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Dr. Christof Koch on Huberman Lab: How Awareness Hides

Detecting awareness in vegetative patients reveals hidden consciousness. Koch explains how IIT maps the substrate of experience; and why selfhood fades in flow.

Andrew HubermanhostChristof Kochguest
Sep 15, 20252h 11mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:31

    Christof Koch

    1. AH

      Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Christof Koch. Dr. Christof Koch is a neuroscientist and investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and a chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. He is considered one of the great pioneers and luminaries of modern neuroscience. Christof's research has spanned how we perceive the world around us, how different states of mind arise and shape our experience of life, and most notably, consciousness. I joined the field of neuroscience way back in the 1990s, and even way back then, Christof's name and his work was considered seminal for our understanding of brain and human experience. And over the subsequent 30 years, he has continued to do incredible, groundbreaking work. Today, we discuss consciousness, what it is, literally, at the level of quantifiable brain mechanisms, and how understanding consciousness at that level can help you experience life more richly and allow you to place deeper meaning on everything from a typical morning, to grief and loss, to your greatest and most awe-inspiring moments. Christof also explains how our individual experiences and memories place us each into a unique, what he calls perception box, which is what shapes your outlook on life, and in many cases, your quality of life, including your mental and physical health. And he explains how you can change your perception box through what we call neuroplasticity, which is the modification of brain circuits. We also discuss what flow states, psychedelics such as DMT and other psychedelics, meditation, sleep, and dreaming tell you about how your mind works and the nature of consciousness. And we don't just discuss consciousness at the level of individuals. We discuss the collective consciousness of humankind. So if you're somebody that's interested in the brain and mind, what it means to be human, how to evolve and improve your mind, today's discussion will address all of that. Oh, and we also discuss dogs, cats, Jennifer Aniston, and the meaning of life. So get ready. This is a very special episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast that I'm certain by the time it finishes will have you thinking differently about your life, and dare I say, with a bit more optimism. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Christof

  2. 2:31 – 8:02

    Consciousness; Self, Flow States

    1. AH

      Koch. Dr. Christof Koch, welcome.

    2. CK

      Thank you for having me, Andrew. It's been a pleasure. It's been a, more than a decade, 12 years since we last interacted.

    3. AH

      Yeah. I've always enjoyed our interactions, and one of the reasons is that you're always into something super interesting, big, big questions, and evolving fast all the time, all at once. So, I think most people have heard the word consciousness. They perhaps have pondered consciousness. But, at least to my mind, it's not a very well-defined word. So when you talk about wanting to understand consciousness or about a being having consciousness or being in a moment of consciousness versus say, a rock, which I'm presuming doesn't have consciousness, what are we talking about? And here we could be using biological language, psychological language, or philosophical language. Please include all of it because-

    4. CK

      Much simpler.

    5. AH

      Okay.

    6. CK

      Do you hear me?

    7. AH

      Hmm?

    8. CK

      Do you hear me?

    9. AH

      Yes.

    10. CK

      Do you see me?

    11. AH

      Yes.

    12. CK

      The fact that you hear, not that you respond to my sound by moving your hand. The fact that you see, not, not th- the fact that you can navigate around this room, but you actually have a picture in your head. The fact that you love, the fact that you hate, the fact that you dream, that you imagine, that you dread. Those are all conscious experience. It's the stuff of life, literally. If I give you a billion dollars, okay, that even for you is probably a meaningful amount of money, but let's say, well there-

    13. AH

      It certainly is, yeah.

    14. CK

      Okay, but there's a slight, you know, that there is a thing that I'm going to remove all your conscious experiences. So you would still love and hate and drive cars and do everything else you do right now but there would be no light. There would, you, there, there wouldn't be any Andrew. Would you take that-

    15. AH

      No.

    16. CK

      ... that wager? Well, the difference is between the, the, those two states is consciousness. So without it, you don't exist for yourself. In fact, tonight you're going to go to bed, in particular in the early night, early stages of the night, you go into non-REM delta wave sleep, right, and you do not exist for yourself. If I wake you up, I said, "Andrew, Andrew, something's happening," and I ask you, "Well, where did you come from?" You say, "I came from nowhere," which is different, of course, later stage in the night, right, when, when you have dream, which is another conscious experience. So, but when you sleep, you do not exist for yourself. When you're under anesthesia, you do not exist for yourself. So you only exist for yourself because you are a conscious being. So it's very, in, in some sense, it's very simple to define.

    17. AH

      Historically, has it been defined as a simple just presence of self and perception of the outside world the way you're describing it? I feel like consciousness has been twisted and turned and, um, you know, weaved into balloon animal form over so many hundreds of years that people tend to argue about consciousness, and then they start getting into discussions about free will versus no free will. But why, given the simplicity and the clarity of your explanation, have people struggled with this definition of consciousness so much?

    18. CK

      The study of consciousness is really a modern phenomenon. It's really René Descartes. So, you know, Aristotle and Plato, much as they are foundational fathers of philosophy, didn't, didn't really have a position on the mind or on consciousness. That's a, that's a modern thing. Where we have struggled is trying to put it in objective...... form. So, you don't access my consciousness and I don't access your consciousness. And this makes it different from anything else that we study, different from a black hole, from a virus, from a brain. 'Cause all those I can study with what philosophers call third-person properties, right? You can stick 'em in a magnet, you can point a telescope at it. We can agree on, you know, what's the wavelength, what's the weight, what's the mass-

    19. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    20. CK

      ... what's the molecular constituency. We can't do that with consciousness. I believe you're conscious. In fact, I ask you, "How are you feeling today?" You tell me, "Well, I'm a little bit depressed because what happened." Well, so I'm trying to get at your state of consciousness, but ultimately it's always an inference, whether it's you or whether it's a baby or whether it's an animal that can't directly talk because language is another way to infer. So, that makes it more difficult. And the other part is people confound consciousness with consciousness of self. So most people, if you ask them, "What's consciousness?" they say, "Oh, it's to know that I'm a man and I will die one day and I know what I had for breakfast." Those are all conscious experience, but they really pertain to self-consciousness.

    21. AH

      Right.

    22. CK

      But that's just one aspect. You can lose self-consciousness. Like, I know you had Alex Holop here.

    23. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CK

      And I know from reading and listening to some of what he says, he says when you're, when you're really climbing at an, at an, at an expert level, you flow over the rock. You're sort of high, you, you'll, you, you totally lose a sense of self that, that inner voice, that critic-

    25. AH

      Yeah. Mm-hmm.

    26. CK

      ... that, that constantly speak to you is gone during those moments. There's this blessed silence, but you're highly conscious because you're highly conscious of, you know, where you are and what's the next, you know, the next place you need to go to. So, and of course, during psychedelic experience, during states of flow, during states of meditation, you can lose yourself, but you're still conscious. So let's not confound self-consciousness, which is one aspect, a big aspect, particularly in adult people, literally highly educated people with consciousness 2Q. That's really a much broader set of the fact that you can feel your limbs, right? That's, that may not even relate to you, just feel something there without assigning it, "Well, that's my body." That is, again, it's, it's, it's another conscious experience.

  3. 8:02 – 13:14

    NSDR, Yoga Nidra, Liminal States; State of Being, Intelligence vs Consciousness

    1. AH

      The liminal states between sleep and awake in both directions, falling asleep and waking up, uh, do you think they offer any windows into this, uh, deeper understanding of consciousness? Or does one even need a deeper understanding of consciousness? Uh, for instance, uh, I'm a big fan of yoga nidra, which is, uh, I've described as non-sleep deep rest. You deliberately lie down, do long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate down, bring down your levels of autonomic activation, more parasympathetic, et cetera. And the idea is you stay awake while deeply relaxing your body, a very atypical waking state that is more similar to rapid eye movement sleep when brain is very active, body is paralyzed, as you know.

    2. CK

      Lucid dreaming?

    3. AH

      It's a state of mind where the, the instruction in the classic yoga nidra scripts, and this goes back thousands of years, uh, is to move your mind from thinking and doing, to being and feeling. You're supposed to be in pure sensation. This is the idea. And as one does that, 10, 20, 30 minutes, and then you do it re- repeatedly over, you know, your life, as many days as you do. I've been doing it since 2017. I can feel my-

    4. CK

      You do this every day?

    5. AH

      Every day for 30 minutes. Yeah. I can feel myself falling asleep, but not quite falling asleep. So, it's a little bit like lucid dreaming. But then as you remind yourself to bring your perception to your body surface or your heartbeat, your breathing, whatever it is, and stop making plans, you lose past and future and you become hyper-present. But something about the, um, your sensation and perception merges with thinking. And you, it's like you-

    6. CK

      But Andrew, is Andrew still there?

    7. AH

      You're definitely s- Yes, I'm definitely still there. I'm definitely still there. You're not out of the body.

    8. CK

      But you don't mind wander in the past or-

    9. AH

      No, no.

    10. CK

      ... in the future?

    11. AH

      And it becomes very easy to do this. So you actually feel as if you're falling a little bit. It's a bit like the vestibular system probably shuts off a little bit as you're going into this and you, you feel as if you're falling into it. And the, the classic definition, and I've tried to translate this to physiology, but they talk about once you eliminate thinking and doing, and you are more, more in a being feeling state, what they called the energy body is more accessible, which is kind of the, it's almost like you're feeling things within your body and it's looping back on itself. Now, this all sounds very mystical, but what we're really talking about is more interoception, feeling, you know, you moving your perceptual awareness as you know to things from your skin inward. It's a very unusual state. Um, but yes, I'm still there in yoga nidra. I'm not someplace else. I'm actually more in my body than in any other state.

    12. CK

      Well, you could also be simply not there at all.

    13. AH

      Hmm.

    14. CK

      Where Andrew isn't there, the, the self, the, the one that, that carries your traits and your personality-

    15. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CK

      ... your memories, but you're still conscious.

    17. AH

      That's interesting 'cause it is very relaxing to emerge from this. I, it's a great tool for replenishing physical and mental energy. And I've tr- tracked sleep while in this and it, and there's some really nice brain imaging studies now of people doing yoga nidra or non, also called non-sleep deep rest, and pockets of the brain go into, um-

    18. CK

      Regional sleep.

    19. AH

      ... regional sleep as opposed to what we normally see-

    20. CK

      Whole brain.

    21. AH

      ... during sleep. So it's an interesting state. I'll send you a script to maybe give it a try and see if, if it means anything to you.

    22. CK

      I would be, uh... I'm interested-

    23. AH

      Yeah.

    24. CK

      ... in all these-

    25. AH

      Yeah.

    26. CK

      ... different states of consciousness because it's al- I mean, it's dominated by everyday waking consciousness. But as you said, that's all about doing, right? You walk-

    27. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    28. CK

      ... you run, you shop, you look around, you talk to people, but there are all these other states that don't involve the, the, the William James times streams of consciousness. But they are, they're all conscious experience. And so the more we know about them and the physiological basis, the better we can describe and delimit what consciousness is and what is it not. So for instance, to your point, it's, consciousness is not primarily doing. Of course we can do things, right? We do it all the time. That's how we (laughs) make a living. But consciousness is really more about being, it's a state of being. And by the way-

    29. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    30. CK

      ... that's also why computers, they can do everything we can do, but they can't be what we are.... conscious. Uh, but that's-

  4. 13:14 – 15:53

    Sponsors: BetterHelp & Our Place

    1. CK

    2. AH

      I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years and I've found it to be a very important component to my overall health. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, great therapy provides good rapport with somebody that you can really trust and discuss any issues with. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional guidance or directed guidance toward specific actions you wanna take in your life. And third, expert therapy can provide you with useful insights, insights that can allow you to make changes to improve your life, not just at the emotional level but also your relationship life, your professional life and on and on. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist that can help provide these benefits that come through expert therapy and it's carried out entirely online, so it's extremely convenient. No driving to the therapist's office, no looking for parking, et cetera. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Our Place. Our Place makes my favorite pots, pans and other cookware. Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as PFASes or forever chemicals are still found in 80% of non-stick pans as well as utensils, appliances, and countless other kitchen products. As I've discussed before in this podcast, these PFASes or forever chemicals like Teflon have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues and many other health problems, so it's really important to try and avoid them. This is why I'm a huge fan of Our Place. Our Place products are made with the highest quality materials and are all completely PFAS and toxin-free. I especially love their Titanium Always Pan Pro. It's the first non-stick pan made with zero chemicals and zero coating. Instead, it uses pure titanium. This means it has no harmful forever chemicals and does not degrade or lose its non-stick effect over time. It's also beautiful to look at. I cook eggs in my Titanium Always Pan Pro almost every morning. The design allows for the eggs to cook perfectly without sticking to the pan. I also cook burgers and steaks in it and it puts a really nice sear on the meat. But again, nothing sticks to it so it's really easy to clean and it's even dishwasher safe. I love it, and I basically use it constantly. Our Place now has a full line of Titanium Pro cookware that uses its first of its kind Titanium non-stick technology. So if you're looking for non-toxic, long-lasting pots and pans, go to fromourplace.com/huberman and use the code Huberman at checkout. With 100-day risk free trial, free shipping and free returns, you can experience this terrific cookware with

  5. 15:53 – 19:53

    Self, Derealization, Psychedelics; Selflessness & Flow States

    1. AH

      zero risk. I'm curious about the stability of self-representation. You know, I- as you know, uh, there are many conditions related to brain lesions, strokes, injuries, et cetera where people will lose their memories of the past or the inability to form new memories, um, emerges, but one of the things that seems so rigid is one's notion of self. Like a baby coming into the world very quickly learns that they have a name, they have a self, that self interacts with other things, and I- I'm not aware of any clinical conditions where people-

    2. CK

      Derealization.

    3. AH

      ... lo- lo- lose themselves completely for long periods of time. Derealization.

    4. CK

      Well, derealization is one where you feel... So A, you're perfectly right. The self is the basic kernel of our operating system.

    5. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CK

      Okay? And we- we... It's very difficult for us to lose because if we lose it, we would not be, from an evolutionary point of view, in a good shape, right? Um, but then there are conditions where you feel... So for instance, in derealization, a psych- a psychiatric condition which can, by the way, happens during psychedelics, you feel not you anymore and you feel there's something off with the world. This is not the real world. There's something funny. The world they still see and hear fine, but they- they all believe that this isn't the real world and they try to wake up. In fact, you probably remember, year and a half ago there was a spectacular case of the Alaska Airline pilot who asked to g- go onto the jump seat on a flight from Everett in Washington to, I think, Oregon or- or- or San Francisco.

    7. AH

      I've flown that from Everett. Tiny airport.

    8. CK

      Yes.

    9. AH

      Yeah.

    10. CK

      And then he- they said, "Of course." He's a colleague, he was a pilot in good standing. Into the flight, he stood up and tried to pull the two switches, um, that would kill the fuel to the two engines. The pilots fought him and kicked him out of the cabin and he was arrested and in fact the trial was three days ago. What happened that for the first time ever, he took psychedelic three days earlier at a wake for his best friend and then he went into this episode of derealization where he thought, "Okay, this is not the real world. This is a dream, I need to wake up and if in my dream, if I crash the plane, then I will finally wake up in the real world."

    11. AH

      Whoa.

    12. CK

      So yes, it is very robust but of course, so, so I call it we always live within the conf- we always live in the gravitational field of planet ego. It is always about me. It is always about me, me, me. And even if I don't think explicitly, there's things that are, you know, they're, they're processes monitoring my consciousness to make sure this, that it's always, it's important for me.

    13. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CK

      And it's very rare, but of course, the, the self can also be highly dysfunctional, right? You can catastrophize, you can be highly anxious, you can think people insult you or they, they say bad things about you while in fact they don't at all. And so there are rare conditions due, of selflessness when just like an astronaut that can become weightless, you can, you can become selfless.

    15. AH

      Mm-hmm. Interesting.

    16. CK

      So during episodes when you're, uh, when you're experience a state of flow, I used to have this when I, when I wrote computer code, when I was, you know, way younger, you can totally get absorbed by it, right? Or you read a book or you read an engaging movie or you play some sports or something, or you're Alex Honnold and climb, right? And partly these states are so addictive because it's such, you, you, you've just realized you spent the last 20 minutes in this heavenly state doing something, but, uh, again, the critic is gone. Uh, and of course during high, during sometimes heroic dose of psychedelics you can also totally lose yourself, the sense of self, and you realize how profound, beautiful the world is without you.

    17. AH

      Yeah.

    18. CK

      You know, the self being there and constantly interfering and relating it to h- what does it mean for me? What does this give me?

    19. AH

      It's incredible. We're definitely going to talk about psychedelics, and I've experienced some of this, uh, loss of self in, in psychedelics,

  6. 19:53 – 28:29

    Transformative Experience, VR, Racism & Self; Perception Box, Bayesian Model

    1. AH

      uh, before. I'm also interested in more subtle, um, shifts in self, uh, that are nonetheless still profound. Uh, perhaps the most dramatic shift in self I've ever experienced that was pervasive after the, the kind of incident, was I have a colleague at Stanford, Jeremy Bailenson, he's a real pioneer in the, in the VR space. Um, very early on, uh, he started using VR and there's an experience you can have in his laboratory if you go there, which is you put on the VR goggles. He's got a big room for VR with padded walls so no one runs into the walls and, and it's called, I, I think Walk of 1000 Cuts. It's very interesting. So o- obviously I'm white, um, you're white, um, so I don't know what it is to experience racism. I've never actually experienced racism just by virtue of when I grew up, where I grew up, and I'm white, and I'm living in the United States. I'm sure there would be those that would argue, uh, there are white people who have experienced racism. I haven't, and I certainly hadn't at the time of this VR experience. So in this experience, you put on the VR glasses, and if you're white you look into a mirror in the VR and you see your face slowly contort to somebody who's Black, okay? And it's still you, but you're Black. And then you go into the world in the VR space and you go to a job interview and you walk down the street and it's very interesting. Now, the stimuli are designed to evoke a certain response, but as you walk down the street, for instance, you notice that white people look at you with like, uh, in a certain glance and, and they actually control pupil size in the, in these other subjects very well, um, very carefully. And then you go to the job interview and there's this experience where at the end of the job interview there's someone else there and they shake the hand of the other person who is also not white but isn't Black, and so there's a number of subtle experiences and then you catch onto what's happening, right? You go, okay, this is, um, these are these little micro, um, not so micro experiences that have a, an emotional load. You come out of that VR experience, it's very interesting, and then you go back into life, back on campus and go do a... You never forget it. It's so interesting, like I never have I forgotten the experience. So when you walk down the street now I notice when people don't glance my way, if they glance my way, how they glance. And so I can't say what it is to be Black, I've only ever lived in this body. I can't say what it is to be anything except myself, but it, in a very brief, maybe 10-minute VR experience, completely transformed my understanding of what it is to be a different self. Which I think is pretty interesting. I don't think I've ever had a, a movie experience or a play or hearing a song that had quite as profound a shift internally, so clearly there was plasticity there. I just would love your thoughts on what, on, on the self as a, as a modifiable entity, not just losing self but as, uh, like how much can we actually change who we are at the level of perception and consciousness?

    2. CK

      So I would call it the transformative experience.

    3. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CK

      Right? We all know changing behavior is very difficult, but there you're telling me within 10 minutes because of this 10 or 15 minute VR experience, you're now much more hyper-aware of this, so that's a rare experience and w- I think it would be useful for all of us to have those. So I work with somebody here in Santa Monica, Elizabeth Acock, we're not related although we share the last name, and she has this really interesting idea, uh, of what she calls perception box, that we all run around with a notion, with our own view of reality, you'll see how this relates, including most importantly my notion of self. And it's not objective, it's all subjective. It's just like a Bayesian thing, you know, the, the modern language would be Bayesian priors. I have various Ba- Bayesian priors how I expect myself to be and how I expect other people to, to respond to me.

    5. AH

      Do you want to explain Bayesian for people just briefly?

    6. CK

      Okay. So Bayesian is a view of, um, of uncertainty in the world that, that was sort of, uh, there's this famous, um, uh, vicar, British vicar, Thomas, uh, Thomas Bayes in the 17th century that, that started this, so this is called Bayesian, whereby I look at, uh, something and I try to infer, well, what's the underlying reason for it, and I update my, based on certain observations that I make, I continuously have this running estimate what I think is really going on and also, this also includes my assu- my base assumption about the world, including political assumption, including assumption how will people react or what's the true motive of people. So the point that she's trying to make with this perception box, it includes everything. So a benign funny example is, do you remember what, what we call #TheDress?

    7. AH

      Mm-hmm.Oh, yeah.

    8. CK

      Okay? So remember, so this was the, the dress that went viral in 2015 where it was a wedding dress where if you looked at it, half the, uh, r- roughly, I can't remember the exact percentages, half the people saw it unambiguously as gold and white. That's how I see it. There's no question.

    9. AH

      Mm-hmm. Same.

    10. CK

      I did-

    11. AH

      Yeah.

    12. CK

      Okay, same. But half of other people see it as blue and black. And again, they don't... It's not something guessing is it maybe one or the other? They just see it blue and black or, or... Okay, so then people ask, "Well, is there anything real? What is the real color?" often, people k- ask. No, there is no real color. What there is are photons that has, you know, from the sun that strike the, th- the two-dimensional surface of the dress that get absorbed by, by my photoreceptors that then get processed and they get evaluated in one way in our brain so we see it as, uh, as white and gold and get valued differently in a different brain because we all have different priors. This has to do with whether we are evening persons or morning persons. But this also applies to things like 9/11 and October 7th. If I tell you this, 9/11, what do you think about it? Or October 7th, depending on whether you are a Israeli or a Palestinian, you have profoundly different views of it, right? So you look at a fact that s- that's supposedly objective, but depending what priors you bring to it, what your perception bar construct is, in what culture you grew up, you have radical different interpretation, and this also includes your sense of self. So I would say what you had was this transformative experience. You expanded the, your perception box, the, your perception of reality to now include the notion, "Huh, I get it now that other people, depending on their skin or their colors, will be treated differently from me."

    13. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CK

      That's invaluable-

    15. AH

      And, and I got to-

    16. CK

      ... and I wish we all had that.

    17. AH

      Yeah, and I got to experience the emotio- you know, a, a sliver of what the emotional experience is like because it was an emotional response in Andrew, right? And in many ways it was far more informative than any documentary I've ever seen or any movie which a- had a profound effect on me while I watched them but didn't change the way that I think about how I interact with others on a moment-to-moment basis 'cause I don't consider myself racist and I didn't then and you notice in this VR experience the way that the s- I, I have a friend who's a psychologist who says, you know, "The subtle informs the gross." The way these little, these little things change the way that you feel and then the, the way that you interact and then it starts to feed back on what the expectations of you are, whether or not you live into or combat those expectations. And what I realized is it's a hell of a lot of work. It's a l- there's like this, uh, there's like a, a burden of, of, of-

    18. CK

      (laughs)

    19. AH

      ... mental load that is, that was not familiar to me before. Uh, and the s-

    20. CK

      Implicit and explicit, yeah.

    21. AH

      Yeah, yeah.

    22. CK

      So you have to think about it. What does it mean? What does it mean for my behavior? What does it mean for other peoples' behavior? Yeah. So-

    23. AH

      Yeah.

    24. CK

      You can call it, in psychedelics this is called the integration period. So I would say, uh, submit you had a transformative experience.

    25. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CK

      You had what philosophers call direct acquaintance now-

    27. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    28. CK

      ... with some form of racism, right? Subtle racism-

    29. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    30. CK

      ... right, in this, in this VR. And now you're doing the explicit work of, of reformulating everything. You're changing, literally, your Bayesian priors.

  7. 28:29 – 34:01

    Oliver Sacks, Empathy & Animals

    1. CK

    2. AH

      Recently, I was, uh, at Esalen, this beautiful-

    3. CK

      Yeah.

    4. AH

      ... place on the Big Sur Coast that-

    5. CK

      And it's just up here, right? Uh, 200 miles or 300 miles-

    6. AH

      Yeah.

    7. CK

      ... up the coast.

    8. AH

      Although they shut it down. The freeway fell out some years ago south of Esalen so you have to go up and around now from Southern-

    9. CK

      Oh.

    10. AH

      ... California where we are now. Still an incredible place, um, that's been very, uh, seminal in the mindfulness movement and the, uh, and just a gorgeous place to visit for many reasons. But while I was there, I, uh, I had an incredible experience that involved you, although you didn't realize it and it wasn't a psychedelic experience nor was it a dream. I went into the bookstore and I found a book of m- one of my favorite humans that I unfortunately never met which is Dr. Oliver Sacks who's now deceased, right? Great neurologist, writer. And it's a book of all his letters and there are a couple letters in there to you.

    11. CK

      Oh, that's fantastic.

    12. AH

      Um, and I, I have a, a very close relationship with all things Oliver Sacks. I'm a collector of many of his things. So one of the most interesting things about him and one of the things that he wrote to you about in this book, I don't know if you've seen this book-

    13. CK

      No.

    14. AH

      ... um, is he describes his efforts to understand consciousness and the human brain better by literally taking some time, presumably without psychedelics, and imagine what it is to be a bat, to be... We know bats aren't completely blind but to essentially navigate and sense the world without vision as the dominant sense, to experience through sonar, and he would spend time thinking about being a bat up in the corner of the room or a cephalopod like an octopus or a cat. And, you know, you read this and you go, "Okay, this guy's crazy," right? "This guys must be crazy." But I realize now based on everything you've said so far that he was, um, very far from crazy. He was hyper sane in this regard because as difficult as it is to lose oneself and to go into the mind of another human, the VR experience that I had clearly demonstrates to me that it's possible and-... and yet we have a very hard time imagining what it is like to be non-human. And nowadays with the emergence of AI and fear about, you know, merging of en- of humans and machines, I think it's going to be ever more important that we understand what kind of flexibility we have in moving from human consciousness to non-human consciousness. So, I would love your thoughts or any stories you have about Oliver. Uh, I simply adore him through the writings I've, I've consumed, but I think this practice of pretending or trying to shift one's consciousness to that of another animal is just profound, and I like to think it also can bring us closer to the animals that we, uh, curate as pets, dogs in particular. So I'd love your thoughts about this or Oliver or all of the above.

    15. CK

      Yeah, he was a great friend. I visited him many times. I, I met him through Francis Crick and we had this shared interest in the brain and in consciousness, and he wa- he was incredible. I mean, what made him so singular also in his interaction with patient was his empathy. So he could have deep empathy with patient and try to imagine himself, uh, uh, you know, these, these strange otherworldly condition, right? Like the, um, the, The Patient From Mars or the, uh, these other patient that he described that had very specific, uh, pathologies that were totally explainable as a rising out of brain lesions. Um, yeah, he was better at that than, and than most other people, trying to imagine what is it for example, to li- uh, to live in the eternal present, right? He had one patient that had this profound amnesia, um, and, uh, but he could still... he, uh, uh, always lived back in the... I can't remember now, 20 years earlier, and the... in his entire world, his entire memory stopped 20 years earlier and, uh, that's how he lived. And it looks crazy, but once you understand that, it makes perfect sense how, um, how he responded. So we each have a bespoke reality, right? So you have slightly different receptors, you may have different color receptors, you may have different taste receptors, you have a certainly different experience from me, right? You grew up in a, in a, in a different environment, so it's not easy to get into someone's else's head, although some people can do it. Actors, for example, can try to do it, right?

    16. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CK

      The, the method acting, right? Where you to- tot- totally try to adopt the point of view of the, of the character you're trying to play. But of course, that's much more difficult for other animals that ha- that share or we may share a close evolutionary history like with all mammals, but that have very different, you know... that may have infrared sensors or they have a much, um, much more potent sense of smell and how do we... that have a different motor system, that hang from the ceiling, right? So how do we imagine doing that? But I think it is possible. It's challenging of... and of course, it's this classical essay by Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat, right? And, uh, he, uh, his position, this American philosopher says, "Well, we can never truly know what it is like to be a bat, but I think we can approximate it." I can't really ever know what is it like to be Andrew Huberman, right? But I can apro- I can try to imagine it and, you know, this is what empathy is, right?

    18. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    19. CK

      Trying to feel like you and trying to realize that we are all conscious being, we all are book-ended between two eternities, and so in some sense we're very, very similar and the, the thing that makes us... uh, uh, th- uh, that divide us are really tiny subsets of all the things that we share, including with cats and dogs and elephants and, and squids and everything else on the tree

  8. 34:01 – 37:48

    Changing Outlook on Life, Tool: Belief & Agency

    1. CK

      of life.

    2. AH

      Before we talk about your experience with DMT and, and, uh, psychedelics more generally, I wonder, uh, to what extent, you know, changing our consciousness is possible, uh, in a very directed way. So what I'm referring to here is, uh, you know, for instance, a lot of therapies, whether or not it's a cognitive behavioral therapy or it's, uh, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for, for PTSD or whether or not it's just really trying to get more REM sleep each night so that you can unload the emotional weight of previous day experiences, which seems to be a hallmark of REM sleep. Um, you know, many people accumulate experiences that they feel either define them or burden them, this is very common in fact, and they would like to live the remaining portion of their life, however long, with, uh, without the emotional load. They, they don't necessarily want to forget the experience, but they wanna remove the emotional load. And it seems like in pathogens like MDMA, in proper clinical settings can help do that. That, um, proper cognitive behavioral therapy can help people really talk through and work through, maybe have a cathartic experience, but w- but unload the emotional experience, uh, the emotional component of the experience. So what I'm referring to here are things bad, um, but it could be positive things like the day that your child was born or something where you're trying to update your conscious experience of life going forward and in the present by way of very deliberate tailoring of, of your memories. Do you think this is possible?

    3. CK

      Of course, yeah.

    4. AH

      Yeah.

    5. CK

      You just gave me an example. (laughs)

    6. AH

      (laughs)

    7. CK

      Your, your experience of VR and realizing what it is to have a Black skin compared to a white skin, right? This was a clearly beneficial experience that enables you to be more emphatic with, with, with, with other people, right? And try to better understand what they mean when they call... when they talk about explicit or implicit racism, right? And it changed you profoundly. And you're telling me this happened when? 2000 and...

    8. AH

      Uh, this was probably 2017.

    9. CK

      All right. So, you know-

    10. AH

      Yeah.

    11. CK

      So that's, um, eight years ago, right?

    12. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    13. CK

      So clearly it lasted. So I think for most conditions we can certainly improve them. You have to believe that you can change, right?

    14. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    15. CK

      So if you are being told, "Oh, the story is it's all the system, there's nothing you can do, it's just hopeless. You can just, you know, take this pill and suffer through to the end of your days." Th- that I think highly counterproductive. No, you have to believe, "I'm an active agent of my own mind. I can shape my reality..."

    16. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CK

      I would call it my perception box, with various, you know, ways. Uh, either talk therapy or psychedelic therapy or some other therapy. It requires a lot of work. It doesn't come sort of for free, right?

    18. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    19. CK

      ... I'm, at the end of the day, I'm still l- uh, left, let's say, with my traumatic memory, but now I can realize, "Okay, I had this bad experience, but it doesn't have to define me. I can go on past it." And there are various ways we can talk about that this can be achieved. Absolutely. I do believe in the malleability of the human mind, even in older people. In almost every condition, you can, but maybe the- except for the most extreme, you can change your outlook on life if you really want to. That's one issue, right? It's a little bit of time to, to convince somebody who's an alcoholic that they should stop drinking until they have the realization, "Okay, I don't want to land in the gutter anymore. I don't want to wake up at f- uh, you know, 8:00 AM in the morning drunk outside my- my house. I want to change." Then you can change. And, you know, 2,000 years of, of, uh, uh, of therapies, of all sorts of things, you know, take Alcoholics Anonymous, right?

    20. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    21. CK

      The first thing you do, you have to recognize that I am an alcoholic-

    22. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    23. CK

      ... and then I can begin, if I- uh, before I do that, there isn't really a hope, but once I do that, I can change. It may be difficult, it may be arduous, but you can change.

  9. 37:48 – 40:23

    Sponsors: AGZ by AG1 & Helix Sleep

    1. CK

    2. AH

      We've known for a long time that there are things we can do to improve our sleep, and that includes things that we can take, things like magnesium threonate, theanine, chamomile extract, and glycine, along with lesser-known things like saffron and valerian root. These are all clinically supported ingredients that can help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling more refreshed. I'm excited to share that our longtime sponsor, AG1, just created a new product called AGZ, a nightly drink designed to help you get better sleep and have you wake up feeling super refreshed. Over the past few years, I've worked with the team at AG1 to help create this new AGZ formula. It has the best sleep-supporting compounds in exactly the right ratios in one easy-to-drink mix. This removes all the complexity of trying to forage the vast landscape of supplements focused on sleep and figuring out the right dosages and which ones to take for you. AGZ is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive sleep supplement on the market. I take it 30 to 60 minutes before sleep, it's delicious by the way, and it dramatically increases both the quality and the depth of my sleep. I know that both from my subjective experience of my sleep and because I track my sleep. I'm excited for everyone to try this new AGZ formulation and to enjoy the benefits of better sleep. AGZ is available in chocolate, chocolate mint, and mixed berry flavors, and as I mentioned before, they're all extremely delicious. My favorite of the three has to be, I think, chocolate mint, but I really like them all. If you would like to try AGZ, go to drinkagz.com/huberman to get a special offer. Again, that's drinkagz.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it will ask you questions such as, "Do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night?" Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress. I started sleeping on a Dusk mattress about three and a half years ago, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix Sleep, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized to you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 27% off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman

  10. 40:23 – 42:09

    Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) & Higher Power

    1. AH

      to get up to 27% off. It's interesting that you bring up 12 Step and, and AA, um, in particular, because the, the next step besides acknowledging, uh, the problem is, uh, at least in AA, is to acknowledge a- an inability to solve it oneself and a giving over of some of the process of, um, eliminating alcohol to another what they refer to as higher power. Uh, some people call this God, some people call it Jesus, some people, uh, you know, but it's a, it a- it's more or less a requirement of AA that you agree that you are- can't do it alone. And you can't do it just with other humans, but you need other humans. They're necessary, but not sufficient. The recognition of the problem, other humans in community are necessary but not sufficient, but this, uh, um, this kind of externalization, like you need help from outside the self that's not from humans, very interesting. They don't say, "You need to go get a dog." They don't say, "You need to commune with nature." They say, "You need to embrace a higher power." It's very interesting given the effectiveness of AA. It's one of the most successful, um, ways for people to, um, continually, uh, av- avoid alcohol.

    2. CK

      It's true. I, I acknowledge that. I, I personally wouldn't say it requires (laughs) divine intervention 'cause I'm not sure there is such a divine, uh, entity that could intervene in this, but, um, but acknowledging and also acknowledging that it's- I can't do it by myself. I need, I would say, at least I would need community. I would need help from others. Again, you have to acknowledge that.

    3. AH

      Mm-hmm. Well, maybe it's the opening up of space that, um-

    4. CK

      The willingness. The willingness.

    5. AH

      Yeah. And maybe it's, "I couldn't do it by myself until now," and in order for there to be a different future in- uh, visualized, maybe

  11. 42:09 – 51:09

    Neurobiology of Consciousness; Accidents, Covert Consciousness

    1. AH

      there is a sort of creating of space. I mean, uh, this is actually probably a good opportunity for us to talk a little bit about the neurobiology underlying consciousness, and then we'll get back to plasticity. You know, we're both neuroscientists, um, and for many years, '80s and '90s and even prior, the emphasis was on brain areas, amygdala, fear, uh, hippocampus, memory, prefrontal cortex, decision-making, this kind of thing. And of course, there's been this beautiful, uh, transition to a, a focus more on circuitry, areas and networks activated more or less o- over time. Can we look to particular networks or network phenomena, circuit activation patterns, and say-... that's the origin of consciousness, or is that, um, no longer a, a meaningful pursuit?

    2. CK

      Yes.

    3. AH

      (laughs) Why'd I have a feeling you were gonna answer that way? Um-

    4. CK

      So, A, uh, A, there are certain enabling conditions, okay? One enabling condition, your heart has to beat because if your heart doesn't beat, it doesn't supply oxygen to your brain and you will lose consciousness within 8 to 10 seconds, okay? Same thing in the brain stem. Your brain stem has to be active to per- to perfuse the rest of the, the forebrain with noradrenaline and dopamine, all of that. But those don't provide the content. You don't love or you hate or see with your hi- with your, with your brain stem, with your locus coeruleus, for instance, okay? So the circ- the circuits that, that convey experience in us, I'm not saying it's the same in other species, particular, you know, non-mammals, but in us that grew up with a normal brain, again, I'm not talking about people who never h- you know, anencephalic individuals. That's very different. So grow, uh, for most of us, we grow up with a normal brain and I think there, the, the relevant circuits are the corticothalamic circuits. And we, we, we can, in fact, we can exploit this knowledge now to test whether someone is conscious 'cause in principle, so it's, uh, uh, so what you can do, you can knock the brain using a technique, uh, called transcranial magnetic stimulation, right? And then you li- you listen to its echo using a high density EG, uh, net, okay? And you can see if you knock here or here, depending where exactly you knock, you get these, uh, up and down states. And if they last for, let's say, 2, 3, 400, uh, milliseconds, um, and they occur different places, you, you can formally compute what's called brain complexity using Lempel-Ziv complexity. And you can show when everyone who's either awake like us or we're asleep in a dream state or we're on ketamine where we're dissociated, in all those cases, the brain complexity size above a threshold. In, however, when you are in a non, uh, REM sleep, when you're in a state of deep sleep or you're anesthetized or you're t- uh, or you are, of course, in the most extreme case, you're brain dead, then the brain complexity is very low. And in animals, we've even done at the Allen Institute, we've done this experiment where we can systematically manipulate the corticothalamic cortical circuits to really show it is this circuit that is really, that is the one that's critically involved, um, in consciousness. In fact, so what, what we discovered over the last 10 years, there's this very abrupt threshold in brain complexity defined using, using this technique where, so it's a d- there's a thing called perturbation complex index. It's a single number, PCI between zero and one. Zero means it's, there's no complexity. It's flat like in a dead brain, flat line. One is means every EG is totally, uh, electrode is totally independent from anyone else. Never happens in, in a real brain. In real brain, typically wake brain, you get things between 0.65 and 0.8, let's say. There's a sharp threshold at 0.31. Anyone that we've had... no, no, there are 300 people that have, uh, both patient and normal people that have been measured. If you're above this threshold of 0.31, you're conscious. If you're below this threshold, you're unconscious.

    5. AH

      Hmm.

    6. CK

      That probably means there's this non-linear, just like Hodges and Huxley, there's probably non-linear circuit mechanism that once the circuit is intact, it's, it's sufficient to suppo- uh, to support consciousness. Now you can ask, "While this is all very nice, why is this relevant?" Well, it is relevant in the following case, something that could happen to any of us. I step out here o- onto the Pacific, um, coastal highway. I get hit, hit by a car, okay? I'm now unconscious. I get to the ICU, whether that's a traumatic brain injury or cardiac arrest or hemorrhage, I'm unconscious. I'm like this. I might be aroused. So, you know, my eyes are open. I'm now what's called, what used to be called vegetative state, what's now more often called behavioral unresponsive state, okay? And there are thousands of these people worldwide because with proper care, with proper nursing care, you can stay in this state for weeks or months, or in the case of Terri Schiavo, 14 years, okay? Furthermore, what happens after, typically, in most cases, after four to five days, the doctors will talk with the, with their loved ones. Is this what he would've wanted?

    7. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CK

      And 70 to 90% of the time they decide, no, this is not what you wanted and you withdraw life-sustaining therapy. But we now know that 25% of these, of these patients have what's called covert consciousness. They're there. We know this because, for example, some of these patients, you can r- there was a big study last year in, um, New England Journal of Medicine, made a front page of New York Times where it can show 25% of these patients can still voluntarily up and down regulate their motor cortex in response to a command, "Clench your fist for 30 seconds, relax it. Clench your fist for 30 seconds, relax it." So these people that otherwise, when you ask them, "Sir, can you hear me? Can you track the, my finger?" Can you, you pinch 'em very hard to see do they do a withdraw of limb reflex. Don't, they don't do any of that. So they have what's called a, a Glasgow Coma Scale, a very low Glasgow Coma Scale, or coma, um, um, and recovery, um, um, um, GSCR Scale, very low, but they still seem to be conscious. They either have high brain complexity or they can modulate their brain. So, so this is now, uh, the first time ever that we have a w- a practical way in people that cannot respond, that, that clinically, behaviorally are considered unresponsive, first convince the family that although their loved one is un- doesn't respond, doesn't mean that they're unconscious. And then try to see, well, okay, so this person is conscious, can we now give particular treatments to enable them to recover? We also have some pilot data to show that those patients that are conscious compared to the patient that are truly unconscious in this behavioral wakefulness, um, uh, state that they have a better chance to recovery.

    9. AH

      Incredible. Uh, this .31 you said is the, the threshold? It- it, um- on the one hand, it seems so reductionist. On the other hand, it- it makes total sense, right? I mean, you need enough coherent brain activity to be aware of self, be aware of what's going on around you, and respond to it. Below that, like in falling asleep or being asleep, you don't have that, um, except in dreams, of course. Um, and it sounds like a wonderful clinical tool, um, because this is obviously many people's worst fear, that somebody's in there, you take them off life support, and they would have emerged. Uh, you- you mentioned, um, uh, Terri Shr- Shribeau was the last-

    10. CK

      Schriebe.

    11. AH

      ... Schriebe.

    12. CK

      Terri Schriebe.

    13. AH

      Wha- wha- um, can you just remind people what- what the outcome of that situation was?

    14. CK

      Yeah, so this was a case back, uh, in the 1998 or 2000 under President Bush. She, um, she w- uh, had a cardiac arrest what- was, um, um, the heart was started up again. She was in this state for 14 years and then there- there was this fight between her husband, who said that she didn't want to be in this state, and her parents that were profoundly devout that said, "No. We want to keep her alive."

    15. AH

      I see.

    16. CK

      And went back and forth, and finally the court allowed her, uh, withdraw of life support, so she died-

    17. AH

      I see.

    18. CK

      ... after 14 years. And the- the, uh, the analysis, the postmortem showed in her case the pa- the ca- her brain was totally shrunk in her case. You know, we didn't do this procedure then. We didn't have it. But clearly, it, uh, it's- she was probably one of the 75% patient that are truly unconscious.

    19. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    20. CK

      Yeah, so it's important to get this into the ICU. So in fact, I started a company called Intrinsic Powers because it's-

    21. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CK

      ... the intrinsic powers of the brain that-

    23. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CK

      ... mediate consciousness and we're now trying... We met with the FDA and they said, "Well, you- this is all cool, but you need, really need to do a clinical trial." So we're trying to- to fundraise now, so if anyone in your au- in the audience here is willing to in- invest in this, to get this procedure into the ICU so we can tell for s- sure is this patient conscious or they just non-responsive, because those... So it pertains to what we said early on. The fact that you don't behave is not the same as the fact that you're unconscious.

  12. 51:09 – 55:34

    Non-Responsive State; Disability Bias, Will to Live, Resilience

    1. CK

      Those are two different things.

    2. AH

      Very, very interesting and- and very important work. Uh, has there ever been an example in the reverse direction where somebody was in one of these what used to be called vegetative states, right, and then emerged after, say, a period of six months or a year and is living perfectly normally in the world saying, "Thank you so much for not taking me off life support"?

    3. CK

      Yes, so they are t- so t- so, A, typically people don't... When they do recover, they typically don't have explicit memory, 'cause again memory is something different than- than actually being, you know, conscious experience, just like most of us don't remember our dreams. We're clearly conscious-

    4. AH

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    5. CK

      ... but, you know, we don't remember them. But there are... There's a study now systematically at Harvard that tries to explore that and some people explicitly say that. In fact, there's one really interesting case where the person, uh, who then recovered, a young guy who first said first he was upset that they didn't follow his co- uh, his, um, explicit instruction to terminate life, but then, of course, later on now he's relatively normal, he was very happy that they saved him. Yeah, so- so we can pull back, you know, particularly with modern technology, 9/11, et cetera, rescue helicopters, we can pull back people from the brink of death, but that may not be the same as- as, you know, having them actually conscious. So- so- so people are now... The- the medical community is now, uh, beginning to recognize this idea of covert consciousness, which is something that was only really realized over the last 10 years.

    6. AH

      Amazing. Well, I turn 50 in two weeks and I'm working on my will, something I never thought I would do, but, uh-

    7. CK

      (laughs)

    8. AH

      ... here I am doing it, so I'm gonna include a section on, uh, this .3-

    9. CK

      Medical directive.

    10. AH

      ... this .31, uh, threshold, but o- also maybe perhaps pending new technologies.

    11. CK

      Yes. That's a trouble because-

    12. AH

      Uh, yeah. Right, you don't know what'll be available if you

    13. NA

      (laughs) .

    14. CK

      You don't know... Yes.

    15. AH

      Right.

    16. CK

      And the other thing is called this, um, uh, this bias, this disability b- bias. So let's say you are... You- you look like a person who's highly active, right?

    17. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    18. CK

      So you probably cannot imagine being in a state where you can't move anymore.

    19. AH

      I mean, I've thought about it, but not in a real way. I mean, I- I fear it. I wouldn't want that. I love being able to move and see and, um, among other things, those are- those are probably two of the most important things, movement and vision, right?

    20. CK

      O- okay, but now you have to change your prior. You've had this accident or whatever. Now you are in this state. This is a given. You're now in this state where you had a bad, whatever, car accident and you can't move anymore or you may not be able to see. Now what- what is it you want? And most people... To those people that you can communicate... Like they did a study in Israel with, um, locked-in p- uh, patient, right? So these are patients that have a- a stroke at the level of the PONS where they're typically... Most of their motor, uh, commands they can't execute anymore except, you know, s- some- some neck and some vertical eye movements, and they ask 'em so- because they can communicate and most of them, except the ones that have chronic pain, most of them want to continue to live. Although before when you would have asked 'em, you would have said, "No. No way." And so it- it's- it's difficult with this medical directive because you don't know until you get there.

    21. AH

      Well, I like the answer you just gave because it speaks to the, uh, the durability of the human spirit.

    22. CK

      Yes, the resilience.

    23. AH

      Yeah, the desire to keep going-

    24. CK

      Yes.

    25. AH

      ... is- is pretty spectacular.

    26. CK

      Yes.

    27. AH

      And there are amazing examples. Like I was introduced some years ago to somebody from the special operations community who, um, unfortunately stepped on an IED and, um, uh, lost use of- of his legs and, uh, but he's a phenomenal surfer. Like he- he literally drags him-

    28. CK

      Wow.

    29. AH

      ... and he won't let people carry his stuff down the... So it's like he drags himself down to the waves and he gets down there and he can get up on... Uh, he has prosthetics that he can use but for partial movement on land, but he basically is on his torso and- and, uh, he's an athlete.

    30. CK

      Wow.

  13. 55:34 – 57:43

    Will to Live, Akinetic Mutism, Neural Correlates of Consciousness

    1. CK

      Resilience.

    2. AH

      I'm very struck by this brain area, um, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, I don't know if you're familiar with it but-

    3. CK

      Yes, I am.

    4. AH

      ... right? Joe Parvizi's, uh, laboratory. Stimulating and people feel as if there's a challenge confronting them and they're gonna lean into it. And we've talked a lot about this on this podcast as a, as a key site for plasticity of, uh, all things but, um, and the friction that's required. But also, i- it's an element of the will to live because it turns out anterior mid-cingulate cortex is larger or more active in people that are these so-called super agers that maintain cognition, so...

    5. CK

      Well, there's also this phenomenon of akinetic muti- uh, uh, mutism that's also all, found in lesion that area where people seem to have completely lost their will to do anything at all. They just sit there all day and they don't say anything. They've lost ebullio- they've lost essentially their will to do or say anything. And if you inject them with dopamine or others, uh, then sometimes they, they retrieve and you ask them, "Why was it?" "I just had no desire."

    6. AH

      And do we know what brain area is involved in this case?

    7. CK

      Ye- uh, yeah, it's the, it's the cingulate.

    8. AH

      Uh-huh.

    9. CK

      It's the anterior s- it's part of the anterior cingulate.

    10. AH

      Okay, so maybe it's the same structure. I mean, I find, I mean, the human will to live and to continue to evolve oneself, I mean...

    11. CK

      May also have a physical substrate.

    12. AH

      Yeah. I, I believe it does. I mean, I think cingulate cortex seems to be a, a key hub.

    13. CK

      Well, and so, it's a, so, so based on the study of your colleague, Joseph Parvizi, right, at Stanford, so that we know if you go a little bit back into the posterior cingulate, that's where you have the sense of self, if you stimulate there or in these people who have epileptic seizures in there, right, they have these weird dissociative states or where they, where they feel themself floating or they can hear themself have a conversation, but observing themself having a conversation so we know some of the self, you know, the sense of self here. And we also know during meditation and doing psilocybin, those areas are reduced. So yeah, there is a, there is a footprint for everything we experience. There is a footprint in, in the brain. That doesn't mean we can reduce it to the brain, not at all, but there is a physical neuronal correlate of it, and F- Francis Crick and I, of course, used to call this neural correlates of consciousness and try to pursue it.

  14. 57:43 – 1:06:47

    Conflicting Perception Boxes, Meta Prior, Religion, AI

    1. AH

      I'd like to go back into the perception box because I'm really intrigued by this.

    2. CK

      Well, you never left the perception box-

    3. AH

      Oh, okay, well, I... (laughs)

    4. CK

      ... because it is your construction of reality.

    5. AH

      Right. (laughs) I, uh, people are getting a sense of how your brain works and I love it. Um, it's been a while since I've seen you as I forgot how much fun it was, uh, inside the context of the perception box, I'd like to explore something that's very relevant today. It's 9/11, yesterday Charlie Kirk was killed, um, assassinated at a, at a, a discussion on a campus, um, and there's a mix of responses to this out there. Um, some people are greatly saddened, others less so. There's a lot of discussion about morality, about words versus actions. Maybe we use this as a bit of a filter to understand something. Um, broadly speaking, I can imagine two somewhat extreme ways to go through life. One is with the philosophy, you know, live and let live. As long as somebody's not hurting somebody, let them do what they want. They wanna change genders, let them change genders. They wanna vote Republican, let them vote Republican. They wanna, you know, a- as long as they're not harming anybody, right? So we have laws to protect people's wellbeing. The other extreme would be one of, kind of moral judgment, like, you know, people offended by someone else's choices or even beliefs, um, and even if they can't point to, like, the exact harm that's being done, they feel as if it's grating on them, right? Um, and then, of course, we have a lot of questions about those two different, uh, people's histories, h- whether or not they see, you know, moral judgment in the context of who's getting more or less resources. There's a bunch of evolutionary stuff we could weave in there but let's just examine, like, two perception boxes, one of a live and let live type, and I'm not trying to politicize this at all, um, a l- it could be right wing, left wing, middle, whatever, it doesn't matter, uh, lets, uh, aliens in outer space, a live and let live dominated perception box versus a moral judgment perception box. H- how, given the reality of these perception boxes here on Earth now, how is it that one can possibly, uh, establish a, a species cohabitating Earth that's gonna go forward in any kind of different way without, um, something fundamentally changing about A, understanding that there are these perception boxes, B, how to change them, and then as you said before, there has to be a desire to change them? So, I mean, it feels a little bit like a stalemate, in fact. And I'm not trying to be pessimistic, I think I'm being realistic. As long as you have people who are live and let live and others who are in a state of moral judgment, I just don't know how 100 years from now things are gonna look that much different. There'll be different conflicts.

    6. CK

      Oh, they could be worse, of course.

    7. AH

      Could be worse, could be worse.

    8. CK

      Could be far worse.

    9. AH

      But I don't, I, I can't imagine, like, unless we let, like, dog consciousness, um, play a, a key role or something...

    10. CK

      Well, we could also have what, what some people in the Bayesian community calls a meta-prior. So you have your priors, right? So the priors are all the assumption that let you judge a fa- a fa- supposedly fact. So to stay with yesterday's examples, trying not to politicize it, but you may have read after the, the assassination was announced in the House of Representatives...... the speaker had, uh, called for 30 seconds of silence, which was fine, and then someone called, uh, for prayer, said out loud, and then all pandemonium broke out. Okay? So among the representatives, they, they, they screamed at each other. You know, all it took this one thing, and then suddenly, because they have radical different priors, they just have, they're partly, you know, you two, the, the ones that you described, but what they should do is sort of have a meta prior. "Okay, wait a minute. We're now sh- screaming at each other, but we all believe that shooting other people," that's what they all said, universal, "This is bad. This is not good. No matter who did it, for what reason, this is bad and evil. Maybe we should stop screaming at each other to change our higher order pr- uh, prior because this isn't gonna end well. It would, th- this just keeps on getting worse and, and where is it gonna end? How is it gonna end?" There has to be this, this insight. So it's a little bit when we talked before about a, you know, an, Alcohol Anonymous. There has to be this inside, "Wait, we can't do this." There has to be a realization that there is a problem and we've got to do things differently.

    11. AH

      Well, I think for many, many years, the meta prior was God and religion. People looked to texts that were, at least people agreed, uh, were scripted by non, uh, uh, uh-

    12. CK

      Human actors.

    13. AH

      ... non-human actors, so the meta priors. Maybe now people will look more to AI. I don't know. But-

    14. CK

      (laughs)

    15. AH

      ... I just feel like humans, um-

    16. CK

      Yeah. We have lost the common-

    17. AH

      ... are not well-positioned-

    18. CK

      No.

    19. AH

      ... are not well-positioned to resolve certain kinds of things for ourselves. And-

    20. CK

      If we lost this narrative, yeah.

    21. AH

      Yeah.

    22. CK

      So we had more or less, uh, I mean, in the '50s and '60, right, there were three TV channels, and we had a common narrative. I totally agree with you.

    23. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CK

      We lost that. And we're never gonna regain that, right?

    25. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CK

      Unless there's extreme political repression, you know, maybe in China, but not here. It's not gonna happen here, right? So what do we do? Th- is th- is this just getting worse every day with more and more violence and other things? Or is there gonna be some point an awakening, a meta, you know, a realization that we gotta change our priors here?

    27. AH

      What do you think, uh, is the potential role for AI? I mean, is AI... you said machines, you know, they don't do, right? They, um, or they only-

    28. CK

      No, they do.

    29. AH

      ... do. They only do, excuse me. They only do. Um, like with, uh, AA, first comes the acknowledgement that humans are not sufficient to resolve these issues on our own. I'm not saying where the answer should come from. I have my own ideas about that. But it seems like there needs to be the acknowledgement that we are, that we're, we're, l- we're limited in our ability to resolve this. Uh, history demonstrates that. Yesterday demonstrates that. Today demonstrates that. I mean, it's naive of anybody, uh, who's been alive for more than a few decades to think that in 30 years, suddenly everybody's gonna, you know, put down swords for plowshares, right?

    30. CK

      Okay, but humanity has bumbled through history for the last, you know, however long, you know, several million years, and-

  15. 1:06:47 – 1:12:19

    AI, Violence, Swapping Perception Boxes, Video

    1. AH

      these key topics. But I would like to th- to imagine that the possibility resides in human beings understanding enough about their consciousness-

    2. CK

      Yes.

    3. AH

      ... and their, and their perception boxes-

    4. CK

      To change.

    5. AH

      ... to understand that no one individual among us, or even small group of individuals among us, has all the knowledge that's necessary in order to get to this, you know, this meta understanding of what's best.

    6. CK

      Right.

    7. AH

      And-... I like to think that, uh, AI might play a positive role there, that-- but it would require an acknowledgement that, uh, we need to hand over some key decision-making to machines, which is very complicated for people.

    8. CK

      So which AI? The Chinese AI or-

    9. AH

      Right.

    10. CK

      ... the OpenAI or-

    11. AH

      Yeah, this is the problem.

    12. CK

      ... or, or, or Claude or Anthropic-

    13. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CK

      ... or Grok or any of the other ones being developed? Once we've agreed on which-- what is the-- what, what is the function we're trying to maximize? Do y- I mean, do you really believe that it's going to be b- b- because we haven't agreed, of course, on the optimal framework, right? Because there are Marxists, there are liberalists, there are market people oriented, right? They all believe we should maximize different things. So we're just going to give this to the AI and they're going to figure it out somehow? Or do you think when they'll be our overlords, then they'll figure out, "Well, for the peace of all humanity, this is what we have to impose."

    15. AH

      In the world that I grew up imagining and that I was told about and that I'd like to participate in creating, uh, humans treated each other with more compassion.

    16. CK

      Yeah, but look, I mean, uh, I'm more with, uh, with Steve Pinker here. Over the last several hundred years, the total amount of violence, I mean, so my forefathers, you know, being German here, initiated World War II, right, that led to killing in Europe probably, I mean, 20 million Russians alone, you know, six million, uh, Jews in the Holocaust, uh, many millions more throughout Germany. So, you know, that's... So I don't think in absolute terms, just in terms of number of people killed, uh, we-- it's nothing like World-- in World War I, every day 10,000 soldiers died, every day for four years of the different sides, for essentially having accomplished nothing whatsoever, right? For one mile going back and forth in the trench warfare in the, uh, on the Western Front. So in terms of absolute numbers, this is... It's not about absolute numbers. It's... Now, of course, we have nuclear weapons and, you know, we have other nasty things, but in terms of total people killed, it still have tiny fractions of what might happen and what has happened routinely over the last 100 years.

    17. AH

      Mm-hmm. Well then perhaps a more tractable, uh, way to approach this, um, in order to get improvement, despite the fact that, yes, there's, there are fewer, uh, mass casualties overall, um, is it possible to put two people with very different perception boxes into an experiment, not unlike the experiment that I described earlier, but let them swap perception boxes for a short while? And, you know, we're scientists-

    18. CK

      How do we do that?

    19. AH

      ... and just like see what, see what happens.

    20. CK

      Yeah, so if I, if I know where all your priors are in the brain, if I know the neural substrate of all your basic beliefs, this is what priors are, right? It's just a fancy word. All your b- beliefs of how you interpret p- humans' behavior in the light of culture and history and everything, if I knew them, yes, and maybe we could swap and suddenly we would understand each other's point of view much better. And maybe we are, you know, of the sort that you, that your experiment has, but that's always on, you know... Does that scale in modern Silicon Valley speak? Does that scale? Can we do this for eight billion of us?

    21. AH

      It's interesting. Um, no, it's, I don't think you can scale it very easily or at all. It's interesting that, um, you point out very correctly that far fewer mass casualties than in World War I, World War II, and violence in many places is going down, not up. That's not true all over the world, of course. But, you know, I have to, uh, kind of wonder if because of social media and the internet, what has profoundly changed now is that things are caught on video. Everything from a couple getting caught cheating at a Coldplay concert where you have all the elements of drama like the friend, the humiliation, the this, the that, you know, the shaming, the... Okay, you have all of that, uh, a woman being br- really brutally murdered on a subway, uh, you know, and the people getting up, not even really realizing or perhaps realizing and just, you know, getting off the s- uh, the, the light rail anyway. Or Charlie Kirk getting shot and seeing it in real time. I mean, the JFK vi- uh, getting shot video was kind of grainy, there's some elements, they're still analyzing that one. I mean, you have thousands of cameras on, the, the Kirk thing. So-

    22. CK

      Yeah, so the emotional impact is much, much bigger.

    23. AH

      Yeah, and I wonder where that will lead, if that will lead to more divergence of perception boxes or more convergence of perception boxes. I don't know. I don't know. Obviously this just happened as well. But this is an ongoing real life experiment-

    24. CK

      It is.

    25. AH

      ... of so much being visible in real time. It's not a story about... It's a... You're, you're actually in the story even if you weren't there.

    26. CK

      And this is totally new in human history. So we're going through this rapid period. Yeah, some people call it the ali- uh, uh, uh, acceleranda, right? This rapid acceleration towards some distant point that we don't... that may not be that far away that we don't yet realize. I doubt it's a singularity (laughs) of Kurzweil, but... Uh.

  16. 1:12:19 – 1:20:54

    5-MeO-DMT, Psychedelics, Light, Consciousness & Awe; Loss of Self

    1. AH

      Let's talk about the perception box elements that one is certain, uh, one can change and, uh, the potential role of psychedelics in this. Um, I was made aware recently that you took 5-MeO-DMT. Um, I've never taken 5-MeO-DMT. I know some people that have, but, um, could you or would you describe that experience and what it revealed to you about the way that your brain and brains work generally with respect to consciousness?

    2. CK

      Yeah, so it's a serotonergic, uh, tryptamine, very similar to, uh, psilocybin or, uh, uh, quite similar to DMT. So chemically they're all very similar, but each one of course binds to slightly different... You know, there are 14 different serotonin receptors, binds to different cells in different proportions. So 5-MeO, what's so unique about that, you inhale it, um, although they're now trying to deliver, um, uh, something that you can inject into your nose, but traditionally you, you inhale it and literally within three breaths-... you do, (breathes deeply) and the third one, the visual field starts fracturing into a hexagonal. And I thought to myself, "Holy shit, what have I got myself into?"

    3. AH

      Layer five of visual cortex. (laughs) That's a neuroscience joke, folks. Sorry.

    4. CK

      (laughs) At that point, you didn't... I wasn't... And you- you think you're gonna die. You said, "Shit, this was a mistake, I'm gonna die," and you die. I died. And, uh, in a sense that my self was gone, Christof was gone. There was no voice, there was no body. People who looked at me... So this was all done in fairly controlled circumstance. People who looked at me all just saw me sort of, "Ah, ah, ah," whining a little bit and with eyes wide open. Huge p- expanded pupils, but you don't see. You don't see, you don't hear. You get totally cut off from the world. When I say "I," it wasn't Christof. It was, um, uh, conscious. There's no question. Did it ever... I mean, whatever remained was man, woman, child, God, angel, demon. But it- it didn't experience anything except a point of overwhelming brightness. So there wasn't color, there wasn't left or right, because there was no space. Space had collapsed into this point. There was no s- stereo or texture, there was no pain, there was no pleasure. There was no sound, no smell, nothing. There was just this point of icy bright, uh, um, light and terror and ecstasy. That's it. Three things. Bright light, terror, and ecstasy. For times, there was no time. There was no perception of time. All right? All right? And so it wasn't too long or too short. It simply was. There was no space, as I said. There was no self. So all of that was, um, was gone, except terror, ecstasy, and light. And then after this timeless moment, they'd asked me to put on a piece- a piece of mu- I- I asked them to put on a piece of music, Arvo Pärt's Minimalist, and so that last nine minutes, I just heard... The first thing that became apparent was the, the ending, uh, uh, of that, um, uh, two-piece, uh, two-instrument piece. And then, you know, it's almost, uh, uh, 10 minutes, and then you rapidly come to. Then I stripped, I went into fetus, I cried. I had all these other, you know, uh, autonomic reaction. But within an h- what's remarkable, you go into the void and you come back, w- you can speak within an hour. You can speak about it if you wanted to. Right? And, and there's no long-lasting physiol- I had my, my watch on, hardly registered a difference.

    5. AH

      (laughs)

    6. CK

      No, no big increase in blood pressure or, you know, heart rate. So there's still not a single da- this was in the first week of the pandemic. I think about it every day. I had two such experiences. One was... The other one s- was very different. Every day, I think about it, and what it taught me was two things. So A, a student of consciousness. It taught me that mind doesn't depend on space, on time, and on self. And this is really something that, you know, the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant taught us, transcendental idealism, that they're all categories. They're all categories that we need to perceive. We cannot but put an object in a place. We cannot but assign a time to an event. And we cannot but have a sense of self. But they're all optional. They're there most of the time, but not, not always. Not in this case. And then the other gift I, I discovered, uh, four or six weeks later, that I never thought about death again. You know, as you get older, this may happen with you, maybe in a, in a slow way, that you lie awake at night and you think about beyond death. You know, death, being, being dead for a long time, for a very long time, for a very, very, very long time.

    7. AH

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CK

      And it's a little bit like getting to this, uh, stepping to the, an abyss and looking down into this abyss that's bottomless. You get this existential vertigo. Never had that again since then. So I... So I don't wanna die, but I, but I've lost the, um, I've lost the... and the fear of that. So both things are reported. I mean, everyone has a slightly different experience. In fact, there were two papers recently published o- about this, about what happens to the brain of these people. But very often, it's sort of going to the void, uh, having the- these feelings of terror and, and, and ecstasy or awe. And if you think about the etymology of the word "aweful," full of awe. When you... For example, theologians talk about the, the, the mysterium tremendum, for example, this author, the theologian. When you're in, in the presence of God, you have this... This is awful. The, the, the terror and the ecstasy. That's what you... This is what you can experience. So it's, it's... I'm never gonna (laughs) do it again. Never, ever.

    9. AH

      Now you're done?

Episode duration: 2:11:42

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