Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - MBB LIVE FROM SXSW 2024: The Science of Spirituality & Well-Being

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

What does it mean to seek out a life of meaning, a sense of wonder and connection, to something greater than ourselves in a way that increases our overall WELLNESS?    Does the body need a transcendental connection in order to be whole?   Mayim & Jonathan are LIVE from SXSW 2024 to break down the intersection of SCIENCE & SPIRITUALITY!!!   We're unpacking all things mind, body, & spirit, including: - Physiological impacts of our minds being shaped by past experiences, perceptions, and thoughts - How mind-body stress can impact the autonomic nervous system and lead to psychosomatic illness & chronic pain - Positive physical & emotional effects of connecting with something greater than ourselves through altered states of consciousness (either with the use of psychedelic drugs or holistic mindfulness practices)   Mayim and Jonathan reflect on scientific evidence of mind-body connection, intergenerational trauma, the body’s system of interconnectedness, auras & energy, and other concepts that were previously dismissed as pseudoscience.   They explain: - Science behind power of prayer & meditation and their ties to gratitude & resilience - Why transcendental experiences could hold the potential to cure society's deepest suffering - What is actually happening to the brain when we are in an altered state? - How we can access these states without the use of drugs - Correlation between near death experiences & DMT - Interstitiums, microbiomes, fascia work, memory retrieval, the Akashic records & collective consciousness   Mayim and Jonathan also discuss the Default Mode Network, from its regulation with drugs like psilocybin and why it can cause some to struggle with maintaining feelings of connection when they return from an altered state, to its role in planning, decision-making, goal-directed behaviors, connecting the brain and spirit, and processing memory and emotion.   PLUS, they explore where they think the intersection of science and spirituality is headed next!   BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm going to break it down for you Because you know she knows a thing or two So now she's going to break down Hi, I'm I'm Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place where we break things down So that you don't have to.

Welcome, everybody. Today we are breaking things down a little differently than normal. Okay, let's set up. Let's set up. We're definitely breaking things down differently because this is our first in front of people podcast. So I brought a couple things that are normally on my desk

when we podcast together, not here. So they're set up, they seem fine, and here's my water. Okay. I mean, when we podcast, I generally think that we are having private conversations and no one ever listens to them because it's such a surreal. I think we're meeting our entire audience today.

Thank you for being here. Yeah, we've never, never done anything like this. No, never. It's always just the two of us and Valerie. Shout out to Valerie. Valerie. Okay. All right. My morning you start, we thought a lot about like where do we start this conversation

and I think, you know, we're going to get very quickly to our main topic, but just before that it's, my morning you start by telling people like, why do we call it the breakdown? Miami-Belix breakdown. And also we both work with computers when we do the podcast and part of us was like, should we remember And they're like, no, we should do it like we do it. So we're both using computers like we do.

We call our podcast the breakdown because the idea started actually just before COVID hit. But once we started our COVID, once we started going and it was during COVID, it felt like every day was an opportunity to have some sort of breakdown. Like it literally felt like I wanted to be able to say, welcome to my breakdown because it was really scary. and it felt like everything was breaking down. Also, three years ago, you know, we were in a very different place than we are right now in terms of the conversation about mental health and what contributes to our mental health.

And there were a lot of explaining to do. And so we started to approach it like that. Yeah, and like I'm trained, obviously, as a science communicator. So I love breaking things down. I love to talk, possibly too much. It's very helpful for this medium. But this felt like the place, that felt like the place that we could sort of put

all of that. And so our first batch of episodes, actually, they started with a lot of scripted, you know, 20-minute introductions about the explanations of things like anxiety and depression and the difference between panic attacks and anxiety attacks. They're not the same thing. Mine likes to point that out. And then, you know, the conversations actually started shifting a little bit. They became very deep and personal conversations with the guest, and we started noticing that guests would say something the same throughout every episode, which people would preface little things that they would share with us, which I've never really shared that before, and they would have these little contemplative moments, and it started to hit us that whatever was

happening, they were going really deep and being very vulnerable with us. Jonathan thinks it's because I always secretly wanted to be a therapist, that that's just how I talk to people. But also, Jonathan is a writer. Jonathan's a storyteller, and I always say he has, like, a touch of magic in him. So, you know, he sort of facilitated drawing things out of people and having people tell their stories. You also, I mean, shout out to Booth, what is it, 429? 429. And literally co-founded a company about the power of storytelling.

So we had this combination of like a science communicator and a storyteller who I think is very magic. And I started asking people how they became who they were. That's kind of how I would frame a lot of those early episodes. You know, I would ask people, do you have mental health challenges? And at the time, three years ago, it was still like not something that people were super comfortable being asked about. But people started talking. I would ask people if they had addiction histories. How did that start?

like what was their childhood like, what were their parents like? If life was hard for them, how did it become not hard? And people wanted to talk. And what we found was really interesting, and which sort of led to sort of how we got here today, is that so many of our guests reflected that, like, no matter what level of success that they had reached, some part of them, even when they were super successful,

still clung to mistakes or misperceptions or hurts that they had from childhood. And actually, it was often when they became the most successful in their careers. You know, a lot of us think that success is the antidote to these things, but it was actually when they became most successful that these issues would surface or rear their heads. And we heard from, you know, not to name drop, but like Ben Stiller and Dustin Hoffman and Kelly Clarkson and Glennon Doyle and Sarah Silverman, and you've all seen the guest list so you know who we're talking about. Peter Ritia from Austin. Austin local and Texas local.

Matthew McConaughey, who Maim had one of the best questions. She's like, do you know why you're here? Do you know who we are? Like, why are we here? At the top of the podcast? The answer was now. He's like, no, I really, you were just on my publicity tour. But what we found, also, I just realized I should wear

appropriate glasses to see. Yeah, do it. And so I'm sorry. I once wore shoes on the wrong feet for an hour on an episode of Jeopardy, because I literally was that not in touch with what was going on on my feet separate from my brain. And I didn't even realize that I can wear glasses that can help me see. Anyway, no matter how famous, you know, a lot of these guests were, no matter how rich or successful they were, what did we figure out? Basically, no one escapes the human experience.

We've absolutely been shaped by our pasts and everyone, no matter who they are, is going through something. And so this breakdown, you know, has become like a space where people feel safe to share deeply about themselves. But then something else happened. Well, we quickly realized that it wasn't just about mental health. Mental health actually was almost a limiting term. And so mine would be like, we're doing a mental health podcast. And I'd be like, no, we're not. And then we spent a lot of time saying, like, what are we actually doing? And I don't know that we have the perfect summary, but it is about the experiences that we've all had that make us who we are and the ways that we're all trying to work on ourselves because we're all trying to figure ourselves out, increase our self-understanding,

and trying to improve in some way. Okay, but, and this is how we get here, or I should say and, And we continued to see that there were three components of human existence that kept, like, surfacing and interacting and looping back, and everybody in some way talked about these three components and the interaction of them. And we felt like this deserves a lot more attention. And the three components have kind of become more of the focus of our podcast, if you've listened or watched, over the progression of our... How many episodes? We just released 200. Okay, so 200 episodes. We're going to break those down for you today, and we're going to talk about that interstate.

section. So the three things are... The mind, the body, and the spirit. So let's start with the mind. Okay? The mind is our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, and everything we dream about, we think about, and when no one's looking, we're thinking the mind is constantly processing that in general is the mind. That's the mind. But the thing about the mind, and we all know this, it carries memory, right? It carries everything that we've experienced. And I say like, in the old days, you know, people, there were those people who were like, I'm fine, my parents do the best they could, everything's fine, it was fine, it was fine, it was fine, it was fine. But what we now know is that there's a lot of complexity to that, and we get to unpack that,

right? So there's this list, you know, there's this magic list of things that can impact you, right? If you grow up with these things, so I'm going to go through this list, and here's, we don't have to do show of hands, but, you know, there's a lot here that I think a lot of us can relate to. If you grow up in a house where there is, alcohol or drug use that in some way feels a little odd or out of control or is clearly out of control. If you grew up and you were hit, if you were talked down to, if you experienced harsh, aggressive discipline, if you had an emotionally unstable or mentally ill parent, and having a parent that experiences anxiety or depression counts, that is something that a parent can struggle with that impacts a child, having rigid or militant parents,

having parents who seem checked out, we now call it unavailable, right? having a parent who was consumed or obsessed with religious or moral strictures, having a chronically ill parent, just having a parent who's constantly struggling or in and out of treatment, things like that, those are all things. And I think that applies to a lot of us, even if your home also had a lot of love, we can come from complicated upbringings in one way or another. And what it often looks like as we mature and we found this with every kind of guess that we've had on, doctor, like, no matter what, whether there's a celebrity or an MD or a PhD,

it often looks like trying to fill in what a lot of people call the God-shaped hole, right? And we can fill it, I mean, name it, you can fill it with alcohol, you can fill with shopping, you can fill it with unavailable people, because codependency is also a way that we fill that God-shaped hole, you can fill it with gambling, we fill it with all sorts of things. Now that everyone feels horrible about themselves, we're going to turn it around, I promise. We're all in it together. So all of our experiences have shaped our minds. They've also shaped our perceptions and our thoughts and our biases and the way that we're interpreting ourselves in the world around us.

And, you know, I think what really hit us as we began to really understand the impact of this is that the way that our perceptions are shaped have real physiological impacts. Well, especially if your perceptions are negative. If you have a lot of self-doubt, if you have low self-esteem. Like, that's a specific chemical stew that you're essentially stewing in. So we just got from the mind to the body, right? That's what we're talking about. This interaction with, like, perceptions, especially of a negative variety, those are impacting our bodies.

So let's get to the body next. Exactly. That's why we keep her around. She explains things really well. So now we're talking about the body, right? So that's number two. The body, the physiology, digestion, heart rate, our skin impacted by what we eat, if we sleep, if we don't sleep.

I mostly don't sleep. How often we exercise, what types of exercise we do. Right. Also, like, so much talk about, I mean, lately in the news and the press everywhere, about gut issues, right? Inflammations. I mean, I'm hearing it a lot. Maybe it's just what I'm reading.

But these kinds of things fall under a category of what used to be called psychosomatic illness. It's all in your head. See a lot of head nods. Happens to a lot of people. And disproportionately it does happen to women. Like, oh, you're fine. just tired, you're just hormonal, whatever it is. Chronic pain is an example. Used to be something

that they're like, we can't find it. It must be in your head, right? It's in your head. Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, even irritable bowel syndrome, even Crohn's disease. I have friends with Crohn's who, when they were younger, were told like, it's all in your head. You just need to relax, right? Why is that voice? That's the mean doctor voice. Even things like multiple sclerosis, which we now know so much about in the early days. It was like, those symptoms, we can't explain it. It's all in your head, right? These are real diagnoses, and they come as a result of the mind and the body being stressed out, right? It's not in your head. You're not making it up. That's what we're talking about

when we talk about a mind-body connection. Let's also talk about the autonomic nervous system. Okay, I'm going to give a little, like a primer. I'm really trying to keep it like, So there's a central nervous system and there's a peripheral nervous system, right? Central nervous system, when people are like, why did you get a Ph.D. in neuroscience? I said, because I love the nervous system. So the central nervous system is the brain and the spinal cord, okay? Everybody can visualize that, the brain and the spinal cord. But then there's something called the peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nervous system is everything basically that reaches the periphery. So there's

nerves that emanate out from the spinal cord, and they reach out to distal parts of your body, to organs, and also to the environment, right? And those nerves are responsible then for getting information about what's happening in the body and in the world, taking that information, bringing it back to the spinal cord, it gets sent back up to the brain, and that's when you say, ouch, right? So that's sort of the system. But the autonomic nervous system is part of that peripheral nervous system, okay? And it has three divisions. It has the sympathetic nervous system, which most of us were taught was, fight and flight, Turns out freeze is also part of that in extremely compromised situations.

We're not going to get into the details, but sympathetic nervous system, fight, flight, or freeze. Parasympathetic nervous system, that's your rest or digest, right? We all hear about that. That's the vagus nerve. It's super hot today to talk about the vagus nerve. Vegas nerve is getting your parasympathetic nervous system to come online. There's also an interic part. Interic is all of your gastrointestinal issues.

The largest part of the peripheral nervous system is actually gastrointestinal. So anyone who has any tummy issues, You have a right to have issues. It's the largest part of the peripheral nervous system. But the autonomic nervous system, the reason that we're going to be talking about it today, is it regulates things that we call involuntary, right? Heart rate. Blood pressure, breathing, digestion, sexual arousal.

The thing about this is that we used to think that the autonomic nervous system was just off doing its own thing and nothing would influence it. But we now know, and people who have done any breathwork, meditated, or anyone who understands kind of how Eastern traditions have practiced this for thousands of years knows that you can impact this stuff. Your mind can impact these physiological processes, specifically breathing and heart rate. It's amazing. Like, it's amazing that we can regulate these involuntary things.

So in that way, the mind-body connection is not so much the mind and the body as what Gabor Mote and others are calling the mind-body. It's actually one system. In our document, it's one word, mind-body. My MBialx 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. There's no real data.

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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 ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. Right. So now we went from mind to body and body to mind technically because they go back and forth. Let's talk about Spirit. Let's talk about Spirit. So Spirit, we can explain this any number of ways.

and I'm sure all of you could have your own ways to explain it. Eckhart Tolley describes the spirit as the part of you that knows you're you. Okay? It's the part of you that can observe what you're observing. And I recently actually started kind of diving into understanding the way Eckhart Tolle frames this. Michael Singer calls this the observational self. If you've listened to any philosophy, any, again, non-religious things that talk about what the observational self is, what the higher self is.

That's what we're kind of talking, it's what we're trying to get to, to have a communal understanding of spirit. And a huge component of a spiritual existence is being in touch with this. And it's not in a religious way, right? It's about feeling connected to something that lets you understand what meaning is and what purpose is. It's a connection to something greater than ourselves. Some call it a force greater than themselves. We'll use that kind of interchangeably today. Like, I don't really care what you call.

You could call it nature. You could call it God. You can call it a force, a power. We're going to use those kind of, yeah. The most important thing is that having that connection to something greater than ourselves actually has a positive physical and emotional impact. Like getting in touch with whatever this is, whatever you want to call it, it's healthy. It's literally physiologically healthy.

And spirituality actually plays a vital role in mental and physical well-being. I'm going to give an example. I actually thought of cutting this. I don't know. Imposter syndrome. drives a lot of negative behaviors. Many guests that we've had, especially super famous people, talk about imposter syndrome, even at the height of their success.

And for many, it drives a lot of their addictive behaviors. Like, who's that addict, right? There's an addict in your brain, right? We can observe that addict in our brain. What that is is literally who am I? Do I belong here? Do I deserve to be here? And that could be dismissed as like, oh, those are just thoughts, right?

Oh, it's just your mind talking. but the sheer notion of this concept is actually it's an existential crisis, but it's also a spiritual one. It's a spiritual question, and there are many other spiritual crises. Before we even started this podcast and before we even started kind of seeing this more and more with our guests, we had a hunch that, like Jonathan and I specifically, and maybe you as well, had a hunch that things that we've been taught to see as unchangeable, immovable, like even in our bodies, the autonomic nervous system, right? it's strongly modified by our state of mind. And what we're seeing is we're seeing that over and over again, even with spirituality.

That is just having a connection to something greater than ourselves. Right. That connection, having that connection has a benefit on our physiological well-being in ways that science is still trying to fully explain. And we're kind of going to get into that today. We're going to talk about the intersection. Are you okay? Yeah. It feels like you need to say something because your hand is going.

I am. I'm getting excited. We're getting into the meat here, which is the intersection between science and spirituality. Correct. And I'm going to be super explicit. We are not talking about religion. We could have called our talk, why God matters. That's not what we're here to do, and we're actually not even trying to sneak that in. We're not being sneaky. Sam Harris would have our heads on a platter if we tried to make it that simple. It's not about, it's not that simple. I wish it was that simple. And for many very religious people, it is that simple. You just have to believe. You just have to have faith. But we're talking. about a collective understanding, you could be an atheist and understand what the spirit is. You could be a religiously conscientious person. You could be a person who is deeply connected, like I consider myself to be, with religious tradition and even with ritual. You could be a nature lover. Like it really, it is, I literally wrote, whatever. Feeling a sense of connection,

something greater than yourselves is real. It's valuable and it has tangible and scientifically provable impact on how your mind-body functions. And we know that a lot of people are skeptical. I mean, I'm still skeptical about there being an exact science to a spiritual experience or to the value of a spiritual experience. So what we thought we'd do today as a little starter was to go over some examples from the past, the not-so-distant past, that many people felt were outside of the realm of scientific explanation, and we now know they're not. And I hope that this will propel us towards being open to hearing what science is saying about some of the spiritual questions and the notions of spirit that we're going to tackle today. It also occurred to me that, you know, you...

Are you going off script right now? A tiny bit. A tiny bit. She hates that. But it occurred to me that, you know, it really depends on who you're talking to in terms of the entry point of these conversations. We have some people who listen to us who are like, unless it's a double-blind study, I don't want to know about it. And then you have other...

This lady's like, that's me. That's why I'm sitting in the second round. And then you have other people on the other side who are like, I truly intuitively know. things to be true and I'm waiting for either a double-blind study or someone evidence to show me that. And so what we're doing in this next little section is saying like let's look at our thinking. Let's look at how we understand our experience and ways in which science has quickly caught up to things that some people

on this side of my example were already ahead of and knew very deeply. Yep. So we'll start with a basic one. It's one that Eastern traditions have known for thousands of years that Westerners historically have loved to poop on. The mind and body literally being connected. Now, for many of us, I mean, I'm grateful to live in a time when we know that that is true for the most part. The mind and the body are connected, and it might sound intuitive from the comfort of South by Southwest in 2024. Trauma specialists, somatic healers, they've been talking about this for years and decades and centuries, right? And this was met with tremendous disdain from most of the Western scientific community. I mean, that's just how it was.

Extensive research by people like Bessel van der Kolk, somatic experiencing by Peter Levine, the enormous body of work of Gabor Mate. And they've primarily worked with traumatized individuals, you know, clinically traumatized individuals, specifically because, and it's very sad, but that is one of the places where we can find proof. But the body keeps the score. Body keeps the score of what the mind has experienced. Trauma is held in the body, body will have it come out if it does not get out. The body will show that it needs to. So the mind and body being connected, that's a fundamental basis for us, bless you, of any conversation about spirituality. Spirituality is guided and governed by the mind, so we're going

to argue that that significantly, and in a scientifically provable way, is impacting the body. And in a similar vein, Gabour Matte, in the myth of normal, describes what are now accepted, and this is a really hard one. This was like one that I didn't even want to talk about when we had him on and talked about his book. There are psychiatric and psychological profiles for people who get certain diseases. We have to be really careful here.

We are not talking about that anyone has caused themselves to get sick. We have to be very careful. But it is widely documented that people tend, who tend to put other people first and don't take care of their own needs, to their own detriment. It's hard.

This is a hard one. It's hard. There are statistical associations that, again, Gabour Maté has been studying this for decades, that people with certain personalities, like what Jonathan described, have statistically higher rates of cancer. And we see this in a lot of immune conditions,

autoimmune conditions, particularly for women. There are personalities that tend to group. And it's astounding. And when this was brought up, people lost their minds. That's the mind impacting the body. And this is not us making. this up. Like this is what the research has been showing and unfortunately it has taken disease and death and suffering and in many cases the detriment of female health for us to start putting these things together.

Here's another thing that people thought was completely nuts, but unfortunately is actually a thing. So you know the hippies who claim that like I can't eat preservatives. Preservatives make me sleepy. My kid gets crazy if I feed them red dye. People used to think that was insane. Turns out, guess what? A lot of symptoms of ADHD, even some features of autism. Behavioral features of autism. I'm not talking about curing autism. Behavioral features of autism can be significantly decreased when you remove preservatives and ultra-processed foods from the diet. Nobody wants to hear, I don't want to hear it. I'm like living it actively. But study after study shows us that this is the case and there has even been... There was a recent study. I was sent it from CNN linked it, but a huge, huge compilation of studies showing that food with preservatives and fillers and dyes are strongly correlated with not just, you know, cardiovascular stuff and all these

things, mental health challenges, anxiety. And this was an enormous legitimate study. It just came out. I mean, Peter Atia said the two most important things that impact your overall health are knowledge and time. And you cannot ignore knowledge because it's free. It doesn't even take that much time, right, to Google something. We live in an age where this knowledge, this is open to us now. We cannot afford to ignore what we know is true and now this information is widely available. So the point here is that stuff that we used to dismiss as pseudoscience or as mine likes to say, I want you to say malarkey. Say it.

Malarkey. That... Rubbish? I can't. I wrote it. I want him to say rubbish. Okay. So things that we used to think and totally dismiss some of us, the people on I forget

which side I was using before. and Eastern traditions, and, you know, hippies is not even really the right word, but people who knew or felt that there were some other way, it's now caught up. So how does that apply to where we're going next, the science of spirituality? Let's move into that, Ma'am. We've covered the things we know. Let's talk about the intersection of science and spirituality. And we also have numbered sections here.

We're going to start with something that, I think, think is easy to get our heads around. Prayer works. Prayer. Sorry people. Prayer works. The skeptics used to say that the statistical overlap was that people who were part of prayer had enough time and, you know, luxury. Or they were part of a community that was like affluent, had access to health care. Like there was this statistical question. Is that what we're seeing? And what we're seeing now is that that's not the answer. Right. It's not just that people who pray are part of rich communities, right? It's not just that people who pray are part of communities where someone will bring you food, which that also is what happens when you're part of a community.

There are statistical models that factor for things like that. It turns out being in, wait for it, a mind space where you routinely, routinely, routinely, which is like what's routine, we'll figure it out, where you routinely practice and experience gratitude and positivity about yourself and the world around you and your potential connection, here it is, to something greater than yourself can actually help your body heal, right? And it used to be like, that's nuts. There is science to it. So being part of a community that believes in prayer, right, is also important. So we can't push that aside. Like, if you know people care about, oh, I just made myself emotional, if you know people care about you and are praying for you, it can make you feel stronger, right?

Like resilience. But there's a practicality of it. Your body has a different set of resources when you know, that people care about you, but your body also has a different set of resources when you believe that you can heal. It's a thing. This is not just like, I'm thinking optimistically. It's much more elaborate than that. I wanted to give a shout out to Buddhists, and not just Buddhists, but there is a Buddhist practice about literally putting energy out into the universe. And I'm not going to give you the science of what that means, because I don't know that I'm there yet, but the notion that prayer can literally, that energy, whatever that energy is, can change. the suffering in the world.

Tell us actually about the science. Okay, so there is science. So there's a handful of really, really strong studies that specifically focus on spiritual meditation in the form of prayer. Okay? So prayer and meditation, you know, prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening, but again,

these studies have to be really specific with sort of, you know, how we measure this, right? people who participate in this kind of prayer have decreases in anxiety and in stress levels, right? So spiritual meditation also leads to people being more positive. And I'm sure there's people out there, especially if you're scientifically learning, like, what's that study? These are legitimate studies in reputable articles. They, you know, they're like, they're double-blinded. They're statistical ruling out.

Like, they're factoring all these things out. They're running a novice, I promise. How do we measure these things? Some of these experiments use ice baths. Who can tolerate pain better, right? It's a weird question. Who can tolerate pain better? It's actually a measure of resilience.

What is it like to be able to control your body with your mind? That's what these studies are looking at. So positivity, better tolerance of pain. So a connection to something bigger than you is correlating with the ability to literally feel more resilient. What happens when you feel more resilient, resilient when you are more resilient, you have the ability to heal, meaning to use your resources to heal. It might mean that you know when you need to take a nap. It might mean that you know when

you need to tell someone, I can't. I need to rest tonight. I can't go out. I can't drink. I can't smoke weed with you tonight, right? We don't know what it looks like. I won't get into it. I mean, but if you know anyone who's given birth without drugs, it's not magic. It's the mind controlling the body. It's literally like it's not, you know, people like, that's amazing. It's self-hypnosis. It's something that people have been doing to control the connection between mind and body for thousands and thousands of years. So break down what's happening in the brain in terms of the science of prayer. Okay, so gratitude is essentially helping that sympathetic nervous system, right? And the parasympathetic nervous system is helping balance this out.

We're basically training the brain to filter out negative so that we can focus. on more positive things. That's one of the ways that we do that. And this filtering system that is part of what resting and digesting is helping us do. It's part of what that parasympathetic nervous is what the vagus nerve is trying to help you do. And there seems to be some sort of filtering process. It's happening in the medial prefrontal cortex that's up here. And also the limbic system, which you probably heard about the amygdala, right? That's what's like controlling for fear and anxiety and all of that regulation. We're seeing that prefrontal that prefrontal cortex and limbic system

are being positively impacted in these kind of large-scale studies, right? There's also evidence for reduction in cortisol, right? That's the circulating stress hormone. More cortisol, more stressed, right? People who spill cortisol all night, if you ever had to do anybody here, well, I've done it. You know, you basically- There's a spit test, there's a P test.

Like how much cortisol are you spilling? Reduction in cortisol in the nervous system of people who are regularly practicing gratitude. in these studies. So more gratitude, less stress. I'm going to clarify one thing. The cortisol, especially, it's not necessarily an objective, how stressful is your life. No, you sometimes don't even realize it. Versus your perceived level of stress. Correct. And also gratitude from this kind of neurological perspective, it's leading to some of the restructuring. You've heard about like neuronal restructuring and synaptic restructuring, and we'll talk about that a little bit

more when we get psychedelic. But that restructuring is what we're looking for. We're looking for that, not just to like shift our mood, but to have long-standing ability to continue shifting your mood when other challenges come up. So the brain needs to be trained. You know, we know this. And going back to the things that we used to think were static, we used to think that the brain was also static, and now we're realizing that it's not at all. It can learn, it can be reshaped.

You hear a lot about rewire your brain, and some people are like, well, what the heck does that mean? What it means is this continual training over time to help you face things in a different way so that you are not reverting back to previous reactions and behaviors that are likely no longer serving us. So I think we should get psychedelic. Let's get psychedelic. So number two, in terms of the science and spirituality, is beyond gratitude into psychedelic, but you can also think about psychedelics as just an altered state of consciousness,

something beyond our ordinary every day. Some people use drugs. Some people don't. Not pointing any fingers. No. But drugs are not the only way to get there. You can get to these altered states of consciousness through yoga, through chanting, through mantras, through holotropic breathwork, has had its moment in the news lately. Transcendental meditation, there are versions of energy work and somatic work.

I don't know if the term somatic work is understood, but it's like tracking where emotions are felt in your body, and they can have profound changes to our. everyday experience when we do that type of work. And all of these can change how we think, how we feel, and how we are perceiving. So one of our earliest episodes we had on Rick Doblin. He's the founder of MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Study. And he talked about transcendental experiences, and specifically through the use of psychedelics in clinical settings in particular, as critical not only to a healthy human experience, but he believes, and he has a lot of research to back this up, these experiences hold the potential. And I'm saying, hold the potential to cure society of some of its deepest suffering. And these are the studies where we're

looking at depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, even the propensity for violence in a society, right, culturally speaking. And we kind of expected this from Rick Doblin because he was friends with Timothy Leary, right, when everybody was being told to tune in, turn on and drop out. But science is increasingly supporting the fact that the body with a transcendental connection can be more whole. And many mental health and spiritual maladies, which we've talked about, can be caused by a lack of connection, you know, to something greater than ourselves. So, so talk about the science of psilocybin with the notion that psilocybin is one way that has been clinically proven to show these effects, but there are other avenues to get there.

Correct. So the idea is not that everybody needs to do drugs. The idea is that when we're talking about where's the intersection of science and spirituality, we're going to look to the studies that are actually able to tap into, how do we measure an altered state of consciousness, and what's the brain doing in that altered state of consciousness, so we can see what might be happening in other ways to get to altered states of consciousness. So one of the studies that Rick in particular has been part of,

decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe. So parietal is the one, it's like the headphones of the brain, so like frontal, occipital, temporal, parietal. Posterior means back, superior means top. contributes, we have been able to isolate. These are really, really awesome imaging studies. The feeling of knowing where you are in space and being able to distinguish yourself from everything else.

For anyone who's ever had a psychedelic experience, you probably know these are two of the things that get tweaked. Literally, where am I? Where's my body? Where's my being? And am I part of something or am I distinct from it? What happens when you experience that sense of deep, like connected this, connectedness with the universe, it's an altered state that's associated with decreased activation of this region of the parietal lobe. But here's the kicker. You have the ability to take that

sense of connectedness that happens when your parietal lobe gets tweaked. How do you take that into your non-altered state life? Quick question. Yes. Let's do a quick show of hands. Whether through psychedelics or something else, how many people have experienced feeling a sense of being a part of something greater than themselves? Oh, that nice. That's very powerful. It makes me happy. I mean, it makes me happy for you, but not unhappy for the people who haven't had that. Because maybe you don't want that.

Okay. And if you haven't, talk to someone who has after. Talk to someone who has? Yeah. So that experience, right, this connection to something greater than yourself, that has the potential to transform the way you see the world if you can bring it back, right? It's often talked religiously about, like, what can you bring down from the mountain? Like, it's wonderful to have revelation on top of that mountain.

What happens when you come back down? So the ability to dial into that connectedness can lead the way. to all those positive benefits that we're talking about. We're talking about prayer, and we're talking about meditation, and we're talking about gratitude. This is just another way to get there. It's bringing it back down. It's also integrating it in times of intense stress and struggle.

Right. And it's also, we're not saying, like, the goal is that everybody's high all the time. Certain religious traditions, Harry Krishna's, right, believe without drugs, that you can live in a state of bliss. You can live in a state of constant, constant gratitude, constant immersion in wonder that we exist and being able to tackle challenges. So this growing body of research, you know, into the use of psilocybin and other psychedelics, specifically with terminally ill patients, shows that these kind of experiences can have a tremendous impact on death anxiety,

depression, right, especially the kind that comes with having a terminal illness, and even a single dose. Even a single dose can improve trauma, death anxiety, and your overall well-being. It's astonishing. And I'm sure you can imagine, and this is a discussion for another time, imagine if instead of us being on drugs every day for the rest of our lives when we have a diagnosis, a problem or a challenge, this is what Rick Doblin is trying to encourage people to understand. If one dose, it's an assisted guided clinical experience, we're not like, go trick balls and Joshua Tree, but if that's your thing, that's fine. We're talking about a clinically monitored and regulated experience if one dose can help you for months, years. Think about what that

does to the pharmaceutical industry and our understanding of how we treat when we're not feeling well. There's also growing evidence for the ability of these kinds of drugs to literally rewire the brain, increasing dendritic connections, literally increasing the surface area of the parts of your nervous system that need to take in more ability to heal, to have positive associations, and to be able, again, to bring that back. Ketamine research is heavily into this, synaptic connections, increasing the ability of you to have access to the things that help us heal. So what about the people who have these experiences but aren't integrating them back? You know, how do we think about that and understand it?

So there's something called the default mode network, which is getting a little bit of attention. DMN, it's called, for short, default mode network. And the default mode network is, it's like kind of what you default to when left to your own devices. And I don't mean your own computer and phone. I realize that expression has different meaning now. when left in a in a passive state basically and they do this with these are also scanning scanning studies it's the ruminations that go on it's your default mode network it's what you go back to right so bless you it's not like for me like my default mode network is like did I say something

stupid like did my hair look dumb like why should I apologize you know we tried to I tried to say to Jonathan like what's your default mode network and his default more network became not knowing what his default mode network is. So, but there is, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's this system in the brain. We all have it. We all have a default mode network and it can basically be imaged, right? And it seems to be, it's active in passive states. It's the thing, it's your, it's your kind of like constant dialogue.

So what is it? It's a collection of areas of the cortex, right? That's the more outside part. The cortex that are, that are communicating with each other. So the prefrontal cortex, again, super important. Important for processing information from deeper regions, the hippocampus, right? That's memory, but it's not just memory. Anyone who's ever had a memory knows it's linked to something.

It's linked to an emotion, right? The amygdala, these are all connected as part of this default mode network. And they're involved in decision-making and goal-directed behaviors. So excessive rumination and self-blaming, we see hyperactivity in the prefrontal cortex. And this default-mode network system in depression, it's all messengers. messed up, meaning it's confused. And the reason I'm not saying it's overactivated, it's underactivated, is that the brain is full of positive and negative feedback loops. So there's some evidence for upregulation of the default mode network and there's some evidence for downregulation

of the default mode network. But what's important to know is this is a system that is trying to understand really, really, really fascinating things that I never thought we'd be able to describe this way. And the notion in the research, I'm just going to read the quote, it opens a therapy window, so like this network opens a therapeutic window to facilitate the emergence of novel insights potentially leading to emotional release. That's what this network is doing, right? And it's altered when we're not functioning optimally. So while people can have very powerful experiences through altered states of consciousness in recreational use, these studies are specifically focused on people who have had therapeutically supervised and traumatic care, individualized care.

Right. So the take-home message is tapping into this DMN, tapping into this default mode network, however we do it, that's a way to have cohesion, right, from kind of like mind, body, and spirit. And it's like when people talk about religious experiences or feeling connected with God, because that does often come up when people have sessions especially with these, psychedelic drugs, even people who don't have a God feeling before, there is this notion of, like, I'm connected to something bigger, and that features prominently, you know, in these encounters. So one of the favorite pieces of evidence I have for a non-drug-related, altered state as scientifically significant and also spiritually profound was this recent episode we did with Elizabeth

Crone, not a celebrity, not an expert, not a doctor, not a specialist. This was a woman who had a near-death experience after being struck by lightning. She was unconscious, this happened in the 1980s, she was unconscious on the pavement in like the parking lot of her synagogue. She's unconscious for a few minutes. She says that she was gone for two weeks and talked to God. But what's amazing is that she did not have a God belief before this happened. And the amount of information that she downloaded, meaning the new thoughts, feelings associations that she downloaded changed her life forever. She also experienced physiological changes that we know can result from being struck by lightning. Like her shoes were literally blown off her feet. Blown off her feet. But she acquired,

like the bottom of her souls were burned. But she acquired abilities that are outside of the realms of our scientific understanding. So she didn't believe in oras. She didn't believe in ghosts. She didn't even like extrasensory perception, but when she came back, she could see colors around people and she didn't know why. She had bizarre abilities that she herself, like, didn't even want to believe. Like, she could cut into time, she said, like, it was a seven-layer cake. She could access to, it was, I mean, well, we... Like, time was no longer linear, and quantum physics is supporting what she's describing. And the reason that I'm talking about Elizabeth Crone in this episode is that there's a really, really fascinating study that shows the overlap between near-death experiences

and a little drug called, it's a serotonergic psychedelic-psychedelic-n-N-N-dymethylptene, DMT. And so this is a Venn diagram from this really incredible case study, literally showing the overlap between things that happen. This was a patient who had done DMT and also had a near-death experience. You can see that there are no experiences unique to the DMT, experiencing. The overlap looks like ego dissolution, space-time transcendence, a unitive experience, cosmic love, hyper-dimensionality, all these things that people report in near-death experiences. So what chemically is going on is the question. And there are things that happen in near-death experiences, as you can see, that don't happen when you do DMT, but once there's that

overlap, it becomes very, you know, kind of scientifically interesting. So this is not for us to say, like, God exists. That's not what we're here to do. But now that we know about this default mode network, now that we know about all these different regions that are getting touched on, that's where it becomes kind of scientifically significant. Let's touch on Neil Thes a little bit. That's where I was going to go. Okay. This brings us to number three, the evidence that we are all part of something bigger and our conversation with Dr. Nieltheis. Right. So we had Dr. Neil Thes on, Dr. Nel Theis is a pathologist. He was not looking to like prove that we're all one. But he was the first to prove that the body has a system of interconnected

He identified the interstitium as the body's 80th organ. And this came out in like a legitimate, like it was a pathology journal, you know? And it got a term... He was also published in nature. Yeah, no, I'm saying, like I'm saying a journal that is addressing pathology, meaning not emotional pathology. Yeah. And the notion is that there's a system inside of us that is literally connected.

It's a vital entity. It touches all of the visceral organs. It's in the fascia. You've ever heard of the fascia? That's part of this. So if you've ever heard anyone describe like the mycelium mushroom system or if you've seen that documentary or watched what is it the last of us You know like mushrooms communicate over miles and miles and like if you touch the mushroom here, you know So this actually happens in our body and again healers have talked about this

Chinese medicine has talked about this that's the meridian system right? It's all connected Traditional science did not give this much thought Correct Traditional Chinese medicine acupuncture meridians acupressure other healers were all talking talking about the systems of the body as being interconnected and communicating with one another, and he then began to prove that. So it was a huge discovery in how we are interconnected. So for anyone who knows what fascia work is, fascia work is bodywork. It's like massage, but much more kind of, I don't know, elaborate, painful, like you can use whatever,

whatever adjective you want. But people who do fascia work believe, and people who have had fascia work done who have experienced this, emotions come up when certain parts of your body or in particular scars are manipulated. The notion is what is being released? What's that wholeness? What is that connection? Many people have a sense of being outside of their body or a sense of being connected to a larger part of their story when fascia work is being done. This is one of those modalities that science is finally saying, oh, there is something here. And even Dr. Thoreau. himself did not realize that's what he was stumbling into. Another example that he provides, which really got me my head around it, was that he just says that when we live in the same house

with someone, your microbiome and their microbiome become one microbiome. So he talked about the interconnectionness of us through our fascia and then began to describe the interconnectedness of us to others and then describes the interconnectedness of us to the living system of the earth. and so all of a sudden when you start to put these pieces together, you start to see the puzzle of us being a interconnected, one large interconnected organism. So in the last chunk of minutes that we have here, what we'd like to do is sort of talk about

where we think this intersection of science and spirituality might head next. And some of this is things that we hope. We're going to start with a fun one. So the fun one that we thought we'd start with, and we're really only mentioning this because in this Elizabeth Crone episode. You know, this woman who didn't believe in like oras, but all of a sudden was seeing colors around people and didn't even know what that was, right?

Of course she saw ghosts after her near-death experience. Of course she did. Like, that's what started happening. She started getting visited by spirits. She started having a sense of people in the room, right? So we're calling this a fun one, because I'm high on the skeptical scale here of UFOs and ghosts and spirits, but

Not all the same thing, by the way? Right, not the same thing. But I do think it's significant that we have this, these people who have had significant physiological changes, right? She was struck by lightning. We know physiological things happen. We were struck by lightning, right? And then there's this acquisition of a set of behaviors, experiences, and connectedness. It is bizarre and possibly one day will be measurable, but I don't know. Let's get a little more concrete. Just as an explanation there, what we're

really talking about is can we perceive things outside of our normal day, everyday perception? Right. Which is similar to... Well, and how do you measure that? And how do you measure? The question is, how do you measure that? But to get a little more concrete, we mentioned holotropic breathwork, right? Memory retrieval. This is something that I'm fascinated with. As I want to see where this goes next.

People who have, anybody had EMDR here? Anyone done EMDR? Okay, so EMDR is a modality. We don't really know, honestly, how it works, but it allows people to access memories and not just like, oh, I'm remembering things that never. It happened. No. My mother actually did EMDR. She's talking about it on our podcast. She said it was like she was in her childhood bedroom and she could look around and walk around. She was not on drugs. It's like that's what EMDR is accessing. What is this memory retrieval? Right? There are people in holotropic breathwork. There was an article in the New York Times last week. People believe that they can access birth memories, preverbal memories. And we used to say like, that's not a thing, right? Now I kind of feel like, and I hope after today, like, I don't know. Is that a thing? Is there a place that our body and our mind is holding memory

that we are able to tap into? Do you have to just get there with drugs? No, we've already talked about. What is this altered state of consciousness where you can pull this information, right? Is that the body keeping the score? That's what it sounds like to me. I've had in utero memory.

They're fantastic. I highly recommend. We don't have time to talk about your in utero memories. But someone said, oh. But we know. from the trauma work that we referenced, right? Vandercoc and Peter Levine and Gabbermante, we know if the body's keeping the score, right,

what is a repressed memory? How much are you allowed to challenge, right? What I retrieve when I'm in an altered state, and I know something to be true. I mean, it brings up really, really complicated questions. Intergenerational trauma, that's another place that we're hearing talked about more and more. The egg that you are was in your grandmother's body.

happy to discuss sexual gamete formation, but that's how it works. You weren't just in your mom. You were in your grandma, right? That's when the gametes were formed that became you. What was your grandmother holding? You know, the way that we kind of talked about it, like, can you heal your grandmother's unresolved issues? Is that what you're here to do if you've ever been to a psychic, if you've ever been to a healer? And they say you have ancestral trauma, right? Like, what is ancestral trauma? Is this, is this what we're talking about? I don't know. That's what we're curious. I mean, another way to describe it is, like, the energetic blueprint that that grandmother experienced,

how much of that has passed on to you, and how do we experience that? Okay, so I want to make sure we get to collective consciousness. Okay, number three, in terms of where things may be going that science may be catching up with are aura's and energy. This, I was like, are we talking about this, Jonathan? And he was like, yes, we're talking about aura and energy. So the notion that there's an energetic body. Everyone has an energetic field around them. He loves talking about the electromagnetic field.

Everybody's got one around them. And at first I was like, but then here's the thing. We are an energetic body, meaning we're a body with energy, right? Like if you think literally from a physics perspective, from a mechanical perspective. So our body has magnetic properties. We know this. Like MRI is based on the magnetic properties, right, of the things that we can mess up in your brain and see how they go back. we have minerals in our body, right?

There's blood coursing through our veins. We are an energetic body, whatever that means, right? So in holistic circles, people talk about this energy body, right? Elizabeth Crone. She did not know what it meant that she was seeing colors around people's heads. And a member of her family who was previously healthy, she saw a black ring around his head and he dropped dead, I think, within a couple days. A couple days.

She said, why am I seeing a black ring around this man's head? And he dropped dead. So, like, is this real? What is this? I don't know. Is it real? And then the question is, can people have access to seeing and feeling things that others don't? That's kind of my interest.

And we're the people who see those things. And in all throughout human history, there have been shamans and medical intuitives and medical people who have been able to track emotional and physiological changes in others. And so why would we assume... We called them shamans. We called them heal. I mean, historically, that's what, I mean, those, those, that exists. It still exists in many indigenous communities.

But my interest, scientifically is if you have, like, I keep coming back to Elizabeth Crone, she had a physiological change in her. She was struck by lightning. And this whole new set of, like, experiences and perception, did something happen to her that we can measure, right? And you can't, like, make people get struck by lightning so that we can see if that's what doesn't. But what could, what was she seeing? Like, what is it when people can see? Do they have access to something? Are they more in touch with themselves? And therefore, they can be more in touch with others. Or is there just some physiological change that's opened in the brain that the perception pattern has changed? The one thing we didn't talk about, Elizabeth Cron, is that she had pre-cognitive dreams that predicted world events.

Like, as if things were ripped from the newspaper headlines of massive global accidents. And they were not always accurate, but there was a significant number that were accurate enough to be like, what is happening? Down to the name of the airline, the number of people. Like, this episode is, it's insane. I highly recommend you listen to it. Let's wrap it up here with everybody's favorite conversation. Collective consciousness. We're going to go there.

I think this is actually one of the most accessible of all the things. And potentially the most impactful to everyone. Okay. So there are people who claim that they are so connected with the universe. And I'm not saying this with disdain. There are people who claim that they have a sense of connectedness with the universe or something greater than themselves that is connected. with the ability to tap into a collective consciousness.

So is there a collective consciousness that exists that some people know how to access and others could learn how to access? All right. Show of hands. Who's heard of the Akashik Records? Right on. That's more than I would have thought. It's more than I would have thought, but that means we've got to explain it briefly.

Okay. The Akashik record is said to be a collection of everything that has existed and everything that will exist. And people can access this through deep meditation or altered states. of consciousness. It's literally... It's just like a thing. It's not like a book. It's records floating in the universe. I know. It's been described differently.

Some people literally say they can open the book of life and read through it and find information available to them. And there's references, like historically there are references to this. There's Kabbalistic stuff. There's Hindu texts that reference this. It's a thing that has been spoken about in many traditions. Prince mentioned it, actually. Prince in a song. It's a story, because it is a storytelling. device, right? If that's not proof that it's real, I don't know what is. So, but, but I think this is

sort of, you know, when we think about what Neil Thiess talked about, right? From a physiological perspective, what is connectedness? What is connectedness in our body and what is connectedness with others? Like, this is one step beyond microbiome. Can we, like, can people talk to the, what does it mean to talk to the universe? And are our memories and thoughts literally part of a universal database that is accessible. So the idea is when people talk about the collective conscience, like is there wisdom in the universe, right? Jonathan says yes.

Yeah. It literally says Jonathan says yes. Oh, yes, there is. Is it, like, is it customized for us, right? Likely. Well, Jonathan says likely. If you've ever been to a healer, or if you ever go to a healer,

if you've ever been in a kundalini yoga class, which I'm a kundalini yoga person, the kind of language, and this is where mind and body and spirit are all connecting, right? When you hear a healer, a teacher, it could be even a philosopher, talk about you can control your destiny, right? You can change how you exist in the world, right? You can change your perception of yourself and your suffering, right? We get in a loop of suffering. That's like, you know, this is this concept of like, how do you get out of that?

when a guru tells you that, right? When a yogi tells you that, when Eckhart Tolle talks about it, what does it mean to be able to get outside of yourself and create a new reality, right? For those of us who have autoimmune conditions, for those of us who are suffering, what does it mean to get out of that suffering? What does it mean to heal?

It's very good. You should keep going. I don't want to keep going. Can we be guided out of the turmoil of our lives because we have found a way to see outside of our limited perspective and to see the steps that we need to take. Even knowing that there's a different perspective, a different way to look at your situation, can help you physiologically

because it's an antidote, right, to the stress that comes when you feel overwhelmed and when you feel hopeless. I think you just fixed everything. I don't know. The way that we sort of talked about this is like what's the next phase of well-being? What's a true integration of the mind and body and spirit?

Like we talk about like, oh, you need to be grateful. You physiologically need to find a way that your body understands how to be grateful, right? What does it mean to be mindful? It means understanding a way for your mind, body, and spirit to truly understand what mindfulness is, not just be like, I practice mindfulness meditation, which I do. But how does it, it's not just what you're doing. You know, one of my yoga teacher says it's not the hour on the mat that he cares about. He cares about the 23 other hours. It's really easy to be like focused and connected, right?

What happens when I get out and, you know, someone is like I've gotten a parking ticket, right? What happens when someone cuts me off in traffic? Happens when I get home and I still don't have patience for my kids, right? What does it mean to seek out a life of meaning and a sense of wonder and connection to something greater than ourselves in a way that helps us, right? That really can help us, not because it's trendy and not because it's fun because it's mostly not fun, but because it is, it's that path to deeper wellness that, Let's talk about this like slicing into time. It takes you back in time, right? It takes you into the future.

Like where are you slicing in? And it also puts you exactly where you need to be and where we would argue we all deserve to be. Thank you, everybody. It's my and be all X breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One, fix you.

And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.