The One You Feed - Chris Niebauer

Episode Date: June 7, 2017

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Chris Niebauer Chris Niebauer received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuropsychology from the University of Toledo where he specialized in left-right brain differences. He has conducted research on consciousness, handedness, beliefs and the sense of self and is currently an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. When he is not teaching, Chris likes to play guitar, spend time with his family, and work on new books. His new book is called The Neurotic's Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment: How the Left Brain Plays Unending Games of Self-improvement In This Interview, Chris Niebauer and I Discuss... His book, The Neurotic's Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment: How the Left Brain Plays Unending Games of Self-improvement That your thoughts and behaviors should match and when they don't you look to make it happen - Cognitive Dissonance Confirmation Bias The power of gratitude The mechanics of thoughts themselves The law of opposition Why if you accept a bad mood, it begins to dissipate That the universe is always becoming something that it isn't The good and bad news about the ego The impermanence of "things" The eternal nature of "verbs" The often incorrect storytelling, or pattern finding nature of the left brain The left brain interpreter The ego as a story that we tell ourselves The challenge of finding consciousness in the brain "Doing" rather than "having" consciousness The analogy of jogging to consciousness or ego: if you stop jogging and pat yourself down trying to find the "jogging" in you. It's a verb, not a noun The connection between pattern finding and depression vs anxiety A state of enlightenment and the left, pattern-finding brain How we want the universe to be a mystery         Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you get in a bad mood, go for it. Get into it. Own your bad mood. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Chris Neibauer, PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology from the University of Toledo, where he specialized in left and right brain differences. Chris has conducted research on consciousness, handedness, beliefs, and the sense of self, and is currently the Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology

at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. When he's not teaching, Chris likes to play guitar, spend time with his family, and work on new books. His current book is The Neurotic's Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment, How the Left Brain Plays Unending Games of Self-Improvement. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to oneufeed.net support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas.

We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long-lasting. Again, that's OneYouFeed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Chris Neibauer. Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show. Hey, great to be here. I'm excited to have you on. I read the title of your book, and I immediately asked you to come on the show without even reading it, which is always kind of a risk because the title is so great and the book lived up to the title.

So the title of your book is called The Neurotics Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment, How the Left Brain Plays Unending Games of Self-Improvement. So wonderful title. We're going to get into all different parts of that here in a minute. But let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the

grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. It's a great question. It's a great story. And the reason I like it so much is you can hit it so many levels. And I've been thinking about this on at least three or four different levels. And so, if you don't mind, I'll just kind of go through a couple of these just to kind of explore it and kind of show you how I think the story is really important. Yep, perfect. So, I think we could start off really with a simple level, the psychological level. And I think the story tells us a couple things about Freud. Most people are

familiar with Sigmund Freud, the famous psychologist, and one of his assumptions was that venting is really important, you know? If you build up all this tension and you need to vent. But this idea of feeding the negative, we know that that really doesn't work, and we should have known this. If you've ever been part of a complaint session at work, you know, a bunch of people get together and they all, it's funny, they have a battle for who has the worst day. And in a strange way, you know, whoever wins really loses. And at the end, according to Freud, everyone should walk away feeling wonderful. They've vented. But the exact opposite is true. And we know this. They walk away and they feel terrible. And there's two real reasons behind this. So we can do a little bit of applied psychology with

this. One is cognitive dissonance. Are you familiar with that idea? Yes, absolutely. And cognitive dissonance is one of the simplest, but I think it's one of the most interesting theories in psychology. And it's this idea that your thoughts and behaviors should be consistent. And when they're not, we need to make them so. And so, here's the problem. You're complaining, and you're feeding the negative, and you hear yourself making all these negative statements. You hear yourself feeding the negative, and you come to believe it. That's part of the problem. The second part of the problem is something called confirmation bias. And confirmation bias is, I think, and I was just finished, it was just finals week, and I just finished lecturing on this. Confirmation bias

is one of the most powerful human biases. We seek to confirm our suspicions. And the problem with this is, so first you feed it, and then you believe it, and then you seek to confirm it. And so, when you feed the negative, it starts a cycle where that becomes your world. I don't know if you're familiar with the author of Zed and Ardor Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Peirce, and he just recently passed, and so he's really been on my mind. And I always share this quote with my class because it's one of my favorite quotes from the book. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us, and we call this handful of sand the world. And what that handful of sand is, to a large extent, depends on this process of feeding it,

believing it, and then confirming it. And so, you can end up with this really negative handful. Now, I think in an interesting way, those exact same mechanics can work in a positive way. Think about it. You can do the exact same thing for the positive. Instead of getting into a complaint session, even if you're faking it a bit, you start with gratitude, and you start with being thankful for what you have in your life. Cognitive dissonance works in the same way. You start to believe it. And then you start to look for confirmation for it. You end up with a completely different handful of sand. And it completely depends on which one you feed. I agree a hundred percent. I mean, we've railed on this

show about mindless, positive thinking. I think that, you know, the way I like to talk about it is that, you know, in any given situation, there's probably some things that I like and there's some things that I don't like. And which do I want to choose to focus on? It's not a matter of avoiding the truth or trying to be unrealistic. It's about, you know, truly, like you said, where am I going to direct my attention? For me, that's the psychological level. And I like to take it a little bit more metaphysical.

Because one of the most interesting things about our thoughts, because the whole story is about which one you feed, and it really makes it sound like we have choice. Okay, I'll feed this one or I'll feed this one. But one of the interesting mysteries, and this drew me into psychology in the first place back when I was a teen. I was fascinated by thoughts in themselves and how we don't always seem to have control over them. Thoughts just happen. And not only do thoughts just happen, but they happen in a way that I think sets up a very mysterious situation for a lot of people. They happen in a way that seems to be in the exact opposite of where we're trying to go. And Alan Watts is one of my favorite philosophers, and he would always use this example. You know, for the next five seconds, don't think of the number 13. You fail miserably,

you know? We all do. I mean, you can't do it. And so that brings in this question about, okay, everyone wants to feed the positive. I mean, if you just ask people, I mean, why wouldn't we? The self-help movement really was an effort to say, listen, we want to feed the positive. And the problem with the self-help movement is, it's being really criticized now because many people think it is a failed movement. It started in the 60s and 70s, and people wanted to be happy. People wanted to feed the positive, but it didn't work. And so we have to really get back to how thoughts work, the mechanics of thought themselves. How do they work? And if we just wanted to be positive, we would have all been positive since the 60s.

I think it brings into another kind of one level deeper where you have to get into why do my thoughts work like this? Why is it if I try to go in one direction, they seem to go in the opposite? And so, my insight that I had, and it was very sometime in my 20s after having lots of anxiety for a long time, years of anxiety, and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't just stop thinking of these thoughts. And then it clicked, and it hit in a very profound way that my anxiety was me not wanting to be anxious. That was my anxiety. It was me trying to be calm that resulted in my anxiety. Actually, I found that, I mean, I'm not the only person who had this insight.

In fact, Viktor Frankl, the famous existential psychiatrist during World War II, he came up with this notion of paradoxical intention. And when I saw that, I started to figure out what is going on with thought. And paradoxical intention, I'll tell you, I'll give you an example. And he talks about a physician, and this physician had this terrible problem with his hands sweating. I mean, his hands would just sweat. So, I mean, it was embarrassing. And so, he went to Frankel and he said, can you help me out? Because this is just interfering with my business. And Frankel said, your problem is you're trying not to sweat. So, I want you to sweat as much as you can.

He shifted the effort and he said, okay, just try as much as you can. And that actually fixed him, it cured him. And that, I think, is an important thing about how thoughts work. And that's why I came up, in my book, I came up with this law of opposition, which I didn't invent, I didn't discover. It goes back to Viktor Frankl. Aldous Huxley had his own version of it, the law of opposite effect. But for me, I really wanted to make it kind of a center stage in the book. Because if you just feed the positive, if it was simple as that, it should work. And why isn't it? Because people, if you just did a survey, people would say, of course I want to feed the positive. And I think they do. I mean, think

about it. Take any day, and you're going around, you're doing your day-to-day stuff. How many times a day do people tell you, have a good day? Being in a bad mood, in other words, feeding the negative, is almost the equivalent of what people thought of sin in the past. I mean, people feel very guilty, you know? They feel bad to be in a bad mood. And no one feels worse than this than spiritual people. People on a spiritual kick, I mean, they feel terrible about it. But this is a very big hint about the nature of thinking and how we have to be careful because thinking doesn't work the way we think it does. We think, you know, on the surface level, well, I should just have positive thoughts. And it actually does sometimes work for a short time.

But the problem is if you take the law of opposition into consideration, the more I try to be positive, the more that can backfire. And think about it. You know, you have an interview the next day, and you need to sleep. You're up all night. You know? It's New Year's, and you need to stay awake, and you're asleep at 10. And you're confused, because why? It feels like we're at odds with ourselves.

Like, we're our own worst enemy. And with ourselves. Like we're our own worst enemy. And it's not that we're our own worst enemy. It's that the nature of thinking, I believe, very strongly works on this law of opposition. And so, that tells us a little bit about who we should feed and why we shouldn't be so worried about occasionally feeding the negative. I tell people, when you get in a bad mood, go for it. Get into it. Own your bad mood. And you'd be really surprised when that happens. When you really own your bad mood, very strange things happen. You're accepting it. And instead of resisting it, which actually intensifies it, your acceptance makes it a very short ride. the idea of the second arrow in Buddhism. I don't know if you're familiar with that one

where the Buddha basically says, if you get shot with one arrow, it hurts, right? And everybody says, yeah. He's like, but what most of us do is we then take that first arrow and we start shooting more arrows at ourselves. And those arrows are exactly what you said. I feel bad because I'm in a bad mood.

I'm anxious because I'm anxious. I fall down and I, in a bad mood. You know, I'm anxious because I'm anxious. You know, I fall down and I, instead of just recognizing like, oh, I just hurt my knee, I'm into, I'm clumsy, you know, my bones are probably failing. Like, it's all the stories that we add on. And I think that's exactly what you're kind of getting at with this is that if we are trying so hard to force things in a positive direction, it's going to rebound on us. Exactly. And I think the short version is, don't worry if you occasionally feed the negative. Yeah. You know, don't feel guilty if you get caught up at work drama, and you come home and you're in a

bad mood. It's human nature, and you're stuck there, and you're going to be even more stuck there if you fight it. One of the things I love about the parable is that I think it sets this idea that as humans, we are going to have both these things going on inside us. And the way the parable lays it out, it sounds like it's kind of a close fight, right? Like the good and the bad wolf are kind of like, well, they're pretty close, right? And so you feed the good one a little bit more. But I think it normalizes, at least to me, and I think a lot of what we try and do on the show is normalize that being a human

is going to mean that you're going to have unpleasant moods. You're going to have bad feelings, no matter how you are trying to be a better person in whatever ways. And we'll talk about that in a minute and your thoughts on that, but that's part of being alive. And I think the more we can normalize it and accept it, the far better off we are. There's a lot of metaphysics behind this, but one of the short phrases I tell people, that you pick the life that doesn't seem like a life you would ever pick. And so the two paths have to be pretty close. That's where the adventure comes in. I mean, if one just was overwhelming, if it was just so much superior, there wouldn't be any adventure to life.

And by having them close, I think creates the adventure, which I think the universe enjoys. I think we live in this universe that wants adventure, mystery. We want things to be a close call. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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listeners supporting the show. And we want to thank you all for listening, and we appreciate you tuning in every week and spending your time with us. So go to OneYouFeed.com and make a monthly donation if you can. And if you cannot, just please keep listening. And here's the rest of the interview with Chris Neibauer. We had a guest on a few weeks ago. He had something in his book that really struck me that says exactly what you said. He was like, if you gave actors in a movie the ability to write their own screenplay, every movie would be crushingly boring because we all try and avoid anything that is what you just said that is

exciting, or, you know, we try and keep things in a certain way. And it's the it's the challenges and the ups and downs and all that that give it its flavor. I just thought it was a very interesting insight. And you just said pretty much the same thing. So I want to transfer from that into a question about something you say in the book, and is another theme that comes up over and over again. So I'm just going to read what you said here and just ask you to kind of tell us more about it. So you say, we are so good at seeing things in the world that we are no longer aware of processes, actions, and verbs. Can you expound on that for me? Metaphysically, the basic idea is that the universe is always becoming what it isn't.

And that's really what the whole theme of my second book is, is that consciousness is becoming everything it isn't. And that's really what the whole theme of my second book is, is that consciousness is becoming everything it isn't. And so, solids, they seem solid, but they're really empty space. You know, we seem isolated, but we're really connected. And so, the idea of things in the universe is very seductive. I mean, it really feels like we're in a world of material things. But even physicists will tell us that it's mostly empty space. And the thing that this is most important with is the ego, the self, the thing that we call, you know, who I am. And the self, I think, is the most deceptive because it really feels like a solid thing. And it's not only just a solid thing. It's the most important thing.

It's the first thing we bring to the surface when we're in a conversation. It's the thing that, when people are honest, they really want the ego to survive eternity, you know? They want it to go on. But here's the good and bad news about the ego. The bad news is that it's not a thing at all. It's a verb. It only comes online when we think about it because it's in the process of thinking about it. I mean, thinking is a verb. Thinking isn not a thing at all. It's a verb. It only comes online when we think about it, because it's in the process of thinking about it. I mean, thinking is a verb. Thinking isn't a thing.

And so, when you start to think about yourself, that's when you come online, and you do the ego. And sometimes I'll use the word ego as a verb. I'm like, oh, forgive me, I'm egoing right now. And people sort of, they don't know what I'm getting at. And they're like, what do you mean? And actually, I didn't come up with this. It's been, other writers have talked about how the nature of the ego is much more like a verb than a noun. So, it sounds like it's bad news because we think things are permanent, but actually, the exact opposite is true. Things decay. Physical world has a time limit. Verbs are eternal.

Verbs come and go. And people worry about death, and particularly they worry about the death of the ego, but you die all the time. And sometimes I say that, you know, I worked that into a lecture and people really freak out because they'll say, what do you mean I die all the time? Like, well, you're walking over here. You know, you're walking over in zombie mode. Where were you? You weren't egoing. And it wasn't anywhere. So, the ego is just like a song. It has to be sung to come into existence.

And the reason people should really embrace that is because verbs are eternal. You know, verbs have no timestamp on them. If the universe ever wants to sing your song again, there's nothing stopping it from doing it. Yeah, and I think that the idea of viewing the world, you know, more in terms of verbs versus nouns or things, so much of what happens in the world and what matters is the interaction between things. And verbs tend to sort of signal that there's some sort of interaction happening. And I think it's just a very interesting way, if we try and get into the sense of that life is kind of flowing in a certain

way, a verb just, that made sense to me when you said that. I'm going to read something else you said related to that, because I think it touches on this. You talk about something called the interpretive machine, which is another word for what you're sort of talking about with ego and the left side of the brain. We'll get that in a second. But you say, and the most fascinating thing about the interpretive machine that solves puzzles and creates egos is that it itself is transparent. That is, we cannot directly experience it ever. The process that creates all thought cannot itself ever be thought about, and therefore is the eternal stranger we will never meet. Tell me about that. That's a great sentence. Oh, thanks.

Because it seems like I know myself, right? This idea, like, I go, well, I'm Eric, and this is the things about me. And so, help me understand how it's transparent and I can never really directly experience it. One of the main things that the book came out of a lot of research in the 60s and 70s concerning the left brain. And they did a series of surgeries where they disconnected the left side from the right side. And what they found is that the left brain, and they found this over 40, 50 years of research, is an amazing storyteller. It is an amazing hypothesis generator. It creates ideas about the world. It looks out and tries to figure the world out. And it's an

incredibly useful tool. But the problem is, is that it's often wrong. It sees patterns everywhere it looks, so much so that when we look at Mars and we see the face on Mars and we say, well, that's a face, we see things all around us. Because it is so good, a pattern perception, it no longer can look out and see nothingness. We're kind of stuck in this, and here's the problem. Imagine having a being with this ultimate pattern perception machine in the left side. And all of a sudden, it looks inward. What's it going to find? It's going to find an ego, a self, and it's going to create it online.

But that process of creating the ego online is itself a verb. And the whole problem with this is you can't really see a verb. You're only there when you're actually looking for yourself. What I mean by that is you're only there when you're thinking about yourself. Like you say, Eric, I say I'm Chris, but I'm only Chris when I turn that online and look within. If I'm changing a tire on a car, I'm not doing that. I'm nowhere. In a real practical way, I don't even exist. So here we have this machine in the left brain, and it goes around and it creates hypotheses and it creates stories and it sees patterns. But the problem is the machine itself isn't a pattern.

The left brain is a machine that perceives patterns, but it itself is not a pattern to be perceived. And so really, when we get to it, all self-reflection is going to end in that way. It's going to be very limited. There's a possibility even the Buddha himself may have picked up on this idea of the left-brain interpreter. And some of his poems kind of suggest that maybe he had this notion that there was an interpretive machine in the mind. But even though you have that, you get it from, you know, the evidence. You never get to directly see it, because it itself isn't really a thing

that can be seen. You know, you get like people like Eckhart Tolle, and the Buddha, and Alan Watts, and all these people on this spiritual trip that eventually figure out that the ego is just a story that they're telling themselves. It's a verb that they engage in. It's an activity. You know, I ego for a while, and then it's gone. I want to follow that with another concept that's similar. You talk about the interpretive mind, and you say that it's deeply connected to the Cartesian theater. What is that? Cartesian theater comes from Rene Descartes, famous philosopher, mostly known for his I Think, Therefore I Am. But he also talked about the nature of consciousness and how all the senses seem to be interwoven into one unified experience, which, again,

think about being at the movies. You have a visual experience, you have an auditory experience, and they seem to be connected, unified into one coherent consciousness. And so, the idea of the Cartesian theater is that there must be some place in the brain that this all comes together. Most neuroscientists have actually, because they've looked for it, they've tried to find some place in the brain where everything gets woven into one coherent experience, and they have been totally unsuccessful. And so, most people say there is no Cartesian theater. There is no place in the brain where it all comes together. However, it does certainly seem like there is no Cartesian theater. There is no place in the brain where it all comes together. However, it does certainly seem like there is. And so this is kind of the screen in our mind. It's kind of what's playing in our mind. I think the analogy uses sort of, you know, on one hand, we can

sometimes be sort of sitting in the audience and watching everything kind of happen and come together on the screen in front of us. Yes, exactly. When you say that we can't find a place where this all comes together, is this similar to trying to find the source of consciousness in the brain? Is this a similar exercise that fails? Oh, yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, people have been trying to find consciousness in their brain. I taught a course on consciousness just last year. And the problem is, is that you can't find consciousness in the brain because it is exactly like the other things that we've been talking about. It is not a thing to be found. Consciousness is a doing. We just don't have a good language for it. I mean, to say

that I'm consciousness thing is awkward. Yeah, it's even worse than egoing. And it's just not a thing. And so, again, neuroscientists, again, our culture is obsessed with things. So, we go around looking in the brain, we're trying to find this thing called consciousness. And there have been a few people out there who've stumbled upon this idea. It's not a thing to be found. It's a verb. It's like going for a jog and then stopping and trying to, like, pat all over your body going, where's the jog? It's not a thing. It's doing. Right. You, at at some point say that, right? You say that, you know, maybe we're thinking about consciousness incredibly wrong

instead of thinking about having consciousness, to think about that we're actually doing consciousness. It's that, you know, exactly what you just said. I just think that's a very interesting way to look at what we're seeing. The other place that you start to take this, and we've gone here with a couple of guests before, is the idea of consciousness not necessarily being confined. We think of it being as inside here. But there are ways that we could look at this that sort of point to or at least indicate that there's possibility of consciousness being broader than what's in our skull. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? The gold standard in neuroscience is that consciousness is limited to the brain. It is somehow more of a thing than a doing. And again, of course, that's been a total failure. And so,

there's a couple things that make us suspicious about consciousness maybe not being trapped in the skull. The first is, again, if you start thinking about it as a verb, it becomes this idea about, okay, is the brain the only thing that can do consciousness? Maybe other things can do consciousness. And if it's a doing, why would it necessarily be limited to the brain? The other part of this that gets problematic, and again, I've had debates with other people, because if you've only experienced consciousness inside the skull, then this argument isn't going to go very far. But if you talk to people like race car drivers, and you ask them, where's your consciousness? It's always in the tires. If you talk to a blind person, their consciousness is in the tip of the cane.

So consciousness seems to be routinely outside of the skull. But that argument only goes for people who have experienced it themselves. So, I think maybe we're dealing with an illusion of the opposite sort. Maybe actually the natural state of consciousness is to be quite often outside of the skull. But it's sort of a limitation that we've been kind of culturally we've bought into. I have this notion that I'm stuck in the head, you know, and it's something we can learn. Maybe it's something we can unlearn. I've had a few experiences myself where consciousness seems to be outside of the skull. And, you know, typical neuroscientists would say, well, that's an illusion. There's all kinds of illusions you

can do with the body now. And I just like to at least bring up the possibility, maybe not. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really Not Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If we believe consciousness is in the brain, how is neuroscience reconciling that with the fact of the neurons that we're finding in our gut? Does that challenge that belief in any way

for more traditional people who are looking at this? Does that cause them to reevaluate and go, oh, well, wait a minute? Well, again, I think neuroscience is such a young science that if you take anything too much on faith, you're probably going to be wrong. I think the most dangerous field is going to be consciousness. And so, consciousness at least isn't limited to just the skull. So, if it's not limited to the skull and you can find maybe it extending out, then it just becomes a question of how far can it extend? Is it totally dependent on the nervous system? We have these accounts of these mystical experiences. And it's probably not a coincidence that there's a new kind of genre of mysticism and neuroscience.

And people are trying to connect the two. And I think the thing behind that is extending the nervous system outward. And of course, when we extend it outward, one place that might be very likely is with computers. I mean, there's so many similarities in terms of what they do, in terms of being in these massive binary systems. And like, I see my son playing these video games. Like, you wonder how much consciousness extends out into the video games themselves. And so, I'm not sure where consciousness research is going to go, but I'm just not convinced that, you know, I think one of the most important things will be

shifting our practice from looking for things to looking for verbs, which actually takes time. It's a practice. And when you get good at it, though, you start seeing everything as a verb. You know, it takes time. Are you familiar with Dan Siegel's work? I think he's another neuroscience who's in this area a little bit, and he has a concept of the mind, and it's very similar I think he's another neuroscience who's in this area a little bit, and he has a concept of the mind, and it's very similar in that he doesn't believe the mind is only in the skull, right? He believes the mind is extended beyond that based on the interactions that you're having with what's around you, which is kind of what you're saying with the cane or with other people.

I just, it very, very, phrased differently, but similar idea. So we're running out of time here, but I want to hit two more quick things before we wrap up. Boy, it's gone fast. We talk about the left brain being a pattern perceiver. And you talk about that if we turn that way down, sometimes what you can find is depression. You say in depression, one doesn't see meaningful patterns or connections and life seems meaningless. And then you talk about in anxiety, we start to find patterns everywhere. And you say it's ironic to consider that the depressed person might be closer to enlightenment than the person with anxiety.

If they turn the pattern receiver down just a little more, the interpreter, by being off for a while, would become opaque in the sense that if we see a little more, the interpreter, by being off for a while, would become opaque in the sense that if we see a shadow move, we can infer that there is something casting it. I just thought that comparison of depression and anxiety with the pattern receiver was an interesting way to think of how what we consider mood relates to level of consciousness, or could in certain ways. Level's probably the wrong word, but you know where I'm going. Yeah, oh, absolutely. And, you know, this is really, I mentioned, and many neuroscientists mentioned JoBolt Taylor and her left brain stroke when her

pattern perceiver was offline. And so, the problem with depression, again, you're not finding any meaning in life. So, clearly, the perception machine is turned down. It's not turned up enough where you're finding meaning. But the problem is, it's not turned down enough. Because if you could turn it down just a little bit more, you get the exact experience that JoBolt Taylor had. She turned her left brain off and had instant enlightenment. The way she describes her stroke is exactly that. She could look down, and there were no more patterns. And my favorite part of that story is, I mean, she no longer saw a boundary between herself and the rest of the world. And that is one of our favorite patterns, is the ego.

And so, if you can turn the pattern perceiver down all the way, which I'm not suggesting you just turn your left brain off, but if you could, I really do think that is synonymous. And I think that does happen occasionally with meditation. I think people achieve a state very similar to what Joe Bull Taylor had. In certain states of meditation, I think astronauts have had it, sometimes in space for some reason, the vastness of space overwhelms the pattern perception machine and it just shuts down for a short time and then they get this mystical state of bliss. People ask me, what do you mean by enlightenment? That's a tough one, because you think, well, it's been used in so many different ways.

But that's exactly what I mean. Enlightenment is this overused pattern perception machine turned off for a little time. And it seems that mystical experiences, what she's describing, there's a common pattern among these things, whether they're induced by brain injury, by contemplative practice that brings you closer to it, psychedelics, name your poison, right? But the experience that seems to occur in all of that in varying degrees is exactly what you're describing, this sense of the self fading away and the boundaries between us and everyone else disappearing. I sometimes wonder, is that a reality and we're just only seeing it part of the time? Or is it something that our brain just does when it gets in a certain place and it sort of perceives that? And I don't, I'm not expecting that you have the answer to that because nobody does, right? I wonder about that often, I think to myself. Well, so the fact that those experiences occur, does that mean truly we are all connected and most of us just can't see it? Or is it a, you know, to use a word you used earlier, a brain trick or brain illusion that happens in certain states of the brain? And maybe it doesn't

matter, but it seems to matter to me. But that's my pattern perceiver, wanting to know and wants to know. Absolutely. And the thing I find really hinting about the nature of the universe and those types of questions is, why is it always set up that we never really know? Eben Alexander goes, if you remember his story, where he has meningitis, his brain is decaying, and he has this wonderful experience of the afterlife, and very detailed, and he talks about this consciousness being more real than this state of consciousness. And it's such a wonderful story, but then the first thing that happens is, we doubt it. But I think that that is a hint to the mystery of the universe. It's a hint because we want it to be a mystery. We don't want the smoking gun where we know what's going on, because I think we have it set up. I think we have it set up like this. So, it is itself an

adventure. The question, because it is unsolvable, that's what we were going for. Think about being an omnipotent, all-knowing, all-powerful consciousness. And what if the universe started this way? And firstly, I think this would be interesting. And it if the universe started this way? And in first view, I think this would be interesting. And it really would be a rush, but I think it would be a horrible, boring, dull existence. I mean, there'd be no mystery, there'd be no adventure. So, I think, and Alan Watts talks about this a lot, and it goes back to some ancient Hindu myths, this notion that God just got lost, became ignorant of himself, and so he stopped being what he was. And in doing so, we're exactly where we're at right now.

Because we have forgotten who we truly are, then mystery becomes possible. Adventure becomes possible. I don't know what's going to happen in the next 60 seconds. And that makes it a very interesting game. I mean, if I had one line, perhaps my favorite line from Alan Watts, he said, all of life is a game. And the very first rule is that life isn't a game. Yep, yep. There's a paradox for you. So we're not going to know. You know, we can play with consciousness, but I don't think we're ever going to find

exactly what's going on with it. I think it's more fun. I think the adventure is just going along for the ride. I agree. And I think that is a great place to wrap up. I feel like we got to, like, less than half of the things I wanted to explore from the book. So there's a lot of great stuff in there. There'll be links to the book in the show notes like there always are, folks. If you want to buy it, which a lot of people do, if you do it that way, you know, we'll get a couple pennies and I'll badger you less for other money. So if you're going to buy it, but it's links in the show notes, links to Chris's website, all that stuff is there. Thanks, Chris, so much for coming on. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Oh, thanks. It was really enjoyable and I'd always be willing to finish off the second half if you ever are interested. Yeah, we've got another book coming, too, so we'll also, you know, that might be an opportunity at that point also. Okay, well, thanks. All right, thanks, Chris.

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