Know Thyself - E71 - Dr. Tara Swart: Leading Neuroscientist: How Intuition, Your 6th Sense & Manifestation ACTUALLY Work

Starting point is 00:00:00 I've always said that science fiction is just science that hasn't been proven yet. Every experience that your brain has, literally every memory that you recall, every emotion that you experience, every person that you meet, every scenario that you're in, is constantly moulding and shaping your brain. In my research, what I found is that inability or frustration around manifestation is because I don't believe I deserve that thing. If you're able to dig down to that underlying belief, that's when you can do really powerful work. This is a must. This is not a spiritual belief. If you can't do that, you will be so emotionally dysregulated.

Starting point is 00:00:36 It can ruin your life. Are there any other ways in which our hundreds of thousands of years human biology now living in modern times is screwing us? I've realized the importance of this one thing that has been staring us in the face for as long as we've been humans, but we have become so disconnected from it. One of the questions that I ask people to consider is, has your life panned out exactly as you always dreamed that it would? The gap between being and becoming is the greatest source of unhappiness in your life.

Starting point is 00:01:05 When you relate to consciousness, what are the possibilities of you thinking it existing outside of our own neurology? I'm probably going to say something you wouldn't expect. Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast where every single week we get the honor and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind to learn more about the true nature of self and the world around us at deeper levels every single week. Our guest today is a leading neuroscientist, a best-selling author, a podcast host, a medical doctor, and in my eyes, she's really bridging science and spirituality

Starting point is 00:01:39 and the understanding of both in such a beautiful way. When we use the words law of attraction, intuition, manifestation, what do we literally mean? And so we're going to be diving into that and the science that grounds it to earth and how we can really choose the direction we want to go in life and be effective stewards and what we're creating in life. So Dr. Taraswar, thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. My honor, where I want to start today, because this is the know they self podcast and it's very fitting is uh is actually about interoception uh and so i've always loved finding ways in which i can grow my own self-awareness so what is interoception and what have you found are the most effective modalities to really raise that self-awareness that is such a great

Starting point is 00:02:24 one to pick for know thyself absolutely um so most of us know about the five senses that we have um but less people know that we have a lot of um the senses like thermoception for temperature, pro preception is understanding where your joints are in space, nociceception is for pain, and interoception is an understanding of the state of the physiology of the inside of your body. So it's things like, how do you know when you're hungry, how do you know when you need to use the bathroom? And if you've got young children, then you see that from zero to two, they go from not being able to recognize those signals, at all to being able to control their bowels and their bladder. And you can really take it further than

Starting point is 00:03:10 that. I think you're probably picking up on the piece where I said that I can tell about two days before I'm starting to get sick, like a cold or flu. And I think the reason that, I think there's two reasons that I have honed that skill. One is obviously I went to medical school so I understand the body inside out, but the other one is that I've had over 20 years of yoga practice now. And in yoga, you connect your mind and your body very much. So you just become very aware of biofeedback from your body. People who do a lot of sport, I think, would say the same thing. And then there are just some people who are really good at reading body language and listening to their own body. You know, this may have been a thing since childhood. And then, of course, there's all the people who have the

Starting point is 00:03:55 potential to grow that skill. I'm so curious about all the different ways that we can grow awareness, like you spoke to the many different facets in which we can, in arenas of our own physiology and mindset. And I'm curious what you think about extra sensory perception. Like outside of just our five senses, what people call the sixth sense, what's the reality of that do you feel? So I actually call interception the sixth sense.

Starting point is 00:04:24 But yeah, there is that phrase in like common, you know, pop language or whatever. So I've become much more interesting. interested in this recently for a variety of reasons. And if we have a spectrum from science to spirituality, I would say the reasons go along that spectrum. So much more on the science side of things. We do know that some of our hormones are released into the atmosphere through our sweat. So the steroid hormones like cortisol, estrogen and progesterone particularly. So this is the reason that women who live together or work closely together synchronize their menstrual cycles within two months.

Starting point is 00:05:03 It's because particles of those hormones are in our sweat and they're released around us. And if we're interacting with each other closely, then they will go into our skin and, you know, all to the levels of hormones in other people. And regardless of your gender, this happens with cortisol, the stress hormone. So there's an evolutionary explanation to this, which is that we needed to respond to the stress levels of the leader of the tribe. And so in this day and age, regardless of gender, like I said, depending on where you are in the hierarchy of an organisation or a family or a group, you know, social group, we do feel the stress levels of the most senior person. So it's like in the troop of guerrillas, the stress level

Starting point is 00:05:46 of the silverback gorilla affects the other guerrillas more than ones who are equal to each other. And so if you think that we are communicating. let's say non-consciously through the effect of hormones that may be in the atmosphere around us. And that's already the physiology of communicating outside of our bodies, right? And then I've always said, I grew up in the 70s, that science fiction is just science that hasn't been proven yet. So a lot of things that I watched on Star Trek and Star Wars when I was a kid are, you know, I mean the other day, because we were in L.A., I was walking down the road and this thing that looks like a shopping cart but it's a robot was walking towards me saying i am on delivery

Starting point is 00:06:32 and it was just on its own and you know in london we didn't have those yet so i was a bit like wow that's very science fiction so you know if you've honed your interception if you've honed your intuition and let's add in if you're very close to someone so you know them really well i do believe it's possible to you know think of someone and then they message you or to like just have a sense that someone's going through something and you should call them. Is that what you meant when you were asking? Sure, yeah. I just picking up on and we can dive deeper into intuition here and what that means in your eyes,

Starting point is 00:07:08 but having those gut feelings, having those senses of a direction that you might move in, you might sense danger, you might sense opportunity. And it's really your ability to pay attention to more subtle frequencies and energies that are happening all around us that are invisible to the naked eye. And so, yeah, when people refer to gut feelings and intuition, I'm just curious for you to break that down a little bit more of what that really means. So actually you want to pick up on something that you've just said, which I think is really important, which is noticing things that you may not have been conscious of or you may not have noticed, you know, if you're in a rush or you're distracted mentally. The reason, so basically there are a lot of things going on around us that we filter out. and that's because we're bombarded with so much information continually

Starting point is 00:07:52 that it's actually an advantage to us to filter out some of that information so the best example is that you're not aware of your clothing on your body all day because once you put it on and you felt that you don't really need to be reminded of that every minute of the day yeah kind of overwhelming a burden exactly so that applies to other things and that's naturally filtered by the brain not necessarily with us directing it we can direct it

Starting point is 00:08:18 but if we don't, then the brain will filter out things that it doesn't think are important to us surviving that day. And so you can imagine in the modern world where there's even more information now than there was, let's say, 100 years ago, that the brain is filtering out those things. But if you want to be really in tune with the people that you love or just your environment, you want to be really present and mindful, then you can certainly direct what gets filtered out and what doesn't. So you can pay attention more than your brain might naturally ask you to or let you because it's focused on your survival. Then I think it's a connected but slightly separate thing,

Starting point is 00:09:02 which is how much you listen to or tap into your intuition. So I do speak about six different ways of thinking. Obviously there are many more and we do them all and they combine, but it's just a very simple framework to break down the way that we think, which is mainly through logic, which is, you know, data and things that we know. Then through emotions, which are things that we feel, motivation is why we do the things that we do, why we get drained by certain things and don't want to do them. So just understanding what makes you really like keep going when things are tough and what kind of makes you give up. Physicality, which is that brain-body connection, we've already mentioned due to interoception, creativity, which is thinking outside the box,

Starting point is 00:09:50 thinking of a, you know, a potentially different future, different reality, and then intuition. And intuition falls a lot between physical and emotional. So the emotional centres of the brain are deep inside the brain and they're the size of your clenched fist. So, you know, yours is slightly bigger than mine, but it's proportional for your body. and then around that about the same thickness we have the cortex which has more of the logical pathways of the brain and because you can't remember everything that you've experienced in your whole life but everything that you've experienced has had an impression on your brain-body system we believe that we keep our working memory up here these are the things we need to remember

Starting point is 00:10:35 every day to do our job and live our life and then through a process called Hebbian learning, which is named after the neuroscientist, Donald Hebb, and is really simply explained by neurons that fire together, wire together. We believe that our wisdom and our pattern recognition get pushed deeper and deeper into the brain, into the spinal cord, and even into our gut neurons. And that's why intuition is sometimes called gut instinct. So basically, the lessons that you've picked up in life, the wisdom that you've learned through repeated patterns, that could be as deeply held in your neurons as like deep down in your gut. So you're not conscious of it, but it still guides the decisions that you make. Now, what I've found over the last 10 years or so,

Starting point is 00:11:23 particularly the 10 years I've been teaching at MIT Sloan, which is business leaders, is that people would really rely on their logic and say things like, well, you know, I'm not going to make a really important decision like hire or fire on intuition, because, you know, that's not, is it even a thing? As we've been able to scan brains and learn more about how these neurons connect up and store information, I really see particularly the older generation of leaders saying that is absolutely the main way that I will make my most important decisions. And I'm like that, you know, I will make my most important life decisions based on intuition. And the way that I have helped myself to understand how much that is the right thing for me is through journaling.

Starting point is 00:12:09 So if I journal and I'm writing like, you know, what should I do in this situation? My gut's telling me this, but logic tells me that or my emotions tell me something else. I basically plot out how things pan out depending on which modality I use to make my decision. Yeah, it feels like the conscious thoughts that we have are just the tip of the iceberg of our deeper intelligence. And you spoke to something really important there, which is the intelligence that gets stored in our spinal cord, in our gut, and that we can pay attention and start to listen to that deeper and deeper and that it's really important as we have tens of thousands of thoughts that are happening every single day in our brain that are for the most part kind of the same as we've been

Starting point is 00:12:49 accustomed to and familiar with. I'd love for you to speak into how it's really important to be mindful of the impressions that we accumulate because then that does become stored becomes who we are and how we perceive reality which is then going to be a direct correlation into what we continually attract in our life. Yeah, absolutely. So every experience that your brain has, which means you have. So like literally every memory that you recall, every emotion that you experience, every person that you meet, every scenario that you're in, is constantly moulding and shaping your brain. So because of a field of research about neuroplasticity, we understand how much more flexible and impressionable the brain is throughout our lives.

Starting point is 00:13:32 this may start to change. I don't even want to use the word decline, you know, around the age of 70, where sometimes things like sequential memories can become a bit disordered, but our wisdom and judgment becomes like a superpower. So it can change towards the end of life, but really throughout most of our working life, let's say, the brain is very open to being changed by everything that it experiences. and the longer that an impression has been held in the brain, the more deeply embedded it is into our neural architecture.

Starting point is 00:14:10 So particularly things that we experience from the age of naught to seven, but also seven to 14 and onwards, but those periods really because they're the longest to go. And if you had a repeated experience or a highly emotional experience, then those are the two main reasons that things get involved. printed into your brain, repetition and strong emotion. And so it's funny, I am five and a half years older than my brother. And I was telling my psychologist friend that I had a very strong memory of speaking into my mother's belly button and then listening to see if my brother would

Starting point is 00:14:50 answer me. And in my memory, that happened once and I just remember it really strongly. But he said to me, you must have done that many times for a five-year-old to still have to hold that memory. So other things like that, like the parental expectation, societal expectation, how competitive your school was, the kind of people that you hung around with, words that were used about you when you were a kid, those things, they run deep in your brain. And like you said, they do affect your perception of everything else that happens in your adult life. And, you know, one of the main areas of work around that is what's called shadow work in psychology, which is the things that you perceived as a child would mean that you wouldn't be loved and looked after by your main caregivers.

Starting point is 00:15:41 So those sorts of things, whether it's like, oh, you know, stop showing off or stop running around like that. Those things get put into your shadow. Like, you know, I mustn't talk highly of myself. I mustn't, you know, sort of like do things at speed. if other people can't keep up. Those are the things we try to hide about ourselves. And usually around the age of midlife crisis or whatever you want to call it,

Starting point is 00:16:05 those things can really come up and have to be dealt with and integrated. Like a lot of those oppressions that we accumulated often in an unconscious state from like zero to seven, seven to 14, they happen in a manner where we don't fully have the memory of how they happened. And that then builds and accumulates

Starting point is 00:16:25 into a stack of impressions that our subconscious holds and becomes the persona in which we look through the world. And so I'd love to talk a little bit about identity because fundamentally we're going to continually attract what we believe we're worthy of, what we believe we deserve, which is kind of all on the bedrock of who we think we are. And so I'd love for you to share a little bit about identity, the science of it, and how that's really the foundational pillar in which how we experience everything, but then, you know, in particular how we manifest in life. So there's an area of research called ghosts. The original research was ghosts in the executive suite because it was explaining how the leaders of today are affected by those childhood impressions.

Starting point is 00:17:09 But my colleague at MIT, Professor Deborah Ancona, wrote a really amazing article in Harvard Business Review about ghosts in your neural architecture from your childhood and how they affect you, you know, whatever you're doing, whoever you are. And identity is one of them. So actually there are, the other things are the values that your family held or your social structure, you know, when you were growing up held. Boundaries that were held in your family, in your social structure, secrets that were kept, roles in the family and identification, which in childhood tends to be comments like, oh, you're just like your father. And so those things are quite intertwined. So for example, if you have a secret in your family and the common examples are, you know, someone that was an alcoholic or someone that was gay that wasn't talked about, then you start to program shame around those things.

Starting point is 00:18:08 And so that affects your identity. So the secrets that were kept in your family affect your identity. The boundaries that were kept in your family. So some families have a really open house and people can just drop in. and they can stay over. They can just join a meal unplanned. And some families, everything's very planned and it has to be like invited in advance

Starting point is 00:18:27 and kind of, you know, not spontaneous. Again, those things also affect your identity because it's your ability to be flexible and spontaneous versus your, you know, inability to function in a world where that may be happening. And roles obviously also affect your identity. So let's say now you're in the workplace and your role as a child was to be the messenger. So let's say your parents had a lot of arguments and didn't speak to each other and said things like,

Starting point is 00:19:00 Andre, go and tell your mother, you know, whatever. That's also going to play out in your adult identity. And you're absolutely correct. You mentioned a few things. But in my research, what I found is that the inability or frustration or success around management, manifestation always boils down to your level of deservingness of the outcome that you're looking for. So in terms of the way this works with neuroplasticity, is that you have to perform a certain action in the material world to bring what you want into your life. To perform that action with

Starting point is 00:19:38 confidence, you have to have a certain thought process that tells you, if I go dating, I'm going to meet someone really nice and be able to settle down and have a family. First, if I go dating, I'm going to meet a series of guys who are going to treat me really badly and it's going to damage my self-esteem even further. You can see the path that, you know, those two people are going to go down. And it's the same for asking for a raise, asking for promotion, setting out to start your own business, any sort of health or fitness goals. And so behind that thought process will be a set of beliefs that may be conscious,

Starting point is 00:20:16 but maybe subconscious as well. So you do not even know that that's what you believe about yourself, that is starting off the thought process, that is either preventing you or allowing you with trust and faith, you know, to take a healthy risk. So if you're able to dig down to that underlying belief, that's when you can do really powerful work to affect your manifestation. And whatever the particular phrase,

Starting point is 00:20:46 tends to be, it usually does equate to inability to manifestation is because I don't believe I deserve that thing. The secrets, the boundaries, the roles, values. So those things that we pick up, because children, you know, they don't often do what their parents say, but they become who they are inevitably. And so I'm just, I'm so fascinated in the deep ways. And I know you've studied Carl's Young's work quite extensively in the process of taking our unconscious material to our conscious awareness to be able to work with these things. And I just think that's really important to get to the root of it because then you're kind of just swimming on the surface of think better thoughts. But like the root of it is still a rotten tree. And so you're going to kind of keep finding

Starting point is 00:21:31 yourself coming back to the same experience of life, attracting the same partners. Yeah. So anything you want to touch on there before I move on? Yeah, just really to reiterate what you've said. But so in the process of neuroplasticity, the practical process like day-to-day is raising awareness of the thing that you wish to change or, you know, awareness around what it is that you want to attract into your life. Focusing attention on opportunities to bring that into your life. Deliberate practice is the action part, which you know I'm really strong on. You can't just sit there and think about what you want and not do anything. And then the accountability piece.

Starting point is 00:22:09 but you're absolutely right that raising from non-conscious to conscious is the absolute key. If you can't do that, you're skimming on the surface. You might be able to change a few behaviors, but you're not changing the underlying belief. So I always just say that raising awareness is 50% of that battle of change, but the process for that is bringing from non-conscious to conscious what it is that's holding you back. Anything else you want to share on the neuroplasticity of being able to invent ourselves. So we might have the desire of, you know, fill in the blank, whatever it might be, whether it's a partner, career, more money, a general sense of well-being. And yet, if we really

Starting point is 00:22:51 struggle to bring the unconscious to the conscious, what are some of those tools that bring into our people's actions that you found most transformative? I want to go with a bit of just like the philosophy around it first and then maybe get down to some tools. But, um, So we've talked about not being aware of unconscious beliefs and trying to raise that. But the other piece that I think is really important is, you know, you've talked about something that we desire. I actually call it magnetic desire, which is a desire that is so strong that you will keep going when it feels like nothing's changing.

Starting point is 00:23:32 And, you know, the biggest reason that people don't change is that when it gets tough, we think, oh, well, this isn't meant to be, so I'll give up and I'll move on to something. else. Magnetic desire is when your head, heart and gut, so your logic, your emotion and your intuition are fully aligned. You know, if any one of those things is saying, I'm not sure if that's what I really want for myself, then it's, you can't, like all three of them have to be aligned. And the desire has to be very strong. Because it's too easy. And what I see a lot is people say that they want things like a family or a certain job. or a certain amount of money,

Starting point is 00:24:11 because that's what their peer group are doing. And what you have to really work out is what you want for yourself, regardless of what everybody else is doing, that you really want for personal reasons and not for what I would call the wrong reasons, which is that, you know, materialistic reasons or peer social comparative reasons.

Starting point is 00:24:32 Once you find something that you really want and you've got that strong desire and it's well aligned in your brain and your body, your ability to be patient, which is part of the process, will be much higher. And the reason that it's part of the process is even if it's a psychological thing that you're changing, physical work is going on in your brain. New neurons are growing, neurons are connecting up with each other, pathways are being myelinated, which is insulating them for like faster conduction.

Starting point is 00:25:06 That is hard work. You need to eat more, you need to rest a lot. It's literally physical work. And whilst that's happening, you're tired, your motivation is being challenged. But then it reaches a tipping point where you have enough neurons and a strong enough pathway that you can do the new behaviour that's required to get what you want and get out of those old patterns. And then suddenly, you know, you know that feeling, it feels that everything's fallen into place. but that can be after quite a long period of feeling like nothing's working out.

Starting point is 00:25:38 Everything's falling apart and definitely not in place. Yeah. Yeah. So that process of head, heart, integration, mind, body, spirit, unification, I think is ultimately the evolution point of where we're headed as a human species. But on an individual level is the goal, you brought up a really important point of first you have to even know what you want, right? You have to know what you actually desire.

Starting point is 00:25:59 And often that's a byproduct of releasing all these old stories. and identities that we talked about earlier, what do you feel like ultimately people truly want? It might manifest in however people look in their life and how they think they're going to get it. But what are the core tenets of what humans truly you feel need and want? Well, as you mentioned, I am a fan of Carl Jung's work. And so I believe that self-actualization

Starting point is 00:26:25 and individualization are the ultimate goals in life. And what that means is you reaching your potential, you becoming the best version of yourself. You know, for want to be a better phrase, living your best life. And I think it's very easy with social media to think living your best life is a set of things that are determined externally.

Starting point is 00:26:49 There is an idea of what a best life looks like, but that may not be your best life or my best life. So, you know, really understanding your purpose. I mean, having a purpose that transcends yourself is really important in terms of your own mental health, your physical health, your longevity, but it contributes to those things because it's the healthiest state for you to be in. And if you're striving for something that is not authentic for you and is very externally validated, that causes dis-ease in the system. You know, and it can literally make you sick or it can just

Starting point is 00:27:30 make you unhappy. And what happens in that scenario is that you may achieve the amount of money that you want to earn or the place that you want to live. But deep down, you're not actually happy. So finding out what it is that will truly make you happy. And I'm not even really saying that, you know, like being super happy all the time is the goal. It's the thing that means that you are the person that you're meant to be in the place that you're meant to be doing the things that you're meant to be they're not completely selfish things that you are absolutely flourishing in gratitude which means that you know the the bonding hormones and the feelings of trust and joy are you know going around your blood and and impacting your immune system in a

Starting point is 00:28:21 positive way and really allowing you to be the best version of yourself that you can be You really just spoke into authenticity, bringing ease in your life. And I guess the opposite of authenticity, whether it's pretense or just not feeling like you're expressing your true nature, then would be the opposite, which is dis-ease, right? And so, yeah. And so I know we wanted to mention just a few action things as well on the other side of really coming back into that authenticity. Were there some practices that you did want to mention before we move on? Yeah. So one which we've kind of touched on the theory of, but it's important to actually do, is to,

Starting point is 00:28:56 to, and I do think journaling is a great help for this, is to try to be very aware of the repeated thought patterns that you are having and start writing them down, start really noticing how often you are thinking this thing. There may be a few, so whether there are themes. Whether it's a particular recurring thought or themes, to then really try to dig underneath that, what must I believe about myself to be having that thought on a repeated basis. And there's a variety of things you can do here. One may require some sort of external help like therapy or a coach or, you know, a really psychologically minded friend that can remain as neutral as possible that you can speak with. Or it could just be journaling by yourself. But doing that work to understand what the underlying

Starting point is 00:29:48 belief is and then using that belief to create a mantra or positive affirmation that is the opposite of that belief. So even if it feels like it's not completely true at the moment, it does need to be quite bold so that every time you have the negative or the low self-worth thought, you can replace it with the positive affirmation. And that actually comes from a Buddhist teaching, which is replace every negative thought with a positive thought. But but it's very much backed up by neuroplasticity, because in the brain, you can't undo a pathway that's already there. You can only overwrite it with a new desired pathway,

Starting point is 00:30:30 whether that's a thought or an action or a belief. So if you meet as soon as you can, and then eventually before you even really start fully having the negative thought, you think of this positive mantra, and you say it out loud, you write it down, you share it with friends, as much as you can. You have it, you know, maybe I have affirmations written up on my bathroom mirror so that at least every morning and every evening I see them.

Starting point is 00:30:58 You can start to overwrite that belief in your brain. I really love the understanding of it's simply neural pathways that we're strengthening, right? And if we've cultivated and accumulated impressions to the point where we are very custom to having a pessimistic outlook on life, we can eventually get to that point. where we can have an abundant outlook on life as we start to strengthen, you know, the neurons that wire together, fire together. So can you speak to Mylan Sheath and how we can really strengthen those? So one of the questions that I ask people to consider is, has your life panned out exactly as you always dreamed that it would? And if not, where are the gaps? Because that

Starting point is 00:31:38 can help you start to identify what your purpose or your dreams might be. And, you know, when we were kids before people said, oh, don't do this, don't do that, don't say this. We actually genuinely had quite a strong idea of what we wanted to be, who we wanted to be. So maybe going back to some of your childhood dreams as well, they're all ways of helping you work out your purpose. And it may be that, let's say you wanted to paint and draw and, you know, you loved that. Maybe for various reasons, you can't be an artist full time as your profession, but you could bring back painting and drawing into your life and just see how much joy that brings you and what else it opens up. So that's an example.

Starting point is 00:32:22 Yeah, so in terms of how deeply embedded all these impressions are that we pick up in life, there's three ways that we embed information in our brain. One is called neurogenesis, and that is the fact that we have little embryonic or baby nerve cells floating around in our brains. Now, from zero to two, there's a lot of them in our brains, and, you know, there's a massive amount of growth in the brain from zero to two, from being completely vulnerable and unable to even survive by yourself, to walking, talking, potentially up to five languages simultaneously in the first two years of your life, having opinions, you know, being able to control your bladder, your bowels, make choices,

Starting point is 00:33:07 etc. It is definitely less so in the adult brain, but we know. know that those embryonic cells exist around the hippocampus part of our brain, which is where we lay down memories. So obviously for a large part of our lives, the majority of our lives, we are able to lay down new memories. And you asked me before about extrasensory perception. So I do believe from what we know at the moment that we will find that there are embryonic cells in other parts of the brains, but we just don't know that yet. The second and most common form of neuroplasticity in the adult brain is synaptic connection. So neurons are, you know, they have a long body and at either end they have what's called a synapse. And it's kind of like a bud at the end of

Starting point is 00:33:58 the neuron between two neurons, there's a gap. And when an electrical signal passes down a neuron, it induces the release of chemicals into that gap that are taken up by the other synapse. So there's a pre-synaptic end and a post-synaptic end. And that's how messages pass down long neural pathways from neuron to neuron. And the ability to connect up with other existing neurons is quite strong in our brains. And my favourite example is learning a new language. So when you learn a new language, you're using neurons that are already in your brain because you know how to speak, but you're just coding that for a new language. And then the third part is, myelination, which you're right is a fatty sheath that coats some neural pathways,

Starting point is 00:34:46 and it means that that pathway is more insulated, so we have faster conduction of electrical and chemical messages along that pathway. Now there's a reason that we have some fast pathways and some slow pathways. We don't want everything to be a fast pathway. So if you put your hand into a fire, your reflex to snatch your hand out of the fire is a fast pathway. But your pain reflex is a slow pathway. Because if you felt the pain of your hand burning immediately, you'd be incapacitated. So what tends to happen is you snatch your hand out of the fire

Starting point is 00:35:19 and then after a few seconds you're like, wow, that really hurts. I can feel it now. And again, that's an evolutionary mechanism to help us escape from predators. Yeah, I just love the analogy that cultivating an abundant outlook on life is like learning how to play the piano.

Starting point is 00:35:41 Like you're just creating these new pathways and it's going to be a process and a journey and that's actually that's an inviting perspective. Yeah, I actually did that during the pandemic because I don't know if you know, but I take on a new neuroplasticity learning every year. And so in the summer of the pandemic, I was learning to play tennis again,

Starting point is 00:36:02 which I had up until the end of high school, but then not since then. And it was so interesting to see that muscle memory and just the kind of mental memory come back as well. So my progress on that was quicker than if I had been trying to learn a completely new sport that I'd never played before. And I could see that, you know, it's obviously very tangible. And then, you know, there was definitely a period of time

Starting point is 00:36:23 during the pandemic where this is extremely privileged, but I felt really depressed about the fact that I couldn't travel anywhere. And I sort of thought, you know, I'm alive, I'm healthy, I'm actually in like nice surroundings, you know, for being locked up at home. This is not okay. And can I do here what I've seen myself do with tennis? And so I basically did six months of being able to, with less effort, see all the positives in a day rather than focus on what wasn't happening that I wanted to happen. And a little bit like I said with the whole tipping point thing, I was working.

Starting point is 00:37:09 on it and it was fine. And then there was literally a moment where I kind of stepped outside and I just looked around at the flowers and the sky and the weather and thought, this is just so beautiful. I'm so happy to be here. And immediately recognized this is quite different to the way I had been thinking for a few months. And it's important to share with our audience that the strongest gearing of the brain is called loss avoidance or loss aversion. And that is a survival mechanism. which makes us two to two and a half times more likely to focus on loss or potential loss than the equivalent amount of reward or potential gain. And so it is really easy to focus more on the things that aren't going right than the things that are.

Starting point is 00:37:58 That's natural for us. So just flipping ourselves to noticing more the positive things because they are there. And even if they're not, you know, then to take it to the next. next stage and bring more positivity into our lives is the mechanism of abundance, which is one of the six things, you know, that I mention in terms of manifestation, which is changing that gearing to being more abundant in your thinking rather than scarcity, the magnetic desire that I mentioned earlier, and the patience, because sometimes it can take, you know, longer than you would like and you need to keep your motivation going. And there's some other things around it, but those three

Starting point is 00:38:35 are the main ones to be really aware of. So that proclivity to like perceiving what could be lost is that that's just like an evolutionary mechanism again. That's kind of deep, deeply embedded for, you know, fear. Is there a reason for that? I just, I try to think of like as newborn babies come into this world, what are we biologically wired for? What is nurtured through childhood?

Starting point is 00:39:03 And then what we can do about it. is just because obviously having the fundamental Buddhist tenet of clinging an aversion and being aware acutely of what we could lose as deeply within our psychology and biology. Anything else you want to share as to why? Yeah. So when we lived in the cave, we had threats from predators, from the weather, from tribes that weren't the same as us or aligned with us. And so two survive, we had to be at least twice as much on the lookout for things that could, you know, things that could bring in disease, things that could bring in, like, scarcity of food, we had to be mindful of those things. In terms of things that we would consider to be rewards

Starting point is 00:39:54 today, they were complete luxuries. You know, in cave times, we would only really indulge in those activities if we had a massive store of food, if the weather was really good, if we'd fought off all of our enemies, you know. So it just wasn't as important to our survival. And that's a wiring that, you know how I said wiring that's been in your brain from zero to seven is really deep and affects like everything that you might think about. A wiring that's been in, you know, in the human species for so long also runs deep. Some of these things do change. So like a really sweet one is that in those times when we lived in the cave and we, we lived in a nomadic hunter-gatherer kind of way. We didn't live in unit families.

Starting point is 00:40:41 Men's priority was to impregnate as many women as possible to make sure that their genes survived. And they didn't have to stay and look after them. They just had to make sure that if they impregnated five women, then one would probably, one baby would survive. Is that link to the testosterone oxytocin balance too that we were talking about beforehand? Yeah, I guess it would be. You can come to that later. In this day and age, Most societies do ask that we live in a unit family, that the father stays with the family, like, you know, after he's impregnated the woman. And for a long time, men would be going against their, you know, testosterone profile to want to do that. But what we've seen in the last, let's say, decade, is that when a man becomes a father for the first time, his testosterone levels drop and the limbic system, which is the emotional part of the brain, that's the I said was the size of your clenched fist, that becomes rewired by oxytocin, the bonding hormone. So the father wants to stay around and protect the baby because he feels bonded to the mother

Starting point is 00:41:45 and the baby rather than feeling competitive with his testosterone. So that means that something that we have changed as a society has actually then created a biological imperative for men and families. But this survival mechanism, it hasn't changed that much. It hasn't changed that much, even though our threats now are primarily psychological for, you know, for most people in the modern world, and not so much physical, we still have that tendency to focus on losses rather than gains, but we are able to override it if we're aware of it. Amazing. Quick tangent, then, do you want to mention that one piece about, I just find it so fascinating. Yeah, yeah. So it's less related to like families, but it's just to do

Starting point is 00:42:34 with sexual interactions between men and women. So when, and, you know, I just want to say that the research isn't clear on other genders and that's why I'm focusing on the, you know, the heterosexual interaction is that in a sexual interaction between a man and a woman, so the bonding hormone oxytocin that is involved in childbirth, in breastfeeding, in bonding between newborn baby and mum. So it's kind of like the love bubble hormone. that is released by women. During sex.

Starting point is 00:43:08 During sex. And similarly to the fact that women do have testosterone, but men have about 17 times as much that they're circulating through their body during the day, men also do release oxytocin, but the way that the receptors respond to oxytocin is completely blunted by the testosterone. So what that means in practical life

Starting point is 00:43:30 is that if a woman sleeps with a man enough times and keeps releasing these bursts of oxytocin, she is going to bond to that man, aka falling in love. For a man, if they are not already in love with the women and they're having casual sex, then the amount of testosterone that's circulating at the time will minimize the effects of the oxytocin, meaning that he will not necessarily bond with the woman. And, you know, like I say, whether it's reality shows or listening to your single friends, we do tend to hear this story quite a lot that, you know, well, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:07 he said we're keeping it casual, but we were having sex and I hoped he changed his mind and he didn't kind of scenario. Yeah, no, I just think that it's really interesting to look into the biology of that because that is a common experience. I think a lot of people have in the male-female relationship dynamics, especially with sex that people are having it casually. Before we move on, are there any other ways in which our hundreds of thousands of years human biology, now living in modern times is screwing us because it's like it's so recent to have technology and the internet and what we've all become accustomed to, but it's so new to how we've evolved. And so is there anything that sticks out as to how that is a recipe for disaster

Starting point is 00:44:50 in certain cases? I want to slightly push back on the way that you phrased that, because I am getting that feedback on social media. And so what I really want to say is, Knowledge is power. And I'm saying these things so that if people have experienced that in their personal life, but they weren't aware of the science behind it, that they can use that information to, you know, make it work for them. So, for example, this scenario about as a woman, you may bond more than you would like to if you repeatedly have casual sex with someone, knowing that could change, you know, what some people do. So it's good to know, right? Yeah. And similarly, we've mentioned a few other things like that, like how the stress hormone cortisol leaks out of your body and your

Starting point is 00:45:36 sweat, and so you can get affected by the stress levels of people around you, that could potentially screw with you if you didn't, you know, if you weren't aware of the fact that, um, be aware of who's draining your energy or making you feel super stressed and either go and sweat that out through aerobic exercise or get it off your mind through journaling or speaking to a friend or therapist. Um, but the main one that I really want to come to, because I've been doing some research into neuroesthetics recently or neuro arts, and I've realized the importance of this one thing that has been staring us in the face for as long as we've been humans, but we have become so disconnected from it for all the reasons that you've just mentioned, because we've got devices, because we're

Starting point is 00:46:23 switched on 24-7, we have artificial light, is the importance of nature to our health? And our mental health. So you and I might have different taste in music or art, although having looked around your house before, definitely similar taste in art, but, you know, we might not. But nature is the one palette that we all agree on because we've all existed in it since the beginning of time. And I'm obviously not going to say exactly where you live, but when you invited me, you know, to come to the studio, it's such a beautiful place that I've been to before. I wanted to have the drive here and be in that place and see the views because I know that that will be good for me today. So what has tended, well, interestingly, during the pandemic, we all maybe did actually

Starting point is 00:47:13 consciously spend a bit more time in nature. But I have to admit that since I've been able to move back to the city, travel more again, I'm not spending as much time in nature as I did during the pandemic. And that's at the back of my mind that I regret it. But equally, you know, priorities and just like the rush of life again has definitely had a negative impact on that. So when we spend time in nature, we kind of know that it's got, you know, mental health benefits and health benefits. And there is research that shows that if you spend enough time in nature on a regular basis, it actually can increase your lifespan. And not just that you live longer, but you live healthier for longer. but one of the areas of research that I've come across recently is so I love going on safari

Starting point is 00:48:03 and I learned quite a few years ago that if a tree gets nibbled a lot by a giraffe and so it's kind of losing its ability to like send the seeds out and grow more of itself it sends chemical messages in the air to other similar trees around who make themselves bitter so the giraffes won't eat them oh yeah so cool yeah I think thought that was cool, but wait till you find out my latest thing, which is that trees and plants, some more than others, release chemicals called phyton sides that actually boost our immune system. They trigger the release of natural killer cells in our immune system that can fight off more infections and cancers. So we're constantly, you know, fighting off small infections and cancers

Starting point is 00:48:52 and not even realizing that that's happened. Obviously, when they proliferate massively and the immune system can't keep up with them, that's when we become sick. But if you, ideally, you know, forest bathing is where this all came from. But if you go out and spend time, you know, by the ocean or in the mountains or in the forest,

Starting point is 00:49:12 even if you have more plants in your house, and, you know, if you have a garden rather than just a terrace or a deck or whatever, then you are getting the benefits of, those chemicals from trees and plants. Isn't that incredible? Just by being in close proximity to them. Yeah. Yeah, I've always just felt the benefit from keeping life, really. It's just plants and now living where I live now, which I moved here about six months ago, I totally feel the

Starting point is 00:49:40 difference. I mean, it's something that we all intellectually know when we go on hikes or go on the water. We just feel our nervous system be more regulated and suddenly our problems don't have as much of a grip on us. But that's wild to see some of the science behind that as well. I didn't know you'd only move six months ago. So yeah, you're in the kind of time period of difference. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:01 And I also feel there's something inherently linked to our human creativity with that. I'm curious if there's anything that came out for you there, there's so much that I want to dive into you with. But I feel like the more that we find ease within ourselves, which can come by product of being in nature more, we get more access to just. It's kind of like this effervescent creativity of wanting to express instead of the alternative. Yeah, so it's really interesting that you've come to that conclusion intuitively. Because when we spend time in nature, what we're essentially doing is beholding beauty.

Starting point is 00:50:39 And there's two forms of creativity, beholding and making. And they're connected. They're both good for you for different reasons. but when you are consciously spending more time beholding beauty, which you're doing without even thinking about it by being in nature, then it connects up in that pathway in your brain to wanting to make beauty as well. And so whether that's drawing, painting, singing, chanting, humming, dancing. And again, let's relate this back to when we were in the cave.

Starting point is 00:51:13 you know, we were talking about how, why we would look out for loss more than reward. Well, even before we could speak, we were like beating drums, we were dancing, we were humming, we were doing cave paintings. And we used to think that cave paintings were a way of demonstrating the success of a hunt. But we understand now that it was much more planning the hunt because we couldn't speak to each other. I couldn't say to you, let's go and kill a woolly mammoth today because then we'll have loads of, you know, fur and fat to get through the winter. But I could draw that with you and help, you know, get you to understand that's what my plan was. But in those days, it was literally all about survival.

Starting point is 00:51:54 We didn't really do things for fun. Everything had a reason. So why were we dancing and humming and beating drums? And, you know, obviously we were walking barefoot in nature and we were looking at the stars in the sky. So all of that mindfulness, you know, beauty stuff was happening. but we had to be creative as well. Being creative was contributing to our immunity, to our health, to our longevity, to our connections as a tribe. In fact, the authors of the book, Your Brain on Art, Ivy and Susan, they actually count being in nature as a creative activity. So when they quote their research, it's about the benefits of creative activities on your mental health, your health and your longevity. And being in nature is just another one of those. Yeah, it feels like that switch. I just love all of that so much.

Starting point is 00:52:43 It feels like that shift of seeing creativity as a luxury that, you know, people who have free time can do to actually, it's a necessity to having a healthy human psyche. Yeah. Beautiful. I love that frame of beholding beauty, being linked to expressing creating beauty. Yeah. Because I totally feel that intuitively. I'm sure so many people do as well. Chelsea, who's our main girl behind the scenes right now, actually goes out and hikes and paints the mountain ridges that she sees in real time, which is so cool.

Starting point is 00:53:09 like being able to merge those, I think is so rad. That's wonderful. So I'm glad I asked that because I wasn't planning on it, but that's good to know in here. All right, I do want to touch on the law of attraction a little bit more here because it's a big part of your work, your book, and in your book, The Source, you touch on this and all the podcasts that you go on quite a bit. I think a lot of people got exposed to the film, The Secret, when they were younger.

Starting point is 00:53:35 And it was a great thing because it put a lot of people on their spiritual path. they're like, just into a different way of thinking and more open way of perceiving things. It also served as really not doing a great job of actually explaining how that really works and kind of keeping it on more of the woo-woo mystical side of things. And so I'm curious just for you to ground in what the law of attraction means in your eyes. Because obviously we're constantly manifesting and attracting in our life. What is the law side of it? Yeah. So I looked into this before I 100% committed to writing the source. And so, you know, what I want to say about the secret and Ronda is that she brought

Starting point is 00:54:19 into massively into common culture the fact that you can do things to bring what you want into your life. I think it was left at the level of less agency for people because it was explained by the power of the universe and like vibrations that were outside of yourself. And so I felt it was really important to add to that that cognitive science, so that's the power of your mind and your brain, and you using that in a directed way, underlies your ability to bring into reality in the material world the things that you think about and desire in your mind. And also, you're kind of more in retrospect to realize that if it is the power of your mind, if it's your mind,

Starting point is 00:55:14 if it's what you believe, if it's what you think, if it's what you then go out and do as a result of that, then you can feel really empowered by that. Whereas even if you think it's, I sit at home and I think about the house that I want or the job that I want and then, you know, I notice more things than certain good things happen, it still feels very external. And, you know, to me, that's not being in the driver's seat of your life. And it's great if, you know, wonderful coincidences and serendipities also happen, but you've got to be feeling like there are things that I can do to make this happen. And you know that what I'm really passionate about is people understanding how much potential they hold in their brain. And so the more that people think,

Starting point is 00:56:01 at least I'm part of this, if not necessarily absolutely the driver of it yet, that That is the start of a journey where you can minimum co-create with whatever might be going on around you, but absolutely, you know, create, like I said, your best version of yourself and your ideal future. So the laws of attraction, I mean, there's a lot of disagreement about actually what they are and how many there are. So I looked as broadly as I could, kind of wrote it all down, and my mission was, can any of these claims, be backed up by cognitive science, so psychology or neuroscience. And literally 80 or 90%, there was an immediate connection for me. Some took a little bit harder work to prove, if you like.

Starting point is 00:56:52 And then in the end, I said, look, there are some which I can't explain by neuroscience at the moment, but it's not going to harm you. So you can either leave it out or you can do it anyway just based on faith. but we've kind of already talked about it, Andre. It's literally about being able to notice and grasp opportunities that will take you closer to the things that you know you want in your life and being able to do those things because you have the thoughts that direct your brain to filter out the wrong things but pay attention to the right things and tag the right things in order of importance, both emotional

Starting point is 00:57:34 in logically so that you're able to notice those in your daily life and that you have the underlying belief like we said that you deserve those things it really just comes back down to that yeah that switch from lack mindset to an abundant outlook that we spoke to earlier that's that's great now how does how does stress affect our ability to usefully take advantage of creating the life that we want because you know Stress makes it stupid. Totally. I'm so glad you asked that, actually.

Starting point is 00:58:09 So when we are stressed, our adrenal glands, which are in our lower back above our kidneys, are releasing more of the stress hormone cortisol. So stress and cortisol are completely aligned. They always go together. And there are receptors in your brain that are constantly monitoring the levels of cortisol in your blood. And we have an amazing adaptive stress response, which means that, you know, if suddenly there was like thunder and lightning,

Starting point is 00:58:39 we would like be aware that there's potentially danger to this house and we might, you know, do some actions based on that. And then as soon as we know, we've secured the house and maybe the storm has passed, you know, our body's reset to a healthy kind of nervous state. When we're under chronic stress, those levels of cortisol are higher than they should be more of the time. As a baseline, just constantly there higher.

Starting point is 00:59:03 Yeah. So there's a normal range. depending on your age and your gender and the time of day. And the receptors in your brain are aware of what those levels should be. When it sees that those levels are higher than that, on a sustained basis, it perceives an imminent threat to your survival. And there's a lot of things that happen in response to that. But in the brain, the blood flow will get re-routed. So to be creative and think flexibly,

Starting point is 00:59:34 and regulate our emotions and manage any biases that we might have, the blood lead needs to be flowing to all the extremities of the brain. But under chronic stress, those receptors will push the blood flow down to what I call survival mode, which is the parts of your brain that you need to wake up in the morning, provide the basic needs for yourself and your family, get yourself to your desk job and sit there and look like you shouldn't get fired, but not actually be able to perform at your best,

Starting point is 01:00:06 be much less able to trust and collaborate. So kind of, at the time that you need the highest functions of your brain the most, your blood flow is literally working against you. And that's why presenteism, which is when you go to work but you're not really productive, costs businesses way more than absenteeism. So my advice to people is when you realize, that you're really stressed, take a day or two off

Starting point is 01:00:37 and try to reset your nervous system because you'll be so much more productive if you're able to release that blood flow around again. Trying to work against your brain, when your brain isn't working with you, is like trying to push a heavy weight uphill. It's kind of counterproductive. So that's why rest and nature

Starting point is 01:00:58 and, you know, kind of mindfulness and creativity are so important to just manage those stress levels. Yeah, I think it's so important to speak into a little bit about physical and emotional fitness as well because I could hear some people way in the back saying, you know, I want to create this life and I have this desire. I have a vision board. We can talk about your action board and some tips there.

Starting point is 01:01:24 In order to effectively manifest that, I need to reduce my stress because all my blood is not going to where it needs to. But on the flip side, I got to feel less stressed to get those things. And to get those things, I will feel less stressed. And it's like a rail wheel. It's kind of confusing. But I would just love for you to speak into resiliency and also being patient along the process there. Because oftentimes in this culture, especially in modern society, Western culture, we want things right away.

Starting point is 01:01:56 We don't like to cultivate and work towards it. And yeah, I think it's important just to remind people. to give themselves compassion along the process of attracting what they want because it is a process. So let's start by really backing up your question by saying that, you know, I said other things are going on when we've got high levels of cortisol as well. So one of the other ones is that because we talked about the blood flow in the brain, when you've got high levels of cortisol going through the blood in your body, it's actually eroding your immunity. So in terms of resilience, it's lowering your immune response, which at the most basic level means you're much more

Starting point is 01:02:35 likely to get colds and flus in the winter and that when you do get a cold or flu, that it's more likely to last for longer than a few days. And sometimes, you know, what we see now is that these colds and flus are lasting for weeks. At the other end of the spectrum, people who are chronically stressed for a long time can end up getting heart attacks. Like I've personally coached coached people or had people in my class at MIT that have had stress-induced heart attacks even when, you know, they're in their 40s, they don't have high blood pressure, they don't have high cholesterol. So really understanding that cortisol is the enemy of your resilience. And that so in a way, you know, one of the things I say is that folk, you know, do all the work that you

Starting point is 01:03:22 need to do to manifest, be clear on what you want, like, you know, build up your self-worth and, you know, grasp the opportunities that you can, but equally don't get stressed about it. And like you said, it sometimes does require patience. It can become very frustrating. I'm stressed that I'm stressed. Yeah, and like, you know, nothing's working out for me and like manifestation doesn't work. And, you know, it's very easy to go down those paths, especially if you're compromised physically and mentally. So to realize that actually that part of manifestation is managing your stress and building up your mental and physical resilience. And that comes back to, I have to repeat, you know, the basics as well as we can go into some other things, but making sure that you're getting

Starting point is 01:04:05 adequate length and quality of sleep. And we don't know why exactly, but regular sleep and wake times are really boosting the, you know, beneficial impacts of your sleep. So within an hour going to bed and waking up at the same time each day. Eating nutrition dense foods. And do you remember I mentioned neurogenesis as the kind of most complex and least likely version of neuroplasticity in the adult brain. Well, there are two things that really contribute to that. One is aerobic exercise. And one is eating mostly plant-based, but particularly dark-skinned foods.

Starting point is 01:04:45 So eating blueberries instead of strawberries, black beans instead of canolini beans, purple-sprouting broccoli instead of green broccoli. all of those things are good but if you can add in like the darker colours then that um the um anthocyanins in the skin of those foods are super antioxidants that promote neurogenesis even further staying hydrated not being sedentary and then managing your stress and so under that falls things like mindfulness techniques whether that's meditation yoga time in nature um mindful eating And then I think everything else that we've said, like you said, understanding that it is a process, that it is hard physical work, even though it feels very psychological and intangible, that it does often take longer than you would like. I mean, and what I find personally is that it happens in sort of like rhythms and cycles.

Starting point is 01:05:50 So there are times where I'm kind of feeling like, be careful what you wish for because everything's happening at the moment. And, you know, I have learned that when it feels like that, that's when I will ask more for the things that I want. And that equally there are weeks or months where it feels like nothing's happening. And hard as it is, I've kind of had to accept that and get used to that too. I feel like for the most part, I've kind of viewed wealth as just like an overall state. well-being and not just like financial income which a lot of people attribute to. And so yeah, I think it's important. Obviously all those reminders of like taking care of our physical self because if you feel good about life, then you're successful. That ultimately is what it comes down to.

Starting point is 01:06:35 So I'm just curious how you navigate this dance between being and becoming. You know, the feeling of wanting to expand limantly and create and do better financially and expand our career and and express ourselves creatively, but then also coming back into feeling completely fulfilled inherently within your presence in this moment, you know, so I'm just curious how you navigate the dance. I'm probably going to say something you wouldn't expect me to. So the gap between being and becoming is the greatest source of unhappiness in your life. So if you think about there's two circles, there's current self and ideal self or current life and ideal life.

Starting point is 01:07:25 If those two things are overlapping, that's like 100% happiness. The further apart they are, the more unhappy you are. So I'm not saying that you shouldn't have goals or want bigger or better things in your life. but the way to get there is to be ultimately grateful for everything you have in your life right now. And to look at those two circles and think about them in two ways. One is that I could strive to change my current life to my ideal life and understand what it is that you have to do to achieve that. And go back to what we said at the start,

Starting point is 01:08:11 which is why are you trying to achieve? that. Is it because it's what you really want or is it because it's what everybody else is doing? Or you could say, I'm going to make my current life, I'm going to say that's my ideal life. I'm just going to be happy with the life that I have now. So, yeah, you know, I have an action board and it has things on it that I want, and I look at it regularly. And we mentioned a book that we both liked before. So, you know, as part of what I learned from that, I... Master key system. Master key system, yeah. Which, you know, you have to go through it and do the exercises, but what you understand at the end of that is believe in the truth of what you wish to manifest.

Starting point is 01:08:50 So part of my practice is looking at the things on my action board and visualise them being true, feeling it in my body, feeling it in every sense, and then giving gratitude for the fact that they're true. But, you know, of course I work hard, but not overly striving to get things in my life that are going to put my nervous system out of sync, you know, kind of being patient, like being on that path, but mostly just being very grateful for everything that's happening right now. I mean, I think, you know,

Starting point is 01:09:27 if you're lucky enough to have come through the pandemic, healthy and not having lost a loved one, then what it made a lot of us realize that, you know, you can have a gratitude list that's 10 or 100 things long and it can have so many amazing things on it. But really, if you can wake up every day and say, I'm alive and I'm healthy, that's actually enough.

Starting point is 01:09:48 And it's a huge privilege because lots of people have really had to stare that in the face in the last few years, not being true. Yeah. It's, you know, I feel like it's important to have goals and like a vision of a future that excites us. But if we always feel like we're not where we want to be, that sucks.

Starting point is 01:10:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I love how you just brought kind of the importance of how good we feel about life around us is the unification of both of those to where we are living a life of alignment and who we are being is in the becoming process. And we can still aspire to create things in life, which is beautiful because we're all inherently creative beings. And that's part of our nature. But yeah, always feeling like we're just never fully satisfied or we're not where we want to be. that doesn't feel like a joyful life to be experiencing. No, that's a really lovely summary of it. And I think the reason that it's important is because when we are on this journey of becoming,

Starting point is 01:10:45 we are achieving things along the way. But the natural tendency for a lot of people is to kind of say, well, I've ticked that one off. So now I'll put that behind me and I'll move on to the next thing. It's constantly moving on to the next thing and it's hardly ever really celebrating your successes. So, you know, the gratitude in every day, but also celebrate. your successes because all that's going to do is tell your brain that, you know, when I focus on what I want and I work hard around that and I, you know, live in gratitude and abundance, those things happen. And so that's going to move you away from the cortisol state of fear

Starting point is 01:11:20 towards the oxytocin state of love and trust. And, you know, in which state do you think the law of attraction works more abundantly? It's so interesting to feel into that when we attract things or we have a desire to create a successful podcast or release a book that does well or whatever our goals are. In a way for it to even come in, we kind of have to expect it. And so I feel like we oftentimes don't create the space for reflection to appreciate what has been created, which is kind of sad because we're under the illusion of thinking that we're going to feel a certain way once we achieve the thing. But then we invariably achieve the thing and then we think the feeling is in the next thing. And it's just like,

Starting point is 01:12:04 continual pushing off that feeling of a joyful presence into someday in the future. And so I think that's just such an important reminder to create that space for reflection. There's actually another piece of research around that, which I've never discussed before, but it's called the hedonic treadmill. And it's the most famous research around it is from lottery winners who, you know, let's say it's like multi-millions, you know, it's life-changing, that obviously you become ecstatic for a short while, but it's shocking how quickly your happiness levels revert to what they were before. Another more day-to-day example that might be more what we're all used to, is that if you have a really delicious meal, when you eat the first bite of that,

Starting point is 01:12:49 you release lots of dopamine and other feel-good endorphins and hormones, and you know, you feel very joyful. But each successive bite has less impact and it returns to, to neutral very quickly. So, you know, that's what we're doing. Like, like you said, we're achieving things, feeling happy for a short burst and then returning to normal. So it's like we're constantly seeking that reward. And so I'll just loop that back to how I answered the question in the first place. You can't be happy if you're constantly looking for something better. And gratitude lists many things that you speak to can allow you to just reflect on and how

Starting point is 01:13:28 probably for most people that are listening to this, there are billions of people on the planet that would kill to switch positions in life with you right now. You know, like how grateful we are to have the basic luxuries that we have is so easy to forget. I think going to experience in a third world country, like when I went to Nigeria, I really got to see, you know, that one, happiness is definitely not tied to material wealth, often case that there's an inverse effect that we see. But then also if somebody can be so grateful for so little

Starting point is 01:14:01 and of course they have their own various challenges but what does that say about what we can feel for the level of abundance that we're lucky to have. Amazing. That was really great. Is there any truth to the thought of

Starting point is 01:14:19 we only use 1% 5% percent, 10% of our brain? I'm sure you've heard it a lot but I think we're always told that and what do people mean when they, is there any truth to that? Yeah. So funnily enough, I was actually having this conversation with someone recently because they asked me about neuro myths that bug me. Yeah. So I think the thing to say is that what exists as neuro myths now are things that we used to think were true, but we now know that they're not as scientists. But sometimes those phrases, they stay in popular culture for a lot longer. So since we've been able to access sophisticated scanning,

Starting point is 01:14:55 technologies to look at the brain and the body, we've understood some things differently to how we understood them before. Because prior to that, the only way we really understood how the brain worked was if we looked at brains where something had gone wrong. So if someone had a stroke or like a neurosurgery, if someone had like a brain abscess or a brain tumor, then as we felt around, you know, that area of pathology, we might notice, oh, you know, this is when we touch the this part of the brain affects the way the person can speak, or even things about how we understand that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa.

Starting point is 01:15:35 So for that reason, things like left brain and right brain became very overstated. And once we understood that it doesn't work in the very, you know, hemispherical way that we had understood it before, and that is probably the biggest one that state, you know, the left brain, right brain thing. I remember when I was writing the source, which came out in 2019, I said, oh, I'd love to do a special box on the fact that, you know,

Starting point is 01:16:02 left brain, right brain is not how, you know, we don't understand that things work anymore. And the editors said, what do you mean? And they said, well, no, no, readers are not going to agree with that. And I said, it's not for them to agree. Like, I've got the research here. And if you think that, it's even more important to tell people that that's, you know, that's not the thought that our logical and emotional sides are split between left and right. Yeah, and that either your right-brained or left-brained, you know, and I'm something else. And so, you know, what we understand now is that there's a bridge that connects the two, there are two hemispheres, but they're much more connected than we thought before. And if you think about two hemispheres like this, we thought there was a bridge that just kind of went from the end of this one to the end of that one.

Starting point is 01:16:42 But actually, it fans massively into both sides. So the corpus call it some. Yeah. And so it's just much more complex than that. And also it's not about the two sides. It's about the limbic system with, you know, more emotional stuff and then the cortex around it and how they interact with each other. And that's different when we're stressed to when we're in a, you know, a good state as well. But the, I think, I believe the neuromith is that we only use 10% of our brains.

Starting point is 01:17:10 And that was the basis of a movie called Lucy with Scarlet Your Hansen. Which is a great movie. Morgan Freeman starts off. It was incredible voice. It would have been a good movie. You hate it because of a neuromit. But I liked the, there's just so many good parts of it, but I hear you on the spreading. Yeah, look, I love the idea that we can access more potential in our brains.

Starting point is 01:17:33 But it's just not true that we only use 10% of our brains yet. We use all of our brain. We use different parts of it at different times of different things. Sometimes it's much more interconnected than others. Interestingly, when we're indulging in creative activity, it's the most connected. Music is like massively connecting different parts of the brain. you know when we're doing creative things we're using the visual parts of the brain the auditory parts the imagination centers the association center which connects all of that up and you know we're

Starting point is 01:18:05 probably moving as well so yeah I think rather than think about it like that to think that you know are there ways of thinking that I'm not accessing as much as I could we tend to focus on reusing our strongest pathways so you know for me that's definitely intuition and probably logic. But like I said, with my yoga practice, I've definitely built up my physicality aspect much more. With age and wisdom, I've regulated my emotions much more, always been pretty motivated. And, you know, I've shared very widely now that building up the creative pathway in my brain is like the area that I'm really focusing on at the moment. So everyone can do that exercise on themselves. They can either put those six ways of thinking

Starting point is 01:18:55 in order of preference or they can understand that there's like one or two or three that you use most of the time because you're comfortable with that. One or two that you could use if you had to in a different kind of scenario and then maybe one or two that you underuse that you could kind of try practicing more. Interesting. Very fascinating. All right. I want to try to take you into some uncharted territory. I thought you've been doing that. So first off, I do find it very interesting that you've been studying various different indigenous wisdom.

Starting point is 01:19:28 And so I would love for you to bring up what have been some of the most eye-opening pieces from indigenous wisdom and ancient wisdom traditions that you found that are really applicable to modern times that would be most beneficial for people. Thank you so much for asking about that. I've really enjoyed digging into that. And it's like literally in the moment changed my life each time I've, you know, sort of of learned a thing, a thing like that. So you're learning by conversations with indigenous individuals, basically.

Starting point is 01:19:56 Yeah, and experts as well. So a bit of both. We've actually mentioned some of the things already because I have integrated them into my life so much already. So, you know, time in nature, making and beholding, you know, creative things. And if we want to connect that to what I've learned from the indigenous, groups of people that I've spoken with, things like adorning yourself. So interestingly, as we were setting up, I asked you about your jewelry. And, you know, a lot of men don't wear as

Starting point is 01:20:27 much jewelry as you are wearing. But when we consider ourselves as divine beings, of course, we're more likely to adorn ourselves because that's what you would. You know, if you have a child or a pet that you love or you, you know, worship a deity, then it is about how. having flowers around the deity or putting jewelry on the child or, you know, a beautiful color on the pet. So that is... Thanks for acknowledging I'm a deity. That's clearly why I'm wearing my jewelry to be good with. That's obviously why you invited me on podcast.

Starting point is 01:21:06 And, you know, all the things I mentioned already, like humming, chanting, mantras, singing, dancing. And this episode hasn't come out yet, but I spoke to someone who's studying Sufi mysticism. And so, you know, she very specifically talked about love and an exercise to, like, kind of hum or chant the vibration that induces love, which I would call oxytocin around your body, and has an impact on the people around you as well. So there might be certain words or something.

Starting point is 01:21:42 sounds that people can use to do that. And another area that I've explored, which is more ancient cultures are more comfortable with than us, are things like reincarnation, near-death experiences, past life memories, terminal lucidity and mind sight. So terminal lucidity is where people who have dementia or they've had some kind of brain injury like a, stroke and lost their levels of consciousness, so either their memory or their ability to

Starting point is 01:22:20 recognize people or understand the passage of time, suddenly become completely lucid towards the end of their life. So this tends to happen in the last hour or day before death. And when you say completely lucid. They remember everything. So they go from having forgotten that they even have children to recognizing their children, knowing their names, speaking to them in the usual parental fashion that they used to. And really getting to say goodbye and being very loving. I wish that for everybody. I know.

Starting point is 01:22:50 I know. So, you know, everybody who's lost somebody who's consciousness was altered, that can happen. And it can be like an amazing experience. But unfortunately, it usually also means that the person is very close to death. But still. So maybe not. Well, everybody would rather have that period of lucidity than not have it. For sure.

Starting point is 01:23:09 But, you know, I mean, we're not very good at death and loss. So it's painful. what the professor that I spoke to about that made me understand is that you have to prepare yourself for death throughout your whole life. And it just comes back to the same things, Andre, that we spoke about being grateful, being kind, being compassionate. If you do that as much as you can throughout your life, you're going to have less regrets on your deathbed. You're not, you know, I'm not the first person that's saying this, but you're not going to be lying on your deathbed saying, I wish I earned more money or I wish I gained higher status in life, you know. So that's one way of looking at it.

Starting point is 01:23:46 Mindsight is something really incredible, which is a near-death experience, but in a very smaller cohort of people who have been blind their whole life, so they've never actually seen. Maybe the most that they've seen is they can distinguish light and dark, but they haven't had vision. And then where they have a near-death experience, they can see. So if you put all of these things together, the fact that some children seem to have memories of a different life,

Starting point is 01:24:17 that you can become very lucid even though you've got, you know, a degenerative process in your brain or an injury to your brain that you can see if you've been blind, it does make you wonder about how connected consciousness has to be to the physical form. And the fact that they can maybe move apart and come back together again and of course it poses the question about what happens after physical death. So in different ancient cultures, there could be a belief in reincarnation,

Starting point is 01:24:52 there can be a belief in the spirit world, there can be a belief in reading signs. And so all of those things can help us to become more comfortable with death and therefore allow us to live our life in a better or, you know, slightly different way. And just, you know, in summary, because I do actually think we've covered most of the things, it really does come back to a connection with nature and the land and the cycle of nature, the seasons, the, you know, eating seasonally and eating plant-based, respect for animals,

Starting point is 01:25:32 respect for, you know, vulnerable groups or marginalised groups. I guess all the things that actually make you happy in life rather than the things that we tend to think of when we talk about manifestation. Incredible, yeah. I see you as somebody who's very much so like a doctor of the future. I feel like in the direction we're moving, it's really important to have the language of modern science,

Starting point is 01:25:56 but then also not neglecting the incredible intelligence that's been cultivated through these wisdom traditions that have preceded modern society and have so much to share And so when you're speaking to whether it's terminal lucidity or mind sight, you know, our NDE's or in the upper, I'm just so curious at the upper limits if there is one, but the upper potential of human consciousness and what we can do,

Starting point is 01:26:23 for example, in like Mahasamadi, where people can cultivate the ability to at will leave their own body. Whether or not people believe that, there's these yogic claims of what becomes possible as you go on that path of the, science of yoga being one of union. And so I'm curious what you make of the realm outside of what science is currently able to understand and dictate, but nonetheless, people have very real experiences and often don't feel the need to try to explain it logically. Yeah, I would say that,

Starting point is 01:26:55 you know, you're absolutely right. Yoga, the meaning of yoga is union. The meaning of Ayurveda is the science of life. And so, and the Vedas are, as far as we know, the most ancient scriptures that exist in the world. And the yogis, the people who practiced Ayurveda and yoga, and yoga is not just doing poses, it's something like much bigger than that. Yeah. Just one limb of what? That's just one of eight limbs of yoga. So there are reports of people from those ancient times who, you know, meditated for hours and days and weeks in grottos and the Himalayas, being able, well, you know, there are things we actually know about, like being able to walk on

Starting point is 01:27:40 hot coals, being able to, like, not feel pain. And then the other cities as well, right, which are like these spiritual superpowers. Yeah, what we would call spiritual superpowers that are less explained, but include things like what you said of your consciousness or your spirit being able to leave your physical body. an understanding and potentially communication with people on a different plane. So, you know, depending on what your beliefs are about what happens to someone when they die, whether it's reincarnation or that their consciousness from this life exists in a different astral plane and, you know, whether or not you can communicate with that.

Starting point is 01:28:18 There are so many things like that that haven't been proven by science. But what I want to say is they keep coming up in cycles. I'm extremely flattered and, you know, grateful for you saying that I'm a doctor of the future. But I already have icons in my life who are people who are doctors, who are, let's say, 20, 30 years older than me, that I know they've gone there because they talk about it maybe as much as I'm willing to at the moment. But I think there are things that, you know, that they're not talking about. So, and they're well-known people, Dr. Bruce Lipton, Deepak Chopra, Daniel Siegel. these are people who, before I was really on that path of, let alone being able to speak about this publicly, but even exploring it for myself, were, you know, MDs or scientists or both

Starting point is 01:29:09 who were talking about really spiritual things. And I was kind of like, is that allowed? Can you, you know, can you do both? Are we supposed to be talking about this stuff? What bumps me out is not being open. I know. And that's why I am trying to be more open than definitely I was comfortable with a few years ago, because what I have appreciated is that because I've got a PhD in neuroscience and a medical degree and a teacher at MIT, if I can't have the courage to talk about these things, then, you know, how easy is it to just ridicule other people that do? And what I have found is that when I have talked about things like life after death with people,

Starting point is 01:29:58 so many people have opened up with stories about it. And when I've said, why have you never talked about this before? They've said because people will think I'm crazy. But by giving people permission, especially if you come from a background where people don't expect you to talk about that because they think that you wouldn't think it's true. By being more open about that, I think we are, hopefully, as a society and a culture,

Starting point is 01:30:24 opening up those conversations, which at minimum can be of so much comfort to people who've experienced loss and disconnection. And that, you know, to me, where we talk about self-actualization and reaching your highest potential, if I can make any contribution to people feeling less lost and lonely and disconnected, that would be me achieving, you know, that would be me self-actualizing.

Starting point is 01:30:51 So if that means that I'm brave enough to talk about things that wouldn't be normal in my profession, then I'm willing to try and I'm willing to see what the feedback is. And if it's wrong, then maybe I'll course correct. But at the moment, I'm just, you know, getting such gratitude and lovely feedback about it. I'm just really excited and curious to see where this can go. And that's why, you know, when you invited me onto a podcast and I kind of checked you out, you know, I could just see that you were all about love and you're a lovely person and you're like open and spiritual. And I wanted to speak with you.

Starting point is 01:31:30 Yeah, I feel like it's, it would be ideal to have thought leaders who have a lot of credibility, whether it's in modern science or authority figures, to be completely, unexpergated and sharing their whole truth. And right now we do live in a society that would often shame and try to cancel people that are sharing something that isn't scientifically valid. And it's kind of a bummer that we have this materialist reductionistic view of just like just even being able to have the conversations and explore and talk about these things because some people seem to have very clear experiences and there's repeated studies,

Starting point is 01:32:09 you know, especially with like NDE's where people have. have these experiences and just to be open in the exploration of seeing what might be there. And there's just the pursuit of science can be applied to spirituality because it's really just trying to truthfully understand how things work. I'd love to mention two people in case you haven't heard of them. So Dr. Bruce Grayson, who's written a book called After and Dr. Jim Tucker, who's written a book called before, they are brothers? They're not brothers.

Starting point is 01:32:37 their colleagues at the University of Virginia, they're both psychiatrists. They were both absolutely not into spirituality. But as they were having their younger careers as psychiatrists kept coming across, so for Bruce, he kept coming across examples of near-death experiences. And for Jim, he kept coming across examples of past life memories and children. And at the start of their careers, because they've been in their careers for like 50 plus years now. There were very few documented cases of either of these things. But now there are so many. And it is absolutely true that there are more of them in the sort of Eastern cultures where people

Starting point is 01:33:19 believe in reincarnation. But there are enough now in the United States of America, including in very Christian families who that's not in keeping with their beliefs, that, yeah, it's now, it's now an area of scientific research. It's not an area of spiritual research. Yeah, there's a fascinating documentary on Netflix called Surviving Death that has episodes on near-death experiences, reincarnation, mediums, signs, and all, you know, it's just,

Starting point is 01:33:56 I find it fascinating. And there is more and more science, you know, starting to be able to explain some of these things. Yeah, it's so, so interesting Nicola Tesla has that quote I'm paraphrasing of whenever we put the human intelligence

Starting point is 01:34:12 on discovering more about spirituality and that's where our energy and focus goes to then we'll make more discoveries in 10 years than we have in a thousand you know which is I love them yeah it's it's important you know we've had Dan Siegel on the show as well

Starting point is 01:34:27 have you yeah we talked about his he had like a trauma that affected his default mode network and his perception of identity and self which gave him a more, you know, like a joyful experience of life. And it's just, you know, I think it's important to keep that fascination open. I'm definitely going to listen to that because I interviewed Dan for my online program at MIT Sloan. And I had the opportunity to say to him that when I changed career, so I'd been a doctor in the NHS.

Starting point is 01:34:55 And then I did an executive coaching course and I tried to start up a freelance practice as a coach. And what I realized was that most coaches in the UK anyway fell into either the category of like a retired business person or a former psychologist. And because I was an MD psychiatrist, I didn't fall into either of those categories. I was actually rejected from a group that was like the society for psychologists and executive coaching. They wouldn't let me join. Look at you now. They did later ask me to do a keynote. That's funny how that works.

Starting point is 01:35:34 I know. So I felt very alone at that time. You know, I'd left my former career, all the stability and certainty of that. I was starting out something new. I didn't feel like I was accepted by any group. And I read Mindsight by Daniel Siegel. And I saw that he was an MD psychiatrist. He'd created this amazing model.

Starting point is 01:35:56 And that literally made me. out like there was somewhere that I belonged. And I got to say that to him when I interviewed him a year. You know, I was a professor at MIT by then, um, with a very successful coaching business. So yeah, I got to say that. I mean, he'd already agreed to be interviewed. But when I said that to him, it was a real little bond. It was really nice. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's beautiful. I'm curious what, you know, and I'm perhaps bringing you to the edge of what you might want to even explore or share, but when you relate to think about consciousness, what are the possibilities of you thinking

Starting point is 01:36:31 at being fundamental and existing outside of our own neurology? Is that something you're even willing to entertain? Like, is a possibility? Does this feel weird to bring up? As a neuroscientist, I'm sure, especially with your colleagues who often case, you know, no brain, no consciousness, right? Eastern indigenous wisdom traditions would say otherwise.

Starting point is 01:36:55 Yeah. What say you? Until very recently, I would have said I'd be willing to have that conversation, but I probably, well, I would definitely say that, you know, there was no evidence for it to be true. Until a little bit less recently than that, I would have said absolutely not. About 15 years ago when I changed career, I had a conversation with a psychologist friend. and this is actually known as the hard problem of neuroscience. You know, this is what does, can consciousness exist without physicality? And I said to him, obviously, all thoughts and emotions and everything that makes us human

Starting point is 01:37:36 emerges from neurons and chemicals. And he said, Tara, how could you say that? He's a lot older than me, he's a mentor of mine. And I said, how could you not? And I completely believed that as a neuroscientist that the only way that anything to do with consciousness can occur is that it emerges from these neurons and chemicals and electrical signals. I have to say I have definitely moved, you know, way along from that. So like I said, probably like during the pandemic where I actually said that, you know, we're heading for a mental

Starting point is 01:38:08 health crisis. The only thing that can avoid that is some kind of spiritual revolution. And then since then, because, you know, a lot of people that I know and myself personally experienced a lot of loss during that time. I would, well, I'll tell you, I have experienced it myself. So I have experienced evidence of consciousness existing outside physical body. It's like a neuroscientist AA meeting. I have, I'm coming out the closet. But no, that's beautiful. Because I know so many incredible people in academia that I've had experiences that, like, I'm sure you just are so tightly held of even mentioning that, which I think is wild. But I understand when your identity and careers are wrapped up in it.

Starting point is 01:38:58 But you're also speaking speculatively and saying, this is just my experience and not like, we can prove this and this is the absolute truth. Well, it's my experience. And like I've said, once I've started sharing that with people, I've heard so many stories like it. And I've, you know, I've delved into, like, you know, interviewing the director of the Victor Frankel Institute whose research is on terminal lucidity and looked into the research from University of Virginia and stuff. So it's very exciting, you know, and I think having said this on your podcast, I would love it if your listeners would share any experiences that they've had like

Starting point is 01:39:36 that because I think this is the only way that we can help each other. And let's not be another generation of people that nearly get there and then don't make it, you know, and everybody else has to start again from scratch. So that experience that you had, was it, was it amidst, like, in a yoga practice? Was it, do you want to share anything? Did it have, have you shared anything about that? I mean, so for me, it was never during yoga or meditation. It's experiences that I've had either, like, like, sleep is obviously a bit of a transcendental state. Yeah, no, I've, I've, I've had so many now. It's like once you, it's a bit like manifestation. Once you believe in manifestation, you fit, like I said, you're like, be careful what you wish for. And it's the same with,

Starting point is 01:40:20 you know, whether you want to call it extra sensory perception or signs or communication across planes, it's the same. Once you understand it and recognize it, it's happening all the time. Yeah. I'm very fascinated, obviously. I have conversations like this on my show because I've had plenty of experiences where I have experienced myself outside of my body. I've experienced creating distance from my own thought and emotion. And for individuals that are so closely identified with the body as themselves, I could understand how that would be triggering. But nonetheless, it is what it is. People, take the experience for what it is. But I'm curious also what you think about the pineal gland, because in Eastern traditions, you know, it's thought of the seed of

Starting point is 01:41:05 the soul, potentially an antenna that connects, you know, through higher consciousness. is anything that you want to share on what the pineal gland is does yeah so just like as a segue into that it's probably worth mentioning although it's obvious that you know I come from an Indian culture from a Hindu culture so I was brought up absolutely being told that reincarnation was a fact so you know when you say you mentioned two things specifically being able to create a distance between yourself and your thoughts and your feelings this is a must this is not a spiritual belief if you can't do that, you will be so emotionally dysregulated, it can ruin your life. You know, it can affect your relationships, it can affect your health. So, you know, just to make it like

Starting point is 01:41:50 really accessible, all you have to do is look at the videos on the Headspace app that teach you that, you know, you must not identify with your emotions. You don't have to identify with your emotions. You can have an emotion. It doesn't mean, you know, if you feel angry, it doesn't mean that you're an angry person. It means that you can experience anger temporarily. And equally, you know, if you have a moment of gratitude, it doesn't mean you're a grateful person. It's something you have to cultivate all the time. So that one is, I wouldn't even consider that as an alternative thought. The being able to, you know, the experience of being outside your body, probably because, you know, my parents were first generation immigrants from India to the UK. I was, you know, brought up with yoga.

Starting point is 01:42:38 and Iroveda and reincarnation, I was experiencing that as a child. And then I think I lost that ability, because I probably lost the belief in it, because I started questioning things like that. There are plenty of people that say they do that. That one is a bit more spiritual, but... Sure, a lot of materialists would say, well, you're having the experience of being outside of yourself within yourself, but how do you prove that? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:43:04 And then there are things that are like, you know, way more difficult. to explain than those things. And I have completely forgotten the question. The pineal gland. Okay. Yeah, the pineal gland. So like when I looked at the laws of attraction, I've looked at the chakras of the body and being able to align them with like various glands throughout the body, like kind of in similar places. And so the pineal gland is often calcified. So it can take on calcium from the body and just that kind of gets embedded around it. So when we look at brain scans, It actually appears as white in the area of your third eye. And so that for a long time has led to people saying that it is your third eye,

Starting point is 01:43:47 which is like the seat of your soul. And so, again, you know, we don't know. It's not proven, but it does appear on brain scans in that sort of, you know, area. And whether or not it is the antenna or, you know, it doesn't, really matter. I think, you know, what matters is that we perceive it potentially as a physical representation of the third eye. It's more important to understand potentially what the third eye is and why it might be important in your meditation practice or, you know, in the way that you consider your spiritual health. Yeah, it can probably only go that far with that one right now.

Starting point is 01:44:33 Yeah, well, there's also, I mean, it makes sense. And it, you know, you. we're again touching in areas here where we don't know, but we're just exploring the potential. And also understanding that a lot of people have very interesting experiences with that in conjunction to a spontaneous remission or healing that occurs also. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm just going to be really honest and not say something about an area that I don't know enough about. And that's an area I don't know enough about. And I think I think I've said more than I've ever said before because of you. Yeah, I just don't know enough about that. But you know I'm going to go down a rabbit hole with that now.

Starting point is 01:45:12 Yeah, it's great. Maybe I've been using all your cues with the, you know, we were talking about how warm tea can create bonding and make you feel more comfortable. And then I heard you talked on the diary of CEO looking into the left eye. Not that I've been intentionally doing that. But I can see all these like spiritually Machiavellian kind of, you know, techniques to be able to connect with people. That's interesting.

Starting point is 01:45:35 Well, this whole conversation has been so fascinating for me and gave me a lot to think on with just our connection to nature, the reality of how attraction works, and just a lot of grounded, you know, applicable things, I think, for our audience to take home. Is there anything that you feel is like on your heart or mind that you want to share before we start to wrap up? I think, you know, it always comes down to me. I just really hope that people something resonates from this conversation that makes people realise how much potential they've got in their brain

Starting point is 01:46:11 and that maybe there was something they always wanted to do or talk about or think about that this conversation would have given them the courage to do and that, you know, yes, I'm a scientist and I very much believe in science and I love neuroscience,

Starting point is 01:46:27 but at the end of the day, I think the most important things in life are love and gratitude. And actually that I shouldn't have said but, I should have said and. because the science completely back set up. Incredible. Thank you so much for sharing yourself.

Starting point is 01:46:42 You have a second season of a podcast book. Anything else you want to share, promote will of course provide links for. Yeah, I mean, I'm very much focused on season two of my podcast at the moment. But you're diving deeper into the indigenous wisdom side of things, right? Yeah. So cool. Thanks. That's rad.

Starting point is 01:46:55 Well, I'm excited. I feel like we'll run it back in the future, and I'm excited to just connect with you more. And thank you so much for sharing yourself. Definitely. Thank you. Yeah, of course. So everybody that's been tuning in to this episode and the Nile Self Podcasts, thanks.

Starting point is 01:47:07 And I would love for you guys to listen to Dr. Terra's advice and write in the comments below some experiences that you've had, share and like, you know, activate this community and let us know what particularly resonated with you and then also would love to hear more of your own personal experiences. And until next time, it will.

Know Thyself - E71 - Dr. Tara Swart: Leading Neuroscientist: How Intuition, Your 6th Sense & Manifestation ACTUALLY Work

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