Metacognition 1: understanding and controlling your mind

Metacognition is kind of my field, and it's in popular media. So, this is some crime show where they talk about metacognition. It's getting out there, just so you know. This is not some obscure academic thing.

Metacognition, it's like, um, your awareness of your ability to think. Yeah, just stopped in to whip up a metacognition scanner. So, when something has pierced Rick and Morty, it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's getting big.

So, metacognition, the ability to direct your own mind, to be aware of it. If you're aware of something, you naturally find interesting. If you're aware that you're a little tired today, or you have a lot of energy today because you just had a double mocha latte, whatever, um, and you're expressing it, then using meta-knowledge, you're saying, "I feel really buzzed from my caffeine." You're noticing some mental state. If you feel, "I feel tired," you're noticing a mental state. You're just aware of a mental state. And if you're expressing it, then we can use very high-flown academic language to say you are meta-representing. You're representing your own mental states.

And we talked about this earlier, the idea of meta-knowledge representing, um, a cognitive state. People throughout history have sort of just been going about the cognitive processes implicitly, thinking without knowing their thinking. Human intelligence, going back to the earliest primates, have just been intelligent and semi-intelligent beings going about the processes without really knowing what their intelligence is doing.

And so now, we're able to do what we're doing now. We're able to be one of the first generations able to think about their own thinking, represent their own cognition, not be a half-asleep intelligence. You'll be one of the first generations in history to actually have meta-knowledge about your own mind. So, you're not just going about your mental processes in a half-awake state, being driven by them automatically. You'll be able to recognize your thoughts, recognize your feelings, recognize how to direct them in a beneficial way, instead of just being driven by them. You can drive them. You get in the driver's seat by understanding that what requires is meta-knowledge.

And meta-knowledge, in some ways, is self-representational. So, just like this sentence, as I said, has, this sentence has 22 letters. It's a sentence that refers to its own attributes. It's referring to itself. If I said, "This is a symbol," I'm making symbols that refer to their own attributes. Also, it can be a cognitive attribute. Your cognition can be referring to itself. "I learn better in the morning." "I'm too tired to drive." If anybody ever raises their hand and says, "I know," they're representing, they're meta-representing their own awareness that they know something. If someone goes, "I don't know," they're still meta-representing a knowledge state. So, you're using verbal signals, verbal symbols, rather, to, uh, represent some internal state.

So, it's everything you already know. We use this idea of self-representing shapes. So, you can have a square, and when it becomes self-representing, it has implicit, sorry, fractal states within it that become more self-representing. So, every state within it has a square that represents the whole. Same with triangles. You have a triangle, not self-representing, sort of like sleeping human intelligence going about its own processes. But once we start to self-represent, we have aspects of our own cognition represent itself for the first time. And we can represent ourselves more. And now we're talking about metacognition. We're in this third-order state where we're talking about the fact that we can represent our own mental states.

This is how human intelligence starts to wake up. Instead of just being driven by implicit processes we don't understand, sort of like being in that dark forest humans evolved in, we can actually be aware and be of those things that are going on inside of us. Meta-knowledge represents cognition. Simple. "I feel curious," or "I agree with that," or "I get that," or "I don't understand." So, just mapping this onto your own experience, you all had metacognitive experience your whole lives.

So, we talked about these levels: neural level, algorithmic level, knowledge level. And we can think of this almost like a, a fourth level, or just a meta-representing knowledge level. Or you have procedural knowledge here, implicit, then knowledge about the world. And now we have knowledge about its own self. And like I said, nobody in your family's history, on both sides, going back through all your bloodlines since the beginning of time, has ever known this about itself.

Your neurons produce computational processes with knowledge, and not meta-knowledge. Can direct the whole. So, you're the first. And anybody who has the ability to meta-represent their own thoughts and their own mental processes can drive their own intelligence better. You can harness your own abilities and, yeah, improve.

So, how do we do this? Well, we represent our own mental states. Just like everything else, symbols, a certain format of representation. We have conceptual concepts in the mind. They represent the pathway towards achieving any goal. And any goal we want to achieve has to be represented first. You have to represent the goals first.

Why didn't, why couldn't humans fly? We didn't have the concepts. It's not like we're genetically different than people who couldn't fly. We just now we have the concepts. So now we can fly. Why couldn't humans get into space? We didn't have the concepts. Now we can get into space. Why couldn't we solve hunger on the scale we are now? We didn't have the concepts. We didn't understand what fertilizer was. We didn't understand what, uh, genetic engineering of plants was. We didn't understand a lot of things. Why didn't we understand how to solve diseases like we do now? In a lot of ways, we didn't have the concept.

So, humans have been lacking the knowledge, the representation of all the goals we want to achieve. And anything we want to achieve, individually or as a species, as a civilization, will be achieved simply by representing the means to do it. That's it. That's the whole goal. All the goals we want to achieve, all the goodness, all the happiness, all the harmonious civilizational processes will be achieved simply by building concepts that allow us to, to do that. Of course, it requires that most of us have those concepts. If some people don't, they think war is good, they think hunger is good, exploitation is good. Well, that's not going to work for everybody.

So, understanding the causal pathway to something is the means to do it. We just need to represent it. That's it. And external goals, driving a car. Everyone knows how to drive a car. Even if you don't drive a car right now, you could probably get in a car, even if you've never driven before, and have a way of doing it. You know that there's certain operations, and you press the gas pedal. You see people doing it in movies enough. So, it's external things.

But it's also internal things. If there's internal states you want to achieve, if you're in some non-perfect state right now, and there's a goal you want to have inside of you, like happiness, you want to get out of some discomfort, you want to get out of some mild dysphoria, anxiety, unhappiness. You can. It's possible for everybody to reach, well, whatever their higher potential is, as a state of inner peace, happiness, joy, the ability to find fulfillment and meaning in life, all the good stuff. Also requires that we represent how to do it.

I mean, a baby in the woods doesn't have the concepts to achieve any external goals. Will perish pretty quickly. Doesn't have the state to achieve any internal goals. Will perish pretty quickly. Now, humans, if we have external concepts like food, warmth, shelter. Well, even if people are rich, I mean, everybody knows the stories of people who are rich, they have all the external goals they want, but they're miserable, they're unhappy, alcoholics, suicidal, drug addicts. Everybody's heard stories of people who have gone that way because they don't understand their inner causality, and they're trying to achieve it outside of them: drugs, partying, booze, whatever.

The internal goals you want are a different type, but it's the same thing over and over. The brain does the same thing over and over. It represents its internal goals. It represents external goals and how to do it. So, if you try to focus, everybody knows what it's like to try to seize your own mind. It's the last day before an assignment's due, and you have exactly 10% done of it. And everybody knows what it's like to try to squeeze their awareness, and they go, "Okay, brain, I need you to do this for me." And you get that anxiety, that last-minute anxiety. Everybody knows what that's like. And you say, "Okay, I need to, I'm aware of my distraction. I'm aware of my desire to do other things. I'm also aware of my anxiety, and that anxiety is taking precedence. And I am directing my attention towards this task, this thing that is due tomorrow, and there's going to be big trouble for me if I don't." And that anxiety allows you to direct your own internal focus.

So, I'm just mapping this onto your own internal experience, focusing, directing your own mental state. It's how we get all the good stuff. So, a little hot in here. Okay. William James, one of the creators of modern psychology, said, "The greatest weapon we have towards stress or anything else is to choose one thought over another." Just choose one thought over another. It's not entirely that simple, but everybody knows what it's like to see laughing, happy children. Children aren't born depressed. You become that way. Even if your people are happy when they're 10 or 20, when they're 30, they can be, or 40 or 50, they can be unhappy. Everybody knows miserable older people who have just disintegrated mentally over time, and they're just angry, and you just don't want to go around them. They didn't start off that way. They became that way over time by negative thoughts starting to feed in on themselves until they just started to become this black hole, collapsing in on itself. This could happen to all of us.

So, choosing our own mental states is how you get to those mental states. You have to choose it. You have to understand the right path, the right causality. It's hard, but what other option is there? Nobody wants to be one of those miserable, grumpy adults. I mean, everybody knows miserable, grumpy famous people who are rich. Your happiness is what matters the most. Happiness of all. And so, metacognition is crucial towards achieving that.

There is an art to directing your own mental states. There is an art to building your own soul, if you want to put it that way. But I try to clarify, this is just a fancy way of explaining something we all do a hundred times a day. Babies do it. Children do it. Teenagers do it. 20-year-olds. There, everybody does it all the time. The first thing you're aware of in the morning when you open your eyes is, "I'm awake." I'm aware that I'm awake. The last thing you think at night, probably, is, "I'm sleepy. I need to go to sleep." I need to direct a mental state. I'm aware of a mental state. I need a coffee to change my mental state. I need a drink to change my mental state. Maybe you need food. "I got low blood sugar. I need to improve my mood. Change a mental state." Everything you're doing is trying to change a mental state, focusing your attention, controlling your emotion.

Everyone knows what it's like to be sitting at a dinner table with your family, and you're trying to pretend you're happy, trying to pretend, "Don't fight with your brothers or sisters. Don't show your parents you're irritated for some reason." You're aware of some emotion, and you're trying to direct it because you're aware that it's better off in the long run if you just kind of pretend everything's okay. Knows what it's like. Or you're stressed from school. "How was school?" "Was fine." You don't want to talk about it. So, just saying "fine" is the easiest way to, to just to move on. But we're all grappling with our own mental states. If you're rubbing your eyes and tired, you're aware of your own mental state. Or if you're distracted.

So, recognizing and controlling mental states is pretty much the whole game in life. You can achieve anything if you can do that. So, metacognition is a big, fancy word for the higher processes that involve the awareness and control of our own mind. Focus, emotion, memory. It's often called thinking about thinking. Not quite. I mean, you're all conscious of your own consciousness now. You're aware of your own awareness. And when I tell you to be aware of your own awareness, suddenly it pops into a slightly more vividness, doesn't it? It's called meta-awareness. You're aware of your awareness. And you can be aware that you're aware that you're aware. Meta-awareness. Now, it's super lucid right now, isn't it? This is all things we all share as human beings.

So, it's not exactly thinking about thinking. That's symbolic thinking. Symbolic processes. So, it usually involves just your mind directing its own processes explicitly or implicitly. So, you can direct your own feelings, your own perceptions. If you're aware that the stick half in and half out of water is just an illusion, then you're aware that your perception is false. That's also metacognition. So, the higher order abilities that humans have come from thinking about thinking.

So, there's been decades worth of research. They people think that it's some other form of cognition. It's not. Babies do it. Animals do it. Primates do it. Dolphins do it. Don't believe me? So, you can give math tests to monkeys and dolphins. They, I'm going to give you a treat if you get this math test. It's like simple, like two plus three. And they know they're going to get a fish if they get it right. So, you show them a math test, and they get really excited if they know it. They know they're going to get that fish. They know they know. And a monkey will get really excited if he knows he knows something, because he's going to get the treat. But if he, he knows he doesn't know, he's not going to get excited. He's going to be angry. Dolphin's going to be upset. Or the monkey will start asking the researcher for a hint. "Me a hint? Can I have a hint?" They know they know.

So, this is something that humans, animals, we all do. It allows us to get sort of higher order processing. But there's two aspects of it. One thing I showed you: awareness, meta-awareness. You're aware of your own mental states. You're aware you're super interested, or a little sleepy, or you're aware of any mental state, emotions. It's also controlling it. Controlling it to get to some better state. So, monitoring. You're just aware of your mental states. You're aware of your feelings. You really want to watch that show. You want to say something mean, but you realize as an adult, you can't do that, especially in public. You're aware you are offended by something, or you like something in the news. Monitoring. You can monitor your internal environment, and you can control your external environment. Monitoring and control. So, you're aware, and you can control. Awareness and control.

So, monitoring. Everybody knows, just you're monitoring your environment. You, when you're walking through this down the street, you got your eyes open so you don't trip over everything or bump into anybody. Then you have monitoring your internal mental states. "Okay, what's my next thought? What's my next feeling? What's my feeling right now?" Just wait. Play the game with yourself. "What's my next thought?" It's one way to meditate, by the way. Just try to be aware of your next thought instead of it sneaking up on you from behind. You can just wait for it. You find that it actually doesn't sneak up on you so easily if you just look for it. This is one way of developing higher meta-awareness, which is what they do in therapy, what they do in meditation, attentional training, metacognitive training.

So, monitoring, the ability to be aware of mental states. You can be aware of your, "I'm certain. I got this. I'm sure I got this." You're aware you're happy. "This is a really good day." Or "I know something good is going to happen today or tonight." Or you're distracted, or really can't focus. And you can control. You're controlling the external world. Your brain can act on the world outside of there. It can pick up things and talk about. Bonus points. You can control the world, and you can control your own mental states. You can steer your focus. "Okay, can't watch a movie right now. It's 2:00 and 2 p.m., and I got to do something for school tomorrow." So, you steer your mind away from things that aren't in your benefit, and you steer your mind towards things that are in your benefit. If you're angry at a friend, steer your emotions away from saying something mean because you know it'll push them away or cause a fight. So, steering your mind, mind monitoring your own mind.

I'm trying to show you that the mind acts on different levels. Metacognition is not some other external, alien form of cognition. It's your mind doing what it always does, just on a different level. So, you have the object level, objects, objects, right? And then you have the meta level. Object level, meta level. So, you can be aware of things outside of you, and then you can be aware of your own mental states. That's the meta level. It's meta, meta. There we go. And the more you can be aware of your own mental states and control them, the better off you are.

So, controlling our mental states, regulation of processes, controlling focus, pushing away anger, trying to remember things better, realizing that what you do now matters, what you focus on now matters, whatever you're doing for schooling matters, how you treat people matters. So, try to be as nice as you can, and you can improve your well-being with therapeutic strategies. So, most therapeutic strategies are about metacognitive control, though a lot of them don't call them that. It's increasingly being called that, but it's about being aware of your own mental states, being aware of your own emotions. People have anger problems, they'll tell you, "Okay, be aware of your anger. Don't just act them out. Just be aware." "Okay, I'm feeling, let's see, rate it. Okay, I'm at a five out of 10. Okay, how about now? Four out of 10. Okay, how about now? Seven out of 10." Okay, people can become aware of their own emotions and control them better. They don't automatically act them out. It gives you a meta-awareness and therefore meta-control over them. If you have negative emotions, they can say, "Okay, what is emotion feel like? Rate it. How strong is it?" And you have better grip as a result.

So, monitoring, controlling environment, monitoring, controlling your internal states. Again and again, it's abstract, but I go over it and, uh, try to really clarify with pictures and with images. I mean, I wasn't given images, so I hope you appreciate that I'm not just giving you verbal definitions. I was given a lot of verbal definitions. I did a master's thesis on metacognition, trying to computationally model metacognition. I think it took me about two years to get my head around all the depth of it. And I said, "You know, probably go a lot faster if there were pictures." So, here's some pictures.

Uh, now, what's the purpose of all this? Because understanding your mind helps you direct it better. And that's the video you'll see on Brightspace. Understanding your mind helps you direct it better. If you're in some negative emotional state, if you want to get to some better emotional state, if you don't understand how to do that, you're not going to reach it. You're just waiting for better emotional states to fall in your lap. Hate to break it to you, but people usually get more unhappy over time if you just let things go. People usually get more angry over time if you just let things go. People usually get more dispirited over time. And in this culture, the modern world, just letting your emotions go, just letting all your desires go, whatever you want to do, just do it, is the quickest path to unhappiness. Get short-term pleasure, long-term unhappiness. And the world is out to just sort of make you an addict to simple pleasures. We all kind of know that. And it will, if you don't direct your mind in an artful, intelligent way. So, this is exactly what the world needs right now.

So, here's just sort of an example of how understanding any system is one of those special properties of intelligence. So, our own bodies, for example. People have been going through, and this is just a metaphor. People have been having immune systems their whole, their whole life on Earth. So, millions of years, all animals, all humans have implicitly been getting cuts, and the immune system just heals it. Antibodies get released from certain glands, and an army of fighters goes through our blood and attacks. White blood cells go out and attack all the bad guys trying to invade us. Nobody's ever known this. Again, we're one of the first generations in history to understand that we have this army inside of us that's constantly fighting off intruders. And if our immune system shuts down, the world will literally eat us alive within a day. It's gross to think about, but there's an army of things keeping the world from trying to, you know, outside viruses, bacteria. But we never knew that. And so, we've sort of been going about it implicitly, not very well. And so, people would get cut, most of the time it'd be fine, the immune system would heal it. Some of the times, I mean, think of a caveman, 50,000 years ago, people would get cut, be red and sore, and then they'd try to wash it off, probably be fine. But once in a while, it would just get out of control, and children would die, adults would die for simple cuts or big cuts or diseases nobody understood.

But we understood the immune system. When we understood what was going on, children didn't have to die from simple things. Adults didn't have to die from simple things anymore. People would get a cold, people would get an infection, people would get measles, mumps, rubella, typhoid, influenza, all kinds of things. And then we know what's going on inside of us, and then we can then interact with our immune system better. We can eradicate diseases. I mean, polio was something that would just make people die, or just, you know, not be able to move around very well. Roosevelt, who had polio, one of the presidents, spent his life in a wheelchair, did very well. But understanding what's going on inside of us allows you to engage with it expertly.

So, now, this started with a fellow at Stanford, John Flavell, who coined the term metacognition when he was doing work in memory. He was, this was in the '70s. You see a picture of him. He has a beautiful '70s suit, '70s fabric. But he was doing work in metamemory, and he was noticing, just doing work in memory, that people can actually be aware of their own memory. Well, how is that? I mean, you know, if you've known something before, the knowledge even reaches you. So, you have a feeling that you know something before you even have the concept of what you're trying to retrieve. So, you can have things in your declarative memory down deep. So, for example, we all know what this is like: the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. You know, like you're like, "Who's that actor in that movie? Who's the lead female actress in Titanic?" I know, I got a feeling that I know. And this is what Flavell realized. People would have this feeling, and they'd be tormented by this feeling. Oh, but they couldn't access the symbol. We all know what that's like, not being able to access the symbol. But the feeling is saying, like a green light, "You know this. You know this. You know this." And that makes us reach down and try to pull up the symbol more.

So, who is the lead female actress in Titanic? Most people know. But you kind of have a feeling you've heard of it. Okay, how about the lead male actor? This is a different generation, isn't it? Okay, there we go. But you know what it's like to be like, "Ah, who's that? Oh, man, I know the face. I know the face I have." And you just be tormented by it. There's something in human cognition where feelings are attached to our deep memory. Like there's a string attached to our feelings that goes down deep into our memory. And then, when somebody asks us something, there's a feeling that comes up and says, "You know this," even if the symbol doesn't come up yet. There's a feeling saying, "It's down there." Or a feeling saying, "It's not there."

So, if I asked you, "What was the seventh dinosaur ever discovered?" You have no feeling. No. You're like, "I don't. I, I know I don't know." I don't even have to try. I know I don't know. It's very useful for a cognitive system to have that. For you to know you don't know. Why? Because if I asked you things and you didn't know, you'd have to reach through your entire memory, every single little box of memory, you'd have to open up and go, "No, not there. No, not there." Spending hours. Instead of instead of doing that, you can just have a feeling say, "I know what's in the boxes in your memory. The answer's not there. Don't even bother looking for it."

And so, this is how feelings can give us an understanding of what's going on inside of us. Not all the time, but in memory. This is what John Flavell was noticing. Feelings are attached to our memory, and they tell us whether we know or we don't know something. It's a time-saver. Because if you know something but you can't access the symbol, well, how do you even know it's down there? You might not even bother looking. If the feeling is saying it's there, it's there. Green light, green light. Then you will spend more time rummaging around.

"Yep. Is that feeling like, is that always true though?" "Not always." "Okay, explain it more, and then the picture will kind of become clear in my head." "Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we're not perfect. You're right." Also, if you know more about a certain area, that association will give you a feeling that you know more about it. So, if you're an expert on dinosaurs, and you're like, "Ah, it's a kid, I knew all the dinosaurs. I knew T-Rex, I knew Stegosaurus, I knew D-D." And then I said, "Okay, what's the seventh dinosaur ever discovered?" You'd say, "Oh, I got a feeling. I got a, do I know this? I got a feeling that you don't know this." But the feeling is coming from all the other knowledge you know about the area. So, it can deceive you. But most of the time, it's it's dead on. So, yeah.

Now, you're having meta-knowledge of what's been going on inside of you. Everybody knows this, but you've never actually conceptualized this experience of having feelings of knowing that tell you what's in your deep memory, or feelings of knowing that tell you that there's nothing there. "I don't have to look. I don't have to open the boxes in my memory. I know they're not there."

Okay, so people are getting fascinated with this right now, especially in a world where people are becoming more and more helpless addicts to entertainment, booze, drugs, addiction crisis, alcohol crisis, this crisis, that crisis. Wouldn't it be great if there was one thing that united them all? Well, there is. Meta-knowledge unites it all. Because whatever problems there are in the world, it starts in human cognition. And if there are people suffering from some problem, it's likely that it's because they don't have the causal knowledge to achieve whatever state they want to. Not addicted in the first place, to get out of addiction, to not be an alcoholic, to get out of alcoholism, to not eat too much, to get out of eating too much, to not watch shows all the time, to get out of it, to achieve some higher state for yourself, whatever it is. People like, "Well, that seems to be the, the common principle." The ability for human intelligence to understand and direct its own process. It seems to be the magic bullet, the unifying principle that will raise human beings up from an automatic, happy state to a better state. It allows you to do reasoning better, learning better, problem-solving better, your emotional states, self-regulation, whatever, better. You, there's a better you possible in every single way. We just don't all know how to open that door, do we? But the door exists. Well, it's a mental door, and all you got to do is open up the right level, understand how to train that level, and then all that stuff comes out of it.

So, we can improve our overall cognitive processing. Not only that, but it seems to improve physical skills as well. So, uh, Olympic athletes, top MMA fighters, I don't know how many of you watch MMA, I don't, but boxing coaches. It seems that the physical level of human beings can only get so good. And they meet, and they box, or Olympic athletes compete against each other for gold medals. And it seems that the final ability to get that gold medal, or to win physical things, seems to come from people, what coaches call, "getting your mind right." You got to get your mind in the game. You got to get your head in the boxing match. You got to get your head straight. Get your mind right. And then they reach that upper level, that extra percentage of excellence. And their physical ability is fully realized by them, metacognitively being able to direct their own mental states in a way that releases their actual, their, their greater physical ability as well. So, there's a lot of metacognitive training going on in in sports as well.

Also, entrepreneurs. It seems that people who excel in business are the ones who are able to harness internal states, harness their internal motivation. They don't succumb to discouragement. They know what they don't know, and they can hire the right people to fill in that gap. They can, uh, they, they know when they're overly excited about an idea that doesn't have a lot of evidence for it. They have courage for going and trying to, you know, risk all their money or their livelihood, or go to that meeting with that very intimidating millionaire who they need venture capitalist funds from. So, it seems that human abilities all over the board come from people who are just better at directing our mental states.

This is a universal principle of intelligence. Again, this class is about unifying ideas. There seems to be unifying ideas here. If you can understand any realm, you can control it better. If we understand our immune system, we can control it better. If we understand aerodynamics, now we can fly. If we understand space travel, now we can go into space. If we understand how to cure hunger, now we can cure hunger. If we understand cancer, then we can cure cancer. And we're slowly getting there. All the things we want to achieve come from just understanding that realm, and then we can reach into that realm and turn it in a way that benefits us. Same with our own mental states. Humans have been in a black box. Humans have been in a dark room since the beginning of our species. And we're just slowly starting to turn the lights on. There was our mental realm. Now we're starting to flick the lights on.

Well, it's not a, okay, it's not a switch. It's a dimmer switch. And we're slowly turning up the knob. So, we're starting to illuminate principles, processes, the rooms of the mind. And we're able to then direct it better as a result. We don't have to be a slave to unhappiness, to depression, to anxiety. No matter how permanent it feels, you can release it, and release it forever, to a point where you even forget about it. Looking through an old diary, like, "Oh, wow, that was a mess." Yep. You can. More than that.

Science is metacognitive now. What is science? It means directing thoughts according to certain principles. You know, we have feelings like, "Oh, my family told me this. The priests told me this. The gods, the Oracle of Delphi, the people on Mount Olympus told me this." But science says, "Okay, yes, you feel those things. Tradition, culture, whatever, says things. But you should base your thoughts on, on the evidence there is to actually to ground them." So, you should have beliefs to the extent there's evidence. And so, science is about getting into a metacognitive state, pushing your feelings aside, and building up evidence for your ideas, making, uh, experiments. Saying, "We don't know. I know I don't know." But if we have an experiment, and we say we have a certain kind of medicine, and we need to see if it works. Well, okay, our culture has said it works. Everyone seems to really be jazzed up about this medicine. I need to separate that out. Now, you're in a metacognitive space. Now, you put all that aside. You say, "That actually is not good evidence for whether something's true." So, scientific thinking is about being artful, being deliberate, and being mindful of your own thinking.

And so, our greater abilities have come through history. You're wondering, "How did we go from mud huts to skyscrapers? How did we go from thinking pottery was a pretty neat trick to space stations?" Well, humans started to think about thinking itself. Thought itself became the object of focus. Instead of just going about our processes implicitly, we started to think about our own thoughts and started to meta-represent our own thoughts. And this allowed us to go about what's called the, the hallmark of the human species: the ability for an intelligence to meta-represent its own thoughts.

And people have said that anywhere in the universe, maybe humans are not alone. Probably we're not. Most scientists say that it's statistically impossible that humans are not alone. Not only that, but it's probably the galaxies are probably teeming like a petri dish with intelligent species. And anywhere there is species all over the universe, at some point, say, "This is the, just the, just the Milky Way." Terrible Milky Way. But you get the idea. And we're here. And we're starting to meta-represent. And at some point, there's going to be a species somewhere over here that's going to start to represent its own mental states. This species is going to destroy itself before it can. This one over here will start to meta-represent. But at some point, species anywhere in the universe will go about the same process. They'll start off sort of in the darkness. They'll represent the world around them. And then at some point, they'll start to meta-represent their own minds. They reach their meta stage. That's where we are. We're just starting to go about our species' metacognitive stage, where we don't just go about our processes implicitly, we start to do them explicitly. We reach that higher level. We break out of received tradition. We get out of negative patterns of thinking and feeling. We get out of needless violence based on ancient principles that haven't been questioned.

And so, we have history of this. Culture came from this fellow who started to think about thinking, started to take a turn. He said, "Maybe the universe and all the, the wind and the rain and the ocean storms are not supernatural." And more than that, "Maybe our own thinking and knowledge of reality isn't supernatural. Maybe it's just us alone in the universe. And either we understand reality, or we don't. Whether we learn to understand our own minds, or we don't." And so, this was how things got to be this way. This is all part of the, the narrative where knowledge, human knowledge, started to represent itself, direct itself. Formal reasoning was metacognition, logic, epistemology, thinking about thinking. Now, that's thinking about thinking. Symbols representing other symbols and directing symbols intelligently, instead of just blindly going about its processes like a chain of dominoes.

Probably that. I pause and take a breath. Thoughts? Random comments? And so, if you're wondering how this story got started, how did humans go from pottery and wooden ships, things we can do without really understanding our own thinking, that's fine. People can realize mud can be put into a certain shape and then baked, and we can hold stuff in it. Neat. You can take wood and you can kind of tie it together, and you can get these floating things. Nice.

What is the universe made out of? Is reality dependent on our minds? Is the world round or flat? Well, there are things we, there's a, there's a, a very low ceiling. That's why human beings didn't get beyond understanding very simple things about reality for hundreds of thousands of years. Object-level thinking is a very low ceiling. You can only reach a certain amount of technology, a certain amount of thinking, a certain amount of social development. Once you reach the next stage, within 300 years, these guys had steam engines. They thought it was a scientific trick. But the first steam engine was ancient Greece. They had tools for measuring, you know, barometric pressure, temperature. Um, they had principles of buoyancy. They started to unlock the principles of nature simply by thinking about thinking. And so, we went from the object level, low ceiling, to the meta level, where there's no ceiling. The sky is the limit. The universe is the limit.

And so, what are some of those principles? Well, they're hard. But one of those principles: Don't base your thoughts on emotions. They're not your friend. They're not, they're not hooked into reality. We all like to think that our feelings are especially hooked into reality, that they're a whisper from the cosmos. Mine are special. Everybody's feelings whisper to them as if they're special, cosmically hooked in. They're not. Sorry. It kind of hurts. Wipe a tear. And you go, "Okay, well, fine. We need to base our understanding of reality on thoughts, on symbols, on concepts that have evidence. Base our conclusions on that. Beware of logical fallacies. Test our theories. Just because, because we have a received idea doesn't mean it's true. Believe things to the extent there's evidence to believe them." These are tough. This is about intelligence representing its own processes and starting to go about the art of thinking, the art of being an intelligence that's intelligent about itself. Instead of our thinking just being a blind, infinite train trail of dominoes in the dark, we can start to think about our own processes and lift ourselves up above the object level into the horizon.

And you can train your mind now. There's this, all the signs of, well, how do we get better? What are the different categories of getting better at our own mental states? Well, if you can't direct your attention for more than 10 seconds, you can't do anything. Just, you know, retire. But you can increase your attention. If you, you realize your mind wanders every two seconds, you can do intentional training, meditation training, whatever you want, that can stabilize it. And you can hold your focus on something, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds. You get better and better. And then you can direct your mind through that portal of awareness towards achieving anything.

So, awareness. You can increase your awareness. Emotional training. Not just not being controlled by your emotions, but also learning how to direct your own behavior more artfully. Learning how to, to release negative emotions. There's ways of, of turning the mechanism of your mind backwards. So, instead of your mind creating more and more negative feelings over time, you know how to lift the lever, make the train go the other way. So, you actually release negative feeling cycles of thought and feeling that would otherwise haunt you forever.

Memory training. You can get better at remembering things. So, there are techniques going back thousands of years. If anybody's ever watched Sherlock Holmes with the Mind Palace? Okay, I see a few nodding. Anybody else see Sherlock Holmes' Mind Palace? He has this meticulously structured mental palace for remembering things. It's actually started with Cicero, even earlier than that. People noticed that if they just remember things as pictures, they would stay longer. Cicero, for example, way back in the day, had this thing called the Method of Loci, which is ways of going from, you know, 5% memory to 95% memory, where you said, "Okay, so imagine you have a mental room. It can be your childhood home. It can be the bedroom you have now. And if you have a list of things, you can put the things in the list on the different pieces of furniture in your home, the different drawers. And then you can close it all up. And then later on, you can mentally go back into it, start opening the drawers, and the pictures of the things on the list are all there, 100%."

So, you have a grocery list. This is just an example. You can, you know, have a list. But you can actually start to put things in the, your mental house. Take some time, and you can actually get better at it. So, there's people who have actually gone about memory, you know, Guinness Book of World Records for memorizing cards. I don't know why, but they are. People who memorize cards in a row. What do you think the champion for memorizing cards in a row is? 10,000? 20,000? 30,000? Now, if you think you just memorized a bunch of cards in a row, Ace of Spades, three of Hearts, Jack of Clubs, 30,000 of them, how did he do it? Well, he said it's impossible if you just try to memorize the cards. He turned them into pictures.

And I'm going to say, "What is that noise?" Because we've all been, it's been our awareness. Is that just all right? So, anyway, this fellow who, and people who go into memory championships. So, they turn all the cards into pictures. So, a club, they see as an actual club. Now, there's two of them. Spades, they think of handcuffs, and it's hooked into the club. Hearts is easy. You can put the handcuffs through the heart. And they start to chain the pictures together, instead of numbers. They think of pictures and they chain pictures together. And then they notice that they can actually look down mentally, the chain of pictures, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000. And they just notice they remember. It's just something that the human brain does.

Here's a scene from Sherlock Holmes talking about his Mind Palace. Just two minutes. You see, I'm trying to solve a mystery using his technique. It's perfectly all right. But maybe it's not a drug. No, it has to be a drug. How did it get into our systems? How? There must be something, something, something, something buried deep. Get out! What? Get out! I need to go to my Mind Palace. What? He's not going to be doing much talking for a while. We made Vgo his? What? Oh, his Mind Palace. It's a memory technique. It's sort of a mental map. You plot a, a map with a location. Doesn't have to be a real place. And then you deposit memories there. Theoretically, you can never forget anything. All you have to do is find your way back to it. So, this imaginary location could be anything. A house or a street? Yeah, it's a palace. He said it was a palace. Yeah, it would be, wouldn't it?

So, there are actually scientific papers on this to see if it actually works. And yeah, it works. I mean, my memory's pretty fine, so I'm not going to devote a lot of time to it. But yeah. So, we just notice there are certain ways you can train your brain to get better at all the different aspects: attention, memory, emotion, whatever. You can become more courageous. You can have less anxiety. You're not locked into whatever state you're presently in. And there's neural evidence for this. It seems that the people who have gone about meta-memory training and then had their brain scanned, the world champions, U, have had their brain scanned. It seems that the world champions of memory, their, their training, what their secret is, says that it's not that they have better memory brains, like their hippocampus and all the different areas of the brain that engage in memory, they're not larger. They have these techniques, these strategies, these, these instructions for unlocking the brain's greater power. They've got a metacognitive key, and they're able to open up their memories' greater abilities as a result. So, this is good neural evidence for that.

Anybody here done any metacognitive training? Meditation training? No. Meditation? Some meditation, yes. What, like I was really into for a while. And so, like, memory cards thing? Yeah, for like numbers. They don't actually do like that sort of thing. Common in like medicine to use it. Here's a question. Do you know how many cards somebody can memorize if they have no meta-memory techniques? Um, like nine? Like five? Like, it's a very low ceiling, right? Yeah, it's not that many. I think like probably between like 10 and 20. 20 would be great. So, 20 versus 20,000? Yeah. So, that's what I'm talking about. The brain has a very low ceiling for things they can do automatically on the object level. But on the meta level, you don't just double the power of the brain. Not even just 10 times. You know that whole, "we use 10% of our brain" thing? Well, that's not true. I mean, we use all our brain.

Largely all the time, but we use 0.1% of our abilities, and we can unlock that with the right, the right training. And so people are saying the future of education will be less facts, and people will just be trained how to direct their minds beneficially, and they can point it towards anything. Gabby, is there a limit to neurons? F, is there a limit to how faster neurons can fire? Yeah, yeah. I mean, um, you, you get better at your brain firing in general because instead of a whole region firing, it gets condensed into small little regions after practice or cognitive skillfulness. And how you go from symbols that direct your minds, meta-instructions that direct your mind in some way, and whole regions of your brain have to be activated. But once you get better at it, it's proceduralized. And so all you need is a small little portion that gets that fires very quickly and automatically. And so if you're directing your attention initially, if anybody's ever tried meditation, it takes your all your will, and you're very not good at it. And then as slowly over time, you can direct your mind like a laser as a result of just building up the right procedural knowledge or memory knowledge or emotional control knowledge or whatever. Scientific thinking. Sherlock Holmes is a fellow who started off thinking rationally as a boy, looking open books of logic. And he had so proceduralized logical thinking that he can just go into a crime scene and just he sees and can logically deduce things that, you know, the police in the 1800s standing around are just kind of baffled. You don't understand. But somebody with proceduralized logical thinking can unlock the case as a result. And then, of course, he blurts out things and then says, how do you not see this? But anyway, neural evidence shows that you can really proceduralize metacognitive skills and get better at it, so that your higher qualities are unlocked and, uh, yeah, greater abilities.

And so again, we take this back to a visual diagram. Instead of a fourth layer, we can just have a third layer. But the metacognitive layer, think of blue, think of self-representing shapes, object level, say you're driving your car. Meta-level is if you're, you know, trying to focus, you're recognizing that you've been in class for an hour, at least the mind is starting to wander. But he's saying things about the mind unlocking its own abilities by getting better at understanding itself. This could be useful. This could be the most useful thing I ever learned. You're, you're right. So meta-knowledge allows cognition to direct itself to wake up from sleeping, automatic, half-awake processes. Everybody knows what it's like to be in a dream and only know you were in a dream after you woke up. Could you control the dream state? No, you were controlled by the dream state, and all the drama in the dream state was so convincing, oh, so convincing. Then you wake up, it was never true. It was never necessary. A lot of the drama we have in our own lives, all the dysphoric emotions that can haunt people are unnecessary. They're the result of automatic sleeping mental processes that hold us captive. That there is a key to unlock the right metacognitive training. You turn the key, you unlock negative emotions. Takes time. But what's the other choice? In the future, children will be raised with this meta-knowledge from birth, and they'll never get into these negative patterns of feeling in the first place. But right now, since we memorized all these useless facts our whole life, and what good were they, especially when we have the internet? Um, they're saying that education needs to move towards people not memorizing facts, but learning how to direct their mind intelligently so they can direct it anywhere to become meta-learners. So this is even the, uh, college or no, Education Ministry of Ontario has said this is the vital competency of the 21st century, not memorizing things. That's how the old system was set up. Object-level knowledge. Hey kids, memorize all this object-level knowledge that isn't useful. You're going to forget after the test. But it was set up in the 1800s, and people didn't have a lot of books. So you had to go somewhere and memorize things because there was no other choice. Now we have phones in our pockets with the entirety of human knowledge. But waiting through an ocean of knowledge takes that you're artful about how to wade through that ocean of information, how to actually engage in a sea of data requires people to have knowledge over their own knowledge, how to actually wade and classify data, how to not be consumed by your desire for entertainment on the internet or whatever, and not become addicts to whatever superficial, meaningless pleasurable thing will help you escape from whatever momentary unpleasant feelings you have. So that's pretty much the whole game. If you can metacognitively overcome your mind's entertainment, superficial pleasure-seeking ability, you can achieve anything. And that's really what people need these days. Since, I mean, that's why the modern world is being called an addiction-creating machine. We need meta-thinkers.

Okay, well, don't worry about this. This is why you should come to class so you know what you don't have to study. This is just something I did during my masters. This was just a literature review of the different categories by which meta-instructions can classify how to get better at whatever. So reasoning, you have science, logic, mathematical training, and physical. Even Navy Seals now, and people in martial arts are learning metacognitive training because they're better fighters. Better, I mean, I don't particularly like that idea, but it just seems that wherever the human mind is active, you can unlock its greater abilities as a result. Cognitive behavior training, self-regulation, meditation, mnemonic devices, and it works like everything else. It's not some, some other form of cognition. This used to be green, object-level knowledge. Meta-level knowledge. It's still a symbol. These are still symbols. My language didn't change. It's some meta-level, different language. It moves into your working memory and it directs your production system, your procedural knowledge. So if you get better at directing your own awareness, better attentional knowledge, better procedural knowledge, it just fires automatically. But it's the same thing. It connects like Lego pieces. Meta-knowledge moves into your working memory, it starts to build up procedural knowledge, then runs automatically. And that's how you get better at directing your own mind. But if you don't have meta-knowledge, we're locked out of those greater abilities. We're locked out of scientific knowledge and all its benefits. We're locked out of all the medical knowledge. We're locked out of the ability to fly. We're locked out of the ability to even understand the, the Earth is round. We're locked out of the ability to build anything higher than reed baskets and clay pottery. You're locked into your whatever pattern of thinking and feeling you don't want to stay in for the rest of your life. Without meta-knowledge, your mind is trapped in some very low ceiling of society, civilization, technological progress, and your own mental states. We don't want to be trapped in that low ceiling forever. We want to have a sky limit. That's why talking about metacognition itself is so essential because everybody wants to, to be boundless, limitless, to reach that higher you that you have to hope is there. And it is. But it's not going to come about on its own. You have to try. You have to have the right type of knowledge and the right type of effort. Civilization itself doesn't build itself. Scientific knowledge doesn't build itself. Flying machines, the internet, communication satellites don't build themselves. It takes people putting meta-knowledge into their working memory and thinking about thinking itself to build scientific devices and studies that create new technologies, better medicine, whatever we want. So that's the, that's the gold level.

So in terms of this dual system process, you know, we have system one, just automatic dominoes, just firing, procedural knowledge is automatically firing outside of our awareness. And you can have system two. You can have knowledge come up from working memory, and this can be in the form of facts or instructions, but comes into our working memory, that low ceiling of object-level knowledge, but then engages with the rest of our system and then acts it out, driving a car, for example. But then you can have the, the higher level of metacognitive processes, system three. And in system three, you have meta-knowledge arise in working memory, work, go into your working memory as a result, drives those processes that interact with your mind itself. Till the right type of symbols, meta-level symbols, symbols that refer to your own mental states, have the right key to unlock your mind's greater abilities. That's where we want to engage. So this type of knowledge, meta-instruction, meta-knowledge, whatever, is essential. It's everything. It's the whole game. Otherwise, we're going to live at the sleeping, implicit level or moderate knowledge level, but we'll never get to the higher abilities and the higher states we want, the gold states, higher civilizational, technological, medical progress, and our own higher abilities and happiness as people. So this is why everybody's talking about metacognition, at least the way I look at it, because we're wondering, what was that thing we've been missing throughout all of history? Well, when the mind can't represent itself, when it's in the darkness about itself, it doesn't know what it's missing. Humans didn't know, know throughout all of human history that we've been missing meta-knowledge that represents our own minds. No idea. No idea. It's sort of like the Sierpinski triangle. There's a mathematical trick where fractal shapes just sort of arise out of the universe on their own. But through history, humans have been building points of data, bits of knowledge, not really knowing what's been going on. And over time, these points of data start to connect to build. Well, it starts to build this emergent shape, this self-representing triangle, so to speak, where our mind starts to become aware of its own processes. And we think, oh, actually, now we realize what we've been missing our whole lives, knowledge that represents its own processes, these self-representing conceptual ideas that we needed trillions and trillions and hundreds of thousands of years of, of, uh, data collection, thinking about thinking, till we have the second-order ability to think.

And so here's some animations again where you can understand. Say you have object-level knowledge where you have, say, water. You're thirsty. Knowledge comes up, object-level knowledge, and the instruction says, pour water in a cup. Okay, well, it interacts with procedural knowledge, and your motor activity starts to act out whatever the instructions are. So this is just object-level instructions, very simple. Knowledge comes into working memory, object-level knowledge, and it directs your physical, external abilities. So now your eyes close. You're on the meta-level. You have metacognitive knowledge. So, or a feeling state of feeling distracted. I have a feeling of distraction, and knowledge comes into your memory saying, working memory saying, I'm distracted. And then you can have the instruction acted out to focus as a result. This is just a simple ability to sort of recognize how working memory, you recognize when you're distracted, you have knowledge come up, and then you have the ability to focus as a result of meta-knowledge. But this is why I saved cognitive therapy till two weeks from now because I'm giving you the meta-level first, and you see how all the actual therapy and all the cognitive psychology fits into this category where humans are representing their own mental states and being able to then direct our deep-down processes by self-representing our own processes. And that's what these therapeutic instructions are that allow people to unlock feelings and anxiety and processes that would not otherwise unlock. So metacognitive instructions are part of cognitive behavior therapy. Oh, man, actually, I just realized the time. Let's, let's wait till later. Got carried away. We got one minute, and I thought maybe we should just, this is a good place to stop. Okay, meta-level, object-level, think about that. Take a photo if you want. Otherwise, I'll see you on Thursday, and I'll be here. Any questions?