The One You Feed - James Kingsland on the Neuroscience of Behind Our Reality

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

James Kingsland is a science and medical journalist with 25 years of experience working for publications such as New Scientist, Nature, and, most recently, The Guardian. On his own blog, Plastic Brain, he writes about neuroscience and Buddhist psychology. In this episode, Eric and James Kingsland discuss his book, Am I Dreaming: The Science of Altered States from Psychedelics to Virtual Reality and Beyond.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, James Kingsland and I Discuss the Neuroscience Behind Our Reality, and…His book, Am I Dreaming: The Science of Altered States from Psychedelics to Virtual Reality and BeyondWhat the best neuroscience tells us about how the brain worksThat we don’t see the world directly, objectively as it isOur experiential reality as a combination of what we expect to see and the feedback from what our senses are telling us is therePrediction Error CodingHow the brain mainly pays attention when you surprise itThat the Buddha discovered that we see a conditioned view of the worldThe types of things that go wrong in the brainViewing mental illness and addiction through the prediction functionality of the brainHow altered states can help when things go wrong in the brainExpanded the flexibility of the brainWhat happens in the brain during sleep and dreaming His experience with hypnosisActive InferenceJames Kingsland Links:Plasticbrainblog.comTwitterBLUBlox offers high-quality lenses that filter blue light, reduce glare, and combat the unhealthy effects of our digital life. Visit BluBlox.com and get free shipping worldwide and also 15% off with Promo Code: WOLFSkillshare is an online learning community that helps you get better on your creative journey. They have thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Get 2 FREE months of premium membership at www.skillshare.com/feedIf you enjoyed this conversation with James Kingsland on the Neuroscience Behind Our Reality, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Daniel LevitinCasey SchwartzDr. Rick HansonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The thing about the brain is, if you surprise it, that's when it pays attention. 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, 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 Know 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 James Kingsland, a science and medical journalist with 25 years experience working for publications such as New Scientist, Nature, and most recently, The Guardian. In his own blog, Plastic Brain, he writes about neuroscience and Buddhist psychology, and on this episode, discusses his book, Am I Dreaming? The Science of Altered States from Psychedelics to Virtual Reality and Beyond.

Hi, James. Welcome to the show. Hi. How are you doing? I am doing very well. I am excited to talk with you. We're going to be discussing your latest book, Am I Dreaming? The Science of Altered States from Psychedelics to Virtual Reality and Beyond. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter. 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 granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather and she 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 the work that you do. Sure. Well, my take on it is sometimes, even though you may want to feed the good wolf, the big bad wolf is slowly growing stronger and more hungry as the years pass. And about a decade ago, I was approaching middle age and dealing with a lot of deep-seated anger, mistrust, and judgment of other people. And it simply wasn't under my control. And I reckon as you get older,

these things can become entrenched. They're deeply subconsciously conditioned into our minds. It's a bit like an addiction, I guess. It's as if even though you know drink is destroying your life, for example, even though you might want to give it up, it's got a hold over you. You might be going to AA meetings, perhaps, and yet the bad wolf has got you by the throat. So as an example, I used to cycle to work in central London. I'd often be late, and I had to cycle down Abbey Road in West London, where the pedestrian crossing was made famous by the Beatles on that album cover, just outside Abbey Road Studios and every morning there'd be tourists holding up the traffic posing for selfies on the crossing and that used to drive me nuts and a few times I just kept going at speed

across the crossing as they were posing there which which was dangerous and stupid. And then I'd arrive at work in a fury. And that was one of the things that told me something was wrong, that being a supposedly nice guy feeding my good wolf just wasn't enough. You know, intellectually, I may have been feeding the good wolf, but in reality, the bad wolf was too strong and hungry. It was getting the better of me. So it was shortly after that I started to meditate and practice mindfulness to become more non-judgmentally aware and to practice compassion. There'd be a little kinder, not only to myself, but also to other people. And I think that's where other altered states come in too, like hypnosis and psychedelics. They're a way to lessen the power of the bad wolf.

10 years later, for me, he's still there, but I know him better now and don't feed him when he's hungry. Yeah, I love that interpretation. I think that's a really great way to frame up what we need to start with is framing up what the best neuroscience tells us about the way the brain works today, how we actually think the brain works. And then we can talk about the ways that it goes wrong, the ways that, to use our metaphor that we've been using, the ways that Good Wolf sort of establishes a stronghold. And then we can talk about how some of these different altered states might help with that. So one of the things your book does a really good job of describing is that we don't really see the world objectively, right? We're not seeing the world directly as it is. We're actually

creating sort of our own virtual reality in our brains to some extent. And so I know this is a tricky topic, so I think we'll need to decide how much time to spend on it. But let's start with a little bit about what we think is happening in our brain to some degree, how we're constructing reality. Well, you're absolutely right. We don't see the world directly. And in fact, the processing power required to experience the world directly through our senses would just be absolutely overwhelming. We don't have the brainpower to do that. So instead, the brain appears to have evolved a quick and dirty means of seeing the world which is a combination of what we expect to see what we expect to hear and taste and so on and feedback

from our senses but it's just as you say the majority of what we see hear taste and touch is our expectations based on past experience. And throughout our lives, we've been building up models in our heads, models of reality of the external environment. And it's these which we draw upon to see the world, to experience the world. And it's only through things like optical illusions, where we realize what's really going on, that our brains are tricking us into thinking that we're seeing the world directly, when in fact it's using these quick and dirty methods based on expectation and past experience to tell us what's happening. And that theory is called prediction error coding.

And the idea, if you imagine the brain as a hierarchy, you've got predictions being sent downwards from the prefrontal cortex. You've got them going downwards through the hierarchy. And you've got sensory prediction errors coming in the opposite direction from the senses. And those are simply the discrepancy between what we expect and the data coming from our senses and if those prediction errors are

allowed to pass up through the hierarchy that's how we learn on the other hand if the preconception see the predictions are sound then that's what we base everything on. And it's not just perception, but it's also our thoughts, our feelings, our sensations, and even how we manage our physiology. It's all based on predictions about how things should be, a sort of set point of how fast the heart has got to be in a particular situation, how deep the breathing has got to be, all that sort of thing. So in a way, it's a sort of grand unified theory of the brain that ties everything together in a single framework based on prediction. And so in essence, the way most of us think what's happening is our senses are taking in data.

My eyes right now are open. I'm seeing something. I'm hearing your voice. And that's just flowing that all the communication is coming from my sense organs straight into my brain. And I'm hearing, seeing all that. And what you're saying is there's a two-way stream of information here. Actually, my brain is also first passing down predictions of what I think I should be seeing, hearing, etc., based on lots of previous experience. And then what actually gets passed back to the brain are times where it doesn't match what the prediction is. That's exactly right. Yes, we don't passively harvest information from our senses. As you say, it's a two-way flow. And a lot of the traffic is coming from the top of the hierarchy,

from the prefrontal cortex, passing downwards. And what we experience is a sort of compromise between that, between what we expect from past experience and the data coming back from our senses, which is a relatively minor stream of information, because otherwise we'd be overwhelmed. We don't have the time to process what's happening. Things are changing so rapidly and there's so much data that we could be taking in. And if we did take in that data, it would overwhelm our senses, it would overwhelm our processing power. Which is really remarkable, given that we know that the brain's processing power is far beyond anything we've ever been able to create as humans. So what you're saying makes total sense to me if I am like looking out my window, right? So I'm

just looking out my window, and I have a pretty good idea of what's outside my window, right? So I'm just looking out my window and I have a pretty good idea of what's outside my window because I've looked outside my window countless times and I've got a pretty good idea. And so my brain is like, I expect to see these things because I've seen them a hundred times and my senses are pretty much going, yep, that all matches. We're good, right? You and I are having a conversation, right? So I'm listening to you very clearly. And I really have, I mean, I guess I have some idea of what you're going to say, because I read your book. But to a large extent, I have no, I have no real idea of what you're going to say. So in in this sort of situation, is there is there a slightly different mechanism happening? Or is the prediction somehow more about what English,

the language is as a whole? Talk to me about how like the conversation you and I are having works in this framework. Well, sure. Yeah. There are many different layers of prediction and that one of the most basic layers in language is the separation of words and the different sounds. And in fact, if you used a machine to record what we're saying and played it back as a series of waves on a graph, it would be a mess. You wouldn't be able to distinguish much order within it. But because we've trained our brains to hear words, to distinguish between the beginning of one word and the end of the previous word, because we've got preconceptions about how it's going to work, about how words and sentences

are fitted together. That's how we impose order on what would otherwise be a chaotic blast of sound. So all the time we're imposing order. In a way, we're creating what we hear. For example, I mean, if you spoke another language and you were listening to English and you'd never heard English before, it would be a mess of noise. But because you and I speak the same language, we've got a similar background. We've learned how to impose order on that chaos and so in this case the prediction mechanism is about english and so what it's doing is that's happening at a lower level and what's flowing through to me is the meaning of it or what you're saying but if you suddenly started speaking gibberish a different part of me would pick up on that and go like, wait, hang on.

Now we've got a serious prediction error because I expected English and now I'm getting gibberish. That's right. That would really catch your attention. The thing about the brain is if you surprise it, that's when it pays attention. Most of the time we just chug along happily and everything happens more or less automatically. But as soon as something unexpected happens, as soon as there's a large prediction error, there's a like, what the hell was that? And our attention is alerted and we actually start to make a contribution. We start to search our database for alternative explanations for what's going on. Right. And so to a certain extent, what we're describing here is not a new idea. It goes back

thousands of years, really. And some of this idea, I think, sits in the heart of what Buddhist teaching is, which is that we're not seeing the world. We're seeing a conditioned view of the world. That's exactly true. And isn't it remarkable that the Buddha intuited that? I think it's extraordinary that through meditation, perhaps, it became clearer to him that all his experience, his thoughts, his perceptions, his feelings were a creation of his mind. They weren't direct experience. They were conditioned by his karma, by his past actions and his past experience. Yep. There's an old saying, and I'm always hesitant to say that the Buddha said anything

at this point because you're like, well, did he really? And so I don't know if this is in the sutras. I've also heard a story about it, but there's a phrase of, if you could see a single flower clearly, your whole life would change. And I think that's what's being pointed to here, is that I'm not seeing a flower clearly, I'm seeing the model I've built of a flower over and over. And if I was actually to see the flower directly without all that conditioning, I would have a totally different experience. Well, that's right, yeah. And in fact, you'd probably be stunned by its beauty, by the color, by the three-dimensional features. It would be more vivid and meaningful than it had ever been

before. That can happen on psychedelics, but I'm sure we'll get onto that later. 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. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who 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 two? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. man reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you? 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. Let's talk about the types of things that go wrong in the brain. And now I'm sort of talking about mental illness, and there's all different types of mental illness. On one end, we might say you've got psychosis, schizophrenia. On the other end, you might say you've got like intractable depression, where not much of anything is

happening. So in what ways are things going a little bit wrong in those conditions as we look at the world through this prediction type model, this inference model? Okay, well, one of the problems in mental illness is that there's an imbalance of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that pass messages between nerve cells, in particular things like serotonin and dopamine and noradrenaline. These neurotransmitters, they're like the tuning knobs of this hierarchical system. They determine the precision, which is the term used for the credence which we give to different streams of information. And for example, if we have more faith in a particular stream of prediction errors in a particular sensory experience, then that will be

turned up. Our attention will be focused on it and it'll become more salient. What can happen is that the balance can go awry. So for example, in schizophrenia, you might have an excess of dopamine. So the signaling is maybe too much credence is given to sensory information. Even sensory information is quite noisy and ambiguous. So you start to get problems with the mind seeing things that aren't really there, seeing shapes in the white noise, hearing things in the white noise that aren't actually there. shapes in the white noise, hearing things in the white noise that aren't actually there. And it's all part of the challenge that any brain has. All of us have the challenge of balancing our expectations against the bottom-up prediction errors in a noisy, uncertain, confusing, and ambiguous world. The brain somehow has to decide how much credence

to give to that raw sensory data and things start to go wrong when too much credence is given to messy data or maybe not enough credence is given to what is actually reliable data so then you start getting errors being introduced which can sort of propagate through the system. And over time, you can have a buildup of faulty models of maladaptive conditioning, which goes on to determine how we see the world, how we experience the world. And it might actually be out of kilter with reality. actually be out of kilter with reality. And so to say that slightly differently, in something like psychosis or schizophrenia, my brain is passing up a lot of prediction errors. It's letting too much signal through to the brain and it's overwhelming it and new patterns are getting created that may not be there. Swinging to the other extreme, I'm not passing up really a whole lot of information,

and the models that my brain has sort of built just stay entrenched, and they become more and more monolithic. Maybe that's not the right word, but it conveys the spirit, I guess. That's exactly right. No, I mean, you've got problems like OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, you've got depression, you've got anxiety. And there, as you say, the problem is the opposite. In a way, you're stuck in your head. The flow of information from the senses is being ignored. And everything you see and think is being conditioned by these entrenched models, which are no longer open to change. You've kind of got stuck in this, whether it's obsessive behavior or repetitive self-doubting thoughts.

You've kind of got yourself stuck in a loop and you're not giving enough credence to what's really happening out there. Yeah, yeah. And that makes a lot of sense for me in terms of addiction. Also, I've got a history of addiction, but a lot of the stuff I've heard about addiction in the last few years, a theory that's emerging is really addiction is sort of a learning disorder, right? In that, you know, in the beginning, the substance was really good. It was a real benefit to you, right? But somewhere along the line, as the relationship with it changes and gets worse and worse and worse, you're not updating that model. Your models, some part of your brain still is like, this is really good. Even though if you look at it with any sort of

reason from the outside world, you're like, this is a total disaster. But some part of the brain is believing, oh, this is good. It's not updating that model. That's right. It's become so tight and inflexible. And the tragedy, of course, is you're no longer interested in other pleasure giving stimuli like, you know, your partner, your friends, your family, you know, enjoying food. Everything is focused on that one addictive substance and your dopamine system is entirely geared to that and nothing else. And you can only get satisfaction through that avenue. So, you know, you've got a problem. Your model of what is worth having and what's not worth having has become completely hidebound and inflexible. It's so fascinating to me. I guess this is the consciousness problem,

right? The hard problem of consciousness, which is like, you know, it's just so amazing to me that on one level, we can look at this stuff and we can be like, all right, there's a dopamine problem there. and electrical signals flying around in our brain that then somehow creates this entirely vivid world of thoughts and feelings and words. And it just blows my mind when I think about it. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And there's so much we don't understand. But the fact that we can enter other worlds, fantasies through television, the internet, enter other worlds, fantasies through television, the internet, through virtual reality,

demonstrates how good the brain is at virtual reality, at creating conscious reality out of these dreams of information that don't necessarily reflect absolute reality, but the brain nonetheless treats them as if they were real, And simulating reality is what it does. That's its job. Yep. And that is a great transition point here for us. You brought in the virtual reality, the altered reality. So we've sort of described how the brain works. We've talked about the couple of different ways it can go wrong.

It either pays too much attention to all the signals coming in or it doesn't pay enough attention to them. pays too much attention to all the signals coming in or it doesn't pay enough attention to them. And then, you know, the rest of your book really goes on to talk about that there are a variety of altered states that can sort of help with this. Is it worth describing broadly how altered states help these two problems before we go into any of the specific altered states? Is there a way you can describe it sort of broadly to start? Well, you could say that all of them help us to relax our prior expectations, to broaden our models out, to look at the world instead of looking at it through this very narrow focus, to broaden its scope, to relax those very rigid expectations so that we're becoming more flexible,

to relax those very rigid expectations so that we're becoming more flexible we're taking in more information from outside and we're considering alternative hypotheses alternative explanations for the way the world is and i guess all kinds of autostate do that kind of reboot you know restart back to basics at least temporarily to give you some alternative perspectives and hopefully to learn from them and to adapt and change and move on. Excellent. So let's start with the role of sleep and dreaming. Okay. Well, the fascinating thing about the brain is that it's so good at soaking up information, at learning. This happens throughout the day. As you go through your day, you're picking up information, you're picking up new habits and ways of doing things, new expectations,

new associations. But there's a problem with this because as the day goes on, your models, your expectations, which were encoded by your synapses, by the fresh connections that are constantly being established in your nervous system, that gets more and more complicated. And you could say it gets more accurate as the day goes on. But at the same time, it's coming very hidebound it's becoming too specific and inefficient and what seems to happen in sleep and dreaming is that there's a kind of a clean out what happens well what is thought to happen is that all your synapses are downgraded their strength is downgraded to a certain amount to a set amount, so that the weak synapses disappear completely and the strong synapses get a little less strong. So you're reintroducing

some flexibility into the system. It's a kind of a sort of a shakedown to refresh it so that you start the next day with not with a blank blank sheet but with a little more plasticity a little more flexibility to start learning new things and this is the importance of sleep and dreaming they're a way to re-establish flexibility into your your thinking and your behavior yeah it's fascinating to me that what the brain is doing in that sort of nightly reboot, you know, the preventative maintenance it's doing on itself. Well, that's right. Yeah. I mean, for a long time, sleep and dreaming, they've been a mystery. You know, why do we need to sleep? Why do we need to dream? If we try to do without sleep and if we try to do without dreams, you can prevent someone from dreaming in a sleep lab by waking them up whenever their

brainwaves start to show signs of REM sleep. And when you do those things, people start to go a little crazy. They're more cranky the next day. They're less flexible in their behavior. They're less good at moving on from maladaptive behavior for example if someone is conditioned to fear a particular stimulus for example a particular picture could a scientist could pair that picture with a mild electric shock in the lab for example and if you're allowed to sleep and dream you can unlearn that association if you're deprived of sleep, that association lasts. And so that even if the stimulus is no longer paired to the electric shock, that's what you expect. And you continue to be fearful. This kind of phobia builds up as a result of lack of sleep because

you're not rebooting properly. You're not relearning during the night. Which is why it's important, I think, to think of sleep not just for physical health, it's really important in mental and emotional health too. Absolutely. Yeah, you've got the physiological side. If you're deprived of sleep, you become more likely to develop cancer and heart disease. But at the same same time it's so important for our mental health to have that refresh to downgrade all your synapses to reintroduce little flexibility into the whole system into your way of thinking otherwise our behavior and our thoughts they become very very hidebound you know we get stuck so it's so important to get enough sleep 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? 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.

Another of the altered states in your book that you talk about is hypnosis. And I was wondering if you could share your experience of hypnosis and the fear of flying that you had, because I think it's a really interesting story. Yeah, I've never been a very comfortable flyer. I've always found that it's always seemed really deeply wrong to me to be stuck up there, you know, thousands of feet in the air. It just doesn't seem right. It's not natural. But generally, I've managed to cope with this nervousness and a couple of drinks at the airport before takeoff help a great deal. But a few years back, I had some unpleasant experiences, or at least they were unpleasant for me. For example, the plane in which I was flying was coming in to land at Lima Airport in Peru.

We were very close to landing, but then it had to be aborted at the last moment. And it transpired that the pilot had seen another plane on the runway. And so at the last moment, he pulled out. And so, you know, the engine started roaring and we were climbing really steeply and then banking to come around and uh and back again and i was seriously upset by this i thought we were finished something terrible was going to happen and of course most of the time it doesn't happen but anyway i was absolutely terrified to put it politely that was a bit of sensory information that was violating your prediction about landing oh yeah so that was a huge prediction about landing. Oh yes, that was a huge prediction error. I was really shaken up by that and you know you can imagine the adrenaline

circulating in my system, the heart pounding, the breathing getting really fast. So you know that was bad but and then just a few weeks later I was on another flight and we were about to take off. It was a budget flight. And one of the crew came over and she said to me, would you mind moving to the seat by the emergency exit? I said, okay, no problem. And then she leaned in and she started to explain to me how to operate the exit. And she said, if we ditch in the sea on the way back, you're going to have to open the door and follow these instructions. And that really freaked me out. I had the responsibility of opening the door if we ditched in the sea. I mean, you know, how terrifying is that? So not only the prospect of ditching in the sea, but also being responsible for all these

people's lives. So that really freaked me out. It was at that point I realized I had a problem. You know, I was starting to think I don't want to get into an airplane ever again. So it seemed as if I was going to be grounded. So I decided to go for hypnosis. I went to see a hypnotherapist and she didn't do any of the things I was expecting. You know, in popular fiction, they swing a fob watch before your eyes and they say you're feeling very sleepy, very sleepy. There was nothing like that. She taught me through my experiences.

She going all the way back to childhood. My mother had a fear of flying. So that's probably where it all started. And she said, OK, here's what we're going to do. We're going to pair your fear with the excitement of going on holiday. We're going to fool your brain into thinking if your heart is going fast, it's excitement at the prospect of going on holiday. And we're going to take you to your safe place,

wherever it might be on the beach where you're relaxing, having a fantastic time. And so when you're strapping yourselves in before takeoff, you're going to interpret that as excitement. And then she hypnotized me, she relaxed me, she paired this new expectation with the physiological stimulus, the fear, the fast heart rate, the fast breathing. She reconfigured my thinking, my expectations towards good things rather than bad things, towards happy outcomes rather than total disaster. And it seems to have worked. You know, I was quite, I was skeptical, but I haven't had any qualms about flying ever since. Yeah, that's fascinating. It's fascinating to me that she didn't try and do anything relating to lessening your fear about planes. There was no logical

discussion of how safe planes were, which you were capable of doing on your own. You put some statistic in the book. I don't know what it is, but we should be far more afraid of a car than we should ever be of a plane, logically. It's not even close. But what I think is interesting is she reinterpreted your signals, which is going back to the model we're talking about. So your brain is getting these signals coming up that are of a certain type, and it's interpreting those. We had a guest on recently who said something, which is what you're saying here. He said it slightly differently. He said, your mind will try and match your body. And I

thought that was really interesting. And I put it into my own life. What I realized is I think there's a lot of times what I'm tired, but with a history of depression, what I'll say is I'm feeling depressed. And the reality is I'm just feeling tired. And those are totally different connotations. Those mean very different things. And so in your case, you were taking these feelings and you were then translating them into excitement. So you were changing the model your brain had of what those signals meant? That's right. You're changing your top-down expectation about what's happening. And this is what not just hypnotists, but also a really good doctor will make you feel really

comfortable. They'll be inspiring. And whether it's hypnotism or going to see the doctor, because you trust that person you trust their knowledge their experience they will be able to replace your top-down expectation about whether it's a drug or flying they'll be able to tweak that in some way and in medicine it's the placebo effect it's the top-down interpretation that this drug is going to help you it's going to make you happier or it's going to cure your stomach you know your bad stomach whatever it might be and simply the expectation will actually will not only change your thinking it can even change your physiology it can can change how your body reacts to this drug simply because some doctor has inspired you with confidence that it's going to work for you.

It's a very powerful demonstration of how important expectation is to everything we think and feel and physiologically how our bodies behave. behave. And in the past, priests and shamans were able to do this, to hypnotize us into thinking a certain way, into having certain beliefs. It's an age-old way of controlling people's behavior through their expectations via highly, highly charismatic, authoritative figures. Yeah, the placebo effect is so fascinating. And we had a previous guest on the show who talked a lot about it. But the thing about the placebo effect that most blows my mind is that it actually changes the brain's physiology. So it's not that you believe that you feel better, like in the case of pain, right? If you take a medicine for pain and the placebo effect is

what's happening, it's not just that you think that you're not feeling pain. Your physiology around your pain receptors changes. It's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, it's remarkable. You know, we're back to Buddhism. Similarly, Buddhism extols the power of the mind to change everything. If you can change the way you look at the world, you change the whole world. Your expectations actually change your experience of the world. Yeah. And so I want to dive a little deeper into this area because it's a particular area of interest of mine, and it's a particular core tenet of Buddhism. It's really about this sense of us being this separate contained self that we have, right? That we spend so much time worrying about.

And you say, I'm just going to read something you wrote because I think it's really fascinating. You say, on this neuroscientists and Buddhists are agreed. The moment by moment experience of selfhood arises when we are striving to change our world in some way. Say a little bit more about that. To start off from Buddhism, if you go on a meditation retreat and you're given instructions, often what they'll say is when you're sitting there and you expect to be told to do something, you know, that's usually in life, the instructor is going to tell you to do something. But the meditation instructor, whether it's a monk or a mindfulness teacher, will say, we're not going to do anything. We don't want you to expect anything. You don't need to change anything. If you have unpleasant sensation, don't worry about it. Just observe it it watch it and let it go so the key really is to not try to do or change anything don't push anything away don't pull anything towards you just let everything be from a neurophysiological point of view according to the prediction error theory

the way we achieve things the way we do things, the way we do things, whether it's thoughts or changing our physiology or moving our limbs, is by predicting how it's going to be, by expecting the changes to happen. But this only works if you suspend your attention to current sensations. If you focus on sensations, for example, if you feel your arm hanging by your side, that's where it's going to stay. There's something about action that involves a suspension of attention so that you can focus instead on the future, on where your arm is going to be in the future, where your mind, your brain wants it to be. And it's called active inference. And what seems to happen in meditation and other kinds of

highly absorbed activity is that our attention becomes so strong that we start to dissolve that impetus towards action. So we become more relaxed physiologically, we calm down. But through this suspension of the need to do something, to act upon the world, we find our whole way of looking at the world changes. And as I think you started by saying even our sense of selfhood the way we define ourselves in relation to the world starts to break down but we become less solid because it turns out that even our sense of selfhood our sense of being a person with an autobiography with a history you know with a set of values and our embodied selfhood our sense of being here

in this physical uh lump of flesh right here is is dependent on action on moving and changing things that's how the self arises through action and uh and the suspension of attention i was talking about and the odd thing that happens in meditation, really deep meditation, is you start to lose your feeling of being separate from the rest of the world. Your sense of self would start to break down. Right.

You have a part in the book that I thought was particularly brilliant, and it was when we say that Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. He had only part of the picture. And you go on to say neuroscience can now fill in some of the blanks. And I'm just going to read the next four or five lines because I think it's so interesting. This experience is emotionally salient. Therefore I am. My five senses locate me here. Therefore I am. I make things happen in the inner world of my body. Therefore I am. I make things happen in the outside world. Therefore I am. I make things happen in the inner world of my body. Therefore, I am. I make things happen in the outside world. Therefore, I am. I remember the story of my life. Therefore, I am. I think. Therefore, I am. And I find that so fascinating because what you're sort of describing in neuroscientist terms is an ancient Buddhist teaching that what we are is a collection of these different things that come together to create this sense of self. And you've really broke them down in a really

fascinating way. Yeah, unfortunately, not quite so elegant as I think therefore I am, but not quite so memorable. But I think there's a lot of truth there. All these different ways we act upon the world, it's through acting upon the world that we build up all these different facets of our selfhood, whether it's bodily selfhood, autobiographical selfhood, or when we act, this feeling of being an agent, of having agency in the world. It's all dependent on doing stuff and when we stop doing that starts to fall away and there's a kind of this feeling of peace and relaxation that uh that floods in yeah i think that's so interesting because i think that one of the biggest challenges in meditation is to actually taking that advice of do nothing. It's one of the hardest parts of meditation is to be like, okay, I'm going to do nothing. We're usually in meditation trying to make something happen. And my experience has been when I finally arrived truly at do nothing, the world has changed for me

in profound and significant ways when I get into that true do-nothing neighborhood. But boy, it's hard to find your way there. That's right. Because, you know, in life, everything we do is geared to getting stuff, to doing things, to changing things. And to get out of that habit mentally is a challenge. But as you say, you know, when it happens, when you let go, is a challenge. But as you say, you know, when it happens, when you let go, you know, it's like, wow, you can have these tremendous feelings of relation and happiness, calm and contentment. And of course, as a beginner, sometimes, you know, it doesn't last very long because suddenly it's, you know, wow, what's this? What's going on? Look, look what I've done. You know, I'm becoming, I'm turning into the Buddha, and then it all collapses,

and you're back to your old self, and you're suffering. You're irritated. You're bored. So it goes. That's the way it goes. Well, James, thank you so much. I mean, the list of notes I have that we could talk about is far longer than this conversation possibly gives us time for. You and I are going to go into the post-show conversation, and we're going to talk a little bit about the role of what psychedelics do, how they work in this, as well as the role of absorption as a path in general. And so you and I will do that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like to get access to the post-show conversation,

as well as a special mini episode I do each week called A Teaching, A Song, and A Poem, as well as ad-free episodes, you can go to oneufeed.net slash join, and you can learn all about it there. James, thank you again so much for coming on. It's been a great conversation. You're welcome. You're welcome. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits.

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