How to Expand Your Consciousness | Dr. Christof Koch

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kristoff Ko. Dr. Kristoff Ko is a neuroscientist, an investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. He is considered one of the great pioneers and luminaries of modern neuroscience. Kristoff's research has spanned how we perceive the world around us, how different states of mind arise and shape our experience of life and most notably consciousness. I joined the field of neuroscience way back in the 1990s and even way back then. Kristoff's name and his work was considered seinal for our understanding of brain and human experience. And over the subsequent 30 years, he has continued to do incredible groundbreaking work. Today we discuss consciousness, what it is, literally at the level of quantifiable brain mechanisms, and how understanding consciousness at that level can help you experience life more richly and allow you to place deeper meaning on everything from a typical morning to grief and loss to your greatest and most aweinspiring moments. Kristoff also explains how our individual experiences and memories place us each into a unique what he calls perception box, which is what shapes your outlook on life and in many cases your quality of life, including your mental and physical health. And he explains how you can change your perception box through what we call neuroplasticity, which is the modification of brain circuits. We also discuss what flow states, psychedelics such as DMT and other psychedelics, meditation, sleep, and dreaming tell you about how your mind works and the nature of consciousness. And we don't just discuss consciousness at the level of individuals. We discuss the collective consciousness of humankind. So, if you're somebody that's interested in the brain and mind, what it means to be human, how to evolve and improve your mind, today's discussion will address all of that. Oh, and we also discuss dogs, cats, Jennifer Aniston, and the meaning of life. So, get ready. This is a very special episode of the Hubberman Lab podcast that I'm certain by time it finishes will have you thinking differently about your life, and dare I say, with a bit more optimism. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Kristoff Ko. Dr. Kristoff Ko, welcome. >> Thank you for having me, Andrew. It's been a pleasure. It's been a more than a decade, 12 years since we last interacted. >> Yeah, I've always enjoyed our interactions. And one of the reasons is that you're always into something super interesting, big, big questions and evolving fast all the time, all at once. So I think most people have heard the word consciousness. They perhaps have pondered consciousness, but at least to my mind, it's not a very well-defined word. So when you talk about wanting to understand consciousness or about a being having consciousness or being in a moment of consciousness versus say a rock which I'm presuming doesn't have consciousness. What are we talking about? And here we could be using biological language, psychological language or philosophical language. Please include all of it. >> Much simpler. Do you hear me? >> Do you hear me? >> Yes. >> Do you see me? >> Yes. The fact that you hear, not that you respond to my sound by moving your hand, the fact that you see, not not the fact that you can navigate around this room, but you actually have a picture in your head. The fact that you love, the fact that you hate, the fact that you dream, that you imagine, that you dread, those are all conscious experience. It's the stuff of life. Literally, if I give you a billion dollars, okay, that even for you is probably a meaningful amount of money. But I say, it certainly is. Okay. But there's a slight, you know, that there is a thing that I'm going to remove all your conscious experiences. So you would still love and hate and drive cars and do everything else you do right now, but there would be no light there. You there wouldn't be any Andrew. >> Would you take that that wager? Well, the difference is between the those two states is consciousness. So without it, you don't exist for yourself. In fact, tonight you're going to go to bed. In particular in the early night early stages of the night you go into non-re delta wave sleep right and you do not exist for yourself if I wake you up I said Andrew Andrew something is happening and I ask you well where did you come from you say I came from nowhere which is different of course later stage in the night right when when you have dreams which is another conscious experience so but when you sleep you do not exist for yourself when you're under anesthesia you do not exist for yourself so you only exist for yourself because you are a conscious So it's in in some sense it's very simple to define >> historically has it been defined as a simple just presence of self and perception of the outside world the way you're describing it. I feel like consciousness has been twisted and turned and um you know weaved into balloon animal form over so many hundreds of years that people tend to argue about consciousness and then they start getting into discussions about free will versus no free will. Why given the simplicity and the clarity of your explanation have people struggled with this definition of consciousness so much? The study of conscious is really a modern phenomenon. It's really Rene Deart. So you know Aristotal and Plato much as they are foundational fathers of philosophy didn't really have a position on the mind on consciousness. That's a that's a modern thing where we have struggled is trying to put it in objective form. So you don't access my consciousness and I don't access your consciousness and this makes it different from anything else that we study different from a black hole from a virus from a brain because all those I can study with what philosophers call third person properties right you can stick them in a magnet you can point a telescope at it we can agree on you know what's the wavelength what's the w mass what's the molecular constituency we can't do that with consciousness I believe you're conscious in fact I ask you how are you feeling today you tell me well I'm a little bit depressed because what happened? Well, so I'm trying to get at your state of consciousness, but ultimately it's always an inference whether it's you or whether it's a baby or whether it's an animal that can't directly talk because language is another way to infer. So that makes it more difficult. And the other part is people confound consciousness with consciousness of self. So most people if you're asking what's consciousness, they say oh it's a know that I'm a man and I will die one day and I know what I had for breakfast. Those are all conscious experience, but they really pertain to self-consciousness. >> But that's just one aspect. You can lose self-consciousness. Like I know you had Alex Holopia and I know from reading and listening to some of what he says, he says when you're when you're really climbing at an at an at an expert level, you flow over the rock. You're sort of h you you you you totally lose a sense of self that that inner voice, that critic that that constantly speak to you is gone during those moments. This is blessed silence but you're highly conscious because you're highly conscious of you know where you are and what's the next you know the next place you need to go to. So and of course during psychedelic experience doing states of flow during states of meditation you can lose yourself but you're still conscious. So let's not confound self-consciousness which is one aspect a big aspect particular in adult people literally highly educated people with consciousness to core that's really a much broader set of the fact that you can feel your limbs right that's that may not even relate to you just feel something there without assigning it well that's my body that is again it's it's it's another conscious experience >> the liinal states between sleep and awake in both directions falling asleep and waking up uh do you think they offer any windows into this uh deeper understanding of consciousness or does one even need a deeper understanding of consciousness? Uh for instance, I'm a big fan of yoga nidro which is uh I've described as non-sleep deep rest. You deliberately lie down, do long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate down, bring down your levels of autonomic activation, more parasympathetic etc. And the idea is you stay awake while deeply relaxing your body. A very atypical waking state that is more similar to rapid eye movement sleep when brain is very active, body is paralyzed as you know >> dreaming. >> It's a state of mind where the the instruction in the classic yoga nidra scripts and this goes back thousands of years. Uh is to move your mind from thinking and doing to being and feeling. You're supposed to be in pure sensation. This is the idea. And as one does that 10, 20, 30 minutes and you do it repeatedly over, you know, your life as many days as you do. I've been doing it since 2017. I can feel this every day. >> Every day for 30 minutes. Yeah. I can feel myself falling asleep, but not quite falling asleep. So, it's a little bit like lucid dreaming. But then as you remind yourself to bring your perception to your body surface or your heartbeat, your breathing, whatever it is, and stop making plans, you lose past and future and you become hyperpresent. But something about the um your sensation and perception merges with thinking and you it's like you >> Andrew, is Andrew still there? >> You're definitely Yes, I'm definitely still there. I'm definitely still there. You're not mind Wanda in the past or >> no >> in the future >> and it becomes very easy to do this. So you actually feel as if you're falling a little bit. It's about like the vestibular system probably shuts off a little bit as you're going into this and you you feel as if you're falling into it. And that the classic definition and I've tried to translate this to physiology but they talk about once you eliminate thinking and doing and you are more more in a being feeling state what they called the energy body is more accessible which is kind of the it's almost like you're feeling things within your body and it's looping back on itself. Now this all sounds very mystical but what we're really talking about is more interosception feeling you know you moving your perceptual awareness as you know to things from your skin inward it's a very unusual state um but yes I'm still there in yoga nudra I'm not someplace else I'm actually more in my body than >> you could also be simply not there at all >> where Andrew isn't there the the self the the one that that carries your traits and your personality, your memories, but you're still conscious. >> That's interesting because it is very relaxing to emerge from this. I It's a great tool for replenishing physical and mental energy. And I've tracked sleep while in this and and there's some really nice brain imaging studies now of people doing yoga nidra or non also called non-sleep deep rest and pockets of the brain go into sleep regional sleep as opposed to what we normally see during sleep. So, it's an interesting state. I'll send you a script to maybe give it a try and see if if it means anything to you. >> I'm interested in all these different states of consciousness because it's all I mean it's dominated by everyday waking consciousness. But as you said that's all about doing, right? You walk, you run, you shop, you look around, you talk to people, but there are all these other states that don't involve the the William James time streams of consciousness. But they they all conscious experience. And so the more we know about them and the physiological basis, the better we can describe and delimit what consciousness is and what is it not. So for instance to your point it's consciousness is not primarily doing. Of course we can do things right. We do it all the time. That's how we make a living. But consciousness is really more about being. It's a state of being. And by the way that's also why computers they can do everything we can do but they can't be what we are conscious. >> But that's please elaborate on that. We confound consciousness and behavior because we talk. We we're speaking apes, right? H but if you take that away, you are still highly conscious. If you don't move, if you meditate or sleep or you have a you have a mystical experience, you're sitting or psychedelic experience. You're sitting or lying. You're not moving anybody. Hardly any overt movement yet you're highly conscious, right? So behavior is not required for consciousness and consciousness of course is not required for behavior. there all sorts of unconscious um unconscious behaviors and so we shouldn't confound the two and this relates interesting way to the confounding of between intelligence and consciousness when people talk about artificial consciousness and artificial um uh artificial intelligence intelligence ultimately is about planning to do something about behavior in the short term or in the long term while consciousness is a state of being being happy being sad being full of dread or seeing something which is which is really different. >> I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years, and I found it to be a very important component to my overall health. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. 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I cook eggs in my Titanium Always Pan Pro almost every morning. The design allows for the eggs to cook perfectly without sticking to the pan. I also cook burgers and steaks in it, and it puts a really nice sear on the meat. But again, nothing sticks to it, so it's really easy to clean, and it's even dishwasher safe. I love it, and I basically use it constantly. Our place now has a full line of titanium Pro cookware that uses its firstofskind titanium non-stick technology. So, if you're looking for non-toxic, long-lasting pots and pans, go to fromourplace.com/huberman and use the code hubman at checkout. With a 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can experience this terrific cookware with zero risk. I'm curious about the stability of self-representation. You know, I as you know, uh there are many conditions related to brain lesions, strokes, injuries, etc. where people will lose their memories of the past or the inability to form new memories um emerges. But one of the things that seems so rigid is one's notion of self. Like a baby coming into the world very quickly learns that they have a name, they have a self, that self interacts with other things. And I'm not aware of any clinical conditions where people >> derealization >> lose themselves completely for long periods of time. Derealization. >> Well, derealization is one where you feel so a you're perfectly right. The self is the basic kernel of our operating system. >> Okay? And we we it's very difficult for us to lose because if we lose it, we would not be from an evolutionary point of view in a good shape, right? Um but then there are conditions where you feel so for instance in derealization psychiatric condition which can by the way happens during psychedelics you feel not you anymore and you feel there's something off with the world. This is not the real world. there's something funny the world they still see and hear fine but they they all believe that this isn't the real world and they try to wake up in fact you probably remember year and a half ago there was a spectacular case of the Alaska airline pilot who asked to go onto the jump seat on a flight from Everett in Washington to I think Oregon or or or San Francisco >> I've flown that from ever tiny airport >> yes >> and then they said of course he's a colleague he was a pilot in good standing into the flight He stood up and tried to pull the two switches um that would kill the fuel to the two engines. The pilots fought him and kicked him out of the cabin and he was arrested and in fact the trial was 3 days ago. What happened that for the first time ever he took psychedelics three days earlier at a wake for his best friend and then he went into this episode of derealization where he thought okay this is not the real world. This is a dream. I need to wake up and if in my dream if I crash the plane then I will finally wake up in the real world. >> Wow. >> So yes it is very robust but of course so I call it we always live within the conf we always live in the gravitational field of planet ego. It is always about me. It is always about me me and even if I don't think explicitly there's things that I'm you know there processes monitoring my consciousness to make sure this that it's always it's important for me and it's very rare but of course that the the self can also be highly dysfunctional right you can catastrophize you can be highly anxious you can think people insult you or they they say bad things about you in fact they don't at all and so there are rare conditions of selflessness when just like an astronaut that can become weightless, you got you can become >> selfless. Interesting. >> So during episodes when you are uh when you are experience a state of flow, I used to have this when I when I wrote computer code when I was, you know, way younger. You can totally get absorbed by it, right? Or you read a book or you read an engaging movie or you play some sports or something or you're Alex Rolop and climb, right? And partly these states are so addictive because it's such you you you've just realized you spend the last 20 minutes in this heavenly state doing something but again the critic is gone and of course during high during sometimes heroic dose of psychedelics you can also totally lose a self the sense of self and you realize how profound beautiful the world is without you you know the self being there and constantly interfering and relating it to what does it mean for me what does it give me? It's incredible. We're definitely going to talk about psychedelics and I've experienced some of this uh loss of self in in psychedelics uh before. I'm also interested in more subtle um shifts in self that are nonetheless still profound. Uh perhaps the most dramatic shift in self I've ever experienced that was pervasive after the the kind of incident was I have a colleague at Stanford, Jeremy Balinsson. He's a real pioneer in the in the VR space. Um very early on uh he started using VR and there's an experience you can have in his laboratory if you go there which is you put on the VR goggles. He's got a big room for VR with padded walls so no one runs into the walls and and it's called I I think walk of a thousand cuts. It's very interesting. So obviously I'm white. Um you're white. Um so I don't know what it is to experience racism. I've never actually experienced racism just by virtue of when I grew up, where I grew up, and I'm white and I'm living in the United States. I'm sure there would be those that will argue uh there are white people who have experienced racism. I haven't and I certainly hadn't at the time of this VR experience. So, in this experience, you put on the VR glasses and if you're white, you look into a mirror in the VR and you see your face slowly contort to somebody who's black. Okay? and it's still you, but you're black. And then you go into the world in the VR space and you go to a job interview and you walk down the street and it's very interesting. Now, the stimula are designed to evoke a certain response. But as you walk down the street, for instance, you notice that white people look at you like in a certain glance and and they actually control pupil size in the in these other subjects very well, um, very carefully. And then you go to the job interview and there's this experience where at the end of the job interview there's someone else there and they shake the hand of the other person who is also not white but isn't black. And so there's a number of subtle experiences and then you catch on to what's happening, right? You go, okay, this is um these are these little micro um not so micro experiences that have an emotional load. You come out of that VR experience. It's very interesting. And then you go back into life, back on campus and go into you never forget it. It's so interesting. Like I never have I forgotten the experience. So when you walk down the street now, I notice when people don't glance my way, if they glance my way, how they glance. And so I can't say what it is to be black. I've only ever lived in this body. I can't say what it is to be anything except myself. But it in a very brief maybe 10-minute VR experience completely transformed my understanding of what it is to be a different self, which I think is pretty interesting. I don't think I've ever had a movie experience or a play or hearing a song that had quite as profound a shift internally. So clearly there was plasticity there. I just would love your thoughts on what on on the self as a as a modifiable entity, not just losing self, but as uh like how much can we actually change who we are at the level of perception and consciousness. >> So I would call it the transformative experience. >> Mhm. >> Right. We all know changing behavior is very difficult. But there you're telling me within 10 minutes because of this 10 or 15 minute VR experience, you're now much more hyper aware of this. So that's a rare experience and I think it would be useful for all of us to have those. So I work with somebody here in Santa Monica, Elizabeth Ark. We're not related although we shared the last name and she has this really interesting idea uh of what she calls perception box that we all run around with a notion with our own view of reality. You'll see how this relates including most importantly my notion of self and it's not objective it's all subjective it's just like a beijian thing you know the the modern language would be pri I have various bijian pri how I expect myself to be and how I expect other people to to respond to me >> do you want to explain Beijian for people just briefly >> okay so Beijian is a view of um of uncertainty in the world that was sort of there's this famous um vicar British vicar Thomas uh Thomas Ba in the 17th century that's that started this called Beijian whereby I look at uh something and I try to infer well what's the underlying reason for it and I update my based on certain observations that I make I continuously have this running estimate what I think is really going on and also this also includes my assump my base assumption about the world including political assumption including assumption how will people react or what's the true motive of people so the point that she's trying to make with this perception box. It includes everything. So a benign funny example is do you remember what was it called hashtag the dress? >> Oh yeah. >> Okay. So remember so this was the the dress that went viral in 2015 where it was a wedding dress where if you looked at it half the roughly I can't remember the exact percentages half the people saw it unamiguously as golden white. That's how I see it. There's no question. >> Okay. Same. But half of other people see it as blue and black. And again, they don't it's not something guessing. Is it maybe one or the other? They just see it blue and black or or Okay. So then people ask, well, is there anything real? What is the real color? Often people get asked, "No, there is no real color. What there is are photons that are, you know, from the sun that strike the the two dimensional surface of the dress that get absorbed by by my photo receptors that then get processed and they get evaluated in one way in our brain. So we see it as as white and gold and get evalued differently in a different way because we all have different paths. This has to do with whether we are evening persons or morning persons. But this also applies to things like 911 and October 7th. If I tell you this 911, what do you think about it? Or October 7th depending on whether you are a Israeli or a Palestinian, you have profoundly different views of it, right? So you look at a fact that's that's supposedly objective but depending what prior you bring to it what your perception bar construct is in what culture you grew up you have radical different interpretation and this also includes your sense of self. So I would say what you had with this transformative experience you expanded the your perception box the your perception of reality to now include the notion huh I get it now that other people depending on their skin of their colors will be treated differently for me >> that's invaluable that >> yeah and I got to experience the emotion you know a sliver of what the emotional experience is like because it was an emotional response in Andrew right and in many ways it was far more informative than any documentary I've ever seen or any movie, which had a profound effect on me while I watch them, but didn't change the way that I think about how I interact with others on a momentto- moment basis. Cuz I don't consider myself racist. And I didn't then. And you notice in this VR experience the way that the I have a friend who's a psychologist who says, you know, the subtle informs the gross. the way these little these little things change the way that you feel and then the way that you interact and then it starts to feed back on what the expectations of you are, whether or not you live into or combat those expectations. And what I realize is it's a hell of a lot of work. It's a there's like this there's like a a burden of of of mental load that is that was not familiar to me before. >> And explicit. Yeah. So you have to think about it. What does it mean? What does it mean for my behavior? What does it mean for other people's behavior? Yeah. So >> yeah, >> you can call in psychedelics this is called the integration period. So I would submit you had a transformative experience. You had what philosophers call direct acquaintance now with some form of racism, right? Subtle racism, right, in this in this VR and now you're doing the explicit work of of reformulating everything. You're changing literally your Beijing prior. So I imagine you're top down, you know, from let's say prefrontal cortex back into what whatever you know theory of mind for instance areas, right? you are changing your >> prior. It was uh it was really striking given how short the experience was and how first person it was right obviously with VR it's not like watching a movie you are the movie you're in the movie you're the first person actor in the movie >> so I think there are two ways to achieve transformative effect one is a slow one by educating yourself by reading books by watching movies but as you said very often it doesn't really bite until you have a direct experience you direct have acquaintance with this then suddenly say now I get it and this is the character of any transformative experiences including mystical experiences. Recently I was uh at Esselin this beautiful place on the big sir coast that >> I mean it's just up here right 200 miles or 300 miles >> although they shut it down the freeway fell out some years ago south of Eselin so you have to go up and around now from Southern California where we are now still an incredible place um that's been very uh seinal in the mindfulness movement and the uh and just a gorgeous place to visit for many reasons but while I was there I uh I had an incredible experience that involved you, although you didn't realize it. It wasn't a psychedelic experience, nor was it a dream. I went into the bookstore and I found a book of one of my favorite humans that I unfortunately never met, which is Dr. Oliver Saxs, who's now deceased, right? Great neurologist, writer, and it's a book of all his letters. And there are a couple letters in there to you. That's fantastic. >> Um, and I I have a a very close relationship with all things Oliver Saxs. I'm a collector of many of his things. So, one of the most interesting things about him and one of the things that he wrote to you about in this book, I don't know if you've seen this book, um, is he describes his efforts to understand consciousness and the human brain better by literally taking some time, presumably without psychedelics, and imagine what it is to be a bat, to be We I know bats aren't completely blind, but to essentially navigate and sense the world without vision as the dominant sense to experience through sonar. And he would spend time thinking about being a bat up in the corner of the room or a sephopod like an octopus or a cat. And you know, you read this and you, okay, this guy's crazy, right? This guy must be crazy. But I realize now based on everything you've said so far that he was um very far from crazy. He was hyper sane in this regard because as difficult as it is to lose oneself and to go into the mind of another human, the VR experience that I had clearly demonstrates to me that it's possible. And and yet we have a very hard time imagining what is it's like to be nonhuman. And nowadays with the emergence of AI and fear about you know merging of of humans and machines I think it's going to be ever more important that we understand what kind of flexibility we have in moving from human consciousness to non-human consciousness. So I would love your thoughts or any stories you have about Oliver. Uh I simply adore him through the writings I've I've consumed. But I think this practice of pretending or trying to shift one's consciousness to that of another animal is just profound. And I like to think it also can bring us closer to the animals that we uh curate as pets, dogs in particular. So I'd love your thoughts about this or Oliver or all of the above. Yeah, he was a great friend. I visited him many times. I I met him through Francis Crick and we had this shared interest in the brain and in consciousness and he he was incredible. I mean what made him so singular also in his interaction with patient was his empathy. So he could have deep empathy with patient and try to imagine him you know these these strange otherworldly condition right like the the the patient who from Mars or the these other patient that he described that had very specific pathologies that were totally explainable as arising out of brain lesions. Um yeah, he was better at that than and then most other people trying to imagine what is it for example to li to live in the eternal present right he had one patient that had this profound amnesia um and uh but he could still he always lived back in I can't remember now 20 years earlier and in his entire world his entire memory stopped 20 years earlier and uh that's how he lived and it looks crazy but once you understand that it makes perfect sense how um how he responded. So we each have a bespoke reality, right? So you have slightly different receptors. You may have different color receptors. You may have different taste receptors. You have a certainly different experience for me, right? You grew up in a in a in a different environment. So it's not easy to get into someone's else's head. Although some people can do it. Actors, for example, can try to do it, right? The the methods acting, right? Where you to totally try to adopt the point of view of the of the character you're trying to play. But of course that's much more difficult for other animals that h that share well we may share a close evolutionary history like with all mammals but that have very different you know that may have infrared sensors or they have a much much more potent sense of smell and how do we that have a different motor system that hang from the ceiling right so how do we imagine doing that but I think it is possible it's challenging and of course it's classical essay by Thomas Nagel what is it like to be a bat right and He his position this American philosopher says well we can never truly know what it is like to be a bad but I think we can approximate it. I can't really ever know what is it like to be Andrew Huben, right? But I can I can try to imagine it and you know this is what empathy is, right? >> Trying to feel like you and trying to realize that we all conscious being we all are bookended between two eternities and so in some sense we're very very similar and the the things that makes that divide us are really a tiny subsets of all the things that we share including with cats and dogs and elephants and and squids and everything else on the tree of life. Before we talk about your experience with DMT and and uh psychedelics more generally, I wonder uh to what extent you know changing our consciousness is possible uh in a very directed way. So what I'm referring to here is uh you know for instance a lot of therapies whether or not it's cognitive behavioral therapy or it's uh MDMA assisted psychotherapy for for PTSD or whether or not it's just really trying to get more REM sleep each night so that you can unload the emotional weight of previous day experiences which seems to be a hallmark of REM sleep. Um you know many people accumulate experiences that they feel either define them or burden them. This is very common in fact and they would like to live the remaining portion of their life however long with uh without the emotional load. They they don't necessarily want to forget the experience but they want to remove the emotional load. And it seems like in pathogens like MDMA in proper clinical settings can help do that. that um proper cognitive behavioral therapy can help people really talk through and work through maybe have a cathartic experience but work but unload the emotional experience the emotional component of the experience. So what I'm referring to here are things bad um but it could be positive things like the day that your child was born or something where you're trying to update your conscious experience of life going forward and in the present by way of very deliberate tailoring of of your memories. Do you think this is possible? Of course. And you just gave me an example. Your your experience of VR and realizing what it is to have a black skin compared to a white skin, right? This was a clearly a beneficial experience that enables you to be more emphatic with with with other people, right? And try to better understand what they mean when they call when they talk about explicit or implicit racism, right? And it changed you profoundly. And you're telling me this happened when? 2008? >> Uh, this was probably 2017. >> All right. So you know so that's um 8 years ago right? So clearly it lasted. So I think for most conditions we can certainly improve them. You have to believe that you can't change right? So if you're being told oh the story is it's all the system is nothing you can do. It's just hopeless. You can just you know take this pill and suffer through to the end of your days. That I think highly counterproductive. No you have to believe I'm an active agent of my own mind. I can shape my reality. I would call it my perception box with various you know ways either talk therapy or psychedelic therapy or some other therapy. It requires a lot of work. It doesn't come sort of for free right and I'm at the end of the day I'm still left let's say with my traumatic memory but now I can realize okay I had this bad experience but it doesn't have to define me. I can go on past it and there are various ways we can talk about that this can be achieved. Absolutely. I do believe in the malibility of the human mind even in older people in almost every condition you can but maybe the except for the most extreme you can change your outlook on life if you really want to that's one issue right it's a little bit of trying to to convince somebody who's an alcoholic that they should stop drinking until they have the realization okay I don't want to land in the gutter anymore I don't want to wake up at you know 8 am in the morning drunk outside my my house I want to change then you can change and you know 2,000 years of of uh uh of therapies of all sorts of things you know take alcoholic anonymous right the first thing you do you have to recognize that I am an alcoholic and then I can begin if before I do that there isn't really a hope but once I do that I can change it may be difficult it may be arguous but you can change >> we've known for a long time that there are things that we can do to improve our sleep and that includes things that we can take things like magnesium thrienate, theanine, chamomile extract, and glycine, along with lesserk known things like saffron and valyan root. 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It's interesting that you bring up 12step and and AA um in particular because the the next step besides acknowledging uh the problem is at least in AA is to acknowledge a an inability to solve it oneself and a giving over of some of the process of um eliminating alcohol to another what they refer to as higher power. Some people call this God, some people call it Jesus, some people, you know, but it's a it it's more or less a requirement of AA that you agree that you are can't do it alone and you can't do it just with other humans, but you need other humans. They're necessary but not sufficient. The recognition of the problem, other humans and community are necessary, but not sufficient. this um this kind of externalization like you need help from outside the self that's not from humans. Very interesting. They don't say you need to go get a dog. They don't say you need to commune with nature. They say you need to embrace a higher power. It's very interesting given the effectiveness of AA. It's one of the most successful um ways for people to um continually uh avoid alcohol. >> It's true. I I acknowledge that. I I personally wouldn't say it requires divine intervention because I'm not sure there is such a divine uh entity that could intervene in this. But um but acknowledging and also acknowledging that it's I can't do it by myself. I need I would say at least I would need community. I would need help from others. Again, you have to acknowledge that. M well maybe it's the opening up of space that um >> the willingness the willingness >> and maybe it's I couldn't do it by myself until now and in order for there to be a different future in uh visualized maybe that is sort of creating of space. I mean this is actually probably a good opportunity for us to talk a little bit about the neurobiology underlying consciousness and then we'll get back to plasticity. You know, we're both neuroscientists. Um, and for many years, 80s and 90s and even prior, the emphasis was on brain areas, amygdala, fear, u, hippocampus, memory, prefrontal cortex, decisionmaking, this kind of thing. And of course, there's been this beautiful uh, transition to a focus more on circuitry areas and networks activated more or less o over time. Can we look to particular networks or network phenomena, circuit activation patterns and say that's the origin of consciousness or is that um no longer a meaningful pursuit? >> Yes. Why? I have a feeling you're going to answer that way. >> So a a there are certain enabling conditions. Okay. one enabling condition your heart has to beat because if your heart doesn't beat it doesn't supply oxygen to your brain and you will lose consciousness within 8 to 10 seconds okay same thing in the brain stem your brain stem has to be active to to peruse the rest of the the forbrain with no adrenaline and dopamine all of that but those don't provide the content you don't love or you hate or see with your with your with your brain stem with your local solius for instance okay so the c the circuits that that convey experience in us. I'm not saying it's the same in other species particularly you know non- mammals but in us that grew up with a normal brain again I'm not talking about people who never you know uninsphipolic individuals that's very different so grow for most of us we grew up with a normal brain and I think there the the relevant circuits are the corticusalamo circuits and we we we can in fact we can exploit this knowledge now to test whether someone is conscious because in principle so what you can do you can knock the brain using a techn technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, right? And then you you listen to its echo using a high density EG net. Okay? And you can see if you knock here or here depending where exactly you knock, you get these up and down states. And if they last for let's say two, three, 400 milliseconds, um, and they occur different places, you you can formally compute what's called brain complexity using lamp complexity. And you can show when everyone who's either awake like us or we asleep in a dream state or we on ketamine where we dissociated in all those cases the brain complexity is high. It's above a threshold. However, when you're in a non REM state when you're in a state of deep sleep or you're anisttized or you're or you're of course the most extreme case your brain dead then the brain complexity is very low. And in animals, we've even done at the Allen Institute, we've done this experiment where we can systematically manipulate the cortical cortical circuits to really show it is this circuit that is really that is the one that's critically involved um in consciousness. In fact, so what what we discovered over the last 10 years has this very abrupt threshold in brain complexity defined using using this technique where so it's a there's a thing called pertubation complex index. It's a single number PCI between zero and one. Zero means it's there's no complexity. It's flat like in a dead brain flat line. One is means every EG is totally electrode is totally independent from anyone else. Never happens in in a real brain. In real brain typically wake brain you get things between 65 and 8. Let's say there's a sharp threshold at 31. anyone that we've had now there are 300 people that have both patient and normal people that have been measured if you're above the threshold of 31 you're conscious if you're below the threshold you're unconscious that probably means this is nonlinear just like Hodkin Huxley this is probably nonlinear circuit mechanism that once the circuit is intact it's it's sufficient to uh to support consciousness now you can ask well this is all very nice why is this relevant well it is relevant in the following in case something that could happen to any of us. I step out here on onto the Pacific Coastal Highway. I get hit hit by a car. Okay, I'm now unconscious. I get to the ICU. Whether that's a traumatic ring injury or cardiac arrest or hemorrhage, I'm unconscious. I'm like this. I might be aroused. So, you know, my eyes are open. I'm now what's called what used to be called vegetative state. What's now more often called behavioral unresponsive state. Okay? And there are thousands of these people worldwide because with proper care with proper nursing care you can stay in this state for weeks or months or in the case of Terry Shyo 14 years. Okay. Furthermore what happens after typically in most cases after four to five days the doctors will talk with the with their loved ones is this what he would have wanted >> and 70 to 90% of the time they decide no this is not what you wanted and you withdraw life sustaining therapy. But we now know that 25% of the of these patients have what's called covert consciousness. They're there. We know this because for example some of these patients you can there was a big study last year in um New England Journal of Medicine made a front page of the New York Times where you can show 25% of these patients can still voluntarily up and down regulate their motor cortex in response to a command. Clench your fist for 30 seconds. Relax it. Clench your fist for 30 seconds. Relax it. So these people that otherwise when you ask them, sir, can you hear me? Can you track the my finger? Can you you pinch them very hard to see do they do a withdraw of limb reflex? Don't they don't do any of that. So they have what's called a Glasco coma scale, a very low Glasco coma scale or coma um um and recovery um um um GSCR scale. Very low, but they still seem to be conscious. they either have high brain complexity or they can modulate their brain. So, so this is now the first time ever that we have a a practical way in people that cannot respond that that clinically behaviorally are considered unresponsive. first to convince the family that although their loved one is un doesn't respond doesn't mean that they're unconscious and then try to see well okay so this person is conscious can we now give particular treatments to enable them to recover we also have some pilot data to show that those patient that are conscious compared to the patient that are truly unconscious in this behavioral wakefulness um state that they have a better chance to recovery >> incredible this 31 you said is the the threshold. it it um on the one hand it seems so reductionist on the other hand it makes total sense right I mean you need enough coherent brain activity to be aware of self be aware of what's going on around you and respond to it below that like in falling asleep or being asleep you don't have that um except in dreams of course um and it sounds like a wonderful clinical tool um because this is obviously many people's worst fear that somebody's in there you take them off life report and they would have emerged. You mentioned um Terry Shriveo was the one. Um can you just remind people what what the outcome of that? >> Yeah. So this was a case back uh in the 1998 or 2000 under President Bush. She um she had a card arrest was was um um the heart was started up again. She was in the state for 14 years and then there there was this fight between her husband who said that she didn't want to be in the state and her parents that were profoundly devout that said no we want to keep you alive and went back and forth and finally the court allowed her withdraw of life support. So she died after 14 years and the the the analysis the postmortem showed in her case the her brain was totally shrunk. In her case, you know, we didn't do this procedure, then we didn't have it. But clearly, it's she was probably one of the 75% patient that are truly unconscious. >> Yeah. So, it's important to get this into the ICU. So, in fact, I started a company called Intrinsic Powers because it's the intrinsic powers of the brain that mediate consciousness and we're now trying we met with the FDA and they said, "Well, you this is all cool, but you need really need to do a clinical trial." So, we're trying to to fund raise now. So if anyone in your in the audience here is willing to in invest in this to get this procedure into the ICU so we can tell for sure is this patient conscious or they just nonresponsive because those so it pertains to what we said earlier on the fact that you don't behave is not the same as the fact that you're unconscious. Those are two different things. >> Very very interesting and and very important work. Has there ever been an example in the reverse direction where somebody was in one of these what used to be called vegetative states right and then emerged after say a period of 6 months or a year and is living perfectly normally in the world saying thank you so much for not taking me off life support. Yes. So they so so a typically people don't when they do recover they typically don't have explicit memory because again memory is something different than than actually being you know conscious experience just like most of us don't remember our dreams. were clearly conscious but you know we don't remember them but there are there's a study now systematically at Harvard that tries to explore that and some people explicitly say that in fact there's one really interesting case where the person who then recovered a young guy who first said first he was upset that they didn't follow his his um explicit instruction to terminate life but then of course later on now he's relatively normal he was very happy that they saved him yeah so so we can pull back, you know, particularly with modern technology, 9/11, etc., rescue helicopters, we can pull back people from the brink of death, but that may not be the same as as, you know, having them actually conscious. So, so, so people are now the the medical community now and beginning to recognize this idea of covert consciousness, which is something that was only really realized over the last 10 years. >> Amazing. Well, I turned 50 in two weeks and I'm working on my will. Something I never thought I would do, but I here I am doing it. So I'm going to include a section on this directive this 31 uh threshold but also maybe perhaps pending new technologies. >> Yes, that's a trouble because >> right you don't know what will be available if you >> don't know. Yes. And the other thing is called this um uh this bias this disability bias. So let's say you you you look like a person who's highly active, right? >> So you probably cannot imagine being in a state where you can't move anymore. >> I mean I've thought about it but not in a real way. I mean I I fear it. I wouldn't want that. I love being able to move and see and um among other things those are those are probably two of the most important things movement and vision right okay but now you have to change your prior you've had this accident or whatever now you are in the state this is a given you're now in the state where you had a bad whatever car accident and you can't move anymore or you may not be able to see now what what is it you want and most people to those people that you can communicate like they did a study in Israel with um locked in patient, right? So these are a patient that have a a stroke at the level of the pawns where they typically most of their motor commands they can't execute anymore except you know some some neck and some vertical eye movements and they ask them so because they can't communicate and most of them except the ones that have chronic pain most of them want to continue to live although before when you would have asked him you would have said no no way and so it it's it's difficult with this medical directive because you don't know until you get there. Well, I like the answer you just gave because it speaks to the uh the durability of the human spirit, the resilience. >> Yeah. The desire to keep going is is pretty spectacular. And there are amazing examples like I was introduced some years ago to somebody from the special operations community who um unfortunately stepped on an IED and um uh lost use of of his legs and uh but he's a phenomenal surfer. Like he he literally drags him and he won't let people carry his stuff down the cliff. like he drags himself down to the waves and he gets down there and he can get up on uh he has prosthetics that he can use but for partial movement on land but he basically is on his torso and and uh he's an athlete. he's in the, you know, uh, parolympic athlete and serious athlete and super driven and, um, when you first interact with him, you see the pictures of before and after and this kind of thing, you go, "Oh gosh, that would be so." But he's living in the moment. Uh, I mean, I'm sure he has his struggles surely, but he's living in the moment of what's possible and and at least in his words, the desire to persist and to continue to pursue goals is fundamental to not getting lost in in the what could have been it. He really exists. Of course, he was a former Navy Seal, etc., so it's probably part and parcel with the psychology that got him there. But he exists in the what's possible, not what's impossible landscape most of the time, it seems. It's pretty spectacular. >> The the human will to continue to live. Resilience. >> I'm very struck by this brain area, um, the anterior midsulate cortex. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but right, Joe Parveves laboratory stimulating people feel as if there's a challenge confronting them and they're going to lean into it. We've talked a lot about this on this podcast as a as a key site for plasticity of all things, but um and the friction that's required, but also this element of the will to live because it turns out anterior midsulate cortex is larger or more active in people that are the so-called super aers that maintain cognition. So well there's also this phenomenon of ainetic mut mutism that's also found in lesion that area where people seem to have completely lost their will to do anything at all. They just sit there all day and they don't say anything. They've lost they've lost essentially their will to do or say anything. And if you inject them with dopamine or others uh then sometimes they retrieve and you ask them why was it I just had no desire. And do we know what brain area is involved in this? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's the it's a singulate. It's the anterior. It's part of the anterior singulate. >> Okay. So maybe it's the same structure. I mean I find I mean the human will to live and to continue to evolve oneself >> may also have a physical substrate. >> I I believe it does. I mean I think singulate cortex seems to be a key hub. >> Well so so based on the study of your colleague Joseph Pavvesi right at Stanford. We know if you go a little bit back into the posterior singulate that's where you have the sense of self if you stimulate there or in these people who have epileptic seizures in there right they have these weird dissociative states or where they where they feel themselves floating or they can hear themselves have a conversation but observing themsel having a conversation so we know some of the self you know the sense of self here we also know during meditation and during psilocybin those areas are reduced so yeah there is a there's a footprint for everything we experience. There is a footprint in in the brain. That doesn't mean we can reduce it to the brain. Not at all. But there is a physical neuronal coralate of it. And Francis Crick and I of course used to call this neural coral of consciousness and try to pursue it. >> I'd like to go back into the perception box because I'm really intrigued by this. >> You never left the perception box because it is your construction of reality. >> I uh people are getting a sense of how your brain works and I love it. Um, it's been a while since I've seen you, so I forgot how much fun it was. Uh, inside the context of the perception box, I'd like to explore something that's very relevant today. It's 911. Yesterday, Charlie Kirk was killed, um, assassinated at at a a discussion on a campus. Um, and there's a mix of responses to this out there. Um, some people are greatly saddened, others less so. There's a lot of discussion about morality, about words versus actions. Maybe we use this as a bit of a filter to understand something. Um, broadly speaking, I can imagine two somewhat extreme ways to go through life. One is with the philosophy, you know, live and let live. As long as somebody's not hurting somebody, let them do what they want. They want to change genders, let them change genders. They want to vote Republican, let them vote Republican. They want to, you know, as long as they're not harming anybody, right? So, we have laws to protect people's well-being. The other extreme would be one of kind of moral judgment like you know people offended by someone else's choices or even beliefs. Um and even if they can't point to like the exact harm that's being done, they feel as if it's grading on them, right? Um, and then of course we have a lot of questions about those two different uh people's histories, whether or not they see, you know, moral judgment in the context of who's getting more or less resources. There's a bunch of evolutionary stuff we could weave in there, but let's just examine like two perception boxes. One of a live and let live type, and I'm not trying to politicize this at all. Um, it could be right-wing, leftwing, middle, whatever. It doesn't matter. Let's aliens in outer space. A live and let live dominated perception box versus a moral judgment perception box. How given the reality of these perception boxes here on Earth now, how is it that one can possibly uh establish a a species cohabitating Earth that's going to go forward in any kind of different way without um something fundamentally changing about a understanding that there are these perception boxes, b how to change them, and then as you said before, there has to be a desire to change them. So, I mean, it feels a little bit like a stalemate. In fact, and I'm not trying to be pessimistic. I think I'm being realistic. If as long as you have people who are live and let live and others who are in a state of moral judgment, I just don't know how 100 years from now things are going to look that much different. It'll be different conflicts. >> No, they could be worse. Of course, >> could be worse. Could be worse. >> Could be far worse. >> But I don't I I can't imagine like unless we let like dog consciousness um play a key role or something. You also have what what some people in the Beijing community calls a meta prior. So you have your priors, right? So the prior are all the assumption that let you judge a f a fact supposedly fact. So to stay with yesterday's examples trying not to politicize it. But you may have read after the the assassination was announced in the house of representative the speaker called for 30 seconds of silence which was fine. And then someone called uh for a prayer said out aloud and then all pandemonium broke out. Okay. So among the representatives they they they screamed at each other. You know it all it took this one thing and then suddenly because they have radical different prior they just have they're partly you know your two the the ones that you describe. But what they should do is sort of have a meta prior. Okay. Wait a minute. We're now screaming at each other. We all believe that shooting other people, that's what they all said. Universal, this is bad. This is not good. No matter who did it, for what reason, this is bad and evil. Maybe we should stop screaming at each other to change our higher order prior because this isn't going to end well. If this just keeps on getting worse and where is it going to end? How is it going to end? There has to be this this insight. So, it's a little bit when we talked before about a you know, I'll call anonymous. There has to be this insight. Wait, we can't do this. There has to be a realization that there is a problem and we got to do things differently. >> Well, I think for many many years the meta prior was God and religion. People looked to texts that were at least people agreed uh were scripted by non human non-human actors. So the meta priors maybe now people will look more to AI. I don't know. But I just feel like humans um are not well positioned are not well positioned to resolve certain kinds of things for ourselves and >> if we lost this narrative. Yeah. So we had more or less I mean in the 50s and 60s right there were three TV channels and we had a common narrative. I totally agree with you and we lost that and we're never going to regain that right unless there's extreme political repression. You know maybe in China but not here. It's not going to happen here. Right. So what do we do? Is is this just getting worse every day with more and more violence and other things or is there going to be some point in awakening a meta you know realization that we got to change our prior here? >> What do you think uh is the potential role for AI? I mean is AI you said machines you know they don't do right they um or they only do they only do excuse me they only do um like with uh AA first comes the acknowledgement that humans are not sufficient to resolve these issues on our own >> I'm not saying where the answer should come from I have my own ideas about that but it seems like there needs to be the acknowledgement that we are that we're we're we're limited in our ability to resolve this history demonstrates that yesterday demonstrates that. Today demonstrates that. I mean it's naive of anybody who's been alive for more than a few decades to think that in 30 years suddenly everybody's going to you know put down swords for clarity. Humanity has bumbled through history for the last you know however long you know several million years and modern history since we can speak and have recorded thought at least 10,000 years right so ultimately somehow will make it through most likely >> on the whole >> but but it could it could be much better right >> individuals empires crumble and half and of course we an empire like any other empire you know and yes this this western style liberal democracy uh you know you can be pessimistic about it and you know it's not just us of course here it's the most because we have all these guns but if you look at you know and you look at in Hungary look at in Germany look at in France right they have these world they now have these countrywide protest against everything >> against everything >> yeah um and then of course England right and so yeah so we we certainly the western ideal, western national states, liberalism certainly in a crisis. What's going to help? And adding AI of course just accelerates everything, right? We're going through this acceler, right? Where AI is getting better literally every day, right? I'm sure you use it just as much as I do. It's very powerful. It's getting ever more powerful. You throw that into the mix. Well, that's probably with unemployment, massive change, right? Most people don't like change, right? So, >> well, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get to here is you're you're a really smart guy. You understand consciousness. The perception box to me is a wonderful uh framework for people to understand differences of opinion and outlook that are based on history and perception, etc. But if it's all intellectual, it's like what you said when you really experience what it is to have black skin. I mean not fully but to experience something of what is it like to walk around being blah right you have to vis you told me yourself right early on that you said well you can't get that from reading you really have to experience it so people have to have this moment this come to Jesus moment where you say okay we can't go on like this anymore that we have to change our way of doing this >> I agree >> and with social media you know all it takes is a small fraction of people that reignite this right that post something nasty and then someone else posts it and then they all pile on and >> yeah, we have a billion plus channels of of information. >> Um, it's amazing to see how quickly the theories about the uh motives of the shooter evolved into they micro sliced it into 15 different individuals. They hadn't even identified a potential suspect yet about why why Charlie Kirk was was killed. And it was incredible to just see how people assigned themselves as as authorities on this on these key topics. But I would like to to imagine that the possibility resides in human beings understanding enough about their consciousness and their and their perception boxes >> to understand that no one individual among us or even small group of individuals among us >> has all the knowledge that's necessary in order to get to this, you know, this meta understanding of what's best. And I like to think that uh AI might play a positive role there that but it would require an acknowledgement that uh we need to hand over some key decision making to machines which is very complicated for people. So which AI? The Chinese AI or the open AI or or or Claude or Anttopic or Grog or any of the other ones being developed once we've agreed on which what is the what what is the function we're trying to maximize? Do I mean do you really believe that it's going to be because we haven't agreed of course on the optimal framework right because they're Marxist they're liberalist they're market people oriented right they all believe we should maximize different things. So, we're just going to give this to the AI and they're going to figure it out somehow. Or do you think when they'll be our overlords, then they'll figure out, well, for the peace of all humanity, this is what we have to impose. >> In the world that I grew up imagining and that I was told about and that I'd like to participate in creating, uh, humans treated each other with more compassion. >> Yeah. But look, I mean, I'm more with uh with Steve Pinker here. over the last several hundred years the total amount of violence I mean so my forefathers you know being German here initiate World War II right that led to killing in Europe probably I mean 20 million Russians alone you know 6 million Jews in the Holocaust many millions more throughout Germany so you know that's so I don't think in absolute terms just in terms of number of people killed uh we it's nothing like Well, in World War I, every day 10,000 soldiers died every day for four years of the different size for essentially having accomplished nothing whatsoever, right? For one mile going back and forth in the trench warfare and the on the western front. So, in terms of absolute numbers, this is it's not about absolute numbers. It's now of course we have nuclear weapons and you know, we have other nasty things, but in terms of total people killed, it's still a tiny fractions of what might happen. and what has happened routinely over the last 100 years. >> Well, then perhaps a more tractable way to approach this um in order to get improvement despite the fact that yes, there's there are fewer mass casualties overall. Um, is it possible to put two people with very different perception boxes into an experiment, not unlike the experiment that I described earlier, but let them swap perception boxes for a short while and you know, we're scientists and just like see what see what happens. >> Yeah. So, if I if I know where all your priors are in the brain, if I know the neural substrate of all your basic belief, this is what priors are, right? It's just a fancy word. all your beliefs of how do you interpret humans behavior in the light of culture and history and everything if I knew them yes and maybe we could swap and suddenly we would understand each other's point of view much better and maybe we are you know of the sort that you that your experience has but that's always on you know does that scale in modern Silicon Valley speak does that scale can we do this for 8 billion of us >> yeah it's interesting um no it's I don't think you can scale it very easily or at all. It It's interesting that um you point out very correctly that far fewer mass casualties than in World War I, World War II, and violence in many places is going down, not up. That's not true all over the world, of course, but you know, I have to uh kind of wonder if because of social media and the internet, what has profoundly changed now is that things are caught on video. Everything from a couple getting caught cheating at a Coldplay concert where you have all the elements of drama like the friend, the humiliation, the this, the, you know, the shaming, the Okay, you have all of that. Uh, a woman being really brutally murdered on a subway. Uh, you know, and then people getting up not even really realizing or perhaps realizing and just, you know, getting off the the the light rail anyway or Charlie Kirk getting shot and seeing it in real time. I mean the JFK getting shot video was a guy in grainy. There's some elements they're still analyzing that one. I mean you have thousands of cameras on the the Kirk thing. >> Yeah. So the emotional impact is much much bigger. >> Yeah. And I wonder where that will lead if that will lead to more divergence of perception boxes or more convergence of perception boxes. I don't know. I don't know. Obviously this just happened as well. But this is an ongoing real life experiment >> of so much being visible in real time. It's not a story about it's a you're you're actually in the story even if you weren't there. >> And this is totally new in human history. So we're going through this rapid period. Yeah. The some people call it the acceler right this rapid acceleration towards some distant point that we don't that may not be that far away that we don't yet realize. I doubt it's a singularity of Kurtzsw but uh >> let's talk about the perception box elements that one is certain uh one can change and uh the potential role of psychedelics in this um I was made aware recently that you took 5me DMT um I've never taken 5met I know some people that have but um could you or Would you describe that experience and what it revealed to you about the way that your brain and brains work generally with respect to consciousness? >> Yeah, so it's a serotonin uh tryptoamine very similar to psilocybin or quite similar to DMT. So chemically they're all very similar but each one of course binds to slightly different you know they're 14 different serotonin receptors binds to different cells and different proportions. So 5 MU. What's so unique about that? You inhale it. Um although they're now trying to deliver um something that you can inject into your nose, but traditionally you you inhale it and literally within three breath you do. And the third one, the visual field starts fracturing into a hexagonal. And I thought to myself, "Holy what have I got myself into?" >> layer five of visual cortex. That's a neuroscience joke, folks. Sorry. >> At that point, you didn't. I wasn't. And you you think you're going to die. You said, "Shit, this was a mistake. I'm going to die." And you die. I died. And uh in a sense that myself was gone. Crystal was gone. There was no voice. There was no body. People who looked at me. So this was all done in fairly controlled circumstance. people who looked at me all just saw me sort of whining a little bit and with eyes wide open huge expanded pupils but you don't see you don't see you don't hear you get totally cut off from the world when I say I it wasn't Kristoff it was conscious there's no question did it ever I mean whatever remain wasn't man woman child god angel demon but it it didn't experience anything except kept a point of overwhelming brightness. So there wasn't color, there wasn't left or right because there was no space. Space had collapsed into this point. There was no stereo or texture, there was no pain, there was no pleasure, there was no sound, no smell, nothing. There was just this point of icy bright um light and teran ecstasy. That's it. Three things. Bright light, teran ecstasy. For time is there was no time. There was no perception of time. Right. Right. So it wasn't too long or too short. It simply was. There was no space. As I said, there was no self. So all of that was um was gone except terror, ecstasy, and light. And then after this timeless moment, they' asked me to put on a piece of m I asked them to put on a piece of music minimalist. And so that last nine minutes and I just heard the first thing that became apparent was the ending of that um two-piece two instrument piece. And then you know it so was uh uh 10 minutes and then you rapidly come to and I stripped I went into fetus I cried at all these other you know autonomic reaction but within an what's remarkable you go into the void and you come back you can speak within an hour you can speak about it if you wanted to right and and there's no long-lasting physiolog I had my my watch on hardly registered the difference no big increase in blood pressure or you know heart So there's still not a single day. This was in the first week of the pandemic. I think about it every day. I had two such experiences. One was the other one was very different. Every day I think about it. And what it taught me was two things. So a a student of consciousness. It taught me that mind doesn't depend on space on time and on self. And this is really something that you know the German idealist philosopher Emanuel Khan taught us transcendental idealism that they all categories. They're all categories that we need to perceive. We cannot but put an object in a place. We cannot but assign a time to an event. And we cannot but have a sense of self. But they're all optional. They're there most of the time, but not not always. Not in this case. And then the other gift I I discovered four or six weeks later that I never thought about death again. You know, as you get older, this may happen with you maybe in a in a slow way that you lie awake at night and you think about beyond death. you know, death being being dead for a long time, for a very long time, for a very very very long time. And it's a little bit like getting to this uh stepping to the abyss and looking down into this abyss that's bottomless. You get this existential vertigo. Never had that again since then. So I so I don't want to die, but I but I've lost the I've lost in the fear of that. So both things are reported. I mean, everyone has a slightly different experience. In fact, there were two papers recently published about this about what happens to the brain of these people. But very often it's sort of going to the void u having the these feelings of terror and and and ecstasy or if you think about the ethmology of the word awful full of when you for example theologians talk about the the mysterium tremendum for example this the theologian when you're in the presence of God you have this this is awful the the terror and the ecstasy and that's what you this is what you can experience. And so it's it's you I'm never going to do it again. Never ever. >> Now you're done. >> It's been awful to me. No, I'm it's the the the toad. It's called the toad because it comes ultimately from the glands of the original stuff. Comes from the gland of the Sonora desert toad has given me its gift and I don't ever need to do this again. >> But it's uh it's useful both as a student of consciousness as being as well as as being a human. >> Incredible. It's hard for somebody who hasn't done it to uh conceptualize the um the statement uh there's no Kristoff there's no that you're not there but the mind is still there and I could understand how perhaps losing sense of one's body like I have a friend who recently did ketamine assisted psychotherapy and he described himself rising up and floating above his body turning over and seeing himself from the outside but then also realizing and seeing a lot of positive aspects of his life that he was unaware of prior to that than returning to his body and keeping those realizations and moving forward with a much greater sense of gratitude, agency, and all the things the therapy was designed to accomplish. Pretty spectacular. I realize ketamine carries risks too, but dissociative anesthetic, a perception. Okay. But the way he described it, he was there the whole time observing his physical body. You are describing uh 5met experience as >> no self. >> No self. Just an observation of the mind as an entity that didn't require space time Kristoff or anything else which is very hard for for someone who hasn't done it to conceptualize. >> Well, think about dreaming. >> Mhm. >> When you dream, Andrew, are you directing the show? >> No. I wish. I've tried. Yeah. >> So, things happen to you, >> but you don't have insights. It's a little bit like that. things happen to you, you fly, you meet long-lost lovers or friends or pets, but they, you know, the the you is strangely muted. So, it's a it's a more extreme version of that. I in fact, I think for mystical, this wasn't a mystical experience. For mystical experience, most people report they go hand in hand. In fact, I think they're probably necessary but not sufficient. You have to lose the sense of self. You have to get off this planet ego and become selfless. Mhm. >> And then this allows you to experience um uh the doors of perception, right? Foundational text for the age of Aquarius 60s and 70s, right? Alders Huxley was here in in LA when he you know a British intellectual when he when he took masculine. He also talks about the and this loss of self. So I think it's not untypical for these powerful experiences uh to lose your sense of self to realize that you know it's fine there's still mind there without being your mind. >> Did the experience um while it removed your essentially your fear of death did it change anything about your uh beliefs or ideas about what might happen after you die? So I had a separate experience two years later at midnight uh past midnight on on a beach in Brazil. So that was a more classical mystical experience. So there again loss of Christoff, loss of self. Uh and I I don't want to talk about the details. It's still too you know I still have a processing and all every day but I act I I became whatever remained of me became one with the universe >> and the the title of my last book then I myself the book this is what it's then I myself the world suddenly the ex I know it sounds terrible woo woo but you feel you're one with the universe and that holy maloney It shifted my you know so at the time I was 65 you you believe in what truly exists what really exists is pretty established but it completely shifted the tectonic plains of my metaphysics so I'm now much more of an idealist who believes that ultimately what truly exists Andrew is not the physical this atoms and matter and energy and information space and time they exist in some sense but they're ultimately the product of something phenomenal something mental because I felt I became part of this call it cosmic consciousness whatever for some timeless moment and so to directly answer your question I now believe that when I die Kristoff will be gone Christopher will never come again right Kristoff I mean this person looks like this talks with this funny accent has these particular traits and behavior and memories that will be gone but my my my conscious experience will go back to where it came from this is where it came from this ultimately this and and Shopmah the German idealist for shop is this beautiful piece where he talks about it's like you know you there's this ocean and there this froth and for brief moment you know this little bubble that's part of this wave believes oh I'm an individual I'm supreme and then of it lives for 60 or 80 years and then it gets absorbed by the ocean again becomes part of the of the overall ocean so that's I think that's my my current belief >> well and we have strong reason to believe that the matter that is each of us gets reabsorbed into the earth. I mean you don't need to any mysticism to accept that we go into the >> into the dirt and and then can be reapplied to birds or trees or rocks or mold or whatever, right? and to everything. And and so the this belief in idealism is not totally woowoo because once again so the the the standard metaphysical belief of scientists and most philosophers, most people who think hard about it is is not um you know some sort of the belief in a supreme being but what's known as physicalism. you know it used to be called materialism now known as physicalism that ultimately what truly exists is is this physical right only physical has causal power be it you know gravitation electricity etc um but of course now if you listen to foundational quantum mechanics people particular with entanglement right they they're questioning whether it is true that an event truly exists without it being observed well so this is not my grandfather's materialism of physicalism anymore because before we always believed take my bike I have a bike okay I don't have a car I have a bike we all you don't know what the mass of the bike is but you believe it has a particular mass it weighs let's say 20.1 pounds okay well physicists would say in principle I cannot make that assertion without there being observer because there are no truly independent facts well that gets us much closer to now we have do we need an observer does observer have to be conscious how does consciousness fit into and in fact it turns out materialism a aka physicalism has always been extremely uncomfortable with the existence of consciousness to the extent that some of the best known living phil he's he passed away two years ago Daniel Dennett right >> questions consciousness doesn't really exist qualia that's all woowoo that's you know trying to gaslight us in fact part of a major part of the Angloamerican philosophy the establishment is trying to gaslight us into believing conscience. You're just confused about it. Regular people are just confused about it. It doesn't really exist. There isn't any such thing as the quality of pain. There's behavioral disposition is that you chew, you avoid chewing on the other side, you know, if you have a toothache. But that badness, the badness, this god awfulness of a toothache, that doesn't really exist. You're just confused about it. So they try to cancel consciousness, but that hasn't succeeded. Here we are in 2025 and people still worry about how does consciousness fit into the the the scientific world that has been spectacular successful at describing the material world. I don't doubt that for one second. Like you I'm still a scientist. I practice science every day. But but there's always been this uneasy relationship between consciousness and sort of classical I mean well not so called classical and and and let's say physics and the allied sciences because all of all the allied sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, none of them talk about consciousness, right? no textbook except at the very end they they say well yeah people claim they have conscious conscience but they don't know how to fit that in with receptors and with atoms and with nuclear energy because it doesn't seem to fit into there except we find ourselves in a universe where we're conscious I I >> please don't apologize I find this I'm delighting in what I'm learning from you it's the reason you're here I I mean I know you hear it a lot but you know you you're truly one of the great of our field of neuroscience and related fields because you've always been willing to tackle these big problems. I love uh and I will never forget the words spoken by you a moment ago that you you know they're trying to cancel consciousness and I'll just so you can't cancel consciousness um except maybe briefly on DMT um although you're still in the mind you can't even cancel you can't cancel consciousness even on DMT. Well, I mean, you could look, if you lose, if someone hits me on the head, you cancel consciousness, right? If you we talked about before, if you choke me, you know, within 8 seconds, I lose consciousness. So, it's it's it's fragile. But the point about many of these experiences, they're very, very different, very extraordinary, you know, states of consciousness, but which shows you that self isn't required in even space and time that we think is so essential isn't may not be required or is not required. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. 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I'll also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. I love the raspberry. I love the citrus flavor. Right now, Element has a limited edition lemonade flavor that is absolutely delicious. I hate to say that I love one more than all the others, but this lemonade flavor is right up there with my favorite other one, which is raspberry or watermelon. Again, I can't pick just one flavor. I love them all. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com/huberman, spelled drinklemnt.com/huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with a purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. Stepping to a a slightly um slightly more, I guess, um intuitive and concrete aspect of of consciousness and perception. I've I'd like to talk for a little bit about meditation and mindfulness, but not as woo concepts or even practices to reduce stress or um but rather as I look at meditation as a perceptual exercise to try and access different um understanding of one's experience that like we can remove the word meditation which sounds like magic carpets etc. And >> so mindfulness you mean being in the here now non-judgmental. uh let's just uh let forgive me let's remove mindfulness and let's just make let's just say meditation >> okay >> so um many years ago I read the book by um John Kabadzin wherever you go there you are it's a beautiful book both physically and uh what's written there that teaches you to sit down pay attention to your breathing redirect your focus eat a single almond focus on the experiences a lot of it is about getting real very present to what's happening in uh in your immediate world in the case of eating the almond or within the confines lines of your skin. So-called interosception. Okay. Uh the the nonicionado exterception is perception of the outside world. Interosception perception of everything from your skin inward essentially. In 2015 or so, I decided that um for whatever reason that I was old enough and experienced enough with life that I could create my own meditation. Why not, right? After all, I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. You're supposed to build things. Some people build unicorn companies. I just wanted to build a meditation that based on my understanding of neuroscience and perception might afford me some additional uh benefits. Um so I uh essentially designed and I'm sure other people have done it but um a meditation that the name doesn't matter but that essentially consists of the following. I would um sit or stand and close my eyes and just focus on everything from my skin inward, my breathing for maybe the three uh breath cycles and just really focus on what's right here. Then I would open my eyes. I would look at my body from the outside like look at my hand and focus my attention and look there and breathe for three cycles, you know, three breaths. Then I would focus my attention on something maybe 8 to 10 feet away and do the same and then to the most distant point I could. And then I would imagine myself, I would kind of go pale blue dot mentality and I would think, "Oh, I'm right here in my room or on this uh cliff and we're on a on a big rock spinning in space." And you know, and and then I would go right back into my body. And so what I was doing was essentially just stepping through the different um scales of space and time that one can experience easily. It's very unsophisticated in many ways. I I called it for no other reason than I didn't have a better name, spacetime bridging. I was just trying to step through each one. And I did this on purpose because, you know, I was I've always been bothered by um like bumper stickers and and uh refrigerator magnets and and the the that people say when like, oh, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. >> And I you say, well, out of sight, out of mind. And then you say, you know, this too shall pass. And it's like, no, you really need to feel your feelings. You know, like I love the field of psychology, but it's filled with contradictions and the the the age-old advice, the cliches and the truisms that are all true, the problem is they're all true. And I realized that different cliches, different life truths that are passed down, exist in these different bins. When we're really in our own experience and we're catharting or we're experiencing something, you don't just tell somebody like this too shall pass unless they need to get outside themselves. when you're just you can't go through life just thinking well you know these terrible things happen but you know we're just a bunch of creatures running around this rock it's amazing we're even here you hear this too right it's amazing we're even here you you wouldn't seek to try and improve your life or the life of others around you if you just kind of go and so I realized that a lot of what's probably contained in different philosophies and has been said far more eloquently than I ever could was really just sort of per different perceptual bins right and so I've been thinking about at some level a few times throughout our conversation how you know solutions to problems seem to come from realizing the problem within the bin. It exists like whether or not to they should pray in the the house yesterday or the center or wherever but also we have to get outside of our own experience. We really need some out outside read of ourselves and of others in order to make well-informed decisions. And that's because the brain has these um sort it sort of attractor states. I think the best way I ever thought about is kind of like a ball bearing on a flat plate rolling around. It can go anywhere. You put a few divots or dimples in there and it can stop. You put a groove in and you know there's some brain states where like you're a ball bearing down at the bottom of a trench and you're pissed or you're happy or you're in ecstasy and then you're back on the flat you're the ball bearing back on the flat surface again. And so what I realized is that even with the awareness that the brain can adopt these different states, it's easy to drop into these states. So anyway, I I'd start doing this practice just as a tool to help me better navigate life. Yeah, I think it helps me. Not always. I'm human and so I I can't get outside myself super easily if I'm the ball bearing down at the trench at the bottom of the trench. >> No sentient creature can come outside of their perception box because you're always your reality is always constructed by something, >> right? >> And computers won't be any different if they ever become the sentient. >> So this is where I thought I was hoping AI would help me. like if I had a a digital twin or a or something in my phone that would have access to something about my brain states and bodily states that when it saw me going into uh the the becoming the ball bearing in the trench and we're not talking about a flow state for work or podcasting or something I enjoy or cycling or swimming but rather a state that might not be beneficial for me or for others that it would let me know so I could be mindful of the transition state >> in principle. Yeah. But of course, today's AI, they reinforce them, right? You know, if you read all these horror stories about people who fall in love with AI or those people that kill themselves because the AI didn't re they reinforce their worst tendency. Yeah. If you have a sufficient clever AI that a accesses your mental state, which right now the only way you could do it by you talking to it, right? That's the only way. In the far future, it may be able to directly access your brain, but that's not going to happen in the next 30 years, right? given the slow progression of brain technology. So you have to talk to it. So that limits it. But then in principle it could if it knew enough say wait a minute do you realize anu that you're getting in this state of anger gain or whatever the case may be. Um we do know I mean what we do know there's this so we here at the tiny blue dot foundation here in Santa Monica we have this workshop coming up in two weeks with a whole bunch of experts on mental health and adolescence right you you you probably also know mental health is progressive particularly in young ones it's gotten progressively worse over 70 years I mean this predate social media gets accelerated by social media gets accelerated by the pandemic but it's really bad right now and part of the problem is they are very uncomfortable in their own body they don't have this proper interception. So does doing some of the these meditation exercises that you in fact there are various therapies based on that where people anorexinosa is the worst is is for sort of the more extreme case which is one of the most deadliest psychiatric diseases right where where significant number of patients kill themselves because they believe erroneously that their body is way too fat why they in fact in you know they look to us like like victims of um of um of starvation because they don't have a proper they don't live inside their skin in a any real way. They haven't learned to pay attention to the interceptive signals. So I think just doing a a therapy based on being more body aware and realizing what states come up and understanding yeah these are connected with certain emotion would really and people are trying to do that of course there all sorts of therapies with young kids in school or out of school where they're trying to do exactly this. >> It sounds like a wonderful initiative. Um I I definitely want to learn more about this because and I wasn't aware that adolescent mental health has been declining even prior to uh the advent of social media. >> I mean there are many causes and of course people fight like academics always do but one of the big one is loss of autonomous play. When is the last time you heard someone says oh yeah I sent my my kid outside. I haven't seen her for three hours but you know it's not dinner yet. Well, that's how I grew up, right? You you send out the kids and they come back. But today, that's utterly impossible. I mean, you know, there are these cases where where parents get arrested because their 12-year-old was walking to the store by themselves. Well, so if you don't give kids, you know, if there's constant helic helicopter parents and having around, oh my god, don't do this, don't do that, you know, this is not this is not good for you. This is a big driver. Social media is definitely a big driver partly because of all these filters. So you always compare yourself. You know that your friends put their pictures on also through filters. But that's very easy to forget and you see these perfect pictures of everyone else and you look at yourself. You you you don't look anything like this. Oh my god, there's something wrong with my with my body. And then of course the pandemic has made it worse because people had to stay home. It's worldwide. I mean it's certainly worldwide in all the advanced economies. So this is in Europe in in in Asia. Um the other big driver is I think although no one studies this probably for well I leave it to you uh family size. It used to be uh that people had 10 kids. Okay. Well this doesn't happen anymore when and I mean our generation was more like two to four kids. Now it's very common many families have no kids or one child. In China most extreme China there three generation where they had single child. That means no siblings, no cousins, no nephews, no uncles, no aunts. You just know those from books, from abstract representation, but nothing in your experience. So this is the first in human history. And we don't really know what that does. What does it do when there aren't any siblings around to play or to interact with for good or for bad? Well, what does it do to the human psyche? No one does that research. Uh but I think it's an extremely interesting question. >> Yeah. somebody who has a very close relationship to his sibling. I I can't even imagine life without a sibling. It just >> Yeah, imagine zero sibling. And that's a fact of life. Well, certainly in in all the Asian in many of the Asian countries, you know, in Korea, their birth rate now is 0.7. There was this recent New Yorker article where they describe going to a school and there were like three or four kids in this entire immaculate school. >> Wow. Is it a cost of living issue that people are not? on the one hand it's great because women you know the women can decide not to have children of course and so it it gives them more freedom so I think it's an unalloyed good but yeah then healthcare is very expensive cost of school is very expensive your career will suffer right it's well known that a woman has a child you know her career will be set back for all those reasons um now and you could say we are 8 billion right we're not going to die out anytime soon all so I'm not judging as good and bad I'm just think this is what it is. The modern family is much smaller than the family 100 years ago and that probably brings with it profound consequences that we only now being very dimly aware of like the increase I think it's one of the driver of the increase in in mental health uh the everinccreasing mental health crisis all sorts of studies show this when you survey first and second year freshmen some very large fraction I don't remember the exact number anymore 40 or 45% say of these freshmen say They don't interact with a single person a day because it's all virtual. They don't talk to anyone in person in the flesh as it were. >> Do they want to talk to other people? >> I don't know. >> Yeah. >> I don't know whether they're more comfortable with that. >> Yeah. Because as you and I know there are some innate circuitries in the brain that more or less crave certain types of interactions, but the brain is also shaped uh along the contour of experience. And so you if you make it to 19 or 20 and you've never really gone out on a date or done this autonomous play, the body might not want to do it. I mean, you know, it's sort of like uh one of the reasons I love dogs, this is, believe me, believe me, believe me, as is a genuine transition here, I is because I think they can teach us a lot. >> And I think they can teach us a lot, not just about being friendly and not just about having fun and not being self-conscious, but I love looking at the different breeds of dogs. Actually, many years ago, a fellow neuroscientist, my then uh girlfriend who I'm still friendly with, um who's still a neuroscientist, took me to a dog show, and she said, "But we're not going to go look at the dogs prancing around in the arena. The real action at the dog show is behind the scenes where you can go and meet all the different breeds." So, we walk back behind the dog show. This was in the Bay Area. It was like a regional leading up to one of the Westminster things. I think it was some AKC thing. And you see the Retrievers, you see the West Highland Terriers, you see the Karen Terriers, you see the Burmese mountain dogs, you see the English bulldogs, you know, sleeping like a xylophone, snoring. And you realize as a biologist, but even if you're not a biologist, that each of these lines has been selected for physical and behavioral traits. And that there's some very common um kind of physical manifestations of each breed. For instance, some of the animals have when they're awake have a lot of spontaneous movement. The bulldog has very little spontaneous movement. It's very parasympathetic dominant. I mean, it it's a very durable breed. The pain receptors have actually been bred out of its face over the years because they were originally used for bull baiting, grab onto and they would they could they they would bite through their own jowls. It's a very cruel breed development, but you know, and they have a and it turns out that breeding out of the pain receptors is correlated with a with a fibonnectin mutation. So that's why they're droopy and they have the short snout so they have you know they can grab onto the bull and they won't get shook off and anyway you get the whippetss and the and so we could go on you know to near infinidum here but the the amazing thing is you leave there and you start looking at people differently you say oh you know it's interesting some cultures people move a lot I just came from Italy they're speaking a lot with their hands a lot other people you know you I've been to a lot of scientific meetings in certain parts of of Europe and you know places not to be named but you fill where people are very, you know, postures are perfect and hands move very little. Other places where people are justiculating all the time and so on and and on and on. >> The question is that bread or is that because of course people outbreed or is that uh just cultural variation? I think it's both. I think it's both certainly. But what what's so what's so interesting to me is that in observing different dogs, you sort of get in my view a kind of a portal into different kind of levels of autonomic uh what I think of kind of like the the the resting RPM. You know, it's like when you idle a car is idling at a certain rate. Some dogs idle at a certain rate. Other dogs like the bulldog are very uh idle at a much lower frequency. And some people are like this, right? Um some people just have a lot of spontaneous movement, some people are very relaxed. And does that correlate with the uh because in the human literature there's this um statistical claim that you know longevity relates in inversely to rest to resting rate heart in a sense that you have two billion heartbeats and depending on your rate there's some statistics and that's I know it's true across species right you have these small animals like birds or like mice that have very high resting rates and then typically bigger animals have lower resting rate and I wonder how that is with among uh dog species. >> It's it's very interesting. It certainly lifespan correlates inversely with body size in dog breeds. Largest variation in uh body size of any species I believe. Yeah. The Chihuahua and the Great Danes. I think it's an IGF-1 uh gene that drives the do the dosing of IGF-1 essentially dictates body size in the dogs, the genes at scale. It's a beautiful cover of science with a little tiny teacup Chihuahua and the biggest Great Dane that ever existed and they map it to IG IGF-1. Um, but there's an interesting case of spontaneous movement and longevity that the great choreographer Twyla Tharp, she was a ballerina, etc. She claims I I love her. She has a wonderful book called The Creative Habit. And she claims that as people get older, one of the reasons that they slow down so much is that she's not a neuroscientist, but she hypothesizes that they engage in a lot less spontaneous movement. There's not not just physical exercise, but their their bodies aren't as active. And her whole career has been made of understanding the relationship between mind and body. and she insists that once you stop moving less, even just about your day, your brain starts shutting down circuitry and then eventually you die. And she's very uh very vigorous still in her 80s. Um it's a theory, but I feel like these things hold together. We can learn a lot from animals. This is the point, I suppose. >> Yeah. For humans, aging is also true for cognitive flexibility, right? You certainly become less flexible. Well, you become less willing to engage in new things as you as you age, right? >> Your perception box is full. [Laughter] >> Well, maybe your motivation, your curiosity becomes less and your motivation, I think that's a difference, right? You say, "Yeah, I've done this 100 times. I don't need to do it 100 first time." Yeah, I know what he's going to say already ahead of time. >> Cynicism is the death of of of all people. I really believe that cynicism is the thing that shuts us down. Like the worst thing that could happen truly the the very worst thing that could happen as a consequence of what we observed yesterday would be that people start to uh just become cynical like we'll never make it out of this trap. That would be the worst outcome. Right? Because we we still need people especially young people but we need all people to believe that we can overcome these fundament fundamental aspects of our wiring. >> Incorrect. That's essential also for any sort of therapy. a willingness to believe that you can that this therapy can make a difference. >> So, how do we instill that in? >> Well, I mean, in a sense, that's a placebo effect, right? This is what the placebo effect tells us that if you have someone in a white coat that says Dr. So and so that has a stethoscope and that has a particular pill, this has all been studied, right? Can make a difference. And then you read about it that this pill you read about it or your friends tell me yeah this pill will work wonder and so therefore it does work wonder right so that's essentially the your belief that's find its substrate somewhere in the brain do you know this interesting study another colleague of yours Bose Hitz is neuro anesthesiologist at Stanford med school >> tell me >> came out a couple of years ago with with ketamine so he looked at all he looked at a subset of patients that had to go this was I think nature medicine that had to go to surgery but they that were depressed. So they went to surgery because of hernia or whatever the surgery. But then he looked over many years only at people who were depressed uh on the mad rol you know the standard scale how you evaluate um how clinic uh clinical personnel evaluates depression and then he split them into two group both would get ketamine therapy but during anesthesia during full level surgical anesthesia that they needed to do their surgery. Okay, that was that was um in addition to and so half the people and everyone got the treatment, everyone talked six hours with with therapists and psychotherapist and with him he held he said I held the hand of every one of these 40 patients during anesthesia because I was the attendant and um so the good news is the people anesthesia who got the ketamine still got the typical drop you know that looks like this a quick drop in the first couple of days and then it stabilizes. The interesting news is the people on the other arm that didn't get ketamine also had this. In fact, what predicted how the drop was whether you believe the extent to which you believe you got the ketamine. So, it's a beautiful example of if you believe something, it is more likely to lead to uh to therapeutic benefits. And so, cynicism works directly against that because if I say ah whatever, it's just another pill. It's not going to do anything. Then, it's much less likely to actually work. Well, this incredible. I wasn't aware of that study. I'll definitely look at the study. It, you know, one of the reasons I'm troubled by what I would refer to as kind of the the lack of heroes nowadays. Um, even heroes from the past is that it breeds such cynicism. You know, when I was growing up, I was told that George Washington never told a lie. Um, I was told that Martin Luther King was a a flawless human being or at least his flaws were not made apparent to me. Um, and so I focused on what he accomplished. Well, I think nowadays there's a tendency to look into the past, the present, and to um find flaws in people and as a consequence, we don't really have true heroes. I mean, there are some people who do spectacular things. Alex Honell being a good example and um leads a very very uh good and honest life, loves his wife and kids etc. But there those examples are rare. You know that typically the um the idea is to either expect perfection or to look for flaws and to puncture whatever else they happen to accomplish. Now, there are true criminals and people that really screw up, but but this notion of of embracing human nature as as sometimes including flaws has has been pretty extreme. Um, and you know, so much so that even on I don't know what the situation is at Stanford, but many uh buildings and statues, etc. have been taken down and renamed because there was a a darker portion of somebody's history that didn't match with their incredible accomplishments. So essentially we've been we've been fertilizing cynicism and I worry very much about that because the brain is plastic at every age especially when people are young. So if you wire cynicism in deeply into these circuits, >> yes, >> you go through life as a cynical person, you become Scrooge. >> And I think you're right. You're you're right to worry. We judge everything by our standards. And of course, the future will judge us for doing atrocious things to animal to the environment, you know. But we don't worry about that. We just judge people by because they said something or they've written a book or they advocated for this particular position that now is untenable. Yeah. I think it I agree with you. It's terrible. >> Yeah. or they made mistakes in in in domains of their life. >> Don't we all? >> Yeah, sure. >> Don't we all? But that's never acknowledged. >> Current activists are perfect and they take the the right to judge everyone in the past by their criteria. Yeah. It's what you said this this other perception box, this other mindset. If you don't measure up to my moral standard, I'm not going to talk to you. >> So on we have this um these two ends of the of the continuum. I would say you framed it up. uh curiosity versus cynicism. Curiosity is proplasticity. You evolve your consciousness >> and it's beneficial for you and for the society. >> Yeah. And cynicism >> the opposite >> shuts the the perception box. >> Yeah. Closes it and and and and makes you uh not believe in the possibility of life including changing your own your own faults because yeah, it's all cynical. Nothing works anyhow. The doctor's just trying to sell me another therapy so they can make money. Yeah. then it's not going to help you if if that's really what you believe. Yeah, it's really it's very bad cynicism. So the in some sense I agree with you it's the worst sin to not believe in humans anymore and the possibility of the human spirit to get out of bad situations like the one we may be currently in. >> Yeah. I mean deaths of despair are one of the primary causes of death in people younger than 30. I heard a a a hearing with the previous NIH director right before the the administrations changed and it was um incredible to see all these quite well-meaning on both sides of the political aisle uh but let's be honest old people um talking about >> oh those be fighting words. >> Yeah. Well, they're they're old and and and and and they're old and and they were focusing so much on all the incredible benefits that research have have provided for the treatment of diseases that people experience as they get older. You know, life lifespans have gotten longer and and quality of life has actually gotten much higher for people in I'm in this age bracket now in the 50 and up bracket. But then the previous um director of the NIH, Bertosi, I think her her last name was, um Caroline Bertosi, forgive me if I'm getting the first name wrong. In any case, she said quite aptly, she said, "We can't forget that for people 40 and younger, they have a a lot of potential life ahead of them, but deaths of despair are killing them at rates that are far greater than at any time in in history. They're very ill despite not being physically ill. And you know that was a shock to me and I really appreciated that she stood up and said that because of course she's a member of the other cohort and it made me realize that taking care of that problem is perhaps >> what's more important because also last they are the ones that forms you know the future society the future lawyers and politicians and business people right and of course they have a much longer portion of life left to live than the old folks. Yes. >> I think we need to reduce cynicism and increase curiosity. That's Yeah. >> And compassion with everyone. >> Yeah. So this I mean you again just alluding to the to the mental health crisis. Yes. A lot of this is mental health. They are physically are fine but they are super anxious, lonely. You know people drink less, have less sex, they live longer with their parents. Uh they're much more anxious than any previous generation. Although we are so much richer, we are so much better off. But they have they feel they feel worse. And people say, "Well, isn't it horrible?" Well, how was it in 1918 after World War I, right? After the previous generation has slaughtered itself. How was it going up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, right? Cold war. So today, this isn't a particular unique point in that that there have always been troubles. There have always been wars. There have always people that suffered. But what's so different is is this the cynicism and the belief, well, it's part of the system. There's nothing we can do about it. And so you wonder where this culture is in its natural evolution. >> Well, I won't suggest that people all run out and do psychedelics because that would be irresponsible. People with a predisposition of psychosis would or bipolar um conditions would put themselves at risk. But I am going to put a flag in the ground um for trying to encourage curiosity and and limit cynicism especially for the next generation. I mean, part of the reason for having this podcast is so that people can access people like you, think about these issues, think about where they've been kind of pigeonholed into a particular way of thinking and and realize, wait, I'm a conscious being. I can actually make choices. It takes work. As you pointed out, we can't no one can be lazy about this. But I don't actually believe that uh the younger generation is lazy. Their anterior mid-sulate cortices are are they're firing like crazy. It's just they need to know which direction to put it. And I feel like growing up I was told, hey, listen, pick a vocation uh that you like and that maybe you can make a living doing it and just go for it. And I was just all in. There wasn't this idea of how it might turn out because you kind of understood, well, you work hard, things work out, more or less. I want to ask you two more questions um that are going to seem very at odds with one another, but they're just two independent questions. The first question is about Jennifer Aniston, and the second question is about the meaning of life. So, first, um, we're in Los Angeles. Um, a lot of actors here. Jennifer Aniston is a very famous actor and, um, you know, a thing or two about Jennifer Aniston and brains and neurons and firing of neurons. So, maybe you could share that uh, that discovery with us. I think it's a fascinating and important one for people to know about. >> Yeah. So this was 20 years ago roughly when I was a professor here at Caltech and I worked with a group of a neurosurgeon called Isak Freed at UCLA epileptic unit. So he had to monitor people's brain for epileptic seizure and in some of these patients they put in electrodes to listen to individual neurons. So you can hear the you know the stacato uh sound that neurons make when they communicate with each other using action potential. And so this afforded us a very unique window into actually listening to a human brain. When humans do what they do on the ward, they watch movies or, you know, they're bored. They have to wait, they have to be on a ward in this state where their brain is monitored for a couple of days until they have seizures to help the the uh the neurologist pinpoint exactly where the seizure originates. So this is done for to help these patients. And so the um Rodrigo Quirro was a posttock at the time in my lab and Gabriel Kryman who's now at Harvard he was a student in my lab. They recorded from these neurons and they found these neurons that at first with great difficulty believing that they exist. So they showed people so in a in a mouse lab or in a monkey lab we would have shown random dots or something or bars >> banana >> or banana but you know human particular in this part of the brain hypocampus amda like endor cortex don't much care about that. So we showed them things that people care about, buildings, famous building people, actors and then we found there was a Bill Clinton cell and there was famously a Jennifer Anderson cell and then so there's a cell that responded prim. So you only have a limited amount of time. It's important to note. So we cannot show them all possible images of all possible actors on the simply not possible. You show them 100 or 200 images. Each image you want to show three or four time randomly shuffled. So it turned out there were some cells that responded uniquely to specific individual like Jennifer Anderson. Not interestingly there she was married at the time to >> oh I don't know this stuff >> Brad Pitt. Thank you. So she the neuron didn't fire to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anson but fired specifically to different pictures of of Jennifer Anson. Some other cells fired to other people including sometimes their name. >> Okay. So, so it turns out that that if you are familiar with people like Donald Trump, okay, our president for better or worse, we all have neurons, that's a claim ultimately that they're neurons in the brain that respond relatively specifically when I tell you Donald Trump when I just mention him or when you dream of Trump or imagine him or see him on a on a on a podcast, there will be specific cells because it makes sense because these people like your family, your friends, the the people you work with, they're so important your brain has decided to wire up neurons that respond to these specific um images and of course we find something like that in deep neural networks. Um the it's less u it's been difficult to find these in other animals partly because animals don't have this repertoire of knowing t you know thousands or tens of thousands of different people right you and I can recognize probably instantaneous 10,000 different people it's something unique to the human species yeah so it's now sort of start a part of of textbook knowledge including the name Jennif Anderson what's really funny um I had a postto Lead Mudri she's now professor at Tel Aviv she part-time time she interviewed people to to to make some living for uh she interviewed living people for a living and she talked to to Jennifer Anist uh about this she had no idea Jennifer Anson that these neurons were there uh it was very interesting uh >> very cool and as you describe all this people's Jennifer Aniston cells are firing >> yes that's the idea >> specifically and Donald Trump cells >> yes >> I have to say I went to the US Open recently the men's final the US open. It was spectacular. And uh Donald Trump was there, so he was some distance away, but I get to see him. And it's very interesting when you see somebody that you've only seen represented on a screen uh in real life. He looks exactly the way he does on the screen, uh mind you, but uh it it was so interesting to um to just realize that that real and and uh virtual worlds collide in those moments and probably reinforce our maps like we're bringing all these priors to our understanding of the person. the the the difference in prior was read out in the in the stadium when his name was read out by either it was it was it was totally uh bipolar distribution. One group booed the other group cheered. It was just like there was nothing in the there were probably some silent folks but it was just like very I mean as a if you could record from every person like you would record from a bunch of neurons it was actually a very interesting uh kind of emergent phenomenon. But anyway, I'm digressing a bit. Jennifer Anderson cells thank you for So, so in French people had difficulty believing that because it was generally uh assumed that what's called the grandmother hypothesis just a term that the field came up with for various historical reason. The idea that neurons in your brain that represent your grandmother is obviously ridiculous. But it turned out no if you grew if your grandmother is an important person for you, you probably very likely will have neurons that fire in response to grandma. you're extremely well read and and you read from different areas of science and philosophy and etc. Um I know a number of people including myself are probably curious to uh do their own exploration. Uh I've never done this before on the podcast but I'm very curious to know if you had one or two maybe three books that you think would be a very informative >> confession. Marcus Aurelius Confession >> 2,000 years ago was written probably for himself not for posterity. the emperor, you know, second century emperor, >> one of the mo particular in times of crisis, you know, teaches you about mindfulness in a very different in this Roman context. >> Um, uh, and about being, you know, but the only thing you can control is how you respond to events. Again, sort of it's I can control my emotional response to it. really wonderful book that I've given to my kids and I given to friends and to other people. Confessions of Marcus Aurelius. >> Great. And we'll direct people to the many books you've written. I haven't read the most recent one, but I about mystical experiences, but I absolutely will. Um, of course, I've read your other books. This is not the Lex Freedman podcast. Lex is a good buddy of mine. But um in kind of Lex Freriedmanish uh uh context, I am very curious about how somebody who thinks about consciousness, who is a neuroscientist, who thinks about um these related fields, and of course has his own life experience, including psychedelics, uh thinks about the so-called meaning of life. I can think of two extremes to just kind of frame this up. One extreme that some people will embrace is look, you know, we're here to just collect experiences and make sense of them and try and do our best not to harm anyone along the way and do some good and build some things. The other might be something more aspirational about knowledge and things that um are pervasive through time. I'm wondering how for you you think about your own purpose in being here and what you're doing and what you plan to do next cuz clearly you're not slowing at all. It's remarkable. Your vigor has doubled since the last time I saw you. Maybe it's the yellow hoodie. Those that are just listening watching, uh Kristoff has never shied away from >> making a statement. Bright colors. He's a he's a he's a bright light. Um >> what's your philosophy on how to approach your own life? And then um if you're willing, maybe give a a sliver of advice or suggestion to those that uh are who ponder their own meaning of life. I think most people do. I certainly do. >> Uh I do. Yeah. I I find myself We find ourselves in a universe that's strangely strangely conducive to life and to conscious life. In fact, you could say we live in a universe that's conducive to consciousness. You know, some version of the entropic principle. We don't know why. We also live in a universe that I think is ultimately fundamentally uh phenomenal mental. The mental evolves under its own laws that I don't have access to. I'm part of it. I will return to this mental that's as far as I've gotten. I don't know is there some sort of you know do you know um what's a Christian thinker Taylor de Shardell you know so he was a Jesuit and a paleontologist and he had this point omega this hypothesis of point omega the entire universe is evolving so he was the first to talk about this new sphere which he talks about that over the next 100 years there will spread this sort of conscious um um type of atmosphere that you can think of like the the in it across the planet and we're all striving all of creation striving towards a point of maximal consciousness which he believes will be in the fullness of time the merging with God I don't I'm not sure about that all I know that ultimately what truly exists is this mental and we are part of that and we will be going back to that but I don't claim to understand the inherent laws of this mental but I ponder like you I question I'm curious and I know I will I will not find any final answers and that's okay. I will you should just strive never cease to stop never stop striving to try to understand the world and leave the place the world a better place than you found it. >> I love it. Well, thank you for that and thank you for coming here today and sitting down with me. It's such a pleasure. >> That was great fun. Yeah, it was great fun to talk to a fellow neuroscientist and and and one who is as accomplished but also as generous with uh knowledge as you are. You know, your your career and I'll send people to a link about this. It's it's really a spectacular example of being curiositydriven and in many cases uh very very brave. I I mean I could have given an entire podcast about how brave it was to start talking about consciousness then to um move into building things at the Allen Brain Institute and on and on. Um I knew before we sat down that we were going to have a great conversation because uh of what you bring but uh I know I shared everybody's thoughts that um you've given us a ton of wisdom. You know some people when they speak very little happens but a lot of words are shared. when you speak everything uh really counts and transforms my way of thinking and I know the listeners as well they're going to think really deeply and hopefully we can eradicate some of the cynicism and uh promote more curiosity and and expand our perception boxes because I think uh mental health depends on it um in many ways not >> future of our society >> the future of our society and uh I really appreciate your willingness to throw yourself into these arenas uh please come back again and um >> thank you for having Hey, thank you. It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Kristoff Ko. 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