On with Kara Swisher - Music, Consciousness and the Power of Connection

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

How should we understand the relationship among sound, consciousness and a healthy mind? It has to do with the power of connection, not just to other people but the world around us. In this episode of the Hacking Longevity series, Kara talks to Dr. AZA Allsop, an artist and psychiatrist who runs a lab at Yale that studies how music and sound can affect mental well-being and the power of connections we feel with other people.  Later, she talks to science journalist Michael Pollan, author of A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. He goes deep on what makes the brain work, and he has some very interesting thoughts on whether machines could become sentient. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's on. Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. One of the simplest things someone can do to live longer and be healthier is to have connections with other people. This is clear, not just with chatbots, but actual human beings. This is something we talked about a lot in the series I did for CNN. Kara Swisher wants to live forever. And it was a single most important thing people can do, which is interactions with people, with actual people.

and the deleterious effects of things like chatbots, which are frictionless and sycophantic, they are not good for your health, no matter what people tell you. It is not the way to solve loneliness in any way, unless done in conjunction, being with more human beings, which are the most important thing for everyone's health. The idea of connection has come up again and again in my reporting, as I said, about longevity and aging, and it's the focus of this episode of Hacking Longevity series here on the podcast. Coming up later, we'll talk to one of my favorite science writers, Michael Pollan, about the mysteries of consciousness. He's been writing about this for a long time. We'll discuss what he learned about finding connection, not just to others, but to the much wider world.

When he sat out to understand what it even means to be conscious, it's actually a big topic. But we'll start with the connective power of music and its role in longevity. Music and sound, really. The science here is super interesting. I'm excited to talk about it with AZA-A Alsop. He's an artist and psychiatrist who runs a lab at Yale University that studies how sound affects the body and mind. It's something we also did in the series of Scott and I went to a sound bath. It's really interesting. And I'd like to know more about the science behind it, so we're talking to him. He's an MD, has a PhD in neuroscience, and also teaches meditation, yoga, and music.

So he knows the science as well as the art, and that's critically important. You like this conversation, so stick around. Support for this show comes from Kohler Health. The body sends you answers to important questions every day. How's your digestion? Are you drinking enough water, but most of us don't know how to interpret them. For over 150 years, Kohler has redefined innovation and craftsmanship in the bathroom. Now, Kohler Health is reimagining its role in personal health with Dakota. Dakota is an attachment that fits discreetly on your toilet.

Learn more at Kohlerhealth.com and use the code Kara One Year for a free and annual app membership when you purchase Dakota. AZA, thank you for coming on on. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with you. This is a lot about health and longevity and things like that, but I wanted to talk to a lot of various people, not just doctors and scientists and experts in that field, but others. And you're a very musical person. I know you play several instruments. You sing. Talk to me about how music fits into your life, maybe even an example of how it fit into

your life today, if one comes to mind. Yeah, I mean, music is central to my life. As an artist, it's how I find my self-expression, my creative identity. It's also how I create experiences for people to come together. As a scientist, I view it as a really important way of figuring out how the brain actually works, the principles, and how we can leverage that for health. And then as a clinician, I see its role as being central to how we can deliver treatments to people, particularly in collective environments. So when I talk about the arts and when I talk about music, I talk about it as my own creative practice,

and identity formation, but I also talk about it as a powerful tool for health and the science that we do. So talk a little bit about that. You know, there's a long time sound longevity connection. And in my series, I did get into a sound pod. And the science is still not there, although there's lots of studies. And of course, historically, there's been a lot of different ideas of how music fits in with people. You know, everyone has that experience of connecting with a powerful piece of music or the experience of having a grandmother, a grandfather, a parent who is in dementia and playing a certain music activates and use sort of cognitive and emotional landscape for them that's not activated.

And so I think what we're finding out is that music is actually one of the most powerful stimulators of the brain in terms of network activity across many different parts of the brain and it also directly stimulates the autonomic nervous system. And this is the part of the brain. Explain for people what that is. Yeah. Yeah. So the autonomic nervous system is the part of the brain that controls a lot of the functions that we don't have to think about, like breathing or your heart beating or your digestive system. And it's really important in terms of the state that our body is in. So people have heard about fight or flight or rest and digest different states the body is in to deal with challenges. And what we've seen is music can activate the system in a way that promotes restoration and healing, not just at the molecular level, but also at the emotional level, at the psychological level. So what we do in my lab and many of our collaborators do is to ask how can we use the tools from neuroscience and the tools from psychiatry to really understand how this works and then use that to not only have people be able to treat symptoms, but to have them live a healthier life.

So this looks like looking at very specific features of music, particularly in group settings, recording things like EKG and EEG and asking how does the brain actually function and change when individuals are engaged with music so that we can get to the level of. of science that allows us to become like a mainstream way that we think about holistic health. Exactly. So talk a little bit about some of the experiments you're doing. But why don't you describe first a bit more what's happening in a person's body and brain when they're listening to certain types of sounds or music? It can modulate heart rate. That's a big part of it. But what else is happening physiologically for people to understand? Rather than I just happen to like this and I feel good. So an example of an experiment that we've done is that, you know, everyone has the experience of being at a concert or being at a show and that feeling of connection

you get with other people who love this artist or is familiar with this music compared to when you listen to it by yourself in a room. We wanted to get at what's actually happening in the brain that leads to this feeling of connection with music. And so we did an experiment, collaboration with a great colleague Joy Hirsch, where we brought people into the lab and we hooked them up to a machine called a functional near-infrared spectroscopy machine. It allows us to read brain activity from both people as they're interacting. And so we had some trials where they could see each other and interact, no talking, just visual inspection of each other.

Then we had other trials where it was opaque, so they couldn't see each other. Then we were playing specific features of music, looking at chord progressions as one. And then we had a control condition where we took all the frequencies and we mixed them up so that there was no longer any chord progression. And what we found is when people are interacting and we play this chord progression, we're actually able to activate a very specific network in the brain. that involves the part of the brain that is feeling. So how you feel sensations when someone touches you

or feeling your clothes on your back, this part of the brain is actually more active when people are interacting and you play the specific chord progression. And the increase in activity in this region, as well as another region of the brain called the angular gyrus, was increased as people felt more connected. And so for the first time, we have a mechanism for how a specific feature of music, chord progressions,

activates a very particular network in the brain when people are interacting to help them to actually feel more connected. From a health point of view, when that happens, because there's all manner of things happen then, cortisol, all kinds of stuff, right? Because I even did, even though it was cringe for Carolewishar, a sober rave, and everyone looked very happy. But it was, I just, I'm really an awkward person, so that's the way it goes. But they were having a great time.

Talk about what happens socially versus alone, for example, Because you can have very meaningful interactions with music by yourself. I often do, like when I work out or when I'm walking or whatever. So one of the things we're discovering now is not only are we seeing unique networks in the brain being activated during social context that aren't activated when you're not, but certain elements of the same part of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, are really changing when people are together. And one of the things that we're discovering is this idea of autonomic synchrony, which is saying that my autonomic nervous system and your autonomic, nervous system can sync up with each other and start firing in the same way when we're in contact with each other and we're interacting. And something like music actually facilitates this

process and leads to more synchrony. Breathing. Exactly. Exactly. And not just the heartbeat, but even the intervals in between the heartbeat. So more parasympathetic drive or the part that helps us to rest and digest, that part of the autonomic nervous system for both of us is going to start behaving more and more similarly. And so there's this idea of like when you look at a mosh or when you look at people at a rave and they're all being entrained by the music and the same frequency, their actual bodies and nervous systems also become synchronized and that we think can have really incredible effects on health and wellness and that feeling of connection to others. So how is it that music primes and person be in a more

meditative state and what's the actual mechanism for people to understand it? So we're still discovering the details of the mechanism and it's likely not just one mechanism is what we're seeing because music is acting at all these different areas of our physiology. But, you know, what we've seen is when you passively listen to music, the music is still getting into the brain and it's still affecting you. For instance, you might have had the experience of being in a room where music is playing in the background and you find yourself tapping your feet or kind of nodding along, even though you weren't really paying attention to it. You're not listening to it. Yeah, because it can directly just get into sort of the cerebellum and these

parts of the brain. Well, what we're finding is when we bring a mindful, to music listening, so bringing focused attention to the sound or focused attention to my breath or even open awareness of sound or open awareness of sensation. That actually puts the brain in a different state that now activates new parts of the brain with the same musical input. And again, going back to the heart and how the heart functions is like one of the more critical readouts of the autonomic nervous system. We see that when you have music with mindfulness, you can have different effects on heart rate variability and how. how the autonomic nervous system is functioning compared to just music alone or just mindfulness alone. And what's activating them together,

the mindfulness and music? So we see frontal and temporal parts of the brain becoming more activated. These are involved in things like prediction, memory, emotional control. We also see that certain metrics in heart vaporability, particularly this idea of the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps the body to rest,

that metric becomes higher when people are engaged in music mindfulness compared to just being with other people or just listening to music alone. So it seems like particularly engagement of the parasympathetic nervous system is increased when you have certain kinds of music, not all kinds of music,

but music that has certain features that can support that mindfulness activity. Right. So as you study more, what applications of it can you imagine? There's probably all sorts of interactions or music would be beneficial for people, as you know,

noted or lonely or socially anxious. So you can imagine individuals who have long-term anxiety and depression. These sorts of engagements can be ways of managing those symptoms and keeping them at baseline without having to take necessarily a pharmaceutical agent. We've seen in individuals with dementia and their caregivers, this can improve quality of life and lead to reduce state anxiety and reduce distress. We've done some experiments to see enhancements in working memory after listening to certain kinds of music.

And there are also people who hear voices that use music to help reduce the impact of those. You call it autobiographically significant music, right? Especially with people with dementia. Yeah. So what we're finding is that music that has autobiographical salience is able to really engage the nervous system in a way. And so we can activate certain memories and certain core parts of our psyche that aren't able to be accessed without music. and this can have particular importance later in life, especially when individuals have conditions like dementia. Does that last? I mean, am I going to be in a chair staring and suddenly someone will put on Frozen?

And that'll be that because my kids listen to it 900 times a minute. Is that how it works? Or does it last? Or is it just that momentary remembrance, I guess? That's a great question. So in most of the cases, it seems to be largely confined to the context in which they're listening to the music. So even after you take off the music, sometimes people will still be more verbal and still more expressive for some period of time. But usually without the music, you know, they sort of go back to sort of a more space where they aren't able to recall those same memories and have more limited, you know, cognitive and emotional space. And so understanding like how do we improve on the ability of something like music to activate these memories over a longer term is part of the research that we're really interested in. Through understanding the mechanism of how autobiographical music actually affects brain activity, we can then get at your question and ask,

how can we make this something that even lasts after the music has gone away? Could you unpack a little more of the science here when you study these things? How do you wire people up? What are you measuring and how are you showing the connections? Yeah, so we use a few different tools to measure different aspects of the physiology. So one of those tools is electroencephalography, it's EEG, where we can measure, specific frequencies and brain waves from the central nervous system largely. We also use functional near-infrared spectroscopy. It's another neuroimaging technique that allows us to look at brain activity

and where in the brain certain signals are coming from. Then we use electrocardiography. So looking at EKG, this tells us about the heart rate, heart signal, how it's changing. We follow respiratory rate, how their breathing is changing, and then psychometrics. How is a person feeling in a given moment? How are they feeling before, how are they feeling after. Is there any measurements that are more important? Is it heart rate or seeing cortisol calmness? Yeah, yeah. Are there musics that really don't work that are like bad, besides bad music?

Like a very simple rule, for instance, music with higher tempo, like over 140 beats per minute or 160 beats per minute. Give an example. Like what song? Like a well-known song. So like maybe YMCA or We Our Family is like a higher beat song would not be good for trying to relax or do focused attention, but it would be good for a more energetic or motivation-activated form of activity. A lot of the research has been around classical music, and that seems to be

really good for relaxation, at least some kinds of classical music, for some cognitive ability. We've done work with jazz and hip-hop to show that some of that music can be also really relaxing and therapeutic. I find hip-hop. My older sons love hip-hop, so I listen to it. I mean, I hear it a lot, But I find it to be very meditative. I don't know why. It affects me in that way. I mean, oftentimes, for instance, in hip-hop, you have instrumentals are very repetitive. They loop through the same core changes over and over again.

So, you know, all of those kinds of features we see in some meditative music. And so part of what we ask is, what are the important features? How can they be spread across different genres? And then, yeah, might there be certain genres are specifically, you know, good for certain outcomes? Right now it seems like it's less about maybe the same. specific genre and more about how specific features are maybe used in different proportions in different genres. Right. So you also study psychedelics. How does that fit in here? Yeah, I mean, I think psychedelics are a part of the transformation of our healthcare system, particularly in psychiatry.

And they work, you know, different to many of the models that we've had traditionally in psychiatry. These are medicines. Exactly. These are medicines that act on the serotonin to a receptor. and seem to have really tremendous effects on not only our physiology and plasticity in the brain, but on psychological outcomes like PTSD, depression, end-of-life anxiety. And so there's a huge, I think, opportunity for psychedelics to inform how we treat a number of different new psychiatric conditions, but also to think about how we age, how we expand the capacity for our lives during aging. And there's certainly a role for music and the arts within the context. of psychedelic medics and both within dosing, but also preparation and integration.

Obviously, there's a lot of recreational use of, say, ketamine and things like that, which I think is a little more, it's sort of like recreational use of peptides. You're sort of like, why don't you go to a doctor? Because a lot of these things could be quite dangerous, if badly administered. For this show, I took ketamine, and there was a very big focus on music that was playing at the time. It had to be a specific kind of music when I was in a medical setting, which was interesting. I did not like it, but that was a different reason.

I also wasn't going in with a problem with trauma or anything like that. But I found it alone, not lonely, but alone. And I didn't like being alone. I felt very alone. I could see why if certain people were facing certain things, it could help a lot. But where is that now? Because it goes in and out of popularity. Obviously, a lot of people are trying to push it hard.

A lot of tech people are. In this, I do not disagree with them in some things. But talk about where it has to go because, you know, obviously the Nix administration did a job just demonizing all of this stuff. When there was some very promising studies happening back then that were shut down, where are we now in that as you study this? Is there more money for it? Is there still more nervousness around it, whether it's LSD or ketamine or mushrooms or whatever? Yeah, I think it's both and. You know, I think I'm in a community in which this is much more central to the conversation.

that we're having and how we're thinking about research, how we think about transformation of our health care system, transformation of our culture. But more generally speaking, I think there's still a lot of fear and bias. And rightfully so, I think there are lots of things that happened in the 50s and 60s and 70s with the use of psychedelics, both knowingly and unknowingly, that, you know, generated a lot of anxiety and fear about how they could cause harm. But I think it's also clear that they have tremendous potential to heal. And a lot of the day, that's been being generated from the biomedical system has been really at the forefront of changing public opinion. A lot of the work with veterans and the tremendous experiences that they've been having with PTSD and their symptoms and management.

Yeah. And trauma survivors have really started to, I think, shift a lot of the public discourse around the potential for psychedelics. Right, absolutely. Is there any one of them that you think in doing these studies the most promising from your perspective? MDMA and psilocybin are sort of the compound. Although MDMA is not classically considered as psychedelic, it's often thought of that same conversation. And both of them, I think, have the most evidence kind of behind them within a clinical sort of biomedical context. But there's also a lot of, I think, interest in LSD, Ibegain, DMT, 5MEO, DMT. I think psilocybin and

MDMA are the ones that sort of have the most clinical evidence behind them currently. beyond recreational use in terms of in the lab and so that's going to continue those are going to continue well i think that's another fear right is that as these become more um invoked clinically and endorsed more from a research and clinical perspective is that it opens up then a more permissive environment for recreational use where their harm and the risk is a lot higher than in a clinical setting well it's already that that that ship has sailed i think on lots of levels i used to live near berkeley it's sailed So getting back to sound of music, when you look at the American medical system, music is not a part of it. Aside from your lab, I don't think I've ever heard music except bad elevator music at a doctor's office. But where does it fit in and where should it be fitting in?

I think music has often just been seen as art as entertainment. Now, when we look back in history, even in the early Greeks, Hippocrates and Pythagoras, they were already thinking about music as a way of shifting nervous system activity and as a early form of medicine. When we look at traditional healing systems across the globe, music is an integral part of it. But in our westernization, art and entertainment became something separate from science and healing. In our education systems, it's very scattered. There's no core curriculum that's taught widely around medical schools.

It's certainly not something that I learned about in medical school or residency. So I think that lack of training also, when physicians start to practice, they don't have any models. They don't really know what the evidence is for different kinds of musical engagements. And so a lot of what the work we're doing with our colleagues is to ask how do we take the evidence that's there and begin to teach medical students, teach residents the evidence and the model so that when they are practicing clinicians, they understand how to integrate these things. And as there's more and more clinical trials and more and more evidence, I think it will have to happen. to become more and more mainstream. And there's a huge now arts and health movement to support that. So one of the things the series is examining is what stands in the way of getting better science to more people rather than a small select group of people.

And I can't imagine there's a CMS billing code for playing harmonious chord progressions. What would it take to make this a bigger part of the system? Yeah. So I think you touched on one of the things right there of front, which is like how does this fit into our payer system? how are physicians reimbursed? Because that's all that matters, you know, how we get paid. But anyway, that is all. It's important. I have doctor relatives.

This is their number one complaint is the CMS billing system. Yeah. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, hospitals are set up as businesses for most of them. And so there's a bottom line. There are these things that have to be, you know, part of the consideration. So I think that's part of it is payer systems and the kind of evidence that they're looking for and how can we provide that for them. I think one of the things I mentioned before, but training systems, how are we getting this evidence and information to the people who are actually going to be on the front lines and have to implement it, then patients.

How do patients understand what music is doing and why it's not just entertainment or intuition, but that there's a real biology there? And so we try to actually work across all these different domains, one working with policymakers, working with payers to present the evidence and to understand the evidence and to understand. understand what kind of evidence they need to adopt and show how it can lead to cost savings. We do training and curricula for development for medical students and residents so that they can learn. And then we think about how do we get the information to the community? Because they're not going to come read my paper as proud as I am of having published it, you know. How is it received when you do that? I mean, obviously the first thing a doctor is going to, oh, that's ridiculous, right?

Like, I'll just hand the pill. So, no, actually surprisingly, what I've found is that most of my colleagues are also intuitively, aware of this because they've had their own personal experiences with music. Many of them are actually musicians. And so when I come to them, I start talking to them. A lot of doctors are. Yeah. So when I start talking to them about music, brothers in a band, yeah.

There's something intuitively that resonates with them. What's been missing is the physiology, the biology, and really understanding that. There's a medical biology that we can tap into that music is powerful modulator of. And so it actually resonates very well with

physicians when they see the evidence for this kind of work because it maps onto the experiences they've already had. They've already talked to patients who they know use music to help them. And same thing when I talk to people in the community, they already want more arts. They don't want to go to the typical clinical setting in many cases. And they would love to see arts integrated systems. They would love to understand how they could access psychedelic assisted therapy in the community. And so I think all of these things are actually resonating very strongly with both people in the community as well as with the physicians. that I interact with.

Yeah, it's interesting. In some ways, in reductive science, the kind of science that breaks complex things into simpler problems has struggled to explain how the brain works. I don't know if you necessarily agree with that. How do you see your work fitting in to that problem? Yeah, so I will say that, you know,

I was trained within the system, so I honor the value of being reductionist and what it can teach us. I mean, we've learned a lot of cool things about how the brain works and how the human brain functions through that. And it's clear that within that framework, we're missing some vital pieces of information,

which is what has been, I think, one of the challenges in translating. And so I think understanding how to study things in more complex, naturalistic environment is adding on to this body of work that we've had, you know, all along, understanding how the brain is functioning differently in social context, real life, social context, versus the kind of isolated experiments that we've had in the past

is now adding on to this body of literature, and we hope giving us the information that can help us take the next step to actually be able to make progress on the mental health crisis and the loneliness epidemic and the polarization crisis. So the last question for you,

it's singing as part of it because it's listening. Is that something you're studying at the same time? Absolutely. So this brings up the importance between passive and active music. And what we found is that, and what has been found in the literature before, is that active music tends to be the most powerful,

way of modulating the system. Singing is a really strong form of active music because not only is it, you know, there's some motor component, but there's also the actual vibrational quality of the singing, and there's a sensory motor entrainment of listening and producing at the same time. We've also done active music with drum circles and playing the drums can also have like a very powerful effect. In doing, in making music itself. Yeah, making music. Yeah. Playing or drums. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, this has been really fascinating, AZA.

I really appreciate your work is really interesting. And I hope more people start to pay attention to it going forward. Yeah. Thank you for having me on. And I always appreciate the opportunity to talk about this important topic. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Kohler Health. What if the most routine part of your morning could give you valuable insights about your health?

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When we talk about connection in health and wellness, we're often talking about connections to other people, but feeling connected to the broader world around us is part of it too. And my next guest has gone deep into that part of it with a study of consciousness and what it means to be conscious. Michael Pollan is a science journalist who's written many bestsellers about food, about psychedelics, and so many topics. He's a brilliant guy. I've known him for years. I have so much regard for him as a journalist, a thinker. He's a beautiful writer. He's very funny. There's nothing he doesn't do beautifully. And he's never high-handed about it. As you'll see, he's a terrific person. And he really puts his finger on important ideas right as they're about to take off into the zeitgeist. And I feel like he's from the future. He comes back and writes about what's about to happen. And his most recent work is A World Appears, a Journey into Consciousness published earlier this year. He has some great observations about the mind. and what it means for it to be healthy. And he's got a lot to say about how we should think about sentience and AI,

which is something I'm excited to talk to him about. Michael, thank you for being on on. Pleasure to be here. This may be a strange place to start, maybe, but I want to open with the question about psychedelics and this new book about consciousness, which we talked about in our previous interview, your previous book,

you began with a story about having taken mushrooms and becoming convinced the flowers in your garden were sentient. Tell us the story of explain how it fits into your exploration of consciousness. And then I'd love your definition of consciousness. Sure. This book was inspired by my psychedelic, my research trips that I took for How to Change Your Mind a few years ago. And two things happened. One was this powerful conviction that the plants in my garden were conscious.

They were returning my gaze. They had agency. They had a point of view. And then there was a more general thing that happens, I think, to most people who take psychedelics, which suddenly you defamiliarized consciousness. You're aware of it. It's not as transparent as it usually is. Right.

I describe it as smudging the windshield through which we perceive reality. And suddenly you realized, shit, there's a windshield, which wasn't really clear to you before that. Right. And so that got me interested and set me down this path of like, what do we know about consciousness? And specifically, I did look at this plant question, and trying to test that insight.

I mean, because the value of psychedelic insights is really up for grabs. I mean, you could dismiss them as drug experiences. Sure. Or you could say they're coming out of your subconscious or some other place, or maybe they're true. And William James wrote about mystical experience, and he said, we can't actually judge for sure

whether they're true or not these encounters with the divine or whatever. So what we have to do is see if the insight is useful and then test it against other ways of not. knowing. And that's essentially what I did. I went down this deep... Down the path from this one experience. And sentient, you were talking about human-like, correct? More than... Well, yeah, I make a distinction between sentience and consciousness that I think is really important. Sentience is a more basic form of consciousness. It's merely

awareness of your environment, an ability to sense changes good or bad, and respond intelligently to them. Alive. People... This may apply to all living things. I mean, this may be true for single-celled creatures. You know, bacteria have chemotaxis. They recognize good and bad molecules and can gravitate toward the food ones and away from the toxin ones. But I think plants have it, have this quality. It doesn't include all these bells and whistles that human consciousness has.

Self-awareness, the fact that we're not just aware, we're aware, we're aware, a sense of self. as this continuous, you know, presence through our lives. So, and in terms of definitions, very simply, a conscious experience. If you're having experience, you are conscious. You could add to that more elaborate elements, like having a sense of interiority. But I think conscious experience is good enough. A very common one in the field, both among the scientists and the philipers, and the philosophers is Thomas Nagel, the NYU philosopher in the 70s, wrote a wonderful essay

called What Does It Like to Be a Bat? And he basically said, if we can imagine it's like anything to be a bat, a creature that navigates the world through sonar rather than light, then that creature is conscious, even if we can't exactly say what it's like. Or they can't articulate. Or they can't, yeah, but you don't need reportability for that. Right. So, you know, your toaster is, you know, it's very hard to imagine.

at having experience that it's anything like to be your toaster. We've been in this interesting process of kind of democratizing consciousness. You know, it was only a few years ago that we kind of admitted to ourselves that other primates are conscious. Right. We, and now we're saying that cephalopods are conscious and cetaceans are conscious and basically all vertebrates, we think now are conscious. Do plants have consciousness?

Did you ever come to? Yeah. I decided they didn't have consciousness as we understand it, but they did have sentience. They were sentient beings. You know, we used to think that simple creatures like plants, not that they're so simple, operated on instinct alone. And, you know, we're pre-programmed to deal with what they had to deal with. But I think the understanding in biology now is that the environment is so changeable that you couldn't

fully program any creature to deal with every possible contingency. Including trees, right? Including trees, yeah. They're all dealing with a shifting landscape. And so what what evolution comes up with are these cognitive beings that can solve novel problems. And that, again, may apply to everything that is alive. So that it's not just philosophical, it's scientific. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of research going on around plant intelligence and consciousness. And I kind of follow that. So let's make it a bit more concrete. Give me some specific examples and have you try to describe what scientists believe is happening in our minds, in our consciousness during these moments. We really don't know. You know, the quest to understand consciousness, the modern

quest, scientific, it doesn't really start until 1990 or so, 1989. It's remarkably new. And it was considered kind of a forbidden topic in science. It would ruin your career. It was too vague, the problems were ill-defined. But then Francis Crick, who had, of course, co-won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA and how heredity worked, thought for his next trick he was going to solve consciousness. And the way he approached it is the way suggested by your question, which is, let's find the neural structures, the specific neurons or networks that generate subjective experience. And he realized pretty quickly that even if you found those, and we have not found those, it wouldn't tell you what you want to know, which is how do you get from matter,

you know, these three pounds of tofu-like substance between our ears, to mind. How do you cross that gap? There's something like 22 fully fledged out theories of consciousness, which, you know, tells you the field is flailing. Right. Is there one that compels you more? I would say yes. There's a line of theoretical analysis with some good empirical backing that I find persuasive. It doesn't quite get you to a full theory of consciousness, but it gets you closer than we've been.

And that is the idea that consciousness begins with feelings generated in the body. And this is a real departure from the assumption that it was a cortical. process. You know, the cortex is the most recent, most human, most advanced, its logic, decision making, abstract thought. Surely consciousness comes from there. But the thinking now, and this is research begun by Antonio DiMasio, the neurologist, but picked up more recently by Mark Somes, is that the inaugural act of consciousness are feelings like hunger, thirst, cold, itch, Yeah, and that the body essentially is speaking to the mind about falling out of homeostasis. And so consciousness begins where these, they're called interoceptive signals enter the brain,

which is at the upper brainstem. And if that's where consciousness begins, that argues for lots of animals being conscious because they have brainstems. So it begins with feeling, and these homeostatic, feelings and then the cortex gets involved. So you feel hunger and then the cortex helps you imagine some counterfactuals of how you might satisfy that desire. Right. So when they talk about feelings as the beginning of consciousness, people like DeMasio said, these feelings are spontaneously conscious. But that's not really an explanation. That's just kind of an assertion.

So where they get stuck is like, okay, there's a feeling, but who, Who's feeling it? How does it end up into an action, for example? Like when you follow a stream of thought to some aren't expected, we don't know what's happening there, correct? Yeah, getting to the contents of consciousness, we're kind of lost. There's some interesting work going on, but it's very hard to understand what's going on. And also how a thought passes from our unconscious to our consciousness. I mean, most of what the brain does is not conscious, right? It's a great automatic machine. It's monitoring your body, all your vitals, keeping them in the right range. It's picking up lots of sensory information without you being aware of it and making decisions

without us knowing it. So the interesting question is, why should any of it be conscious? Why aren't we zombies? Why don't we just kind of automate it all? And the reason goes back to what I was saying about sentience is that, you know, in a world that's incredibly complex and changing all the time, you couldn't program all the appropriate responses. Now, for this book, you engage in all manner of strange experiments, and I've done the same with reporting about aging and longevity. Some of you, actually, some of them are Hocum that I did, but in a way, it's a way to learn about it and understand it and why people are doing these things. I want you to describe one of these experiments you ran on yourself

where you needed to record your own thoughts a certain number of times a day. Explain how it work and what you learned with that. So I was interested in the contents of consciousness as well as the form and how it gets generated. And I found this guy, this psychologist at the University of Las Vegas named Russell Hurlberg. And he has been spending the last 50 years doing what he calls experience sampling. And you wear a beeper and you've got a little earpiece and it's a little box you keep in your pocket or on your belt. And at random times of the day, it sends a very sharp beep into your ear. And you're supposed to write down what you're, you're thinking at that moment. What is the thought you're having? And then you collect about five or six

of these over the course of the day. And it's a very weird experience wearing this thing because you're hyper self-consciousness. Like what if it goes off now? Right. Yeah. What am I thinking? You're thinking about it. You're thinking about it going off, right? Yeah, constantly. So, I mean, there's a problem right there. See, then you have this long Zoom session with him where he runs through the beeps and asks you questions. And so you'll say, I mean, there was one beep I had where I was seasoning the fillet of salmon and walking into the fridge and I'd put the salt on it. And at the moment the beep went up, I was thinking to myself, shit, pepper. I forgot to put the pepper on. So I was taking it back.

And so that seemed really clear cut. It was a verbal thought. And this is what it was. And this is when it happened. And he said, well, did you hear that pepper? or did you speak that pepper? So the voice in our heads, are we identify with it or is it talking to us? I had no idea. And so I also had a lot of trouble disaggregating a thought from the context, from what just happened before, from the smells when I'm standing in the bakery, you know, buying a coffee.

So I said, so what have you learned after 50 years? 50 years, yeah. Yeah. Basically, he said, well, we don't know that much about what. what we're thinking. We assume we're all verbal thinkers that our minds, our consciousness is made of words, but it turns out that some people, many people, their consciousness is more visual when they're thinking. And other people have kind of unsymbolized thought. And even among the verbal people, some people think in fully form words and sentences. And some people think in these kind of wisps of language.

So it's interesting. We have different styles of thinking. And we have this word called thinking, and we think it describes the same phenomenon in all of us. But in fact, it's an umbrella term, and what thinking means to you may not be what it means to me.

Yeah. Now, let me ask you something else. The psychologist who came up with this descriptive experience sampling has been doing it, he said, for decades. Do you have a sense that your experience is typical of other people? have done it or not? You know, a journalist who had read the book just did it with him.

And he had similar experiences. I think I was particularly bad at separating out one thought from another. They all kind of mush together in my head. In the end, Russell concluded, and this was kind of funny, that I was part of a small group of people that didn't have much internal thought at all. and that my interiority was sparsely furnished. Oh, wow. That's like what?

You know, it was ridiculous, though. A Kea living room or something? Norwegian living room? Norwegian would. One more experience I wanted to ask you about being fully, freshly present to the universe, as you put it, at a retreat where you lived in a rudimentary cave and meditated deeply. Describe that and how it helped you come to some sort of understanding of consciousness, given how empty your mind is,

according to this psychologist. Well, I undergo a kind of shift in the course of my exploration of consciousness. For most of it, I approached it like the classic Western male thinker. We've got a problem. What's the solution? And, you know, we have powerful abilities to focus, right? What's called spotlight consciousness, you know,

where we wear blinders and we rule out lots of things and we narrow the aperture in a way that is very good for getting things done and solving problems, but it also eliminates a lot of peripheral vision and things like that. And I realized I had gotten so focused on like, what's the solution to this problem of how consciousness comes about, that I was not as conscious as I could be, that I'd given up a lot, and that I could think of consciousness as a problem to be solved,

or I could think of it as a practice, that we have this incredible gift, which is this private space in our heads, that no one can tell us what to think, that we have total mental freedom to think whatever we want. Sure. But we're not using it. And so that's what grew out of all this meditation I did in the cave and looking at the stars and just realizing, okay, you know, maybe we'll solve this problem of consciousness at some point. But in the meantime, we're really squandering it. And we should take it back.

We need to kind of reclaim the space of interior art. It's really hard. Technology is, you know, the algorithms are hacking our attention. The life of the mind is much harder to have. Although I have to say it was before. I went on an outward bound once where you go on those journeys by yourself. You know, you're not sitting in the woods. And I looked up at the beautiful stars and I was sitting there.

And all I could think of was I would like some graham crackers. And I literally was like, what is wrong? with you. I was hoping for deep thoughts. And instead, it was like, my graham crackers would taste delicious right now. And I could not get the thought out of my head. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Kohler Health. Everyone's looking for more information about their health. Watches, rings, and monitors can give you a snapshot, but they don't always show the full picture. Meanwhile, what if you've been flushing away some of your most valuable data all along you probably have? Coler has spent 150 years redesigning the bathroom.

Now its new venture, Kohler Health, is building on that expertise with its Dakota tracker. From fingerprint authenticated sessions to data, privacy is designed into its features. Obviously, it's very important in this case. Dakota fits seamlessly onto your toilet and works discreetly in the background. The Kohler Health app then translates the signals your body is sending so you can see patterns in your gut health and hydration and get flagged when there's blood present. That's really important. I just installed it, and it's going to be really interesting to see,

because I use a lot of these different things like these rings and watches and things like that. It's really important so you can make changes to your diet or whatever else you need to do once you learn this information. Learn more at Kohlerhealth.com and use the code Kara one year for a free annual membership to the Kohler Health app when you purchase Dakota. So let's move into artificial intelligence and how it fits in here. So the idea of artificial intelligence and whether it can have a consciousness is all through the book, which is why I loved it. In Silicon Valley, it's widely accepted. The answer is yes, AI can and maybe we'll achieve consciousness. It's their artificial general intelligence.

You don't think so, and I don't think so. And many smart people also don't think so, because it's a reflection of our thoughts. All it has, but can it make new ones? It's always based on our thoughts, no matter how they slice it. They never came up with it originally itself. So talk a little bit about this. So, you know, if you ask a chatbot, are you conscious?

They've been told to say they're not. Right. But you can jailbreak that fairly easily and start a conversation and then back into the subject of consciousness. And suddenly it'll tell you it has feelings. And many people are fooled by this. We know this. People get into these deep emotional relationships. It's no wonder that we can be fooled by this because the whole human conversation about consciousness and feelings is part of the training data set.

So it knows how to talk the talk. It would be very interesting. Susan Schneider has proposed this. Build an AI from the bottom up and exclude from its training set all mention of consciousness, all feelings, no novels, no poetry. Right, because the minute you get Shakespeare in there, you get violence, right? Yeah. And then try to have a conversation about consciousness with it. And my guess is it would not learn how to talk in a way that sounds conscious to us.

You know, nobody has this problem with, what is it, alpha fold, right? Thinking it's conscious. It's just a machine. And what it knows is proteins. That's all it knows. So there's a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst named Mark Psalms from South Africa who's spent some time with. He's trying to build feelings into an AI agent. Explain what that even means and what you made of it.

He has a project to make a conscious AI, and he let me sort of be a fly on the wall for a while. And it's essentially a game, and there's an avatar in it. And he believes feelings arise when you have conflicting desires or incommensurate desires. So you're hungry and tired. What are you going to privilege? What are you going to deal with first? So he's trying to subject this avatar to these desires that can't be. easily averaged or reconciled. And he thinks at that point it will generate a feeling.

I mean, I think it's crazy. If it claims to have a feeling, it's not going to be a real feeling. I mean, a feeling is rooted in the flesh. You have feelings because you're vulnerable. You have feelings because you can suffer and feel pain. And I think our mortality is tied to our feelings. Absolutely. I mean, think about if you know, if you know, knew you were immortal, you would just ignore all sorts of feelings in your body. They wouldn't matter. Especially if you couldn't be killed or hurt. You have to add on extra things, right? Or you'd never be hungry. Yeah. If you removed all that stuff, for sure. You might still have pain, but I don't know that you'd have suffering because you know that, oh, whatever, this is just noise.

I'm going to live forever. So why would a machine have feelings? Why would it need to have feelings? They are for all intents and purposes immortal. Yeah, they're not a meat sack as, as, you know, Elon Musk's favorite sci-fi showed it. We don't have meat holes or meat tubes, which are throats and stuff like that. So why is there this obsession with the idea of consciousness in machines? Well, I don't know because there's no money in it that I can see. I mean, you know, there's a lot of money in making machines intelligent. And intelligence and the other issue here is intelligence and consciousness have an orthogonal relationship.

That's correct, yeah. We all know people who are conscious without being particularly intelligent. And it isn't automatic that as these machines get more intelligent, they will get more conscious. Maybe it would happen, but it's not implicit in an intelligence. So mimicry is what you're talking about. And I think Dariomodi was, I think, anthropic, there's a lot of feelings happening. And I'm like, well, they read Shakespeare. Of course they have feelings.

But they're mimicking it. But his comments are very interesting. I mean, he seems sincerely to believe that Claude is anxious, and he's given it the right to end human conversations that make it uncomfortable. So, you know, they do say spooky things. You know my theory. I have this strange theory of why these men think this, because they can't have children. They can't physically make children. This is their children.

And I think everyone understands. even if you're a misogynist, childbearing is miraculous, right? It really truly is. It's astonishing even to me, and I had a kid like that. But I think they can't make children, and this is their version of it. So it has to have a consciousness. Yeah, that's very interesting. It's just mimicry.

It's just Pinocchio and not the boy. Right. Now, there's an interesting point. Psalms raised, and you explored in the book about the ethics of how humans would interact if AI did indeed have feelings. Yeah. If it had real feelings, there would be moral questions. I mean, if a machine could suffer, we would have introduced into the world a lot more suffering.

And the question of do we then owe the moral consideration? I think by normal human moral standards, the answer would probably be yes. But, you know, when I read all this concern, especially in Silicon Valley, about, you know, how are we going to deal with the morality of these suffering beings we're creating? There's so many humans we have an extended moral consideration to. Silicon Valley prefers to deal with the abstract future than the present, right? What's right here, right? There's an escapism to it.

Well, think about how they behave. Yeah, the bunkers. Peter Thiel just moved to Argentina. Yeah, I just saw that. Or the obsession with interplanetary travel. See, I see it all about transcendent. of the mortal flesh. This idea that, you know, if you're rich enough, you can buy anything, it seems unfair that you have to die. You should be able to buy your way out of that one.

It's at the heart of my thing. So talk a little bit about where this is going then. And if there's this idea that they are going to have feelings, all of them think it does. Yeah, but I mean, I mean, there are two issues. One is whether they're really going to have feelings and be conscious. And the other is whether that matters because we're going to believe they do. I think it was a really fateful decision, and I don't know who made it, to have chatbots speak to us using the first person in our language. I mean, we were bound to anthropomorphize them at that point. That was, you know, in the history of this whole story, that's going to be a very big decision.

It didn't have to be that way. Right. And maybe that began with Siri. I don't know when that began. or robot, you know, science fiction robots. Well, there is a lot in science fiction. No, tons, tons. What I say in the book is we're arriving at what I call a Copernican moment in the same way that Nicholas Copernicus, when he demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around.

It was a shock to our species and our sense of centrality. And it caused this kind of redefinition of what it means to be human. I think we're approaching a cliff where we're going to have to figure out. What does it mean to be human? What is special about us that these machines can't do and these animals can't do? And also, whose team are we on? Are we more like the machines that speak our language and we can talk to? Or are we more like the animals that go through a life like ours of being young and growing old and suffering and dying, even though we can't talk to them?

So who are we? Right. Where do we fit? And I think that's the big question being raised. And I think it's very interesting. It's happening in both realms, this idea that consciousness may be more universal in the natural world. And then we have these machines making claims to be conscious also. I don't know how it will come out.

We'll go with the machines. I'm afraid you're right. I want to bring this back to the main idea of the series, which is about longevity, lifespan. health span, which you just touched on. It seems this dream of tech billioners that they can live forever with the help of AI and machines. Does that idea even hold water? Talk a little bit about the idea of wanting to get the soul of the machine. Yeah, it's the old idea of downloading your consciousness into a computer. And that's the immortality you have. The problem with that idea is it implies you can separate consciousness from the body when we're learning just the opposite.

that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon. Right. It all goes back to this idea that brains are computers. And this metaphor is very powerful in our culture, but it doesn't bear close scrutiny at all. So in computers, you have a very sharp distinction between hardware and software. And the thinking is that consciousness is like software and silicon is like hardware. Or we have these meat computers, as they like to call them. But in fact, in brains, you cannot disentangle the two.

Every memory is both hardware and software. Everything that happens to you physically changes the substance of your brain. Your brain is not interchangeable with mind because you've had different experiences. And so the whole premise is that you could take consciousness, this pure, I don't know, digital cloud thing, and put it somewhere else. But consciousness doesn't exist apart from brains and bodies. So I think it's a dream of immortality. It's a dream of transcendence.

And it's been fed by science fiction for a very long time. Did you find any examples that would change your mind about that? No, I haven't yet. I mean, you know, we hear about these biomorphic computers that will actually have some living stuff in them. You know, these things may become conscious, but it's hard to say. I mean, without a really working theory of consciousness that, you know, has some support, it's going to be hard to tell in that case, too.

What about the brain being mapped, the idea? Because that is, to me, if I was a scientist, that's all I would study. Yeah, and there's a lot of effort to do it. It's so hard. So, you know, we liken neurons to transistors, right? Because they're on or off. Yeah. But, again, that's, we're oversimplifying because transistors.

are also affected by chemicals, how hard, you know, how intensely they fire. I mean, you know, hormones, neurotransmitters, drugs all affect what they do. They're also affected by waves. So they're very analog, actually, even though they have this digital component. And also, a single cortical neuron can be connected to 10,000 other neurons. I mean, the level of interconnectedness is so massive and so beyond anything we can imagine that those maps, which will be incredibly important when we get them down, but we're a long way. So this is the last question.

You've written a lot of zeitgeist stuff before they were that way. And you were delving into the food with the omnivore's dilemma, which, by the way, I recently reread. It so holds up back in 2006. I wish it didn't hold up. Yeah, but it does.

And so does eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And of course, psychedelics. You were there early in how to change your mind. You've just written about consciousness. What do you think the next thing that interests you is in this way? Because it's all around the body in some fashion. Yeah. I mean, the thing I've been thinking about since publishing this book,

and this comes out of my conversations with readers on book tour, is this idea we discussed earlier, which is the fact that the sense that our consciousness is being polluted and that between, you know, Trump, who commands so much of our attention for so long, in an unprecedented way, when did we let someone do that for 11 years? And then you have social media, obviously, in the problem of our attention. And now you have people forming these powerful emotional relationships with chatbots. Yeah.

So I think that people feel that their heads are just full of crap, and they want to reclaim that space. And so how do you do that exactly? Obviously, taking breaks from technology is one way. Getting out in nature is another way. I think psychedelics is another way. I mean, you're with your thoughts, and you're not with some algorithm's thoughts. And it's your own algorithm. So I think that that's a nice way looking at it. To the extent that there's a movement that implicit in all this, it's that. It's like reclaiming the space of interiority. Instead of changing your mind, reclaiming your mind. It's absolutely true.

Anyway, thank you so much, Michael. My pleasure, Kara. Anytime. Today's show was produced by Tracy Hunt, Emma McNamara, and Dave Shaw. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Our engineers are Jim Mackle and Steve Bone, and our theme music is by Tracademics. If you're already following this show, you have a richly furnished mental interior. If not, your mind looks like a college dorm.

Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Caro Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Caroushisher from Podium Media in New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday. Thanks to Coler Health for their support. We focus a lot on what we put in our bodies, but not nearly as much on what comes out. You get my point. Coler Health is changing that with its Dakota tracker,

which turns your everyday bathroom habits into meaningful insights about your gut health, hydration and even presence of blood without any manual logging. Over time, Kohler Health helps you build your baseline so you know what's normal for you and you can take action when something changes. Learn more at Kohlerhealth.com and use the code Kara one year for a free annual membership on the Kohler Health app when you purchase Dakota.