The Jordan Harbinger Show - 177: Beau Lotto | Why You See Differently When You Deviate

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

Beau Lotto (@beaulotto) is a world-renowned neuroscientist who specializes in the biology and psychology of perception. He is the author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently. What We Discuss with Beau Lotto: Why our brains evolved to experience the world differently from reality. What Beau means when he says: "Choose your delusion or it will choose you."  How our experiences literally change our physical makeup. Why the more complex your environment is, the more complex your brain will be. How our assumptions control our perceptions and what we can do to break free from assumptions that don't serve us. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Most of us, myself included, of course, grow up with the idea that the things we see are the things that actually exists, you know, out in the world. You know, I see a hairless cat in front of me. There's a hairless cat in front of me. End of story. But if you've ever read up on perception or perhaps just made a cameo at Burning Man, you might be familiar with the idea that our eyes and ears don't really see in here. But everything our senses take in is just electric signals that our brain decodes and creates pictures of inside our heads. And this is why people can learn to see with their tongues, literally see with their tongues. We can also develop powers of echolocation to see objects when we're blind, et cetera. It's amazing to see this kind of stuff.

And in the future, we'll most certainly have entirely new senses and ways to perceive the world around us aided by technology. This, of course, drives us to the conclusion that we don't actually experience. the world the way that it is because our brains really didn't even evolve to do that. Today, neuroscientist, author, and perception expert Bo Lotto and I dive into why this is the case. We'll explore why our shared and unshared delusions of the world are actually useful and discuss some methods to develop new perceptions of the world that might actually serve us better. This might be a little heady for some folks, so if you're just waking up in the morning, make sure you got some coffee in your hand. Of course, I look forward to hearing your

thoughts on today's show, as always. If you're interested in how I maintain this amazing network of guests, well, I have a great network of humans in my life, friends, professional, personal, personal relationships, and I develop them all through systems and tiny habits in a way that's, you know, not scammy, smarty, and weird business card in your face type stuff. I'm teaching you how to do that for free at six-minute networking. So go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course and check that out, and let me know what you think of that as well.

In the meantime, enjoy this episode with Bo Lotto. There's a lot of focus now, especially these past few days, honestly, in my industry, where Spotify had just bought some podcast network for like $230 million. It wasn't worth nearly that much. And everyone's like, oh, I'm so jealous. You know, wait, we should start a podcast network. We should do this. And then do, da, da, da, da, acquisition.

It's just, I wish I cared about that stuff because it's like, that's where all this money is. But I just, it's like I can't. No, but as a consequence, you're going to do something well. Yeah, that's what I like to think of. Yeah, that's where I'm hoping. At least the story that we tell ourselves. Yeah, that's what I like. Sorry, I'm telling myself.

That's right. It's funny. It's funny. Right. That's what we called the Lab of Misfits. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

Yeah. That makes sense because, of course, there's a part of me that's like, wait a minute. These guys have been working for like five years. They took on a bunch of investment. They really didn't, a lot of these company, software companies and stuff, they basically buy a bunch of users. And then they just kind of offload it to AOL or whoever for multiple tens of millions or $100 plus million.

And they're super, super, super, super loaded. And you go, well, what did you? you create and they're kind of like, yeah, I mean, it never really did anything. Yeah. Like, it never did anything. It's amazing. So it will resonate. Yeah. Yeah. But your book, Deviate and your work, in large part is about the idea or the fact that we don't experience the world as it is because our brains didn't really evolve to do that. And I think that's fascinating because I always thought my eyes see what's in front of me, but they just, my eyes are really the keyboard to the computer or the another input device and that's pretty much it all these things that

i'm seeing right now this isn't the form that they take per se and that that's sort of a hard thing to wrap my head around i had david eagelman on the show before i'm sure you're familiar with and he was saying similar things like yeah you know some animals will see an electrostatic but as a human since this is all we've ever known this is really what i believe is in front of me these lights and these cameras So the other point is like, who cares if I don't see reality? I mean, we're still going to get along just fine. So what's the point of even trying to figure out what's actually there? First of all, a lot of people when they think about perception and they use illusions

and think about perceptions, for instance, or make statements that we don't see what's really there, too often they use it in a way that gives the impression that everything's an illusion. Okay. And I think that's a convenient. and it's an aesthetic way of trying to create intrigue, but it's wrong. The world exists. There is a world out there, but we don't see it as it is, right? So this is not postmodern relativism, right?

It's not like every perception is as good as everyone else. Some perceptions are better than others. But it is the case that we don't see the world as it is because we're forever separate from that world. So this isn't philosophy. This is just laws of physics. So light, all the light that's coming around us, right? It's bouncing off objects, and then it's changing.

when it hits an object and then it comes to our eyes. But our retina has no access to the light directly, nor to the surfaces. All it literally has access to is energy. Energy is out there, electromagnetic radiation, sound waves are out there. So you have all these vibrations and chemicals and energy, and that's what we detect. So in the same way that a camera is detecting light, or radio telescopes are collecting radio waves.

but that energy doesn't have a meaning. It doesn't tell you what to do. All it is is energy of different amounts. So your sensors detect that. And that's like the metaphor, like the eyes are like the keyboard is the computer. The keyboard is detecting your touch, but it doesn't make meaning of your touch. The rest of the computer does in a way. So the retina is capturing this energy.

And what's more, it's capturing a really small range of that. energy. So we're sensitive to an amount of light, which is tiny compared to the rest of the amount of energy that's out there. And then your brain has to do something with that. And that's where your brain is actually constructing a meaning. And it's that meaning that you're seeing. You're not seeing the energy. You're detecting the energy, but you're not seeing it. So we could really construct the picture in a different way. So if my brain was just a really complex calculator that displayed everything in numbers, I would just see trillions of digits everywhere. Well, in a way, that's effectively, it's effectively what we're doing, right?

It's just that those trillions of digits then move your arms, they move your legs, but they have to move it in a way that's useful. And the only way your brain can do that is by taking that data, right? The data itself is meaningless. It's literally devoid of meaning, but it's useful. It's useful stuff, but it's not meaningful stuff. It then comes into the neural network of your brain, and then that neural network, which is literally just billions of connections,

with electrical activity going through, which then generates a movement, and that movement has to be useful. But how do you know what to move towards or away? And that's empirical. So what experience and evolution and development give you is utility, not accuracy. And that's great. It's really brilliant that,

we actually have useful perceptions, but not accurate perceptions because they're not the same thing. Yeah, that makes sense, right? So I don't necessarily need to know exactly what everything is in an accurate way, because that's not the thing that's going to help me survive the best. No, and if that were true, we wouldn't have things like language, because language is not a construct of the world. Think about perceptions of pain. Is pain an illusion? Of course it's not an illusion. It's a meaningful perception, but it's not something that exists in the world. There aren't painful things in the world. If we weren't here, pain would not exist.

Right. It's a, is it like a delusion? Is that a kind of fair? You could use those in a sense. So I talk about how the brain is effectively delusional. But what I mean by that is not in, say, the artistic way that your senses are being fooled. Your senses are not being fooled. So when people often too often, in fact, even scientists talk about illusions, they use

them as examples like you have the fragility of your senses. Right. It looks like the trinched. But they're not tricks. Right. What they're really, they're only tricks if you think your brain evolved to do something, which is to see the world accurately. To then see the world differently from the way it really is would be an illusion.

But if your brain evolved to see something useful, well, that doesn't have to be accurate, which means an illusion is not that. What illusion demonstrates is what your brain actually evolved to do in the first place, which is to see utility, not accuracy. Can you give us an example of that? And I know that you in the book Deviate, you talk a little bit about the dress, that sort of meme that went viral and how people will see

something different. It's not just that some people are colorblind or less accurate or perceiving colors, it's that the utility was different in the person's brain. Or maybe I don't fully understand. So what happened with the dress, there were at least two really fascinating things about the dress. First of all, to explain the dress, the dress is an example of what we basically call color contrast illusion, that if you take a piece of light and you have it surrounded by a light of a different color, then they will look different. They affect each other in our perception. Okay. Okay. And so what was happening with the dress is that you had the juxtaposition of different colors and they interacted in your perception as a consequence they look different than what they, in a sense,

really were. And so that's a well-known illusion called brightness, or sorry, color contrast. What was fascinating was how powerful it was on people, not just the illusion, but that people really cared. Yeah, there was a lot of strife online. So because I'm a color neuroscientist, I study how the brain makes color because it's one of most basic perceptions. So I did, of course, a lot of interviews

about what was going on your brain. And eventually I started shifting the topic of interviews to about why is it so viral? because we know that if you're speaking German and I'm speaking English that we have different words for the same information. So we're perfectly happy to accept that. But why was it so hard to accept the idea that people have different colors or could see things differently? And I think some people literally became almost frightened by it. It's like, wait a minute, if that's true, how is it possible that I could hold on to any of my perceptions? And in fact, that's a

actually what most of our work is really about. It's about creating that doubt because it's only through that doubt you have the possibility of having creativity. So that doubt is really powerful and it's really positive. I think the reason people might get a little bit upset by this or freaked out might be the technical term is because it says that essentially the meaning of the thing is not the same as the thing itself. Does that sound, I feel like I need to roll up a J or something when I talk like that, right? But that's what that means, right? Like the information, and I think you bring this example in the book, the information is like poetry, it only means something in the brain. Does the, the words written on the paper are just kind of, they don't mean anything.

They don't mean anything. They're abstract, symbolic representations of something, right? There's no inherent meaning in any letter, much less a letter string, nor does the other letters of the words impose a meaning. Because, of course, if you're not an Egyptologist, and I give you a hieroglyph, you don't know what that means. Right. Now, if I embed that hieroglyph and other hieroglyph, I create a context for it. Well, for an egyptologist, they know it changes the meaning. For you, for me?

Right. Don't know. Right. And that's everything that the brain's dealing with, right? It's getting this data from the world, and it's like, now what do I do? And the only way it knows what to do is by thinking about what did this mean for my behavior in the past. And not just my behavior, maybe the behavior of my family, behavior of my culture,

or my evolutionary ancestors. And all that trial and error history of experience is encoded in your brain. That's literally what the functional network of your brain represents. It's that history of what was useful in the past given these concerns to certain stimuli. So you can say most of your life happened without you even there. You come into the world already with a complex set of connections which were useful in the past. So if when walking along the savannah And you came upon a patch where there was low light

We'd call it dark, right? But objectively it's just less light Well, there could be a number of sources for that It could be a hole or it could be a dark surface or it could be a shadow Right A prior you don't know which one And for those who thought hmm I'm going to walk around that because it was a hole They survived

those who stepped into it were selected out, right? So that meaning now gets incorporated into the reflexive network of your brain, and that's what we inherited. Oh, right, because if we're, let's say, it's our first day having, being able to perceive something, let's say I'm blind and I get cited tomorrow through the magic of science. Which happens for some people, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure it's going to happen more and more in the future

when we figure out how to quote unquote fix these problems. or create working robotic eyes or whatever. These, or bionic, I guess, in this case. I might look at that and go, what is that? I don't know what that is. Let me just walk over there. And then they fall in this hole. And I think, what the hell?

Yeah. Why nobody tell me about this? That's right. Because I'm not using my cane, which I was using before. If I had my, if I was looking at it and I'd had my stick, I would have aimed my cane at it and gone, oh, that's weird. That feels like a hole.

Oh, that's what a hole looks like. I wouldn't have no, there would be no basis for that in my head whatsoever. No. And that's, and so maybe more intuitive example for people is language. Language, you get sound information. That's everything I'm saying right now is literally meaningless. There's no inherent meaning in any sound that I'm making right now. So the meaning that's being constructed is inside everybody else's head, right?

They're taking that art in some sense arbitrary sound string and they're constructing a meaning. Where did that meaning come from? They didn't come into the world with that meaning. They learned that meaning through trial and error history when the parents said, you know, glasses. And now you associate, ah, glasses, and then, oh, you put them on. So now you increasingly create a complex meaning, which is, in other words, how do I behave towards that thing? Right, that's the meaning. It's not some sort of abstract.

It's behavioral towards that thing. And we construct that through history. So our experiences then literally change our physical makeup. up inside our brain because we're... So we... A lot of people keep forgetting that. Our brain evolved in a body and our body in our world. So our brain

lives in that world. That's how your brain literally makes meaning by physically engaging with the world. Silicon Valley often forgets that. That you think that by passively receiving content your brain's... No, no. You physically interact. And hence someone who is doesn't have sight and

is given sight, often they can't see. Because they've never had a history of physically interacting with sort of the sources of that light data and making meaning from it. So there's a famous experiment which I can describe with kittens, where you had two kittens recently born eyes just open. And one of the kittens is allowed to run on the ground. And the other one is suspended in a basket.

And it's connected to the one of the ground, which means wherever the one on the ground goes, the one in the basket also goes. And the point is they're having the same visual experience of the world. And after a period of time, you test the vision of the one on the ground. It sees fine as you would expect. But what about the one in the basket? It's eyes have been open. It's had the same visual history, but it's blind.

Why? Because it's never been able to physically interact and make meaning from that light. And so now as you let it run around, it will actually learn to see. And that's how we make meaning by physically engaging. So if there's data going in, but I'm not able to physically engage, does my brain just treat it like noise? Because it can't do anything with that particular data? Yes and no.

what it will do is it'll find correlations. Your brain is really good at finding relationships. Okay, so the first step is to find those relationships. In theory, there's almost an infinite number of possible relationships. But our brain is wired to find some relationships more than others, right? And that's itself a historical representation in your brain. The next stage is once it find those relationships and those connections get reinforced, then says, now do I, what do I do with them?

So it finds relationships and then it finds the meaning of those relationships. So if you get a lot of data, your brain will still be shaped by those relationships, but it still doesn't tell the brain what to do with them. And then you still have to engage. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Bo Lotto. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard,

visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. And now I'm back to our show with Bo Lotto. Do you think we'll create new senses in the future? Or am I jumping too far on the sci-fi? No, I think it's a great question. In fact, we've kind of tried to do that in the lab.

Because if you really want to understand how the brain works, it means you have to understand sort of the historical relationship between information and what that information meant in the past. The problem is that past is often lost to us. We haven't been able to quantify it. So that's one of the reasons why we work artificial neural networks, for instance. We can play God in that system, and we can relate the history to the structure of the network to behavior. But so one way we've tried to do with humans is rather than give a new sense, we've replaced one sense with another.

So we translate light into sound, and then people hear their visual world. And because sound has a different statistical structure than light, we can then see how does the brain adapt to that new information. So if I'm hearing my visual world, and this is something we've been doing for about 15 years, and initially it sounds like noise, but as they start interacting, they can start hearing objects,

but where they're hearing are visual objects. And the people who really did this work back in the 1960s started on the tongue. They were actually able to project into the world, even though the information, the light information, was actually on their tongue or on their back or in their ears.

So in that sense, yes. But there's another way we can actually do it with technology. So you can argue technology is another way of extending our ability to sense the world. And a telescope or a microscope or an MRI or being able to detect heat. So these are other ways we extend our senses. It's called an extended phenotype. It's a bit like a spider on a web. And the spider extends itself.

into the world by creating a web. Is it the spider or is it not the spider? Right, right. Because doesn't the spider detect vibrations in the web or something? And it's able, in a sense, to read those vibrations in the same way that we're reading the vibrations of sound. They're reading the vibrations in the spider web. So is it like sound to them?

Do they hear a sea? Does an insect when it lands sound like a cord? And they say, ah, that cord means mosquito. That cord means fly. Who knows? Yeah, that is fascinating. One thing I remember researching about the brain or hearing about the brain a million years ago was if we look at something or most of what we're looking at essentially is filled in by the brain. So I might look over there and say, oh, there's some clothing over there. And then when I look again, I see even less because there's this picture of the clothing in my head. I don't have to actually, my brain doesn't have to decode everything that it sees every time. It makes these assumptions that are in large part correct, which is why. you end up with these kind of cool optical illusions or why, unfortunately, we hear of, well, this officer literally the brain said they saw a weapon in this person's hand when there

wasn't one because that's how our brains work and that's how our eyes and brain work in concert in certain ways in some circumstances. You've got this exercise where we can stop, these things called saccads, which you can define in a second. We essentially go blind when this happens. What's going on with us? What is this? So first of all, when it comes to your brain filling in, it's not that it sometimes does that. It's always doing that. Every moment, every day, that's what you're seeing, is a filling in, right? And then there are sort of more explicit examples of that where in your peripheral vision, you don't have any color receptors, and yet we see color.

Yeah, I was going to say, nothing's black and white out there. Nothing's black and white out there. You have a massive hole in your retina, so to speak, which is actually where your receptors are being covered by the fibers that are going back into your brain, right? And it's called the blind spot, which is about here, right? But I don't see a hole. And yet there's your hand, yeah. But in the same way, you can say color is filling in,

because color is not a function of light. Light exists, but it's not colored. So every color that you see couldn't be closer to you. It's literally inside your head projected outward. You are literally coloring the world. So if a tree falls in the wood, no one is there to hear. It doesn't make a sound. No.

It creates energy. but the sound is a construct of your brain. So the tree exists, the energy exists, but your brain then turns that into something useful, which is sound. So saccades, what are saccods? And how does that relate to this? And congratulations, by the way,

on answering a Zen Cohen. I don't think you're supposed to do that. So saccades are, what the power of saccots that they demonstrate is that your brain's only ever interested in relationships. It's not interesting in absolutes. It's interesting contrast and change. that changes life, right? And this is both literal and metaphorical. When things don't change,

they die. You get selected out. So your brain is interested in difference and change. So as you're looking at me, whereas people are looking at this, their eyes are actually moving. They're not aware that they're moving. They're called microscods and saccods, and they're consciously unaware of it, but they're constantly moving. And you can actually stop your eyes from moving by, you look at a stable scene, and you cover one eye, and then you take your finger, and you push, you feel your tear duct, and then you push your eyeball to the back of the eye, and then, which is happening now, and then slowly, the whole world disappears. Oh my God.

So you just disappeared from me right there. Should I try this for now? So you cover this eye. Okay. Okay. And then with this finger, feel the tear duct. Okay. Keep your eye open.

And then slowly push your finger back, which is forcing your eyeball against the back. Oh, God. This is highly uncomfortable. Okay. Yeah. It sort of just fades. it fades away. Yeah.

So what's happening? Your eyes open. Yeah. But you can't see. Why? Because now there's nothing interesting to look at. There's no change. Oh, so that is, okay, I thought I was just cutting off the blood support in my eyeball.

There's just, nothing's changing, so there's nothing interesting to look at. You know, it's funny. I used to do that as a kid. And my mom goes, if you're, if you're, it's going to stay that way. You're going, what are you doing? You know, you can't do that. Because I used to think, how fun is this? My eye turns off.

And my mom was, of course, horrified. Like, hey, that's probably not wild. Beautiful example of curiosity. Yeah. Yeah. And meanwhile, little did I know. I was just stopping my microsychids. Well, you were doing a, which is great, you were doing a famous science experiment, which

started many decades ago. And it was asking a fundamental question about why do our eyes move and what happens if you stop them from moving? So by stopping this motion, I'm stopping these little changes from being perceived by my brain. That's right. So you could actually stop your eye from moving. but keep the world moving and you'll still see. So it's not that your eye is stationary.

What it is that the information coming from the world is stationary. So the brain finds it uninteresting. You could argue that in a way. It's like there's nothing used to you look at. Of course the brain's not thinking about it. But it's as if. So at least metaphorically, what we've evolved is to find difference. I mean, diversity is fundamental.

Change is fundamental to survival. And this isn't just with our eyes. You gave the example in Deviate about certain Asian cultures, Japanese was, I think, the example you gave, and the language in the letters R and L. And movies and TV are, in polite adult cartoons are full of people imitating that accent and confusing the letters R and L. And I'm married into a Taiwanese, Chinese family. So I often hear those two letters confused, so to speak. And I always thought, oh, they can't hear those sounds. But then I noticed after enough exposure to my wife's parents and family, wait a minute, they use them

sometimes? Yes. But then it's like they also confuse them sometimes. So what's going on? What's going on here? This was fascinating. Yeah. It's a wonderful example.

And it's not unique to Asian culture because also we can't hear the five sounds of A that people in Scandinavia use, for instance. Right, right. We can't see certain shades of red that Russians can see. Really? Yeah. Because their language has many descriptions of red. There's behavioral.

value in making distinctions, so they therefore make distinctions. Because it wasn't behaviorally useful for us to do so, we don't make distinctions. So this is a perfect example of how the relationship between accuracy and utility is different. So come back to the aura v. L. Why does it happen? Those sounds exist in their language. The sound of rah and la exist in language, but they're interchangeable. There's no behavioral value in making a distinction between them. So though it would be accurate to hear the distinction, it's not useful. In order to make a distinction, you have to have wiring that facilitates making that distinction. That's expensive. You have to have more, literally spend more energy in forming new connections, having those connections

be active to maintain those connections, all that costs energy. So it's not useful. So why have it? So which is why they can substitute them, but there's no change in the meaning. For us, there's a change in the meaning. But if you play those sounds outside the context of language, they'll hear a difference. So fascinating. So it's in the context and that suddenly, and it's not like it's a conceptual difference.

There literally is no perceptual difference. Right. So the language has those sounds, but their brains or the brains are not trained to hear the difference in a way because there's no use for that. Because there's no use for it. So if it's not useful, why do it? Because what experience, what evolution gives you,

first of all, it's not accuracy, it's utility. And it works from failure, not function. So it works from failure, not success. It's more sort of we've evolved to not die as opposed to evolve to survive. Right, or thrive in some particular way. Yes, because dying is easy. Right.

There are lots of ways to die and not so many, right? So what we evolved to do is to not die and to conserve energy to a certain extent. And so your brain is constantly in this balance in your body and nature. in general, this balance between redundancy and resilience, which requires energy and efficiency, which is to conserve energy. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Bo Lato.

We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com and don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to the show on the Overcast player for iOS, please click that little star next to the show.

It really helps us out. Now for the conclusion of our show with Bo Lato. What about exercises like visualization? You hear this almost, I think it's trendy now, right? And you see this in things like sports coaching, performance coaching of all kinds. Even if you're going to go up on stage and speak, people say, let's visualize this.

So we're simulating something in our brain. what is this doing sort of from a scientific perspective? There's a great deal of research on visualization by others, and what they've demonstrated is that the visualization is activating the parts of your brain that would be active even if you were looking at something. So if I am, let's say, seeing the slope of the skiing, because there's literally a slope in front of me, and because I'm moving through it,

and there's all that energy coming from it, and my brain is now interpreting that in a useful way, okay? That's seeing it. And so that will activate the back part of my brain, the visual cortex, and then other parts. If I imagine seeing it, you still activate the exact same areas of your brain. You just activate them less. Ah, so visualization is seeing. Is seeing.

Wow. Okay, because I'm thinking, eh, it's imagining stuff. How could it possibly be the same? But in that sense, the power of it is the visualization can instaing. itself be a form of training. Right. But I was skeptical about that at first. I wasn't sure if that was the case.

Well, imagine a chess player visualizing a game of chess. And the masters can, of course, do this. And they'll play a game of chess in their mind, and they can probably almost literally, if not literally see the board in front of them, right, in their minds. So their eyes are closed and they're seeing this board and they're seeing the moves.

And they could probably re-visualize the game that was just played. And then they can go back and say, oh, well, that was the mistake I made. What if I did this? Right? And now they'll play the game as if they made the move that they didn't make. That is imagination. And now they can see the consequences of making that move because if I do this, now you'll do that. And they'll play that out.

That is experience as far as you're training those synapses between the neurons as if you actually played. So next time you're in that scenario, Instead of making that move, you might make the other one because your brain is only ever used in the history of what you've done before. But what you've done before is not only what you've literally done. It's also what you've imagined to do. And that will necessarily affect the architecture of your brain. Wow. So it's essentially, is it as simple as saying it's like trial and error? It's all trial and error, right?

Everything is trial and error. So in that sense, it's trial and error, but it's trial and air in my head. And so you could argue that that's the beauty of imagination. And you can maybe even argue that that's the beauty of consciousness because I can have that trial and air experience without the risk of actually doing it in the world. Right. It could be with chess, you're safe, but with something.

Imagine a car or imagine the skiing, right? The downhill skier, who's imagining, and they're imagining going this way. There's a huge cost to getting it wrong. We call it the cost function. If you get some things, if you get a small change, dramatic effect. And so now I can rehearse that.

And what's more, not only that, not only about imagining the future, I can also do that for the past. I can go back into the past. And while I can't change the things that happen, I can change the meaning of the things that happened. And so if everything I'm doing right now is a consequence of the history of my meanings,

and that determines what I'm going to do in the future, well, how do I change what I'm going to do in the future? change the meanings of the things that happen in the past. That's effectively every story you've ever read, every therapy you might have gone into, is about re-meaning the past of what's happened. Again, you can't change it, but you can change the meaning of it,

and your behavior is determined not by the thing that happened, but by the meaning of it. Can you give this an example? That sounds really useful, actually. Well, it's fundamental. Yeah. And you could also argue this is, again, what consciousness is doing,

the ability to time travel, because you could argue that, we don't have any free will in the moment. Everything I'm doing right now, every word I'm saying to you right now, is a function of a reflex. You're giving me information, I'm generating a behavior. That's based everything on the history of what led to this point. But again, it's not the history of the thing that happened. So what would be an example? If you think about behavioral cognitive therapy, very simplistically, what's happening is that people will, during the therapy, they bring you to the point of where you engaged in a situation and applied a very bad meaning. It could have literally

been a bad meeting that happened. Someone died or you felt super anxious. And it could be both objective or subjective. That I felt anxiety could have been a good idea or it might have been a pathological idea. So now what I can do is I can go back and imagine that time. But instead of feeling anxious, I could apply a different meaning to it. Say calm or just, just neutral, let go of the anxiety. And now, when I'm engaged in that situation, again, say public speaking, giving an interview, going to work, I can now change my statistic, and maybe I won't apply that reflex of anxiety because I've diminished it as a possible behavior, a possible response.

Okay, right. And that, of course, requires practice slash therapy. The brain's like a muscle. You use it to lose it. And all of these things, you could argue that this is the power of meditation. Meditation is really about practicing and exercising your brain to let go of the meanings that it's already attaching to something. It's what I call going into not A. If you ever want to shift someone or yourself from A to B, the first step is not B.

The first step is to go to A to not A. I hit your patella 10, your leg goes out. That's the reflex. That's A. That's the meaning. I shout at you, you get angry. That's the meaning. It's reflexes that's very natural. It's human.

now if you don't want to go to anger the first step is not to go to happiness it's just to go to anger is to let go of that reflexive meaning and go to not a i.e. to go to uncertainty so that ties in well with something else i read and deviate which is choose your delusion or it will choose you so what does this mean we can't really just like choose reality i mean i guess we could but that's very burning man you know well i go to burning man yeah yeah i can tell by this Right So

Yeah Choose your delusion What does that mean And this is This is both a playful statement But in some sense A literal statement Okay

The point is that We have too often We are only ever Reflexively responding to the world And we play a game with herself We think we're making choice But we're not Right

When I'm studying my bumblebees Because I train bumblebees Right The bumblebees might think that they're making a choice, but I already know what they're going to do. And so much of our behavior is almost predetermined in that way. My wife is so interested. She keeps bees, so she's smiled big time. I didn't know you could train bumblebees. Train bumblebees. And we can even etch them into sculptures, the flight of the bumblebee into glass. So the, and bees are just

like little flying people, right? The beauty of them is they have a million brain cells, but they're solving the most complex problems that even our most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems can't solve. Playing chess is easy. Relatively to recognizing a flower from different directions, different orientations, and then behaving according. That's what's hard. So a bee can do that.

So we train bees to figure out what's going on side their heads to understand what's going on side ours. So the bees are effectively in a reflexive state. And that's often how we live our lives. We are very scripted. And there's efficiency and utility on that, but it's also very scripted. And it's only when you have awareness of why you're doing what you're doing that creates the possibility of doing it differently.

So the point of choosing your delusion is to evoke that idea that you can actually be an agent, an active agent in the constructions of the meanings that you give. So if someone say, shouts at you, whatever you do at that moment, how you respond to the thing determines its meaning. Your shout to you as neither you could argue has no meaning to it. I project the meaning onto it. And I project that meaning by deciding how I'm going to respond to you. So if I respond to you with anger, that's what that means.

If I respond to you with compassion, like, oh, really? Maybe the bees stung you or, right? Now that's a very different response and a very different meaning to your same stimulus. Your stimulus hasn't changed, but my meaning has. So in that sense, I have a choice. And I only have that choice if I know I have one. And you only have that choice if you know how perception works. So that's the whole role of deviate is to give that awareness of how your perception is working

so that you can come an active agent in how you perceive. Now, of course, if you don't have eyes, you can't choose to see. And it can actually be incredibly detrimental to create that measure to say, you know, just see whatever you want to see. course you can't. You still have to function in a world that has gravity, right, that has light, but we have more freedom than we think we do. We have more agency than we think we do. How do we practice that? Are there ways that you can strengthen the skill of deviation? And I think the words use exactly that. It is a skill and it is a practice. So first of all, you have to begin with awareness. That if you don't have awareness of how and why you're seeing what

you do, you have no potential of freedom. Now that you have that, the next step is that you have to realize that everything you're doing has a bias and assumption, not sometimes, all the time. And most of the time, those biases and assumptions have a real significant advantageous value to them. You know, right now you have an assumption that the chair is not going to give away. When you take a step that your legs aren't going to give away. So these assumptions keep us alive and they're embedded in us. The problem is we don't know what they are. So the practice is often having this awareness, that awareness gives you humility, and that humility creates the possibility of doubt.

And it's through that doubt that gives you the possibility now of responding differently. Because if you are seeing the world as it really is, why would you ever want to see it differently? Right. Right. That's the beauty of not seeing the world as it really is by seeing the utility because the world changes, which means you need to change with it. Because what was once useful may no longer be useful. You've learned English, now you need to learn German.

Because the world has changed because I'm now in Germany. So the world is always changing and complexifying, and we need to complexify with it. And we never could if we always just see it as it really is. So the message is that you have an agency, and then you have to practice that. And you have to practice it by letting go and then creating new ones.

We see a lot of instances in which circumstances or context, I guess, changes our perceptions. I talked with Sean Acour about happiness in an earlier episode. And one of the kind of crazy anecdotes or principles that he brought up was hills and summits look lower when we're with someone else or in a better mood. Coins look bigger, I think, to people who maybe children who don't have enough money, right? and distances seem farther if we're carrying a heavy load. What's actually going on in the brain here? Because when you're looking at distance, you're not actually looking at distance.

You're looking at the meaning of the information, not the information. Right. So what you're anticipating is how far I have to walk. So if you ask people, you put them in front of a gradient, and you ask them to rate how steep that gradient is, and then you have them to use their hands say, oh, it's about that steep. You put a heavy backpack on them,

and now they're going to say it's deeper. Why? Because what they're perceiving is the effort they're going to have to put in to climbing. It's that effort, it's that meaning that you're perceiving. It just seems like you're representing the world accurately and that sometimes you get it a bit wrong. No, no.

It's that what you're always perceiving is the meaning. And color and pain make that, and pleasure, make those explicit. Because color's not out there. Right. It's literally a function. So too often with distance, people say, ah, but I did, he's a meter away. Of course I'm seeing it accurately, and sometimes I get a little bit off.

Well, either that's true, and it's everything else, that somehow we have two very different kinds of ways of perceiving, or we have one kind of way of perceiving, is that one seems to correlate more with accuracy than another. Right, okay, so I'm not seeing a 45-degree hill that suddenly looks steeper. Your brain isn't seeing 45 degrees. It's just perceiving based on all of the same. Yes, it's perceiving effort.

It's perceiving, right? And so that is a very useful way of receiving. Wow. Okay. So then if this context can be, I'm carrying something heavy or don't have enough money, then can there be contexts that are different like, well, maybe I feel powerless in society, therefore I perceive things differently? Which happens.

This happens? Yes. So we actually have a study showing what happens to your perception if you feel disempowered versus you feel empowered. And in fact, in that study, the way you get people to feel disempowered, it's not a methodology we've developed, but it's our colleagues at UCL developed. But the strategy is this, I get you to imagine a time that you were very stressed and out of control versus someone else who feel, I also imagine to a time that they felt very stressed, but in control. and I get you to imagine that for five minutes as much detail as possible

the colors, the smells, the light, everything. And then I get you to write it down. What I'm getting to you is to imagine, visualize that moment. And that's like, great, that's done. And you think, great, but I don't feel any different. Sure. But now I show you my illusions. My illusions like where I give you something

that is a gray on a dark background versus a gray that's on a light background. And the one that's on the dark background will look lighter than the one that's in light background. Now, if you're disempowered, you actually see that to be a stronger illusion than if you're feeling empowered. Yeah, why? Why? And it's because we think that everything your brain is often trying to do is trying to increase certainty.

Because to be an uncertainty during evolution was to increase the probability of death. If you couldn't predict, it increased the chance of you dying. Right. So when your brain goes into uncertainty, that's a scary place. That's why we're afraid of the dark, right? Because you literally can't predict the next step. So suddenly, everyone can imagine this, right? If you're walking through a space, think of just the speed at which you walk through a space.

When the lights are on, you walk through you quickly, right? Why wouldn't you? Lights are off, do you walk through at the same speed? No, of course not. You're going to crack into a wall. Why? Exactly. Because you can't predict what's going to happen the next step.

That's what happens when we go into uncertainty. And your brain has this fear. What's the fear response? Their fear response is, get out of here. So when you're disempowered, the world feels more uncertain. Why? Because you would have less control. So the reason why the illusion goes up is because you start using context more.

You're trying to create certainty. People actually became more gullible. They're more willing to believe something we would tell them. If I show them just six scenes that are just random dot patterns, and I hide three in three of those scenes hidden figures. And I say, which of those six scenes has a hidden figure in it? The disempowered person is more likely to say all six. The one in power is say, oh, it's those three.

So they start seeing pattern when no pattern exists. I feel like this explains our election results. This is actually, in some sense, you're absolutely right. This is what politicians and people who try to control other people do all the time. not just in politics, but also interpersonal relationships. So one thing you can do if you're incumbent, and you'll see this often, is how do you maintain control? I create uncertainty, but I'm the only source of relieving that uncertainty.

Exactly. Right. So I say, you know what? The world suddenly is going to be really scary. But fortunately, I can solve that problem. Well, we see it in abusive relationships, too. Like, why do you stay with them? Well, I don't want to be alone.

Okay, well, being lonely sucks, but really, what you're scared of is this boogeyman of what's even worse than going home to somebody who punches you in the face. That's right. So that's how powerful the fear of uncertainty is because it's literally linked to death, right? We are so, sea sickness is a consequence of uncertainty, right? Yeah. You go down below in a boat and your eyes are moving in register in your boat and your eyes are saying, I'm standing still, your inner ear is saying, no, no, you're moving, and your brain can't do with that conflict so it gets ill.

So you see this in interpersonal relationships. So if you're in our relationship, I could create a sense of uncertainty. So what were you doing last night? Oh, no. Now, suddenly, I've created a power dynamic because you kind of want to know. Why? Because you want certainty. But I'm the only one who can relieve that certainty for you.

Now I have an element of control over you. Right. Right. And you see this, unfortunately, in interpersonal relationships all the time. And by create, and this is the power of honesty, right? The power of honesty is if I give something to you, I'm actually decreasing your certainty. That's the one particularly powerful aspect of honesty. Wait, I don't understand that.

So if you give you a question. Right. Right. And I give you an honest response. I'm decreasing the uncertainty for you because I'm making it less ambiguous. Oh, decreasing the uncertainty. I'm decreasing uncertainty. I'm sorry to misheard you.

Right. Okay. Right. And that's a tremendous gift. That's generosity. Because now you have the basis. by which to make a decision. Your decision might be, thank you very much, I'm leaving, which is a state of vulnerability. So there's tremendous vulnerability in that trust and creating

that certainty for another person. But that's also one of the reasons why we don't do it, because you might walk away if you really knew. Right. However, it's also going to like a sales perspective, it's actually a really good technique to be honest. And I say technique, sort of loosely, because of course short term, you can lie your way to a sale easily. but if you create certainty in someone else and they go wow this person had the option to lie to me didn't do that's right gave me certainty i decided not to do business with them this is a person who gives me certainty i trust this person i'm seeking the certainty because i'm human this is somebody i want to be around and do more with exactly i don't want to do it and why is that it's because you're increased so we call that integrity right and unfortunately increasingly there's almost like a culture of lying now yeah right whether it be through

Facebook and all this, where people are in the very least exaggerating the truth, if not just being outright. Outright lying, right? Disingenuous. But the consequence is that the other person becomes increasingly unpredictable. If I can't predict you, that's a, that, you're now scary to me. Because I have no idea what you're going to do next. Unless you're a teenage girl in which kids, then you're wildly fascinated.

But then that's the element. To be honest, that's the element where we also like that intrigue. but we want that intrigue not to be random, right? If I can predict that this is where you become creative or this is where I can't predict you, but I always know that you're going to go well rather than bad, right? Then we start thinking about what's their values. Because if you're both unpredictable and only about you,

well, now I have no idea if you're going to go right or left, right? Or good or bad. But if I have a, if you're honest and predictable, but you're also predictably unpredictable in that I know he has a good heart, he's going to go towards the good or he's going to try to. Well, now I have that combination of certainty and a comfortable form of uncertainty. You just summed up everything I did wrong in high school. Our brains look for assumptions, right? Like fear of heights was one of the ones that you gave in the book. Can we talk about this a little bit? Because the assumptions thing is,

is interesting for me. We want patterns that make things easier. This phenomenon, am I bringing up any, am I speaking your language here? I think a lot of these assumptions, they come from experience. But I want to talk about this because this seems like this is what limits our perception. That's right. So if you think about what does history give me? What does history give you? What does history give a brain? What it gives your brain are biases and assumptions. That's which, in a sense, what you're constructing and inheriting. And in fact, you could argue that most of them you have inherited. We've inherited the assumptions of our culture,

of our evolution ancestors, and they're embedded in our brain. Okay, what's the significance of having those assumptions and biases? Well, they're very useful, because now I can use those biases to generate a behavior given a stimulus that is inherently meaningless. Okay? So it's like, ah, there's that dark patch on the ground.

I have the bias in assumption that it's a whole, I'm going to walk around. I have the bias of assumption that will be bad if I step into it, so I'm going to go walk around. So that's great. The challenge is not only do they facilitate a behavior, they also are constraints to our behavior. So your brain never makes a big jump. It only makes a small step.

I can't get from here to the door without passing to the space in between. What's sitting right next to me metaphorically in my next step is determined by what my biases are. So if you, again, coming back to if you shout to me, my bias is that you're angry. but I don't have to have that bias. Let's say my next step is that

to go to anger because you're angry with me. Well, that's a function of what my biases were. I might have a different assumption that you can't hear me, and that's why you're shouting. Right, or that I'm really excited about something. I really want you to see it. Yeah, so now I have a different possibility, right? But if I'm someone who only ever goes, thinks that's anger,

I have one place to go. And I will go a different place if I have different bias assumptions. These biases and assumptions shape what we do next. So they kind of make up our personality. In fact, you could argue that that's what makes us who we are is our collection of biases and assumptions, which means if you ever want to see differently, first you have to become aware that you have them,

and the second is to change them. Because if you change your biases, you change your perceptions. If you change your assumptions, you change your perceptions. A simple example of this, and this is probably an oversimplification, but whatever, I'm the king of that. I grew up in like this very safe suburban neighborhood, which will surprise no one listening or watching the show. And I would easily run up to a friend of mine that I saw walking down the road with his dog

and run up behind him and give him a little shove and say, hey, Tim, what's going on? And he'd go, hey, how are you doing? Turn around with a smile. Yeah. I started working in Detroit, which I don't know if you've ever been there. I have. It could be a little rough sometimes. I learned pretty quickly not to run up behind my friends in the first.

road and shove them and go, hey, because it's a good way to, at the very least, get punched in the face or just scare the crap out of your friend in a way that he's not really going to appreciate. And some of that's contextual, but if you ran out, if it was my first time in Detroit and someone ran up behind me and did that, I'd probably just turn around and smile, because that's, that was my set of assumptions dictated that that's what you do. That was the next most likely possibility giving your set of assumptions. Right. Yeah.

But somebody who grew up in that area, or we're here in New York. right now, Manhattan. If you walk up to a tourist and you do that, they might turn around and smile and laugh. But if you do it to somebody who grew up here, you're probably going to get clocked in the teeth. Yeah, possibly, right? And so, I mean, this makes a sort of really nice example. And it makes a couple of really interesting points about thinking about what even what is, what is creativity, because it's linked into that. So, but what you're demonstrating there is that how biases that we've learned or inherited affect the next step that we're going to take. And that next step that we take is determined by a bias and assumptions, which is different

for everybody. Why you can get the exact same stimulus resulting in different behaviors from different people, like the red, like the dress. The dress, yeah. Right? How people saw it differently. Because at that point, they were applying different assumptions and biases in their brains. And then what would happen when they would flip it is because they would flip those

biases assumptions. So this actually relates to creativity. and actually to communication. Because if you said to someone in Detroit, when you jump up behind them and they get angry with you, you could actually view them through your own set of bias and assumptions, what an idiot? Why on earth are you doing this?

I mean, why are you angry? I'm just jumping up behind you and saying hi. Because in your history, that's... But by not taking into account the fact that they might have different bias and assumptions, you can't understand their behavior. Their behavior is just wrong because it's not yours. Because what makes sense to you make sense to you. We all make sense to ourselves.

Why? Because we all have these bias assumptions that didn't determine our behavior and they all make sense. So when someone's not making sense, it's not because they have their bias and assumptions and are just behaving randomly. It's because they're behaving according to their set of biases assumptions. So to understand someone is not necessarily to understand what they did,

it's to understand why they did it. Okay, maybe I do need to roll up that J because what I'm about to, but if our assumptions control our perceptions and our perceptions form our assumptions, are we stuck in a loop? Yeah, yeah. And a J, it'd probably be MDMA would be better. Right, yeah, yeah. Some kind of psychedelics or something. Yes, in that sense, you can never step outside your assumptions.

Okay. So this concept of stepping outside your box, stepping outside the box is a silly idea because all you do is you step inside a new box. You can never leave them, but what you can do is expand them. You can increase them. You can also change them. So this is super powerful when thinking about conflict. So if you are in conflict, my aim is, unfortunately, the way we've been taught in this culture is to prove that you're wrong and to shift you towards me.

Sure. Persuasion or debate. And the problem is you're trying to do exactly the same thing. You're trying to prove that I'm wrong and to shift me towards you. But notice that conflict is set up to win, but not learn, because to learn is to move, to move from where you are. But if we're only on a line, because our assumptions are constraining us to that line, right, there's no else for me to move, which is towards you away from you. But if I expand my space of possibility, I become more open. I become more open to the possibility that a stimulus might cause someone to be angry or happy.

Now I have a more complex, I'm more open to more possibility. Now when we're in conflict, I have the chance of actually moving, not necessarily towards you, but just away from where I am. I have the possibility of actually learning. And you can only do that if you have space to move into. In other words, you're more open. Do you think that psychedelics could help break this loop since they alter our perceptions and this cause connections in places that we're not used to having? Yeah. So there's research to show that this is the case.

We actually know that we can facilitate, this is recent research that we've done with Cirque de Soleil, where we've been measuring the power of awe and wonder on your brain, what happens when you experience awe when you go to a magnificent landscape and you feel small but connected to the world. The pattern of activity that's going inside your head is not unlike the pattern of activity that's going inside your head when you take psilocybin. And you're feeling small but connected to the world, you're diminishing your ego. And what's happening is also you increase the connectivity. And what's happening is that you're creating the possibility of new experiences.

You're becoming more open. You're letting go of your reflexive responses and therefore creating the possibility of new biases coming in. Like you learned, by going Detroit, you learn the possibility of another bias. You complexified yourself. You didn't stick with your own bias that that was a wrong behavior. The only right behavior is to turn around and be happy. Right. You expanded yourself by entertaining the possibility that that was also a legitimate response.

And now you're entertaining two possibilities at the same time for the same sentence. You're now more complex. So travel can do this. Travel is a beautiful way. So you could argue that travel is a great way to basically reveal yourself to yourself and to become aware of what your own biases are. Because if you don't know them, how could you ever question them? Right, and just like colors, you can't really see your own bias until you have another set, right? Yeah, and also to expand them, because suddenly you start seeing biases that you never had.

But then you can also think about travel metaphorically. So that's literal travel. But think about a book. A book is travel. A book is to go to a new place, a new description, a new kind of person. Think about, in fact, you could argue all the best technologies, the most transformative technologies made the invisible, visible. They enable us to see what we couldn't see before. Most technologies are focused on efficiency. They enable you to do what you could already do faster and easier.

Transformative technologies, again, let you see what you couldn't see before. So think of a telescope. Think of a microscope or a book or the sale that was invented on now where suddenly you can actually go places that you can never go before. So think of when Galileo pointed out that telescope and discovered that our assumption biases that we were the center of the universe was wrong. How challenging that was for people. Well, yeah. I mean, he got thrown in freaking prison.

Right? Yeah. Talk about triggered. Yeah. And that was the travel. That was the travel in space. Microscope, you're traveling in space. And again, a book.

So travel is fundamental to expanding your brain. Bo, thank you. This has been super interesting. I know you hate selling your book, so I'll do it in the show close and mention it so that we don't turn the whole thing to a sales book. That's what we were talking about before. This is really fascinating. I know a lot of people were just like, wait, what happened? I got to rewind this. Roll it J. Like you say,

yeah, roll it. So I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Great big thank you to Bo Lotto. God, this was so interesting. This stuff fascinates me to no end. It does not get old hearing about how amazing the brain is and all this perception stuff is just crazy. Bolaado is a smart dude. We did this in his house. He's just got so many, so many cool things going on. His book is called Deviate, and you can find that in the show notes as well, of course. Want to know how I managed to book all these great people and manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits? Check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I know. You're going to do it later. You're really busy right now. You cannot make up for

lost time when it comes to relationships and networking. The number one mistake I see people make is postponing this, not digging the well before they get thirsty. And once you need relationships, you're too late. These drills just take a few minutes per day. This is the stuff I wish I knew a decade ago. This is absolutely crucial. And it's at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Bo Lotto. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, there's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode is co-produced by Jason

the Deviant DePhilippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. So the fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time.

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