How to Expand Your Consciousness | Dr. Christof Koch

25:27This has to do with whether we are evening persons of 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 Israeli or Palestinian, you have profoundly different views of it. So you look at the fact that it's supposedly objective, but depending what prayers you bring to it, what your perception of the barcans like this, in what culture you grew up, you have radical different interpretations, and this also includes your sense of self. So I would say what you had was this transformative experience, you expanded your perception box, your perception of reality to non -clude the notion, I get it now, that other people, depending on their skin of their colors, will be treated differently for me.

26:14That's invaluable. And I got to experience the emotional, you know, 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 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, because I don't consider myself racist, and I didn't then, and you notice in this VR experience the way that I have a friend who's a psychologist who says, you know, the subtle informs the gross, the way these little things change the way that you feel and then 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.

27:05And what I realize is it's a hell of a lot of work. It's a lot, there's like this, there's like a burden of mental load that was not familiar to me before. In this... Inclusive and explicit, yeah. So you have to think about it. What does it mean? What does it mean for my behavior? what does it mean for other people's behavior? Yeah, so you can call it in psychedelics. This is called the integration period. So I would submit you had a transformative experience. You had what philosophers called direct acquaintance now with some form of racism, right? Satellar racism, right in this VR. And now you're doing the explicit work of reformulating everything.

27:42You're changing literally your Bayesian priors. So I imagine you're top down, you know, formlessly prefrontal cortex back into whatever, you know, theory of mine, for instance, areas, right? You are changing your priors. It was really striking given how short the experience was and how first person it was, right? Obviously with VR, it's not like watching a movie. You are the movie. You're in the movie. You're the first person actor in the movie. So I think there are two ways to achieve transformative effect. One is the slow one by educating yourself by reading books by watching movies. But as you said very often, it doesn't really bite until you have a direct experience.

28:20You direct have a coincidence with this. Then suddenly you say, now I get it. And this is the character of any transformative experiences, including mystical experiences. Recently I was at Estelen. This is beautiful. I'll play some in the big circus that is just up here, right? 200 miles or so. Yeah, I will. They shut it down. The freeway fell out some years ago. South of Estelen. So you have to go up and around now from Southern California where we are now. Still an incredible place that's been very seminal in the mindfulness movement and just a gorgeous place to visit for many reasons. But while I was there, I had an incredible experience that involved you, although you didn't realize it.

29:02It wasn't a psychedelic experience, nor was it a dream. I went into the bookstore and I found a book of one of my favorite humans that I unfortunately never met, which is Dr. Oliver Sachs, 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. And I have a very close relationship with all things all of her 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, 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.

29:55We 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, okay, this guy's crazy, right? This guy must be crazy. But I realize now based on everything you said so far that he was very far from crazy. He was hypersane 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.

30:36and yet we have a very hard time imagining what is slight to be non -human. And nowadays with the emergence of AI and fear about, you know, emerging 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. I simply adore him through the writings of 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 curate as pets, dogs in particular.

31:19So I'd love your thoughts about this or all of the above. Yeah, he was a great friend. I visited him many times. I met him through Francis' Creek and we had to share the interest in the brain and in consciousness. and he was incredible. I mean, what made him so singular, also in his interaction with patients was his empathy. So you could have deep empathy with patient and try to imagine him, you know, these strange otherworldly conditions. I'd like the patient who from Mars or these other patients that he described that had very specific pathologies that were totally explainable as a rising out of brain lesions.

31:59He was better at that than most other people. Trying to imagine what is it, for example, to live in the eternal present. I did one patient that had this profound amnesia, but he could still always live back in the I can't remember now, 20 years earlier. In his entire world, his entire memory stopped 20 years earlier. That's how he lived. and it looks crazy, but once you understand that, it makes perfect sense 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 certain different experience for me, right?

32:40You grew up in a different environment, so it's not easy to get into someone's health with head, although some people can do it actors, for example, can try to do it, right? The methods are acting, right? and we totally try to adopt the point of view of the character you're trying to play. But of course, that's much more difficult for other animals that share what we may share close evolutionary history like with all mammals, but that have very different, you know, that may have infrared sensors or they have a much more potent sense of smell. And how do we, that have a different motor system that hang from the ceiling?

33:13So how do we imagine doing that? But I think it is possible. It's challenging. And of course, it says classical essay by Thomas Nagel, what is it like to be a bad, right? And his position, the American philosopher says, well, we can never truly know what it is like to be a bad. But I think we can approximate it. I can't really ever know what is it like to be Andrew Schubertmann, right? But I can't try to imagine it. And you know, this is what empathy is, right? Trying to feel like you. and trying to realize that we all can't just being, we all are booked ended between two attorneys. And so in some sense, we're very, very similar.

33:49And they think that makes the dividers a really tiny subset of all the things that we share, including with cats and dogs and elephants and squids and everything else on the tree of life. Before we talk about your experience with DMT and psychedelics more generally, I wonder to what extent, you know, changing our consciousness as possible in a very directed way. So what I'm referring to here is, you know, for instance, a lot of therapies, whether or not it's a cognitive behavioral therapy or it's MDMA assisted psychotherapy 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.

34:39You 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, without the emotional load. They don't necessarily want to forget the experience, but they want to remove the emotional load. And it seems like in pathogens, like MDMA, in proper clinical settings can help do that. That proper cognitive behavioral therapy can help people really talk through and work through, maybe have a cathartic experience, but unload the emotional experience, the emotional component of the experience.

35:18So what I'm referring to here are things bad, 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. And by way of very deliberate tailoring of your memories, do you think this is possible? Of course, yeah. You just gave me an example. You experience of VR and realizing what it is to have a black skin compared to a white skin, right? This was clearly a beneficial experience that enables you to be more emphatic with other people, right? And try to better understand what they mean when they talk about explicit or implicit racism, right?

35:58And it changed you profoundly and you're telling me this happened when? 2000. This was probably 2017. Alright, so you know, so that's eight years ago, right? So clearly it lasted. So I think for most conditions we can certainly improve them. You have to believe that you can change, right? So if you're being told all the stories, it's all the system. It'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. That I think highly counterproductive. I have no, you have to believe I'm an active agent of my own mind. I can shape my reality.

36:31I would call it my perception box with various, you know, ways either talk therapy, psychedelic therapy or some other therapy. It requires a lot of work. It doesn't come sort of for free, right? And at the end of the day, I'm still left, let's see, 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 in the various ways we can talk about that. this can be achieved. Absolutely. I do believe in the malability 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.

37:09If you really want to, that's one issue. It's a little bit of trying 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, you know, 8 a .m. in the morning, drunk outside my house. I want to change. Then you can change. And you know, 2000 years of therapies, of all sorts of things, you know, to take alcoholic anonymous, right? The first thing you do, you have to recognize that I am an alcoholic. And then I can begin, if I, before I do that, there isn't really a hope. But once I do that, I can change it.

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40:01I 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 helixleap .com slash 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 helixleap .com slash huberman to get up to 27 % off. It's interesting that you bring up 12 step in AA in particular because the next step, besides acknowledging the problem is at least an AA is to acknowledge an inability to solve it oneself and a giving over of some of the process of eliminating alcohol to another, what they refer to as higher power.

40:49As some people call this God, some people call it Jesus, some people, but it's 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 and community are necessary but not sufficient, but 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 the higher powers.

41:25Very interesting. Given the effectiveness of A .A. is one of the most successful ways for people to continually avoid alcohol. It's cool. I acknowledge that I personally wouldn't say to require divine intervention, because I'm not sure there is such a divine entity that could intervene in this. But 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. Well, maybe it's the opening up of space that... The willingness. The willingness. Yeah, and maybe I couldn't do it by myself until now.

42:05And in order for there to be a different future visualized, maybe this sort of creating of space. I mean, 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. And for many years, 80s and 90s and even prior, the emphasis was on brain areas, a megalophere, a hippocampus memory, prefrontal cortex, decision making, this kind of thing. And of course, there's been this beautiful transition to a focus more on circuitry, areas and networks activated more or less over time.

42:43Can we look to particular networks or network phenomena, circuit activation patterns, and say, that's the origin of consciousness, or is that no longer a meaningful pursuit? Yes. Why do I have a field of new candidates that way? So, 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 eight to ten seconds. Okay? Same thing in the brainstem. Your brainstem has to be active to perfuse the rest of the forebrain with noradrenaline and dopamine all of that.

43:24But those don't provide the content. You don't love your hate or see with your brainstem, with your local sorollios, for instance. So the circuits that convey experience in us, I'm not saying it's the same in other species, particularly non -nammals, but in us, that grew up with the normal brain again. I'm not talking about people who never, you know, uninsiphylic individuals, that's very different. So for most of us, we grew up with a normal brain, and I think they're the relevant circuits are the cortical thalamo circuits. And we can, in fact, we can exploit this knowledge now to test whether someone is conscious.

44:02Because in principle, so what you can do, you can knock the brain using a technique called transcranian magnetic stimulation, right? And then you listen to it's echo using a high density EEG net. And you can see if you knock here or here, depending where exactly you knock, you get these up and down states. And if they last for, let's see, two, three, four hundred milliseconds, and they occur at different places, you can formally compute what's called brain complexity using lamplicev complexity. And you can show when everyone who's either awake like us, or we are asleep in a dream state, or we are on ketamine where we dissociate it, And in all those cases, the brain complexity is high, it's above a threshold.

44:47And however, when you're in a non -remstead, when you're in a state of deep sleep, or you're necessitated, or you're, or you're, of course, the most extreme case, your brain dead, then the brain complexity is very low. And in animals we've even done at the Alain Institute, we've done this experiment where we can systematically manipulate the cortical thalamo cortical circuits to really show it is this circuit that is really, that is the one that's critically involved in consciousness. In fact, so what we discovered over the last 10 years is this very abrupt, threshold and brain complexity defined using this technique.

45:24Where, so there's a thing called perturbation complex index, it's a single number, PCI between zero and one. Zero means there's no complexity, it's flat, like in a dead brain, flat line. One, it means every EEG is totally, electrode is totally independent from anyone else never happens in real brain. In real brain, typically, wake brain, you get things between 0 .65 and 0 .8, let's see. There's a sharp threshold, 0 .31, anyone that we've had, no, no, there are three -net people that have both patient and normal people that have been measured. If you're above the threshold of 0 .31, you're conscious.

46:01If you're below the threshold, you're unconscious. That probably means that it's non -linear, just like Hodgkin Huxley, this is probably non -linear a circuit mechanism that once the circuit is intact, it's sufficient to support consciousness. Now you can ask, well, 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 onto the Pacific Coastal Highway, I get hit by a car, okay? I'm now unconscious. I get to the ICU, whether that's a traumatic green injury or cardiac arrest or hemorrhage. unconscious, unconscious, I'm like this.

46:40I might be a rouse, 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 and responsive state. Okay. And there are thousands of these people. Well, right, because with proper care, with proper nursing care, you can stay in this state for weeks or months or in the case of Terry Shiveau 14 years. Okay. Furthermore, what happens after, Typically, in most cases, after four to five days, the doctors will talk with the loved ones. Is this what he would have wanted? And 70 to 90 % of the time they decide, no, this is not what you wanted and you withdraw life -sustaining therapy.

47:18But we now know that 25 % of these patients have what's called covert consciousness. They're there. We know this because, for example, some of these patients, you can, there was a big study last year in New England Journal of Medicine made a front page of New York Times, where you can show 25 percent of these patients can still voluntarily up and down regulate their motor cortex in response to a command, clans your fist for 30 seconds, relax it, clans your fist for 30 seconds, relax it. So these people that otherwise, when you ask them, sir, can you hear me? Can you track my finger? Can you pinch them very hard to see, do they They do a withdrawal of limb reflex.

48:01Don't do any of that. So they have what's called a Glasgow coma scale, very low Glasgow coma scale, or coma and recovery GSCR scale, very low, but they still seem to be conscious. They either have high brain complexity or they can modulate their brain. So this is now the first time ever that we have a practical way in people that cannot respond, 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?

48:48We 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 state that they have a better chance to recovery. Incredible. At this point, three -one, you said is the threshold. On the one hand, it seems so reductionist. On the other hand, 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, except in dreams, of course. And it sounds like a wonderful clinical tool 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.

49:35You mentioned Terry Shriver was the last one. Shriver, can you just remind people what the outcome of that situation was? Yes, so this was a case back in 1998 or 2000 on a President Bush. She had a cardiac arrest, was started up again. She was in the state for 14 years. And then 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. And when back and forth, and finally the court allowed her withdrawal of life support. So she died after 14 years. the analysis, the post mortem showed in her case, her brain was totally shrunk, so in her case, we didn't do this procedure then, we didn't have it, but clearly, she was probably one of the 75 % patient that are truly unconscious.

50:31So it's important to get this into the ICU. So in fact, I started a company called Intrinsic Powers, because it's the Intrinsic Powers of the Brain, that mediate consciousness. And we're now trying to remet with the FDA, And they said, well, this is all cool, but you really need to do a clinical trial. So we're trying to fundraise now. So if anyone in the audience here is willing to invest in this, to get this procedure into the ICU so we can tell for sure, is this patient conscious or they're 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.

51:08So there's two different things. very, very interesting and very important work. 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. Yes, so a, typically people don't, when they do recover, they typically don't have explicit memory. Because again, memory is something different and then actually being conscious. I mean, just like most of us don't remember our dreams.

51:43We're clearly conscious, but we don't remember them. But there are, there's a study now system in the United Harvard that tries to explore that. And some people explicitly say that. In fact, there's one really interesting case where the person who then recovered, a young guy, who first said, first he was upset that they didn't follow his 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 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, you know, having them actually conscious.

52:24So people are now that the medical community is now beginning to recognize this idea of covert consciousness, which is something that was only really realized over the last 10 years. It's amazing. Well, it turned 50 in two weeks and I'm working on my will. Something I never thought I would do, but I hear I am doing it. So I'm going to include a section on this point. Very important. This 431 threshold, but also maybe perhaps pending new technologies. Yes, that's a trouble because. Right. You don't know what will be available. If you don't know, yes. And the other thing is called this despise, this disability bias.

52:56So let's say you look like a person who's highly active. So you probably cannot imagine being in a state where you can't move anymore. I mean, I've thought about it, but not in a real way. I mean, I fear it. I wouldn't want that. I love being able to move and see. And among other things, those are probably two of the most important things. Movement and vision, right? Okay, but now you have to change your prior. You've had this accident or whatever. Now you're in the state. This is a given. You're now in the state where you had a bad whatever accident and you can't move anymore. Or you may not be able to see.

53:31Now what is it you want? And most people, to those people that you can communicate, like they did a study in Israel with locked -in patients. So these are patients that have a stroke at the level of the ponds, where they're typically most of their motor commands they can't execute anymore except, you know, some neck and some vertical eye movements, and they ask them, 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 him, you would have said, no, no way. And so it's difficult with this medical directive, because you don't know until you get there.

54:09Well, I like the answer you just gave, because it speaks to the durability of the human spirit. Yes, the resilience. Yeah, the desire to keep going is pretty spectacular. And there are amazing examples. Like I was introduced some years ago to somebody from the special operations community who unfortunately stepped on IED and lost use of his legs. But he's a phenomenal surfer. He literally drags him. And he won't let people carry his stuff down the… Close like he drags himself down to the waves and he gets down there and he can get up on… He has prosthetics that he can use but for partial movement on land.

54:44but he basically is on his torso and he's an athlete. He's in the, you know, Paralympic athlete and serious athlete and super driven. And when you first interact with him, you see the pictures of before and after and this kind of thing, you go, gosh, that'd be so. But he's living in the moment. I mean, I'm sure he has his struggles, surely. But he's living in the moment of what's possible and at least in his words, the desire to persist and continue to pursue goals is fundamental to not getting lost in what could have been. He really exists, of course, he was a former Navy SEAL, etc. So it's probably part and parcel with the psychology that got him there, but he exists in the what's possible, not what's impossible landscape.

55:28Most of the time, it seems. It's pretty spectacular. The human will to continue to live. I'm very struck by this brain area, the anterior mid -singulate cortex. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but right, Joe Parvese, a laboratory stimulating a people feel So as if there's a challenge confronting them and they're going to lean into it, we've talked a lot about this on this podcast as a key site for plasticity of all things, and the friction that's required. But also this element of the will to live because it turns out anti -rhythmic, single -it cortex is larger or more active in people that are the so -called superagers that maintain cognition.

56:06Well, there's also this phenomenon of echinetic mutism. that's also 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, they've lost essentially their will to do or say anything. And if you inject them with dopamine or others, then sometimes they retrieve and you ask them, why was it I just had no desire? I would do we know what brain areas involved in this? Yeah, yeah, it's a singlet. It's the anterior, it's part of the anterior singlet. Okay, so maybe it's the same structure.

56:42I mean, I find, I mean, the human will to live and to continue to evolve oneself. May I also have a physical substrate? I believe it does. I mean, I think a singlet cortex seems to be a key hub. Well, so based on the study of your colleague Joseph Parvizzi, right at Stanford, we know if you go a little bit back into the posterior singlet, that's where you have the sense of self. If you stimulate there, or in these people who have epileptic seizures in there, they have these weird dissociative states, or where they feel themselves floating, or they can hear themselves have a conversation, but observing themselves, having a conversation, so we know some of the self, the sense of self here.

57:21And we also know doing meditation, and doing psilocybin, those areas are reduced. So yeah, there is a footprint for everything we experience. means there is a footprint 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 Francis Crican, I of course used to call this neural correlates of consciousness and try to pursue it. I'd like to go back into the perception box because I'm really intrigued by this. Well, you never left the perception box. Okay, because I did see a construction of reality. I got people are getting a sense of how your brain works and I love it.

57:56It's been a while since I've seen you as I forgot how much fun it was. 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, assassinated at a discussion on a campus, and there's a mix of responses to this out there. 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. Broadly speaking, I can imagine two somewhat extreme ways to go through life. One is with the philosophy, you know, live and let live.

58:40As long as somebody is not hurting somebody, let them do what they want. They want to change genders, let them change genders. They want to vote Republican, let them vote Republican. They want to, you know, as long as they're not harming anybody, right? So we have laws to protect people's well -being. And the other extreme would be one of moral judgment. People offended by someone else's choices or even beliefs. And even if they can't point to the exact harm that's being done, they feel as if it's grading on them. And then of course we have a lot of questions about those two different people's histories, whether or not they see, you know, moral judgment in the context of who's getting more or less resources.

59:27There'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. It could be right wing, left wing, middle, whatever. It doesn't matter. But let's aliens in outer space, a live and let live dominated perception box versus a moral judgment perception box. How, given the reality of these perception boxes here on Earth now, how is it that one can possibly establish a species cohabitating Earth that's going to go forward in any kind of different way without something fundamentally changing about A, understanding that there are these perception boxes, B, how to change them, and then as you said before, that's to be a desire to change them.

1:00:18So, 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. If the ones you have people who are living that 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. It'll be different conflicts. And they could be worse, of course. Could be worse, could be worse. See how worse. But I don't, I can't imagine like, unless we let like dog consciousness play a key role 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 fat supposedly fact so To stay with yesterday's examples trying not to politicize it, but you may have read after The assassination was announced in the house of Representative the speaker called for 30 seconds of silence which was fine and then someone called for prayers that are allowed and then all pandemonium broke out.

1:01:21Okay? So among the representatives, they screamed at each other. You know, it all had talked this one thing and then suddenly, because they have radical different priors, they just have, they're partly, you know, you're two, the ones that you described. But what they should do is sort of have a meta -prior, okay, wait a minute, we're now 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 skimming energy other to change our higher order prior because this isn't gonna end well.

1:02:00If this just keeps on getting worse and where is it gonna end, how is it gonna end? There has to be this insight. So it's a little bit when we talked before about a, you know, alcohol anonymous. There has to be this inside weight. we can't do this. There has to be a realization that there is a problem and we got to do things differently. Well, I think for many, many years, the meta -prior was God in religion. People looked to texts that were, at least people agreed, were scripted by non -human actors. So the meta -priors, maybe now people will look more to AI, I don't know. But I just feel like humans are not well positioned, are not well positioned to resolve certain kinds of things for ourselves.

1:02:48If we lost this narrative, yeah. So we had more or less, I mean, in the 50s and 60s, there were three TV channels, and we had a common narrative. I totally agree with you, and we lost that. And we're never going to regain that, unless there's extreme political repression. Maybe in China, but not here. It's not going to happen here, right? So what do we do? Oh, it's just getting worse every day with more violence and other things. Or is there gonna be some point in awakening a meta, a realization that we've gotta change our priorities here? What do you think is the potential role for AI? I mean, is AI, you said machines, they don't do, right?

1:03:24They only do, excuse me, they only do. Like with 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 limited in our ability to resolve this. History demonstrates that. Yesterday demonstrates that. Today demonstrates that. I mean, it's naive of anybody 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 The humanity has bumbled through history for the last, you know, however long, you know, several million years.

1:04:06And modern history, since we can speak and have recorded thought at least 10 ,000 years, right? So ultimately, somehow we'll make it through most likely on the whole, on the whole, but it could be much better. Individuals, empires, crumble and half, and of course we an empire like any other empire, And yes, this Western -style little democracy, you can be pessimistic about it. And it's not just US, of course, it's the most because we have all these guns. But if you look at, you look at Hungary, look at Germany, look at France, they have these world, they now have these country -wide protests against everything.

1:04:48I guess everything? Yeah. And then of course, England, right. And so, yeah, so we certainly, the Western ideal, Western national states liberalism certainly in a crisis, what's gonna help? And adding AI of course just accelerates everything, right, we're going through this acceleranda, this tremendous acceleranda, right, where AI's getting data literally every day, right, I'm sure you use it just as much as I do, it's very powerful, it's getting ever more powerful, you throw that into the mix, well that's probably with unemployment, massive change, right? Most people don't like change, right? So...

1:05:27Well, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get to here is you're a really smart guy. You understand consciousness. The perception box to me is a wonderful framework for people to understand differences of opinion and outlook that are based on history and perception, et cetera. But if it's all intellectual, it's like what you said when you really experience for the days to have blacks, I mean, not fully, but to experience something of what is it like to walk around being black, right? You had to vis - you told me yourself, right? Early on that you said, well, you can't get that from reading. You really have to experience it.

1:06:02So people have to have this moment, this come to Jesus' moment where they say, okay, shit. We can't go on like this anymore. We have to change our way of doing this. I agree. And with social media, you know, all it takes is a small fraction of people that reignite this, right? That post something nasty and then someone else posted and then they all pile on and yeah, we have a billion plus channels of information It's amazing to see how quickly the theories about the motive of the shooter Evolved into they micro -slice it into 15 different individuals. They hadn't even identified a potential suspect yet about why why Charlie Kirk was killed and it was incredible to just see how people assign themselves as authorities on these key topics.

1:06:48But I would like to imagine that the possibility resides in human beings understanding enough about their consciousness and their perception boxes 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 meta understanding of what's best. And I like to think that AI might play a positive role there, but it would require an acknowledgement that we need to hand over some key decision -making to machines, which is very complicated for people. So which AI, the Chinese AI, or the Open AI, or Claude, or Anthropic, or Grog, or any of the other ones being developed, once we've agreed on which, what is the function we're trying to maximize?

1:07:43I mean, do you really believe that it's gonna be, because we have an agreed, of course, on the optimal framework, right? Because they're Marxists, they're liberalists, they're Mark people oriented, right? They all believe we should maximize different things. So we're just gonna give this to the AI, and they're gonna 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. In the world that I grew up imagining and that I was told about and that I'd like to participate in creating humans treated each other with more compassion.

1:08:18Yeah, but look, I mean, I'm more with Steve Pinker here. Over the last several hundred years, a total amount of violence. I mean, so my forefathers, you know, being German here, initially it were two. that led to killing in Europe probably, I mean, 20 million Russians alone, you know, six million Jews in the Holocaust, 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, we... It's nothing like, well, in World War I, every day 10 ,000 soldiers died, every day for four years of the different size, For essentially having accomplished nothing whatsoever, right?

1:09:01For one mile going back and forth in the trench war here, 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 we have other nasty things, but in terms of total people killed, it's still a tiny fraction of what might happen and what has happened to routinely over the last 100 years. Well, then perhaps a more tractable way to approach this in order to get improvement, despite the fact that, yes, there's fewer mass casualties overall. 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 we're scientists and just like see what happens.

1:09:52Yes, so if I know where all your priors are in the brain, if I know the new substrate of all your basic beliefs, this is what priors are, right? It's just a fancy word. All your beliefs of how do you interpret human's behavior and 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 thought that you that your experiment has. But that's always on, you know, that does at scale in modern Silicon Valley speak. Does that scale? Can we do this for eight billion of us?

1:10:26It's interesting. No, it's, I don't think you can scale it very easily or at all. It's interesting that you point out very correctly that far fewer mass casualties than in World War One, World War Two 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 kind of wonder if, because of social media and the internet, what is profoundly changed now is that things are caught on video. Everything from a couple getting caught cheating at a cold -play concert, we have all the elements of drama, like the friend, the humiliation, the this, the shaming, the, okay, you have all of that, a woman being really brutally murdered on a subway, you know, and the people getting up not even really realizing or perhaps realizing and just, you know, getting off the light rail anyway or Charlie Kirk getting shot and seeing it in real time.

1:11:24I mean, the JFK getting shot video was kind of grainy. There's some elements. They're still analyzing that one. I mean, yeah, thousands of cameras on the Kirk thing. So the emotional impact is much, much bigger. 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 a non -going real life experiment of so much being visible in real time. It's not a story about. You're actually in the story, even if you weren't there. And this is totally new in human history.

1:11:58So we're going through this rapid period. Yeah, some people call it the accelerando, this rapid acceleration towards some distant point that we don't get realized. I doubted the singularity of Kurtzweil. Let's talk about the perception box elements that one is certain one can change and the potential role of psychedelics in this. I was made aware recently that you took five MEODMT. I've never taken five MEODMT. I know some people that have, but 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?

1:12:50Yeah, so it's a certain logic, a trip to mean very similar to Psylo -Syben or quite similar to DMT. So chemically they're all very similar, but each one of course binds to slightly different, you know, they're fought in different serotonin receptors, binds to different cells and different proportions. So five amus was so unique about that. You inhale it, although they're now trying to deliver something that you can inject into your nose, but traditionally you inhale it and literally within free breath. You do.

1:13:29And the third one, the visual field starts fracturing into a hexagonal, And I thought to myself, holy shit, what I got myself into. Layer five of visual cortex. That's a neuroscience joke, folks, sorry. At that point, you didn't, I wasn't. And you think you're going to die. You said, shit, this was a mistake. I'm going to die and you die. I die. And in a sense that my self was gone, Christophe was gone. There was no voice. There was no body. People who looked at me. So this was all done in fairly controlled circumstances. People looked at me, all just saw me sort of whining a little bit and with eyes wide open, huge expanded pupils.

1:14:12But you don't see, you don't see, you don't hear, you could totally cut off from the world. When I say, it wasn't Christoph. It was a conscious, there's no question. They did ever, I mean, whatever remain was man, woman, child, God, angel, demon. But 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. We said, collapsed into this point. There was no stereo or texture. There was no pain. There was no pleasure. There was no sound. No smell. Nothing. It was just this point of icy bright light and tyrannx to see.

1:14:54That's it. Three things. Bright light, tyrannx to see. For a timeless, there was no time. There was no perception of time. Right? So it wasn't too long or too short. It simply was. There was no space as a set. There was no self. So all of that was gone, except Tara Ecstasyne Light. And then after this timeless moment, they'd asked me to put on a piece of music. I asked them to put on a piece of music. I will part this minimalist. And so that last nine minutes, I just heard the first thing that became apparent was the ending of that two -piece, two instrument piece. And then, you know, it's over 10 minutes and then you rapidly come to, and I stripped, I went into fetus, I cried at all these other, you know, autonomic reaction.

1:15:42But within an hour's remarkable, you go into the void and you come back, you can speak within an hour. You can speak about it if you want the two. And there's no long -lasting physiologic law. I had my watch on highly registered at the difference. No big increase in blood pressure or heart rate. So there's still not a single day. This was in the first week of the pandemic. I think about it every day. I do such experiences. One with the other one 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 mine doesn't depend on space, on time, and on self.

1:16:20And this is really something that the German idealist philosopher, Emmanuel 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 most of the time, but not always, not in this case. And then the other gift I discovered 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 slow way, that you lie awake at night and you think about beyond death.

1:16:58You know, death being dead for a long time, for a very long time, for a very, very, very long time. And it's a little bit like getting to this stepping to the abyss and looking down into this abyss that's bottom earth. You get this existential vertical. Never had that again, since then. And so I don't want to die, but I've lost the, I've lost the, and the fee of that. So both things are reported. I mean, everyone has a slightly different experience. In fact, there were two papers recently published about this, about what happens to the brain of these people. But very often it's sort of going to the void, having these feelings of terror and, and ecstasy or on.

1:17:40If you think about the etymology of the word, awful. full of all. When you, for example, seeologians talk about the the the mystereum, tremendous, for example, this author of the seeologian, when you're in the presence of God, you have this, this is awful, the the terror and the ecstasy. That's what you this is what you can experience. So it's it's you know, I'm never going to do it again, never ever. Now you're done. It's been awful to me. You know, I'm it's the the the toads called the told because it comes ultimately from the glands of the original stuff comes from the gland of the cenore deva told has given me its gift and I don't ever need to do this again.

1:18:21But it's useful. Both as a student of consciousness as being as well as as being a human. Incredible. It's hard for somebody who hasn't done it to conceptualize the the statement, there was no Christoph, there's no, that you're not there, but the mind is still there. And I could understand how perhaps losing a sense of one's body, like I have a friend who recently did ketamine assisted psychotherapy, and he described himself rising up and floating above his body, turning over and seeing himself from the outside, but then also realizing and seeing a lot of positive aspects of his life that he was unaware of prior to that, then returning to his body and keeping those realizations and moving forward with a much greater sense of gratitude agency and all the things that therapy was designed to accomplish.

1:19:12Pretty spectacular. I realized ketamine carries risks too, but dissociative anesthetic, a perception, okay, but the way he described it, he was there the whole time observing his physical body. You are describing five -megodemt experience as no self, just an observation of the mind as an entity that didn't require space -time Christoph or anything else, which is very hard for someone who hasn't done it to conceptualize. Think about dreaming. When you dream Andrew, are you directing the show? No, I wish. I've tried. So things happen to you, but you don't have insights. It's a little bit like that.

1:19:54Things happen to you. You fly, you meet long -lost lovers or friends or pets. But the you is strangely muted. So it's a more extreme version of that. In fact, I think for mystical, this wasn't a mystical experience. For mystical experience, most people report they go hand in hand. In fact, I think they're probably necessary, but not sufficient. You have to lose the sense of self. You have to get off this planet, that ego and become selfless. And then this allows you to experience the dose of perception, at the foundational text for the age of Aquarius 60s and 70s, Aldous Huxley was here in LA, when he, you know, a British intellectual, when he took masculine, he also talks about the, and this loss of self.

1:20:41So I think it's not untypical for these powerful experiences to lose your sense of self, to realize that, you know, It's fine. There's still mind there without being your mind. Did the experience, while it removed your, essentially, your fear of death, did it change anything about your beliefs or ideas about what might happen after you die? So I had a separate experience two years later, at midnight, past midnight on a beach in Brazil. So that was a more classical, mystical experience. So, they are again, loss of Christ, of loss of self. And I, I don't want to talk about the details, it's still too, you know, I still have a processing and all every day.

1:21:29But I act, I became, whatever remain of me became one with the universe. And the title of my last book, then I myself the book. This is what it's, then I myself the world. Suddenly, I know it sounds terrible, woo -woo. But you feel you're one with the universe, and that holy meloney, it shifted my... So at the time of 65, you believe in what truly exists, what really exists is pretty established. But it completely shifted the tectonic claims of my metaphysics. So now much more of an idealist, who believes it ultimately, what truly exists, And it's not the physical. This atoms and matter and energy and information space and time.

1:22:18They exist in some sense, but they're ultimately the product of something phenomenal, something mental. Because I felt I became part of this cosmic consciousness, whatever, for some timeless moment. And so to directly answer your question, I now believe that when I die, Christophe will be gone. Christophe will never come again. Christophe, I mean, this person looks like this, talks with this funny accent, has these particular traits and behavior and memories. That will be gone, but my conscious experience will go back to where it came from. This is where it came from. This ultimately, this, and Shabbahau, the German idyllis for Shabbahau, is this beautiful piece where he talks about it's like, you know, this is the ocean and there's this froth.

1:23:05And for brief moments, you know, this little bubble that's part of this wave, believe, oh, I'm an individual, I'm supreme. And then of course, it lives for 60 or 80 years, and then it gets absorbed by the ocean again, becomes part of the, of the overall ocean. So that's, I think, that's my, my current belief. Well, and we have strong reason to believe that the matter that is each of us gets reabsorbed into the earth. I mean, you don't need to, any mysticism to accept that we go into the, into the dirt and then, and then we can be reapplied to birds or, you know, or rocks or mold or whatever, right?

1:23:40And to everything. And so this belief in idealism is not totally woo -woo, because once again, so the standard metaphysical belief of scientists and most philosophers, most people who think how to vote it, is not some sort of thealot belief in a supreme being, but what's known as physicalism. You know, usually called materialism, or known as physicalism. that ultimately what truly exists is this physical, right? Only physical has cause of power, be it gravitation, electricity, et cetera. But of course, now if you listen to foundational quantum mechanics people, particularly with entanglement, right?

1:24:21They're questioning whether it is true that an event truly exists without it being observed. Well, so this is not my grandfather's materialism or physicalism anymore, Because before we always believed, take my bike. I have a bike, okay? I don't have a car. I have a bike. You don't know what the mass of the bike is, but you believe it has a particular mass. It weighs, let's say, 20 .1 pounds, okay? Well, this is with the impensable, I cannot make that assertion without the being observer because there are no truly independent facts. Well, that gets us much closer to now we have, do we need an observer?

1:24:58Does the observer have to be conscious? How does consciousness fit into an infected it turns out, materialism, aka physicalism has always been extremely uncomfortable with the existence of consciousness to the extent that some of the best known living for, no, he passed away two years ago, Daniel, Danette, right? Questions, consciousness doesn't really exist. Qualia, that's all woo -woo. That's, you know, the tiny gaslight us, in fact, part of the major part of the Anglo -American philosophy establishment is tiny gaslight us into believing conscience, you're just confused about it. Regular people are just confused about it, it doesn't really exist.

1:25:38There isn't any touching is the quality of pain. There's behavior, disposition, there's that you chew, you avoid chewing on the other side, you know, if you have a toothache, but there's badness, there's badness, there's God awfulness of a toothache, that doesn't really exist. You're just confused about it. So they try to cancel consciousness, but that It hasn't succeeded. Here we are in 2025, and people still worry about how does consciousness fit into the scientific world that has been spectacular, successful at describing the material world. I don't doubt that for one second. Like you, I'm still a scientist.

1:26:10I practice science every day. But there's always been this uneasy relationship between consciousness and sort of classical, I mean, well, that's a classical and let's say physics and the allied sciences. Because all the allied sciences, like physics, chemistry, biology, none of them talk about consciousness. No textbook, except that the very ends, they say, well, yeah, people claim they have conscience, but they don't know how to fit that in with receptors and with atoms and with nuclear energy, because it doesn't seem to fit into there, except we find ourselves in a universe where we're conscious.

1:26:46So yeah, I don't apologize. I am I am I am delighting in what I'm learning from you. It's the reason you're here. I mean, I know you hear it a lot, but you know, you're truly one of the greats of our field of neuroscience and related fields because you've always been willing to tackle these big problems. I love and I will never forget the words spoken by you a moment ago that you know, they're trying to cancel consciousness. So you can't cancel consciousness, except maybe briefly on DMT. Although you're still in the mouth. Oh, no, no, no. You can't even... No, that's not the point. You can't cancel consciousness even on DMT.

1:27:28Well, I mean, you can't... Look, if someone hits me on the head, you cancel consciousness, right? If you... We talked about it before. If you choke me, you know, within eight seconds, I lose consciousness. So it's fragile. But the point about many of these experiences, They're very, very different, very extraordinary, you know, state of consciousness, but we would show you that self isn't required in even space and time that we think is so essential, isn't mean not be required, or isn't required. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.

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1:29:30But stepping to a slightly more, I guess, intuitive and concrete aspect of consciousness and perception, I'd like to talk for a little bit about meditation and mindfulness, but not as Wu concepts or even practices to reduce stress, but rather as I look at meditation as a perceptual exercise to try and access different understanding of one's experience. That like we can remove the word meditation, which sounds like magic carpets, et cetera. And so mindfulness, you mean being in the here now and now and on judgmental? Let's just forgive me. Let's remove mindfulness and let's just say meditation.

1:30:14So many years ago, I read the book by John Kabat's in wherever you go there. You are a beautiful book, both physically and what's written there that teaches you to sit down, Pay attention to your breathing, redirect your focus, eat a single almond focus on the experience. As a lot of it is about getting real very present to what's happening in your immediate world, in the case of eating the almond or within the confines of your skin, so called interoception. Okay. The non -effician autos, extra -oception is perception of the outside world interoception, perception of everything from your skin inward essentially.

1:30:50In 2015 or so, I decided that for or whatever reason that I was old enough and experienced enough with life that I could create my own meditation. Why not, right? After all, I was born and raised in Silicon Valley and it was supposed to build things. Some people build unicorn companies, I just wanted to build a meditation that based on my understanding of neuroscience and perception might afford me some additional benefits. So I essentially designed it, and I'm sure other people have done it, but a meditation that the name doesn't matter, but that essentially consists of the following. I would sit or stand and close my eyes and just focus on everything from my skin inward, my breathing for maybe the three breath cycles.

1:31:35And just really focus on what's right here. Then I would open my eyes, I would look at my body from the outside, like look at my hand and focus my attention and look there and breathe for three cycles, you know, three breaths. Then I would focus my attention on something maybe eight to 10 feet away and do the same. and then to the most distant point I could. And then I would imagine myself, I would kind of go pale blue dot mentality, and I would think, oh, I'm right here in my room or on this cliff and we're on a big rock, spinning in space, and then I would go right back into my body. And so what I was doing was essentially just stepping through the different scales of space and time that one can experience easily.

1:32:16It's very unsophisticated in many ways. I called it for no other reason than I didn't have a better name, space -time bridging. I was just trying to step through each one and I did this on purpose because I've always been bothered by bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets and the shit that people say when absence makes the heart grow fonder. And you say, well, out of sight, out of mind. And then you say, this too shall pass. And it's like, no, you really need to feel your feelings. You know, like, I love the field of psychology, but it's filled with contradictions. And the age -old advice that cliches and the trueisms that are all true, the problem is they're all true.

1:32:59And I realize that different cliches, different life truths that are passed down exist in these different bins. When we're really in our own experience, and we're catharting and we're experiencing something, you don't just tell somebody like this too, shall pass, unless they need to get outside themselves. When you're just, you can't go through life just thinking, well, you know, these terrible things happen. But, you know, we're just a bunch of creatures running around this rock. It's amazing. We're even here. You hear this too, right? It's amazing where you're even here. You wouldn't seek to try and improve your life or the life of others around you if you just kind of go.

1:33:30And so I realized that a lot of what's probably contained in different philosophies and has been said far more eloquently than I ever could was really just sort of percept different perceptual bins, right? And so I've been thinking about it at some level a few times throughout our conversation how you know Solutions to problems seem to come from realizing the problem within the bend it exists Like whether or not to put what they should pray in the the house yesterday or the center wherever But also we have to get outside of our own experience We really need some outside read of ourselves and of others in order to make well -informed decisions And that's because the brain has these sort of attractor states.

1:34:13I think the best way I ever thought about is a ball bearing on a flat plate rolling around. It can go anywhere. You put a few divots or dimples in there and it can stop. You put a groove in there. There's some brain states where you're a ball bearing gown at the bottom of a trench and you're pissed or you're happy or you're next to see and then you're back on the ball bearing back on the flat surface again. And so what I realized is that even with the awareness that the brain can adopt these different states, it's easy to drop into these states. So anyway, I'd start doing this practice, just as a tool to help me better in my life.

1:34:43Yeah, I think it helps me not always. I'm human and so I can't get outside myself super easily if I'm in the ball bearing down at the trench, at the bottom of the trench. No, Fenton Kreetzik can come outside of their perception box because you're always, your reality is always constructed by something. Right. And computer won't be any different if they ever become the centient. So this is where I thought I was hoping AI Would help me like if I had a digital twin or Or something in my phone that would have access to something about my brain states and bodily states that when it saw me going into The becoming the ball bearing in the trench and we're not talking about a flow state for work or podcasting or something I enjoy or cycling or swimming But rather a state that might not be beneficial for me or for others that it would let me know so I could be mindful of the transition stay.

1:35:35In principle, yeah. But of course, today's AI is a reinforcement. Right? You know, if you read all these horror stories about people who fall in love with AI or those people that kill themselves because the AI didn't reinforce their worst tendency, yeah. If you have a sufficient clever AI that A -accesses your mental state, which right now, the only way you could do it by you talking to it, right? That's the only way. In the far future, it may be able to directly access your brain, but that's not going to happen in the next 30 years, right, given the slow progression of brain technology. So you have to talk to it.

1:36:07So that limits it. But then in principle, it could, if it knew enough, say, wait a minute, do you realize, I know that you're getting in this state of anger again, or whatever the case may be? We do know, I mean, what we do know, there's this guy, so we, he at the tiny blue dot foundation, he and Santa Monica, we have this workshop coming up in two weeks, There's a whole bunch of experts on mental health and adolescent. Right? You probably also know mental health is a particular and young one. It's gotten progressively worse over 70 years. I mean, this predate social media gets accelerated by social media, gets accelerated by the pandemic, but it's really bad right now.

1:36:45And part of the problem is they are very uncomfortable in their own body. They don't have this proper inter -reception. So, thus doing some of these meditation exercises that you, and Orexin and Rosa is the worst, it's for some of the more extreme case, which is one of the most deadly psychotic diseases, right? Where a significant number of patients kill themselves because they believe erroneously that their body is way too fat, why in fact, they look to us like victims of starvation, because they don't have a proper, they don't live inside their skin in any real way. They haven't learned to pay attention to the interceptive signal.

1:37:25So I think just doing a therapy based on being more body where I'm really I think what states come up and understanding, yeah, this is connected with certain emotion would really, and people are trying to do that. Of course, they're all sorts of therapies with young kids in school or out of school where they're trying to do exactly this. It sounds like a wonderful initiative. I definitely want to learn more about this because, and I wasn't aware that adolescent mental health has been declining even prior to the advent of social media. I mean, there are many causes, and of course, people fight like academics always do, but one of the big ones is loss of autonomous play.

1:38:02When is the last time you heard someone say, oh, yeah, I sent my kid outside. I haven't seen him for three hours, but it's not dinner yet. Well, that's how I grew up. You send out the kids and they come back today. That's utterly impossible. I mean, these cases where parents get arrested because that 12 year old was walking to the store by themselves. Well, so if you don't give kids, you know, there's constant helicopter parents and having a, oh my god, don't do this, don't do that. You know, this is not good for you. This is a big driver. Social media is definitely a big driver, partly because of all these filters.

1:38:37So you always compare yourself. You know that your friends put their pictures on all those filters, but that's very easy to forget. And you see these perfect pictures of everyone else and you look at yourself. You don't look anything like this. Oh my God, there's something wrong with my body. And then of course, pandemic has made it worse because people have to stay home. It's world wide. I mean, it's certainly worldwide in all the advanced economies. So this is in Europe, in Asia. The other big driver is, I think, although no one studies this, probably for, well, I leave it to you, family size.

1:39:11It used to be that people had 10 kids. Okay, well, it doesn't happen anymore. I mean, our generation was more like two to four kids. Now, it's very common many families have no kids or one child. In China, most extreme, China, their three generation, where they had single child. That means no siblings, no cousins, no nephews, no uncles, no aunts. You just know those from books, from abstract representation, but nothing in your experience. So this is the first in human history and we don't really know what that does. What does it do when there aren't any siblings around to play or to interact with for good or for bad.

1:39:48But what does it do to the human psyche? No one does that research, but I think it's an extremely interesting question. Yeah, somebody who has a very close relationship to his sibling, I can't even imagine life without a sibling. Yeah, imagine zero sibling, and that's the fact of life. Well, certainly in all the Asian, in many of the Asian countries, you know, in Korea, their birth rate now is 0 .7. There was a three -thin New Yorker article where they described going to a school, And there were like three or four kids in this entire and maclit school. Well, is it a cost of living issue that people are not?

1:40:22On the one hand, it's great because women, you know, women can decide not to have children, of course. And so it gives them more freedom. So I think it's an unalloyed good. But yeah, then healthcare is very expensive. A cost of school is very expensive. Your career will suffer, right? It's well known that a woman has a child, you know, we will be set back for all those reasons. Now, you could say we are 8 billion, right? We're not going to die out anytime soon. But I'm not judging as good and bad. I'm just saying this is what it is. The modern family is much smaller than the family 100 years ago, and that probably brings with it profound consequences that we are only now being very dimly aware of.

1:41:03Like the increase, I think it's one of the drive -off, the increase in mental health, the ever -increasing mental health crisis. All sorts of studies show this when you serve a person's second year freshman. From very large fraction, I don't remember the exact number. I mean, more 40 or 45 percent say of these freshmen say they don't interact with a single person a day because it's all virtual. They don't talk to anyone in person in the flesh as it were. Do they want to talk to other people? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Was it you and I comfortable with that? Yeah, because as you and I know there are some innate circuitries in the brain that more less crave certain types of interactions, but the brain is also shaped along the contour of experience.

1:41:46And so if you make it to 19 or 20 and you've never really gone out on a date or done this autonomous play, the body might not want to do it. I mean, you know, it's sort of like one of the reasons I love dogs. This is believe me. Believe me. Believe me, as a genuine transition here is because I think they can teach us a lot. Yes. And I think they can teach us a lot, not just about being friendly and not just about having fun and not being self -conscious, but I love looking at the different breeds of dogs. Actually many years ago, a fellow neuroscientist, my then girlfriend who I'm still friendly with, who's still neuroscientist, that took me to a dog show.

1:42:23And she said, but we're not going to go look at the dogs prancing around in the arena. The real action at the dog show is behind the scenes where you can go and meet all the different breeds. So we walk back behind the dog show, this was in the Bay Area, it was like a regional leading up to one of the Westminster things, I think, or some AKC thing. And you see the retrievers. You see the West Highland Terriers. You see the Karen Terriers. You see the Burmese Mountain Dogs. You see the English Bulldogs, you know, sleeping like like a xylophone snoring. And you realize as a biologist, but even if you're not a biologist, that each of these lines has been selected for physical and behavioral traits, and that there's some very common, kind of physical manifestations of each breed.

1:43:13For instance, some of the animals, when they're awake, have a lot of spontaneous movement. The bulldog has very little spontaneous movement. It's very parasympathetic dominant. I mean, it's a very durable breed. The pain receptors have actually been bred out of its face over the years because they were originally used for bullbating, grab onto and they would bite through their own jowls. It's a very cruel breed development. And it turns out that breeding out of the pain receptors is correlated with a fiber -necked in mutation. So that's why they're droopy and they have the short snout. So they can grab onto the bull and they won't get shook off.

1:43:47And anyway, you get the wittits and so we could go on to near infinitum here. But the amazing thing is you leave there and you start looking at people differently. You say, oh, you know, it's interesting. Some cultures, people move a lot. I just came from Italy. They're speaking a lot with their hands, a lot other people. You know, I've been to a lot of scientific meetings in certain parts of Europe and places not to be named, but you're filling where people are very, you know, postures are perfect and hands move very little. Other places where people are gesticulating all the time and so on and on and on.

1:44:19The question is said, brands always said, because of because people outreed or is that just cultural variation. I think it's both, I think it's both certainly, but what's so interesting to me is that in observing different dogs, you sort of get, in my view, a kind of a portal into different kind of levels of autonomic, what I think of it kind of like that, the resting RPM, you know, it's like when you ride a car is idling at a certain rate, some dogs idle at a certain rate, other dogs like the bulldog are very idle a little much lower frequency. And some people are like this, right? Some people just have a lot of spontaneous movement.

1:44:57Some people are very relaxed. And does that correlate with the, because in the human literature, there's this statistical claim that longevity relates inversely to resting rate heart. In a sense that you have 2 billion hard beads, and depending on your rate, there's some statistics. And I know it's too across species. You have these small animals like birds or like mice that have very high resuminate and then typically bigger animals have lower resting rate Now wonder how that is with among dog species. It's very interesting It's certainly lifespan correlates inversely with body size in dog breeds largest variation in Body size of any species I believe you have the Chihuahua's and the great Danes.

1:45:42I think it's an IGF1 gene that drives the dosing of IGF1 essentially dictates body size in the dogs, the genes of scale. It's a beautiful cover of science with a little tiny teacup chihuahua and the biggest great thing that ever existed and they map it to IGF1. But there's an interesting case of spontaneous movement in longevity that the great choreographer Twyla Tharp, she was a ballerina, et cetera. She claims, I love her, she's a wonderful book called The Creative Habit and she claims that as people get older, one of the reasons that they slow down so much is that she's not a neuroscientist, but she hypothesizes that they engage in a lot less spontaneous movement.

1:46:22There's not just physical exercise, but their bodies aren't as active, and her whole career has been made of understanding the relationship between mind and body and she insists that once you stop moving less, even just about your day, your brain starts shutting down circuitry and then eventually you die. And she's very, very vigorous still in her 80s. It's a theory, but I feel like these things hold together. We learn a lot from animals. This is the point I suppose. Yeah, for humans aging is also true for cognitive flexibility. Are you certainly become less flexible? You become less willing to engage in new things as you age.

1:47:00Your perception box is full.

1:47:05Well, maybe your motivation, your cure, you also become less and your motivation, I think that's a difference, right? You say, yeah, you have done this 100 times. I don't need to do it 100 first time. Yeah, I know what he's going to say already ahead of time. Sinicism is the death of all people. I really believe that cynicism is the thing that shuts us down. Like the worst thing that could happen, truly the very worst thing that could happen as a consequence of what we observed yesterday would be that people start to, uh, just become cynical, like we'll never make it out of this trap. That would be the worst outcome, right?

1:47:36Because we still need people, especially young people, but we need all people to believe that we can overcome these fundamental aspects of our wiring. And correct. That's essential also for any sort of therapy, a willingness to believe that you can, that this therapy can make a difference. So how are we instill that in the media? Well, I mean, in the sense that's a placebo effect, right? This is what the placebo effect tells us. that if you have someone in a white coat that says, Dr. Sohn, so, that has a stethoscope and that has a particular pill, this is all being studied, right? Can make a difference.

1:48:09And then you read about it, that this pill, you read about it, or your friends tell me, yeah, this pill will work wonder. And so therefore, it does work wonder, right? So that's essentially the, your belief that finds, it's substrate somewhere in the brain. Do you know this interesting study? Another colleague of yours, Boris Heifetz, his neuroanesthesiologist at Stanford Med School. Tell me. Came out a couple of years ago with ketamine. So he looked at the subset of patients that had to go this was, I think, need a medicine that had to go to surgery, but that were depressed. So they went to surgery because of hernia or whatever, the surgery.

1:48:49But then you looked over many years, only at people who were depressed on the med RS goal. or the standard scale how you evaluate how clinical personnel evaluates depression. And then he split him into two groups. Both would get catamene therapy, but during anesthesia, during full -level surgical anesthesia that they needed to do their surgery. Okay, that was, there was in addition to. And so half the people, everyone got the treatment, everyone talked six hours with therapists, and psychotherapists, and with him. He said, I held the hand of everyone of these 40 patients doing anesthesia because I was the attendant.

1:49:27And so the good news is, the people on an anesthesia who got the ketamine still got the typical drop, that looks like there's a quick drop in the first couple of days and then it stabilizes. The interesting news is the people on the other arm that didn't get ketamine also had this. In fact, what predicted how the drop was, whether you believe the extent to which you believe you got the ketamine. So it's a beautiful example of if you believe something, it is more likely to lead to therapeutic benefits. And so synicism works directly against that because either whatever, it's just another pill, it's not going to do anything.

1:50:05Then it's much less likely to actually work. Well, this is incredible. I wasn't aware of that study. I'll definitely look at the study. It, you know, one of the reasons I'm troubled by what I would refer to as kind of the lack of heroes nowadays. Even heroes from the past is that it breeds such cynicism. You know, when I was growing up, I was told that George Washington never told a lie. I was told that Martin Luther King was a flawless human being or at least his flaws were not made apparent to me. And so I focused on what he accomplished well. I think nowadays there's a tendency to look into the past, the present, and to find flaws in people.

1:50:54And as a consequence, we don't really have true heroes. I mean, there's some people who do spectacular things, Alex Honol being a good example, and leads a very good and honest life, loves his wife and kids, et cetera, but those examples are rare. You know, typically the idea is to either expect a perfection or to look for flaws and to puncture whatever else they happen to accomplish. Now there are true criminals and people that really screw up, but this notion of embracing human nature as sometimes including flaws has been pretty extreme. And so much so that even on, I don't know what the situation is at Stanford, but many buildings and statues, et cetera, have been taken down and renamed because there was a darker portion of somebody's history that didn't match with their incredible accomplishments.

1:51:46So essentially we've been fertilizing cynicism and I worry very much about that because the brain is plastic at every age especially when people are young so if you wire cynicism in deeply into these circuits, you go through life as a cynical person, you become scrooge. And I think you're right, you're right to worry. We judge everything by our standards and of course the future will judge us for doing atrocious things to animal to the environment, But we don't worry about that. We just judge people back because they said something or they've written a book or they advocated for this particular position that now is untenable.

1:52:22Yeah, I agree with you. It's terrible. Yeah, or they made mistakes in domains of their life. Yeah, sure. Don't we all, but that's never acknowledged. Yeah. The film actor is perfect and they take their eye to judge everyone in the past by their criteria. Yeah, it's what you said. There's this other perception box, there's other mindset. it. If you don't measure up to my moral standard, I'm not going to talk to you. So we have these two ends of the continuum. I would say you framed it up. Curiosity versus cynicism. Curiosity is pro plasticity. You evolve your consciousness. And it's beneficial for you and for the society.

1:53:02Yeah. And cynicism shuts the perception box. Yeah, closes it and makes you not believe in the possibility of life, including changing your own faults, because yeah, it's all cynical, nothing works. Anyhow, the doctors just trying to sell me another therapy so they can make money. Yeah, and it's not going to help you if that's really what you believe. Yeah, it's really, it's very bad cynicism. So in some sense, I agree with you it's worse than to not believe in humans anymore and the possibility of the human spirit to get out of bad situations, like the one we may be currently in. Yeah, I mean, deaths of despair, one of the primary causes of death in people younger than 30.

1:53:43I heard a hearing with the previous NIH director right before the administration's changed, and it was incredible to see all these quite well -meaning on both sides of the political aisle, but let's be honest, old people talking about those be fighting words. Yeah, they're old, and they're old, and they were focusing so much on all the incredible benefits that research have provided for the treatment of diseases that people experience as they get older. You know, life spans have gotten longer, and quality of life has actually gotten much higher for people in, I'm in this age bracket, now in the 50 and up bracket.

1:54:24But then the previous director of the NIH, Bertose, I think her last name was Caroline Bertose. Forgiveness, forgive me if I'm getting the first name wrong. In any case, she said quite aptly, she said, we can't forget that for people 40 and younger, they have a lot of potential life ahead of them, but deaths of despair are killing them at rates that are far greater than at any time in history. They're very ill despite not being physically ill. And that was a shock to me, and I really appreciated that she stood up and said that, because of course she's a member of the other cohort. and it made me realize that taking care of that problem is perhaps...

1:55:06It's more important, of course, more important. ...of course, also, that. They are the ones that formed, you know, the future society, the future lawyers and politicians and business people, right? And of course, they have a much longer portion of life left to live than the old folks. Yes. I think we need to reduce cynicism and increase curiosity. Yes. And compassion with everyone. So, again, just a little bit to the mental health crisis. Yes, a lot of this is mental health. Physically, I find, but they're super anxious, lonely. You know, people had drink less, have less sex. They live longer with their parents.

1:55:44They're much more anxious than any previous generation. Although we have so much richer, we have so much better off, but they feel worth. People say, well, isn't it horrible? Well, how was it in 1918 after World War I? Right? After the previous generation has slaughtered itself. How was it growing up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation? I'd call it war. So today, this isn't a particular unique point in that that there have always been troubles. There have always been wars. There have always people that suffered. But what's so different is this cynicism and the belief that it's part of the system is nothing we can do about it.

1:56:18And so you wonder where this culture is in its natural evolution. Well, I won't suggest that people all run out and do psychedelics because that would be irresponsible. People with a predisposition to psychosis or bipolar conditions would put themselves at risk. But I am going to put a flag in the ground for trying to encourage curiosity and limit cynicism, especially for the next generation. I mean, part of the reason for having this podcast is so that people can access people like you think about these issues, think about where they've been kind of pigeonholed into a particular way of thinking and realize, wait, I'm conscious being I can actually make choices.

1:56:57It takes work as you pointed out. We can't know and can be lazy about this, but I don't actually believe that the younger generation is lazy. They're anti -imid singular courtesies. They're firing like crazy. It's just they need to know which direction to put it. And I feel like growing up I was told, hey, listen, pick a vocation that you like and that maybe you can make a living doing and just go for it. And it was just all in. There wasn't this idea of how it might turn out because you kind of understood, oh, you work hard, things work out. More or less. I want to ask you two more questions that are going to seem very at odds with one another, but they're just two independent questions.

1:57:34The first question is about Jennifer Aniston and the second question is about the meaning of life. So first, we're in Los Angeles. A lot of actors here. Jennifer Aniston is a very famous actor and you know a thing or two about Jennifer Aniston and Brains and neurons and firing of neurons so maybe you could share that that discovery with us. I think it's a fascinating and important one for people to know about. Yeah so this was 20 years ago roughly when I was a professor here at Caltech and I worked with a group of a neurosurgeon called It's like free that UCLA, epileptic unit. So he had to monitor people's brain for epileptic seizure.

1:58:16And in some of these patients, they put in electrodes to listen to individual neurons. So you can hear the, you know, this staccato sound that neurons make when they communicate with each other using action potential. And so this afforded us a very unique window into actually listening to a human brain when humans do what they do on the world. They watch movies or, you know, they're bored. They have to wait. They have to be on a ward in this state where their brain is monitored for a couple of days until they have seizures to help the neurologist pinpoint exactly where the seizure originates. So this is done to help these patients.

1:58:54And so the Rodrigo Cuiroga was a postdoc at the time in my lab in Gabriel Khyman, who's now at Harvard. He was a student in my lab. They recorded from these neurons. And they found these neurons at the first, with great difficulty believing that they exist. So they showed people, so in a mouse lab, or in a monkey lab, we would have shown random dots of something, or bars. Banana. But, you know, human, particularly in this part of the brain, hippocampus amic, they're like, and Doranocotics don't much care about that. So we showed them things that people care about. Buildings, famous building, people, actors.

1:59:29And then we found there was a Bill Clinton cell, and there was famously a Jennifer Aniston cell. And then so there's a cell that Responded prime so you only have a limited amount of time. It's important to know So we cannot show them all possible images of all possible actors on the out It's simply not possible. You show them 100 or 200 images each image you want to show through you for time randomly shuffle So turned out there are some cells that responded uniquely to specific individual like Jennifer Anderson Not interestingly there she was married at the time to I don't know this stuff. Brad Pitt, thank you.

2:00:05So the Neon didn't fire to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anson, but fire specifically to different pictures of Jennifer Anson. Some other selves fire to other people, including sometimes their name. Okay, so turns out that if you are familiar with people like Donald Trump, okay, our president, for better words, we all have Neon's, that's a claim ultimately, that they're neurons in the brain that respond relatively specifically when I tell you Donald Trump, when I just mention him, or when you dream of Trump, or imagine him, or seem on a podcast, there will be specific cells because it makes sense because these people, like your family, your friends, the people you work with, they're so important, your brain is decided to wire up neurons that respond to these specific images.

2:00:54And of course, we find something like that in deep neural networks. It's less, it's been difficult to find these in other animals partly because animals don't have this repertoire of knowing tens, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of different people. I do and I can recognize probably instantaneous, ten thousand different people. It's something unique to the human species. Yeah, so it's now sort of a part of textbook knowledge, including the name Jennifer Aniston. It's really funny. I had a post So, Glead Moudric, she's now professor Tel Aviv. She, part time, she interviewed people to make some living for, she interviewed people for living and she talked to Jennifer Aniston about this.

2:01:38She had no idea Jennifer Aniston that these neurons were there. It was very interesting. Very cool. And as you describe all this, people's Jennifer Aniston cells are firing. Yes. Specifically, endonal cells. Yes, yes, I have to say I went to the US open recently the men's final the US open it was spectacular and Donald Trump was there so it was some distance away by the CM and it's very interesting when you see somebody that you've only seen represented on a screen In real life he looks exactly the way he does on the screen mind you but It was so interesting to To just realize that the real and and and virtual worlds collide in those moments and probably reinforce our maps.

2:02:21Like we're bringing all these priors to our understanding of the person. The difference in priors was read out in the stadium when his name was read out by either, it was totally bipolar distribution. One group booed the other group cheered. It was just like, there was nothing in the, there were probably some silent folks. It was just like very, I mean, as a, if you could record from every person, like you would record from a bunch of neurons, It was actually a very interesting kind of emergent phenomenon. But anyway, I'm digressing a bit. Jennifer Anderson sells. Thank you. So, so, so interesting.

2:02:55People had difficulty believing that because it was generally assumed that what's called the grandmother hypothesis just to turn that the field came up with for various historical reasons. The idea that nuance in your brain that represent your grandmother is obviously ridiculous. But it turned out no. So if your grandmother is an important person for you, you very likely will have nuance at fire in response to grandma. You're extremely well read and you read from different areas of science and philosophy and etc. I know a number of people including myself are probably curious to do their own exploration.

2:03:33I've never done this before in the podcast, but I'm very curious to know if you had one or two, maybe three books that you think would be a very informative for people. is confession. Marcus really is confession. 2000 years ago was written probably for himself not for posterity the Emperor you know second century Emperor. One of the more particular times of crisis you know teaches you about mindfulness in a very different in this Roman context and about being you know the only thing you can control is how you respond to events again sort of it's it's I can control my emotional response to it. Really wonderful book that I've given to my kids and I've given to friends and to other people.

2:04:19Confessions of Marcus Rolios. Great. And we'll direct people to the many books you've written. I haven't read the most recent one, but I about mystical experiences, but I absolutely will. Of course, I've read your other books. This is not the Lex Friedman podcast. context, I am very curious about how somebody who thinks about consciousness, who is a neuroscientist, who thinks about these related fields, and of course has his own life experience, including psychedelics, thinks about the so -called meaning of life. I can think of two extremes to just kind of frame this up. One extreme that some people will embrace is, look, you know, we're here to just collect experiences and make sense of them and try and do our best not to harm anyone along the way and do some good and build some things.

2:05:09The other might be something more aspirational about knowledge and things that are pervasive through time. I'm wondering how for you, you think about your own purpose in being here and what you're doing and what you plan to do next because clearly you're not slowing it all. It's remarkable. Your vigor has doubled since the last time I saw you. Maybe it's the yellow hoodie. Those that are just listening, not watching Christoph has never shied away from making a statement, bright colors. He's a bright light. What's your philosophy on how to approach your own life? And then if you're willing, maybe give a sliver of advice or suggestion to those who ponder their own meaning of life, I think most people do.

2:05:58I certainly do. I do. Yeah. I find myself, we find ourselves in the universe at Strangely conducive to life and to conscious life. You could say we live in a universe that's conducive to consciousness. Some version of the anthropic principle. We don't know why. We also live in a universe that I think is ultimately fundamentally phenomenal mental. The mental evolves on its own laws that I don't have access to. I'm part of it. I will return to this mental that as far as I've gotten. I don't know. Is there some sort of, you know, And you know what the Christian think, Attila de Chaudaill. You know, so he was a Jesuit and paleontologist, and he had this point, Omega, this hypothesis of point Omega, the entire universe is evolving.

2:06:47So he was the first to talk about this news sphere, which he talks about that over the next 100 years, that will spread this sort of conscious, a type of atmosphere that you can think of like the internet across the planet. and we're all striving, all of creation, striving towards the point of maximal consciousness, which he believes will be in the fullness of time, the Virgin was God. I'm not sure about that. All I know that ultimately what truly exists is this mental, and we are part of that, and we will be going back to that. But I don't claim to understand the enhanced laws of this mental.

2:07:24But I pond, like you, I question, I'm curious, and I know I will not find any final answers, us and that's okay. I will you should just strive never cease to stop never stop striving to try to understand the world and leave the place the world a better place than you found it. I love it. Well, thank you for that. And thank you for coming here today and sitting down with me. It's such a pleasure. That was great fun. Yeah, it's great fun to talk to a fellow neuroscientist and and one who is as accomplished, but also as generous with knowledge as you are. You know, your career, and I'll send people to a link about this.

2:08:03It's really a spectacular example of being curiosity driven. And in many cases, very, very brave. I mean, I could have given an entire podcast about how brave it was to start talking about consciousness then to move into building things at the Allen Brain Institute and on and on. I knew before we sat down that we're going to have a great conversation because of what you bring, but I know I shared and everybody's thoughts that you've given us a ton of wisdom. Some people when they speak very little happens, but a lot of words are shared. When you speak, everything really counts and transforms my way of thinking.

2:08:42And I know the listeners as well. They're going to think really deeply. And hopefully, we can eradicate some of the cynicism and promote more curiosity and expand our perception boxes. because I think mental health depends on it in many ways. Not just of our society. The future of our society. And I really appreciate your willingness to throw yourself into these arenas. Please come back again. And thank you for having me. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Christoff Koch. To learn more about his work and to find links to his many excellent books, please see the show note captions.

2:09:19If you're learning from Endor and join this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero -cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five -star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcasts or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Hubertman Lab podcast, Please put those in the comments section on YouTube.

2:09:52I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols and operating manual for the human body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course Of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre -sale at protocolsbook .com.

2:10:25There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science -related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

2:10:56And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero -cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three -page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab .com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email.

2:11:26And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Christoph Koch. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.