Something You Should Know - The Interesting Math of Life and Death & Understanding the Science of Consciousness

Episode Date: January 2, 2020

Flattery works – if you know how to do it right. So this episode begins with a discussion on how to use flattery and why it is such a powerful tool in getting people to like you. Interestingly though, flattery doesn’t work on everyone and I’ll tell you who. http://changingminds.org/techniques/general/ingratiation/flattery.htm Math is an important part of almost every aspect of your life. You probably just don’t think about it. In fact there are ways to use math that can help you save time and money and make better decisions. Kit Yates joins me to explain the importance of math in our everyday lives and how it works. Kit is a senior lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath in the UK and author of the book The Math of Life and Death (https://amzn.to/35aW5pI). Now that it is a new year and a new decade, it is probably a good time to let go of that grudge you’ve been holding on to. Listen as I explain the amazing benefits of NOT holding a grudge compared to the real downside of holding on to those thoughts of anger, resentment and revenge. http://www.drugs.com/mca/forgiveness-letting-go-of-grudges-and-bitterness What is consciousness? In short it is the essence of who you are at any moment. But where does it come from? Where does it go when you die? These are questions I tackle in this episode with Philip Goff. Who teaches at Durham University in the UK and is the author of the book Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (https://amzn.to/2QggRjs). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, let's talk about that grudge you're holding and why you need to let it go. Then, the mathematics of everyday life, like why time seems to go by fast when you're older but slower when you're a kid.

One theory goes that we perceive a period of time as a proportion of the time that we've already lived through. So for my son, the time between Christmases is still a year, but actually he's only four years old, so it's a quarter of his life, so it seems like a really long time. Also, how to use flattery that will make people feel really good about you? And what actually is your consciousness? How do you define it? What is it? In a way, it's paradoxically, sometimes a little bit hard to define just because it is so familiar. You know, when we talk about consciousness, we really just mean what it's like to be you right now in your waking life. All this today on Something You Should Know. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most.

Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior

due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast.

The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hey, hi, welcome to Something You Should Know, our first episode of 2020. So let me take a moment to say Happy New Year and thank you for your support by listening and sharing this podcast.

It is doing remarkably well and I have you to thank for that. We begin today with flattery. Do you flatter other people? Flattery can be very powerful when it's done right. When you flatter someone, you almost always score points because flattery boosts a person's sense of identity. It makes them feel good about themselves, and they have you to thank for it. Flattery can and probably should be honest, but even dishonest flattery can work. That's because even if the compliment is a lie, it makes the other person feel so good, they'll choose to join in the lie rather than challenge it. Flattery doesn't work on everyone, though. Some people are too modest, so flattery just

embarrasses them. Other people have such a low self-image that flattery doesn't really feel genuine. And others are suspicious of flattery, particularly if they receive a lot of it. Flattery seems to work best when you're brief and relatively low-key about it while still showing that you are truly impressed. And that is something you should know. My son tells me frequently how the math he learns in school he'll never need again any time in his life. And that may be for some of the math, but math is part of everyday life, sometimes in ways that are not always readily apparent. And when you understand how the math of life works, it can make you a little smarter and maybe save you some time and money. Here to help is Kit Yates. Kit is a

senior lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath in the UK, and he's author of a new book called The Math of Life and Death. Hi, Kit, welcome. Hi, Mike, really nice to be on. So before we get too deep into the math of everyday life, you are a mathematical biologist. So what is mathematical biology and what does a mathematical biologist do? As a mathematical biologist, I take a biological system that I'm interested in. So for me, I'm interested in things like the way that locusts swarm or the way that patterning happens in the

embryo. And I try to describe it using either computer code or equations. And I try to make predictions about what these systems will do in situations that it's either unethical to do an experiment or it's impractical to do an experiment so it's a growing field and we're we're I think we're helping out in a number of different ways trying to reduce the number of animal experimentation animal experiments that go on trying to save people money in terms of drug discovery. We can test whether a drug will interact with a human's biology in a computer rather than doing it in a human. So yeah, it's a growing field and it's a really important field as well, I think. Great. So one example of how math works in everyday life is this perception that people have that as they get

older, time seems to go by faster. And so explain the math of that. So one theory goes that we perceive a period of time as a proportion of the time that we've already lived through. So for my son, the time between Christmases is still a year, but actually he's only four years old. So it's a quarter of his life. So it seems like a really long time, whereas for me, I'm 34. So a year of my life is just about 3% of it. So it seems to go by more quickly. So this is sort of explaining why we perceive time to accelerate as we get older. But there's other theories about that too, aren't there? Yeah, there are. There's a number of other theories. I'm not sure any of them explain

this mechanical way in which time seems to accelerate almost exponentially. But yes, certainly there's a theory that suggests that the way we perceive time is related to the amount of new perceptual information that we're taking in. For example, the first time that you hear a song on the radio, it seems to last quite a long time because your brain is hearing it for the first time and writing down a detailed memory of it. Or maybe the first time you do your commute, for example, it seems to take a long time. But actually, when you do your commute after a few weeks or a few years of doing it, you do it on autopilot and it seems to go by much more quickly because you can be thinking about other things

while you're doing it rather than concentrating on the commute. So, yeah, some people suggest that the amount you have to concentrate, the amount of new perceptual information your brain is writing down dictates how you perceive a passage of time. And it goes some way to explaining why in an accident, people often report this sort of slow motion time slowing down when they're in an accident. Because it's such an unfamiliar situation. Our brains are really writing these detailed memories. So, yeah, there are a number of different explanations.

I prefer the mathematical one, but that's perhaps because I'm a mathematical biologist. Yeah, well, that makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, of course, you would like that one. So talk about the optimal stopping problem. That's an interesting mathematical thing that I think we can all relate to. So it comes from a problem called the secretary problem. And the idea is that you're wanting to hire someone, in this case a secretary, to do a job for you. And maybe you have 100 candidates. And the game is that you get to interview everyone. You can judge their quality objectively against each other.

But you have to tell the person at the end of the interview whether you're hiring them or whether you're not going to hire them. And you don't get to go back to the people that you've seen before. And the question really is, how do we make a choice? What strategy should we use to choose so that we can find the best candidate for this job? And this can apply in all sorts of places. It can apply to when you're choosing a restaurant to eat at. You've got a set number of places you might have a look at the menu at

before you decide to go into the restaurant or before the person you're eating with gets really bored. So you look at some of them. You need to decide how many you look at before you decide on the final option and how you can make sure that you get the best option. And so the answer is called optimal stopping. And so the idea is that you want to check out a few of these options. If it's restaurants, you want to check out a few of them. If it's secretaries, you want to interview a few of these candidates just to get a sense of the quality to

see what's out there. But you don't want to interview everyone because if you interview all of them, then you get stuck with the last candidate. You have to hire that person because you've rejected all the other ones. So you don't want to go too far. So how far do you go? It turns out mathematically that you should look at the first 37% of the options that you've got, reject all of the first 37%, and then choose the best, the first one that comes along after that, so the first secretary you interview or the first restaurant you come to after that, that is better than all the ones you've seen so far. That mathematically gives you the best chance of choosing the best option.

It only gives you a 37% chance of choosing the best option. It only gives you a 37% chance of choosing the best option, but still, when you compare it to with these 100 secretaries, if you compare it to just choosing at random, that would give you a 1% chance of choosing the best option. Right. It's a significant increase mathematically. But of course, the very best home run out of the ballpark candidate could have been the first one you interviewed, and now they're gone. Right, exactly. So it doesn't guarantee to work every time, and it only works 37% of the time. So it's applicable in certain situations, maybe like hiring for a job. I've heard other mathematicians suggest that you could use this as a dating strategy. So decide how many people that you want to date over the course of

your lifetime and then cold-heartedly reject the first 37 percent of them just judging them for quality and choose the best one after that but of course you know the one could have been in that first 37 percent of people you wanted to date and you could have rejected them um but i think that the bigger message to take away is that these mathematical tips and tricks work in certain situations, but it isn't always optimal to have the very best option. So there are probably multiple people out there who you could happily spend the rest of your life with. It doesn't have to be the one, the very best person. So this optimal stopping problem is really about finding the very best option.

But there might be loads of restaurants you want to eat at or loads of people who would do a decent job. So it's really about finding the very best option. Talk about math and the law and how they intersect. I think there's been a number of cases, high-profile cases in the past, where people have been maligned by mathematical miscarriages of justice, precisely because maybe the expert witness that was testifying against them was an expert in a particular area, maybe in biology, but weren't an expert in the statistics that they were using, or perhaps because defence barristers weren't statistically sound enough to question the maths that was being presented to them. So there's been a number of high-profile cases, in particular over here in the UK,

where people have been suckered by mathematical mistakes. So one of the most high-profile ones was the case of Sally Clark. She was a mother of two infant children that both died within the first three months of their lives and so after the the second child died um she and her husband were arrested for the murder of her their two children the husband was let go because he wasn't there at one of the the deaths but she was charged and she was um taken to court and she was convicted of the murder of her two children. And in part, that was due to the testimony of an expert witness, a guy called Sir Roy Meadow, who was not a statistician. But nevertheless, he gave a figure which really stuck with the jury in this case.

And this figure was that the likelihood of Sally Clark's two children dying from sudden infant death syndrome, which is an alternative explanation to them being murdered, it's often called cop death. It's effectively the diagnosis that's arrived at when all other diagnoses of death have been ruled out. He said that the probability of these two children dying from sudden infant death syndrome was one in 73 million, which made it seem extremely unlikely that they died due to this cause. But there was a number of problems with this figure. One of them was that Roy Meadow had taken a figure for a single SIDS death, a single sudden infant death syndrome death, which is one in about 8,500.

And he decided that the probability of two sudden deaths, to find that he could just multiply this probability together because these two events he assumed were independent of each other. And that's how he came up with this figure of one in 73 million. But actually, once you've had a single death from SIDS in the family, the chances of you having a second SIDS death increase dramatically because there are a number of risk factors which are common to that family. So there are genetic factors associated with SIDS. There's also lifestyle factors like smoking or

bed sharing, various things which increase the likelihood of SIDS. So it's not okay, basically, to assume that two SIDS deaths are independent of each other and just to square the probability of a single SIDS death to get the probability of two SIDS deaths. So Roy Meadow did this. He multiplied these two figures together and he came up with this extremely unlikely 1 in 73 million figure for the probability of having two SIDS deaths if Sally Clark was innocent. And the jury took this to be that actually the probability that she was innocent was one in 73 million, so incredibly low. And the probability that she was guilty, therefore, was almost certain. And they convicted her based

on this mathematical mistake, this mathematical misunderstanding. And anything happened after that? Yeah, so fortunately, Sally Clark's case went to appeal. And actually, the appeal judges the first time around rejected her appeal. So they appealed on the basis of Roy Meadows' statistical blunderings, if you like. And so it went to appeal and they rejected it. But the second time they appealed, fortunately, they found both new medical evidence and they took into account this statistical evidence and sally clark was cleared of the murder of her two kids which was a great relief but the story ends quite sadly in that um she never really recovered from um being accused of of her the murder of her two sons and spending time in prison she also had a third son before she went to jail,

and she was kept apart from this child, obviously, while she was in jail. And she died of alcohol poisoning a few years after being released from jail. So it's a sad story, and it shows that maths misused in the wrong hands really can have a dramatic impact on people's everyday lives. I'm speaking with Kit Yates. He is a senior lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath, and he's author of the book The Math of Life and Death. Hi, this is Rob Benedict.

And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors,

and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. People who listen to Something You Should Know

are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So Kit, another place where people use math that has, I don't know if it's a dramatic effect, but it certainly helps shape people's beliefs and perceptions, is in the media and in politics where numbers get thrown around all over the place,

and we don't know if they're true or not, but it seems like if somebody says them often enough, they become true in people's minds. Yeah, right. I think a really good way for newspapers to sell stories and for politicians to sell their policies and soundbites is to use statistics and to sell those statistics in the most dramatic way they possibly can. I don't know about you, but when I read the newspapers, it seems that almost every day there's a new study on how our lifestyles are impacting on our health. It might be that we're drinking too much or we're drinking too little or maybe we're not sleeping enough or we're eating the wrong sorts of things. And people take significant life decisions based on the statistics that they read in the newspapers, in the headlines. And actually often those statistics and those figures are are not wrong but they're

not the whole truth they're just part of the story they're sexed up if you like to to sell newspapers there's a nice example of of the british newspaper the sun and they said that eating a bacon sandwich every day could increase your risk of colorectal cancer by 20 percent and for me when i read that i thought well if the you know if the background rate of colorectal cancer by 20%. And for me, when I read that, I thought, well, if the background rate of colorectal cancer in the population is maybe 5%, is it true that eating a bacon sandwich every day can increase that risk to 25%? That's what they made it sound like. But actually, when you dig down into the statistics,

it turns out that the background rate of colorectal cancer in the population for people who don't eat bacon sandwiches is 5%. But for people that do eat bacon sandwiches, it's just 6%. So it's only 1% more. So those are what's called the absolute risks. But actually, what the Sun had calculated is that a 1% increase from 5% is a 20% increase. So they calculated what's called the relative risk. And that's the figure that they went with because they knew that this big percentage figure would scare people and it would sell newspapers. And that's exactly what it did.

They went on to launch their Save Our Bacon campaign where they branded scientists as health Nazis who declared a war on bacon. And it sold loads and loads of newspapers based on this, if you like, sexing up or half-truth statistics. So, yeah, being aware of the way in which newspapers and politicians can tweak with and lie with statistics is something that's important, I think. Something we hear about a lot today in terms of the information we get or how things work. We hear the word algorithm, and I don't know that everybody really understands what that means and how it works. And

so can you help fill in the blanks? Sure. Yeah. Well, I think like in its most basic form, an algorithm is like a recipe. You give it some inputs and then you get some instructions to process those inputs and then you get some instructions to process those inputs and then you get an output. So yeah, a really simple algorithm might be, here's the ingredients you need for your recipe. Follow this step-by-step rule, these step-by-step rules to make the meal you're trying to make. And at the end, you get out the meal that you want. And that's all an algorithm is really. And they're being used more and more frequently in our everyday lives from social media through to the way that things

are marketed as online. And yeah, we need to be wary because actually maybe unsupervised algorithms are doing things which we might not be expecting them to. Like what? There's an example, which is sort of a funny one, but also a shocking one. There's a guy who set up a company to print t-shirts. And he had this idea that instead of printing the t-shirts and holding them in stock, what he would do is just list loads of t-shirts on Amazon. And then as soon as someone ordered them, he would print that slogan off. And he decided that he could massively optimize the number of listings he had

by coming up with an algorithm which would create a certain phrase and put it on a t-shirt and then list it automatically on Amazon. So he decided to follow this meme of keep calm and carry on. So he decided to follow this meme of keep calm and carry on. So he decided that he would use this keep calm and insert a verb and then insert a noun, and that would be his formula. So he got a list of verbs and a list of nouns, and he wrote an

algorithm which would just automatically combine these verbs with these nouns and put it on a t-shirt image and put it straight on Amazon. But he became a cropper when he didn't properly vet his lists. So he had t-shirts on Amazon, which were saying things like, keep calm and kick her, or keep calm and knife them. And he hadn't properly vetted these algorithms. It was a big media ferrari. And it eventually caused his company to go bust because people decided they weren't going to buy T-shirts from him any longer because he was a misogynist. So, yeah, algorithms can have dramatic consequences, and they can have unintended consequences if they're not used in a supervised way.

There's another story of an Amazon algorithm which ended up listing a book about genetics for hundreds of thousands, in fact, millions of dollars. And it was a really simple algorithmic problem. There were two people that were selling this book. And every day they would check each other's prices. And one of them would increase their price to be about 1.3 times the other one's price. And then the other one would increase their price to be just lower than that. And every day they would increase their prices against each other,

and effectively the price ended up growing exponentially. Because no one was supervising it, this copy of the book ended up, you know, it's a $100 book if you buy it in a bookstore, ended up being the most expensive thing that Amazon had ever listed because of this algorithmic price war. So yeah, unsupervised use of algorithms can be sometimes funny, but also a bit dangerous, I think. And since we've been talking about the math so far of life,

give me something about the math of death. As a mathematical biologist, I'm interested in the way that diseases spread around in different populations. And actually, there's a whole subfield of mathematical biology called mathematical epidemiology, which is all about trying to understand how diseases spread in different populations. And so we have relatively straightforward models which can represent whole populations and how diseases spread through them. For example, in the US in 2019, the US saw the biggest outbreak of measles in over a quarter of a century, in part because people are not being vaccinated, not getting their children vaccinated and not

getting themselves vaccinated as much as they have done in previous years. And what mathematical biology, mathematical epidemiology can tell us is how many people we have to vaccinate in a population in order to keep that disease at bay, in order to almost effectively wipe that disease out. And it's using a technique called herd immunity, whereby if we vaccinate enough of the population, then the rest of the population are effectively safe from that disease.

And it's really important for diseases like measles that we keep up herd immunity because there are children that are too young to be vaccinated who are vulnerable there are people who have immune problems and the elderly who um who are vulnerable and maybe can't get the vaccination or maybe it doesn't work for them so we need to vaccinate enough people to try and keep these diseases at bay. And at the moment, both in the UK and in the US, and in fact, across a lot of the world, in particular for measles, we're not doing that. Measles is a real problem because it's one of the most infectious diseases known to man, which means that the proportion of people that we have to vaccinate to keep the disease at bay is commensurately high. We have to vaccinate nearly 95, 96% of people to keep the disease at bay.

And we're getting nowhere near that at the moment. So math has something to say about how we can control disease as well, how we can hopefully prevent deaths from happening. So the next time my son says, well, all the math he's learning is stuff he'll never use in life. Well, clearly there's a lot of math in everyday life and it's been fun to talk about it. My guest has been Kit Yates. He is a senior lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath in the UK and author of the book, The Math of Life and Death. You'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Kit. Perfect. That sounds great. Yeah, thanks so much. It was

really, really nice interview. I really enjoyed doing it. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games,

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When I say the word consciousness, what comes to mind? Or what comes to your consciousness? What is your consciousness? How do you define it? What does it do? And when you die, where does it go? Well, these are deep questions, and here to discuss and hopefully answer them is Philip Goff. Philip is a philosopher and teacher at Durham University in the UK, and he is author of more than 40 academic papers, as well as the new book, Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Hey, Philip, welcome. Hi, good to be here, thanks for having me. So what is consciousness as you see it? Can you define it or describe it?

Sure, well you know right now you're having an auditory experience of my voice, a visual experience of the room around you, maybe a table in front of you. Maybe you're having an experience in the background of traffic or the hum of a computer. If you attend more carefully, maybe you're having tactile experiences of your back against a chair. So this is all part of what it's like to be you right now, all part of your consciousness. You know, and again, in a way, it's, again, paradoxically, sometimes a little bit hard to define just because it is so familiar. You know, when we talk about consciousness, we really just mean what it's like to be you

right now in your waking life. And that's the thing we're interested in, really. Right. Well, it sounds pretty simple when you say it that way. It's just what it's like to be you right now is, well, okay, I know what it's like to be me right now. And so now that I know what that is, what do we do with that? Where do we go with that? So some people say it's a mystery what consciousness is. I don't think it's a mystery what consciousness is. As we've been discussing, in a way, nothing is more familiar.

The mystery is how do we fit it into our standard scientific picture of the world? That's the real challenge. How does what we know about ourselves from the inside, about our feelings and experiences and emotions, how does that all fit in with the story that the brain scientist tells us, this story of very complicated electrochemical signaling, information processing, mechanistic explanations of behavior? How do these two worlds fit together, what we know about ourselves from the inside and what science tells us about our brains, as it were, from the outside? And, you know, some people think, you know, we just need to carry on with our standard scientific methods

of investigating the brain and, you know, we'll one day crack the problem. But I kind of think it's a little bit deeper than that, and that's what I try to push in my work. Well, one of the interesting things has always been, for me, is that your consciousness, your brain, if you die, somehow it disappears. It goes, your brain is still there, it doesn't look any particularly different than it did before, but something's clearly missing. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, there are different theories of consciousness, you know, some people think it's consciousness is something outside of the physical workings of the

body and the brain, whereas other people think it's somehow dependent on not just the brain, but it's complex functioning. You know, one of the leading scientific theories of consciousness right now is something called the integrated information theory. This is proposed by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. And that really says that consciousness is all about connections. You know, there are, you know, the cells of the brain are called neurons, and there are almost 100 billion in your brain, and every single one of them is connected to 10,000 others, and this yields some 10 trillion connections. And what the integrated information theory says is the way in which information is stored in the

brain is heavily dependent on the complex web of connections. And they really take that to be the hallmark of consciousness, not just information, but information that's wrapped up in a network of a web of connections. So I suppose that's what's different with the dead brain. Although the soggy gray brain matter is still there, it's not actively sustaining this incredibly complex network of connections that many people are now thinking, you know, is what consciousness is all about, really. And this idea that consciousness is what it's like to be you right now, how did I get to be who I am right now, and how unique is that? And maybe a way to discuss this is, are twins and triplets, is their consciousness

much more similar to each other than it is to me? Maybe in part, but you know, I mean, what we now know is that plasticity, what neuroscientists call plasticity, is a very important feature of the brain. This is just the technical term for how incredibly flexible the brain is. So, you know, as I've said, brain functioning is all about connections. And what we've discovered is that all the time, you can actually alter those connections and in fact, change the physical structures in your brain,

especially in childhood. But even as an adult, what kind of experiences you have or what kind of thoughts you think actually changes the connections. So strengthening some connections and thereby strengthening certain ways of thinking or weakening other connections and weakening those ways of thinking. So I find it incredibly liberating, actually. You know, we're not just hardwired, programmed by our DNA. You know, to a large extent, we can actually shape the kind of brains we want to have. And that's why, you know, an important part, I guess, is human individuality.

Even if you have two twins, you know, pretty soon they're going to, the plasticity of their brains is going to end up very different because of the very different experiences they have. So I get it that this is really fascinating, that consciousness is hard to really put your finger on, and yet it's such a simple concept of, it's just who you are right now. But so what do we do with this? I mean, we can be fascinated all we want, but now what? Yeah. One thing I've tried to emphasize in my own work is that we shouldn't really be surprised that our current scientific approach struggles to deal with consciousness. And that's because our current scientific approach

was actually designed to exclude consciousness. So, you know, a key moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo's decision that mathematics should be the language of the new science. You know, the new science should have a purely quantitative vocabulary. But Galileo understood quite well that you can't capture consciousness in these terms. You know, you can't capture, because consciousness is an essentially qualitative phenomenon, you know, just in the sense that it involves qualities. If you think about the redness of a red experience or the smell of coffee or the taste of mint, you know, you can't capture these kind of qualities of experience in the purely quantitative vocabulary of neuroscience. So what Galileo did is he said, well, what we need to do is take consciousness out of the domain of science. And after we've done that, you know, we can capture everything else in mathematics. So this was like the start of mathematical physics.

And I think we've forgotten that it was never intended to deal with consciousness. And so, you know, if Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about this problem of explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he'd say, you know, of course you can't do that. I designed physical science to deal with the quantitative, not the qualitative. So I think really this isn't just another scientific problem that we need to just do more neuroscience and more crack. If we want to bring consciousness into our scientific story,

we really need to rethink what science is. And that's, you know, something that people are starting to understand now and face up to. So it's going to be a real profound change to our whole approach to science. So if I have a sense of what my consciousness is, what it's like to be me right now, and we've heard so much in, you know, new age, higher consciousness, and can I do something with my consciousness? Can I make it better? Or is that a bunch of gobbledygook? Or what? Yeah, well, I mean, I think we, to a large extent, we don't know the answer to that question,

because we still don't know how to bring consciousness into our scientific story. You know, and I think this does matter in a very practical way because, you know, consciousness is at the root of human identity. Fundamentally, we relate to each other as conscious beings with feelings and experiences and emotions you know arguably it's it's at the basis of everything that's important human existence and yet the shocking fact is our at the moment our standard scientific story does not have a place for consciousness and you know i think this can in subtle ways lead to a kind of alienation. You know, we know from the inside that we have feelings and experiences, but it looks as though science is just telling us, no, no, there's just a load of electrochemical signaling.

We need to find a way of bringing these things together. And I think, you know, this might be part of what, in the 19th century, Max Weber famously called the disenchantment of nature. You know, this sense that we're living in a cold, meaningless universe. So I think part of what we need to do is bring about, you know, the story we know about ourselves from the inside and the story science is telling us about from the outside. Bring them together. And I think that hopefully could make us feel, you know, a little bit more at home in the universe, a little bit more comfortable in our own skin.

Isn't part of the problem that science tends to be objective, repeatable, we can do this over and over again, and that's science, and what you're talking about is so subjective by its own definition of what it's like to be me. Well, nobody else knows that. It's oil and water. The two will never mix. Yeah, I think you're completely right there. I mean, as you say, physics tries to describe the world in completely objective terms. It tries to have a language that anyone

can understand no matter what their life experience. You know, if there were aliens visited us from another planet, they might have very different sensory organs and, you know, maybe they wouldn't understand our art or music. But if they were clever enough to understand mathematics, they could understand our physics. In that sense, science tries to be utterly objective. The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously said, it tries to get the view from nowhere. This utterly objective picture of things. Whereas to understand the consciousness of something, you have to be able to adopt its perspective, right? You have to be able to, as it were, get inside its head. And so, again, the philosopher Thomas

Nagel, you know, famously posed the problem of consciousness in these terms. He asked the question, will we ever know what it's like to be a bat. You know, bats have such incredibly alien way of perceiving the world through echolocation. You know, they squeal and the sound bounces off the walls and then they hear it and that allows them to navigate. Can we ever imagine adopting the perspective of a bat? And so Nagel thinks, you know, no matter how much we learn about bat physiology,

there's always going to be something we're missing out on, some information, namely, we'll never know what it's like to be a bat, what it's like to adopt the perspective of a creature that echolocates its way around the world. So that's really another way of seeing the challenge. You know, how do we bring together the subjective and the objective, the qualitative and the quantitative, I think there is a way forward. But what would be the value, other than to satisfy that curiosity of what it's like to be a bat,

what's the point? Bats are bats and people are people, and, you know, I don't really need to know what it's like to have sonar bouncing off the walls and coming back to me. has nothing to do with me it's it because i'm not a bat yeah so well i mean one thing to say is there are very real world practical um implications of a science of consciousness for example how do we know if you have a patient in a coma for long periods of time, how do we know if they're still conscious, if there's still some kind of inner life inside their head, even though there's no behavior? To answer this, we has been one of our most successful theories for explaining why certain regions of the brain are associated

with consciousness and not others. Certain periods of sleep are associated with consciousness and not others. And hopefully, you know, once we have a completed theory of consciousness, we will be able to know whether, for example, people in locked-in coma patients have any conscious experience. So that's, you know, a profoundly important implication. But more generally, you know, I think science isn't just about the practical nuts and bolts of building bridges and curing disease. I think it's always been about the attempt to understand the universe, you know, and our place within it. And, you know, I think it's always been about the attempt to understand the universe, you know, and our place within it. And, you know, I think given that consciousness is so central to what is important in human life,

I think properly understanding consciousness will not only help our understanding of the physical universe, but also of what it means to be a human being. So I think science has always been about more than the straightforwardly practical question, but there are very real-world questions associated with the science of consciousness at the same time. Is there any science behind the idea, as we often hear in some new wave, new age popular culture, that perhaps consciousness is much more mystical, supernatural, it has to do with religious concepts, sort of greater power, and that's how you explain this, rather than through science.

I think maybe there are two approaches to consciousness. One is to say, say oh it's just so magical and mysterious it'll never be part of science it'll always be outside of what we can give a scientific explanation of the polar opposite approach is then to say no you know we just need to carry on with our standard ways investigating the brain and we'll one day crack it. And I think what people are coming to see now is that actually neither of those approaches really gets it. The conventional scientific approach has problems for the reasons we've been discussing, that science deals with the objective, but consciousness is subjective. Science deals with the quantitative, but

consciousness is qualitative. So it's not just another scientific problem. There is something unique and uniquely challenging here. Something that in a way science from Galileo onwards wasn't designed for. On the other hand, if we just say, oh, it's a great big mystery, you know, that's kind of giving up in a way. What people are doing now is thinking, what we need to do is rethink what science is. We need to move to a more expansive conception of the scientific method, one that's able to accommodate

both the quantitative, objective features of matter that science has been dealing so well with for the last 400 or so years, and the qualitative reality of consciousness that each of us knows from the inside, from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences. So what we're finding now is philosophers, and you know, at these times of great revolution, you need some philosophers around. It's really important to have the scientists in the lab doing the experiments. But when you have these moments when science needs to change,

when we need to reimagine the universe, I think that's when you need philosophers around. And what's really exciting at the moment is we're finding scientists and philosophers coming together to sort of rethink the science of consciousness and maybe lay down the foundations for a new scientific approach, you know, that's what's really exciting. I think we need both. We need the science and we need the philosophy. But if we crack the code, if science and philosophy sit down and they go, bingo, got it, so what? Now what? Yeah, that's a good question. And I mean, there's always,

you know, some people say, well, why don't we just stick with what neuroscience gives us? What neuroscience gives us are essentially correlations between conscious experiences and brain activity. You know, you can scan someone's brain and you can ask them how they're feeling and experiencing. And you can discover that a certain kind of activity in a certain region of the brain is always associated with, say, a feeling of hunger. Right. So every time someone has this kind of activity in their brain, they feel hunger. And people say, you know, that's all the information we need. Why not just stick with that? But I guess I think human curiosity can't stop there because what we ultimately want is an explanation. Why is it that when you have that kind of brain activity,

you feel hunger? What's the connection there? Human curiosity wants to explain. And I think this is part of science. It isn't just about building bridges, it's about explaining the universe and leading to a deeper understanding of the world around us. So, you know, if we can get a little bit closer to that, then I think that's worth doing. Is it a fair statement to say that consciousness as you define it, as contemporarily we define consciousness,

is basically the same thing that religion calls your soul? That's a really difficult question, yeah. I mean, I guess I'm inclined to say the soul is one theory about consciousness. Why are people attracted to the soul? Because on the face of it, consciousness does seem so different to everything else in the physical universe for the reasons we've been discussing. It's subjective, it's inner, it's qualitative,

whereas the rest of science seems to be quantitative, objective, outer. So, you know, what one natural response has probably been, the most popular response historically is to say, well, they're just completely different things. You know, there's on the one hand the physical body and brain that science studies. On the other hand, there's consciousness in the soul and the soul although it's closely related to the body is is is essentially distinct from it this is the view of renee descartes and

and there's been some interesting work actually by the psychologist paul bloom that he actually believes and he's got quite good evidence for this, that we're in some way hardwired to adopt that view. From a very early age, children start to class things into mental things and physical things. It's almost as though they've got a commitment to the soul as distinct from the body hardwired into them. But I guess I think that view ultimately is not sustainable because we know there's a deep connection between the mind and the brain. You know, if you're feeling anxious, your body will start to react accordingly, or if you decide to move your arm up,

your arm will go up. So we know there's a close connection between the mind and the body. And I think what traditional belief in the soul really has difficulty explaining that. They've never really managed to explain how an immaterial, non-physical soul could somehow pull and push things in the brain. So that's always been the deep problem with that traditional belief in the soul. Well, it does seem that consciousness is in some ways rather complicated to discuss, and yet very simple to discuss in what you said in the very beginning, that consciousness

is what it's like to be me right now, is my consciousness. And okay, I get that, that's very simple, but there's so much more to this, It's really interesting. My guest has been Philip Goff. He is a philosopher who teaches at Durham University in the UK, and his book is Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Philip. Thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks so much, Mike. It was really fun chatting about this.

If you're ticked off at somebody and holding a grudge, this would be a great time to forgive and forget. It's the beginning of a new year, a new decade, and it's all for your own good. A study found that those people who can manage to forgive others have lower blood pressure, lower levels of stress hormones, and they live longer. People who hold on to anger, resentment, or thoughts of revenge are much more

prone to depression and other illnesses. The holidays and the beginning of a new year are a natural time for goodwill and wiping the slate clean. And that is something you should know. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or any podcast platform. It's always free, and that way you never miss an episode.

I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.

The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.