Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today my guest is Dr Sam Harris Dr Sam Harris did his undergraduate training in philosophy at Stanford University and then went on to do his Doctorate in neuroscience at the University of California Los Angeles he is well known as an author who has written about everything from meditation to Consciousness Free Will and he holds many strong political views that he's voiced on social media and in the content of various books as they relate to philosophy and Neuroscience during today's episode I mainly talk to Dr Harris about his views and practices related to meditation Consciousness and Free Will in fact he made several important points about what a proper meditation practice can accomplish prior to this episode I thought that meditation was about deliberately changing ing one's conscious experience in order to achieve things such as deeper relaxation a heightened sense of focus or ability to focus generally elevated memory and so on what Sam taught me and what you'll soon learn as well is that while meditation does indeed hold all of those valuable benefits the main value of a meditation practice or perhaps the greater value of a meditation practice is that it doesn't just allow one to change their conscious experience but it actually can allow a human being to view Consciousness itself that is to understand what the process of Consciousness is and in doing so to profoundly shift the way that one engages with the world and with oneself in all practices all environments and at all times both in sleep and in waking States and in that way making meditation perhaps the most potent and important portal by which one can access novel ways of thinking and being and viewing one's life experience we also discussed the so called mindbody problem and issues of Duality and Free Will Concepts from philosophy and Neuroscience that fortunately thanks to valuable experiments and deep thinking on the part of people like Dr Sam Harris and others is now leading people to understand really what free will is and isn't where the locus of free will likely sits in the brain if it indeed resides in the brain at all and what it means to be a conscious being and how we can modify our conscious States in ways that allow us to be more functional we also discuss perception both visual perception auditory perception and especially interesting to me and I think as well hopefully to you time perception which we know is very elastic in the brain the literal frame rate by which we process our conscious experience can expand and contract dramatically depending on our state of mind and how conscious we are about our state of mind so we went deep into that topic as well today's discussion was indeed an intellectual ual deep dive into all the topics that I mentioned a few moments ago but it also included many practical Tools in fact I pushed Sam to share with us what his specific practices are and how we can all arrive at a clear and better understanding of a meditation practice that we can each and all apply so that we can derive these incredible benefits not just the ones related to stress and focus and enhanced memory but the ones that relate to our Consciousness that is to our deeper sense of self and to others several times during today's episode I mentioned the waking up app The Waking Up app was developed by Sam Harris but I want to emphasize that my mention of the app is in no way a paid promotional rather The Waking Up app is one that I've used for some period of time now and find very very useful I have family members that also use it other staff members here at The hubman Lab podcast use it because we find it to be such a powerful tool Sam has generously offered hubman Lab podcast listeners a 30-day completely free trial of the waking up app if any of you want to try it you can simply go to w up.com huberman to get that 30-day free trial during today's discussion we didn't just talk about meditation Consciousness and Free Will we also talked about psychedelics both their therapeutic applications for the treatment of things like depression and PTSD but also the use of psychedelics and we discuss Sam's experiences with psychedelics as they relate to expanding one's Consciousness I also asked Sam about his views and practices related to social media prompted in no small part by his recent voluntary decision to close close down his Twitter account so we talked about his rationale for doing that how he feels about doing that and I think you'll find that to be very interesting as well 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 I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and behaviors affect your health by giving you realtime feedback using a continuous glucose monitor one of the most important factors in your immediate and long-term Health are your blood sugar levels and not just your overall blood sugar levels but your blood sugar levels throughout the day in response to different foods you eat to fasting if you're into fasting to exercise and so forth I started using levels some time ago in order to figure out how different foods impact my blood sugar levels and indeed it does that very well it allowed me to see how certain foods really Spike my blood sugar and others keep it more level and in particular how foods that I eat after exercise can help raise my blood glucose just enough but not so much that then I get a crash two or three hours later which was what was happening before I started using levels I've made certain adjustments to my diet I can now eat post exercise and still have plenty of energy throughout the day without any issues it also has helped me understand how different behaviors impact my blood glucose levels if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself go to levels. link huberman again that's levels. link spelled l i n k/h huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by whoop whoop is a fitness wearable device that tracks your daily activity and sleep but goes beyond activity and sleep tracking to provide real-time feedback on how to adjust your training and sleep schedules in order to feel and perform better 6 months ago I started working with whoop as a member of their scientific advisory Council as a way to help whoop Advance their mission of unlocking Human Performance and as a whoop user I've experienced firsthand the health benefits of their technology it's clear based on quality research that woop can inform you how well you're sleeping how to change your sleep habits how to change your activity habits even how to modify different aspects of your nutrition exercise sleep and lifestyle in order to maximize your mental health physical health and performance so whether or not you're an athlete or you're exercising simply for health whoop can really help you understand how your body functions under different conditions and how to really program your schedule nutrition and exercise and many other factors of your life in order to really optimize your health and performance including your cognition if you're interested in trying whoop you can go to join whoop spelled w o o p.com huberman that's join whoop.com huberman today and get your first month free today's episode is also brought To Us by eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've talked many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the fundamental layer of mental health physical health and performance now one of the key things for getting a great night's sleep every single night is to optimize the temperature of your sleeping environment put simply in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep your body temperature needs to drop by about 1 to 3° and waking up on the other hand involves a heating of your body by about 1 to 3° with Aid sleep you can tune the temperature of your mattress cover or mattress to be cooler or hotter depending on whether or not you tend to run too hot or too cold and you can even vary it across the night so that you can access the best deep sleep early in the night the so-called REM sleep rapid eye movement sleep that's more pronounced in the later half of the night and in doing so really get your sleep optimized not just in terms of duration but in terms of quality and the overall architecture of your sleep this has a profound influence on your alertness focus mood and many other important factors throughout the day if you'd like to try eights sleep you can go to eights sleep.com huberman to save up to $150 off their pod three cover eight sleep currently ships to the USA Canada United Kingdom select countries in the EU and Australia again that's eight sleep.com the huberman Lab podcast is proud to announce that we are now partnered with momentous supplements because momentous supplements are of the very highest quality they ship internationally and they have single ingredient formulations if you'd like to access the supplements discussed on the huberman Lab podcast you can go to live momentus spelled o us so Liv mous.com huberman and now for my discussion with Dr Sam Harris Dr Sam Harris we're just talking about this you are indeed a doctor I cannot save your life but uh I I might I might I might save your non-existent soul if we talk long enough well neither of us are clinicians but we are both uh brain explorers from the different perspectives some overlapping yeah and I'm really excited to have this conversation I've been listening to your voice for many years learning from you for many years and I'd be remiss if I didn't say that my father who's also a scientist is an enormous fan of your waking up app nice and has spent a lot of time over the last few years um he's in his late 70s he's almost 80 he a theoretical physicist walking to the park near his apartment and spending time meditating with the app or sometimes separate from the app but using the same sorts of meditations in his head yeah he kind of toggles back and forth and even uh I shouldn't say even but yes even in his late 70s has reported that it has significantly shifted his awareness of self and his conscious experience of things happening in and around him and he was somebody who I think already saw himself as uh a pretty aware person thinking about you know quantum mechanics and and and the rest so a thank you from him indirectly a thank you from me uh now directly and I really want to use that as a way to frame up what I think is one of the more interesting questions in not just science and philosophy and psychology but all of life which is what is this thing that we call a self you know as far as I know we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our perception of self there are areas of course that regulate appropri reception you know our awareness of where our limbs are in space maybe even our awareness of where we are in physical space there are such circuits as we both know yeah but when we talk about sense of self I have to remember this kind of uh Neuroscience 101 um thing that we always say you know when you teach memory you say you know you wake up every morning and you remember who you are you know who you are most people do even if they lack memory systems in the brain for whatever reason pretty much everyone seems to know who they are what are your thoughts on what that whole thing is about and do we come into the world feeling that way I would appreciate answers from the perspective of any field including Neuroscience of course yeah well big question I mean the problem is we we use the term self in so many different ways right and and there's there's one sense of that term which um is the target of meditation and it's the target of deconstruction by the practice and by just any surrounding philosophy so you you'll hear and you'll hear it from me that this self is an illusion right and and that there's a there's a psychological Freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion um and some people don't like that framing some people would would insist that it's not so much an illusion but it's it's a construct and it's not what it seems right um but it's not that every use of the term self is illegitimate and there's certain types of selves that are not elusory I mean you know I'm not saying that people are Illusions I'm not saying that you can't um uh talk about yourself as distinct yourself as as a whole person and and you know with as you know psychological continuity with your past experience uh as being distinct from the person and psychological continuity of some other person right OB obviously we have to be able to conserve those data it's not fundamentally mysterious that you're going to wake up tomorrow morning still being psychologically continuous with your past and not my past right and and you know if we swapped lives you know that would you know demand some explanation um so the illusoriness of the self doesn't cut against any of those obvious facts so that the sense of self that is elcer um and again we might want to talk about self in other modes because there's there's just a lot of interest there psychologically and you know ultimately um scientifically um the the thing that doesn't exist uh certainly doesn't exist as it seems and I would I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion uh is this the sense that there is a subject interior to experience in addition to experience so most people feel like they're having an experience of the world and they're having their an experience of their bodies in the world and in addition to that they feel that they are a subject internal to the body you know very likely in the head most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention and and that every is it's almost like they you're passenger inside your body you don't most people don't feel identical to their bodies and they can imagine this this is sort of the origin the psychological origin you know the the folk psychological origin of of a sense of that there's there might be a soul that could sur survive the death of the body I mean most people are are what my friend Paul Bloom calls Common Sense Duelists right you you you're just the default expectation seems to be that whatever the relationship between the mind and the body there's this there's some promise of separability there right that the and whenever you really push hard on the science side and say well no that the mind is really just what the brain is doing that begins to feel more and more counterintuitive to people and there still seems some some residual mystery that you know at death maybe something is going to lift off the brain and go elsewhere right so there's this sense of dualism uh that me many people have and obviously that's supported by Many religious beliefs um but this feeling it's it's a very peculiar starting point with people feel that in it in they don't feel identical to their experience right as a matter of experience they feel like they're on the edge of experience uh somehow appropriating it from the side kind of on the edge of the world and the world is out there your body is is in some sense an object in the world uh which you you know you it's different from the world you know the the boundary of your skin is still meaningful you can sort of loosely control your body I mean you can't control you can control your gross you know and and subtle you know voluntary motor movements but uh you can't you're not controlling everything your body is doing you're not controlling your heartbeat and your you know your um hormonal secretions and all of that so there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you and then you you you give someone an instruction to meditate say and you say okay well let's let's examine all of this from the first person's side let's look for this thing you're calling I and again eye is not identical to the body people feel like their hands are out there and they're when if they're going to meditate they're going to close their eyes very likely and now they're going to pay attention to something they're going to pay attention to the breath or the sounds and it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath um that there's this dualism that is set up and ultimately the ultimate promise of meditation I mean there really two levels at which you could be interested in in meditation um one is you know very straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical and very well subscribed and it's it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get for meditation right so you're going to lower your stress and you're going to increase your focus and you're going to you know Stave off cortical thinning and there all kinds of good things that science is saying meditation will will give you um and none of that entails really drilling down on this paradoxical claim that the self is an illusion or or or anything else of that sort but from my point of you the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not in this long list of of benefits and you know I'm not discounting any of those though you know the science for many of them is quite provisional um it's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you're calling ey if you look for the sense that that there's a thinker in addition to the the the mirror rising of the next thought say you won't find that thing and and you can what's more you cannot find it in a way that's conclusive uh and that matters right and and and it has a there's a host of benefits that follow from that Discovery um which are uh quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits you know de-stressing increasing focus and all the rest I have a number of questions related to what you just said and uh first of all I I agree that the evidence that meditation can improve focus reduce stress Etc it's there it's um not an enormous pile of evidence but it's growing and I think that especially for some of the shorter meditations which I these days view more as perceptual exercise you know uh talked about this on the podcast before but for those that haven't heard it before about you know perception you can have exteroception extending it things beyond the confines of your skin interoception which is think also includes the surfaces of the skin but everything inward um and meditation through eyes closed typically um involving some sort of um attentional spotlighting something we'll get into uh to more inter receptive versus EXT receptive events Etc including thoughts and so I think of at a at a basic level meditation as a somewhat of a perceptual exercise um you can tell me where you disagree there and I I would expect and hope that that you would um but I would like to just touch on this idea that you brought up because it's such an interesting one of this idea that our bodies are containers and that we um somehow view ourselves as passengers within those containers that's certainly been my experience um and the image that I have is of uh as you say that is of myself or of people out there that sit a few centimeters below the surface or that sit entirely in their head and of course the brain and body are connected through the nervous system I think sometimes a brain uh is used to replace nervous system and that can get us into trouble in terms of coming up with real real directions and definitions but the point is that there is something special about the real estate in the head I think for as much as my laboratory and many other scientists are are really interested in brain body connections through the nervous system and other organ systems of the that the nervous system binds that if you C cut off all my limbs I'm going to be different but I'm fundamentally still Andrew whereas if we were to leion a you know a couple Square millimeters out of my paral cortex um it's an open question as to whether or not I would still seem as much like Andrew to other people and to myself even and so there is something fundamentally different about the real estate in the cranial Vault uh right you can even remove both my eyes I'd still be Andrew and those are two pieces of my central nervous system that are fundamental to my daily life but I'd still be me whereas um and this doesn't I think just apply to memory systems I mean I think there are regions of the frontal cortex that when destroyed have been shown to modify personality and self-perception in in dramatic ways so it's a sort of obvious Point once it's made but I do think it's worth um highlighting because there does seem to be something special about being in the head the other thing is that um sitting a few centimeters below the surface or riding in this container makes sense to me except I I wonder if you've ever um experienced a shift as I have when something very extreme happens let's use the the negative example of you know all of a sudden you're in a fierce State all of a sudden it feels as if your entire body is is you or is me and is and and now I need to get this thing the whole container and me to some place of saf in what whatever form um this is also true I think in ecstatic States yeah where you can feel really when people say embodied I wonder whether or not we normally oscillate below the surface of our body when I say oscillate I mean in neural terms I mean maybe our sensory experience is not truly at the bodily surface but sits below the bodily surface more at the level of organ systems and within our head and then certain things that jolt us our autonomic nervous system into heightened States bring us into states of um you know bring us closer to the surface and therefore include all of us again I don't want to take us down a a mechanistic description of of something that doesn't exist but does any of that resonate um in terms of how you are thinking about or describing the self yeah yeah there there's a lot there um first on the point of the brain being you know the locus of of what we are as Minds um yeah I mean there are people who will insist that sort of the whole nervous system has to be thought of as when you're talking about our emotional life and you you know the the um the the insula's connection to the gut and just the the the sense of of self extends beyond the brain but I I totally take your point that a brain transplant is a coherent idea and you would expect to go with the brain rather than with the viscera and um so in that sense we really are the the old philosophical thought experiment of being a brain and a vat I mean we essentially are already you know the vat as our skull and we're you know virtually in that situation um horrible movie I'm sorry I can't help put interrupt when I was a a teenager my sister and I used to go to the movies every once in a while we trade off who could pick the movie and um she took me to see once the movie Boxing Helena the David Lynch film where he amputates the limbs of a woman who he's obsessed by and keeps her it's a really horrible film and about 20 minutes into it my sister just turned to me and said I'm so sorry and the question there was whether or not two siblings should actually persist in a movie like that right we decided to persist in the movie so that we could laugh about it later um but it was rather disturbing I don't recommend the movie nor do I recommend seeing it with a sibling but in that movie that the woman he he takes her as a container and and restricts her movement right quite sadistic and horrible thing really um David Lynch um interesting mind perhaps but the the idea was that uh was to question how much of the person persists in the absence of their ability to move Etc could there be love could there be these other affections um anyway a rather extreme example but um one that I that still haunts me and I suppose I'm thinking about still now yeah well so but just to follow that point um there's a there's a lot about us that we don't have access to unless we enact it physically like you know if I ask you you know do you still know how to ride a bike right there's no place in your memory where you can you can inspect by you just sitting in your chair that you you've retained the knowledge of how to ride a bike right like it's a procedural memory is different from semantic or episodic memory if I asked you you know you know do you know your address yes you can recall your address just sitting there but if you if you had had a micro stroke that neatly dissected out your ability to ride a bike you know and left everything else intact you know you might think you could ride a bike but suddenly you stand up next to one and you have no idea what to do with and that would be a discovery that would only happen if you were you motorically engaged with that you know object um and I'm sure there's you know we could probably come up with a hundred things about us that really seem core to us and we and and not separable for our you know from our you know personhood which seem to only cut you only get invoked when we're you know out there moving in the world and you know we have limbs Etc um and uh but yeah no it's the the seat of of Consciousness I mean the right framework to talk about all of this from my point of view is consciousness and its contents right so we have Consciousness the fact that there's something that is like to be us right the fact that that the the world and our internal experience is is illuminated that it has a qualitative character um and then there's the question of what is that qualitative character what is it you know what kinds of information do we have access to what does it feel like to be us how do how do different states of arousal change that so you talked about fear yeah I mean fear can change a lot of things but um uh and you know various neurological deficits or you know you know you can add drugs to the mix you add psychedelics that you they radically transform the contents of Consciousness from my point of view Consciousness itself is simply the the cognizance the awareness this that that is the the flood lights by which any of that stuff appears right so um Consciousness doesn't change but its contents change and um to come back to meditation for a second many people think meditation is about changing the contents of Consciousness you there's some some contents you want to get rid of like anxiety other contents you want to to encourage like calm and you know unconditional love or you some other you know classically Pleasant pro-social emotion uh and that's all fine that's all possible but the real you know wisdom of you know the 2,000 year old wisdom of meditation that really is the you know the the chewy center of the the tootsie poop is a recognition of what Consciousness itself is always already like regardless of the contents and the changes in Contents and this is why I mean we might talk about this but this is why they're mutually compatible uh psychedelics and meditation for me or somewhat orthogonal because psychedelics is all about making wholesale changes to the contents of Consciousness and and there's a you know some wonderful consequences of doing that there can be some harrowing and terrifying consequences of doing that but uh generally speaking I think you know you use used wisely they can be incredibly valuable and and the therapeutic potential there is enormous but the crucial disjunction here is that there really is something to recognize about ordinary waking consciousness the Consciousness that's compatible with my driving a car to get here on time right you you don't have to you don't have to have the pyrot Technics of be being on LSD to see the the the to transcend the central illusion that I'm I'm saying is is the thing to be Transcendent which is the sense that there is a duality between subject and object in every moment of experience um and to take it back to to something you said about just all of our different modes in ordinary life the interesting thing is I think people are constantly losing their sense of self and they're not aware of it and I mean there there's a um probably an analogy to the visual system here which is um to visual sads which perhaps you've spoken about at some point on your podcast not enough so please yeah um so so what happens with our you know every time we move our eyes this is called a a sad and we do that about you know three times a second or so just Norm um there is a you know the the region of motor cortex that that affects that movement sends what's called an an efferent copy of that motor movement uh which is which is used as information that propagates back to visual cortex that suppresses uh the data of vision while the eyes are moving because otherwise if you weren't doing that every time you moved your eyes it would seem like the visual scene itself was lurching around and people can experience this for themselves if they just you know touch one of their eyeballs on the side you know not all that hard and kind of Jiggle It you know and then they can roll it around you can Jiggle It from side to side you can see that a a um a movement of the eyeball that's not governed by your ocular motor system delivers a jiggling of the world because it's not your brain is not anticipating it in the same way and it's not you're not producing that that same uh you know predictive copy of of the movement it's a little bit like um uh we have some action sports filmers on our staff here the the gimbal you know that holds a an iPhone let you see the kids on surfboards or skateboards or something they're going to hold a phone while moving around or the people who the vloggers does anyone even still use that phrase Vlog um moving around into it's it's image stabilization essentially um that keeps the the camera steady and these are more than cameras of course the for those listening I pointed at my eyes but they do far more than just what a camera do but yeah this internal system of of image stabilization yeah I can see perhaps where you're going with this um that that it allows us to remain in a self-referencing scheme as opposed to um sort of paying attention to just how confusing it is to to track the visual world at some level well actually where I'm going is so people are having this suppression of vision three times a second on average and they're not experiencing it right so like you're like you're literally like you're you're you're effectively going blind and you're not noticing it and um this is very fast yes very fast now there there's an analogous uh suppression I would say of the sense of self that occurs every time attention gets absorbed significantly in its object right so like like we we even have this concept of you know losing yourself and your work or you know you losing your I the classic flow experiences have this this quality where there's that and this this tends to be why they're so rewarding um whether it's just if you're in in some you know athletic activity or you know an aesthetic one um uh or you could be having sex or you could be whatever it is some Peak experience its peakness usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience right for that moment you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere where where you weren't or you know micromanaging errors or you like this you know there's not there's just the flow of unity with whatever the you know whatever the experience is you know a surfer on on the wave right um and we love those experiences um and then we are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them we think oh my God that was so good or how do I get back to that or you know you're looking at a sunset it's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen and then you're continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary about how amazing this is and I wonder you know what are real estate prices are here I mean is it possible to actually could move here and like your your mind is just continually narrating a conversation you're having with yourself however paradoxically I mean you're telling yourselves thing yourself things that you already know uh as though they were two of you rather often right like you know you're just you know I'm looking for you know which which is the water and I say oh there it is right but like I'm the one seeing it who am I saying oh you know there it is too as though there's someone else who needs to be informed about the thing I already saw right so it's it's um there's something about our internal dialogue that is paradox Le um is there any um neurologic condition um uh colos sectomy or or anything like that where somehow people feel more unified with the self on a continual basis um The Observer and the actor within whether it stay more more um as as a complete sentence is there any known neurological syndrome makes it sound like a bad thing but it could be a good thing whereby people feel that the actor and the Observer within them are unified continually there's not a pathological one some of them the work on the default mode Network suggests that that's at least part of the story right so the default mode network uh which has been talked about a lot of late because it it has come up both in the in the meditation literature and in the Psychedelic literature um but it's original uh Discovery was that you know and the reason why it was called the default mode was is that in virtually every neuroimaging experiment ever run they found that between tasks when the brain was just in its default State the these these midline structures would would increase their activity uh and then they would then they would reliably diminish whenever the person in the scanner was was on task and usually that meant some kind of outward looking um you know visual discrimination task I mean but it could be it could be you it could be visual it could be semantic it could be but there tends to be their eyes are open and they're paying attention to something that's being broadcast to them through you know monitor goggles um or you know they're looking at a mirror that's showing them a computer monitor um but the so the general Insight was there are these midline structures in the brain that seem to be uh increasing their activity when the brain is just kind of idling between tasks waiting for something to happen um and then further experiments found tasks that actually upregulated um activity there Beyond Baseline and those tasks seem to be self-referential so that when you ask people you know you give them a list of words and you say would do these any any of these apply to you right you know and so people or or you ask people to think about um uh you actually one experiment I did when you you know when you're challenging people's beliefs uh when you're challenging beliefs that that have more of a personal significance like political or religious beliefs you get an upregulation in these regions as opposed to just generic beliefs about you know you're in Los Angeles this is a table you know there something to which you know people are not you know uh holding fast as a matter of identity um so anyway both meditation and psychedelics seem to suppress activity in these in these regions which we know are associated with both selft talk mind wandering and and explicit acts of self-representation right so could we say that they are somewhat autobiographical because they Access Memory systems and in the way you're describing them and in the way that a colleague of mine who's been a guest on this podcast I don't know if you've interacted with him before but I think you'd very much enjoy whatever interaction you would have his um David Spiegel he's our associate chair of Psychiatry he's the one he and his father actually his father then he founded um hypnosis as a valid clinical practice in Psychiatry and hypnosis which is obviously a heightened sense of attention with deep relaxation is known to dramatically suppress the the default mode network uh he talks about this a lot and I I always wonder as we um take down activity within the default mode Network what surfac is it in its place and is what surfaces it in its place um does that somehow reflect that the two are normally in a push pull because that's not necessarily the case right when I fall asleep I can hallucinate but that doesn't mean that during the day my uh the fact that I'm looking at objects is is what's preventing me from hallucinating if I close my eyes I can get imagery but you know there's this kind of a a different illusion the illusion of antagonistic circuitry sometimes um I don't want to take us off course but the default mode Network seems to um want to be there quote unquote it seems it seems to be fighting for for our attention um unless we give ourselves a visual targeted or an auditory Target or some Salient experience of some kind it sounds like and then if um I'm surprised to hear that meditation reduces activity in the default mode Network at some level because meditation to me oftentimes involves um paying attention to a some sort of perceptual Target yeah so maybe you could um eventually explain as to how it might do that or why it might yeah and and I I don't think it's the whole story because obviously outward goinging attention is not um even if you're having the kind of egoic sad that I'm talking about where you're like you're actually not clearly aware of of yourself you're not clearly defining yourself as separate from experience um for the moment of paying attention so you are sort of losing yourself in your work that's not the same thing as having the clear meditative Insight of selflessness that I'm that I'm claiming as the goal of meditation um but there is a you know to wind back to the original point I was making and the reason why I drew the ref the analogy to visual sads I do think there's a continuous interruption in our sense of self that goes unrecognized and um but but the conscious uh acquisition of of of the understanding that the the self as an illusion is a different experience and it's I mean because you're then you're then focusing on this absence actually there's another analogy to to the visual system that applies here which is to the the optic blind spot I mean it's like so um which is a good analogy for me because it cuts through a bunch of false assumption as to kind of where that you would look for this or how this relates to ordinary experience so as many people know that we have you know in both eyes we have um what's called the blind spot which is a consequence of the optic nerve transiting through the retina I mean unlike seapods I think I mean I think seapods have their optic neres you know as you know a a an omnicient being would have engineered it connecting the retina from the back and therefore there is no blind area of of blindness associated with its Transit back through the retino but photo receptors on the outside exactly humans for whatever reason uh put photo well I always say I wasn't consulted the design phase something uh put photo receptors um combination of things put photo receptors in the back and so you actually have to send the highway of information through through the pixel center of the of the eye yeah seop pods and drop basically um uh invertebrates right uh the design is more at its face logical mammals very illogical design at least as far as our judgments go yeah but it it gives it gives me a good analogy so I'll I'll take it I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor athletic greens athletic greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contain digestive enzymes and adaptogens I started taking athletic Greens Way back in 2012 so that's 10 years now of taking athletic greens every single day so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens is that it covers all of my foundational nutritional needs so whether or not I'm eating well or enough or not I'm sure that I'm covering all of my needs for vitamins minerals probiotics adaptogens to combat stress and the digestive enzymes really help my digestion I just feel much better when I'm drinking athletic greens if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athletic greens.com huberman and for the month of January they have a special offer where they'll give you 10 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 vitamin D3 and K2 are vital for immune function metabolic function Hormone Health but also calcium regulation and heart health again that's athletic greens.com huberman to claim their special offer in the month of January of 10 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 k too so in any case we have this blind spot which you can I think most people learn this in school although my daughters had not been taught this in school I just showed them this for the first time like a month ago which and they were briefly fascinated then they want to return to their screen time uh but uh anyway you can take a piece of paper and you make you know two marks on it and then you cover one eye and you fixate on on one Mark um I mean you can look this up online if you need uh details about how to do this and and you while staring at one fixation point you move the the paper back and forth and you can get it to a place where the other Mark disappears and that and if and you know you can run this experiment long enough to satisfy yourself that there is in fact a blind spot in your visual field which you with one ey closed you don't normally notice um the reason why you have to cover cover one eye is because each eye compensates for the the blind spot of the other so um but which is to say that if you close one eye and and Survey the visual scene something really is missing whatever you're looking at if you're looking at a crowd of people somebody is missing a head and you're not noticing it and it's not it's not easy to notice because um you know the brain doesn't tend to vividly represent the absence of information I mean it's just like this just part of the game that's not being rendered it's not it's not showing up as a a break in your in the visual field it's just not there and you're um I mean that people have argued that there's a a kind of filling in phenomenon that happens but I think that can be you know um misunderstood or or exaggerated but the eye movements themselves you described before I I guess I should say that the the the sod analogy of about um transiently and repetitively erasing the self works perfectly here because indeed micro cods little smaller cods that occur all the time also prevent our eyes from fixating at one location for long enough to observe our blind spot even if one eye is closed right right so if we uh the experiment done with paralytics to essentially lock eyes at one location basically things just start disappearing yeah just we all to think that we start hallucinating but actually we start going blind right and those experiments have been done and on humans I I hear they're quite terrifying yeah yeah yeah but I mean you can do that for yourself too it just you know it begins to just all Melt Away in a in a warm glow um no psychedelics required but the um the interesting point there is that when you ask yourself okay so this because of as a consequence of the eyes Anatomy there's this this thing you can see that is absent from your experience but the question is where is that in relationship to the rest of you to your mind is that deep within or is that in some sense right on the surface of experience and there's there's expectation that people have again I think conflating meditation with with a search for changes in the Contex of Consciousness they're looking for you know you know um much more subtle things to to to notice about the mind or much you know vaster things to notice um psychedelic sets up this this expectation that you know you do you know a massive dose of mushrooms or LSD and everything changes I mean you just get this full you know biotypic Vision um and you know you get you not only visual changes but you know emotional changes and and you get athesia where like you're just you have much more mind in in in so many ways um so they begin you having these experiences or reading the mystical literature you begin to think okay well then freedom is is really elsewhere or it's it's really it's deep within it's like it's not it's not coincident with the ordinary awareness that can that can see this coffee cup clearly and that can just transition attention to you know reading an email uh you with with the sort of full sobriety of just you know you know ordinary waking consciousness um but the truth is this insight into selflessness this insight into the non-duality of subject and object is as close to ordinary Consciousness as this insight into the optic blind spot like where do you have to go to have this insight into the blind spot no you just have to you have to go anywhere you just have to set up the the the experiment correctly such that you know you you can see the data but the data is right on the surface it's like it's it's it's almost too close to you to notice I if it's at all hard to notice it BEC it's because it's so close rather than it's you know deep within or far away um and there are other analogies like um I don't know remember those Mind's Eye pieces of artwork that were those the random dot stereograms where you have an image that pops out um I always find it very difficult to see those because I have you very dominant eye you know but people can't see those these are these images that used to be at the kind of like touristy shops of a people say oh there it is the whale and I was thinking I don't see it um you know kids that swim a lot when they're younger and they're tend to breathe just to one side I don't know if this was you this was definitely me they tend to um will keep one eye closed you set up a pretty strong ocular dominance biasing your vision to one or the other eye early in life whether or not you're learning how to be a bow hunter or you're learning how to throw darts or shoot Billiards or anything involves um selectively viewing the world through one eye for even a couple of hours can set up a permanent um asymmetry in the waiting of of visual flow flow of visual information from the eye to the brain um it's reversible but only through the reverse gymnastics of covering up the other eye intentionally so I actually be I had to be reverse patched for a while CU I was seeing double because I lost binocular vision I don't stand a chance in hell of seeing an image pop out of a random stere which is kind of ironic because I did my PhD on binocular circuitry but um nonetheless if people can see these um or if they can't what I think they provide a really terrific example of what you're talking about as a larger theme which is that perceptually you see a bunch of dots and then all of a sudden right what you thought wasn't there is suddenly there but can dis disappear again or there are certain visual Illusions if we were to include others that once you see them you cannot unsee them right so there's the faces vases you know figure ground type stuff very bable percepts yeah yeah bable percepts and then there's sort of um ocular competition you show two different images to the eyes each of the two eyes it is near impossible for people to perceive them both simultaneously yeah um so it's a little bit of what you're describing I mean these seem to be fundamental features about the way the neural circuits are organized that they don't want to stably we they don't want to stay fixated on any one thing for very long to do so either takes training intense interest intense fear intense excitement when I say intense I guess I come back to this idea that the autonomic nervous system is somehow governing our ability to um Spotlight at any one location for very long does that is that a useful framework or is that going to take us down a a different path well it's sort of a different path for this I mean for the only point I was making is that the seemingly paradoxical claim that something can be right on the surface uh and yet hard to see right so like there there are things that are um because it's and again this this this seems to justify the expectation held by I would think you know the vast majority of people who get interested in these you know spiritual things for lack of a better word um that the truth must somehow be deep within right like that like there's really like a there's some distance between where you're between the one who is looking and the thing that has to be found right and you have to go through this this long evolution of changes I mean there are many metaphors that set this up it's like you're at the base of a mountain and you have to climb to the top and so you have to find the PATH however secure secure it is to get you there um but there really is a distance between where you're between your starting point and the goal and what I'm arguing you know and this is kind of a non-dual you know to use a term of jargon um this is a non-d du approach to meditation as opposed to a dualistic one that there really is a a the the path and the goal are are are coincident right that there's a there that you have to unravel the logic by which you would seek something that's outside of you you know the the present moments experience um you know I.E not available really not available to you now um because so many things worth having so many so many skills worth acquiring really are not available to you now it's like it's like you know if you want to be a a Pianist or if you want to speak Chinese or if you want like like the you there's something you don't know and then you want to learn that thing and there's a whole process right and you might not be capable of doing it right you might and and real Mastery is far away right if you if you've never hit a golf ball and you want to hit a golf ball 300 yards straight right you know I can pretty much guarantee you're not going to do that initially and you're not going to do it you know on day two and uh you're not going to do it reliably for the long time and there's real training you know in front of you to to be able to do that reliably an insight into and really the core Insight I mean the Insight that is you the core of you know the Buddha's teaching to take one one uh historical example of this um really is available now and it is not I mean you know granted it can be very hard one for people I mean I I had probably spent a year on silent retreat in in you know one week to 3 month increments before I sort of got the point I'm making now right so like I you know it's quite I mean literally and this these are you know these are Retreats where you spend you know 12 to 18 hours a day just meditating trying to to you know unpack the kinds of claims I'm I'm you know making now um so there it's it's possible to rigorous ly overlook this it's possible to stand in front of the Mind's Eye image and stare in a way that is guaranteed not to give you pop out right and to be to be Adept at you know staring in that way um so it's possible to be misled and so what I'm what I'm trying to argue here is that there's um there's a fair amount of Leverage you can get with with better information which can kind of cut the time course if you are searching for this thing and and and kind of cancel your false expectations about just where this is in relation to your ordinary waking consciousness um and it's possible to get bad information and to have a bunch of experiences you know you go you go and do an iasa trip and you have it's incredibly valuable and it's valuable for all the ways in which it change the contents of your Consciousness in in you know startling ways and you had insights into your past and into your relationships and into why you're not as loving as you might be and there's lots to think about and you're like okay that's all great that's all something that you know you we can talk about but there is it it truly is orthogonal I me if it makes a point of contact to what I'm talking about it's really just at one point you know and it's at the point where this sense of of subject object division in Consciousness is elusory and vulnerable to investigation and if you investigate it as sort of the the right plane of focus you know you pick the analogy you want from you know whether it's you know setting up the the um the optic blind spot spot experiment in just the right way so that you can see that you know it's actually not the data is not there or um I mean the by stable percept is is great because you know when you see one of these images like the vase face um diagram or you know the dalmati you know that it looks like just a mess of dots and then you see the the image of a Dalmation dog pop out once you see it you really can't unsee it I mean like once you have the the requisite conceptual you know anchor to it then every time you look you're going to find it again and and it eventually becomes effortless and that's what ultimately meditation is I mean this kind of meditation you you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation from you between you and your experience right there's not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other there's just experience right there's just seeing hearing smelling tasting touching thinking feeling you know reception add add whatever channels of information you want to that um but there's just the there's just the totality of the energy of Consciousness and its contents and there's no it's not that you're on the riverbank uh and this is this is how it can seem in the beginning even when you're practicing meditation fairly diligently it can seem like you're on the riverbank watching the contents of Consciousness Flow by and then and meditation is the act of doing that more and more dispassionately so you're no longer grabbing at the at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away you're just kind of relaxing and in in the most non-judgmental frame of mind just witnessing the flow right but if you're doing that dualistically you feel like the meditator you feel like the subject aiming attention and so now you're on the riverbank watching everything go go past but the truth is you are the river right experience itself is that there is just experience itself you're not you're not on the edge of experience and everything you can notice is part of the of the flow right and there's and there's no point from which to abstract yourself away from the flow to stand outside it and to say okay this is this is my life this is my experience this is my body yes you can do that I mean those are all just thoughts but that's more of the flow right and so there is a there's a process by which you would eventually eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience and again you can you can wait for those moments in life where experience gets so good or so terrifying you know just so Salient right your amydala is driving so hard I mean so you're in a war and you can't think about anything because you know the enem is shooting at you and this is the most thrilling video game you've ever played in your life uh and your life is on the line or you're you're you know at the peak of of some you know athletic event where there's just you don't know how you're doing the things you're doing but it's all happening automatically right um but you know those are those are you know one 100th of 1% of one's life you know and you know what I'm calling meditation is a way of Simply understanding the mechanics of attention whereby you are denying yourself that Unity of experience so much of the time and recognizing that that's you know it's it's based on a a misperception of of the way Consciousness always already is well if there wasn't an incentive to learn how to meditate properly um that was one and I've been meditating a fair amount since I was in my teens um but more along the lines of just paying attention to breath and um you know recognize thought sort of Observer open Observer type meditation or focused attention I would suppose more of the focused attention we'll get into these a little bit later but I have a number of questions related to what you just said sure um I love the idea that this thing that um we would all do well to uh understand to observe Consciousness itself as opposed to um trying to alter the contents of Consciousness um May sit much closer to us than um one might think that it um and that because it sits so close to us that that might be one of the reasons why we miss it I I go right to a visual system example I mean if you don't if you're wearing corrective lenses and there's a speck on your lens you know typically you're looking out through the lens and so you wouldn't observe that spec um any number of different analogies could work here the the fact that there are states however few um positive and negative ecstasy extreme ecstasy and extreme fear uh being the the two I think most obvious ones that seems like we agree on that allow us to capture the sense of um completeness of self or the the unity of the The Observer and the and the actor um the fact that those are are seldom for the non-trained for the non-m meditator um suggests to me two things I think one um perhaps worth exploring more than the other but one is that um what's really being revealed in the states where we can feel the unity of the Observer and the actor is understanding something fundamental about the algorithm that not the online algorithm but the algorithm that is our nervous system just as a you mentioned seapods I mean mantis shrimp see an enormous array of color Hues that we don't right they map their maps and representations of the world are fundamentally different pit viper see in the infrared right we're restricted to somewhat of a limited range within the color spectrum but still more vast than that of dogs or cats okay so understanding that for seeing what um a pit viper can see for moments would be informative um perhaps um sensing heat emissions uh as a human might be invasive then maybe that's why we don't do it so the question is to just make it straightforward is um why would the system be designed this way again neither of us were consulted the design phase but that brings me to perhaps the more tractable question was which is um about development I mean I'm a great believer that the neural circuits that uh encouraged uh healthy parent child relations or unhealthy parent child relations as the case may be in childhood stem from the initial demands of internal versus external states which is exactly that we're talking about which is that a young child feels anxious because it needs its diaper change it doesn't really know it needs its diaper change or it's cold or it's uncomfortable or it's hungry or it's overly full and so it vocalizes and then some external Source comes to us and relieves that hopefully right and so the fundamental rule that we first learn is not that we have a self or that um Things fall down not up but is that um when uncomfortable um externalize that discomfort and it will be relieved by an outside player and then of course there's a repurposing of that circuitry for adult romantic attachments I don't think anyone doubts that and that can explain a lot indeed about attachment and so forth so something about our developmental wiring and the algorithms that these neural circuits run tend to bias most people the non practice meditators to live a somewhat functional life at least um without this awareness of actor and observer right and so what you're really talking about is a a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve that Gap in the algorithm is that do I have that right yeah yeah I'm more or less restating what you said in a way that I'm I'm hoping will serve as a jumping off point as to you know why questions are always dangerous in biology or any you know um and or in relationship yeah what's that or in relationship or in relationship right exactly um although I think it all does really hearken back to this early developmental wiring which of course is modifiable that's the that's the beauty of of the the nervous system is it's the one organ that seems to be able to change itself at least to some degree right um so what are your thoughts about the organization of the circuitry to to essentially under normal conditions to not reveal its what seems to be one of its more important and profound and um for you know dare I say enlightening features right it's almost as if we are potentially like mantis shrimp we can see so many more colors than we actually see and yet we don't we we sort of opt most people opt not to and I would argue that um one of the great strengths of the waking up app for instance that it it essentially walks you through the process of being able to arrive at at these things without having to go do one year or threee um long silent meditation Retreats so if you just elaborate for a moment before we move on about you know what are your thoughts about how the circuitry is arranged by default versus that the and and what that means um for there to be an an intervention that we have to intervene in the self in order to reveal the self well so the two big questions there one about Evolution one about development so um with respect to Evolution I mean it's important to recognize that Evolution doesn't see our deepest concerns about human flourishing and human well-being you know it's all about the it's just you know you you we are set up to spawn and to survive long enough to to help our progyny spawn if we can do that and that and that that's it right and so anything that was good for that including you know uh tribalism and xenophobia and you know um you know all kinds of hardware and software flaws that are that are revealed themselves to be flaws in the present time when we're trying to build a viable Global civilization um but you know they they redounded to the advantage of our ancestors somehow um or they just there there are things about us that were simply not selected for they just kind of came along for the ride you know you know what Stephen J G called a spandrel you know um so uh we are not set up by Evolution to be as happy as we possibly can be um and certainly and and to do almost anything that interests us well I mean we're not set up by Evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to to create democracies that are healthy I mean Evolution can see none of this and we are doing these things based on cognitive and emotional Hardware uh that we are leveraging in New Directions right I mean we have we are primates and we are you know we're communicating with you know small mouth noises I mean we're language using primates and all of that is clearly evolved um uh and we're doing these amazing things including science you know however improbably we're we're actually able to to you know almost entirely with language uh understand reality that at a scale that exceeds Us in both dire I mean the very the very vast and the very small and and you know also temporally the very old uh we have you know visions of the far future we can figure out you know where an you know an asteroid is going to you know cross Earth's orbit a thousand years from now uh if we just do the math and it's amazing that we can do all those things but evolution is blind to all of that right and so we have in terms of what we care about and certainly in terms of what we what's going to ensure our survival as a species we have flown the perch that was created for us by Evolution I mean we're just not it's not just the primate things and so so it is with learning how to regulate our emotions and and you know punch through to a self-concept or Beyond a self-concept that is more normative psychologically that allows us to you know not be um terrorized by our apish genes uh as fully as we seem to be even in the presence of more and more destructive technology that I mean like you know we're we're still practically chimpanzees armed with nuclear weapons right I mean and that is you know increasingly dysfunctional and uh very soon we're going to be in the presence of minds or apparent Minds that we have built you know that are as intelligent as we are or and very quickly you know probably 15 minutes after that far more intelligent than we are and so what we do with all of that is again something that we have to figure out based on the minds we have the minds we can build the minds we can change you know we can we can medle with our own genomes now and and that will produce its own consequences uh you know in in ourselves and uh in future Generations if we meddle with the germ line and again all of that is just you know you know evolution is just sort of the womb we came out of but it's not it didn't anticipate any of that right so so the you know Mother Nature has has simply not had our best interest at heart right and it's we might die off and and from the point of view of Mother Nature that's that's fine because 99% of of every species dies off you know um so there's that but but when you're talking when you're talking about the the individual developmentally so you know we all come into this world again as a as a um fairly hairless primate uh that needs a tremendous amount of Care by others and um the logic of that is that um you know you know the reason why we're not a a gazelle that can you run you know 45 minutes later and then basically do all the gazelle things uh perfectly uh soon thereafter um the reason why we have you know we have this this time of of immaturity uh and that becomes has become functional for us is that it's just we we're we're far more flexible and we can learn based on the needs of of environment to do you know so much more than a gazelle can and language is a part of that and you know um in the last 10,000 years or so culture increasingly has been more and more a part of that and there's a probably a layer at which we can plausibly talk about cultural Evolution you know and cultural Evolution interacting with biological evolution to to change us um but when you're talking about the development of an individual each of us comes into this world I I think um not recognizing ourselves in any in any sense that would make sense to to reify um I mean it's not that there's nothing there I mean there could be some kind of Proto self differentiation but I think it's it takes a it takes a long while and there is pro very likely a coincidence between really recognizing recognizing others we recognize others first and we're in certainly in relationship immediately and we Orient to human faces and and we uh you know even detect um other humans as good and bad moral actors very early I mean certainly long before we recognize ourselves in a mirror um uh we um the experiments run again this is Paul Bloom and and colleagues experiments run on kind of the moral hardware and software of of uh developing toddlers but I think at this point they push it down all the way to like six months of of age where you'll get these infants staring at kind of a puppet show and they'll they'll show a a um a greater interest in you know you know classically good actors versus Bad actors you know Cooperators versus you know defectors in various you know puppet show games um so there's it's not that we have no mind and no um Proto awareness of others and and of self but what eventually happens certainly as we become at all fastel with with language use is that we become aware that that not only are we in relationship to others but we are an object in the world for them right so that like we have enough people pointing at us in our cribs right and impinging Upon Our experience right you know that you you're you're being physically moved and prodded and touched and consoled or not consoled and just imagine mention what all of these you're on the receiving end of 10,000 interventions right and you're completely helpless for the longest time um and all of that attention you have all of these people coming up you know to the crib and and making faces at you cheering yeah and and it's all pointed at you right so there's a you know there's a a classic magical n narcissism that that gets constructed there if you if you take the psychological literature you you know at least a certain Str of it seriously um and I think it's it's largely apt to to think of of a child at that age as a kind a kind of um uh there is a kind of Nar narcissistic structure there where it's it's it's all kind of going Inward and at a certain point you realize okay I'm I'm the center of all of this right like it's not just it's not just a movie that you're that you're you're you know where you're that you're completely absorbed in and you've lost your sense of self I mean this is to talk to the yet another example of um of what it's like as a grown-up to lose our sense of self and one of the things I think we find so fascinating by about television and and and film is that when we get totally absorbed in it we're in this very unusual circumstance where we're you know our brain is basically reading it as we're in a in the classic social circumstance we're presented with with you know the the the the facial displays of other people in fact you know we can get some of the sometimes these people are 10t tall right or their faces are 10t tall you a close-up in a movie theater so it's like this super stimulus in terms of of of evolution and they could make you they could be making direct eye contact with a camera right so you have this gigantic face staring at you and yet you're totally lose self-consciousness and yet you're you're able to examine with completely free attention again because you're totally unlic um the the the facial minutia and the mimetic facial play of people uh from at a very close range I mean you're seeing people clo I mean you you'd have to be you know physically just you know about to kiss your your your spouse like that's what a close-up is in a film right like that you never get that close to people right um and yet here you're in a situation where you're unobserved and you know that and so I mean this is a bit of a tangent but the it's it's the other side of what's Happening developmentally for a kid um when you're in a movie theater watching a movie you are truly invisible and yet you're right there seeing you know the however harrowing the human drama is you're seeing it play out and you're seeing it you're seeing it up close and it is a it is in principle a social encounter that your genes are ready for but they're not ready for you to be invisible right and so that's what's so uh um magical about it but what happens developmentally for a kid is that you're not invisible you are an object that is constantly being being um overrun the boundaries of your you know you know your sensory engagement with the world are constantly being impinged upon by others and at a certain point you recognize okay I'm at the center of this and the and the way this gets enshrined as a self um I think is probably coincident with our learning The Language game we we learn to play with others where we we're talking to others people are talking to us and at a certain point we're talking to ourselves even when the other people leave the room right so and you can hear if you ever have been with a toddler when they're when they're when they're externalizing their self talk you know you hear them talking to themselves they're playing and they're and they're they're having a conversation they were talking to you the parent but then you left the room and and they're still talking you come back in then they're still they're still talking right and what happens to us strangely um and this comes back to the logic of evolution um we never stop because Evolution never thought to build us an off switch for this right I mean language is so useful and it gets tuned up so strongly for us uh and there was never reason to shut it off right there's never reason to give you this ability to say it wouldn't it be nice to have four hours of quiet now and like no selft talk um and so for most of us I mean I think there are people who for whatever neurological reason or you know idiosyncratic reason undoubtedly there's there'd be a neurological reason for it don't have any selft talk but for the for most of us um we are covertly talking basically all the time and and there's an imag component of this for many people you're visualizing things as well but there's just a lot a ton of white noise in the mind that feels a certain way and you know what I what you discover in meditation ultimately is that the self is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking right a thought arises uninspected and seems to just become you right so like you and I are talking now and you say you're you know people are listening to us they're they're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because it is competing with their the conversation that's happening in their heads right so they I'll be saying something and a person listening will say well what does that mean or like oh but wait a minute he just contradicted himself or like you're and there's a voice in your head that is also Vine for your attention much of the time and um so it's you know the the first discovery people make in meditation is that it's just so hard to pay attention to anything the breath or a mantra or sound whatever it is because you're thinking every you're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour and oh it's so good that I I downloaded this app I'm like this is really good this is going to be good for me but and you're but you're that that chatter isn't showing up you you're not far back enough uh in the in the kind of the theater of Consciousness so as to see it emerge it's it is just sneaking up behind you it feels like me again it feels like when someone is thinking the thought what the hell does that mean right they're not seeing it as an emerging object in Consciousness it just feels like me it just feels that that that's it is it the the you know subjectively it's like the Mind contracts around this appearance in Consciousness and it really is just it is just a you know it's just a sound with the voice of the mind if you actually can inspect it it is it is deeply inscrutable that we ever feel identified with our thoughts I mean how is it that we could be a thought these thoughts a thought just arises and passes away and when you inspect when you go to inspect it it's it you know it unravels it's it's just it's it's the least substantial possible thing and and it could but yet it could be a thought of self-hatred you know it could be a a thought that that unrecognized totally defines your your mood you know it's like um I mean just again this this this all can seem kind of abstract but well no but I I but I think it it's extremely concrete from the perspective of the neural circuits that we'll return to in maybe in a few minutes I'd like to take a brief break and thank our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goal I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test the problem with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there however is that you get data back about metabolic factors lipids and hormones and so forth but you don't know what to do with those data inside tracker solves that problem and makes it very easy for you to understand what sorts of nutritional behavioral maybe even supplementation based interventions you might want to take on in order to adjust the numbers of those metabolic factors hormones lipids and other things that impact your immediate and long-term Health to bring those numbers into the ranges that are appropriate and indeed optimal for you if you'd like to try insid tracker you can visit insid tracker.com huberman and get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans that's insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off if you could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli and the bridge between them because that's think that uh for some people that might be intuitive I think for others um it's not so obvious that um language is ongoing in the backdrop Yeah because sometimes I think some people are more tuned into um that language for some people it's it's louder volume for some people it's uh more structured I have a colleague at um at Stanford who's been on this podcast Carl diero who's like and the preent like bioengineers he's also psychiatrist and he has a med he doesn't call it a meditative practice he has a practice where each evening after his five kids are put down to sleep you know um they're older now but uh and in the quiet of the the late hours of the night early morning he sits and forces himself to think in complete sentences with punctuation for an hour this is the way that he has taught himself to structure his thinking right because of the very fact that you're describing which is that ordinarily there is an underlying structure to what's internal but it's disrupted by external events and it's and these are typically it's not um coherent enough to really make meaning from so it's almost like somebody sitting down to write in complete sentences but forcing himself to do it in his head but for many people including myself that's a that's a foreign experience and we only experience structure through our interactions with the world and other people that if I were I've taken the time to try and explore ideas with eyes closed and you know and I've been able to do that um there are certain pharmacologic states that we could talk about that facilitate that um and know those are not amphetamines those do exactly the opposite by the way but um I think people exist in varying degrees of structured and and unstructured internal dialogue and um in in varying depths of recognition of that internal dialogue and so the question I suppose is is just the recognition that there's a dialogue ongoing internally is that itself valuable yeah and that that also can take some time so so so here here's a claim I would make that some people might find surprising but I I think uh this is an objectively true Claim about the subjectivity of most people which is that unless you you know have a fair amount of training unless you just happen to be some kind of savant in this area which you know most people by definition aren't um or you have a remarkable amount of training mean in what's called you know concentration practice in in meditation um I I believe this is a a true claim that you know if we just put a you know a stopwatch on this table and and you know people could just watch you know 30 seconds elapse and um I set you know set all of our listeners or your viewers the task uh for the next 30 seconds just pay attention to anything your breath you know or you know the the side of your hand or the side of the clock or uh any object without getting lost in thought without getting momentarily distracted by this conversation you're having with yourself um this couple things would happen one is no one would be able to do it right and and and not just this is not just a a superficial inability I mean if your life depended on it you wouldn't be able to do it I mean if if the fate of civil ization dependent on it none of none of our listeners would be able to do this um and yet some percentage of them are are so distracted by thought that they would think that they will actually try this experiment and think they succeeded right and for these people what what happens is you put them on a Meditation Retreat and you have them spend 12 hours a day in silence doing nothing but this right so the practice is just pay attention to the breath when they're sitting and then eventually you know you incorporate everything sounds and other the sensations and then you inter leave that with walking meditation where they're paying attention just to the sensations of lifting and moving and placing their feet and then you know once the practice is going you you incorporate sounds and sights and everything but so you can pay attention to everything but the goal is for every moment um you are going to you are going to cultivate that what this this faculty of mind which you know increasingly is known as mindfulness right so and mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful attention to the contents of Consciousness uh but the crucial piece is it is not a moment of being lost in thought right you're not you you're not blocking thoughts thoughts themselves can arise but in those moments of being truly mindful you're noticing thoughts as thoughts whether they're whether it's language in the mind or images you're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances in Consciousness um so uh if if most people you know certainly anyone who thinks they can pay attention to you know to they can do the experiment successfully that I just uh suggested pay attention to something for 30 seconds without being lost in thought you put those people on a Meditation Retreat what they're going to experience is you know on the first day they're going to feel like oh yeah I was you know I was with the breath or I was walk you know I was with the sensations of walking and I'd be there for like five minutes you know solid and then I would get lost in thought then I come back and you know five more minutes i' be lost in thought and get back but as the days progressed you know even you know 10 days into a silent Meditation Retreat they're going to experience more and more distraction they're going it's going to seem like okay wait a minute now I can't pay attention to anything for more than 5 Seconds right that is progress right because because what they're discovering is just how distractable they are right and um you know so some for some people that will be immediately obvious for some people it it'll actually take a a lot of practice to realize just how distracted they are what you just said which was that at some point um we can start noticing our thoughts I can notice my thoughts but what you're talking about is as a goal state is not um is not being distracted by thoughts but actually seeing the relationship between thoughts self and other types of perceptions and here I think recognizing and seeing thoughts is a form of perception it's just internally directed perception this raises a a topic that um I'm also obsessed by which I think Neuroscience can somewhat explain but still incomplete um incompletely that the circuits and mechanics Etc are not um yet known which is about time perception and you know it a simple analogy would be that um there are a lot of small objects flying around in the space that we happen to be having this discussion but they're moving so fast that I can't perceive them or they're entirely stationary so I can't perceive them because of the reasons we talked about before in the visual system my eyes are moving in perfect concert with these with these small object movements and therefore they are they're I am blind to them right a slight shift in time perception um think of this uh perhaps as um a change in the frame rate right camera frame ratees faster frame rate you can capture slow motion slower frame rate you're going to get more of a strobe type effect if the frame rate is low enough right right could it be that our time perception is not one thing but we have one rate of perceiving time for external objects at a given distance which we know is true another frame rate for objects that are up close we know this to be true even if those objects are moving at the exact same speed right I mean this would be the sitting on a train the rungs on the fence seem to be going by very very fast but ones in the distance seem to be moving slowly this is the way the the visual system and time perception interconnect at some level MH um you're up on a skyscraper the little ants of cars and people um down below you know they're moving much faster than you perceive them to move yeah but it's it's a distance effect you see you see a plane it's could be going 300 mil hour EXA and it's not because of the lack of resolution the lack of resolution is incidental we know this because in animals such as um Hawks that have twice the degree of acuity as far as we know they have the same uh distance Associated shifts in time perception so could it be that we are running multiple streams of time perception multiple cones of attention that include cones of attention to our thoughts and that somehow through meditation we start to align the frame rate for these different streams of attention so that they all fall into same they all fall into the same movie if you will although it's not just a movie with visual content what I'm doing here is clearly I'm becoming a lumper rather than a splitter I I'm sure this violates certain rules of time perception neural circuitry but I'm not sure that it's entirely untrue either um and does it survive um at all as a possible model for what you're describing and if the answer is no I'm perfectly comfortable with that well it's a um it's dependent on what you mean by meditation this this is where you sort of the particularities of of what one is doing with one's attention under the you know the the frame of meditation really matter because there are ways to practice where practice mindfulness in particular where the frame rate really does seem to go way way up right and there's actually been some research done on this where you take people you know before and after a three-month silent Meditation Retreat and you give them some kind of visual dis discrimination task where they have to like detect um I think they used a to to tachistoscope is that the tool for there some some some they presents uh um you know like very quick pulses of light and in any case you can you can discriminate um just in any in any sensory Channel I would imagine you can make finer grain discriminations if you're practicing mindfulness in a very specific way which is to be making these fine grain discriminations more and more and do do nothing else for you know three months which is which is a way of practicing so you're so the classic you know mindfulness practice in in what's called vapas meditation is to pay scrupulous attention to seeing hearing smelling tasting touching in a way that breaks everything down into the this kind of microscopic sensory uh moments so you know you're rather than feel your you know your hands pressing together what you're trying to feel with your attention and you're feeling more and more is all of the micro sensations of pressure and temperature and movement uh such that the feeling of hands completely disappears you realize that the hand is a concept and all you have is this cloud of of punctate and and uh very brief Sensations and so that so anything you think you you you have as a datum of experience as you as you bore into it with your attention it it resolves into a a a this kind of di diaphanous cloud of changing sensation and that can be even even something is as um captivating as like a you know a serious pain in your body I mean you could have like you know you could have injured your neck you know and you have some excruciating pain in your neck if you just are willing to pay attention to it you know and just pay 100% attention to it um your a couple things happen one is your resistance to feeling it go goes away by definition cuz your now your goal is to just pay attention to it and and you recognize that so much of the suffering associated with the pain was born of a of the resistance to feeling it you're kind of you're bracing against it and all of your thinking about it you know you're thinking like you know why did I do this to myself or when should I see an orthopedist or when how long is this going to last and and you're you know maybe I herniated a disc like all of that selft talk is producing anxiety and you know I'm not saying there's never anything to think about there but you know either you can do something about it in the moment or you can't and uh so much of our suffering in in the presence of pain is the result of resisting it worrying about it think is just all of the everything we're doing with our minds but just just feeling it right so when you just feel it again it it it breaks apart into this this ever CH ever shifting collection of of different Sensations and it's not one thing and it never stays the same and it's and so there's two things happen there one is there can be a tremendous tremendous amount of relief that happens there where you you you you can achieve a level of equinity even in the presence of really unpleasant you know physical sensation um and this is true of mental sensation as well this is true of emotions you know the classically negative emotions like anger depression or you know fear the moment you become willing to just feel them in all of their you know punctate uh uh and changeable qualities they cease to be what they they were a moment ago they're just they're and they when you're talking about emotional states they cease to map back on to you and your self-concept as meaningful in the same way so that suddenly you know the anxiety you feel let's say before going out on stage to give a talk you know a moment ago it it was it had psychological meaning it felt like you know okay I'm anxious how I get rid of this you know why am I this sort of person why you know should I have taken a beta blocker you know this is the the conversation you're you're having with yourself the moment you just become willing to feel it as the pure energy of you the physiology of of you know of cortisol release it ceases to have any meaning it just it ceases to be a problem in that moment because it's no more it no more maps onto the kind of person you are Than A Feeling of indigestion or a pain in your in your knee maps onto the kind of person you are it's just it's it's just sensation anyway but back to the main point here which is that if you train your attention in this way to notice the particularities of of sensory experience and emotional experience like you're looking for the atoms of experience you know um you get better and better at that and certain things happen but one thing that one thing that I I really do do think happens is there's a kind frame rate change in in the the data stream where you really are just you're just noticing much much more um all of that is an very interesting way of training it's not what I tend to recommend now it's a great preliminary practice for what I do recommend because it gives you it it really teaches you the difference between being lost and thought and not it really teaches you what mindfulness is but it tends to be done you know by you know 99 .9% of of people in a dualistic way which you again you're you're you're set up to think okay I'm over here as the Locust of attention you know and and I'm continually getting distracted by thought and the project is to not do that anymore and actually pay attention to the breath and sounds and Sensations and and every time I get lost in thought I'm going to go back to here but this whole dance of I'm lost in thought now I'm now I'm strategically directing my attention again all of this seems to ramify this sense of self the sense of of there there's one to be doing this there's there's somebody holding the spotlight of attention and getting better at coming back to the object of meditation um again it's inevitable that 99.9% of people are going to start there and stay there for some considerable period of time but the thing I like to do when I talk about all of this is undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring all of that as early as possible because where where where I think you want to be is recognizing that there is no place from which to aim attention right there this whole dualistic setup of subject and object is the thing that is already not there and it's not that you it's not that it's there and you meditate it out of existence successfully it's really not there and if you if you learn how to look for it you can see that it's not there and feel that it's not there and no longer seems to be there right it's like it's it's not and it becomes like again like a bi-stable percept where you looked at it long enough and you thought okay now I see the vase and the face and um I can't unsee it and every time I look it's it's there again right and um so yeah that mean so to come back to the the example you gave with your um your colleague at Stanford um whose book I know I have I haven't read it this is the he wrote a book projections right desia um so it's it's on my stack to read but um it's the opposite what I'm recommending essentially the opposite end of the Continuum of the sort of internal exercise he was he he was doing so rather than so you know he's doing something very deliberate and controlled and he's you know he is deliberately thinking in complete sentences and kind of commandeering the you know the the um the Machinery of thought and attention uh in a way that I would imagine I mean I'd be interested to talk to him about it but I would imagine he really feels like he's doing that right and there's there's he's an engineer it's you know it's as you describe it in this way it it reminds me he he's he's a physician but he's also an engineer so it's really about taking the the raw materials of thought and Engineering something structured from it I um right you know I haven't been in uh Carl's mind um yeah but if we got him talking on that we would get I'm sure we would get a sense of what it is we'll do that conversation at some point exact opposite what you're exact opposite would be to recognize that the sense of control is a total illusion right there because you don't know what you're going to think next right and even he in the most laborious way I mean he could he could just get as muscular as he wants with it he still doesn't know know what he's going to think next right thought because thoughts simply arise right like you know you know you can run this experiment for yourself and this connects up to the topic of of Free Will which uh we might want to touch but I mean just think of any category of thing you know if I asked you to think of you know the names of cities or of you know friends you have or of famous people you you can you know remember exist or uh think of nouns or you know you know anything um and just watch what comes percolating into Consciousness right now there's there are things you can't think of or there are things you don't know the name of you know there are languages you don't speak there's there are famous people you've never seen or never heard of right so like like so you have no control over that part like those those names and and faces are not going to suddenly come streaming into Consciousness but of of the the totality of facts and figures and faces and names that you do know right only some will come Vine for inclusion right and they're not and there's there's a sort of you know I'm we could um make guess and we know something about the Neurology of this but we you know depending on what Channel you're you're um you're waiting for thoughts in I mean it's going to be different if it's visual or semantic or or um episodic memory I mean all these things are different but um wherever you kind of Point your inner gaze of attention and wait for the next face or name um certain things are going to come and certain certain things aren't going to come and how you land on one right there'll be this process if you're paying attention you might think let's say let's say we go with names of cities right you just you say you'll you'll think of Paris You'll Think of London You'll Think of Rome You'll Think of Sedona you'll say like so these these names will come and if I ask you to just say one right so just Minneapolis is what came to mind for me it was very straightforward it was Minneapolis the famous person was Joe Strummer and they just like I can give you reasons why I think they those came to mind recent conversations okay so so so whatever so we know we know a fair bit a fair bit about much of this so one we know that your reasons you know obviously could be right or wrong they're very likely to be wrong because we have this sort of confabulatory Storytelling mechanism even in an intact brain where we just you know we we all seem to never lack for the reasons why something came to mind and we know we can know we can manipulate people in ways that prove that people are just reliably wrong and confident you know confidently so about the reasons why they thought of things or did things but leaving that aside even if you're completely accurate right um there are there are people's names who you know and cities names that you know that inexplicably just didn't come to mind and if we ran this experiment again and again again they they wouldn't come to mind if your brain was was in precisely the state it was in a moment ago if we if if we could return your brain to the state it was in a moment ago correcting for you know all the deterministic changes and all the random changes that would have to you know be corrected for to just get all the synapses and the synaptic weights and you know everything in in the the state it was in to produce Joe Strummer in Minneapolis right you're going to if we rewind that movie that that part of the movie of your life you are going to say Joe Strummer and Minneapolis a trillion times in a row right so this is why in my view the notion of Free Will makes absolutely no sense right um and you can add as much Randomness to that process as you want it still doesn't get you the freedom people think they have um there's another conversation to have about you know why none of that matters and why things only get better once you admit to yourself that Free Will is an illusion uh and yes you can get in shape and you can diet you can do all the things you want to do and you don't have to think about Free Will um but the from a from a contemplative meditative point of view the to notice is that everything is just springing into view right you're like there's no place from which you are authoring your next thought because you would have to think it before you think it right like like like there is just there is just this fundamental mystery at our backs that is discouraging everything that we experience what what if I'm speaking so if I'm talking about something and I have some command of that uh information I can often sense what I'm going to say next and then find myself saying it hopefully that's what I say not something else I certainly said things I didn't intend to say or never thought I would say in life but um when engaged in speech or action it at least gives us the illusion I think that we somehow have more command over our thoughts yeah well you have a script I mean it's like there there are things you know a lot about and you've talked you've talked about them a lot and you you know you have the things you want to say about those things and the things you you you don't want to say say or you wouldn't want to say um and you know you can you know it still is a bit of a Highwire act because you can misspeak or you can fail to get to the end of a sentence in a grammatically correct way and and it's again all of this subjectively this whole process is mysterious to you right like you you don't know how you follow the rules of English grammar right like that like just just your tongue is doing it somehow and you know um and when it fails it fails and you're just as surprised as the next guy that it failed and you know you mispronounce a word and okay I don't know what happened there but it's if it keeps happening I'm going to worry I had a stroke and you know if it stops I'm I'm I'm going to you know I'm not going to worry about it uh so it's still mysterious even when you're doing it in a very um roote deliberative and repetitive way but when when you're talking about something you've talked about a lot and you know you sort of know where you're going to go right like and this is you know we we have many conversations like this um it is somewhat analogous to like a golf swing where it's like you know how you want to do it there's going to be all kinds of errors that are going to creep into your execution of it in in real time but there's like you you basically have a pattern and so you you have certain linguistic patterns which you're following um again none of this is a proof of of free will but I will grant you that you know phenomenologically it feels different than just waiting for the next thought to come but my point is is that even if you're um I me you can trim it down to the simplest possible thing and like you take two things you like to to drink right you may you like you like coffee and you like tea and you're deciding which to have right both are on offer you've got two cups in front of you and and the question is you know which you know here I've got water and I've got coffee which am I going to drink next next it's a it's incredibly it's the simplest possible decision and no matter how long I make this decision process I could literally sit for an hour trying to figure out which to reach for next and I could have my reasons why and I could have my all my talk there's there there's going to be a final change in me that's going to be the proximate cause of me deciding one over the other and that no matter how laborious I can make it seem in in terms of my reasoning about it um it is going to be fundamentally mysterious as to why I went with one rather than the other right whatever story I have because it's like it's it's still going to be as mysterious as you thinking of Joe Strummer when you Absolut like you know of the existence of Marilyn Monroe just as much and yet she simply didn't occur to you right it's like it's it's fundamentally mysterious like there are people who are even more famous than Joe Strummer to you right who who I mean I'm sure you you know he may be somebody who you have thought a lot about but but they're there're people who like if we could just inventory you know your conscious life going back the last 10 years they're people who you've thought about more than Joe Strummer yet they didn't appear right so and that's that is mysterious right and they could have but they didn't and so um and what what I'm saying is that this mystery never gets banished in our experience whatever stories we have to tell about it like because if if the story is oh well I went for the water because um I you know I I think I've been drinking too much coffee you know I I I listened to Andrew huberman's podcast and he was saying talking about caffeine and I think I probably it's good for us but you don't want to overdo yeah okay so let's say that is actually the causal chain like I listened to your podcast you said something about caffeine now I'm now I'm self-conscious about my coffee intake right but that's just just adding a couple of links to the chain there's there's still this fundamental mystery of well why did I find that persuasive and why why did I find it persuasive now and not five minutes ago when I was drinking the coffee right like why did I just remember it now or why was it effective now like what like you you only have your experience in every moment is precisely what it is and not one bit more like and and and and this subsumes even moments of real resolve and effort and you know picking yourself up by your bootstraps and changing everything it's like you're on a diet and you're tempted to eat chocolate and you think you're about to reach you say no I'm not I'm not breaking this diet this diet is actually going to stick right okay why did that arise in that moment and not at this analogous moment on your last diet right and why did it arise now to precisely the degree that it did why why will it be as effective as it will be and have the halflife that it will have and not you know 10% more or less like all of those are always mysterious to you well could we give a uh as we did before um an evolutionary and a developmental explanation an evolutionary explanation might be that um directed attention and action is metabolically demanding it would be uh inefficient or impossible for us to be be in constant you know deliberate action with access to all the relevant information as to why we would do anything so our ideas literally spring to the surface um at the last possible moment um in order to offset uh the the metabolic the great metabolic requirements of having ideas that are are related to Gold directed action or that gold directed action is expensive that's one idea the other idea would be and we know this as a fact which is that initially the brain is fairly crudely wired that's not true within the neural circuits that control breathing uh heart rate Etc but within the neural circuits of sensory perception thought Etc they're fairly crudely wired and then across development there's a progressive pruning back and um uh also in parallel to that a strengthening of the connections that underly directed action and thought um and here I don't mean directed as in Free Will I mean just that that can I can decide to imagine an apple and imagine that Apple for instance right um but your decision to be some maintenance of the the random fine random wiring in systems I mean we've seen this even in in worms in flies in in you know in so-called lower uh invertebrates and lower vertebrates and we see this in humans and it seems to be uh that there's a lot of background spontaneous activity I mean I've sunk electrodes into the brains of uh humans maacs carnivores and mice and in every case most of what you hear is called hash and it has nothing to do with hashish is just on the Audio Monitor which is yeah you're picking up a bunch of action potentials right you're listening to a chorus of action potentials but it's rare to find a neuron that Faithfully fires to represent some sensory stimulus in the world and you can arrange that marriage experimentally so that you can arrive at those strong signal to noise events but I was always struck by how much noise there is in the system all around all the time and people argue is the noise really noise Etc and is it you know um there's still a lot of debate about that but I could imagine that some of the uh the spontaneous nature of thoughts just relates to the fact that there's a lot of background spontaneous activity in the brain now why that is is a whole other discussion but um but if I were to sort of set up two constraints that there's a lot of spontaneous activity it's going to Generate random thoughts thankfully not much random action although there's a little bit of random action in our daily lives and then against that say well any deliberate thought or motion is going to be expensive right it's a metabolically expensive or going to begin with and so you just have to Evolution has arrived at a place where um spontaneous geysering up of things um uh upon which like deliberate thoughts and action are superimposed is the best arrangement overall for this very metabolically demanding organ is that is that a I mean what I basically gave was just kind of a biological description of of of one just one narrow aspect of it but can we get comfortable with that and the reason I say get comfortable is that you know I'm and here I admittedly I'm forcing a little bit of a strip tease towards what I think I and everyone else wants to know which is how to meditate and why in particular meditation convinces us that something doesn't necessarily have to be eliminated but that was actually never there I feel like we're we're now set up a sort of a almost like a you're not contradicting yourself by any means but in my mind there's a contradiction and here's the contradiction I love this statement that meditation over time or done properly reveals to us that actually not trying to make the gap between actor and observer go away it was actually never there to me that's one of the more important statements that I perhaps have ever heard and it inspires me to go further down this path of meditation because I've never experienced that right um not deliberately and certainly not through meditation um if I ever experienced it it was transient enough that I you know I'm intrigued to to experience it more so on the one hand you're telling me something was never there and there's a profound experience to be had by anyone that's willing to do the work to arrive at that experience of the loss of that illusion on the other hand I'm hearing that there's a um a profound Gap that really does exist which is that you we we believe that our thoughts are um somehow from us um and indeed they're from in in the cranial Vault someplace maybe in the body a bit as well but that we over uh attribute the the degree to which we are that and that is us in a way that's volitional that we control and so once I'm hearing that there's something there's an illusion that we can eliminate and on the other hand I'm hearing that there's an illusion that we can't eliminate and maybe these are unrelated and I'm bridging them in a in a in an unimportant way that seems only important to me but somehow I I can't resolve these two and maybe the thing to do then is is can we separate them in terms of a practice to witness them that would allow us to resolve them separately right so yeah I think I I'm hearing the problem there's this um well let me kind of Brack at the whole Free Will discussion because it's it's it really is the flip side of this coin that that I'm you know the the obverse of which is the illus the illusion of the self okay so at least I be on the right track they are the opposite sides of of of a coin okay great so to me they seem very different in essence no because what I'm calling the sense of self and what people what I think most people feel as their core sense of self is the this feeling of I mean it's the feeling of being the locus of attention but it's also the feeling of being the locus of agency like I can do the next thing I I like who's doing this who's reaching for the cup I am right I I intended this and now I'm doing the thing my and my int my conscious intention is the proximate cause of my reaching right um so I'm the ath and so I'm the author of my thoughts and actions essentially and I'm and my and my specific uses of attention right so I can I can pay attention to the breath I get lost in thought I come back to the breath but um you know the lot the the in on some level the thoughts themselves are more of my doing something uh with with almost you know authorial intent right like I'm thinking like you know like what the hell is this talking about I'm I know I'm think you know I know you know who's thinking these thoughts I am right like that's that's the person who really doesn't get what I'm saying is thinking something like that right it's like what the is this guy talking about like I like I know I'm here I'm a self I'm you know I'm I'm I'm a body I'm a mind I can reach for things that these are these intentional actions are different from things that happen to me right uh a voluntary action is different from an involuntary one you know so having a Tremor is different from conscious L deciding to pick up a glass right um so obviously everything I'm saying about meditation and the self and Free Will in order to be a sane picture of a human mind and of reality has to conserve the data of experience such that yes I can acknowledge the difference between a Tremor and a a deliberative you know voluntary motor action um and uh you know and the things you do volitionally are different not just psychologically and behaviorally but they just have different implications for like they different in a court of law you know you accidentally hit someone with your car or you did it on purpose that's still a distinction that matters right it importantly it tells us a lot about the global properties of your mind such that you know we have a sense of what you're likely to do in the future if you're someone who likes running over people with your car you know you're a a psychopath who we need to worry about if you're someone who did it by accident well then you know you may be uh culpable for for the level of negligence that uh allowed that to happen but you're you're a very different person and we we we treat you differently and we we're wise to um so anyway we can those let's bracket all of that um there's this I mean there's some fundamental there there's some false assumptions about the underlying logic of this process which I think it's worth addressing and there actually there's a kind of found object in the news that I I I talk about at one point I forget where it is in in in the waking up app but there's a story I stumbled on on the internet um I think it's about 12 or 13 years old of a um a tourist bus in I think it was in Norway it was somewhere in U northern Europe and it had about 30 people on it and one person was a was described as an Asian woman uh and all they they went to a rest stop and everyone got off the bus uh and they you know shopped and had lunch and and this Asian woman changed her clothing uh for whatever reason and they all got back on the bus um I think the relevance of it being an Asian woman is you know there were language barriers that that that explained what later happened um so everyone gets back on the bus the Asian woman has changed her her clothing and the bus is about to leave but then someone notices hey there there's a there was an Asian woman who got off the bus who isn't hasn't come back yet and they tell the driver this um and this poses a problem so now everyone's waiting for this person to return but in fact everyone was on the bus that this woman had just changed her clothing and was not recognized by her fellow Travelers um so everyone gets concerned as this this tourist doesn't you know show up and they start looking for her right and they can't find her and so a search party is formed and the Asian woman because of the whatever language barrier um thought heard that there was a missing tourist so she joins the search party which is fact is looking for her right and this goes on into the night and they're readying helicopters at you know for a dawn patrol to find the Miss Missing tourist um now at some point along the way I think it was at like 3 in the morning this tourist realizes that she is the object of this search right and obviously the whole thing unravels she you she confesses that she changed her clothes and you know the problem is solved but the problem is not solved by the the logic that The Seekers expected right so it's like it's not true to say that the missing tourist was found in in the way that was expected right because the missing tourist was never lost the missing tourist was part of the search party right and so when you think about it from her point of view like what happened she's part of the search party she's looking for the missing tourist not knowing that she in fact is the missing tourist so what happens at the moment she realizes that everyone's looking for her right like what what is the the search isn't consummated in the way that is implied by the logic of everyone's use of attention um and yet the problem of operates and there's something deeply analogous about the structure of that and the the meditative journey in in precisely in again not talking about all the changes in the Poss changes in the contents of Consciousness that could be good which again they come along for the ride anyway when you when you do the thing I'm talking about it's on this point of looking for the self and not finding it and there is this sense that okay the self is here and it's a problem it is the the string upon which all of my conscious States mostly unhappy ones are strung right it's it's the thing that is at the center of my anxiety it's the it's it's the it's the thing that I don't feel good about it's the thing that when criticized I sort of let implode um it's the center of my problem and now I'm trying to feel better and meditation has been handed to me as a as a possible you know remedy for my situation and it and it's build as a remedy in fact it's it's it's I'm I'm hearing from this guy that this is the thing that is going to cause me to realize that myself isn't where you know or as I thought it was um so now I'm a look right and so again you're you're the sense is I start out far away from the goal here I start out with a problem uh I'm now meditating on the evidence of my unenlightenment right I I can feel my problem I feel that I'm distracted and distractable and I feel this sort of cramp at the center of my life it's me and I'm not as happy as I want to be I'm not as confident as I want to be I'm I'm more distractable than I want to be and now I'm paying attention to the breath right um this is what the search party feels like this is what the the confused tourist feels like in her own search party and she's she's looking she's looking for the missing person and so the so the the angle of of you know the inclination of all of this is and the logic of it is all wrong you know understandably so uh given how we we all get into this situation but you you know it's useful to continually try to under undercut it and um recognize that the that the thing that's being looked for is is actually right on the surface which is you know the there is no one looking there is no place from which you are pay if you're paying attention to the breath or to sounds or noticing the next thought arise this sense that you are over here doing that thing is actually what it's like to be thinking and not knowing that you're thinking you're not there's a there's a thought there's an undercurrent of thought that's going uninspected in that moment and um so there is just a there's a continually looking for the mind a looking for the center of experience a looking for the one who is looking which again which is the kind of the the the orienting practice here and there's a lot more I say about this obviously um over at waking up but um it's it's the experiment you have to perform in order to get ready to recognize that this whole this the search party you know was formed in in error essentially and the the problem that you're trying to to solve with this practice does evaporate in in a similar way which is like you don't actually get there in the way that you're hoping for right it's like like you drop out the bottom of this thing in in an unexpected way it's not um there's actually another uh kind of a similar um Parable or or anecdote that I I don't remember if it's Zen or Sufi or I mean I'm sure it's been reappropriated in many different ways but or by many different Traditions but there's there you know the the case of somebody who's lost in a town and they they're asking for directions you know you could put put this in in in Manhattan you can let's say you're wandering Manhattan and you're you're a tourist you don't know where anything is and you stop and ask someone you know where is Central Park and the person thinks for a second they says oh um unfortunately you can't get to Central Park from here right now that is a very strange I mean we you think about that for a second you realize okay that's a that's an absurd CL there is no place that you can't get to from the place you're starting you know on Earth right like failure to describe the physical uh relationships between anything in the world yeah that's just not the world we live in right so but it's a funny thing it's but but on some level that is true of medit it's like you can't get there from here like the sense of you the sense of you as subject isn't brought along to this thing you're looking for right like you're like you're you know it's almost like it's almost like you're you're making a fist and you're trying to get to an open hand the fist doesn't get to take that Journey as a fist right like you don't the fist doesn't go along for the ride the fist comes apart right and and on some level that our subjectivity is a kind of an an an intentional fist you know it it it is a contraction of energy again it's it's so much bound up in thought for for uh most of us most of the time that it's and it get when when properly inspected there's just this you know evaporation of the starting point but there's not this there's not this fulfillment of I'm going to get this fist is going to just going to if I you know if life gets good enough if I get concentrated enough focused enough you know if I austere enough if I renounce enough if I desire less if I you know you know enough with enough good in intentions this fist is going to move into some sort of sublime condition right that's not the logic of the the process I I really appreciate these um models and analogies for conscious experience both as most people experience them and um Harbor them and it's as a way to frame what's possible through a through a proper meditation practice I do want to talk about what a proper meditation practice looks like a bit but at some point um I do want to raise a model of maybe even just perceptual awareness to see if it um survives the filters that um you've provided um but first just even if briefly and then we could return to it it you know what does this meditation practice or set of practices look like obviously uh the app is a wonderful tool I've started using it as I mentioned in the beginning my my father's been using it for a while and many people have derived great benefit from it but if we were to break it down meditation into some basic component parts as we have broken down um normal perceptual experience and some of its component parts yeah um um I can just throw out some things that I associate with meditation and maybe you can elaborate on on how these may or may not be applied for instance um there is almost always um a ceasing of motor Mo robust motor movement I know there are walking meditations and so forth but it seems like sitting or lying down and perhaps not always but often limiting our visual perception closing the eyes right um directing a Mind's Eye someplace um is there a dedicated effort toward generating imagery um what are the component parts and where I'm really going with this is why would those component parts eventually allow for this disillusion of the Fist or the um the realization that there is no um distinction between uh actor and observer and so on yeah yeah well so to answer that second question first ultimately meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life it's not it's not a doing more of anything it's actually ceasing to do something it's ultimately non-d distraction I mean it's ultimately you're recognizing what Consciousness is like when you're no longer distracted by the the automatic arising of of thought it's not that thoughts don't arise it's not that you can't use them it's not that you become irrational or or um uh you know unintelligent I mean like all of that you you still have all of your tools but there every everything is in plain view there's an analogy in in Tibetan Buddhism which I love which is um you know kind of in the final stage of meditation uh thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house you know there's nothing for them to steal right so you know in in the usual case thoughts are there really is something in Jeopardy every time a thought comes I'm not meditating anymore and and not only that I feel terrible because of what I'm thinking about most of the time right um and so it's totally understandable that thoughts seem like a problem in the beginning and for certain types of meditation they are explicitly thought of as a problem because you're trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else including thought and that is a kind what I called concentration practice earlier and that is a you know it's a that's a training that can be good to do it becomes a tool that you can use for other kinds of of of insight but it's a very specific and kind of brittle skill in in the end I mean it's it is it's a skill just like I'm going to pay attention to one thing and I'm going to do that so well that everything else is going to fade out and it's somewhat analagous to what you you described in the visual system if you if you you know have laser focus to one fixation Point everything else in your visual field begins to to fade out but meditatively if you have a laser focus on any one thing whether it's the breath or or you know a candle flame or whatever it is not only does I mean let's use the breath for you know for a second uh because your eyes are can be closed um I mean you can lose all sense of everything I mean you can lose all sense of hearing and your physical body can disappear I mean like literally can become incredibly subtle and vast and druglike um and many people approach meditation thinking kind of climbing the ladder of those changes into subtlety and vastness that's the whole that's the whole game right and it can be a deeply rewarding game to play and it also does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits I mean all the focus and the calm and the and the the kind of smoothness of emotional states I mean all that comes with greater concentration and it it can be quite wonderful um but again at best that's a tool to aim in the direction that I'm talking about now with with respect to meditation which relates to more what I would call you know mindfulness generically um and ultimately kind of non-dual mindfulness so mindfulness generically and for for most people certainly in the in the beginning dualistically is just the practice of paying careful attention to whatever is arising on its own right now in the beginning it's it's it's natural to take a single object like the breath as a starting point it's kind of an anchor um but you know very very quickly you know over the course of even you know your first week of doing this people can you know teachers and you know um various sources of information will recommend that you know once you get some facility once once you know the difference between being lost and thought and actually paying attention to the breath well then you can open it up to everything you can open up to sounds and other Sensations in the body and and uh moods and emotions and even ultimately thoughts themselves and so very quickly you can recognize that thoughts are not intrinsically the enemy to this practice they are also just spontaneous appearances in Consciousness that can be observed um but for some considerable period of time people will feel that there is a place from which that observation is happening right there's just you know I'm now the one who's being mindful um and however attenuated that sense of self can be I me again it can it can get very expansive I mean you can you know you can lose you know as you get anything just a monom of concentration you know it becomes very druglike and you get you know your the boundaries of your body dissolve and your feel your feeling of having a body can disappear and um and you you know if your eyes are closed you know your visual field I mean most people when they close their eyes initially they just forget about their visual field but you know it's if you close your eyes right now you notice your visual field is fully present and you know it's we call it dark but it's not quite dark there is this sort of scintillating uh some field of of of color and Shadow um that's there in the darkness of your closed eyes and that can become a skylike domain of kind of vast uh uh you know visual expression that opens up as you as you get more concentrated with you know with your eyes closed right so you're so you can very much be aware of seeing with your eyes closed in in meditative practice um but from the point of view of mindfulness the logic is not to care about any of the interesting changes and experience that come as a result of practicing in this way because what you're what the the the underlying goal is is to be more and more equanimous with changes so not to grasp at what's Pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant or or you know boring or you know otherwise non-engaging away um what you want is just a kind of a skylike mind that just allows everything to appear and you're not clinging to anything or or or reacting to anything could I ask you what your thoughts are about the differences between nouns adjectives and verbs in the context of what we're talking about and you're describing and the reason bring this up is that um as you know and I know everything in biology is a process you know we we would never ever say oh you know the perception of that red line on a painting is um is a noun right I mean it's it's an event in the visual system you're you're abstracting some understanding about that thing in the outside world and I think it's very useful in thinking about the brain um and people will notice I notice I excuse me actively avoid the use of the word mind because I figure especially with you sitting across from me that I'll I'll step in it if I if I do but the brain generates a series of perceptions or what have you by through processes not nouns and so when thinking about biology I think of development is a is a is an arc of processes um aging is an arc of perception is an arc of procy they just exist on different time scales and so a little bit of what I'm hearing is that inside of an effective meditation practice there's a little bit of a of a um certainly non-judgment but discarding of the the noun and the adjective uh modes of language like red apple okay it's a red apple but then you sort of need to eliminate some other adjectives about it it's a rotten apple it's a you know ripe apple and instead view the appearance and disappearance of that apple as a it's just a thing a process as opposed to an event and now events could we really get into the language aspect of it that just reveals how um diminished language is to describe the workings of the brain at some level um I don't know if any of this resonates but it but it seems to me the goal or one of the goals is to start to understand the algorithm that is the fleeting nature of perception but to not focus on any one single perception and then to not even focus on one single algorithm but to at some level there's a um what is revealed to the medit over time is some sort of macroscopic principle about um the way perceptions work at a deeper level right that there's that there's sort of a deeper principle there that sits below our certainly our normal everyday awareness but that in paying attention to the mechanics of all this stuff and not judging those mechanics not naming those mechanics or just naming them and let them pass by that there's some action function some verb is revealed and that maybe that verb maybe the word to describe that verb is mindfulness maybe mindfulness is is really just a verb to describe that I don't know um but is there anything here or am I create am I I don't know if I'm creating just like useless straw or if there's if there's actually a seed here of something real but to me anytime I want to understand something in biology or psychology I try and um broaden the time domain and think in terms of verbs not nouns or adjectives yeah yeah yeah no that that's very useful and that's somewhat adjacent to this distinction I'm making between dualistic and non-dualistic ways of experiencing the world so even dualistically everything is still a process right and and we're misled by the the reification that noun talk gives us so and this this applies not just to something like mindfulness but even to something like the self right so the sense of self is also a process I mean it's it's a verb it's not so we're selfing more than we are selves right and um and there you know even even appropriate uses of of of the term self that don't go away even when you when you recognize that the this the core subject self is an illusion there there are states of self right where you you can recognize in your life that you inhabit very different modes of of being depending on the context so like there are moments where you just by walking into a certain building you suddenly transition into a different state of self like like suddenly you passed through a door and now you're are a customer in a store right so we know what that customer feeling is like you're now the person who's getting the attention it's a very kind of formalized type of attention from the person who's running the store and you know or a restaurant you're a customer in a restaurant right that's a um I just I just remembered something that's kind of funny um that uh it was born of a mismatch of of this I'll come back to that in a second um but um so there are um uh so we we go through you can be a you know you can be a student in the presence of a teacher you can be a parent in the presence of a of a son or a daughter you can be a spouse in presence in the presence of your spouse and all of those shadings of like the this the change in context um really does Usher in some fundamental psychological changes in just the states of Consciousness that are available to you I mean and and it's and some of this is really I mean I'm sure we could understand a lot about this you know personally and and you know generically but it is pretty mysterious I mean like I mean there are people who I know who I you know I'm with them in a certain way and like based on something I'm getting off of them like I can't be that that I'm I'm I'm effortlessly one way with them and there's no way I could be that way with somebody else right like it's just I don't know if it's pheromones or their you know their facial just the way they are their facial expression but I mean they're people with whom I'm really kind of effortlessly funny and there are people with whom you know I couldn't even it would never occur to me to be funny no matter what happened you know it's like and and I have like long-standing relationships with with these people you know so like it's just very um you know all that's very mysterious but anyway the the difference there is is not in this core sense of subject in relationship to all the objects it's in kind of the the the states of self and but and all of that is just is very verby right like all this is this pattern of changes it's a pattern of what's available and what's not available the capacities that are you know that are that come online or not um in in in those various contexts uh but no the the memory I just had which I hadn't hadn't had in a long time but it was one of these these moments where I realized the power of these shifts in context for states of self so I once I was a um a young man I think I was I was uh probably 22 or so and single and like you're just like trying to figure out how how how do you meet women and like how does how does one get confident to do this well and um I um I walked into a restaurant and a um kind of a woman was walking toward me at you know toward the front door of the restaurant but she was walking toward me in a way where I just by default assumed she was the hostess in the restaurant uh but she wasn't the hostess she was just a a um you know someone who had just eaten there I guess um so I walked through and she comes out and so there's a fundamental misunderstanding in me that's set up by literally just this change in architecture and I and so I just said hi to her in a way that I would I presumably I would say hi to any Hostess who was coming up to to ask me whether where I wanted to sit um but what had actually happened is I had said hi to a total stranger in a way that I tended at that point never to say hi to total strangers because I was shy and you know just like um but apparently I gave her like a 10,000 watt you know high of like like all of the confidence you would have if you if you were that sort of person and it just ushered in a complete like you know this is so I went to my table and this woman like came back into the restaurant and like gave me her phone number right which was something that was just completely foreign experience to me you know and it was based completely on my misunderstanding of the situation I was in right and and so anyway that among the understanding uh among the misunderstandings that one can have and then um action engage in life I I would say that that was a somewhat Adaptive One yeah yeah but but but then you realize that okay but then there are certain people who who recognize this Machinery to whatever degree or have kind of natural aptitudes for bringing certain things online or not such that okay they can make these State they can consciously make these states of self you know this kind this level of gregariousness say available to them in different you in the circumstances where it's it's actually useful to them so like if you if you're single and you want to meet people well it's actually very helpful to to feel confident enough to just go say hi to strangers ask them how they're doing and and and to be to be you know online you know in in that way where at that point in my life in that circumstance you know by H you know by default I was going to ignore this stranger who I was passing by in the doorway of a restaurant but thinking she was the hostess I was engaging her you know fully um so anyway you can consciously again this does not invoke Free Will at all but yes you can consciously decide to play with this with these mechanisms such that you can decide you what state states of self uh would be more normative to have you know given what you want in life and and you can become increasingly you know attentive to the ways in which you get played by the world you know you're a kind of instrument your mind is a kind of instrument your brain is a kind of instrument that is continually getting played by the situations you're in and you can become more of an intelligent curator of your conscious States and your conscious capacities just by noticing the changes in you like I I in graduate school something I talk about I think at some point in waking up this became very Stark for me because I had um you know I was a you know an old graduate student i t had taken 11 years off at Stanford between my sophomore and junior year right so I like when I went back to school talk about a leave of absence yeah no it was yeah yeah but so Stanford had this you know you might know this um they have the stop out policy where you never really drop out you just stop out so you're like can always go back you don't have to write letters saying that you still exist every you know two years as you do in other schools so anyway I showed up after 11 years and but you know so I was really on a deadline I I felt late for everything so I'm kind of you know finishing my degree you know as quickly as I can um as an undergraduate and then I jump into graduate school and I'm an old graduate student and I'm you know uh there's a real sense of kind of urgency like I'm late I I should have done this earlier I want to get this stuff done um but then 9 11 happened and I as just as I had finished my cours workk at you know getting my my PhD um and I was just getting into my research but 911 intersected with my life in such a way that I just had to drop everything and write my first book and I did that and then I just had to drop everything and write my second book because of the response to the first book and so essentially I had like four years where I was awall doing my PhD but I was still had a toe in the lab and I was still showing up occasionally but I was becoming this kind of caution AR tale from the point of view of grad school but I was also becoming kind of a famous you or semi writer because my first book had been a a New York Times bestseller and I I just I was you know so I was getting some notoriety as a a writer and so I was doing things like you know I was giving a TED talk but I still hadn't finished graduate school right so like it was just it was um I think that timing is right maybe I had just finished graduate school when I gave the Ted talk but um anyway so I I was in rowing in two boats and one boat was sinking or you know showing every sign of of being damaged and I was literally like you know getting letters from the head of the department saying you know we're concerned about you but on the other hand I was like becoming a you know a quasi celebrity in that world too um you know at least in a world that was overlapping so I was having the experience of like going in I the the moment where this crystallized with for me in a in a fairly peculiar way was I had a meeting at like 3 clock with my adviser who was just this guy Mark Cohen in the brain mapping Center at UCLA was a fantastic guy um great adviser uh I did not extract as much wisdom from him as I should have um brilliant scientist and you know he's for him I'm late right at least in my head like he it's not that he was riding me so hard but like in my head I'm very self-conscious about how I'm not living up to his expect expectations at this point um so I have a meeting with him at like 3:00 and I'm just kind of wilting you know under my you know you know his gaze and my own imagined you know inner gaze of his um you know but that two hours later I have a meeting with his boss you know a dinner meeting with his boss who wants to meet with me to get advice on launching his book we have the same publisher but I'm like the much bigger author at you know at Norton you know and and he's he's coming to me for advice um and so I'm ricocheting between two diametrically opposite self states that are again this comes down to architecture it's literally like the state I was in walking into one building and then leaving and walking into another building on the same campus um and they were completely opposite self-concepts like in one in one context I'm a in another context I'm a celebrity who Mastery and virtuosity and and we're developing it very quickly yeah and and but so again this is kind of a stark version of that but everyone has some version of this just in bouncing between talking to their mom and then talking to their best friend and then talking to a stranger then and talking to someone who's who's very successful talking to someone who's not very Su like all you notice your vulnerability to all of this stuff and ultimately what you want is a level of psychological Integrity that that is truly divorce from that now I I'm not I'm not saying you're ever going to get it perfect you know there there's always going to be some I me I I can't I can't talk about the ultimate fulfillment of this process like I'm not I'm not you know I'm not a Buddha I'm not saying I'm i' I've finished the project but um I think there's more and more you you know as you become become sensitive to these changes and you become sensitive to what it's like to actually not be psychologically reactive and and not be definable by your own self-concept your own you're not identifying with anything you're not hanging your hat on anything you're not thinking about yourself in terms in in in in in the kind of terms that you would export to others and then care about what they think about you right like you're there's a kind of invulnerability uh uh that that arises that's not born of being well-defended it's born of of of being evaporated right it's like you're no longer keeping score in those ways once again we're we're at the I really appreciate that description because I I these days I'm I'm really intrigued by um something we've known for a long time that I'm you're certainly familiar with is prefrontal cortex's ability to establish context dependent rule sets you know stop task would be you know basic example of you know reading numbers or letters on on cards and then switching to having to report the colors that the letters and numbers are written in it's a basic task but prefontal cortex obviously important for setting context dependent thought and behavior and directed action and and but within the context of all these different um variations of the self depending on graduate school or you know relationship or sitting alone in one's room yeah there different rule sets arise but and somehow we are able to have a sense a coherent sense of self that encompasses all of those um functional people can um toggle between them as needed and not overlap them inappropriately at least not to the extent that it's um career failing or life failing although there are sad examples of that um many of which exist in uh the Twitter space I I know several colleagues not directly of mine but people who um through mistakes made with their thumbs where they forgot context right um or forgot to realize that the context on social media is near infinite but the context that existed in their head might not be clear and the way that they communicated something and they lost their jobs right by saying what were perceived as insensitive things in some cases we're in fact offensive in sensive things in some cases it's debatable right um in any case I think that the the the image that now comes to mind uh relates to something you've said several times that um it's not about eliminating something it's it's about revealing that something was never actually there and then in terms of sensor experience and this these different aspects of the self I have this image in my mind of of um I'm not an experienced scuba diver but I've done enough of it you know worn a wet suit you wear a complete wet suit with the hood and this idea you know if you were born into that wet suit you might think that yeah you you know nudge up or lean up against a wall and you experience it one way right and um but were you to shed that wet suit you go wow there's this incredible landscape of samata sensory experience that I had no idea that goes Way Beyond levels of sensitivity right now you're talking about fine two-point discrimination and light strokes and this could be positive or negative pain in other ways too but what you're describing is essentially that the wet suit was never really there it but was created through a series of in of action steps and what I think what we're migrating towards here is a set of um for most non-intuitive um non-reflexive action steps that reveal to us that in fact we're not wearing the sweatsuit now you raised one um topic which I I think is analogous to this sweat suit which is this notion of distraction that normally distraction is masking what would otherwise be a a better experience of life um I can think of distraction as falling into two different bins one would be the kind of distraction that is internally generated like the fact that thoughts arise and pull me down different Alleyways and avenues of my of my brain and my thoughts and my experience and then the other would be um and and that that would compete with my ability to really focus on something and then another form of distraction which captures my ability to focus intensely but has me focusing on the wrong things and here I think the Judgment of wrong is is reasonable to include if for instance I'm being impulsively yanked to something on social media I'm being impulsively yanked to someone else's pain and experience and somehow confusing that with my own experience this isn't empathy but just getting yanked around my attention as a spotlight is kind of like over here over there I'm not feeling as if I'm the one standing behind that Spotlight controlling or I'm not the spotlight just to keep with the what we've been building up here so could you tell us a little bit about distraction and tell me whether or not these two forms are in any way accurate or inaccurate I'd be happy for them to to be inaccurate and whether or not there are other forms of distraction that we need to be on the lookout for and again I think what most people are seeking is what is the way to not just enhance our ability to focus but to shed this wet suit like cloak that limits our experience that I'm calling and that you've called distraction yeah I get like this me distraction is is one component of it the the other aspect of it is identification with thought and identific the feeling of self is bound up in the sense that that I'm the I'm The Thinker I'm the one attending I'm the one vulnerable I'm the inner kind of the inner homunculus that's vulnerable to experience um and it can be gratified by it or not and it's constantly trying to improve it or and mitigate negative aspects of it um it's this it's the sense that there's kind of a a rider on the horse of Consciousness as opposed to just Consciousness and it's contents so it again it it rides at Top This illusion of control um Etc so to to go all the way back to the to the question you asked about just what is an you know what do I recommend as a starting point for for meditation um some of your assumptions are in fact true yes I mean it's it's you know I often recommend in the beginning people close their eyes and you you you do a sitting practice and that's different from a walking practice I mean you can do both but people tend to start you know sitting with their eyes closed but again ultimately where this is going is it's not an artif meditation properly recognized is not an artifice that you're adding to your life it's not it's not even a practice it is it is less rather than more you know it and and therefore it is also coincident with you know potentially every waking moment there's nothing there's nothing that you can do with your attention once you know how to meditate that in principle excludes meditation because meditation is just a a recognition of an an intrinsic character of Consciousness in each moment and all you have in each moment is consciousness and its contents whatever you're doing so um so in the beginning you you know you you'll be very deliberate and precious about deciding to practice meditation and you'll set aside 10 minutes in the morning and you'll do that and then and it'll seem very different from the next 10 minutes when you're you know spilling out onto your to to-do list and you're you're trying to figure out you know what the day looks like right but ultimately you want to erase this boundary between formal practice and the rest of life such that there's it's just not remotely findable and and um and that that's that's achievable and and I think even from the very beginning you can relax this conceptual distinction between meditation and its antithesis because it's not it's not a level of anything you're doing it's the level it's at the level of what's happening in your relationship to thought you know like what what can you notice when when you know like it's the transition from you know the B the bable percept you know you're looking at the at the um the image and you see nothing let's say this you know the dalmatian you know it's just the spots on the paper and you just you don't see you don't see anything and then all of a sudden the Dalmation or the face of Jesus or whatever the the image is pops out and then you see it it's the transition from nothing to something right that you the practice becomes the transition from being lost in thought and then waking up and break you it's very much like breaking the spell of thought identification with thought is very much like waking up from a dream and having it's like that that transition the whole like you're having a dream and there's a couple things are true there I mean it it really is a kind of it's it's a it's a psychosis that is just not we don't problematize because you're safely in bed and you're not moving or unless you've got some kind of you know sleep disorder you're not walking around harming yourself or anybody else so but to be in bed and to not know it and to think you're you know running along a beach or you know you're you know getting tried for murder in a court of law or whatever thing is that you're completely delusional about right that is psychosis right and like you're fundamentally unaware of your circumstance and then you there two things can happen there you can either become Lucid within the dream right which is interesting and that's a whole there a whole phenomenology of that which um can be practiced but more commonly you can just wake up from the dream and all of a sudden the problem you thought you had is no longer there and and you have a completely different context for your conscious life like now you know you're ined you safely in bed all all the while there really is something analogous when you break this identification with thought right you're just you're having a thought that seems to be some kind of you know uh moral or psychological emergency and and yet you can you can the moment you see daylight around it the moment you see that that the mind is larger than than this mere appearance right then you have it suddenly you have a degree of Freedom that that a moment ago was just Unthinkable right and you're also you recognize you sort of come to in a way you recognize your circumstance in a way that you weren't a moment ago when you were just talking to yourself when you were just identical to that conversation um so this is all all to say that that ultimately meditation I mean so again there's another apparent Paradox here many people don't know much about meditation will say things like you know well you know for me running is by meditation or skiing or rock climbing or playing the guitar something they like to do that gives them an experience of flow that's what that's what they go to to feel better and that's that's the opposite of all the you know the chaos of their lives or the the you know their time on Twitter or whatever it is in virtually every case it's it's not true to say that that is effectively meditation you're not going to by learning to play the guitar you're not going to learn what I'm calling meditation and you're not going to learn it by you know cycling or get and getting no matter how good you get at any of those things you're not going to learn it by doing those things but paradoxically not really but it can seem like a paradox once you know how to meditate then you can meditate doing all of those things right meditation is totally compatible with playing the guitar or skiing or you know doing any ordinary thing you like to do right so once you know how to meditate and again it's totally natural in the beginning to formalize it and to set aside time each day to do it because it is a it is a training I mean it is something that in the beginning you have to get used to but once you have once you're getting used to it then there is no good reason not to be experiencing this thing I'm calling meditation this this insight into the the the centerless of Consciousness the the the nonself hood of Consciousness um you should experience it when you're playing your favorite sport or when you're having a conversation with somebody and the then the reason then to come back to your initial assumption about eyes closed a lot of practice even formal practice can be done eyes open and it's important to do it eyes open because so much of our anchoring of our sense of self is is based on visual cues I mean like we just we we know that you can if you give people the right visual cues you can translocate their sense of self you can give them an outof body experience you know with a with a video display where you can literally make them feel like you there's a body swapping illusion you can make them you can make them feel that they're in another person's body looking back at their body if you if you you know run the cameras the right way I've done this in VR seeing an image of of you they create an avatar for you and then your bodily movements generate the movements of the Avatar and um you start gaining presence as they call it in the lingo very quickly and then pretty soon um you lose sense of your own bodily representation and and um it's a little Eerie uh what's eest to me is um going back into of course never left but um back into your actual body when the VR goggles pop off the world seems almost overwhelming the number of sensory stimula that are in like a laboratory room which is actually quite sparse right um so exactly what you described this trans of of Notions of self through Visual experience but conversely when you lose the sense of self the sense of self I'm talking about it can be especially Vivid and Salient with eyes open because it because so much so many of your reference points to selfhood are delivered visually right especially in a social situation so like you know I'm talking to you you're looking back at me right so you're the implication of your gaze is that I'm over here behind my face implica by your gaze like so the sense that you're looking at something is the sense of self in that social context right and so and if you're if your facial expression changes like so I'm saying something and if you kind of furrow your brow like what the hell is you and I can read into that facial change some inner state of yours that is you know sailing into me all of a sudden we've got this sort of dance of like I'm noticing you reacting to me and I'm that's that's changing the way I'm feeling about what I'm that that that's the that's the you know the the perview of you know every Neurosis everyone didn't want right and every relationship I had a girlfriend when I was a postto who was a who was um very very uh she was brilliant really um still is and she always said that every relationship they refering is is they four arrows she used to say she's a neuroscientist still is and said you know there's the arrow of you know uh she was talking to me so she said you know me to you and kind of what you perceive coming from me and then there's you to me and then there's an arrow from the middle going right back at each one of us which is our own of what the is thinking us and it's feeding on the other arrow and she gave me this very um clear but um model of basically relationships um uh the relationship failed but it was good while it lasted I should say and um but the four arrow model of relationships actually shows up in every type of uh one one-on-one relationship and it's probably an under description of of the total number of arrows but is I think it's exactly what you're describing is that perception of self Through The Eyes of other whether or not we're empathic or not strongly shapes the way that we access different context dependent rule sets about what we're going to say and not going to say it's very Dynamic right yeah so but the the freedom that I think we want and people can sometimes experience this just halfhazard but the the thing that the center of the bullseye from the meditative point of view is to get off that ride entirely and to so so the losing the sense of self in this context of of a social encounter is to is to give up your face essentially like your like so and and what what that entails is or what that gives you is the free attention to actually just pay attention to the other person right and the other person is now no longer quite an object in the world for you there's really just a kind of a totality of which that person is a part um and and actually you know Martin bber the the uh kind of mystical uh Jewish philosopher uh talked about the kind of the I thou relationship and and this I think is you know it's been a long time since I've read Boer but um and I don't know if he goes you know far enough to be truly non-dualistic but this distinction between I I and now um the the thou part of it is is I think potentially this or again it's been several decades since I read read him but there's a there's a there's a way of beholding another person where you have the free attention to Simply behold them right like you're no longer you you're no you no longer care what they think about you you don't feel neurotically implicated by their gaze you don't feel you you're simply the space in which they're appearing right and so you're free like like there's just there's no and and people can feel and so you're you're by definition you're no longer self-con ious right and when and this phrase self-consciousness really does get at this what I'm calling the self the the elusory self as a kind of contraction and and you can you can notice this for yourself just imagine what it's like to go from not being self-conscious to suddenly being self-conscious and the the the approximate cause of this you know almost invariably is suddenly recognizing that somebody's looking at you right so like you're in a Starbucks and you're you know you're alone and you're reading the newspaper whatever it is this is now sounds highly anachronistic it's been three years since I've held a physical newspaper I think in a Starbucks um but you know you're you're you're just minding your own business and you look up and you you're seeing you know a room full of strangers but then you notice that someone is just looking at you you know and so like that moment of eye contact right suddenly that throws you back on yourself as a kind of suddenly you're the object in in the world for that other person that recognition is a the tightening there the kind of contraction there is a is a a a further ramification of this this feeling most of us have most of the time of being the center of experience like the the place you feel like like it's it's like you know we're all walking around with a fist and in moments of self-consciousness the fist gets really tight you know and that and that's um that's the thing that gets fully relaxed when you discover this this what I'm you know at various points call the nature of mind or the the non-d Dual nature of Consciousness it's just that there is no Center to this experience and when you recognize no Center then even when your gaze is aimed at another person's gaze there is no implication going back to the center because there is no center right and and rather than that being an experience of weird Detachment or confusion or or it's it's actually an experience of Greater relationship because you're no longer you're no longer defend it you're you're not defending anything over here like you're not you're not braced against anything you're just the space in which that person is showing up and so it's it's a it's a an experience of being much more comfortable in in the presence of another person you whatever your relationship because you're not Contracting right and then when you do when you have that again and this is meditation right this is meditation that is totally compatible with having a conversation with somebody and then when you notice yourself Contracting like when you notice you're not doing you're not meditating anymore you're just you're actually reacting like they just said something or looked a certain way and now you're cast back upon yourself in relationship to them that becomes a kind of mindfulness alarm right then you know that that it it becomes like the the the unsatisfactoriness of that psychologically becomes more and more Salient right and it's um because that's not one that's not the way you want to be I mean that's like it's the antithesis of being as as comfortable as you were a moment ago but two it's it's something you're doing unnecessarily right like it's like you're you're you're you're like again you're making a fist when you don't have to make a fist right and and it's um again you can leave aside all those circumstances where it's appropriate to react to someone and you know I'm I'm you know I'm into martial arts and self-defense and yes you're not supposed to be just this puddle of goo out in the world who can be just mistreated by people and and you know never put up you know resistance but it's um psychologically you know even if even if a state like anger or contraction is sometimes times normative and appropriate the question is how long is it normative and appropriate for like how how long do you want to stay angry for um in my experience these kind of classically negative emotions like anger and fear are appropriate as salian cues you know they they Orient you to you know an emergency or a potential emergency but then in dealing with the emergency they're almost never the state you want to be in you know it's like you don't you know you like it's it's better to actually be calm in an emergency you know so oh absolutely I think that um and again the language is is insufficient to describe what um what you're telling us but I think what comes to mind for me is this a distinction between situational awareness and self-awareness and we need both but under conditions of uh emergency true emergency um or motivated desire we need to um dial down the amount of self-awareness in order to be more effective within the situational awareness um but you said something very important in my lab has been working on uh fear-like States for a long time so I'm going to I confess I'm going to um Rob this from you but I'll credit you every time I describe is that that the that the the fear of the threat detection state or set of events acts as a as a flag but is not meant to persist in the way that uh the flag went up right if one is to be in their most adaptive State actually Joo willink and I were talking about this he has talks a lot about Detachment and open gaze things that my lab's interested in visual system and autonomic interaction so why broadening The Gaze literally broadens the time domain of thinking and you've come up with new solutions to complex problems in real time and so on and um and you're describing an everyday set of interactions where that could be very useful and yet there seems to something that about the way you describe meditation and what you've managed to arrive at and um what practitioners of meditation can arrive at which is something more than that like it it's not just about being effective or optimizing all the language we see thrown around a lot in the space that I I live in these days but um but something fundamentally more important about how to experience life and the self this this realization that what you thought was there was never really there there are but that there are constraints that limit that and so to try and Fracture those just constraints one by one would you say that meditation as a practice done for a few minutes each day or with the app that it's a um kind of a step function is a very nonlinear in terms of people's progress um you know I'm certainly going to go um start doing more meditation based on this discussion truly um because anytime someone describes a um that there's kind of a myth that we've been living in I I become obsessed with the idea of dissolving that myth right that's a very seductive phrase so thank you for using that one there is no better marketing tool which is I realize what you're not trying to do here but that's for me to capture my my um efforts you tell me that there's a myth that I'm living in and that it can be dissolved and that opens up a better landscape um yeah what is the the process like is do some people make progress very quickly do some people um experience kind of Step functions towards progress what is a meditation practice look like over time um do you still meditate or do have you just threaded it through your Jiu-Jitsu your writing your daily life your coffee your time with your wife Etc yeah Al so just to come back to just to to talk about the myth for a second so they're really what you just annunciated was a kind of a second doorway into this whole project so like the the usual door is through the door of suffering for lack of a better word I mean people feel unhappy in a variety of ways and they get more sensitized to the mechanics of their own unhappiness and meditation is one of the things on the menu that see that is is explicitly built as a remedy for for unhappiness and uh and it is and that's you know I think that's probably the most common path to this but another path is just intellectual interest I mean just wanting to know what's real so about the mind subjectively in a in a first person way and and there's there's no contradiction between those two things I'm motivated by both of them but um you know it's a totally valid doorway into this um there are definitely step functions I mean I would say they're there at least two I mean the the and they really are articulated along the lines of of um the framework I've been describing of dualistic and non-dualistic mindful right so in the beginning you're going to start out you know 99.9% of people will start out dualistically paying attention and and noticing the difference between being distracted by thought and then being on the object of attention whether it's the breath or sounds or whatever and eventually that you know that opens up to all possible objects of attention including thoughts and and there's still this fluctuation between being distracted and then being mindful of whatever and the fact that it's open to all possible objects differentiates this type of practice from anything that is narrowly focused on one object like a mantra or a visualization or so you know those are other Paths of practice that are more concentration based um and interesting but the the benefit of mindfulness is that very quickly you realize it's by definition compatible with all possible experience because you're not artificially Contracting your attention down to something you're you're just being aware of the next thing a sight a sound a taste a thought um so the first step function is to very clearly experience the difference between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of any part of experience including thought and to notice the freedom the comparative psychological Freedom that gives you right so you can like you're something's made you angry and now you're thinking about all the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're going to tell that person when you see them and and then you notice you're thinking right and you notice the connection between the thought and the anger right like like the the minute spent lost in thought about what's making you angry is the thing that dragged through the physiology of anger right and the moment you notice that once you're mindful once you can be mindful you can notice thought as thought and how quickly that dissipates it's just the language and the imagery just you you couldn't hold on to it if you wanted to and then you notice the physiology of the anger is just this you kind of meaningless uh you know kind of inner incandescence that has its own halflife and degrades very very quickly when you're no longer thinking about the reasons why you should be angry you can't hold on to the anger the anger itself dissipates right and from some from the point of view of the one who's being mindful this is tremendous relief I mean and at minimum it's a degree of Freedom you can at that point decide well how long do I want to be angry for right is it useful to stay angry do I want to be angry for 1 minute 2 minutes 5 minutes 10 minutes or because and before you have that capacity to be mindful you're going to helplessly be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be that way just based on the kind of the time course of you're thinking about it brooding about it telling your wife about it you know like just the you know it's just going to be this conversation-based misadventure in you know negative uh states of mind uh and you are you are going to be the hostage of that for as long as you'll be the hostage of that you'll have nothing you can do apart from just deciding to you know check out and watch Game of Thrones again for the third time right like like it's just you can divert your attention to something else which is you know sometimes a good thing to do but mindfulness even dualistic mindfulness gives you this capacity to just observe the mechanics of this and then get off the ride when you when you whenever you want so that really is a step function like first there was a time when there was a time before you could do that and then there's a time after which you can do that the other step function is noticing that there is no one who is doing that I mean this is the non-duality the the selflessness the the centerless of awareness right the fact that there's no place from which the mindfulness is being aimed but the fact that there just this open condition in which everything is appearing you know thoughts included to to have you as at that point your mindfulness no longer becomes it's no longer this this dualistic effort to strategically pay attention to anything as opposed to being lost in thought it's just what's left when thoughts when when when the present recognized thought unravels even before it unravels what's recognized is you are simply identical to the condition in which everything is appearing again this is not a I'm not making a a a deoch Cho Chopra like metaphysical Claim about the mind you know this is not I'm not saying the mind isn't what the brain is doing I'm not saying that you're recognizing the Consciousness that gave birth to the universe I'm not not making any broad claims about metaphysics I'm just talking about as a matter of experience there is just this condition in which everything is appearing right and what you're calling your body again as a matter of experience I'm not saying that we can't have third person conversations about you know physical bodies in the physical world but as a matter of experience the only body you're ever going to directly encounter as your own is an appearance in Consciousness right so Consciousness is not in your body what you're calling your body is in Consciousness you visually proprioceptively it's like everything is just appearing in this condition and again you're not aiming you're not this is not a spotlight that you're aiming at the body or at you know there's just this condition in which everything including anything you could call yourself is appearing and um so yeah so that's the second step function is to recognize that this is all this is already true Consciousness is already without the thing you've been calling your ego hoping and you know hoping to to unravel it through meditation Consciousness is not going to get any more selfless any more centerless any Freer than it all always already is recognized as such and and so that's that's the that the step function at that point is your mindfulness at that point the thing you come back to when you're no longer distracted is that that recognition again and again and then it becomes yeah it becomes compatible with anything you would do and so to answer your question yes I I still practice you know formally you know sometimes you know frequently but not you know I definitely miss days and I don't do it for I mean I you know I I don't rule out the the possibility that I will go back on retreat at various times just to you know check in with that and see if if that makes a difference but um you know I you know I tend to sit for um I mean I tend I've designed my life so that I can spend a lot of time meditating without having to be formally meditating like so you know you know I'll go for a hike for two hours right and what I'm doing when i'm hiking is identical to what I'm doing when i'm quote meditating you know sitting in a chair you know doing nothing but meditate um so it's um yeah I mean I just again the I'm very um I'm very interested in erasing the boundary between what people are calling meditation and the rest of life and that so that in in in teaching these things I tend to emphasize that from the beginning because I I think it's it's very easy to set up um to get to get Gull by a bunch of assumptions that that cause you to be very um split in your sense of what your life is about and like I'm I'm sort of banking my meditation over here because I'm I'm I'm meditating two hours a day diligently and you know this is going to be really good for me and then over here this is the rest of my life which is not nearly as wise or as useful or as like this is the stuff that is still the area of my problems and um I think it's useful to recognize you've got one you've got one life you know and you've got this this this single condition of Consciousness and its contents in every mode of life and there's something to to recognize about it and you're always free to recognize that and truly even in your dreams right I mean it's just not this it never stops so that's that's what I tend to emphasize so earlier you told us that meditation is not about changing the content of conscious experience and in a different podcast that you were on I heard you say something to the effect of that normally we are in our daily experience and unless we are trained in meditation um unless we've dissolved this illusion of the gap between uh actor and self and observer that we require certain sensory events to create collisions within us and with the natural world that sort of you know blast us into a different mode of being I want to use that as a way to frame up this idea that some things such as psychedelics but also a very long hike a very long fast um you know who knows a banquet uh you know different types of Life Experiences do exactly the opposite of what you're describing meditation does which is that they actively change the content of our conscious experience so much so that we often remember those for the rest of our lives yeah could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful and here I'll give the caveats that maybe you'll feel um obligated to give as well but this we're talking about use safely and responsibly age appropriate context appropriate ideally with some clinical or other type of guidance legality issues obeyed Etc all that stated psychedelics to me are an experience of uh altered perception internal and external perception altered space-time relationship somewhat dreamlike I think it was alen Hobson at Harvard for a long time talked about the relationship between psychedelic like States and dreamlike states um because of this Distortion of space-time dimensionality um and I haven't uh experimented with them much um I've been part of a clinical trial three doses of MDMA which certainly altered my the the quality of my conscious experience in ways that led to a lot of lasting and at least for me valuable learning yeah so what are your what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect with the discussion that we've been having and um what utility do they play in recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes well so uh yeah C let's just price in all those caveats that people can anticipate um these drugs are not without their risks and this it's one problem is that we have this single term drugs or psychedelics which names many different types of substances and they're not all the same and they're not so like MDMA is not even technically a psychedelic I think it has immense therapeutic value and it actually was my gateway drug to this this whole area of concern amphetamine pathogen right it's a sort of an amphetamine and a pathogen at the same time yeah I mean it's often called empathogen anth not pathogen empathogen yeah an empathogen or an intogen it's it's been called um but it doesn't tend to change perception in the way that classic psychedelics do and it's it's it's also serotonergic but it's it's not um uh it has to be in some part differently so than I mean even LSD and and psilocybin which are much more similar and and classic psychedelics both are also sergic but they're not merely so and they're they're also different um and the and the higher dose you take of these drugs the more you at lower doses everything can kind of seem the same at higher doses they you they they they begin to diverge um and we can talk about the the uh pharmacology if you wanted to but um the uh I would just say that for many of us I me certainly for me psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that this was a firsters interrogation of the Mind was worth doing you know because I was somebody who at you know age 17 or 18 before I had any real experience with um with MDMA or LSD or psilocybin um if you had taught me how to meditate at that point I think I would have just bounced off the whole project I think my mind was I I was just I was so um cerebral in my just my engagement with anything I was so skeptical of any of the the spiritual the religious and spiritual Traditions that that have given us most of our meditation talk you know um that I think I just would have um and I know many of these people like I you know I have I have tried to teach you know Richard Dawkins to meditate and Daniel Dennett to meditate I've ambushed them with meditation and you know both both in a group set in and and oneon-one uh not not Dan but uh but Richard I I I ambushed on my own podcast with a guided meditation and he just you know from his he you know he closes his eyes he looks inside and there's nothing of interest to see right like it's just it's like it's not he doesn't have the the um the conceptual interest in him that would that would cause him to to persist long enough to find out that there's a there there right now this is not a problem with LSD or psilocybon or MDMA I know that if I gave him 100 micrograms of LSD or five gram of of mushrooms or you know 20 you know 25 milligrams of psilocybon um that's probably not the analogous dosage to the five grams of mushrooms five grams of mushrooms would be more than that um uh um I forget what it is of uh of MDMA maybe 120 milligrams of I think the maps dose is uh which is the one that's under clinical trials is 125 milligrams with an option of a 75 milligram booster funny I would remember that strange the facts that come to to hand um but uh there's not there's just no possibility that nothing's going to happen right now something with with a psychedelic with MDMA most people tend to have certainly under any kind of guidance tend to have a very uh positive you know pro-social experience um but you know with a psychedelic you might have a a a um somewhat you know terrifying experience if you have quote a bad trip you know if you and I've certainly had those experiences on on LSD and and to some degree on psilocybin but um the prospect that nothing is going to happen is just in you know a million you know nearly a million cases out of a million just not in the cards I mean just just neurophysiologically something's going to happen with the requisite dose of of uh of one of these drugs and if if that thing that happens is is psychologically at all normative and you know Pleasant and interesting and valuable which it is so much of the time and certainly under the appropriate you know set and setting and and guidance um it can be you know a lot of the time for you know virtually everybody again there are caveats if you if you're prone if you think you have you know proclivity for schizophrenia or you know bipolar disorder this is almost certainly not for you you know anyone doing a the the studies like John's Hopkins for for um the therapeutic effects of of any of these drugs they're they're ruling out people with you know first-degree relatives with with any of these clinical conditions um but so for somebody like me at 18 who didn't know that this was an area of of not only interest but would it be the you know the the center of gravity for the rest of his life if only he could pay attention clearly enough to see that it could be right um I was someone who very likely again I don't know I don't have the counterfactual in hand I don't know what would have happened if if someone had you know forced me to meditate for an hour at that point but I know I wasn't interested in it until I took MDMA um I know I wasn't having these kinds of experiences spontaneously that get that showed me that there was an inner landscape that was worth exploring um I was a very hard-headed skeptic who was very interested in lots of things but there was no alternative to me just thinking more about those things right I mean the idea that there's some other way of grasping cognitively at the interesting parts of the world Beyond thinking about the world right I just that that just wouldn't have computed for me at all right and if you had so I just I and I literally I no one ever gave me a book to read or and ever had I don't if you the noun meditation very likely meant absolutely nothing to me before before I uh took my first dose of in this case it was MDMA um so what the drug experience did for me is it just proved I mean so the the LI one of the limitations of a drug is that you know obviously no matter how good the experience the drug wears off and then you're back to you more in more or less your usual form and now you have a memory of the experience and it can be a fairly dim memory I mean some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness that it can be like trying to remember a dream you know that just disappear that degrades you know over the course of seconds and then it could have been the most intense dream you've ever had and for whatever reason you can barely get a purchase on you know what it was about and um you know there's some psychedelic experiences that are analogous to that but for most people most of the time there's a residue of this experience and with something like MDMA they can be quite quite Vivid um where you recognize okay there there was a way of being that is quite different than what I'm tending to access by default and it is different in in ways that are just uh you know obviously better and and and psychologically more healthy I mean it's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I I never imagined right and then then when you be then when you link it up to the traditional literature around any of this stuff again so much of it is shot through with with Superstition and otherworldliness of of religion and you know as as you know and I think you're listen listeners probably know I've spent a lot of time criticizing all that but there is a baby in the bathwater to all of that right it's like it's it's not that somebody like Jesus or the Buddha or any of the matriarchs and Patriarchs of the world's religions it's not that they were all conscious frauds or you know temporal lobe epileptics or like there there's a there's a pathological lens that you can put on top of all that but once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like MDMA you know that there's a there there you know that unconditional love is is a possibility right you know that that um feeling truly one with nature right I mean just so one with nature that you you could spend 10 hours in front of a tree and find that to be the most rewarding experience of your of your life right that's a possible State of Consciousness now it may not be the State of Consciousness you want all the time you know you don't want to be the crazy guy by the tree you know who can't have a conversation about anything else but uh once you have one of these experiences you recognize okay there's there's some reason why I'm not having the biotypic vision right now and I can't even figure out how to aim my attention so as to have anything like it and that's a problem right because it's it's available right and it's it's the best you know it it is among the best things that has ever happened to me right and now I'm can just only dimly remember what that was like um so how do I get back there on some level and that see so that invites again a logic of changes a logic of seeking changes in the contents of Consciousness which set someone up for this this um protracted or seemingly protracted and and you know fairly frustrating search to you know game their nervous system so as to have those kinds of experiences more and more um and again it's not that that's in principle fruitless but it is from the point of view of the kind of the core Insight of you know the core wisdom of you know what I would take from a tradition like Buddhism which is not you know it's not the only tradition that has given voice to this but it's I would argue it's given it you voice do it the most in the most articulate way um again leaving aside any of the Superstition and and other worldliness and miracles that you you know we don't have to talk about at the moment and you certainly don't need to endorse in order to be interested in this stuff um and so that's the the bifurcation between the all of the utility of psychedelics and what I'm talking about under the rubric of meditation is at this point of okay once you realize there's a there there what do you do and what's the logic by which you're led to do it and it's possible like if if your only framework is the good experiences the good feels you had on on a whatever drug it was and a a further discussion of of like what that path of changes you know can look like and that can come in a religious context it can come in just a purely psychedelic context or or you know some combination of the two um I think you can be misled to you can just be you you can be misled to just seek lots of peak experiences you're just trying to string together a lot of peak experiences hoping they're going to change you every one of which by by definition is going to be impermanent right I mean it's it's first it wasn't there then it's there and then it's no longer there and then you've got a memory of it right the qu what I think it's what everyone really wants whether they know it or not and right to want is a type of Freedom that is compatible with even ordinary States Of Consciousness which which can ride along with them into extraordinary States Of Consciousness I mean so when I I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years because I again they were super useful for me in the beginning then I discovered meditation on the basis of of those experiences got really into meditation and realized okay this is a much more this really is the you know conceptually this makes much more sense to me this is delivering the goods you know in terms of my experience um there's no need to keep having these you know seeking these Peak experiences with with drugs but it had been you know 25 years since I had done that and and there was this Resurgence in research on psychedelics and I was being asked about psychedelics and I was talking about their utility for me but again these were Distant Memories and so and there was also one type of psychedelic experience I was I was aware that I had never had I had never done a high dose of mushrooms uh blindfolded you know like every every mushroom trip I'd ever had I'd been out in nature and interacting with you know you know just been a very transformed sensory experience of the world and of other people but I'd never done it alone blindfolded just purely you know inwardly directed and at a a high dosage i' done high doses of LSD but um but not mushrooms um so I did that you know and it was very useful and I I I I spoke about it on my podcast and there's actually there's I think if you search Sam Harris mushroom trip on YouTube you get the the the 19-minute version of that my describing that trip it was incredibly useful and but what was was doubly useful was my mindfulness training in the context of that explosion of synesthesia I mean it was was it was such an overwhelmingly strong experience um and there were so many moments where it could have gone one way or the other based on my sense of just okay I'm going to try to resist this you know it was like it was it was it was in truth irresistible because it was just so much but um there were moments where I was aware of okay this is like letting go of self you know you in this context is is the thing that is going to you know turn make the difference between heaven and hell here you know and because there's there experiences that are so extreme that you can't even tell if it's Agony or ecstasy it's just it's just this everything has turned up to 11 right and it and the difference between the two is like you know the Tipping Point is just it's on really is kind of a Highwire act in some sense you know you could just fall to one side or the other and um yeah so what I think people want is um they certainly want to be able to extract from the Psychedelic experience wisdom that is applicable to ordinary States Of Consciousness it's like what is the thing you can realize in a moment of having a conversation with your child that isn't distracting you from that relationship it's not a memory of when the world dissolved or you know when you were indistinguishable from the sky but it's just a way of of way of being having free attention and unconditional love in this you know totally ordinary and potentially chaotic Human Experience you know which can be psychologically fraught and you can meet you know iterations of yourself that you don't like that are that are not equipping you to be the best possible person in that relationship and what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually you know be in love with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more of the time yeah and um that's there's I'm not saying that's the psych you know that repeated psychedelic Journeys aren't can't be integral to that project but but you know that it C the project can't be being high all the time right so whatever is extractable from that the the the occasional you know psychedelic trip has got to be able into ordinary awaking Consciousness and the point of the real point of contact does kind of run through this you know what I've been calling the illusion of the self and again it is that part is discoverable without any changes in Contents right so you don't have to suddenly feel the energy of your body be rush out and be continuous with the you know the ocean of energy that is not your body right like that's an experience that's there to be had right there's no doubt but this the truth is me just looking at this cup is just as formless and as mysterious as that right when it's seen in the right way and that's and that's that's what you know meditation encourages to you know one to recognize I share the experience that MDMA um significantly altered my perception of what's possible in terms of an emotional stand Dan towards self and others yeah including animals right something that runs very deep for me and that i' had been kind of actively suppressing in anticipation and having me put my dog down but also I you know I'm not um I don't know how to frame it except to say you know my lab did animal research for years and I was always very conflicted about it yeah because I love animals and yet I wanted to understand the brain and we need to work on animal brains and rodents or or what um yeah I'll be very direct about this my laborat I've worked on many species I've worked on um mice and rats I've worked on um admittedly I've worked on I done some cat experiments I've worked on large non-human primates includ including maacs um I no longer work on any of those species um I've worked on cuttlefish seapods a discussion for another time brilliant little amazing creatures maybe maybe as smart as us or who knows um maybe smarter and now I work on humans because I couldn't reconcile the challenge inside me which was my love of animals and working on them I just couldn't do it any longer yeah and and MDMA didn't set that transition um that transition actually had been set a lot earlier and it was something I really grappled with it didn't keep me up at night but it was always in the back of my mind right in any event I hope what we discovered was um was worthwhile but this is a that's a bigger debate um and I have strong feelings about this and maybe it's a topic for another podcast um but I'm very happy that now I work on humans and they can tell me if they want to be part of the experiment or not and I and I trust them and I trust their answers I think that MDMA in its role as an empathogen I think really did set an understanding of what's Real and True so thing truths like that become um they don't I felt that they didn't hit me square in the face I just could the feeling behind the conflict made itself evident and what to do about it made itself evident so suppose MDMA did uh did assist the transition to purely human research as opposed to um animal research um the other thing that I noticed it did is it um it made it not scary to confront things that were scary to confront in my conscious life and I could think about things in my conscious life but it made you know it brought them close in a way that I could get closer and closer to the flame and then gain some understanding i' I've still um uh amazed at how answers arrive both during the and then the weeks and months that follow if one puts the attention to it I think that's why it's important to have a guide of some sort or to have some some pseudo structure because otherwise you can one can get attached to the Sounds in the room and just and there's probably meaning there but I wanted to do some deeper work right I have not had experience with psilocybin at least not since my youth and I don't recommend young people do it I regret doing LSD and psilocybin as a young person I don't say that for politically correct reasons or liability reasons I just think my mind was not developed and um but I'm intrigued by something so here's the question how is it that psilocybin in particular and high psilocybin and the ego dissolution that people talk about on psilocybin how do you think that um lines up with some of the experiences that um you've been describing for a adequate meditation practice because that's something that I did not experience on MDMA in fact if anything I experienced for the first time what um really feeling like a a isolated container was and the difference and how empathy and being bounded having in other words good boundaries and empathy could be symbiotic I experienced that for the first time there and I I do think that there is learning inside of these states that translates into everyday life when one is not on these states and the last thing I'll say is no I don't feel the um the impulse to go and do 20 more MDMA sessions I think that the three is part of this study um were uh very effective for me and you know as they say if you hear the calling again you might do it but I'm very curious about psilocybin in particular and this notion of ego dissolution because we've been talking about the self well so so there are different ways in which the sense of self can be eroded or expanded or there's lots of experiences that can still have a kind of Center to them but be you know very novel and and transformational um and one can reify those as a kind of goal state right and it's sort of the there's a concept in in Buddhism that I think is useful it doesn't translate well to English or can it can set up um kind of uh false associations in English that that are unfortunate but so there's a concept of emptiness in Buddhism which um sounds again kind of gray and dispiriting in English but it's um uh what it the what it's it's of cognate terms are are things like unconditioned unconstrained open centerless right so it's it's um there's a uh and and that is so when I'm talking about non-duality when I'm talking about the loss of a sense of subject and then what's left in Buddhism they would often describe what's left as emptiness but it emptiness is not a something it's not a it's and it's importantly it's not the same thing as Unity right so it's not it's not a Oneness right because it's it's what's what's let when when the center drops out of experience it's not like you are suddenly merged with the cup right it's but now granted you know this is where psilocybin and other psychedelics can give a false impression of of I think what the goal is you can have kind see seeming merging experience you can have Unity experiences on psychedelics which can be quite powerful especially with nature with other people and with nature where you can just feel like you know the the the energy of your body becomes uh incredibly Vivid and Powerful it's just like like you're just you everything is just you know buzzing with you know life energy and then when you you know touch another person's hand or you touch a tree there can be this sort of continuity of energy which can be this overwhelming experience of and again this is a a a just a 20 Megaton change in the contents of Consciousness right this like this is a non-ordinary state of consciousness but like this this is a give some indication of what of how this happens when back in the day when I was uh in my 20s and I was experimenting with with uh this was LSD but um some friends and I decided we had this brilliant idea we would we would Camp above Mir woods and then take some some LSD at dawn and then walk down you know like a mile I think from the campsite into the into the actual proper Grove of trees and and you know commune with the giant redwoods the tallest trees on Earth um and so we dro the acid at dawn and we start walking but the acid came on you know almost immediately and we didn't get I me we got nowhere near the woods and we got stopped by a tree that was just like a an ordinary you know 20ft oak tree like the most boring tree in the world and that tree absorbed like the next next 6 hours of our of ouring conscious attention because it was just you know it was the tree of life I mean it was just it could there could be no better tree um so the we're talking about non-ordinary States Of Consciousness wherein a a merging with life and with with the world is possible and that is a so I'm not I'm not saying that kind of experience isn't possible but there's a sort of uh expanded self reification it is a kind of ego dissolution but there's a there's a kind of egoity that sort of goes along for the ride as well or can go along for the ride and the real insight into emptiness the real sort of centerless you know center of the bullseye is a recognition that that in some ways equalizes all experiences I me again it's it's it's just as available now in the this ordinary you know podcasting experience as it is when you're merging Hands-On with an oak tree and you know on you know 400 micrograms of acid and this is you know the this is the whole universe um and so it's it's it's the it's the equality of those two experiences that that that this concept of emptiness captures which a con concept of Oneness does doesn't quite capture because Oneness is really this this peak experience of being dragged out of your you know your somethingness into a much bigger somethingness right Emptiness is just no center right and then everything is in its own place right there's still sights and sounds and Sensations and thoughts and feelings but there's just there's no there's no Center and there's no clinging to anything there's no clinging to Identity there's no clinging to the good stuff there's no there's no resistance to the bad stuff there's no so pleasant and unpleasant get sort of strangely equalized and there's this very it's it's very expansive and it and most importantly it doesn't block anything so yeah if if for whatever reason if your nervous system is set up to have the oh my God I'm now merging with the tree experience that's a that's possible from the state of no center right and then and and on my you know that my recent now not so recent 3 years ago was right before Co U but my last you know big psychedelic experience you know there was I was very much experiencing that whereas you know in so far as I you know you know at the peak there was no me to remember any of any of this stuff but you know in so far as I could experiment with is this really different from anything else you know there is a kind of equalizing to the the emptiness recognition even in the in the presence of a completely transformed neurophysiology and and so that's um again there's there's a point of contact I mean the the the real point of contact between psychedelics and meditation for me is but for my experiences on psychedelics there I think there's just no way I would have had the free attention to be interested in in the in the project at all um and there are other aspects of the project it's not just having this insight into selflessness it's it's all of the ethical ramifications of that it's just like what kind of person do you want to be what are your values what's what what is a good life altogether when you are talking about relationships and you know political engagement and the changes you can make in the world or not make or it's just you know what kind of person do you want to be there's there's there's a much larger consideration and I mean as you discovered you know an experience on MDMA can and uh really you both both expand your model of what is possible and what is desirable what is normative I mean just what kind of you know what kind of self do you want to be in the world uh and uh it can also help you cut through things that are inhibiting you you're actualizing any of those possibilities in ordinary waking consciousness I've certainly found that to be the case I mean you rais a really important point which is that um once these learnings take place these understandings take place inside of psychedelic Journeys and um I do believe they translate to neuroplasticity I do want to um highlight the point for people oftentimes people say oh you know this uh mushroom or this uh psychedelic um it opens plasticity but of course plasticity has to be directed someplace plasticity is just a process like like walking or anything else underlying neural process and I I think um it's possible for me to understand what compartments of my life have been impacted by um these three MDMA sessions but I um in some ways I wonder whether or not not just the transition away from animal research but also a um a deeper realization of the love for Learning and sharing information uh you know I won't go so far as to say this podcast is happening because of that particular session but these things um they splay out into multiple domains of the self and I do think that um the key features that feel most important to me to mention are that um it really identified uh true loves things that I truly love and made me less um less cautious about feeling how intense those loves really are and then also uh lower the inhibition point of exploring like well what that what would that mean right you know and one of the reasons I bring this up and why I think it's so important that you mention you know uh some issues around politics and ethics and many things have splayed out from your exploration of psychedelics meditation Neuroscience philosophy you know all the things that are you and of course that's only a subset is that so much of what I hear and see so much of what I hear and see in the kind of self-help space contradicts itself and leads back to the the origin without a lot of um progress and and for instance we hear you know absence makes the heart grow fonder but then out of sight out of mind you hear about radical acceptance but then what if it's radical acceptance of non-acceptance right I mean there are some experiences and people for which I radically accept the fact that I want nothing to do with them yeah and does that some am I supposed to transcend that so these are the questions I think that keep a lot of people from exploring things like meditation because they feel like well is the idea to just be okay with everything is radical acceptance just like will just you know bulldoze me with with with things even if they you know and my goal is to somehow um surpass the idea that they're harmful and I don't think that's actually the way any of this stuff is supposed to work although I don't claim to be the authority on it either I you know I think Notions of radical acceptance and um radical honesty and and any number of different sayings that one can find out there are really the the most Salient beacons and guides that most people have in order to try and navigate tough areas in their life including the relationship to self but other others and political orientations and so I feel like almost all those things can be used to anchor down in a stance that may or may not be informed or to open up to ideas and so I think the none of this can really be solved in a single practice it sounds like but it does seem to me based on what you've told us today is that only through a um a deep understanding of the self as it really is as opposed to this illusion that you framed up could we actually arrive at some answers about like what's actually right for each and every one of us yeah I mean there's one generic answer that I think can be extracted both from the psych psychedelics and from meditation and just from just thinking more clearly about the nature of of our lives and it's it's to become more process oriented and to and to be more and more sensitive to the the moral the mor like character of of achieving our goals right now I'm not I'm not against achieving goals I have a lot of goals i' you know I'm I'm you know I'm very busy there are lots of things I want to get done and and I you know I'm I'm as satisfied as anyone to finish a project and but if you look at the time course of all of that you know fulfillment and you you you there few lessons everyone I think has to draw one is most of your life is spent in the process right like the like the moment at which the goal is you know fully conquered that is just I mean that has a you know it's a tiny duration and has a very short halflife and you're it it the moment you you arrive at it it begins to recede because in the meantime you have all these other goals that have appeared on the horizon you've got people asking what you're going to do next and you you in some sense if you're if focus on goals you really you can never arrive right and I think what we're what we're looking we're all looking for in life you know whether we're ever thinking abouts taking psychedelics or or practicing something like meditation we're looking for good enough reasons to let our attention fully rest in the present right now like so that that is the logic of success like the the S the sense like I've got all these things I want to do if I could just get rich enough or fit enough or you know dial in my sleep well enough or you know improve my life in all these ways get the right relationship wouldn't it be great to be married you know I want to start a family I want all of these these things why do I want these things right I want these things because I'm telling myself this is It's not that all of those things are wonderful right I'm not I'm not discounting those relative forms of happiness or sources of happiness because it's all completely valid to it's completely valid to want those things but in the Pres one thing is absolutely clear it's possible to be miserable in the presence of all those things right it's and you can add you can add great wealth and fame and everything on top of that it's possible it's possible to be absolutely miserable having everything any anyone could seemingly want right you just have to open a newspaper just to see people living out that predicament right you know spectacularly wealthy famous healthy successful people who could do anything they want in their in life apparently and yet they're doing this thing that is completely dysfunctional and making them needlessly miserable um I won't name names some people come to mind at the moment um so so there is a there is a a clear dissociation between having everything and happiness that's possible and it's also possible to have very little you know and almost nothing and to be quite happy I mean you might not have met these people but you know I have met people who have spent you know 10 years alone in a cave right you know and they come out of that cave not fluidly neurotic or psychotic they come out of that cave beaming with compassion and joy and I mean it's like they've been taking MDMA for 10 years essentially and they come out of the cave and now now they're going to talk about it right um so and I'm not necessarily recommending that project to anyone but I'm just saying that is that is a psych ological possibility so you have a double dissociation here whether you can have everything and be miserable you can have nothing and be beaming with with happiness um so what is it that we actually want in all of our seeking to arrange the props in our lives and our and our and the story to have a a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves that we're doing the right thing uh what are what is all of that effort predicated on is predicated on this desire and this expectation that if we could get all of this stuff in the right place and not have anything terrifying to worry about right everyone we love is healthy for the moment right and we're healthy and it's you we've got something to look forward to on the weekend and there's not some there's not a you know a Plumbing Leak in the house that we have to immediately respond to and we like our house and you know our career is going fine and there's something good to watch on Netflix and we have all of it right now can we just actually give up the war right can we can we can we fully locate our our sense of well-being in the present moment is can we relax the impulse to brood about the past or think anxiously about the future for long enough to discover that all of this here is enough right because our life our our life is we have this finite resource of I mean we abs abolutely have the finite resource of time but within this the finite resource the Continuum of time we have the even more precious resource of free attention that is that that can find our our our our fulfillment in the present right and because even if we're even if we're guarding our time to do the things that are most important to us we can spend all of that time wor regretting the past or you know anxiously expecting the future and telling just bouncing between past and future in our thinking about ourselves and our lives and basically just dancing over the present and never making contact with it right so what we I think what we want is a a circumstance where attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling and unless you have had some kind of radical Insight that allows you to do that on demand you are in some sense Hostage to the circumstances of your life to do do that for you you're just you're constantly trying to to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the the present moment good enough and what meditation does and psychedelics to some degree does this but meditation very directly does this it reverses the causality and and and lets you actually change change State such that you can be fulfilled before anything happens right nothing your your happiness is no longer predicated on the next good thing happening you can be in the presence of the next good or bad thing already being fulfilled and already being at peace you know I mean there's a there's a I think they're misleading nouns we can we can throw it at what is left there but it is you know um you know Tranquility peace freedom lack of contraction lack of conflict I mean like all of that is a A can be more and more of a default and all of that is also compatible with deciding you know yeah why not get in shape why not engage this project why not you know change your career I mean it's not it's not that you need to be somebody who who except to to your point you can notice all of these nonoptimal things because no matter how much you meditate you know you're very like very likely going to spend a lot of your time still lost in thought still identified with it and still wanting still caring about the difference between dysfunction and and normativity in your life right and and it's just the question is what can you what can you locate when the question it's really it's like how much can you puncture that se seing Happiness Project with the recognition that you're already free right that that is that's what that's what meditation makes possible you can keep just a thousand times a day letting some daylight into this search space and so it's it but it is still compatible like you can I mean working out is a great um frame in which to look at this because mean in working out when you when you when you really work out you know I'm thinking you know mostly of I me it's really it's anything but it's you know resistance training or cardio or something like Jiu-Jitsu you're you're intentionally putting yourself in classically unpleasant circumstances physiologically I mean so if you if you were you know you imagine what it's like to do anything to failure right if you just check in what the on what that is like at at the level of sensation I mean that is it's basically a med it feels like a medical emergency like that if you were having that experience for some other reason like if you woke up in the middle of the night and felt what it feels like to be deadlifting you know on your 10th rep on a set where you're going to you know you would fail at 11 right like that is just you know that's an emergency but because you understand what you're doing in the gym and you've sought it out and like it's actually it's actually something you like doing right and you can you can get a real dopamine you know hit from from doing it um that what what you're doing when you're doing that is you're you're owning a kind of a like you're you're actually um transforming a a classically negative experience into something that's almost intrinsically positive right certainly the net on it is positive um you can do that and and and being able to do that is more and more the experience of being actually at peace even while exerting really intense effort in in One Direction so you can be straining and I'm sure physiologically showing a lot of stress I mean I'm sure that you know cortisol is up and like you know you know blood PR pressure is up heart rate is certainly up um so it's like it's it's as far as the body is concerned is stress as far as the eye can see but you really can be deeply equanimous and at peace because again because of the frame around it because of the concepts attached to it because you know what you're doing you know why it's happening and you want it um you so that that that's an attitude you can bring into other stressful things that take effort to accomplish and so it's not it's not that you just need to be a pushover when you learn how to meditate or when you take MDMA or do any work on yourself in any of these ways but um what I think you I think you want to find is you want to find your point of of rest in the midst of of any struggle I would say that the certainly MDMA but and uh again I have less experience with meditation and um but they really I think put us ultimately in positions of what can only refer to as real strength he's can make what before seemed like impossible decisions or even um Concepts or emotional states to even think about for any period of time without deliberately distracting or avoiding in some other way and be to lean into those with with open eyes and I think that's um to me that's my definition of strength I don't know what other people consider but yeah um there's there's definitely something real there in each case this may seem like a Divergence but I and many other people are very curious about a recent decision that you made which was to close your account on Twitter um you still have an Instagram account I noticed but um although I never I mean my team manages that I've never it's a lot friendlier over at Instagram I've been there a lot I've never even SE seen it so oh it's pretty good actually considering imagine what would happen if you did did pay they they're doing a good job with it um but your decision to close your account on Twitter um I think grabbed a lot of eyes and ears and um there's a lot of questions about why it was a very large account you know um it correlated with a number of things that for the outsider people might be wondering about um you know new leadership uh new you know people who had been booted off brought back on or at least invited back on right and so on uh you are certainly not obligated to explain your behavior to me uh or anybody else um for that matter but I'm curious if you might share with us um what the motivation was um for taking the account down and and uh how you feel in the absence of of I mean your thumbs presumably are are freed up to do other things actually yeah I was getting like an arthritic right thumb I think and and I think if if you don't mind sharing I think there's there's a lot of curiosity about you and your your routines you've been very generous in sharing that your knowledge um and but also kind of like what what makes what makes you tick what motivates um pretty big decisions like that it was a a major platform for you right yeah it was it was the only social media platform I've ever engaged I mean like you said we I have an Instagram I have a Facebook account but I never never use those as platforms right never on them I never F I've never followed people and I've never and all the posting has just come from it's just marketing you know from my team um but Twitter was me I mean I you know for better or worse and um I began to feel more and more for worse and it was um it was interesting because it was very you know I you know I've talked about it a lot lot of my podcast about just my my LoveHate relationship with Twitter over the years many good things came to me from Twitter and and I was you know I was following a lot of smart people and it it had become my news feed and my first point of contact with with information each day and I was really attached to it just for that reason just as a consumer of of content um and then it was also a place where I was I genuinely wanted to communicate with people and react things and and and you know you know I would see some article that I thought was great and I would signal boost it you know to to my the people following me on Twitter and that was rewarding and I was I I could literally help people on Twitter like I mean there was a there were you know there people who I've raised lots of M money for on Twitter just by you know signal boosting their gofundmes and and uh so I was engaged in a way that seemed productive um but I was always worried that it was producing needless Conflict for me and was was giving me a signal in my life that I was being lured into responding to and taking seriously that was out of proportion to its its representation of any opinion or set of opinions that I I should be taking seriously so I was noticing that that um and again this evolved over years I mean this this long before long long long predated um recent change is to to Twitter um but I was noticing that many of the worst things that had happened for me professionally were first born on Twitter I mean just like you know some some conflict I got into with somebody or something that I felt like I needed to podcast about in response to on Twitter um it's just so much of it it's either it's Genesis was Twitter or it's the the uh the further spin of that that became truly unpleasant and dysfunctional happened on Twitter like it was just Twitter was part of the story when it was got really bad and I've I've had you know vacations that have gone sideways just because I got on Twitter and said something and then I had to produced a controversy that I had to respond to and then I had to do a podcast about that and blah and just and it was just okay this is a mess right and so at that point you know I I you know have friends who you know also had big Twitter platforms who would who would say you know why are you you know why are you responding to anything on Twitter just tweet and ghost you know just due to have like Joe Rogan sat me down and tried to get get you know give me a talking to as did Bill Mo um and both of them engag Twitter in that way I mean they I think they basically never look at their at mentions they never see what's coming back at them they just you know they use it effectively the way I use or don't even use Instagram or Facebook I I don't even see what's going out there in in my name um and so I I could essentially do that for myself s on Twitter presumably and I did that for some periods of time but then I would continually decide okay now it's all balanced again maybe I can just communicate here because it was very tempting for me to communicate with people because I would see somebody you know clearly misunderstanding something I had said on my podcast and I think it's like why not clarify this misunderstanding right and in and my efforts to do that almost invariably produced a um this I mean sometimes it was a kind of Meandering uh process of of Discovery but often it was just kind of a stark confrontation with what appeared to me to be just lunacy and malevolence on a scale that I never encounter elsewhere in my life like I never meet these people in life right um and yet I was meeting these people by the tens of thousands on Twitter and so it what the the thing that began to worry me about it and again I understand that people have the opposite experience on I mean depending on what you're putting out and what you're you know the kinds of topics you're touching you could have just nothing but love coming back at you on Twitter right uh but because I'm very essentially in the center politically and because I'm you know on my this is now on my podcast this is not in the waking up app I'm often criticizing the far left and criticizing the far right I'm basically pissing off everyone some of the time right and it's very different if if you're only criticizing the left you hate no doubt you get hate from the left but you have all the people on the right who just reflexively and tribally are are expressing their solidarity for you right and who are who are dunking on your enemies for you and you know when when your enemies come out of the woodwork and if you're only criticizing the right I'm sure you get lot of pain from the right but you've got the people on the left who are tribally identified with the left who are who are just going to reflexively defend you if you're in the center criticizing the left as hard as anyone on the right ever criticized the criticizes the left and you're also criticizing the right as hard as anyone on the left criticizes the right you're getting hate from both sides all the time and no one is reflex reflexively and tribally defending you because you pissed them off last time like you might be getting hate from the left now and the people on the right agree with you but they can't forget the thing you said about Trump on that podcast you know you know to podcast ago um so they're not going to defend you and so what I I basically created hell for myself on Twitter because it was um I just you know it was just a theater of it was just pure cacophony most of the time and what I was seeing was I mean like there's no way there's this many psychopaths in in the world but I was seeing Psychopaths everywhere I was seeing like the most malicious dishonesty and uh you know just gpost moving and hypocrisy and and I mean it was just I mean some of it's trolling and some of it's real confusion and some of it is psychopathy but it's like it was so dark that um I worried that it was actually giving me a a very negative and sticky uh View of humanity that was I mean one it was you know I think it isn't inaccurate but two I I I it was it was something I was returning to so much because again I was checking Twitter you know at least a dozen times a day and I'm sure there were some days where I checked it a 100 times a day I mean it was it was again it was my main source of information I was constantly reading articles and and then putting my own stuff out um that it became this kind of fun house mirror in which I was looking at the the most grotesque side of of humanity and feeling you know implicated in in ways that were import important because it was just it was reputationally important or seemed to be important um I know a lot of these people it's not these weren't just faceless trolls these are these are people with whom I have had relationships and in some cases friendships who because of what you know largely Trump and Co did to our political landscape in the last you know half a dozen years um we're beginning to act in ways that that that seemed you know starkly dishonest and and you know crazy making to me so I was just noticing that I was forming a a view of people who I actually have had dinner with that was way more negative based on their Twitter Behavior than I think would ever be justified by any way they would behave in life with me you know I mean like never I was never going to have a face-to-face encounter with any of these people that was this malicious and dishonest and gaslighting and weird right as as was was happening hourly on Twitter right and so I just began to become more sensitive to what this was you know just the residue of all of this in my life and how and just how often the worst thing that the worst thing about me in my relationship with the people in my life you know they just talking to my wife or my kids was just the fact that I had been on Twitter at some point in the you know previously in the the previous hour and there was some residue of that you know if you know in my interaction with them you know I was like what you know what are you stressed out about what are you annoyed about what are you pissed off about you know what can't you get out of your head um what is the thing that you now feel like you need to spend the next week of your life focused on because it went so sideways for you all of that was Twitter you know l i mean literally 100% of that was Twitter and and so um I just at one point it was actually on Thanksgiving day I just looked at this and I just just I mean there was very little thought went into it I mean literally I mean you know there was more thought in involved in you you you know whether I wanted coffee when you asked me when I showed up here I me it was just like at a certain point I just I just saw it and I just I just ripped the Band-Aid off and and yeah so um and to answer your other question it's been almost wholly po positive as you might expect given the the Litany of of pain and discomfort I just ran through but um I mean it's also it's it's surprising to recognize how much of a presence it was in my life given the sense of what is now missing I mean it's like there there's it was there's no question there was there's kind of an addictive component to it and when you see I like when I look at what elon's doing on tter forget about his ownership of it and I I'm not you know I I've got a lot to say about you know the choices he's making uh for the platform but just his personal use of it is just so obviously an expression of I mean I don't know if addiction is the you know clinically appropriate um term but you know his dysfunctional attachment to tweet to using the platform forget again for forget about changing it and owning it but just H the just the degree to which it is pointlessly disrupting the life of one of the most productive people in any Generation Um uh I that was also instructive to me because because I know Elon and I I just you know um he's from my you know kind of a friend's eye view of the situation it's so obviously not good for him that he's spending this much time on Twitter um that uh I I just brought that back to me it's like well if it's not if this is what is doing to Elon and he's got all these other things he could be doing with his attention how much of my use of Twitter is actually you know a good idea and you know optimized to my well-being and the well-being of the people around me um so anyway it was there was an addictive component to it I think and so when that got stripped off I you know I I do notice that there's I mean there's some there are times I pick up my phone and I realized this is like the old me picking up my phone for for a reason that no longer exists because there's not that much you know you know I have a slack Channel with my team and I've got email obviously but it's like that is not much of what I was doing with my phone really in the end and so like it's just my phone is much less of a presentence in my life and and so it's it's almost wholly good but um yeah it's you know there's I think there is some danger in uh or some some possible danger in losing touch with certain aspects of culture which again I'm not even sure I mean there's this question of you know how much is Twitter real life and how much is it just a mass delusion uh I don't know but in so far as it actually matters what happens on Twitter um or in so far as I was actually getting a news diet which I'm not going to be able to recapitulate for myself or I'm just not in fact going to re recapitulate for myself even if I could um if any of that matters I haven't discovered that yet but it's yeah I mean there's it was taking up an immense amount of bandwidth and it's it's impressive I I think I said I I you know it was like I amputated a a a phantom limb right like it was not a real limb but it was it was a this continuous presence in my life that um that uh it it's weird it actually relates to the concept of Self in in surprising ways because I I felt there was a part of myself that exist did on Twitter and I you know I just performed a suicide of that that self like that's this is ending right now and you know there's no residue there's nothing to go back and check there's just it's gone I and I didn't even I didn't go back and look at my like what's interesting to consider is that you know I'd been on Twitter for 12 years I don't keep a journal I mean Twitter what my timeline would have been a kind of Journal I could have gone back to a specific hour and a specific day and looked at what I was paying attention to I mean that could have been an interesting record of just who I've been for a decade and I probably a pretty humbling record of who I've been for a decade um in terms of the kinds of things that captivated my attention but I didn't even you know didn't even think to go in no you know nostalgically just look at any of that or see if any of it was worth saving or archiving or thinking like just just delete you know and it was um uh and so my my actual sense of who I am and my engagement with with my audience my you know the the world of people who could potentially know me like what does it mean to be to have a platform you know where do I exist digitally my sense of of all of that got truncated in a in a way that um is much less noisy I mean it's amazing how much can't get up now in my life like it's like with Twitter almost anything could happen right like like the next tweet was always an opportunity to massively complicate my life there is no analogous space for me now and you know so what I'm going to say on your podcast what I'm going to say on my own podcast what I'm going to write next that's much more um you know uh deliberative and uh the opportunities to take my foot out of my mouth or to rec consider all you know whether any any of this is worth it is it worth is this the hill I really want to die on now um it's much more um can be much more considered and I mean I think all of that's to the good um but even more important than that is that there's not I'm not getting this continuous signal that is always inviting a response whether on Twitter on my own podcast or you know anywhere else um and it's just much less noisy I mean life is much less noisy and and cluttered and that's you know that that is definitely feels better just it's 100% better I'm happy to hear that I know a number of people miss you there but um you sound happy I sense the genuine happiness in it um several things come to mind uh first of all thank you for sharing your your rationale there and how it went I think for a lot of people think oh you must have like walked around in circles for hour is talking about everything was delete as many good decisions are executed right um you know I'm a big fan of Cal newport's work deep work in many ways C's I've never met him but um we know each other through the the Internet space he um really ahead of his time with this notion of deep work and limiting distractions I think he's even got a book about a world without email or something really extreme so he had I mean he deserves some credit because he had been somewhat approximate cause to this he had been on my podcast and he had encouraged me to delete to Twitter cuz I had been I had been sort of in the in reaching some kind of uh you know crisis point with it uh prior to that podcast and so we talked about it and I had I had recorded that podcast but hadn't released I actually recorded the podcast the day before I wound up deleting Twitter um but hadn't yet released it so in my podcast with him you know in the intro to it I I then give a postmortem on my deleting it but he was yeah he was one of the last people who was in my head around these issues and I I you know it that was not by accident I had invited him on the podcast cuz I increasingly wanted to think about you know whether this was totally dysfunctional well I'm a big fan of Cal Newports and I I am on social media I'm on Twitter I had some you know High friction interactions there and um I have a process for dealing with those I tend to avoid High friction confrontations online but um Instagram is a much friendlier place by the way if if you want to come over to where like the nice kids like the the cool kids actually hang out Str strangely I'm not looking for a substitute you know that's a I didn't I don't let me entice you over there you do but I think that this notion of of um really being a able to access what Cal calls deep work what um Rick Rubin talks about you know um being able to touch the source of create creativity and focus and on a regular basis does require that one have certain types of and in some cases zero interaction with certain platforms um that merely being on a platform and blocking people that would just won't provide I think a lot of energy opens up and I'm fascinated by this concept of energy I mean we only have so much energy neural energy to devote um and in many ways what you described um there's really I think striking parallels to what been talking about all along these last hours which is that sometimes the thing that feels so um so powerful that has such a gravitational pull and that we think this is experienced this is life this is just the way it is actually is an illusion and when you step away from it you realize that there's this whole other dimension of interactions that that was available all along but that we uh for whatever reason um we intervening in by way of our reflexive distracted Behavior so I think there's a there's a there's a poetry there I was a hard case but uh yeah I I got religion on this point and it's a it's a good change well Sam I want to say a couple of things first of all um every time you talk I learn so much and that's you know in the dimensions of Neuroscience even hardcore neural circuitry type stuff which I'm you know sort of my home um when you talk about philosophy or uh or meditation or psychedelics and even politics some a topic that I'm you know woefully undereducated in but um you have this amazing ability to to blend and and synergize across things and I think today what what occurs to me is that um not only is that no accident because of your training and your the rigor and the depth at which you've explored these different topics but also your openness to it but I think at least For Me Above All is because I think you are able to encapsulate this idea of the self and and the different ways in which we each and all can potentially interact with the environment and and our inner landscape um your description of meditation I have to say is now has forever changed the way I think about meditation I would no longer just think of it as a perceptual exercise I on the podcast I've been talking about it as something to to do for these various benefits the benefit set of more Focus lower stress ET seller of which certainly exists but what you described today has a um has such an Allure and a and a um hold such a promise that um as I mentioned I'm certainly going to change my behavior and and I know I'm speaking on behalf of many many people I just want to extend my thanks for your coming here today to teach us even more because of course you have your podcast and the the app The Waking Up app um and the fact that regardless of the political Landscapes regardless of the what Neuroscience feels about psychedelics or the where things are at any point in time you strike me as somebody who is very committed to sharing knowledge and thoughtful deep discourse so that people can benefit and there are very few people like you um in fact there's probably only just one and so I feel very grateful to be sitting across uh the table from him for these last hours oh nice nice well I I really enjoyed this and uh I want to congratulate you on what you've built here because your podcast is is everywhere I just you know I'm a fan and uh even more than that I'm continually seeing the evidence of you reaching people people and and benefiting people and it's just it's really immed like this is the one of the best examples of you know New Media just carving out of space that that people didn't really know existed you know cuz like this is not television it's not radio it's not and and all of a sudden people have time to hear a conversation of great length that goes into you know nitty-gritty scientific detail on you know hormones I mean like who would have thought that was even possible and so um yeah I just congratulations it's fantastic to see and I'm just very happy for the opportunity to talk to you and and your people well thank you it's very gratifying to hear and um I feel very blessed um in no small part because of our conversation today thank you much well to be continued to be continued we'll do it again and again and again thank you for joining me today for my discussion with Dr Sam Harris I hope you found it to be as enlightening as I did and be sure to check out the waking up app the Dr s Sam Harris has made free to any hubman lab listeners for 30 days by going to waking up.com huberman please also check out his incredible podcast the making sense podcast and you can find any number of Sam Harris's different books on meditation Consciousness philosophy Neuroscience politics and more you can find links to those books by going to samh harris.org if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's the best zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for us or comments or topics that you'd like me to cover or guests you'd like me to invite onto the huberman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast not so much during today's episode but on many episodes of The hubman Lab podcast we discuss suppl ments while supplements aren't necessary for everybody many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like enhancing the depth and quality of sleep for enhancing focus and for hormone support and many other aspects of mental health physical health and performance the uberman Lab podcast is proud to announce that we are now partnered with momentous supplements because momentous supplements are of the very highest quality they ship internationally and they have single ingredient formulations which turns out to be important if you're going to develop the most cost- effective and biologically effective supplementation regimen if you'd like to access the supplements discussed on the hubman Lab podcast you can go to live momentus spelled o us so liv.com huberman if you're not already following us on social media we are hubman lab on Instagram Twitter LinkedIn and Facebook and all of those places I talk about science and science related tools some of which overlap with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content of the hubman Lab podcast again it's hubman lab on all social media handles all platforms Instagram Twitter Facebook and Linkedin if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter that's a monthly newsletter it's completely zero cost and includes summaries of podcast episodes as well as toolkits for things like enhancing your sleep enhancing your focus and ability to learn hormone support Fitness and on and on you simply go to hubman lab.com go to the menu click on the menu and scroll down to newsletter provide your email and you can start receiving our monthly nural Network newsletter thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Sam Harris All About meditation Consciousness Free Will psychedelics social media and much much more and as always thank you for your interesting signs [Music]