Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

(music plays) 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. Today my guest is Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris did his undergraduate training in philosophy at Stanford University and then went on to do his doctorate in neuroscience at the University of California Los Angeles. He is well-known as an author who has written about everything from meditation to consciousness, free will, and he holds many strong political views that he's voiced on social media and in the content of various books as they relate to philosophy and neuroscience. During today's episode, I mainly talk to Dr. Harris about his views and practices related to meditation, consciousness, and free will. In fact, he made several important points about what a proper meditation practice can accomplish. Prior to this episode, I thought that meditation was about deliberately changing one's conscious experience in order to achieve things such as deeper relaxation, a heightened sense of focus or ability to focus generally, elevated memory, and so on. What Sam taught me, and what you'll soon learn as well, is that while meditation does indeed hold all of those valuable benefits, the main value of a meditation practice, or perhaps the greater value of a meditation practice, is that it doesn't just allow one to change their conscious experience, but it actually can allow a human being to view consciousness itself, that is, to understand what the process of consciousness is, and in doing so, to profoundly shift the way that one engages with the world and with oneself in all practices, all environments, and at all times, both in sleep and in waking states, and in that way making meditation perhaps the most potent and important portal by which one can access novel ways of thinking and being and viewing one's life experience. We also discussed the so-called mind-body problem and issues of duality and free will, concepts from philosophy and neuroscience that fortunately, thanks to valuable experiments and deep thinking on the part of people like Dr. Sam Harris and others, is now leading people to understand really what free will is and isn't, where the locus of free will likely sits in the brain, if it indeed resides in the brain at all, and what it means to be a conscious being, and how we can modify our conscious states in ways that allow us to be more functional. We also discussed perception, both visual perception, auditory perception, and especially interesting to me and I think as well hopefully to you, time perception, which we know is very elastic in the brain. The literal frame rate by which we process our conscious experience can expand and contract dramatically depending on our state of mind and how conscious we are about our state of mind. So we went deep into that topic as well. Today's discussion was indeed an intellectual deep dive into all the topics that I mentioned a few moments ago, but it also included many practical tools. In fact, I pushed Sam to share with us what his specific practices are and how we can all arrive at a clearer and better understanding of a meditation practice that we can each and all apply so that we can derive these incredible benefits, not just the ones related to stress and focus and enhanced memory, but the ones that relate to our consciousness, that is, to our deeper sense of self and to others. Several times during today's episode, I mentioned the Waking Up app. The Waking Up app was developed by Sam Harris, but I want to emphasize that my mention of the app is in no way a paid promotional. Rather, the Waking Up app is one that I've used for some period of time now and find very, very useful. I have family members that also use it. Other staff members here at the Huberman Lab Podcast use it because we find it to be such a powerful tool. Sam has generously offered Huberman Lab Podcast listeners a 30-day completely free trial of the Waking Up app. If any of you want to try it, you can simply go to wakingup.com/huberman to get that 30-day free trial. During today's discussion, we didn't just talk about meditation, consciousness, and free will. We also talked about psychedelics, both their therapeutic applications for the treatment of things like depression and PTSD, but also the use of psychedelics, and we discussed Sam's experiences with psychedelics as they relate to expanding one's consciousness. I also asked Sam about his views and practices related to social media, prompted in no small part by his recent voluntary decision to close down his Twitter account, so we talked about his rationale for doing that, how he feels about doing that, and I think you'll find that to be very interesting as well. 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, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and behaviors affect your health by giving you real-time feedback using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in your immediate and long-term health are your blood sugar levels, and not just your overall blood sugar levels, but your blood sugar levels throughout the day in response to different foods you eat, to fasting if you're into fasting, to exercise, and so forth. I started using Levels some time ago in order to figure out how different foods impact my blood sugar levels, and indeed it does that very well. It allowed me to see how certain foods really spike my blood sugar and others keep it more level.... and in particular, how foods that I eat after exercise can help raise my blood glucose just enough, but not so much that then I get a crash two or three hours later, which was what was happening before I started using Levels. I've made certain adjustments to my diet. I can now eat post-exercise and still have plenty of energy throughout the day without any issues. It also has helped me understand how different behaviors impact my blood glucose levels. If you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself, go to levels.link/huberman. Again, that's levels.link spelled L-I-N-K /huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Whoop. Whoop is a fitness wearable device that tracks your daily activity and sleep, but goes beyond activity and sleep tracking to provide real-time feedback on how to adjust your training and sleep schedules in order to feel and perform better. Six months ago, I started working with Whoop as a member of their scientific advisory council as a way to help Whoop advance their mission of unlocking human performance. And as a Whoop user, I've experienced firsthand the health benefits of their technology. It's clear based on quality of research that Whoop can inform you how well you're sleeping, how to change your sleep habits, how to change your activity habits, even how to modify different aspects of your nutrition, exercise, sleep, and lifestyle in order to maximize your mental health, physical health, and performance. So whether or not you're an athlete or you're exercising simply for health, Whoop can really help you understand how your body functions under different conditions and how to really program your schedule, nutrition, and exercise and many other factors of your life in order to really optimize your health and performance, including your cognition. If you're interested in trying Whoop, you can go to join Whoop, spelled W-H-O-O-P, .com/huberman. That's joinwhoop.com/huberman today and get your first month free. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the fundamental layer of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, one of the key things for getting a great night's sleep every single night is to optimize the temperature of your sleeping environment. Put simply, in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature needs to drop by about one to three degrees. And waking up, on the other hand, involves a heating of your body by about one to three degrees. With Eight Sleep, you can tune the temperature of your mattress cover or mattress to be cooler or hotter, depending on whether or not you tend to run too hot or too cold, and you can even vary it across the night so that you can access the best deep sleep early in the night, the so-called REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, that's more pronounced in the later half of the night, and in doing so, really get your sleep optimized, not just in terms of duration, but in terms of quality and the overall architecture of your sleep. This has a profound influence on your alertness, focus, mood, and many other important factors throughout the day. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $150 off their Pod 3 cover. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. The Huberman Lab Podcast is proud to announce that we are now partnered with Momentous supplements because Momentous supplements are of the very highest quality, they ship internationally, and they have single-ingredient formulations. If you'd like to access the supplements discussed on the Huberman Lab Podcast, you can go to livemomentous, spelled O-U-S, so livemomentous.com/huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. (footsteps) Dr. Sam Harris.