TRIGGERnometry - Neuroscientist: "We Live in a Controlled Hallucination"

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

SPONSORED BY: ExpressVPN. Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/trigger and get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package! Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He has given one of TED's most popular science talks with over 13 million views, and Sam Harris included his conversation with Dr Seth in a book of his 11 favourite interviews. His latest book, 'Being You: A New Science of Consciousness', is a Sunday Times Bestseller. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's very easy to assume that we all experience the world the same way. You're wearing a kind of mauve purple shirt and a blue shirt and it seems like that's out there in the world. Those colors are out there in the world. They're not being made up in my head. But that's not true. We don't see the world as it is. We see it as we are. So there's some classic studies about the effective language that native Russian speakers

distinguish more shades of blue. These categories are imposed in a slightly different way. If we see things in a different way, then we're talking about two different realities. Yeah. In a sense. I've been fond of saying that our experience is like a controlled hallucination. We have these social media echo chambers, but we also have, to some extent, perceptual echo chambers too. We all live in different inner world, unique inner worlds, and we'll probably seek out perceptual information to reinforce the way we can.

counter the world, even at these lowest levels. And what's out there, who knows, ask a physicist. But the way we experience it is always coming from the inside out. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishon. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations, with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex and author of a best-selling book, Being You, a New Science of Consciousness. Neil Seth, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you on the show. Before we get into the main interview, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, obviously neuroscientist, but how are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

I've always been interested in one of these, I think, fundamental mysteries, which is this mystery of consciousness. I think it's a mystery that even before you put a name to it appears when we're all kids. Like, who am I? Why am I me and not somebody else? Where was I before I was born? What happens to me after I die? And then as I got older, that basic question evolved into deeper questions. Like, how is it possible that this lump of electrified paté inside my head can give rise to an experience? An experience of the world, the redness of red, the pang of an emotional experience, the sense of free will? And it's not

that I set out with this plan to be an academic researching this stuff, I just kind of never lost interest in it and gradually wound my way through different disciplines at university and afterwards studying psychology and physics and then computer science. And by about 20 years ago, when I'd finished my PhD, around that time, the study of consciousness was coming back onto the radar in academia and neuroscience and psychology and philosophy. And so I was lucky to get a position back at University of Sussex. I did my PhD there. I went to America for a few years, California, and came back and started a group trying to understand how the brain works, but specifically trying to understand this big question of how and why we experience the world

and the self the way we do. And also what applications this understanding can have for for medicine, for mental health, for neurology, for technology, how we develop and interact with AI, and also for society as a whole. Understanding how we perceive the world and how we perceive ourselves, I think, has a lot of implications

for society in general. So that's kind of how I got. Yeah, well, it sounds like you've taken like a childhood passion and just kept going until you became quite successful in that field. And that's why it's interesting to have you on. So what is consciousness? People will disagree. For me, it's very simple. We all know what consciousness is. It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go under general anesthesia, which, have you done that? Have you been under general anesthesia? So you know, it's like it's completely different from sleep, isn't it? I mean, you have no idea how much time has passed. Certainly the times I've had general. You go under, you come back, and you're not just sort of dozing. You were just not there.

It could be 10 years later. It could be 10 years later. It could be 10 years later, and it's that oblivion. That is unconsciousness. And the flip side of that is consciousness. So when that's not happening, you are conscious. The philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it, I think, very nicely. He says, for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism. Like it feels like something to be you or me, probably many animals.

It feels like something to be that animal. But for you under general anesthesia or for a table or a chair, there's nothing going on. There's no subjective experience going on at all. So that's consciousness. So, but see, forgive me, but to me, that's quite an unsatisfying way of describing it because I suppose what I'm, so I thought I imagine as part of that. Yep. And also then experience, whatever that is, physical, you know, emotional. That's all consciousness, right?

Right. So I think you can, yeah, that's a starting point. So that definition is useful partly because of what it excludes. So it's saying consciousness is not the same thing as intelligence. It's not the same thing as having language or of behaving in a particular way. It's just any kind of experience. But what does that mean? How do you work with that? So the way I approach it is to think of three different aspects of consciousness.

that cover this broad idea. One of them is level, like what happens in the brain when you lose consciousness entirely, like in anesthesia or in other conditions, something that affects globally how conscious you are. Then there's conscious content, which is when you are conscious, you're conscious of something. You open your eyes and a world is there and has colors and shapes and people and places and objects and things are happening. And how does that occur? Because the brain can take an information and respond to it without consciousness being involved. And we can perceive things unconsciously.

Not everything that reaches our senses, affects what we're aware of. So what in the brain generates the experience of a world? And then finally, what in the brain underpins the experience of the self? because it's tempting to think of the self as like, you just take it for granted. It's this mini-mee inside my brain somewhere that is doing all the perceiving and then deciding what to do next.

But the way I think and a lot of others in this area think is that the self is not the thing that does the perceiving. It's not something to be taken for granted. The self is another kind of perception. The brain is creating the experience of self in the same way that it's creating. creating the experience of the world. I think dividing it this way gives, certainly that's what structures the way I do my research, I try and understand these areas. They're all joined up in

some ways, but you can approach them at least a little bit separately. I feel like I'm high again. Over to you, mate. And so if that being the case, so we all experience consciousness. Yeah. So why is our consciousness different and how different is our consciousness? if you see what I mean. Yeah, I think this is a really, I mean, this is in fact something we're working on at the moment. It's very easy to assume that we all experience the world the same way because our experience has that character. You know, I'm looking at you guys now and you're wearing a kind of mauve purple shirt and a blue shirt.

And it seems like that's out there in the world. Those colors are out there in the world. They're not being made up in my head. and the same for everything else I'm experiencing. But that's not true, right? The way it's actually working is, of course, there's a real world out there. Of course, you guys are actually out there, and there are these objects that you're sitting on and wearing.

But the way I or anybody or any animal would experience them is dependent partly on what's there, but to a large extent on how the brain decides to make sense of it. Colors are really good example. You take a piece of white paper from in here outside, and it still looks white, even though the light waves bouncing into your eyes have changed completely. The brain takes into account all the ambient lighting in order to decide what color something should be. And the same is true for everything that we experience, which means that we're all going to experience things differently, even though it seems as though we each see the world just. as it truly is.

And sometimes these differences can be quite large. And sometimes people see things that other people don't. They start actively hallucinating. Or they might have what we would call a neurodivergent condition, where it's an autism or ADHD or something. So their experience of the world is quite dramatically different in a way that can often be challenging. But I think, and there's some evidence for this now,

that even if you don't hallucinate actively or describe yourself as neurodivergent, we all experience the world differently. In fact, there's no sort of single, true way to experience it. You know, our perceptions are tied to reality, otherwise they would be useless. But there's, but there's always a construction, and the constructions will always differ. Quite how much they differ is something that we're looking at. We have this project called the perception census, which is, a set of online little brain teasers and interactive experiments and illusions, that is trying to map out this hidden world of inner diversity.

Because, you know, I think we know in society that we've come to hopefully, optimistically cherish the externally visible diversity we have in sort of height and skin color and so on and cultural background that we can see on the outside. And so I think recognizing and learning to, to cherish. the inner diversity that we have too could be equally transformational, but we just need to know what it looks like. That's such a profound point, the inner diversity,

because how much of this inner diversity, Anil, is chemical, biological, whatever way you want to put it, and also how much of it is a product of our childhood experiences and our culture and what we have been taught growing up? This is a very good question, and I don't think there's going to be any single clear answer to it. We're all, you know, as individuals, this complicated mix of inheritance, you know, what's in our genes, development, how we grew up,

childhood experiences, the culture, the language we speak. And just what happened to me yesterday is going to affect how I encountered the world and the self today. Teasing these things apart is very, very difficult. But there's some clues that can help us. So there's some classic studies about the effective language that native Russian speakers. distinguish more shades of blue. So you're a native Russian speaker. So probably, I mean, you know like the light wave spectrum,

the electromagnetic spectrum, is basically just a continuous set of light, of wavelengths. But our brains carve it up into distinct colors, which is why a rainbow has these distinct bands. It doesn't just look like a continuous band of color. But that's our brains imposing these categories. And it turns out that for native Russian speakers, these categories are imposed in a slightly different way.

Entirely useless here because the sky is always gray. The sky's always gray. This is true. But it's one example of how, you know, language can affect perception. I've always thought this, you know, like I noticed that when my wife and I, if we're speaking Russian versus when we're speaking English or I am speaking Russian or English to people, If I'm, I've always thought the language is identity to some extent because I am a different person when I'm speaking Russian to when I'm speaking English. I say things differently.

It's almost, I almost would say I have slightly different opinions. Interesting. When I am in the different, I don't know if you find this for Spanish. Yeah, I find it because I wouldn't say I'm a native Spanish speaker, but I learned Spanish at the same time I learned English. Right. But I feel that way when I speak Spanish. I'm more demonstrative. I'm more open.

And then when I'd speak English, I'm all kind of, I also speak Spanish, but not as well as you. I learned it as a sort of a late teenager, embarrassed about my inability to speak anything but English. And I think, yeah, I feel just much more stupid when I speak Spanish. They speak it really badly. But it does seem to affect the thoughts. It's not just the ability to express the thoughts. I start having simpler thoughts about where the bus station is, like what's on the menu. Yeah.

So one of the interesting things that I've also saw, and you know, this idea is, that perception is projection, right, essentially, to some, to a large extent, that's kind of a part of almost every spiritual tradition. It's part of, if you do personal development, this is the first thing they'll teach you. You know, you're projecting your crap basically onto the world and then you're upset at what's coming back at you. So what does it, what does it mean? Particularly because, as you say, when we look out into the world, the world is an infinite amount of information. And is it the case that the reason we have, we see certain things is like I am, like right now there's a wealth of information behind you, but I'm looking at you.

Yeah. Because you're a human being. And I'm seeing certain things about you that I'm primed to receive. And so we're all essentially creating our own experience for us, for ourselves. Yeah, I think that's right. I think you're quite right that a lot of traditions, whether it's in Western culture of personal development or in Eastern spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism and the concept of Maya and that things are illusory in their surface appearance. There's a lot of a long history to thinking this way that what we experience is a kind of projection. But what I think neuroscience is bringing to the table is instead of this being metaphorical, it's unpacking it literally.

Like how does this actually happen? How deep does it go? What does it mean in terms of some of our more basic encounters with the world? our experience of shape and color, for instance. And that's not given. That's also a projection. And what's literally happening, at least, you know, I think, and this is the idea that I've been exploring in my work and in the book is that the brain is a kind of prediction

engine. Yes. And instead of just passively soaking up information from the world or the body, the information that comes in is ambiguous. It's noisy. It's just this, as you say, this almost infinite morass of signals, whether it's electromagnetic radiation or sound waves or whatever it might be. The brain has to make sense of this to conjure a definite world,

a world that just sort of clicks into position, things that we see. And so the way it does that, it has to actively interpret the information that it gets. And how does it do that? Well, here's what the theory says. The theory says that the brain is constant. throwing out predictions about the likely causes of sensory signals. Like what's most likely to be out there in the world to give rise to the information that's coming in? And then it uses the sensory information to calibrate its predictions to update them, to tune them

to the world. And what we perceive is not a readout of the signals. It's the content of the the predictions. So just zooming out a little bit again, what this means is our experiences are not just passive registrations of an objective reality. They're always active, top-down, inside-out constructions. We actively generate our worlds. And we also, I think, the same goes for the body too. Our emotional responses are perceptions of what's happening to the body in response to the world. I think this is really, for me, this keeps nagging at me, even just in everyday life, because we walk around and it just seems as though we see the world in this kind of, we're reading it from the outside in, and it's continually

challenging counterintuitive to think that's not what's going on. We're always, you know, what's out there, who knows, ask a physicist. But the way we experience it is always coming from the inside out. That's very interesting. And of course, anyone who's looked into this for half a second knows it's true. And on the other hand, I feel like that puts, that makes it quite difficult to live life in a way because it's like I get that I'm projecting my thoughts and whatever onto reality. So how do I then navigate the world? Because like I know, for example, if I jump out of that window, I am going to hit the ground. That's real, right? If I drive my car into something, that's a bad outcome for me and for the car and whatever. So how do you,

do we navigate reality then, knowing all of this? How does this change the way we live life? Unfortunately, evolution has designed the way the brain constructs experience so that we don't do things like jump out of windows or drive cars into walls. I've been fond of saying that our experience is like a controlled hallucination. It's a hallucination in the sense that it is generated by the brain, but the control is equally important. So evolutionist shapes our perceptual mechanisms, our brain circuitry, so that the experiences we have are tied to the world in ways that are very useful for guiding our lives for survival in the broader sense of the word.

So this means also that we're likely to have somewhat, well, substantially similar experiences. Yes, we might experience slightly different shapes. days of red. But unless you're actively, frankly, hallucinating, we all look out of the window and see there's a big drop. And we know that that's a bad thing to, you know, to just launch ourselves into. So I think that's fine. I think that actually the novelist, the nice and ins said it very well. She said, we don't see the world as it is. We see it as we are. And evolution has made sure that we see things as we are in a way that's usually aligned with what we need to do to survive. Of course, this is a challenge in some respects because we have technologies now where we're

unable to sense some things which might be damaging to us, like radiation, for instance. We just don't detect it. That's not part of our controlled hallucination. Evolution didn't shape us to be sensitive to these kinds of things. And then we might also perceive other things like the rate of change of carbon in the atmosphere. We're very bad at perceiving things that unfold over time scales that evolution hasn't deemed relevant to our ongoing survival. And in the world in which we live, our perceptual tuning is becoming less adequate to the challenges we face. But it's still perfectly adequate to the here and now to like the not jumping.

jumping out of windows or running in front of buses. Isn't that the problem as well, that essentially we're all on social media, and social media has been designed almost to hack our very consciousness so that we judge our success and failure in life by what is happening in this virtual world? Yeah, I think it's amplifies. I mean, we're very familiar. I think from social media with this idea of social media echo chambers, right? I mean, we seek out news that confirms what we already think. There are this drives of dynamics of polarization.

And we enter this situation where it becomes very hard to even understand that another person can have the beliefs that they have because the way our own beliefs has been shaped have been rooted in very different sources of information. And I think you can almost draw a parallel. here with perception too. Yes, we have these social media echo chambers, but we also have, to some extent, perceptual echo chambers too. We all live in different inner world, unique inner world, right down to the level of how we experience them, and we'll probably seek out perceptual

information to reinforce the way we encounter the world, even at these lowest levels. How do you solve that? This is an enormous challenge, but of course, recognizing that we live in echo, Cochambers is essential prerequisite to overcoming the problems that they pose. If you don't know, you live in one. If you don't know, you live in a bubble, you'll never get out of it. Hey, Francis, do you like accessing dodgy websites? Yes. Do you like watching naughty films that you're not meant to watch?

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if we all experience reality in inverted commas subjectively, then is there any such thing as truth, really? You know, people argue about the truth and this is the truth. Is there any such thing as the truth? Well, that's a very loaded term, right? I mean, it can mean different things in different contexts. If you think about truth as in objective reality, it's true to say that we're all sitting on chairs, right? But then a physicist might come along and say, well, you know, of course a chair is just an approximation for a bunch of atoms behaving in a particular way.

And there's no such thing as a chair. And Wittgenstein would come along and say the whole concept of chair is a problem. You know, there's just this sort of vague category of chairness. But for those of us are not that clever. I mean, we can all agree we're sitting on chairs. You know what I mean? So that's what I mean. I think there's a level of truth,

which is just the right level of consensus, which is reinforced by experience. So yeah, it is true that we're all sitting on chairs. I think that's fine. So the fact that we all construct our experiences doesn't mean that we have to get rid of the concept of truth and that nothing is true. No, I think that's right.

I guess what I'm getting at, I'm curious, is this will be a, shocking example, but like, is there a difference between us consensually agreeing that we're sitting on chairs and people in Nazi Germany agreeing that the Jews are evil? Like, is there a difference between that? Or is that just people creating their subjective consensual reality based on what's going on in society? I think there's a massive difference. Forget morality. I'm just talking on a practical level. But I think, I think, yeah, because the fact that we're sitting on chairs is something that can be immediately verified by the fact that, you know, you know, you're

you know, you sit down and you don't immediately fall through onto the floor. Yeah. And the consequences of our belief that we're sitting on a chair is just reinforced by what happens next. As you get further and further away from the ability to test your perceptual beliefs against reality, then they become, then they can become more and more divorced. And so I don't think you can get away, the key difference there is morality. You know, the idea about what not what people and some people in Nazi Germany thought about Jews is a moral ethical position and you that is not something the truth of which is established like sitting on a chair.

It's clearly wrong anyway, but that kind of claim, even if it was a morally good claim, even if it was a different kind of claim that, you know, the claim that, you know, the claim that, you know, everybody should be free to, you know, marry whoever they want or something like that. That's not something that can be verified in the same way that sitting on a chair can be verified. So there is a difference. And since we are on the subject of politics, I suppose the question that we end up with, you mentioned polarization. We've obviously had an awful amount of it in recent years. Is there any point having political discussions? Seems to be our only chance, right? I mean, one of the language is one of the most probably.

the most distinctive features of the human species. And we like to think as humans, we're special. And we usually think we're more special than we actually are. And a whole history of science, I think, has been a history of deflating this human exceptionalism and realizing that we're more continuous with the rest of nature than was previously thought. But language, I still think, is distinctive for humans. and it gives us so much potential in both directions.

It's language that allows us to build culture, build civilization, but of course it's language also that can be used to bootstrap these dynamics of polarization. I don't know. I mean, sometimes it seems fruitless, doesn't it? It does. But what else are you going to do? Yeah. Do you sometimes think, Anil, that because, so early on in the year,

I did a mushroom ceremony, where it took magic mushrooms, and then I took a tobacco as well, and I had very powerful hallucinations. And people said to me, like, what was the experience of that? And the reality is, is that language isn't enough at times. Do you think that's also part of the challenge,

that we are experiencing this consciousness and we have this marvelous tool that is language, but sometimes it isn't enough to adequately convey our emotions and the way that we perceive the world. I think that's absolutely right. I mean, this is why we still have a space for literature, isn't it? I mean, there's something about good writing that can evoke an experience of setting more than most of us are able to do with words. But I think there is still a fundamental limit. Of course, this is almost a necessary trade-off with language. It has to gloss over fine

distinctions in order to be useful at all. If I had a word, and this gets back to the fact that that we might experience the world in subtly different ways, without even going as far as a mushroom ceremony. If there was a separate word for every possible experienceable shade of blue, then we would be using different words and we would never communicate. So it's the fact that language abstracts away from the fine details of experience.

That's actually what makes it useful, because we can then communicate. But the trade-off is, as you say, language will not capture the fine grain of experiences. And there are some experiences like psychedelics that will really challenge the boundaries of what language can achieve. But this is perhaps why, you know, sometimes these kinds of experiences can be quite valuable

because they provide a first person, sort of kick. You know, they've got a first person opportunity to realize that the world we experience is a construction of the brain, that it's not just a direct window onto the way the world is. It can open a gap, I think, between our lived experience and how we relate to that, in the same way that meditation can do as well, but over much longer time scales with much more practice.

Do you think that's part of the problem as well, is that we all, since we all experience a world in a different way, it makes it so much more tricky to be harmonious because if we see things in a different way then we're talking about two different realities in a sense. I mean you remember that photo from a few years ago of the dress.

Yeah. That was half the world saw as blue and black and half as yellow and white. And that's a great allegory for your point, isn't it? Because I mean the division over that was extraordinary and it was just a photo of address. But people could not understand that it was possible to see it another way because it seemed to them that they were seeing it as it really is.

And so that does. You put that in a more contentious context rather than just the color of a photo of address. Tax policy, you know, strikes, whatever. Yeah, you're going to get into trouble. And I think that's part of the reason why this recognition about how perception works. how conscious experience works.

It's not just sort of of mere scientific interest. It's of direct social relevance because we need to understand. When you kind of bed in this understanding as widely as possible, that perception is dependent on us. We see things as we are and to cultivate a little bit of humility about our perceptual encounters with the world, which this is me being a bit sort of optimistic. Fanglossian, you know, might end up in cultivating a bit of humility also about our beliefs

and allow us to, you know, if we can get people, for instance, imagine this, imagine you have people disagreeing violently about some political issue and you get them to sit down and look at this photo of the dress and they see it different ways, but then you kind of take them through how and why they see it different ways and the fact that it's a construction and so on. would that process of understanding the nuts and bolts of perspective taking, would that give them a better platform for communicating about the beliefs they violently disagree about? I don't know, but maybe. Well, speaking of contentious issues, I suppose one of the most obvious questions here is,

well, there's two questions, actually. first of all, human beings throughout our history have had some kind of belief in a supreme being or a set of supreme beings or super whatever, you know, some version of that. Do you have any insight as to why we do this? Is it because we are connected to a supreme being that exists? Is it because our brain produces, you know, what can you tell us about that part, first of all? I think this is, it's such a common feature of human culture. isn't it? Of course, to everybody, different cultures have their own different

supreme beings. This is where a lot of the trouble starts. But I think you asked the right question. Why are we compelled across cultures to have some belief that fits that description? And this is a little bit out of my wheelhouse, but the intuition I have is it's really something to do with the fact that we might be two things going on. First is perhaps, another distinctive. Maybe this isn't distinctive about humans, but we know we are mortal. You know, we know we will die. At least we know that in the abstract is very hard to actually understand what that means. And in the face of that, we have that conflicts with what evolution over millions and millions of years has shaped brains to do, which is to persist, to keep the body alive. And that

basic kind of operating system of our of our psychology to continue to keep on going is just incompatible with the knowledge that at some point we don't and to resolve that that contradiction now we need something and one of the things that that comes up is um is a supreme being i think the other interesting idea about this and this is not my idea at all i can't remember where i where i first read this was that the concept of a God or a supreme being came about as human society changed in ways that groups of the groups of people living together got stronger and stronger, got bigger and bigger rather, so that in order to reinforce the hierarchies to allow larger groups of people to keep on, to keep going together without sort of dissolving into conflict.

Is it the shared myth so you all know of Ferrari, for example? Yeah, that's probably, I mean, and I don't think it's very hard to find any evidence for that, but some appeal to something beyond a single individual human seems in principle that can reinforce hierarchies very, very strongly. I don't know whether it's true. I tend to think it's the, it's this distinction between knowledge of our mortality and the deeply baked in drive to stay alive that's at the heart of it. And as the second question that's interesting to me, is whether it's psychedelics, whether it's spiritual experiences that I've had, talking to other people about certain things,

I got the sense very strongly that when people experience that freedom of this constant brain processing, the immediate surroundings and whatever, quite often they all have the experience of ultimate connection with other people and the universe, whatever that is. Do we have any thoughts on where that comes from? I think so, yeah. I think this is something where neuroscience might shed a bit. bit of light on because it goes back to earlier part of our conversation about what is the self.

Now, the idea, there's the sort of immediately superficially appealing idea that the self is this immutable essence of you or me that's just there and might survive after death or whatever compared to this other view of the self that it's a perception, that it's a construction of the brain and might change over time as well. And the way we experience being a self is not fixed. It does evolve, even though we don't necessarily perceive it evolving. And if it's a construction of the brain, it can also be tuned down or even go away. And there's this concept from meditation, from some psychedelics research as well,

from some spiritual traditions about ego dissolution. And I think, again, this is not necessarily a metaphorical thing. It can be quite grounded in a way of conscious experience happening in which the experience of self is either absent or at least attenuated to a great degree. One of the things the brain does, I think, when in normal everyday life, at least to people in our culture, is it's always establishing distinctions between self and other, whether it's other people or the rest of the world. Now, these distinctions are not complete and they're very fluid. Part of what it means to be me is how I experience myself refracted through the minds of others. Part of me is really residing in the minds of my friends and colleagues and so on.

But at the same time, I see this hand in front of me. I know that's my hand. Those hands are not. This chair is not part of my body. there are some aspects of the construction of self, which impose a relatively clear distinction. But those distinctions can be done away with. It doesn't mean they go away in the real world. Like my body is still separate from the chair. But the brain might, in some states, it might not draw these distinctions in perception. And that could be what's going on that

underlies this experience of connectedness. And in fact, if you look inside the brains of people on high doses of psychedelics, you see things compatible with that idea. You see sort of more mixing of the brain circuits, whereas typically there's sort of, there's parts of the brain that are more associated with self and when they're active, other parts of the brain more associated with experience of the world. They tend to be largely separable, but under psychedelics, everything gets a bit mush together. So it's when the self, the self is reduced and So prominence, that's when our ability to connect with other things become stronger, essentially. Is that?

Well, I think that's when we have the, I think there's a difference here between ability and experience. Yes. So we enter a state where we suddenly feel more connected with other people, with the universe in general, with the stars, with the trees, with the grass and so on. But if experience is partly projection, I would imagine then in that state, you're much more likely to behave with other people in a way that makes it easier to connect. I mean, I know this experientially. Like, the less self, the more we can connect.

Maybe. I think it might be a sort of a balancing act, right? I think if you're in a total state of ego dissolution, then the concept of interaction becomes a bit pointless because there's no you anymore at all. So it's about finding the balance. And I think the value of transient experiences of things like ego dissolution is that when you come back out of the other side, you relate to your everyday self and therefore others in a bit of a different way. But it's still back. So we talk about hallucinations.

And in a sense, this is a hallucination. There's, well, we all know, I'm the music producer, Farrell, who says that he sees. music, certain notes of certain colors. And what does that mean then in terms of hallucinations in terms of creativity? Are creative people as the saying goes like, they're more volatile, they're more passionate. Is that such a thing? Do they tend to feel things more deeply? Do they tend to see a different type of hallucination? I think it's very hard to pin down what the secret source of creativity is. And people can be creative in all sorts of different ways. But there are, in individual cases, I think you can see that specific and interestingly

different ways of experiencing the world can be a spark that fuels one person's creativity. I mean, the phenomenon you're describing there is called synesthesia, which is super interesting. It's like broadly speaking, it's a mixing of the senses. And for most of us, vision and hearing, you know, they're separate. If I hear a sound, it might conjure up a particular image in my mind, but I don't literally see things. But in synesthesia, the connection is much closer. And people indeed, different notes can evoke experiences of particular colors. That's one form of synesthesia.

Tastes can have shapes. There are many forms of mixing the senses. I mean, even for us, even for non-cinesthetes, the senses mix in some ways. Like this is what we call metaphor. You know, some notes are high, others are low. And taste is sharp or dull. I mean, we don't, yeah, we encounter our world as a mixture of senses anyway. But for synesthesia, it's like more direct.

And there's good examples of musicians, painters, Kandinsky was a synesthetes. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov who wrote Lolita was a synesthette. And this is understandable, right? you have a different way of encountering the world that can provide associations that other people don't have. And that being the case, at what point does these types of conditions go into something like mental illness

with schizophrenia, where people are seeing things or perceiving the world in ways which are just completely have no bearing on reality? So this gets back to this idea of perceptual diversity and this continuum or spectrum that we might think of. And most of us live in the middle bit, just as most of us are between, I don't know, like nearly five feet and six feet or whatever of height,

and most of us will see the world in different ways, but in ways which is still well adapted to what's really out there and sufficiently similar that we can communicate. But as you go further off that, then you get into the territory where you might start to establish, describe people either with something like a neurodiversion condition or with something like a mental illness. But the key point here is that the fact that you experience the world differently

does not in itself mean that there's a deficit or that there's a particular condition or that there's a mental illness going on. Now, that's something that happens when your way of seeing something poses challenges for the environment you live in. Like, even something like schizophrenia, which is very, very distressing for people that experience it. You know, you hear voices in your head that are instructing you to do things. Often there's a lot of auditory hallucinations. You feel dissociated from yourself. You know, in some cultures, these experiences were sort of celebrated as somebody,

you know, channeling some spiritual energy rather than being thought of as mentally ill. and hopefully the recognition that we all construct our experiences, we all differ in some ways, gives us greater empathy for people who are mentally ill in one way or another. That's at least the hope. And also, just sorry, one other point on this is that there's plenty of people who hallucinate who are out of that middle range who aren't, mentally ill. There's a hearing voices for instance is actually quite common for people. I

can't I'm not sure the statistics I have a colleague Charles Ferniehoff in Durham who's led this project called the Hearing Voices Project to understand like how widespread it is because for most people if they hear a voice in their head, you know they there's a great taboo against talking about it because you don't want to be labeled as as suffering psychosis or a mad or mentally ill. It's only a problem when these voices become a problem in virtue of what they're saying. For some people, they're just the kind of benign. If they're saying go to the gym, like, that's fine. Yeah, exactly. And visual hallucination is the same. Some people see things, but it's not always distressing or problematic. So the range of altered experiences, I think,

is much, much broader, much richer than we typically think. So I find that very interesting because I have ADHD and I remember when I got diagnosed with it, I entered, not a period of morning, it's a strong way I put it, but almost a week of just sadness, really, when I received the diagnosis. And then it's a process of understanding with myself in that the way I see the world, in the way that I move through the world, is very different to the way other people do. And as a result, it's not just an acceptance of myself, but it's also, how can I put this, a journey to try and understand other people

so that we can meet halfway. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's a really important way of looking at it. Because if you just go down the path of, well, this is me, the world needs to change around me, the world is never going to do that. Right.

And you have to accept that. But if you find a way for you to be able to exist, more cohesively with the world. I think that's how you gain a greater sense of acceptance. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. And I think the bar should be higher than acceptance as well. And here, you know, I come to this metaphor of biodiversity. Like in ecosystems, we are, we're just aware that having lots of different kinds of plants and animals is a good thing for a flourishing ecosystem. You don't want a monoculture. And I think exactly the same is true for human cultures and whether this is diversity on the outside, again, skin color and whatever, but especially diverse than the inside.

It's not that we... Yeah, I think that's much more important, actually, personally. Yeah, and you want to get to a point where differences in the way we encounter the world are not merely accommodated, but enrich society. Well, if you think about the fact, I mean, Francis talks about ADHD, most comedians have come out as having ADHD in the last year, just for some reason. But it kind of makes sense. Like, Francis is brilliant when we do our live streams at like making random jumps from one thing to another. I imagine ADHD is part of that. And there will be other conditions that fuel other forms of creativity and whatever.

They're not maybe even a condition. There's just a different way of being in the world, which has trade-offs, right, as all ways of being do. So I'm curious to come back to the political side of the conversation because I'm just wondering, you know, how, because on the one hand, you could say, well, look, people have their own version of reality, and that's just what it is, and that's fine. But yet we do go through, like, periods, don't we?

You know, you have Thatcher, and there's a particular way of seeing the world, and then you have, you know, Blair, and there's a particular way seeing the world, and then you have the current government. And there are philosophical and political ways of looking at the world that change over time. And at the same time, you know, if you read more about history, actually, the political battle between the sort of more lefty, more compassion, or empathy, but perhaps slightly less of the rationality and pragmatism versus the overly rational, overly pragmatic, lacking in empathy.

That's been going on since forever, right? So how do we navigate the political world? I mean, like, you know, I'm doing question time tomorrow. Is there any point of me saying anything? Well, this is you asked earlier about what's the value of political conversation. I think making these points is exactly is what's needed. I mean, there are some currents, as you say, that that have just almost always been there,

some tensions between individualism and collectivism in politics very, very broadly. And the pendulum swings, and the pendulum swings for all sorts of reasons, right? Partly because people tend to react against a status quo, people have short memories. People always are attracted to change. for change's sake often. So this sets up, you know, dynamic where it's very hard to retain stability.

And it looks like, you know, we're leaving one period and maybe entering another period. Now after whatever 12 years in Western politics seems to have this kind of cycle. And I think what's really helpful is trying to get under, you probably can't stop that from happening. But, you know, nonetheless, there might be some shared core beliefs. that can be built on. What I really personally find troubling about politics is this kind of tit-for-tat responsive thing rather than the inability to build on previous positions,

previous political eras in a way that's cumulative, even if it might not seem like it, because whether you're on the left or the right in England, for instance, or the UK, you probably still have some core beliefs about access to health care, and so on, people should have some. And why can't we still find those areas of consensus and build on them without too much

just doing something and then undoing it and doing something else and then undoing it and undoing it and going back and forth? Well, it seems like that's happening because we're all too attached to the idea that our particular interpretation of reality is the one true thing. And anyone who disagrees with it is a heretic and must be, you know, cancelled, destroyed, evil, whatever, you know. that seems to me to be quite a big part of it, probably driven by social media to a large extent, although I imagine political debate has always been fraught and sometimes violent, actually.

Right, I mean, it's getting a lot more peaceful than it has done over history. And I think there's people like Stephen Pinker who do quite a good job of pointing out, in fact, there are a lot of things that are getting better, even though it really doesn't seem like it. And again, partly because of how the media's attention works and things that change, slowly don't tend to get much, much focus. Things that change quickly and dramatically do tend to get focus. And I think in the same way, the differences between positions tend to attract attention rather than the commonalities between positions. And one of the things that I've been

quite surprised at as I've gotten older is, is actually the consensus between different political parties on things. Because you just don't hear about it in the media and you tend to assume that that everything is treated differently, but it's not always the case. That is a really interesting point. And, of course, you're right that people want change often for the sake of it. I remember, I can't remember who it was, but there was a period when there was quite a lot of agreement and concordance between the positions of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. And what happened?

You get people from the left like George Gallow and people from the right, like Nigel Farage, coming along and saying, well, it's Tweedledee and Twiddled Dun. There is no difference between the two cheeks of the same backside and people are clamoring then for a new way of doing things when there is that consensus. So I guess this is kind of the human condition, isn't that? We go around in these circles. Yeah, and I think you see this especially now with the rise of identity politics, you know, people needing to have almost as an extension of their experience of self. You have the body, you have the perspective, sense of will, you have your social network. and then, you know, you need a political self too.

And, you know, this is, again, something that can be valuable because it can serve to highlight underrepresented groups. This is a valuable thing. But again, taken too far, it becomes just a bit pointless, really, because, again, it emphasizes the differences rather than the commonalities. You're disconnecting yourself from other people. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So what role does hormones or do hormones play in this in the need to become part of the tribe, in the need to, you know, have a group and also have an enemy, which is literally hardwired into us. It's a survival mechanism. It's a really good question. I mean, I don't know enough about what happens in the brain that shapes social affiliations. Clearly there's something, whether it's a football team, whether it's a group of friends, whether it's a political party.

Our minds do work like this. And it's not only human minds. I mean, it's many other species, social creatures in general are very, very bound to this dynamic of social affiliation. Hormones, emotional responses are clearly very, very important in this. And they're important in general. I think this just more generally highlights something that's still, incompletely understood and lacking when we think when and people talk about the brain and some kind of computer often and and there's still this this hangover from I think

philosophers like Descartes in the Enlightenment who who emphasize rationality as the sort of ideal of of human mind and what's set us apart from from other animals but our rationality is completely dependent on our emotional responses to. There's plenty of examples of that. People who you lack emotional responses and they don't they don't make good decisions. We need emotional responses to be practically rational. People like Antonio de Mazio in my field have been writing about this for decades and it's abundantly true. And not taking into account the emotional responses of people is a big mistake in whatever sphere you're in. Even if you're trying to understand the brain as a neuroscientist,

we have to think about the way, I think the way we experience anything is fundamentally grounded in our body's response to the situation. Our nature's living creatures is fundamentally important to our experiences of the world and the self. And then back out into the realm of society and politics, there's obviously a play on people's emotions to drive these dynamics of polarization. But this is often disguised, right? It's often presented in the guise of a rational argument. But really what's going on is a play on emotions and emotions of tribalism often. Because you talk about, you know, it's important to have emotion, but if you were too emotional, you can't be rational either. If you were someone who feels emotions

very intensely, then you get blinded by your emotion. We'll see. I don't know. I mean, this is against something we want to look at a bit with this perception sense is to try and understand how all these different parts of the puzzle fit together. Clearly at the extremes, I think you're right. You know, if you're just, if you're just washed over by by massive waves of emotion breaking on you all the time, you're not going to be able to do very much. So like most things, it's a balance, but downplaying or failing to recognize the way in which emotion structures our thought is, it is a big mistake. And we shouldn't, to get rid of this emotional response.

I think that's another mistake. People often think that I would make better decisions or I'd be more rational or be more effective if I could suppress my emotional reactions to a situation and really think it through. And that's just, I don't think the evidence bears that out at all. And in fact, it's not what people in practice end up doing. Most people always go with their gut reaction.

and what's a gut reaction? Well, that's a recognition of the emotional contribution. Is there not a difference between, like, what you're talking about, which is intuition, and like, oh, I'm afraid and therefore I must do this, or I'm angry and I must do this, or I'm, I don't know, horny and I must, do you know what I mean? Like, is there not a difference between intuition? And my wife is very into this, as a lot of women are, and like a, an emotional reaction.

Is there not a difference between those two? Okay, maybe. But also, I think the reliance on intuition is definitely not gender-specific, right? I mean, I think... My wife would disagree, but that is her right. Yeah, there's a difference in type, but I'm not sure there's a really fundamental difference.

What does that mean? An intuition to me is still an emotion. It's just an emotion that is, it has a less, maybe a less immediate at target and it may unfold over a longer time scale. But it's still like a perception about something,

you know, this is good, this is bad, that is shaped in a large part by the brain's response to the body. And an emotion of fear and anger is more transient, one would hope anyway, and more directly associated with a specific thing. I'm afraid of X. I mean, I'm...

And so its contours may be more easily definable. But essentially, my intuition about this is how I would describe it because, again, I honestly, I don't think there's a fact of the matter. But the way it appears to me is that intuition and fear

and are just different... There's part of the same spectrum. And that spectrum is... of how the brain interprets a situation based on perceiving its body's response to that situation. It's interesting you say that because experientially I would very strongly disagree with that. Like, for me, I've got a very powerful intuition as well that I've used to achieve a lot of the things that I've been able to achieve in life. And to me, it's very, it's literally the opposite of emotion.

If I am emotional about something, I'm almost certain to do the wrong thing. Whereas intuitively, if I have a calmer space to experience that sense, that's when I get the good stuff. Okay. The good advice. And my wife, likewise, and I know other people also who I've talked about this that also have, like to me intuition is a deep knowing. And emotion is a reactive force that is often destructive. Right. I mean, we might just be using the words in slightly different ways.

Probably. Back to the problem with language. Yeah. that a deep knowing, that makes sense to me in some ways, but what I would still like to suggest is that deep knowing is not sort of just an aspect of disembodied rationality. Oh, no, no, no, it's nothing to do with rationality. That's grounded in the body too.

That's, that's grounded. It's definitely no rationality because knowing is not rational. Knowing is knowledge. There's no rationality, too. It's just like, you must do this. or you, this would be the right thing to do. Yeah. I mean, I think there's also something interesting about intuition is that,

and this isn't me thinking about it off the top of the head now, but intuition has a kind of opacity to it, right? If you can explain why you've come to a particular decision, then it's no longer intuition. Intuition depends on an inability to unpack it into sort of fine-grained elements. And that may not apply so much to, you know, if I'm angry and I do something, then it's a pretty transparent causal link, right?

You know, I was angry, so I did it. Although even in these cases, we may, we may misattribute things. We may do things because we think we were angry, but in fact, there's other reasons. There's all sorts of old ethically dubious psychology experiments from the 60s and 70s where people were manipulating people's emotional responses in particular ways. Tell us about that. There's one, I get the classic one. I mean, I'm not sure it totally illustrates the point.

The classic one is an experiment by Dutton and Aaron, two psychologists in California or in Canada, Western Canada, actually, in the 1970s. And they were trying to make the point that the emotion we experience is going to be, it's the brain's interpretation of what's happening in the body. And so what they did was they got a bunch of students to walk over a bridge. And this was kind of a scary bridge. It was like this little rope bridge like Indiana Jones, high above a raging torrent. And so it would get the adrenaline going.

You know, the body would be put in in a particular state. And at the end of the bridge, there would be, there was all male students. And at the end of the bridge, there was an attractive female researcher who got them to fill out a questionnaire. and at the end of the questionnaire, and if questionnaire was, I can't remember what it was, that was sort of irrelevant, but at the end of it there was a,

you know, she would say, if you have any further questions about the study, here's my number, give me a call. And so there are a bunch of students that went over that bridge. There was another bunch of students that went over like a much less scary bridge,

a couple of feet above the river, nice, stable, same thing. And so what happened was the students that went over the scary bridge, of course, a lot of them called called the number and asked the girl out for a date. And the interpretation of this experiment was that the guys on the rickety bridge were misinterpreting their physiological arousal caused by the scariness of the bridge

as an attraction with the girl. And that said they were, yeah, they'd been encouraged to misinterpret the state of their body was in as being something else. So that for me is kind of interesting because it reveals that it's the emotion that we have is not just a reflection of the state the body is in, but it's deeply shaped by the context, the overall context that we understand the body state

to be in as well. And that can, you know, that's a misinterpretation, right? The reason the person was in that state of physiological arousal was because of the bridge. not because of the girl. Which brings to sort of start heading towards the interview, but you mentioned the arousal and to take it slightly deeper than that. What is love?

Yeah. I have no idea. I have no idea. I have no idea. I have some idea. In terms of what's happening, I mean, is it a particularly human thing? That's one question. I'm not sure but it's it's yeah I mean there's something there's something very

perplexing about it because there's something almost counterintuitive about the depth the psychological depth that that emotion can have you know the selflessness that it can bring about whether it's a love of another person a partner you know or a love of a country you know it can lead to to behavior we're trying to face of it is just a bit On the other hand, it is, it's what makes life worth living. And it's the most rewarding experience that is possible to have. Quite why our human psychological architecture has such a special place for it, I think, is a bit mysterious. Clearly, it's got something to do with the fact that we generally pair bond and we need to

bring up kids and so on. And you need some psychological anchor to stop new parents drifting apart. the kids fending for themselves and so on. So I think there is probably quite good evolutionary reason why we have this experience, but quite what it is and quite why it's so different from other experiences, that's extraordinary. I don't have a good answer, but I'm glad it exists.

Anil, it's been a wonderful interview. Thank you so much for coming on. Before we do our questions for locals, which only they get to see, we always end on the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? We've already talked about one of these things,

which in this interview, which is the fact that we see the world differently. And I think most people assume that's not the case, the implications of that are very important. The thing we haven't talked about much today that maybe fits into the various arc of the topics we've covered is death. We all die. until now this has been one of the great equalizing forces in society.

One of the things I worry about enormously is that that may change and that with the amount of investment going into life extension companies and things like that, it may soon be the case that people at one end of the spectrum not only have a lot more money during their lifetimes, but have a lot more lifetime as well. I think that would be incredibly disruptive for society. It's already true, by the way, to a large extent. I mean, if you're wealthy, you probably live about 10, 15 years longer. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, to me, that's still, that's a minor difference.

You think it's going to be 50 years? 50, 100, something like that. 100. The potential, we don't know, right? But there's, there's, that could happen. Right. If you want to invest in trigonometry, I want to live, well, I don't want to live forever, but an extra 100 years, I'd settle for.

But so that's something I think we need to take seriously the possibility of something like that happening. And what is the, what are the, what are the, disruptive consequences that you fear well then you just get this entrenched the set of interests that that is common among all people becomes smaller right you know society depends on some common process that applies to all of us and if you have some people who are living a hell of a lot longer their interests diverge a lot more from people who don't have access to that you go back to a real aristocracy and the peasants yeah it's a pretty dystopian situation. Just accompanying that though, I think even in the current world in which we live,

where we do all die, there's so little focus on that as part of life. And I think we neglect the end of life in a way that's really unfortunate for society, but for each of us as individuals as well. We started talking a little bit about anesthesia in a definition of it. of consciousness, anesthesia being its absence. So anyone who's had anesthesia kind of has a little premonition of what it's like to be dead. You don't exist. And I read a wonderful book, a novel by Julian Barnes. The title is Nothing to Be Frightened of. And I think he means that in two ways. You know, we're all frightened of oblivion, but then oblivion really is nothing. There's nothing going on. And we were not, we're not worried about all the time we didn't exist before we were born. But we are

worried about the time afterwards. And coming to terms with with mortality is something that I think is necessary and I think is something that is within grasp because a deeper understanding of the self that it keeps changing, that there isn't an unchanging immutable essence of you to cling onto can give us a greater accommodation with the prospect of not existing. And when we reach that accommodation, I think, that enhances the use we make of the days we do have. Anil, it's been a wonderful interview. If people want to find you online, if they want to buy your book, where's the best place to do that? Easiest place to find me is my website, which is www.annilseith.com.

And the book, Being You, New Science of Consciousness, pretty much everywhere. It is everywhere. Even in airports and everywhere. You've done really well, man. Thank you. And if anyone is keen to help us with this research into perceptual diversity, please take part in the Perception Census. And you can find that again on my website or on dreammachine.

Dot Perceptioncensus. That's a bit complicated. Just look at my website. Anil, thanks for coming on. Thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you with another brilliant interview like this one or also. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigger on,

on the go. It's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon guys. See you on locals for the bonus questions. Take care. Do we have free will? This is a very good question.