive seaweed bloom in the Atlantic Ocean.

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[tractor, ocean waves]

MG: Dozens of people are part of this beach cleanup in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, armed with tractors, wheelbarrows, rakes and pitchforks. They're clearing tons of sargassum. In the background, you can hear the ocean breeze coming in from the sea, and that is wafting an odour that could make your stomach turn. Turns out these mounds of seaweed have drifted ashore for weeks now. They are from the Great Atlantic sargassum belt. It stretches for some 8000 kilometres. That raft of seaweed is wreaking havoc on shorelines and in the water. Brian Lapointe has spent most of his career studying sargassum. He is a research professor at the Florida Atlantic University's Harbour Branch Oceanographic Institute. Brian, good morning.

BRIAN LAPOINTE: Good morning.

MG: I'm calling this seaweed. What exactly is this?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: Sargassum is a floating brown seaweed. It has little air bladders on it, look like berries that allow it to float. There are two species, sargassum fluitans and sargassum natans, and they float around the Atlantic Ocean looking for nutrients to grow.

MG: Can you just describe it a little bit more? In part because people have talked about this sargassum belt as kind of like a sea monster, something that you can see from outer space. Describe the scale of this issue right now.

BRIAN LAPOINTE: So the Great Atlantic sargassum belt formed in 2011. And it stretches between the west coast of Africa, across the tropical Atlantic, towards South America, up through the Caribbean and into the Gulf of Mexico and the south Florida region. So this particular year, we're seeing a lot of biomass in the Great Atlantic sargassum belt. March set a record with about 13 million tons estimated to be in that belt moving westward through the Caribbean towards the Gulf of Mexico and Florida.

MG: And so from your eyes, what does this mass of sargassum look like?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: Well, if you're out at sea and you encounter it, it's actually quite beautiful. And it's generally a good thing when you're out there. It provides habitat for over 100 species of fishes and invertebrates and endangered sea turtles. And it's golden brown in colour and contrasts with the deep blue sea around it. So it's really quite striking to see from a boat. But when it comes ashore, that's when it becomes a big problem. It decomposes when it forms these large rotting masses releasing hydrogen sulphide, discolouring the water, a muddy, dark brown colour that's not very inviting to bathers. And it's affecting seagrasses and coral reefs in the Caribbean region not in a good way and has a quite high content of arsenic. So in the attempts to remove it from beaches, you know, a lot of people are trying to repurpose it for things like fertilizers. But you have to be a little bit wary about that because of this high heavy metal content in arsenic in particular.

MG: What does it smell like?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: Well, it smells like rotten eggs. And at really high concentrations, it's really a putrid smell. And it does have health effects at certain concentrations. And I know there have been a number of studies published in The Lancet, the medical journal from Martinique in Guadeloupe, where thousands of people were diagnosed with exposure to hydrogen sulphide.

MG: Why is this an issue now? I mean, as you mentioned, out in the sea, that's one thing. And we'll talk a little bit more about what happens when it comes onto shore. But why is there this 8000 kilometre sargassum belt that has been created now? What's going on?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: This is a whole new oceanographic phenomenon. You know, in the past, oceanographers first described sargassum in the Sargasso Sea, which is to the north of the sargassum belt, and it would accumulate there. It grows in the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf Stream. It's found abundantly in the Sargasso Sea. And so it's this big clockwise gyre through which these plants have evolved over eons. And they assimilate nutrients in the higher nutrient water in these currents in coastal waters as they circulate. Our research has shown that is really a key part of their growth cycle, taking up these nutrients. So we think what happened is that some of this sargassum from the Sargasso Sea may have been transported south east towards the west coast of Africa, which seeded that area with enough of this sargassum that it began growing on local nutrient sources in the eastern tropical Atlantic and the Gulf of Guinea. Of course, we have the Congo River, other rivers of Africa that are discharging in that area. We have natural upwelling and vertical mixing of nutrients from the deep ocean also, Saharan dust, biomass burning, all of that going on in Africa that could provide nutrients to support this new centre of growth for sargassum that basically never existed previously.

MG: I was going to say have you ever seen, you've studied this your whole career, have you ever seen anything quite like this before?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: No. This is new. And it's basically something we did see in the Gulf of Mexico on a much smaller scale. We have the Mississippi River delivering, you know, a lot of nitrogen and some phosphorus to the Gulf of Mexico. And we know through our work with nitrogen isotopes that the sargassum is assimilating that nitrogen from those river discharges and has helped support blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. So we've had issues of excessive amounts of sargassum washing up on beaches, for example, in Texas back in the 80s. And in fact, around 1990, an 80-mile long patch of sargassum came ashore on the west coast of Florida Crystal River and clogged the cooling intake, causing that nuclear power plant to shut down. And that grabbed headlines in Florida when that happened. So, you know, these massive blooms of sargassum obviously can cause real issues for human infrastructure. A similar phenomena last year in the Virgin Islands occurred where it clogged the intake of a reverse osmosis plant.

MG: If it's floating out in the sea, what does it do to the water? Is there something that it is doing to the ecosystem if it's just out there in the ocean floating away as a belt?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: In moderate amounts when it's offshore floating in the ocean, it's generally a good thing. It’s like a fish factory. Over 100 species of fishes call it home, and larger pelagic fish come in and feed on those as prey items. Mahi-mahi, for example, is a big fishery here in Florida and throughout the Caribbean. And we're seeing, however, that with these really large, thick mass, that those fisheries are being impacted in a negative way. So if you think about it, if the issue here is increasing nutrients, which we do think it is from a variety of sources, the algae, the sargassum grows faster than the fish or the invertebrates as it sees more nutrients. So what happens is the fish become diluted out in a larger amount of sargassum. So it's kind of harder to find the fish since they're more dilute. And the massive amount of sargassum causes issues of fouling of fishing gear. So those two things seem to be impacting fisheries. In the old days, we had this abundance of life of all these prey items, filefish, jacks, all types of crabs and the amazing biodiversity that lives in these sargassum communities that are prey item for fish. And you could fish those weed lines and catch plenty of fish in a small amount of time. That doesn't seem to be happening anymore because of the massive amount of sargassum that's now present.

MG: And so then when it comes ashore, I mean, people might have seen the images coming out of Mexico, tourists who are trying to figure out how to get along the beach because I mean, it's like thick carpets of seaweed along the beach, right?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: That's correct. So I've seen it build up on the beach up to five feet high and maybe higher at times. So this typically occurs in the mid-summer months, June, July. And of course, we're getting close to a turtle hatching season when those little hatchlings are trying to find their way to the water over these mounds of sargassum. And so I know here in Florida, we've seen some recruitment failure due to that, I think 25% recruitment failure in these hatchlings actually getting to the water. And of course, once they get in the water, if there's a lot of rotten sargassum in the water, you can have anoxic conditions with high concentrations of hydrogen sulphide there as well that can be toxic and possibly even lethal to wildlife.

MG: I mean, again, the stench of rotten eggs at scale is not anything that tourists are going to want to engage in on the beach. And people may say, oh, poor tourists, but these are economies that are based around tourism. What does that do to the regions when this stuff washes ashore again in a great volume?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: It has had catastrophic impacts on tourism in different areas around the Caribbean, particularly Mexico. People come down to the Riviera Maya for those beautiful white sand beaches and clear turquoise waters. And when they step out of their room and they smell that and then they look out towards the water and see these mounds of rotten sargassum and this discoloured water, you know, they're going to check out and they're going to do their homework next time planning their vacations and go where there isn't this problem.

MG: And so just before I let you go, I mean, as you said, it generally seems to come ashore for many communities in the summer. It's headed your way to Florida.

BRIAN LAPOINTE: It is. It's already here actually. This is very early. Typically, we don't see this much sargassum coming in until oh gosh, late April or May. And so we began to see this in early March this year. And this is why we think we're likely going to see a record year.

MG: But is this just the beginning of something or do you worry that this record year, as the oceans change and the world around the oceans change, that this will be the beginning of a huge change when it comes to the scale of this problem?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: Well, the trajectory is upwards. It began in 2011 and 2018 was the previous record year. But the last two years, it's been quite abundant, close to what we saw in 2018. So it does look like the trajectory is upward. And it makes me wonder what's it going to be like in another five years or 10 years if this continues, this upward trajectory.

MG: Is there a little part of you, as somebody who has studied this for 40 years, who's vaguely excited by this, the scale of this problem?

BRIAN LAPOINTE: Well, I'm excited and scared at the same time. I mean, as a scientist who began his career trying to add nutrients to grow sargassum for biofuel production, I never thought back in the early 1980s that we would see nutrient sources in the Atlantic basin that would be doing this on this massive scale. And that's why we're now looking at the rivers, the Congo, the Amazon, the Orinoco, the Mississippi, all of these that we think are contributing to the Great Atlantic sargassum belt.

MG: Brian, good to talk to you about this. Thank you very much.

BRIAN LAPOINTE: Thank you.

MG: Brian Lapointe is a research professor at Florida Atlantic University. He has studied sargassum for more than four decades. Researchers are trying to figure out what can be done to stop this sargassum from making landfall. Ajit Subramaniam has been working in the South Atlantic for more than 25 years. He's a biological oceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Ajit, good morning to you.

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: Good morning.

MG: Can you describe what you have seen, what you've experienced with this stuff?

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: We saw it for the first time in 2018. When we were out in the northern reaches, so basically around Barbados, we ran into masses of sargassum that completely surrounded the ship. And then when we came into port in Barbados and went to the beach, we did see these almost five feet high sargassum washed up on the beaches there. And since then, what I've been trying to figure out is how we can actually prevent it from washing up on the beaches, precisely because this really does devastate the economy of the small islands, the communities there who depend on tourism.

MG: I'll ask you about that in a moment in terms of what we might do, but what's your understanding as to why this is happening right now? Brian Lapointe was suggesting in part that the prevalence of nutrients, of things like nitrogen and what have you that might come from fertilizer that perhaps have changed the ecosystem such that this bloom would turn into a belt. What do you think is going on here?

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: I must confess I'm a little bit more careful about that in that we have been making nutrient measurements along the equator all the way from the African coast to the South American coast over the last few years. And I have sampled all along the tropical Atlantic and I am not so sure that it is actually nitrogen from the rivers that is making it like that because we just don't measure enough nitrogen in the water. Now, it is an important caveat to put in that we don't measure the nutrients because they may have been taken up. But for me, it is still a little bit of a mystery as to why we have this new population. The direct linkages to land use for me is a little more difficult to connect.

MG: The reality, though, no matter why this is happening, is that it is causing, as you said, real impacts on nations that are reliant on tourism, that see their economy based around there. People again aren't going to go to the beach if the beach is covered in rotten seaweed that stinks. What should be done to deal with the sargassum before it gets to shore?

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: I'm very much trying to figure out ways in which we can collect this sargassum when it's still offshore. If you think about the size of the islands, very soon, you’ll run out of space to put them. So by the time they come to the beach, it's almost too late for some of these communities, the island communities I'm talking about, to take it off the beach. So the question is what can we do to collect them while they're still offshore? We are trying to come up with systems. There is actually one working system that is run by a non-profit in the Dominican Republic where they're collecting the sargassum and taking it offshore and dumping it in deep ocean waters where it might serve a dual purpose. One is that you're preventing it from washing up on the beach. And the second is if you can successfully sink it entirely in its entirety to depths greater than 1500, 2000 metres, then you're also taking out basically carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and putting it in a place where it's not going to come back for at least 100 years. So that's something that they're doing in the Dominican Republic. We are trying to see how we can scale this up so more communities can benefit from this using robotic systems. There are a couple of private enterprises that are essentially doing research on this.

MG: And you would be able to sink this down to the floor of the sea.

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: That's right. That's the objective. You've got to sink it deep enough such that when it gets revalorized, that is when bacteria consume it, the release of carbon dioxide through the breeding, the respiration of the bacteria don't make it back up to the surface. So you don't want to do this in shallow water where apart from the fact that you're using up your oxygen, that then leads to other problems such as hypoxia, you also are not going to help with the carbon problem. But if you do it in deep enough waters, and one of the advantages many of these islands have is that they are all right next to very deep waters. So if you’re actually able to do it in deep waters, then you'll be solving two problems at once.

MG: Is there a way to use this to solve another problem, which is that I mean, to your point, sargassum is a bit of a carbon sink. And there are researchers and companies, one in the UK that is trying to figure out ways to create sargassum farms for that purpose, to be able to absorb carbon, which is a huge issue in our world right now and use the sink element to that to be able to grab some of that carbon and then I guess tuck it away at the bottom of the sea. Is that something that's possible, that we could find some benefits to this?

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: Well, I'm sort of cautious of geoengineering. So while I like to think of a nature based solution that we have, which is that actually making use of a new phenomenon that has come about in the tropical Atlantic through the great sargassum belt to deliberately go and farm sargassum is I think still an open question as to what all the various impacts are because you need nutrients to grow these. And if they're growing in natural sea water, which is I think maybe one of the proposals, then they're going to use up nutrients that are then not available to something else. So and to do it at a scale where you're actually attacking a climate problem requires growing a large area of these, of the sargassum. And I am not yet sure we know all the downstream effects of something like that, as to whether that can be done at scale that will make a difference.

MG: Is there anything that can be done with the sargassum once it washes onto the shore, aside from raking it up and putting it in a truck and hauling it away? I was reading something about people creating bricks, for example, out of this.

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: Right. The advantage and disadvantage with sargassum is that it's extremely fibrous. And so I suspect it has a lot of tensile strength that allow you to make building material out of it. But on the other hand, because it's very fibrous, it's difficult to use it for many other purposes. I also have read studies where they're trying to create biofuels out of it. And it should be possible, but it's probably low in fat content. So again, it's going to be a process that may not produce as much biofuel as some other material that can be used. I guess what I'm trying to say is that these are all processes that would work, but they may not be the best suited for the use, but they're all good dual use outcomes of the sargassum.

MG: You just wonder whether that would deal with the scale of the problem. Again, there's a lot of this stuff that's washing up.

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: Exactly.

MG: Yeah.

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: Exactly.

MG: I mean, Brian was saying, you know, he's worried that what he's seeing this year might be worse, next year might be worse, in five years, might be worse in 10 years. If we don't deal with this with whatever the cause of this is, but what also the amount of this stuff that's floating around in the sea and washing up on shore, what are you most concerned about?

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: I do believe Brian is right in the sense that based on the trends we are seeing from the satellite data, it does seem like this is getting bigger every year. I am really concerned that this is going to really devastate the small island economies that depend on tourism because tourists do depend on having access to the beaches. At the same time, I also sort of want to caution people that we are not talking about an 8000 kilometre, one continuous blob as is often represented or talked about. When you're out on a boat, you really see them as blobs that are more in the order of five to maybe 50 metres in length discontinuous, but you can also see them as wind rows that are perhaps a couple of metres wide that sort of stretch out from the horizon. So the scope of the problem is real, but I think we need to also be cautious about talking about how your vacation is going to be destroyed because of these masses of sargassum appearing everywhere all at the same time.

MG: I think those who are involved in the tourism industries in those small island nations would appreciate that degree of caution so that the word doesn't get out that yet, to your point, people's vacations will be destroyed because of this thing, this giant blob that's floating around in the sea.

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: To answer your question, I really do think that we have to get creative about how to use this. This is something that has been provided to us. And I do believe that there's a nature based carbon solution here. So what I would like to think about is how these communities that have done the least to contribute towards the greenhouse gas emissions and accumulation in the atmosphere are the ones that are right now facing the brunt of it in terms of hurricanes. And so I would like to figure out ways in which we can actually use this nature based carbon removal solution to actually benefit these communities. But I'm also happy to think about all the other researchers who are working on other uses for the sargassum because we need to do something about it better than just dumping into the landfills.

MG: Ajit, really glad to talk to you about this. Thank you for walking us through some of the solutions that we might be exploring in years ahead. Appreciate it.

AJIT SUBRAMANIAM: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Ajit Subramaniam is a biological oceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Well, coming up after your regional update.

SOUNDCLIP

PAUL BLOOM: I bet you've always been obsessed with the mind. Everybody kind of wonders what's going on? What are people thinking? Why do I do what I do? What makes me sad? What makes me happy? So I think an obsession with the mind is pretty common for everybody. Not everybody goes into psychology.

MG: Paul Blume did, though. He went into psychology and he has dedicated his life to better understanding the mind, how we think, how we feel, how we communicate. In about 90 seconds, Paul Bloom talks about the difference between the brain and the mind and that shared obsession of ours. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. We're back in just a minute. Stick around.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

PAUL BLOOM

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[clip from The Simpsons]

HOMER: Well, good night, son.

BART: Dad?

HOMER: Yeah?

BART: What is the mind? Is it just a system of impulses or is it something tangible?

HOMER: Relax. What is mind? No matter. What is Matter? Never mind. [laughing]

BART: Thanks, Dad.

MG: A bit of a psychological poser there from one of the earliest episodes of The Simpsons and the kind of question that Paul Bloom has thought a lot about actually and has some really interesting answers to. Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His new book is called Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. He joined me in studio last month. Here’s our conversation.

SOUNDCLIP

MG: You say in the book that in many ways, the study of psychology is as exciting as the study of the cosmos.

PAUL BLOOM: The study of psychology is about what's most interesting to us. It's about our emotions, our feelings, what could go wrong in mental illness, how we raise our kids, what makes us happy. It's a terrific topic. I devoted my life to it. And I think there's something in psychology everybody finds interesting.

MG: Have you always been, I mean, Bart Simpson there, but have you always been obsessed with the mind?

PAUL BLOOM: Yeah. But I don't think I'm special in that way. I think I bet you've always been obsessed with the mind. You've always kind of. Everybody kind of wonders what's going on? What are people thinking? Why do I do what I do? What makes me sad? What makes me happy? So I think an obsession with the mind is pretty common for everybody. Not everybody goes into psychology. So the answer is yes.

MG: Okay. So begin at the beginning. There's the brain and there's the mind. What's the difference between the two?

PAUL BLOOM: At one level, there is no difference. The mind is the brain. This is one of the major findings of psychology. Everything you do, every aspect of thought changes the brain, is the workings of the brain. And another way of thinking about it are two different levels of explanation. So we could talk about what we're doing now in terms of our neurons firing and dopamine and serotonin and all of that stuff. It wouldn't actually be very useful. We don't really know very much about how the brain connects to the mind in that way. Or we could talk about it in terms of us using language and persuading each other, transferring information back and forth, having different emotions. And studying at the level of the mind, we understand it's the brain. But just like you talk about a computer in terms of the program it runs without getting into the hardware, you could talk about what we're doing in terms of the mind without talking about the brain. And in most of the book, although I talk about the brain, most of the book is about the mind.

MG: Do we know what feelings actually are?

PAUL BLOOM: No.

MG: [laughing] This is a theme that goes throughout the book, and we'll get to that later on.

PAUL BLOOM: And I will answer any questions. Do we know for sure of this? And I’ll reply no, no, it's a young science. We know a lot about feelings. We have an understanding that feelings are actually, despite what you might hear, the emotions, the feelings, our gut instincts are not noise in the system. They're not that sort of thing so we want to set them aside so we can think rationally. Central to a life well lived. Feelings like gratitude, love, hatred, sadness, happiness have evolved through natural selection. They certainly serve functions. You know, nobody likes to be afraid or anxious. But if you lacked fear or anxiety, you wouldn't have lived long enough to be talking to me. You would step onto a highway or end up in prison or a morgue as the expression goes. So fear and anxiety are adaptive. Love and gratitude and shame and guilt serve different purposes. And so that's one thing we know about the feelings. Another thing we know about the feelings is we know something about the brain base is where, where in the head different ones are, what neurotransmitters they involve. And yet another thing we know about the feelings is the social roles that they do. The circumstances under which I might feel grateful for you, the circumstances in which I'll feel guilty for something I do to you.

MG: Some of the most interesting stuff, and you've hinted at this and it's connected with feelings, but also connected with how we live our lives. Some of the most interesting stuff in this book is around language and language acquisition. You say that language is where the action is. What is so interesting to you about the study of how we develop language, but also how we use language?

PAUL BLOOM: Language is my first love. It's what got me into the field in the first place. And it's fascinating on many levels. Every normal human phenomenal brain possesses language no other creature does. Although now we're living in a world of artificial intelligence, has language to different abilities.

MG: And we’ll get to that in a moment. You mean no other creatures? So when I hear my dog barking, my dog is not speaking a language.

PAUL BLOOM: Other animals have communication systems. Dogs bark, bees dance, birds whistle and sing. And some of this is for communication, has evolved for communication. But no other creature has, you know, nouns and verbs and syntax and the capacity to produce potentially infinitely long sentences to convey propositions. And we're doing that magically. You're thinking a thought without any effort at all. You're just shooting it out. It's getting to my head. I'm understanding it and sending something back. And without language, we wouldn't have technology. We wouldn't have culture, religion, society, law, the sort of advanced morality we have. Once language evolved, it set the stage for everything. And it's why our lives are so different from every other species on earth.

MG: What is so interesting, and again, you spent a lot of time looking at this is how children acquire language and the way that children learn to use language without really us understanding how they're picking these things up. For example, there's a part in the book where you talk about adding an S to something to pluralize something. How do kids figure this out?

PAUL BLOOM: It's a vibrant area of research, and there's at least two answers. One is brute memorization. So you've got to remember a lot of stuff. Most English speakers know about 60 to 80000 words. You've got to learn each of them. You’ve got to learn dog Is this and table Is this and microphone is this. You've just got to memorize it. But a second thing about language is rules. Learning productive rules, learning to add a certain sound to dog to make it dogs as a plural. And you take a three-year-old, you know, hold up something and say I'm holding a plug in my hand. And then give them three of them and ask what is it? And the kids will say, plugs. They’ll learn the rule. And even a young kid could produce sentences they've never heard before using these combinatorial rules. And the combination of memory and generative rules is how kids do it and it's what makes language so interesting.

MG: How far along are we? This is the how this works question again. How far along are we in understanding how that happens?

PAUL BLOOM: We are getting closer, but we are quite far away. Here's what the sort of golden standard would be. You build a machine and you put into it the same things that children get, the speech of adults, what they see around the world. And out from that would come if the speech is English, would come English. If it's Japanese, it's Japanese. If it's Turkish, it's Turkish. And we are very far from building such a machine.

MG: You mentioned Freud. You can’t have a book called Psych without talking about Sigmund Freud. Very controversial. Much of what he put forth has been dismissed. Some of it has been embraced. In 2023, how would you describe his importance in terms of the understanding of the mind?

PAUL BLOOM: Controversial is a good word.

MG: Yeah.

PAUL BLOOM: I have friends who teach psychology courses, intro psych courses, and they don't mention the man. They think it's just nonsense.

MG: Can you do that?

PAUL BLOOM: Nobody’s stopping them.

MG: Yeah. That’s what I was thinking.

PAUL BLOOM: You know, you choose what to teach. And my friends are not ridiculous. They say why should I waste time filling these kids’ heads with nonsense? And it is nonsense. And what they'll say is besides, Freud applies as a character. He was a wonderfully interesting character, but in many ways, not a very decent man. Some of his ideas are insane. He had this obsession with sex that pervaded everything. He made controversial claims like every boy falls in love with his mother and then worries that his father will castrate him in revenge. And these florid claims have very little support, very little evidence for this. So why am I talking about him?

MG: One of it still holds up.

PAUL BLOOM: Yeah. One of it still holds up. And I think he had one big idea. He wasn't the first. Even Freud was incredibly immodest, conceited he wasn't the first to say this, but he pushed it very far. And the idea is that of a dynamic unconscious. The idea is that if I ask you why do you love those you love? Why do you hate those you hate? Why did you choose this job? You will say, oh, you don't have an answer. You have stories. Everybody has stories. Freud's insight I think was those stories might be wrong. You may be motivated in your feelings, in your actions by forces that you are not conscious of, forces that we could only discover in indirect and complicated ways. And while psychologists have rejected everything else about Freud, that stays. The idea that so much of the workings of the mind is unconscious is an idea which has had immense staying power.

MG: What to you is really compelling about that?

PAUL BLOOM: I realize sometimes in my life that if you asked me a question about why I did something, I could really come up with an answer. We're natural storytellers. But sometimes, upon reflection of my answer, it could just as well be another answer. Sometimes, you know, I do interviews because I had become a psychologist and I have a story. It's a very boring story, end of story.

MG: But it’s a story you tell.

PAUL BLOOM: It’s a story I tell. And once I was talking to some friends and we were talking and I said a different story. And that story seemed just as plausible. And I realized I don't know. I don't know. There are reasons for this. And then the second thing is often we are struck with cases where the story doesn't readily come to mind. I missed an appointment that I knew I was going to make. I put it in my calendar and so many times, oh my, I missed it. I find that I have this irrational dislike for a person and my wife asked me, why do you dislike him so much? I don't know. He just annoys me. And I think Freud’s right. There are things going on that I'm not aware of.

MG: I want to play something else for you. This comes up a number of times in your book in different ways. Have a listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

[clip from The Matrix]

MALE SPEAKER: Have you ever had a dream, Leo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

LEO: This can’t be.

MALE SPEAKER: Be what?

LEO: Be real.

MG: What do you love about the film The Matrix?

PAUL BLOOM: My favourite movie.

MG: Your favourite?

PAUL BLOOM: My favourite movie is The Matrix. I have seen it approximately 4000 times.

MG: [laughing] Not counting.

PAUL BLOOM: No. You know, there's The Big Lebowski. There's other movies. It's a wonderful movie and it's a movie of ideas. And one of the ideas is a very old idea from Descartes, probably before him, which is that we could question whether our experiences reflect a real world or whether they are illusions in some case. In the Matrix, they were illusions set up by a malevolent computer. For Descartes, it could be a trick that God did or that Satan did to fool us into thinking we're living in a world. You may think we're living in a dream maybe, or a simulation, some people say. In the book, I don't endorse that. I think I hold sort of, you know, very white bread, vanilla realism, I think. I think there's a person in front of me. I'm talking to him and there's a table here and I'm touching it.

MG: And how do you know that somebody hasn't created all of that as the simulation?

PAUL BLOOM: I don't. I can't respond to the sceptic except a sort of parsimony saying. It's sort of simpler to assume it really is a table as opposed to some crazy tech guy in the year 40,000 who is kind of fooling me, fooling my brain into thinking there is one. It’s just simplicity.

MG: But the fact that that process unfolds to you is really intriguing.

PAUL BLOOM: That's right. That's right. And that's the problem of perception. And the question is how do we perceive the world? And although I'm not a sceptic, I think there is a world and we perceive it. And I think it evolves for a reason, but it's imperfect. And psychologists exploit this imperfection by giving us illusions. We know it's one way, but it looks the other.

MG: What do you mean?

PAUL BLOOM: You could have illusions, for instance, where you might see shapes pop up. But when you look closely, there's no shapes at all. The shapes pop up because these things are configured so that it will give the impression that there’ll normally be a shape there. Your mind fills in stuff. There's actually a beautiful auditory example, which is you're talking and we could take out a clip of your sound, of your voice. So you're saying yesterday and we take out the ter so it’s just yesday and put it in a cough. And when somebody listens to it, they won't hear Yes cough day, they’ll here yesterday with a cough superimposed. They'll fill it in. They know what you're saying so they'll fill it in. And the mind is all of this sort of filling in and in part our perception of war. Right now, what we're doing is a compromise. It's a compromise in what comes into the senses and what we believe should happen. And your mind kind of meshes those two together to give the impression of the world that we're now experiencing.

MG: The velocity of that. When you think about what's happening in your mind for that to unfold is unbelievable, right? And the speed that that is happening at is incredible.

PAUL BLOOM: It's unbelievable. And we'll talk about AI, but computers are very good at conversations, logic, math. But building a robot that can navigate through the world, that can make its way through this room, avoid crashing into things, pick up objects has proven to be extremely difficult. The computational problem that every two-year-old solves of seeing the world, perceiving the world has proven. But we do this, again, going back to Freud, easily and unconsciously.

MG: So I mean, again, you've hinted at this a few times. Let's talk about AI. Do you believe in the promise of artificial intelligence? I mean, the matrix is built around that in some ways, that this thing has been created and these bots or sentience, that I mean, they're evil purpose, but that they're sentient, they're able to think and they're running this interference that is allowing us to live our lives but not think about that. Do you think that we are at a point or is there any possibility that machines would be able to replicate what we've just been talking about, the way that our minds are working?

PAUL BLOOM: If you asked me five years ago, I'd say no. But a lot has happened. Right now as we're talking, we're living in a world where Chat GPT and the Bing system are actually not only doing very impressive things, but they're really doing very scary things. There was a New York Times article about a reporter who is interviewing a chat bot, and the chat bot says you don't love your wife, you love me. A little bit downright scary. There again, I'd say I don't know. And I don't know a couple of things. I don't know whether these things will ever be sentient conscious and how we'll know if they are. I don't know whether it'll hit a wall where there'll be a certain set of things that they can't do, like for instance, carry on a long narrative, write not just a paragraph or a series of paragraphs, but a book.

MG: Not just predict things, but actually think.

PAUL BLOOM: Exactly. Exactly. And there are people like Gary Marcus, for instance, who argue that the problem of these current systems is that they use all deep learning statistics, but they lack the rule governed nature, the symbolic nature of human thought. Unless you plug that into them, they'll never be quite like a person. And then another thing I wonder is exactly how dangerous will they be? They could be an enormous boon to humanity, but you could imagine all sorts of very frightening outcomes.

MG: I mean, in many ways, this gets at the heart of the book. What is the difference between what those machines are able to do, process that information, spit things out, tell you that you're not in love with your wife but you're in love with the machine, and what our minds are able to do? What's the daylight between the two?

PAUL BLOOM: At a certain level, there is no daylight. The AI pioneer Marvin Minsky described people as machines made of meat. And that's a very ugly way of talking about ourselves and people we love. But there's a truth to it. We are in and mechanical processes. And at that level, we’re no different in kind from these AIs. But then I think when you look closer to our differences, we are different kinds of machines. These AIs, the way they're currently constructed do statistics on the world. They are predictive machines. Basically, what they do in an extremely complicated and elaborate way is they start producing sentences and they just predict what should come next. And I think humans do more than that. I think that humans, for instance, have a model of the world. If you close your eyes or turn your head, you could write down on a piece of paper, a map of your apartment or your house, a map of the building we're in. We have the mental representations. You have memories that you could call upon. The machines don't quite work that way. And until they work that way, I think they're going to fall short of human capacities.

MG: But we don't know. And again, this gets back to that humility that runs through the whole book. We don't know, in your words, how what is it, a lump of meat in our heads gives rise to a conscious experience.

PAUL BLOOM: It's what's been called the hard problem

MG: The hard problem.

PAUL BLOOM: The hard problem compared to the easy problem of how we learn to talk and how we fall in love and all that. And the hard problem, philosopher David Chalmers uses this term. He's kind of kidding a little bit because there’s other problems that are pretty darn hard too. But the hard problem is we know. We know that the brain is the source of the mind. We know this in a million ways, including the fact that damage to the brain affects the most intimate aspects of our thought, including the fact you could actually look at parts of minor activity and then infer reliably what people are thinking. But how it does it, how a physical thing can give rise to the feeling you get when you slam your hand on a car door, when you kiss your newborn baby or whatever, the feelings, how did that become the physical thing is I think a mystery. It's a problem of consciousness. It’s a problem of experience. It’s driven some people to spiritual beliefs or religious beliefs or skeptical beliefs we can never know this. And I'm not there, but I will concede it is a problem that we are struggling with.

MG: Just finally on this, is there a part of you as a guy who has studied this that kind of doesn't want to know? Do you know what I mean? That there is a mystery in that that is tantalizing and I like the fact that it's out there that I can't grasp it. Do you know what I mean?

PAUL BLOOM: If we were close to a complete theory of the mind, I might get that feeling. I might start to worry. If I could predict what other people do, well, our world would be different. If we knew how to persuade each other with perfect scientific certainty, then I would start to worry maybe this will take away some of the mystery of the human mind. But we are so far away that I think we can have great fun exploring things without running into the risk of sort of explaining everything away. And I think more generally, a lot of people see a clash between the sort of research we're discussing, the scientific exploration of the mind and deep values that we have, like moral responsibility or free will or spiritual value. And I think in the end, there isn't any clash. I think these things can coexist. We can have a science of psychology that's compatible with the values that are most important to us.

MG: I want to play one more thing for you. Listen to this.

[Everyone's a Little Bit Racist /music from Avenue Q]

MG: Everyone makes judgements based on race. That's from the musical Avenue Q. Is everyone a little bit racist?

PAUL BLOOM: My answer will be It depends what you mean by racist. I would like to say no, actually. I think there's a deep insight in what you played me, which is that nobody's colourblind. When you see a person, you make inferences about them based on all sorts of things including their race. And it's actually true. You make generalizations based on race, what people vote for, what they like. You make generalizations based on age and on religion and all sorts of things. And our brains are sort of statistical machines. You see a lot of lawyers and you may say, hey, there's a disproportionate amount of lawyers who are Jewish. And you just record that in your head. Now, does this make you racist? I don't think so. I think what would be racist is if you said, oh, I can't imagine a lawyer who's not Jewish. I can't imagine a gay person who's not liberal. If you assume there's no exceptions to your generalizations, if you have pernicious and cruel views to other groups, it makes sense to reserve racism for that sort of thing. In some way, I think that if you reduce racism to simply holding ideas and generalizations, then everybody's racist. But the problem with saying everybody's racist is the term loses any force. If you and me and David Duke are all racist, then we need another way of describing somebody who has, you know, a violent element of this rhetoric towards a group.

MG: Let me ask you just a couple final things before I let you go. One is I said you're a professor of psychology. And you say in the book that when you introduce yourself, you're not the type of psychologist who helps people.

PAUL BLOOM: Yes.

MG: Part of this is around how we understand the brain now and the use of a phrase like mental illness in 2023. Do you think that that phrase is still appropriate?

PAUL BLOOM: I do. I think that there are illnesses like schizophrenia, psychosis, serious major depression that count as illnesses in every sense of the term. They involve, you know, structural problems and failures. And at a sort of brain level, they cause enormous distress for people. But there's also a difference, which is maybe unlike diseases like cancer or COVID for that matter, a lot of what we call mental illness isn't categorical. So one way to see this is look at depression. We all get sad sometimes. Sometimes it's justified. Bad things happen, you get sad. You can put people on a continuum for how sad they are. At a certain point we say, okay, that's too far. For you, we're going to give medication. For you, we're going to give therapy too. That's true also for anxiety. It's true to some extent even for something like schizophrenia. So a lot of psychologists are turning to the idea that these illnesses are not discrete categories, but more like points on a continuum. Don't think of it like cancer. Think of it like blood pressure. What's high blood pressure?

MG: In some ways, you say that it's like extremes of human variation, that this is part of who we are and that there are lines on the chart, that there are different levels.

PAUL BLOOM: That's right. I do think there is such a thing as mental illness. I know this sort of more radical people say there isn’t. And I think there are clear cases where people really need to be treated. They can't care for themselves and so on. But I have some sympathy for a movement known as neurodiversity, which says we should be more accepting as a society for people who are more towards extremes than we might like. Though introvert extrovert is a personality type of different extremes. And the world sometimes is very unkind to introverts. And I think in some way that the way to treat people who are more introverted isn't to say, will pump you full of drugs and make you into an extrovert, but rather to say, there's gifts to being an introvert and society should change to being more accepting.

MG: The last thing is just about, again, you've talked a little bit over the course of the conversation around humility and what we don't know. As somebody who has studied this for a long time, what is the power of humility when you're looking at how the mind works?

PAUL BLOOM: I think it's important to be accepting of our limits, both our limits as a science. And I think there's times where psychologists go outside their lane. I'm sure in this conversation, I do that a few times talking about moral issues. And when I talk about that, I'm talking about it as a person, not as a psychologist. But also, our studies are limited. We often are too quick to draw conclusions based on small samples. There's a narrowness that has bedeviled our field where so much of our research is in Canada and the United States and Europe, and so little has been outside the educated rich West. And as such, we're developing a very incomplete picture of the mind. And we're moving very quickly to try to address it, but maybe not quickly enough. And some of this is a message for people who aren't psychologists. I guess I would say if I had some sort of consumer advice on what to do is never, ever, ever take too seriously a single study. Every once in a while, you hear on The New York Times or BuzzFeed or hear about a theory…

MG: Or say CBC.

PAUL BLOOM: CBC, you find that the amazing new study finds bah bah bah bah bah bah bah. And what I suggest is people say just ignore it. Wait until there's a hundred studies or a thousand studies supporting the same thing and then you can start to take it seriously. Single studies you could never really trust. They could just be flukes, aberrations done poorly and so on. I think both psychologists and also people who consume psychology should be more sort of critical of what we know, more humble.

MG: This is a fascinating book. And there's a lot that we could talk about and a lot to think about in here. Paul, thank you very much.

PAUL BLOOM: Thank you very much.

MG: Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. That fascinating book is Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. We could have had about a six-hour conversation about that. That conversation originally aired last month. Before we go, I want to let you know about something coming up tomorrow on this program. One of the key findings of the Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia was that intimate partner violence needs to be treated as an epidemic, as a public health emergency. More than 40% of Canadian women will experience some form of violence at the hands of a partner in their lifetime. Tomorrow, we'll introduce you to a group of women, all survivors who have found each other and who offer support to one another.

SOUNDCLIP

AMY: I met Mike on Tinder. He talked about how he had two kids. And at that time, he said he had a relationship with them.

KATIE NICHOLSON: Amy said her new boyfriend just made her feel safe.

AMY: I think it's like that alpha male personality. Like when I was around him at the time, I felt I had somebody I could kind of count on.

KATIE NICHOLSON: But even then, in the midst of their honeymoon phase, some things about Mike seemed a little off.

AMY: On his social media presence, there was like no history before me. Like there wasn't a lot of pictures of even his kids, his ex-wife, but he said it was too painful for him. He always had an excuse.

KATIE NICHOLSON: And then after Mike posted photos of them together at Christmas, she got a surprising DM.

AMY: Hi, Amy. You don't know me and have no reason to. But I’m Mike's first ex-wife. Ex-wife Number two and soon to be number three and I have become good friends as I've helped them through the wrath of Mike. He's not what he says he is. I'm only sending this because I'm worried about your daughter.

MG: That's from Katie Nicholson's documentary, The Ex-Wives Club coming up tomorrow on the program. We'll also speak about what needs to be done to curb intimate partner violence with a lawyer and with Canada's Minister for Women and Gender equality. That is The Current for this Easter Monday. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Monday April 10, 2023 Episode Transcript

More Stories Like This