Julian Dorey Podcast - #349 - Harvard Neuroscientist on “GHOST” Receptor, Spiritual Realm & Dream Illusions | Baland Jalal

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Baland Jalal is a Danish neuroscientist at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, whose work spans clinical neuroscience, cultural psychology, and the biology of altered state of consciousness. Originally from Denmark and of Kurdish-Iraqi descent, he is best known for his research on sleep paralysis. BALAND's LINKS: IG: https://www.instagram.com/balandjalal/# YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCumyt6mGLaVO4_N1LkAoXdA WEBSITE: https://balandjalal.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Intro 01:46 – Baland’s Classy Look & Upbringing 12:34 – Nations Are Just Stories 20:54 – Egypt Studies & Early Discoveries 30:50 – Brain Growth & Neuroplasticity 42:24 – Curing Depression with TMS 53:48 – The Power of REM Sleep 01:03:51 – Neuroscience of Empathy & OCD 01:19:39 – Academia, Peer Review, & Frustrations 01:29:10 – Why Dreams Feel So Real 01:38:21 – The Science Behind Dream Recall 01:47:35 – Time Distortion in Dreams 01:57:52 – Dreams as Emotional Therapy, Ghost Receptor 02:06:43 – Science Meets Spirituality 02:14:61 – The Mystery of the Hatman 02:26:10 – Science & Religion Intertwined 02:29:63 – Epigenetics & Generational Trauma 02:51:33 – Free Will & The Brain 03:09:63 – Intellect vs Emotion Systems CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 349 - Baland Jalal Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One day in California, as I'm walking about, I bump into this guy who turns out to me one of the greatest neuroscientists alive, if not the greatest. Who? V.S. Ramachandra. Take his class, sit in the front row, and every question he has, I'm just sitting there answering. I think he got impressed with that, and so he took me into his laboratory, ended up becoming friends. In fact, we became best friends. Can you believe it? It was unbelievable. And this guy, who's on Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, literally just got that announcement.

And I'm sitting there with him talking about the human brain. Just started to just read books. Read books 24 hours. The first explanation. The brain is never wasteful. Why do dreams have this bizarre, strange feel to it? And the reason is simple. This is in REM sleep. These are the dreams where you see yourself on the moon. You're wrestling with an alligator. Why is that important? When you experience your dreams and you see yourself being chased and you can get away and things are dangerous, you're more likely to face situations like that in your real life and survive. The one last night was so detailed. That's only a few minutes.

So Romashandra and I wanted to do an experiment on time perception in dreams. So That's crazy. That's really possible. Is there any science that could link this to some sort of otherworldly or spiritual endeavor? This is a very interesting and a deep question actually. So... Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help.

Thank you. Listen, it's a good look. This is a really, I was telling you before, like, you got to keep this. Everyone's known for like one very, like, simple thing online. You got the simple thing going. It's classy. It makes you look even more learned than you are. Thank you.

And you happen to have like good hair and look like Michael Jackson in his prime a little bit. Well, thank you, brother. I appreciate that. Listen, it's going to work out for you, I promise. But I'm very, very excited to talk to you today. Same. Dr. Jalal. Same here.

It was very cool to see you reach out because, as you might imagine, I get a lot of people reaching out. It's usually like I'm hitting my head against the table. Like, what the fuck? So then when I get one where I'm like, woo, that's good. I'm pretty excited about it. It's like finding a $100 bill on the ground. Thank you, brother.

I'm excited, man. So you do a litany of different things as a neuroscientist. You are currently researching at Harvard, correct? Correct. Among many other things, I'm sure we'll talk about today. But where you found, I guess, like a real niche. expertise is particularly within like sleeping dreams and OCD. Right.

Is that fair to say? That's fair to say, yeah. There are some areas. So sleep paralysis and sleep and dreams is something that I've, you know, been fascinating with for a very long time. And OCD, as you mentioned, was something that I bumped into later on. But yeah, these are all areas that I'm interested in. It all started, if you want to go back there, you know, to my mind.

That's exactly what I want to do. You're reading my mind. So let's go back to when I was a team. in Copenhagen. So I grew up in Copenhagen. I grew up in the hood in a ghetto-like area. And so one day I was sleeping in my bed, you know, calmly. Everything was supposed to be calm, nothing dramatic. And I found myself, you know, that I saw, I found myself waking up consciously. So my eyes became aware they opened. I saw my surroundings. I saw my room. But I was paralyzed from head to toe. So I couldn't move, you know, at all. I was paralyzed. And at this moment,

at this point, I was scared. What do I do? Like, I try to scream, you know, oh, my mom, dad, you know, but the words just wouldn't come out. My throat was no words. Very scary at this point. And suddenly I have this realization that there's an ominous creature in the corner of the room and it's approaching me and it's coming closer and closer. And then finally it was on my chest strangling me. Oh, whoa. You know, and pressing on my chest, and then I saw my legs flying up and down, and it was all this bizarre experience. And, you know, I was sure at this point I was going to die.

I mean, I was sure of that eventually I wrestled myself out of the state, so I was able to sort of get out of it. But the ramifications were huge, you know, the next day I was like, did I see a ghost? What happened? You know, was I visited by supernatural forces? What does all this mean, right? And I couldn't really go to my parents, right? At that point, you know, I told you earlier that as a kid, I was a very, I was the black sheep in the family.

I didn't usually do my homework. I had like 25% abstin rate in high school. I was very, you know, I was a very rebellious kid my whole life, never do any homework. The worst, I was the guy who entire school years were just never did anything, you know. Were you in a gang? I was kind of in a gang, you know. I was a little bit of a gang as a young kid, but, you know, in Copenhagen, the gangs were not that, you know, I wouldn't say that it was that. We weren't killing people, but we were, there was stabbing.

My best friend got, you know, shot at, like, in his house. My neighbor got shot in the head. You know, there was a lot of tons of stuff going on, but I wasn't, so I was starting to dabble in that world. But let's say, put it that way. Shoot them in the foot, not the head. Let's put it that way. Gotcha. Gotcha.

But anyway, so I had this experience. I was like, okay, I saw. a ghost, what does this all, what does it mean, right? What is this about? And so I decided to study this phenomenon closer and I realized there's something called sleep paralysis, this state of being paralyzed unable to move or speak as you wake up from sleep. And that's going to start at me in science. Yeah. So that's how I started. Before we get there all the way in, because that's what we're going to be talking about today, I'm sure, a lot. There's actually one other thing that I wanted to note here. You are, as far as I know, the first Kurdish person I've had in here. Is that

right yeah and it's it's cool to talk with you because that is that subject matter of the kurds has come up probably 30 to 40 times across the episodes i've done yeah whether it be talking with joby warwick or you know some of the former military guys who worked with the kurds in the middle east but i bring it up because it's a very fascinating thing to me that a group of over 30 million people does not have their own country. And I have advocated on here for them to be able to have their own country, you guys, because you also basically have like a lot of land that you run already. I don't know why we're not just drawing lines there. But, you know, you grew up in Copenhagen. Was that because you were displaced from some of, from where the Kurds were, I guess, like

fighting over territory? Yeah, it's a great question. So my parents, I grew, my parents were both orphans. So my, my mom, her, her dad died very early on. When he was a kid, my father, same thing. His father died very early on to orphans, and they found each other at some point. There was a lot of war in Iraq at the time, as you know, Saddam Hussein was attacking the Kurds. And my parents decided to, my father, my father wanted to escape Iraq because of the war. He didn't want to go and partake in that war. Came to Bulgaria.

That's where I was born in Bulgaria. And eventually I was like five or six months infant, and we were in Copenhagen. moved to Copenhagen. Now, on your, on the topic of like, on the question of the Kurds and so, yeah, definitely, you know, the issue of the Kurds has been a huge, you know, issue, you know, they haven't really had land and stuff like that. Personally, I'm, my parents and that generation was a lot, you know, they were into that a lot, you know, they found that, you know, the Kurds, you know, they need to have their own country and things like that. But I think our generation, my sister, my brother, my, you know, they're not that strict about it.

I think they are more, they find themselves more as global citizens, I think. And because we grew up in Europe and we're sort of, we lived in, you know, in Europe and in American, things like that, we're not attached to that idea, really. I think the most important thing is that that Kurds or any sort of group of people have rights have you know the human rights covered that they're not oppressed in any way and and i think look now the kurt's actually doing very well you know they aren't they're pretty rich in the iraqi region yeah that that's what's strange to me it's like they have a incredibly sophisticated military structure and therefore leadership structure yeah i don't know always bring this up and even like

some of my reporter guys aren't really sure the semantics but it's not like they're paying taxes to Syria and stuff like that. Like, they literally have their own Mad Max Fury Road area. It's just they don't, you know, they don't sit on any international commissions because of that. They don't have, I guess, like, they're not a part of some of the trade agreements that are allowed to happen in the region because they're not officially a country and all that. And I don't know. I just, I think the world is a really complex place, obviously, but my thought is any sizable group of people. I mean, if it's 10 people, I think you're kind of shit out of luck. But if you have a sizable population, whether it be the Druze, D-R-U-Z-E-E, or the Yazidis, who almost got exterminated from the

planet back when ISIS was around, or the Kurds, it's like, I feel like you should probably have a spot where you get a little voice in the matter. It just kind of feels like the right thing to do. But that's an interesting perspective you have because you didn't grow up in it. I think that's my perspective and really what I'd love to see. And this has kind of been my own view is that I'd love for people to, like, for example, in Iraq, we have different, like there's Shiites, there's Sunnis, there's Kurds, there's all these people. I'd love for them to unite more and sort of leave aside their cultural barriers and leave aside that shouldn't be a barrier for unity. Yes. You know what I mean? Like the tribalism of like having to kill

each other or fight each other because I'm Kurdish or I'm this or that, we should try to go beyond that. We're all human beings. We all. are, you know, the same. We're all the same. You and I, you know, all of us are the same. And so that's kind of my view. I'd like less nationalism in a way and more sort of understanding, unity. And, yeah, personally, you know, growing up in Copenhagen, in the hood, my best friends

or Turks or Iraqis, you know, I'm Kurdish, you know, and they're not supposed to get along in some cultural sense, right? But my best friends were of that, you know, nationality. and I loved them more than my Kurdish friend. When I was in a, when we went to, the gangs went to fight, I was like 14, 15, right? And so we used our fists and all that, right? My Turkish brother would stand up for me more, perhaps, than my Kurdish brother, if I needed him. Wow.

So, so for the idea of a, me being Kurdish and you being Turkish and you being, you know, Arab, kind of eroded. And we all just became humans and we just saw each other as the person you were inside. What was your level of loyalty? How was your heart? How was your mind? That mattered. So that kind of, for me, it raised that whole thing. And, you know, so.

That's beautiful. Color, nationality, all that just went away from me. Yeah. To be honest. I think that's how it. That's my view. That's what we should be. You know, like we make all these stories up.

And I don't mean to over trivialize it. But my friend Eric Zulger, who's like a world traveler who finds his way into some very interesting situations. Like he got kicked out of Turkey a couple times for saying he was coming from Kurdistan. They didn't like that very much. But he always said, like, nations are just stories. Countries are just stories, man. There are stories there.

We make them up, man. We make it all up. Look, ultimately, we have the same blood. You didn't choose to be born as Julian. You didn't, were you born in New Jersey? I was technically born in Philly, but yes. In Philly, right? Born and raised in Jersey.

Did you choose your parents? Nope. You didn't. You didn't choose your, like, how you look, your skin color. Nothing, none of that. You were just thrown into this vessel of flesh and blood that you called Julian. You got to, even your name you didn't choose for God's sake, right? So, so the fact that you are here and that you are having a human experience as the person you are, that's what it is.

And, you know, we shouldn't make that a difference. We shouldn't let these construct that we create in our minds divide us. That's what I feel, man. That's what I feel. Do I sound like Michael Jackson now? He'll the world. Yeah, you do. You're doing great, by the way.

Can you just pull in the mic a little bit? When you're talking. Yeah, just keep it tight like that. That's perfect. So we left off, though, where you talked about this sleep paralysis event. You said you were a teenager. So what, like 15, 16, something like that? Well, actually, at the time I was like 18 maybe, 18 hours, end of my teenage years. And so, yeah, that's when it happened, man, that experience. And so it really took me on this. It was a trip. It was a trippy experience. And I decided, well, I'm going to study this phenomenon further. I'm going to read books. And I'm going to just devour them and figure out what the hell is this. So I looked at books, I started reading books, and lo and behold, I found something that kind of sounded like what I experienced. I saw, you know, I heard about people lying in their beds being paralyzed, and then space aliens would come down on ships, and there was an experiment on the sleeper. They would pull out semen, you know. I've had a couple of those guys in your seat.

Right? So they take out semen, and then they would, you know, whisk them up to the spaceship and all that. So it's very, very exotic stuff. Yes. And so the question was, what is this? What's going on? Is this the brain playing tricks on you? Or is it actually, you know, space alien coming down from faraway galaxies? That was the question. And I had to explore this. So when I went to Egypt, I did research. I started to do research. And so I looked into the cultural ideas for it. And soon my research found that in Egypt, it's the evil genies. You know the evil. Have you seen the Latin? The cartoon? Yeah. The evil Jaffar, the evil genie that comes, you know, it's huge muscles and he wants to kill a Latin. That's kind of the cultural explanation for sleep paralysis in Egypt.

So people will say that is... The genie. The genie. The genies. It's called the Jin in Arabic. Yeah, I remember the Jin. That's the same thing. Same thing.

Interesting. The gin and the genie is the same thing. So the gin is what is causing sleep paralysis. That's the monster of this sleep paralysis monster in Egypt is the genie. And they have very, very evil intentions. they want to kill you, when they want to violate you sexually. They want to do all kinds of things to you.

And so very terrifying explanation for sleep paralysis in Egypt. Wow. I went on then to study it in Italy, for example. And it turned out in Italy, people would say it's this creature called it Pandafaca, which is this witch-like creature, it can kill you, potentially harm you, do all kinds of things to you.

So again, a cultural layer to the experience. I then wanted to compare sleep paralysis in Egypt to Denmark directly to see how these two cultures interpret the experience like how do they interpret and sort of make sense of it why is that important well because I knew from my time in Denmark that people in Denmark are very let's say secular in the way of thinking you know

they don't believe in the spiritual world very much they are more sort of science based more physiological in their view of the world. So I thought, well, how would they understand something like sleep paralysis versus Egypt where literally people are, they walk around and they just kind of are very spiritual and very religious overall, right? So how do these two cultures digest something so profoundly supernatural in nature? And it turned out that, first of all, we found that in Egypt, it's much more common.

So it's twice as common as in versus Denmark. Okay, so in Egypt, very, very frequent. A lot of people have it, okay, versus Denmark. So that's the first finding, all right? Second finding, we found that in Egypt, the people who have it, so if I'm in Egypt, my name is Ahmed, I have it, and my name is Joe, I live in Denmark, and I have sleep paralysis on a frequent basis. The guy in Egypt has it three times more frequently.

So the experience is sort of you just have it more. You have it maybe five times a week versus the gain. Danish guy, he has it maybe one time a month. That's so terrifying. It's terrifying. It's going to be even more spooky. The guy in Egypt has greater fear of it. So their fear of dying from sleep paralysis is about like it's huge.

I mean, it's like 50% of people in Egypt think that they can die from it. Literally like they think that the experience is fatal. That's, you know. Every time? Yeah, so the rate is like 50% of the people think it's fatal. Yes, but every time they experience it or just once in a while. So we didn't really get it down to if it's each time. So we just asked the question, like, do you think sleep paralysis can kill?

And about 50% of the 100 people, let's say we ask, or 1,000 people, so 500 would say, yes, we think it can kill. So whether it's each time or not, is this the general perspective of it, that it's fatal. Right. Okay. Beside that, they have more vivid hallucinations. They have more fear. They feel it lasts much longer. So once they have it, they feel like it lasts for ages.

So the Danish person, it feels like it lasts for a few seconds, right? It's like, okay, I had it. It just lasted for a few seconds. The guy over here in Egypt, he feels like it lasts for hours. So it's like it's a very amplified, prolonged, scary experience. Now, this was all, it all came back to one key finding, which was that the Egyptians, 90% of them thought it was the evil genies. So because of that, you know, the cultural ideas was driving this versus the Danish people where everybody pretty much said it was just the brain, it was just stress, it was just anxiety. So literally you saw how beliefs your mind can shape the experience.

It's kind of like a, you know the placebo effect? I give you a sugar pill. I said you'll be better like space jam. Yep, you know. Nocebo is the opposite. I give you this drink. I'll say it's poison. You drink it.

You get busy. You get sick. You know, it's poison and you die, right? That's the nocebo effect. So we believe that this is a profound example of the nocebo effect, the difference we saw. And we later replicated this finding in Italy. We found a similar pattern. Italians will say about a third of them that it's these witch-like creatures.

And again, this experience is prolonged. The fear is. They have vivid hallucinations and so forth. So clearly, you find this very interesting pattern. Now, this is, how were you when you were finding this? So this, I found this when I was, I started my research as an undergraduate and then as I was moving to California and doing research there. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

All right, let me put a little bit of a timeline together here. So I understand, like, how you got all into this. So you had the initial experience yourself as a teenager. Correct. At the time, you kind of like, a little bit of a gangster, going to school, 75% of the time. Exactly. Skipping the other 25, shooting people in the foot. Anyway. Exactly. All that stuff. All that stuff. Yeah. Obviously, you were a pretty intelligent guy. You just never, like, found an interest in school or applied yourself. Is that fair?

Well, maybe, I mean, it's a compliment, but I didn't feel intelligent. I always got bad grades. I felt like I couldn't make sense of any of it, but I'll take the compliment. Well, there was something going on there because then this happens and then you sink yourself into studying that. So did you go to undergrad in Egypt? Did I understand? I did so. Okay. My grades were so poor. I couldn't get into an university in Denmark.

But they let you in during the Arab Spring in Egypt. It's money, you know? Right. That had a pizza shop. And so he could afford some of it. And then once I got there, I did one semester. And then my semester, I did so well that they paid me for the rest of the. Oh, that's awesome.

Yeah, because at that time, I changed so radically. So I went from, like, poor grades. I never saw more than a D. in my entire high school until I was like 18, 19, and then to like this dramatic shift where I just started to just read books 24 hours. I'm very obsessive, you see, my nature. I'm very obsessive.

I get into things. I just focus on it like 24 hours. And so once I wanted to sort of crack the code of this phenomenon, I read books all the time. I did nothing but read books. And my mind, my brain really expanded. And obviously it started with sleep paralysis, but it was just leak.

I want to just read other stuff as well. So I just got really into reading and thinking and writing poetry. I became very sort of, and mind you, I was philosophical as a kid, you know, growing up in the ghetto. I always was thinking a lot about my, my existing life, you know, life, what is meaning and all that. So I was kind of philosophical, but there was no intellectual or academic hinge or like tethering. It was just like free-floating thoughts. Yeah. When I went to Egypt, my obsession got even more because I lived alone.

pretty much. And I would just hang out with the poor kids in the streets sometimes, but other than that, I was just read. So I'd read and then go down and hang out with the, you know, the kids in the streets sometimes for social interaction, you see. Did you speak their language when you went there? I learned it. Wow. How many languages do you speak? At the calum Arabic, I'll talk Arabic. Okay. But then Kurdish is my Kurdish. Is that that, okay, Kurdish, gosh. I learned a little. I've done a little Spanish. Spanish, many years of school. I'm a little bit Italian.

Ah, bravo, bravo. Also, also. I used to. Italy, Italian, I don't, I don't speak that well. But I speak a little bit Italian. Three and a half. German, but German, they are learning in school. I was really bad at it.

But I was supposed to, I was supposed to know it. So I got drilled in German since I was like five or six. What other languages do is speak? I think that those are probably, Spanish, Italian, Kurdish. Well, you speak English, obviously. A little bit of English. I'm trying to learn.

I'm still learning. And, yeah, I think those might be, those might be it, I think. All right. I think so. That's pretty a lineup right there. You can find your way around. So you go to Egypt. You learn the language.

I learn the language. You sink yourself into studying. I just studied 24 hours. And then I learned Arabic from the street kids. Yeah, because the American University in Cairo, I went to American University. So I wasn't really speaking Arabic in the university. Oh, got it. So I learned that's how the street kids come in.

It was kind of my own instinct of hanging out with street kids. I went from ghetto kids to street kids. That's what I mean. Yeah, what I'm trying to. Graduating. Yeah, yeah. And then once I was in Egypt, I, because of that drastic focus on books, I just got really good grades all of a sudden.

Have you seen that movie called Gangsters Paradise? Yes. Yes. So Michelle Fife. right she's the teacher she gives everybody an a to start with so you all got an a and then you have just have to keep that a until the end of of your school or whatever and then you just keep it instead of instead of earning the a you got the a and just keep the a you know what i mean yeah same thing when i went to egypt they actually there was some because i had taken some classes in

copenhagen in literature english literature because it was free universities free in copenhagen so i've taken some classes and i had some like ds and fs it transferred but to egypt And once it transferred to Egypt, it showed up as an A. Oh, wow. So they told me, oh, you were perfect 4.0, 4.0 GPA. I was like, what? Okay, I'll take it, you know. It's like that TikTok where they change all the F still like an A plus.

So it was just like, okay, good. I'll just keep that. And then I graduated with 4.0. Everything was just A's from there. And that was full four years down there? Full four years. Okay. And then the final year actually took my final year in California.

So I went to final year. I had to sort of get out of Egypt. I felt like it was becoming, I had to have more challenge. Was that when the Arab Spring was happening too? During the Arab Spring. Yeah, man, you're, you're on the Air Spring. I went to, at this point, I went to California.

And one day in California, as I'm walking about, you know, in San Diego, I bump into this guy who turns out to be one of the greatest neuroscientists of a life, if not the greatest. Who? You know, V. Ramoschandran. Oh, yeah, I've heard that name before. Yeah, yeah.

One of the greatest neuroscientists, and I run into him, and I was like, I'm starstruck. You know, I was like, Ramah, Ramahandran, kind of like, I'm shaking. I'm what do you're doing with myself? Like, I start sweating, you know, and he's kind of, he greets me. He's very warm, very kind, and, you know, I was just so happy to meet him. And I thought, okay, I have to take his class. So I take his class. I sit in the front row.

Okay, I sit in his front row. And every question he has, I'm just sitting there answering it. Every question. You know, he's, I think he got impressed with that. And so he took me into his laboratory, got into his laboratory, and we ended up becoming friends. In fact, we became best friends. Can you believe it? So I was with him for like four or five years, six years in the laboratory.

Wow. He became like best friend. He literally called me his third son. He had two other sons. He called me his third son. He was my second father, always together. Three or four hours every day would drive, you know, go to the supermarket with him, do all kinds of things with him. It was unbelievable.

here I'm here here here's this kid in the ghetto going from nothing and this guy he's just on was just on time magazines 100 most influential people in the world literally just got that announcement and I'm sitting there with him eating cookies and drinking you know in the cafeteria and having milk and cookies with him you believe it talking about the human brain how life can take you from nothing to like that's right you know to like shootings and then here you are in California right well you put yourself in that position too you know I feel like I feel like I was I feel like I was blessed. I don't want to take any credit for it. I feel like I feel like I was I was blessed. It was a blessing. That's very humble of you, but also like if you want to call it luck or a blessing or something, does that old American phrase, luck is where hard work meets opportunity? A hundred percent. You know what I mean? I think that's very true. And what happened was I did I did work really hard, become very serious about life, discipline myself. I mean, didn't come easy, but my brain change. So the brain can change. And I think that was a huge part of this reason, this whole thing. So the brain, as you know, is hyper-flexible.

We have different modules in the brain. You have a structure called the prefrontal cortex, which is outer layer. Then you have the temporal lobes, the emotional part of the brain. It's right here behind your ears. You have the occipital lobe, which is the vision part of the brain. So you have different parts of the brain. This is called the cortex. Now the brain can change. It can change its form. And once it's formed changes, your personality changes to, your discipline changes. For example, let me give you one concrete example.

There's a region called the anterior cingolid and the mid-singulate cortex, which is just beneath this layer called the cortex. The cortex is the outer layer helmet. Yeah. So that singulate cortex, that region, there's neurons there. The more you use, the more disciplined that you are, and the more you take action, even though you don't want to take certain actions, the more that portion of the brain will grow.

So, for example, Beland, he's lying there, he's sleeping, he doesn't want to get up and take a cold plunge. Okay, or Julian doesn't want to go to the gym, right? So you're sitting there and thinking about it for three minutes. Should I go to the gym? Shouldn't I go? Should I go? Shouldn't, you know, no, yes, no, yes. You decide to go.

When you decide to go, that mid-singulate cortex will literally grow. And the more you actually do that, the more you take up the challenge and you say, the hell with it, I'm just going to go. The more the cingulate cortex will grow larger, it will become thicker and literally expand. And does this happen in the other direction as well when you go the opposite way? 100%. It shrinks.

So the less you decide, no, I'm not going to go for that run. Nah, I'm not going to wake up and go to school today. My entire life was a dead mid-singulate cortex. It wasn't active at all. It suddenly became very active. And that's because the brain has these synapses. Synapses are, so there are neurons in the brain, and then neurons have wires, axons, and dendrites. Okay, so dendrites are sort of wires that receive information from the axon, which is a wire from the neurons.

And between them, there are synapses that allow for communication. Okay. This is a fancy way of saying that these synapses and connections between neurons can grow our entire life. So the more we do things we don't want to do, the more we challenge ourselves, the more we take action, the more we will grow new synapses and allow for the brain to become more plastic. So we can get into plasticity. There are certain things that have to occur for plasticity to really run its course. For example, you have to be hyper attentive, right? So if I live in the ghetto and I have the same routines every single day,

I go to the, you know, I come home, I go to school, I come back, you know, I go out, fight this guy, come, you know, I have all these routine things I do every single day. I will have very little plasticity. Why? Because the brain doesn't work like that. It doesn't change itself because it sees, look, it's just the same thing over and over. There's no reason for me to change. The brain is not wasteful in that way.

However, when you do new things and you put yourself in new environments, your attentional system becomes active. This is a system called the nucleus basalis is in the mid-central part of the brain. It produces neurons called acetycholine. And acetycholine neurons are basically attention-driving neurons. This is your attention system. So whenever I see, like if I see this girl over there and she's really pretty, I'll have a lot of acetycholine, attention focusing on her way, for example, right? Or if I go to travel to Egypt, for example, and everything is new, guess what?

I have a lot of acetylcholine, attention, because everything is new. I have to be aware of the streets. I have to be aware of the new mountains. And maybe there's a new lion over here using figurative language, obviously. But things are new. And so my brain says, look, since you are in new territory, you better hell change your structure for survival reasons. So if you, right, or Joe, or anybody wants to change their brain, they have to go to new places or do new things because that's what triggers and prompts the brain to change. change its structure, right?

So if that makes sense, it's survival. So that's the first factor for changing your brain. And I had that in Egypt. Literally, it's an example of me going new territory. The brain says, look, you are in survival mode, change. Second factor is dopamine. Dopamine is this reward chemical we have in your brain. There are structures in the brain fancy names like the nucleus acumbens and, you know,

basal gangular regions and things like that. Just fancy words for neurons. a little bit deep, a little bit beneath the cortex, and these are involved in reward, or anticipation of reward, in fact. So not even reward. So if I am, again, if I'm hugging a girl or if I'm hugging my mother, that's rewarding, but it's not that much dopamine. It's more endorphins and feel-good chemicals.

Like oxytocin. Oxytocin, vasopresin, you know, these kinds of chemicals you have. But if I'm anticipating a meal, tons of dopamine. or before sexual encounters, tons of dopamine. So that's anticipation of joy. Anyway, dopamine you also need. So you need reward. And so anytime you do something new when it's rewarding,

that's when you get especially a lot of plasticity in the brain. So you have to have these two things, these two factors. And I think I had that in Egypt. It was very rewarding for me to learn new things. I was driven, and that's how my brain changed. I must have gotten new synapses. And so that took me from ghetto to the Arab Spring in Egypt, all the way to the top of the palace with the prince of neuroscience,

the king of neuroscience. Here I am, you know. So that's how they're all that whole journey. Yeah. Joe, how are we doing with that sound outside? Is that okay? It's fine. I'll stick at the noise around that. We're good. So you, what's, how do you pronounce his name again? I've heard that name before. Vias Ramachandran. Vias Ramachandran. Can we pull him up as well? as well, Joe. Give him a big old shout out. So you're spending six years with this guy. Oh man, I spent not only six years. So six years was the time where we were like best friends and just hanging out every single day and going to the beach and talking about science and the history of science and just really shaping my brain. Literally I had the greatest

scientist mentor me personally, right? But then unfortunately what happened to my my dear friend is that he got Parkinson's. So the world greatest scientist or neuroscientists get Parkinson's brain disease. That's so cool. He slows down. He becomes, you know, so Parkinson's is that you get mask expressions. You can't really smile that much because you need dopamine for smiling. Your movement is very slow.

You walk, you walk with a sort of what's called a, you have like this special walk. You walk like, oh, you can't really move, you know? You've seen Muhammad Ali and also Michael J. Fox. So you have this and you got this. And so I, you know, from there on, I, I, I tried to really take care of him. So I went from, like, having fun with him more to taking care of him, nurturing him, being a, like a son to him.

Like, when I got sick at one point, I got sick when I was there in my early years. He was so kind. He gave me his own car, like a jaguar. What happened to you? I was, I had some, I had some sort of inflammatory issues with, like, my, you thought with my heart and all kind of things. But it turned out not to be very serious, but I got a couple of months where I was pretty sick. he was like you know he gave me everything man his own car everything and so when he got sick

i really took care of him and i really you know tried to be a close friend and yeah just help him through through that and i still visit him i just saw him last year and he doesn't talk that much now he can't really talk that much it's hard to understand but just being in his presence i can see in his eyes that he can still see it's me he still feel that happiness when we were taking together, like, you know, that kind of friend thing, you know, we have. Sure, he's very proud of you and everything you've done. He's, he's very, he's very proud of me, but he's also hard to impress, you see. His standards are very high.

He's hard to impress. But he is. He always says, this is my star student. Still, he's still a student, you know. I think he's impressed then. Man, he was, he was a great guy. If I can give anything back to him, honor him is what I'll do as long as I, and he knows this. As long as I'm alive, I will honor him because I,

I really know what he did for me is why I'm here today. He opened up all the doors. You know, you can be as smart as you want. You can be, get 4.0s, right, scientific papers. But when you have a mentor, that's the top of the hierarchy. That's when doors open. And so he opens a lot of doors from me, go to Cambridge and Harvard and all that. So you mentioned it as one of the traits you look for in friends growing up,

but you mentioned loyalty and stuff like that. I have a great appreciation for people who understand where they came from. and the people who allowed them to do what they do. And that comes across heavily. So I'm sure he feels that as well. If he's calling you his star student, I think he's probably impressed with where you're getting to. So you're doing a good job.

Man, yeah. Thank you, brother. I really appreciate it, Julian, man. But look, I think, little did I think that ever I should, I would have like a mentor that would love just like a father or like a very close uncle. I never thought this would happen to me. Like you'd have somebody who's literally so close that, you know, you know, you don't think this will happen to you.

And then see him getting sick and you kind of feel like, well, life can really throw your curveballs. It can be very hard. And so it's very important to honor those who really took care of you. Yeah. And I'll do that, man. Continue to do that. Yeah, that's that. I had said it when you first mentioned it, but it's like a very cruel thing from the universe that someone who's,

who studies the brain and all these different things that then they get afflicted with something that affects their function from their brain. This guy was a superstar. He was literally so talented, you can't believe it. So you see talent today. For example, you may see Jordan Peterson. You're very talented at giving lectures, mesmerizing. This guy was the superstar.

If he had been alive during, or he's still alive, thank God. But being able to speak. How he been young and healthy during this? time he would have been he would be number one he would he was so mesmerizing speaker i jordan told me during one of our conversations he said that he once had ramashandran give a lecture at harvard back in the 90s and he literally said that was the most mesmerizing speaker he's ever seen the most mesmerizing when you saw rama you know so it tells you a lot from somebody who's himself extremely very very talented speaker very mesmerizing himself

giving, giving praise to who was like really unbelievable, you know, a star. Now, he obviously can't, unfortunately, communicate like that anymore because of his affliction. Unfortunately. But I know Parkinson's like kind of has a range to it sometimes, how it affects people. But, you know, can he, does he still do any work or research or things like that? Is he able to contribute to, I don't know, some of the stuff you're working on? Fortunately, that stopped, like, I would say, four or five years ago. It just became too slow.

So we couldn't really do that. You know, we couldn't continue our work in the scientific sense. But, yeah, as I said, I saw him, I think, was it in January or something? I was at his home. It was lovely to see him. He was a bit better this year than the previous year. I saw him. He was a bit better.

My own pops with my own dad was there. Oh, that's cool. So my dad and him were all both together, and we went out and had food. and went to his house and we hang out. And we, you know, it was, it was, it was beautiful, man. It was a good experience and, um, yeah, I treasure that. Aren't they, see, you can't trust this stuff when you see. I'll see things in passing and like not look at it, but it's like stored in there

as like a headline somewhere. Right. Aren't they working on some new treatments right now for Parkinson's that could potentially reverse it? Or am I making that up and thinking of a different one? No, there are different technologies that there are different technologies that there working on. So one is deep brain stimulation. So in Parkinson's, you have parts of the brain that has to do with automatic movement. So it's called basal ganglia. Yes. Basal ganglia is deeper inside the brain. It has to do with moving automatically versus the cortex where you move voluntarily.

So when I move, I grab something over here. I move my hand from here to A to B. That's the cortex, the motor cortex out here. The basal ganglia has to do with automatic movements, automatic involuntary movements. So, on that note, for example, if I, if I get a, if I have a, if I tell, you tell me to smile, Beland smile. Okay, now I'm going to smile, okay? It looks hideous. Yeah, your eyes aren't doing it for real. You don't have the, that, this, these muscles, the Shem smile, you don't have these, you know, it's all seems, this is because, this is called a cortical smile, cortical smile. Now, Julian is a great photographer. and he wants me to really look good on a screen, okay, on a photo.

You're looking great over here, I see it. I appreciate that. What you would do then, you would say a very good joke. And I would laugh, and my basal ganglia would fire with activity, and I would have a real smile, and that would look much more charming, you see? Yes. That's the basal ganglia. Now, the basal ganglia, the neurons in the basal ganglia are dying off in Parkinson's.

And so how do you reactivate those neurons? How do you revive those nuance, make them come alive again? And it turns out that you really, it's difficult to get deeper in the brain. So we can stimulate the brain on the outer layer, on the cortex, as I mentioned, the outer layer. It's easier because you can have a magnet and you stimulate it. You go, and you stimulate the brain, and you can revive some of those neurons or make them more active, right? But deeper in the brain, it's harder. It's more difficult.

And so how do you get in there? So one potential way to get in there is a, you can have a helmet that has, it's called photobiomodulation. It's a newer technique. And so you have light, go through the brain, and it can go deeper, and it can potentially make those neurons more active. There's a helmet called, what is it called? It's neuronic, and they're not paying me, but they send me a helmet, free helmet.

They're not paying you? They're not paying me. Sure. Yeah. All right, we're going to check your bank account out there. They sent me a helmet, you know, actually helmet, about $2,000 helmet. Send it to me. And they asked me to try it out.

That looks like an eye falling and can't get up, helmet. There you go, Nirani. Okay. So what does this do? This will go inside your brain and the light emanating. It's called red light, so infrared light. Yeah. Yeah, it's deeper.

It's not, you can't really see it with your eyes. eyes, but it can penetrate the skull, go in there, and then it can act on the mitochondria inside the cells and make them more active. And so the cells that you won't necessarily, it won't create new neurons, obviously, what's called neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons is very rare in the human brain, okay? But you can actually make some of the neurons that are, you know, less, they're deficient. You can make them more active by using these kind of techniques. Wow.

But it's good. It has sort of an all-purpose, all-purpose, you know. know, function to it. So my sister had insomnia and she tried it. She has an insomnia going on. I said, look, you can try it. I'm okay myself. I'm fine right now. You can try it. And so she tried it. And actually, she got better within a week, you know. Whoa. It started to improve. Yeah. So it's quite something to see, you know. I don't like to assume we're going to get everything solved and all that. But sometimes I get like a little excited in my head that we're living in an era.

where the exponential growth scientifically is still a thing. They say eventually that'll stop, but it's still a thing, which means we're building on the best building blocks ever, as you always are with exponential growth. And that there are so many horrible things right now that we take for granted is like, well, you're fucked with it, that maybe it's five years, maybe it's 10 years or 15.

It's going to be like, oh, that's gone. We're good. You know, like something crazy right now that it would be like if you walked in there, It feels like a death sentence in 15 years. It'd be like, all right, just step over here. Let me five minutes. You're good.

Like, am I crazy to feel that way about innovation? No, not at all. Look, so, for example, depression. Let's say depression, what you've seen for like 30, 40 years. What we've been doing is that somebody comes in, we give them a pill, SSRI or, you know, something like that. And they take it and they may take it that for six months at least, but typically a year they take it. most people don't even get better let's say 50%, let's say at the most

get some a little bit better tons of side effect sexual dysfunction they you know gain weight all these side effects they get dizzy horrible horrible horrible right

and then so what do you do well something called TMS as I mentioned before stimulation of the cortex what you can do now is that literally instead of a year on drugs and potentially getting better or changing like four or five drugs if the one didn't work,

you have this machine, you put it on the left side of the brain, you stimulate it, okay, in one day you can potentially cure people with depression. 80, 90% of people will get better. 80 to 90, just one day. One day. So these are newer trials coming, but it seems very promising. So this is some of the stuff over at Harvard Medical School that have been involved in in the last year.

very promising so put it on the skull stimulated like this and you literally will in one day you take a drug as well and this is just one for one drug what's the drug the drug will boost neuroplasticity it's not an SSRI no it's just one like for one day you can

like Tylenol something like that right it'll boost SSRI SSRIs SSRI oh sorry boost what's called neuroplasticity and specifically called what's called neurotrophic factors so neurotrophic factors for your nerdy audience for those the audience who like these kind of things. No, this is great. You like it?

Don't worry about it. Okay, so you have what's called BDNF and GDNF. These are nootrophic factors, this meaning proteins like fertilizers in the brain. And when you have a lot of those proteins, what will happen is these synapses, these gaps, will increase more rapidly. It allows for growth in the brain. And that is literally these drugs will do. This is what a trip will do if you go to, like when you go to Egypt or new country, you will have more BDN. dnf and gdnf in fact if you exercise if julian goes out and takes a run and you know or do some kind

of cardiovascular exercise you will have more bdnf and gdnf another factor that allows for plasticity in the brain 100 so you don't only need to travel you can also just exercise yeah that's what i feel like sometimes balan like people want to solve so many of these problems and we see a society where it's like oh just throw a pill at it or something yeah but like i don't know if this a great example but if my computer I just got one that has like eight terabytes of space well let's say you know these are big files I keep a lot of files on there if I start filling it up with seven and a half terabytes 7.7 terabytes it's gonna run slower right and then you know sometimes like my desktop looked like a war zone a

couple weeks ago just things everywhere right yeah and I had storage filled on the last computer it's like I went in there I took the time I cleaned up the whole desktop. It's completely clean now. I organized everything. And then I also went and I cleared data. I moved some stuff to external hard drives I've been putting off to do. You know, it was like a couple hours to clean things up and everything. So I had to put in effort, but now the computer ran great. And then I transferred to the new computer. Now it's running fast as hell. So it's like a little bit of time and effort creates some sort of solution that mathematically makes sense. And I like, it's not a perfect parallel, but like so many afflictions we see. I'm not talking about

Parkinson's or things like that where it's something completely out of your control, but so many afflictions that are bad, you know, be it depression or other things like that. Instead of a pill, there are things like, well, do you exercise? No. Okay. Go exercise for an hour a day. Do a half hour of cardio, move some weights, get some feel better about yourself. Go for a walk out in nature, not on a treadmill or something. like that. Experience the outside. If you're a male, it boosts your testosterone. It's like, you know, so do you ever get frustrated that people also have some very human, basic biological, evolutionary things in front of them that they could just do and work into their day as a new

plasticity for habit? And they just kind of refuse to do it. Yeah, we see that a lot. I mean, it's a huge problem. So think about this. I mean, when you sleep, for example, you have good sleep, tons of plasticity and healing occurs in sleep. Like, so when you go through different stages, of sleep. You have something called deep sleep, which is sort of the third stage of sleep. During this stage, literally you have cells regenerate, you have skin regenerate, you have cardiovascular regeneration. Your memory is, all the memories from your day will consolidate, meaning they will sort of fall in place. You have a region called the hippocampus behind your ears, memory part of the brain. It will literally take information from the day and store it

in different localities in the brain during this stage. You know, so when we rob ourselves of this stage, we are robbing ourselves of physical healing. Yes. After that, after deep sleep, you hit REM sleep, which is arguably even more important. Both during deep sleep and REM, you have like things like growth hormones. Growth hormones mainly deep sleep,

but REM, you have things like testosterone. You have emotional healing. So during REM sleep, what happens is very interesting. So neurons in a part of the brain called the Lucas Cyrillus is about 32,000 pitch black cells in the lower part of the brain. Locus Cyrillus. Lucas Surrelius. I was going to say, it sounds like when I'm looking at it behind you. It sounds like Marcus Aurelius.

Well, yeah, it sounds like. Maximus Desmus Meridian. Exactly, exactly. But those cells, right, they produce a chemical called no adrenaline. This is the chemical cousin of adrenaline. So whenever you're stressed, you have a lot of adrenaline in the system, you are very hyped up. you're agitated, you're excited, potentially. And so this is no adrenaline, right?

Now, when you are in REM sleep, you have no no adrenaline. No adrenaline is absent. And this is interesting. The only phase in the 24-hour cycle where the stress chemical, no adrenaline is absent from your system, is during REM sleep.

It's during REM sleep. I'll get to the punchline now. Why is that important? Well, because when I'm in REM sleep and I'm dreaming, REM sleep is stage of sleep but we have vivid and lifelike crisp dreams. These are the dreams where you see yourself on the moon.

You're wrestling with an alligator, playing soccer with Messi at the same time, and then you're suddenly in Buckingham Palace as well and everything is warped. This is in REM sleep, right? I'll be getting a lot of REM sleep, that's good. REM is important. Now I'll tell you.

Now I'll tell you. Your brain during REM, in the lower part of the brain, you have something called the Pons and the Medea, two structures, okay, in the lower part of the brain. They send down a chemical called glycine, and another chemical called GABA. These are inhibitory neurotransmitters.

They calm things down. Yes. They go down through the spinal cord, and then they are called, in the spinal cord, they paralyze your entire body. So you're entirely paralyzed from head to toe during REM sleep. Okay? Now, you are paralyzed in REM.

You're having these vivid and lifelike crisp dreams. dreams. And then I mentioned no adrenaline is absent. So that means the stress chemical that allows you to be agitated and anxious is not there. Now Julian asks the $100 million question, why is that important? That is important because when you experience your dreams and you see yourself being chased by a monster and you're running and you can't get away and things are bizarre and strange and dangerous, but there's no stress chemical in the system, that means you can you learn to deal with the world without stress and anxiety. So your brain will lay down new circuits without stress and anxiety,

making you more flexible in your output and the way you deal with the world. So it's literally like a way of training your system in your brain to be more flexible and cope better with stressful situation without a stressful chemical. Does that make sense? Yes, and it also literally inhibits the chemicals that would be causing that in the daytime if you had it while you're experiencing something that's an illusion and not real because you're suspended from it.

Whoa, that's like... It's important. You know why? Also, it's important. You just made me think of something. You know people with PTSD? Yes. They have tons of noradrenaline when they're awake.

So they walk out and they see a mouse and they go, oh my God, this is terrifying. There's a mouse on the street because it reminds them of some hand grenade or something they saw in Baghdad. Right. So this is what PTSD is about.

It's taking a fear memory from, you know, Baghdad or Afghanistan. and bringing it to New Jersey or, you know, to, to California. Yeah. We're not, they're not supposed to do that, right? So they have tons of no-adrenaline in their system, and that's a problem because because of their noradrenaline, they can go into, they cannot go into REM sleep because you need no-adrenaline to shut off during REM sleep.

And so they lack this ability to take their daily experiences and experience them in their dreams without anxiety. And so that perpetuates the trauma and the anxiety they have during the day. Does that make sense? I want to make sure you get this because I'm sometimes a bit convoluted. No, you explain that very well. My point is this, if you have tons of no adrenaline in your system, you prevent yourself from going to REM to have restful sleep because you cannot go into REM without shutting down no adrenaline. Does that make sense? Yes, which in REM And then when you are in REM, that would in turn buffer you and make you less, less anxious during the day. So it becomes a vicious cycle for these people. You know what's crazy? So do you know

Luis Nicola at all? I got to hook you up with Louisa. She's right here in New York City. She's a neurophysiologist, works with high performers, extremely, extremely smart, loves every studying part of the brain. So there's some things you're saying that also like remind me of some conversations I've had with her. But the first time I talked with her was earlier in 2024. And without going through the whole litany, I had been dealing with a lot of health problems for a few years. And I had begun treatment to take care of that. It was something called ESN and philochasma, which like crashed my whole immune system for four years. So I started treatment in November 2023. That treatment wasn't supposed to really start to work until, you know, late February, early

March, 24, right when I was talking with Louisa. And it was going to start working a little bit at a time. And hindsight being 2020, it did. And it worked well. But Louisa put me over the top with kind of like fixing my body from off of the very broken thing that it was. And one of the things she talked about is she came here to record a podcast with me. And so she saw my place. And she saw the skylight out there. She saw the skylight over my bedroom. She saw, I love the lighting in this place because this is the only room that's not lit. She saw my big windows right there that let light in. I live right next to New York City, the most lit city, you know, in America. It's never off. And then she looked at the French doors on my bedroom. And she said, do you dream? She asked me,

do you dream? I said, come to think of it? Not really. No, she's like, how much do you sleep? I'm like, I put myself on a schedule and now I sleep seven to eight hours a night. And she goes, you're not getting seven to eight hours of good sleep. You're not getting REM sleep. You're not getting REM sleep and she started explaining this whole thing to me and she she said the light that you are letting in and then to combine that with the stress of your job and everything means you have cortisol like she kept at very high level you have cortisol at the very least running through your system at all times your body's completely off the what's the word that starts with an S circadian rhythm and all that it starts with a C I guess and then she's like you need to sleep with an eye mask

Yeah. I was like, what? She's like, sleep with an eye mask. And I'm like, that, that feels like a little not heterosexual. I don't think I'm going to do that. She's like, fine, have a problem. I'm like, all right, fuck it. I order an eye mask. I will never not sleep without one again. I dream now every single night and I dream like extensive dreams that would be required in the REM area. And it completely like whatever that back literally 50 to 60% was to start to begin feeling like myself again. I'm telling you it wasn't fully overnight, but throughout that year as the rest of my body got better from the other stuff, the combination of sleeping seven to eight hours with the eye mass having light out of the system and like sleeping deeply, totally rebuilt my brain. I'm firing on a level that I haven't in years since before I got sick. And it was just that simple thing. And I'll think about that forever. But you just reminded me of that because some of the patterns you're discussing, which you're actually going even deeper with some of the chemicals that literally fire in your body. when you're doing this. It's like, duh, how is that answer not in front of me the whole time, you know?

It's important. Look, REM sleep is important. Like, another chemical that's being shot off doing during REM is serotonin. So you have a structure called the rafide dorsan nucleus in the lower part of the brain again, produces serotonin. During REM sleep, serotonin stopped firing altogether. Okay, so you have no serotonin in the system during REM sleep. Now, you might ask, why is that important?

Well, it's a kind of a replenishment, right? is a replenishment for serotonin. Serotonin is the chemical involved in mood. It's involved in well-being, sense of stillness, sense of I feel good in my body. Right. That's serotonin. Literally, I mean, when you have depression,

you have typically load serotonin, and I give you a drug to boost serotonin. So that's the standard therapy for it, right? So if you're not getting REM sleep and you're not replenishing serotonin, again, you have another problem. So it shows you how important REM sleep is. And cognitive tests, there's tons of studies

REM sleep, you have low REM. That means you have very low. You have cognitive tasks. You will perform very poorly on cognitive tasks, IQ tasks. That's all REM. Now, mind you, you have, so you sleep in four, so you have these stages of sleep, stage one, two, three, and four. So four is a deep sleep, stage of sleep, and then you have REM, right? But it's important to keep in mind, Julian, that It's not like you have, so one third, so one, so that's the first cycle you have, let's say, these are 90-minute cycles. The first cycles, you have tons of deep sleep. So in the first part of the night, you have tons of deep sleep, okay?

And you have maybe a couple of minutes of REM, a few minutes of REM. And then you go through another 90-minute cycle, REM expands a bit more. And then third cycle, REM more. And then by the morning, you have maybe 30 minutes of REM. Now, I'll tell you why this is important. It's important because it shows us if I only sleep until 4 a.m. or 3 a.m., I would have tons of deep sleep, meaning I'm physically okay. I can run from a tiger. I can sprint. I won't get an angling injury. However, my REM sleep is still very deprived because I didn't get from

4 to 7, which I'm supposed to. So I didn't merely just strip my sleep of entirety of like 50% of REM. I maybe I removed 75% of REM. and all the emotional and cognitive benefits of REM. Do you see that crucial point? Yes. Meaning you can't just sleep until 4 and then run to the airport and think, oh, I got 50% of REM, I'm good. No.

You can run, all right. You can maybe do some sports. But your mind and your emotions will be all over the place. It's exponential. Exactly. That makes so much sense. I always wonder, like, when I get up to piss at like 2.30 in the morning, I've had little dreams.

I'm like, ah, what was that? You know, like thinking about it when I'm taking piss. Right. And then when I come back and then fall asleep again, that's when I have the wild dreams. Like last night, that's exactly what happened. And it wasn't even, I probably got up to piss at like 4.30. So I slept another hour and a half. And it was like, it was like they turned into this crazy story and everything. Right. And I'm like, now I'm, you're talking. I'm like, that's usually what happens. So that makes a lot of sense. So we're dreaming more of when that happens. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely. It's all the REM, man. Rem. Rem, you got to have REM. It's so important, but again, you have to have deep sleep as well, so you can't skip the first night either. Right. But these stages are important for well-being and a sense of just feeling like yourself. Yeah, and you can effectively reset your body when you change a habit like that.

Like you were talking earlier about how, now I'm going to fuck up the terminology, it was a little while ago, but you were talking about plasticity. I'll keep it there. And you were talking about how, you know, you can train the brain to do new habits. And you were relating it to how you suddenly sunk into reading and going to a new place in Egypt and all that put together created like you just sinking yourself into this. And the other side of that, like, it makes me think of the, I think it's a Michael Jordan quote where he's like, the day you skip that one thing is the day you form a bad habit because now you're shrinking it in the other direction. With sleep, you can effectively form the bad habit for a while, which I wouldn't recommend. I did do that for years. Don't do it.

But like, you can form the bad habit, lose your health along the way, which it contributed to me losing my health. It wasn't the cause. But it certainly didn't help, right? You can look sickly, not think all the best. And then when you decide, fuck it, I'm going to dedicate myself to sleeping seven, eight hours a night. I'm going to get onto a real schedule with that. If I got to do a sleep stack, including, you know, I wear the mouth tape the whole bit.

you know if i got to do that to sleep better i can like you can form that new habit and effectively at least through my experience like reverse a lot of mistakes you've made in the past so people out there i'm bringing this up because there may be people out there thinking like god damn like i haven't been sleeping over the last five six years i work really hard doing this this or that am i screwing myself over they can they can make a change and and suddenly you know maybe get i i'm speaking figuratively but correct me if i'm wrong like get some years back in a way yeah yeah 100 percent you can wow it's very true wow when so you started with the sleep paralysis stuff because it was personal right it started with the sleep paralysis because it was personal yeah but this

you know i i imagine probably when you were in egypt this very quickly turned to you just being like neuroscientists interested in the brain because everything you were looking at was related to the brain 100% like beliefs how does belief emanate in the brain how does how does empathy it come about in the brain how does it um you know how is it how is instantiated in the brain. So this is something that I got into early on. So let's talk about empathy. Absolutely. So in the brain you have in the frontal structures, specifically the medial, you have what's called, people call the mirror neuron systems or perceptual action systems. You have them also in the region called the TPJ, which is here.

So this part of the brain is kind of like a multimedia studio, meaning whenever I walk about, you know, let's say I walk about here in Julianne studio, I move my body from A to B. This is all my TPJ firing away, the neurons in the TPJ. Yeah. Okay. So the TPJ region, text information, I'm going to be a little bit technical, but I'll get to the punchline, I promise. So the TPJ, text information from the world, so vision, touch, pro preception, meaning

sense of your body, and integrates that and create a sense of a self, a sense of a Julian, a sense of a balan, okay? That's in the TPJ, a sensory integration hub, sensory input, integrate that. Next to it, you have something called the superior parietal law. This is a region involved in a sense of body image as well, sense of creating you. These regions, if you have, if I stimulated, for example, using a magnet, you will literally feel like you're floating out there. So you create a ghost, so you're out there in space, you're looking at yourself, you know, there's a ghost, there's a different person out there. So this region is involved in self-other distinction, meaning I know I am me, I know that you are you, and this bridge won't collapse.

There's a clear barrier. If I zap that region, I may feel like we're merging. So that boundary between self-other erodes. That's that region, the SPL and the temper parietal junction, TPJ. Okay, fancy name, but forgive me. I'll get, I get to the whole punchline. Then you have the frontal lobes, the prefrontal as well, also involved in sense of self and sense of me,

but also empathy. What is Julian thinking right now? What is his agenda? What is he up to? right this has huge survival value if i'm running around in the savannah and i'm somebody's chasing with me with or holding a spear is this a friend or a foe is he trying to kill me how do i escape him well all in the front of lobes plus the tbj so these this tells us that these are these regions are involved in creating sense of self empathy looking at the world from other person's perspective when we talk

about empathy in science there's typically two forms of empathy empathy there's cognitive empathy and there's affective or emotional empathy. Two times of empathy. Cognitive is, I can kind of figure out what Julian is thinking right now and I have intellectual insight into your mind, okay? Is he telling me the truth? Is he, you know, being deceptive?

Is he trying to do this or that? That's cognitive empathy. Psychopaths have tons of cognitive empathy. They are very good at this. They can read your mind very well. Then you have emotional empathy. That's actually feeling what you're feeling. experiencing your emotions as they were my own, okay?

Psychopaths have zero of this. They have no emotional empathy. That's why they can deceive you, manipulate you, be very Machiavellian. They can read your mind, but they have no actual empathy for your emotions. The flip side of this is autism. Autistic individuals have tons of emotional empathy. They can feel your pain. When you do like this and you post it,

your hand with a needle, they will feel that. But when they're trying to decipher what's in your mind, they can't really do that. That's why they don't lie themselves and don't understand why people will lie because they don't have much cognitive empathy, meaning they don't have insights into the other person's mind. So this is empathy, cognitive and affective.

Now, getting to the whole thing here. I wanted to explore empathy more, right? I wanted to explore, first of all, is there a way to break down the barrier between self and other while we are awake? So Ramachandran and I did some experiments. And we used people with OCD, people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. These are people who wash their hands and cleanse their hands for 10 hours a day, let's say. And we thought, what if somebody with OCD merely watches somebody else touching something contaminated?

How would they react? Would they feel that contamination as their own? Okay, so Julianne, can you touch something disgusting over there like, you know, fake vomit? So you touch it over there. Just imagine, imagine this, okay, all right, so I watch you. I'm like reaching from my ass. Don't become literal on me here. All right, you touch something contaminated over there.

It turns out I have OCD. I will feel contaminated in my hands merely by watching you touched that contaminant. Oh, wow. There's a first discovery, okay? Second, now you touch it again. You touch the table like this. I wash my hands, okay, and you watch me wash my hands. Well, actually, let's do it.

I'm the one with OCD, so you, I touch the contaminant, and you wash your hands. And I watch you wash your hands. And whenever I watch you wash your hands, I will go, oh, Julian, wash your hands more between the fingers. Oh, Julian, use some more soap. Oh, Julian, scrap this part off. Why? Because I start feeling your emotions and sensations as if they were mine. This is actually interesting discovery because it shows us that emotions and sensations can be experienced vicariously through somebody else's lens.

And then they can override cognitive barriers and cognitive logic. Like, I know that you are you and I am me, yet I feel disgusted when you touch it and I feel relief when you wash your hands. This is very interesting. Yeah, I have a little bit of that. Yeah, so this is, and later we did some studies using smart. smartphones and we found that people to OCD, when they go around in the world and they watch a video of themselves washing their hands. So they watched a video, not actually doing it, tapping into that empathy system of watching a virtual version of themselves. And that will reduce OCD by about, you know, 20% overall. How do you measure that? Typically self-report. So they will report their OCD symptoms and so forth. So these studies were done in people with, subclinical OCD meaning people would not not the full-scale OCD but with OCD

symptoms and some of the studies were done with actual patients so it was a bit bit varied but overall it's very interesting it really shows us that you can you can really transfer your emotions and sensations to other people that's really possible yeah that's crazy because OCD is one and and you can say this about a lot of different it seems like a lot of different disorders that emanate from the brain, whatever they may be. OCD is one that has a real spectrum to it. You know, like certain people will have it manifest in ways that are completely, almost seemingly unrelated. Just like when you look even at autism, you know, you can have someone all the way from nonverbal autistic who actually may be

really, really smart to someone who's like very high functioning and just kind of has Asperger's or something like that. It's like kind of strange how that works. But did you find, like how did you get to OCD from studying sleep, was there, was there something, was there some sort of like related strand there like a thing that made you go, wait a second, you know? No, I mean, my research and my interests have always been various things. So I have, you know, I've done sleep paralysis research, obviously, and I've done OCD research. But I think these strands of research has just gained more attention. That's why I'm perhaps a bit more known for them, but it's not like I haven't So I've done other research too.

So anxiety, depression, we did a study on metaphor blindness. We found that people, some people in the populations who are, you know, in the general population or otherwise healthy, they can't understand metaphors, for example. They literally will, you say, not all that glitters is gold, and they will say, what does that mean? You know, you tell them Shakespeare poem, you know, shall I compare these to a sum as they, you know, and they understand nothing. They all take it all literally, you know. You are more temperate and more beautiful. They want to understand it. They think it's a summer's day.

They don't understand that this is a guy who's Shakespeare writing a poem for his lover, for example. And so it shows us that there are regions of the brain involved in understanding and making sense of metaphors, for example. That's a region called the Angulogyrus. In the left and right side, you have centers for that. And so those are interests of mine that I have. So, yeah, I have broad interest, but I think the OCD research just got a little more attention, I think. But yeah. So do you think through some of your research, there are ways you can translate this to some sort of solution that can help treat this and reduce people's OCD significantly or get rid of it depending on who they are?

100%. Yeah, definitely. So let's take another example. There's something called the rubber hand delusion. Yes. I have my hand right here, and this is my left hand, and my right hand is here. I put it underneath the table. And a separate person comes over here, and he strokes and taps the table in front of him.

He goes, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap. And the person does the same stroking and tapping on my right hand underneath the table. He'll go stroke, stroke, tap, tap, tap, stroke. So the feeling I'm getting in my right hand is identical with the visual presentation I'm seeing on the table. Does that make sense? Yes.

In about a few minutes of the person doing this, B'Land would literally feel touch sensations arising from the table as if this table is now part of me. Like on the other hand? Literally this table will feel like this hand that's hidden. Even if someone's not tapping it. Somebody must tap it. So I must have tactile stimulation.

I must feel some stroking and tapping that's identical with the stroking and tapping I'm seeing on the table. And then you feel the... On the words, I feel it. That's where you lost me a little bit. And then you feel the table? I feel the table.

So in other words, I'm feeling a stroking and tapping on my hand, right? But my hand, I'm actually not... So I'm not seeing it. It's hidden. But I'm just feeling it. Yes. Yet I'm seeing the same...

sequence of stroking and tapping on the table. So the stroking and tapping that I'm feeling, I'm seeing that on, because the person, he's doing both, you understand? He's doing both the stroking and tapping at the same time. So it's synchronized. So it's like stroking and tapping. He's doing like this underneath the table

and then on the table as well. He's doing like this. So what I'm seeing, what I'm feeling on my hand, looks identical with the pattern that I'm seeing on the table. So your brain goes, what is the statistical likelihood of me feeling this bizarre, you know, random pattern on my hand and seeing that random pattern on this table in front of me

and the chances are in nature zero. Therefore, this table is me. And literally if I then scan the brain, I will literally feel, you will see that the body image centers of the brain, the centers involved in creating a sense of body image, they will light up whenever you touch the table let's say you go and you bring a hammer and do like this to the table your pain centers will flare up as if your hand was afflicted with pain yeah i've seen

i've seen those experiments that's reminding me of it where someone puts their hand here and a fake hand there's a wall and then a fake hand is put here and someone takes like a hammer and is hitting the hand and the person starts to flinch on the exact fingers it's the same it's the same It's the same experiment. Yes. But this experiment can just be, there's variations to it. So the original experiment, exactly is what you're saying, there was a wall, a little cardboard wall,

and then you have like a rubber hand right here. And then the person's real hand is out here. Okay? And so the stroking and tapping is occurring on the real hand, and he is seeing it on the rubber hand. So it's identical. In fact, you can even, if somebody comes and strokes and taps my back, of my head, okay? And I'm, I'm stroking and I'm seeing a stroking and tapping on another person's

head in front of me. I'll feel like his, his back of his head is my back of my head. So it doesn't, it doesn't have to be a table or a rubber hand. The point is tactile sensations coupled with a visual presentations that identical, that will expand your body image. All right. Now coming to OCD, I thought one day I was driving on the freeway in California. I just been in Ramashandran's lab. Rama's lab had tons of fun. I thought, well, look, why not help people with OCD using this trick? Why is that important? Well, 50% of people with OCD will not go to therapy because they literally fear contaminants.

So you bring them into the clinic and you say Julian, let's imagine Julian has OCD. I say, Julian, touch this nasty thing right here. Here I have a shoe, the bottom of a shoe, touch it. and they will not go near it. And that's the way you treat OCD. You have to confront what you fear and touch the anxiety-provoking stimuli. 50% of people with OCD drop out.

About 25% will not start because of fear and so forth. There's all these stats showing that it's a huge barrier, the fear component. Now then Beland was thinking, what if I use a rubber hand instead? So I bring in Joe with OCD, and I use a rubber hand. and I stroke and tap the robber hand in front of Joe,

and I do the rubber hand experiment, and so he feels like the robber hand is his after five minutes, and then I contaminate the robber hand. Okay? In theory, if he gets contaminated in the robber hand, he will get the anxiety exposure that he needs for healing, okay, because he will feel like the rubber hand is his. But at the same time, I can trick him, I can say,

look, oh, Joe, come to the clinic, and don't worry, we won't actually. contaminate your real hand, we'll just contaminate a rubber hand. So he feels more safe, you see? He feels less exposed to contaminants. And we said, so we did this experiment, and it turned out that they actually feel contaminated in the rubber hand when we do the stroking and tapping. They will feel like their own hand is contaminated by using a rubber hand. So it's like a bridge. So how can you use, obviously, the extensive findings of an experiment like that to help solve that problem without it being just the you have to face it head on in therapy,

like, but also not being like an SSRI, not that it would be an SSRI, but you know what I mean, something where it's just throw a pill at it. Yeah, yeah. It's, well, it's, it's a way to get around these psychological, psychological barriers, right? So if the barrier is fear and anxiety, and I can trick you by using a robber hand instead of a real hand and convince you, well, this is not as terrifying as a real hand, but your brain is getting the memo. Your brain is actually becoming more versatile and able to tackle, you know, anxiety and discuss situations more, in a better way than we have solved the problems, just using a robber hand. So this is some of the work that we've been doing and, and feel like could, you know,

potentially help people with OCD. That's amazing. Yeah, I think so. Thank you, brother. I feel like it's, um, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's good stuff and you've written a lot of papers on this you know explaining the the experiment and the findings and all that yeah you know a little side note we all talk about peer review and stuff like that all the time when you go to write the write-up for the rubber hand experiment whenever that

was what year approximately 2014 i think okay yeah what's the process there like i feel like we just take this for granted all the time how does it actually work who how does the peer review process work such that that gets published and where does it get published so it's like okay that's a respected scientific paper right well it's a very long process right and this is one of the things of science um one of the annoying things to be honest do the experiments collect data you have the data then you analyze the data is may take three to six months depending on how fast you are then you have to write it up you let's say you have one of the research assistants write it up i used to write tons of papers myself then you have it and then you submit it to a journal

often what you see is about five or ten journals will it reject the paper this is common so five or ten journals rejected so this takes another six months to a year and then finally it gets into one one journal says okay we'll have a look at it be sent to three or four experts in the field they will read the paper and criticize it heavily like literally just tarnish the paper just go like this is bad why did you use this you know person why do you use this control experiment Why did you use this brush instead of that brush? Literally, they are the most OCD, anal, annoying people on earth. Okay?

And their job is to just kill your paper. Like, I'm trying to fix you. They're trying to just destroy your paper. And the funny thing, they're anonymous, so you can't see who they are. So they become even more nasty. Oh, that sucks. So that's how it works. And then you get all the feedback.

And then most of the time, as I said, it's a rejection. But sometimes it's not a rejection. It's just like this much work. It's just like hours of months of having to work on the experiment, maybe do new experiments, add new angle to the experiments, and then fix your papers and send it into them, and then another three or six months. You might be lucky, and then you get it published.

So it's a very lengthy and tedious process. How would you improve that system? And the reason I ask it like that is because it seems like, it perhaps unintentionally has become a bit of an ivory tower system where it's like you're within academia or within our research or you're not and if you're in you need to abide by our standards and if those standards aren't perfectly met we don't care if you're the next fucking Einstein it's not getting published and no one's going to recognize it that's problematic at the same time the idea of having a system of checks and balances to try to arrive at truth

scientifically is something that you should have like how would you kind of bridge that gap to make it middle ground and allow science to evolve and test things but also not you know just have it be random shit being thrown out there all the time that's completely that just causes noise you know what i mean yeah i think the the some of the factors might be things like you know science is a very it's it's poorly funded so literally i get maybe i used to get. Now I've rejected so many of these guys who send emails to review papers. I always just ignore these emails. My colleagues shouldn't hear this. So they send you all these invitations and you have to sit there for free and review papers for hours and hours. So they can start with

paying some of these scientists good money. They might be less, you know, less annoyed and less negative if they got some, you know. I think that's one of the things. So it takes so long because the sciences won't review the papers, they may take a month to review it. If there is a faster process where it's sending in, there's some money, so it could just make the system flow a bit faster. I think the key point, I think, obviously you have to do the experiments, it has to be rigorous and all that, but this, the scientific system is very broken financially. That's, I feel like that's the biggest, biggest barrier.

And this not only comes to peer review, but even things like when I, you know, At Harvard or Cambridge, I saw some of the smartest people in the world. Smartest people, literally geniuses in the, sometimes in the literal sense, like, out of this world. I know. And they would sit there and write emails all day and do all this bureaucratic work because the university was so slow and they have to do all this paperwork. And they have to sit there and reply to this. It's nonsense. I mean, if you have somebody who's at that level, you should have him just produce science and gain noble prices.

can help people and transform our world. They shouldn't sit there and do all this, send all these emails. It makes no sense. And that's, that's a huge problem in that system. That's why I'm really, to be honest, I'm very, I'm very, there's a lot of things about current academia

that really turns me off. I know my colleagues won't like it and I'm part of that system, but it's, it's that for a huge, having seen that for a very long time. It's very hard to escape. In business, it's very different. you know you it's because it's fueled by money you can have Elon Musk just coming up with ideas

every day and creating you know all these brain things for the brain and all that neuralink and all that and it goes so it just flies off because you have money and you just get the right people to work on the the most interesting problems but in a very fast manner efficient manner yeah you've also been in this country now during what I would describe is really the entire genesis of, you know, almost like a little bit of a down cycle within academia where you see some trends come in that are, frankly, anti-intellectual. You see politics infesting campuses where it's supposed to be debate. You see bureaucracy taking control of things where, as you're laying out right now, that shouldn't be the case. You should let genius minds work and try to find

new things. I think things will swing back at some point here. That said, I do think it's really great that guys like you who study things extensively and are doing research now have the outlet to do this and go public, whether it be you teach in to Peterson Academy or coming on shows like mine and discussing the things in a popularizing kind of way to explain it to everyone, the common man like me and everyone listening. it also allows you to get a profile which gives you perhaps some financial backing to be able to do your research and attract other like-minded people who are passionate about the research and kind of go around the system in a good way right like it seems like there's a really good opportunity now for that yeah definitely that's definitely one of the positive changes you know having seen having having having compared having been able to comparing these two worlds, right, of academia and traditional grant. So you have to sit down and write grants for six months and then it gets rejected ten times and then get some money versus you go do something that's in more in the, you talked about before. In the influencer realm, you do something small and you just get tons of money and you feel like, my God, you know, why even waste my time?

Right. You create your own destiny a little bit. You create your own destiny. Life is, you know, definitely things are changing. things are evolving and you have to you know be dynamic and flexible yeah but also when you have a good skill of communicating like you take advantage of it thank you i mean like that's that's a big thing because you'll see i i've seen it both ways i've seen scientists who are brilliant they're just not like great talkers or bringing it down to the level of the average man

being able to understand and you know they're going to rely more on the behind-the-scenes stuff and i get but then when you have guys who can kind of make it digestible and be passionate about it and make it fun you know it also does a lot for society too you know yeah no i agree and look beside that like i feel like something that i really love is is is science and i love explaining science as well so it's it's a passion of mine talking about science and talking about scientific ideas is really something that i love so and really during my entire career when i when i speak to young students and I see their face light up when you tell them about the brain or, you know, it's just very rewarding. Of course.

Of course. Now, you, again, this whole journey starts with your own sleep paralysis and everything like that. Now, as far as I know, I've never experienced that before. But to go back, just a review, because you explained it at the very beginning, the first time that you had it as a teenager, you felt like you were awake, but your whole body couldn't move. You're calling out to your parents trying to get help. And then you see like a monster in the corn. and it comes over to you and it's like pressing down on you.

So the connotation is that you are still technically asleep, but you feel like you're woken up in the very room that you're in. Is that fair to say? That is fair to say. Okay. And that's exactly what's happening in the brain. Exactly what's happening. So the brain has created this illusion that you're awake.

You're not. Exactly. So in the brain, what you have is you have two systems. The sensory systems, which are out here, the outer layer of the brain, it's called the perceptual cortex out here. that part of the brain just keep this pointing to you sorry yeah that this part of the brain

is involved in sensory perception of the world okay that and so that part literally turns on even though you are still in REM sleeping so sleep paralysis is a REM phenomenon

it's a rapid eye movement sleep phenomenon and as we mentioned during REM sleep during REM you have vivid and lifelike dreams right yes said that and so sleep paralysis emerges out of REM it comes out of REM so it's a REM phenomenon

and literally what it is is that your brain remains stuck in REM right so it's in REM it's stuck in the REM so it has all the physiological features of REM it has the paralysis it has the you can't move your eyes are moving from side to side which is also a REM thing it's a REM system and you might ask by the way

Julian might ask well well If you paralyzed, you can't move or speak, how come your eyes are moving? What's that about? And I'll just tell you this is a different circuit in the brain. Simple answer. There's a different circuit for your eyes. That's why you can move your eyes. Yeah, they're wired directly into it.

Yeah, you can put it that way. You can put it that way. He's like, no. Now, sometimes what can happen is that when you are in REM, your perceptual systems can go, oh, I'm going to wake up right now, even though you are in REM. So it's almost like you switch a button, like a turn on and off switch. gets stuck between on and off. Like it turns on perceptually so you can see your surroundings, you become aware of yourself, your eyelids can move, but you're still stuck in the paralysis of

REM. The REM stage of sleep and the paralysis part remains. So there's a decoupling of these two systems, the paralysis system and the perceptual system. So that's what REM sleep is all about. But also you have a lot of the features of dream sleep and REM sleep as well. So let me go into that. I think that will be interesting. Yeah, this is very interesting. So now when you on REM, you're dreaming. Take the dream world. When you are in dreams, are dreams bizarre, strange, illogical? Yes. Why is that the case? I'll tell you. I mean, I've always described him as just, but I'm using the word so it's a cop out. I've always described it as like fever dreams, right? Where you can take a movie character and suddenly like he's also, he's still that

character, but he's your buddy now that you grew up with and you're driving in a taxi somewhere. It has nothing to do with the plot, you know? Well, well put, well put. It's exactly. And the reason is simple. In the brain right here, you know, it's called a DLPFC on the prefrontal region. These parts of the brain, this part shuts down during REM. The logical, serial thinking part of the brain shuts down. And so that's why my sense of logic and agency and cohesed, building cohesive stories out of the window, literally because a part of the brain that has to do with serial and logical and cohesive thinking, thinking shuts down during REM. Literally, that is the simple explanation for why dreams are strange and bizarre.

That's the first explanation. So it totally shuts down so you can't distinguish between logical and illogical. The world becomes strange and bizarre because your logic centers shut down. Is it similar? I'm sorry, I just want to ask this because I thought of it. I don't mean to break your flow. But is it similar to like the phenomenon of some sort of psychedelic experience? like Alice in Wonderland?

We'll come to that. Okay. Thanks for the reminder. We'll get to that because I'd like to cover that. Not exactly. This part is not. It's different. But the LSD experience is also a part of the dream experience.

I'll get to that in a second. So you have the DLPFC shutting down. The world is illogical. First component. Now sometimes Julian finds himself on a spaceship and he flies in the spaceship and everything is just quickly. He's whisked up in the air and he's flying.

Why? Well, that's because behind your ears, you have a vestibular system. The vestibular system is involved in sense of balance, sense of me being here, but then I'm over here. And so this allows you to create balance in the brain. The neurons in the vestibular system are overactive in REM. Simple explanation, illogical, but also your balance centers are hyperactive.

So you become like this, out of balance. Things become pretty fleeting, right? that's that's one second the emotional core of the brain the limbic structure behind your ear there's a limbic center called the emotional center it's about 30% more active in REM sleep in your dream and because of that dreams are highly instinctual emotional you are desirous of things of emotional stuff maybe women or whatever that's because 30% more activity in the emotional instinctual part of the brain. Okay. Three parts. Four.

The interior singulate and empathy part of the brain that's involved in creating other people hyperactive. That's why the brain is populated. The dream is populated by a lot of people. Your dreams are literally very social. Your dreams dreams are full of people. Real and fake. Well, they're all fake in the sense that, well, okay, I see what you're just saying. Imagine versus people you met in real life.

Yeah, I'm thinking to my dream. last night. Gotcha. I gotcha. I understand. Well, your brain creates these mix, right? So it could be people that you think, you know, could be real people or people that you imagine. Yeah, it could be both. But it's, but the key point is that is populated by a lot of people, all right? Tons of people. So you have that. So the, so the theory of mind part of the brain is as hyperactive. That's another part. Let's continue. Dreams build narratives. So the hippocampus part of the brain, the memory part of the brain, builds stories and takes from your memory

so it's literally people you knew from real life and weaves them into the narratives as well. So the hippocampus is there. Got it. The motor regions of the brain are active and for that reason

you are moving around in your dream. You can move. That's the motor regions. So it's creating the illusion that you're moving. Correct. So basically, in a nutshell, when I,

beland, I'm moving when I'm awake, I move my arm from A to B in space. I'm using my motor cortex on the left side. neurons fire, I move from A to B. This is motor cortex. I close my eyes and imagine myself moving from A to B, and my motor cortex will actually fire as well,

even though I'm not moving. They're partially fire, just by imagining it. When I'm dreaming, because I'm imagining myself moving, the motor cortex fires away. So you have all these different centers of the brain being active, and that's why the dream landscape has this flavor to it, Bizarreness, strangeness, sense of agency is gone. I don't know that I'm dreaming when I'm dreaming.

Why is that the case? Well, again, the DLPFC is involved in self-agency, not only logic, but also self-agency. So I am unaware of myself dreaming. The TPJ regions we mentioned before that's involved in self-body image shuts down. This region shuts down. And for that reason, you feel like you're here, but then suddenly you occupy somebody else's body, or you might feel yourself in a bird's body or you see yourself from the outside

like a Netflix movie why is that the case well your sense of self and body image becomes fluid that's a TPJ shutting down you literally have your brain chemistry and your brain milieu

dictating what you see in your dream now if I Beland Julian is dreaming and his brain is firing in this bizarre pattern and he's seeing a certain dream because of that. And then I come in and I fire some light over here and put some fire, and the smoke will overwhelms you, right?

In your dream now, you will incorporate that smoke into your dream as well. So you'll see yourself in a high house where it's like there's fire and you're trying to escape. So we can externally affect the dream as well. So not only your internal brain environment, also the external environment can affect the dream content. So these are very crucial points The final point I don't want to go ramble too much But a final point

This is great A final point on this is that You may notice And I've had this dream a ton And a lot of people tell me They have these dreams Is that the dream that you're trying to walk But you can't

You feel like your hands Your legs are heavy Joey is Your legs are heavy And the monster is chasing you You're trying to get away But you can't You're like I'm stuck

What's going on there? This is simply your motor cortex firing, so you're moving. But at the same time, in the brain stem, the lower part of the brain, there's a structure that's called a central motor generator. Central motor generator. If the neurons there will go to the cortical regions and the outer layer of the brain and compete with the motor cortex. So if the central motor generator in the lower part of the brain is involved in automatic movements,

and the outer layer is involved in actual voluntary movements, the automatic center will sometimes, because it fires sporadically, like, it will overwhelm, it will overwhelm the motor cortex, and for that reason, even though you feel like you can move, but then suddenly you feel like you cannot move, okay? I understand. It's a very crucial point, actually. That explains why dreams feel so fleeting,

and you feel like you have control one minute, but then the other minute you don't have control. Yes. And it has to do with the fact that you have tons of neurons in the lower part of the brain overwhelming the more voluntary cortical regions. It's like they're competing with each other. They're competing and the lower parts are more aggressive

and when they fire sporadically, suddenly they will overwhelm it. So if you are walking and you feel like you have control, suddenly you don't have control. And that's the automatic regions out competing, out wrestling these outer layers. And then you might add, before you go, then you might add, well, what's the monster all about?

The monster is literally a physical representation of your limbic emotional fear centers being 30% more active. So it manifests as a monster chasing you. So it's like if I were watching, if I had the activity monitor open on my computer and I were watching all the different places it was using the unified memory in, these are all the places it's capable of using it. But depending on what I have open, Chrome, Spotify. you know, YouTube, which would be in Chrome, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, and depending on what I'm actively using, some levels are going to be more, meaning they're going to take a bigger piece of the pie. If I'm understanding correctly, this is what's happening with different centers of your brain during a dream. You just don't control what's open and what's not. That's a beautiful

metaphor. It's a beautiful metaphor. Thank you. Look at it. No, I love it. I love it. I'm not retarded, you. He's like, no, you still my face. Look, Julian, what I'm trying to say, and you put it very nicely in that way, your brain is set on a certain, there are certain parameters with this part being slowed down, this part being slowed down, this part being overactive, creating a, a, the way your brain will express based on that. Literally, I can give you another example. As you know, I'm teaching a course on love at the Peterson Academy in a few days.

And so when you are in love, for example, there's another, let's analogy to the dreams state. When you fall in love, your prefrontal cortex will shut down. Your logical is part of the brain will shut down. Yeah. Serotonin will go down. I'm talking about the infatuation stage. So serotonin, which is involved in well-being, will go away. You will have, when serotonin goes down, you become OCD. You start obsessing all the time. Okay. When you fall in love, dopamine goes up. You become like a cocaine, cocaine head. You become like a crack head. Okay. I'm serious. I understand exactly. what you mean. You have tons of dopamine, all right? The TPJ region of the brain that has to do with empathy and like the psychopath, like trying to understand other person's mind, becomes hyperactive

because you're always trying to figure out what you're, but the girl is, you know, girl is stinking right now. So that becomes hyperactive, okay? Cortisol goes up, just like Julian, when he's stressed, when in the infatuation stage of love, cortisol is through the roof. That's why you can't stay there for a very long time. Three to six months, you have to either break up or become a stable couple. Otherwise, you'll just wear yourself out. Literally, what I'm trying to say is that

the dream state, or whether you are in cocaine, or whether you are newly in love, the brain has a way of organizing yourself, and your behavioral output will reflect that. Their mental activity will reflect exactly how the brain is set in that, the default state of that situation. that's perfectly explained cool joe we're watching a superstar being born today i don't know if you

haven't picked up on that i know you have but i i i think you're gonna have a future on a lot of screens around here but you're the way you explain things is really amazing and it also like everyone out there this these are human experiences right we all dream we all can think of it like from our perspective and be like oh maybe that's why this or that but one of the things i keep on thinking about while you're going through all the different parts of the brain that are working for and against each other in some ways to create a dream is the fleeting nature of those dreams. And what I mean by that is... At Desjardin, we speak business.

We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice. And we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already... ready count on us and contact Desjardin today we'd love to talk business i will dream vividly and know that i dream vividly yeah i will usually remember most of the dream the second i wake up

yeah at at at 615 in the morning but there are some days where by 621 i don't remember any of it yeah and some days at 621 i remember all of it and i remember it days later and months later and years later. Like last night's dream, I can tell you play by play what happened. The dream I had like three nights ago, I remember was fucking crazy. I couldn't even tell you where it was or who was in it. Why is that? Why do we have like selective memory of dreams?

It's a good point. It's a good point to emphasize that the whole night, right? So you have eight hours of sleep. Julian has six or seven. Most of us have eight. I do seven or eight now. Seven is good. That's at seven, seven hours, right?

And that whole, whole, you know, sleep architecture, one-third is in REM. In REM, you have dreams. Whether you remember them or not, you actually dream in the entire night. Entire REM stages dream. In fact, the other stages of sleep, you also have some fragments of dreams. Dreams have less of a story plot. They are less cohesive. They are less story-like, but there are still some dreams in the other stages.

So you have tons of opportunities to dream. Now, Julian is asking, then how come I don't remember my dreams, right? Why do I have a few dreams that I do remember? And the reason is this, remember I told you that serotonin shots off? Remember I told that? Yes. Serotonin goes down during REM. And neuroadrenaline also goes down during REM.

That's why we have, why we are, things are spacey and all that. Right. That's the REM phenomenon. So these two chemicals go down. And because serotonin and noradrenaline shuts down in REM sleep, you need, need those chemicals in order to take memories from the hippocampus, the memory part of the brain, and place it in the cortex to store the memories. In other words, you have the memories, but they're not stored.

The brain, because of these two chemicals being absent, it's much more output fixated than input fixated, meaning input, it doesn't store new memories, but it just builds stories all the power. It's output generated. It's output fixed. And the reason for that is also there's another chemical. And I'm throwing chemicals at you, but it's important. And it's very simple, actually. There's a chemical called acetycholine in the lower part of the brain. That fires up the brain. So it's always in the business of creating new stories, new stories, new stories, but never because of that hippocampal region being deactivated and not deactivated, but lacking these chemicals to store them. Does that make sense? Yes. It's basically that. That's

it. The hippocampus can't store new memories in the same manner. But sometimes it, sometimes it fires in a way that it does. And this is really it. Then when you wake up, and this is the crucial point of all this, when you wake up, the wakefulness process itself entails a surge of serotonin and your adrenaline flooding your brain. That's why when you actually wake up, the dreams you do remember are the last few minutes of the dreams you just had. You don't remember the whole REN thing. That's actually what you remember are only the last few minutes. The last, I mean, the one last night was so detailed, so many late. That's only a few minutes. Well, we'll get into that too, why dreams feel so expanded. Let's get into that.

Yeah, please. Is it, I'm talking, this was like. Yeah, yeah. No, it feels a long time. Yeah, it's a full movie. That's a full movie. So just to conclude on this, the reason why you can remember your dreams is because serotonin and neurovenilin, the chemicals helping your hippocampus store them are absent. That's the whole story. And then when you wake up, you jolt awake, you remember your dreams because serotonin and adrenaline comes online. That's a simple story for that. Then Julian says, well, look, I felt like ours, like inception.

It feels like, you know, years. Yeah. It turns out, when you record the neurons of a rat as it's running through a maze, so it's running through a maze and you record their neurons in the in a region called the hippocampus, we talked about the memory part, The fire, neurons go dr-dr-dr-dr-dr-dr-dr-th. Then the mice are awake. And you look at their neurons again,

and it turns out the same neurons will fire when they are awake as when they were dreaming. So when, sorry, let me get this right. The neurons of the hippocampus of the mice firing a certain pattern when they're asleep and the same neurons fire when they are awake. There's a replay of neuronal firing. It's like the same, it's like this,

they're doing the same thing, okay? I'm mirroring. Now you go, here's the, here's an interesting part. So the neurons not only fire when they are awake, but they also, they fire about 50% slower. Okay. 50% slower when they are in REM. Does that make sense?

Yes. So when they are awake, the neurons fire fast. When they are asleep, the neurons fire slow, about 50% slower. So this might explain why when I am sleeping on a couch and I'm sleeping and then I feel like it's been two hours and I wake up and look at the clock

and it's been like two minutes. It's been like two minutes. The reason for that is potentially that the neurons in my brain fired 25% to 50% slower when I was in REM. And it's not perfect math. It doesn't mean that because it was two minutes, therefore in your brain,

It's now four minutes. It could be like two hours. It's distorted. It's distorted. Essentially because it's not, the percentage isn't related to the percentage of time. It's related to the percentage of like activity. Therefore, some of that activity being reduced means that your perception is gone. Correct.

And to be honest, we don't really know this, how this works out in humans. We have not, we don't have a real story for that. It's hard to really do these experiments in humans. We can't really crack open the skull and record the neurons in the same way as we can in rats. right but you know it's a it's a good indicator the fact that we know that that you know rats the neurons are slowed down by 50% the same neurons when they are in in rim but let me tell you a different experiment that I wanted to do with ramashandran so ramashandran I wanted to do an experiment on exactly sleep on time perception in dreams and this was a experiment we came up with

and I took it to Alan Hobson one of the greatest dream sleep dream researchers of the last hundred years not to brag or anything I knew him a little bit You got clout. It's cool. Yeah, yeah. So I took it to him, I said, look, this experiment here, what do you think about this? We have a guy, let's call him Joe. Joe is sleeping.

And as Joe is sleeping, I will ascertain using neural recordings, EEGs in his brain. EEG is like a net-like thing on the brain, you record the activity of the brain, and you kind of can figure out whether a person is in REM. You can record facial muscles and all that as well to see he's paralyzed in the rim. So you do that. You know he's in REM sleep. And once he's in REM dreaming away, the land will come in and I will sprinkle water on Joe sleeping. I'll go, and then here, this is what I'll do.

I will wake Joe up instantly. I'll go, wake him up. Wake up, Joe. Okay? Like a few seconds, maybe. Wait a few seconds and then wake him up. Wake him up. The question is,

Will Joe, if I asked Joe, what did you dream about? Would he go, A, this is the first scenario. I was walking in a New Jersey. I saw the clouds come out. You know, it became darker. I took out my umbrella and it started to rain slowly. But I also just called my mom telling her to also, you know, it's mom, it's raining. You know, remember that, you remember the umbrella as well.

And I saw a long story. The person builds a long story around them. That's the first scenario. Scenario B is the following. I wake Joe up and I ask him about his dream and he'll go, oh, I was just walking and suddenly I was hit by a tsunami. I was just hit by tsunami. I woke up.

These are the only two possibilities. The question is which one is correct. The first one would imply that dreams are heavily slowed down compared to real life because remember I put water on him. and woke him up after like a second or two, right? The second one, he's just like, oh, I just, I was hit by, by, you know, water like a tsunami. Which one is it?

We don't know. And this is one of the huge, this is such a simple experiment. We haven't, we haven't, we don't know the answer to this experiment, but it could potentially reveal a lot of things. And my, and Hobson was excited about this experiment. But we haven't done it. You got to do that one. You got to do that one.

Yeah. Where do dreams come from? It's a good question. Where do the dreams come from? So for a long time, people thought these were messages from God and divine realms. And to be honest, we can't really exclude anything in the sense that just because we know there's a brain chemistry and there's a brain substrate to dreams, we can't for sure know if there's something coming from outside. We can't know that. So we'll just keep that possibility open for a science.

just 100 years from now. We won't go into that, but that was the belief for a long time. So where do they come from? Let's say we don't know other than we can look at the brain, chemistry, and the functional activity of the brain and say, your dreams are a product of this,

of this activity. But you can go further than that and say, well, it's not merely the activity of the brain and the neurons firing in this bizarre synchrony that's creating the dream. There's also other factor. be things like your unconscious memories of life and experiences. We know that the hippocampus, as I mentioned, is hyperactive in REM,

so definitely you have a lot of activity of the hippocampus spilling over, and so you see yourself replaying some of your life experiences. In fact, dreams don't just replay real-life events. They tend to be more sort of around core themes and fears and things you're happy with rather than just mere replay. Julian is not merely seeing himself, you know, walking around in New Jersey and eating pizza at the deli. He's not seeing that.

He's seeing more of emotionally important themes and symbols. Even if they're changed from what reality is. Even though they're changed. You can think of dreams more like, dreams are more like an Indiana Jones, and you are, it's an exploratory process where your brain ticks these visual scenarios and throw them,

throw them at you at Julian and says, look, here's Julian is in a space suit and he's walking around in Buckingham Palace and then see how you react to that. If you're emotionally aroused, it will say, oh, this is important. Let's go further down this route and you explore it a bit more. And then it takes another scenario. Maybe it introduces a colleague that just, a new colleague from work and you see her suddenly wearing a, what's not Batman, the lady in Batman? the catwoman she becomes cat woman for example or you know bizarre something that's why it was a good cat woman yeah something strange and bizarre will happen

and the point of all this your brain is literally exploring scenarios and testing them against against your expectations and your emotions and if it's important you'll go down that route more so that's the first that's the first element second element you can think of dreams as as a visual I'm trying to be like you now and use metaphors

so it's like a museum, an art museum rather than actual verbal stuff meaning that it takes you and shows you these indescribable things like walking around an art museum and being aroused and you can't really put words on what you're seeing

it's so profoundly evocative emotionally oh my God I'm seeing the sun and the moon bowing in front of me I am seeing you know this this television splitting into becoming a rainbow and flying off. And things are indescribable.

And that's because the brain, it seems, is using more the right hemisphere, which is more the art part of the brain. It recruits a lot of those centers, for sure, and less linguistic. It uses language. We do speak in dreams, but it's less linguistically describable.

It's more of metaphorically abstract. That's a very crucial point, actually, of the whole dream experience. the fact that you have that these are like that art museum metaphor that things are visually evocative and just profound and indescribable often but they often you know i'm one of these guys that likes to think about the meaning of my dreams because they have these strange nonlinear parallels to things in my life with real people mixed with some bizarreness not real people as well but the real people are in a totally different context but then the actions they take or you take with them in the dream explains something else that's either like something you need to do yeah in your life or something that's missing in your life it's a good point yeah it's almost like emotional processing it's a way of it's it's reminding it's a reminder but it's really one theory just to go back to theory land here but it's it's it's kind of what you're saying there's a theory called three threat simulation, which is merely fancy word for saying that dreams is a way of exposing you to the terrifying situations and see how you survive in them. In other words, if you go around and if you're walking in a landscape and you jump over a river and you're running away from

a serial killer or a sable tooth tiger or something like that, and you survive that scenario, you're more likely to face situations like that in your real life and survive. The brain is never wasteful. Your brain is never redundant. Your brain doesn't want to waste energies and resources. So it's using that time to build new circuitry in the brain, plasticly rewire your brain, so you don't have to go out and chase that, that, that, you know, that lion or run away from that lion. You are more, you have already have the circuits laid down while you are dreaming. So that effectively one view. Your point is also similarly, and it's related, it's valid that you're you're learning how to cope emotionally with other other people.

So dreams are hyper-social and one social and they're hyper-emotional as well. And they tend to be more negative. And negative, we have more negative social encounters in dreams. That means that's important because your brain goes, look, for me, Baland, to be having a chit-chat with a girl in my dream is going to be less important for my survival than having this fight with a serial killer and escaping that. Which one is more likely to help you survive? Well, the emotional interaction with the girl can be important too. You learn skills, but it's skewed and biased towards more negative interaction because your brain is always

trying to help you survive. Even if it's far less realistic. Like, the first one with the girl could be very realistic to something you're dealing with with a girl in real life right now. That is true, but the brain and dreams are generally not very realistic. It tries to use the more extreme examples to be more evocative. And that's the whole point. But does it use extreme examples of like symbolism that doesn't make sense while the examples are actually very real things?

They make emotionally sense. That's the point. I think they do make emotional sense. So even though in your dreams, the thing is with dreams, you can have your dream, you can be in your bedroom, you can be in this apartment here,

and it will feel like a, it will be a palace. It would literally be transformed into a palace, but it still feels like your own room you don't question it and that's the whole point of dream the fact that you can have this moon and the stars prostrate in front of you

but it feels normal in the dream and that's because somehow logic is turned off but emotion is hyperactivated so we don't we don't find it bizarre and abstract and that's a key point emotionally you

you cope with the experience and you learn from it and so that's why yeah that's why the whole that's why we can even even though it's bizarre and strange the whole serial killer attacking you and you're trying to run away

and by the way the serial killer has three heads but still it can teach you something about emotional coping in a similar emotionally evocative scenario on the monster thing I do want to point something out here the mantra thing

the monster thing and the point is that have you noticed in your dreams the monsters in your dreams are terrifying but they look a certain They look a certain way typically. They look a certain way typically. And the way they look is that the monster has to be terrifying, but not that terrifying that they are not on.

They can't be remembered. There has to be some level of terror. But if it becomes, if instead of three heads has like hundred heads, it wouldn't work. I don't, I'm not going to say that's never happened. I'll say this and now fucking tonight I'll dream about monster. But I don't really have the monster coming to my dreams ever.

Yeah. So the only type of dream that involves like me running for my life from death usually involves like a vehicle or something like that. Like a car is driving at me or the plane's going down. I'm like, well, fuck. And then like you'll wake up and you're like, you know, like almost you were falling from the sky. But a lot of things that are like the monster are the threat of something happening. Yeah. Like do you ever sit with people and like break down their dreams and like what it means? Yeah. I do get those. often people ask me often about their dreams and do can you figure out like how it taught like sometimes when they're describing it like how it makes sense from yeah yeah i try to interpret it differently i try yeah i try because like i you know i'm not a scientist but i'm always trying to do that because there will be some sort of theme that is the hypothetical monster it's not a real monster but it's like a threat in the real world and even if sometimes it'll be called something different and it's not like an actual thing but it's directly parallel to something and I'm like oh I was just talking about that with someone and what a danger that is or or that

kind of thing is if it's almost like man I should hit that again or you know because I also have a show too so I cover topics sometimes of things that are like a problem you know I don't know if I don't know if that's like related to what I do and I'm always thinking about this stuff but it's it's more of a I describe it less like someone holding a gun to your head and more like you watching a movie of a gun to someone else's head and watching it go off. It's more like that. Yeah.

You know? No, I agree. I agree. It has that unpredictability about it and it's it's fleeting. But again, it's the neurons firing a certain way, the chemicals being in a certain about and state and things like that. I want to also touch on the whole, you said the psychedelics and all that.

Yeah, you're reading my mind. You're in my head right now? Yeah, yeah, I did. God damn it. Put a fucking neuron on me or something. So why do dreams have this kind of bizarre, strange, airy field to them? Why do they kind of remind you

of the psychedelic state? You might ask that. And the reason is simple. The mystical aspect of dreams and the highly sort of personalized cosmic aspect of dreams is that, this is a theory, of course, but it's very plausible. I remember I talked about serotonin being shutting down in REM sleep, and therefore dreams not being absent in dreams, right?

And this is, no, when serotonin overall shuts down, often what you can find is that other receptors for serotonin might go up all of a sudden. And this is a feature of the brain. You shut down one receptor or one family of neurons or chemicals, and it might find another way to come back online. So there's a receptor called a serotonin 2A receptor, okay? Fancy word for the ghost receptor in the brain. This is literally the ghost receptor, meaning that when you take psychedelics, when you take psilocybin, LSD, all these drugs, you will titillate and tickle these serotonin two A-receptors,

and in effect, the world feels mysterious. It feels everything becomes salient. This water becomes salient. This becomes salient. It becomes imbued with meaning. Okay? Now, in dreams, we think that because serotonin shuts down, these receptors, these serotonin-2-A receptors,

might actually get a boost. and that might explain why dreams have this mystical, overall, airy qualities with them, simply for that reason. It's quite interesting, but it might explain it, it might explain it, the fact that you have these serotonin two receptors suddenly coming alive. So it makes you, if I'm understanding that correctly, it makes everything feel like it has a spirit to it and like it's existing. It's not just atoms. Yeah, it's again another layer to all the brain components I told you. This is another layer besides things being bizarre. strange and flying you know things flying all over the place there's also a

mystical and almost spiritual layer to it and that's that's that's the serotonin 2a receptor that you can also artificially take by using drugs do you think that like the ghost receptor and and this this concept how do I want to ask this is I don't want to overcomplicate this I want this digestible so that you can understand it and you see where I'm going here but yeah because we we are suspended from reality when we're asleep yeah it's literally this thing that every organism does like you gotta just like go to sleep to let the body rebuild itself during time but you you fall like that's how we say you fall asleep like you're falling out of reality in a way and you are then

the brain goes into rebuild mode and as a part of this rebuild mode it almost i guess it's elevator music is the way that it fires all the different parts of the brain for you to dream and like be distracted like oh look over here while we're fixing all yourselves and shit like that is is there any science or is there any idea you have that could link this to some sort of otherworldly or spiritual endeavor does that make sense it's a little bit of a woo-woo way of asking it but is there anything that you've even if it's not proven yet that you've been like ooh that could tie to that yeah this is a very interesting and a deep question actually so as you know i'm a i'm a religious person myself a muslim spiritual i believe in other realms so

by default i become a bit more open to other realities when did were you like that as a child too or did that develop later but the science the more scientific became the more spiritual i became wow that's that's actually true i became more spirit in my childhood look at I was, when I was in the gang, I knew nothing about spirituality. My family is not very religious or interesting. So this is something that. You just developed that yourself. It came with the whole, when I started to study science and all that, I just felt that, you know, there was more to, to the world than life. So this is something that I grew into. But I, but I do think that other dimensions could exist. So consciousness, we know what consciousness, it's, okay,

consciousness, what is consciousness? Consciousness is something inside of you. The, awareness of you, of the world. You have something called qualia. Qualia is, and I get to the question, but qualia is the sensation of, when I drink water, the sensation of water, or the redness of red or the pain of pain. That's called qualia.

It's a fascinating thing, because we all have this. Okay, this is humanly, very, very crucial. And then inside the brain, spirituality and dreams and spirituality and the brain is very hard, it's very hard to pin down, but it seems like if there is, if consciousness can be pinned down to one part of the brain, it would be the limbic center.

The limbic center. Emotional core of the brain. I'll tell you why. And this is also where if I, if I have epileptic seizures, it's called temporal lobe epilepsy in the, in the temporal loat, in the emotional core of the brain, I will literally become more religious, I become more spiritual, I become poetic, I, become, I start writing all this religious stuff and it's just become

like, act like a prophet. If I get temporal lobe epilepsy, this is well studied. Yeah, this is a neurological disorder where the neurons in that part of the brain goes, go ballistic and they fire. Okay? The temporal lobes is also, it may be part

of that part of the brain where consciousness comes about because if I stimulate it artificially using a current, I will have these vast experiences that are emotionally rich, sensorially rich. I see myself floating outside my body as well, but it's a very rich experience I have of emotion and self as well. To make this illustrate this point, let me give you the opposite scenario. Let's say the limbic structure dials down. If the limbic structure dials down

to the extent that it shuts off, you may develop Kotar syndrome. Kotar syndrome. Kotar Kotar, okay? You see I said Qatar, everyone's talking about Qatar these days. Kotart, Kotart, exactly. I know what you mean, yep. Plus $7,000, go ahead. Right, right. Okay, Kotart syndrome is the following.

You feel like the world is dead. There's no meaning in the world. Before, in a dream, everything is significant and emotionally salient. When you have Kotar syndrome, everything is dead. Everything is without meaning. There's no meaning to know. There's nothing, there's no meaning at all. And in fact, you may look in the mirror and say, I am dead.

I'm not alive. And the doctor might say, well, what are you talking about? You're sitting here and having a conversation. He said, yeah, well, I'm having a conversation, but I'm dead. You might poke him with a needle, and it bleats. And he looks at it. He says, and the doctor might say, well, you're bleeding. Do dead men bleed?

And he might say, maybe they do after all. You know, maybe dead men do bleed after all, okay? So he sees himself as dead because of his limbic structures turning off. Coming to your point now, there's also a helmet called the God helmet. God helmet is you put it on. It was Michael Persinger in the 1990s. I think he came up with this concept. The helmet you put it on.

And literally people will feel like they are one with God. They have spiritual experiences by stimulating the limbic core of the brain. So if there's any part of the brain where spirituality would come about, it would be in the limbic core, where consciousness would come about as well, it would be in the limbic part, the emotional part of the brain. Emotion, in fact, saying this, the emotional part of the brain would be a disservice because it's involved in such a vast array of human experiences. But that's what I would say.

So in dreams, that part of the brain is dialed up. That's why it can feel spiritual and cosmic. But then, my mentor, Ramashanan, once said, how do we know that God is not merely communicating with us using that limbic center? Why do we think that the limbic center is creating God, whereas it could be God communicating with that limbic center, and I think that could be true. I think that personally, I think that I do believe in God and spirits and all that.

And so there's nothing negating the fact that God could be speaking to us through brain centers. How would he speak to us? Imagine a radio, you're a guy 200 years ago, and you walk in a in a in a um desert okay and this desert and julian he sees a radio i'd be like what the fuck he takes it and he turns it on and music comes out of it okay what would you think you would open it and you would maybe start breaking some things and the music would go a little and things would become messy right but never in your mind would you have thought well this is radio waves coming from somewhere else creating the music yeah yeah you would thought that you're messing

around with the insights of the radio it's all that's happening. So in a sense, science is right now in this stage. We are tampering with the brain. We shut this center off, amplify this region, and we see changes. But we cannot negate the fact that other

forces might communicate with us from the outside. So, did that analogy make sense? Yes, it does. It does. I don't think I'd open it up. I think I'd like back away all afraid of it. Like, what the fuck is that? Right, right. It's like, but it's also like impossible to simulate late what you would think because I we know that reality like I was born with all this

technology around me so like I didn't see it would I be totally afraid of it I would assume so I assume so I'm not really sure by the way you'll have to use the restroom if you oh sure we'll be right back so that terms ghost receptor you were saying that's like a real scientific term I came up with it actually you came up with it that's a sick term one of my my that's in the title yeah the title of the paper I think it's called the ghost receptor in the brain why we see Freddie Krueger during dream sleep paralysis or something like that. And I published this. Why we see Freddie Kruger? Yeah, something like that. It's about the Freddy Krueger phenomenon and why we see the

Hatman and all that. Can you explain that the hat man thing? Was I just talking with you about that the other day? Yeah, in the last episode. Right, yeah. So why do people see these Freddie Kruegel-like monsters and people with hats and all that in sleep paralysis or these states that are between wakefulness and dreams? And the reason I think is the following. When you are sleeping, first of all, you might say, why do most people just see a shadow in the corner of the room? Why a shadow? Why is that about?

And here I would say the following. The limbic centers of your brain, emotional core, the fear centers are hyperactive. That's the fear representing as the corner, the monster. And then what's called visual processing, the visual act of seeing itself is very hierarchical. It occurs in a hierarchy. So first of all, in the back of your brain, you have a structure in the occipital lobes back in the brain, the visual cortex.

It responds to lines and things like, and basic shapes, basic lines and shapes. So what I think is that when you have sleep paralysis, for example, your brain says, look, I don't want to hallucinate a monster with, like, with detailed a face and a perfect, like, you know, clothing and all that. that. I just want to have the basic shape. So I'll just use my visual cortex and then just think about how to get out of this room, escape routes and all that. The reason for this, Julian, is that visual, there's one third of the cortex is for vision alone. We have 30 centers for vision. Vision is very costly. It's a very costly process to see. So your brain is always in the business of how can I see things in the world using the most efficient way. as possible.

So for the brain to say, look, I'm just going to visualize a shadow over there and the hell with the rest, and I can focus on other things. That's just a way to get out of it. So that's the first step. Now, occasionally, then, you might see the shadow moving, right?

That's because we have a part of the brain called the MT, the motor it's called the MT, okay, it's not the motor, but it's called the MT region. It has to do with movement. So the visual process will also recruit that center. And so for that reason, you have movement of the monster. That's part of the visual hierarchy. The next step. Think of it as a ladder going next step up. In fact, the

MT, if I get a stroke in the MT, and I drink a glass of water like this, the water will go like this. It won't flow. It goes like a black and white movie from 100 years ago. It'd go like this. Or if I see a car, I won't see it as floating and moving like this. It'll be like. But yeah, like shitty frame rate. Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. That's the MP. team. Next, you have in the visual hierarchy, you have something called V4, color vision. Okay. Occasionally, the monster will actually have color. That's because you, next step in the hierarchy is V4, color. Then in the hierarchy, you have things like face, face area of the brain. Do you know? The brain has a face area. It's called the fusiform face area. If that region is messed up and I look at a face,

I won't able to recognize faces. In fact, one of my, one of my colleagues, I want my, old friend died a few years ago called Oliver Sacks. You should look him up. He's a famous writer of neurology. Can you come a little bit this way, sorry. Yes. He's a famous writer of neurology. I'm just mentioning this to brag, but Robin Williams plays him in a movie.

Once he was walking here in New York, Oliver Sacks, he was walking here in New York, and he ran into a man. He saw this man, he ran straight into him, and he was like this, what's going on? And then he looked again, and he realized it's actually a mirror, and it's myself I'm looking at. He had proposagnosia. Proposugnosia. A condition where you can't recognize phases.

So the face area of the brain is not working. So that is the fusiform face area. Whoa. Yeah, here he is. He even looks like Robin Williams a little bit. This guy was a phenomenon. Oh, he's dead. He's just going to ask you if we could bring him on.

Oh, yeah. This guy was a superstar. I mean, this was one of Ramachandran's friends. So because of Ramachandran's, I would meet superstars like this and become friends with them. Oh, yeah. Awakenings. Yeah. Yeah, he was a great guy who used to correspond by, he would write me handwritten letters.

Do you remember, can you imagine this? I do them. I swear to God. He would write me handwritten letters. Old lost art right there. He was a very shy guy. He was a very shy guy. He used to, when you gave lectures or seminars, he would only have us, but be four or five people.

Otherwise, he couldn't deliver it. Such a character. Unfortunately, he passed away from, from, I believe, it's brain cancer, but... It lived a long life, though. 92 years old, or 82 years old? Yeah, yeah, unfortunately. Wow.

Now, so we have face recognition area of the brain, fusiform face area. Again, that's why you add the face to the monster. Next to the visual hierarchy is the vernicus area, is the meaning part of the brain. It's called the vernicus. Again, you recruit that, and then the visual scene become more meaningful, and then finally you have things like,

You have things like the hippocampus part of the brain, the memory part of the brain. And so you recruit memories from your daily life. This would be, I saw Freddy Kruger movie. I saw my grandmother told me about a story about a monster that looked like this or that. And that I will weave into the narrative. And then the visual scene will look like this. Does that make sense? So you have narrative and memory, meaning, you have depth, you have color, you have movement,

you have basic, basic shapes, and that's how your visual process works. Sometimes you just stop at the earlier stages of processing to use those resources to a better purpose, but sometimes you just hallucinate the bloody thing, the whole thing. And that's why some people literally see the hat man looking like Freddie Kruger, being in color, moving towards you, strangling you.

And it comes in, like, different forms as well, like culturally, too. That's the memory part of the brain because that's the part of the visual cortex and the visual, not the visual cortex, it's part of the visual hierarchy. And so that, for that reason, depending on your cultural narrative, that will spill into the experience. Have you ever read Metzger's work before? No. He's great. I'll send you it afterwards. He does some great work on this.

Kurt Metzker talking about the Hatman and all that, different cultural phenomena. Terrific scientists. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them. But that's, you know, it's very, everything that you have described today, especially when it comes to dreams, it's, it's psychedelic in a way, no pun intended, but there's a real like math to it as well. Like you're describing ratios and how the ratios get distorted, like everything you just described there with all the different parts and then it gets put together and voila, it like spits out this thing. So people, when their brains decide to do different ratios for them, have wildly different experiences and it becomes individualized. That's kind of cool. It's very cool.

On that point of vision, a key point to emphasize is that even though vision has this hierarchy and things are going from bottom up to do the higher regions and we create meaning and we create vision, we create color and depth and all that, there are as many. wires going from the top regions down to the lower centers. And by this, I mean the following. Vision is an active process. So when I see a table, when I see this table here, Julian's table, I won't, my brain won't go, oh, here's a table, let me just take all the fragments and slowly create the whole thing. It actually literally will say, I've seen a table like this a hundred times.

And for that reason, I merely will take a splotch from that table. and then I will recruit from higher centers of memory and send them down to the visual centers and create the image. Meaning, vision is as much or even more perhaps about expectation and interpretation versus actually what's out there. And this is a crucial point. Vision is as much about interpretation versus what actually is out there. It's a controlled hallucination.

Vision is a controlled hallucination. Your perceptual reality is your expectation, meaning the data. It's not data, just coloring everything. It's expectation. I expect the world to look like this. Therefore, I will see this, but I will also use the data to match my expectations. That's why if you have damage to the eye, for example, you rely more on expectation when you see the world versus data because there's eye damage.

Same if you have damage to some of the lower part of the cortex, the visual cortex. Does that make sense? expectation versus data is always wrestling and battling it out to find the best fit of the world but if there's an imbalance to that symmetry eye damage you literally see the world

and then suddenly you might find there's a monkey sitting there on your table and I'm not being not trying to be funny literally this is called Charles Bonaise syndrome eye damage you will see elephants here suddenly sitting here or because your expectation of the

world your conceptual beliefs will color the world. So the world is our created reality is always based on expectation and data meeting each other. Not about the actual thing. I see this table

your brain goes, I've seen tables like this a thousand times, so I'll just pull from memory and create a table much faster than actually going there and taking the whole table in and processing it one at a time, like one fragment at the time. This is an important part of it. And that's why hallucinations

can occur all the time, because but not all the time most of us luckily don't have hallucinations when we are awake but we are as humans prone to them because we have this conceptual overlay to vision vision is very conceptually driven very conceptually driven and so if that balance shifts towards more concept-driven you will hallucinate more are our dreams it's a stretch to say dreams are effectively hallucinations they are effectively effectively a form of hallucinations they are not only hallucinations, but they're hallucinations. And they are, we have amnesia as well.

We forget them. We have, we are delusional, completely delusional in dreams as well. So it's psychopathy at peak, illusion, amnesia, hallucinations. And yet it feels all normal and you wake up and take it for granted. Now you said as you went along, we talked about this for one minute and then got off it. You said as you went along your scientific work, it made you connect more with spirituality and actually made you religion. Religious, I'm sorry.

And so you practice Islam. What was the journey like to get to that? And was there one kind of like ripple in the current that caused it in particularly from your work? I think it's a great point. It's a great point. So I would say the following. I feel like when I was

in the ghetto and I saw my friends being shot at, stabbed, I saw these horrible things, and then I saw myself being rescued so many times by forces that were unlikely to happen by chance. I felt like, okay, God must be real. And then once I went to Egypt as well and I studied and I lived a more disciplined life,

I just saw the blessings pouring in, and reading about science reading about the brain the complexity of the brain the neurons just made me go look how did how did that come about it just made me more religious

as I went to Egypt sorry I went to California and I met Ramachandran and I met top scientists and figured out well a lot of these guys behind the behind the scenes are actually very religious and they believe in prayer

and things like that you know the top sciences in the world in fact I noticed the correlation the greater the scientists were, the more religious they were. Really? Versus, this is something, yeah, but often they don't talk about it in public. You know, they keep it to themselves. You know, there's a lot of, you know, sciences like to be hard-nosed

Then you want to be played cool, you know, and play- Yeah, they don't want people to have the perception that their religious beliefs would impact the results of their studies. 100%. And we have to keep it separate, and that's very important. So we don't mix the two. But look, there's nothing in spirituality and religion that negates science

and the two worlds these two worlds are not incompatible there's just two levels of description as I say as I always say look if I told you

about 200 years ago you have all these small animals crawling on your skin right now trillions of them you'd say you're talking about

kill this guy burn him at the stake yeah we develop the microscope and lo and behold you have 90% of your cells are bacterial cells

you're literally a bacterial colony with a few human cells hanging on that's what you are right That's, and so how do we know that this world is not full of things we can't see, spiritual dimensions, and spiritual dimensions? Dimensions we cannot see, right?

In many ways, in many ways, think of, think of when you were in your mom's womb, and I told you about a world outside your mom's womb, full of rivers and mountains and, and skies and. all this you would think me crazy right if i were in the womb yeah you would i don't know that's not reality that's not reality at the same at the same here we are in a reality now that's encapsulated by a certain structure and a certain framework but there's nothing that negates the fact that another world could be out there we just we just live by the limits of of this current reality and frankly you have to be open-minded to other worlds the key thing is the key thing is though is when you do science you just don't mix these things up. You cannot be a woo-woo scientist.

Yes. In no way because science is a very valid. It's a very, it's a beautiful way to predict the world and have cause effect, the process of cause effect showing, you know, making us fly planes and do all these things, have satellites and all that. So as long as we don't mix them, spirituality, yeah, it's a different way, it's very hard to capture that world as well.

I think one of the greatest, greatest is really the wrong words, one of the most tragic stories of humanity that we've done to ourselves over time is convince our collective consciousness the science and religion are at war. Science and religion are seeking the answer to the same question, the meaning of life and where it all comes from. And they don't all have to be right. In fact, it kind of goes against the idea of progress and humanity for everything to all be right. It's about proving and getting to a higher, higher level of understanding and therefore a higher, higher level of consciousness to eventually maybe you get to the top of it. But, you know, I don't pretend to know exactly how it works or what's out there. I'm very confident that I fully believe that there's a God. There's some sort of creator that put all this together.

I actually think things like math. I see it in things like that when I see the patterns of how that works and then ties to the physical world. I'm like that they can't just come out of nothing. Like that had to be something far beyond any sort of understanding wherever that creator is for it to happen. But like we were saying, you didn't grow up religious. And then as you got around some of these scientists and realized they were religious as well, just weren't as public about it. You started to think about it. Do you remember like the moment?

though where it like clicked not even to say like oh i'm gonna go to islam like specifically but where you're just like you know what well had you had you believed in god before like as a kid yeah it's a good question so as a kid i was as like as a very young kid i was like is god real i may believe in so i was kind of i didn't really know i was six or seven years old my parents didn't really give me religious education or like teach me a lot about religion but you know we generally believed in god generally and as a family thing, but it wasn't, there was no practices or anything. I would say, it was these experiences that I had in my life, in my youth, that were so emotionally powerful that it really tilted me towards God and thinking about God.

And also my experience of being like born in Bulgaria, Kurdish parents, living in the ghetto, having to question a lot of things and say, who am I? like why do i who's this body who is me why here why now why me like this experience why am i why is this flesh and bone here like imprisoned in this body what is this sound coming out of me i know i'm going into some rabbit rabbit hole here but literally why am i stuck in this body why who's me this this very second and i had these a lot of these experiences when i was like these flashes when i was like 17 18 19 i thought well there's got to be more there's got to be more why am I stuck here? Who's controlling on this? And this was really when I started to think about God

and then if it felt like God was present in my life and when I would do good things, good things would happen. And it just felt, it just felt real to me. And as life just progressed and I went to Egypt and I went to various places in California and all that, there was nothing negating. You know, there was nothing diminishing that belief. It only became stronger to where I am now and I'm deeply grateful to where God has, you know, taking me from, from, from where I was to where I am now, it feels, it's, I feel so blessed. You see, I feel like I'm the most blessed person in the world. That's what I feel. I've been so blessed by God and he's giving me everything. I mean, I feel, um, also logically it makes sense that there's a creator. Why would the universe exist? Um, it just makes, make sense that there's more. So that's kind of my journey. And did you pick up Islam because you were thinking about a lot of this while in Egypt and that was what was around? It's a good, no, I wouldn't say so.

So my, I would say for the Islam, when I was a kid, my parents were Muslim, so they just weren't practicing. So my background is Muslim. And so that, I had that background. But I'd say the reason why I sort of hang out, sort of became or continued to be Muslim and really stick to the faith, be, I'd say monotheism, just believing in one God. It's very simple. And believing in one God and believing in prophets. This is very simple.

It just made a lot of simple sense. We're very, very simple. You know, that idea just was just straightforward and just made sense. And I've been very, I think in my life, I found the stories of the prophets extremely fascinating, like the story of Joseph, for example, in the Bible. He's also in the Quran as well. Fascinating. This guy, he was a slave.

first of all he was tell you the story briefly for your for your audience as well I love this still to this day I always watch Joseph movies and cartoons and stuff I love it this guy he's born he's a bit

sort of he's a scholarly kid among his brothers he has like all these brothers like 11 brothers or so and they get really jealous of him because his father Jacob the prophet he's really into Joseph he loves Joseph and so Joseph is treated differently he's like this scholarly you know he's always

he's reading the scrolls and all that, and the other kids are just out there in the fields, you know, doing hard labor. So one day, the brothers decides to go kill Joseph. They want to get rid of them because they're so jealous. We can get into neuroscience of jealousy too, but they're so jealous of Joseph, they decide to take him out. And so what they do is they go and tell the father, look, father, we want to take Joseph out and play, you know, go some, have some fun. allows them to go he's a bit hesitant because you know that there's something up it's not right the brothers don't really like joseph takes him out in the field and then they literally throw him they throw him in a well and inside the well he lies there in the well he's down there and they take his

shirt and take and kill the kill a sheep and put some blood on the on the on the on the shirt go back to the the father and say that we kill with joseph was eaten by a wolf fast forward Joseph ends up in Egypt as a slave Egypt he ends up in Egypt as a slave He's working suddenly In Egypt he gets picked up by the minister of finance One of the highest ranking people In the land

And he gets taught how to work in finance How to be sort of in that in that ministry role He learns that But then he's pursued He ends up in jail as well because there's a there's a lady that's trying to seduce him, the wife of the minister, trying to seduce Joseph, and because he's so faithful to God

that he doesn't sleep with the woman, so he ends up in jail. But he goes to jail for not banging her? I couldn't put that better, exactly. So he ends up in jail because he didn't have sex with her, right? So he spends maybe what is it, seven years in jail, right? Interpreting dreams, he becomes a dream interpreter for the people. He has this gift.

He can interpret dream and understand dreams. So in the jail, in the prison in Egypt, he interprets dreams, and then suddenly one day he interprets some of the other prisoner's dreams, and one is released, tells the king about Joseph's talent of interpreting dreams, and he's let out of the prison, and he interprets the dream of the king, and it turns out his interpretation is correct. And he goes from the prison now to minister, becoming a minister of the land. A long way of, a very long wind.

way of saying he went from nothing to this long journey to becoming the dream interpreter a minister of the land and these stories inspired me i also went from nothing to egypt and from egypt to the minister ramashandran and you know i'm not i'm not saying i'm not the minister no you see yourself i understand i see myself and people like this you know and and they and i've also been tempted in my life by by girls or things that i could have done things you know i've i've done You know, I've not dumbed, but that's funny. Congrats on the sex. Thank you, brother.

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the opposite, brother. The opposite. The opposite. So what I'm saying is I've also had my fair share of challenges and a fair share of things. And so these stories are extremely inspiring for me even as a scientist, you know, to learn about Joseph or Jonah or any of these people in these scriptures. Yeah, it's it's very cool when I meet someone who's extremely well-rounded, right?

So you have all, you know, you're very into science, you're into learning, you're into making sense of why things are the way they are, and you don't just draw on data and experiments and, you know, the scientific method. You're also drawing on history. You're drawing on your own personal experiences and interpreting that. And I think that's also why you study some of the things you do. Because a lot of the things you do with the brain involve like interpretation and why things are. It's kind of like a loop that makes sense.

But it's refreshing to hear that when we kind of live in a world where there's a little more dogma than there should be in these different spaces, both religiously and scientifically. You know, you're kind of like morphing the two. And it was also, you know, before we got on today, it was 1245. So like you had to pray towards Mecca. That was the first time that's ever happened in here. Joe and I were very solemnly, like, watching that and, like, you're dedicated to that. So there's, you have something in you where you recognize it's way bigger than you, right? And that gives you, I think that just gives you incredible perspective on, on what you do.

100%, Julian, and I always have this belief, look, whatever you are, who you are, never hide it. Be who you are, be proud of who you are, be proud of your parents. I have people, I sometimes take, when I go lecture at Oxford or something, I take my dad with me. You know, I haven't seen in the audience, proud. And this is advice for myself and everybody. Always be proud of who you are. Be proud of your parents. Never think that, you know, just because your parents are wrinkly and old,

or you have a certain faith, or you have a certain background, you were born. Like, I came from, I was being Kurdish in Denmark. One was the most popular thing, you know, as a kid. I never tried to hate it. Always be open of, you know, never hide who you are. Always be authentic. And that's the way to really live. So this is what I, this is also one way of believing in God and having faith.

It's just being proud of who you are and never, you know. Yeah, it's been, it's being humble too. It's being humble and understanding. And grateful, right? Yes. For what you've been given. Yeah, there's a lot of people who, whatever it is, they get success in something, they get really good at something.

Maybe they're smarter than the average person, which you definitely are. Thank you, brother. You know, where consciously or unconsciously, for better or worse, usually worse, like they kind of switch up and they kind of start to look back on things from their life and look down upon it. Yeah. And I, what you just laid out there is the direct opposite of that. And obviously it sounds like you have a great moral compass, so I don't think that'll change. But I think a lot of people can learn something from that too because, you know, when you get good opportunities and you start to experience more. than say the average person can or whatever you know you want to try to create

more opportunities for more people to come after you you know and and you don't want to you don't want to write off the people who are never going to get a chance to do that either you know you are the way you are for example because of your parents and in a lot of great ways and your parents may not have had the opportunity to go the same route but for you to kind of bring them along with you literally and figuratively it's very very cool like if there's anything you can take away from this if I can give any advice is be good to your parents be good to your family but your parents

your parents like your mom would die for you the things your mom would sacrifice for you can not even believe your dad your parents be good to them honor them your parents are guests in this world and once these they are guests in the sense that they are here for a short time

and when they leave you will feel their absence and you will regret not doing the things appreciating them enough you can never give back enough to your parents and especially a mother so that's what i mean by i guess their their presence is so so fleeting so take advantage of it and just raise them up and and just honor them because yeah once they leave it's great that you know that while they're here it's crucially important that's crucially important

sometimes i have an exercise that i that i used to do i don't do it often now as much but i would sometimes close my eyes and meditate on their death just thinking out okay now in the back of my mind, I know I can always call my mom or dad. So I do my phone and call my mom and dad. I have that, right? That blessing. I started to think about what if I imagine myself not having my mom and dad to call anymore? How would that feel? And I would feel pretty hollow. I would just imagine them. So this allows you to be more grateful. So we should always, always try to do things like that. Imagine the opposite of the not being here. And that helps us not taking them for granted. Is there a part of you that when you were making that mature shift to really focus on studies,

like you found your thing too, you found something you're interested in, which is critical. I think it's always tragic when people study for the sake of studying and doing well when they don't love what they do. Right. But, you know, it's hard to find that sometimes. You were able to morph it too. It seems like there's a party that also really cared about making your parents proud and, you know, leaving some. kind of legacy that, you know, they're giving you the opportunity on this earth by bringing you here to leave.

100%. Look, my mom, my mom, as I said, was an orphan. The way her dad died was horrible. She was about 10 or 11 in Iraq. One day her dad called her in and said, look, come my daughter, there's something I want to tell you. And my mom ran in, as I said, 10 years old, and she said, go call your mother. So she went and got her mom. Then went over to her dad, she went over to her dad and her dad, her dad, my granddad said, look, I think I'm checking out. I think I'm dying. So please forgive me.

You just forgive me. And then within a second, he just fell down and died. My mom just stared at him, being 10 years old, staring at him. Her mother was in shock. Suddenly her older brother, my mom's older brother, ran into the room and saw her father die. being dead. And now, my granddad, her mother, my mom's dad, and her brother, had a tumultuous relationship. Had a really bad relationship.

So he immediately got in shock, took a glass, like smashed his head, so blood would pour from his head. And now my mother, my mom was watching her brother, harming himself, and her dad dying in this traumatized state. Oh, shit. Pretty bad. And then, because in Iraq at the time, Saddam's regime would not allow for, it was like, you know, the quarantine kind of thing. They couldn't leave, they couldn't leave the house until like four or five a.m. So my, the body was just lying there for like, what, seven, eight hours and she was just watching him dead, you know. This was her situation.

Horrible, right? So imagine this is one scene from her life. Later on, when she was a bit older, her and mom would go, for example, to. visited different cities in Iraq and suddenly bombs would fly and bombs, things will just and they would see bodies all over dead bodies and they would go into sewers

to protect themselves and so she see all these things and then later when she went to Copenhagen she would hear fireworks and she would hide, you know, she would hide from fireworks from PTSD symptoms. This is my mother's story. My dad, I don't want to go into a story

because it was very long is pretty long, but kind of similar story with his dad dying. So I have trauma in my DNA. Now, I'm going to go to science here because it's important. You are going right where I want you to go, man. It's amazing. In science, in our DNA, we have something

called methyl groups sitting on the DNA and turning genes on and off. Turning genes on and off. Now, if you have, this is called epigenetics. So I have genes. I have a certain genes, Belan's genes, right? These are inherited from mom and dad. 50 from mom, 50% from dad.

But our genes are propensity towards anxiety, propensity toward mental illness, propensity towards sleep disturbances, propensity towards stress, all stored in the genetics, in the code, but can be turned on and off depending on our experiences. And not only our experiences, but also our parents' experiences. Yes. Okay, so this is crucial.

Let me use a rat study analysis. to illustrate this. If you have if baby rats are licked by their mothers a lot, okay? So they get groomed by their mothers and licked.

Their epigenetic switch gets turned on such that they are less anxious later on in life. They are less stress, less anxious. Opposite. The mom is neglectful. Epigenetic switch goes off in a different direction and they are more stressed and anxious in their life.

depending on the switch. Okay? In other words, on the DNA, methyl groups turn on and off these genes. Now, another similar experiment. You have mice. They are exposed to a smell. They get a smell like something.

It could be like a citrus fruit or something, a certain smell. Potent smell. They get that. And at the same time as a smell, they get electric shock. zap zapping them okay later on you remove the electrical stimulant the stimulus and you have and the smell alone produces what profound fear okay this is called classical conditioning palbovian

conditioning they feel fear from the from the smell alone okay so you see that in PTSD all the time you see it in PTSD all the time here's the fun here's the interesting part not fun but here's an interesting part these mice their kids kids, these mice, their kids, have never been exposed to the electrical shock. Yet when they smell that smell, they will feel profound fear, not knowing why, okay? Simply because in their genetic switch, they learned to fear that particular smell. But not only that, these mice is kids. So we go another generation down, these kids, these, these, these, these, these, these, these,

The grandkids of the original mouse now smells this, this smell, and they will feel, what, fear from a... Oh, my God, it's that passable. Imagine me, Balan now, living in Copenhagen or living in being California or being in New Jersey and I see certain thing, and I feel fear and anxious, for example, not knowing why, not having no idea why it's happened, not knowing that my genetics which my mom and dad were in war in Iraq and Saddam Hussein. and bombs and I don't know all this yet I have a genetic makeup and epigenetic switches all over the place making me who I am today

okay so as a person I had to overcome all that that's a crucial part of my story too that I have to overcome all that bringing it back to the when did you realize you had to like when did you understand this well from a scientific perspective or you mean just generally like generally generally I kind of knew that

you know I might I had certain you know perhaps certain aversions or fears or whatever but what I think really changed things for me and this is the key thing and the key point of the story. Although I had the trauma passed down for my parents

my mom was my mom and my dad were much like the rats who licked their babies all the time they were very nurturing. Very nurturing. So they would give me love you cannot imagine. My mom is the most loving person you can imagine. Always hugging me, always since I was a kid always loving me, always taking care of me. My

dad the same way taking me out even though he was we were poor in the ghetto he had to work a lot but whenever i was with him always love and so i think that sort of rebalanced the whole thing so the epigenetic clock got shifted a bit and i didn't all the times that i could have gone and this guy he beat me up in the ghetto i could have gone there and beat him up i had a knife i could have stabbed him i did something stopped me what was that well god of course i believe in that but It was also the voice of my parents, the love that I experienced, the empathy in me, and said, look, don't do that. You'll destroy your life.

You destroy your parents' life. So I think that's the way to think about it. On the science point, another point, you know what baby's brain is about the synapses? There are about 50% more synapses in a baby's brain. Do you know that? Yes, I have read that before. I actually thought it was higher. It's very interesting.

Yeah, it's a lot. So the brain, the baby is hyperconnected. there's all these connections. And the more you get stimulated as a child and stimulated not only emotionally, you know, nurtured, but also intellectually stimulated and really your parents took you out and play with you and all that, you will keep a lot of these connections.

Yes. And you will shave away the bad ones. You'll remove the bad ones. And for me, that was the case. I kept a lot of my connections because of my parents would play with me, my mom. We didn't have, like, toys, and we didn't have things like actual things I could play with,

but they were very imaginative and fantasy and take me out. And she would use her scarf and use it as a Zoro thing when we were like for the, what do you call, when you, we had to dress up for school. We didn't have like the Zoro thing, mask and all that. So we just wear her scarf and I would have fun. And that was that was my life. And I think, and my parents, I have to give thanks to them. So they, you simultaneously have a self-awareness of the epidemiist.

genetic trauma genes that exist within your family, whether or not your parents consciously understood that or not, they took direct actions to help cushion that blow to a point that it affects you less because of that in a way. But it does make me think, man, like we see, there's a lot of wars going on around the world right now. There are, and it's war is hell, and it's fought among civilians and you have men, women, and children who, particularly the children, they're being raised in these fires right now. You know, the reality is mathematically speaking on a statistical population level, not all parents are going to be like your parents.

A lot of them, through no fault of their own, they're not going to do those things. And it does make you wonder where generationally people become the same, you know, fear the same things and then act in a certain way because of that. always in defense mode that then can turn into offense mode in a way because of the things that have happened in the past. And you're not, you're given a great explanation, but you're not helping me feel better faith on that changing. True. That's true. But let's talk about free will for a second. So do we have free will, right? And so I went out to that guy. He had stolen my jacket. He had taken my jacket, stolen it. I took a knife. I wanted to go stab him, right? That's what

scenario. Right. Let's say. It was about 14. It wasn't like yesterday. It was like 13 years old. What kind of pocket knife? Swiss Army. Let's say. Let's say something like that, right? Okay. I didn't do it. Why? Because my parents' voice came into my head and said, don't do it. Even though the guy humiliated you, he stole your things. He, you know, has been this and that. Don't do anything like that. I stopped. Now, most neuroscientists don't believe in free will. This is actually the case. They will say, look, the reason you did not go and heard this other chap was because of your genetics, because of your epigenetics,

because of your chemical state, maybe you got slept well that last few months, you had not been very stressed, your experiences were such that, you know, you were determined not to kill him, predetermined by nature and the circumstances, your genetics and your hormonal state, for example, your brain state.

This is what many scientists will tell you. And they will use an experiment called the libid experiment, is an interesting experiment. go something like this I think 40, 40 years ago it was a classical experiment in neuroscience you have a clock ticking my five minutes go

and you tell the chap sitting there he said, Balant, within the next five minutes whenever you want reach out and grab for this thing in front of you whenever you want. So after 10 seconds

I may go down here. after 30 seconds I may go grab for it 45 seconds so forth I grab it interesting but here's the real interesting part

when you measure the brain activity using an EEG on the brain it turns out that your brain will pick up on the signal your awareness and the urge to move about half a second

before you actually move whoa half a second it's called the readiness potential so before I I even have the awareness of knowing, my brain knows by half a second. It already picks it up and says, okay, it knows by half a second before. This made a lot of scientists go crazy and say, look, we have no free will. It's all in the brain. The brain already know that you would do that. You would do the movement, right? You would do the action before you had the conscious

urge or awareness. Now, there's some opposition to this argument, but let's Let's look at another twist on the experiment that you can do. What if the guy, he sees on the screen, half a second before he does the movement, he sees on the screen something saying, now you'll do the movement. How will he react? This is kind of philosophical.

But basically, half a second before he actually does the movement, he's shown a sign on the screen saying, you will move now. There's three possibilities, okay? One, he will say the machine has ESP. That's the one possibility. Second, he will say, the machine is controlling me, okay? I'm a puppet. I can't help it.

Okay? Or the third is he might post-dated, say, oh, it came later. And it was a later inter... These are the three possibilities. But I think the post-dating is interesting that when you post-dated, my point is here that the reason why you can't used this as an argument against free will, this libid experiment, is that the whole time space or the whole time and continuity and sense of time in the brain, it's kind of smeared a bit. It's not that pure. And the time it takes for the brain to pick it up compared to when you actually do the movement, it's not that fine and clear cut. So I think that's one of the arguments against that this, you know, this argument, the argument that this shows, We have no free will. There's a lot I want to dig into in that.

We're going to be bringing you back, though. So I'm going to do that part next time because that's a whole can of worms. The one thing, I just don't want to leave people hanging on something. We touched a little bit, but you said you were going to touch more before you go on this one. So we're going to bring Boulon back. Don't work. He'll be back here in three weeks. We already talked about it on the break.

But you have, you laid out a little bit of your work earlier comparing it with dreams about love. and the research there. So you're starting to give lectures on that and studying like the brain science behind love. What made you interested in doing that? Well, to be frank, I mentioned this during one of my previous courses at Peterson Academy.

I talked about human nature. It was a course about human nature, why we feel attraction. And there was a lecture on love and why we feel altruism, romantic love, spiritual love and all that. And it's kind of, you know, I mentioned,

know, it would be fun to do a course on love. And then one of the, one of the directors over there and works there, Nancy is a really nice girl. She told the folks, Michaela and Jordan Fuller, her husband about this, and then they asked me to do this course. So, and that was interesting. So I learned a lot about preparing for this course. It's extremely fascinating learning about love, really digging deep into doing a whole, whole

course on love. self-romantic love and then going into why you know the passion and infatuation of love and you know love is interesting romantic love is so interesting when you're in it you feel like it's the whole world and this purpose of existence and I got to in my course I have a lot of I have a lot of vignettes or case studies for movies Titanic why James Bond is charming you know why the movie Cinema Paradiso, do you know that movie? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's one of the best of all time.

How come he waits for Helena, Helena on the 100 days? He waits at the front of her window, and then the last minute he runs off and she runs after him. What's the neurochemistry of that? You know, and so it has a lot of interesting case studies and looking at the brain as well. And so I think it would be fun. One of the most fun courses I'll teach. So when you're breaking down like fiction like that, how do you relate that scientifically? Oh, neuroscience of that is, for example, anticipation of reward.

When does dopamine centers fire? When, if I'm with a girl now and I leave her, when is her brain most likely to crave my absence? Is it a week or is it two weeks after my departure? Why doesn't it work to be too much into her a girl in the beginning or vice versa, a girl into a man? But it's more men into a girl that can just be a bad thing. Well, it has to do that the girl, for example, expect prefrontal integration.

What's prefrontal integration is that if you show a girl too early that you have fallen for her emotionally. I'm not saying to play it fake and be a different person. But the fact is, if you see a girl and after a week tell her that you're in love with her, Joey knows what happens. She'll dump you, right? I'm in love with you. You're never even going to get to the point to be dumped. Correct. Why is that?

Well, it's because she expects a man to have calm. manly composure, which is a direct correlate of neural circuitry that has to do with prefrontal inhibition, being able to control your sexual desires, emotional core, and all that. And that itself is a predictor of survival in a very dangerous world and a predictor of resource acquisition, and it's a predictor of all these things that will help you survive. So this is one example of how your brain directly and neurocane. neuroscience plays into these love scenarios how how why is leonard decaprio so damn charming in titanic he's a he's a he's a he's a he's a fucking leonard de gap he's handsome yeah he's handsome in the movie i

agree yeah so but but it's not the whole story no you're right he's extremely charming because he's basically a bum right he's a poor guy who's on this on this on this on this big ship with this rich lady but he's so comfortable in his own bloody skin he's like he's he's like i'm a bum um i have have nothing, but I'm going to just own it. That's right. And that confidence is a direct predictor of survival in a very harsh world. If you are confident, that shows how the brain is better integrated versus a non-confident guy, which would mean a non-confident guy would have less prefrontal integration, be more

impulsive, have more fear and anxiety centers of the brain being active, which again would be, again go against resource acquisition and providing this lady with a protective environment. Yes. The bodyguard have you seen the bodyguard with Whitney Houston? Of course. Kevin Costner. Another example. Why is he so damn charming.

Again, Frank, his name is Frank, the guy. Protector. Protector will. Women turns out love protecting like male that can protect because again, survival, competence, prefrontal activation. So there's tons of stuff there. I think with the Titanic one, too, it's a great point. Like, he's comfortable in his own skin.

But he also, the character, Jack, played by Leo, he finds a way to chase without attachment. Right? He's detached from the outcome. He'd like her to like him. But he doesn't, he's not going to, it's not going to affect his reason for being if she doesn't. So, like, there's some sort of mental game there where it's a combination. of confidence and showing interest, but not tying that interest to the meaning of his life.

And it makes her simultaneously then want to chase him. It's a beautiful point. And I think, and you can clearly see in that movie that Leo or Jack is definitely into her when she rejects him at some point in the middle of the story. He says, I can't. I'll stay with my mom and the rich guy.

And he goes out on the very front of the ship and you can see him. He's kind of handsome with his hair. sort of, he's kind of looking outside and his eyes are kind of closed and he's looking. You can see he's bloody heartbroken. It's not like he's heartbroken. He's not like he's just, oh, I'm nonchalant. I just lost the, perhaps the girl of my life.

He's heartbroken, but he remains composed. And that's the point. You want to have emotions. You want to feel the thing. You want to bloody have feelings for the girl and being bold about it. But you want to have that prefrontal integration where you can stay composed and stay, like, on track with life, even though things are shaky. You feel things, but you feel emotions, but you don't let the emotions control you and define you.

You have the emotional limbic core will not overtake the prefrontal. And it didn't in Jack's case. He just went out and he just looking and he was obviously sad. And sadness is a good thing. It shows emotion. And then what's her name? Rose. Rose runs out after him.

And he looks, he says, they told me you were out here. And she looks at, she looks at Jack and says, he says, I changed my mind. You came back. I said, she said, I changed my mind. And he says, he says nothing. He says, come here. And then they go out and he holds her and says, yeah. And he does one of his charming.

With girls, not that you want to ask me because I'm very clumsy at this, but I used to have a few tricks in my sleeve. I think that's about to change. I used to have a few tricks off my sleeve when I was in my teeth. teenage years. I was a bit more smooth. I'm not too brat. I was when he had a Swiss army enough. Just saying. No, I'm just, I'm just joking. But, but, but look, what he does is extremely charming. He says, close your eyes. He's being very mysterious. He's being very sort of romantic and then, you know, I'm flying Jack and all that. It's actually very romantic that whole scene. It's a very, not only romantic, but it's a, from a dopamine perspective and

a brain perspective, it's very persuasive. He's, he's a metaphor for, look, I'm going to, I'm going to be I'm going to take you on magic carpet in life and just allow you to fly and be free free from the constraints of the palace and the rich chap and all that. So it's tapping into her dopamine centers.

It's a great movie to teach with because it's a fine balance you know that like you'll see a lot of things like in the online like Tatosphere or whatever where it's like you got to go hard this way and be like fuck you and that's not real.

No, no. But the other way of being needy and all over it and trying to emotionally attach yourself to really, you cannot do that. No, you can't do that. It does not make any sense and it doesn't make sense scientifically to a woman's brain. You can't, it doesn't make sense and she can't help it. She's not like she hates you and she's being evil. No, she can't help it.

She's wired like this. And look, same thing for you, if the girl is all over you all the time. That's exactly right, dude. It still works the same way. But I want to say something else. I don't want your audience and your folks to go away with the idea that you have have to play a role and be inauthentic. No, you're not saying that.

No, I'm not taking it that way. My point is when time comes, when time is ripe and there's a girl there and you've been, you've been sufficiently composed and you haven't chased and you've been yourself and you've been authentic, you haven't played games. Don't play any of, don't play games. It will destroy you. Playing psychological Machiavellian games is the worst thing you can do, by the way. Be yourself.

But when time comes, let her know what you feel inside. Yes. Because you will regret it. And there's nothing. worse than the regret of a woman that could have become, you could have a story with, a beautiful story with, and you held back because of fear, because of fear of rejection. Don't. Don't overwhelm her, but bloody tell her what you feel. That's what I'm saying. People either never do that or do it way too early. It's a balance between the two. And I love that you said, don't play these

Machiavellian games. Because they'll smell right through that eventually, like, because you can't keep up and act forever. Eventually, the truth will shine through and suddenly you'll be a different person, than they may have fallen for if you put up a facade. But with love, it's a matter of, like, I don't mean to be like woo-woo or, you know, selfish with this or whatever, but you have to love and respect yourself first. You have to. And value that first in order to be able to let love in. There is literally scientifically, a woman is not going to come to a man who shows the weakness of not

being comfortable in their own skin to begin with. if you want to have them come your way you then need to be able to not only maintain that but when the time comes know that you have the timing to be vulnerable in that way because vulnerability doesn't have to be you know weakness or something like that like we take it it can it can be a sign of of that same comfort in your own skin it's a sign of strength i think being vulnerable in the right situation in the right context is definitely side of strength it's it's a sign you you have to be vulnerable you have to open up if you want to to, if you want to share something with that, with another person, with a lady, you've got to be willing to let some of that emotion and the core you come out. And this is just, it's just very important. But I agree. Definitely. Mechavillianism and all that. Look, in the brain, you have two systems. You have a system called the utilitarian cold cognition, cold logic, cold serial thinking. It's the DLP we talked about before. It's out here. But the medial prefrontal cortex up here is crucially important.

We want to use this. Why? It's involved in emotional intellect, emotional decision making. So now, if you are utilitarian, McAvelian, right, another decision you make with a girl is always calculated. It's always, you like chat, GBT, how do I make her fall in love with me? How do I trick her? How do I do this and that?

This is the psychopath speaking. But if you use this part of the brain, the medial part of the prefrontal cortex, you always consult with the emotional part. How do I feel right now? How might she feel if I hurt it like this? How much she feel in this situation? How do I feel about this? So it's intellect paired with some emotion and that's important. So we don't become robots and don't go around hurting people and not consulting our hearts.

Dr. Blanchello, we're going to do this in three weeks again. All right, there's a lot on the bone here. There are, but I've been doing this five and a half years. I've done, you know, when this comes out, it'll be 350-some episodes or something like that. You're a superstar. Thank you, really. That same feeling I had when Rosalie walked in there for 124, like I got it with you. Thank you. You're amazing at explaining this stuff, making it fun. You're a great speaker, so do not stop.

Keep going. Thank you, brother. I love you, man. You're a cool guy. I love your, you know, everything here has been so fun. I've loved it. Thank you very much. Very, very talented. Thank you. I will see you soon. All right? Everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.