Mental gravity: Modelling the embodied self on the physical environment

Hello and welcome. It is March 3rd, 2024, at least where I am. And we're here in active guest stream number 73.1 with Lachlan Kent, mental gravity, and I guess all that comes along with it. So thank you for joining, to you for a presentation, and then we'll have some questions from live chat. So thank you and to you. Thanks to you. My name is Lachlan Kent. I'm here in Melbourne. It's Monday morning at 6am. So I work at RMIT at Tech University here where I do very applied practical research into mental health promotion and prevention. And I think one of the major barriers to progress in my field is that we don't have a really solid scientific theory of what constitutes mental health and wellbeing. And by contrast, how to define mental ill health for even the most common conditions like anxiety and depression. So I've been working for a number of years on a theory of mental wellbeing, effectively, based on the foundational and universal experience of gravity to try and get to the root explanation of why positive and negative mental states have a kind of vertical dimension to them. So depression, for example, is a painful downstate. Anxiety is a painful upstate. Well, joy is an upstate as well, but it's pleasant, not painful. And mindfulness or calmness are pleasant downstates. So I think there's kind of explanatory power in those distinctions when we look at how gravity shapes, biology, cognition and phenomenology. So I call it mental gravity, but I don't mean anything mysterious by it. It's just a way of modelling sort of physiological, mental and emotional states on their physical roots. All right, next slide. Thanks, Daniel. Before I start, though, I'd like to acknowledge the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation where I'm presenting from today. And I respectfully acknowledge their elders, past and present. And next slide again. Okay, so today's talk, we're going to go through a few sections. We're going to start with a nice accessible anecdote, a parable. We're going to talk about Barbie, the Barbie film and Barbie's fall. And we're going to give a quick overview of the theory itself and then really focus on one of the key concepts and controversial concepts, I think, for mental gravity, the idea of a centre of mental gravity, and then relate that to active inference, sort of give a summary of where I come from and then take questions. Okay, so let's start with a kind of parable of mental gravity, Barbie's fall in the recent film starring Australian Margot Robbie. So maybe you've seen it, but even if you haven't, it's not a very complex premise for the film. So here we are at the start of the film, Barbie's sort of coasting along in her usual happy mode. So life's good. She has a strong sense of self. And the world is inherently predictable. She's happy. And this is depicted in the film as her floating kind of joyously sort of light and carefree. But, next slide, thanks, Daniel. But then the whole narrative arc of the film revolves around her fall. She starts uniformly positive. But then, there's no spoilers, this is in the trailer, she experiences an identity crisis. So instead of being happy all the time, she starts feeling negative emotions. Something unpredictable happens that causes her to lose her sense of self. And on account of the loss, she experiences kind of an emotional breakdown. She says, this is the lowest I've ever been emotionally and physically. If you could just click once there. And to really nail home the metaphor, when Barbie falls, these are the lyrics of the really beautiful melancholic song by Billie Eilish. It's, I used to float. Now I just fall down. I used to know, but I'm not sure now what I was made for. What was I made for? So it's an existential crisis for her that goes to the kind of core of her being. She's not just sad because she lost something that can be replaced, or even someone that like dear to her, she kind of lost herself. And when people get…