Dr. Robert Cloninger: Are You Ready to Know Yourself (Season 3, Episode 3)

Welcome to Take the Long View with Matt Hall. This is a podcast to reframe the way you think about your money, emotion, and time. The goal? Helping you put the odds of long-term success on your side. Are you ready to know yourself? Think about that question. I hope so, because I'm joined today by someone who can help help us know ourselves better. He doesn't normally talk to the public, but he's gonna talk with us. And I'm so excited to be joined today by a legendary thinker. His name is Dr. Robert Kloninger. He's Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis and Director of the Research Institute of the Anthropedia Foundation. He was a big shot professor at Washington University School of Medicine He has been cited and honored for his incredible work that relates to genetics, neurobiology, development, psychology, brain imaging, and the assessment of personality and psychopathology. His personality inventories have been used in more than 6,000 peer-reviewed publications around the world, and he's one of the most highly cited scientists in the world across all fields. He's in the top 0.01 percentile. He graduated from the University of Texas and then got his MD from Washington University in 1970, and he has honorary doctorates. Dr. Kloninger has published 10 books and over 600 articles in psychiatry, psychology, and genetics. His recent books include Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being and The Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. He's been awarded every award you can think of in his field, and he is a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Medicine in the United States. He's a really big, big deal. Dr. Cloninger, thank you so much for joining us to share your wisdom.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So you have accomplished so much and written so much and done so much that the challenge is for us to condense what we talk about today to what I think is most useful to my listeners. And part of the goal of the podcast is to help people make better choices, specifically in my industry around money. But I think because I have, I've come to be familiar with some of your work. I think you are perfectly equipped to help some of the people listening to this podcast reframe the way they think, not just about money, but other aspects of their life. And I'm so excited to talk with you. But let's start with how you got started. In 1985, you worked on a paper that sounds like it helped kickstart your life's work. Tell me about it.

Well, in '85, I was asked to develop a model of susceptibility to anxiety based on my research. And I had always been interested in personality, but the methods for measuring it were really rather poor because they either were just statistical methods or they were too simple. If you ask someone, "Are you vain?" which many psychiatrists would do with the approach they were using at the time, you don't get good answers. People get defensive and they cover up. So you really have to understand what's underlying the behaviors that motivate them. And when I looked at anxiety states, I could see that there were different kinds of anxiety and that there were different susceptibility factors. And I described those susceptibility factors in terms of the underlying personality traits. And I could ground that in very good animal research. On the genetics and the brain structure of susceptibility to anxiety. But after I did that, I realized that this was a very general model and that I had the opportunity to develop a general model of our emotional drives and our temperaments and why we get along with some people and not others. And that was pretty exciting because I'd always wanted to have an understanding of what was the underlying motivation that people had, and not just to judge them on the surface. Because I think all of us would really like to be healthy and happy, but sometimes we get into bad habits, or we don't learn the right way to achieve what we really value and desire. And so that's the way I approached personality. It was not a judgment on the surface. But to try to get into the heart of the person and the drives in their biology, their psychology, and their aspirations about life. And that gave me a very general approach to talking to people in a way that was helping them as well as me to understand themselves.

Was there much work at that time that clearly defined what personality is?

There were genetic studies with twins that showed that there were about 2 or 3 factors in personality that were heritable. And there were studies in animals mainly, because we didn't have brain imaging then, where people would stimulate or destroy little parts of the brain and see what happened to behavior. There was very little work in humans in the mid-'80s underlying personality because techniques for functional brain imaging came just a few years later. But I was able to ground my model of temperament, which are basic emotional drives and our habits and our ability to reconcile our emotions and our relationships. But there was not an understanding of what the biology of that was unless you looked at animal studies. And so I grounded it in the animal studies and the— what we knew about learning systems. From— I'd studied animal learning at the university, and I'd also studied experimental psychology and philosophy, and so I had the background in both anthropology and medicine and psychology and some things in genetics that allowed me to try to integrate these areas.

Yeah. Well, let's jump way ahead to today. It feels to me like a lot of your work is tailor-made for the current state where many of us are excited about getting back to life, but we also just had a year and a half of life being disrupted in a really significant way. And I feel like the way the medical community sometimes, it feels like, defines wellbeing or doesn't, just treats illness, the way the media sort of is a catalyst in creating anxiety, I feel like your work and the more we can dig into, I think, a few of the pieces of your work that I'm familiar with, it seems like it's tailor-made for this time. Do you feel that way at all?

I do. You know, as you asked that question, it occurred to me that there's an incident early in the development of the Temperament and Character Inventory that's really directly relevant to investments. Okay. Because after I developed the temperament model, which just describes our emotional drives, I had hoped that this would be the foundation for all of personality. And people criticized it as being too genetically and biologically based. But something happened that by the time they made that criticism, it really changed my perspective. I had developed a test for measuring temperament, measured novelty-seeking, harm avoidance, and reward dependence. In other words, novelty-seeking is what leads you to explore things and be curious. Harm avoidance is what leads you to avoid things that are frightening and maybe destructive. And where dependence involves your need for approval from other people. So these are the kinds of tendencies that people have that sometimes lead them to make judgments that are too sentimental, too emotional, not too wise. Well, I had given this test to many people, and I had just finished evaluating a violent murderer. Well, all murderers are violent to some degree, but this one was really very aggressive and cruel. But just as I was reviewing that, a colleague of mine brought in the temperament inventory of her husband, who was a very successful investor, investment banker actually. And I looked at these two and I thought, "Oh, wait, there's a mistake here. I've mixed them up," because they were identical. I mean, they were almost— I mean, to the point, they were identical. Essentially the same, and I looked at this and actually the words were, "Oh, crap. I've really left something out that's extremely important, and I've got to figure out what that is," because these two people had the same kind of emotional drives. They were not at all anxious. They were very confident and calm. They were very inquisitive, very exploratory, loved to do new and somewhat dangerous things. And they were rather detached in their personal interactions with people, so they could be very objective. But one was totally undisciplined, didn't have any real sense of what he valued, and the other was actually very mature, very responsible, very compassionate person. And he could take his emotions and regulate them in a very constructive way, consistent with what he wanted to achieve. And so I realized at that point that I had neglected character, and that what I had to do was to understand how it could be that there were other factors that had been missed in the early studies of the genetics, because we only thought there were 2 or 3 heritable factors. So I thought, well, maybe character is something that you acquire. By learning, and there wasn't much evidence for the heritability of it. So I first looked to see what could people measure in people's personality that was not captured by temperament, and I recognized things that suggested being self-directed so that you're responsible and purposeful, being cooperative so that you're agreeable, kind, compassionate, and principled, and also self-transcendent. That is that you can get lost in the moment, just feel connected to everything around you because you love what you're doing and you feel one with other people, with nature, maybe with God or something divine and sacred. And this is what rounded out the full human being. And I had to draw on all forms of psychology, transpersonal, intrapersonal, and depth psychology, and also interpersonal psychology, like in relationships and attachment theory and so on. So I had then a really comprehensive model of personality, but I had only been able to get there by having started with the biological foundation and then added the regulatory component. And so it's very appropriate that this highly successful investor who had a very adventurous temperament, like the murderer, was a very different kind of human being because he was very clear about his goals. He was resourceful. He was able to admit his mistakes, correct them. He didn't cover up his mistakes. And he was also someone who could work in teams. He could work with other people who would listen, who might know more than he did in certain areas. And he also had a sense of what gave long-term value to things, what was sustainable action with the environment. What was something that made you feel good at night when you— after you accomplished it, rather than just having the sense that a lot of people have who are rather self-centered that, you know, well, I'm achieving things, I'm making a lot of money, but it doesn't feel meaningful to you. And so these people tend to be insatiable in their need to just make more and more money because they don't have enough that is psychologically meaningful to them and spiritually meaningful to them to be able to say enough or to accept limitations. I think this is really very important in all fields of life, but it's very true in investments too. Yeah. Wow.

So much you just shared with us. Let's unpack or restate one piece of this. You mentioned this thing called the TCI, or Temperament and Character Inventory. So this is a diagnostic tool that can help a person understand their temperament traits, which are not likely to change.

Right. Well, eventually you can't moderate your temperament.

Exactly. Your character traits can act as a governor on your temperament.

Correct.

Right. That framework just character and temperament. And as you told in the story, you know, sort of you had unveiled the aspects of temperament, but the missing piece was the character element.

Correct.

And that in our personalities, we really can break it down into those two big broad categories?

That's correct. I started with temperament, which was clearly a heritable biological component of personality, and it's really our habit system. It's what drives our emotional desires. But the other domain that I recognized was character, and I thought of that as what we do intentionally, what we make of ourselves intentionally. But later we recognized that there are actually 3 systems of learning and memory that humans have. One is the habit system that all animals share, and then there's the a system for intentionality that allows us to be self-directed and cooperative, but not necessarily willing to make sacrifices for other people, because we don't really identify with the world as a whole. And then there's the third system for creativity and imagination and what allows us to appraise our values, to evaluate things, and that is a system for self-awareness. And so character is really a composite of being either or both intentional and creative, imaginative. And it was only the last 5 years that I was able to actually document that we have 3 systems of learning that are heritable, that underlie personality. And so character is really what we make of ourselves, both intentionally and creatively. And both our creativity and our capacity for self-control allows us to regulate our temperaments.

So we blame our parents for our temperament, but we undo our temperament with character development. Is that right? Not quite.

Well, we inherit our temperament from our parents. We get half of our genes from each parent, and then that gives us a unique mix of those things. And so we can't completely blame them, but yes, we got our genes from there, and the heritability is about 50%. But some of that is shaped by the choices we make about the conditions we put ourselves in. But it turns out that self-control and creativity are also equally heritable. They're also about 50% heritable. And one of the most heritable personality dimensions is actually self-transcendence, which is the most spiritual. So you might speculate that the direction of human evolution now is not our body, and not even our capacity for intelligent self-control, but actually our ability to recognize that we're part of something greater than our individual self.

Okay, so much. Let's talk briefly about something I'm obsessed with.

Okay.

I heard you give a talk a couple years ago, and the thing that hit me the most, that stuck with me even weeks later, was this distinction you made about separateness and unity. And the way I heard it was that there is a perspective or a lens or a filter through which we contextualize and see the world. And we feel certain feelings when we're in separateness, and we feel others when we're in unity. Can you describe these two different perspectives? And then the obvious question will be, How do we spend more time getting to unity?

What happens in character development is that we move from just thinking of ourselves as a separate object operating in the world to one where we're actually operating more like an orchestra director who needs to bring harmony to all the different members of his orchestra to get them to work together efficiently and effectively. To create something that will be a positive experience. And the way this happens in the brain is that as we evolved from just the earliest mammals, we started to first be able to have cortical control of touch, and then we added cortical control of taste. Smell, and then hearing, and then vision. So the human actually has different parts of his recently evolved neocortex that regulate and sense all the information that's coming to him through all the 5 senses. And this gets integrated into a synthesis that is our image of the world. If you're in a state of separation, you feel fear, excessive desire, insatiable desire really, and also either self-doubt or kind of a false pride that you're using to cover your self-doubt. That's contrasted with an outlook of unity, where instead of fear, you have love. Love's actually the opposite of fear, not hate. Instead of immoderate desire, you have hope and unity. And instead of self-doubt or vanity, you have faith. So a person of strong character and vision has an understanding of love, hope, and faith that allow them to intelligently and responsibly and compassionately and hopefully regulate any condition he gets in. But you know, we all have bad days. And so you may have the best of intentions to get along with someone and they just push some button, some sensitive spot, or just they say the wrong thing and you explode. And that will get you into a state of fear or anger or some negative emotion. So you can always recognize when you're in an unhealthy state of separation because you're going to feel negative emotions and you're going to feel either anxious or agitated or resentful or bitter or cynical or just vain and arrogant. Whereas if you're in a state of unity where, you know, sometimes 3/4 of us at some times in our lives feel peak experiences where we just feel connected with everything around us. You may be standing on a mountaintop or by a lake or an ocean, or maybe you're just having a really good discussion with someone who you trust and you can see is trying to help you. That moment you feel a connectedness, and that is the state in which we feel trust and willingness to make sacrifices for others, to be compassionate, to try to help and teach them the I think the way you're doing with this broadcast and to bring something meaningful beyond just money and fame and power.

So I'm in a coaching program that is based on a lot of the work that you've done, Dr. Kloninger, and one of the exercises we did was to, in a single day, perform 5 acts of service for others. And it was amazing how impactful that was on me. And they didn't have to be grand gestures. They could be simple. And it just got me thinking, and you've got me thinking, what are the key elements or key exercises to spending more time or living more in unity?

You have to understand that when we're thinking and acting, what happens is you often start with a certain emotional state, and that can bias your perception of the situation. So if someone hits you with a problem about which you're fearful, then you may tend to excessively worry. And so we have to recognize these shifts in our emotional state and how it biases our very perception. But we also have to have a clear sense of what it is we value. And so of a person, and this has to be done in freedom. And so I can't tell you how you should be because each of us is different. But we have to give people experiences that allow them to understand what they most deeply value because we're not always aware. You know, you can ask someone, "What do you really value? What has given you the most satisfying experiences in your life?" And people will usually think about something that involves giving kindness and love. Others may get a lot of satisfaction from accomplishment or caring for their family or contributing to the community. But we need people to understand for themselves what they value rather than telling them how they should be because we're not all gonna do things in the same way. So what we've devised in Anthropedia's Know Yourself series is a series of experiences that many people find to be satisfying, but we give them to people as exercises, as an experiment in their own life to decide what they value so that it comes not from being told what they should do, but to discover what they really find truly for themselves satisfying.

Can we make a quick distinction for the audience between pleasure and satisfaction?

Yes. Well, pleasure Pleasure, of course, is something that makes you feel good in the moment, but it's not the same as satisfaction because people can make sacrifices, say, to save their child who's about to be hurt. That might put them at risk of grave harm or even getting killed themselves. But knowing that you're willing to do that for someone you love is truly satisfying even though it's not pleasurable. Sometimes working hard to accomplish something takes a lot of late nights and hard work and other kinds of sacrifice, giving up pleasure to accomplish something you truly value, but that is what makes it even feel more satisfying in the long run. So it's a very important distinction, and if you just chase pleasure, you're never gonna really cultivate a sense of what's valuable and what's challenging for us in the world today is that there are so many things that allow us to be manipulated for other people to make money. Like terrorism is used to manipulate us to be in a state of fear and to not really work as a community. Disinformation doesn't give you the facts to think intelligently. Many, many things, just the beeps on our cell phones gets us to respond to that because we feel an urge to respond to that and we become conditioned. But it's very It's very helpful to instead turn that off and take a walk in nature, walk in the forest, just to listen in silence, appreciate the beauty around you, rather than being controlled by these conditioning signals. So we have to be aware of how our environment is polluted psychologically, as well as in terms of chemistry and things that pollute the air and the water supply and so forth. And if you have that big picture, then you can step back and think about not only what is a sustainable and profitable investment, but what is going to contribute to our sense of community, our sense of unity, rather than just creating a few people who are dominating. Because we know that the determinants of health include not just what kind of medical care we get, But are we contributing to a society where there's equity? Are we contributing to an industry that is cleaning up after itself, not just polluting and expecting other people to clean it up? And so, questions about diversification and sustainability that capture a very old issue, which is equity. There's a saying that goes back to— I think it's a 14th century French psychologist named Rabelais, a novelist, who said that knowledge or science without conscience is the ruin of the soul. Basically, if we don't think about the consequences of what we do for ourselves and for other people, we're not living in a virtuous way, but we're also not living in a sustainable way, and we're not living in a way that's truly satisfying because we Really, to be healthy, we have to have physical health, mental health, emotional and cognitive, and we also have to have a sense of being a part of a community. This is what made modern human beings so superior to all other primates. We displaced all other primates primarily because not just that we were intelligent statisticians or strategic thinkers, but we had a sense of how satisfying it was to help one another. Community. Community.

Do you want to talk at all for a minute about snakes and ropes?

Well, this is the other kind of bias. There are two major steps that bias our perceptions and our understanding. The first is what you just referred to as the story about if you're walking in the forest and you're a little bit anxious, and you see a long thin thing, you're likely to think that it— maybe it's a threatening snake when it's just a rope or a vine. But if you're in a calm state and you're alert and not overly fearful, you may look at it carefully enough to discern that it's not something threatening, it's just a harmless vine. But that's an example of the distortion of cognition. By the emotional state that you're in. And then beyond that, the second step, that even if you're fairly calm, you may still be having a perspective of separation rather than unity, and that will also bias your perception of other people's motives. So both of these things are very important biases to become aware of, and so we've developed meditations to help people are just practices of life to help people realize just what it is that gives them satisfaction. You mentioned acts of kindness to cultivate cooperation. We also have exercises about acts of setting goals and accomplishing them. Maybe something simple, just like your posture sitting in a chair. And if you do that, if you work on something to better yourself, you find that then you develop more self-confidence, and that generalizes to other acts of hope. And then there are acts of faith that we can do too, to sometimes control our tendency to be too cynical and skeptical, to really live in a sense of our connectedness to the community and nature. We get that if we do things like gardening, walk in the forest, just a stroll with your dog or a family member or someone.

Okay, Dr. Kloninger, you know, one of the questions I tend to ask is what's a good long view story? I think you may have the longest long view story. Can you talk for a minute about this sense of human connectedness and whether it's fantasy or whether there's some science to this?

That's a very good question and one that I would have had a hard time answering until just the last couple of years. We recently have been able to identify nearly all the genes for human personality. We did studies with populations in Finland, Korea, and Germany to compare their genomes, and we did— we were able to identify almost 1,000 genes for human personality. And they're the genes that constitute those 3 systems of learning and memory. So it's very important to know that human personality is not fixed traits but are systems of learning. And what we found is that these 972 genes regulate our personality traits. And the long story is that once we had identified these, we had the opportunity to understand how modern humans had evolved to be able to displace the Neanderthals and to be superior in their functioning than the other closest living primate, which is a chimpanzee. And what we found was that we have 267 genes that are unique to modern humans. Mm-hmm. And we also discovered that these genes are regulatory genes. They're made of RNA instead of DNA, and they allow us to put the other genes into groups to function, to accomplish certain tasks. And they're actually— these three systems of learning and memory have a different genetic basis with very little overlap, some enough to let them interact with each other. But the genes for temperament and habit systems actually go back about 40 million years to the earliest primates who evolved habits that they could regulate in order to form attachments and to regulate their emotions so that they could reconcile after conflicts and fights. And then about 2 million years ago, we developed the capacity for intentional self-control. And it was only about 100,000 years ago that we developed this capacity for self-awareness and imagination. And that's what really set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But we still have to remember that we're not just the kings of the world. We really live in symbiosis and cooperation with all other animals in our environment. And it's that awareness that I think modern industrial society has tended to lose sight of. Become very secular, feeling like we could do whatever we want with a limitless resource. But it turns out that there are limits to the resources of the Earth, and we started exceeding those limits in about the mid-'70s so that we're each year a little bit earlier, we're degrading ecological systems, we're polluting the oceans, we're polluting the air, and that creates an environment for us that's rather toxic. And of course you combine that with a lack of conscience and sense of social duty to go with the freedoms that we enjoy, and you get a situation where we get too much inequity, we get distrust of one another because we're not sure about people's emotions, intentions, and how they're trying to exploit us. And so we get a society that's not very functional. So I think we have to remember that we need to get back to what initially made us creative, effectively functioning animals, which is to be able to have a conscience, to have a sense of community, and to have a sense of our participation in something larger than ourselves, not just see ourselves as kings of the universe.

I just want to say thank you for all your work. I feel like you are so far ahead of your time, and there's so much more we could cover. If people want to learn more either about your research or learn more about themselves, what would you recommend they do? Where should they go?

I have a book called Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being that's available from Oxford University Press. You can get it on Amazon. So that's one book that you could read. It depends on people's interests. Probably the best way to move forward actually is to inquire about the programs that Anthropedia Foundation and Palm Health have. Because at Palm, we have an approach to integrative medicine that helps people to take charge of health promotion rather than just focusing on disease. And it's very important to think about how to be healthy and how to take care of yourself, but to have resources in a convenient place like they do at Palm. In addition, we have— Anthropedia has a Center for Well-Being near St. Louis University at Spring and Forest Park Parkway, where we have a spa that's more than just kind of a touchy-feely spa, but one that actually has mind-body services that truly can help you to detoxify yourself from a lot of the air we breathe and the foods we eat that are highly processed and unhealthy and so on, and also to have exercises that build up your physical health and your ability to regulate negative emotions, and basically to learn more about the Know Yourself series that you were talking about. We have coaches that we train that work at both the, the Agora, we call it, and at Palm Health. And those are both good programs to learn about these principles. And there's written material, but this has been put together with modules where people can have real dialogue with someone who understands it and can answer your questions and so forth. And I think that's sometimes more helpful than just trying to do it by reading by yourself.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your work and sharing your wisdom with us. I hope people investigate some aspect of what you've just mentioned and investigate themselves. I can say for myself, who I am involved in one of the coaching programs you mentioned, It's been just a huge advantage for me to go through this program. I feel like I, you know, have a different perspective or a different lens and spend more time in unity than in separateness. And I'm so thankful that you didn't just do the work, but you found a way to apply it in real people's lives. There's a big difference between understanding what makes up the human psychology and figuring out ways to put your work into practice and change people's lives for the better.

Thank you very much. We tried to do this in a way that is self-paced and that is fun. Yeah. Because we have enough things to do and burdens to face. The path to health is actually one that's very satisfying. And it has to be self-paced and directed at what you value.

Very good. Well, thanks, Dr. Kloneinger. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure.

Is it a snake or a rope? Quick side note: Dr. Kloneinger mentioned a place called PALM Health, and PALM stands for Personalized Advanced Lifestyle Medicine. Phenomenal place that I don't think has many peers in the United States. Check it out online if you're interested. Please note, the information shared in this podcast is not intended as advice. The intent is to share meaningful experiences. I am likely not your advisor, nor wealth manager, nor financial planner, and my opinions are my own and not necessarily shared by Hill Investment Group. Investing involves risk. Consult a professional before implementing an investment strategy. Thank you.