The New Science Of Intuition: Neuroscientist Joel Pearson On Leveraging The Unconscious Mind For Better Decisions & Actions

26:42People were saying, oh, it's good, you can trust it. Other people were saying, no, no, you can't trust it. It leads you with all these terrible biases. It'll lead you astray, you can't trust it. And once you understand what it is, the way the brain works, it's like, it's not black and white at all. It's gray and sometimes you can. And for some things you can trust it, but other things, not at all. And other times, not so much. Self-awareness is key. Yeah. M? mastery, right? So we mentioned learning before this association, you walk into the cafe, right? Your brain has to learn all these different cues in the cafe, all these things in the cafe predict certain things, predicts good or bad coffee in this example, right?

27:20So if you've never played chess before, you can't just sit down and be an intuitive chess player. It doesn't work like that. You have, your brain has to build these associations. So you need a certain level of experience or mastery with intuition, whatever the thing is, right? So how much, how many hours, it depends on the thing. It depends how emotional it is. So with a cafe, the coffee example, you're gonna need to go a lot of cafes to learn that, because it's not highly stressful. When the learning is more emotional, and there's a whole sort of way to unpack that. Like so PTSD would be an example where you have very strong learning from a single instance.

27:56That would be the other end sort of extreme. So there's no simple answer of how much learning you need to trust your intuition, but you need a certain amount. It's not like 10 ,000 hours either, right? That doesn't really hold up in neuroscience. Learning is not sort of - Poor Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah, no. It's not linear like that. It's very non-linear, right? So sometimes you only need a tiny bit of learning. Other times you need a huge amount. But yeah, you need to have learning. So in essence, the brain is tapping into this massive data set and doing all this processing in the background that you're unaware of that's helping you to develop an intuitive sense of what's right for you or what decision needs to be made based upon copious amounts of past experience.

28:45And with that, the intuition becomes more trustworthy. But the fallible human can be counted on to then think if they have mastery in this area and their intuition is reliable, that they must have reliable intuition in all areas of life or in this other area in which they lack mastery. And that's where we get into trouble. That's where we get into trouble. And that's really the E at the end of smile for environment, but we can chat about it now. So, I mean, I talk about Steve Jobs as one example of this, where he wrote and spoke about intuition. He went to India. He was a fan of it and he used it in Apple, apparently.

29:25And he was really good at it, right? He made some beautiful products. Then when it came to his home life, and his health decisions towards the end of his life, everyone around him sort of reports that he made some really poor decisions. He put off the treatment for his cancer until it was basically too late. And that's the sort of way to think about that. So, when you remember something you listen to in your car, you get a flashback of the car, right? And that's because the environment, when you learn something gets imprinted on that learning, right? So, if you learn something at work in the office, right?

29:59it's not just a thing you're learning, it's also imprinted in the environment, the context, right? So that's why if you're studying in your bedroom at home for an exam or something, and then when you go to the exam, go to school to take the exam, that changing context makes it much harder to remember thing. And it's all these memory hacks, like chewing gum or fragrance and things to try and make the environments more similar. So the mastery and the learning behind intuition is context specific to some degree. So it won't transfer that well. So we need to be careful with that as well. And then the I is for impulse.

30:35Impulses and addiction. And addiction, which we already kind of covered. The interesting kind of ripple here, and to my point about how these all kind of overlap and you need all of them, when you lack self-awareness, you then don't really appreciate when you're being driven by an impulse or an addiction. Yeah, you wouldn't feel it, you're not aware of it. You think you're acting on your intuition or in your best interest and unaware of how you're captured because you don't have the self-awareness. Yeah, they interlock like that. But I think it's as a blanket rule, like I'll sometimes fall for this thing like, I better check my email just in case, or like I've got a feeling that an important email, And I'm like, maybe I'm tapping into something that's, and I'm like, no, no, no, settle down.

31:28It's the, I'm addicted to checking my email. So it's not my intuition tapping into something that's telling me something important is happening. It's not, put it aside, relax. I'm glad to hear that it's still a struggle for you. I mean, with all this work, right? Are you a master of your own intuition? I don't know if I'm a master. The context thing I find hard, especially when I'm traveling or if I go for a run or in very different environments, then there are lots of subtle things when you're traveling that you have to be aware of, whether it's gestures and habits or driving or going for a run in a forest and navigation is very different because the sun's rising and setting in a different, more to the north or the south or things like that.

32:14So I find the context one hard to remember to just be very careful with trusting my intuition in very different context. I've gotten pretty good at realizing when I'm emotional or stressed and just to try and ignore the emotional things. If I'm anxious about doing this thing, it is anxiety, right? If I'm anxious about, I don't have anxiety for flying, but that's one thing that comes up a lot. People talk about their anxiety to get on the plane is intuition about a plane's gonna crash. And it's not, right? It's something else. I mean, that gets into the next letter, the L, low probability. Another thing that humans are really bad at is having a rational relationship with probability.

32:57Yeah, which is terrible. For that very example that you gave. And the other example you always talk about is sharks. The shark attack rule, yeah. Like I'm not gonna go in the ocean because of sharks. Like it doesn't, our relationship with probabilities and risk and behavior is highly irrational in so many ways. And you can tell people that. And then as soon as they imagine the shark, they're like, no, no, no. Like, well, it's safer to swim. Unless you have a fantasia. Exactly, yeah. If you can't conjure the mental image of the shark, then you're gonna have a different relationship with risk. Yeah, which I guess I should define that for people, which is the lack of mental imagery or visual mental imagery, the capacity to visualize, right?

33:41So do you have imagery, Rich? I do, yeah, I'm highly visual. Okay, hyper. The way that I process and learn. So if you think about what an apple looks like, Like what do you see? Yeah, I can see it clearly. For example, if I'm trying to recall something I learned in a book, my memory or my brain will go to what it looked like on the page. Like I can see the text on the page. Well, photographically you can reread it kind of thing. Well, no, but I map to that. Oh, I see, yeah. And in another way, if I'm listening to an audio book or a podcast, it's much more difficult for me to retain the information.

34:20But if I were to re-listen to a podcast that I listened to a month ago, just randomly pick the middle of the pot, I will immediately flash to like where I was when I heard that. So I see, I was on this trail or I was driving at this intersection. That's relevant to intuition, this idea that memory imprints the location where you are when you make that memory or learn something new. So that's interesting and that can tie into the next topic. So it turns out that if you imagine the thing, So imagining things is like a virtual reality simulation. In other words, you're simulating the shark and maybe the Jaws music.

34:57And you're kind of tricking other parts of your brain into thinking it's real. And so you start really fearing it. And it turns out that when you imagine something, if you have imagery, that's much stronger than just thinking in words or reading the words. It somehow fires the emotional system of the brain much more by having that image. Which makes it no surprise that people with aphantasia don't suffer PTSD to the extent that someone without it would because they don't have that recurring mental image that is triggering that emotional state. Yeah, they can still have sort of a diagnosis of PTSD, but it seems to be rarer and the symptoms are very different.

35:38So we've run experiments where people come into the lab and they watch sort of this quite, a real footage of a car crash. and then they sort of sit and they have to report how many times they think about it, why they're still in the lab. Then they go home and have like a digital diary thing that pops up and ask them questions. We track over five or six days how often they have flashbacks of the film. And people with aphantasia just have significantly less. It just pops up less. And when it does pop up, it's not visual. It takes on some other format. Right, so it has kind of a different valence to it.

36:13Yeah. I suppose. The last letter in the acronym is E for environment. We kind of talked about that. It's really just about context, right? Yeah. And this is kind of important, I think, during COVID as well, where people went from the office to all of a sudden working at home, they changed their context like that. And the learnings they had for work at work in terms of intuition wouldn't apply that well at home. So when you change context like that, you just need to be careful and sort of carefully think through what you're gonna do and probably rely on intuition a little less. What I like about this acronym is it really helps make sense of this mystical, magical, mysterious thing.

36:54But it's also very actionable. I mean, basically your message is like, you can train this, like you can improve, like here's some ways to think about it and to deploy your intuition or reserve using your intuition in various contexts with like strategies for making it better. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the main idea behind the book is to help people, right? How can you practically help people make better decisions, sort of bring this rational decision-making with the emotion together to improve their lives, right? And intuition, as we've said, is such a fascinating topic and it has sort of a range of different definitions and way people think about it.

37:38And so it's the first sort of, my first attempt at trying to bring all that together. Wow people with some of the science, but also, yeah, something that's practical. They can sort of use it almost like a field guide, right, carry it around. And I talk about having a daily practice. I think it's a good idea to practice, you know, if you think you don't have intuition or you can't use it, I think you probably can, but you need to start practicing, right, with very small decisions and try and feel that internal interoceptive feeling, track how good your decisions are. Like, did the feeling lead you astray or did it lead you in the right direction?

38:10And track that over time. So when it comes to these larger decisions, you're sort of well rehearsed, you know how it feels, you're used to going through this five rule checklist kind of thing. You should create an app for this. That would be good. I've thought about it, yeah. It's on the list. Yeah, how can you really track it over time to extract from your own behavior and decision-making if you're moving in the right direction or not? Yeah, I think that's a good idea, yeah. I presume that some people are just born with more intuition or more reliable intuition than others. Like, how do you think about that?

38:46There seems to be, yeah. There seems to be large individual differences. So whether we test them in the lab with our methods or we give someone a questionnaire, some people will say, yeah, I basically use intuition for all my decisions. Other people will like, no, no, I make everything carefully, logically, and rationally. And that bears out in our lab test as well. why that is, we don't fully know yet. I think it probably has something to do with this interoception or sensitivity in terms of interoception that the body is probably still tapping in to the unconscious, but people aren't even noticing.

39:20So, but we need, we're doing more research on that now. And so, yeah, we need to, I mean, intuition is, it's a young science when I think about it, at least in the modern day with modern brain scanning and the sort of modern era, it's a young science. And so it's just beginning. and we really need to build it out. Now I think we have ways of measuring it, understanding it. We can start doing large scale studies. We have a good definition now. So hopefully it'll spread. Science can be slow, but hopefully this will kick things off. Is there any sense that there might be a genetic piece to this? I don't know.

39:54There could be, yeah. There might be. And what about back to the gut brain access? Like what do we know or not know about the microbiome and how this might be impacting intuition. Well, we know that the microbiome is linked to mental health and it is linked to cognition to some degree. And it's a bi-directional relationship. I think it seems to be, yeah, it seems to be. And that's a fascinating field that is also not new, but again, there's a new sort of era of this coming to bear now. Whether that plays a role in intuition, It's hard to know at this moment. I think it probably influences decision-making generally just because the neurotransmitters involved that are made in the gut will influence decision-making.

40:42But yeah, we don't know yet.

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44:17you're an interesting character uh i mean you studied architecture you studied art you studied filmmaking all of this before becoming a neuroscientist and yeah i'm curious around your kind of arc and path to neuroscience to neuroscience and and how all of those experiences is kind of inform this unique approach to science that you have that you call agile science. Yeah. How long have we got? Yeah, let's - We got plenty of time. Let's get comfortable. So, I mean, it really started in high school, right? I was kind of either in the art room, painting, drawing, or sculpting, or I was in one of the science labs doing science.

44:55And that was kind of my two passions. And it felt at the time, it felt like being pulled in kind of opposite directions or at least different directions. And then this kind of thing continued a university. I started off, my university track record is kind of all over the place, but I started off doing science, got a bit bored, completely changed track to fine arts. I was doing painting, drawing, and then majored in digital film and was gonna be a filmmaker. And at that point I started reading about the nature of the universe. What is consciousness? What is the nature of reality? And I was like, this just drew me in.

45:29How do I study this? At the time, consciousness wasn't part of neuroscience or psychology. It was still a bit taboo. And I was like, well, I could try and study quantum mechanics or this kind of physics, this sort of that approach, but it just didn't sit well with me. It felt like everything was so subjective that you have to study the experience, so psychology and neuroscience. So before I graduated from the fine arts degree, I actually changed back to science, then finished the undergraduate, did a PhD in Sydney, Australia, then came over to the US and worked at Vanderbilt University for a few years there.

46:09It wasn't until a bit later, I realized the thing that kept pulling me in these two directions was sort of discovery, is the best way I can describe it. Whether it was how, you know, filming certain things and adding a soundtrack to it, making a short film sort of created this emotion almost from nowhere, just in me and anyone watching it, it was like a discovery kind of like stumbling on something. And in the same way, figuring out how the brain works, how the mind works, how decision-making, you know, intuition works was also like discovery. And the best way I can describe that is like being an explorer, you know, on one of those old wooden boats and bumping into some landmass somewhere and saying, you know, what is this?

46:46Wow, we've just discovered a new territory. And that's what it sort of feels like being explorer to me. So, the thread through both those is discovery. And that's what was like, I don't know, like a drug or something. It just pulled me into this like, wow. And that's, I think. And do you think, and also like maybe the architecture piece providing the structure or the lattice work like on which to hang all of these ideas and make sense of them. But do you think all of those things kind of conspired to make you this individual who could approach this terrain, this subject matter from a first principles perspective?

47:22I think so, yeah. I mean, the way I do science, the way I come up with ideas, it is different to most of my colleagues and most people I talk to. So, I became aware of that. I seem fairly good at mixing different ideas, maybe that you collect in a creative manner. And then this agile thing you mentioned before started sort of seeing this pattern. And it's a bit, the agile science idea is a bit like sort of the way people do startups, right? You have this agile startup idea, you want to test something straight away. And I started doing that in science fairly early on. The kind of science we were doing in cognitive neuroscience wasn't the kind of thing you had to sort of test participants for a year before you knew what was going on.

48:06If you're studying visual perception or mental imagery, the kind of thing I was doing, sometimes you could design an experiment and test it on one person or myself. And that's like super agile, right? So I can design something, program it up, test it on myself and maybe it worked, didn't work the first go, I'd iterate it, try again, try again. So, you could iterate in a couple of days sometimes rather than getting a big grant or writing a proposal, getting a grant, getting a giant population of people and running some kind of randomized controlled trial that is very elaborate and time-consuming.

48:38Yeah, I mean, you would do that afterwards. But the idea was to de-risk it, to figure out like the chances of you designing the perfect experiment first go are pretty low, especially if this is a whole new thing, an unknown area. and so you can do all that or you can read and study for six months a year and think you've designed the perfect experiment but you probably won't so you mostly need to iterate a couple of times anyway so the idea is to iterate through a pilot experiment with low cost, quickly as possible on a small scale before you upscale so you can sort of go through this sort of this sort of pilot experiment loop as quickly as possible to de-risk the experiment before you invest a lot of time and money and effort.

49:21So that's kind of the approach I have to science. And that's the spirit in which your lab kind of operates, right? It is on some level sort of a startup, like it's a unique kind of hybrid organization that defies one's expectations around what a lab would look like and how it would function. Like it's sort of an agency, it's sort of a consultancy, it's also a lab, but it's like in an office space that would look like a startup company, like a tech startup. So that's the other side of it, yeah. So before, a year or two before COVID, we got some money for university to set up this new lab and try and work with companies and startups, small to large, massive companies.

50:00And that was the idea of trying to get this science, the psychology and neuroscience we're doing out from the university, from behind these closed doors into the hands of people that could use it. And that was assessing products and services, but it was also building workshops for companies, how to deal with uncertainty in this modern age was sort of a theme and we ran some workshops on that, for example. So it was just trying to put all this stuff to good with people rather than, a lot of what, I mean, science is fantastic and I love it, but a lot of what academics will do, not all, but a lot is apply for a grant, get a grant, write papers, apply for another grant, write papers.

50:36And some of those papers will often just get read by a hundred other academics and that's kind of rinse, repeat, repeat, which is fine, but it's kind of a closed loop system, right? And you end up, the research you do can often be dictated by the people who are reviewing the grants rather than taking a step back and saying, what does humanity need? What do people need? Which is a kind of a different approach which doesn't always fit with the funding models. Other than the Aphantasia piece, a field in which you're an expert, this is kind of where your world and Ed Catmull's world overlap, right?

51:11Like how do you take these ideas and apply them in the workplace to improve the happiness quotient of a workplace or the productivity and the creativity of a shared mission? Yeah, so I met Ed many years ago at a conference on Aphantasia. And so he has Aphantasia and we started, we hung out a lot and talked and then he shared some data from Pixar and we played around with some things he was looking at there and we've done a few events together and we just kept in contact. So yeah, really interesting guy. He's this sort of amazing mix of mathematical computer versus art versus business. And he sort of learned all this business stuff on the fly.

51:50And as you know, yeah. He's amazing. You're a filmmaker. I was one, so let's put it that way. You have experience in filmmaking, you've studied filmmaking. We had, yesterday we had Tom Shadiac in here, the comedy director of all the Jim Carrey movies who kind of went on this personal journey where he walked away from Hollywood to find greater meaning and purpose in his life. And he ended up making this, he like gave away all his possessions, like it's an incredible story. And he made this documentary called I Am that kind of chronicles his search for happiness basically. And in that he kind of travels around the world and he talks to philosophers and mystics and academics.

52:32And he's trying to understand meaning, purpose, happiness. And there's one sequence in the movie where he's with some scientists of some sort or another, and they're running this test where they're showing him like images that are either fear inducing or neutral. So a picture of a snake that looks like it's poised to attack or a coffee mug. And they have some kind of EKG situation where they're monitoring the heart. And according to these people, these scientists, the heart is actually responding to the image before the visual cortex has enough time to respond to it. Before. Yeah, so basically the point being like, the heart is more central to our kind of emotional experience of life or our relationship to consciousness than previously thought.

53:34And I don't know if this is, you know, legit science or not, but I thought I would throw it out at you. Like just the idea of the bi-directional nature of the somatic with, you know, the neurological. Yeah, I'm not aware of that, those studies or that study, but there's been a lot of recent studies now looking at perception, like visual perception, but also time perception and linking the way the heart beats with the brain and our capacities. And it does seem to change based, not just like when your heart's pumping faster, but as the heart squeezes versus relaxing, that from there to there will change cognition on quite that sort of micro level, just over half a second or so.

54:19So there is these, and also with breathing, so the body and the brain are really connected, right? And we often think about the two as two separate things, like this dualism idea that we are something else and our body and brain are something else, but it's all linked together, right? It's all, yeah, you know, when you do breathing and you relax, your body's relaxing, your brain relaxes and it changes and vice versa when you're getting excited and pumped up, it's all changing together. So yeah, the heart is intimately linked to how we think and how we feel. And how does that inform how you think about the heart problem of consciousness?

54:54Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating thing, right? So it feels like we are something and it's separate to our body, right? That in other words, you could get rid of my body and I'd still be me. But it doesn't seem, all the evidence suggests that's not the case, that we are our brain or we are what our brain does. It would be another way to say that. So being Joel is just what it feels like to have a brain like mine that has a history like my brain does. And so then the question I think becomes, so why? Why does it feel like anything to have a brain like mine or a brain like yours? Does it feel like something to have a circuit like in a phone or in a computer?

55:36We don't know. So why, is there something special about the wetware, the biology? Is it about the complexity, the information that's held in the brain is one theory. And we don't know yet. We don't have the answer. And this is, we can go into AI with this because the question is, are any of the AI systems conscious? and we have no evidence of that. But the elephant in the room is we don't have a test for consciousness really. So how would we know, right? How do I know you're conscious? I take your word for it because you behave like you're conscious and I'm conscious, so I presume you are. So how do I know that one of the AI systems platforms is conscious or not?

56:14We don't, right? And if the AI platform is so sophisticated that it can mimic consciousness to such a staggering degree that no human could tell the difference, does it even matter in terms of how a human would interface with such an advanced intelligence? Yeah, I mean, that's a question, isn't it? You could say it doesn't matter, but I think everyone would say it does matter ethically, right? So as soon as an AI system is conscious and sentient, then what's our response? We're responsible for that, right? But if it's such a close approximation of that, that we would treat it as such anyway. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't know if there's gonna be some like step function or some perfect threshold where it's like not conscious, conscious, maybe it's just a smooth thing.

57:03And so then it's arbitrary when you'd say it's conscious. In a sort of panpsychic way. Yeah, so panpsychic, that's sort of come back into fashion recently, this idea that everything's conscious to a certain degree, the book, the microphone, the glass, they're only slightly conscious. and as you have more or larger, more complex things like the internet, humans, then there's more consciousness. What does your intuition tell you about the veracity of that theory? And I say that to somebody who has self-awareness and a level of mastery in the field in which I'm inquiring. I don't know, but I'm gonna be a bit stressed now.

57:43Rich, you're making me feel stressed. We're in the right environment. It's context specific. It's hard because, I don't have experience of the different things, right? So there's this, most people have a comfortable with this intuition that, you know, you go humans, monkeys, I don't know, cows and dogs and da-da-da-da, mice, and then, I don't know, a little slug or something. But at some point, the switch has to go off and at what point does it go on? Yeah, they say like dog, mouse, and people have this, whenever I ask this to students in my lectures, it's come somewhere around there, right? So there's this intuition about that, But I think that's mostly driven by behavior.

58:21And driven by socialization and cognitive bias about what a mammal is capable of and what their interior experience is, which we have no idea. Yeah, and we're really bad at, so we do something called anthropomorphize, and this is a big deal with AI, right? And there's these classic old experiments where you'll have like a square and a triangle, and the square will, if you're watching this video, will bang into the triangle, and the triangle will like go away, and then it'll like come up, and people go, you watch that for like 10 seconds. You're like, the square is a bully and it's hurting the triangle.

58:52And there's just two outlines and it's just the way they move. You start layering on these human characteristics, right? So when it comes to anything more like a mouse or AI or something, where we're kind of helpless to not think there's something there, right? There's something behind it. If we feel that already with two little outlines, right? You give something a human sounding voice and it sounds intelligent. We're a sucker ready to think it's somewhat sentient, or it's conscious or it's intelligent. So how are you thinking about artificial intelligence right now? What should we be paying attention to and worry about?

59:28Yeah, so this is my next big thing. So I'm working on a book on this topic, not on the AI itself, but on the human side of the equation. So I don't think there's anywhere near enough attention on this. I think we should be focusing our attention on how to prepare humanity for this because the next decade is gonna be crazy, right? Almost everything's gonna change, not everything, but it's changing day to day and week to week with such an accelerated pace, it's insane. Yeah, I mean, schools, universities, jobs, companies, economies, you name it, all those structures are gonna radically change. And the big elephant in the room is that that creates a lot of uncertainty and uncertainty is like a fear stimulus.

1:00:07It creates people get very anxious because of uncertainty. So that simple idea, how can we prepare like everyone to deal with uncertainty better? Yeah. First of all, why is uncertainty so disconcerting for the human animal? Yeah, so it's humans, primates, most animals seem to find uncertainty, there's experiments on this, really uncomfortable. And it's like showing someone, you know, a picture of a snake or something, like, you can see the fear, centers the brain respond. And it seems to be built in through evolution, right? You could say it's, we talked about, I mentioned it before in terms of like a hardwired instinct.

1:00:42and it seems we think it's there because of evolutionary reasons right at one time when the world was a simpler place staying away from uncertainty kept us alive yeah now when you know the level of uncertainty is ratcheting up almost day by day it becomes maladaptive right so we need to find ways of enjoying uncertainty being comfortable thriving with it and there are examples of horror films, scary movies, and roller coasters, or fancy restaurants where people don't know what food they're gonna get, and people will pay good money for those experience. And so there's some context where people like uncertainty when there's a bit more control around it.

1:01:23And so I think there's a reframing piece around that that we can try and hard to reframe it. But those are contained contexts in which we know everything's gonna be fine. So how uncertain are they really? like it's a controlled uncertainty. So some of the work we've done trying to help people with uncertainty, like the first step is to understand what it is and that it's your brain responding that way. So primate brains respond to uncertainty and it can, in some people more than others, but in most people it will induce some form of anxiety and discomfort, right? And so if you're feeling that, you don't know whether your job's safe or not or how everything's gonna change with AI.

1:02:00It's not, don't blame yourself. Don't think I'm an idiot. I'm feeling this way because I'm worthless. It's just because of the biology of your brain. It's just the way it's wired up. So that's kind of this first step to try and understand something around that and then try and work with that. I think we can try and reframe it as an uncertainty wave. We could try and surf and there is positivity around that. And then trying to do the more standard things to bring down the anxiety, bring down your physiology, the breathing things, whatever the things in the toolkit you have, exercise, sauna, all the kind of the usual characters that people have heard of.

1:02:43But yeah, it's something we're working on because I think we need to have something to deliver and scale up for people to do, individuals at home and companies. So in the context of AI, obviously we're kind of ushering in this unprecedented moment or era of uncertainty. but with respect to the artificial intelligence itself, what is your intuition around what we should be paying attention to, to that technology? And where is some of our kind of attention misguided? Like, are we thinking about this correctly? Is there a lens that you have unique because of who you are and the work that you do that could help us kind of better understand how it could benefit our lives and the areas in which it poses a potential threat.

1:03:33Yeah, so it's happening, it's not gonna stop, right? So the nations are competing and companies are competing and it's just like this competition all the way down kind of thing. So it's coming, it's coming fast. There's no, remember that letter about how, yeah, it was just a performance art. Yeah, so it's coming and it's gonna bring some amazing things, right? Just like the internet and social media has done, but there's gonna be dark sides to this as well. And like we saw with social media, right? And it's really hit young people really hard, right? We've seen the data more recently around that.

1:04:07So, I'm trying to come in to sort of ring the alarm bells around that, that we don't want to repeat the sort of things we've seen with Facebook and other social media platforms and realize that once it's too late. Because I think once AI comes into multiple fields, there's going to be lots of things like that. In other words, it's going to be a thousand or some high number, many times worse than what what we've seen with social media. So for a quick example. So with like deep fakes and synthetic media, one of the things that we don't understand a lot about, but we do know that once you see something that is not real.

1:04:42So if I go and watch a bunch of videos of you saying really horrible and hurtful things, or hurting, torturing an animal or something, right? And then someone says, oh no, that's fake. Don't worry about it, Joel. That stays with me. It doesn't matter. Just telling me it's fake doesn't undo it. It's called the continued influence effect. and it stays with someone. It's quite hard to undo that. You've got to put a lot of effort in. I basically have to sort of reestablish a whole story in my head about who you are. It helps if you tell me it's fake before I watch it, that also helps. I was gonna ask that.

1:05:12Does that make a difference? That does help. Yeah, and so we know a lot about this with fake news and text and written things, but there's not many studies on this with video. They're happening now. So that's one thing. So just using cyber tools to label something as fake doesn't really do the job. We need to work on the psychological side of that. And that's just one example. We're not too far away from a world in which literally you have to question every single thing that you see in terms of whether it's real or fake, like deep fake technology, like we're seeing stunning work already, but this is the worst it's ever gonna be, right?

1:05:51And there are too many, you know, vested interests in fomenting dissent and creating confusion and chaos to make the social media landscape or anything that we consume on the internet, our information silos from being trustworthy. Like every article, every video, every photograph. And that in terms of like what that does to us psychologically, even if we enter that domain knowing, Like, I don't know if any of this is real. Like, what does that do to us psychologically? What is that doing to us neurologically? How does that translate into our behavior in the world, our mental health, our anxiety, our fear, that relationship with uncertainty?

1:06:39And then kind of scaling out from that, what does that do to us as a society and to, you know, how does it imperil like the future of democratic systems? Like it's quite terrifying. Yeah. You know, solve this. You took the words out of my mouth. Yeah. I mean, it is scary. And everything you just said is not gonna be positive, right? It's gonna induce stress and anxiety. It's gonna destabilize people, people's worlds, people's identity, right? When they start seeing versions of themselves played back, doing and saying things, we don't know how that's gonna influence. if I see, you know, synthetic media of me over and over again, I'm gonna start doubting who I am.

1:07:26Wait, did I say that? Or maybe that is, maybe that's true. Maybe that is me. But it's gonna destabilize. Yeah. So, there's a lot of psychological work. We need to do rapid research on this. And then we need to rapidly deploy that into services and products that can scale up and help people and prepare them, get them into the right state. So, people can survive and thrive through this. It feels like a Band-Aid though. It feels, you know what I mean? Like, from a neurological perspective, just think about an algorithm that's just serving you up, whatever it is that's getting you engaged with whatever content you're scrolling on your feed.

1:08:02Of course, you're gonna keep scrolling on the stuff that is producing outrage and fear. We already know that. And psychologically, like how detrimental is that to the human being? And what does that do to our ability to cohere as a society and effectively communicate with each other in a healthy way. Like the downstream implications of this are tremendous. And in terms of safety measures, I sort of think of it like performance enhancing drugs. Like they're always one step ahead of the ability to detect. And this technology is moving so rapidly that any effort to police it, I feel like is always gonna be leagues behind.

1:08:46Yeah, exactly. I mean, and there will be policing, there'll be rules and things will come in, but like you said, it'll already be happening. So that's why I think we need to really focus on the psychological side of things and how to prepare people, educate people, come up with new ways of thinking about this. I think we can do all this. I don't think it's like complete doom or gloom, but I'm trying to get my colleagues to sort of like, if you're in academia and this sounds like, this is something that we're all facing, the whole globe's facing this for the next decade, right? Maybe take a step out of what you're doing, the research you're doing and put some time and effort into this, right?

1:09:23We need rapid deployed research and then we need translation of that research rapidly into, like I said, services and products. And so we sort of, like scientists need to sort of take a step towards this and embrace this, right? Because we can't rely on the tech CEOs and the tech people building the things to do any of this. we need to do this ourselves and in terms of scientists. So that's where, that's something I'm working on at the moment. And it's a multi-pronged approach. As I said, I'm working on a new book on this, but it has to be more than a book. It has to be a movement. It has to be products and services.

1:09:59And it'd be great if the company's putting billions and billions and billions into the actual tech development could also put some money into this and put that money aside in whatever way possible. Yeah. Do you, are you optimistic about that? Them putting money aside? Yeah. Oh, they'll put money aside, but they'll put small amount. Like they already are doing that, but very like, I don't know, some tiny, tiny percentage of their budget for other things.

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1:12:11Shifting gears here, I'm curious about the relationship between intuition and creativity. Like what do we know or not know about creativity? Yeah, it's something I thought a lot about. And unfortunately we don't have the best tools to measure it. So we've done some studies on creativity and Aphantasia because one of the things that people reach out to me and say, you know, oh, the reason my career hasn't gone this way, the reason I haven't been a successful musician or whatever it might be is because I have a Fantasia. And then we did all the tests. So the way we sort of academics tend to try and measure creativity is with kind of funny tasks.

1:12:53One is the multiple use of an object task, which is kind of a weird thing where you say like, here's a paperclip. You have three minutes, write down as many different wacky uses of the paperclip or a brick or whatever it is, right? And based on those, you get someone to score them and how many there are, things like that. You get a sort of creativity score. And that's measuring something and that's interesting, but it's heavily biased again towards words and semantics. Is that creativity? So when I ask people that, people kind of go, hmm, it doesn't sound like creativity to me. So we haven't got the killer way to measure creativity yet.

1:13:27So that's sort of something. Well, precedent to that, you also need the killer definition, don't you? Yes. In the way that you've defined intuition, like how are we defining creativity that drives how we think about it and study it, right? Yeah, so typically it's this sort of, this divergent, the thing I just described was a divergent thinking task where you go out and try and get as many crazy ideas as possible and then you converge those back in again. That's this is a very common way of thinking about brainstorming or coming up with ideas for products, these kinds of things. And is that different from imagination or are those synonymous?

1:13:59Yeah, and this is an interesting thing that comes up. I will use imagination as a very broad sort of title that will cover some creativity, visualization, mental imagery, all under that one banner. When I'm being more specific, I will say mental imagery, visualization, or creativity and keep them separate. Now they sort of overlap somewhere in there. Just going back to that research piece we did, we didn't see any high performance in people with mental imagery compared to those with aphantasia in those divergent thinking tasks. And this is a much more common thing, right? Than I think our intuition would think, right?

1:14:384 % or something like that? I think it's probably higher. Because you talk about this all the time and there's always people that raise their hand and say, I think I have this. Yeah, so the thing is, so a bunch of people have done studies using questionnaires and that's sort of, you know, imagine, you know, think of a sunset and then give it a number. How strong, how vivid do you rate that sunset? Those kind of questionnaires. The problem is, yeah, I'll give a talk on this and someone will go, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. Like, what do you mean that you are conscious of something when you think about an apple?

1:15:08What are you talking about? I'm like, well, yeah, I think about an apple. I don't see the apple like I do if I hold an actual apple, but I am conscious of the experience of an apple. And they're like, maybe some people listening, they're like, no. I'm like, yeah. And they're like, what do you, no. And they're like, there's this moment of like, like stress and confusion and misunderstanding. and they're like, and they, you know, it might be 30 or 40 or something. And like my whole life, I just thought imagery was a metaphor that it wasn't a real thing. It was just the way the words people use to describe thoughts about something.

1:15:40And they're really shocked. And so because of that, and then you say, okay, have you filled a questionnaire on imagery before? And they say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I say, well, what did you rate it? And they say, oh, I rated it quite high. So because of that, so people with - Because of the way the questions are phrased? They're phrased, but they don't even, the issue is that people who have aphantasia often don't know what imagery even is. So they don't know that you can be conscious when you visualize something. I see. And so without that piece of knowledge. Like color blindness. Exactly, like color blindness, yeah.

1:16:10So you've never experienced red and green, then you have this sort of gray-browny, you can still differentiate them slightly. You don't know what other people are experiencing. And so you live your life, It's just a metaphor. Visualization imagined is a metaphor. And so if somebody is listening to this and they're reflecting on their own aphantasia for the very first time, what is somebody supposed to do with that information? Like what is the, that diagnosis, like what does that mean and not mean? I don't like using the word diagnosis because it suggests like it's a clinical or it's a problem they have to get seen to or something.

1:16:47So we can define it, we can measure it. People will use the word diagnose it, but I don't like, yeah, I don't like that. Is it a form of neurodivergence? Yeah, so that's how, you know, there's this normal distribution. Let's say like a normal distribution and most people, the bulk of people are probably somewhere in the middle here. And then you have these two tails, people with aphantasia, so no imagery at all. And then the other tail where people have this really strong hyperphantasia at the other end. And they're people who I've met who say they can watch a movie and they can replay it. And they swear to me that replaying it is the same as watching it.

1:17:21And I can't like, I can't do that. Wow, wow. What percentage of people have that? And what is, how does that like translate into some kind of superpower? Yeah, so that's an interesting question. So we're starting that now because that's way less defined, right? We haven't done the kinds of objective, reliable studies we've done with aphantasia, with hyperphantasia. Is that related to photographic memory or is that something different? I think it could be, yeah. I mean, there's this other memory, there's memory conditions where you can remember every day of your life in photo detail. I think that's different, but we don't know how that's related to imagery.

1:17:58I presume those people are experiencing it as this strong, vivid image in their mind's eye, but we haven't done that research yet. Interesting. But one thing I'll quickly say is that the people with this hyperphantasia that I've talked to will confuse, they'll imagine a scene, like a conversation, and then they'll get confused whether they actually had the conversation or not. They'll genuinely think, wait. Oh, because it's so realistic. It's so real, yeah. They think it just happened when it happened years ago. Yeah, so unlike like a dream where you tend to forget most of our dreams, right? Very quickly in the morning, people with very vivid imagery, very strong imagery, will imagine something and then that gets sort of locked into their long-term memory and they'll get confused whether it actually happened or they just imagined it.

1:18:43In the same way that someone who's blind is apt to develop a hypersensitivity in their other senses like hearing. For somebody with aphantasia who can't form those mental images, do they have some other capacity that's overdeveloped or is there some kind of hidden cognitive enhancement that takes place with somebody who has that? We haven't seen anything which would fit that description. I think you could think about at least the silver lining if you wanna say it like that, as less likely to get PTSD or anxiety if you have a Fantasia. So you become the military. Yeah, I mean, I don't like saying that, but you quickly think that, right?

1:19:29Start recruiting people with this. First responders, everything else being equal, you're less likely to go on to get PTSD without imagery. You'll be better capable of handling, the intensity of a job like that. Yeah. Long-term. The data would suggest that. I don't like saying that, but yeah, the data will suggest that. And we've run other studies where we get someone and they sit in this sort of dark room and they read out like scary stories on a computer screen. And we have that skin conductance thing on their finger. And if they have imagery, you know, it's like you're swimming and there's a dark shadow, something bumps your foot and then the shark comes.

1:20:03So if you have imagery, you see this skin conductance response goes up sort of in this linear fashion. If you have aphantasia, it bounces around pretty much flat lines. And so there's this interesting link between reading scary things without imagery and reading it with imagery that translates to this idea of imagery being this sort of, this link between emotions and thoughts, right? So if you have these thoughts and you have imagery, it's gonna amplify the thoughts with a sort of a vivid picture there. And there's a lot of discussion boards where people who have a Fantasia saying they don't get the same emotional response when they're reading fiction, for example.

1:20:42So it kind of would play out there a bit and other scenarios. That would have implications for things like empathy, I would imagine, yeah. It's funny you bring that up. So we have, yeah, we've done a study on that. We haven't published it yet, but we do see differences in scores of empathy between people with imagery and without imagery. In other words, more challenging for them to be in emotional contact with that. Yeah, yeah. And so it's kind of like anything you think would be different with like, think of imagery as like virtual reality or something that's built in. So anytime you're gonna have this virtual reality picture in your mind, you're gonna feel more based on what you're seeing in your mind's eye.

1:21:23So anything that would be different there, some moral dilemmas, empathy, risk stuff. We're doing some experiments on risk at the moment. That does seem to be a bit different. So any of those scenarios where, yeah, simulating something would be in play seemed to be a bit different. And risk also, I would imagine, relates to your fear reaction as well. Yeah, or something. So if you have aphantasia, you have a different relationship with risk, you may be more open to taking certain kinds of risks because you're not like cycling fearful images in your mind. You can't imagine jumping off the thing into the water.

1:22:02You can't visualize it. You don't imagine. Right, right, right. That's so interesting. But these things are on a spectrum. Like it's not one thing, right? Yeah, exactly. They're on a spectrum. And I should also say that, you know, looking at the literature in terms of mental health challenges, it's not just anxiety. We know that schizophrenia and Parkinson's are both also associated with very strong imagery. So we've done some research with Parkinson's and most people who have Parkinson's disease go on to have visual hallucinations and that's closely linked to strong mental imagery. So you have anxiety, PTSD, schizophrenia, and Parkinson's all seem to be linked with very strong imagery.

1:22:41So I don't think it's, you know, when people say, oh, killed have super strong imagery, I don't know whether they really would want that. And when you, you know, and this is one of the things that comes up because a lot of people say, well, can you treat it? I don't like saying that, but can you give me imagery? I don't have imagery. And so I think that could be possible with a training regime and maybe brain stimulation. What worries me about that is giving someone imagery who's never had imagery before. Let's say we do it for two weeks and bang, you have imagery and it's non-reversible. All of a sudden your thoughts have pictures and you have all these strong pictures bouncing around.

1:23:17If you can't control that, that's gonna be pretty unpleasant and probably lead to some uncomfortable mental health situations. Or the fact that you don't have that capacity is somehow tied to some kind of adaptive strategy you've developed over the course of your life because of something that happened or some circumstance. Yeah, exactly. So we haven't done that study yet for that reason that I don't know about the ethics of that. Because even though people think it'd be fantastic to have strong imagery, I worry that once they have it and it's irreversible, they wish they hadn't done the study.

1:23:51Well, if you've learned anything from the history of humankind in science, the unexpected result is the most predictable, right? Yeah. And this is actually, so there's a new thing with psychedelics now. There's a couple of case studies that people who seem to have aphantasia then took psychedelics and had imagery during the experience and then the imagery stuck with them afterwards. Wow. And so a lot of people have been asking about that. And so we've just written a piece, it's not out yet, about that. It's sort of almost like a warning. So I don't want people to go out and saying, I want imagery, I want to take psychedelics, they get imagery and then maybe, like I said before, it's not a great outcome.

1:24:31And it's also something, there's a lot of psychedelic experiments happening and treatments happening for other things around the world at the moment. And so it should be one of the things that's discussed before someone goes into one of the psychedelic experiments or treatments. That's super interesting. But caution advised. I get concerned about the mainstreaming of these psychedelic compounds. And certainly, and I've said this many times before, there's a ton of science coming out in Disha that there are all of these effective treatments for PTSD, et cetera, depression, anxiety. But I feel like the way that translates or percolates down into kind of our collective mainstream awareness makes us feel like they're innocuous or just part of our wellness protocol.

1:25:19Yeah. That we should be, you know, all exploring. Well, I think it's for that, it's important to think about, it's not like other treatments. It's not like taking a pill and it's the thing that you're taking. It's not the substance, let's say it's LSD. It's not just the LSD getting into your body. It's not just that. It's the experience you have and the context and who's with you. And so the music and everything you go through is just as important as having the substance. So it's, and people I don't think fully get that. They think, like you said, they could just, it's like taking a pill. And if you take the pill in a medical office with supervision and relaxed atmosphere and dim lighting and someone guiding you through it and all that comfortable, that doesn't matter.

1:26:02I can just take it at home. And that doesn't seem to be the case, right? I wanna get back to creativity. And I'd asked you about the relationship between creativity and intuition. Because when I reflect on creativity, however you might define it, my mind goes towards that liminal space that kind of lives beyond our intellectual mind. When you talk to people who are very in touch with their creativity, they will tell you by and large that their job is to sort of get out of the way and be this vessel or this channel for whatever needs to kind of come out of them, whether it's writing a song or a verse or strumming a guitar or a paintbrush on a canvas.

1:26:51there is this sense of being kind of a passenger, right? Which makes me think about intuition or the unconscious mind at work. And then of course we can get mystical also. I love talking about you're a scientist. I don't know if you wanna go there. But creativity, much like intuition is something that we don't quite have a handle on. And we have this sort of sacred relationship with like the great artists are in reverence of the greater collective creative force that kind of comes through them. And I wonder as a scientist, like how you think about that and is there a way to study that or to tie it to intuition or is this something different altogether?

1:27:37I think the flow state is something that's really interesting and that there's some research on, but not a lot of research. I'd like way more research on that and some sort of more hardcore neuroscience on that. So one of the fascinating things is when you're in a flow state, you kind of lose track of yourself and self-awareness just disappears. So does time perception, right? So it's like you're out of the way then. It's kind of how you described it. And that's, I think an interesting way to think about the creative process that when you're in there doing the thing, it doesn't feel like you exist.

1:28:11It's just happening, right? And that applies to games and sports and other things. And so what is the relationship between that feeling that it's coming from somewhere else and flow state and self-awareness and time perception in a flow state? I think those things are intimately linked. I haven't seen a lot of good data sort of trying to slice that up and see how it all works together. I think the intuition for creative ideas is really interesting. And I've talked to a lot of artists and people in the creative industry about that and they're kind of, they like the ideas in the book because it can bring legitimacy to this idea that they are experts in their field.

1:28:52And when they're feeling the thing, it is legitimate. They don't have to try and explain something to other people outside because they're deep in it. They've worked in that space for a long time and everything's working and in the flow state. Could, let's say, let's say that, you know, some of these rules weren't met and you had like what you thought was a flash of a creative idea, but it was being driven or being nudged by anxiety or something else, right? Or depression or something. Yeah, I don't know. I don't wanna say too much there because it might go the other way, right? There's this history of association at least between seeming mental health challenges and creativity in many artists in many different ways.

1:29:39And so that might speak against that, right? So it's a complex relationship there. I don't think we know a lot about, but it's a fascinating question. If you were to go about trying to define and measurement, like how would you design that?

1:29:57I think you probably wanna take two approaches. One is have people being creative, doing a creative practice in the lab, wearing some neural tech or something like, try and get them comfortable enough so they're doing that. That's one approach. And then the other approach would be to go out to artists of all kinds and study them and work with them. So they have quite different approaches and try and work with those until they meet in the middle somewhere. Yeah. That's how I think about it. Somebody must have done MRIs or other kind of brain scans on creative people or creative people in the midst of a creative act to glean some understanding of what's going on in the brain.

1:30:35I don't think anyone's brought like the flow state intuition all into that and sort of modeled out the dynamics or thought about how it would work. and when you're in a flow state. So here's a question. So can you have a negative flow state? You're terrified and I'm chasing you or something like that. Is that still a flow state? So we've discussed that in the lab before. Well, it depends on how you define it. Like if you're outside yourself and you're like lost in the moment, right? Lost in the moment, time perception's gone. Certainly, that would be true. It kind of sounds like it, right? But it's not the way people normally talk about flow state as a positive thing.

1:31:14Can creativity be negative? I guess it kind of can. I don't know, yeah, it's interesting. I'd like to jump in there. I'd like to start with the definitional things. What, try and really tabularize, I get to a first principles definition of creativity that again, like I talked about with intuition is gets to something practical and useful that can help the science, but help people as well. Yeah. My intuition or my bias or my choice around how I think about creativity or even some aspects of intuition is that there's still copious room for entertaining the mystical beyond our ability to understand.

1:31:59I think humans need to humble themselves a little bit in terms of our capacity to truly understand the nature of reality and consciousness. And I'd like to believe, and I do believe, that there are other forces out there and capacities available to us if we can get out of the way, if we can get into a state of presence of presence where we make ourselves available like an antenna to be a channel for, you know, higher states of awareness and understanding. So I guess I'm curious what your relationship is to kind of the unknown in that regard as somebody who is, you know, this hardened scientist who wants to define these things and test them in the lab.

1:32:51I hope I'm not hardened. No, hardened, but I mean like rigorous, I guess is the word I would use. So one of the things I think most scientists, I don't know about most, but a lot get wrong is this idea that when you see something like that or something that you can't explain, that is really interesting and fascinating, they'll just go, ah, it's not scientific, whatever, forget about it, like what's the point? And they confuse the idea of the scientific method and the first witnessing of something weird or curious that piques your interest. And it's a very first sort of sign that something interesting might be there.

1:33:23and you kind of wanna follow it. Of course, it's not scientific because you're not doing science at that point. You just notice something. But that's a crucial and really interesting part of science that's not really discussed that often. So a lot of scientists will, you know, I use my intuition in science. Like I'll notice something, I'll just be like, hmm, there's something odd about that or just there's something unusual, intriguing. And that's like a pull towards that thing, right? The discovery thing I talked about earlier. And of course, it's not scientific. You've gotta then figure out how would you design an experiment and then bring the science to that thing.

1:33:56And for things we don't understand, it's very hard to do that because you're gonna get the experiment wrong the first time pretty much guaranteed, right? So you've gotta do agile rapid iterations and try and come at this thing with no preconceptions. So I'm personally very open to this. I think anything that looks really interesting just because it hasn't been shown before doesn't mean there's something interesting there. In the current framework, the way science is mainly funded in most countries, it's very hard to do that because it's classified as high risk science. And one of the sort of criteria that reviewers of grants, government grants is that it's very feasible, that it's gonna work.

1:34:35And so, which means basically you've gotta do a lot of the stuff first before you get the money for it, which is a whole other thing. So for multiple reasons, it's hard to do that research. I'm quite interested in it, right? And we're actually starting to do a little bit of, we're dipping our toe in the pond in that direction at the moment. I can't talk about it yet, but it was something where we're starting to look into and do some work on. Just because it's fascinating. And I think, you know, the way like venture capitalists, you know, I was in Palo Alto last week talking to venture capitalists and the way they think about investments is that most of those investments will be all gone.

1:35:15But all they need is one, this one like 1 % chance, it's this one thing will blow up to be a big Google or a big whatever, huge company. And I think that's an interesting way to think about science, right? If you're gonna look at this unusual mystical or whatever kind of thing you can't explain, if there's even a small percent chance that it could blow up and be something that changes the whole way we think about humans and the brain and the mind, it's worth investing in that because if it works out, it's gonna change everything. And that's, but I don't think most scientists think like that. Yeah.

1:35:49I like that. I mean, I think when you reflect on how much we don't quite understand and appreciate like the limitations of the human mind when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of reality, like time-space, like, you know, we experience time and space in a linear fashion, but that's not reality, right? You know, there are other dimensions. There is a fourth dimension. There's things like quantum entanglement out there that are so fascinating and mysterious that for me, like that just basically is nourishment for like a spiritual relationship with the undefined, I guess. And so I guess I'm asking you on a personal level, like maybe not as a scientist, like how does a scientist think about the world of spirituality?

1:36:39And I'm not saying in a woo-woo way, but in an appreciation for the unknown. as somebody who's trying to understand the unknowable, I guess. Yeah, fantastic question. I think about it a lot and I'm fascinated by all of the unknown, whether it be everything from mystic spiritual things through to near-death experiences. I think science is, the simplest way to think of science is this is the best way to get the truth of something. So I'm a massive fan of applying science to any of those things. And I don't think doing that kills or takes away the magic. I think you can have both coexisting at the same time.

1:37:20Well, the more you learn, the crazier it gets, right? Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned like quantum mechanics and I'm often jealous because some of the theories with quantum things and things moving forwards and backwards in time, like the craziness of that, if I started talking like that with neuroscience and psychology, people just laugh me out of the room, right? I get jealous of the guys or the people that talk that way. But that is reality. Yeah, I know. but when you, they can, I guess they back it up with equations and math, but. And we didn't even say, you know, we didn't even talk about free will, the illusion of free will.

1:37:50Oh, we can go there and say, yeah. But no, everything that we can't explain, yeah, fascinates me to some degree. I get pulled in lots of different directions. I would love to have infinite amount of time to go deep dive into all these different things from near-death experiences to, you know, from psychedelics through to, you know, holotropic breath work through to all kinds of things, spirituality and deep dive into all of those. But yeah, I've got to focus on a couple of things at a time. Like, and focus is a really hard thing. I struggle to focus and say no to things. What is like the big, like nagging question or study that you would like to perform that you think could help answer some questions that are gnawing at the back of your mind that you haven't yet explored, that you have the liberty to talk about, I guess I would say.

1:38:45Yeah, so there's that caveat there. There's a fascinating history of things that we couldn't explain from ESP to, I don't even know the right words. We could call them parapsychology, but I don't like saying it. Things that there's little tidbits from all over the place. X-file shit, basically. Yeah, right. And if you start going through all the declassified military stuff, There's hundreds of fascinating experiments and a lot of them, some of them are really good. They're not done with modern day techniques. So there's interesting stuff there, I think. I don't know, I don't think, is it true or not is the right way to think about it.

1:39:23And I think it's hard to study these things when you don't know what is going on, whatever the mechanism is. And going in there and just running a single experiment and then deciding, oh, it didn't work, forget about it. It's all bullshit kind of thing is not the right approach. So yeah, there's a whole lot of juicy stuff there that I think it would be fun to, if we had infinite resources to deep dive into. With the advent of AI, are there tools on the horizon in the neuroscience context that you think will be helpful in better understanding the brain? When you think of like the, of however many neurons there are in the brain.

1:40:03Like it's this incomprehensible organ, right? That's so complicated that I can't help but think this machine learning tool that's so good at analyzing and synthesizing information from massive data sets must have some kind of application in your field that could elucidate kind of some of these answers and make sense of some of the mysteries. Absolutely. I think all scientists are like getting more and more excited to see how AI can plug in, right? We're seeing, what is it? Google's DeepMind coming up with this protein folding stuff. And I think that AI will plug into every form of science and not just, so the obvious thing is that you can get it to just like read all the papers that exist and the hundreds of papers that come out every day that no human can read and process all that and look for the commonalities, the overlaps, the missing themes and all this sort of stuff.

1:40:55So there's all that analysis side, which will be interesting in itself. And then there's that, yeah, the brain is hugely complex and trying to use AI to analyze the data will rapidly speed things up and let us do things that we can't do at the moment. So that is on the near horizon, if not happening already. Yeah, I was wondering if there isn't already, you know, some tool that - So people have, yeah, put it to good use. There's been papers out sort of doing real-time decoding of what people are thinking or seeing, right? So you can look at a bottle and you've been wearing a thing and using AI, you can decode and it'll say, it'll recreate a picture of the bottle I'm looking at.

1:41:33It's not perfect, but you can see what it is. So you can take that one step further to imagery, to imagining I'm thinking of something. I can decode it from my brain activity, put it up on a screen. Then you have dreams, right? You can record someone's dream. So I think that will all happen at some point. There's the actual neurotech as well that needs to sort of improve getting high resolution, more data from the brain, more detailed, more time-sensitive data. And then the AI tools to analyze that. So I think that's happening already. Yeah. What is your sense of Neuralink and its potential to kind of fulfill that promise?

1:42:13It's interesting. I mean, other university labs have done what they've done already. So they're not, I think they're, I don't think they're more advanced than other groups or other university groups sort of implanted things and had people, you know, control the computer or control a robotic arm and do these kinds of things. But certainly the speed and the, yeah, the speed of the engineering side of it doesn't typically exist inside university. So when you add that into the mix, I think it could probably go further faster. So it'll be really interesting to see. I mean, it does seem like there's been some interesting breakthroughs here.

1:42:48And, you know, given Moore's law and everything that's happening so quickly here that it's probabilistic that it's gonna get figured out in a meaningful way. Yeah, I think - And I don't know how to feel about that. Which bit? Well, the sort of transhumanism aspect of it and - You still gotta have surgery, right? It's not like everyone's gonna be lining up to the other thing, put it in there. I don't think I'd like that. Yeah, and listen, if you have a spinal injury or some, to the extent that there are therapeutic use cases for it, like, of course, but to the extent that we're becoming these kind of hybrid animal, I guess we already are, right?

1:43:24Like our phones are adjunct to us already. They're appendages and this is only gonna accelerate and lead us into some strange brave new world, right? Yeah, there's so many, I mean, yeah, talk about exponential functions, right? There's all these exponential functions happening simultaneously and they're intertwining. And all these different fields. Yeah, and they were mixing and they're bouncing off each other and it's hence the uncertainty, right? And you can't predict what's gonna happen. There's too much happening. Right, yeah, it's too much. They say, may you live in interesting times, but maybe a little too interesting, I don't know.

1:43:59With respect to intuition, in all of your research and study of this, what was the most kind of surprising or unexpected discovery that you made about the nature of intuition? Was there anything counterintuitive, I guess, you didn't expect? Probably not counterintuitive. I think it was, I mean, intuition aside, just the fact - Where your intuition around intuition led you astray. So meta. The fact that, you know, in real time, our brain can mix conscious and unconscious signals. There's two data streams and they're mixing together and influencing us in every moment of our lives or our waking lives at least.

1:44:45Actually, all our lives. that simple fact was really i think just like call it intuition whatever you want that our brain is constantly mixing these two sources in and what does that mean for you know we think of ourselves these complex fully conscious beings right but we're going to have these feelings we don't know where they're coming from that will drive behavior and you can think about that and you can apply that to you know elections and people saying i'm going to vote for this person and then they go into the voting booth and they probably have some emotion that hits them in the gut or something.

1:45:19And then they do something totally different to what they said they would, right? Or you have these momentarily urges that people will follow. And so just questioning how fully conscious most of us are most of the time, I think is really interesting. So I think a lot about that. And how that can be weaponized, like a full understanding of that can be used to manipulate people for whatever end. Yeah, so talk about free will. Like one of the, I know this is a deep stuff, two hours on free will. Go for it. One of the parts of the conversation that people don't often talk about is that, you know, you walk into a supermarket and you're being controlled and biased by all, you know, things at eye level, things of certain colors and grabbing your attention.

1:46:00And so your behavior is any shop or any website is being manipulated. And you can think about that as taking away free will and you don't even notice. Taking away free will that you didn't have anyway. Anyway, go ahead. No, but as a point, right? So if I can control, let's say control your behavior. But the pernicious part is that you believe you're a free agent, right? That you believe that you have agency and choice when in fact you're being manipulated in subtle ways that you're not cognizant of. And that's happening to us all day long every day. Exactly, but my point is - Every algorithm is creating realities based on that.

1:46:37But we don't feel it. And so this idea, because people think, oh, I feel like I have control of, I have free will. therefore I must. My point is that I can take away, I can sort of up and down regulate how much I can control your behavior in the lab and you don't feel any different. So, I can bias you by brain stimulation or by priming you in different ways to do this or choose that and you don't feel anything. You don't know when you're being controlled is my point. But that gets to my point about how we overestimate our agency when it comes to intuition or we overtrust our intuition because we are completely unaware of the many, many ways every single day that we're being nudged and impulsed to make decisions in a particular way.

1:47:21Just think about how many things you scrolled on and billboards you saw, all the stimuli that's like percolating this brew in your unconscious mind all the time, that's driving your intuition and creating decisions under the illusion of free will and agency. Yeah. And that's only gonna ratchet up like exponentially with the AI kind of tools that we were talking about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's any evidence we have free will, which might be a controversial statement. Maybe it's not anymore, but it's certainly crucially important that we feel like we do. When we see like in depression and mental health situations where people feel like they've lost control, they don't have agency or free will, it's quite devastating.

1:48:10So a loss, at least thinking you don't have free will is a really bad thing. So it's really important we feel like we have agency and control, even if we don't. So you as a neuroscientist who's convinced we have no free will, but still has to play a trick on your own mind to convince yourself that you have free will, must create like this dissonance within you. Kind of, yeah. Yeah. But it's important that I, yeah. I must persist in this delusion that I have free will in order to be a happy person. I must remind myself of this every single day. Pretty much, is that bad? Well, it's nihilistic to believe otherwise, right?

1:48:45It's certainly not gonna make you happy if you think you have no agency in your life and everything is predetermined. Yeah, you crash. But you're here to say that it actually is. I say there's no, I haven't seen any convincing evidence that there's any free will. We have free will, put it that way. Yeah. Did you see this limited series called Devs that came out a couple of years ago? Alex Garland, the filmmaker who made Civil War. The quantum stuff? Yeah, it's basically Nick Offerman plays this tech wizard who has this ultra powerful quantum computing machine. That's right, that was cool, I really enjoyed that.

1:49:22It's so powerful, it can basically absorb and synthesize every data point in the known universe with such precision that it can predict the future with complete fidelity. So it knows everything that's going to happen. And what does that do to us and our behavior and our lives and how we think of ourselves and the human race? Yeah, that was a great series. Yeah, so I don't know what to do with that. I feel like we're going in a really pessimistic direction here. Lift us up, like give us some hopefulness and - Intuition is real. Some inspiration around intuition. Intuition is real. If people doubt it or think, ah, it's all BS, it is real.

1:50:05We can understand it with all the science we already have, right? We can understand it. We can unpack some simple rules for when we should or shouldn't use it. Following those rules, I really think can improve people's decision-making and sort of a way to guide and blend the emotions and the rational decision-making together in a sort of harmonious way. So I encourage people to have a daily practice of intuition, practice with the small decisions, have, maybe there'll be an app at some stage, but otherwise have a little diary or something or have a little table where you keep track of what you felt, where you felt it and what the decision was and what the outcome was and whether you're happy with that.

1:50:39And then see how you can improve that over time, like training or practice, going to the gym or whatever it might be. I like that it emphasizes and underscores the importance of paying attention to how you feel. because we're in a culture that, you know, overemphasizes the intellect at the cost of, you know, those somatic experiences, which we're kind of trained over time to just repress or ignore. But those are powerful signals that are guiding us and, you know, trying to lead us in the direction we're meant to go, right? And when we're repressing them or ignoring them or denying them and just living entirely in our heads, we're missing out on the fullness of human experience, but also the intuition that is there for a purpose, which is to guide you responsibly.

1:51:33Yeah, well said. So there is an Eastern mysticism in there too, like the head versus heart and the relationship between the intellect and all of these bodily signals that are, I think much more important than we give them credit for. Yeah, the brain and the body. It's a call, the book and your work is a call to action to like, remember this. I think so, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and - So there's something ancient about that too. There is, and it's something that, I mean, it's funny because intuition is, you know, it was, what a decade ago, it was huge in the US military, right? Those had a whole programs trying to look at, you know, the spidey sense they call it in the military.

1:52:13And then it's, you know - Was that part of the men that stare at goats stuff? That was different. I don't think so. That was more of like, that's more of an X-Files thing. You'll be studying that soon, soon enough, right? That's the secret secret. I can't talk about that, Richard. I can tell you, but I'd have to kill you and wipe all your hard disks. Now I know, defense contractors. That's how you're making a living on stage, right? You parents, right? Having kids, you have intuition very quickly about like the different tones and the way a baby will cry, serious or not serious. You learn that rapidly, right?

1:52:44Through to the more mystic and the spiritual. Like there's something, and sports, right? Like playing at any kind of sport is, you have to use, you have to take rapid action and run this way, run that way, pass the ball. You don't have time to logically, you gotta feel it. There's two options, this feels better, do it, right? That's a form of intuition. And so it's something that's plugged into so many different fields and left and right and in so many different ways that I think it can tie everyone together in really interesting ways. Yeah, beautiful, man. Yeah. Well, my intuition is that this conversation went quite well and I have a certain level of mastery in this domain here.

1:53:23So I say that with confidence. That was brilliant, man. I love the work that you do. And like I said at the outset, like I really do think it is profound. Anybody who's decided to commit their life and their work and their mission to better understanding the mind, consciousness, it's really getting at the root level of, you know, solving the most fundamental problems that plague humankind and trying to find a way to kind of allow us all to level up because if we can improve not just our intuition, but our relationship with our conscious awareness and our lived experience, that is truly the only way that we as a collective are gonna be able to solve these very real dire and existential problems that we got all pessimistic about.

1:54:11Yeah. So thank you. No, thank you, Rich. Thanks for supporting me and thanks for supporting the mission behind the book to get this intuition out there into the hands of everyone and improve their decisions and their lives. So yeah, thank you for the support. Yeah, beautiful man. So the intuition toolkit is available in bookstores everywhere. Should I do the whole thing? Yeah, hold it up, show it to everybody. Just be shameless. Yellow, look for the yellow book. Shameless. Yeah, it's brilliant work, thank you. And much luck and please come back and share with me your adventures, especially when you get super X-Files about stuff.

1:54:44Yeah, I'll bring the X-Files stuff. All right. Stay tuned. And I come to Australia from time to time, so maybe I can drop in and visit you. I'd love to see the lab and kind of what you're up to there too. Yeah, anytime, Rich. Awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you. Peace, Joel.

1:55:07That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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