Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Katie sent me a private message on social media, and it goes like this. “Hi Susan. I don't know if you've ever gotten this question before. I've wanted to ask you this for about five or six years now. So here goes. When you are consuming Bright Line Eating® compliant foods that would typically contain sugar or flour, but you're making them without the addictive substances, does the brain have the ability to fill in the blanks? Meaning will the brain create the illusion of flour and sugar and trick the body into higher levels of insulin? I have a very strong auditory and olfactory sense in my neural perceptions, and my body can imagine music and smells that are not there. So, I was wondering if the brain has the ability to imagine the addictive substance while you are Eating a compliant food? Just curious. Thanks in advance.”
Oh, Katie, that is a very good question. You're very astute. That is exactly how it works. The brain not only does that, but it does it all the time in spades. Relentlessly, every day all the time, frequently, and it's even got a name. You can look it up online, you can read tons of examples about it. It's called, “top-down processing.” Basically, in all sensory perception, there's two main forms of processing. Bottom up and top down. Bottom-up processing is what you would typically imagine the brain is doing. It's taking the tiny little bits and bobs of information from very specific neurons. If it's the visual field, for example, and the brain is trying to figure out, Hey, what am I seeing? What am I looking at? It's going to take the image that's projected onto the back of the retina, which is going to be then fed back to primary visual cortex back here in the occipital lobe. There are all these cells that have the ability to perceive this angle or that angle or that angle and all the way down around the hands of a clock, right? Every different angle or different intensities, different colors, and the brain is going to build up an image of what you're looking at from the bottom up, from all of those tiny little perceptions that's bottom-up processing. You would typically imagine that that's how it works.
Similar with the auditory system, right? That the waves coming into the eardrum are vibrating at certain frequencies, and all that gets funneled into the brain. That's like temporary cortex, auditory cortex, and it's going to build up a sense of what you're hearing from the specific wavelengths, and it's going to put it all together into sound. It turns out that if that's all we could do, we wouldn't get very far.
The brain is actually galloping ahead based on what it knows already. Its beliefs, its expectations, its knowledge, and it's projecting all of that onto the perceptions. This is top-down processing. This is saying, “Oh, I know what is happening here. I'm at a rock concert and it's going to be very, very loud, and the drumbeats been going at a certain pace.” It's going to keep going like that. It's going to make all kinds of assumptions and guesses. It's going to fill in the blanks.
Now, you might already be noticing, well, it's not always going to be right then. And yeah, that's exactly true, and this creates all manner of optical illusions and ways that you can trick the brain. If you look at a classic example of reading, you can see the letters, the cat or the words the cat. Here, I'm going to put them on the screen. If you're just listening on the podcast or you're not watching right now, basically it's the words the cat in all caps, but the A and the H in the middle, right? The H in the and the A in cat are identical, meaning they're like two vertical Lines that kind of sort of lean in, but not fully. They look like a ladder really. They're like leaning in, but they're not touching at the top. It's not a great A and it's not a great H. It's good enough. It's halfway between them. But the brain reads this so easily as the cat. It doesn't skip a beat. It's not tricked at all, right? The cat not a problem. And the brain really does fill in the gaps so well that it's exactly how it works.
If you're going to go and eat something, let's say the good old cauliflower pizza, right? Or I dunno, people mashing butternut squash and sweet potato together and putting pumpkin pie spice in it, no sugar, but pumpkin pie spice, and it's pretty close to pumpkin pie as far as the brain is concerned. What's going to happen is that the circumstances around eating that food are going to make the brain fill in the gaps. This is part of the reason why people don't lose weight when they drink diet soda. The brain assumes you're drinking sugar and it gives a response. That is to large degree in line with that. There's a study that showed that over the course of a day, people drinking sugar water or artificially sweetened water, whether it was aspartame or monk fruit or stevia, didn't matter. Ended up releasing the same amount of glucose and the same amount of insulin over the course of a day, whether they were drinking actual soda like sucrose water or non-nutritive sweetened water because the brain will trigger the release of glucose and insulin, right?
The implications of this are huge. I don't know if you've noticed, for example, why don't we have robots doing all of our household chores by now, right? The MIT robotics laboratory in 1960 was promising us robots to do our laundry and our dishes, and we still don't have 'em, right? The best we've got are those Roomba things that bump around in a living room trying to vacuum the floor, right? Maybe they're pretty good by now, but seriously, I could use somebody doing the dishes and the laundry. Why don't we have that? Well, it turns out that a lot of what we do is human beings. When we just enter a room and assess it for the furniture and what we need to move around to get around the kitchen counters and over to the sink, it turns out that it's as much top-down processing as bottom-up processing. If you just have robots that are trying to build up a sense of what's going on in the room and where the objects are constructing those edges and surfaces from the bottom up turns out to be incredibly difficult. We know it's a kitchen. We know to expect counters, we know to expect a trash can. We know to expect chairs, we know to expect these things, and the brain takes some amount of perceptual information and constructs a kitchen largely from top-down information. It turns out that that's really hard to get a computer to do. We're still working on it. They're still working on it. I'm not working on it. Someone's working on it. But yeah, our brains are so good at top-down processing that you can read whole sentences, whole paragraphs. If all you've got are the first and last letters of each word and the middle is gobbledygook, as long as it's the right length, you can keep reading as if the word were there because you're just filling in the blanks. It's kind of stunning how far it can be taken. People in cognitive science have pushed the envelope pretty far, and that's how far you can push it. All you need are the first letter and the last letter of the word and the right length of word, and that's it. You can figure out what the word is, the brain will just figure it out, top-down processing.
What this means for your Bright Line Eating journey is that indeed being extremely careful around foods that are lookalike foods is really prudent, right? I mean, the old timers in Boston who stayed abstinent in their 12-step food addiction program for decades and decades and decades and decades and are still abstinent to this day, abstinent from sugar and flour, weighing and measuring their meals. They used to say things like, if one day they came out with pasta that was made out of broccoli, literally the only ingredient was broccoli, I still wouldn't eat the pasta because I don't eat pasta. That was their sort of thought experiment for where their boundary was. It's yet another example of how not knowing the science, these folks had an intuition for what would work and what wouldn't work, what was prudent and what was not prudent, what was conducive of recovery and what was not. It turns out that gaming the system, as lots of people have been trying to do with diet sodas for a lot of years, it doesn't work. You can't actually game the system. You need to actually eat simple, wholesome, nutritious vegetables, proteins, fruit, grains, whole real food, not mocked up to actually look like some other NMF concoction. The brain is savvy, the brain is savvy, and it will release a flood of chemicals if you try to dupe it into thinking that you're actually eating pizza. If you try to go that route, the brain will release the chemicals and it doesn't work.
I heard; I don't have a citation for this. I don't even remember where I heard it. I've been in 12-step recovery for a long time now, off drugs and alcohol for coming up on 30 years, so, I could have heard this anywhere. I don't remember. In graduate school probably at some point. But what I heard was that heroin addicts had a process for getting their fix. It started with getting some money, then finding their dealer, getting the bundle of heroin, then cooking it up, sucking it up into the needle, and then injecting it into their vein. All of those steps happened with the brain watching, and the brain knew what was happening, right? Like, oh, a fix is coming. Apparently, such intense preparations physiologically were made in the body, in the body as shepherded by the brain to prepare for that fix coming to brace for that fix coming, that if you took that same amount of heroin and just injected it into someone while they were sleeping, it would be enough drug to kill them. Their typical dose of a fix would kill them without the benefit of the brain being able to prepare of like, oh, we've got $40 in our hand. That means something. Start the cavalry of preparations, right? Oh, we've found our dealer. Now we've got the bundle of powder in our hand. Start the preparations. Oh, now we're cooking it up in the spoon, advance the preparations. Without the brain and the body being able to prepare its defenses in that way, the person would die of an overdose from the same exact dose. Take it as you will. That's just hearsay. That's just street talk. I don't know if that's true or not. I believe I used to teach it in my Psych 101 class. I believe there was a reference for that at some point. But don't ask me for it. I can't find it. Now, I've learned a lot of things over the years. I don't know where they all are in terms of the scientific literature, but it's just an illustration that a lot is happening behind the scenes, and absolutely the brain is filling in the gaps.
I explain all this to say in Bright Line Eating, it's not that we're judging people who are making cauliflower pizza and figuring out a way to do it without flour. It's not that there's a judgment about that. It's a scientific reason why that might not be wise depending on your Susceptibility Score right? Now, if you're a six on the Susceptibility Scale™ or a five and you figured out how to maintain your Bright body and cauliflower pizza is a part of your weekly enjoyment on Friday nights with your family, and it's working for you, then it's working for you. That's fine. That's totally great. And if you're a 10 on the Susceptibility Scale and it's working for you, that's fine too. It's just that we're providing you information. I'm providing you knowledge so that if it's not working, meaning if you're eating the cauliflower pizza and you're not free, you're not in your Bright body, you're still struggling with a few pounds. Maybe you're binging on and off, maybe you're having a hard time keeping your Lines squeaky, Bright, maybe. Maybe, maybe, right? If things aren't Bright and shiny in your world of Bright Line Eating and you've been trying to doctor your foods to make them look like “look alike” foods, then this vlog provides you an opportunity. Knowledge is power. That good old saying, when we know better, we can do better. Now you have a sense of why that might not be serving you. So no judgment. Just knowledge and do with it what you will. There's no Bright Line Eating police, but yes indeed, Katie, you're very astute. The brain does fill in the gaps. Absolutely. It's called top-down processing.
Wait, hot off the presses. Oh my gosh. Nadia Briones on the Bright Line Eating team just found the scientific literature. It is true. Pavlovian conditioning is a risk factor of heroin overdose death. You can Google that phrase right there, and the literature will come up. What happens is when people take the heroin in a situation, in a circumstance that's atypical for them, either they're not aware that they're taking it, or it's literally just a different environment, the condition tolerance doesn't kick in, and boom, they can die of a dose. That is their typical dose. Thank you Nadia, for going to find that study for us, and that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
