Annaka Harris On Consciousness | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] I'll welcome to the podcast I have to say before I read your book I listen to your your interview your your interview your appearance on your husband's podcast and it's so funny because he says welcome to the podcast and then you just start giggling right and then he says so Annika I probably remember it better than tell me about the book and then you just go really look that's the question you're gonna ask and I just immediately felt like oh I'm all in on just like taking the piss out of him I thought that was very nice so yeah and I love the book congratulations on it making the New York Times bestseller list is very cool and I'm excited to talk to you this is a fascinating subject yeah I think so subject the more that you think about it the more sort of amazing and wonderful and mystifying it becomes right yeah so before we kind of delve into consciousness why don't we contextualize this a little bit how did you get interested in this field I also I just wanted to ask you though is this something you're interested in before you read my book er was it have you been thinking about it since reading it well I asked just because they're the category of people who are have just been fascinated with it always and then everyone seems to become fascinated with it once they learn a little but it's impossible to not be fascinated by it once you start to learn a little bit about it right I would say that I have a an interest in it that is long-standing although I don't know that that it rose to the level of you know obsession like it's not that but through my journeys and in addiction recovery and then being introduced to meditation and yoga and various spiritual practices and certainly become more and more interesting so yeah yeah so actually I became interested in meditation I think mostly because of my fascination with consciousness but they're obviously related so as I said it was a lifelong fascination it's something I've just always been interested in and want you know as I got older read a lot about and then for the last almost 15 years I've been working with scientists who write for the general public I've been doing mostly editing but some coaching for TED talks and things like that and so I got actually deeper into the neuroscience and I have I basically have just for my because of my own interest been taking notes all of this time for myself and a few maybe like two and a half years ago I started really formally writing not really for any purpose except to think through my own thoughts because I was interested and I felt like the but the topic is so complex I needed to do some writing just to sort out for myself where I was with all of it and what I thought could be true but my so my book is really the the science and philosophy of consciousness and I tried to make it as accessible as possible which was really the main goal and I I'm focused on kind of consciousness what the most fundamental aspect or consciousness in the most fundamental sense and why it's so deeply mysterious why it's so difficult for neuroscientists to study it why it just always has been perplexing to scientists so I walk the reader through what I think are some of the most interesting theories and research and consciousness studies but this is all kind of in the context of challenging our intuitions right about what consciousness is yeah it's it's not it's less about drawing any specific conclusions right yeah and it is about let's confront what we think it is and deconstruct that a little bit I think us realize that it's so much more complex and fast and confounding inspiring and yeah one of the great mysteries so yeah so I kind of part of me just wanted to spread that the idea that this is one of the great mysteries and if you haven't discovered it yet it's like as its as fun to contemplate as the idea of black holes or the you know the beginning of the universe or all the things that we that we pretty easily understand our great mysteries and interesting to come right from black holes all the way down to particle physics right yeah yeah and that this actually fits in with with some of the mysteries that pop up there as well so yeah so so challenging intuitions is something that I think is incredibly interesting and it's a very important part of the scientific process which I think most people know but they don't really think about or realize that every time we make a scientific breakthrough or understand reality at a more fundamental level or reach a deeper truth about the nature of reality that always requires that we challenge our intuitions at the very least sometimes we have to completely let go of intuitions that are actually giving us false information about reality so this is true and everything from understanding that the earth is a sphere and not flat as our senses lead us to believe and you know this actually took a lot of science to to get enough information to realize that our intuitions were wrong celestial observations that convinced people over a long period of time because it was it was it's so counterintuitive it's actually hard for people right once they get their minds around once the science is hard and fast there's still an extraordinarily extraordinarily long lag period before people who still adopt it yes and that's true for scientists it's kind of like the scientists come first that but there's always this period of time of wrestling with intuitions before the scientists first are kind of able to accept the evidence that has come in that's counter to our intuitions and then the public obviously comes a little bit later but that's you know the germ theory of disease is another great example that I like to give that the idea that microscopic things that we can't interact with or sense at all can kill us you know is there something that took people a long time to see enough evidence for right that they could accept it scientists priding themselves on their objective lens are still you know held prisoner by our own cognitive biases well absolutely and it's part of a scientific process we have to kind of check everything against our intuitions but it and it is just this process of checking and checking and saying no you know that can't be right that informed that just it feels so wrong it can't be right and then you can fight you finally get to a point where you start to shift your intuitions or you learn how to just not trust them in that particular area in the case of consciousness though I feel like after reading this book were barely out of the starting gate yes so that was that was why I was one of the main reasons I wrote this book and really the goal of the book is to shake up our intuitions about consciousness as much as possible because I think if we are able to make progress if we're able to and the human brain I think is not capable of understanding everything and so it may just fall into that category but if we can understand consciousness better it will require that we that we really challenge some strong intuitions that we have and I think we're at that point with regard to consciousness I like that you say that the human brain isn't capable of understanding all of these things I feel like there's a cubic Flair that that kind of emanates across the scientific community then that that that we can indeed understand everything and perhaps that's true at some future point or with the I think it's a I think it's interesting cuz most science I know and and typically scientists more than other people I know are much more willing to say they don't know something or we may never know or you know this is this is deeply mysterious physicists in particular but scientists in general I think the messaging that comes out and I would partly fault the media but I think it's also just at a natural circumstance of the messaging when we learn something new it's kind of declared as if we we know all these things and everything is knowable right but I don't actually think that's the stance well particularly with physicists I mean the more you do I mean it's like it's like how do you even begin to understand what these things I've been watching these wonderful videos of this physicist nema our Connie Hamed who's brilliant and hard to understand but I do my best but he spends most of his time talking about how space-time is no longer something that we think is fundamental that there's something that's more fundamental that space-time that basically there is no at a fundamental level there is no space and time so yeah I mean therefore we're never gonna get our minds around that even if we can believe it well time is a is a is a is a focus of the book and in the later chapters and I want to get to that but let's start with let's just let's just define our terms like we're talking about consciousness like what do we actually mean so people do use the word many different ways and it's confusing the way I'm using the word in the book and what I think most people mean when they're talking about the mystery of consciousness the kind of them consciousness in the most fundamental sense is the closest word I can get to his experience and I use Thomas Nagel description of consciousness from his essay called what it is like to be a bat which is a great essay and I recommend from from the 70s and he says in that essay an organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism and that language for a lot of people they kind of get it right away I actually for me that happened I I knew exactly what he meant but the language really isn't very precise and it can be confusing so I usually follow that up with a series of questions especially for someone who's just says I don't I don't know what that means to say it's it's like something and so I'll say is is there something that it's like to be you right now and I run through this in the book and of course whoever I'm asking week we all know we're having an X aryans right we're conscious and we're having an experience and then is there something that it's like to be this book on the table and our intuitive answer is no and despite what's actually true in the world the fact that we can imagine a collection of matter in the universe that entails no experience at all the lights are not on from the inside right that's non conscious material and then a collection of matter in the universe like your brain where there's something that it's like to be that matter that difference is consciousness and it's how I'm using the word in the movement although I do actually prefer experience I think it's slightly less confusing yeah I've been thinking about that definition over the last week and I can't escape this sense that it's still reductive in the sense that we're looking at experience through our own experience right we're defining what experience means only through the lens of what it means and feels like to be human and it doesn't leave a lot of space or room for for contemplating that experience could take another form that we can't relate to well I can see oh no I think I think but that's so that's where I'm talking at a more fundamental so I think and that's partly what I try to do in the book is strip away everything that could be human like you could you could radically change an experience but the fact of an any experience at all and you know I get into these more far-out theories but even if you contemplate that you know a single cell or bacteria has some minimal level of experience that you and I could never imagine what it would like to what it would be like if there's any experience even the most minimal experience you could imagine if there's something it's like then that is consciousness and that could be completely unlike any human experience right it's just whether whether it's completely dark and dead you know whether the stars there's there's no experience there at all it's a collection of atoms that are doing their thing but there's nothing that it feels like at all or or there is in a very binary way yeah one I yes you know I mean it's in a binary way once you go from nothing to something but then of course there's this gradation of what's possible in an experience once you have experience but yeah I think you can't you can say that it's either there or not right the fact that exists begs the question of the evolutionary advantage of having it at all like what is the reason that we developed this yeah as opposed to you know the sort of zombie example there yeah use in the book yeah no and I think that's that's a that's a very interesting question and that's kind of where I swear my thinking started and it's early on in the book that I posed these two questions that I think so I have two categories of intuitions that I want to challenge one category is our intuitions about consciousness itself and then intuitions that occur in other areas that are in our lives that strongly influence on or inform our intuitions about consciousness and so I kind of put those into two separate categories and I start with consciousness and I just thought you know for myself and in my own notes I just wanted to get out what are the most basic strongest intuitions we have about consciousness and so I asked these two questions in the book one is is their behavior we can point to from outside a system that we can use as conclusive evidence that consciousness is present in that system right is there is there something we can witness from the outside some physical behavior that we could say yes any time we see behavior a B or C that's absolute evidence of consciousness and I think our intuitive answer is yes and it's a very strong yes and even after dissecting this for 15 years my answer is still yes so an example of that would be I mean there's so many but uh I often use you know my daughter if my daughter's fallen down and she's crying and asking for a band-aid all of that behavior to me absolutely signifies that there's consciousness present right she's having an experience of pain and and so I wanted to start there because I thought this is an important exercise in all areas of science and this is where our strongest intuitions are but could we be wrong is it possible that the behavior that we think is evidence of consciousness is not necessarily evidence of consciousness and so you can kind of go in the direction of AI and imagine we might in the future create something that seems like a child who is crying because she fell down but the lights are actually not on there's no consciousness there but I think the flip side of that is also interesting which is even if we can come up with behaviors and I could for myself I can't and I think it's super interesting that we can but on the other side of that we know that consciousness can be present with no behavior at all right so you use the diving bell and the butterfly yeah have you read that book I saw yeah yeah so that's based on a writer who had something called locked-in syndrome where I believe his was due to a stroke but it can it can happen variety of ways that damaged the brain like a stroke and it left him completely paralyzed but with a full experience of consciousness as full as our experiences right now as full as his experience was before the stroke he could hear see think write a book but he had no way he's completely paralyzed except for in his case his left eyelid there was some mobility left in his left eyelid and miraculously his caretakers noticed this and they were able to develop a way for him to write through the surra I don't know the exact details but yeah he lean language made a what created a certain letter and then he would spell out words and and wrote this beautiful book but so that's a case of even if we can find behavior there's this other problem in terms of behavior which is there can be zero behavior and still be a tremendous the detailed experience of consciousness the philosophical zombie example is super interesting and I think it's related directly to what we're facing now with the advent of AI and this uncanny valley like we see these videos online of robots doing things that look very human and it freaks us out but to extrapolate that example to it's extreme whether it's a zombie or a robot that is manifesting human behavior in all of its forms knows exactly what to say and how to behave and demonstrates an outward manifestation of things like empathy and etc but technically the lights aren't on the closer you know it's like this this asymptotic curve like the closer it approximates human behavior the question of consciousness almost in and of itself seems to fall away like what is the relevance of consciousness if somebody is mimic mimicking it to such a precise agreed yeah is it even a thing is a consciousness even yeah like you know I mean it's clearly a thing because it's actually the only thing we can be sure exists I mean everything else might might not be what we think it is we could we could literally be brains in a vat or in some computer-generated yeah alternate right at matrix reality yeah but the experience you're having is the experience you're having right like whatever it is whatever it feels like that is what consciousness is and so I think yes so the the thing that's interesting with with AI is we will have no way of knowing unless we have a better understanding of consciousness ahead of time but then Mike Mike I guess my question is really like does it matter then if it's so yeah no I know what you mean and I think I think we it Matt it has to matter because it is why anything matters right like if someone I mean you can use a lot of examples but basically everything that matters to us any any ethical question it has to do with consciousness if we're talking about an unconscious system we don't have any ethical obligations towards them we're not worried about them we don't have to think about suffering like all of suffering happens in consciousness and so the difference is everything if if we brought in some advanced AI that looked like another human being who just came in was introduced to us if the if the scientists who brought this robot in and said don't worry this robots not conscious we would have I mean it would still be hard because our intuition yeah absolutely and it's everything that matters in terms of mattering I mean if this this being starts to suffer in any way if we think they're having an experience we want to help it mm-hmm it's strange times already well the the kind of operating definition for everybody who's walking around without any kind of more precise familiarity with this is is is this alignment of consciousness with identity and a sense of self right and another one of the intuitions that you you try to you know break down a little bit is the fundamental illusion of self and a distinction between consciousness and our I guess lack of selfhood and also drawing a distinction between consciousness and complex thought so yeah so yeah so these kind of fall into this other category of illusions that show up in other areas of life but I think strongly inform our ideas about what consciousness is and so the self and conscious will which is not exactly free will and I can talk a little bit about distinguishing between the two but for me the important piece is the idea the feeling that we have conscious well and the feeling of being a self a self being kind of a a self contained individual entity that I mean our intuition is actually it's strange when you say it because you realize there's something false about the intuition just in describing it right but what I feel myself to be even though I've worked with a lot of neuroscientists I understand that everything I'm experiencing is due to all of this processing in my brain there's some sense that there is a me that's this kind of distinct me that is in some way separate from brain processing that can they can make these decisions you know even if my Brent and my brain is you know pushing me in one direction and you know telling me I am I'm should go get a coffee right now because I'm feeling tired or thirsty or whatever and then I decide oh you know now is not the right time to get a coffee so there's there somehow there's the sense that I there's the me that can choose to follow my instincts or not and that is the thing that is making all of the choices and so it the the self and conscious will are really part of the same illusion and it's the sense that there's a separate self that has this will and so there's a lot of neuroscience now disprove I mean showing that these are that these are truly illusions and you can and many people have had the experience of breaking through these illusions in meditation through use of psychedelics and we now know actually the the kind of network in the brain called the default mode network is responsible for creating this this sense of self and so when that is quieted through meditation or psychedelics or by other means people talk about having the same kind of experience of realizing that that way they usually experience themselves is is a kind of illusion right that consciousness exists outside of the self our senses are elusive re are loose or a sense of yeah yeah well and then and then also just in terms of how the brain processes things and how many things are happening before it rises to the level of our awareness so that often if not always I mean there's a lot of research suggesting that this is basically always the case that every time we feel like we've made this free decision you know we're contemplating two different choices and we decide to go with option a that that has already taken place in terms of processing before we are aware of it and there are other systems that are that we know much more about actually that are just like this and binding is one of them that I talked about in the book yeah so binding the way for people to really grok what this is all about in the sense that we receive these inputs from the outside world at differing speeds like you see something before we hear it there is this delay mechanism wherein our brain assembles all of these inputs in some kind of Final Cut Pro program and then presents it to us in a cohesive whole but that's not the way yeah that's not the way it actually happens and that the the kind of behavioral reactions that that we manifest in in in response to those occur prior to our conscious awareness of having done so mmhmm yeah yeah you can I mean I can see you know I mean it's also realizing that our experience of will our conscious will isn't what it feels like either can be a bummer but I thought there's another way to look at me we want to believe that we're sentient beings that are in control of our lab no it's actually and truly we are not it's a very controversial point actually because people get very emotional about it and I thought long and hard before I included it in the book actually dismantling conscious will well your husband is written extensively about this idea yeah so it's not it's not new to anyone who's coming to you via him that's true yeah yeah but still yeah I had I had this guy dr. Judd Breuer in here two days ago and he's done once he's done a lot of work on the default mode Network okay doing fMRI is on people's brains after mindfulness and meditation practices and we talked a lot about a little bit but more he's more in the mindfulness space and it was super interesting to see that relationship of you know sort of toning down or turning off the default mode Network and the dissolution of our our sense of identity or self allowing pure consciousness to enter and kind of the impact of that experience yeah so yeah I actually be curious to know how how many people experience that is positive versus negative but there's definitely there's a positive way to experience that and it can be extremely positive right it's part of the reason why there's been so much success with this psychedelic research on PTSD that it part part of the healing is actually realizing that the sense of a separate self is an illusion and there's kind of a connectedness with everyone and everything that comes about when when you're quiet that default mode network yeah I think the the experience if you've had it is universally positive because it provides a sense of connected connectivity to the world but I think intellectually it's it's it's hard to grab and very hard to grapple with yeah yeah yeah no it's it's completely counter to it and I think that's part of the reason why this process is probably going to take a long time like the process even just of the neuroscience we now have and know to be true it's taking forever even for some of the neuroscientists who are doing the work to really be able to accept the implications because it is just deeply it's not the way we're wired to think about things it's not really wired to experience things but again it's the reason why I think it's such an important thing to be doing right now with consciousness because I think it is the only path to deeper understanding and to better understanding right yeah we have this idea that our consciousness there's a locus for our consciousness and it resides in our head behind our eyes yeah and that's fundamentally you know the makeup of who we are and a way of looking at that or defying our intuition about that is - you taught you've talked a lot about this on other shows but but on a neuroscience level understanding that neuroscientists have not been able to find that look it's not like oh it's it resides right here in this part of the brain we see it flaring up when you activate it and also this practice of from that book about the you know pretending don't have a head or like what it's like to not having know that yeah having no head yeah to understand that is nice can't be can't be located in any geographical precise location yeah I think that consciousness can in some sense the self can't I mean there there is no self no I'm confused so the so there are different ways of looking at it and as I say in my book that I'm kind of 50/50 on this at this point but we we basically assume that consciousness is created by at the very least a brain and a central nervous system so we can kind of look at it from that perspective there are all these other theories that I carefully talk about in my book which I completely rejected myself for many years and didn't even think they were they merited my hands like I'm talking about if we're gonna get to that trust me we've already gotten to it so I need to get a little disclaimer before for its we start really talking about it but Pan psychism is this category of theories that posits that fund that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe down to the level of atoms even possibly originating out of some sort of field the the fluctuations of which give matter this intrinsic property of experience so that they're all these physical properties of matter and then there's actually an intrinsic property of all matter so that there's some level of experience wherever there is matter present so you can kind of answer this question of where consciousness is in space-time from either angle from from if we just assume consciousness exists only in brains we know that that is I mean there's no like pinpoint location right but the brain itself is creating a certain experience that it does not exist in your chalkboard right your your your chalkboard is not participating in the experience is my brain and so it's oh so there's some sense in which you can talk about a physical location in a brain-based view of consciousness but even if you go down some pens psychic rabbit hole it's still for at least for the the theories that make sense to me the way that I there are theories that don't make sense to me within pen psychics I mean I definitely when I consider those views and so so as I was saying I rejected it categorically for a long time it just sounded completely crazy to me and went against everything that I understood about the brain and the more I fixated on the subject and the more I read in the more I thought about it the more open I actually become my own thoughts actually started leading me there like what what if and then I realized there was this category of theories called pen psychism and so then I started doing research there and there are actually many mainstream well-respected scientists who take some view either within pen psychism or some you know it's basically a pan psychic view whether or not they they considered they call it that by by the name which I've said many times the terrible name we need a new name but it's so taboo for scientists to consider something like this and if you have actually done it publicly which i think is incredible most of them there are many more of them than I realized because they won't admit it publicly because it's such a career ender so I do truly believe it's a legitimate category of theories that we should be open to and now I forgot your class I was answering some other we're talking physical location of Christ so within Penn psychism still each area of matter would entail whatever experience make sense for that area of matter even it underpin psycho so I think there's some there's a sense in which consciousness no matter how you look at it is tied to matter right that that consciousness can be redefined and perhaps it's not exactly what we think it is and it's a fundamental aspect of all matter going down to you know the atom all the way up to the human being and beyond and I have to say that that like that activates my you know new-age proclivities you know it's like I want to believe that that's true so badly beyond the beyond part yeah I just I just think it's cool you know it's like wow think about that like wouldn't that be amazing that everything we thought about consciousness you know it's so much more complicated and vast to be an essential property of what yeah the universe is comprised of yeah is an amazing idea and it's it's I guess it's a reality but it's sort of disheartening that there are certain ideas out there that would be career Enders for scientist just to talk about and think about because science is about like science at the cutting edge has to be about asking questions that no one's willing to ask and exploring them as open-mindedly as possible yes I agree and I think I think it's kind of the right time to start making noises about this because you know there are a variety of reasons but I can see why it's gotten such a bad rap and I can see the ways in which science gets threatened and also the ways in which certain theories get co-opted by some ridiculous you know pseudo scientific New Age idea and then those scientists kind of get implicated in the pseudos you know careful yeah I get it but it is it's it's a legitimate category of theories and it's incredibly interesting and given that we've made no progress on what's what's called the hard problem of consciousness the fact that it's still so deeply mysterious and that it doesn't seem that more understanding of brain processes will give us more information about this fundamental nature of consciousness what it what it actually is this is I mean this is where I started is this is why these are the moments in science where we have to start challenging intuitions and be open to me we've been thinking about it all wrong the the kind of way in here seems to me to be by challenging this emergence you know the emergent phenomenon of consciousness this idea that yes we understand as human beings that we are conscious and that perhaps animals are but as you slide down the scale at what point is something that is technically alive that is cellular not conscious and you know from a binary perspective is it a switch that gets flicked at what point does the fetus become conscious yeah there has to be some demarcation line right and the more you know that you realize like this it's a gradation kind of thing but is there a you know just semi consciousness become consciousness and then if so what is semi-consciousness it all falls it falls part yeah no I mean in some sense it kind of has to be binary there's if there's a spectrum either the all of reality is is the spectrum or you drop off the spectrum at the end of the spectrum right at that point it's it's binary right so yes and that is that's just this eternal mystery that we don't seem anywhere close to the ad it's all and so I do think kind of flipping the question is is it is incredibly interesting especially since so much of the science is actually very intuition challenging already and we can kind of start there and just see I mean my book is all about asking questions I think it's interesting even if you know what works what we're asking is is wrong and there's a clear and what we what our intuitions are telling us is right there's no reason not to say let's just totally break this open yeah yeah so if you were to define consciousness at you know at the molecular level like well that definition be I think the definition is always the same even though it's hard to have a definition but I think it's always the same as long as you're talking about consciousness in its most fundamental sense so experience is the best word I can come up with but if there is any experience at all if there's something that it's like to be that matter to be that collection Adams's then there is consciousness present there if it's completely dead and lights are out and there's absolutely no experience being had then it's it's not but you need a very broad definition of experience experience not in the sense of what we would qualify as experience maybe although I'm but so this is the problem with a lot of these words I think experience is the cleanest word I think awareness brings in other things that aren't necessarily conscious experience we usually think of it as something more complex because more complex creep creatures having a very complex complex experience and so it's kind of the problem with all talking about consciousness in general is we are these incredibly complex systems the brain is the most complex thing we know of in the universe right and that and our experience is of being that so we assume that consciousness is complex because we associate it with our own experience and don't know how or if we can apply it to other things but I think there are ways that we can imagine their little thought experiments and theirs in the beginning of one of my chapters one of the chapters in my book I do a little bit of it like a guided visualization to try to get someone to imagine even you know from the perspective of a baby I don't use a baby in this sense but at least that brings it to the to the human level what experience is like when you start stripping away all of our inputs like we're without sight without hearing without you know if you're just talking about super minimal I think there's some way in which we can imagine you know a worm say which many people think worms aren't conscious but you can imagine there's something that it's like to be a worm there's some level of consciousness there it would be so incredibly minimal right like whatever the feeling is it would be probably not even in the sense of a localized self it might be like pressure or heat or and so I think we can imagine experience being very very minimal and my guess is that if it does go as far down as worms or even deeper it gets more and more minimal right along those lines I want to talk about the the consciousness in the plant kingdom oh yes there's some super interesting so especially like the Douglas fir yes Apple that you use right so I didn't know a lot of this before I wrote my book I did all of this research most of the research for the book and what's interesting is I brought in plant behavior kind of to prove the opposite point I didn't bring plant and plant behavior because I think plants are conscious although this point kind of makes you question whether they are but I brought it in because I was addressing this issue of are there behaviors we can point to that that are evidence absolute evidence of consciousness and there are so many plant behaviors that are so much more similar than I realized and I think then most people realize down to the mechanism so it's it's kind of like behavior that you would describe in similar terms to the way we describe human behavior but they're also similar genes similar processes of cell changes resulting in electrical signals in much the same way that our that our brains do and of course they're very different but they're similar enough that I use it because we assume plants are not conscious and so you can kind of play this trick on yourself by saying okay if plants do these things that when humans do them we say that that's evidence of consciousness but we assume plants are not conscious they're doing all of this without consciousness why maybe we don't need consciousness for these behaviors in humans and this is just part of the intuition challenging that I was doing but yeah so you you spoke about the the tree behavior the Douglas fir and the birch this is the work of Susan Simard I don't know if you've seen her TED talk so worth watching she did work in the Canadian National Forest and and I actually think she grew some of her own trees in her own like lab setting to study the communications that happen under and what are called mycorrhizal networks these are fungal networks under the ground so there are root systems but there are also systems of fungus that help trees communicate to each other share carbon with each other they share defense signals there is this incredibly elaborate system of communication happening underground some of which and I use this in my book because it mimics human behavior to some extent where the trees that have dropped seedlings she refers to them as the mother trees are able to recognize through these networks which trees that have grown in the forest are their own kin and they send them more carbon and they send them defense signals that they're not sending to other trees and there's a sense in which they're protecting they are protecting their kids it's unbelievable they make more room for their roots and you can see how this could all happen without consciousness right like it's all trippy but you could still say okay that's so interesting all that that happens there's all this communication and cells talking to each other and and that could all just be happening in the dark right that could be happening in the same way that we imagine our computer processing systems are happening in the dark and if that's true why do we think all of these things that we're doing require consciousness and so I think that's an interesting starting point but it does also make you wonder if trees are cut I mean what comes up for me when I think about that is is the beautiful symbiosis of these ecologies right like we're caught up in our sense of self were we separate ourselves from others I mean you talk about Stardust and yeah we yeah we're all Stardust but when you really think about that we don't yeah and when you think about the limitations of free will and the fact that we're just truly reacting to our environments and there is no you know impermeable barrier between ourselves in the world and the Sun and all of these things that were reacting constantly to our environment and that we are very much in that same place of responding to our environment adapting yeah trees and forests and you know all of these sorts of things are instructive because they show us that that integral the integration is so undeniable when you drill down on it yeah I know so so I've been using plants more recently I've been getting into more hairy discussions about free will and you can use plant behavior to talk about this as well because you wouldn't you don't think the plants are making this decision like ok no no I'm going to give more carbon to you over there and they are as you said there's this complex way in which they are connected and responding and we don't in plant behavior we don't mistake that response however complex and interesting it is for free will right and I think you can you can map that on to human beings as well that there's a sense in which it's all a system from the brain to our bodies to the air we're breathing two of the sound waves that I'm speaking that are bouncing off you I mean there there's this connection that we don't see but that is is there not only do we not see it where our brains are rigged to convince is that right it's something very different yeah yeah I don't know what to do with that though I know I can tell you this as somebody who's who's been vegan like plant-based for a very long time like in the Twitterverse like the plant consciousness argument comes up a lot yeah I actually just heard someone for the first time use it for the reverse argument which I'd never heard before which was they they're so complex and they seem like that you know the sense that they he'd spent it was um it was this a podcast that you did I listen to it he's the guy who went to the Amazon yes and he was immersed in that biosphere yeah such a Corey Allen yes but there were some sense of like I'm how am i how is this type of consciousness any more important than that type of contrast and I don't follow that path and I think there are reasons to think that suffering there's there's definitely a range of suffering and even if plants are our conscious and I mean even if everything's conscious I think yeah definitely make a good argument for some things being able to suffer a lot more than other things well what was interesting about that is that he said he was a longtime vegetarian and then he had that experience in the Amazonian rainforest and then he began eating meat after that because he saw himself as just part of this greater whole but I couldn't help but thinking yeah but eating all those animals is actually contributing to the destruction of this thing that you fell in love with I don't know yeah yeah to see it right differently for sure but it does I think all of that shaking up our intuition specifically about self and free will and and just about consciousness in general get us to see things very differently and I think I mean for me it brings me a lot of joy and it was really the first reason I decided to turn my notes into something that I was writing for the public was really just to share this feeling of awe that I get in contemplating all of this and I think it can it can do that I think it can be kind of a spiritual a source of a spiritual experience and it's another word we can use about a hundred different ways but yeah for me as someone who's not religious and I feel like I'm a fairly spiritual person a lot of it comes from from contemplating things like this how does that work with your famous atheist husband I think he's a very spiritual person I don't I think he's the word if he is I really did yeah I mean we neither of us like the word for obvious reasons but he actually used it I'm forgetting now which book I should know but he used it in one of his books and he gives oh and waking up he uses the word spiritual and he talks about why he thinks it's a necessary word and it shouldn't mean all the things that that people have used it for and there's actually a new sorry it's not that new but Thomas Metzinger is a philosopher who's wonderful and he it's something about spirituality I don't know how long ago but not not that long ago I actually posted an excerpt of it on my website because it's so beautiful and brilliant and is is a kind of an argument for taking the word back to mean something very different from what it generally means in pop culture now his his essay is called spirituality and intellectual honesty or maybe the other way around intellectual honesty and spirituality but he equates spirituality with a kind of a scientific mindset of seeking truth and yeah so I so his his article has made me think a lot about spirituality and what I mean by spirituality when I say it and I absolutely thought I think of myself that way I absolutely think of Sam that way and yeah for me it's more of a kind of staring into the unknown while seeking truth and feeling this intimate connection to the rest of the universe and so you know that can be done through meditation I mean it can be done in a variety of ways but I mean I I think well first of all you know a guy who stops out of college because he has an experience and goes on a 10-year journey that takes him to ashrams and all these met I mean this guy's a seeker you know you can call it spiritual or whatever but he's on a journey for greater deeper understanding yeah and I don't see science and spirituality is incompatible at all in fact your book is testament to that the more you drill down on these crazy ideas the more room you provide for oh and wonder it just how mysterious and amazing all of this is yeah that's what I think that's why ya know that's why I call it hesitantly call it a source of spirituality for me yeah so another intuition that that you confront and and debunk about consciousness or what we think about when we think about ourselves has to do with you you explore it through like the split brain experiments and Toxoplasma that allows you to realize like that Hey we're not we're not so much in control or that consciousness isn't exactly this unified entity yeah so yeah this is some of the research I use to help help people break through or see the sense of self and conscious will as illusions so the split brain research I think does this incredibly well and this joint explained yeah so this this is research that was first done by the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry and they were doing research on patients who had a surgery to essentially split the brain in two this sounds like a horrific procedure but it actually helped a lot of people with epilepsy because an epileptic seizure is essentially an electrical storm that can spread the most devastating most dangerous ones spread throughout the brain and so they they discovered that if they they cut the brain through the corpus callosum and essentially split it into into its separate halves it would prevent the electrical storm from from spreading to the entire brain and many patients got incredible relief from this and for the most part you couldn't tell they seemed normal and healthy after the fact through this research they discovered that there was a sense in which the person the split the two split sides of the brain were kind of like separate people in terms of their consciousness and in terms of their their will as well and so I do want me to describe some of the experiments go supersonic yeah it's super interesting I never tire of thinking about this and what it must be like but essentially the patients end up like conjoined twins almost where they're they have like separate minds but they're sharing this body so one of the the the famous experiments is of a split brain patient so the way the brain works is our visual field the right side of the visual field gets projected on to the left hemisphere the left visual field is projected onto the right hemisphere the same is true for a lot of things like our hands the the sense perceptions from our hands go to the opposite hemisphere and so they were able to kind of separately question and communicate with each side of the brain so they would flash a word I think in my book I use the one where they flash the word key and they flashed that to the left visual field which would only go to the right side of the brain because that's where it goes and normally that would be shared across the corpus callosum but this has been split so it's stay it's it only gets received by the right hemisphere so the right hemisphere has seen the word key the left hemisphere hasn't seen anything and when you ask the person also the the speaking centre of the brain language communication is not always but most fear in this patient it was in the left hemisphere so the experimenter asks the person what word did you just see and they say I didn't see anything and that's because the speaking part of the brain is is the left hemisphere then they'll say there'll be a bunch of objects on the table in rocks and coins and and things for them to choose from then they'll say reach out and pick up the object of the word you just saw and the person with their left hand because it's controlled by their right hemisphere who saw the word key will reach out and pick up a key and this is just replicated over and over again with the same results so in there there are different ways that they that they can ask various questions there was a child I'm forgetting the name they used her and I think they kept his name anonymous but they used a name what he was famous for having the ability actually to speak with both hemispheres and so they were able to get a lot of information from him but they would ask him questions and he would have different answers depending on which hemisphere they they projected the question to so it's crazy he wanted to be true to you know one side wanted to be I forget now but you know one side wanted to be a draftsman when he grew up and the other side wanted to be something else and they're bizarre cases of someone one half of their brain being an atheist and the other one being a Christian the whole the whole range is possible but it really is like you end up with conjoined twins rather than a single unifying and so what do you make of this like how does this inform yeah you think about consciousness so they're they're a couple of ways and actually the interpreter is something that comes up here that I that I didn't mention which is super interesting which is the the language side of the brain it was Michael Gazzaniga and another scientist kind of came up with this term the interpreter for this experience that they noticed or phenomenon they noticed again and again in these patients where they would give a command to the to the patient to get up and walk to the end of the room and so the patient would do this sorry I always I know the example years so it's like so it's to the right hem they tell the right hemisphere get up and walk and they'll get up and serve walk to the back of the room then they ask the person so the speaking left hemisphere is going to answer why why did you just get up and the left hemisphere is not aware of that command so the left hemisphere doesn't actually have information about why his body got up and started walking and in most cases it will come up with an instantaneous response that kind of makes sense that it doesn't seem that it's alive doesn't seem like the person fabricated this it's a function of the brain it's kind of have an answer and he'll say oh I got thirsty I was good I was standing up to get a glass of water and this is a little bit of an insight into into conscious will the idea that and many neuroscientists think there's something like this there's a kind of an interpreter effect happening all the time or a lot of the time where we have this unconscious brain processing and kind of rises to the level of consciousness and we think we know the reason and we may not be right about that right we're sort of post-hoc coming up with rationalizations for behaviors that are already underway yeah right using example also if you being startled from a noise in the middle of the night before you were like your body moved before you heard yeah the thing yeah yeah and that was more kind of an interruption of the binding process or I think and there are these disorders that interrupt a binding so that people don't actually experience the sights and the sounds of things in the same moment happening at the same moment how does that manifest in an individual like if they're not binding properly it's just mishmash of everything coming in at different times yeah yeah there's a category of disorders called agnosia which is the inability of the brain to process sensory information together so there's a whole right I mean there's strange things that can happen that I just discovered there's something called finger agnosia which is the inability to differentiate between your different fingers but basically everything we experience is the brain is doing all of this for us right it like once you start to pull these things apart in the split brain research does the same thing it's like everything that we kind of take for granted and think this is the way things are you manipulate the brain a little bit and you realize it just breaks down yeah like if there if you split somebody's brain and you know one side's an atheist and one side is a Christian what does that say about how we think about who we are what is the self right yeah or is there no such thing right you know yeah that gets back to the bummer part I guess I always I always see two paths they're like there's a fork in the road you can go the bummer path but you can also go of the kind of like surrendering to this bizarre universe we're in and just letting it be something different than you thought it was yeah I mean at all I feel like whatever we discover it's all kind of magical I noticed I'm sure you notice this having kids they ask you to explain everything and they don't understand anything and you realize every answer is crazy right you just might not answer any about her like I am I saying blue and when we breathe are we breathing the sky and I'm you know she's just trying to understand yeah extending the micro Raizel example is this Toxoplasma great example that you use which just also further you know enhances the mystery of all of this when you realize like that your your neurology can be hijacked by these you know microscopic entities that then take over and control your behavior yeah although the parasite research is so interesting and I knew a little bit about it before I started writing the book as a book but I did a lot more reading and it just gets creepier and creepier but parasites control the behavior of their hosts and they do it with neuro chemicals because or not not always but but often they're either mimicking the neuro chemicals of the creature its invading or they're just disrupting some system so that they get the creature to do what it needs it to do for its own needs so yeah Toxoplasma that that's an interesting one that's one a lot of people know about in cats where it needs to reproduce in the intestines of a cat and so in order to but then it it it part of its life cycle happens outside of the cat but it needs to eventually make its way back to a cat and so you know rats who are that are infected with this parasite who have normally have a natural fear of cats this parasite alters their brain chemistry in such a way that they actually become less fearful in general but they are less fearful of cats they can be drawn to cats they're drawn to the smell of cat urine like they suddenly become they just run headlong into the cat deucey in some cases yeah and that's just this parasite needing to get back but my point about all of that is there's some sense in which we're already in that circumstance right like we are our conscious experience is really at the mercy of whatever processing we are a part of there's some interesting science happening right now in the microbiome where they're discovering this nexus between the quality of your gut flora and the foods that you crave yeah and that again you think like well my body's telling me I need this it's like no actually this thing inside of you that's what it feeds on well in your body is hardly your body and I forget the numbers but it's so no it's like this percentage right yeah yeah yeah all right well the ultimate kind of wrench in this whole thing that just takes it off a cliff is time mmm so let's talk about time okay I probably I feel like I'm not qualified to talk about time although I will say I keep recommending his book because I think it's so beautifully done Carl over Valley's new book on time called the order of time I think one of the reasons I love it but it's just it's it's a great book on an accessible way to kind of understand where the science is at at this point but he does this he ends the book on consciousness and he kind of talks about how the two are interrelated and I love that because I end my book on time and there is some sense in which you know whether at the level of physics they're interrelated you know we don't know but our conscious experience certainly couldn't exist without time there's something it is it's in many ways all about time so explain okay how does that work so I think I think many people have this experience in meditation and a lot of the kids that I teach get have communicate this experience quite often that it starts to make them wonder what the present moment is so we have so our experience is just forever in what we feel is the present moment right it's this experience of what's now one when you start to pay closer and closer attention to that it's hard to even understand what we mean by now and in what sense time is moving and it's interesting that we use the word moving it's like we talk about time in spatial sense and yeah so I think I think it's interesting even just you know how am I to talk about this in the last chapter how much time do we need for a conscious moment right and this may be different for humans than for other animals is a common flickering intervals or is it a continuum right and it gets into you then explore this this these two kind of countervailing theories of present ISM versus eternalism and how we think about time yes yeah and I think I could be wrong but I think Karl or Valley actually says neither of them are right although he basically says there is no such thing as time as we experience it and we we think of it to be that it just it it completely falls apart there's no present moment in the universe that is consistent throughout the universe right there's things at the quantum level there's no past and present even like things go in both directions and you can't tell one from the other what was your question using myself so we consciously we experience time in you know in a present ISM context like a flowing yeah you know in Raritan er way right but the science suggests that it's really it probably is more of an eternal ism kind of thing that all of these things are happening simultaneously in multi-dimensions and yet we can't even really fully yes yeah well and I think whether or not eternalism is the right way to describe it like the block universe I think is a controversial concept the idea that it's it's a static thing that every point in time exists always but present ism doesn't seem accurate either I mean it's clear it's clearly not accurate but it's interesting that that's the way we experience the world and there's there's something about our experience that kind of lights up these different and we call them moments and we're only experiencing them one at a time mm-hmm so why explore time now like what is the relationship between how we're trying to understand time and how we are trying to think about consciousness I mean for me the reason I brought it up in the book mostly is just because I think it's incredibly interesting that our experience of the present moment is something we can't even quite mm-hmm get our minds around our own experience of what it is actually Donald Hofmann is doing this work I don't know if you're aware of him he's very interesting he has a book coming out in August called the case against reality and he is a very he's doing this very with this very rigorous science and I think some peace some scientists are questioning what he's doing but I think it's very interesting and he's certainly grounded in science but he's his question is should we are we thinking about it backwards so is it is it so hard to understand consciousness because we're thinking we're living in this non conscious universe that somehow gives rise to consciousness that that's not the right way to think about it is it possible that consciousness is fundamental and gives rise to the physical world and so you know even he will say I might be wrong but we should explore this yeah that's and so those are the play the types of places that these intersections happen between the mysteries were coming up against in quantum mechanics and right in your research your research for doing the book what what really out there ideas did you come across that didn't make the cut yeah I mean like you went out on a limb to include you know this para para psychism because I'm sorry parasite know it even worse and I know in in your podcast with Sam he's like you know he's saying like he was trying to talk you out of this but yeah I would imagine you came across some other stuff too you're like yeah I mean I get you out there yeah I think there are some my feeling is that some people have taken what I think are legitimate questions within pants psychism to make all kinds of claims like the universe is common there's something called the combination problem in pants psychism which I talked a little bit about in the book because actually don't see it as a problem I think it's partly because we're confused about being selves and that illusion that's misleading us there but within this the the combination problem is essentially the philosophical problem if pants psychism is true how is it that these smaller points of consciousness in the atoms of my body in the cells come together to create this other form of consciousness and I actually I don't think about it that way when I contemplate pen psychism that's not the way I think about it but so then the natural next question is is there some kind of human you know larger human consciousness or consciousness of the universe that there was an article recently I think titled is the universe conscious so I think again confusing consciousness with complex thoughts right I think it's it's a really a misunderstanding of the implications of pan psyche ISM that lead people to what look to me like slightly religious beliefs that for many people give them some gets them out of the feeling that they're they're bummed we're coming across and they want to prove that yeah it's not comforting to me it's annoying but I get I get why it would be comforting but ya know the idea that there's some there's some plan there's some path there's this higher consciousness we don't you know we can let go of God but now we're gonna use this other thing as a placement for for God but the idea that human brains that aren't connected would have some bigger mind that it I mean it's you know those are the type of plan for every single person yeah right but that aside it's undeniable that there is an organizing principle on some level going on here that I don't know that we'll ever fully be able to comprehend yeah but yeah is is certainly true nonetheless right yeah what that is whatever it's true is true well you're somebody who who has been a meditator for a long time and I know your your entry point to that started with migraines right which is something my wife mmm deals with and has dealt with she was just just recently in the last two days like down and out just tried everything it's been a real challenge for her but that's originally if I'm not mistaken what kind of brought you into that world yes so I when when I was yeah I was about eight years old when I first started getting migraines and there was a moment at which I was in a particularly having experiencing a particularly bad one where I'm sure this happens to your wife - it's it's the strangest thing or you're in so much pain and it's actually a migraine is kind of hard to even pinpoint where the pain is but any tiny little movement like just taking a big breath or adjusting myself would be like was crashed in my head and so I had to stay incredibly still and I guess because I was so focused on like all these little micro movements and just you know I think when you're in that much pain and I know other people have had this experience just the slightest adjustment in one way or the other can can make a huge difference so you can bring you a just a little bit of relief it feels like a lot and that's in that circumstance in the same way that the movement that makes it makes it more painful does so it was aware of that and I think as I was staying really still I was able to notice that just the psychological state I was in that I had gotten myself into or maybe that's not a fair way to describe it but I realized that I was kind of like fighting the pain it's hard to describe but with my psychological stance right like my my way of my way of kind of looking at the pain or being with the pain was with a lot of resistance and like wanting it to go away that's not the right way to describe wasn't with words it was a mess yeah I mean almost felt like a movement right and so I just decided in that moment I don't know why but I just decided to stop doing that and to just get curious about what I was experiencing and to kind of get closer to that just really let it be there and really kind of almost like facing your fear like let's just get into this like what what is this and I that was kind of the first moment for me of noticing that curiosity could be helpful and can it be an antidote to different types of pain which is I think part of a realization that comes through meditation also but more specifically just not resisting something and kind of having a stance of being curious and letting things be even when you're in terrible pain it creates just that you know the slightest bit of relief and that was a powerful insight for me that I then when I was able to or when it occurred to me I was able to apply to other areas of my life not just physical pain but psychological pain to to just getting curious about what is this thing that I'm resisting made it a little more tolerable yeah that's interesting that's that's something something that Jed brewer was talking about the other day here like using like his his work is really in cravings and addiction and using mindfulness it's a kind of pain and the idea of like like letting go of your you know willful impulse to try to combat this and releasing your self judgments and all the emotions that swirl around it yeah and just being curious like being present with it curious about what it is and when you approach it from that perspective it's it almost like it it's like it dissolves the solid mm-hmm yeah yeah no I think that it's I hadn't thought about it in that context but it must be a great tool because it kind of it gets you to see thoughts and even sensations like pain as almost as energy right it's this thing that is pretty amorphous that when you look at it very closely and craving is a really interesting one and I actually had it's not quite craving but it's in my meditation practice the thing when I if I'm sitting along retreat the thing that I now that I now welcome because I think it's so interesting is the desire to move right like what it's very hard to pinpoint what that feeling is like a you know I know a touch to the hand I can kind of know what that feeling is pretty clearly but wanting to move is very hard to find in it's not localized in any particular yeah so any kind of like craving or wanting when you take a closer look at it I think becomes a kind of you realize it's a kind of energy for it if it starts to break down yeah yeah talk to me about the work that you do with kids and meditation so yeah so I've been teaching meditation to children for close to 15 years I think I've stopped counting but I think it's about 15 years ever since I discovered Susan Kaiser Greenland's work which I think is truly brilliant and unlike any of the other work that has been done with children although there's a lot of great stuff out there now she created a secular program for children in schools based on the bop asana teachings but truly turned it into a completely secular program and I had just finished a meditation retreat where I kept thinking about how beneficial it would have been to for me to learn to meditate as a child and how I was kind of naturally inclined as I think a lot of I noticed this in my classes so I think it's like any other ability or talent where most people can learn it but some people are like truly gifted at it and can learn it much more easily and I think actually in general I think children can learn to meditate more easily than adults but then there are the ones who really take to it pretty quickly and just fall into it right away and then they can get derive all of this benefit from it when they're young so I came out of that retreat mostly wondering why we don't teach this to children and thinking about it in the context of physical education that you know like we consider this to be mandatory like we have to keep our bodies healthy and this is such an incredibly powerful tool for keeping our minds healthy and why this right how's everybody accumulates all sorts of baggage I can barely learn and it's completely closed off yeah that openness the open mindedness of children seems to be you know perfectly suited because they're not like they want to be in that place of all annoyance right and they still there in that place all the time it's like my daughter asking if she's breathing the sky and like why her breath isn't blue and you know it's all mysterious and and there's no idea that it should be one way versus another way and so much of that is an obstacle to learning how to meditate when you don't know what a self is or what freewill is or know what you know you're just very open to the next experience how many of the kids that you teach end up adopting like a consistent practice I wish I knew that's at work it's all over the place I'm sure I I've heard from many parents I get these wonderful emails and sometimes photo actually got this text a couple of years ago from a mom who said we couldn't find I won't I'll use a different name Rebecca we couldn't find Rebecca we were visiting my parents we couldn't find Rebecca we were looking all over the place and then I found her and she showed me the picture and she's sitting meditating under a tree in the backyard it's amazing yeah it's amazing and it's the most wonderful thing about it is that what I was hoping was true is true that she clearly was deriving so much benefit from it she could she was this is something she wanted to do on her own she just decided to go do it in a moment that she felt like she wanted to or needed to or whatever does it work with your own kids much harder tell me about it yeah yeah I keep thinking I need someone else to record all of my guided meditations for my kids yeah yeah yeah I mean so I all of my meditations and lessons are now on the waking up app and I have a long page and it's maybe slightly intimidating because there's so much text but I put everything in there that I think is actually really important to know before you teach kids how to meditate and I forget oh so and and one of the points I make there is that it's really important to not force kids to not really to not put pressure on them at all to do it or to learn it and that I think the best thing that parents can do is model it for their children which is true of so many things and my kids especially my older daughter she's 10 it's definitely interested and I got very lucky actually they invited me to teach a meditation class at her elementary school so I taught her class kindergarten first for three years through second grade and you know that's not advice I can give to parents you know it just kind of stops there but what's interesting is I think children really learn meditation better in the context of a group or a school or like a learning setting and I think at home you really just have to offer it and talk to them about it so they know it's something that's available and show them how it helps you and I actually think it's important to do it in front of them I think they become interested without telling them they have to do it just actually sit down and set a timer and that parents I know who meditate who have kids who meditate that that isn't Orange yeah I mean it's it's like any good behavior that you want to instill in your kid if you create restrictions and mandatory rules around it it's that's a recipe for a disaster yeah I mean it can go both ways but meditation is definitely that way because it's totally an internal so you can't you know you can tell them to say thank you to someone when they've given them something but meditating you can't control it's like you can't force someone to go to sleep right like that if that's just not something is there an optimal or appropriate age to introduce this my favorite age to teach is nine and ten and I still generally think that's the best if there's one time that you're going to introduce it to children I think that's the time partly because it stays with them I think when they learn around fourth grade those memories stay with them yeah and they're also at this really beautiful stage of still being kids but they're starting to think like adults and you can have basically every conversation you would have with in adults about meditation with a child that age and so I think the learning is just very deep and I think they learn as well as as younger children but I am always proven wrong when I think a group of children are too young and I'm invited to try to teach them now the youngest I've taught is four and a half and they absolutely learned and it's different you know what each age is different you and I would say not every child in that class was meditating for sure maybe four or five of them caught it and a couple had some really interesting experiences so I think they can learn as young as four I think it depends on the context on how they're learning speak about that and just the Epiphany that one young child had about what the present moment is else yeah no that's so often the Epiphany and it's I love it it's so interesting to hear them talk about it but yeah this was a little boy I think he's five or was five at the time and yeah he I mean he barely had the language to describe what he was talking about but it was similar to what that the other girl in second grade who I mentioned in my book it's a similar realization and he talked about it in terms of it going fast he said it just keeps going I don't even remember exactly what he said but it was something about it moving fast which was one of the first realizations I had when I really got and was able to concentrate for long enough to kind of stay moment-to-moment for a significant period of time if there's something kind of energizing about it because it really it is it's it it's a good way to describe it so moving fast there's maybe teaching us in schools we should be teaching it in schools and you all our schools are in need to institutionalize this I know that yeah yes I think we might be headed there yeah yeah I was not optimistic about that just five ten years ago and now I actually think we're headed there somewhere I now have the opposite concern which is that's happening too fast and I don't want programs that aren't vetted and legit yes yeah all right we're gonna we gotta land this plane but perhaps leave us with all right so you we've challenged all our intuitions about consciousness like where where does this leave us like I finished the book and I'm like okay now I'm like I'm I you know what are we you're asking questions right so what do we do with these these threads that were pulling on in terms of how we can how they can inform how we live our life day to day yeah I'm not sure I don't ya know luckily we now have this research actually that shows that being in a state of awe is actually very good for us and there's I mean we kind of can feel that we know that it feels good but it's it increases our well-being to to think about these things in to contemplate mysteries and the bigger questions and so I think if anything there's that there's that you know if you enjoy wondering about these things keep doing it I think you know what's going on think again right right I love the book it's great the subtitle is a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind it is brief it's a it's a small book but don't be confused this is this is a very you gotta take your time you know you're not gonna rifle through this you could read it in a short period of time but the concepts themselves are are very deep and they're asking you to think deeply about them which is great so congratulations I love doing yeah good how do you feel you feel all right yeah good we did it yeah thanks so much if you want to connect with Annika where the best ways for people to probably my website is the best is just Annika Harris comm but it's a tan aka Harris comm and are you doing any public events or speaking or any that kind of stuff um very literal yeah nothing to announce now although i do i do announce everything that's coming up on social media all right good and if you have children and you're interested in exploring meditation with them the waking up app you can find all hanukkah's programs yes and some of my guided meditations are on my website awesome cool thank you yeah all right peace [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 116,920

Rating: 4.8131919 out of 5

Keywords: Annaka Harris, panpsychism, quantum mechanics, quorum sensing, rich roll, artificial intelligence podcasts, neuroscience podcasts, consciousness podcasts, meditation podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, science podcasts, education podcasts, philosophy podcasts, plant consciousness, rich roll podcast, self-help podcasts, self-improvement podcasts, waking upp app, sam harris, spirituality podcasts, wellness podcasts, sam harris consciousness, sam harris free will, AI podcast

Id: vqP5ukwyfp0

Length: 87min 45sec (5265 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 11 2019