Modern Wisdom - #146 - Dr Heather Berlin - Considering Consciousness

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

Heather Berlin is a cognitive neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine. All humans have a subjective experience of reality, but why? What does it mean that a collection of atoms, arranged into a particular configuration, is able to consider its own existence? How can it dream, reflect and not only be a passenger within its environment but to also become captain of the ship and affect its own destiny? Get Surfshark VPN - https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter Promo Code MODERNWISDOM for 83% off & One Extra Month Free) Extra Stuff: Follow Heather on Twitter - https://twitter.com/heather_berlin Check out Heather's Website - https://heatherberlin.com/ Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello humans of podcast land, welcome back. My guest today is Heather Bellin. She is a cognitive neuroscientist and a psychologist. And I had one question that I wanted to ask, which was, what is consciousness? We all have a subjective experience of reality around us, but we've just got this big mess of fat and water inside of our heads that makes all the magic happen.

So how does it work? But for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Heather Berlin. I mean, fundamentally, the kind of driving force in my career has been trying to understand the fundamental question of how the physical brain creates our subjective awareness. So basically the neural basis of consciousness. But then I also got really interested in the neural basis of all of these unconscious processes that are motivating our behavior because much of what we do, the decisions we make, our behaviors are being dictated by things that are happening outside of our awareness and we're only consciously aware of a very small bit of what's actually happening. We often make up these post-hoc explanations about why we do things which are not necessarily

the real reasons, so we have a narrative that we tell ourselves. So I'm interested in both the kind of how the physical brain creates our conscious experience or our subjective states, as well as the unconscious processes that are motivating us and explaining how we behave. Wow. So we got a lot that we can delve into today. We've had a lot of discussions recently about sort of purpose and meaning in life and things like that, but I guess at an even more base level the fact that we are able to be conscious, the fact that we're beings that can kind of consider our own existence, sit before all of that, right?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it was Carl Sagan who said like we are a way for the, you know, universe for matter to know itself, right? Because it's basically matter that's organized itself in such a way that it can, you know, have subjective states, it can try to understand itself and it's placed in the universe. It's pretty amazing. But it's very fundamental. I mean, when we talk about consciousness,

we don't need language for it. We don't need a sense of self. It's really just pure subjective experience. So like, you know, tasting something sweet or, you know, seeing the color red or smelling a rose. And other animals have it. We assume they do because they have similar heart than we that we have. The act is if they, for example, if you step on a cat's paw, it'll pull away and maybe yell, but acts as if it's experiencing pain.

We'll never know 100% for sure, but then again, I don't know that you're conscious, right? I mean, I assume you are, but. So we just define it, basically consciousness is first person subjective experience. I just know that I have it, and even when we do experiments, I mean, the only way to really tell is the person has to report, like did you see it or not? Were you consciously aware of that stimuli or not?

They have to self-report. And we can make some predictions like with babies, where they look might be what they're attending to or what they're conscious of. But again, it's really this first person's rejected experience that we're trying to understand. So that's our definition of consciousness that we're working with today? Right, yeah, that's pretty much it. And then there's different levels, you know, then there's like, then you add in language or self-awareness and there are ways to sort of elaborate this objective experience. But fundamentally what we're trying to explain is just how a physical

piece of matter could produce this sort of subjectivity, these feelings. So how low down the animal kingdom does this go? Do we presume that insects are conscious? Is there a line somewhere that we hit? Do we presume that insects are conscious? Is there a line somewhere that we hit? Yeah, so there's been a lot of debate and discussion about this topic. I was a year or two ago, I was at a meeting which is all about animal consciousness. What do we know?

And so look, we can take it down to a fish. A fish, for example, if you give it like a noxious stimuli, something that might cause them pain or that's offensive. You'll see the microtoresis stimuli, then they get a sense of it, and they'll move away, something that say causes pain. But then, if you give them something like a type of anesthesia that kind of blocks their pain receptors, then they don't move away from the noxious stimuli.

So the idea with this is that they were feeling something, right? Because when you block there, to give them kind of anesthesia, then they no longer retract from that stimuli, right? So we assume there's some sort of feeling there. And now how far down the animal kingdom is hard to say, for this, we really need sort of a fundamental overarching theory of consciousness. So for example, one theory that is pretty popular

is called the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness, which basically says that any system that has a high degree of integrated, differentiated information will have the property of consciousness. It's like a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity. So the brain happens to be one of those systems where when we say integrated, it means like if one neuron fires, it will directly affect whether the neuron next to it fires.

There's integration of information rather than say a pixel in your phone goes out, like it's not going to affect the one next to it, right? So that's not integrated. So we talk about how to reintegrate information. And so the brain happens to be one of those systems. And then basically, there's a mathematical calculation called phi, which you can calculate the amount of differentiated integrated information of a system and that predicts how conscious it is.

So if we go along with that through your consciousness, we can look at like a B or a fetus and try to make a measure of how much by it has. But I'll do this theory basically. It's kind of pants like it means anything. Like a light switch has a bit of information. It's either on or off. So in some sense, it would have a bit of by.

So it gets very philosophical. So that's just one theory. So again, it depends on the theory. I think you have to have some sort of nervous system to have consciousness. Some people talk about plant consciousness and things like that. I just don't think that they have necessarily subjective states or any kind of feeling, but I mean, I could be wrong. I might feel like something to be a plant that responds to light and starts growing towards it.

I think the sort of the anecdotal quote that I've heard from Sam Harris is that consciousness within any being is if there is something that it is like to be that being. If there is something that is like to be a plant or if there is something that is like to be a bee because we know with pretty good certainty that there is nothing that it is like to be a bee, because we know with pretty good certainty that there is nothing that it is like to be a rock, or like there's nothing really that it is like to be this table,

apart from maybe when it was still alive and it was a tree. But yeah, so is that kind of touching on what we're talking about there? Is that coming from a different... I mean, that's one way you can look at it, but you know, some might argue that, say, the interactions, you know, between, you know, the molecules within the rock or have some level of, you know, five. I mean, there's different levels of this argument. Yeah. And what does it mean to be like something?

I mean, how do we ever know if it is like anything to be, let's say, a plant, right? So we don't know because it responds to its environment, it might just respond reflexively. And we don't know that there's anything to it's like to be that. So it's an interesting definition, but it's very hard to then test it to then, you know, prove like, well, is it like something to be a bee? I don't know. How do we know? Yeah. You know, how much of your work is sort of theoretical and how much of it is experimental? Well, I mean, all the experiments are based on some theory, right? So you have like a theory and then you might hypothesis and do the experiments. So, so it is trying to, I mean, I like to ask these big questions.

When it comes to doing research, it's much more practical endeavor, and especially working most of my career at a medical school and department of psychiatry. You know, a lot of it is, so as I say, some of my research is interested in that overarching question, but a lot of it is more so as I said, some of my research is interested in that overarching question, but a lot of it is more practical in the sense of what's the neural basis of different psychiatric disorders or in particular symptoms within psychiatric disorders and how can we come up with novel treatments for those symptoms, whether it's impulsivity or

compulsive behavior. So it's mapping out doing sort of these correlations between underlying brain mechanisms and dysfunction and then trying to kind of fix that either with drugs or cognitive treatments and the like. So that's more practical aspects of my research. That's so fascinating that you've got this subjective experience which is anxiety or

happiness or depression or a thought pattern or whatever it might be. And the thing that kind of blows my mind is that the way that we feel something inside of our heads is one particular experience, but that actually manifests as something physically happening within the brain, right? It's a particular series of neurons firing, but we don't feel it like a series of neurons firing. We see an elephant when we think of an elephant, or we imagine a smell when we think of a smell, or we can change our, you know, our emotional state when we think of that. That sort of type of thing. The place where those two things meet, to me, seems so crazy. Well, I mean, I think that's also why there's so much stigma around mental illness because,

you know, let's say you, I don't know, you have like a bacterial infection. Like, oh, there's this vector. I'll take this antibiotic and that will help it or you break a bone and you take whatever to fix the bone. But when the brain is sort of broken or not working properly, we just don't see it as like a dysfunction of an organ. We see it as as a dysfunction of a human being, right? And because it's just these subjective states. And people often forget that it's really it's tied to a physical mechanism, right? So if there's a dysfunction in let's say

your way of thinking, it's a problem related to the brain somehow. And we don't always know exactly how, but, but, you know, with enough time and research, we can figure that out. And then ultimately, treatment can be targeted at the brain itself. I think talking to everybody like cognitive behavioral therapy and the like does work because our thoughts can also work to change our brain. It's this interactive system so you can either work sort of from the bottom up or the top down. But either way it's both. It's just two sides of this same coin. Yeah. So, can you talk about some of the particular conditions that you think there's good opportunities

to make inroads on treating people? Yeah. Well, I think any disorder, whether neurological or psychiatric, there's always some room for improvement or people can change themselves, they can change their brain. Some disorders are a little bit more amenable to treatment than others, right? And it varies their individual differences. So for example, personality disorders are a little bit harder to treat. In fact, much harder to treat than some other disorders because they seem to be very fundamental

and like very much, you know, children who are born with a certain temperament tend to, you can predict kind of how their personality is going to be the rest of their life. And it's pretty sort of hardwired in. And much harder to change than say treatment for a phobia, for example. You know, if you have, let's say if you're flying, there are certain behavioral and cognitive techniques we can use to help treat that, and it's going to be pretty amenable to treatment in many cases, whereas treating, say, like a narcissistic personality disorder is much harder to treat, because it's just part

of your DNA. It's part of the way you're wired. But I do see a lot of potential right now in terms of novel treatments in the use of psychedelics, like psychedelic medicine to treat. So for example, MDMA or X tostasy to treat PTSD and other anxiety disorders, ketamine to treat depression, psilocybin or mushrooms to treat certain types of anxiety, and we're looking at other disorders as well, so including depression. So I think a lot of these novel treatments are pretty exciting. I mean there has been a lot of movement in the world of psychiatry for, you know, I would say half a century, but we're starting to make some,

you know, except for like minor tweaks and things, you know, SSRI, okay, this is a little bit more selective serotonin one, this is slightly more selective, but, you know, nothing really major breakthroughs. So I think we're, we're at the precipice of making those big breakthroughs now. I get you. So that would be really interesting to get your stance on psychedelics and how or why they work. Because from a subjective experience, you take a particularly strong psychedelic, you have a subjective experience of seeing something being somewhere. But what's happening neurologically at the level of the brain must be completely different. I don't know what's actually happening.

So can you take us through what happens if I take a therapeutic dose of MDMA, And you're logically at the level of the brain must be completely different. I don't know what's actually happening. So can you take us through what happens if I take a therapeutic dose of MDMA or if I take a therapeutic dose of psilocybin? So it's different for the different drugs. So each drug has different mechanism. And we're still in the very early stages. So there are different theories about why the different drugs work. One, let's say I'll take a psilocybin,

which works on the serotonin receptors in the brain. But one thing that it does as well as like LSD and other psychedelics is it tends to, in a very general sense, open you up in many ways. So parts of the brain that are involved in your sense of self and your ego tend to kind of decrease in activation. So you tend to feel like one with everything, right? You kind of give this dissolution of your ego.

And a lot of these parts of your brain, like the prefrontal cortex, when they're really highly active, are involved in like rumination and anxiety, or like when you're depressed and you have this thoughts that you just can't get out of your head, these negative thoughts. And this kind of helps break that cycle. It also helps you kind of make, we see a lot of novel activation across these long range networks in the brain where a lot of the time, there's a lot of local communication, where

it now kind of opens things up. So you're thinking in a completely different way. But so there's a lot of, you know, we look at what's happening at the hardware in the brain, but I think a lot of the therapeutic effects of this kind of, these kind of drugs is, is the psychological effect. Because you only need to take it one or two times, like with a guided with a therapist for it to have this long lasting effect. Whereas other drugs, let's say an SSRI that you take for depression or a selective Okay, one or two times, like with a guided with a therapist for it to have this long-lasting effect. Whereas other drugs, let's say an SSRI, that you take for depression, or a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, it always has to be in your system.

Like it only works while it's in your system, and as soon as it wears off, that's where you have to take it every day, right? So they're saying, okay, it's clearly the effect of the drug itself. Whereas with the psychedelics, it seems to be the psychological experience that's profoundly like shifts your consciousness or your perspective and has these long-term long-term impact. How do you as a neuroscientist look at that situation? I have a particular experience. I've not drilled or greased a particular thought groove a lot. I've not wrapped tons of myelin around one particular way of being. And yes, this particular experience has been so profound or changing that it's caused

everything downstream to alter. What's that mean? Well, what happened? Okay, so like when you're talking about, you know, actual changes in the physical structure of the brain, talking about things like long-term pretentiation, or like when you're learning something and you develop a new pathway in the brain, you know, by rehearsing it over and over again, right? And that doesn't seem to happen with this. But there is also something, you know, called one trial learning. So like often this happens with something like a very negative experience and it's an adaptive, it's adaptive because let's say, you know, back in cavemen days, you're foraging through the forest, you get really violently ill by eating a particular berry, right? So for survival, it makes sense to like really remember that berry and that experience and

never go near it again. So basically, you get sick from it one time and that's all it takes for you to like avoid it and you know and we know that from now like if you ever get food poisoning from something you know you won't touch that food for a while and that's adapted right so you learn it and so with the drugs it seems like it's a very profound one-time experience right that might shift the way that you think about things and then then over time, that shift in your thought process will start to develop new pathways and new ways of thinking.

But it's such a profound, it has to be at such a heightened level of experience whether positive or negative, that it can really shift how you think, which then can go on to create these new long-term pathways. That's so fascinating. The evolutionary basis for it as well. And it makes total sense. You've

got this very, very intense experience. You either want to have it happen again. You find this unbelievable kill or you come up with a new way of taking down a particular prey or whatever it might be, or the negative side, you do something that you don't ever, ever, ever want to do again. That's so cool. Yeah. I mean, it works. So we're kind of like hacking into the sort of cavemen brain in a sense. And again, it can work, I guess, like when people have a traumatic experience, right, that also can stick with that, right?

Something very negative happens. It's, you know, in a soldier and war and they see like their friend almost dies or does die, you know, that can have such a profound effect that it causes all these negative psychological effects after. So I think with the psychedelics it's trying to take that having a very something very intense positive, you know, experience that then sticks with you over time and helps change your brain in a positive way rather than a negative way say, with PTSD. So what about MDMA? What do you have an understanding of the reasoning for that?

So with MDMA, it's more about, and with the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, which it's called, it's about, so often there's just a sort of traumatic experience, like what's a PTSD. And then our brain, we put up these kind of protective mechanisms because if it kept coming to the surface and we had to think about it all the time, it would be maladaptive, it interferes with our daily life.

So we suppress it. But yet, it goes on to affect our behavior, right? So, you know, we're anxious or hypervigilant or having nightmares, right? And one way to sort of resolve that is to gain conscious access of that unconscious memory that might be suppressed, let's say, and reintegrated into the brain in a more neutral way. So it's not intimately connected with the negative emotion. So, you know, for instance, I don't know, let's say it's a, I mean, somebody was like

sexually assaulted, you know, you could be able to like think about that assault and really think about your mind, but kind of separate it from the terrible emotions that it brings up. So with the MTA, it's a way to allow people to re-remember these traumatic experiences in a neutral way, in fact, in a way where they're feeling very calm and pleasurable, so that it can kind of re-associate these memories with more, at least, neutral emotions, so that they're not constantly, every time they're triggered, it triggers a negative emotion, right? So it's about kind of restructuring, but it also allowing you to access unconscious processes

that when you're in your sort of normal defensive state, you're not even allowed that they don't even come to the surface, right? So it's sort of a way to access the unconscious and then reintegrate the memories in a more neutral way. Yeah. I keep on seeing so much about psilocybin MDMA, Tim Ferris is donating tons and tons of money to MDMA therapy and Silasibon therapy because that's how much he, how much sort of future and how much efficacy he thinks is in these treatments. It's so, it's so mad that something that's a party drug that's seen as people as this

kind of ravers drug from Woodstock or cream fields or whatever it might be. To now be something that's potentially changing the lives of soldiers with PTSD or people that have got addictions and dependencies or people that have had traumatic childhoods. It's so crazy. Yeah, yeah, again, but it's not just, you know, it's with, doing it with somebody who's trained to help you, let's say, gain access to these memories, think just doing the drug itself without having that guided psychological experience doesn't have the same impact.

So kind of using it in conjunction, you know, with the therapy. Yeah, or else everyone that was walking out with Creamfield's ultra-festival in Miami would just be complete, then, that absolutely no inhibitions left, everything would be working fine, right? Everything great, come by, yeah, and everything.

Come to a music festival, get a brain MOT, come out and you're working, everything's working brilliant. Oh, he's great. So I want to kind of really try and dig into what it means that we have conscious experience. What it means that we can think of things and that we can remember things and that they appear in our consciousness. Can you kind of

try and take us through how that is occurring within the brain? So what it means to have to be conscious or what? So I am able to picture something now, so I'm able to picture an elephant on my desk in front of me and in my mind I can think of an elephant on the desk I don't understand how my brain is able to make that elephant appear in my mind Or when I close my mind I can think of something which is a past memory I don't understand how it these particular processes a bunch of synapses, actually create a landscape or a sense of a smell or any of this sort of stuff.

I mean, to be honest, that is the big question is why is it that these sort of neurochemicals slushing around and electrical impulses happening in these neurons can create these subjective experiences like the image of an elephant? We do know that, for example, so there's been a lot of work on the individual system in the brain, right? How we see something.

And for example, when you see, say, a sunset, you know, we see a particular pattern of activation in the visual cortex of your brain. There's parts of the visual cortex that are involved in color perception and movement. And each like aspect of, let say a visual senior seeing we can divide it up into different sort of segments within let's say the visual cortex or the visual stream let's say stream of information and we see and the reason I study for example people it's like

you have your neurological disorders is because it helps us get gives us insight like when something's broken into actually how it actually works Like you know when your car is running fine You don't really know but when there's a problem you're right then you should figure out okay is it the car read or whatever I don't know a lot about cars, but you know like when something is broken You can understand how it works a little bit better. So like with the visual system for example some people get a brain lesion um and they can no longer see color, right? So they can see movement, but they just things

are in black and white. Or there's another part of the visual cortex if you get damaged, movement is taken away. So they see everything in kind of like staccato. So film cuts. And so that helps us understand how it's all working. We understand a bit about when information comes into the, you get your retina stimulated, then we know it goes to the thalamus, which is a relay station in the brain, which then

sends the information to the visual cortex, and then it's not conscious yet, then it has to come back up through to the prefrontal cortex, and need these kind of feedback loops until it comes into conscious perception. So we're learning about like what is happening to brain when something when a certain stimuli becomes conscious. At the moment we're consciously aware of it, what needs to be in place. So we're looking at for the minimal, what's sufficient, you know, necessary amount of activation for any conscious events to occur. What's interesting is that when you imagine, say, a sunset, you get the same areas of brain activation in those visual cortices as when you're actually seeing it.

There's other circuits in our brain that signal to us whether that is coming in externally or being generated internally. So we understand the difference between imagining something or not. But certain people would say it's schizophrenia. They lose that distinction. So they think, for example, the voices which are really coming internally, you know, you have that little voice in your head, but you know it's you, right? But they lose that distinction.

So they think, if somebody's talking to me, you know, it's coming from externally or, you know, hallucinations. It's really normally, you know, it's just my imagination. But when you lose that distinction, let's say you're on a hallucinogenic drug or you have schizophrenia, you think it's really out there, right? So our brain, it's all happening in our head, really. I mean, you know, and what we perceive in our head doesn't necessarily correlate to reality. You know, we're making these approximations all the time. Some of it,

you know, is better correlated than others. But it's all in our imagination, really. Yeah. So I have to get clients by stimuli coming in, but it's still a recreation of what, you know, we think is happening. I'm reminded. I'm reminded of the example, was it a railway worker who accidentally had something shoot through his brain and then I think there's another example. Yeah, there's another example of a man who killed his family and then went up on a bell tower shooting everybody and it turned out that that was because of a tumor that was affecting some area of his brain that encouraged aggressiveness. So I suppose that those are two examples and your earlier example of someone who has a

blockage that stops them from being able to see color stops them from being able to see movement that you can pick apart the individual elements of how we consciously experience things, right? Yes, yeah, yeah, and it can change your personality. I mean, so you get like Phineas Gage, you had a metal tamping iron, go through his prefrontal cortex, and he went from being a mild man or man to being a pulsing and aggressive. You have the man who killed a bunch of people when they found he had a tumor. There's another man who also, he was doing some sort of pedophilia-like behavior. They were about to put him in jail, he started getting these headaches.

And then they found this big tumor in his prefrontal cortex. And then they removed the tumor and all the symptoms went away. He was allowed to return back home. But then about a year later, the symptoms came back and sure enough, the tumor had come back. So, we're going from sort of correlation to causation, right? It's changes in your brain affecting who you are and how you behave. And now we're doing treatments like for intractables, psychiatric illness, so basically we're

other first-line treatments haven't worked. So I call deep brain stimulation where we actually implant electrodes and people's brains in some cortical areas, evolutionarily older parts of the brain, and can change the behavior. We can help treat their OCD or their depression. Wow. So we're really starting to go in and manipulate the brain itself to change behavior. That is my answer. Yeah, and we can control it with remote control, you know, outside your head. So turn it up, turn it down, you know, wow, wow.

Yeah. I think one of the one of the questions that I'm trying to articulate here is that I'm able to see what I do with my body, right? Raise my arm, lower my arm. I also have that same conscious control over the things that are in my head, but I don't have them with it. I don't have control in quite the same way as I have control over my body. If I don't want to raise my arm now, it's quite easy for me not to do that, but if I say

don't think about an elephant, really hard for the person that's listening, not to think about an elephant, does that make sense? The fact that we seem to have much more control over the way that our body moves than what our minds think. Everyone that's listening will know what it's like to have heard a song earlier in the day and just be going to bed on a night time and it's just the chorus. I like two lines from the chorus just nailing you as you're desperately trying to have some peaceful sleep. Do we have an understanding neurologically about why that's happening? Why it's so much challenging for us to control our minds and our thoughts?

Right, then it is to say control a body part. Well, I mean, okay, so first of all, different circuits in the brain. No, I'm actually writing a book now about impulse controls. You know how to control our impulses, our urges, our behaviors, right? So somebody, there are people out there who, for example, can't control body movements, people with ticks, right? Ticks disorder, where they have these uncontrollable urges to move, let's say, you know, a body part,

and they just can't seem to suppress that. So, there are times when we have an urge to do something physically, but we are able to then suppress it. The thing, the brain is always active. It's always on, right? It's always humming away in the background. And you know, it's certain points, thoughts pop up, right?

And we can either kind of suppress them or, but we can't stop them from just popping up. And so, the way the motor system works is slightly different, right? So it's not like randomly like the arm will start to move or you know, we have more, it's sort of called like conscious volition, you know, over the bat. But our thoughts are different.

And so we can't, like I often say to people with, say OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, they have these obsessive thoughts that can't stop. Now, you might not be able to stop the thoughts themselves, but you can control the behavior. So usually you have an obsession like, I'm gonna catch, like right now, there's the coronavirus, right?

That's really scary. Somebody might actually be constantly thinking about it and anxious about it. And in order to relieve the anxiety, right? That's really scary. Somebody mentioned the cause of thinking about it and anxious about it. In order to relieve the anxiety, they wash their hands. But then they're washing their hands ten times a day. So part of the treatment is, well, you can control the behavior. You can't control the thought from coming. So when you have the thought, we have to not do the behavior.

And over time, the thought will eventually start to subside because basically what you want to do is have bitching to the anxiety. So when you wash your hands you're basically getting rid of the anxiety and not and not and so the cycle keeps happening. But if you force yourself to sit with the anxiety not wash your hands eventually the thoughts will start to subside. So yeah, we had more control over our physical behavior in most cases than we do our thoughts

But we can control how we respond or react to our thoughts and we can reframe our thoughts and you know contextualize them and things It's very hard to just stop them from naturally coming up and that's a lot of meditation It's like allowing the thoughts to come up and just observe them and kind of be Separated from them are a bit distant and not having to like emotionally react to them kind of be separated from them or a bit distant and not having to like emotionally react to them. Yeah, I've had a number of discussions recently, one being with Aubrey Marcus about not fixating or suppressing when something arises, so that equanimity, right, that just allowance that it is and then it goes and then it is and it goes.

Right. And that's certainly something that I know my friends who are significantly more experienced meditate as than me sort of talk about enjoying on a day-to-day basis. And one of the things, oh, just there's one thing about the more counter-intuitively. So the more you try to suppress it, the more it's likely to come up. So like with the elephant, if I'm like, don't think about it, don't think about it. All you're interested in an elephant. So the idea is to kind of, in a way, go into it.

Be like, if you're afraid of something, like, or you're getting anxious, like, if you're about to have a paddock attack, be like, okay, let's see how anxious can I get. You know, is that all you have? Like, let's make it more. Because the more you try to not be anxious, the more anxious you're going to get. The more you try to not think of it, the more you'll think of it. So it's like, let's move into it. You know, be like, okay, let's think about the best elephant you can possibly think of and all sorts of, you know, ways to think about it. And after a while, you're just thinking,

so sick of the game elephant, you're not going to want to think of it anymore. So it's like kind of counterintuitive how you have to stop suppressing in order to get rid of something. Do you think that that's reflected when people have challenging experiences in psychedelic trips? So a lot of the time people will say if you see a big snake or some in scary don't run away from it, run toward it, is that a symbolic version of what we're talking about here? Yeah, pretty similar, exactly, because the more you try to run away, the worse it's going to get, so you should just go into it and then eventually it'll dissipate. the worst it's going to get, so you should just go into it and then eventually it'll dissipate.

Yeah. So hilarious that you've got a symbolic representation in a psychedelic state of something which is much more common and usually traveled by people in a normal day to day state, right? You've got the thought that's coming up and you're running away from it and that's actually making it worse. And now that manifest as a dragon or a snake or a guy in a hooded jacket or whatever it might be. Yeah, that's all we do with kids, like with OCD.

We kind of make a metaphor. Like we'll call it the OCD monster. And you know, like that thought is just the OCD monster coming and you know, you can't be scared of it. You just have to like confront it. And so it's kind of similar. I guess therapy with children is like dealing it. And so it's kind of similar. I guess therapy with children is like dealing with adults on a second's electric. They do say that. Actually,

there's this great work by Allison Gottmick, who's a child psychologist at Berkeley and talks about the baby's brain. Because of prefrontal cortex, it's simply developed until like you're 25, but that's normally which filters all this sort of random stimuli coming in because the brain's trying to make sense of it. But that being a baby the kind of conscious experience of a baby is kind of like a psychedelic trip. It's very similar to that. Everything is just like, you know, cool and moving. I've had kids and so I've seen it. Like they look like they're tripping. They're just like, well, they're starting on their face and they're like, ah,

so it could be very similar analogy. Yeah. Well, I think being around my business partner's kids, he's got a three year old and a six month old now. And I might not have said at first glance psychedelics, but I would have definitely said alcohol. Like he's just like a little drunk, running around. Now he's a fireman, now he's bouncing off stuff. Yeah, just been crazy.

And actually, to be fair, the last time that I went in, he just had a cookie, like quite a iced cookie. And apparently that just sent him through the roof. That was the M-DMA hitting him. That was the like child M-DMA hitting him. That's right. cookies or child M-DMA. Yeah, that's interesting. Precisely right. cookies or child M-D-M-A. Yeah, that's interesting.

Precisely what it is. So I want to get back to what we were talking about just before where we said that you can be, you can have a thought arise, which you didn't consciously come up with. So it's not as if you thought of your fear about the coronavirus, it just appears in consciousness. If it's not something that you've started yourself, where does that come from? Ah, that's yeah, and often a question is, where do thoughts come from? Where do they start? And it's really very hard to sort of find the initiation of a thought, because as I said, the brain is always in flux

and always in movement. So one sort of idea or kind of metaphor is that, and this is basically taken from research, which looks at brain activation and the rest. But basically, if you think of it like, the waves coming in on the shore, right? And they're coming in. And like, summer bigger, summer less, you know.

And at some point, like these kind of rain waves reach a sort of threshold, just by the random fluctuations in activation in the brain. And when it crosses a certain, let's say, height or threshold, that's when it suddenly comes into consciousness. So it's this constant random movement and activation, always the things fluttering around until they accidentally sum up to something a little bit greater that reaches

a threshold and then we become aware of it. So there's no one place in the brain where it happens, but you can kind of think of it a bit like, this oscillatory firing of neurons, and at some point they sink up in such a way that it brings them up into conscious awareness. And so then we have this idea of like, oh, we have control over the thoughts,

but really we're just kind of like pushing the system a little bit in one way or the other. It's like a system that's already active and then we have some control about where it goes, but often it's just doing much of it on its own. You know, sometimes we kind of take steer or you know, control of it a little bit, but then it goes off on its own again.

That was precisely my next question, how much control over our thoughts do we have? Yeah. It's a hard one. I'm asking all the big questions today, Heather. I'm really sorry. I know you're going to push me this hard. No. You know, I'm on two minds on this because a lot of the research and the things that I'm interested in are like related to free will, right? And, you know, how much control do we really have? According to neuroscience, you know, basically the brain decides first and we become consciously aware of that after the fact, right?

We can see a build up of brain activation. This goes all the way back to classic experiments by Benjamin Limit in the 1980s where, you know, he said, like press this button whenever you get the urge and then measure brain activation. And then you can see a build up of brain activation about 350 milliseconds before the person was even consciously aware of their intention to move. Now with more modern neuroscience, we can see it up to 10 seconds before a person is even consciously aware. For example, whether they're going to go left or right,

they're going to make a decision on their own. So I often say the brain, we don't have free will, but maybe our unconscious does. The brain is deciding, but you are your brain. And we're just the last to know about it. So in that sense, I don't think we have a huge amount of control. However, we have evolved the capacity to have self-control.

So this prefrontal cortex, like the brake system in the brain. So we have this like urge to do something. And then maybe we have some forth thought, like maybe that's not the best thing, you know, the do right now, you know, like, I don't know, I want to like get naked in the middle of the street, like maybe not a good idea, right? So then that's what I had ever had that urge, but you know other people. Are you among friends here? It's fine. I can let it all out. Private just this will go beyond our conversation. Um, so, but then you know, you have this, okay, maybe I shouldn't do that and you'll suppress it, but some people, whether they have a brain lesion in the prefront of cortex

or under activation or other kinds of psychiatric illness where they can't control that. So, so I do think that we have evolved the capacity to have self control, even if we don't the cortex or underactivation or other kinds of psychiatric illness where they can't control that. So I do think that we have evolved the capacity to have self-control, even if we don't have free will in the classic philosophical sense in that, if everything was happening exactly the same way in your brain, you could have done otherwise, which would mean there's a sort of a ghost in the machine controlling things. No, I think the machine has controlling things, but the machine has evolved the capacity to have a bit of control over itself. So we do have some control in limits. And like also for people in therapy,

you know, let's say you're really anxious kind of personality type. With therapy, I can get you to be a little bit less anxious, but you're never going to be the most relaxed person in the room. It's just, you know, so there's movement within certain biological constraints. That's so interesting. I've been Luke, who is a friend that will be listening. I sent him Sam Harris talking about free will on Joe Rogan. I sent him this probably about a year ago from now. And it sent him into a two-week spiral of of depression because he thought that life was essentially meaningless. And I've never felt so bad.

I was thinking about it last night. I messaged him today saying, Hey man, how are you doing? Like you in work tonight? Turns out he isn't. And I was thinking about it last night. And I was like, I sent someone one video. It's 40 minutes. Somehow it's really shoved the red pill down everyone's

throw about his view on free will. And it spiraled him into two weeks of depression. Man, I am so fucking sorry. It's a powerful man. You got a powerful two there. What tool when you're dealing with people's thoughts and emotions? I mean, it's like planting the seed. And you know, the studies show that when you tell people they don't have free will, like when you tell them about these neuroscience studies, and then you test them after, they're more likely that behave on ethically and to cheat on an exam.

So the illusion of free will is actually very adaptive. We've evolved, to have this very strong sense of our control over our own agency for a reason because it helps us interact with social environments. If we think we have control over our actions and we are responsible for actions and we're going to behave and we are socially appropriate, if you think, well, it doesn't matter. Anyway, my brain's deciding, I can just kill this person and say, my brain made me do it, right? So the strong illusion of free will, it evolved for, it has a purpose.

And when you break it, it can affect people, although, listen, this philosopher once said this to me, I think it was John Surrell, who's this well-known philosopher, even if I tell you don't have free will, is it really going to change any of your behavior? It's not because fundamentally, the illusion is still existing. If I say, when you see something, you're not really seeing. It's just these neurons firing in the visual cortex or whatever, you're still getting the perception of seeing the thing.

So it doesn't change. So the illusion is still there. Even if I tell you about it, you get a momentarily, there's a crack in your illusion, right? You like break the, what is it? Third wall, the fourth wall. Yeah. The fourth, fourth wall. But then you go right back, you know, that's where you were before. So it doesn't last very long. I have, I've never heard that before. I've never heard that the subjective experience of having free will is fitness enhancing and it totally makes sense.

You just blow it out of you, just completely blow my mind with that. Great, that was one of my goals for this interview. Wow, that's so cool. You are totally right as well. I mean, you know, perfect example, it's a case in point. Like I told my friend, go and have a look into this free will thing. He did, and then he went down the rabbit hole

of like every free will video on YouTube that he could find, went through the full works, went through, and then has just come out as this complete, is it determinism? Is that the particular viewpoints? So now he's just completely subscribed to that. But you were right, he was like, he didn't want to go to the gym, he's like, what's the point? And he go into the gym, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, actually, my husband does, he's a rapper, and he wraps about science, and he's doing a rap on it

about free will and the illusion of free will. And he kind of argues a way around it. Like there's like something called compatible determinism. And I won't even try to describe it, because it's all philosophical. But it's sort of a way to kind of get us out of it a little bit. Like even though everything's sort of determined from the big bang on, like there's some, you know,

there's some indeterminacy there. It's not having to do with the, with the, with the, also, let me just take this away for now. A lot of people want to talk about the, what is it called? I'm like, oh, God. Quantum states. Quantum states, exactly. I couldn't leave it.

And because there's indeterm determinacy at the quantum level, whatever, like none of that scales up to like whether or not on fires or not. Yeah, so to interject there, I had Professor Sean Carolan, recently, who is. Okay, I know Sean. Yeah. So I had him on and he said exactly the same as that

that you can talk about what's happening at the quantum level. And it, in theory, is how everything acts, but it's happening at the quantum level and it in theory is how everything acts but it's not at all how our conscious experience of the world exists and this the quantum uncertainty principle that we've got just it's not enough to it doesn't create the special stuff to allow to allow things to change in that way which is what I think you're getting in. Yeah it doesn't scale up So for instance, because we're living at the macro level of physics, right? Classical physics, not quantum physics.

And so if we were going, if we were, basically it's an emergent property. So you have these things that are happening at the quantum level, but they don't scale up. So if we were living by the rules of quantum physics, we could disappear at any moment, like switch states, right? Like all of a sudden I'm here and then I'm not here, right? So that doesn't happen.

So just because there's these quantum effects happening at that level, doesn't scale up to the emergent properties of like what's happening at the classical physics level and like whether or not it fires or not. So it's just not a way to like some people want to try to argue free will into that somehow, but it just doesn't work I think that it's the people that are listening that think that they're talking about what what on earth are you talking about? Like I've got free will I can choose whether I put my right hand to the table or my left hand to the table I have free will all the time I can choose to think of an elephant I can choose to think of the color red or

a memory or a smell or whatever it might be I Do I want to suggest. Right, I'm going to link the particular episode. The video of Sam Harris talking to Joe Rogan about free while I'm going to link it in the show notes, but I'm warning you that if you decide to watch it, I'm not responsible for you going into a two week depression spiral. And also Luke, I'm really sorry for telling thousands of people about the fact that I made you sad for a couple of weeks, man. We can laugh it off soon. Yeah. When it's just, this is funny on so many levels.

I did. So what I thought, like, you have done like a trigger one warning. That's it. Yeah. Like, do you, are you sure you want to open this link? Are you really sure that you want to open this link? Taking the red pill on that. Why don't you take the red pill or not?

Yeah, that's great. Like warning. Yeah. You might be totally crushed. But the good news is it won't last long. Like you'll go right back. It's such a strong illusion that you can't get around it. And like, that's what John's going to say to me.

He's like, even if you know free will as an illusion, is it really going to change how you behave? And fundamentally, it's not. So the knowledge comes in and then it goes right back out again. You have a moment of like, wow, that's crazy. But then, you know what, it really doesn't feel that way. It's like, right? You just gotta get around.

I've got stuff to do. I can't be thinking about the fact that I don't choose whether or not I do this stuff. I just need to go do it. Exactly. The example is like, if you're at a restaurant and like, what do you want to order? You just sit there like, I don't know.

There's no free will. I can't, you know, like ultimately at some point, the brain just does what it does and it's a side. It's also like time people like their sense of self, like self is an illusion. Like it's a construct of the brain. There is no self. Like it's basically like your brain when you were three is different than what your brain is now, but you still have this continuity. Like, oh, that was me, right?

That person at whatever five was me. But really, your sense of self is a construct, it's another perception in the brain that creates, created by your memories and things, like people who lose their memories, lose their sense of self, they don't even know who they are anymore, right? And there's all different sorts of disorders

where people have changes in their sense of self. So it's just another process of the brain. That's also an illusion. But again, it's so strong that we can't get away from it. There are moments like on psychedelics where you lose your sense of self and you feel this connectedness and it's a very powerful, very positive emotion.

Because a lot of our sense of self has to do with self-consciousness and worrying what other people are thinking and all of that. Whereas if you can let go of that, it can be very therapeutic. But. What does a prolonged sense of self look like in the brain? Is that particular neurons wide together?

Is that kind of what it actually manifests as? It's a particular root of neurons that tend to wide together and fight together? No, I wouldn't say that we found in the brain like a particular, you know, pathway or, you know, that's where the self is instantiated. There are a couple of key areas in the brain where we think our sense of self and one has to do with our body awareness, like our sense of, because it's our sense of self and also being a part of this body, right?

And those are interrelated. So there's certain like key sort of hot spots in the brain where that helps us form sense of self and also being a part of this body, right? And those are interrelated. So there's certain like key sort of hotspots in the brain where that help us form our sense of self. There's no kind of one place or one pathway. It's a lot of interconnected pathways that give us our sense of self. There's a very famous British comedy show.

And in it, one of the guys is talking about the fact he's had this broom for 20 years. I've had this broom for 20 years, and it's a 20 years. I can't believe it. How have you managed to keep it for so long? He says, yeah, yeah. Well, it's had 14 new handles and 13 new heads, but I've had this broom for the last 20 years.

And that always makes me think about the way that our body is refreshed, right? I think is it seven years within the space of seven years, every cell in our body is going to have changed. So it will have been, it'll have died and been replaced and then come back. And yet we are the same, but unlike the, unlike the broom for which that was definitely not the case, we are the same person. Right. But are we?

Well, are we? I mean, I was, I mean, I'm asking you Heather, you are the person that is here to tell us whether or not I'm the same person I was seven years ago. Yeah, there are parts of you that are there are parts of you that that is the same person, but much of you is different. And so, you know, in terms of neuroplasticity, in terms of the way your brain is changing, there are certain things that stay fundamental and stable, but who you are is really developing and evolving throughout your entire life until your very last day. Like I've said, as I said, it's in my TED talk as well, like you're working progress until your very last breath.

You're always changing, you're always evolving, you're always redefining yourself and trying to figure out your identity. You know, like, it's psychology, it's like one of the different stages of development of your identity, but there's never really a point where it's like, okay, that's it, like we're done. You know, it's never, okay, it's like evolution. We're all evolving as a species and we're still evolving, right? We haven't just stopped evolving.

Like maybe in, you know, a thousand years, we're going to. We haven't just stopped evolving. Like maybe in a thousand years, we're going to be a slightly different species or two thousand or ten thousand, however slow it's going, but we're still evolving. And that's just like within our own individual lives, we're still changing. You know, we meet again on this podcast in 20 years, which I'm sure you'll still be doing it in 20 years from now. We will, you know, you'll be a bit of a different kind of a person. You'll have had different experiences, your brain will have changed. So again, you'll have a perception of continuity, but you, but how much are you really the same? I mean, is it open-ended question?

It really is because, you know, especially a lot of people that go through big life changes and you think, well, the person that I am now versus the person that I was seven years ago is so different that the only thing we both have in common is that we've both been in exactly the same spatial location between then and now, and we have memories from before that point. And that's it. That's all that you share with this person that used to be you. Basically, it's a collection of memories, you know. It's these memories, it's this memory storage. I mean, you should have seen me as a teenager.

I mean, I have no idea who that person was. But, you know, I think it's still me because that's a memory set that I've carried with me. You know? But it could apply to me easily if just been someone else, right? It could have been someone else, but it wasn't. It was you. Right. And it's really just

because it's okay, this physical package of, you know, cells that are collection of things that have, as you said, have changed over that time period. Anyway, they're not even the same cells. So it's just, it's just basically an instantiation of information that's been carried over in this kind of in our hippocampus, which is a memory section of the brain, that like, or I don't know if it's a CPU, I'm pretty bad at computer analogies as well. I have no idea, the RAM, I don't know, anyway. I get you. It makes sense though, and I'm going to guess

that this will be fitness enhancing as well. To have this continual sense of self that allows you to kind of compound wisdom and learning over time, I remember I once did something that maybe wasn't so traumatic that it goes into the total change your perspective thing, but I once put my hand in the fire and the fire burned me. I don't want to do that again, etc, etc. Is that right? Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all I think part, I mean, some theories, even about consciousness, say it involved because we evolve memory and working memory. So basically, you know, keeping things online, there's a party of brain called the Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex, which is kind of like the working online memory, like when you are, like remembering a phone number and you're saying it over and over again, so I keep it in that space. And that when we had to sort of develop these recursive loops to keep things online and it

was adaptive, that is sort of what helped bring us into sort of these conscious states as well, because you had a lot of this kind of recurring, like information, I mean, it's one theory of how consciousness develops. But to be able to remember and not do the same sort of bad behavior or learn where the tiger is hiding and so, you know, not to go there

or where you got the good kill. That's all adaptive and then part of it is it could just be as a consequence we started picking up memories about ourselves right so not just about what's happening in the environment but maybe internal states that we've had previously you know oh I remember you know how that person made me feel maybe I don't want to interact with that person anymore, you know, but I think it's memories certainly an adaptation that helped us to survive and then came theory of mind, right? Being able to predict how you might behave or how you were thinking would give me an advantage, right? And so it's just another, you know, gift evolution has given us.

I had a William von Hippel on, do you know who William is? No, I don't know. Bill von Hippel. I love that name though. Oh, yeah, he's an absolute boss. He's such a boss. So his book talks about Australopithecus and the move to from apes in trees to upright animals on planes.

And he talks about the throwing the development of the throwing out. And he talks about theory of mind. And he talks about the fact that he, there's two, two examples that he gives the first one is the first time that his son lied about something. And his wife was really upset that his son had lied and was like, no, like Joshua, you're not supposed to lie, and secretly Bill was like, kind of, guess, behind the scenes because his sonnets show and develop theory of mind for the first time.

But the other thing that he talked about is this predicted requirement for tools in the future. So there's good examples that our ancestors didn't have this theory of mind because they weren't able to predict required needs. Let's say that they made a tool, used the tool for a particular purpose, then they would throw it down. But as we began to evolve and develop, these tools started to cluster together as opposed to just being strewn around and what that suggested was

you made a tool, you used it and then you thought ah in the future I'm going to need this tool, I'd better take it with me. And I thought that that was so interesting to have that happening. The other, you know what's also interesting is basically it's because can you still hear me one of my things, but you're okay. We humans have developed, we have the largest prefrontal cortex compared to the rest of the brain than any other animal. And that gives us our ability to have foresight to think into the future. And so we can think further into the future

than any other animal, which gives us a lot of advantages, but also disadvantages because we're the one species that can experience anxiety, which is different than fear. So fear is like, you know, in the immediate situation, you're afraid, right, fight or flight. Anxiety is the anticipation of a future threat or fear or, right? And so that, that rumination, that anxiety, that the ability to think ahead, to think about our own demise my, right?

To contemplate our own death. Other animals are not really sitting there doing that. They're living in the moment. They're surviving. But we get this unique ability to have anxiety about the future. But also, make these predictions, like, hey, maybe I'll need that tool in the future. I mean, other animals, they might do it instinctively. I mean, a bird who builds a nest, I mean, they are planning for the future, right?

A squirrel who's stockpiles, you know, nuts is thinking about the future. But, you know, I don't know how abstract that is, you know. I just don't know if that's an adaptive behavior that they kind of do instinctively. Or they really thinking about like, man, you know, it might be a cold winter, I bet. Yeah, it's how conscious how conscious is that or how much is it just North Pole versus South Pole and those two things clicking together. I think, you know, one of the things that I often think about with relation to my own brain is I've got this memory from ages ago when I was around an old girlfriend and I remember looking at her dog and saying, I wish that I was daisy. It would be so much

easier and simpler if I was daisy. And I was thinking, that's actually really profound to say that. It's actually really interesting to say, well, I would lose so much of the depth of the anxiety, of the depression, of the rumination, of all this sort of stuff. But I would also lose the ability to be able to think abstractly, to be able to contemplate the fact that I am here thinking these thoughts. And I just thought, I mean, she didn't realize it at the time, and I've never told her, but, you know, fat play. never told it, but yeah, it's that like. Well, you know, it's that ignorance is bliss. You know, sometimes I'd look at, you know, like babies are really young kids and they're

just fully in the moment, right? They're prefrontal fur sixes and fully developed. I mean, they're kind of like a cat. I was just talking about this last night with a friend like, they could play peekaboo like all night long. I mean, it's an amazing and never bored. It's always like a surprise, you know? So or like a cat, you know, chasing a light like it's just constantly novel

And so that's kind of fun, right? And dogs don't feel guilt, you know, these kinds of or shame. I mean, they might act a little bit like we might Anthropomorphize and think they are, but these very more complex emotions. And so, you know, I often wish sometimes I was just like, just as a human, like less, you know, I'm always thinking about these big questions, whatever, like, can I just stop and just, you know, chill out and I don't know, watch the Kardashians or something and just be okay with that, but I can't seem to, yeah, so I think, you know, there's pluses and minuses, right? You can live at the moment, but I think that's what meditation does is it kind of helps you to just be purely in the moment and try to release all the rumination and the anxiety and the thoughts about the future of the past and just be present and be kind of like a dog

is really really want to go with that. To me, that sounds like a wonderful way for me to live the rest of my life. If I could just be as simple as a dog that would be beautiful, but I also appreciate what you mean. Someone asked, I went to go see Jordan Peterson lecture in Manchester last year, not two years ago, sorry. And someone asked a question, which was essentially the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. That was broadly what the question was interpreted as. And it was the same as you is ignorance bliss. Like, can I scale back the depth of my consciousness and think about thinking less and think about things less? And Jordan gave it a very typically sort of symbolic answer. But what he said was, once you've opened that Pandora's box,

there's no real closing it. Once you've realized the depth that your mind can go to, there's nothing that you can do to stop it. And he says, the only choice really is to go deeper, not to go back because there is no retreat. So he says, take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic and girdle the world around it. I mean, it was real grand and metaphysics, like the way that classic John Peterson, but I actually really liked that.

I thought, you know, when we're talking about the crisis of overthinking, the crisis of worry and concern and anxiety, and what did you say right at the beginning when we were talking about something you have a fear over? It's like I have my worry about this particular thing. It's like, right, okay, I'm going to lean into it. I'm going to completely immerse myself in whatever this thing is and break it apart into its component pieces. What are the actual fundamental parts that this is constructed of? And that's what I'm going to do. I think there's I don't know there's something there. I feel like there's something there. Yeah, no, I like that leaning to it. And the other thing I'll say we just about that is that you know if I don't know where you believe so or whatever, but this is you know, the one chance we get of like being conscious, like sandwiched between two attorneys of nothingness, right? Like let's try to get as much as we can get out of this experience.

All right, you know, we have this limited, this little piece of matter, this brain that limits our ability to sort of understand the world around us. Like we're seeing it all through this one organ. But whatever it allows us to see your think or contemplate, like I want experience as much of it as I can, you know, with the good and the bad, right? The further the greater depth of experience I can have, I mean if this is my one and only chance to just be conscious

and experience things, then I want like the fullest gamut of it all. So I choose, you know, non-ignorance and with whatever that may come with. Because that's the fullness of life. That's really beautiful. Well, a wonderful way to finish. Thank you so much. When's your book going to be done? Oh, that's a good question. So I'm writing it now and it's due next year. So I'm hoping optimistically it's going to be the end of next year. The working title is the fine art of losing control.

That's cool. I like that. Yeah. It's about sort of impulse control. When to reinvent it, how to reinvent it in. Is there any control really? And then when to let it go and how letting go in a controlled way can counterintuitively allow you to gain more control. That's cool. I look forward to it. Thank you. Awesome. People want to hassle you online. People want to find you where should they go? HeatherBerlin.com. And I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Heather underscore Berlin.

Lovely. Links will be in the show notes below. As always, if you've enjoyed it, like share, subscribe. You know what to do. Any questions, comments or feedback. Just leave them in the show notes below. As always, if you've enjoyed it, like share, subscribe, you know what to do. Any questions, comments or feedback, just leave them in the comments on YouTube and I'll send them over to Heather and she can come in that pop-by and say hi or whatever it might be. But Heather, it's been awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'll fix.