Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Is There a Science of Belief?

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

We're recapping the best moments from Mayim's appearance on Rabbi David Kasher's Best Book Ever podcast! Mayim and Rabbi Kasher discuss how and why the human brain is wired for belief, how we can function in a world gone mad, and how mystical and spiritual structure help us navigate life. You know, light stuff! They also consider the scientific, physiological basis for emotions and spiritual experiences, why there is room for both science and spirituality to exist, what biological functions allegiance to a higher power serves, why love equates to safety, and the science of prayer. Check out the full episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/best-book-ever/id1588788530?i=1000610954397 BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We sometimes speak of love like, oh, sure, you know, we might feel a rise in our blood pressure, but actually the feeling itself is something beyond anything that can be boiled down to chemicals moving around in the brain. And I think you're saying, no, on some level, we can, we could identify and see a physical cause for all of our feelings, thoughts, beliefs, etc. Yeah? You know, there are many things that I can't explain. that I feel deeply, right? There are many experiences that I've had, especially in religious realms,

which feel otherworldly. You know, they absolutely do. They feel otherworldly. And there is a certain amount of logic and of rationality that I do experience, even as a religious person. I don't feel a conflict, you know, between my love of science and my love of God, you know, or religious structure.

But yeah, I think that there are, I think there are things we can't explain. I think that there are things that we cannot measure. I'm completely willing to be open to that, and I think that that wonder is something I'm comfortable with. I think a lot of people of science are not comfortable with that unknowability, and I am comfortable with that. You know, something happens when I can drop into a deep space on Yom Kippur, when you're not eating and you're not drinking and you're sitting and you're, you know, deep in contemplation, something's happening. And yeah, there's a physiological explanation for it,

but that doesn't preclude an ecstatic experience. And for me, both can exist. It's my and Bialics breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. Because you know, she knows a thing or two. So now she's going to break down. So break down. She's going to break it down. Hi, I'm I'm Biolic, and welcome to my breakdown. The place where we break things down so you don't have to.

Welcome to Thursday. We have a very, very fun episode today. This is an episode that is essentially our cut down version of a podcast I did with my rabbi, David Casher. His podcast is called Best Book Ever. The book that he's referring to is the Torah. That's the old text. Testament, but this is not just like, oh, a crazy Torah conversation. This is a conversation about

the brain. What in the brain constitutes belief? Why do we believe the things that we do? Are there some brains that are more likely to believe things than others? How does that impact our life? How does that impact how we approach what we do, who we love? Rabbi David is awesome. He's fun. Spoiler alert, he is the brother of comedian, Mosher. So he's like Mosher. He's very funny. He's smart. He's witty. And he's incredibly wise. And we have a really good time talking about some very heavy stuff that I think gives a really special perspective on how to view belief and how your brain believes things or doesn't and what that means for your life. So please enjoy a few of the very special highlights from my

conversation with Rabbi David Casher from his best book ever podcast. And come back on Tuesday for a brand new episode of Myam Bialach's Breakdown. Break it down. Hello, Mayam. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. It is nice to see you and excited to talk to over. I'm looking forward to digging with you a little bit into it and digging with your help.

I'm often in the position of being the teacher or the guide in Torah conversations, but I want your help today because I want to think a little bit about how the thinking that you've done in science in particular reflects back on this shared tradition that we have. I was thinking of starting with the kind of the Jewish or the ancient Hebrew biblical system as it's laid out. And that is to say that the word that I want to start with is the word lev, which we often translate as heart. but it doesn't really mean heart in the Bible, in the Torah. It means something like consciousness, like mind and heart together. In fact, in the Torah, in the book of Deuteronomy, the Torah speaks of a lev la dat, a heart which knows.

So kind of speaking of both the intellectual and the emotional in one. And I wonder if that tracks with your understanding of how we, think and feel. Do they all come from the same system? It's hard because my instinct is to lean into my Jewish sensibility, which knows that, you know, even just from the Veja hafta itself, you do not just love with your heart. You love with your entire strength and your being and, you know, kind of all of your consciousness, as it were. So, you know, speaking sort of, you know, from a scientific perspective, but also one that that is absolutely informed by text,

you know, brain is not mentioned in the Torah, if I'm correct there. That's right. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And I think one of the important things to remember really in any conversations

about science and the brain or science and faith is that the consciousness that existed thousands of years ago in many ways is similar, right? The structure of the brain does not change that quickly to our understanding. Obviously, there are changes in the brain and happy to talk about intergenerational trauma anytime you want. But we haven't, we haven't evolved that much since the days of

we have not evolved significantly in terms of structure of the brain, you know, neuronal systems, the way the nervous system is organized. However, what has changed is a relationship with the world and with our kind of conscious experience. And one of the things that is true, and we see that, you know, throughout the Torah and throughout, you know, kind of all of our sacred writings, is there was a very different relationship to nature at that time. There was a very different relationship to culture. You know, the fact that people existed without a lot of the conventions that we have today means that there was a different consciousness. And when we look at writings from any number of religious faiths at that time, there's a lot of.

absolutely a different way that we're structuring our understanding of the world. And in that sense, a feeling sense is very wise, meaning what you feel is incredibly in many cases intuitive, or it can dictate belief systems. It can create collective consciousness. One of the neat things about neuroscience or about science in general is, you know, it's not that I don't believe, there are feelings, but there is absolutely a neurochemical explanation for everything that we perceive and everything we feel. So I believe in love, but I also know that love is a very complicated set of neurochemical reactions and interactions and situations that create a flood of neurochemical stew that creates this thing that we say is love, right? And I think any sort of, any person who's

been in therapy, anyone who's, you know, lived enough, had enough heartache or beauty in their lives, knows that the concept of love, it doesn't just drop in. It is experience, it's trust, it's a verb. It's not just a thing, right? It's an action. So for me, as a scientist, there's a science to all feelings. There's a science to all belief. There's an explanation as to why people believe things the way they do and what happens in your brain and in your heart when you are part of a collective like that in particular. But all of that, that is, I guess I should have expected you to say this, but I kind of didn't expect you to put it quite that way. All of that, in the end, you feel like, not you feel like you believe or you think, can be boiled down to chemical processes

and to like, in other words, on some level, even though I think of you as a very, like, religious person, on some level, you are a kind of thoroughgoing materialist. Like, our, that is to say, there's another way of looking at it, which is that there is, and you were, I feel like you were kind of alluding to this, we sometimes speak of love like, oh, sure, you know, we might feel a rise in our blood pressure,

but actually the feeling itself is something beyond anything that can be boiled down. to chemicals moving around in the brain. And I think you're saying, no, on some level, we can, we could identify and see a physical cause for all of our feelings, thoughts, beliefs, et cetera. Yeah? Yeah.

And I think also, you know, it is, there's a romanticism, I think, that we tend to have. And I can be a very romantic person. You know, there are many things that I can't explain that I feel deeply, right? There are many experiences that I've had, especially in religious realms, which feel otherworldly. You know, they absolutely do.

They feel otherworldly. And there is a certain amount of logic and of rationality that I do experience even as a religious person. You know, I don't feel a conflict, you know, between my love. of science and my love of God, you know, or religious structure. But, but, yeah, I think that there are, I think there are things we can't explain. I think that there are things that we cannot measure. I'm, I'm completely willing to be open to that. And I think that that wonder is something I'm comfortable with. I think a lot of people of science are not comfortable with that unknowability.

And I am comfortable with that. But I also know that. that, you know, something happens when I hear a particular nighoon. You know, something happens when I can drop into a deep space on Yom Kippur, when you're not eating and you're not drinking and you're sitting and you're, you know, deep in contemplation, something's happening. And yeah, there's a physiological explanation for it, but that doesn't preclude an ecstatic experience. And for me, both can exist.

I feel like there is something reductive. about talking about our feelings and our thoughts, like as the outcome of chemicals moving around in our brains. Okay, so tell me what makes you, what feels icky about that? I guess, I guess it seems to me to render it arbitrary or meaningless. That is to say that, sure, of course there's a biological basis to my emotional life, but the meaning of my emotional life seems to come from somewhere else.

The phenomenon of love itself is meaningful because the meaning is rooted in something that is beyond just what's happening in my body. And if it could just be explained by what was happening in my body and what I ate that morning and, you know, how many drugs I took or whatever, just something that was purely physical, it would feel to me less meaningful somehow.

Well, I think that's a really, I think that's an important distinction, you know, and it's an important one because I think if you are too much in that rational space, too much in that materialist space, as it were, it can feel loveless. And I think for me, and I can't speak to other people's experience, for me, you know, that I feel intoxicated with the knowledge of what happens in the body and brain because of the meaning that it produces.

Like for me, they're not mutually exclusive. Let's try to integrate these systems and apply some of this. thinking to the feelings and beliefs and thoughts that course through our tradition and are sometimes, and this is what I'm interested in particular, are sometimes even mandated by our system. And the Torah is a record of an attempt to guide feelings and thoughts in just that way. And we see, we have all kinds of commandments. This is like a very, very legalistic religion. and there's lots of stuff to do.

And most of them are real, like, do real actions. You don't pick up your phone on Shabbat or whatever it is. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. So there it is. We're talking about love, and we're being commanded to love, commanded to feel a certain way about God. And so I wonder what that could mean.

in the context that we've been talking about where love is the kind of the product of some kind of biological process within, if that's the case, how can you be asked to summon that? I mean, look, it's a weird idea anyway. How can be told to love anyone? Sure. Let's try to think about it a little bit from a neuroscientist's perspective. What is going on when we love?

And could we summon that? Can we control that? Do we have any agency over that? MyNBialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water.

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Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention My Ambiotics Breakdown to help support the show. It's a really fun way to think about it. You know, several things come to mind. the first is na sevinishma. You know, the first is that there is a very Jewish notion

of doing something first and being able to deeply integrate it later. And that scientifically makes a tremendous amount of sense. And so when you think about being commanded kind of to do anything, what we know about the human brain and about how we are wired is that we do well with practice.

We do well with repetition, meaning the brain is geared towards actions that we derive meaning from. Meaning comes from doing them in repetition. So what's also fascinating is, you know, in science, we tend to seek, at least I tend to seek as a scientist, ways that humans are not special. Because in many cases, we're not. You know, in most cases we behave like primates. You know, what are signs of comfort that animals give when they feel safe? You know, that's a form of love. However, apply it to humans and you'll hear it as well, right?

How do I behave when I feel safe? I seek closeness, right? I feel safe eating around someone. I feel safe in the dark with someone. When we think about this notion of, you know, why would a people decide to put in writing, you have to love? and you have to love this way. And chances are this is an indication

as to what kind of community we're looking to form. There is an allegiance and a loyalty that we are to look to in this God figure that typically we reserve for our parents. Without that, why are we here? What are we doing? And this is something that is special for humans to get to contemplate.

Well, yeah, that you feel allegiance to, And I think part of what you're saying is, and you feel allegiance to it and you, and you, you experience it as caring for you because that's, that makes you feel safe. And you are like the cat, you are experiencing a sense, a sense of safety. And you and you, your life force like all, you know, living beings is seeking safety. And so this commandment is trying to harness that, that desire to feel safe and put it in the language of love. If God didn't exist, we would just create God because this is this is what we do. You know, we create these kind of circles of identity as humans. It's, it's, it's to make sense

of what we're doing here. But you know, it's like, we don't usually think of the commandment that way. Like we think of the commandment as, I mean, you do, I guess. But I think we tend to think of that is something we're doing because God deserves our love. And it's because of, you know, and we want to show God something. We want to testify to our relationship with God. We want to honor God. We actually, like, that there's no other, there's no, there's no other agenda that we have, that the idea is that God is just, is just lovable and worthy of our love. And so it's, it's quite a reframe to imagine that that that commitment serves a function for us. Like, we're better off if we're a loving people that has a collective sense of that which

we love, which provides for our safety and well-being. Well, and in any healthy relationship, right, it benefits both. All of my relationships with humans are based on my relationship with God, right? Everything that I seek to, you know, be as a person, right? It's what we, it is the qualities that we seek to be as humans. We attribute them to God, right? So that we can then echo them. That's very beautifully put, but it sounds like you're also saying something in the kind of reverse direction,

which is that all of our, all of our understandings of God and the way we relate to God, all of that is also drawn from our, our experience. of each other and of ourselves as as human beings and the way we relate to each other. And we extract and we sort of project. You might even say project our own feelings and needs onto this higher being. We imagine this higher being that is the overarching structure for it all. But there's a way in which our very notions of God are really based on our most basic fundamental human needs. I think that's what you're suggesting. Our relationship with God,

God's creation of us, is then a projection of all the interactions that we then have. So what happens is as part of the human system, because we're humans, because we're going to start making meaning from things, we're going to start structures, we're going to start commandments, we're going to start saying, here's the way to do it. When it comes to beliefs, ideas that we are being, given and asked to commit ourselves to, because the Shema has that commandment to love, but just before that is the great declaration, the Lord is one, God is one, and our tradition learns from that, also a commandment, a commandment to believe that there is one God. That's like one of our famous, our famous principles, monotheism, there is one God, which is to say,

and there's lots of different formulations for that, but some, some, um, assertion that there is one great force in the world. Now, that seems to me to be, first of all, it's, again, a funny thing to command. How can you be commanded to believe in, to believe that something is true, either believe it or you don't. I wonder if there's a material, a neurological explanation for those sorts of commandments as well, commandments to believe. The reason that beliefs are placed this way upon humans is, as I said, we want to make sense of things. We want to make meaning of things. And we, you know, one of the most interesting fields of study, I think, is the science of belief. And where is God in the brain? You know, there are all these really, really fascinating

studies that are done often when people are in dire situations, in hospitals, or about to undergo surgery. And what we know is that the prefrontal cortex, you know, that really, really front part, That part of the brain in particular seeks to understand sort of where we go, how we relate, and how we specifically relate to deep mystical and spiritual concepts. So when we have a tradition that is really exactly like you said, taking something outside of yourself and asking you to essentially place belief in it, with no personal resonance necessarily, what we're also doing is we're trying to train ourselves.

You know, we're training people to pass on a way of thinking. And while that might not be something that we can say, that's going to change over one generation, we know that epigenetics exists. We know that belief systems rub off on people around us. We know that when people believe they're being prayed for, they tend to recover nicely. Not because, quote, prayer works, but because what it means to say prayer works is to say you have a consciousness that how other people feel, how other people think and what other people believe about you matters, right?

So to me, that's what the first commandment is, like literally the first commandment. To believe in God. Right. To believe that there is something that is larger. And I've met many happy atheists. I have. I've met many good atheists. What I will say is that for the most part of human history,

in addition to all the wars that we bring in the name of religion, pathways to a lifestyle surrounded by Gimmilut Khasadim and Mitzvote and an act of organized structure around interpersonal goodness do tend to come from belief structures that make you say there's something bigger than you that you don't even understand. But I promise we're in this together. But is there something bigger than us? I mean, I think that's one of the questions I'm asking here because I'm both fascinated by what you're saying and also a little threatened by it in the sense that like I feel defensive in the sense that I feel instinctively a little anxious about that because I think I want, like, on some level, that feels to me like, oh, there's no real,

there's not really a God. That's like a cool idea that we have to help us feel good about, about, oh, if you believed in one God, then you would feel at home in the world and then you would feel safe in you. Like, it's an evolutionary impulse and we can, we can diagnose it and we can get it. And it's very nice and it might be a good feeling, but it's not, I don't know if I want to use the word true, but when I feel the presence of God, I feel like I am encountering something and not just, but I don't know if I should say just. Maybe it's, maybe it's a powerful thing that I am suddenly feeling overwhelmed by a sense of safety and comfort and like maybe it's all, it's all, like it can all be explained that

way, but there's something about it that feels to me, as I said before, a little reductive. Like I want there to be an actual thing out there. Okay, so here we go. So this is my favorite part of this conversation because what you're actually looking for is a completely rational scientific explanation for something that lives beyond the bounds of rationality. And this is where I think modernity, and by modernity, I mean at least from my monities on, right? this is where we see the true conflict. This is like where we put the pedal to the metal of what is belief.

Because it's like it's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of your religious faith. Once you try and name it, once you try and observe it, once you try and quantify it, it disappears. Because this is the, your brain was wired. your chemistry is such that you can hold that kind of ecstatic, supernatural beauty. And who did, I guess who did the wiring is one of the questions that I'm asking. We're getting right to the heart of it, to the question of whether there is indeed a conflict between the scientific and the religious and between the scientific account of the world and the religious account of the world.

And you are doing a wonderful job of giving us a kind of scientific account of our religious lives. And I am reacting to that because I hear in that a sense that actually science is the explanation for religion. and that actually everything has a scientific explanation. And I think I want to say, as you're naming very well,

that there are things which are unquantifiable. There are things that are beyond the scientific. We actually, we are people who have always affirmed science and medicine and empiricism and being able to figure things out about the world, a tradition that starts by celebrating the wonder of the natural world. And so, you know, rabbis have grappled with this question throughout our history, and there are various approaches. And some of them are to say, the gersonities, the al-Bagh is famous for this approach, to say that actually, I think he's in the camp that I'm hearing from you, which is that ultimately everything has an explanation, and there's no real difference between the spiritual and the material.

It's all one system. and if you understood the material account of our, of spiritual phenomenon, then they would be as scientific as everything else. And then there are other approaches, I think of the Maharal as one of my favorite Jewish philosophers, who suggest, no, these are entirely separate realms. There's the spiritual realm, and then there's the material realm, and science is here to give an account of the material physical world, but there's another reality, it's sort of like a platonic approach.

There's a spiritual reality, and that's what we're talking about. And yeah, I wonder if you, like, do you see them as separate or it sounds to me like much more integrated? I don't know. It's like believing in God feels like it doesn't even scratch the surface, you know? Moses comes upon a burst. It's all in flames. It starts talking to him. What's going on in his brain there?

What's happening? It's all burning. It's not consumed. And a voice comes to him. Right? And I'm starting to cry because I'm a human being who's having an experience of this story, both because it has historical significance in my life, meaning I was taught it. And I'm literally walking you through what I understand is happening, right, in my brain. I have the images that I conjured as a child of like, what? How could something burn, but it's not consumed? And you have a person

who is having an experience of some sort that may also be a mystical or supernatural experience. He could have been fasting. There could have been meditation surrounding it. Many people say, like, oh, they were smoking weed. Like, I don't know. To me, it's not really important. He's having an experience, right? What the basis of my religious identity and belief is,

is that I'm learning that there are perceptions of things that have a definition that I don't always understand. And sure, maybe it was a kind of tree that is not very flammable, right? Like, to what level do I need to know what tree that is? For me, personally, that's not what's important. What's important is that the experience he had was that this thing is on fire and it's not being consumed, which brings up abundance. It brings up awe.

It brings up terror. it brings up all of this, this captivation with an experience, right? And to hear a voice. And to me, it's not important if it was an acoustic airwave. It's really not. I know exactly what sound is like. I know that God doesn't have lips and I'm okay with that, right? To me, as a religious person and as a person of science, that's all I need to know. And the most important thing is what happens, when he leaves that place and brings it back to the people. And where it takes him is to a place of liberation. I'm totally comfortable.

I got no conflict. So it's not as important to me that there was an actual bush and what Moses thought he saw, he thought he saw. And I'm with you on all of the transformative meaning that came out of it. I think the thing that I'm still yearning for, or searching for and maybe hoping for even, is a sense that Moses understood something true, not just about the way we ought to live,

but that Moses actually accessed something, that there's something out there, in other words, that there is another, like a being is already a word that feels too specific, but some other entity that Moses makes contact with. And it isn't just his own sense of well-being or will be good for his people or just like the stimulation of his nerves,

but that he got something. And it's important for me to read this story because I'm trying to get something true about existence itself. And that's also what Sinai represents to me is like a whole people coming into awareness and contact with something up there, out there that is not us. And I think this is the struggle for especially modern people of faith. I think that there's something that is so divine about this level of inquiry that you have,

meaning the holiest work that we do, right? Intellect is the glory of God, right? My mononides. the holiest work that we get to do is to find a way to come to terms with this element of, in many cases, ambiguity and uncertainty. And for many people, that is what tips the scale towards, I'm out of here, right? For many people, that is. And the question then, it does. It becomes a more practical one.

What do I gain me? What do I gain when I'm willing to take that leap and say, I don't know that I can know. And I know what feels true to me. And I know what feels deep to me, even when I know like, oh, it's the chemicals. It's the this, that music. It's hitting that place. It's my auditory cortex. It's connecting to the prefrontal.

You know, there's still, to me, the fact that we can have a conval. conversation like we're having now. We're both in our bodies. We're in two different places, speaking through computers and space. That level of existence to me is the ecstatic acknowledgement that I didn't create it and I couldn't. That for me is that that's the overarching principle to why I wake up every morning and why I go to sleep every night. We pray together. We practice together. We share a we share a tradition. and in many ways you're speaking my language, I think I'm not so much pushing back against science.

I think I'm pushing back against, like Freud. He mentioned Freud earlier, against this idea that I can't trust my own perceptions. That's what I'm worried about. Like that in my burning bush moments, where I feel suddenly I'm aware of a great oneness and a great harmony. And I feel like, oh, my gosh, I can sense a presence.

Like, there is something there, you know. And I might say there is, like, there are also things happening in my body, and there's a material account of this. And I might also say, but there's something I'm becoming aware of that I can't put into the language of numbers and science. but it's but I but I want to trust myself I want to feel like but there I am actually intuitively or or extra censorily or mystically I am actually knowing something and this feeling that I have of a presence I can trust that and not just as I said like take the kind of Freudian

approach of like oh you think so and it's safer for you to think so and isn't that cute that you think so but actually this is all just because you are scrambling to like survive, feel safe, eat, and reproduce in the world. And this is the grand superstructure that you've created to, you know, to accommodate your complicated brain when you try to do those things. I want to feel like, no, there's a form of knowledge that is, that I can trust, that is spiritual knowledge. There's two solutions to this line of thinking.

There are certain ways of believing that eliminate the sense of ambiguity that our tradition glorifies, meaning especially the tension, you know, that Soloveitchik spoke of, the tension and the dialectic, you know, the sort of approach of, you know, this last hundred years or so, you know, sort of embracing that tension

in a more conscious way. So there are forms of our religion and there are other kinds of, religion and practice that essentially don't allow for that ambiguity. And what that means is it's much easier to believe when you are told that you have something that other people do not have access to. In many cases, that is this worldly. In many cases, it's otherworldly. But part of this struggle, which I believe is the glory of God, this intellectual, you know, debate, we are wired for this. We're wired to be challenged. We're wired to be challenged. We're

wired this way. Once you leave open, the possibility to wonder, there is more doubt. This tradition that our people have been developing for thousands of years is even sort of defined by its commitment to ambiguity to a certain extent. And I would, in other words, the debate, the struggle, the questioning, the things that Jews are famous for, but also at the heart of a sense that there is something unknowable that the great force is beyond all comprehension. And so if that's true, you can believe in it all you want, but you have to live with a certain amount of like, well, we don't, we don't know that everything is, is complicated. And there are, there are seeming contradictions that we cannot resolve.

And then the question is, what do you do in the name of that? Do you kill in the name of it? Do you love in the name of it? How do you worship in the name of that? Who do you exclude? Who do you include? to me, that sort of becomes then a lot of that. The second part is the scientific response, which is we do know what happens when people have

certain transcendental experiences. And there are many legitimate studies that involve the use of psychedelics. But what we know from indigenous cultures, you know, a more recent in the last, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 years that it's been kind of part of more of the scientific. mainstream conversation. You know, psychotherapy-assisted psilocybin. People are, you know, also using ketamine for these kinds. You know, there are therapeutic uses of drugs that we actually have a fair amount of information

about. We do know that when people, for example, experience, even on LSD, when they experience synesthesia, which is described in theory, when we stood at the base of Mount Sinai, right? We saw the sounds. We saw the sounds. Three experiences. That is called synesthesia. And some people do experience anesthesia not related to drugs or chemicals.

There are ways that the sensory systems can cross. That can be facilitated chemically. And there's also another experience people describe often on mushrooms of like, everything seems so clear. It just seems so clear. And what that is is, is there are actually. actually, you know, there are processes in the brain that we know that when muted, because of a chemical experience, create what feels like clarity because there's less interference. There's literally less noise. If you've ever spoken to someone with severe ADHD who is given a medication that allows them to focus, what they will describe is it's as if I could focus on what I wanted to and not what I didn't. So that's a chemical process.

It's not mystical. It's not spiritual. So what we know from people who have these kinds of transcendental experiences, and we've mapped brains while people do this, there's legitimate science from every well-known medical university you've heard of that has really been able to pinpoint what in the brain is emphasized, what is overemphasized, what is strengthened when you have the ability to say, I've experienced something outside of this realm. So I'm going to go ahead and grant you, Rabbi Casher, that there may be a genetic predisposition among certain people. If you take a community that had bottlenecking that led

to inbreeding, if you're going to shrink down a genetic population's ability to experience things, which happens in, for example, the Eastern European Ashkenazi community in particular, you may literally be looking at a propensity for belief, a propensity not just to create God, but to have access to the things that we call God. And that's the feeling that you're talking about. That's it. And it feels different. Some people experience it during sex with the person that they believe God intended them to have sex with. When I gave birth in my home, you know, unassisted till pushing, right, on my living room floor, that was an otherworldly ecstatic experience that felt like it defied all logic and reason because it was the power of my brain and my body combining for something

that felt like, thank God, right? I wanted to be in touch. I felt like I was drawing energy from something that I could not define, right? To me, like, like that's all the divinity that I need. And I am grateful I have that brain that wants that and that craves it because it's taken me my whole adult life to then pursue it and live in it in a way that doesn't feel problematic. You know, to raise children in a tradition where I say a lot of this is cultural, a lot of this is historical. And also, look what you can experience. That's divine. I experience it in my darkest moments as well. I'd like to add that. I do not only have a relationship with a God that gives me gumballs and gives me the right color when I put my coin in. You know,

the depths of despair is also a place where that consciousness exists. So this is not about how to be a happy religious person, you know, meaning this understanding of belief. It means that there's something that can be tapped into even in despair. We people of faith are sometimes worried that science takes on the same kind of fundamentalist orientation and says that, you know, all of all of life and all of them, even the meaning of your life and all of the experiences you've ever had, they may seem to you beyond all logic and reason, but they're not. And we can account for everything and the material world is everything. and the rational mind will eventually understand everything. There's a kind of, this system is the only system, just in the same way that fundamentalists,

religious people say this system is the only system. I, you know, to circle back to the phrase that we started with, the heart that knows. And I said, Lev is kind of mind and heart and consciousness. But in this sense, I'd like to keep the translation as heart. and to distinguish between intellectual, rational, cognitive knowledge and some other kind of knowledge, some kind of heart knowledge, some kind of intuitive knowledge, some kind of mystical knowledge that is just saying something fairly simple, which is that no one system can account for all of truth.

And that there is, there are truths, you know, there's more in heaven and earth, and dreamt of in your philosophy, Prospero, or in your science, or in your religion, or in any one system, the whole idea of an infinite God is that there is so much more than any of us will ever be able, any of us, you know, limited beings will ever be able to comprehend. And if nothing else, that's what I want to hold on to as a person of faith, is the idea of the idea of uncertainty, the idea of standing kind of humbly before the infinite. And so yes, just science and knowledge of the brain and the account of that that provides the better understanding

of the evolution of our people, but also yes and, like there has to be, I still feel like there has to be more. There has to be love can be boiled down to certain processes within the body. And yet it seems like something more is going. It's like a, and I want, as I said, I want to believe it isn't just my, I'd like to feel that way or my, my evolutionary history has me feeling that way, but that I actually, like, there is something that I'm tapping into that I can trust. I agree with you. And my response to that is, for me as a scientist, I feel so enthralled with every rational explanation for everything.

that for me, that feels sacred. That feels divine to me. So even the understanding of the chemistry of attraction, attachment, for me, knowing that there is a structure around it, that we are literally communicating with words, that we exist on the planet, like that's always where it takes me. And that's why when people say like, oh, the human eye is so complicated, it had to be designed by God.

No, that's not even how it works. The human eye exists because of all of the processes that exist on this planet that we then get to try and understand. And that is divine. Yeah. Amen to that. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Myambiolics Breakdown. If you like what you hear, please rate and review it. Also, check out Rabbi Cashers Podcast, Best Book Ever, and Five Book Ever.

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