Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Narrowing the Gap Between the Body and the Mind | Neuroscientist, Dr. Antonio Damasio

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Antonio Damasio, a Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Trained as both neurologist and neuroscientist, Antonio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying affect and consciousness. His work on the role of emotions and feelings in decision-making has made a major impact in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Antonio is considered one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era - you may be familiar him with from his previous appearance on Finding Mastery - episode 168.Antonio is brilliant... When I speak with him, I find myself on the edge of my seat - my mind expanded and my heart thumbing with excitement for what he’s about to share.I wanted to have Antonio back on to discuss his recent work, which addresses the evolutionary development of mind – the intersection between feelings, consciousness, the mind and the nervous system – and how a deeper understanding can lead to a robustness of flourishing. His newest book: Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious is fantastic!_________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And that is to attribute things like consciousness or feeling for that matter to the brain alone. That is a tragic mistake. Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Michael Gervais and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, fortunate to work with some of the most extraordinary thinkers and doers across the planet. And the whole idea behind this podcast, behind these conversations is to learn from people, to pull back the curtain, to explore how these extraordinaries have committed to mastering both their craft and their minds. Now, our minds, flat out, our greatest asset.

We have to train them. We have to work with them. And if you want to learn more about how you can train your mind, this is just a quick reminder to check out the online psychological training course where we've pulled together the best practices to meet the unique intersection of the psychology of high performance and the psychology of well-being. We walk through 16 essential principles and skills for you to train your mind in the same way that we train world-class athletes. You can find it at findingmastery.net forward slash course.

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He's a professor of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He's trained as both a neurologist and a neuroscientist, and he's made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processing underlying affect and consciousness. I have been fascinated by his work on the role of emotions and feelings in decision-making, and he's made a major impact in the larger field of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. And he's made a major imprint on me as well. So Antonio is considered one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era. You may be familiar with him from a previous conversation we had on Finding Mastery. That was episode 168. It is loaded. It is so good. And I wanted to have Antonio back on. One,

because he's brilliant, both through his writings and his conversations with him. I find myself uniquely on the edge of my seat with both my mind expanded, but then my heart is thumping with excitement for what he's about to share, what he's about to open up. And two, more concretely, I wanted to discuss his recent work, which addresses the evolutionary development of mind. Now, if your mind begins to bend in this conversation, mine too. But what we're working on understanding in this conversation is this intersection between feelings, consciousness, the mind, and the nervous system, and how a deeper understanding of these can lead to a robustness of flourishing. So his newest book is called Feeling and Knowing,

Making Minds Conscious. It is fantastic. I highly encourage that you pick it up with that this jump right into this week's conversation with the inimitable dr antonio dimasio dr dimasio it is a pleasure to be here with you today so how are you i'm fine glad to be here today too. And glad to talk to you. Your work has been meaningful in my life and it's been disruptive to the industry. And so maybe can we just start by level setting on a couple definitions that you have been very clear and innovative with. Can you start with talking about emotions and feelings and the difference between those two? And to put them in, your science in poeticness is brilliant, like the way that you do it. So I just wanted to hear you say it. I've read it so much, but I just wanted to hear you say it.

Okay. I'm glad you asked that because there's really a fundamental difference. Emotions and feelings are very different things. And what is a pity is that most of the time people confuse the two. Sometimes they use emotion and they mean feeling. Sometimes they use feeling and they actually mean emotion. and it's in part the result of not having had from very early on a very clear separation of the two. And I suspect that actually when I started my work, I had not realized that there ought to be very clear different words for these two processes. And the fundamental difference is that emotion is all about action. And in fact,

even the etymology of the word is partly near in that direction. It's about movement, it's about action, and it's about action directed to the outside, emotion. Whereas feeling is not at all about action, it's subjective. It's all internal. So you couldn't really have two more different things. One, acting. The other, something that is interior. Emotions are public. Anybody can look at my emotion and decide what my state of mind is, make guesses, diagnosis, whatever.

Feelings are entirely private, and my feelings you do not know. You will never see them. You will never be able to look at a feeling. You will never be able to observe my feelings. Purely internal, purely in the mind. So what could be more different? Action, publicness on one side, internal, subjective, entirely hidden in a mental process.

And I say mental in quotes because as you probably know from reading me, I have my doubts about what mental really means and what people mean when they say mantle. So that's the big difference. And so the acting of emotion is very important to underline and actually to connect it with something that I'm sure you know all about. And that is the profession of acting. If it weren't for the fact that emotions are public, and they're constructed out of little different bits of actions in different parts of our body,

from the face to the entire body and posture to the hands, there wouldn't be no acting. There would never have been theater. Because theater is about people learning to exhibit emotions in a credible way, such that the public can believe that they're actually going through certain kinds of feelings, which they may or may not be, depending on the school of acting. But this possibility of mastering the art of putting together different acts in your face or in your body and conveying to somebody else the idea that you are in love or that you are in fear, it is really the heart both of theater and of this set of phenomena that we call emotions, and are very represented at our effects.

But all of this, in the end, exists to serve one's imagination about what one may be feeling and to do with the reactions that we've had to our thoughts or to things that are happening to us. End of story. I love it. It's the poetic nature that is layered and sits on top of deep science that I love how you have been able to capture something that is novel each time I hear you say it, but is grounded in principles that are well-researched and well-established. Now, just to be clear, I've got emotions right now. So I feel in my body, I'm aware in my body

of my heart is beating with a little bit of a flutter and there's right at the bottom of my solar plex or the top of my stomach, there's like a buzzing. And then that's the emotion. Now the feeling, the way I'm interpreting that, if I'm clear, the way I'm interpreting that is that it's excitement, excitement to talk to you. And so you can can't you don't know my feelings exactly you if if you were to see if we're to to when you look at me you can probably see a flush in my skin you could see right so it's really you know the the key is public versus private emotion is public, feeling is private. And there are constant interactions. So as time moves, you can be emoting and having feelings that correspond to those emotions, and they may be connected to the moment, to what's around you, or you may have a thought that provokes

a certain feeling internally and may be expressed in part also in your body. So you actually, it's the public and the private, and it's a two-way street. Things are constantly moving in one direction or another. The only point at which you suspend this, of course, is if you run under anesthesia, if you faint, or during certain portions of sleep, in which you are in deep sleep and you don't have any of this going on. But even during sleep, of course, during dreams, part of this process is revived not fully but in part feelings and emotions emotions are public feelings are private not that different than thoughts or mental

images and language so this is a new idea for me and i'm running it by you right now which is thoughts are private and we express thoughts and or mental representations or images in our mind through language, through words, or sometimes paintings, or sometimes whatever the way we can convey it publicly. Is that another analogy? That's perfectly correct. So there you're talking about the issue of quote-unquote translation, because we languaged creatures, we can translate thinking processes and whatever is in our minds in the form of whatever language we choose to use. And sometimes that language, by the way, can be pictorial language, can be the language of a painter that transmits a certain idea, either through something that is factually very concrete or something that may be even abstract. And the function of emotions, to be clear, has two parts to it, which is the management of life, to help with the management of life, right?

And that is to provide motivation. Tell me if I have this right. Motivation, it's really the alert systems of whether I need to take some action or feel a certain way about an event that's happening external and or potentially internal. Yeah, and sometimes it goes even more than alert. Sometimes some of the actions concretely already direct you in a certain way.

But what is interesting is to think that if you think evolutionarily, I would bet that the majority of these two processes came at different times. A lot of the creatures that had feelings probably did not have a very complex emotive system necessarily. So in a way, feelings may have preceded. But in another way, if you enlarge the definition of emotion, it may have been there very early as well. For example, you could imagine that there is a small creature with a few cells that is suddenly responding to extreme cold temperatures.

And that creature could contract. That in of itself is a bodily expression, and you could interpret that as a pre-emotive state. So it's as simple as you can get. Creature is here. Suddenly there's very cold temperature induced into, say, a battery dish, and the creature contracts. So that's motion.

And in a way, it's motion that is seeable to the naked eye, in some cases, to the outside. So that's sort of the beginning of what emotion must have been. And then the other thing is that creatures that developed feelings, which, by the way, require not only the existence of a body with a life inside and with a good or bad state, but also requires a nervous system, because otherwise you won't get feeling. It's quite likely that this again began fairly early. And the first creatures that had feelings were not creatures with our kinds of brain and with our kinds of thinking process. They were obviously very, very simple to begin with, but they had to have a nervous system. And the key there is that I believe, and this is one of my strongest points to defend, it's a very strong hypothesis, that you would never have gotten feeling if you did not

have this interaction between the nervous system and the rest of the living body. That's the magic. And sometimes people fall into the trap, even people that think that they are actually helping me in my position, and say, well, this all comes from representing the body. Well, true. Of course, you have to represent the body if you're going to be conscious of what your organism is, but the representation is too weak. You need to have something deeper, which is the interaction, the commingling of that that belongs to the nervous system and that that

belongs to the body without the nervous system. And this thing is made possible by the fact that one is inside the other, which is something that people constantly miss. People, you know, I tire of listening to explanations of consciousness that start with how things look in the outside and how great our vision system is and how wonderful that is to generate consciousness. Sorry, you know, this had to start much earlier than vision. This started modestly early on with the fact that you have one part of this equation,

which is the nervous system, inside the living body. It's not, you know, the landscape outside my windows is there quietly, and I'm here. That landscape is not inside my body at all. I can make a picture of it the same way that you could make a photograph of it, and that picture is inside my brain momentarily. But in the case of the body and the nervous system, it's a different story. The nervous system is inside the body. The two things can interact and they do. And that interaction is through mitigated and experienced through feelings. That interaction generates feelings.

Generates feelings. Okay. It's not mitigates. That's not the right word. Yeah. It generates feelings. So it's the fact that you have denuded axons. You have these axons that are part of very, very simple neurons,

early neurons from our interoceptive nervous system. And those exons are prey to everything that is in their surround, different chemical molecules, different other exons that can interact at any point in the exon, not just at the synaptic plate like happens, for example, with our refined systems, the systems that you and I are using right now, which allow us to see, to talk, to think. That's very sophisticated machinery, late, late, late in the game. Whereas the things that produce feelings are very humble. It's the most primitive systems that we have.

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and use the code findingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. So you layer on top of this with very concrete language about ownership. And so the organism owns its mind, its particular mind, right? And I want to get into the mind with you as it relates to feelings, feeling, emotions, but more importantly, consciousness. And if we just go upstream for a moment, when I was in graduate school, we all knew that Descartes started the thought of mind-body dualism born out of Aristotle's position, Plato's position about the mind. And Descartes tried to pull it apart to look at it, to examine it.

But it was the separation that created some problems, if I can be bold. And then we all knew though, that the mind-body integration is more accurate than the separate dualistic approach. But there was a lack of sophistication to take it deep, to take that thought deep, which is what you have done. And so I think the best way in for me is about when you talk about ownership. But I want to pause here and say, if you go way upstream to talk about the integration, where do you start when you begin to explain that formula. Okay. So let me see if I can find a way of picking up on your question and making the story more clear rather than more confused.

Let's start with your word ownership. The key to understanding consciousness and the value of consciousness is defining self and an owner. Why is consciousness an interesting issue and an interesting problem? Very simply because it allows you to know and be certain of the fact that whatever is in your mind is happening to you, and it belongs to you. These are sort of odd ways of describing it, but there's no better way. So you can say, well, consciousness is what gives you a self. That's perfectly correct, but it's not sufficiently clear. A greater clarity comes from the notion of ownership and the notion, the answering of a question. Could there be a confusion?

Could it be that I am looking at you right now on the screen and it's not me doing the looking? Is somebody beside me? Somebody somewhere else? And of course, the answer is no. So I am looking at you. And what is in my mind is your picture, as I see it on the screen, and your voice. And those are in my mind, and sure enough, they belong to me. So trying to understand the problem of consciousness is trying to understand how this is possible. How is it that I am, without any equivocation, certain that what I have in my mind is mine,

which means what I have in my mind belongs to my mind, belongs to my living organism, and belongs right now. And that's the end of the story. So ownership is really the key. And so the project of understanding what consciousness is, is the project of understanding how is it that my mind could allow me, me, my mind, same thing, to be convinced that this is mine. That's it. And I get to be convinced that this

is mine, exactly through this process that I was just describing, which is this thing inside the other. It's mine because it's inside me. You know, what is happening to me that is personal and is myself is this interaction between the body, my living body, and the nervous system that is inside me. And if it weren't this way, if the nervous system had happened to be outside, maybe it would be different. But it isn't that way. Nature put this together. And that's why, by the way, that the possibility of cells and consciousness is, in my view, so widespread. I think that the minute you get to flies, very, very different creatures from us teeny creatures but lo and behold you look at those nervous systems and they're actually very similar to ours in the plan you know the ground plan of

that those nervous systems is very similar and so i think very comparable interactions must be going on and maybe a teeny little consciousness quote unquote But it is the same thing that is happening with me. So by the way, none of this is human only. Okay. All right. So this is where it gets really interesting for me, is your position here, which is nervous system, then feelings, then consciousness. Correct.

So feelings give rise to consciousness. Exactly. Feelings are the beginning of consciousness. So the way I like to see it right now is feelings are the inaugural event of consciousness. And it's very, very dramatic because feelings are spontaneously, naturally conscious, or they wouldn't be of any use to you. What would be the use of you having pain if you were not conscious of the pain? What would be the use of you being hungry and therefore being told by your nervous system, by your organism, go and get eat, get something to eat,

if it wouldn't be naturally conscious. So once you get the first homeostatic feelings, namely hunger, thirst, pain, well-being, malaise, desire. All of these things are the immediate representations at a conscious level of states of your organism. And they were selected in evolution for the very important reason that they provide living organisms with a way out to save themselves. Even well-being is informative, because when you are in a state of well-being, you know, sometimes because somebody said, oh, well, that's okay for hunger and thirst and pain. What about well-being? What does well-being do to you? Well, it does something very important.

It tells me that right now I don't have any immediate needs from the point of view of my metabolism. I can go around, take a walk, make love, do whatever. It is actually extremely informative because you're not going to go and make love when you are in pain. But if you are in well-being, then you can do other things. So it's very constructive. Unless making love and pain is very complicated for you.

For some, it is. That's right. Okay, so to make your framework concrete, I would love to apply your lenses on a specific fear. And this is a problem, a human problem that fascinates me. It is our obsessive concern about what others think of us. So could you pull your theory through that obsessive concern of what others have with ourselves. And so that fear is paramount to human potential from my point of view. The concern we have about what others think of us.

Correct. Okay. Well, that's interesting because that sort of pulls it all the way up into current types, evolutionary speaking. So when you're talking about hunger, thirst, pain, and so forth, you're talking about things that, in fact, we share with all sorts of creatures, provided they have a nervous system. And you can, by the way, even see behaviorally that they have those things. Even in flies, you can observe things that indicate that they have certain kinds of concerns, certain kinds of problems at that moment, and that there are responses that they're having to that. But one problem that flies or any such creatures are not going

to have is being worried about what others think, others of any species. And we are because our social relations have become so important and have become so critical to the point that in certain ways, they are almost at the level of fundamental homeostatic slash metabolic needs. It's like food, like drink. Why? Because what others think of us can influence how others will treat us, how others will allow us or not to progress according to the plans we have for our lives. Anything social is always a projection of our minds into other minds and comes out of the multiplicity of other minds that surround us. That's why almost everything that you find in social endeavors, human social endeavors,

including politics or the arts, neural structures are organizing it. Because although the neural structures that are fundamental are in interaction with the nervous system, at a certain point, the nervous system is really in command. The interaction is critical in order for us to remain conscious. Once that happens, it really smears over everything else. You know, it's very interesting. If I can make a little diversion, which is what I'm doing all the time, as you can hear. Many years ago, I remember hearing from some of my older colleagues

and some of the people that I most admire in our field say, well, vision is so developed, is so important, is so refined, that if we are going to understand consciousness, which must be very refined as well, we need to understand vision. This was a very bad idea because everybody that tried to understand visual consciousness or tried to understand consciousness

through vision ended up in the ditch. Nothing came out of it. But then there was another thing that says, okay, fine, it doesn't work. So we still need to know how consciousness, what kind of consciousness exists around vision so that you can have a visual consciousness or an auditory consciousness. Another dead end. Why?

Because once you have feelings about whatever is happening to you and about your life as it goes on, you have the material to construct your ownership yourself. And once you have that, whatever comes into your mind is blessed by that consciousness. It gets that support of consciousness from the fundamental process of life. So you don't need to have a visual consciousness or a smelling consciousness or whatever. You just need to be conscious, which really means that you are a feeling creature and that you are aware that what is going in your mind, like a sort of ticker tape that is crossing your mind

in different tracks, visual, auditory, tactile, that all of that belongs to you. So you're going to spread over the goods of consciousness through feeling into everything that is happening around you. Okay. Brilliant. And I'm not satisfied. Okay.

Okay. So because I understand this quote from you, we are feeling creatures that think and thinking creatures that feel. Okay. So the part that I'm trying to wrestle with is when I look, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole as you beautifully described, the rabbit hole of vision only. But when I look into another person or a crowd of people, and then there's a thought that happens. And that thought is, oh, they're critiquing me. They're judging me. I might not be good enough. the fear that I might be embarrassed, the fear that I might be kicked out of the tribe. There's the triangulation here between thoughts, emotions, and feelings. And part of it is the content of the mind, And part of it is the content of the body, the feelings and emotions. And so this is the part that I want to understand from you because

I can also, the same actor or another person right next to me can look to those, that same group of people and have a completely different experience because their thinking pattern is, I can't wait to share my insights and practices. I can't wait to learn based on their response. Oh, I can't wait for this to happen. Now we've got excitement. We've got interest. We've got other feelings and it's maybe the same emotions, but different feelings.

So this is where I get confused. And I would love for you to, if you could apply your lens on the obsessive nature we have of other people's opinions of us. I think that that precise question clearly has to do more with contents of mind than it has to do with the process of feeling to begin with, or the process of consciousness that is consequent to feeling. So then you are describing true contents, you're describing not a particular phenomenon, not a fundamental phenomenon of our, you know, our architecture and function, mental function.

You're describing something that is really has to do with the facts. You know, it's like describing a city or like describing, for example, I'm in the middle, it's an urban landscape, but there's also some not so urban landscape. It has to do with Bel Air over there to the right. It's describing the structure that is in the mind or in the city or whatever. And different parts of that structure can cause certain emotive reactions and can cause certain feelings. And as this is happening, you have to realize there's one part of both your mind and mine they are not accessing,

they're not central enough to provoke an emotive response to have a feeling attached to them. You see? So it's really, it's essential that you see that the problem is one, you have this moving target, it never stops. You know, the image I was having right now, when you're, do you ever do voice memos on your iPad? I'm constantly dictating memos. Oh, yeah, yeah, I do. I do. Yes. I dictate whole articles. And when I'm dictating, when I look, you know, you have this thing constantly, you know, moving forward, and once you hit the stop, the thing continues. That's exactly what

our mind is like. It's a continuation of these phenomena, and some of them are very central, and they are allotted appropriate attention, which simply means that they are more more robust, they're more, they're better shaped. And others are a little bit on the fringes. This, by the way, is sort of classical psychology. And it was very well worked out. When you go to William James or even to Freud, basically they were describing this, and they did a very good job of it. So if you have these multiple components, you can have all that complexity that you are concerned with. In other words, you're there you exist and you there are people around you that obviously will

relate to you in one way or another and you're perfectly authorized to and you will have to think of some of those people as people that will support you and engage well with you and then think about some other people as people that you have reasons to be concerned with or fear because they may not like you and they may do something to you that is not going to be beneficial. But all of this is going on at the same time. Now, I thought that behind all all this there was a question how would consciousness be allotted to which of those layers and i think the answer is that first of all we don't control it it is automatically assigned to a certain content because that content is more neat.

That content is more vivid. You know, it's a little bit like having a part of an image that is very sharp, it's in focus, and a part of the image that is not in focus. And the part that is in most focus is the one that is going to be commanding the response in terms of emotions and feelings. That's the one. Can I pause you here? Anytime.

I love this sharpness and fogginess of an image and would it be does it fit in your model that the sharpness there are some biological innate reasons why some images are sharp but there's also another set of practices that would sharpen images, such as a repetitive, chronic, consistent rehearsal that other people's opinions are scary. And then that becomes a sharp focus, maybe born out of trauma, maybe born out of a learning mechanism from the family. Complete agreement.

That's exactly it. There are certain things that are naturally sharp, and they're naturally sharp because they are of such value to us. And by the way, that sharpness in some cases is actually determined by evolution itself and by the way we constitute it. So there are certain things that are always be sharp, certain themes that are always going to be wrapped onto. And it depends, varies a little bit with the personalities, but that's going to be there. And then there's certain things that are going to be sharp

that have become sharpable out of your own experience. And you may have had, for example, an experience with certain kinds of people that will make certain events that ought to be trite suddenly become important. So that's exactly what you were describing. Full agreement. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines

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I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. Okay, brilliant. And if I think we should probably just level set to I just want to go back and this is more for folks following us is that nervousness to feelings, feelings to consciousness. And then when we are, when we become conscious of the content of our mind, then we begin and I shorthand that by, when we have awareness of the content of our mind. And again, the mind is, you know, a very complex, very complex system, if you will. But it's really, the core of it is about representations and images, awareness of the world outside and within.

And the awareness from within comes from the nervous system. I think I have that right. But my pointed question here is, if fitting in your model, how would you help somebody that has a terrifying fear or a low-level fear? So terrifying meaning I will never get on stage. I cannot get up on stage, even though I think deeply and have a high accuracy about the way I'm thinking. I would never go on stage because of the fear of other people's opinion

or the more mundane, which is, oh my gosh, I don't think I have the courage to go up there. But okay, I'm going to try. Either set of scenarios. How would you help people? Would you help them by understanding the content of their mind can be changed, or it can be put to sharp focus or grayed out focus? Or would you say, no, get better at interpreting the emotions and so that you have more volitional control over how you determine that emotion to be experienced, meaning that you have better control of your feelings. So how would you, of course, correct me if I'm wrong on it, but I want to also ask you about the application.

How would you help somebody based on your model? My answer, first of all, I think that there are many ways of attempting it. But I'm a great believer in having first an understanding of what the mechanism is. So the more, of course, you could be dealing with somebody who has a complete hatred of anything abstract. It's very difficult to explain things of this sort

to people who don't want to imagine the process. And there are people that can be very intelligent, but they just don't want to enter a mechanism and to go into that. Because we've been talking about things that you're trying to make concrete, but in the end

appear as obstructions because you don't have all the detail. You cannot film it and show it. The mind. You're talking about the mind and feelings. Yeah. You're talking about things that are, for me, they're very concrete.

Actually, I see these things in operation. And I think those scientists that are able to be very energetic, very often get to the, I mean, you probably do great physics when you're able to imagine things that even I can't imagine.

And the same thing with things that have to do with biology. You need to have a certain amount of imagination to be able to understand how it works and how it might not work. But still explaining the steps using whatever language is adjusted to a specific person is the best way to get it unmounted. You need to say, look, there is something that is happening here that does not have to do with the reality of danger, but rather with the way it's operating you so that it makes it look like you are in danger, but you're really not. And if you get the person to understand that first step, then you can do whatever other manipulations you can do, such as, for example, the person's own fear of going on stage,

going on the stage with a person. But I think you need to know the background. And you have to assume, and I may be, you know, I'm not involved in doing that kind of work. Although for a time in my life, I actually did neurology and psychiatry, which was, I'm very glad I did. I'm very glad that in the end, I'm an MD, and I was in the medical school, and I had to glad I did. I'm very glad that in the end, I'm an MD and I was in the medical school

and I had to cope with patients in different conditions. That gave me a perspective that is fabulous. But I'm not, obviously, a practitioner now. No, no. I absolutely respect it. Let me tell you one thing. As we were talking about consciousness and its beginnings and the connection to feeling and the existence of another system,

there's something that is very important that you have to have on your program. There is one monstrous mistake that people have been doing over and over again, and I did it for many years. And that is to attribute things like consciousness or feeling to the brain alone. That is a tragic mistake. So if you if you read most of the philosophical discussions on consciousness, the big problem, whether it is the art problem or something that passes for it, is always how could the brain do this? How can the brain, which is physical, do something which is mental? Who asked you to have the brain do it for you? That's absolutely unnecessary.

The brain, which by the way, which is a truly short word for nervous system, the brain is simply acting as one of the two partners that are essential for the process. But the body is not at all the minor partner. The brain is the decisive part. The nervous system is the decisive partner. But to have a feeling, to have consciousness without the body is an absurdity.

And it's precisely if you are, if you concentrate on feelings rather than on the rest, that you realize that this is absurd because what is the feeling of? The feeling is of the body. The feeling is of hunger or pain or desire. It's always about the state of the body. It's describing the state of the body. It's describing the state of the body.

And that's why it's so critical that the story be told from this sort of humble position somewhere in the course of life on Earth, organisms that developed this, quote unquote, mutation for, I'm using terms appropriate for the day, a completely different level, but this is like a mutation. So organisms that develop this possibility, this arrangement that generates feeling, that was so good that it was selected and stayed on and the organisms that we have today that came out of that out of that line have to have to have this this uh this element you know this is so revolutionary like there's you've just done something very eloquent is that you have

fundamentally and gracefully challenged david chalmers you know question about the hard consciousness the problem of hard consciousness which is you know again like you said why and how can a biological organism with physical and biochemical neurochemistry, like give rise to consciousness, give rise to mental states. And you're saying, wait, hold on. It's actually given rise to the ability to feel, which is the ability to interpret the emotional signals that we're experiencing. To interpret and to gain knowledge about the state of life in your body. That why oh that's so good thank you for adding that that is that's really clear that is really good

that's why my humble little book is called feeling and knowing feeling and the knowledge that that brings and then it makes you conscious so it when you think about it, it's terrific. Because up to the point where feelings emerge, organisms have a blind, quote unquote, way of running their lives. Their lives were, actually there was a lot of intelligence, but it's all covert intelligence. I mean, when you look at organisms without nervous systems, whether you're talking about simple bacteria

or much more complex organisms, multi-cellular, even multi-system, those organisms were very intelligent, except that they didn't know that they were intelligent. And they don't today, because what they have is mechanisms to adjust homeostasis. They do have to seek proper temperature around them. They do have to seek energy sources. They do have to have a metabolism. And yet they don't know they're doing those

things. What does it mean they don't know? It means that they cannot represent internally either the problem or the solution that they are very gingerly producing. Once you have nervous systems and once feelings emerge, then this new way, this brave new way of managing life begins. And that's a way in which knowledge and deliberation play a role. I have pain and I can do something about it. Whereas the equivalent of pain in an organism without consciousness without feeling is not going to lead to anything conscious is going to lead to some kind of adjustment, but without the possibility of doing it deliberately. So

knowledge, feeling and knowledge are the key. Okay. And I think it's important to differentiate because there are confusing words for many. Consciousness and the mind, they are not the same thing. They're not the same. The mind is really about a succession of images, which are really patterns, which are really constructed with maps

in the nervous system. And it's this succession, this relentless continuity, which is really very filmic. That's why, you know, again, so interesting, since you're interested in this curious byways, why do we have film? Why did people get so interested in creating film? Well, they got interested in creating film the same way that before that they have been interested in creating literature to begin with, in which you describe series of actions and reactions that can relate to what a life is, that people could enjoy

analyzing and learning something from. How about this, Dr. Masio? I think that film, on the film part, not the literature part, but on the film part, one of the reasons we love it is because we are so unprepared to deal with our own stream of mind, our own streaming of mental content, and it becomes overwhelming. It becomes, in an undisciplined way, it loops around itself, or it becomes wildly problematic with thinking about the future and images of future danger, and that we're so undisciplined with it that, please, let me just offload this internal burden I have because I haven't examined it. I haven't done the introspection to understand the content of my mind and the streams of my mind. Please, let me just watch somebody else's images and just give me a break.

Give me a break. That's exactly it. Film is a break. It is a break. It's a close proximity. It feels at home. It feels familiar. Absolutely.

So that actually allows me to help you with the answer, this distinction between consciousness and mind. So mind is like a film track running. No consciousness, it's just mind. It's just mind flowing. Consciousness is when that film is running and lo and behold, I know that that film is inside me. It's my film. That's when you get conscious.

And by the way, you're quite right. People are constantly confusing consciousness and mind. It's one of the problems. In fact, it's one of the great difficulties of either writing about this or even talking about this is the state in which people are of not having made those distinctions. And of course, in favor of the people that don't make the distinctions, the fact is that many scientists, many philosophers that write about this have not made the distinctions to begin with, and they've made the problem even more difficult to manage.

So obviously, that's a problem. But it takes time. Let's do something philosophical for just a moment, which is you would say, and I would say, my mind. I am Mike. So in that statement, what is, or who is, or where is, wherever you want to take it, the mind, my mind, you know, I am, I have a mind. Where does the I, how do you describe the I? constant reference that is happening between the things the reference that

that you have from the things that are occurring in your mind to this sense of self and it is not in the place it's it's it's at a very high level feeling is for example if you're sure having the mind of this moment, you know, and I have this iPad in front of me and there you are and there I am, unfortunately, because I don't like to walk. And you have your nice logo. Okay, so you have all of this stuff.

But I also have, in a different language system, because this is actually a visual language system with an auditory track. I also have this other track, which is internal, in which is feeling. Because unavoidably, I feel in a certain way. I don't have any pains. I'm not hungry, I'm not thirsty, but it's there and it's that that gives me the continuity and that is the point of reference. Anything that is happening, whether it is on the screen as i'm watching you or

what we normally say there's a very interesting expression in the back of my mind in the back of my mind really is not in the back it's really below you know in this continuous tracks it's really below with less definition. They're things that I'm actually thinking and that I'm vaguely seeing, they're vague forms. But then it doesn't make any difference whether it is the back of my mind or my mind, I have me. And me is the fact that I'm alive.

It's the fact that I feel like something. It is something to be me. Me is the fact that I'm alive. It's the fact that I feel like something. It is something to be me. But the language, I think that the problem, where many people create the problem is that when they want that expressed, for example, in a linguistic way, so I would be looking at you and something would be saying, I am me, I am me, I am Antonio, I'm Antonio. Obviously, it's not like that. It's done in a nonverbal way. And the image is not visual or auditory. The image is the image of my body alive in a very quiet way

there in the background. And if you suspend, and by the way, why do you need when you want to have an operation, why do you need anesthesia? You need anesthesia because anesthesia is a way of suspending that process. Anesthesia is a sure bet to stop the body from being represented. And that's what surgeons and patients have sought for millennia in order to permit surgery.

You wouldn't do surgery if you did. There's plenty of horror stories about people having surgery made without anesthesia. And then of course, the feeling is there at the at the top of the heap and making it impossible. But when you when you use it, and aesthetics, you have the possibility of canceling that process, and you are no longer aware of your body. Okay. Emotions are local. They're here. They're in the physical form.

The body is local. The brain is local. The nervous system is local. Are feelings non-local? I think the mind is non-local. Consciousness is non-local. But the content of the mind is non-local. Consciousness is non-local. But the content of the mind is local.

Yeah. So do you agree with that? Yeah. Well, I wouldn't want to put too much stress on that because you may go in an alley that will be blind. I think that mind is local and consciousness is local and feeling is local too. Oh, you do? You think all of them are local? They're here? Yeah, I think so. I think they are

here. It's just that our minds are so fortunately rich that we can, as you increase the complexity of your analysis, the capacity increases, this all looks more and more ethereal. But I don't think it is necessarily. I think it's tied to a very strong reality, and that reality is our biological reality. Here's where I go with that, is that the content of my mind is local. It's unique to me.

My feelings are unique to me, and so I have intimate awareness of them when I'm aware of them, I should say. However, I have this, my mind now, using my mind, my mind can interpret accurately or inaccurately and meet another person in a non-local way. And this is where I get, it's amorphous for me here, but the non-local is this idea that for me, that I have a mind, I know you have a mind. It doesn't feel like my mind is in me. It feels as though the content of my mind is unique to me. and the watching of my mind or the consciousness of my mind

also feels like it's not biological. And I follow your thinking that it's not that like what Chalmers has suggested that from biology comes consciousness, like how do we figure that out? And I think you've aptly pointed out that that's the wrong question. And so I also don't believe that the mind comes from the biological experience. And this is some of where I have a hard time discerning. Is this overly influenced by a spiritual practice that there is life after death, that there is something beyond the biology that we experience now. And so this is where the philosophical, spiritual, and biological conversations come alive to me. And if I just stopped talking, I know that you would take us somewhere, but I'm wondering if you would take us to a spiritual spirituality as a construct that is related to consciousness, the mind and biology. Yeah, that's a very interesting question.

It's very interesting point that you're making. And it's one about which I have a serious difficulty in making sort of easy pronouncements. Because on the one hand, I am a strong believer in mental refinement, in the refinement of our thinking, the refinement of our feelings, and in the elevation that those refinements produce in human beings and in societies that are made of those human beings or that are influenced by those human beings. So I have an enormous respect for that.

What I do not know is the exact nature of it biologically. And so I would make very clear that I had enormous respect for it. And I was thinking, for example, of having just quite recently had a conversation with a friend that had to do with those aspects of life. So, but I don't know enough, and probably I never will, to make intelligent comments about it in one way or another. One thing is very good, which I'm sure you're very aware of, that it's very good to know when to stop. There are certain things about which I'm very passionate and that I can defend.

I have the data to defend and I can have the arguments and certain things that I'm intrigued by and admire and I'm an idiot. So best things to Sean. I love it. One of the best pieces of advice that I've had comes from my father-in-law. And he says, listen, when you're going to give a speech about something, be brief and be seated. You know, it's just like sometimes going on too long is a problem. Okay.

So. Certainly one of my problems. Mine too. But what you've just said to me, the way interpret is like i don't know i i don't know what to say about this problem of life after death i i think i told you already i i much prefer when you talk about serious things and this is serious things uh i think it's much better if you talk about the things that you are convinced of and you have some kind of certainty which maybe maybe poorly based maybe stupid maybe you shouldn't be confident but there

are things that i'm confident i don't mind talking about and the things that i'm not confident and i do mind talking about i love love it. I appreciate it. It gives me deeper comfort in the things that you do talk about. So that is appreciative. Okay, so listen, I just want to say thank you. I hope that this conversation has...

We have been at this for a long time, my God. I know, it went by fast. And so I want to say thank you. And I hope that this conversation has done service to your brilliance. Oh, come on. Yeah. No, no, no. You've made a serious difference in our community, in my life.

And so thank you from a distance. So I want to encourage folks to check out your newest book and then check out all of your books. And thank you for making the disruption in the fields around how to understand the mind and the body, consciousness, feelings, the whole gamut. And then before we sign off, would you wave me off from this thought that you can train your craft, your technical skills, you can train your body, physical movement, and you can train your mind. Yeah. Would you say yes to that?

Yeah, absolutely. And how do you train your mind? Thinking, analyzing, exercising. You know there's something very similar that you can do. Of course it's better if you do it early in life than late, but you know you just do and do again and try to do better. I can write exactly on the same topic with numerous, numerous attempts at clarifying your thoughts. And actually write it in words, in pencils. I'm a great believer in pencils with erasers. It's absolutely essential.

Pencil and eraser. And I write and I erase and I come back and I modify. And a lot of the things you end up writing are garbage, but it's a great way when you look and you come back and you realize where the flaw is in the argument and you try to make it better. And none of that

protects you from still saying stupid things or writing stupid things, which is worse. But it goes a long way to avoiding it. I love every part of what you just said. Dr. Demasio, thank you.

Thank you very much, Michael. Thank you. Have a good day. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support

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