Today's guest is Professor Masud Husain a neurologist, neuroscientist, and essayist who sits at the intersection of brain identity and self. Masud Husain is a leading figure at University of Oxford, editing the journal Brain and treating patients whose neurological disorders cause us to reassess our deepest assumptions about who we are. His new book, Our Brains, Ourselves, what a neurologist's patients talk to him about the brain is a compelling, beautifully written exploration of how identity is wired. and how it unravels. Through seven rich patient stories spanning language loss, apathy, delusions, and disinhibition, Hussein illustrates that our minds are fragile architectures, but also sometimes repairable. If you've ever wondered how much of you is just a brain doing its job, and what happens when it doesn't, then this is the episode that you've been waiting for. Masud Husain welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast. Masud Husain (01:05) Thank very much, James. Great to be here. James Taylor (01:08) Now in your decades of the work in neurology, neuroscience, was there one particular patient or moment early in your career that you convinced you that identity and selfhood are maybe far more fragile than we assume? Masud Husain (01:24) I think a lot of our neurological patients who come to us with cognitive complaints, whether it's about their language, their memory, the fact that they're missing things in the world around them. In total, they made me think that actually we can learn an awful lot from the people who come to see us. We can learn an awful lot about ourselves. So the seven patients you mentioned in the book are... really, I thought, good examples of how that would occur. But for me, it's actually the sort of whole panoply of the kind of patients we see that make me think that what we're witnessing is how different brain functions really create ourselves. And it's not one of those in particular that I think is particularly revealing about the self. It's that combination of functions that creates our identities ourselves. And all we need is to lose one of those functions. Then it becomes clear that someone has changed in their personal identity. So you might lose your memory when you think, well, that someone's just amnestic. But it's not just that. It changes the way you are. And it changes your personal identity. It changes how you fit in society, your social identity. James Taylor (02:49) and we're gonna get into some of these individual kind case studies as well, but I live part of the time in North London, kind of Hampstead area, and often I walk past the house, I think it was Oliver Sacks used to live in that. So you follow in this kind of, I feel like this traditionally, Oliver Sacks, Ramachandran, but you bring a kind of a new nuance to it. So this identity as a neuro function. What first took you on that path, that particular path of research is identity as a neuro function. Masud Husain (03:18) Well, I think philosophers have been talking about identity for a long time and the self, what is the self? And many of those thoughts are thought experiments. They're sitting there thinking about what makes logical sense, about what we would create in terms of how we would think about the self. I just think modern neuroscience has got to a stage where we can start to talk about what the brain is doing in terms of creating the self. And we can see how the brain is important in creating even simple functions, relatively simple functions, that people might not think of as necessarily contributing to their identity. So, you know, the way you perceive the world, your visual perception, you might think is just a basic fundamental kind of... computation process that's happening in the brain in all of us. But we see the world differently and the way we see the world has an impact on who we are. So I think it's got to the point where modern neuroscience can try to start to explain what those computations, what those cognitive processes are. And it's also got to the point where we can start to see whether we can modulate those processes in people in whom a function goes wrong, like visual perception. So one of the cases in the book is someone who is having visual hallucinations and worries that they've become mad. And what I try to explain there is in a way, all of perception is a hallucination. It's just a controlled hallucination. And in this case, it wasn't controlled. we now know enough about the sort of neurotransmitters involved that we can start to treat people who are having visual hallucinations and see whether we can restore that controlled hallucination rather than the uncontrolled hallucination that some people suffer from. James Taylor (05:24) I was also interested, obviously this book really is core, obviously there's the link between the neuroscience and then the identity side and identity politics has become such a, it feels like a huge thing over the past few years as well. I'm wondering as this book's coming, as this book's out now and people are reading the book and responding to the book, did you ever get pushback from any groups of people or were there particular groups of people who kind of are leaning into this book a little bit more? Masud Husain (05:53) I haven't had any pushback. mean, I think all we're saying in this book is, well, I'm saying in this book, is that the brain creates our identities, ourselves. I think that's something that many people will accept nowadays. Of course, that's probably how it occurs. There doesn't have to be anything else than the brain. In the past, people thought that there could be something else, the soul, which was different from the brain. So all I'm saying is that our brains create ourselves and those cells are very different because brains function in a different way. And I'm also trying to show that, you most people think ourselves are personalities, but personalities are created by the brain and even fundamental things, as I mentioned, like visual perception or language or attention or memory are crucial to creating what we would call personality and self. James Taylor (06:51) Now you walk through one of the case studies in the book is a patient called David whose kind of apathy kind of took over his life after strokes and I thought this was a really interesting one because so many of our audience, our listeners are very interested in motivation, how to become motivated, how to stay motivated, regardless of the kind of work that they're doing as well. Masud Husain (06:57) D James Taylor (07:13) So you talk about these kind of lesions in the Basal Ganglia, can you talk about how those lesions map to motivation, personality, and social disengagement, from this case with David? Masud Husain (07:22) Yes, sure. mean, David was a remarkable case. He's a man in his 30s when he came to see me. And he had been a very gregarious, highly sociable, highly productive person at work. He worked in finance and ⁓ he had suddenly lost all his get up and go, his motivation. Now, it turned out that David had suffered a very unusual kind of stroke, two tiny little strokes. one on each side of the brain affecting parts of the basal ganglia. These are really deep nuclei within the brain and most people up to now have thought of them as being very important for the control of movement because the basal ganglia are also the areas that are affected, for example, in Parkinson's disease. But in David, his movement wasn't a problem. The problem was that he wasn't motivated to act. So this man who'd been highly productive suddenly did very little work. He got fired from work because he really wasn't doing anything useful. He couldn't be motivated to get unemployment benefit. And he had some nice friends who said, well, why don't you come and live with us? And they really regretted saying that very quickly because he did absolutely nothing. I mean, he literally sat there all day. When we saw him, he was in a bit of a disheveled state. He wasn't really looking after himself. He wasn't having a shower. He wasn't really looking after himself in any way. And I remember asking him, so what would you normally like to do if you're sitting at home and say, I'd love to listen to music. So why aren't you listening to music now? it would take me a little while to put my music system together. How long would it take? Five minutes. So he wasn't motivated to put in that effort, five minutes of putting his music system together, to get the reward of listening to something that would give him pleasure. So he did nothing. And his mates would come home, they'd find that he hadn't cleaned the house, cooked, done anything, all those things that we take for granted. So not only had David's personal identity changed, he'd become a very different person, but his place... ⁓ in society's place in the group of people he was with had changed because obviously they got very annoyed with this guy who did nothing and just seemed to be just waiting for them to come and cook, clean the place and all the rest of it. James Taylor (09:54) So what was the treatment for someone like that then? Because I'm also guessing, maybe people that are listening to this who have teenagers are thinking, well, that just sounds like my teenager. So what is different? So this gentleman, he had a stroke, a very unusual kind of stroke, I guess. What was the treatment for someone like him? then is there any, are these really exceptions to the rule? There's no real kind of pass or what can others learn from this as well? Masud Husain (09:57) Yes. Thank Yeah, all very important questions, but I just wanted to explain that he was so rare that I had to go and learn a little bit about the animal literature and what that's telling us about the basal ganglia. And it turns out the basal ganglia are very, very ancient parts of the brain. They go back to the lamprey. These are millions of years old, the lamprey, which is ⁓ a vicious creature if you've ever come across one. But in the lamprey, all the research suggests that the basal ganglia are linking motivational cues, go and seek food, to the action to go and seek that food. Now in David, these critical notes have been taken out. So that link between a motivation cue, I'd like to listen to music to get pleasure, to the action required, put the system together, the music system together to listen to it, had been broken. What it turned out is that dopamine is a very key neurotransmitter in the basal ganglia. So we tried David on a drug that we would normally use in Parkinson's disease. It's called levodopa. It's a very standard drug. It's been around actually since the time of Saks because awakenings, that book and the film that you see with Robert De Niro as a patient. is based on the use of levodopa. And unfortunately, David showed no response to levodopa. And we were about to give up, but we now have newer drugs which latch on to dopamine receptors. They're called dopamine receptor agonists. And with that, within three months, this man who really wasn't looking after himself doing anything came back unrecognizable, came back in a suit. I didn't really recognize him in the waiting area. He'd had a haircut, he'd had a shower. He had a new job and most remarkably, he had a new girlfriend. He would never have met anybody in the state he was. And so going back to your question, he is an extreme rarity. These kind of patients are reported in the literature, about 12 of them. But what we'd realize in neuroscience is that rarities can be really important examples of how the brain works. So we'd found these critical nodes in the basal ganglia that are important in linking motivation to action. We'd found that dopamine or dopaminergic drug could restore the motivation that had been extinguished in this individual. And although he's rare, it turns out that apathy, pathological apathy, is really common across neurological diseases, in Alzheimer's disease, in vascular dementia. in Parkinson's disease, in multiple sclerosis. And you might say, well, what are those things got in common? They all have different pathologies. If you look under the microscope, all those diseases are caused by different things. But if they affect the same part of the brain, if they affect the basal ganglia, if they affect the connections of the basal ganglia, you can also get this problem of pathological apathy. So that makes us think. where those lessons that we learnt in David can extend to other types of patient and that's why we're doing trials on patients with dopaminergic drugs to see if we can improve their apathy. But it also makes us think James about what you mentioned which is what about what we call normal people? We know a ⁓ range of people who vary in their levels of motivation. Could any of that variation be accounted for by biological differences. To me that was a startling thing to think about because you know probably like most of your listeners you'd think there are lazy people and there are highly motivated people and this is some sort of personality or psychological trait. But we actually did a study in Oxford students and believe it or not there are apathetic Oxford students as well. James Taylor (14:30) I'm shocked, I'm absolutely shocked. Masud Husain (14:35) Yeah, so we selected them on a range of levels of apathy, very motivated to very apathetic, not depressed, that's very important, it's very different from depression. And we put them into the scanner and looked at their brain activity when they were doing a task which required them effectively to weigh up whether a particular rewarding outcome, it was a monetary reward in this case, was worth the physical effort. Would they be willing to invest this much effort for this much reward? And we could parametrically alter the level of reward that was on offer, and we could parametrically alter the amount of effort they had to put in. And to our surprise, what we found were there were differences in levels of brain activity between the people who are very apathetic and those who are very motivated. And the surprise was it wasn't the way we were expecting it. The surprise was that the people who are apathetic actually activated their brains more in those regions, including the basal ganglia and parts of the frontal lobe which are connected to the basal ganglia, when they're deciding whether something is worth the effort. And the way that we tried to explain this was that actually it's a much harder decision. They're taking up more brain activity to make a decision, which people who are highly motivated make. without so much effort. And of course, brain activity is effort. The brain requires glucose for its energy. It's expending more effort, consuming more energy in people who are apathetic in making those decisions. The people who are motivated would make just like that. So, yeah. James Taylor (16:23) So there's like an evolutionary, there's an evolutionary perspective to that, I guess then that animal brain or the early brain where we're looking for ways to save energy to reduce that glucose that were taken into the system as well. it benefits us to make that link between idea and action, it's benefits us to make a quicker move then, which I guess is maybe something that also links to like cognitive biases as well, because you have to use... you have to almost like slow down your thinking, use more energy if you want to understand your cognitive biases that you have. Masud Husain (16:57) Yeah, I think that's right. ⁓ this one fundamental ⁓ link we've got is that motivational cues like hunger, thirst, sex in animals, these cues funnel the signals through the basal ganglia to reach the action areas of the brain in the frontal lobe. But it's also this system which alters our biases, as you're talking about, in terms of choices. And in fact, drugs of addiction hijack this system. So this is really interesting. At one end, you've got... apathy because the system isn't working as well as it normally should be, as in David in an extreme case. And at the other end, you've got hyperactivity of this system which links the basal ganglia to the frontal lobe. People who become addicted get a high, that huge amount of dopamine surge, the pleasure they get, which means that they seek that pleasure. So it turns out that ⁓ apathy and addiction are actually using a very, very similar system. We can use that system to explain those behaviors. James Taylor (18:11) I'm guessing your research is probably of a lot of interest to those neuroscientists and PhDs that work at social media companies, for example, because what you just described there in terms of dopamine, know, addiction as well, you know, with people that see on TikTok or whatever the tool that they're using is giving those little micro doses of dopamine all the time. And then I also wondered if that starts to have an effect where people buy, let's say there's a there's a campaign for something that they want to do politically or otherwise and it's quite an easy little dopamine burst to say I like that thing or to reshare that thing. It's a much higher level of motivation to go and say I'm actually gonna go on the streets and campaign against that thing as well and I'm wondering if there's some kind of link that's going on there as well. Masud Husain (19:02) Yeah, so I should also say that we've learned an awful lot about dopamine. So although, you know, what most people would think about is dopamine is the neurotransmitter of pleasure, hedonism, if you like, it turns out that that isn't quite right. What it is, is it's the transmitter, the neurotransmitter, the chemical that links those motivational cues to action. So it motivates you to seek that rewarding outcome. And the rewarding outcome itself depends on other neurotransmitters in terms of pleasure. Many sets of data suggest these are opioid neurotransmitters, which actually give you that pleasure. The dopamine makes you want to seek that pleasure. So there's two slightly different things, but there's no doubt that ⁓ exciting things, whether it's playing video games and getting to an end result or seeing something that you find fun and attractive, whatever it is, exciting, leads to those ramping up of dopamine signals. what I think you're getting at is to persevere in an action, to continue with an action is very different from that little burst of action and excitement because we know lots of people who start doing things. button can't sustain it. They don't really follow up and get through to the end. So there is quite a lot of work in neuroscience looking at these phasic dopamine signals. So they come and go, the little bursts. And they might also not only be important for motivating actions, but also in learning new kinds of activities. And then the tonic dopamine signal, which persists. and may actually ramp up to get you towards that rewarding outcome. So there's quite a lot of detail on dopamine. It turns out to be much more complicated than just the pleasure chemical, and it may be very important for both phasic and tonic activity. James Taylor (21:15) If was that research, there's a link then to, we're seeing a of an attention deficit, I guess, is maybe the easiest way to kind of talk about it where, and you're in front of students, you're with students all the time, I'm guessing as well, where I heard a professor say the other day, it used to be very common that over the weekend you would give, on a Friday, would give a student, here's like three major works I want you to read. And these were three big books and they're going, now they're saying, no we can't. we can't read those over the weekend. So all those things, you're talking about like language learning or instrument becoming a musician, let's say, which does require little bits of motivation along the way. And I guess little kind of levels of dopamine at the same time, but for a prolonged period, longer levels of attention, it can't just be like a Red Bull, like shot of excitement. Masud Husain (21:52) Hmm Yeah, so we talked about motivation being disrupted and we came into this conversation with David, but obviously motivation is only one aspect, one of those modules in the brain that... is important for our everyday activities. And as you've mentioned, another one might be attention. And attention also isn't one simple thing. It turns out there are, you know, we talk about selective attention, which is how we filter out information. if you're listening to a news program or if you're going to a lecture, if you're a student, you don't take everything in. You select the stuff that you think is important. And that's the stuff you hold on to. ⁓ and our senses are being bombarded on a millisecond basis by information. My visual system is being bombarded, my auditory system is being bombarded. even the clothes that I'm wearing are brushing against my skin and giving me tactile information. I don't want to keep all that information because it would be ridiculous. I'd have to have a huge hard disk to hold onto that. So what I do is I'm very, very selective about the information I keep. So that's one type of attention and that can go wrong in particular patients with affect, which might, who might have lesions of the parietal lobe ⁓ in humans. And there's also the ability to sustain an attention. just being able to hold your attention for an hour in a lecture is a very, very difficult thing. And it turns out, you there are brain systems which are engaged when you're doing that. If you look at little kids, it's very difficult for them to sustain attention. They develop this, which is very important in being able to sustain attention. And a lot of the work suggests that parts of the right hemisphere in humans are very important, not only for selective attention, but for sustained attention. They include the right frontal lobe as well as the right parietal lobe. So these are two other functions which are important in being able to do our everyday lives in a way that is effective and productive. James Taylor (24:26) Now, I know in the book you weave in historical kind of neurologists, philosophical ideas about self as well. As you were kind of researching and writing the book, was there a particular thinker or a clinician or a neuroscientist whose work kind of really influenced how you see this idea of identity in the brain? Masud Husain (24:50) ⁓ Well, I think probably the person who had the ⁓ kind of biggest impact when I was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT was a guy called Marvin Minsky, and he was one of the pioneers of AI. I'm not sure that a of people would know about him now, but what he was, I guess, instrumental in was thinking that... these brain processes, these cognitive processes, these computations that were being performed in the brain, in a way what we're talking about is that those processes create our society of mind. That's what he called it. Essentially, it's that constellation of computations that are going on in different parts of the brain that are creating our society of mind and for me, the self. And if you took away one of those computations, if you took away one of those cognitive processes like language, memory, attention, motivation, you have a different society of mind. And one of the things that I wanted to do in this book was to get that across in an accessible way to the readership who didn't know anything about the science and to try then to try and explain the neuroscience of motivation or about concepts. about attention in a way that people could grasp. So Minsky was very important. The other strand of work here is about philosophy and how philosophers have thought about the self. If we go back to Descartes, he had a very dualist kind of way of thinking about how the self worked. For him, wasn't in the brain, it was something outside the brain. But others like Hume thought the self was just an illusion. We're kidding ourselves. It's just a bundle of perceptions and things that we consider and we decide that we create a narrative, essentially, about who we are. And that's what we consider to be the self. I just think we've got to that point where modern neuroscience can say, look, we are beginning to understand these computations. We're beginning to understand what's going on in our brain. We don't need to invoke anything more than brain activity as explaining who we are. James Taylor (27:15) As I was thinking about some of the ideas in the book, the first thing that kind of came to me was, struck me was, you mentioned that on the philosophy side was Buddhism, actually, with like selfless, of this idea of identity is a useful construct, but it's not real, this idea of selflessness. So as you were kind of thinking about kind of going back, you know, obviously the Greeks and the ⁓ ancients as well, was there things that we could perhaps learn from those ideas going way back there that we can kind of pull into or that aligns in some way or conflicts with some of the findings that you had in the book. Masud Husain (27:55) Well, think, you know, human thinking about the self is a very rich area. Even if you go back to the Greeks or even think about how Buddhism considers that there is no self in the way that Western philosophers have thought about the self. I don't think... think we need to necessarily rest on those ideas if we're thinking about this from a scientific point of view. I don't think we need to go back because they just didn't have the information we have now. This is basically what it boils down to. I don't think that we need to rely on those ideas, although the kinds of thought experiments that philosophers conducted were really, really quite prescient. James Taylor (28:43) Yeah, the cave, I would say the cave idea, know, that's something like this. Masud Husain (28:48) Exactly. Even in more modern times, people have thought about if we were to take an individual and we were to teleport you, as in beam me up Scotty, Star Trek, what would that person at the other end of the teleporter be the same person or not? Most people would say yes, okay, you've reconstructed this person, but that would be the same person. But imagine now, that we could duplicate you. We could teleport you to Mars and we could teleport another you to Venus. Who is the real James Taylor under those circumstances? And I think what that kind of problem actually exposes is you need some psychological continuity. You need to have had first-hand experience as James Taylor before the teleportation. to say that the one on Venus or the one on Mars is the one who is the same James Taylor. And those problems, I think, have been really interesting because they really push people to thinking about it just cannot be the reconstitution of atoms that creates the self. It's the experiences that you've had that create the self. James Taylor (30:12) In some cases in the book, you talk about where there was you managed partial restoration, obviously David was one case of that as well. Can you tell us about maybe another patient whose self was altered and then partially reclaimed through your team and yourself working with Masud Husain (30:28) Yeah, I think ⁓ in a way Anna is quite a good person to think about because she was a young woman who was assaulted in a London park simply because she was speaking Polish on a mobile phone. And she sustained a very bad head injury as a teenager. Luckily, she got to a neurosurgical unit. had surgery performed, which meant that actually she did very well. But years later she came to see me with a problem that she found very difficult to discuss because what she was explaining was that she would find that her hand would lose, she'd lose control of her hand. It would do things of its own accord. And that became a real problem because she loved dancing, including ballroom dancing. And this hand would wander to places that she really found embarrassing because her partners would find that embarrassing. And it turned out that what had happened is although she had recovered from a head injury, she'd grown a cyst over that area. And that cyst was pressing down on the brain and having an impact on her body schema. you know, knowing where our body parts are in space. is a fundamental thing that we all have. We understand, you know, the personal limits of our space. If someone's coming too close, we recognize that. We recognize when we shouldn't get too close to somebody. But in this case, Anna's hand was effectively autonomous because she wasn't representing it properly unless she looked at it. If she looked at it, she knew where it was. If she didn't look at it, she slowly lost... position of her hand, she didn't know where it was, and it would do things autonomously. In this case, it turned out there was a simple solution. We could send her to one of our neurosurgical colleagues who could remove that cyst so there was no longer pressure on the brain and her body schema was not distorted. So this was a very simple solution which didn't require medications. It's an unusual case, but it also reveals to us that part of the brain which is holding a representation of how our body parts are positioned in space. So important for everything we do. doesn't have to be an athlete. It's just somebody knowing where your hand, your leg, your head is in space. These are things we just take for granted. James Taylor (33:17) Is this linked a little bit to, you hear people with phantom limb syndrome, where they've lost a limb of some sort, yet they still feel pain from that missing limb? And my understanding is what they often have to do is almost have a mirror to kind of see the other part, the missing part, and it's kind of like reconnecting that part of the brain to understand that that thing doesn't exist anymore. Masud Husain (33:38) Well, I mean, that is in a few people and that's, think you're alluding to the work by Ramachandra under there. But it's very related because it's really about how the body is represented within the brain. And there are maps within the brain which ⁓ map the tactile surfaces, but also the angles between the joints. including the hand. If you look at the hand, this is a really complicated bit of machinery because we've got 17 degrees of freedom and with 17 degrees of freedom you have a very, very complex bit of engineering that the body has to represent. We take that for granted how we would move, how we would shape our hand to pick up an object, but if we lose that representation, as was the case in Anna, this hand was effectively autonomous, a bit like what we would now call an alien limb. I don't know if you've seen that film with Peter Sellers, Doctor Strangelove. He has a very good impersonation of an alien limb because his own arm, his own hand is choking himself because he has no control over that hand. James Taylor (34:53) think actually that work, the work you're doing around there also picks up a little bit where I'm seeing stuff I do, is speaking to companies about artificial intelligence and robotics and what we call centaurs or ⁓ almost like cyborgs where individual humans are now, if you go to the Ford motor factory, you see them wearing exosuits, for example, that becomes part of them. And my father's a guitarist and a jazz guitarist and he has, ⁓ he has synesthesia. So we did something, we did a thing at University of Cambridge. with Professor Roger Nebo in there, where he was describing what he would call his mind instrument, essentially. So he rehearses, he rehearses, like the guitar is actually in his hat. It is almost an extension of him. So when people say, do you not have to ⁓ practice lots of things? Well, I do, but a lot of it I do in my head. I'm practicing and it's almost become an extension, like you said, that objects become an extension of him as well. So it might be interesting to see where some of that kind of... Masud Husain (35:37) and James Taylor (35:52) work goes, like research goes, in terms of these extensions that we have, and maybe not born with, but they end up becoming part of us. Masud Husain (36:01) Well, funny you should mention that, it has already been done to an extent because, for example, if monkeys are taught how to use a rake or a tool which extends effectively their limb, what you can find in their brains is a representation of that tool. And of course, you know, the thing that happened in human evolution is tool use, so this hand I was talking about with 17 degrees of freedom, really evolved because we developed these new types of tool from very, very sophisticated, fine instruments to flint arrows and all the rest of it. We learned how to develop tools and how to use them with our limbs. And they do become extensions of your body in terms of how the body represents that tool. And it's not just tools, it's driving. When you're driving a car, you build a representation of where the edges are. If you're a good parker at least, you need to know what that representation is like. we've become very familiar with the idea that we don't just represent the body ourselves in terms of the limits of the body, we represent beyond the body. James Taylor (37:21) That's a fascinating area. If a listener walked away today with perhaps one shift in how they think about their mind identity and based upon the work you've done, what would that one shift that you would encourage them to really think about to kind of reflect on themselves and the work that they do? Masud Husain (37:41) So far what we've been talking about are how our cells can change with brain disorders. But I think it's worth thinking about without having a brain disorder, how yourself can change. And there are obviously many examples in terms of how we develop. Our brains develop, we change as we develop, we can learn new ways of doing things as we develop. But it's also the case, I think, that we can still learn new ways of doing things and new ways of shaping ourselves through thinking about these cognitive processes that I've been alluding to. Motivation is a really interesting one. Can you teach yourself to be different in the way you're motivated, how you allocate your effort? in some way. Can you teach yourself to persist more in tasks that don't necessarily give you the reward immediately? and where you're having to put in a lot of effort to get that in the end. It's the kind of thing we would do with children, We're kind of teaching them that you won't necessarily get an immediate reward here, but if you persist, it would be worthwhile. So I think if there was a shift, I think it's worth thinking about how we could change, even though we think we've become very hardwired people. We're very flexible. We still remain very flexible. So I think that's what I would think about is to consider how if you wanted to, you might be able to change as a person. James Taylor (39:26) I think it also provides some hope for some of us a little bit older as well, that there is a potential for change and development and these things, it's not calcified in that way, you're still open to possibility. We're gonna have a link to your book ⁓ here, Masood, but if there's another book that maybe someone that's interested in this general area and they're coming to your book and then they say, I wanna go a little bit deeper, what would be a book that you would recommend to them? if they want to go a little bit deeper into this area, you've inspired them, you've given them these examples, these case studies here as well. And he said, I want to go a little bit further into this area. What book would you recommend? Masud Husain (40:05) Well, if you want to know about neuroscience, probably the kind of Bible here is a book by Candell and Schwartz, Eric Candell and Schwartz. Those were the original, ⁓ it's called Principles of Neuroscience. It's a huge book, so it's not for the faint-hearted. If you want to find out about how the brain works, that's probably the place to go and look. You may want to just dip into a chapter or two to find out about that. Yeah. James Taylor (40:33) And if people want to learn more about your other writing, obviously your academic, your research, your talks, I'm sure you're giving lots of keynotes around these ideas as well, where's the best place for them to go and find that? Masud Husain (40:46) Well, I have a website. It's massoudhussein.org, Hussein spelt with a single S. And ⁓ you can find out the stuff I write and also some of the videos on talks and podcasts. James Taylor (41:03) Well, Masud Husain, Our Brains Ourselves is out now. We'll have a link here. Please go in, go and check out that book. Get the audio version if you prefer the audio. Or if you're old school like myself, definitely go into your local independent bookstore and pick up a copy of that book. Masud Husain, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast. Masud Husain (41:24) Thank you, James.