25. Sam Harris: “Spirituality Is a Loaded Term.”

23:01Sam Harris:We'll see you next time. $250 on your first campaign and get a$250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. This NBA playoffs with FanDuel. You're not just watching the playoffs. You're a part of them. Steve's got the phone, opens FanDuel, and he's going for threes. Be a part of the action on FanDuel. All customers get a profit boost every NBA playoff game day. 21 plus and present in select states. Opt-in required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable profit boost tokens. Restrictions apply, including any token expiration and max wager amount. See full terms at fanduel.com slash sportsbook.

23:36Sam Harris:Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET. Finding ways to be financially savvy is a smart move, and knowing you could be saving money for the things you really want, like that dream home or new ride, is a great feeling. That's why the State Farm Personal Price Plan can help you save when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling, just another way to save with a personal price plan. Head to statefarm.com to get a quote. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

24:11Before we get back to my conversation with Sam, I want to share a new segment we're launching. We're going to start fielding questions from you. Yes, you, the listener, and I will answer them on this podcast. Ask me anything, questions about my research, beliefs, hobbies, or about something you heard on this podcast. and I might address it in a future episode. We want to hear from you, so don't hold back. Email us your questions at pima at freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at freakonomics.com. And to kick off this new segment, I'm going to answer a few questions we got about our golf episode featuring Greg the Shark Norman and golf analyst Mark Brody.

24:53If you haven't heard that episode, you can find it in our archive. Now, I made the case that golf would be a lot more fun for amateurs if we changed the scoring system. Rather than just adding up strokes like we do now, I would count scores differently. One question that someone asked is, what's a hole-in-one worth in your system? And my answer to that is, whatever you want it to be. I'd say like a million or seven million. A hole-in-one is a once-in-a-lifetime event. You should celebrate it. If you get one, my recommendation is walk off the course right there. Don't hit another shot and don't go back for a long time.

25:30Just savor the fact that you had a hole in one. And I will tell you, I once went bowling with Stephen Dubner, my friend and Freakonomics co-author, and I'm not a good bowler at all. I'm a pretty good golfer, but I'm a terrible bowler. And lightning struck. And I bowled 222, which is just absurd. I would never do it again in my life. and Dubny said, well, let's bowl another 10 frames. I'm like, are you kidding me? Not only am I not gonna bowl more now, I'm literally never gonna bowl for the rest of my life. I retired from bowling and I have not bowled again in maybe the decade since we did that.

26:08That's the answer to today's question and send me your question. I wanna be able to answer your question on this podcast in the future. Now back to Sam Harris.

26:24Reflecting back on the beginning of our conversation, where Sam tells me he's been able to change the minds of a handful of people, I've been trying to think if anyone has ever persuaded me to change my core beliefs about something. And I literally can't think of a single thing. I mean, people teach me stuff all the time. Stephen Dubner, he taught me how to tell stories. And my wife, Suzanne, has helped me unlearn all sorts of crazy beliefs about relationships that I've carried my whole life, but I can't think of a single case where anyone ever persuaded me to change my mind about anything. I tend to think of myself as being open-minded, but I'm starting to wonder, is that just self-delusion?

27:06So I've had a few experiences in my own life that really opened me up to the ideas that you are putting forth. The first was when I adopted my daughter, Amanda. So she was adopted from China, And one of the rules was that you had to spend two weeks in China with your daughter before you were allowed to leave the country and bring her home. And for reasons related to other children, my then wife couldn't come. And so I went and did it alone. And I have to say, I dreaded those two weeks like almost nothing I've ever dreaded in my life. I just steeled myself to the idea of survival, that I would somehow have to get through these two weeks alone in China with this baby I didn't know.

27:46and something completely unexpected happened, which is that I met her and we spent those two weeks together and I developed a love for her that I've never had before for any other human being on the planet. And it was for me a very spiritual experience. I was just completely committed to the moment. And every second of that time in China, my focus was on her. You know, I'm never quite sure I understand mindfulness very well. So I guess I'm reaching out to get a sense of whether the story I just told you feels consistent with it or whether you think I'm misinterpreting that experience.

28:25Sam Harris:Well, it's definitely consistent with the demonstrable fact that how you pay attention to experience changes the quality of experience, right? So that is the thing that gives us this feeling of profundity, meaning, awe, love. when you're talking about it in the context of a relationship. It's all gated by attention. And it's just a fact that everyone's attention is bound up in their thoughts moment by moment. They're having a conversation with themselves that is incessant. And that spell only gets broken for most people by what are recognized to be peak experiences. Enough changes in the environment or in one's expectations or beliefs that all of a sudden the reservoir of truly undistracted attention opens up and we feel a flow experience where there's no distance between you and your experience anymore.

29:29Sam Harris:and people tend to get that in athletics or sex or some aesthetic encounter with art. But generally speaking, we're spending a lot of time looking over our own shoulder, somehow abstracted away from experience in the present, not really connecting with our lives in the present. So an encounter with your daughter, like you just described, is one where the details of the present become so captivating that there's no possibility of attention wandering, and that becomes profound. I'm surprised to hear you describe flow and attention. Really, you're saying they're two sides of the same coin. So I've experienced flow myself in the context of both sports and academic pursuits.

30:17But my experiences with Amanda in China were nothing like the experiences I've had with I would call flow.

30:24Sam Harris:Having a concentrated mind is intrinsically pleasurable, and the more concentrated it gets, the more pleasurable it gets. And it can become just an ocean of bliss and very drug-like by paying sufficiently close attention to any arbitrary object. I mean, the breath is often one that's picked because it's always accessible and it's just a repeated sensory experience. The person who thinks that the only way to have a deep flow experience is to get up at four in the morning and grab the surfboard and get out there and catch some really good waves, they're mistaking the point of access. You can have that experience paying sufficient attention to anything.

31:04Sam Harris:But mindfulness is actually an independent principle from that. Ultimately, mindfulness is about just noticing how experience is without trying to change it. So you're not actually even trying to cultivate an exalted state of mind or change anything about your experience. You're just dropping back into the mode of merely witnessing what's appearing on its own. Meditation can mean one or two things. It can be a kind of concentration practice where you're trying to produce a specific state of mind, or it can be what's generally called an awareness practice where you're simply trying to be aware more and more clearly of what is arising on its own.

31:43Sam Harris:You pay closer and closer attention to anything, and all of a sudden, it becomes more and more like the best experiences you've had in life. I had a second experience, which I think relates to what you're talking about. My then-girlfriend and now-wife, Suzanne, decided that she was going to go to India for a month, and she has a lot of spiritual interests, and she was going to pursue those spiritual interests. I had zero interest in spirituality. I had zero interest in India. I had zero interest in being gone for a month. And I decided to go for all the wrong reasons, insecurity and lack of trust in her judgment to keep safe and fearing she wouldn't love me if I didn't go.

32:19And to make things worse, she said that she would only let me go if I didn't use any electronics on the trip. And for two weeks, I would wake up in the morning and I cannot think of a single thing ahead of me that holds any promise whatsoever. And then a little more than two weeks into it, we missed a train. And as a consequence of missing that train, we have tremendous inconvenience. And I remember that I wasn't bothered by it at all. And it just hit me that there was literally nothing that I could be doing that was better than waiting in the train station. And in a crazy way, it was completely liberating because I was completely content with nothing.

32:59and it sounds kind of corny, but for the next two weeks, I was probably happier and cheerier and smilier and more patient than I've probably ever been in my life. And this halo hung over me really for months. And still, if I work at it, I can bring myself into it. That was the experience for me that rattled me out of my cage of scientific rationality and brought me to waking up, to which I'm incredibly grateful to have discovered. Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective.

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34:59I'm going to hug you. I'm coming in for a hug.

35:09You talk in Waking Up about the very different roles of the right and the left sides of the brain. Could you briefly recount that discussion? Because it had a really profound impact on the way I thought about the world. I mean, there are some results in neuroscience that are stranger than the strangest things in physics.

35:30Sam Harris:And even neuroscientists find it just very difficult to integrate these facts into their perception of the human mind. But we've known for many decades now that the brain can be partitioned into islands of consciousness by a simple surgery. So when you have a bad case of epilepsy, one of the final remedies for that is to sever the white matter tracts that connect the left and right hemispheres so as to keep the seizure activity localized to one half of the brain. Those surgeries are still done. And when you tested people who'd had the surgery for the longest time, it seemed like they were unchanged, right, apart from the mitigation of their epilepsy.

36:11Sam Harris:And so people thought that, okay, maybe the white matter tracks connecting the two hemispheres weren't doing much of anything except holding the brain together. But when you tested them in a specific way, it revealed that actually when you disconnect the two hemispheres, you're partitioning the person, the subject, and essentially creating two independent conscious subjects. and this can be revealed if you present a stimulus to one half of the visual field so that, I mean, let's say the left half of the visual field. So you only see it with your left eye? It would be the left half of each eye, the left visual field in each eye.

36:50Sam Harris:That information gets sent to the right visual cortex and in the absence of an intact corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres, it stays there, it doesn't get sent over to the left hemisphere so that the left hemisphere hasn't seen what the right hemisphere has just seen. And in most people, the left hemisphere has more or less total control over language. The right hemisphere understands language and can be somewhat expressive, but for the most part, it's mute. And you can interrogate the hemispheres independently in these very artificial experiments. The language using left hemisphere, when asked, what did you just see?

37:30Sam Harris:it'll say one thing when something else was presented to the right hemisphere, but then you ask it, okay, well, with your left hand, can you pick up the object that you may or may not have seen? Well, the left hand is controlled by the right hemisphere, right? So the left hand will reach out and pick up the object. Let's say it's a key that was just shown to the right hemisphere. And then when the subjects ask, why did you just pick up a key? Again, now we're talking to the left hemisphere, you know, it'll just lie. The left hemisphere, when it's left to its own devices just makes up stories and seems to not suffer any internal sense of a need to be reality testing.

38:08Sam Harris:You just bullshit. And so the left hemisphere, without missing a beat, would say something like, oh, because I lost my keys last week. And we know that's not why it picked up the key, because we know we just flashed an image of a key to the right hemisphere, you know, which the the left hemisphere knows nothing about. So it's fascinating work and it leads very directly to the conclusion that consciousness can be literally cut in half with a knife and partitioned within a brain. And so you can have these independent perspectives on the world, but it does possibly open the door to a quasi Freudian sense that we may be somewhat partitioned already because even in an intact brain, there's no illusion that we could have perfect connectivity across the hemispheres.

38:54Sam Harris:I mean, there's just no way that the data sharing is perfect. So it's quite possible, even likely, that there can be points of view within your own brain that you, the conscious witness of what it's like to be you in this moment, aren't sharing, like a kind of Venn diagram that's constantly separating and coming together. It's a picture of the mind that is deeply foreign. The self isn't a unified thing. It's a kind of illusion.

39:26Have you thought at all about what we teach kids in school? I've begun to think we should be maybe teaching kids more life skills, say mindfulness, things they'll actually use when they grow up.

39:38Sam Harris:Yeah, this does to some degree relate to the degradation of philosophy. Somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, philosophy became almost entirely denuded of the traditional project of arriving at something like wisdom. It became a language game, largely. And as a matter of what you'd want to teach children so as to equip them to become adults, wisdom has to be on the menu. And wisdom can mean many things, but at least it means not suffering unnecessarily. Necessarily, right? I mean, just having some kind of internal guidance system that tracks the possibility of human flourishing and what prevents it in each moment.

40:25Sam Harris:You can teach mindfulness in school, and I would say five or six is the earliest you'd want to start. I mean, it's amazing to see a room full of six-year-olds sitting in silence for 15 minutes is like coming upon Stonehenge when you didn't know it existed. And then they'd report back some genuine insights into their own subjectivity. It's really quite amazing. And I'm sure a lot of people are looking to you to be some kind of a guru or through your app. There are thousands of people there looking to you for guidance. Do you find yourself slipping into guru mode? And if you do or you don't, would it be a bad thing?

41:08Sam Harris:No. Well, it's quite a relief, frankly, to have found this technology by which to teach because it disentangles me from all the other ways in which one might show up as a teacher. And I've wanted to avoid those ways. I didn't want that role in the world, really. I've had incredibly positive experiences with meditation teachers and gurus or Tibetan lamas, but I'm very clear about the extent of my experience and the limitations of it. I'm not ready to be anyone's guru, but I'm also not confused about many of the things that many people are confused about. So back to the Venn diagram, I'm not the best meditator in the world.

41:53Sam Harris:I haven't had the most experience, but I have an unusual amount of experience when you look at just the world itself. And likewise, I'm not the greatest neuroscientist in the world. I'm more of a moral philosopher or a philosopher of mind. but there are many books that, to be a professional philosopher, I should have read, which I haven't read yet or will never read. So I'm not the best at any one thing, but if you stack all of these things on top of each other, most scientists don't have my experience in philosophy, most philosophers don't have my experience in science, and most philosopher-scientists don't have my experience in meditation, but I'm under no illusions that I'm the final product of the ultimate fulfillment of this path.

42:41You will. Maybe one day you will. You're just not there yet.

42:44Sam Harris:Yes, then it's going to have to be a long life indeed, I think. Are you afraid of dying? I think about death a lot. I guess I'm afraid of the chaos and discomfort that can surround dying. I'm not afraid of the loss of experience. And it's strange that anyone would be. I mean, this is a point that obviously Lucretius made a couple thousand years ago, but death is just the absence of experience. And that's not something to be afraid of. But you can recognize that you're not actually afraid of it either because just think about your relationship to deep sleep, right? I mean, everyone gets into bed each night desperate to have the plug-pulled on experience.

43:29Sam Harris:And then you come back and you never really reflect on how strange it is to have been okay with the zeroing out of everything. And I think there is a lesson there for what it will be like to die. And it's not to say that a deep sleep is necessarily synonymous with a total zeroing out of experience. There's everything else around death, the grief and the bereavement and the concerns about whether you lived your life in a way that you regret in any way, you know, but you can prepare for it in many ways. And I think the best way to prepare for it is to live a more and more mindful and self-examined life that will create in its wake the least regrettable life.

44:16I didn't get a chance in our discussion to tell Sam that he is responsible for perhaps my weirdest hobby. Sam talked briefly in the conversation about how the left and right sides of our brains function almost independently, and how for most people, only the left side of the brain is able to express itself through language. In his book, Waking Up, he goes further, speculating on the possibility that the right side of our brain is more or less enslaved by the left side of our brain because we're so dependent on language. After reading that, I started to pay attention to how deeply language impacts the way I interact with the world, even when I'm alone.

44:54I use words constantly to describe everything I'm experiencing, talking to myself. So just for fun, I made it a hobby of mine to see whether for periods of time I could experience the world without using language. And it turned out with just a little practice, I got pretty good at stopping the constant banter in my head. I became able to, for instance, watch a car drive by me with its radio blaring. And without the word car or radio or blaring coming into my head, I could just know that that's what I saw. Now, I'm not sure whether that distinction will make any sense to you or not, but I have to say, I experience the world in a surprisingly different way when the words are absent.

45:38And it's strangely enjoyable. And without Sam Harris's influence, I would never admit that.

45:53People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network. This show is produced by Freakonomics Radio. Morgan Levy is our producer. And Dan DeZula is the engineer. We had help on this episode from Matt Hickey. All of the music you heard on the show was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at pima at freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

46:33I noticed you were ranked number 13 recently on a list of the most spiritually important people in the world.

46:39Sam Harris:I haven't seen that list. That's funny.

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