Hank Azaria: Flaming Moe's (Simpsons Neuroscience with Dr. Kevin Ochsner) | Transcript
Listen and watch the episode here.
Join Simpsons favorite, Moe The Bartender and his human counterpart Hank Azaria for a lively conversation with Social Neuroscientist, Dr. Kevin Ochsner.
We talk about the legendary “Flaming Moe’s” Simpsons episode from both Moe’s and Hank’s perspectives, how and why our brains are wired to thrive in social contexts like Moe’s Tavern, Hank’s experience recovering from alcoholism, the neural underpinnings of practicing acceptance and more!
Matt Whyte
Today's episode is co-presented by Columbia University's Zuckerman Brain Institute, and was recorded in front of a live audience on October 4th at the Forum Theater on Columbia's campus. Please be sure to check out our other episodes, including one with Nick Kroll on the topic of puberty science. Don't forget to click subscribe and please rate the show on your favorite podcast platform.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
It seems like as a species, our default setting is to be empathic and to kind of share somebody else's pain. And there's actually evidence from modern neuroscience that when someone else is in emotional or physical pain, that the brain systems you use to understand their pain are the very same ones that would be engaged if you were feeling that pain.
The thought is, it gives you this vicarious sense of what it's like to be them. And I suspect a lot of that goes on in the context of folks interacting at a.
Matt Whyte
Welcome to sing for science. The show where musicians and scientists talk about music and science. I'm your host, Matt White. Each week, we'll talk about a song by our guest artist and how it connects with our guest scientists area of expertise. Today we'll be speaking with illustrious Simpsons character Moses Black, subject of the 1991 episode and song Flaming Moe's.
The lyrics to Flaming Moe's characterized Moe's Tavern as a place where Springfield's downtrodden can gather in community. Moe is portrayed by six time Emmy winning actor Hank Azaria, who will also be joining us to offer his unique perspective on today's topic. Doctor Kevin Ochsner is a professor and former chair of the psychology department at Columbia University, where he directs the social, cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab.
The lab's work on emotion, self-control, and person perception highlight how our brains function in social contexts. Furthermore, Doctor Ochsner, his work as a social neuroscientist, looks at how and why it is we are wired to be social creatures. Be it inside a bar, a church, basement, or otherwise. The title of this week's episode on the podcast is Happiness is just a Flaming Mo Away.
How, when, where and why? Neural systems fire in social contexts. Columbia University. Please join me in welcoming Doctor Kevin Ochsner and Mr. Mo Kislak.
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Hey there. Like, there goes.
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Professor know it all. And his long haired friend there, he's all grown.
Matt Whyte
Mo, are you there?
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Yeah. We mo. Were you able to hear the song that we just played?
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Yeah, I heard it. Yeah, I heard it. Yeah, that's an old song.
Matt Whyte
Well, do you feel that it accurately sums up why patrons are drawn to your tavern?
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Well, if. If what? It's saying is they come here to get drunk and fall down and you're.
Matt Whyte
Okay, that's that's fair. Now, in the decades that you've been serving and observing customers, what wisdom have you gained about the human condition?
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Oh, jeez. Well, look, I pretty much I find everybody annoying, you know? And then they have a few, and they get, you know, they they progress in stages. They're like, they get tipsy, you know, and and you get kind of fun and they get a kind of kind of real drunk. And, then they then there's a phase I call vomiting.
And then they find a back door right back into annoying. You know what I mean.
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Right. Okay. Well so you have your hands full on any given night. I have, a Columbia University neuroscientist here who I think can add further insight to your experience and what you might see every single night. So, Kevin, as it relates to your labs research, maybe tell us a little bit about that, why we seek connection with one another in an environment like most tavern.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
In an environment like Mo’s Tavern, specifically?
Matt Whyte
Answer. Loosely.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Loosely indeed. Well, I think we come into the world as little kids needing other people, and we start as fundamentally social creatures from the first moment. And people are always there, to help meet our needs, to allay our fears, to save our wounds. And people do that quite often in a bar context. Alcohol, tends to make us sort of myopic and focus on the present moment and kind of forget the big picture, and that might help us kind of be right there in the moment, connecting with another person where you maybe you feel like you can unburden yourself and connect with them and they can connect with you.
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
So yeah, that's what I said. Folks want to get drunk.
Matt Whyte
I mean, that's fair. And Mo, do you know anything about emotional regulation? Okay.
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Sure. There's, I have sort of, two, two modes, very angry and furious and, you know, when anybody, trips, one of them is I come at them and, and, look, the way I say it is this in one way or the other, you're going out, right? Am I? By I mean, they're throwing you out or you passing out one way or the other.
Matt Whyte
So and let's talk a little bit about some of your more well-known patrons, because, you know, what Kevin's saying is that we can sometimes help regulate one another's emotions in a social context, like a bar. So is it fair to say that when in each other's company, Homer, Carl, Lenny, Barney, Gumble, they provide that for one another?
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
Well, that's a lot of fancy words there. Along here. If if by what you just said, you mean do they get drunk together, then. Yeah, they sure they they they seem to, you know, have a time with each other until I throw them out at a pass out.
Matt Whyte
Okay. Well, Kevin, I mean, what's your perspective on that?
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Well, they certainly get drunk together. But, you know, the I think one thing I might emphasize is when people are there because they're feeling down, they're in some kind of difficult moment. It seems like as a species, our default setting is to be empathic and to kind of share somebody else's pain. And there's actually evidence from modern neuroscience that when someone else is in emotional or physical pain, that the brain systems you use to understand their pain are the very same ones that would be engaged if you were feeling that pain.
So it gives you the thought is it gives you this vicarious sense of what it's like to be them. And I suspect a lot of that goes on in the context of folks interacting at a bar.
Hank AzariaMo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
You know, if I may, I I'm sorry. Professor, Professor Baldy there, but, whatever. You know, I disagree because when I take, like, a baseball bat out from behind the bar and give it to a guy in the head because he's got to come and I feel nothing, but I don't feel his pain. I feel nothing but joy that,
Matt Whyte
Well, Mo, that's that's fair. But I want to offer a different perspective. Are you familiar with the work of pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead? Moses, like.
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
My familiar with the work of pioneering? What's his with the. Who is he now?
Matt Whyte
Anthropologist Margaret Mead. She said that the first sign of civilization is a healed, broken femur. Because in the animal kingdom, if you break a femur, you're left behind. However, when civilized, we help one another. So what are your thoughts on that?
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
I thought I you you lost me at FEMA. The heck is a FEMA?
Matt Whyte
It's it's it's it's a leg bone.
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
But why did you just say that? If it's a leg bone, to say it's a leg bone. That's a problem with your fancy college. Point is, everything means something else.
Matt Whyte
That's fair. Well, the reason why I wanted to push back on your earlier response with the bat is because I'm curious. You know, at the end of this Flaming Mouths episode, you have an appearance of conscience, and you seem motivated to offer Homer a cut of your franchise money. So how does that reconcile with what you just said about only feeling joy when you can hit someone with a baseball bat?
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
You know, I don't know their, Mr. Fancy hair, but I'm starting to feel like hitting you with a baseball bat. Okay, I well, what are you implying over there? That it's a surprise? Weird that I would be nice to one of my friends. Is that what you're saying?
Matt Whyte
I guess, I mean, I, I think that's what I meant.
Mo, the Bartender / Hank Azaria
I think that's, you know, something I don't I don't know why I'm doing this in the first place. I don't have to stand here on my own bar and be insulted. That's going to happen later when these guys come in. Ever get drunk? So I. I'm done with this. I'm out of here. I will, and you can send my check to the tavern.
Matt Whyte
Yeah. Okay. So, this, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hank Azaria.
Hank Azaria
Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. Sorry I had to come down on you so hard.
Matt Whyte
There is. That's the thing. That's what we all needed here. What are your memories of making this episode, if any? I know you've done hundreds.
Hank Azaria
Yeah, it's sort of it's way in the rearview. It's very young. Was the first episode where I really got to be featured in the show, so I was very excited, and, Oh, we got to, my main memory is they actually flew us to Boston to record with Aerosmith when they. Because they were the bar band in that episode.
And amazingly enough, I don't even realize how on theme this was, Steven Tyler, I was very recently sober then. And we're sharing a lot about what that was like, and I'm like 23, 24 and I'm talking to Steve. I'm freaking out. You know, I'm like, oh my God, it's Steven Tyler. And he's sharing all you know about the oversharing.
You know, I didn't that believe me, I didn't ask. So Steve, I hear you just got sober. What was that like for you? He's like, oh yeah, no. No more drugs, no more drinking. And I was a sex addict, too. I'm like, isn't that that's the definition of a rock star? I thought that was the job description. But yeah, that's what mostly stands out about that episode.
Matt Whyte
Well, because he, I'd read that I think they had asked that a joke be changed from free beer to free pickled eggs.
Hank Azaria
Oh, I think you're right. I think you're right.
Matt Whyte
So they were like, really?
Hank Azaria
Yeah. He was very all about, he was very grateful. He was really kind of full of joy and love and very happy to be alive. And I was really struck by that.
Matt Whyte
So you were not sober yet at this point? No.
Hank Azaria
I was years from discovering I even should be. Okay. It was amazing. What, what what, you know, a precursor to the to my life was going to be that conversation.
Matt Whyte
Well, because when you and I first met, you said if I hadn't become Moe the bartender, I would have become Hank the bartender.
Hank Azaria
Well, I was a bartender, okay. And, so, yeah, that's my little joke about how I didn't get The Simpsons. I probably still be one. Yeah. Bartender.
Matt Whyte
Yeah. So when did you get sober?
Hank Azaria
Well, not till later. Not till. I mean, I'm. I just turned 60. I got sober when I was 42. 18 years ago. I went into recovery. About seven years before that, though, for for an Al-Anon, for codependence, for families and friends of addicts and alcoholics. Alcoholics. That was my first experience because I had so much of that around me and some very close people.
And and then my the short story is that, I was such a caretaker, you know, alcoholism, we call it, you take on the characteristics of the disease without actually, drinking a lot. And, so in that early recovery, it was all about. Well, what do you like? What's your. If you're not taking care of somebody else, what would you like to do?
What what what's. And one of the things I realized I really like do was drink and and so at first I really did. And at first it was kind of healthy for me to go and have my own good time. And then that got away from me. And seven years later, I had a hard time stopping and I went into AA.
Matt Whyte
So, Kevin, you're you're kind of stand out in your field because you've done a lot of research on not just, well, specifically on drinking alcohol and recovery from it in social context. So if you could please tell the audience a little bit more about that.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Sure. So the the work that we do in my lab, I think that's very relevant to what Hank was talking about, is we study brain systems that are involved in triggering an initial emotional response. It could be in the case of someone who's alcohol dependent, just seeing a beer ad or walking by a bar, or you're at a party and you see people drinking, and in clinical circles, they talk about something called cue induced craving, where it can just trigger this quick response, like, I kind of want to go and do that.
It doesn't necessarily have to mean you feel good about it, but it's that sense of craving. Like if you're a cigaret smoker, you can feel it in your fingers. People will describe, but then we study not just how that response gets triggered, but then how you can regulate it, how you can change and modify that response in some ways, either on your own kind of what we call that self-regulation or with other people.
We call that social regulation where they help you just their presence or the things they say, the things they do help you change your emotional response in some way. And maybe most relevant to what we're talking about, we did, the first brain imaging study of, somebody who was substance a group of people who were substance dependent.
There were smokers, getting their craving for cigarets triggered and then trying to regulate it. And the cartoon version of it is shown there on the screen on, I guess it's your left hand side, right? It's like parts of the evolutionarily newest and and kind of biggest and usually biggest in us part of the brain, the frontal lobe parts of that are involved in like reminding yourself what's negative about smoking, the consequences of it, the reasons you have to stop and that ends up turning off or influencing, turning down kind of evolutionarily old subcortical parts of your brain that trigger the initial craving.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
And that that was kind of like, the ship that launched a thousand other ships lots. We've done subsequent work on that. People have done it in the context of alcohol cue induced craving for alcohol. But maybe that answers your question.
Matt Whyte
Well, so when when you like, we're looking at these regions in the brain. And is that just they light up. You measure with like what increased blood flow is that.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Yeah. So if you guys have ever had an MRI scan, they put you in this big what looks like plastic box on a bed that slides in there. If you end up with, like, a black and white picture of what it looks like inside your head, that's a structural image. It's the structure of your brain. When we're doing this stuff, we're looking at kind of activity.
So, when you see a picture of alcohol, what parts of your brain are more active? And we measure blood flow. Yeah. So it's it's an indirect measure of the brain being active.
Matt Whyte
So can you tell us more about the right hand image there about social regulation.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Yeah. So social regulation is something we do all the time. You know, when we talk to friends or having trouble when your therapist talks to you, they're the regulator and you're the express are of emotion. Parents do this with their kids all the time. At least up to a certain age. They let you, and the idea is the figure on the the left, the blue is kind of using their frontal lobe to interpret and understand the person and greens emotional responses, which are kind of the brain systems that are symbolized by the little red circle and the things they say, the things they do, even just their simple presence, can
end up changing the way in which that person's emotion systems respond. And this is like a cartoon version of it. And then the brain regions below are also for another piece of it that's really specific to the social context. There's a whole system in the brain for understanding thoughts and feelings. Like any time you say to yourself, oh God, I feel like crap about that, or I feel like it's that person made an off color joke and I'm so embarrassed now and so on, just the language, retrieving that language.
It's so important to us. There's a whole system in the brain that seems to be really important for that. And like the one brain structure that's unusually big in us, Homo sapiens sapiens and every other primate is right here, and it's part of that system. Right. And it's the system we use, like kids use it to understand the first time, the perspectives of other people and so on.
So when you're trying to understand somebody else and help them, that brain system is really, really important.
Matt Whyte
Did you tell me when we first spoke that the size of our brains corresponds to the size of the social group that we exist within?
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
So there's a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar who first put this idea forward that, there's something called the social intelligence hypothesis that the driver of us being this unusually smart and creative and flexible species that made us this crazy dominant organism on this planet, was really the advantage we get by being social. Like by working in groups, we can do so many things we can't do otherwise, and that we needed to be really smart in order to understand each other and all our emotional and social complexities to negotiate.
But I think really importantly, and sometimes it's underappreciated to emotionally support one another is another piece of it. And so his idea was that you can chart brain size across primate species, across the size of like the largest group that you tend to be a part of. And there's a sort of linear relationship that he initially chart it out between like size of your cortex, which is like the outer surface of the brain.
It's like one imagine you took like a piece of paper and crumpled it up. And like the little bumps, the little ridges are what you see in a brain diagram, like the surface of your brain. The cortex just means bark in Greek. It's like one continuous sheet crumpled up to fit inside your skull.
Matt Whyte
That about the bark again?
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
The Greeks named a lot of brain structures, right? And they're just named for stuff in the world. It looked like to them. And so cortex means bark. Oh, because it looked like the bark of a tree to the Greeks.
Hank Azaria
So I was wondering when we were chatting a bit backstage, I was wondering, so the evolutionary advantage it was, it was a huge advantage to be empathetic, relate to each other, connect with each other emotionally and otherwise, for sure.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if you're trying to work together as a team to accomplish something like agriculture early on, would that have been possible if people didn't work together in groups? Just the survival advantage. Some people draw an analogy, like with early human groups, early primate groups, and just like, imagine like some species of, I don't know, wildebeest or something on a savanna somewhere where you made note.
If you watch them, if you watch, like one of these Richard Attenborough series, you'll see they're all standing there together in a group grazing, but there's always one up with their head up, looking around, and everybody else gets a chance to eat while one person watches and they take turns. So there's just a simple advantage of being in a group, right?
One you don't. You get to eat or somebody else looks out for the predator. And so the idea is like that's built into many species from the get go. So there's just this sense of like, load sharing, like we were talking backstage about one of the reasons it's better to probably see horror movies in a theater than at home by yourself is,
My daughter wants me to go take her to see the saw movie that's coming out, so we're going to see it in the theater. It's a little bit less scary, right? Like there's actually. But people have done studies of this, like, you measure physiological responses and how scared people are, and it's like the load is shared.
Like you can see other people like, we're okay, right? This isn't going to happen to us.
Matt Whyte
And what was that study? People hold hands.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Oh yeah. That's a that's another study in this domain. A fellow named Jim Cohen at the University of Virginia, he first did these studies, just showing that if you're in physical pain, they can give you, like, a little thing on your arm that heats up and feels like you just spilled your Starbucks on your hand and it's burning hot.
You just heat this up on somebody's arm. You can show or you can, like, give him a little electric shock. Yes. These things happen in psychology studies. If you're just holding the hand of your relationship partner, it's physically less painful. Other studies, like Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA, has done studies where you just see pictures of your relationship partner and just seeing that can down regulate your experience of physical pain.
Hank Azaria
In their rooms of recovery, sometimes the, you know, the homespun way we say it is, alcohol in the alcohol is is a bully that I, I can't beat up alone. And you literally need you need you need folks. But if you're together, you can take him the bully and that I definitely whether it's codependency or drug addiction or alcoholism or or food or cigaret, you name it.
And yes, I've, I've qualified for all these programs or have at one time in my life.
Matt Whyte
Don't they say that you're not a real New Yorker until you're in multiple 12 step programs?
Hank Azaria
It was. I mean, I first went in LA, so that shoots that theory down. But yeah, I mean, I have found it's really true if I can just, you know, I have a sponsor today we're sharing, you know, the fifth step, as you share, as we say, in the language of the program, do you share with God or higher power yourself and another human being?
Stuff? You're sure no one would ever like you if they heard, the stuff that gives you the deepest shame and, and actually the just the process of sharing that. It's amazing watching people to. Something's lifted. You know, it certainly was true of me.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
And can you talk a little bit about when you first started? We touched on this a little bit backstage, what the experience of not being able to turn to alcohol in the ways that you did what that was like.
Hank Azaria
It was misery. You know, that one of the homespun things we say is if you want to find out why you drank, stopped drinking, and, all of a sudden, all these feelings that I was, you know, alcoholism is an attempt at a solution. It's not the problem itself. It's it's medicating, literally. And it works for quite a while for me and for most people.
And then it becomes its own problem, physically and and otherwise. So you have to stop. You had some version of a bottom which you hope is in somebody else's death or your own, or something so horrible that maybe your life can't come back from it, and you have to stop and you're convinced you have to stop. And then there's, it was described to me as a period of grieving all of a sudden, all these feelings that I was keeping at bay for years and years and years, my whole life came up and out.
And, it was described to me that grieving is a physical process. It takes about 9 to 12 months. You have to, like, be willing to live through that year, at least that year, and not go back to the thing that numbed it and sort of hit the reset button on starting over again, because that's the way it kind of goes.
Or if it's a toxic relationship you're in, not go back into that or whatever your drug of choice is or was.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Did you feel like you were grieving the loss of the self you were that could use that as this way of dealing and regulating? Or what? What exactly were you grieving? The loss of.
Hank Azaria
A lot of different things. Some of it was trauma. Some of it was just bad experiences I had as a kid and a teenager, or adult, my deepest bottom was really my divorce. It was my my bottom alcoholism. Bottom was no picnic at all. I don't mean to downplay it. I had a more profound emotional, I don't collapse is the right word, but real terrible time.
I, when my marriage ended and that what I was, I was grieving the loss of that relationship. But I really was grieving the loss of my father that I had never, dealt with. And he wasn't he hadn't passed away. We just were, disconnected. And I experienced that at such a young age. And couldn't it was buried so deep that I, it didn't come up and out until I stopped numbing myself and and just realizing it.
What? I mean, it was progress, but it didn't make it any less painful. For a year.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
And when you were in AA and you had a sponsor, we talked backstage a bit about that might not have been effective if you weren't talking to people who had gone through this themselves. Can you say a bit about that?
Hank Azaria
Definitely. Would not I don't know what it is about. It's somebody just understanding, being empathetic, not just, you know, oh, I'm so sorry that, you know, or oh, well, you know, cheer up or whatever version of that you get from folks, which is well intended. But sort of makes you feel lonelier. But, you know. No, I that happened to me.
Yeah, I know what that feels like. And there's no it's like it's going to suck for a while, but I'm here for you. I can receive folks received it from me. I made it through. That was mostly it. I'd sit there in those rooms really freaking out and miserable. And you hear stories that are worse than yours.
Worse? Like, oh, shit. But this guy's, like, smiling and okay, I'm like, how the how did you do that? And I would that, you know and the and like this way we just would tell each other what it was like and sit there with each other.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
You know, from like the, the scientific perspective that we often have in the lab when you think about ways in which other people's, thoughts and their feelings communicated to you in a way that makes you feel like your burdens are lifted. And, you know, part of it is examples, you know, role models of people who have gone through the struggles you've been through and survived and come out the other side, and they can offer you that kind of perspective that you can sit with and tolerate the pain that you're going through.
Like, part of that depends on whether you think your experience is similar to theirs or not.
Hank Azaria
That's how you find a sponsor in those rooms. You wait to hear something that sounds like your story. Go to that person and say, Will you sponsor me through this? And our sponsor means is you read through the steps together and you just share about how that's hitting you, and you just talk about your life based on how can I maybe bear some of this stuff if I'm not, you know, dousing myself with drugs or alcohol or whatever else?
Matt Whyte
Kevin, how would you how would you navigate studying people who are in an anonymous recovery program? I'm just I'm just curious. And this is kind of a it's an it's an evolving thing about, you know, because one of the traditions of AA was that, you know, anonymity was was sacred, you know, but I'm curious because now that we're studying these things, how would you go about that?
Like in official capacity representing Columbia University?
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
I mean, just from a pragmatic perspective. You know, we don't need to get into the nuts and bolts weeds of that kind of thing, but you you'd have to be in contact with people who are in one of these groups and anonymity. Does it when you're doing science, it doesn't mean you never meet them or know their name.
It just means the way that you record their data never includes their name along with what you learn about them. In their experience. Any measure you take of their emotions, their feelings, their thoughts, you might have them like report on their phone like give them little reminders of like, remember when if you have a craving for alcohol today, this is what we want you to do.
Scientists like me, we collaborate with some folks, at Columbia medical school that study alcohol dependance, where you do studies that give them a little smartphone pushers, reminders of things that they need to do in their daily life. And then you try to measure what their outcomes are, what their trajectories are. You can give them you can tie those reminders to geographic locations.
Right? So if someone is near a bar or a liquor store, those locations are in the app on their phone and it gives them reminders or even alerts a sponsor and says, hey, this person's near this place. They're near most.
Hank Azaria
Yeah.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Don't go in.
Hank Azaria
I hope they don't actually do that.
Matt Whyte
Hank, I'm curious because I mean, I've revealed on a number of these episodes that I'm in recovery and sober, and one of the traditions is to maintain anonymity at the level of press, radio and films. How do you navigate that as a public figure?
Hank Azaria
Something I've given a lot of thought to because it was years of recovery before, and I was asked a lot to do things like this, or even just speak publicly in a non recorded way. And I would say no, because of that tradition. There are good reasons for it. That tradition, the main reason I, as it was always explained to me, was that,
A lot of folks would get sober, in AA. There's lots of ways to get sober, by the way. Not just AA, but, and then they would go public out of gratefulness and well-intentioned. Oh, I got sober and a I'm so grateful. And then two weeks later, be publicly, you know, wasted and that great advertisement for AA and sobriety there.
And that was sort of the main reason and a lot of it's built to around there should be no leadership. There should be no it's a, it's a group of fellows. Everyone's equal. There should be no public face of it or spokesperson for it. That's very, very important. Eventually, though, I felt especially in the modern era, we live in social media and instant information.
I personally felt that the, the benefits of, of, speaking publicly about there's no shame in having this problem and seeking help and connecting with people over it outweighs, any of those potential downsides. I also, I went through, I had a public controversy. I was in the middle of, over the character of Apu on The Simpsons.
And as I was asked more and more to speak about it publicly and why I made the decision to stop doing The Voice, I couldn't leave out of it my recovery journey because it had a lot to do with it. A person who, as someone who, part of, recovery is you look at your own part in things and take accountability and try to make amends.
Which is how I felt about, it's this is a whole nother night and different podcast and topic. I mean, open a can of worms, but suffice to say that there was no way to speak about that, about that journey of empathy. And where that led, without referring to my own journey of recovery. So I that.
Matt Whyte
Thank you. One thing that the thing that, you told me, Kevin, that I found very fascinating is the concept that you studied, that you have studied acceptance because acceptance, Hank, and I can attest, is probably the most central principle in recovery. Arguably, maybe there are others, but this is, I'd say, you know, the Serenity Prayer is part of the zeitgeist now, but it, the key pieces, I can't remember it.
Hank Azaria
You're forgetting the Serenity prayer.
Matt Whyte
Grammy's trying to accept the things I cannot change.
Hank Azaria
The courage to change, the things I.
Matt Whyte
Accept, the things I cannot change.
Hank Azaria
So thank you.
Matt Whyte
So what I found fascinating, and I, and I may be getting this wrong, but you said that acceptance happens somewhere else in the brain than a lot of the other executive function. Is that right?
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Yeah. Yeah. Basically. So this this slide and the one after it refer to a study we did a few years ago. We just take in the idea of acceptance for us wasn't coming directly from the AA context. It was coming from kind of Buddhist psychology and Buddhist traditions. And the former.
Hank Azaria
Graduate, I think is kind of the same thing. Yeah. We talked.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
About that. Yeah. Yeah. They I mean, there's a lot of wisdom that's been around for thousands of years. But the basic idea of acceptance is, something bad might happen that makes you upset. And the Buddhist talked about that is the first arrow that causes an initial injury. But then there's a second arrow, which is a wound that you cause yourself where you might be sad about something, but now you're angry because you're sad, and then you're afraid of what the anger will do because you're sad and you've turned.
You've made an emotional mountain out of what was a little molehill and the idea of acceptance and their whole, like, kinds of therapy built around that. So we we drew some of our way of doing this from something called acceptance and commitment therapy, which is really one of the most effective tools for people of a chronic condition. Could be chronic pain, could be something that doesn't ever go away, like you're always in recovery, right?
Where you just learn to accept and allow the fact that there are aspects of yourself and feelings cravings. In this case, it's experiences of pain or disgust that you might have, but you allow them. You like. You bend like a reed in the wind. It's bad weather that goes past you, but it doesn't define you. And you can observe it, be distant from it, and accept that it exists.
Yeah.
Hank Azaria
I have a personal story that relates that as I was, you know, getting over my marriage, I was told 6 to 9, you know, 9 to 12 months of grieving. And I was starting to feel better. And as about ten months into that, I was feeling pretty good. Been many days since I had felt bad or thought about that relationship.
And I woke up one morning in misery. Just, I don't know what it was I just with was missing my ex-wife and and just feeling really bad. Really, really bad. And, it freaked me out. I thought I should have been past that point at that point. And, I called my sponsor and said, Roger, I don't understand.
Why am I what is this? Why am I back here? And I remember him saying, you know, why are you. It's bad enough what you're feeling. Why are you attacking yourself for feeling it? He just said, feel it. It's a storm that'll pass. And, it just because it feels bad, that's all it is. It's just that's. And that's plenty for today.
Just feel it. And sure enough, by around the middle of the afternoon, I was like, oh yeah, that just where is that? I was really about to spin out. I never forgot that. And I passed it on to many other sponsors, since that's.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
A great example of this. In in the brain imaging context, what we found was when you train people just briefly to do this, people can grasp the idea of it pretty quickly. And then you show them either like really nasty images, kinds of things you like, want to avert your eyes? And there's a brain structure called the amygdala just means almond in Greek.
That image is as if you took like you just took a little slice drop off the front of my head and are kind of looking in. It's like, right about here. You're kind of looking in through the front. That brain structure turns out to be really important for detecting things that are potential threats out in the world and signaling like, pay attention.
What is that? The alert and that brain system we know will respond when you see these kind of nasty images. But when you're accepting and allowing the fact that they're there, you can see the response, it's diminished. And then in another part of the experiment, we put this like really hot thing on your forearm that's like, that feels like that hot cup of coffee, spill your Starbucks on your arm.
And when people are just like, I'm going to accept and allow the fact this is pain, it will come and it will go and I'll be fine. You can see the response. And that's a brain structure. Not have to worry about what the brain structures are. There's a whole like they call it the pain matrix, a whole set of brain regions.
When you're in physical pain, they're active activity that goes down a lot. But the striking thing was, in contrast, other ways of regulating your emotion, like in cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy, all these kind of very Western means of training people to logically reanalyze something, you know, you're having this feeling logically analyze whether there's really a basis for you to feel that you're over interpreting this.
It's like the wrong interpretation. That stuff involves all this frontal activity up here, turning off parts of your brain that trigger emotion for this. Nothing here, no frontal lobe involvement at all. And believe me, we look for it. We sat on these results for a while, thinking we did something wrong. Like it's got to be there. Control by definition.
Is this stuff modulating something else? It's like the conductor of the orchestra telling the emotional instruments stop playing so loud, but we didn't see it. And Hetty Kober, the first author of this paper, who herself is a Buddhist, always said, like, that's what Buddha would say is like, yeah, you're just not it's not the second arrow. It's like, okay, things feel bad.
But maybe what we see in a lot of our brain imaging studies of emotional response is the amplification on top of a what a response that otherwise would have been smaller.
Hank Azaria
We have another thing in programing. You got to feel it to heal it. And I think we talked about this backstage and what you know. Yeah. You want to find out why you drink drinks. Stop drinking. Sure. A lot of pain came up, but it wasn't, the pain itself that made me want to drink. It was the belief that I had the core belief that this pain was never going to end.
So there was really no point in so feeling. It was not a good idea. I had to avoid feeling it in whatever way I could, as opposed to I didn't have belief that it would pass, you know, and I think almost every newcomer to the rooms has that belief.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Yeah. You're not alone in that, you know, certainly in that context. But I think one of the weird things about feeling terrified or any strong negative about feeling really ashamed or embarrassed about something is there's this weird thing negative emotions do to us, and they make us feel like that feeling will never go away. It's here, it's not going to go away, and there's nothing you can do about it.
It can be very disempowering. And like scientists who try to understand where emotions come from, distinguish your initial interpretation of what's happening that triggers that response. So the fear, the anxiety. And then a second interpretation, which is can I cope with it? And it's that coping thing. If it's if the answer there is, I can't do it on my own, it can create all these other things.
You seek some other solution. And so psychologists will call it a maladaptive strategy. Alcohol, any substance use, all kinds of addictions take root when there isn't something else available. And a lot like what people are doing when you see a therapist or like when we were talking backstage, one tool when you aren't able to do it yourself is just be with other people who can help you do it until you can get there yourself.
And frankly, like I remember being a parent when our kids were really little, it's a little dangerous because they're sitting in the front row listening to everything I say very closely. You had this sense, like, kids come into the world not having a fully developed frontal lobe or sense of they don't know yet. Can they trust the things when they're upset?
It's going to get better. And like, one of the big jobs as a parent is when they're upset to be there for them. So they learn things get better, but they're also learning tacitly. They get better with other people present who care about you. And that's so important. There's a whole theory called attachment theory that's all about that.
It's all about learning early on that there's this they call it the secure base. It's like people that have this close relationship. Just them being there makes me feel better because it's like it's a safety signal. It's like, hey, they're here. It can't be so bad.
Hank Azaria
I, noticed in that first year my all my recoveries were about somebody just sitting with me, and that's what we say. One day at a time, because the idea of, like, I'll never drink again or I'll going to endure this pain for longer than today is just so kind of horrifying and panic inducing. That would just kind of convinces you that you just have to get through today.
Just don't drink today. Just feel this today. And I I'd say most of what I do is sponsor is just convince them it's not going to be tomorrow, that this feels better, but it will if you stay with it eventually. And I'm a living example, and my sponsor was a living example to me, and it's just yet convincing folks to stay with it long enough before you turn to the ballot.
That adaptive choice, which I understand wanting to turn to. You really believe that there's just no way out.
Matt Whyte
Yeah. So we are we are at the point where we open it up to the audience for questions. And many have been submitted. You just mentioned, Kevin, the amygdala, which and you mentioned anxiety, right? That's where that happens. Someone wants to know what is most his lax take on anxiety.
Hank Azaria
I'm glad we're starting off with a question here. Look, I aspire to anxiety. I live in like the depths of are horrified. Like, well, you know, when you like the worst, scare you ever jump scare in a horror movie? Yeah, I lived there all the time, so I aspire to just, like, a nice baseline of anxiety.
That would be like heaven for me.
Matt Whyte
Okay. That's fair.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Wait. Can I add something to that? I don't not there's no way to top that. But you're just reminding me. I had an advisor in grad school who said happiness is the absence of anxiety.
Matt Whyte
One more time.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Happiness is the absence of anxiety. I always thought that was a pretty sad life that he led, because, But there's something to that. There is something to that.
Hank Azaria
We we call it the priceless gift of serenity in recovery. I kind of think of it that way. And also, there was like six months into my alcohol recovery work, which just was wildly boring. You know, I didn't really feel like drinking anymore, but I'm like, this is just I got very nihilistic, like, what's the point of any of this?
I'm I'm really boring now. I'm bored with everyone and everything and like, why even do this? And I got close to me. I really got thought about going back to drinking. Not to relieve misery, but just like I gotta mix this up, this is just. And then I really was. I shared it with my sponsor. Like, I don't know, this seems pointless to me and, just feels nothing.
And I started thinking about all the damage that I would be doing if I were still drinking all the negative. I started thinking in terms of all the horrible shit I wasn't doing and not the great stuff I, I could be doing. And I started realizing, oh my, I I'll take, I'll take the boring.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
That's actually exactly what we had people do in our first study of trying to get people to regulate craving. It was think about all the negative stuff that will happen if you do it. But for that was like smokers. And then people have subsequently done it with alcohol and so on. It's it's a powerful block.
Hank Azaria
And I got far enough in my alcoholism to really come very close to a lot of those bad things, you know? Yeah, I was fortunate I didn't go any further.
Matt Whyte
Well, someone wants to know. Your recovery story puts Brockmire in a whole new light for me. Was that hard to do with much?
Hank Azaria
Is there a question in the air for Jim Brockmire? What's the story? Jim Brockmire is a baseball announcer character I played who, had a nervous breakdown on the air, drank, drank a lot, drugged a lot. Much too much. Walked in on his wife having an affair, got blackout drunk on the air and said things like, But given the count on the baseball game, said, like, sorry, folks just walked in on my wife.
With I don't know if it kids know this, but it's called a strap on. And she was ramming my neighbor, Bob Greenwald. And I do mean right in the ass as Johnson swings and misses at a breaking ball. Oh, and one that's Jim Brockmire. What is there a question for Brockmire?
Matt Whyte
I think the question is for Hank Azaria. Was that hard to do?
Hank Azaria
No. Well, I played I played an alcoholic drug addict in that. And was always drunk drinking and drugging on the show. And I really loved it. It was really fun to, like, revisit. It was like watching a horror movie. It was a.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Cathartic. Yes.
Hank Azaria
It was like the fun of, you know, watching your play out. But, you know, thank God I'm not really to getting my head chopped off. Bye bye bye, Freddy Krueger and I, some of it, I realized sitting there and I got, just, you know, a drink and iced tea, but as whiskey and I kind of got, kind of drunk just from the ritual, like the muscle memory of sitting at a bar and knocking them back, and it was kind of fun.
Yeah.
Matt Whyte
Don't they call that a free lapse, I guess? Yeah.
Hank Azaria
Yeah. When you have that dream and you wake up and you're like, oh. And like, oh, well, I just got drunk for free without any real consequence. Yeah, yeah.
Matt Whyte
What were you going to say, Kevin?
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
I just going to say the brain learns to associate all the physical stuff that you did with the feeling of having the alcohol. So if you do something that just resembles it, it's going to cue that stuff up. It's like when you drink a diet beverage and you still have a spike of insulin. Like they're not good for diabetics to have because your brain has come to associate the sweet taste with the sugar in your system.
And in anticipation of the sugar being in your bloodstream, you drink the sweet drink, the insulin gets released.
Hank Azaria
I mean, actor that's a that's kind of a key to acting. Well, yeah. You know, I, I, I did it. I won't go into the long story, but I started smiling a lot more because I sort of needed to, because I was very grumpy about a certain thing. And I decided just to smile. And I came out of program, kind of worked with my sponsor and, you know, my body.
I realized my body doesn't know the difference between a fake smile and a real one. I started actually experiencing more happiness and joy after a while. And conversely, like I did a Holocaust drama about, about, oh, 25 years ago and about a weekend. And I'm not a method actor. I go very outside and I do voices and sort of character things, and I don't really like, try to relive stuff like some people do.
But lo and behold, after a week of shooting this, I was getting very depressed. I was like, what's, what's wrong with me? I was like, well, I'm sort of reenacting the Holocaust every day. That's, you know, not a, not a pick me up. And so I started having to watch comedies at the end of every day to kind of like cleanse my emotional palate.
And then it worked. But yeah. So pretending to drink was was fun.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
By the way, there's some evidence that if you give people Botox injections, their emotions get a little weaker.
Hank Azaria
Oh from not having any expression.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Yeah. For not being able to have the facial expression. There's this old idea from, William James, psychologist called the facial feedback hypothesis. That part of the emotional response is reading out kind of how your body's responding, which happens before you become conscious of even what you're feeling. It turns out you have people pose, facial expressions. They'll start to feel the emotion that goes along with it.
But then by extension, if you give them Botox injections, we did this. We actually did a study like this. Their emotions get just a little bit weaker, not a ton, but just a little bit weaker actually.
Matt Whyte
Mr.. The Botox too. Sorry. Did you administer the Botox?
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
No. No, we recruited people from a clinic. Oh, I got it. There's a whole backstory to this. You know, Martin Short, I think he used to do a character that was a Botox doctor on SNL. It was the actual guy. The guy in real life that we went to his clinic. We got his patients.
Hank Azaria
Oh, wow.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
There's a sad story there if you Google it. But, you know.
Matt Whyte
It's not Sizemore, is it.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Pardon.
Matt Whyte
This is more the guy that's on the subway ads doctors is more.
Hank Azaria
You know I mean most like dealing.
Matt Whyte
With someone wants to know what's the origin of of Moses lax last name are you do you do you know.
Hank Azaria
It's Polish. And I think like most of the names on The Simpsons, it's some. Right is, you know, childhood friend. Yeah. Usually that's that's the last name.
Matt Whyte
Okay. Someone wanted to know. As society moves more online, do you believe the human species is forgetting the basic things that makes us human? Empathy and social interaction with others?
Hank Azaria
I think that was for you.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
So I'm not a Luddite. I'm not anti-technology at all. And I don't think it is. I think it's I think the very ubiquity and popularity of social media is a testament to how social we are as a species. It's just another forum, another mode of expression it does have. It's like lower dimensional like texts. You don't get the nonverbals, the tone of voice and all that stuff.
And that I think in the long run might be a problem. Like you need to learn in direct interaction with other people how to interpret what's going on and how to have conversations and have close relationships with people. And that can't be done just on text.
Matt Whyte
I think we're correcting for that with the exclamation points. The over.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
And the emojis for sure speak volumes.
Matt Whyte
Okay. Introvert extrovert development. How does this occur in the brain? Do you have an answer for that?
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
No, I do not.
Matt Whyte
Okay.
Hank Azaria
Oddly, Comic Book Guy does say.
Matt Whyte
Fill us in.
Hank Azaria
And no, I really don't. That's that's very interesting though.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
It is. I don't I don't mean to be flip about that, but I think personality is something that's complex enough that it wouldn't just boil down to like a brain system or something like that. It would be about like a complex set of things you've learned over time. It turns out there's probably some genetic predisposition to be more of an introvert or an extrovert.
But it's and it these effects kind of appear pretty early, like this developmental psychologist who look for kids that sort of temperamentally look a little more inhibited to look for, like physical characteristics and genetic markers for these kind of things. There is some evidence that there's an early appearing component that kind of snowballs over time.
Matt Whyte
Our kids are better at mindful acceptance than adults because they don't have a fully developed frontal lobe that creates the second arrow.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Which is that's a can.
Hank Azaria
You kind of just say that they do, then you just.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
Well, that's really wow. That's a really interesting question. I'm not I don't know, kids. Their frontal lobe is developing like your frontal lobe is continuing to develop structurally all the way up into your early 30s. And, certainly through your 20s. You know, the funny thing about acceptance is it involves a kind of meta awareness of yourself.
And we've done other stuff with it, actually, with college students, that's coupled with like reminders and measures of their alcohol consumption and daily life. With Emily Falck and a bunch of other people in aggressive Pennsylvania, where, it's not, you know, the frontal. It's not the same as the other things in that sense, being frontal, it's not like effortful trying to rethink and rejigger, response, but there is some kind of meta, ability that I don't think kids might have yet, but I don't know.
That's a really tricky question. We should study that.
Matt Whyte
Okay. We got let's we got time for one more.
Dr. Kevin Ochsner
I bet it might depend if there's someone there to help them model the acceptance. There's actually this really interesting phenomenon called, like, maternal presence that for a lot of mammalian species, if mom is there, it's kind of a signal and mom is not looking afraid. It's a signal that things are okay. And they'll like, explore environments that they would otherwise be fearful in.
And in fact, there's like this phenomenon, this a tool like a this method called fear conditioning where you, you learn to associate like a bad outcome with like a light or a tone, like it's classic. You know, we have Skinner, if you know who that is. It turns out in like, rats and even in people, you kind of can't fear condition when mom is there.
Hank Azaria
They haven't met my mom.
I be careful with that thing. You get it? Break your neck.
Okay. The t shirt made that said that. No, really. I mean, you know, we talked about that back stage. One of the things that my wife and I learned early on, the good advice we got as parents was, you know, the little one falls in and, you know, you know, falls down in the playground. They immediately look at you as you said, they look they look to mom or dad and, you don't want to go, oh my God, oh my God.
Hank Azaria
And you also don't want to go. You're fine. You're fine. Because, you know, let's, you know, just let's see how they are. You know, we were advised to say, I saw that you fell. How's that? How's it going? You know, and it was amazing to watch because sometimes he he was actually genuinely hurt. So you don't want to say no, no, no, no, you're fine.
Walk it off and sometimes he was actually fine. And I think, I do want to say one thing about acceptance from a program standpoint, because this blew my mind in early recovery. My sponsor just said to me really simply because I was really having a hard time with it. Like, isn't that acceptance? I mean, that means I'm supposed to, like, condone all the awful shit going on it personally and in the world is like, no, no, accepting doesn't mean liking at all.
It just means you are in acceptance of what is and including your own feelings about it. That's all that means. That really blew my mind. Yeah.
Matt Whyte
Okay. We've got time for one more question. What Simpsons characters are Hank's favorites? Both the ones that he plays as well as the others.
Hank Azaria
Moe is the closest to my heart. I there's other characters I really, I love, I really love Kent Brockman. I love the, newscaster. I just Harry Shearer, to me is a genius. And, the way he can watching Harry do that. Harry never, we all don't have to memorize lines because it's voice over, so we just read it.
But Harry, it's often called read like it's the first time he's laying eyes on it, and it just comes out of them perfectly on the first take in, like, next. And how he can get that newscaster rhythm just so naturally, I just find it endlessly, amusing. I also love, I love Martin, you know, Oh, not Martin.
Excuse me, I love Ralph Reagan. Make son Ralph.
Matt Whyte
Oh, yeah.
Hank Azaria
Ralph is the hardest, character to write, the writers say, because he's so stupid that everything you have to say has to be really brief and really comically stupid. So it's like writing poetry, almost. It's like writing comedic haiku. You know, it's really hard to write. Ralph, I love.
Matt Whyte
I saw an Instagram post you put up resurrecting Chief Wiggum, especially. And I thought about this when I was watching the debate because there was he.
Hank Azaria
When he took the call about people eating cats and dogs in Springfield. Yeah. That was yeah, that went viral. It's the kids like to say, you know.
Matt Whyte
Did that. How did that first come on your radar that that had happened?
Hank Azaria
I have a social media person, as we do in Hollywood. And they they said, look at this Jon Stewart clip. He, he, he was talking about that Trump talking about that, that Haitian folks eating cats and dogs in Springfield. I believe Ohio, by the way. It's it's Springfield in The Simpsons because there's a Matt Groening called it that, Springfield because there's a Springfield that every state in the Union.
That's why he he did that. And, so they said he referenced, Springfield. Can you think of something? You know, I'm sure you can think of something that ties in The Simpsons. So it it seems natural to have Police Chief Wiggum, receiving a call about people eating cats and dogs. And at the end of it, he asked them, are they good?
As he likes to eat.
Matt Whyte
Well, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Hank Azaria and Doctor Kevin as oh.
You can catch Hank on Broadway this February in the star studded comedy all In. For tickets, please visit All in Broadway.com. Also, be sure to check out Hank's Bruce Springsteen Tribute Band on tour. For dates, please visit easystreetnyc.com for more information about Kevin's work, you can check out his labs website ochsnerscanlab.org. Sing for science is co-produced by Talkhouse and made possible in part by a grant from the Simons Foundation.
Guest accommodations for this event were generously provided by Ace Hotel Brooklyn. Our music is by Panorama. Social media manager is Bailey Constas, digital producer is Keenan Kush, and our location recording engineers were Brian Enright and Justin Anderson. Special thanks to Jamie Pollock, Yadira martinez, Paula Croxton, Kim Milian, Catherine Nimitz, Alyssa mayers, Laura Spann, Mayowa Tomori and Monica Rocha for making today's episode possible.
If you like sing for science the best way you can support us is to give us a review. Tell a friend about the show and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. For more information, please visit sing for singforscience.org and follow us on social media at sing for science. Thanks for listening.