Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How Your Brain Creates Your Reality: A Neuroscientist’s Take On Consciousness, Near Death Experiences & What it Really Means to be You with Professor Anil Seth #366

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

What does consciousness mean to you? It’s something that’s fundamental to who we are as humans. And yet it’s a concept that many of us would struggle to define – scientists and philosophers included. But today’s guest is someone who has spent many years and countless hours studying it, and is keen to share what he has learned.   Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Science at the University of Sussex and Co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is a globally respected neuroscientist and author of the Sunday Times bestseller Being You: A New Science Of Consciousness. And he is someone who excels at making complex ideas simple as evidenced by the fact that his TED talk has been viewed over 12 million times to date.   After 20 years researching the brain, Anil’s ideas on perception, reality, and what it means to be you, will have you reconsidering everything you’ve taken for granted about your experience of the world. And if that sounds scary, it really isn’t. You don’t need any prior knowledge of neuroscience, philosophy, or spirituality to enjoy this episode – but it will leave you feeling enlightened in all three areas.   During this conversation we consider death, ritual and the cultural idea of reincarnation. We talk about Near Death Experiences and what we can potentially learn from them and we dive into what consciousness and the self really mean. Anil also sets out his theory that our brains don’t read the world, they write them – all of life is a controlled hallucination.   The way we encounter reality, he asserts, is a construction. Our thoughts and perceptions are merely interpretations of external and biological cues. We’re all hallucinating, all the time. It’s just that when we agree on those hallucinations, we call it reality.   Anil’s work is fascinating and I’m convinced it could pave the way for a humanity that’s more connected, considerate, and humble. This is a conversation that I think will have you reflecting and thinking deeply about the world and your place within it. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/366 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

The easiest way to define consciousness. It's the redness of red. It's the painfulness of pain. It's the sweetness of honey. It's the fact that for everything we do and everything we are, there is something it is like. It feels like something to taste honey. Feels like something to be happy or to be sad. Feels like something simply to touch

a piece of wood. It's what makes us more than biological objects roaming around in the subjective dark. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. What does consciousness mean to you? Well, consciousness is something that's fundamental to who we are, yet it's a concept that many of us would struggle to define. But today's guest is someone who has spent many years and countless hours studying it and is really keen to share what he's learned. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Science at the University of Sussex. He's a globally respected

neuroscientist. He's author of the Sunday Times bestseller, Being You, A New Science of Consciousness And he's someone who excels at making complex ideas simple As evidenced by the fact that his quite wonderful TED Talk has now been viewed over 12 million times After 20 years researching the brain, Anil's ideas on perception, reality, and what it means to be you will have you reconsidering everything you've taken for granted about your experience of the world. And if that sounds scary, it really isn't. You don't need any prior knowledge of neuroscience, philosophy, or spirituality to enjoy this episode, but my hope is that it will leave you feeling enlightened in all three areas. During our conversation, we consider the process of death,

ritual, and the cultural idea of reincarnation. We talk about near-death experiences and what we can potentially learn from them, and we dive into what consciousness and the self really mean. Anil also sets out his theory that our brains don't read the world, they write them. All of life, in his view, is basically a controlled hallucination. The way we encounter reality, he asserts, is a construction. Our thoughts and perceptions are merely interpretations of external and biological cues. We're all hallucinating all of the time. It's just that when we agree on those hallucinations, we call it reality. Anil's work is really, really fascinating, and I'm convinced it could pave the way for a humanity

that's more connected, considerate, and humble. This is a conversation that I think will have you reflecting and thinking deeply about the world and your place within it. I really enjoyed having it. I hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Professor Anil Seth. I thought we'd start off by talking about death. Because as I've done my research on you, Anil, one thing we have in common is that in 2013, both of our fathers died. So for both of us, it's around 10 years since we saw our dads, at least in this realm. And because of what you study, the brain, our subjective experiences of life, consciousness. I'm really fascinated, how do you view death? And specifically, back in 2013, how did you view your dad's death? And 10 years on, has your perspective changed or altered in any way?

It's amazing that it's already 10 years. I don't know if you find that remarkable as well. For me, it will be next month. It was on the longest day of the year. So the summer solstice always has a rather poignant feeling for me now. I think about death quite a lot. And I don't think in general, we really do do we try to hide it away and pretend that it's maybe never going to happen to either us or all those around us but of course it does and when my father died i was already i'd been studying consciousness and thinking about consciousness and neuroscience for for a long time then and one of the things that I think helped me through that time was the recognition that consciousness and self are processes. They're not things.

So my father's personality wasn't a sort of essence that was then disappearing forever. It was a process that was coming to an end. And actually, general anesthesia, that was something that helped me face the death of my father and deal with it. Because in general anesthesia, I think we come as close to death as we ever will before we actually die. Now general anesthesia is actually quite different from sleep. In sleep, if you've been asleep for a while, you might be confused about exactly how long. But you always know some time has passed when you wake up. But under general anesthesia, it's different. You are gone. The ends are joined up. There's just oblivion in the middle,

the kind of oblivion that was there for you before you were born. And I think the kind of oblivion that's there after you die. And in that absence of anything, there's no pain, there's no suffering, there's nothing at all. And I think at some level, maybe I didn't consciously recognize it at the time, but there's a certain reassurance in that, some level, maybe I didn't consciously recognize it at the time, but there's a certain reassurance in that, that there really is nothing to be frightened of in death because there's nothing at all. There's no pain, there's no suffering, there's no anything. Knowing that or believing that, because of course we can never 100% know these things,ieving that helped me come to terms with, so when my dad died, he really was gone. That process had come to an end. Of course, he lives on. I still dream about him. I don't know

if you do. I mean, with astonishing regularity, he still crops up in my dreams. But having this view of consciousness as being a process that depends intimately on the brain and the body just forces you into this recognition that there is an end to it but it's a relative it's it's natural you know it's a natural end and we don't worry so much about all the time before we were born that we were not conscious so why should we worry so much about all the time after whether it's for our own death or for somebody else's. It's so interesting to hear that perspective. But I guess what I'm trying to really understand is, and I guess this speaks to the heart of your work about consciousness, is what is it?

To be human, presumably, requires that we have an element of consciousness, or we have consciousness within us. Otherwise, we'd just be a table or this microphone. Or a meat robot that just moves around from one place to another. So then how can it be that when we're asleep for an operation, are we still human at that point? I know we're alive, we're breathing, our parameters are being controlled, but how do you describe that? What's the difference between that and death? Well, I think we are turned into objects. I think we're reversibly transformed into biological objects under anesthesia

when consciousness is gone. Consciousness really is just any kind of experience whatsoever. It's the experience of the world around us and of being a self within it with all our emotions and plans and memories. Any kind of experience is consciousness. And when that's selectively turned off, then you just become an object. And in a way, that is similar to death, but it's not the same thing because your body, the processes of life that animate your body are still ongoing.

That's why anesthesia is such a remarkable invention because it's able to selectively alter consciousness without killing you, frankly. Do we fully understand anesthesia? I don't think we do. No, I think that's why often this metaphor is that you'll often hear when you're going for an operation that you'll go to sleep for a while and then you'll wake up.

This might be a comforting thing to hear, but it's not very true. And what's perhaps even more disquieting is that we don't know exactly how and why anesthetics work. We just know that they do work, they're very reliable, and if used properly, they're very safe. I mean, that's not unlike many things in medicine, as you know, as well. We know that they work, but the deep reasons how and why things work are often still a little bit mysterious. Yeah. I mean, I imagine that's potentially scary for some people to hear that we don't really know exactly how anaesthetic works, given how many people willingly go through it. But then,

you know, as you describe in your book, you know, we kind of do the same thing when we get on an A380 airplane. You know, every time I've been on one of these double-decker jumbos planes, I'm like, how does this work? How is there two floors on this aeroplane and all these heavy bags? And I still can't get my head around it. And I'm a reasonably well-educated person, but I still go, right? So I guess the wider point is we're always doing stuff that we don't fully understand, but we kind of know works. That's right. I think probably we know in general, you know, as a society, a bit more about how A380s work because we designed them from scratch. And anesthetics

work on our brains and brains were evolved, not designed. So there's a little bit more uncertainty there. But you're absolutely right. The important thing in these cases, frankly, is that they do work and anesthetics really do work. And we do know something about how they work. If you look at what happens in the brain under anesthesia, you see that parts of the brain stop talking to each other in the ways they normally do in waking consciousness. So the brain kind of disintegrates into little functional islands. And as that happens, consciousness goes away. And I remember the last time I had general anesthesia, I tried to really pay attention to this process of losing

consciousness. The anesthesiologist often asks you to count backwards from 10 or 100 or whatever it might be. And I never get past three numbers or something. I never get past seven and then I'm gone and then I'm back. Do we have any, I guess, case reports of people remembering stuff when they were under? You know, do we have that? Because we have, you know, again, talking about death for a moment, we have lots of reports of near-death experiences, don't we? Yes, we do. Or people who went to the other side and then came back. So how do you see all these kind of different experiences? And then how do you relate that to your work and your study of consciousness? I think there is a way to understand how they might come about,

but also holding a little bit of humility here because we don't understand consciousness fully. And so this is all a little bit of humility here because we don't understand consciousness fully. And so this is all a little bit provisional. There are case reports of people remembering things while supposedly having been under general anesthesia. This could be for a number of reasons. It could be because actually maintaining the balance of anesthesia is quite tricky. And that's why anesthesiologists have to be very good at their jobs. You don't want to give too much because then it can become dangerous for the patient. So sometimes the threshold might slip a bit

and maybe they are slightly aware and able to remember things. That can happen. And then, of course, coincidences can happen too. When you come around in the recovery room, it's a very confusing, dissociated, almost delirious state. And you might think you remember things, but they're really sort of confabulations or hallucinated memories that sometimes might just match something that somebody said.

So these things can all happen. If anesthesia is done right, then I think you don't have memories of what happened. And near-death experiences, this is another, I think, really interesting example. And what I'm keen to emphasize here is that these experiences can be incredibly meaningful for the people that have them. And just by trying to provide a more scientific, and just by trying to provide a more scientific, naturalistic explanation shouldn't drain these experiences of meaning for the people that have them. Does that mean you don't think they're real?

It depends what we mean by real. I think the experiences themselves are real. They are real for the people that have them. They have the experiences they say they have, but it doesn't mean their interpretations of these experiences is true. So for example, a common report from a near-death experience is seeing a tunnel of light and then maybe some emergence into all surrounding whiteness. This could be interpreted as the soul leaving the body and traveling

somewhere. But a more prosaic explanation is that, well, that's what happens when your visual cortex starts shutting down. And it shuts down more on the periphery of our vision first than at the center of our vision. And in that case, these experiences, they still happen, but they happen because the brain really starts to do some quite strange things when it's close to death. This can also be very meaningful because it means for these people, for all of us, that what we experience is not directly a reflection of what's going on. It's the brain's interpretation of what's going on. Yeah, I mean, there's a much wider point there, isn't there, which we're definitely going to dive into.

But what we're experiencing every day is a form of controlled hallucination. And what we call reality are just hallucinations that we all agree on, right? We're definitely going to dive into that. But if we look at that through the near-death experience that you just mentioned, yes, so that is a common report, this kind of white light. And many people will say that actually, you know, because I've read some of these experiences and I find them really, really interesting, especially the meaning that comes

on the other side, which is, you know, the angel said, it's not your time, you know, go back, you've got more work to do or whatever it might be. And people often, I guess you may argue because of the meaning they put onto that, they then go and live their lives in a very different, more intentional way than maybe beforehand. But I guess the bigger question for me is, why does it matter? In the sense that you said about your dad's death, understanding that it is a process and that there's nothing to fear, believing that has helped you, right? So if we follow that logic, to me, why does it matter what the science says about consciousness? Surely it's the belief people

have around it that then determines how it plays out for them in their life i think in many cases this is this can be true and it and the two things are not necessarily incompatible either and one of the things that also helped me through my dad's death was was ritual which doesn't come from a scientific worldview it came from his his hindi religion and um ritual is really helpful at these times it gives you a frame it stops you thinking too much it gives you things to do and i found that a great comfort at the time can you share some of the rituals i remember there was there was a there was a little a little bottle of Ganga water, Ganga Jal, water from the river Ganges,

that he'd brought back on his last trip to India, which had been a couple of years before. And one of the first things you do in Hinduism when somebody dies is put a few drops of Ganga water in the mouth and on the eyes, if I remember right. There were a lot of instructions like this, which I found just very helpful because at times like that, you just want to be told what to do. You want to feel that you're doing the right thing. And ritual can do that for you. It can give you this architecture. You feel

like you're participating in a social process and not something that's only happening to you. And if you reflect back on that as a globally respected neuroscientist, I don't know if there's science on rituals, right? I'm sure there is, but the point I'm trying to make is that whether there's a scientific basis for rituals or not, I think we all kind of intuitively know how helpful they can be. You know, after death, it's useful to have a framework, this is what you do, instead of having to figure out and rationally explain, you know, well, what's the point in this? Or should I really be doing that? It's like,

I don't know, there's something, I don't know, this sort of feels as though it also relates to consciousness, which is, yes, we can study it, and I know that's what you do, but we can also maybe feel that we're experiencing it and are happy to experience it and think about it without a kind of modern scientific explanation? Absolutely. So people have managed to deal with death for many, many thousands of years without drawing on modern neuroscience. That's fine. That happens. It really probably applies selectively. I mean, for me, it was very

important to try and align these different ways of understanding what was happening in my life, to be consistent between the scientific me and and the more the son of my father sometimes beliefs can be in conflict with what science reveals so it's not always comfortable and i think being a scientist and trying to understand something like human consciousness human psychology does mean you you have to face the possibility that you will learn things about the mind and the brain, which might conflict with some otherwise comforting beliefs. And then you've got some work to do.

But I think that's work that's always worth doing. And I think that's because I probably have this prior belief, even higher level belief, that understanding more about how things are will in the long run always enable me to live a better life, to manage better, to cope with adversity better. Now that might be wrong. That might be entirely wrong. Maybe it's better to just live a life of comfortable delusion. It probably depends, doesn't it, on who you are and how you choose to live. It's so interesting to me that you're... In some ways, I don't know if this is fully accurate or not,

it seems as though what you found comforting about what you chose to believe about your dad's life and what death meant, in some ways is opposing to how I'm choosing to look at my dad's death now, which is maybe in a less scientific way, a more maybe spiritual, more the beliefs I've absorbed from my culture growing up, certainly my Indian culture, my family backgrounds, that in Hinduism, the soul is eternal, right? There's a belief in reincarnation. And I guess the way I've explained it recently is this idea that I still feel I have a relationship with my dad. It's just different now. I can't see dad in the physical form. I can't go around. I can't, you know, pop in after work and see him having a cup of tea watching BBC News for the 12th time that day on repeat, right? I can't do that anymore.

But dads, it's funny, 10 years on, I feel that my dad is really playing quite a significant role in my life now, but he's not around. Like the way I relate to him, the way I think about him, the things, you know, that picture there just behind you on the wall is me and my dad. I saw that when I came in. It's a lovely picture. Yeah. I mean, I can only have been, what, seven or eight back then. And so, I don't know. I don't know what I'm trying to say. I guess all I'm trying to say is that we… because I think death is such a big thing, I agree that we don't talk about death enough. I think, certainly in a lot of Western societies, we hide death. You mentioned culture, you know,

I can still remember as a… when was it? Was it 1984 when the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi died? I still have some sort of memory watching her funeral, maybe as a seven, eight-year-old kid on TV with my mum and dad. And I know how unreliable memory is, right? But this is the memory I think I have of watching her on a funeral pyre, her body alight, right? You're literally witnessing the body being burnt. Whereas we don't do that in Western culture. We hide the body. I don't want to speak in absolutes, but it's interesting, isn't it? How different cultures look at this. That's right. And my family, my dad's side of my family come from a place called Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh in northern India,

which is not far from Varanasi, where there are these public cremations on the banks of the river there. And I remember going there for the first time when I was probably 18, something like that, and seeing these things happen right there in front of me and smelling them as well. I mean, you're right there. That was really rather shocking for me at the time. And yeah, it speaks to a totally different way of approaching death. There are many cultural variations. There's, I think, in some cultures, in some Pacific Island cultures, I think people dig up the dead people every year and give them some food and drink and something to

smoke and then bury them again. I mean, there's very different kinds of rituals that happen. But just responding to one of the things you said as well about for you, yes, you're right, in Hinduism, there's the soul as the Atman. It has this context of being reincarnated or reincarnatable. And the sense that for you, your father's still around. He's just not around in the physical sense. There's a sense for me, which this is the case as well. And this is because I think a human self, whether it's you or me or your father or my father,

we exist partly in the minds of others. So part of what it is to be a human self is the way I perceive other people perceiving me. It's as if myself is kind of refracted through the minds of my family and my friends and my social context. So I still also have a relationship with my father because he is literally part of my brain, is part of his self, because part of his self was part of how he perceived me perceiving him. So the self is not this one unitary thing in this view. Part of it is distributed across many.

So in that sense, even though for him consciousness has gone, his self or the parts of his self that were distributed, they still exist. So I think we're familiar with this in Western cultures as well. There's this idea that we do live on in the memories of others and in the works of art and science that we produce as well it's not the immortality that you know some tech billionaire in silicon valley might aspire to where they literally want to keep existing as the subject of consciousness for a long time but it's

it's a way of persisting it's just so fascinating to reflect on these topics. Your perspective that we're basically living these controlled hallucinations, which we are going to explain, I'm going to, shortly you can put, you know, why you believe that to be the case. But if we just take that for a moment and then apply it to death and apply it to what we've just been saying could we make any case that death then is actually an illusion i'm not sure we can of course it depends what you think death is in the first place. For me, and again, I might be wrong about this, but witnessing the intimate dependency of

consciousness, the ongoing flow of experience, witnessing the intimate dependency of this on the brain and the body, how changes in the brain are instantly reflected in changes in experience, how when the brain stops under anesthesia, well it doesn't stop under anesthesia, but how when changes in the brain in anesthesia interrupt the flow of consciousness. It's very, very hard for me to reconcile that with the idea that consciousness for an individual persists when the brain stops entirely, which is medically when we say death happens. Yeah, that term's interesting, the flow of consciousness. I like that, the flow of So if very, simplistically speaking, consciousness is what makes us as humans different from a table. Or one of the things that makes a difference, right?

I know, because there's this article in public about your dad's death. there's this article in public about your dad's death. And you send the article that your dad was lucky to have died in the way that he did, which I found really interesting. And it's funny, on a podcast I did last year, I was on someone else's podcast, and they asked me, I think, something like, what moment in your life would you like to relive? moment in your life would you like to relive and the moment that came up for me was my dad's death because it was actually a very it was a very powerful experience of course the death of a parent is but

just a little bit of background my dad was on kidney dialysis for 15 years. So he had an autoimmune disease called lupus. Now, I think dad died on a Wednesday late. And I think at the weekend, dad was in Manchester Royal Infirmary and the head nurse of the dialysis unit had a chat with me and my mum and explained that they didn't think it was a good idea to dialyze dad anymore. And of course I knew what that meant. It's like, well, dialysis is keeping dad alive. And for a variety of reasons they had decided, or certainly were consulting with us, but yes, had also decided that it wasn't appropriate to dialyze dad anymore. And so I knew, again, I've not really thought about this in this way for a while, but I knew after all these years of chronic illness that dad's going to die at

some point now. Now this is a reality that is coming. Whereas previously his state of illness was something that seemed difficult, but stable. That was him and that was what he was going to be like. Yeah, and so again, I was a very different person by then. I was 10 years younger. I saw the world very differently. But on that final day, I remember at lunchtime, dad was in a hospital

bed. It wasn't very well, but somehow dad became really alert and his brother and his family and me and my kids and my brother and his son, you know, were all there. And he hadn't eaten much for a few days, but he ate. He had like a full lunch. I think my mom was feeding him. And then I can't remember, you know, everyone said their goodbyes, people left. And then me and my mom stayed. I was on the right-hand side of dad's bed holding his right hand. Mom was on the left-hand side holding his left hand. And over a period of hours, probably for 10, 11 hours, bit by bit, the life force within him starts to extinguish. It's a bit by bit, you'd see the heart rate changing, blood pressure starting to go down. Dad was in the corner just looking up at the top right the walls for hours. And what's really interesting is that when I think

about your work, Anil, and this study of consciousness, is what happens? At what moment does consciousness leave my dad's body? At what moment is, you know, he's not responding for hours. He's not saying anything, right? But yes, his pulse is there. His blood pressure is there. So there is something beating within him. And so I really find this fascinating. At what point, because what was also interesting is when dad was officially medically dead, I call my brother who, you know, he was struggling with it. He'd just broken a bone in his leg. He'd had an accident. So he couldn't be there. I called him. He got a cab into the hospital. And I remember for a few hours, it was in the middle of the night,

me, my mum and my brother were in this cubicle in Manchester World Infirmary, in this hostel room. cubicle in Manchester World Infirmary in this hostel room. My dad was lying there, dead, but it was such a wonderful few hours. We were just chatting, me and mum and my brother, and dad could have just been asleep. It was a really powerful moment where it was like, wow, we were just chatting away about the good times and things, almost ignoring the fact that dad's dead. We knew he was. So I'm sorry that was a bit long-winded. I guess I'm really trying to understand, because I've loved diving into your book over the last few days to really try and get my head around this quite complex topic of consciousness, right? How would you reflect that back to me? When do you think consciousness leaves someone's body? Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show.

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That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. I think it leaves someone's body when the brain finally stops or maybe slightly before then. It's very hard to know from the outside, isn't it? And my dad, one of the ways he was lucky was that he died at home. I still remember the parallel moment to me from the doctor saying they were no longer going to dialyze your dad was we went, my dad had heart failure. We went into John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. It was about three weeks before he died. And the doctor there said, really, there's, there's nothing more that we can do, but he wasn't,

he didn't need to stay in hospital, but driving home from that hospital was one of the memories that seared into my mind now now recognizing at this point that well that was the last time we'll do that drive everything was suddenly the last time and that imbues things with such a sense of meaning and significance and my my dad sat down on the sofa when we got home and i still remember he just said oh well cycle of life very very I don't know what he was feeling inside but he seemed calm and and resigned and then the next three weeks he he as you said he gradually gradually slipped away it was very hard to know when the moment was I actually missed it because it was he was at home for three weeks and my mother was there I happened to have popped out for a walk around the village

and my mum called me and said, I think he's gone. And when I got back, there was a definite change. Exactly when it happens, it's very, very hard to know. But I do think it's when the brain stops, which is why the moment clinically, as you know, the moment where we define death has changed over decades or centuries of medical practice from when breathing stops to when the heart stops to now really when the brain stops. How does that play into these near-death experiences, do you think? Do you think the

brain still, but by that definition then there are we saying that they're not actually dead right right right exactly and just as you were describing about your dad that on his last day he sat up and he started eating a lot and maybe was more alert than he had been previously there's some evidence now it's very hard to study this in the lab because you don't you can't really get the ethics to do this very easily. And of course, you can't time these things. There have been a few studies with animals, with mice and rats and things. What you tend to see is there is this burst of activity in the brain

as death approaches, a kind of last hurrah of brain activity. And the experiential flip side of that may well be what a near-death experience is. Yeah. I mean, my belief is, and I use that word intentionally, my belief is that dad on some level knew that this is it, these are the final hours now. And so, because everyone was around, something internal caused him to wake up, engage, enjoy his last meal before signing off. And again, I have no proof of that. But then going back to that question, you know, is death an illusion? Well, I guess it depends on your definition of death, because, you know, by the older definition of death or one definition of death,

the near-death experience where someone goes to the other side and then comes back would argue that, yes, it is an illusion, but it depends when you define that point, doesn't it? Right, right. And illusion is always, it's a very tricky word. When people say the self is an illusion or free will is an illusion, it's like, with respect to what? Yeah. It assumes that there is a definable ground truth that we're not perceiving accurately. When does consciousness start then?

If we don't know when it, I guess it's also going to be an unknown, but is it when the sperm meets the egg? Is it, you know, again, I asked the question knowing there's probably no firm answer. It's more to generate the conversation about it. You know, it's interesting to imagine, isn't it? It is. And there is, frankly, not much known about this because it's also very hard to study. So why have you chosen to study such a difficult because i tend to study in in people in the time between being born and dying when it's when it's slightly easier when it's pretty unambiguous what's going on but just you know in the moment of birth we we tend to assume for cultural or religious reasons that there's some point at which awareness starts, whether it's at birth or whether it's before birth, or even, you know, there's a possibility that it might be after a baby is born, that there might be this period where they're not really experiencing anything.

It's very, very difficult to tell. But what we do know is consciousness develops in stages. It's not like suddenly the lights are on and you have consciousness in a sort of mini version of a human adult. William James, who is one of the originators of psychology as a science in the late 19th century, speculated about the conscious experience of a newborn baby. He called it a blooming and buzzing confusion. He speculated about the conscious experience of a newborn baby.

He called it a blooming and buzzing confusion. For us as adults, it's kind of clear what's a visual experience and what's an auditory experience. We hear things, we see things. Sometimes what we hear affects what we see, and sometimes what we see affects what we hear. But our ways of encountering the world are relatively segregated. But the idea is that doesn't come at the beginning. That's something we develop, we learn to do in part. And so the world of a newborn might be this undifferentiated mass of sensory impressions,

this blooming and buzzing confusion, as James put it, and I think a delightful phrase. So I think these, for me, these are the, in a way, the more interesting questions about this semi-arbitrary moment, when it starts and when it finishes. It's more, what is it like and how does it change? Let's move on to these controlled hallucinations. And if people have not seen your TED Talk, I highly, highly recommend it. I don't know how you got so much brilliant information into just, what, 17 or 18 minutes. It really is very, very good. And it throws up a lot of questions for people. I enjoyed watching it with my son this morning for the third or fourth time in the last few days.

He really enjoyed it as well. And I guess this idea that we're living controlled hallucinations, I wonder if you could backtrack a little bit and explain what do you mean by that? Because people could hear that, Anil, and go, what are you saying? You're saying that basically life is just a simulation. Is it not real? And I don't think you're quite saying that. I'm not saying that. It's very hard to find the right words to describe these concepts that are coming out of neuroscience and philosophy. No metaphor is perfect. And in this idea of our experience being a controlled hallucination, the control is extremely important.

But let me try and unpack what this concept means in its essence. And I'll do that by just asking, let's just reflect for a moment on what happens when we open our eyes in the morning. We wake up, we open our eyes, and it seems as though the world is just out there with all its colors and shapes and smells and so on. And it just pours itself into our minds through the transparent windows of our eyes and our ears and our nose, as if we're just passive recipients of this objective reality. This might be how things seem, but it's not how things are. The idea, and it's not a new idea, it goes back in philosophy hundreds of years to Immanuel Kant and back to Plato in some ways, and in psychology and neuroscience at least 100, 150 years.

The idea is the brain doesn't read out the world. It kind of writes the world. What we experience is the brain's best guess. It's the brain's, what we experience is the brain's prediction of what's out there in the world or in here in the body. There's this essential indirectness between what we experience and what's really there. I think the easiest example for this is color. And color is such an important part of our daily lives. It imbues our lives with beauty and meaning. But what are colors? We know from physics that there are no colors, so to speak,

out there in the world objectively. There's electromagnetic radiation, goes all the way from radio waves at one end to x-rays and gamma rays at the other. And our eyes, the cells in our eyes only respond to three of these wavelengths, which aren't colored, right? They're just wavelengths of energy. Yet out of those three wavelengths,

the brain generates this infinite palette of beautiful color. So what we experience when we experience color is simultaneously less than what's really there because it's just sampling this thin slice of reality. But it's also more than what's there because out of that thin slice of reality, the brain conjures millions of different colors. So it doesn't make sense to say that, you know, is our perception of color, is it accurate? Well, that's an ill-formed question because color isn't there in the world anyway. Evolution has developed our brains to experience color because it's useful, not because it exists. Yeah. Okay. I love this, right? I absolutely love this. So a couple of years ago, we were on holiday somewhere, my wife, myself, and my kids. And I remember looking at the sea.

And I think one of the key things I want to teach my kids is that everything in life is just perspective, right? And I think this really speaks to your work. It's just perspective, right? And you have a perspective, but other people may have a different perspective. I'm always talking to them about the things they get taught. I say, okay, could there be another explanation for that? What's an alternate viewpoint on that? I think it's a, I'd like to believe it's a really great way to interact with the world, gets us out of our little tribes where we think that things are only one way. And we looked at the sea and said, what color is the sea? And because we do this quite a lot, ultimately the conclusion was, well, the sea appears to be blue to us, but we don't know what colour a dog sees. Or maybe we do, but to my knowledge, we

don't know. What does a dog see when it sees the sea? What does a dolphin see when it sees the sea? Does it see it as pink? Does it see it as green green does it not even have a color right so when you start looking at things like that is it then accurate to say not that the sea is blue i perceive that sea as blue yes i think that's much more correct to say the artist suzanne said this years ago too he said color is where the brain and the universe meet. Very nice way to put it. Beautiful. And yet the color of the sea, the color of anything,

is not existing in the thing itself. It's what the philosopher John Locke called, it's a secondary quality. It requires a mind to exist as well. Not everything is like that, right? Solidity. If you think about a car coming down the road, it's a particular color. That color only exists in the interaction of the physical object that's the car and the brain that's looking at it. And because we all have different brains, it's not only a dog will have

a different experience. You and I might have a slightly different experience. We just probably won't realize it. But the car still has solidity. That's not dependent on the brain. If you go and jump in front of it, it's going to do some damage. But the way we experience it, that's always a construction. So I think this is a key part of this idea of controlled hallucination. I'm not saying that nothing exists, the mind just makes up reality. No, reality is there and reality can bite. But the way we encounter reality is always a construction. We never see things as they really are. We see them, I'm drawing another quote here, stealing a quote from the novelist in Aishanin, we see things not as they

are. We see them as we are. But that doesn't mean they're not real. They're perfectly real. And that's why we can get around in the world. We can behave. That's why when people are hallucinating in an uncontrolled way, maybe through psychosis, maybe through chemicals, maybe through other things, they're less able to behave in the world because now their hallucinations lose their grip on reality. Not only do we all see the world differently, we all perceive the world differently, even within ourself, there's multiple versions of us that can see the same thing in different ways. So an example would be an email, right? And I'm not a neuroscientist, so please do give me your perspective on this. But one thing I think a lot about, and I would say for a good two or three

years now, is that we all see the world through the state of our nervous system. So you can read an email at 4 p.m. on a Friday if you've had a fraught week and you're tense and your stress is up and you don't feel you've got enough time to finish what you need to before the weekend. So because you're stressed, your whole system has changed. You're no longer having your peripheral vision. You've now got tunnel focus trying to get things done, right? You can interpret the words in that email as a threat. Whereas, let's say after a relaxing weekend where you've chilled out on a Sunday, spent time with family, gone for a walk in nature, had a good night's sleep on Sunday night,

on a Monday morning, when you're in a nice, let's say you're in a calm state, that same email with the same words, you can infer a different meaning. You can perceive it differently. So it's not only we all see the world differently, there are multiple versions of us within ourselves that can also perceive things differently. That's a really good point. I really like that. And I think it's absolutely true. And I think it speaks to this fundamental subjectivity of how the brain creates experience. So again, we see things as we are and we change. We change over time. And the example of the email really hits home

because I've had exactly that experience. We also have it when we're talking to friends or partners where if we're stressed about something at work, we interpret what somebody says in a very different way than if we're relaxed. Interpret being the key word. Yeah, the truth is not necessarily in the sounds that we hear. It's in the meaning that we make from them.

And what I think is fascinating, it's actually one of the things that I think can help each of us. When we recognize that it's really that way all the way through our experience, even color is an interpretation. It becomes easier to catch yourself in the act of interpreting things. What was the example I think you referred to in your book? Was it this blue and white dress?

That's right. Could you just explain it? Because I think most people will probably get it, and on the video version we'll maybe find an image and cut it in so people can see it. If people were anywhere near the internet in 2015, it would have been very hard to avoid this particular meme. So this was a photo, a badly exposed photo of a dress. And it suddenly tore around social media because there was this violent disagreement.

Some people said, well, that dress is clearly white and gold. And then some other people said, what are you talking about? It's clearly a blue and black dress. Absolutely no question. Hold on. White and gold and blue and black. Very different. Are very, very different. Very different. And this is why it kind of took off and various celebrities were weighing in. And of course, then it went completely nuts. And I remember I'd just been teaching a class on consciousness as it happens. And I'd recently published a book on visual illusions as well. And my phone was going off the hook and emails were coming in. What is going on with this dress? I'd never heard of it until that morning either. First

I'd seen it and I looked at it and I thought, well, that's clearly a blue and black dress. And I took it around my lab and the first five people said it's a blue and black dress. The sixth person said it's white and gold. And I thought, oh, hold on, there is something here. And I didn't know what it was at first, but of course I agreed to try and explain it about an hour later. And what's happening here is that the colors that we perceive depend not only on the light reflected from the thing itself, but on the context. So this is another general thing about interpretation. When we interpret something, we interpret in a way that's hugely dependent on the context in which we're in. This

could be an emotional context, like you said, the difference between a stressful Friday afternoon and a peaceful Sunday evening. But in the case of the dress, the context was the ambient light, the surrounding light. Our brains do something very clever, which is basically control for what the ambient light is. So if you take a piece that we've got some pieces of white paper on the table here, if we take them from inside this studio out into the garden, they'll still look white. But the light reflected from the paper into your eyes has changed massively. Inside, the illumination is relatively yellowish.

This is why paint in a paint shop can look very different from when the paint is put on the wall in your house. So yeah, if there's one lesson to take home from this is you always need to take a sample of the paint home. Never trust what it looks like in the shop. Yeah, this is good neuroscientific research on how to decorate your house. That's right. You know, I like it. I'm still terrible at choosing colours.

But if we take this paper outside, it'll still look white, even though the ambient light has changed massively because the brain controls for it. It's called colour constancy. What we didn't know, and really people in psychology haven't studied this, is that this process can vary a little bit between people. And this particular photo of a

dress hit a sweet spot where for some people their brains assumed that the ambient light was relatively yellowish, that it was an indoor scene, in which case their brains inferred that the dress was blue and black. But for other people, their brains assumed that the ambient light was more bluish, like an outdoor light, and their brains inferred that the dress was white and gold. Once someone has... Is it possible that someone who sees it as, let's say, blue,

can they also in a different setting, do we know if they can also see it as white and gold once they've been tuned into this is what it can look like? I think so. If you change the context enough, you can flip it. It's not easy. I find it very difficult to flip my perception from one interpretation to the other. There's these other illusions, things like Necker cubes,

which are these like cubes, you just have the outline lines and you can either see it as if it's from below or from above. You can never see it both ways at once. And your experience can sometimes flip between the two. Same thing with the dress, but it's much harder. What was just fascinating about the dress is that it really, it perplexed people because it challenged this assumption that most of us have most of the time, that we see things as they are. And we have this common phrase, like, I'll believe it when I see it. And by just this one simple example showing that, hold on, it's the same image, yet two people can have a radically different experience of the same thing, usefully undercuts that idea. Well, what you're

speaking to here through this example of a dress, it's like, wait a minute, you see the world the way you see it, right? Not everyone sees it the same way. Yet, you know, I don't know, what did it teach you about humans? I don't really remember this back in 2015, right? Certainly not clearly. Was there a really divisive dialogue? Were people quite, I guess, demeaning to other people who saw it? They say, you're blind. What was going on there? And there's a little mini example here where when my wife and I started dating, I can remember at my mate's wedding we went to, she wore this really nice dress. Now, I think I saw it as orange, she saw it as red, and we would have this kind of back and forth for months over what colour it was. And both of us were, you know,

maybe at that time in our relationship, both keen to assert that this is this colour, this is this colour. You didn't immediately agree with her. I thought that's what you've done. No, I didn't. Neither of us did. We were pretty sure that the way we were seeing it was the way it was. But actually, it kind of speaks to this wider point, doesn't it? That all we're ever seeing is our own perception. That's correct. And I think it's not... The thing with the dress is that it came and it went.

It was a social media meme, and then it kind of vanished a little bit. One of the things we're doing now, one of the projects that I've been running in the lab for the last couple of years is this thing called the perception census. It's still going on actually. And it's trying to understand these individual differences in how we perceive things, not just in color, but in other aspects of vision, in the flow of time, in music, in sound, in emotion. We don't know very much about this kind of hidden landscape of inner diversity that characterizes all of us. And I think this is partly because, as you say, it's very hard to recognize that there could be this

inner diversity because it seems as though we just see things as they are and partly also because the dress was exceptional that the difference was so big that it immediately showed up in our language and behavior not in a particularly vitriolic way actually more in a in a confused way um but many of the differences in how we encounter the world in experience might not be that dramatic you know if we we both look at the example of your wife's dress, maybe it's just at the fringe where you're going to use a different word and if the differences in your experience had been a bit less, you'd both have said it was reddish or something like that.

So with this perception census, we're trying to get a picture, build a picture of how just as we all differ on the outside in terms of skin color and height and body shape and so on, we all differ on the inside too. And knowing this, I think, is vitally important. It's an important scientific challenge. Let's see what's out there. It's a bit of a voyage of discovery.

But it's also, I think, socially important for exactly the reason you were hinting at that one of the things that the dress episode suggested to me was the importance in general for people recognizing that they have a point of view that's what we see when we see the dress it's not as it is it's I'm seeing it through my point of view and recognizing that we actually have a point of view is important. Yeah, I mean, I honestly think that the implications of this are truly quite profound because what I hear as the, or one of the conclusions of what you're talking about and what you're researching,

I just see a more compassionate world. I see less tribalism, more forgiveness, more understanding, more empathy, once we recognize that not everyone sees things the way that we see them. That's the hope. I mean, that's a very idealistic hope. I'm an idealist, mate. I believe it's possible. I hope so. I mean, to your point, you look at something like political disagreements, right?

People are so embedded in their political and social media echo chambers that they find it very, very difficult to not even understand another's perspective, but even recognize that other perspectives exist. And so here is something where I think the science of consciousness of perception can be very useful, because when you realize that you literally can see the world differently from other people and nobody sees it as it is, idealistically, optimistically maybe, this can cultivate a sense of humility about the way we perceptually encounter things. And then that provides a platform for cultivating a bit of humility about what we believe. And it's not saying that our beliefs are arbitrary and that they bear no relation to the truth.

It's just saying that they are interpretations. There's a point of view happening here. And if we can cultivate a bit of humility about our own perceptual interpretations, if you like perceptual beliefs about the world, maybe we can also cultivate a bit of humility about our other beliefs. And that, of course, provides a platform

for better communication, empathy, and so on. One of the examples I have used in the past to try and explain this to people, not from a neuroscientific point of view, but just from the idea of trying to understand, well, what is truth, right? What actually is going on? And the example I often use is, let's imagine there's a romantic couple, okay? For ease of explaining, let's call it husband and wife, right? Husband and wife are having a heated disagreement around the kitchen table, okay? I think most people would probably be able to relate to that. They would have had an experience like that at some point. What happened? What was the truth of what happened? Well, I think the truth of what happened

kind of depends on who you ask. The husband will have their perspective on what just happened in that five or 10 minute heated disagreement. But if you walk around to the other side of the table, the partner, the wife, let's say, may have a completely different perspective on the same situation. So actually, what was the truth? What actually happened? Well, it kind of depends on which side of the table you're sitting on. I think that's quite helpful for people to really understand perspective. And then I read this study once about these football fans. And maybe you're familiar with it, especially because you're doing work on perspective, right? especially because you're doing work on perspective, right?

But I'm trying to recall it all now, but it was basically two sets of football fans and opposing teams were shown the recording of an incident in the game. I think, you know, someone tackled someone, right? So this wasn't in the midst of the game. This was afterwards when people were feeling calm, I think, at least. But they're looking at this and how you reported that incident depended hugely on which team you supported, right? So again, what is reality, right? Something happened, a foul,

or there was contact between two footballers and something happened to a ball. But whether you deem that a foul or whether you deem that a great tackle kind of depended on which side you sat on. Yep. I mean, so what does this speak to? So I think there's two things.

Firstly, it's important to recognize that something did happen. In both examples, maybe a glass broke in the kitchen. And in this case, a ball was kicked in a particular way or somebody's foot hit somebody else's leg. So something happened. But beyond that ground truth, then things can start to differ in very dramatic ways through the biases that we have. And I think the really important thing here is that it's very hard sometimes to know that we have these biases, that we have these interpretive processes that are creating the world for us. We see through them. We don't realize that we have them. And when you take the piece of white

paper outside, you're not aware that your brain is doing all this stuff in the background to take the context into account so that we still see it as white. We are subjectively blind to all this. So there's a need to, I think it's very helpful to the extent we can recognize that all our perceptions are our creations, our constructions, but not totally arbitrary ones. That helps us put a higher level of context on top of it. We can get a bit of distance. Is this where practices like meditation and mindfulness can be so helpful? Is this one of the reasons why they can be so helpful because it helps us develop that distance,

that psychological distance. It helps us realize that we can observe these multiple interpretations. I don't know, given how long you've spent studying the brain and consciousness, how do you see meditation and mindfulness and their potential benefits? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning

a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour, and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with

Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than

five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal, or click on the link in your podcast app. Extremely complimentary. I meditate a bit. I don't know about you i've tried to meditate

more diligently but i've never really been able to muster the discipline it's not easy to meditate um especially if you have a fixed idea of what meditation is or should be i think that's often one of the obstacles to meditation yeah it's yeah you should not even think of a meditative state as something you should try to achieve which is what makes it even harder in my view. But I have been on a couple of retreats, and I'm very interested in it. And I've some experience, and I've talked to a lot of people who've meditated a lot. And I think the parallel, the complementarity does lie in opening this little gap, this very useful gap between how things seem and how they are. In meditation, one of the standard ways to engage in meditation is just to let your thoughts,

experiences, emotions, moods just pass by like clouds breezing across the sky. To just witness their passing and not buy into them in the way that we often do we have a thought and it leads to another thought and another thought and we start ruminating meditation just makes you realize that thoughts are just thoughts thoughts come and they go our perceptual experiences they come and they go they pass and and that's and they are. They pass. And they are, I think, deeper into meditation. You also get some recognition that our thoughts, our emotions, because emotions are just forms of perception too. They're just the way the brain makes sense of what's happening in the body. All of these things are constructions, creative acts. I know a former guest of yours,

Ruben, talked about this in these kinds of words that everything that makes us human is a kind of creative act. It's not a passive registration of just something that's there. And meditation can make that pretty clear as well. We train our attention so that we don't get wrapped up

in these habits of thinking, habits of perceiving, habits of behaving, but can step outside of these habits just for a little while. And if you do that enough, then I think you can recognize the grip they have on you in your everyday life too. So studying neuroscience for this long, I don't think it's equivalent to spending 10,000 hours in a Himalayan cave somewhere really meditating. But I think the place you get to is somewhat similar. Another aspect of meditative practice is to realize that the experience of self is also changing. The self is not this fixed thing, but it's a bundle

of different kinds of experiences and perceptions. And that's very, very complimentary to the perspective that I'm trying to talk about here too. I definitely want to get onto the self shortly because the way you write about it, the changeable nature of the self, it's again, it's very provocative, I think, for people, but it's very, very helpful, especially when we think about the rising rates of mental health problems and things like depression, where people often feel stuck. They feel stuck. They often feel, and again, I understand that everyone has a different experience of this, often feel that actually they're stuck a certain

way, that the way they think is reality and that's all there is. So, you know, I'm always trying to think about practicalities. I feel already in this conversation, this idea that there are multiple perspectives, hopefully is going to help people realize next time I'm arguing with someone, next time I'm strongly attached someone, next time I'm strongly attached and fighting about something, maybe I could take a step back and go, maybe that person sees the world and experiences the world differently from me. I think that's a pretty profound take home for people. This idea that meditation and mindfulness can help us just wedge in a little bit of distance to go,

oh, wow, these things are changeable. I think that's very, very practical. Sorry, go on. No, I just agree. I mean, there's some sort of ideas that meditation is just sort of having an empty mind. And I think that's wrong. And I think meditation, indeed, it doesn't mean you stop thinking, you stop perceiving. It just changes the relationship that you have with yourself and your perceptions and your thoughts. And it's a very, very powerful thing to do. Have you at all studied or are you familiar with the science, the neuroscience of what happens to the brain when someone is meditating? There's a lot of work on this. It's not work we actually do in my group,

but it's still ongoing. The two kinds of studies that tend to be done are studies on people who are beginning to meditate. So we might follow them over eight or 12 weeks of meditation to see what changes. Or studies of people who've already accumulated years and decades of experience meditating. Of course, you don't then know what they were like to begin with. It's hard to draw conclusions besides the fact that you do see differences. There are differences in the brain, in the meditative state. And it seems likely that these differences accumulate over time. So after a lot of meditation, it's not only that your brain is in a different state during meditation, but that meditation has changed your brain over time too.

Exactly how it is, I think, the details are still to be worked out. But in a sense, it doesn't much matter. Everything changes your brain. Breakfast changes your brain. Breakfast over time certainly changes your brain. But it's more the direct exit. Of course, it works through the brain. But I think the right level or helpful level to think about meditation is how it changes your experience and why that can be valuable. As you say as well, it's very valuable for dealing with mental health issues.

One of the things that happens in conditions like depression is that there's a very dysfunctional realism that you bring to your experience of yourself and the world. Things seem terrible they seem unsalvageable and of course that's an interpretation and it's very hard from the depths of depression to recognize that this is an interpretation of events it doesn't mean that everything is fine i think there may well of course, depression often triggered by things that are objectively very challenging, very, very difficult,

and are not solved just by meditating for a bit or just by thinking differently. This is not a panacea, but it can be helpful just to break that cycle where things seem to be a particular way, you believe them to be a particular way, and therefore you behave and respond in a particular way, which can become self-entrenching and self-fulfilling. Staying on the subject of controlled hallucinations, right? And that

we're not really seeing, I guess, talking visually what's there. It's an interpretation of that. It's how we put it together. You mentioned the conversation I had with Rick Rubin. And I want to just follow that thread a little bit because one of the things I remember talking to Rick about, for those people who've not heard, Rick Rubin is a legendary record producer. And a few months ago, we had a quite wonderful conversation about health, happiness, the creative process, so many things, right? But one of the things I think we touched upon on the mics was this idea that, let's say Rick has been working with a band on an album for a period of months, let's say, it's always a good idea to get someone

fresh to hear it towards the end. Because if you've been hearing it for two or three months, you're going to, this goes, this, I guess, speaks to this idea that you talk a lot about, that the brain is a predictive organ, right? That you're often not hearing it. Well, you're not hearing it as if someone was coming in fresh and hearing it. So someone coming in fresh is always going to pick up stuff that you may not be picking up, right? When I think about editing books myself, like it's always helpful towards the end, getting somebody fresh and it's amazing what they pick up and you think, or even typos. Exactly. I was thinking that. Typos. You're like, I've read that. There's no typos in that. And there's somebody,

have you seen that? I'm like, how did that go? So, and I think in your TED talk, you beautifully show various examples of the brain as a predictive organ. You used voice. I wonder if you have any of those files to hand. Is this a good thing to use to explain? I think it's a great thing. But by the way, I mean, I listened to your conversation with Rick Rubin, and I didn't expect there to be such a close resonance with the perspective that I've been developing as well.

And I mean, I just have to read this quote. I mean, I went out to read this quote. I mean, I went out to read his brilliant book. And there are some passages which are just more beautifully than I could write, put some of the same ideas. He said, the outside universe we perceive doesn't exist as such. Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions, we generate a reality internally. We create forests and oceans, and cold we read words hear voices and form interpretations then in an instant we produce a response all this in a world of our own creation i mean i it's a it's exactly it's the same and but what he's emphasizing and what i

didn't usually emphasize is the creative aspect of it. Yes, it's implicit in this view of the brain as a prediction machine, as an active interpretive organ that generates. I mean, there is something essentially creative about that. And what I loved about that conversation with Rick is he links the thread all the way from this basic level of how our brains create our experiences of the world to of course the kind of creativity that he embodies as an artist and we're all artists in this view and one of my other artistic heroes brian geisen who said this too and and he's in using this technique we've also been working on

in the lab of stroboscopic light to give people interesting visual experiences. The original thing he did in the 1950s was really designed to make people aware of their power of their own brains and minds to create their experience and underline that this means that we are all artists. We are all creative expressions of what's happening within our brains and bodies. And you, to give you credit, the beautiful phrase that you use in the TED talk,

and I think in the book, we don't passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. I mean, that is thought provoking, that we are actively generating our experience of the world. And I guess a lot of spiritual philosophers would argue, and I know the Indian philosopher Sadhguru, for example, who I've been watching some of his talks recently, especially his chat with David Eagleman on consciousness in preparation for our conversation,

I saw parts of it. And he would argue that, or his perspective is that that's what makes us human, that actually we can actively generate our experience. We're not compulsively reacting to what's going on around us. We're actually in charge, if we know how to harness that, I guess. Right, because I don't think this process is limited to humans, of course. So other animals too. We share very similar brains. It's always an interesting question.

What really makes us different and distinctive? Is it something in the brain? Is it something in culture? But this is a very, very deeply evolutionary conserved principle, I think, of how many organisms perceive the world. And it gets back to what you were saying earlier about the dog looking at the sea. What experience is a dog having? It's also creating its experience. It's also a highly creative dog. But what it will come up with is going to be quite different. And it's going to be different partly in terms of the sensory receptors in its eyes. Maybe it's sensitive to different wavelengths, but the bulk of it will depend on how the dog brain interprets the signals that it gets. So it's not just humans.

Yeah. But maybe we uniquely have the ability to recognize this process as unfolding. And as you say, then harness it, guide it, take advantage of it in some ways. But let me try to find an example. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it. This is a phenomenon called sine wave speech. So it really shows how our brain's interpretations can change what we consciously experience, even for the same objective sound that we might hear. So I'm going to play one sound first. Okay. Here it is.

I think brain is really terrible, aren't you? Okay, so to me, that sounds like a jumbled mess. I have no idea. No idea what's going on there. Okay. So, have a listen to this. I think Brexit is a really terrible idea. Okay.

Crystal clear. I can hear that. Crystal clear. Right, now we'll go back and we'll play the same sound that I played first. The exact same sound that you couldn't make head or tail of. Have a listen. I think Brexit is a really terrible idea. Yeah, I think Brexit is a really terrible idea.

I mean, okay, so how do you explain that? This is a phenomenon called sine wave speech. It's been well studied in psychology for a long time. What you do is you take a spoken phrase. In this case, I think Brexit is a terrible idea. I recorded this in 2016 in preparation for the TED talk. You take that phrase and then you treat it. You basically chop off all the high and low frequencies and it becomes really hard to understand. Actually, if you do it enough, it becomes incomprehensible, as I think you found it.

So you play that. People have no idea what it is. It sounds like noisy whistles. And then you play the original sound, and it's very clear. Now, what this is doing is it's giving the brain, if you like, a perspective, an interpretation on the basic sound that's common to both. So that when you next hear the treated sound, the noisy whistle sound, your brain has an additional expectation about what's going on. It has a prediction about what, not the sound is, but what the sound means.

And that causes us to hear it in a very, very different way. It's almost priming the brain. It's priming the brain. It's giving it, it's giving it a frame. It's giving it a perspective on what the sound is. How does this differ from when you go to the car showroom, for example, and see some red cars, let's say you're thinking of buying a car and there's a red car that you particularly like, and then the next day and the following week, when you're out on the roads, or you see red cars everywhere and you think, oh, wow, there's loads of red cars, you know, on the roads at the moment.

Whereas the reality is that, well, the probable reality is that it's the same type of cars, but your brain has been primed now to look for red cars. Is this similar or is it different? Because I think that, is that meant to be the reticular activating system? No, I don't think so. No, I think they're slightly different examples. So in the car example, what may be happening is that you're just paying attention to these things.

Red cars have become suddenly a lot more salient because you just spent a lot of money on one. And so then your brain will start to notice more red cards. So is this predictive processing in the same way? To me, what I hear as a non-neuroscientist is there's all kinds of signals and noises in the environment all the time, right? We can't, if we took everything in that was out there, we'd literally be frazzled, won't be able to operate. So our brain is constantly trying to make our life easy and

simpler. And it's feeding us consciously the information that it thinks we need to interact with the world. And so that's the kind of broad lens through which I look at these examples. So that's the kind of broad lens through which I look at these examples. I get that maybe physiologically and biochemically they may work in different ways, but that's kind of my overarching way of looking at it. How would you explain it? That broad picture is basically right. I think there's just a couple of differences. I think they're important differences actually, so it's worth dwelling on a little bit. And I'm glad you mentioned the car example because it does highlight these differences. So yes, in general, you're absolutely right. Our brains sample just a tiny amount of the information that's actually available there to us. And this is another aspect of perception that's quite

difficult for us to recognize. We only see in detail a very small proportion of the whole of our visual field of the entirety of our visual experience. Yet it seems as though we see quite a lot, you know, all the way out to the edges and the tops and the bottoms of our visual experience. The brain is kind of creating the rest. And we move our eyes a lot and we move our attention a lot too. We can focus in one direction but we can suddenly pay attention to something that may be happening out of the corner of our eyes this is one way in which the brain is actively engaged in probing its environment it's not just passively sitting there this control of attention that's one way in which the world can seem different if we pay

attention to different things and that's slightly different from these examples of sine wave speech because they don't really depend on attention so much it's really changing the brain's template for something you know what the brain thinks is the cause of the sensory information that it gets. The two processes are very interrelated and what we pay attention to has a bigger impact on our perceptual experience. It's like turning the volume up on some sensory information. And if we do that, then our brain's predictions are likely to change more than if we don't pay attention. In fact, there's a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, which is if you don't pay attention to something and you're not expecting it to change,

then you don't experience the change at all, even if it's perfectly visible to you, even if you're staring straight at it. Even if it's perfectly visible to you, even if you're staring straight at it. I once used this phenomenon to try and get out of a parking ticket in San Diego when I was living there. There was a no left turn sign which had recently been put up where I used to drive to the beach and turn left and go surfing. And I'd made this turn hundreds of times over the years I was living in California. And so when the sign appeared, even though it was directly visible to me right there in front of my car, I claimed to the traffic court that I literally did not see it because of this phenomenon of

inattentional blindness. Something had changed. My brain was not expecting that change. So there was no way that I could have actually seen it. It didn't go very well. But it's a great point, isn't it? It's a great, there is it, although it's a funny story, right? Actually, it's quite possible that some people simply will not see it. It's there, but they're not seeing it. Now, this then, I mean, this thing gets really either empowering or really quite confusing for people. As in, if we're all creating our own experiences of the world, you could go to a stream and go, we're all just playing our own internal computer game, right? So what does it mean for us? Like, how do we put all of this together, Anil, and try and

then interact with the world? I think it's by recognizing that, yes, our perceptual experiences of the world are individual, are distinctive in ways we're trying to measure with this perception sensors study, which people can actually, by the way, it's still open. So we'd love to get more data on this. So how do people go on to it? If they just look at my website, annielseth.com. annielseth.com. You'll find it straight away. We've got already 25,000 people from 100 countries. And if people are interested, what happens?

They go onto your website, they go on the link. And what do they get asked? A series of questions? It's some questions, but there's also little interactive visual illusions that people can play with. We designed it to be actually fun and not just useful. Is it open for a few more months? It's open for at least until the end of September 2023.

And there's many different sections. What will happen as well, each section takes about half an hour and maybe on different topics. Each section takes about half an hour and maybe on different topics. And at the end of it, you'll learn something about that aspect of perception and about your own way of perceiving and how it might relate to others. And of course, people will get the warm glow of helping advance the science of what I'm going to do. I'm in. I'm in. I'm interested. Okay, so back to what we can take from this. Okay, so back to what we can take from this.

What we can take from it then is that indeed, we each create our own experience in an individually distinctive way. We have different brains, we have different bodies. We will inhabit a unique subjective world. But that it isn't arbitrary. There is a real world. Evolution has designed our brains to make pretty damn sure that most of the time we see the world in ways that it's useful for our survival, for our behavior, for our daily activities. So there's always this balance. What we don't want to do is

fall into a kind of solipsism or something and say like, the way I see things has got nothing to do is fall into a kind of solipsism or something and say like the way i see things has got nothing to do with the way anybody else sees things no we there there's a lot of overlap but recognizing that we have a perspective that we have a point of view that there is this indirectness and that this applies not only to the world, but to the self too. I think that's a very useful message to constantly just, I mean, what I do often, I don't know if this is generally helpful for people, but to try and automate that a bit.

So when I just walk around the world, it's a bit like a kind of walking meditation in some ways. I will just occasionally stop and just reflect on this for a bit. Just think about the colors that I'm seeing and just think about where are these colors? Are they out there? They seem to be out there, but where are they? They're in the interaction between the world and my brain. And recognizing that, I think, really can be very helpful.

It really does introduce this space between how things seem and how they are in a way that allows us to to better communicate with others because we can recognize that they have their own kind of creative act of perception too yeah you know one thing i've started doing over the past few months i don't even think I've told my wife that I'm doing this, but I sometimes, when I'm going to see her after, let's say, a day's work, or when I'm interacting with her, I have this internal mantra, start from zero, which is this idea that, and I think this speaks to your work, and I'm sure you'll give me your perspective shortly, but this idea that often when we're interacting with people, we're so conditioned by our previous interactions that it can color positively or negatively the present experience.

And I think many people in social interactions will realise that a lot of the time they're not reacting to what is actually happening, it's what they think is happening based on what has previously happened. That's absolutely right. Yeah, it's a bit like that speech example. Yeah. That what we're reacting to is what we think is being said. Exactly. So this whole start from zero idea that I'm playing around with is this idea, can I show up and interact with my wife as if this is the very first time I've met her?

Which of course is impossible to a certain degree because, you know, I've been married for over 15 years now, right? So it's not the first time, but there's something really liberating and enjoyable about trying to interact in that way. I'm really enjoying it. I feel it gives a different kind of experience. Although I haven't told her that's what I'm doing sometimes, I think when she hears this, because she's the producer of the show, I'm interested in her perspective. I'll maybe tell you next time we talk, but I do actually do that sometimes. And I think it's a really nice and beautiful way to try and interact with people. But would you say it's going against what

our brain is there to do? Our brain is a predictive organ. So how does an exercise like that, do you feel, help us? Or is it pointless? No, I think, well, you'll have to ask your wife about whether she's found it helpful as well. That would be a fascinating thing, actually, to know whether it seems different from her perspective without her having known that you're engaging in this exercise it sounds potentially extremely valuable because it does strip away some of the preconceptions we bring to our interactions and yes the brain has evolved as a prediction machine but that doesn't mean it's always going to do the right thing in every specific situation. The brain is evolved in general to do the right sort of things at the

right sort of times. But of course, this can mean very different things. And of course, it's evolved for safety, not harmony, right? So it's there to predict things to keep us safe. But in a lot of relationships, of course, not all relationships, but in many relationships, the issue isn't safety, it's harmony. So maybe what the brain has been evolutionarily wired to do is working against harmonious relationships some of the time. I think we could make that case. I think you could. I think one of the things that really screams out to us when we think about the vast tracts of time over which our bodies and

brains have evolved is that the environments in which they were evolving are very, very different from the worlds we live in now. Yeah. Very different. Think about things like how we deal with climate change. We can't, even though we know it's a problem, it's very hard to experience it as being the problem until we start to see storms happening and immediate catastrophes happening in places. We didn't evolve in a world where it was necessary to perceive things changing over that kind of timescale,

even though geologically it's incredibly fast. Psychologically, it's so slow as to not be salient at all. And that applies as much to social circumstances as well. Probably the social circumstances that our ancestors existed in were very different. Now, people make all kinds of claims based on this as a whole discipline of evolutionary psychology, which is just, it's interesting, but sometimes it's a little bit weak, I think, because it's a lot of speculation. But I think the truth is fundamental that indeed our brains did not evolve to deal with the world in which we live. So then it can be very important in the world in which we live to notice the habits that our brain gets us into and to challenge them when we can.

A couple of times in this conversation, the phrase, the self of time trying to unpick what is the self. As you see it now in 2023, if someone says to you, Anna, what is the self? What do you say? I would say the self is not the thing that does the experiencing, like the mini me behind my eyes sitting somewhere in my brain. The self is a kind of perception too. The self is a set of perceptual predictions. The self is a creative act. So who we are is a series of perceptions and predictions. Right. So that means then the self is changeable. It's always changing. It's relatively tempting to think that the self is this essence that is

the recipient of this perceptual information that comes from the world and decides what to do next and then does it in this sort of cycle of we sense things, we think things, and we act in the world. But what I think is much closer to the truth is that experiences of the world and of the self are both based on exactly the same principles of the brain making predictions about what's going on and updating these predictions, testing them against the world. and updating these predictions, testing them against the world. The relevant part of the world when it comes to the self is largely the body. So the body, if you think about things,

one thing I find helpful is to think about things from the perspective of your brain. Just try and imagine that you are a brain. You know, you're locked inside this bony vault of a skull. And the purpose of the brain is to try to, at a first approximation, figure out what's going on. Okay. When it comes to the world, we've already told this story. The brain doesn't have direct access to what's actually there. It has to make predictions and update these predictions based on the sensory information it gets. And that's what we perceive. You know. We actively generate the world that we experience. We don't just

passively perceive it. But then the body too. The brain is somewhat cut off from the body. It doesn't have direct access to what shape the body is, where it is in space, or even what it's doing on the inside. It gets a lot of sensory information. You can see the body. We can touch things. When it comes to the interior of the body, things like heart rate and blood pressure, there's a lot of nerves that carry information

about the internal state of the body to the brain. And the brain has to undergo the same process. It can't just read out the state of the body. It has to infer it. It has expectations about what's going on in it. It perceives the state of the body as, again, a kind of internally creative act. But you can train it, can't you? Like you can train it in the sense that you write about interoception, that perception of our internal state, I guess. Is that an accurate definition? Yeah, it's the perception of the body from within.

And we tend to think of perception as the five senses, right? Hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, seeing. But there are many other senses. We sense our body position, we sense our body movement, we have a sense of balance. And then we have all these senses that tell the brain about what's going on inside the body, and that's all interoception. And I think interoception is something that can be trained. You hear stories of yogis who've spent years putting their attention on their internal state, being able to

actually feel their gut contracting. To many of us, we'll say, that's ridiculous, you can't do that. But the more you understand, or certainly the more I learn about the brain and how adaptable our bodies and brains are to what we're doing, you think, well, yeah, it's very believable to me that that would be the case if you spend a lot of time training yourself for that. And I kind of feel that many of us are, I would think that many of us are more disconnected than we have ever been from our internal state. Because of the way many of us live now with all this tech, all this distraction, all this external stuff, if you get up first thing in the morning and go straight onto your phone and are constantly consuming all the time other

stuff, you're not putting attention inwards. And I think it's a big problem for health, for happiness, for our well-being. You know, I've said for many years that the most important practice I do on a daily basis for my own health and happiness is a practice of solitude. There's many things I do within that solitude, but of course, we've already touched on meditation and mindfulness. And I do have concerns with trackers potentially in this kind of like, you know, now getting to the point where some people need a sleep tracker to tell them how they feel. Of course, not everyone uses them like that, but I think this internal perception of ourselves, I think is really, really important. Any comments on that? Definitely. I think I agree with everything, really important. Any comments on that?

Definitely. I think I agree with everything you said there. And there is a lack of attention in modern culture to this. There's this sort of dominant cultural narrative that the brain is maybe primarily a thinking thing and the body is just something that needs to be kept healthy in order to stay alive longer. And this idea also that the brain is a kind of computer, you know, and maybe the mind is the software running on the wetware of the brain. What do you think about that?

I think it's wrong. You know, I think computers are extraordinary and powerful, but we've always used a dominant technology as a metaphor for how the brain works. Before computers, it was something like telephone exchanges. And before that, it was something like networks of pipes. So we've always reached to technology. Now it's changing. And maybe we think of the brain as a little bit more like the internet,

a big cloud of information processing. But all of these things are inadequate. The brain is its own thing. It has its own reality. And if we think of it as a kind of computer, then the body fades a little bit into the background. Because for a computer, it doesn't much matter so long as it's light enough to carry it around and its screen is big enough and so on. It doesn't have an interiority in the same way that bodies do. So when we learn to pay attention to our bodies, I totally agree by the way, I don't think you need to be a yogi for thousands of years. I think we can all learn to pay attention to what's going on in our bodies a little bit more. Meditation is again a way of

doing this. And one of the conduits to meditative practice is to really pay attention to the breath and to notice what's happening in your body as you breathe. And then when you move on from there, one of the ways I think it can be very useful for mental health is the relationship between the body and the emotions that we feel. Now, it's easy to feel an emotion and look for its cause out there in the world

or in somebody else. But if we pay attention to what's happening when we feel an emotion, we pay attention to what's happening inside our bodies, it becomes clear that a large part of any emotional response is is our brain's interpretation of what's happening in the body you know when i feel anxiety i i try to you know with more or less success depending really notice what's happening in the body and you can feel it it's like well my my arms my hands and my feet feel different anxiety for me tends to appear in the extremities of my body and when you realize that and then you it can help dissolve the negativity of these emotions because you realize that they're just constructions they maybe they're not

an objectively valid reaction to what's going on in the world that's something that's happening in my body and if you allow that to change, the body can change. Yeah. And then the emotion changes too. Yeah. I love that. Two things there. Firstly, relating to what you said a few minutes ago that we can all start paying a bit more attention to ourselves, what's going on inside. And of course, as we say, meditation is one way we can do that. I've been a fan of barefoot shoes, minimalist shoes for many years for a variety of different reasons. And I think there are all kinds of benefits for our gait and our movements of wearing them. But one of the benefits I also think relates to this, which is often we can go for walks these days and be very disconnected. People will be listening to this

right now on a walk with ear buds in, and I have no problem with that. I think that can be a very enjoyable way to have a walk. But you can also go for a walk in a very mindful way. And I think some people can be mindful whilst listening to podcasts and walking for sure. But one of the benefits I found when people, myself included, wear minimalist shoes and these barefoot shoes when walking is that you naturally become more mindful because you start to really feel what your foot is doing as you're walking, as you're interacting with the ground. And it's a really quite beautiful experience. I think that's one of the untold benefits of

wearing shoes like this, for example. So that was just one sort of reflection I wanted to comment on. The other thing, what you're saying about paying attention to your body, that one of my favorite bits in being you was, I think this section where you were talking about going through the history of how we think about emotions, you know, do we feel sad and then cry? Or do we cry and then feel sad? And I think intuitively, many of us will go, no, no, I feel sad. That's why I'm crying. But you sort of unpick why that may not be the case, which I found really interesting. I wonder if you could expand on that in a second. But it was also this study you referenced in the 1970s, which was just brilliant. My recollection of that study was about these men who were going over this narrow bridge where there was going to be a big fall on either

side. And there was something about a female questionnaire. Maybe you could explain the study because it was truly profound. It's a wonderful study. Unfortunately, it's the kind of study that would be impossible to get the ethics to do these days for reasons which will become clear. So what happened was, it's basically testing the idea, just as you said, that what happens when we have an emotion? Is it that we feel fear and that drives changes in our body? Maybe then adrenaline starts flowing so that we can run away or fight or whatever we need to do? Or is it the other way around where our body starts changing in a particular way and it's the perception of the change in the body that is the emotion. That's the counterintuitive view,

that's the view that traces back to William James, mentioned him before, one of the earliest psychologists already proposed this. And to test this idea, well one of the ways to test it, quite creatively in the early 1970s these psychologists called Dutton and Aaron took two groups of people. Each group was, I think they were male undergraduate students or young men of some sort. And half of them walked across a very precarious, what seemed to be a very precarious bridge.

This was above this gorge with a raging torrent and rocks far below. And they'd walk across this bridge. This was above this gorge with a raging torrent and rocks far below. And they'd walk across this bridge. And at the end of the bridge, there was an attractive woman who gave him a questionnaire. And the questionnaire was quite a vanilla questionnaire. I can't remember what it was. It was kind of a deviation, really. It wasn't that important. What was important was she said, at the end of giving the questionnaire, said, if you have any questions about the study or the questionnaire, here's my number, give me a call. The other group of male young men went across a fairly boring bridge, much lower down, very sturdy, strong handrails, not a big drop, placid waters beneath. Same thing, women at the end, questionnaire, any questions, give me a call. And what the experimenters were interested in

was whether more people would call from one group than the other. And of course, what happened was, well, what do you think would happen? I mean, you know this study. Well, I've read it. So, you know, it was, I don't know what it teaches us. Does it teach us more about men? Does it teach us more about emotions? It's a bit hard to interpret. But what happens is, of course, more of the people, more of the men who cross the rickety bridge call the woman and they call in the hope of getting a date with that woman.

And the interpretation of this was that in the group walking across the rickety bridge, they're getting physiologically quite aroused because it's scary. There's a big drop. So the adrenaline starts flowing, the cortisol starts flowing, and they're in a state of physiological excitement. When they get to the end and they have this social interaction with a woman, they can misinterpret their sense of physiological arousal which was objectively caused by the walking across the bridge as a sense of romantic

or sexual excitement between the man and the woman so the um the body has been stimulated there's a degree of arousal in the body from being on top of this bridge. But the meaning, going back to what we've been talking about all throughout this conversation, the perception, the meaning that we give to that arousal depends on the scenario. So if there was no woman there, let's say, they just finished and went on, they presumably would be interpreting that as fear. That's why I'm feeling like this. That's why I'm feeling exhausted or a bit fraught or whatever. But because there was a woman there who gave them their phone number, and I got to say that as we're talking about this, I appreciate how politically incorrect this kind of conversation is in 2023. This was a study done in the 1970s.

This was in the early 1970s. Okay, so we're putting it out there on the table, so there's no misinterpretation. But that same physiological arousal in the body was interpreted differently, which is really quite remarkable, isn't it? So that then speaks to this idea that what our body picks up the signals first and then our brain gets involved to put a meaning to it. I think rather than it being a like one thing happens then the other, I think for most of us, most of the time, these things are happening at once. The emotion that you feel will indeed control your body too.

It's this kind of circular causality here. But I think the important lesson I certainly draw from this is it underlines the same principle as applying when we experience the world and our brain comes up with an interpretation of what we see, what we hear. Did that, did that person say this thing or what color is that car? It's the same process that's happening when we feel an emotion that yes, there's some sensory information. In this case, it's saying like the heart is beating fast and cortisol levels are high. But the emotion that we feel that corresponds to that is not given purely by that

change in in the body it's the brain's interpretation of the meaning of that change yeah that's what the emotion is so interesting i know that really is um just to close off this part of the conversation on the self, let's say, one thing I really want to ask you is if the self is changeable, if it really is a series of perceptions, in your view, and I'm not sure how familiar you are with the research on psychedelics and potential therapeutic applications of things like depression. But if we're saying that sometimes in depression people get stuck in a way of thinking, in a way of being, they have maybe a rather fixed perception of self. One thing we know that many people report on the other side of psychedelic experiences is that you almost bust through the idea of a fixed self. That sense of

self often gets stripped away where people will talk about there being, oh, there are multiple experiences here. There's a sense of connection with other people, the natural world, all kinds of things, right? So, and again, as a medical doctor, I have to highlight, you know, psychedelics in many countries in the UK are currently illegal. Yes, research has been done on them in very prestigious institutions like Imperial College London, I think King's College London, Johns Hopkins in America. But in your view, is that one of the reasons why they may well have such profound implications for some people suffering with mental health problems? I think it might be. There's this phrase in the psychedelic literature of shaking the snow globe. Our normal modes of encountering the world and the self are thrown up in the air, thrown up for grabs a little bit in the psychedelic state, which gives the opportunity for them to resettle in different ways. And it happens directly in experience. I think one of the reasons psychedelics for some people might work

is precisely that they reveal in the first person, directly in experience, how indirect and constructed our perceptions can be. Things that we would take for granted become harder to take for granted. One common experience in psychedelics is that of ego dissolution, which is a way of saying that our experience of the self as being this inner essence, totally distinct from the world around us, that fades away and we feel a greater sense of

continuity with the world, with nature, with each other, with the universe. And that's a positive emotion to feel in some ways anyway. But I think the deeper meaning of that is it can suggest to the person that their normal way of experiencing the self doesn't always have to be like that. It is a construction. I think the other really important thing to say, though, is that psychedelics by themselves are not a magic bullet. They're not a panacea they open up this gap but then the context is so important in psychedelics people talk about set and setting yeah and and it's psychedelic assisted psychotherapy that i think shows the the real promise where the psychedelics open up a

space to work with that you can then you can then utilize to explore what ways were you perceiving yourself your body your world that might resettle in in different more helpful ways yeah it's you know we started off talking about death and we were talking about the different beliefs around death, but also the importance of ritual to allow those beliefs to maybe come to fruition and actually have their impacts. And I hear a similar thing here, whereby it's the psychedelic in a control setting with ritual attached to it to allow it to do its work. Is that a fair comparison? I know it's not quite the same thing,

but I certainly heard something quite similar, how ritual is really important. Right, actually, that's a really good point. So ritual, back to the beginning of our conversation, that provides some of the context in which we experience something like death happening to somebody else. in which we experience something like death happening to somebody else. The ritual, yeah, it provides this larger set of,

it gives the brain, if you like, some existing predictions, interpretations to draw on when making sense of what's happening in the body or in the world. And I do think it's important. One of the other projects that I've been doing since I finished writing Being You is this project called Dream Machine. It was actually this artist, Brian Gyson, who started this in the 1950s. And it's the use of fast flickering light on closed eyes, which can also give people quite interesting and quite unexpected visual hallucinations and experiences. And a lot of people feel better after this kind of experience. But we put it in a setting

where there was a lot of context, where there was a lot of structure around it, so that the experience wouldn't be destabilizing for people. And people were held throughout the journey in a way that encouraged them to reflect on what having this unusual experience meant for the way they would perceptually encounter the world and the self and the rest of their daily lives. But it's potentially an interesting intervention because it gives you a powerful experience,

but it doesn't rely on psychedelics. It's something that's much more in principle accessible to people. Super fascinating. Circling back to consciousness, if an eight-year-old child was sitting here right now and said, Anil, what is consciousness and why does it matter to me what would you say to them to the eight-year-old child i would say consciousness is what goes away when you go to sleep and you're not dreaming and it's what comes back when you wake up consciousness is what gives it's incredibly hard to define what consciousness is even after even after studying it for so long especially when you try and explain what it is to an eight because we take it for granted this is the thing it's so hard to define something that

is kind of always there for us perhaps the easiest way to define something that is kind of always there for us. Perhaps the easiest way to define consciousness. It's the redness of red. It's the painfulness of pain. It's the sweetness of honey. It's the fact that for everything we do and everything we are, there is something it is like. It feels like something to taste honey, feels like something to be happy or to be sad, feels like something simply to touch a piece of wood. It's what makes us more than biological objects roaming around in the subjective dark. it's magical to hear you explain it like that part of what you said reminded me of a conversation i had with daca keltner a few months ago he he's a scientist in berkeley he wrote a book on awe what's interesting is in

in that book they he kind of there's a bit of a struggle with a definition, maybe a bit like consciousness. And I actually find that very comforting that there are some things in life, like consciousness, like awe, that we can't necessarily accurately define, that we can't put an envelope around, that we can't use our kind of human language that by definition in many ways is limiting. I actually really like that. I think it leaves room for the mysterious and the mystical and the fact that as humans, we don't know everything yet. Do you know what I mean? I quite like that personally. It may be difficult for you as a scientist who's trying to study it so you define it

so you can actually measure things. But to me, I actually really like that. I think it's important that there is this space. And it's a bit of a misconception about how science progresses that we need these kind of watertight definitions that exhaustively capture every aspect of a phenomenon. I think about how we've come to define and think about life.

Life 150 years ago was as perplexing to people as consciousness might be now. People didn't understand how life could appear from matter. Did we need a spark of life, an elan vital, a divine spark perhaps? And now, even though we, as scientists, as doctors, we don't understand everything about life, there's no longer this big sense of mystery. Life is part of nature and we understand that. We can control aspects of life. We can even synthesize life in the lab now. But there's still something that's very difficult

if you ask people to define what life is. It's not one thing. It's many things. And I think the same is true for consciousness. It's not one thing. It's many things. But it's a collection of things that share this property that feels like something to be conscious.

And we can hold that definition. And so long as we know intuitively what we're talking about, that's fine. That's enough. One of the things that is, I think, remarkable for me when I think about your work when I think about your book when I think about this this topic of consciousness is how it speaks to so many different disciplines it speaks psychology, philosophy, maths, science, spirituality. It kind of, everything converges in this topic. It must make it very fun and challenging as well

to study and write about. But I think that's, yeah, it's really exciting for me to think of it through that lens. And as I said, when I was researching for this conversation, because consciousness is not something we've covered on this podcast before, right? And I've been really trying to think deeply about it, both from your work and from observing how other people are talking about it. Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, says you don't have consciousness, you are consciousness. Okay, so from his perspective, I found that really, really interesting. I was watching a Swami talk about consciousness through the lens of, I think, the Vedanta school of thought. And again, I don't claim to be an

expert here, but I really resonated with this, where they said, consciousness is actually within you. This Swami was saying, it's not a part of your body and mind. It illuminates and pervades your body and mind. It exists outside your body and mind. You may have a different perspective here. It is known through our minds and bodies. And without our minds and bodies, it is there, but it can't be known or experienced. And the way he was describing it was, again, I'll try and make this relevant to the audio listeners as well as people watching on video, but there's light here now in this space between us, right? But if I put my hand there, I can now really see the light the light is reflecting I'm aware of that studio light that's there and how it's coming off that

and I think he was explaining consciousness like that as in without the hand there the light's there but I can't feel it and experience it until my hand is there. So to me at least, and I think this is a good place to try and close off this conversation is, is consciousness in your view generated within us or does it exist there out in the ether and we simply experience it? ether and we simply experience it i think consciousness is the medium through which we experience everything whether that's the self or the world this means in a sense it's out there because we the if i look at you now i i experience a person sitting across a desk from me. So that seems to be out there in the world. There's something out there.

There's a body. There's all kinds of things going on out there. But my experience is of something external to me. But the mechanisms of consciousness, the actual stuff that gives rise, that makes experience of any kind possible, that I do think is inside the brain. But the contents of consciousness, and that's what's important in our lives to each of us. It's not the fact that consciousness happens to exist per se, it's the varied things that are

experienced, the world, the self, other people, emotions, light, color, beauty, awe, these are not purely within the brain. They depend on the body. They depend on the world. I mean, maybe in a trivial way, if you could get, so here's what I would believe, and again, I might be wrong, that in any given instant, what you're experiencing depends on the state of your brain at that point. Put the brain in a particular state, you get a particular experience of the world, of the body, of other people. But in our lives, to get the brain to be in particular states, we need the body, we need the world, we need other people. And in that sense, the contents of our consciousness depend fundamentally on the interactions between the brain, the body, the world, society, culture, the universe. I know you're doing incredible work. You are leaving us with a lot of things

to think about and reflect on. That's coming up to the studio. Thanks, Rangan. It's been a delight. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of

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