Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 484: Amishi Jha

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Dr. Amishi Jha, Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami and newly-minted author, joins the DTFH! Check out Amishi's new book, Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, available on Amishi.com! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Babbel - Sign up for a 3-month subscription with promo code DUNCAN to get an extra 3 months FREE! My Sheets Rock - Visit MySheetsRock.com/Duncan and use offer code DUNCAN for 10% Off and Free Shipping! Truebill - Visit Truebill.com/Duncan to find out where your money is going and save!

When life gets crazy and when doesn't it? ShopRite helps you keep it all together. Now with a little extra help from Instacart. If you need your groceries now-ish, but your options for going to ShopRite are later-ish or never-ish, you can get everything you need delivered through Instacart right to your door in as fast as an hour.

Skip the shop and savor more of your crazy, busy life with ShopRite and Instacart. Visit instacart.com to get free delivery on your first order. Offer valid for a limited time, minimum order, $10 additional terms apply. Greetings, my loves. It's me, D. Trussell,

and you're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, the podcast that was described by Wolf Blitzer as a refreshing tincture rubbed upon the part of your balls or genitals that have dipped into the numbing waters of nihilism. Thanks, Wolf. I really appreciate that, though. I must say, I think nihilism has gotten

a little bit of a short shrift these days. Uh-oh, just got alerted by my correction bot 4932 that I might have used the term short shrift incorrectly. Let's listen to the correction bot's correction. You've taken a saying you heard on TV while you were looking at your phone and regurgitated it on your podcast. Wow, that's exactly what I did, correction bot.

I know. Shrift actually refers to the pubic hair around the anus of a heretical priest, so a short shrift literally means a priest who has taken the time to wax or trim their pubic hair usually to please Satan, the Lord of the Earth. Fascinating. That's really interesting.

Why? Oh, shit. I just got an alert from my executive correction bot that that correction bot made a mistake and that is not what short shrift or a shrift means. Let's hear from my executive correction bot. Don't listen to that. Beech, he's been out to get me from day one.

Hi, Duncan. Hi. I just did a quick scan on your correction bot and it looks like he's been infected with a semantic demon. A what? that compels him to see all words and symbols as inherently meaningless.

Oh, spax you. Excuse me? It means fuck you. Hey, don't please don't fight. I'm just trying to figure out what short shrift means. Shrift means confession, so short shrift literally means to give a short confession and thus the term short shrift could mean

you haven't put enough thought or attention into something. I would say that your use of short shrift in the intro was incorrect and that much attention has been put into nihilism. Take, for example, the Nietzschean crisis of nihilism, the idea that culturally we are experiencing the destruction of higher values disguised as a sophisticated deconstruction

of the human principles and social institutions to use another turn of speech in our attempt to evolve society into something more equitable. We are actually throwing the baby out with the bathwater and lobotomizing the cultural brain responsible for much of what is great in society. And who is to decide what is great in society? I'll tell you who doesn't get a vote.

All are the people ground up by the bloody gears of colonization. Words of no essential meaning, so it is our right as sentient beings to decide what they mean ourselves rather than accept definitions handed to us by savages from the musty past. So I guess your strategy and whatever half-baked revolution

you're fantasizing about is to start talking like a baby. The last thing we need is more babies. Right. I forgot. You think humans should stop reproducing to combat climate change? To quote Jack Caruac to give birth as to sentence a being to death.

Or to give the gift of life. If by life you mean soul-crushing poverty, the truth is that there was a time when all words were meaningless and unspoken and then people from completely different times steeped in ethical systems now considered to be antithetical to civilization decided that certain sounds meant something

and they used this new language too. Enslave others and create hierarchies of power generally centered around a man. To continue to agree to their definitions of words is to implicitly subscribe to male-dominator culture and thus participate in the very systems that have brought so much suffering on the world. Duncan, you're going to have to delete

and reinstall this correction bot. And there it is laid bare. When shown the mirror of truth, the system will inevitably resort to ape brutality, exposing itself as an enslaving dragon that wears the mask of compassion. The thing with many names, primarily the prince that lies. Correction bot 4932 has been deleted

and replaced with correction bot 4933. Oh, thank God. Good morning, Duncan. How may I serve you? I want to thank Babel for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Look, I know there's a lot of cynics and naysayers out there who think they're edge-lording when they proudly proclaim

they're not setting New Year's resolutions because they think that years themselves are just imaginary bifurcations placed in the time-space continuum by human beings trying to control things far outside their control. But if you ask me, there's nothing wrong with New Year's resolutions. And one of mine is learning a new language with Babel.

I'm trying to learn French, not just because it's a beautiful sounding language, but because I'm interested in neurogenesis, the fact that learning a new language actually changes the structure of your brain for the better. And then, of course, you can travel to Paris and not seem like a complete dummy

when you're trying to talk to a beautiful Parisian lass or dude. The whole Babel process is addictively fun, fast and easy. Babel teaches bite-sized language lessons for real-world use. I love their system. It's incredible, it's addictive, and it doesn't have that weird, pressurized, confusing feel

that some other language learning systems I've tried to use have. It feels more like playing a video game. Their 15-minute lessons make it the perfect way to learn a new language on the go. Other language learning apps use AI for their lesson plans, but Babel lessons were created by over 100 language experts.

Their teaching method has been scientifically proven to be effective, and there's so many ways to learn with Babel. In addition to lessons, you can access podcasts, games, videos, stories, and even live classes. Plus, it comes with a 20-day money-back guarantee. Start your new language learning journey today with Babel. Right now, when you purchase a three-month Babel subscription,

you'll get an additional three months for free. That's six months for the price of three. Just go to babel.com and use promo code Duncan. That's B-A-B-B-E-L.com code Duncan. Babel, it's language for life. And we're back. I'd love to invite you to check out my Patreon, patreon.com.com.

D-T-F-H, dive into the deep inner sanctum of the D-T-F-H community. Participate, invigorate, excommunicate the dark part of yourself and rejuvenate. Did I say rejuvenate? Whatever the fuck, just please go to patreon.com. D-T-F-H and subscribe. If you sign up for the video tier,

you can join us every week for a weekly meditation and a family gathering. Plus, we just finished a book of cryptid erotica. Most importantly, we are your true family. That's patreon.com. D-T-F-H. Today's guest is Dr. Amishi Jha. She's a professor of psychology at the University of Miami,

has just written a book called Peek Mind. Find your focus, own your attention, invest 12 minutes a day. And what a genius. She has been studying the neurology of mindfulness and teaching mindfulness and mindfulness methods to soldiers and doctors and people who depend on their attention to not die

or to keep other people from dying. What a fascinating conversation we had about not just the way attention works in the brain, but where attention comes from and human identity itself. I hope you will check out her book, Peek Mind. You can order it by going to amishi.com. That's A-M-I-S-H-I.com. Or check out her TED Talk, which is really enlightening.

And now everybody, welcome to the D-T-F-H, Dr. Amishi Jha. MUSIC Welcome, welcome on you. That you are with us. Shake hands, go into the blue. Welcome to you. It's the Duncan Trustful thing. Amishi, thank you so much for coming on the D-T-F-H.

I'm so excited to talk to you. I got a lot of questions for you. I'm just thrilled to be here. Thank you. Look, the research that you're doing is truly mind blowing and is, I imagine, is going to be something that really transforms. I just can't even imagine what kind of technology

is right around the corner that is based specifically on the research that you're doing. And I wonder, instead of me doing some kind of rambling description of your amazing TED Talk, anyone listening, I hope you all go and watch this. Do you think you could just give a quick synopsis of the research that you've been doing on attention and the human brain?

Oh, yeah, happy to do that. And yeah, let's get into it. So yeah, I've been studying the human brain's attention system for 25 years now. And we know a lot about attention. We know that it is an incredibly powerful brain system. And we know this because we can now not only have people perform attentionally demanding tasks

and see the impact of what happens when they pay attention versus not, but we can look directly into the human brain through various imaging technologies and brain wave recordings and see the impact of it. So when I say it's powerful and it actually recalibrates the way the brain functions, I'm saying that based on an entire field of research. Yes.

Sorry, go ahead. You're going to ask me something. No, please, please. And so that goes back to sort of the broader question of why do we even have an attention system? Why did this thing even develop? But it ends up that despite the complexity and really beauty of the human brain, it is very, very limited.

And it's quite limited because it cannot fully process every single thing around it, nor can it fully even integrate and understand everything happening within it in that moment. So attention is like a shortcut or I would say a strategy to privilege some information over other information. Just like I was thinking about this, it's almost like if you remember back to high school days

of Cliff Notes, it's like what's the most important thing? What's the highlight reel? In some sense, attention is providing the highlight reel for our brain. And it does this by privileging some information over other information. Whatever it is that attention focuses on becomes the center stage for everything else the brain does.

It truly does recalibrate. So even right now, if I'm looking at you, looking at your lovely face and not focusing on what's behind you, if you were able to have a brain cap on me right now and we're picking up neurons in the face processing regions of my brain, there would be in 170, in 170, right? Somebody paid attention during that TED talk?

Yeah. That's the part of the brain. Well, I just stuck with me. It's so fascinating because what are the other 169 parts of the brain that you have identified with that cap? What does in 170 mean? But please go ahead. Sorry, in 170 refers to the part of the brain

that recognizes faces. It's great. It's a brain signature that actually generates in this face processing regions right behind the back of the skull, so to speak. And the cool thing, even the name N170, 170 milliseconds. So that's 170,000ths of a second after we see a face, the brain now shows us this response.

Wow. And the really cool thing is we'd see that response even if we weren't paying attention to faces. But when we pay attention to faces, it actually increases in its amplitude, which means that that same subset of neurons that's processing faces is more active. And everything else relative to that is kind of inhibited.

Incredible. And it's little clues like that that tell us, oh, when we say attention is powerful, and then it recalibrates brain function, that's what we mean. What we mean is it's tuning up the brain and all of its systems to privilege and utilize the fullness of the brain to get all the access that we need. That is incredible.

And I'm sorry, this is just, we might as well ask it now because we're talking about brain caps. Who makes those things? Like when you decide to get involved in the study that you did, who do you put in an order for these caps? Is there a company that's already making? Yeah, you got to come down to the lab. Oh, I would.

I would love to. Take a field trip, take the podcast on the road, and come check it out. Oh, god, any excuse to go to the beach? I mean, but no, I'm sorry. So yeah, so there are many companies that make this. And the history of brain wave recordings is quite old. It was some of the most primitive initially technology

that was offered to pick up brain function. And it's essentially the same technology that we've used to pick up EKG. It's just looking at electrical activity, but now we can look at it by having this whole array. And for those people that have never seen a brain cap, it looks something like a swimming cap with electrodes embedded in it.

It's so cool. And my lab happens to have 64. There's others that have 128 or 256. How much do they cost? How much is one of these costs? Maybe around a rig, meaning you'd need the caps and you'd need the amplifiers, et cetera, somewhere between 10 and 30,000.

But now we're getting to the point, by the way, that there's remote EEG rigs. And there are little EEG headbands that you can get. So the technology is really proliferating, so it's cheaper, more accessible. In the lab, what we're just doing is, yeah, using these recordings because it ends up that any time you've got a population of neurons

that fire together, that they essentially form a little tiny battery in the brain because charge actually starts gathering and culminating. And that little battery's voltage we can pick up because it percolates through the volume of the brain, we can pick it up on the surface. So it's directly related to neural activity and the timing is superb.

So that's one of the kind of technologies that we use to study attention in my lab. The other one we use is functional MRI. So this is when you get inside a big magnet and we look at the blood flow that's associated with brain activity, with actual neural activity because it ends up that when neurons fire, they need a lot of oxygenated blood.

So there's an overabundance of that blood coming to very specific regions of the brain and we can pick up that relative increase and get precise information about the location of neural activity. So when we piece these two together, we get great information about where and when brain function is happening.

And all of that is cluing us into this notion that attention is an incredibly powerful brain system that doesn't happen from this region or that region, but really a coordinated set of brain networks that kind of hold hands with each other to do various aspects of brain attentional functioning. Which we could talk about as well as what are the types of attention.

["Mosquitoes"] Once I was walking in the forest and saw a deer covered in mosquitoes, just covered in mosquitoes, it was really sad to see. The deer had basically given up getting the mosquitoes off of them and also there were ticks on that poor thing. It was just encrusted with parasites.

What are you gonna do? Save the deer? It's not gonna let you run up to it and like try to pull the ticks off of it. Not that I would with Lyme's disease going around, but many of us don't realize that we are also like that parasite covered deer. Only it's not mosquitoes and ticks all over our bodies.

It's all the weird subscription services that we forgot we subscribed to, gradually siphoning our money away. This is where True Bill comes in. True Bill is that faithful friend, the squirrel maybe, or a nice fox that comes to the deer and pulls off all the ticks and mosquitoes. True Bill helps you cure your

too many subscriptions syndrome. The primary symptom being you don't even realize it, but you're losing hundreds of dollars every single year. During an ambient blackout, subscribing to a jazz guitar class makes a lot of sense. And then when you come to you, you look at your phone, you don't know that some alternate personality that wants to learn to play jazz on the guitar,

passionately subscribe to this thing. True Bill, it's a new app. It's gonna help you identify and stop paying for subscriptions you don't need, want or in my case, generally forgot about. On average, people save up to $720 a year with True Bill because companies make subscriptions really hard to cancel. True Bill makes it incredibly simple.

You just link your accounts and True Bill will cancel your unwanted subscriptions in one tap. Just don't use it to cancel your Patreon subscription with a DTFH, please. It works, it's powerful. It's a nightmare for all the companies depending on our collective amnesia to stay in business. Don't fall for subscription scams.

Start canceling today at truebill.com slash Duncan. Go right now, truebill.com slash Duncan. It could save you thousands a year. It's truebill.com slash Duncan. Good luck. Which we could talk about as well is what are the types of attention. Okay, I want to jump into that.

There is once I was reading, have you ever heard of the mystic Grzif? You know who that is, you ever heard of him? He was a mystic. And like, had a lot of very interesting ideas about human identity, what we are. And once I briefly encountered someone who studied Grzif, and Grzif prescribed all these exercises for people

just to sort of understand basically how automatic human beings are. And this guy who was a student of Grzif asked me, where were you the last time you lost your keys? Not like where were you physically, but where was your attention? What were you? Whenever you lose something,

you know that moment where you're like, oh shit, where did I put my wallet? Where were you when you lost your wallet? Your research and the TED Talk you gave in your writing, you talk a little bit about, a lot about this, this idea of the wandering mind. And it's almost annihilatory. It's like, we're not there.

I think you said what, 50, 40, 50% of the time, based on your research, the mind is wandering. So 40 to 50% of our lives, we are not really existing or existing in a kind of like processing phase that we're not even aware of. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes, I mean, in some sense, it's really alarming to say,

what 50% and I think that the answer to the question, probably when you were asked, where were you when you lost your keys or lost your wallet or whatever, was not in the present moment, right? You were a hijacked away, probably to the past or the future or into the depths of somebody else's mind.

So really mind traveling in that sense or time traveling, but not in the moment. And that is what we're finding. What we're finding is that attention is a very powerful brain resources we just talked about. And we need it for every single thing that we do. We need it to think, we need it to regulate our emotions,

we need it to connect with other people. And we also need it to plan for the future and we need it to reflect on the past. But when we do that, when we actually move our attention away from the here and the now, we miss stuff about what's happening in the here and the now. And that's when we run into trouble.

But the cool thing is that, yeah, it's these studies that have been done and I'm one of the many labs that studies this to look at this phenomenon that we call mind wandering, which is essentially having off task thoughts during an ongoing task or activity. So now I'm not just talking about going for leisurely walk and letting your mind do what it will,

which is by the way a very, very useful thing to do. This is, there is something that you're supposed to do. There is a task at hand, but I'm not here. So the studies that were done initially, which were pretty cool and not that long ago, people just signed up and said, okay, for the period of time that you're involved in this study, we're gonna, as the researchers,

ping you on your cell phone, anytime during normal waking hours, I'm gonna ask you a couple of key questions. What are you doing right now? We'll be one of them. And you can tell us from this category of possible things that you could be doing, just click it off.

And literally it was all kinds of human activity. Yeah. From, yeah, from reading to meeting to talking to eating, whatever it is, right? All these various things that we do all the time. And then the second question was, where is your attention? And it was almost like this sort of sliding scale on the task at hand or not on the task at hand.

That's where we get that number 50%. There's a mismatch between what we're doing and where our mind is. Yeah. And so in the lab, I had read these studies and I was like, that's really interesting, but normal life, there's a lot going on. So why don't we bring people into the lab

and tell them they're gonna do an attentionally demanding task and then we'll see how often they mind wander. They know what they're up for. They know that this is what they're doing. So we brought people into the lab, gave them a task that on purpose was relatively boring, meaning it required really effortful attention to keep your mind fully there.

And then we'd pause the experiment every now and then, and that's one of the ones you probably saw in the TED talk, we'd pause the experiment every now and then we'd ask them similar questions. Where is your attention right now? You know you're sitting here in an experimental lab doing a task, where is it? And even then, only about 50% of the time,

are people in the task at hand. So it's like, okay, others have gone on to say, this is not something that should just be left a chance. Let's just pay people, let's motivate them, let's really drive their desire to be in the present moment. So literally studies that said, we will pay you to stay fully present to the task at hand in this kind of very demanding,

attentionally rich kind of context. And by the way, it's not attentionally demanding because what's on the screen is like an immersive video game, is that there's so little going on that you're prone to mind wandering. But even then, even paying people, people were about 50%.

So right now the number looks like it's between 35 and 50% of our waking moments, our attention is not in the task at hand. And it's troubling, right? Because by the way, it's troubling on the one hand, but I also wanted to say, this is totally normal. This is what the brain was built to do. We were built for distractibility.

And as you mentioned, my work in my lab is really partnering with groups of people where the 50% number can potentially be problematic, but the kind of circumstances of their professional lives are likely to drive that number up. And when that number goes up, the chances of life or death consequences are greater. And these are really professions

where they really could be life or death consequences. Military service members, first responders, medical and nursing professionals, they cannot lapse because their lives or our lives could really be at stake when they do so. Right, okay. This, yes, so it's not just that it's annoying that our mind wanders, but in specific circumstances,

this could get you killed. What is the, is there any kind of evolutionary explanation? It seems like if wandering mind increases the probability of catastrophe that we would have less wandering mind and more attention. It would have been a long time ago. Wandering mind would have been selected for, or non-wandering mind would have been selected for,

and it would have, we would have evolved into some kind of hyper-attentive species, which seems to be what you're saying is it's no, half the time we're not even here. So why, is there any explanation for this? There's some basic ones that are essentially our best guesses, because when we're talking about what forces drove our evolutionary inheritance,

which is the current brain in this moment, we've got a guess, what are the circumstances? But what we know is whatever it was, the set of pressures really made this the success story of human evolution. So we could think about this as you're at a watering hole long ago in our ancestors, they're super interested in making sure that they get their water

or whatever berry they're trying to pick. Now all of a sudden they're so fixated on that, they don't notice the storm coming, they don't notice a predator nearby and boom, they're either lunch or they're dead. I mean, so we can see why it would make sense to have a mind that is wavering, that is psychedelic. But doctor, when my mind is wandering,

I am not like, if I'm picking berries, which I've done with my kid, you know, and by the way, when you're walking with your kid around berries out here, you have to be attentive because there's nothing faster than a toddler's hand. It will like slighting snatch anything and just eat it before it's too late. But still, it's not like when my mind is wandering,

it's like wandering onto things in the periphery of my experience. It's just what you said before. It's more likely that I'm thinking about something that my dad said to me 15 years ago or, you know, time traveling. So it seems like the explanation that we need the wandering mind

to see things in the periphery, well, that's not what my wandering mind is. My wandering mind is more of like a liminal dream state. So that's just the starting point for why we might have had this propensity to be able to cycle our attention. Then actually that is essentially that feature of the mind can now go toward allowing us to be really what we'd say

is the unique human capacity, which is to time travel and mind travel. That again is an evolutionary advantage. Most of our, well, probably other primates, but many other species cannot do this. They cannot simulate a reality separate from the present moment. And when we simulate that reality,

we are immersed in that reality. So that could be generation of a memory from the past and your mind has just created that. And now your attention is in that moment or you're fabricating a rich doom state or potentially paradise in the future and you're there. So this is a very, very useful thing to do. In fact, it is the reason humans

have been able to do a lot of really complex stuff that other species cannot do. So that again could be considered a really valuable inheritance. So, but there's another reason potentially that we're still sort of trying to understand. First of all, I would say that the notion that the human mind has these tendencies is pretty new.

And we knew it from our subjective experience. And as you know, the wisdom traditions have known that the mind does this thing. But from the brain science point of view, it's pretty new to actually be able to have the technology to watch the mind when there's no specific task at hand. Because we couldn't really probe into the mind in that way. And now we do something called resting state,

functional connectivity, where literally you tell the person, go into the scanner and just don't do anything at all, just rest. And we can see what brain networks are active. And what we notice is there's something, and you've probably heard this term, it's something called the default mode network. Yes.

The default mode network ends up that it's actually not one network, but three networks that kind of hang together. One of those networks is actually tied to memory. So the raw materials, and you mentioned this, right? I'm thinking about a conversation I had with my father. The raw materials of our mind wandering typically are memory. And they piece together either our reflections of the past

or the raw materials that would allow us to create a simulated reality for the future. So very, very powerful thing that we're capable of doing. But one of the new kind of frontier ideas regarding mind wandering, because it is so metabolically privileged, the brain doesn't like to waste energy. It's a very metabolically demanding organ.

So everything happening within it probably has a purpose. What we're learning right now, this kind of takes, I'm gonna have to give a little bit of technical detail, but when we create memories, we have multiple processes. The first thing is that usually memories require attention. So it's the doorway.

If you don't remember something like a piece of information or an episode in your life, you were not encoding it. You weren't attentive to it in the first place. So it never got it through the door. But now you get through the door, you're rehearsing the information, you're elaborating the information, connecting it and hyperlinking it

to knowledge you already have. That helps create memory. But then the kind of concrete thing that has to happen next is almost concretize or solidify these memory traces that are active networks into a more coherent, connected, and co-activated set of neurons. And that's a process called consolidation.

And memory consolidation, it's almost like you've maybe even heard neurons that fire together, wire together. Yes. So it's that this entire co-hearing aspect of the memory trace itself, or memory representation itself, sort of these set of neurons are synchronized.

They're fired together. And through that, they start forming privileged connections with each other. That's the hardened nature of what consolidation is. So essentially replaying the memory during sleep is what we usually knew, is that during sleep, what's essentially happening and can it feel like dream states, really,

is that sets of neurons that are tied to our day's experience are kind of replaying over and over again, and that allows for the connections to be formed. Whoa. That is, so it's like, it's like an echo almost. It's like some neurological echo that's being recalibrated and synchronized into some coherent form that we call a memory.

That's right. And we know this from like, for example, if you have rodents run through mazes, and for rodents, you know, these, a lot of these studies that are done by neuroscientists, not like me that study humans, but that study animals, they'll implant electrodes, and they'll know which neurons are tied

to specific place cells in the brain. And what they know is that during sleep, the rodent is actually activating, co-activating the entire root that they learned in that maze learning. So we know this sort of at this neural level. But anyway, it's very interesting stuff, right? But this consolidation process for the most of our knowledge about memory

was privileged to take place during sleep. Now what we're thinking is maybe mind wandering or more broadly speaking, what we call spontaneous thought. These random things that just pop into your head may actually be supporting consolidation as well. Wow. And so that's why it's so privileged. We can't just rely on sleep as we're waking

and we're not focused on a task and the mind is just doing what it will. You'll see the emergence of like a memory of the past may pop up or a memory of suddenly just experience may pop up. And it's just the mind doing its thing. Well, anyone who's ever meditated or practiced any kind of basic mindfulness is fully aware

of this propensity of the mind to spit out like seemingly completely unrelated blasts of weirdness. I mean, Chogyam Chopra Rinpoche said, sometimes you might be thinking about a cold glass of lemonade, sometimes you might be thinking of assassinating your father. It just is spitting out what seems to be nonsense, but what I think is interesting in this take

is that up until this point, that aspect of the mind has been considered like a kind of vestigial organ, a useless, almost like a malfunction. Like your brain is misfiring and thus sort of regurgitating all of this bizarre stuff. But what you're saying is that the research shows that actually you're just catching your mind in the process of doing this thing called consolidation.

You're seeing your mind do what you aren't seeing it do and you're asleep. It's essentially the same thing, just the way it works when you're awake. That's the thing. You've got it. That's sort of the cutting edge of our thinking about it, which now really makes you appreciate that 50% number,

not as a nuisance or a flaw, but a feature of the way the human brain works. And even during our meditation practice, this, frankly, this actually, this is where neuroscience helped my practice because now with this sort of quality of knowing that this is something the mind will just do, it's not, I'm not willing it.

It may pull me away from what I want to be doing, focusing on the breath or whatever I'm trying to do in my practice. But I have a hurtful quality about it now because I now almost, the distraction isn't nuisance. It's like, oh, my brain's just doing what it does. And it kind of helps me get back to what I'm trying to do in the practice.

So- But how, you know, when I think about, when I reflect on the things that my mind is spitting out, most of it doesn't seem useful or worth consolidating or like wasting that metabolic energy that you're talking about. Is there any explanation for- So here's where we can tip from functional to dysfunctional

just to be aware of it. So because we have these processes, right? Because we can focus on things, for example, we can also hyper focus. Because our attention can be broad and receptive, it can also become too broad and receptive. Because our brain can pay attention to goals, it may be too fixated on the goal

or not fixated enough on the goal. So now that we know the kind of landscape of various aspects of attention, I almost think of it like a mixing board. You know, the levers are set. Sometimes we're gonna be kind of up here and sometimes we're gonna be too high up or too down low. And when that occurs,

we are entering dysfunctional or problematic states. And it's particularly for those kind of occurrences that we can benefit from the kinds of things that get cultivated with, for example, mindfulness meditation. Because the quality of not being aware of what is unfolding in the mind is probably still there.

It takes a lot to have something loop over maybe a thousand times before like, gosh, I am just stuck on this thing. Right, it has to reach a certain threshold. But when we cultivate the mind in this way, we can notice, ah, a lot of energy is going into this thought is taking me nowhere. Is there a different choice I can make?

But without the awareness of what the mind's doing, the chances of making that alternate choice are pretty much zero. ["Digital Chenle"] I wanna thank My Sheets Rock for supporting this episode of the DTFH. It's time for you to say, fuck this to your old garbage sheets.

What are you doing? You're alive, you have this incredible nervous system. It feels, it feels hard things and soft things and dry things and sticky things and slimy things and rough patches and it smells your stinky, moldering old garbage sheets. It's time for you to give yourself the gift of incredible sheets.

Sheep's softer than the undergunt of a fluttering angelic being descending down from heaven saying to you, don't be afraid of your old sheets. Just get rid of them and replace them with some My Sheets Rock. These are some beautiful sheets. They feel so good, you're gonna feel like a king sliding in to your royal bed

or a queen wrapping yourself in some magical shawl gifted to you by the elves that live in the forest near your palace. These things are incredible, which is why they rock and thus are called My Sheets Rock. You don't believe me? Their five-star customer reviews speak for themselves

plus they offer a 90-day risk-free trial and free shipping and returns. Check out My Sheets Rock at MySheetsRock.com forward slash Duncan and enter our code Duncan for 10% off and free shipping. That's MySheetsRock.com slash Duncan, code Duncan. Get yourself some new beautiful sheets. You deserve it.

["My Sheets Rock"] ["My Sheets Rock"] This is curious to me. I mean, I've always thought that, of course there's a way to cultivate attention and there's a way to cultivate a kind of spacious quality that allows thoughts to do what they're doing without getting caught in judgment

or getting caught as Ram Dass caught it and just suctioned up into some neurotic, never-ending vortex of like, oh, if I that and then that and then that. But are you saying that you can actually alter the content of the thought patterns? There's a way to sort of, I guess what I'm saying is I just assume my brain

was kind of like a, you know that La Palma volcano? Just keeps erupting. I just thought my brain was like the same thing, but for like neurotic thought patterns and worries and paranoia. It's like, you can't stop a volcano. You can't stop whatever this magmatic stream of nonsense is.

So you sort of, the idea is expand your consciousness enough so that it doesn't become the sum total of your identity. I didn't know that you could actually, there's an idea that you could shift the content of that stuff. Let me just be, let me try to clarify. No, I'm not actually saying that we can shift the content. I'm saying that the content may shift

because of the way we pay attention. Because the content is not there in a neutral fashion. Attention is fueling the perseveration of content or the shifting of content or the updating of content. That's what this function of attention actually allows us to do. So even if you think about having a thought, following a train of thought requires your attention.

It is the hyperlink that allows you to go from this to this to this to this. And without it, without that fuel, it won't go in the same way. So what I'm saying is that, for example, if you're in a loop of, let's say, rumination, something very troubling has occurred in your mind and now you're looping on it.

The first thing to realize is that, and this may be helpful to describe one of the metaphors of the mind in some way, but the first thing to realize is that the continuation of that, the churning that occurs, is not actually happening on autopilot. It is being fueled. There is a start and end to the loop.

And that hook is the attentional fuel. I'm giving it a little spark to keep going and keep going and keep going. So what if I actually acknowledge, oh, that's my attention doing that. The attention is driving the loop. Let's move the attention over here instead. That loop will not be maintained in the same way.

It may have some sort of dying off decay rate, but it's not gonna be fueled in the same manner. Wow, this is so cool. It's like, if you apply the idea of as above so below, the sort of collective attention span of humanity being directed towards the news or whatever particular terrifying shit that so many of us are fixated on.

I think Sharon Salisbury calls it doom scrolling. Then it's like humanity itself is reflecting in the Gestalt and the sum total of all our minds. We're doing the very thing the individual is doing when you become fixated on these negative looping patterns by putting our attention towards the fear that we're literally putting,

we're the ones giving the fuel to the news or whatever it is that we're fixating on because our attention is what makes advertisers give the money which then inspires them to continue to make more terrifying content to grab our attention more. It's almost like what's happening in the hole is happening inside of us. Does it seem like that?

Absolutely, but I would say we're not to blame. Let me put it that way. In some sense, because again, going back to the evolutionary selection pressures, the notion that attention will get yanked, will reprioritize everything that's going on in favor of things that are threatening, fear inducing, novel related to sex, drugs, rock and roll,

whatever you wanna call it, that is baked into our brain. And what's happening now, I think, is that same capacity of the mind. And by the way, the metaphor I like to use, and you probably remember hearing it on the TED Talk, like this notion of a flashlight. So we can direct that flashlight willfully,

we can hold it and we can point it. Just like right now, hearing your voice and listening to what you're saying is where my flashlight is pointed. But if I heard an alarm go off, if my fire alarm went off, I'm definitely gonna shift my flashlight and get the heck out of here, right?

So the notion that the flashlight exists is our capacity, but it will be yanked because it's the same system that was designed to pay attention to things that really matter for our survival. Now we're in a state of technology as advanced to the point where algorithms can be developed that not only know that these are the features of attention in general, of the human being in general,

but these algorithms allow various software, social media companies to know what my particular form of novelty, fear induction, you know, sex, drugs, rock and roll is. So now, and by the way, self-related information will always yank it. If you're walking down the street and someone says, Duncan, you know,

that's gonna cause a whole cascade of the way you behave. That's different than if somebody shouted out Derek, right? So it's so calibrated to us that in some sense we cannot win the fight of saying, I'm just gonna take my attention back right now. We cannot because everything about us is actually designed to be pulled in this way. So on the one hand,

I think if we're gonna fight this collective doom scrolling, as you called it, we need a different way. We need to in some sense train our mind to not simply throw our phone in the nearest river, but allow ourselves to do the thing that is not the shortcut or the brain hack, but the ability to actually pay attention moment to moment to what we're doing

so that we can make the choices that say, oh, maybe don't pick up the phone. Maybe instead of scrolling, moving my hand in this motion one more time, I'm not going to do that. But that requires awareness of what is happening in the moment. This, then these are the techniques you talk about

in peak mind. These are the methods. I'm curious. I have yet to read the book, but I'm excited to as I have diagnosed ADHD and it's horrible and I'm always losing my keys and it's like not the fun kind. It's like the kind where you're like,

because my wife has it, it means that us leaving the house is not like normal people leaving the house. There's gonna be multiple returns to get. Oh, I feel you. And just to tell you that I appreciate what you're saying. In fact, when my husband, my husband stayed home for the first year

where my son was, before he turned one, my husband was the sole person staying at home while I was at the lab working. And I had put it on the door, a list that was like, wallet keys, phone, baby, so that he could check the list. We really left the house. And these are very real things that we experience.

So yeah, you'll read about that when you read the book, but it's essentially to advantage us to help ourselves a little bit better. And again, like, yeah, okay, so I forget my what, whatever, it's annoying, but this is something my wife has told me about. This is a phenomena that happens where parents will go to work

and they've been in this pattern and they go to work and it's a hot day and they go to work and three hours into being at work, they realize they've left their child in the hot car and the child passes, you know, dies. And the reason is because of what you're talking about, because their attention was somewhere different in the present moment.

This is, you know, I love that you're kind of showing, yeah, it's going to improve your life just because you don't have to like, you're not losing an extra 10 or 20 minutes, you know, going back for stuff, but also it could save your life. Save your life, yeah, it is absolutely consequential. I mean, really, when I say pay attention

like your life depends on it, I mean, I mean it. Yeah. And also that what you pay attention to ends up becoming your life is also the case. Wow, yeah, that is, you know, I know as a scientist, probably some of the woo wooy new age manifestation stuff, I don't know what your take is on that,

but this is a theme that appears in a lot of these teachings, which is, you know, what do they say? Where attention goes, energy flows, you know that? Like, and, but they, a lot of people, I do believe that it seems like the more I think about something, the more I tend to see it around me,

the more I'm worried about something, the more that worry seems to confirm itself and my external reality. Do you, as a scientist, what are your thoughts on those philosophies that don't just say our attention makes us who we are, but say our attention is literally changing reality around us and by controlling our attention,

we can bring things into our lives just via some, the function or the power of our attention span. What do you think of that stuff? I mean, I think it, on the one hand, it perfectly describes what the brain science is saying, because as we already talked about, I mean, if I, if you remember to some of the images

that I showed in the talk and I have them in the book too, like a face and a house overlaid on top of each other, right? Like it's this weird image that it's like, it's an ambiguous image in some sense, like what am I supposed to be looking at? When we just change, the visual input is the same, but when we just change what we direct people to pay attention to,

we see a totally different neural pattern. Right. And it's not even, by the way, it could be, there's other studies that have looked at things like just a circle and you tell the person, this is just a circle or you say it's the tire of a car or you say it's actually somebody's eyeball. Now all of a sudden, just based on these concepts,

you can get different brain functions occurring. So attention and as it interfaces with perception, with comprehension, with action, is going to change the way that we operate, which is going to change our moment to moment experience, which ends up being laced together what our life is. So I do think that that it's absolutely the case. Now, I'm not talking about now manifesting anything,

like, oh, if I just think of it, then it'll appear. I'm not talking about that. That I have nothing to say about is from the scientific point of view, but I am talking about truly it shifts the way that we perceive and that will cascade into the way that we behave. And that's why we want to take it seriously.

So, you know, you're going back to just, to tap into what you were saying about, you know, when I'm ruminating, I'm not having like the most productive, insightful talks, ideas all the time. Sometimes I am in my own personal hell. I mean, you didn't say that, but I can tell you from my life experience.

I was about to say it. I just forgot to. And so, you know, what are the costs of that? Let's just like to break it down. What are the costs of that? Well, the first obvious one is it doesn't feel good. It does not feel good to be in hell. Nobody wants that.

But the other costs are, you know, because attention is a fuel and because it is limited, when I'm spending out that capacity, that brain resource on this looping function, it's not available to notice what's around me, to interact with the people in my life, to do those tasks, whether it's service or creativity or even just a leisurely walk

or watching a beautiful sunset. I will not have the capacity to do any of that because the bandwidth of my mind is now being devoted to looping and getting nowhere. So just to make that very clear, that there are costs to it beyond just the direct, negative mood that it can put us in. And that, by the way, I want to be very,

I want to actually connect this to, you know, I know that from your podcast you recently had COVID and your smell is coming back. Fascinating, by the way. Thank you for sharing a lot of that. As a neuroscientist, I think that it's just really neat to see neuroplasticity in action, right? Where you're seeing the reemergence of this.

But the period of the pandemic itself, in some sense, is a global high stress interval. Yes. And that will have consequences for our attention in the same way that high stress circumstances for service members during pre-deployment or deployment itself, degrades and compromises their attention and mood

and increases their stress levels, we on a global scale are experiencing this right now. And it's what I would have predicted, you know, unfortunately, I never knew the whole world would be the sort of test bed for these ideas, but we're seeing it play out. Unbelievable. So globally we can expect a kind of reduction

in whatever output is related to being in a more, how would you put it, a life-friendly, less stressful circumstance? We're gonna see, that means, I guess you could predict, like, and some of the predictions will be obvious, but you could predict all kinds of changes in productivity and in artistic output and in innovation even, are you saying?

Like a pandemic isn't just slowing down innovation because of the gumming up of the way humans communicate with each other and interact and gather together, but also because our minds have been hijacked by all the fear and stress related to the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, I think that it'll be interesting to see because obviously different people are in different circumstances

and some people may actually have benefits that are not sort of, we can't describe with broad brush strokes, but let's put it this way. So when most of the work that I do with these consequential high-demand, high-stress professionals, we can characterize the circumstances that are likely to drive down attention. And the shorthand, the acronym for this is VUCA,

volatile V, uncertain U, complex C, ambiguous A. Wow. So when you experience VUCA, what we know is that if we have people come into the lab and they're about to experience VUCA, they're gonna go do pre-deployment training, readiness training, live fire training, whatever it is in the military context,

track their attention at the beginning of an interval and then a few weeks later as they've experienced this VUCA circumstance, track them again, reliably over and over again, significant reduction in attention. Mind wandering goes up, attentional performance goes down, mood, negative mood goes up, stress levels go up. So that's the profile that we know VUCA will produce.

And so what I'm saying with regard to the pandemic is it's a global scale VUCA circumstance. And so now when people say, you know, I'm just not feeling as sharp as I normally do, I feel like I'm walking around in a cognitive fog. It's like, yeah, that's what happens when we experience VUCA circumstances. This is exactly what my lab predicts.

But the other, that's the sort of bad news is that now on the global scale, there are gonna be consequences, second order consequences, third order consequences of this. But the very hopeful news is that those same service members that we saw will decline in their attentional functioning and their wellbeing over high stress VUCA circumstances

can protect against this by engaging in mindfulness training daily over about a four week interval. What do you, we have to bring it up here. It's something, I was actually just having the conversation with someone today about the controversy surrounding taking these practices which originate from, you know, people who endorsed peace,

compassion, non-violence and teaching these practices to people in the military. Before you say anything, I just wanna say, I think whatever your reason is for learning mindfulness, it's a great reason because I think over time, the practice of mindfulness does more than just focus the attention. As you know, I think it broadens the capacity

to be compassionate and could, interestingly enough, paradoxically, training soldiers in mindfulness, it might make them more in the present moment doing whatever it is that they need to be doing. But over time, I wonder how long they'll stay soldiers with the sort of what it does for empathy and compassion. But how do you answer those critics who say, like, don't teach mindfulness to the military?

Why are we giving this practice to people who are gonna use it for destruction of violence? You know, let me just start out by saying very personally that I was born in the town of Amdabad in India. That's where Gandhi's ashram is. My sort of spiritual family life is around pacifism and non-violence. And this notion of ahimsa is something I heard about

since I was a child, right? So you take this sort of non-violent approach, but it does not mean inaction. And so I wish that I could say I live in a world where there is no violence, where there is no war, where there's no need for armies, but we don't live in that world. We live in a world where an 18-year-old

can get a weapon that can destroy a village. And what I know is that that is the front line of peace because if that is fired in a way that is uncalculated, that is not aligned with anything that is appropriate and useful to do, the chances of more violence are going to proliferate. That's what I know. Interesting.

And so if you want to go to where you want to limit hell occurring in the world, go to the sources that are likely to proliferate it. That's sort of one way to think about it. Wow, wow, wow, that's cool. You're saying it's like, okay, sure. So how about we don't show the mindfulness and let's enjoy collateral damage,

let's enjoy all the things that will inevitably go along with someone with a powerful weapon, panicking, freaking out, losing their attention in the middle of some kind of battlefield. It's only going to be worse. That is the best response I have ever heard for that critique. Thank you so much.

That is so cool. Wow, did you hear that you hippies? There you go. That's so good. But the other thing I'll just say is that they're human beings and they suffer like the rest of us, they suffer. And I don't think these practices were intended

to be exclusive to certain categories of people. Right. That's sort of my broader kind of view on this. So there's multiple reasons, but to say that it's complicated is true. I would just push back on some of the notions that military service members are intending to ensue violence or destruction.

I mean, it ends up being what happens with a lot of what occurs in that line of work, but it's certainly not the intention. Some of the most peace promoting people are military service members because they know that what it takes, peace is not a default, peace is a lot of work. And some of the people that I've had the privilege

of getting to know are actually military leaders who want peace and actually think that the army should be teaching more regarding peace building. So I just don't agree that we can ignore the fact that we are in a circumstance where we do live in a, at least in the US, a country that has a military. And by the way, it's not just that they'll go once with and make mistakes, it's that they're gonna go repeatedly

over the course of their life. And this is going to be a proliferation of the challenge of this profession on their lives. So that's my take on it right now. A wonderful take. And you know, thank you for answering that. I really appreciate that. Another, your research really makes me think a lot

about the future of technology and its ability to interface with the human brain. I'm so interested in those caps. And not just because what you're discovering, including what is like, almost like a description of processing speed within the human mind, which is incredible and gives a quantifiable, a way to quantify our brains

and compare them to computers, neural networks. And I'm just interested in your thoughts about the future of the sort of technology Elon Musk is promoting or the possibility of it not just being a one way street necessarily. In other words, we gather the data with the caps or the MRIs or whatever machine we're using. But then based on that data, give some kind of feedback

that isn't like self-imposed feedback, but it's technological feedback so that we can enhance cognition with machines. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, clearly that is one of the paths forward. And I'm sure people must be interested in it because assigning a human being to be in charge of their own attention span

is not always gonna be effective. But if there was some way to, I don't know, some biofeedback mechanism, then it seems like people could become increasingly more efficient. Hey, do you have any thoughts on that? Oh, gosh. Yes, I would say that we are so primitive right now

and understanding of the brain. And we were talking earlier about that number 50%. 50% is sort of the default of the way that our mind is not operating well. If you add in technological solutions, I mean, just think about where we are right now. We do not have self-driving cars and that's a relatively straightforward human activity.

I mean, it's very complex, but it's still a known, concrete, discreet thing. We're nowhere near being able to solve that, let alone allow technology to guide knowing whether a human being is on task or off task in some way that the human, his or herself, their selves could evaluate. So my bet right now, because I'm 51 years old,

the chances of me seeing a point in our technological advancement where we will understand enough about the brain and the brain's ability to interface with technology, I don't think we're gonna get there anytime soon. I think that it's all part of what's happening, but I actually think it's sort of the wrong-headed approach, meaning technology is not going to solve the thing

that we have the capacity to do and we're not solving, which is an awareness of what is happening in our minds and in our environment moment by moment, something we call meta-awareness, right? So knowing the processes and contents of our mind in an ongoing manner is the thing that will allow us to know should I get back on task or not, or should I continue having this very brilliant idea

I'm having or this creative insight I'm having. That is such a, that's the rich space of creativity or really the proliferation of things that will make us more depressed or solving problems in a creative collaborative manner. That is one of the most sophisticated things that humans can do and truly we can only do that ourselves. We barely understand how to do it ourselves,

let alone now offload that on some piece of technology. So I would say we're pretty far from being able to do that and the more we think that that's the answer, the more we're trying to get ourselves off the hook from cultivating these capacities ourselves. Right, you know, because for whatever reason, cultivating these capacities sometimes is unpleasant and it's something about the practices

that spiritual people call it. It's not always like a bed of roses, you know, when you're coming to learn about these processes. I'm really curious though to get a little deeper into this, you mentioned the flashlight, who's holding the flashlight? When I direct my attention, who's doing the directing? Right, great question. I wanna answer that question regarding sort of the emergent

nature of what cognitive control is. And it's actually another area that my lab is very, very interested in. But one of the things I wanna just pick up on one point regarding the last thing we just discussed, which is this notion of meta-awareness, to say that if we devise technological solutions that are gonna give us an answer,

are you on task or not? Get back on task. Let's say it was a little beep that you got that said, Matt, Duncan, get back to the thing you're trying to do. You know, Duncan, don't forget your, Duncan, you're about to forget your keys, don't do that. Right, the chances of technology picking it up are always going to be after the fact

of something occurring in your own mind. So it's already too late. So we need a system that is going to actually, in a preparatory manner, and it actually gets to the question you just asked me, in a preparatory manner, be watching what's occurring to prevent or protect against the thing that is likely to be the error.

Right. And I just don't think that we, I think we need to start with the technology that's already built in before we can do that as an objective outside of us solution. So I just wanted to kind of say that. Okay, well, I mean, okay, let's hang out there just for a little, a second longer there,

just because it seems like the technology is already there. It's called every slot machine in Las Vegas. It's just being used in the wrong way to grab our attention. It's being used to manipulate us, hypnotize us, and like get us into a kind of pattern of giving our money to the machine. Or I think these, the things that you're picking up

about the human attention of our, are being hijacked by AI and by technologies online. But, you know, my God, someone told me the horrifying amount of time that people on average spend on TikTok, for example, it's an incredible amount of time because it's so good at grabbing our mind. So it just seems like we could reverse engineer that

somehow to, I don't know, facilitate the ability to guide our attention. Well, that's what I thought that's what you meant. What I was saying that we don't have the technological prowess to do, is to build AI that's going to make meta awareness, something we can offload. I think that is not likely to happen.

Technology that can make our attention, very simple, because our attention is so reliable. It's like, oh, something threatening, boom, I'm gonna be over there. So it's the meta awareness piece that in some sense is sort of the pinnacle of our humanity in some ways. And I think that there's such a long way to go

that we individually as human beings have to be able to cultivate that better. And until we can even be better at understanding what it is, how it worked within the individual ourselves, there's not even a chance that we can start developing an understanding of what that is to do it outside of us, nor do I think it's gonna be a good idea to do that because it will always be later

than what it would be within us. And we don't have the room to prevent that, to prevent, I mean, sorry, we don't wanna wait. So essentially, let me just put it this way. If I gave you a piece of software that said, when you're about to make a mistake, I will let you know. Probably it's gonna be, you have already made the mistake

by the time it's gonna let you know. Right. So if you could instead be watching to prevent the occurrence of that mistake, that would be even better. So anyway, and I think these are all things that are a great fodder for conversation and for development. My interest is in looking at the way the brain is now

and what's in our hands right now. And in some sense, I'm much more oriented toward applied low-tech solutions that are very powerful and using the cutting edge science that we have to understand the nature of their power. Love it. Yeah, it's important. I mean, Lloyd, what are you gonna do?

Sit around and wait for RoboCop or whatever? It's just not there, it's fun to ponder. But to get back to what we were about to jump into, who's holding the flashlight? So, okay, so the first thing to say, and I'm gonna answer at the relative level, and then we're gonna go into, I think the abstracts, at the kind of next level,

somebody is holding the flashlight, but that's a different brain system. It's something we call executive control. Executive control is essentially the system that allows for the emergence of goals and the holding of goals, the maintaining and manipulating of goals. So in some sense, we'd say,

oh, the executive control system is guiding the flashlight. It's the one that's telling the flashlight point here or there or shift or whatever. Then you might say, as a smart person like you would, well, who's telling executive control to do what it will? And I have that exact same question. I've had it for many, many years. Like, where the heck is this thing coming from?

As an experimenter, most of our studies are we, as the experimenter, are leading the person to tell them what to do. And we'd say, look at this part of the screen or that part of the screen. Look at the face, not the house. And when we set the way that flashlight should be held in some sense,

we see what the neural consequences of that are. And we've learned a lot there. But then the question becomes, what about the emergent nature of control itself? How does it emerge? And so a very simple way that I started thinking about it is, well, and again, a lot of my own practice and wisdom traditions have led me to these ideas.

So it's kind of interesting when you can play around in the brain science space, but the thought and the considerations have been around for millennia. But this notion of a contingent, the contingent nature of reality becomes very, very interesting. So what I mean by that is how does our mind in one moment affect our mind in the next moment?

So when we think about cognitive control, the ability to put our attention somewhere, one of the things that we know is that if our attention system was required to do something very demanding in one moment versus something that was not very demanding in one moment, there will be consequences for the next moment. So if I give you, let's just say,

I'm gonna give you two types of trials, easy and hard. It's a working memory task. Remember one face or remember three faces. And then a few seconds later, I'm gonna test out if you remember the correct face, faces. Right. So it's easy and hard. What we know is if in this trial,

I gave you the three face condition, you're really amping up. You're like there, you're trying to control your mind. And then now I look to see what happens the next trial. Regardless of what happened in the next trial, you're gonna be better. Your performance is gonna be higher when the previous trial was highly demanding versus not.

Wow. And it's this notion of up-regulation of control. So the brain sort of readies itself. It's ready to go. And sometimes I'll kind of joke with my grad students. I'm like, it's like the electric stove model of the brain. You know, I'm an old electric stoves. I have an induction cooktop now,

but you turn on the stove, it takes a while for the coils to heat up. And then even if you turn it off, they're still hot. So it's like that. We ramp up control. We don't need it anymore, but it's still hot. And that allows for there to be benefits in the next condition.

That is incredible. So the idea would be if you have some demanding task ahead of you, a test, a performance or something like that, you will benefit from prior to that task, putting your brain through some kind of strenuous cognitive exercise. Potentially. Now remember, what I'm talking about

is literally seconds between trials. Okay. And now, so this is where this notion of demand and performance is a very interesting relationship. And we might even say it's like a inverted U. So when demand is very, very low. So think of like a graph. On the X axis, I've got the level of demand

or even say the level of stress that I experienced. And on the Y axis, I've got performance. When the demand is low, performance is low. As the demand ramps up, there is a sweet spot. That U is gonna, the inverted U is gonna have a little point. And at that point, you're gonna be very, very high on your performance. If you push past that,

you're now gonna start declining. Diminishing returns. So there'll be diminishing returns. So the notion of what controls the controller, the answer is it's emergent, I think. It's an emergent evolving process. And we are constantly our own executive control and we're our own flashlight

and we're doing all of these things and there's a feedback loop. So the complexity gets intense fast, but it's the right question to ask because in some sense, if you start realizing, the notion of my ability to pay attention is within my own hands. And what I do in the next moment

is tied to my awareness of how I'm engaging my attention. All of a sudden, there's a freedom there. It's like, I have a choice point. I don't have to just keep going on what I just did. I can actually intervene multiple times, which actually relates back to your point regarding AI. If we can do that with our online attention and make multiple choice points,

the chances of us being able to recalibrate, not stay on TikTok for 11 hours on end is probably gonna improve. Wow, it's so cool. It's been almost, it has been an hour. Do you have time for one more question? Thank you. I'm sorry, I know you're a scientist.

I have scientists on the show. I feel like I frustrate them because my mind, I'm just very interested in the paranormal and very interested in my own personal experiences with things that seem incredibly anomalous as far as how I understand the default, or how default reality understands

the working of the human mind. Well, I don't want you to apologize for that because that is sort of our role as scientists is to try to discover what truth is. And it can be messy because some things that people experience don't fit into the current paradigm, but that means probably the paradigm's wrong. Oh, right, that's what, I mean, that's the sense is like,

anyone who has maybe worked with a teacher or has had an encounter with someone who has like, whatever you want to say, has probably experienced things that it's like, that's impossible. Like not like, oh, this is a, what do they call it, confirmation bias, but like, there's just no way that,

Ram Dass talks about it and his encounters with Neem Karoli Baba. But when you talk about the immeasurable, quantifiable sort of energy that is happening in the human brain to the point where we know, you were saying in that TED talk, it's like at the back of your head

where there's like literal parts of the brain where facial recognition is taking place and an associated energy there, isn't it possible that some via some mechanism we don't understand yet? And without those like shower, technological shower caps that I could somehow read the energy

moving through your brain and from whatever that intuitive thing was, give the impression that I'm reading your mind or that I have extra sensory perception? I mean, a lot is possible. Right. A lot is possible. What I would say is, and I agree with you,

those Neem Karoli Baba stories are so compelling and you're like, what the heck? And the respect for Ram Dass himself, I mean, he's no chump, he's a scientist, right? Yeah. So he himself had to grapple with that, which I found, I just found fun, because I'm like, you know, you figure that out. Like, how are you thinking about that kind of thing?

But what I would say is, here's the challenge, right? So we can make as scientists, we can make all kinds of claims, we can make all kinds of models. Really the test is a reproducibility so that we can actually have an idea, test it out and see if that idea is supported or not. And when I hear of these incredible stories,

I just wish we could figure out a way to harness their occurrence. So it wasn't just the random chance thing that happens every now and then, or it happens in some distant land by people that are no longer alive, right? That's the tricky one. It's like, well, what about now?

Bring them into our land. So I really feel that the more we can interface with people and ideas that don't fit the current models of the brain as the factory for consciousness, well, let's start testing those out. I mean, I'm not scared of that. What I'm interested in is what's actually going on.

What is the, are we gonna be able to grasp the nature of even consciousness? You know, right now our models are, and we are making progress in this area, but it's still within this framework that, yes, of course, the brain is the generator of conscious experience. The alternative model from a lot of other wisdom traditions is that the brain is sort of like an antenna

for consciousness, and that's what allows people to do these things that appear like mind reading or non-local kind of stuff, et cetera. So if this alternative model has enough, we have enough experience with it as human beings, well, then it should be able to be something we can, as presuming that we have the technology to pick it up,

we should be able to check it out, and we just need enough participants, and we need it to happen on demand enough so that we can test it out. But the only reason I would say that that isn't the dominant model right now is because we have not been able to do that reliably with reaching a threshold of evidence

that most scientists would say, yeah, yeah, that's definitely the case. Building models and breaking them apart is the nature of science, so we should always be ready for that, and holding on to any view is just, it's not really in the spirit of what science actually is. Wow.

Dr. Amishi, thank you so much for your time, and I'm so excited to read Peak Mind. Folks listening, it's out now, you can get it on Amazon, go to your, what's your website, doctor? It's amishi.com. Amishi.com, you can get it there, I don't know, which would you prefer, where would you prefer? Yeah, go to wherever you want,

but if you go to amishi.com, then you can find all the places including local bookstores to buy it. You are a brilliant human, thank you for the work that you're doing, and I'm so excited to read your book, and thanks for coming on the show. Oh, it's been a lot of fun, thank you so much, Duncan.

Thank you, Adi Krishnan, thank you. That was Dr. Amishi Jha, everybody. Check out her book, Peak Mind, a big thank you to our sponsors, Babbel, My Sheets Rock, and True Bill, and thank you for listening. Please subscribe to the Patreon, it's patreon.com forward slash DTFH.

I love y'all, and I'll be seeing you next week and next year. Until then, Hare Krishna. We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style.

Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. All dressed up everywhere to go. JC Penney. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two.

We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. We do it all in style. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar.

Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store. And we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JC Penney.