Antonio Damasio and Dan Siegel - Mind, Consciousness, the Body, and Relationships

[Music] we've gone into some incredible deaths this weekend and then this morning about very specific issues about theories of consciousness mechanisms and things like that what Antonio and I thought we would do in this chat together for the next 40 minutes is to really widen the scope so for example in the strange order of things you deeply go into not just consciousness but the idea of culture and the title of our conversation together is about mind consciousness the body and relationships and how these things pertain to both our personal well-being and planetary health so the the way we're gonna do this is we can start with some introductory comments then Antonio and I are gonna go back and forth there's some specific specific things I want to make sure to ask you about we've done a dialogue before and it was incredibly rich and so this is wonderful to be back here with with you so do you want to start with interactive comments or would you like me to begin you stopped okay so the first thing I want to begin with here at Stanford is a very personal story that may relate to a lot of you it's a painful story and it has two parts one was just across the street at the main high school here the public school Palo Alto High School there were several young people who jumped in from the Train and they had been filled with so much despair and disconnection within consciousness felt so much suffering and didn't see any way out that they killed themselves so I was called I'm a child and adolescent psychiatrist to come and do an intervention at the school and in the months before I could get over here two more children killed themselves just the week before I came and they had me meet with the students with the faculty and with also people from the gun the other school nearby and then the students made a video which you can actually watch which they gave me permission to make available to everyone and you'll see me talk to people who are unbelievably terrified and in terms of consciousness what came up in the discussions we had in all those settings was an incredible sense of not belonging a feeling of despair disconnection and this was really painful and you can watch the video if you want but then actually a few months before that Stanford Medical School had asked me to come and do the same thing for the entire medical faculty and nursing faculty because as you probably know there were several post graduates trainees who killed themselves physicians and when the chairperson of not the server's in the Dean of the Medical School got up said here's the Mayo Clinic report 56% of postgraduate physicians are clinically depressed anxious or suicidal over half of your your physician to over half of people and then right around that same time I was speaking to 3,000 veterinarians who had achieved the highest rate of suicide and that was for 3,000 people in the room I did a small workshop with 700 other veterinarians one of them got up and took the microphone said I'm thinking of killing myself right now in front of his colleagues and the feeling was always I don't belong I'm disconnected and I can't get this loop of thoughts out of me so for me as a clinician wanting to know the science of consciousness and to know about how we can actually do something in the world it actually seemed sadly related to what's happening even with climate change issues where people feel so disconnected from being a part of nature that they treat earth like a spherical trash can and there's this incredible despair I was just with my daughter's at Columbia and graduate school in environmental science she invited me to a class on emotional resilience in the face of the climate crisis and it may seem strange but the suicide here at Stanford is not just at Stanford it's not just in the high school it's all around this country we have a country here with incredible individualism and in brain terms you would say oh the default mode network is really excessively differentiated and people are just preoccupied if you want to do the brain side of this and amazingly just to stay with the brain if you can reduce that people in the mindfulness community would tell you and shenzhen young and i were talking about this last night at the party if you can reduce that excessive default mode activation of mimimi mimimi and drop into a state of awareness which gives you a feeling of connection things shift and so the last story I want to say about this this is just some introductory comments I'm working with some people at MIT on something that Peter sangai and Otto Sharma two professors there called generative social fields generative was mentioned earlier by a wonderful talk by a philosopher and in that view we're looking at how consciousness can allow people to feel incredibly separate and when you go into a classroom you could talk to students who feel disconnected that they don't belong there there's just like perfunctory doing work and we can study and we are studying generative classrooms where teachers create a culture in the classroom where kids feel like they belong and the whole mood in the room is different and this is an amazing thing so a number of the faculty went to a forest this is what I want to ask you about we went to a forest and we are asked to spend three days alone in the forest and initially you're by yourself you're just with a creek the sky and after a few hours I had the experience and all of my colleagues there were a dozen of us the same experience where the sense of a separate self goes away this is no drugs just being in a forest and you feel incredibly not even I wouldn't even use the word connected but you feel like you are a part of this nature and that the body is an illusion to place the self only in that and I know you've written deeply about the self so the self is in a body as a me but you feel this deep part of a we and we would start talking about this term we've you're both a bodily self and a cultural self including all of nature and this happened in this wheel of awareness practice we did yesterday and it's happened to the 10,000 people that I've studied doing that where people will get this feeling I'll just say this one last thing in a parliament I was asked to do this wheel lots of tension in the government we do the wheel which basically Antonio is where the knowing of consciousness is placed in the metaphoric hub of a wheel the knowns are on the rim and this happens over and over again but I'll give you one specific example of parliamentarian says during a break I didn't want to share with my colleagues what it was like to get into that hub and now he's crying he said but I've never felt so connected to everyone and everything and I've never felt so much love and he wouldn't say it to his colleagues because he said they'd think of his week and then I said to him I said so let me understand something when you're in pure awareness you felt connected in love he goes more than I've ever felt never meditated before in his life and then I said to him so when you're making national law do you leave love out of the reasoning and so he went over and he started chatting up his parliamentarian friends and I hope they would bring that in but this experience I wanted to ask you about if feeling connected to everything feeling that the self which you've written so beautifully about is more than just your bodily experience yes you have a body more than just your brain it's in a whole body and you know all your work in homeostasis so powerful but I worry that the reason in medical school and in high schools people are killing themselves literally is because they're feeling so separate from the rest as Einstein would say this optical delusion of separation that for planetary health and personal health expanding that sense of self through really these methodologies of consciousness which you can do being in nature or even meditating and so that's I just want to put all that out there because I feel we're at this turning point in humanity where if we don't focus directly on the nature of consciousness and its impact on our personal and Planetary well-being whether it's for personal crisis or a climate crisis we're not going to be going in a good direction those are my opening reflections okay well that's it's very thoughtful and I'm trying to think about where am I going to pick out of your many many comments something that relates to me and that can relate to you and to everybody else in this conference and the first thing that came to my mind actually has to do with reasons for connection of course going having a healthy life going to the middle of a forest and being able to look around and and calm down and reflect on your environment and on yourself calmly without any sort of pressure is extremely good knowing a little bit in divulging the knowledge that we now have about the interconnectivity of all ourselves he's also very important and I was thinking about the fact that if we pause a little bit to think about what we are made of the kinds of cells that make up our organism not just the neural cells on which of course we have to be very interested if we're going to understand deeply things about the human mind but cells in general living cells that make up an organism and if you think about the fact that plants around us are also made of cells like we are it can also be anesthetized what I would like to call attention to is that we have a world that continues outside of ourselves into a world of other things that are living and into a planetary world that needs to have certain kinds of interconnections for it to continue so there is something that let's just pick up on the notion of um your stasis which is the notion that you can apply to a single cell and can apply to a whole organism and actually you can apply at higher and higher levels to whole cultures and to a whole universe that's something that is important for us to reflect on the possibility that things have points of regulation that they're there certain areas where where the connections work well and where the process sorry the process of life for example continues and certain conditions under which it goes down and you can it would be good for us to have that notion there very present that the material that we are made of as human beings is not that different from the material that makes up plants and forests in the kinds of regulation that apply to us as a whole organism are not that different the ones that applied to the animals that we have around us and that would be a beginning to have some more respect for all of those processes that already now is around so I think actually just plain knowledge of biology is very much needed and would be superb to have and I think people would would a lot of the conversations for example that we have in terms of animal rights and in terms of climate would be much easier if people would know more about biology and would know what about their biology and the biology of what is around and notions of regulation and notions about processes that cannot or cannot be sustained if they are outside of certain ranges of equilibrium for example then the other thing I would I would was thinking about what you were talking it's the fact that the kind of regulation that you want to have at the level of the single cell even the same cell without a nucleus like a bacterium and that you have in organisms with nervous systems very simple ones or in organs in organisms with nervous systems like we are tense to be repeated over and over so the kind of equilibrium or own ranges of possible life continuation that you have at the level of a cell single-cell appear in organisms that are multicellular and have nervous systems and what is interesting is that you can look at it as a think about what is the charge of that nervous system charging the sense of what what kind of job does it have to do well turns out that the job that the nervous system has to do in general is do exactly the kind of homeostatic regulation that a single cell with no nervous system whatsoever already does with things that are actually extremely similar in terms of the sociality of a single-cell organism the sociality of an organism in if multiple cells and then something very intriguing is that the the charge that we have when we have a mind or the charge of a mind or the chart of consciousness within the mind or the charge of culture happens to be exactly the same as far as I'm concerned there is nothing terribly special about cultural developments that is not inscribed in the fundamental honors thesis of the single cell or of an organism with multiple cells and I think the nervous system is actually the instrument that continues their homeostatic direction in two organisms that have brains eventually and that culture just continues that you think for example of economic systems think of justice think of morality think of the development of the arts and think of what we do when we do science and technology we are essentially procuring on your static possibilities and we are finding ways in which it can operate now to go into the area of dysfunction that you talked about because when you're talking about suicide especially massive suicides like you're describing you you you have to think that something is very badly regulated at that point for that to go to a so badly and there you can point to certain things that are happening for example in our culture and I'm talking about the United States in particular although we have well pretty man at it and we have for a variety of reasons first of all we are we have access to a tremendous amount of knowledge not the beautiful kind of knowledge that one one can sort of trace back to saying the best century with people like William James occlude there now who by the way was incredibly important force in the development of an understanding of how the the botanical world is so close to ours and how it responds in very similar ways but other kinds of knowledge that we have all around and that very often generates conflict by the sheer abundance and one of the things that I think is very problematic in our culture again not just ours here that culture in general we find it all over the sort of advanced advanced countries is that you have a very rapid presentation of knowledge the because you don't have time to think about the knowledge and reflect and be able to see the pros and cons of a certain idea you very rapidly generate the conflict and then you have on top of that the fact that a lot of news media and a lot of a very interesting developing our culture which is social media actually procurers conflict and generates conflict by rapid juxtaposition of things that are very anemic oh and it actually entices you to responses that search for the worst in our emotional armamentarium so when people talk about emotion and talk about emotion to positively I caution because a lot of ours the big sets of emotions are actually negative and they have extremely forceful negative feelings that come with them and so I think that's part of the problem but what I in response to your very beautiful description of all these dramas that are going around I would say that there are things that can explain them at the cultural level but I would again bring back the fact that culture is just one way in which our biology and function functioning and that it's becoming sick it's becoming sick and one day one of the things you mentioned was kind of a reality of our interconnection and yet it's like in these social media things you're referring to the studies are very clear when people spend more time on social media they actually feel more disconnected and there's more an emphasis on the idea of a solo self that you're just who you are your identity is just separate and you know I was reviewing not only you know the strange order of things which is a fabulous book everyone should read it but also the self comes to mind and you make these very powerful distinctions among things like mind and then we can add to that consciousness right so so the consciousness experience self experience mind experience you distinguish those and some really helpful ways which I think would be great to talk about but also what we're talking about now is culture which you really address in the strange order of things and in our discussion here thinking that a culture could be sick and not doing its homeostatic thing part of what comes out right now between us is the idea that if a culture is giving a message of separation that who we are is just a person in a head or a separate being just in a body and that in fact our relationships with one another whether it's parents with children or families or neighbourhoods where you feel like you belong and this whole sense I think that Heather's beautiful talk ended with I got it right belonging at all if you look at the studies of belonging at all and add to them you know the studies of gratitude and the studies of compassion you know they're called self transcendence emotions would Decker Keltner we teach a lot together he studies them I suggest him instead of calling it self transcendent like you're leaving the self what about self extending or self expanding and I want to ask you about that is in our culture if we think from this conference forward what's what's the way you take all these powerful stuff we've been talking about and actually turn it into action in the world let's say for our culture so that instead of the self only being as separate only existing in your head or your body you realize your relationships and I want to ask you how you feel about this your relationships are one aspect of a more integrated way of looking at the self I don't have any problem with that obviously you know I think you have all the possibilities and it's it's it's really a question first of all it's a question of of common sense and then a question of wisdom common sense being on the way to wisdom how to regulate your life in your relationships and I mean we have we I think in a way we were victims of an enormous success we have the successes of our accumulation of knowledge the accumulation of our that comes from science and comes from observations of every every kind then the amount of the knowledge that we're generating is huge and it's wonderful I mean you look at the conference like this and it's actually one of the biggest collections of new findings and novelty in a variety of areas of science around mind and specific problem of consciousness and and around the ways in which philosophy is trying to cope with it as it should because it's sort of a sort of conscience of what is going on at a particular knowledge moment so that's that that's wonderful but at the same time the riches are so much who in this room can cope with all of these findings and all of this accumulation of knowledge sensibly and in a productive way of course you need to go by steps and you it's it's it's a slow digestion but then there's the fact that that marvelous development with the marvels developments of Technology the rapidity with which we get all of this creates those conflicts that I refer to in in relation to social media which is of course a good thing to begin with but can be misused and the general idea that not only is it difficult to manage but all of this can be misused and you know and let's think that at the level of a culture at the level of the Poly's of a society there are good actors and bad actors you know you we cannot when you especially when you ask questions like like I like the ones you're asking it's not just about science and in rational processes going forward it's defective we live in large communities and there are people in those communities that are wonderful and that may have good intense which I presume is the intensive most of the people all the people in this room like you and then they have people that have bad actors and they have all sorts of reasons why they want to achieve certain results that may be good for them and for a small group and that can be disastrous for others all you need to do is look at what is happening in the world in terms of politics in terms of societies in terms of all the conflicts that we get if you if you look at the New York Times yeah or some other paper absolutely well you know there's a set of research studies that are either called terror management studies or mortality salience studies same set of studies which I think a very relevant what you're saying when when you get the experience of threat even if it's subliminal shown to less than 200 milliseconds when they study the brain of the subject who is getting that mortality salience 'my life stimulus what seems to happen is that the brain intensifies its evaluative process to say is the person I'm seeing in my in-group in which case I'll treat them with more kindness other studies would show or is this person in front of me in my out group in which case I'll treat them with more hostility and when you follow those studies forward if you've evaluated a person as quote not like me for whatever criteria that are being used at that moment in the brain the circuitry of it both empathy and compassion is shut off and you're looking at the person in front of you who have you put in the out-group under threat conditions as if they're just a piece of dirt that they don't have a subjective feeling state an internal mind if you will and then you just treat them in a dehumanizing way so part of I think the question we can ask from this conference is is there a way to awaken people to the biology of things even to our inherited tribalism of in-group out-group distinction and realized we actually have consciousness that can raise us above our biological vulnerabilities to be other in people and the there's a wonderful professor named John a Powell who says beautifully that the opposite of uttering is not say mning it's belonging and can we actually open people up to saying you belong you may not be exactly like the person who has this skin color this religion or whatever but you belong and even with what you said earlier Antonio that you know although this is plastic I think but if this were if this were you know the cells of a or maybe it's real it no I think anyway assuming this were real you say we should where you're like me because we're living organisms that rely on homeostasis so when you breathe in I breathe out when I breathe out you breathe in this kind of beautiful way we're interconnected so I'm just wondering of what you feel yeah go ahead stay there yeah anywhere else I mean if that's the important thing is to to think even in relation to ourselves look you you we breathe oxygen that comes not from the plastic plant but from other plants I mean if you if you don't have the plants around you're not gonna have oxygen to breathe and we don't be nasty to bacteria because they're in our gut and if you don't have the bacteria in your gut you're gonna die so actually you have all sorts of levels at which the biology can knowing about biology is really the the summary of this conversation on my side is study biology in general not just neurobiology and in and get to know about this interconnections and just think of that the oxygen you breathe comes from the world of plants those plants that that are living that do not have anything that resembles consciousness and that yet you can anesthetize with stewart's understandings exactly then think about the fact that you cannot live with the bacteria that are in fact extremely numerous there are not only in our gut but in everywhere in in different groups and in different parts of our skin in different organs and so forth so there's an integration of this living world that is that we are testimonies to and that is very important to to realize and yet why do you think the human condition and in particular individualistic cultures can generate a state of awareness that then would include and you see this as a clinician I see this sadly so often in psychotherapy the psychotherapists people feeling all I am is in this body I'm just separate separate separate and there's this incredible loop of despair where it's like okay I just need to accumulate material things for my well-being but then I don't feel particularly good that way and there's not a relational world in which this person live and that's gently and lovingly kind of support them saying well actually who you are yes as a body but if you got the message somewhere along the way that all that you are is just your body it's actually all the studies show gonna lead to all sorts of terrible things in your body and in your mind and all these things then then we're back to the fact that you know cultures can develop marvelous things and can develop bad things and in we're going through a period in which we have both in spades but in which the bad things are taking quite a lot of prominence yeah I think it's quite quite yesterday at lunch somebody asked a very interesting question what was the thing that had most surprised me recently and I think most surprises me recently is the collapse of democracies across the world and it's something I I would never have been able to predict and plenty of people would not have been able to predict in fact many people have very foolishly predicted exactly the opposite that we were in the best of all possible worlds and that we were living in a new enlightenment and it was going to be Just Peachy going forward and what we have witnessed is the collapse of one Western democracy after another and now many other near democracies in other parts of the world that that's absolutely spectacular and that is you know if you don't believe in conspiracies and I don't think that there's a conspiracy for that to happen but there is a conspiracy quote-unquote that comes from the fact that at the same time huge numbers of people are being confronted with very similar problems economic problems problems of realization of what their lives are like and their their social groups are like and all of this can then be properly manipulated by again things that natural we are coming up in the in the in in the culture in any culture which have to do with defense mechanisms which are individual selves very um aesthetic but can be good on me aesthetic defenses or bad you know you can have for example you can have an immune system that is very useful to you but it can malfunction and produce anaphylactic shock for example so all of these all of these are pathologies and again the thing that you're provoking me in the good sense of the term of course something then is very dear to me which is the trying to find all mala G's in different levels of biology and that's it it's cultures are eminently biological you have all of these actors you know the the cells of a culture of the people that are actors in the culture but the the the modes of operation are extremely limited and again go back to something very simple like a bacterium or you know colonies of bacteria and you find that the sociality of these creatures is quite extraordinary how you can have groups of these creatures who clearly are not thinking creatures and we have absolutely no apparatus to to produce anything like mental images maps or anything of that sort but who do have the possibility of sensing stimulus and creating a response but these creatures can group themselves and create alliances they can then fight other groups or they can create coalition's you know as if you had just just come to a political treaty and and solve problems that way yeah so the the the idea that we are very smart human beings inventive cultures and invented politics and things of that sort is complete rubbish because because those simple creatures are already operating in predicting a tremendous amount of the phenomena that we can find it you at individual level or at social level which is quite quite remarkable so just just one more thing to get us a little bit out of your track better back into the track of the of the lorry today but the day before is this idea that we can gain something from understanding how Minds operate and in understanding how minds develop this particular feature that we talk about called consciousness I think actually I was I was listening to of course many of the speakers this morning and I have an impression that making a distinction between mind processes in general and conscious mind processes is something that is worth doing and maintaining because I think when Stewart talks beautifully as he just did and summarizes a lot of his work I think that he is to say that that has to do with consciousness is too modest a claim you should you should be you should be Boulder and say no I am talking about a certain number of mechanisms that are probably quite relevant to the generating to the generation of mental the phenomena of mental experiences and then there are certain of those mental phenomena that can have the quality of experience and that's when they really have a reference to a particular organism and when that reference is accompanied as I believe by a feeling by a feeling that has to do with the being of the creature which is very primordial which has nothing to do with us knowing language being able to communicate with each other all of those marvelous things it's something much deeper than that but it's worth thinking about a fabric of mind which we all share and that has you know we have to go we don't have anywhere to go but deep in the structure and you know it's very fond of of microtubules so am i because you thank you for mentioning Alzheimer's disease today which is interestingly when people think about Alzheimer's disease and this start talking about amyloid plaques I get an allergy reaction because you know the microtubules are where the with the diseases and and you know how that functions so just and how does the quantum perspective that Stewart has been talking about in the microtubules or just in general how does that fit into your view of mine it fits perfectly well if I knew if I knew what what it does I probably will be working on what he does but since I don't I work at a different level you know I'm I'm interested in knowing how feelings operate that's that's the business of my life and and I'm very happy that feelings contribute to the generation of consciousness in the narrow sense which it's really understanding consciousness as a systems level phenomenon as opposed to consciousness in the broader sense of mental phenomena which is what I think he talks about in many others talk about the deeper East he's talking about something deeper you know then you can understand our consciousness is made our consciousness is concocted by understanding the system's lateral arrangement and then you don't need to to worry at that point you don't need to worry about what's going on in the quantum world and in the at the level of microtubules for example your your higher up one last question about systems levels do you see there's a systems level for consciousness in culture say again when you're talking about system yeah a level we're looking at things you've written about culture yeah how does consciousness fit in with your view of culture and also specifically this group what can we do in our culture as humanity on the planet to try to bring things in a positive direction let's let's go back to something today Anil Seth said something very interesting he quoted a guy who is complete anathema to me in there a Stuart Sutherland and he had the quote by the way when I wrote thicker I think it's within Deckard Sarah I have there the entire quote and I put it on purpose I put it at the very beginning of the book and then I was completely undone by the fact that Stuart Sutherland wrote a positive review of decart Sarah in nature and I expected the guy to completely hate me and then I wrote this very nice review now think about what that man says to her son he said nobody nobody has ever understood the gist of it is that you don't know what it is you don't know what what it's good for nobody has any clue how it works and and this was the most nihilistic view possible and one I was exactly on the opposite side what I wanted you to say this is rubbish of course we can't understanding them provided we we given time and money this is from Darwin without still here provided we have time and money get to know everything okay [Music] there's nobody for NIH where was I a large yeah yeah exactly so the critical thing is that consciousness is useful so if you have a mind process but the mind process does not have this curlicue called consciousness this reference to an organism how would that organism care and give a hood about doing good or bad doing something useful or not that's the beauty of it and contrary to its other one we know what is the of consciousness the role of a conscious moment is to make the creature that has it aware of the goodness or badness of what the creature is about to do or what the creature has just experienced that's it and that's useful now that's projected into the culture that's exactly what culture does and when you are when you have an organized cultural system you have the possibility of finding things that are useful or not useful at that point not just for one person but for a group and and so that that denial of the usefulness of consciousness is crazy but miscibility here again you have you have multiple levels there's the the level of usefulness that only comes if you refer to thing to yourself and then there's the level of usefulness that comes from you even having the possibility of knowing anything which is of course what is given by mind in the raw state beautiful I think we could talk for another few days but I think the clock has told us at least in this part of the universe time has come to a stop but Antonio I want to thank you this was really really great thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: BrainMind Summit

Views: 21,765

Keywords: Neuroscience, Psychology, Philosophy, Brain, Creativity, UCLA, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Siegel, Dan Siegel, Mindsight Institute, Psychiatry, Mind, Consciousness, Body, Relationships, Mind and Body, brain processes, emotion, relationships, Awareness, BrainMind

Id: 85zFp0bYe1Y

Length: 42min 1sec (2521 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020