How your brain predicts your reality (w/ Anil Seth)

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1:33You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. But actually, how do I know that I'm your host, Chris Duffy? How do I know that I am Chris Duffy? Am I sure about that? How do I know that I am me? How do you know that you are you? Are we actually conscious beings? Are we just figments of someone's imagination or just bits in a simulation? Today on the show, our guest is cognitive and computational neuroscientist, Anil Seth. Enel is the author of Being You, A New Science of Consciousness. And he and I are going to get into some weird and wild territory, the kind of topics that you might discuss at 3 a.m.

2:12in a dorm room or after having eaten a very powerful edible. But we're going to be talking about this using real science and trying to understand genuine advances in technology and research that are happening right now. Here's a clip from Enel's TED Talk. So just over a year ago, for the third time in my life, if I ceased to exist, I was having a small operation. My brain was filling with anesthetic. I remember a sense of detachment and falling apart, coldness. And then I was back, drowsy and disoriented, but definitely there. Now, when you wake from a deep sleep, you might feel confused about the time or anxious about oversleeping, but there's always a basic sense of time having passed, of a continuity between then and now.

2:58And coming around from anesthesia is very different. and I could have been under for five minutes, five hours, five years or even 50 years. I simply wasn't there. It was total oblivion. Anesthesia, it's a modern kind of magic. It turns people into objects, and then, we hope, back again into people. And in this process is one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science and philosophy. How does consciousness happen? Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is generating a conscious experience, and not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience right here and right now.

3:36How does this happen? Well, answering this question is so important because consciousness for each of us is all there is. Without it, there's no world, there's no self, there's nothing at all. Well, we are very lucky today on the show because here to share a bit of his conscious experience with us is Anil Seth. Hi, I'm Anil Seth. I'm a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex and the author of the book, Being You, A New Science of Consciousness. The first question that I have for you is, for a regular person, just going about their day to day, why is it important to think about consciousness?

4:18Why does it matter? It's really easy to take it for granted, isn't it? I mean, we just are who we are and the world is how it is and we get on with our daily lives. But I think if you just reflect on it for a little bit, and I actually think children are very good at this because I remember first getting interested in consciousness as a child. I think as many of us are, like, why am I me and not somebody else? Questions like that. What happens when I die? But this moment of reflection suggests, I think makes it clear that everything that matters to us matters through the medium of conscious experience.

4:55You know, we feel good, we feel bad, we see something beautiful, we see something ugly. Without experiencing the world and the self, nothing really matters at all. So I think it's a central concept. It's a central aspect of what it means to be a living human being. There are plenty of other reasons why it's important, plenty of other practical applications. It's not just the realm of philosophy. It matters in our daily lives. I think that's fundamentally why we should be interested in it. One of the many things that I admire about your work is how you take really big, complex ideas and you don't oversimplify them, but you do make them accessible.

5:40And so as we are going to have this conversation that I think is going to touch on a lot of big, complex ideas about consciousness and conscious experience, let's actually get started with what I found in your book and in just thinking about these ideas to be one of the easiest, most concrete, immediate examples, which is to think about color. We have a conscious experience of, say, the color red or the color green. And we all think that we understand what that is. And yet it's possible. In fact, it's quite likely that other people's perception of those exact same colors is not the exact same as ours, that their experience of the world, their conscious experience is not the same as ours.

6:20Well, I think it's not only likely, it just is the case. There's that example, I think. Do you remember it, Chris? I don't know if people listening to this will, but about 10 years ago, there was this photo of a dress that half the world saw as yellow and white and the other half saw as blue and black. And that's a very clear example of how you can have the same exact stimulus, the same image, but we can have a very different subjective experience. I think colour is an excellent example that gets us into this whole issue of consciousness and why it's important. Because as you said, we take it for granted.

6:57We walk around the world and things are red or things are green, the sky is blue. And it feels to us as if it exists out there in the world independently of us. But we know that's not true. And this is even before neuroscience gets going, really. from physics we know that the electromagnetic spectrum goes all the way from radio waves which are very long to x-rays gamma rays which are really short and this so-called visible spectrum is somewhere in the middle it's a thin slice of reality and what's more within that thin slice of reality we just have cells that are sensitive to more or less three different wavelengths we call them red green and blue but they're not actually colored they're just three wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.

7:47And out of those three wavelengths, the brain conjures up millions of different colours. So colour just is not there, out there in the world, in the way that it seems. But it's also not made up. What's happening, as far as people who study this stuff in detail think is that surfaces reflect light and what we experience as color is a sort of property of how different surfaces reflect light in different ways and that's why color is useful for us because it helps us keep track of objects when lighting conditions change and when things change it's a very useful thing for our visual systems to be able to do but it's not this direct transduction of something that exists in objective reality.

8:37It requires a brain and a world to experience color. One of the other reasons why I think color is such an interesting place to start is because my personal experience here is I am colorblind. And so I struggle to differentiate between colors, certain colors that many other people feel are very clearly different. So to me, my experience of the world does not include this bright line between, say, lavender and light blue. Certain types of green and brown are more on a spectrum to me, rather than there's a clear difference between them. And one of the things that happens whenever people find out that I'm colorblind is we play this game.

9:21It's unavoidable, and it doesn't bother me. I know it bothers some other colorblind people. But we end up playing this game where they point at all the things around us, and they say, and what color is that? And what color is that? And what color is that? and what does this look like? And they're amazed that it's not always the same for me as it is for them. The most common form of colorblindness, and see if this resonates with you, is when what non-colorblind people would say is red and then say is green, people with the most common form of colorblindness would perceive those things as being roughly the same.

9:55Yes, it's a red-green colorblindness. Every once in a while, there'll be these photos that kind of go viral, which is like, how the world looks, to someone with red-green colorblindness. And it'll be two photos that I'm told to someone who does not have this look very different. And to me, those photos look exactly the same. I could not tell you which one is the altered one. The philosopher Thomas Nagel years ago, 50 years ago, actually, wrote this wonderful essay called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Now, I'm not saying being colorblind is like being a bat, no. But his point was that for each of us, we have our subjective world.

10:29And that is unique to us. everybody's world will be different. The subjective world of a bat is going to be very different because they have echolocation and all this other stuff. And the subjective world of someone with colorblinds, of you, Chris, is going to be different with respect to color. It's not a simple subtraction of what my experience would be. In Being You, a new science of consciousness, you describe one idea of seeing the world as controlled hallucination. So can you define that and talk to us about that? Because I feel like it really ties in with what we're talking about. But the idea of controlled hallucination is not just an account of how we experience color.

11:09I mean, the power of the idea, at least for me, and as I try to explain in the book, it's a way of understanding everything that we experience, whether it's an emotion, or a sense of free will, or the sense of being Chris or being Anil. It's a way of understanding everything that we experience whatsoever. And the idea is pretty simple and it's pretty old. I mean, in thinking about color, it's already clear that what we experience isn't this direct readout of what's objectively out there in the world, because colors aren't objectively out there in the world. But now let's switch perspective a little bit and think about what things are like from the perspective of a brain.

11:50So imagine being a brain. A brain is locked inside this bony vault of a skull. And to a first approximation, what it's trying to do is figure out what the hell is going on out there in the world or in here in the body. All the brain has to go on are these electrical sensory signals that arrive via the eyes and the ears and so on. Light doesn't just get right into the brain. It's dark in the brain and it's silent. All the brain has are electrical signals that are only indirectly related to the things out there in the world. They don't have labels. So the brain has to infer, has to make a best guess about what is happening in the world based on these ambiguous, unlabeled, uncolored, unsounded sensory signals.

12:41The brain makes this best guess about what's happening in the world by continually making predictions about the sensory signals that it's getting. And then instead of just reading out the sensory signals to sort of form this inner picture of the world, the brain is continually updating the predictions so they explain away the sensory signals that are coming in. And the key idea here is that what we experience in this story is the content of these inside-out predictions. We don't read out the world from the outside in. We always actively construct it, actively generate it from the inside out. Now, it turns out, if you do all the maths and all this stuff, that if you have a brain which is continually updating its top-down, inside-out predictions to minimize the sensory signals that are coming in to try and explain them, predict them before they happen.

13:43That mathematically is a very, very good way for the brain to approximate exactly what caused the sensory signals out there in the world. It's a very good way to make a best guess. And that's the claim. That's what we experience. And that's why I call it a controlled hallucination, which is a term I call good analogies. I like the idea because it emphasizes that our experiences come largely from within. So that's the hallucination part. One thing that I think is a way for me to understand this inside out and outside in dance is when I think about emotions. So there's the idea, right? Let's just say with the line between fear and excitement.

14:31I see something exciting and my heart starts pounding and my heart is pounding because I am excited. And then there's also the idea that I see something and my heart starts pounding and then my brain has to decide, is your heart pounding because you are terrified or because you are excited? And that increasingly the science seems to be pointing towards the second rather than the first. That's right. There's a theory of emotion from William James who, like many theories in psychology, came up with these ideas back in the 19th century. But it was James and another guy called Carl Langer who first put things this way.

15:09And they gave the example of seeing a bear. So you see a grizzly bear or something. You feel very afraid and adrenaline starts coursing through your body. And so you run away. And in this way of thinking about it, you know, you see the bear that causes an emotion of fear. and the emotion of fear sets in train all these bodily responses that allow you to run away or fight if you really want to fight a grizzly bear, which is a bad idea. And James kind of flipped that. What James suggested was going on was that what we experience as the emotion of fear is mostly the brain's perception of the body's response to the bear.

15:54So the chain of causation is now subtly but importantly different. We see a bear, brain registers there's a bear because that's its best controlled hallucination of what's out there in the world. I mean, that itself is still an inference. That visual perception of the bear immediately sets in train all these physiological changes in the body, cortisol, adrenaline, all of that. and then it's the brain's perception of these changes in the context of a bear being present that is the emotion of of fear and this is a useful way to think about it because the interior of the body you know the state of the body even on the body on the inside the brain has to infer that too one of the aha moments for me was to think of this james theory of emotion as actually basically identical to these ideas about how visual perception works.

16:55So just as the brain has to infer the causes of its visual signals, and that's what we see, it's making predictions about what's out there, the exact same mechanism can do what James was suggesting happens. It can make its best guess about what's happening in the inside of the body, and that becomes experiences of emotion and that's kind of satisfying from a sort of if you're a theory person it's very satisfying because you've got one simple principle the brain making and updating predictions that can now bring together what were previously two quite different fields of understanding human experience you know visual perception on the one hand and emotion on the other.

17:39I find very appealing when you have these unifying principles and you can start to understand different domains of human experience through the same underlying mechanism.

17:52We are going to be back with more in just a moment, but first, we're going to explore one of the key domains of the podcasting experience, which is playing advertisements.

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21:29Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And we are back. So I think that many people, especially in the Western world, have this idea of the brain as a supercomputer, like a very hyper intelligent machine that is processing information. And that image of the brain is is often as like it is its own thing, quite separate from the rest of the body. But it seems to me like you are saying that it is quite a bit more of the full body experience than just the locked away supercomputer in the top type situation. I think this idea of the brain as a computer has been an extremely powerful metaphor, but it's reaching its limits.

22:07You know, the brain is pretty implacable in its complexity. And I think scientists have always struggled to figure out how can we conceptualize what's happening in this gray goo inside our heads. And initially, it was a system of pipes and plumbing and then a telephone network. And since the 1950s, this metaphor of a computer has been very powerful. So powerful that we just sort of take it for granted that the brain computes and processes information. And if you programmed a real silicon computer in the right way, you'd get everything that you get from real brains, including and we'll come back to this consciousness and this is where i started to get really uncomfortable about this metaphor but the computer it relies on something to implement the computations but it's it's you know it's it's not nearly as intimately related to the body as you know our brains are related to our physical bodies and i think that's super important if we're ever to really understand how brains work and what they're for.

23:10The body isn't just this kind of meat-based robot that can take our brain computer from one meeting to the next. If you zoom backwards in evolutionary time, every brain that ever existed evolved to control and regulate and guide a body. That's what brains are fundamentally for. I'm inclined to think that we've reached the limits of the brain as computer metaphor. And the brain is actually much richer, much more complex than computers. There's one key difference that I'll just mention. And then I'd love to see what you think of it, which is a key principle of all the computers we have is that we have the sharp separation between software and hardware.

23:58I can run the same version of whatever it is, Word on my computer will do the same thing on yours. And on my computer, I can run many different programs. And it'll do the same thing every time, right, if it's working properly. Even a single neuron is a very complicated biological machine that is trying to keep itself going, you know, right down into the furnaces of metabolism. And when you see brains like that and understand their richness and see how different they are from computers, then it really undermines the idea that what they're doing is computation. Because computation makes sense when you've got this sharp separation.

24:41And to the extent you don't have that, then it makes much less sense to think of the brain as a computer. Yeah, I think that the connection between our body and our brain in the sense of like, you know, if you exercise, if you lift heavy weights or go for a run, it changes how you feel in your brain. It doesn't just change your body in a way that I think if I get a new mouse, I don't perceive that as changing how my computer feels. You're right that there is this tight interaction between our bodies, our brains, and our minds. I mean, our brains are part of our bodies. I think this is also something we often neglect.

25:17But the brain is an organ, just as much as our heart, our liver, our kidneys are organs. But it's a distinctive one. If you're going to have an organ transplant, the brain is the one operation for which you want to be the donor and not the recipient. So you ask a question in your book on page 209 towards the end that I want to ask you, and I think is a really important question for anyone who is listening to this or watching this to ask themselves as well. What is the aspect of being you that you cling to most tightly? So it's your question, but I would like to put it to you first. What is the aspect of being you that you cling to most tightly?

26:00well of course i clearly remember what i wrote on page 209 but i think the aspect of self that that i cling to most tightly is this sense of free will i mean one of the other i think ways in which our intuition can mislead us when we think about consciousness is the idea that the self is just one thing that there is a single essence of christoffee there isn't a single essence of Anil Seth. But that's not the case. And there are many ways in neurology, psychiatry, but also in the lab where we can show that the experience of being a self has all these different aspects, which are all present in a kind of unified way for most of us most of the time, but which can come apart.

26:45So for instance, emotion, we already talked about, is one part of the experience of self. It feels like those are on the verge of crossing from the interesting academic questions into a really practical, applicable question in a way that is, quite frankly, to me, scary. So I'll give you just my example that I'm curious what you think about is, for me, the aspect of being me that I cling to most tightly is, I think, some version of uniqueness, that I am me and there isn't another me out there. And yet, if it was possible to upload my consciousness or to have an artificial intelligence that was trained on my voice and my writing and my thinking so much so that it was the same as me, but not me.

27:32That feels quite disturbing to me. And yet it doesn't feel impossible to imagine a world where we get to that place. So I'm curious to hear your take on that. I think you're absolutely right that these are the times we live in and that's both scary but also quite exciting and certainly very interesting place to be as someone who's followed these things of course both in popular culture as we all do but just watching what's happening in the underlying science too and it's happening in many ways so there's the example about these these avatars is really is really fascinating and I've had a couple of opportunities to have a digital avatar.

28:12I haven't yet taken them up because I'm slightly worried about, you know, they're very ethical things about that that I'm concerned about. But the fact is, it's now possible. I think it would be still distinguishable from me, but things will just get better and better for sure. The other example where I think we're on the cusp of something that's going to be ethically and morally very challenging is with brain-computer interfaces. And when you say brain-computer interface, you mean something that literally is going directly between a brain and a computer. Like signals from the brain are directly controlling a robotic limb, or they're going straight into a computer, or vice versa.

28:53A signal from a computer is going straight into a brain. And here's a situation where, on the one hand, you've got all these amazing clinical benefits that you just can't argue against and you really shouldn't argue against because they're brilliant. You can help people with Parkinson's disease. You can restore paralysis to people. You can restore sight to blind people potentially. I mean, that's coming. All these amazing interventions that are on the horizon or even here now in some cases. But then you get to this other terrain of cognitive enhancement. Can someone who's not got paralysis or blindness or Parkinson's disease, should we all have brain computer interfaces just as we all have cell phones these days well that's a very very different world and it's a world where you know if you take it to the to an extreme something like free will which is at least for me pretty central and part of uniqueness too you know i feel that the thoughts are my thoughts i feel that that my actions are my actions but if now there's a brain computer interface that is not merely reading out my intentions to get something done, but actually causing me to have intentions and thoughts that I feel are my own, but I would not have otherwise thought, that's pretty scary to me.

30:21Because once you've got into the brain, there's nowhere else to go. What should we be doing as regular people to protect our consciousness or to think about it in a way where we won't just wake up in a world that's not the world we want to live in? What can we do or how can we understand this in a different level? Yeah, it's a very difficult question to answer. I think the good side of the optimistic view is that there's still time to shape the future in these things. We're not already at the stage of fixing problems that have already come to exist as we are, for instance, and how do we rein in the societally problematic consequences of social media.

31:08We can still decide what kinds of technologies we want and what kinds of technology we don't want and how they should be regulated or made available. but you know i think there are things that you know regular folk can do you know we can all do and it's sort of it may sound slightly cliched or try to say it but the most important thing is to just not be scared of of trying to understand what's going on right we have to be informed if we're not informed about what these technologies do also how our own brains work too you know we don't have to understand every detail, not asking people to go and do whole neuroscience degrees and so on.

31:52But the more we understand how our own minds work, I think, the better we'll be able to make informed decisions about the kinds of technologies that we want.

32:08We're going to take another quick break and then we will be right back.

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33:53And we are back with the author of Being You, A New Science of Consciousness, Anil Seth. In the book, you talk about your experience of caring for your mother and how she had a medical issue that caused her to have a brief period of amnesia or not necessarily understanding who you were and what your relationship was. I'd love for you to talk about that personal experience, but also to people who are caring for family members and loved ones who have cognitive decline and dementia, where this question of, is this my mother? Is this my father? Is this the person that I've known? Is not a hypothetical question and it's not a far off technological question, but it's kind of a practical day-to-day question of like, who is this person that I love and that I care for?

34:45And are they the same person they have been? Because you've been in that situation. So the episode I described in the book, my mother was in a hospital for operation. She was just shy of 80 years old, but there were problems in the hospital and she had what i later learned was what the doctors call hospital induced delirium which i'd never heard of before and it's apparently very common especially in older people and the name is immediately suggestive of people actually don't know what's going on at all it's sort of a name straight out of the 18th century it sounded like to me but it's a severe disorientation but also a change of personality she didn't recognize me she thought I was somebody else and appeared to be a very different person that resolved.

35:31But yes, in the years since then, it's been a continual process in which she and I have had to adapt to very different circumstances. So there are many ways in which a person can continue to be the same person, even if they no longer know much about who they are or where they are, who other people are. And for me, that's been, you know, I think that's been a useful strategy. It helps me recognize that there's a deep continuity underlying these fairly dramatic changes. But there's nonetheless a continuity. And of course, the same is true for us. You know, we're changing too. But we just don't experience the change in ourselves because we, you know, to cut the long story there very short, when things change very slowly, we tend not to perceive them as changing.

36:28I find that to be so profound and so comforting. It's impossible to lose it because it is a continuous transformation through the years. That's right. It was never there in the first place to be lost, right? It's always been this process. And I think it's important just talking about these things to just to point out that But these ideas have, of course, been central to many spiritual traditions in Buddhism, in a lot of meditative practice, in Hinduism as well, to some extent. The idea of the self as process, as identity, as multifaceted, as constructed. I mean, this is not news to many people from different cultures.

37:08And what I find quite fascinating is the confluence, the convergence between these different ways of thinking. and it's not that it's not that just science is basically telling the same story but 2 000 years later it's telling a different story it's a story in which what we are learning from the neuroscience and the philosophy modern philosophy about the self i think enriches the stories that were already there but also vice versa understanding consciousness that's part of the battle we come with all these preconceptions about what it is that we're trying to understand But actually, the experience of being a self is not simple.

37:48And when we widen the lens to other cultures and other traditions, I think we get a richer view of what consciousness research should be about. I feel like it would be professional malpractice to have had a conversation about consciousness and the self and to not ask you about drugs, hallucinogenic drugs, and also legal anesthetic drugs, right? How does the fact that I can be put under to undergo an operation and wake up and have no memory or any possible way of accessing that time, how does that affect your ideas about consciousness? And then relatedly, if I can take LSD or hallucinogenic mushrooms or any of these other types of substances and change my experience of the world, how does that affect consciousness?

38:38the more hallucinogenic drugs in particular psychedelic drugs emphasizes the intimate connection between consciousness and the brain you take a different chemical now interfere in the brain's business with a different kind of electrochemical manipulation pharmacological manipulation and now instead of losing consciousness it changes and it changes extremely dramatically so i you know i find this very very good evidence it's highly compatible with a sort of view that consciousness is something the brain does you know you intervene in the brain and consciousness changes interestingly you know you can take it in a very different way you could take the experiences that you have on psychedelics as some sort of insight into the nature of reality and come to a very different conclusion that oh look you know i've experienced consciousness is in fact a fundamental property of the universe and so it doesn't depend on the brain at all it all depends on your priors what you come into it with for me it sort of reinforces the dependence of consciousness on the brain but i think in each case psychedelics can show well maybe not in each case but certainly from the perspective that psychedelics change the brain and that changes consciousness it really underlines that what we experience is is a construction because you change aspects of the brain function aspects of our conscious experience that we might otherwise take for granted you know we we can realize are things that the brain is doing because they're changed or they go away so for me it's a very provides a lot of insight into those aspects of consciousness which need explaining.

40:28And that's entirely separate from all the potential therapeutic benefits, which I think are also very exciting, very interesting. I think the jury is going to be out for a little while on their overall efficacy, but there's certainly a lot of rich potential there. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for your work and thank you for taking the time to explain it to us. No, thanks, Chris. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks a lot for having me on the show.

40:56that is it for this episode of how to be a better human thank you so much to today's guest anil seth his book is called being you a new science of consciousness i am your host chris duffy and you can find more from me including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffy comedy.com how to be a better human is consciously created by a team of fully aware beings on the ted side we've got the electrical signals of daniela balarezzo ban ban chang michelle quint Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laini Lott, Tansika Sungmanibong, Antonia Leigh, and Joseph Debrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who experienced truth at a level the rest of us can barely comprehend.

41:35On the PRX side, they are challenging the very limits of the brain's capacity to experience perfect audio. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. Your conscious decision to listen to this show makes everything we do possible. Please share this episode with a person whose brain you really enjoyed. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks again for listening.

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43:38Thank you.