Dr. Sam Harris: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Huberman Lab 105

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor

of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today my guest is Dr. Sam Harris.

Dr. Sam Harris did his undergraduate training

in philosophy at Stanford University

and then went on to do his doctorate in neuroscience

at the University of California at Los Angeles.

He is well known as an author who

has written about everything from meditation

to consciousness, free will.

And he holds many strong political views

that he's voiced on social media and in the content

of various books as they relate to philosophy and neuroscience.

During today's episode, I mainly talk

to Dr. Harris about his views and practices related

to meditation, consciousness, and free will.

In fact, he made several important points

about what a proper meditation practice can accomplish.

Prior to this episode, I thought that meditation

was about deliberately changing one's conscious experience

in order to achieve things such as deeper

relaxation, a heightened sense of focus or ability

to focus generally, elevated memory, and so on.

What Sam taught me and what you'll soon learn as well

is that while meditation does indeed

hold all of those valuable benefits,

the main value of a meditation practice,

or perhaps the greater value of a meditation practice,

is that it doesn't just allow one

to change their conscious experience,

but it actually can allow a human being

to view consciousness itself.

That is to understand what the process of consciousness is.

And in doing so, to profoundly shift the way

that one engages with the world and with oneself

in all practices, all environments, and at all times,

both in sleep and in waking states.

And in that way making meditation

perhaps the most potent and important portal

by which one can access novel ways of thinking and being

and viewing one's life experience.

We also discussed the so-called mind-body problem and issues

of duality and free will.

Concepts from philosophy and neuroscience that, fortunately,

thanks to valuable experiments and deep thinking on the part

of people like Dr. Sam Harris and others,

is now leading people to understand really what free

will is and isn't.

Where the locus of free will likely sits in the brain,

if it indeed resides in the brain at all.

And what it means to be a conscious being

and how we can modify our conscious states in ways that

allow us to be more functional.

We also discuss perception, both visual perception auditory

perception, and especially interesting to me,

and I think as well, hopefully to you, time perception,

which we know is very elastic in the brain.

The literal frame rate by which we

process our conscious experience can expand and contract

dramatically depending on our state of mind

and how conscious we are about our state of mind.

So we went deep into that topic as well.

Today's discussion was indeed an intellectual deep dive

into all the topics that I mentioned a few moments ago,

but it also included many practical tools.

In fact, I pushed Sam to share with us

what his specific practices are and how we can all

arrive at a clearer and better understanding of a meditation

practice that we can each and all apply.

So that we can derive these incredible benefits, not just

the ones related to stress and focus and enhanced memory,

but the ones that relate to our consciousness.

That is to our deeper sense of self and to others.

Several times during today's episode,

I mentioned the Waing Up app.

The Waking Up app was developed by Sam Harris,

but I want to emphasize that my mention of the app is in no way

a paid promotional.

Rather the Waking Up app is one that I've

used for some period of time now and find very, very useful.

I have family members that also use it.

Other staff members here at the Huberman Lab podcast

use it because we find it to be such a powerful tool.

Sam has generously offered Huberman Lab podcast listeners

a 30-day completely free trial of the Waking Up app.

If any of you want to try it, you can simply go

to wakingup.com/huberman to get that 30-day free trial.

During today's discussion, we didn't just

talk about meditation consciousness and free will.

We also talked about psychedelics.

Both their therapeutic applications for the treatment

of things like depression and PTSD,

but also the use of psychedelics.

And we discussed Sam's experiences with psychedelics

as they relate to expanding one's consciousness.

I also asked Sam about his views and practices

related to social media.

Prompted in no small part by his recent voluntary decision

to close down his Twitter account.

So we talked about his rationale for doing that,

how he feels about doing that.

And I think you'll find that to be very interesting as well.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize

that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research

roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring

zero-cost-to-consumer information about science

and science-related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I'd like

to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is Levels.

Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods

and behaviors affect your health by giving you

real-time feedback using a continuous glucose monitor.

One of the most important factors

in your immediate and long-term health

are your blood sugar levels.

And not just your overall blood sugar levels but your blood

sugar levels throughout the day in response to different foods

you eat, to fasting if you're into fasting, to exercise,

and so forth.

I started using Levels some time ago in order

to figure out how different foods impact my blood sugar

levels, and indeed, it does that very well.

It allowed me to see how certain foods really

spike my blood sugar and others keep it more level.

And in particular, how foods that I eat after exercise

can help raise my blood glucose just enough but not so

much that then I get a crash two or three hours later,

which was what was happening before I started using Levels.

I've made certain adjustments to my diet.

I can now eat post-exercise and still have plenty of energy

throughout the day without any issues.

It also has helped me understand how different behaviors impact

my blood glucose levels.

If you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying

a continuous glucose monitor yourself,

go to levels.link/huberman.

Again that's levels.link spelled L-I-N-K /huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by WHOOP.

WHOOP is a fitness wearable device

that tracks your daily activity and sleep

but goes beyond activity and sleep tracking

to provide real-time feedback on how to adjust your training

and sleep schedules in order to feel and perform better.

Six months ago, I started working with WHOOP

as a member of their scientific advisory council

as a way to help WHOOP advance their mission of unlocking

human performance.

And as a WHOOP user, I've experienced

firsthand the health benefits of their technology.

It's clear, based on quality research,

that WHOOP can inform you how well you're sleeping,

how to change your sleep habits, how

to change your activity habits.

Even how to modify different aspects of your nutrition,

exercise, sleep, and lifestyle in order

to maximize your mental health, physical

health, and performance.

So whether or not you're an athlete

or you're exercising simply for health,

WHOOP can really help you understand

how your body functions under different conditions

and how to really program your schedule, nutrition

and exercise, and many other factors of your life

in order to really optimize your health and performance,

including your cognition.

If you're interested in trying WHOOP,

you can go to join WHOOP spelled whoop.com/huberman.

That's join whoop.com/huberman today and get your first month

free.

Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep.

Eight Sleep make smart mattress covers with cooling, heating,

and sleep-tracking capacity.

I've talked many times before on this podcast

about the fact that sleep is the fundamental layer

of mental health, physical health, and performance.

Now one of the key things for getting a great night's sleep

every single night is to optimize the temperature

of your sleeping environment.

Put simply, in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep,

your body temperature needs to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees.

And waking up, on the other hand,

involves a heating of your body by about 1 to 3 degrees.

With Eight sleep, you can tune the temperature

of your mattress cover or mattress

to be cooler or hotter depending on whether or not you tend

to run too hot or too cold.

And you can even vary it across the night

so that you can access the best deep sleep early in the night.

The so-called REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep,

that's more pronounced in the later half of the night.

And doing so really get your sleep

optimized not just in terms of duration

but in terms of quality and the overall architecture

of your sleep.

This has a profound influence on your alertness, focus, mood,

and many other important factors throughout the day.

If you'd like to try Eight Sleep,

you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save

up to $150 off their pod three cover.

Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA,

Canada, United Kingdom, select countries in the EU,

and Australia.

Again that's eightsleep.com/huberman.

The Huberman Lab podcast is proud to announce

that we are now partnered with Momentous supplements.

Because Momentous supplements are

of the very highest quality.

They ship internationally, and they have

single-ingredient formulations.

If you'd like to access the supplements discussed

on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to live momentous

spelled O-U-S so livemomentous.com/huberman.

And now, for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris.

Dr. Sam Harris.

SAM HARRIS: [LAUGHTER]

ANDREW HUBERMAN: We're just talking about this.

SAM HARRIS: Yes, doctor.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: You are indeed a doctor.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SAM HARRIS: I cannot save your life, but I am--

I might save your non-existent soul if we talk long enough.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: [LAUGHTER] Well, neither of us

are clinicians, but we are both brain

explorers from the different perspectives.

Some overlapping.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I'm really excited to have

this conversation.

I've been listening to your voice for many years

learning from you for many years.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't say

that my father, who's also a scientist,

is an enormous fan of your Waking Up app.

SAM HARRIS: Nice.

That's great.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And has spent a lot of time

over the last few years.

He's in his late 70s.

He's almost 80.

He's a theoretical physicist walking

to the park near his apartment and spending

time meditating with the app.

Or sometimes separate from the app

but using the same sorts of meditations in his head.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: So he kind of toggles back and forth.

And even-- I shouldn't say-- even

but-- yes, even in his late 70s, has

reported that it has significantly

shifted his awareness of self and his conscious experience

of things happening in and around him.

And he was somebody who, I think,

already saw himself as a pretty aware person.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Thinking about quantum mechanics and the rest.

So a thank you from him indirectly.

SAM HARRIS: Oh, that's great.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: A thank you from me now directly.

And I really want to use that as a way to frame up what I think

is one of the more interesting questions in not just science

and philosophy and psychology but all of life,

which is what is this thing that we call a self?

As far as I know, we have not localized the region

in the brain that can entirely account

for our perception of self.

There are areas, of course, that regulate proprioception,

our awareness of where our limbs are in space.

Maybe even our awareness of where we are in physical space.

There are such circuits, as we both know.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: But when we talk about sense of self,

I have to remember this kind of neuroscience 101 thing

that we always say.

When you teach memory, you say you wake up every morning,

and you remember who you are.

You know who you are.

Most people do.

Even if they lack memory systems in the brain for whatever

reason, pretty much everyone seems to know who they are.

What are your thoughts on what that whole thing is about?

And do we come into the world feeling that way?

I would appreciate answers from the perspective of any field--

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: --including neuroscience, of course.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

Well, big question.

I mean, the problem is we use the term self in so

many different ways, right.

And there's one sense of that term, which

is the target of meditation, and it's

the target of deconstruction by the practice and by,

as you said, any surrounding philosophy.

So you'll hear, and you'll hear it from me,

that this self is an illusion, right.

And that there's a psychological freedom that

can be experienced on the other side of discovering

it to be an illusion.

And some people don't like that framing.

Some people would insist that it's not so much an illusion,

but it's a construct, and it's not what it seems, right.

But it's not that every use of the term self is illegitimate.

And there are certain types of selves that are not illusory.

I mean, I'm not saying that people are illusions.

I'm not saying that you can't talk about yourself

as distinct-- yourself as the whole person

and with as psychological continuity

with your past experience as being distinct

from the person and psychological continuity

of some other person, right.

I mean-- because obviously, we have

to be able to conserve those data.

It's not fundamentally mysterious

that you're going to wake up tomorrow

morning still being psychologically continuous

with your past and not my past, right.

And if we swapped lives, that would demand some explanation.

So the illusorines of the self doesn't

cut against any of those obvious facts.

So the sense of self that is illusory.

And again, we might want to talk about self in other modes

because there's just a lot of interest

there psychologically and ultimately scientifically.

The thing that doesn't exist--

it certainly doesn't exist as it seems

and I would want to argue that it actually is just

a proper illusion, is this the sense

that there is a subject interior to experience

in addition to experience.

So most people feel like they're having

an experience of the world.

And they're having their-- an experience of their bodies

in the world.

And in addition to that, they feel

that they are a subject internal to the body, very likely

in the head.

Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind

of locus of awareness and thought and intention and that

every-- it's almost like they're-- you're a passenger

inside your body.

You don't-- most people don't feel identical to their bodies.

And they can imagine this is sort

of the origin, the psychological origin,

the folk psychological origin, of a sense of that there

might be a soul that could survive the death of the body.

I mean, most people are what my friend Paul Blum

calls common sense do lists.

You-- you're just the default expectation

seems to be that whatever the relationship between the mind

and the body, there is this-- there's

some promise of separability there, right.

That the-- and whenever you really push hard on the science

side and say, well, no, no, the mind is really

just what the brain is doing, that

begins to feel more and more counterintuitive to people,

and there still seems some residual mystery

that at death maybe something is going to lift off the brain

and go elsewhere, right.

So there's this sense of dualism that many people have.

And obviously, that's supported by many religious beliefs.

But this feeling it is a very peculiar starting point.

People feel that in a--

they don't feel identical to their experience.

As a matter of experience, they feel like they're

on the edge of experience.

Somehow appropriating it from the side.

You kind of on the edge of the world.

And the world is out there.

Your body is, in some sense, an object

in the world which is different from the world.

The boundary of your skin is still meaningful.

You can sort of loosely control your body.

I mean, you can't control it-- you can control your gross

and subtle voluntary motor movements,

but you can't-- you're not controlling everything

your body is doing.

You're not controlling your heartbeat

and your hormonal secretions and all of that.

And so there's a lot that's going

on that is in the dark for you.

And then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say.

And you say, OK, well, let's examine all of this

from the first person side.

Let's look for this thing you're calling I.

And again, I is not identical to the body.

People feel like their hands are out there.

And when-- if they're going to meditate,

they're going to close their eyes very likely.

And now they're going to pay attention to something.

They're going to pay attention to the breath or the sounds.

And it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention

that is now aiming attention strategically at an object,

like the breath, that there's this dualism that is set up.

And ultimately, the ultimate promise of meditation.

I mean, there are really two levels

at which you could be interested in meditation.

One is very straightforward and remedial and non paradoxical

and very well subscribed.

And it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're

going to get from meditation.

So you're going to lower your stress,

and you're going to increase your focus,

and you're going to stave off cortical thinning,

and there's all kinds of good things

that science is saying meditation will give you.

And none of that entails really drilling down

on this paradoxical claim that the self is an illusion

or anything else of that sort.

But from my point of view, the real purpose

of meditation and its real promise

is not in this long list of benefits.

And I'm not discounting any of those

though the science for many of them is quite provisional.

It's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing

you're calling I. If you look for the sense

that there's a thinker in addition to the mirror

rising of the next thought, say, you won't find that thing.

And you can-- what's more, you cannot find it in a way

that's conclusive and that matters, right.

And it has-- there's a host of benefits

that follow from that discovery which are quite

a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging

meditation on the side of its benefits.

You know, de-stressing, increasing focus,

and all the rest.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have a number of questions related--

SAM HARRIS: Sure.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: --to what you just said.

And first of all, I agree that the evidence that meditation

can improve focus, reduce stress, et cetera.

It's there.

It's not an enormous pile of evidence, but it's growing.

And--

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: --I think that especially

for some of the shorter meditations, which

I these days view more as perceptual exercises.

I've talked about this in the podcast before.

But for those who haven't heard it before about perception.

You can have extra perception extending to things

beyond the confines of your skin.

Interception, which is, I think, also

includes the surface of the skin but everything inward.

And meditation through eyes closed typically involving

some sort of attentional spotlighting, something

we'll get into more.

Interior receptive versus external receptive events,

et cetera, including thoughts.

And-- so I think of--

at a basic level meditation as somewhat

of a perceptual exercise.

You can tell me where you disagree there,

and I would expect and hope that you would.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: But I would like to just touch on this idea

that you brought up because it's such an interesting one.

Of this idea that our bodies are containers and that

we somehow view ourselves as passengers

within those containers.

That's certainly been my experience.

And the image that I have is of--

as you say, that is of myself or of people

out there that sit a few centimeters below the surface

or that sit entirely in their head.

And, of course, the brain and body

are connected through the nervous system.

I think sometimes a brain is used

to replace a nervous system, and that

can get us into trouble in terms of coming up

with real directions and definitions.

But the point is that there is something special

about the real estate in the head.

I think for as much as my laboratory,

and many other scientists are really interested

in brain-body connections through the nervous system

and other organ systems that the nervous system binds

that if you cut off all my limbs,

I'm going to be different, but I'm fundamentally still Andrew.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Whereas if we were

to lesion a couple of square millimeters out

of my parietal cortex, it's an open question

as to whether or not I would still seem as much like Andrew

to other people and to myself--

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: --even.

And so there is something fundamentally different

about the real estate in the cranial vault.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

I mean, we are--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: You can even remove both of my eyes,

I'd still be Andrew.

And those are two pieces of my central nervous system

that are fundamental to my daily life, but I'd still be me.

Whereas-- and this doesn't, I think,

just apply to memory systems.

I mean, I think there are regions

of the frontal cortex that, when destroyed,

have been shown to modify personality and self-perception

in dramatic ways.

So it's a sort of obvious point once it's made,

but I do think it's worth highlighting because there

does seem to be something special about being

in the head.

The other thing is that sitting a few centimeters

below the surface or riding in this container

makes sense to me.

Except I wonder if you've ever experienced

a shift as I have when something very extreme happens.

Let's use the negative example of all of a sudden

you're in a fear state.

All of a sudden, it feels as if your entire body is you

or is me.

And now I need to get this thing-- the whole container

and me to some place of safety in whatever form.

This is also true, I think, in ecstatic states--

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: --where you can feel really--

when people say embodied, I wonder whether or not

we normally oscillate below the surface of our body.

When I say oscillate, I mean in neural terms.

I mean, maybe our sensory experience

is not truly at the bodily surface

but sits below the bodily surface more

at the level of organ systems and within our head.

And then certain things that jolt us--

our autonomic nervous system into heightened states

bring us into states of--

bring us closer to the surface and therefore include

all of us.

Again, I don't want to take us down a mechanistic description

of something that doesn't exist.

But does any of that resonate in terms

of how you are thinking about or describing the self?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot there.

First, on the point of the brain being the locus

of what we are as minds.

Yeah, I mean, there are people who

will insist that sort of the whole nervous system

has to be thought of as a--

when you're talking about our emotional life

and the insulas connection to the gut.

And just the sense of self extends beyond the brain.

But I totally take your point that a brain transplant

is a coherent idea, and you would

expect to go with the brain rather than with the viscera.

And so, in that sense, we really are

the old philosophical thought experiment

of being a brain in a VAT.

I mean, we essentially are already--

the VAT is our skull, and we're virtually in that situation.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: A horrible movie.

I'm sorry I can't help but interrupt.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: When I was a teenager,

my sister and I used to go to the movies

every once in a while, and we'd trade off

who could pick the movie.

And she took me to see once the movie Boxing Helena.

SAM HARRIS: Oh yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: The David Lynch film--

SAM HARRIS: Which I never saw that again.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: --where he amputates

the limbs of a woman who he's obsessed by and keeps her.

It's a really horrible--

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: --film.

And about 20 minutes into it, my sister just turned to me

and said, I'm so sorry.

And the question there was whether or not

two siblings should actually persist in a movie like that.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And we decided to persist in the movie

so that we could laugh about it later.

But it was rather disturbing.

I don't recommend the movie.

Nor do I recommend seeing it with a sibling.

But in that movie, the woman, he takes her as a container

and restricts her movement.

Quite sadistic and horrible thing really.

David Lynch, interesting mind perhaps.

But the idea was to question how much of the person

persists in the absence of their ability to move, et cetera.

Could there be love?

Could there be these other affections?

Anyway, a rather extreme example.

But one that still haunts me.

And I suppose I'm thinking about still now.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

SAM HARRIS: Well, so just to follow that point,

there's a lot about us that we don't have access to unless we

enact it physically.

Like if I ask you, do you still know how to ride a bike?

There's no place in your memory where

you can inspect but just sitting in your chair

that you've retained the knowledge of how

to ride a bike.

Procedural memory is different from

semantic or episodic memory.

If I asked you, do you know your address?

Yes, you can recall your address just sitting there.

But if you had had a micro stroke that neatly dissected

out your ability to ride a bike and left

everything else intact, you might

think you could ride a bike.

But suddenly, you stand up next to one.

And you have no idea what to do with it.

And that would be a discovery that

would only happen if you were motorically

engaged with that object.

And I'm sure we could probably come up

with 100 things about us that really seem core to us

and not separable from our personhood which

seemed to only get invoked when we're

out they're moving in the world, and we have limbs, et cetera.

No, it's the seat of consciousness,

the right framework to talk about all

of this, from my point of view, is

consciousness and its contents.

So we have consciousness.

The fact that there's something that is like to be us,

the fact that the world and our internal experience

is illuminated.

It has a qualitative character.

And then, there's the question of what

is that qualitative character?

What kinds of information do we have access to?

What does it feel like to be us?

How do different states of arousal change that?

So you talked about fear.

Yeah, fear can change a lot of things.

And various neurological deficits, or you

can add drugs to the mix.

You add psychedelics that radically transform

the contents of consciousness.

From my point of view, consciousness

itself is simply the cognizance, the awareness,

that is the flood lights by which any of that stuff

appears.

So consciousness doesn't change.

But its contents change.

And to come back to meditation for a second, many people

think meditation is about changing

the contents of consciousness.

There are some contents you want to get rid of like anxiety.

Other contents you want to encourage,

like calm, and unconditional love, or some other classically

pleasant, prosocial emotion.

And that's all fine.

That's all possible.

But the real wisdom of the 2000-year-old wisdom

of meditation that really is the chewy center of the Tootsie Pop

is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always

already like regardless of the contents in it

and the changes in contents.

And this is why we might talk about this.

But this is why they're mutually compatible.

Psychedelics and meditation, for me, are somewhat orthogonal.

Because psychedelics is all about making wholesale changes

to the contents of consciousness.

And there's some wonderful consequences of doing that.

There can be some harrowing and terrifying consequences

of doing that.

But generally speaking, I think used wisely,

they can be incredibly valuable.

And the therapeutic potential there is enormous.

But the crucial disjunction here is that there really

is something to recognize about ordinary waking consciousness,

the consciousness that's compatible with my driving

a car to get here on time.

You don't have to have the pyrotechnics of being on LSD

to see to transcend the central illusion that I'm

saying is the thing to be transcended,

which is the sense that there is a duality between subject

and object in every moment of experience.

And to take it back to something you said about just all

of our different modes in ordinary life,

the interesting thing is I think people are constantly

losing their sense of self.

And they're not aware of it.

And there's probably an analogy to the visual system

here, which is to visual saccade, which perhaps you've

spoken about at some point on your podcast.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Not enough.

So please.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

So what happens every time we move our eyes,

this is called a saccade.

And we do that about three times a second or so just normally.

There is the region of motor cortex

that affects that movement sends what's

called an efferent copy of that motor movement, which

is used as information that propagates back

to visual cortex, that suppresses the data of vision

while the eyes are moving.

Because otherwise if you weren't doing that,

every time you moved your eyes, it

would seem like the visual scene itself was lurching around.

And people can experience this for themselves

if they just touch one of their eyeballs on the side,

not all that hard, and kind of jiggle it.

And then, you can roll it around.

You can jiggle it from side to side.

You can see a movement of the eyeball that's

not governed by your oculomotor system

delivers a jiggling of the world.

Because your brain is not anticipating it

in the same way.

And you're not producing that same predictive copy

of the movement.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's a little bit like--

we have some action sports filmmakers on our staff

here that the gimbal, that holds an iPhone,

like you see the kids on surfboards

or skateboards or something.

They're going to hold a phone while moving around

or the people, the vloggers-- does anyone

even still use that for phrase?

SAM HARRIS: I don't know.

I guess.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Moving around and it's image stabilization,

essentially, that keeps the camera steady.

And these are more than cameras, of course,

for those listening, point at my eyes.

But they do far more than just what a camera would do.

But this internal system of image stabilization, I

can see perhaps where you're going with this,

that it allows us to remain in a self-referencing scheme, as

opposed to paying attention to just how confusing it

is to track the visual world at some level.

SAM HARRIS: Well, actually where I'm going is,

that people are having this suppression of vision three

times a second on average.

And they're not experiencing it.

You're effectively going blind.

And you're not noticing it.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's very fast.

SAM HARRIS: Yes, it's very fast.

Now there's an analogous suppression, I would say,

of the sense of self that occurs every time attention gets

absorbed significantly in its object.

We even have this concept of losing yourself in your work.

Classic flow experiences have this quality.

And this tends to be why they're so rewarding.

If you're in some athletic activity or an aesthetic one,

or you could be having sex, or whatever

it is, some peak experience, its peakness usually

entails there being some brief period

where there was no distance between you and the experience.

For that moment, you were no longer

looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment

or trying to get somewhere, where you weren't,

or micromanaging errors.

There's just the flow of unity with whatever the experience

is, a surfer on the wave.

And we love those experiences.

And then we are continually abstracted away from them

by our thinking about them.

We're thinking, oh my god, that was so good,

or how do I get back to that?

Or you're looking at a sunset.

It's the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen.

And then you're continually interrupting the experience

of merely seeing it with a commentary about how

amazing this is.

And I wonder, what real estate prices are here?

I mean, is it possible that I could move here.

And your mind is just continually narrating

a conversation you're having with yourself, however

paradoxically.

I mean, you're telling yourself things

that you already know as though there are two of you

rather often.

I'm looking for-- which is the water.

And it's, oh, there it is.

But I'm the one seeing it.

Who am I saying, oh, there it is to.

Is there someone else who needs to be informed

about the thing I already saw.

So there's something about our internal dialogue

that is paradoxical.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Is there any neurologic condition

call it soulectomy or anything like that where somehow people

feel more unified with the self on a continual basis,

the observer and the actor within?

State more as a complete sentence.

Is there any known neurological syndrome--

makes it sound like a bad thing, but it could be a good thing.

--whereby people feel that the actor

and the observer within them are unified continually?

SAM HARRIS: There's not a pathological one.

Some the work on the default-mode network

suggests that that's at least part of the story.

So the default-mode network, which

has been talked about a lot of late because it

has come up both in the meditation literature

and in the psychedelic literature.

But its original discovery was that-- and the reason

why I was called the default mode was is

that in virtually every neuroimaging experiment ever

run, they found that between tasks, when the brain was just

in its default state, these midline structures would

increase their activity.

And then they would reliably diminish

whenever the person in the scanner was on task.

And usually, that meant some outward looking

visual discrimination task.

But it could be visual.

It could be semantic.

But it tends to be their eyes are open.

And they're paying attention to something

that's being broadcast to them through monitor goggles,

or they're looking at a mirror that's showing them a computer

monitor.

But so the general insight was, there

are these midline structures in the brain that

seem to be increasing their activity when

the brain is idling between tasks, waiting

for something to happen.

And then further experiments found

tasks that actually upregulated activity there beyond baseline.

And those tasks seem to be self referential.

So that when you ask people--

you give them a list of words.

And you say, well, do any of these apply to you?

Or you ask people to think about--

Actually, one experiment I did.

When you're challenging people's beliefs, when you're

challenging beliefs that have more

of a personal significance, like political or religious beliefs,

you get an upregulation in these regions

as opposed to just generic beliefs about you're

in Los Angeles.

This is a table.

That is something to which people are not holding fast

as a matter of identity.

So anyway, both meditation and psychedelics

seem to suppress activity in these regions, which

we know are associated with both self-talk, mind-wandering,

and explicit acts of self representation.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Could we say that they

are somewhat autobiographical because they

access memory systems?

And in the way you're describing them,

and in the way that a colleague of mine,

who's been a guest on this podcast--

I don't know if you've interacted with him before.

But I think you'd very much enjoy whatever interaction you

would have. --is David Spiegel.

He's our associate chair of psychiatry.

He and his father actually-- his father

then he founded hypnosis as a valid clinical practice

in psychiatry.

And hypnosis, which is obviously a heightened sense of attention

with deep relaxation, is known to dramatically suppress

the default-mode network.

He talks about this a lot.

And I always wonder as we take down activity

within the default-mode network, what what surfaces

in its place, does that somehow reflect that the two

are normally in a push-pull?

Because that's not necessarily the case.

When I fall asleep, I can hallucinate.

But that doesn't mean that during the day,

the fact that I'm looking at objects

is what's preventing me from hallucinating.

If I close my eyes, I can get imagery.

But there's this different illusion,

the illusion of antagonistic circuitry sometimes.

I don't want to take us off course,

but the default-mode network seems to "want to be there,"

quote, unquote.

It seems to be fighting for our attention,

unless we give ourselves a visual target,

or an auditory target, or some salient experience

of some kind, it sounds like.

And then, I'm surprised to hear that meditation reduces

activity in the default-mode network at some level

because meditation to me oftentimes

involves paying attention to some perceptual target.

Maybe you could eventually explain

as to how it might do that or why it might.

SAM HARRIS: And I don't think it's the whole story

because, obviously, outward-going attention is

not--

even if you're having the kind of egoic

saccade that I'm talking about, where you're actually not

clearly aware of yourself.

You're not clearly defining yourself

as separate from experience for the moment of paying attention,

so you are sort of losing yourself in your work.

That's not the same thing as having

the clear meditative insight of selflessness that I'm claiming

is the goal of meditation.

But to wind back to the original point I was making,

and the reason why I drew the analogy to visual saccades,

I do think there's a continuous interruption in our sense

of self that goes unrecognized.

But the conscious acquisition of the understanding

that the self is an illusion is a different experience

because you're then focusing on this absence.

Actually, there's another analogy

to the visual system that applies here,

which is to the optic blind spot, which

is a good analogy for me because it cuts

through a bunch of false assumptions

as to where you would look for this

or how this relates to ordinary experience.

So as many people know that in both eyes we have

what's called the blind spot, which

is a consequence of the optic nerve transiting

through the retina, unlike cephalopods.

I think cephalopods have their optic nerve,

as an omniscient being would have engineered it,

connecting the retina from the back.

And therefore, there is no area of blindness

associated with its transit back through the retina.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: But our receptors are one the outside.

SAM HARRIS: Exactly.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Humans, for whatever

reason, put photoreceptors-- well, I always

say I wasn't consulted on the design phase.

Something put photoreceptors, combination of things,

put photoreceptors in the back.

And so you actually have to send the highway of information

through the pixel center of the eye.

Cephalopods and drosophila, basically

invertebrates, the design is more at its face logical.

Mammals, very illogical design, at least as far

as our judgments go.

SAM HARRIS: But it gives me a good analogy.

So I'll take it.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like to take a brief break

and acknowledge our sponsor, Athletic Greens.

Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin-mineral probiotic drink

that also contains digestive enzymes and adaptogens.

I started taking Athletic Greens way back in 2012.

So that's 10 years now of taking Athletic

Greens every single day.

So I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast.

The reason I started taking Athletic Greens,

and the reason I still take Athletic Greens,

is that it covers all of my foundational nutritional needs.

So whether or not I'm eating well

or enough or not, I'm sure that I'm covering all of my needs

for vitamins, minerals, probiotics,

adaptogens to combat stress.

And the digestive enzymes really help my digestion.

I just feel much better when I'm drinking Athletic Greens.

If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,

you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman.

And for the month of January, they

have a special offer where they'll

give you 10 free travel packs, plus a year

supply of vitamin D3, K2.

Vitamin D3 and K2 are vital for immune function,

metabolic function, hormone health,

but also calcium regulation and heart health.

Again, that's athleticgreens.com/huberman

to claim their special offer in the month of January of 10 free

travel packs, plus a year supply of vitamin D3 and K2.

SAM HARRIS: So in any case, we have

this blind spot, which I think most people learn

this in school.

Although, my daughters had not been taught this in school.

I just showed them this for the first time a month ago.

And they were briefly fascinated.

And then they went to return to their screen time.

But anyway, you can take a piece of paper.

And you make two marks on it.

And then you cover one eye.

And you fixate on one mark.

I mean, you can look this up online

if you need details about how to do this.

And while staring at one fixation point,

you move the paper back and forth.

And you can get it to a place where

the other mark disappears.

And you can run this experiment long enough

to satisfy yourself that there is

in fact a blind spot in your visual field, which

with one eye closed you don't normally notice.

The reason why you have to cover one eye

is because each eye compensates for the blind spot

of the other.

Which is to say that if you close one eye

and survey the visual scene, something really is missing,

whatever you're looking at.

If you're looking at a crowd of people,

somebody is missing a head and you're not noticing it.

And it's not easy to notice because the brain doesn't

tend to vividly represent the absence of information.

I mean, it's just part of the game that's not being rendered.

It's not showing up as a break in the visual field.

It's just not there.

And I mean, people have argued that there's

a filling-in phenomenon that happens,

but I think that can be misunderstood or exaggerated.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: But the eye movements themselves,

that you described before--

I guess, I should say that the saccade analogy

about transiently and repetitively erasing the self

works perfectly here because, indeed, microsaccades,

little smaller saccades, occur all the time also prevent

our eyes from fixating in one location

long enough to observe our blind spot,

even if one eye is closed.

So if the experiment's done with paralytics to essentially lock

eyes at one location, basically, things start disappearing.

SAM HARRIS: It just fades away.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: We all love to think

that we start hallucinating, but actually, we start going blind.

And those experiments have been done on humans.

I hear they're quite terrifying.

SAM HARRIS: I mean, you can do that for yourself too.

It begins to just all melt away in a warm glow.

No psychedelics required.

But the interesting point there is

that when you ask yourself, OK, so

because as a consequence of the eyes' anatomy,

there's this thing you can see that is

absent from your experience.

But the question is, where is that

in relationship to the rest of you, to your mind?

Is that deep within?

Or is that in some sense right on the surface of experience?

And there's expectation that people have.

Again, I think conflating meditation

with a search for changes in the context of consciousness.

They're looking for much more subtle things

to notice about the mind or much vaster things to notice.

Psychedelics sets up this expectation

that you do a massive dose of mushrooms or LSD,

and everything changes.

I mean, you get this full beatific vision.

And you get not only visual changes, but emotional changes.

And you get synesthesia, where you have

much more mind in so many ways.

So they begin having these experiences,

or reading the mystical literature, you begin to think,

OK, well, then freedom is really elsewhere or it's deep within.

It's not coincident with the ordinary awareness

that can see this coffee cup clearly

and that can just transition attention

to reading an email with the full sobriety

of ordinary waking consciousness.

But the truth is, this insight into selflessness,

this insight into the nonduality of subject and object,

is as close to ordinary consciousness as this insight

into the optic blind spot.

Where do you have to go to have this insight

into the blind spot?

you don't have to go anywhere.

You just have to set up the experiment correctly such

that you can see the data.

But the data is right on the surface.

It's almost too close to you to notice.

If it's at all hard to notice, it's

because it's so close, rather than it's

deep within or far away.

And there are other analogies like--

I don't even remember.

There's Mind's Eye, pieces of artwork,

that were the random dot stereo grams, where

we have an image that pops out.

I always find it very difficult to see those because I

have a very dominant eye.

But some people can see.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: People can't see those.

These images that used to be at the touristy shops.

But people say, oh, there it is, the whale.

And I'm thinking, I don't see it.

Kids that swim a lot when they're younger,

and they tend to breathe just to one side--

I don't know if this was you.

This was definitely me.

They tend to keep one eye closed.

You set up a pretty strong ocular dominance.

Biasing your vision to one or the other eye early in life,

whether or not you're learning how to be a bow hunter

or you're learning how to throw darts or shoot

billiards or anything that, involves selectively viewing

the world through one eye for even a couple of hours

can set up a permanent asymmetry in the weighting

flow of visual information from the eye to the brain.

It's reversible, but only through the reverse gymnastics

of covering up the other eye intentionally.

So actually I had to be reversed-patched for a while

because I was seeing double, because I

lost binocular vision.

I don't stand a chance in hell of seeing an image pop out

of a random dot stereogram, which

is kind of ironic because I did my PhD on binocular circuitry.

But nonetheless, if people can see these,

or if they can't, I think they provide

a really terrific example of what you're

talking about as a larger theme, which is that perceptually you

see a bunch of dots.

And then all of a sudden, what you thought wasn't there

is suddenly there, but can just disappear again.

There are certain visual illusions,

if we were to include others, that once you see them,

you cannot unsee them.

So there's the faces-vases, figure-ground type stuff.

SAM HARRIS: Bi-stable percepts.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Bi-stable percepts.

And then there's sort of ocular competition.

You show two different images to the eyes, each of the two eyes.

And it is near impossible for people

to perceive them both simultaneously.

So it's a little bit of what you're describing.

I mean, these seem to be fundamental features

about the way the neural circuits are organized,

that they don't want to stay fixated on any one thing

for very long.

To do so either takes training, intense interest, intense fear,

intense excitement.

When I say intense, I guess, I come back to this idea

that the autonomic nervous system is somehow

governing our ability to spotlight at any one location

for very long.

Is that a useful framework?

Or is that going to take us down a different path?

SAM HARRIS: Well, it's sort of a different path for this.

I mean, the only point I was making

is that the seemingly paradoxical

claim that something can be right on the surface

and yet hard to see.

And again, this seems to justify the expectation held

by, I would think, the vast majority

of people who get interested in these spiritual things,

for lack of a better word, that the truth must somehow

be deep within.

There's some distance between the one who is looking

and the thing that has to be found right

and that you have to go through this long evolution of changes.

I mean, there are many metaphors that set this up.

It's like you're at the base of a mountain,

and you have to climb to the top.

And so you have to find the path,

however secure it is to get you there.

But there really is a distance between your starting point

and the goal.

And what I'm arguing--

and this is a kind of a nondual, to use a term of jargon--

this is a nondual approach to meditation,

as opposed to a dualistic one.

The path and the goal are coincident,

that you have to unravel the logic by which you would seek

something that's outside of the present moment's

experience, i.e. not available, really not available to you

now.

Because so many things worth having, so many skills

worth acquiring, really are not available to you now.

It's like if you want to be a pianist,

or if you want to speak Chinese, there's

something you don't know.

And then you want to learn that thing.

And there's a whole process.

And you might not be capable of doing it.

And real mastery is far away.

If you've never hit a golf ball, and you

want to hit a golf ball 300 yards straight,

I can pretty much guarantee you're not

going to do that initially.

And you're not going to do it on day two.

And you're not going to do it reliably for the longest time.

And there's real training in front of you

to be able to do that reliably.

An insight into, and really the core insight,

I mean, the insight that is the core of the Buddha's teaching,

to take one historical example of this,

really is available now.

I mean, granted, it can be very hard, one, for people.

I mean, I had probably spent a year

on silent retreat in one week to three month increments

before I got the point I'm making now.

I mean, literally, these are retreats

where you spend 12 to 18 hours a day just meditating,

trying to unpack the kinds of claims I'm making now.

So it's possible to rigorously overlook this.

It's possible to stand in front of the mind's eye image

and stare in a way that is guaranteed

not to give you pop out and to be

adept at staring in that way.

So it's possible to be misled.

And so what I'm trying to argue here

is that there's a fair amount of leverage

you can get with better information, which

can cut the time course of your searching for this thing

and cancel your false expectations about just

where this is in relation to your ordinary waking

consciousness.

And it's possible to get bad information

and to have a bunch of experiences.

You go you go and do an ayahuasca trip.

And it's incredibly valuable.

And it's valuable for all the ways

in which it changed the contents of your consciousness

in startling ways.

And you had insights into your past

and into your relationships and into why you're

not as loving as you might be.

And there's lots to think about.

And you're like, OK, that's all great.

That's all something that we can talk about.

But it truly is orthogonal.

I mean, it makes a point of contact,

or what I'm talking about, it's really just at one point.

And it's at the point where this sense

of subject-object division in consciousness

is illusory and vulnerable to investigation.

And if you investigate it as the right plane of focus--

you pick the analogy you want, whether it's setting up

the optic blind spot experiment in just the right way,

so that you can see that the data is not there.

I mean, the bi-stable percept is great because when you see one

of these images, like the vase-face diagram,

or the Dalmatian that it looks like a mess of dots,

and then you see the image of a Dalmatian dog pop out--

once you see it, you really can't unsee it.

I mean, once you have the requisite conceptual anchor

to it, then every time you look, you're going to find it again.

And eventually, it becomes effortless.

And that's what, ultimately, meditation is,

I mean, this kind of meditation.

You ultimately learn to recognize

that there's no separation between you

and your experience.

There's not the experience on the one hand

and the self on the other.

There's just experience.

There's just seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching,

thinking, feeling, proprioception,

add whatever channels of information you want to that.

But there's just the totality of the energy of consciousness

and its contents.

And it's not that you're on the riverbank.

And this is how it can seem in the beginning,

even when you're practicing meditation fairly diligently.

You can seem like you're on the riverbank,

watching the contents of consciousness flow by.

And meditation is the act of doing that more and more

dispassionately, so you're no longer grabbing at the pleasant

or pushing the unpleasant away.

You're just kind of relaxing in the most non-judgmental frame

of mind, just witnessing the flow.

But if you're doing that dualisticly,

you feel like the meditator.

You feel like the subject aiming attention.

And so now you're on the riverbank

watching everything go past.

But the truth is, you are the river.

Experience itself is that there is just experience itself.

You're not on the edge of experience.

And everything you can notice is part of the flow.

And there's no point from which to abstract yourself away

from the flow to stand outside it

and to say, OK, this is my life.

This is my experience.

This is my body.

Yes, you can do that.

I mean, those are all just thoughts.

But that's more of the flow.

And so there's a process by which you would eventually

recognize that there's no distance between you

and your experience.

And again, you can wait for those moments in life

where experience gets so good, or so terrifying,

it's just so salient.

Your amygdala is driving so hard.

I mean, so you're in a war, and you

can't think about anything because the enemy is

shooting at you.

And this is the most thrilling video game

you've ever played in your life.

And your life is on the line.

Or you're at the peak of some athletic event,

where you don't know how you're doing the things you're doing,

but it's all happening automatically.

But those are 1/100 of 1% of one's life.

And you know what I'm calling meditation

is a way of simply understanding the mechanics of a tension

whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience

so much of the time and recognizing that it's

based on a misperception of the way consciousness

always already is.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, if there wasn't an incentive

to learn how to meditate properly, that was one.

And I've been meditating for a fair amount

since I was in my teens, but more along the lines of paying

attention to breath and open-observer type meditation,

or focused-attention.

I would suppose more of the focused-attention type.

We'll get into these a little bit later.

But I have a number of questions related to what you just said.

SAM HARRIS: Sure.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love the idea that this thing that we would

all do well to understand to observe consciousness of self

as opposed to trying to alter the contents of consciousness

may sit much closer to us than one might think.

And because it sits so close to us,

that might be one of the reasons why we miss it.

I go right to a visual system example.

I mean, if you're wearing corrective lenses

and there's a speck on your lens,

typically you're looking out through the lens,

and so you wouldn't observe that speck.

Any number of different analogies could work here.

The fact that there are states, however

few, positive and negative, extreme ecstasy and extreme

fear being the two, I think, most obvious ones

that seems like we agree on, that

allow us to capture the sense of completeness of self

or the unity of the observer and the actor.

The fact that those are seldom for the nontrained,

for the nonmeditator, suggests to me two things.

I think one perhaps worth exploring more than the other.

But one is that what's really being revealed in the states

where we can feel the unity of the observer

and the actor is understanding something fundamental

about the algorithm, not the online algorithm,

but the algorithm that is our nervous system.

Just as you mentioned cephalopods.

I mean, mantis shrimp see an enormous array of color hues

that we don't.

Their maps and representations of the world

are fundamentally different.

Pit vipers see in the infrared.

We're restricted to somewhat of a limited range

within the color spectrum, but still more

vast than that of dogs or cats.

So understanding that for seeing what

a pit viper can see for moments would be informative.

Perhaps sensing-heat emissions as a human might be invasive,

maybe that's why we don't do it.

So the question is, to just make it straightforward,

why would the system be designed this way?

Again, neither of us were consulted in the design phase.

But that brings me to, perhaps, the more tractable question

was, which is about development.

I'm a great believer that the neural circuits that encouraged

healthy parent-child relations, or unhealthy parent-child

relations as the case may be, in childhood stem

from the initial demands of internal

versus external states, which is exactly what we're talking

about, which is that a young child feels anxious because it

needs his diaper change.

It doesn't really know it needs its diaper changed or it's cold

or it's uncomfortable or it's hungry or it's overly full.

And so it vocalizes.

And then some external source comes to us

and relieves that hopefully.

And so the fundamental rule that we first learn

is not that we have a self or that things fall down, not up.

But it's that when uncomfortable,

externalize that discomfort.

And it will be relieved by an outside player.

And then, of course, there's a repurposing of that circuitry

for adult romantic attachments.

I don't think anyone doubts that.

And that can explain a lot indeed about attachment

and so forth.

So something about our developmental wiring

and the algorithms that these neural circuits run

tend to bias most people, the nonpractice meditators,

to live a somewhat functional life at least

without this awareness of actor and observer.

And so what you're really talking about

is a deliberate intervention to understand and resolve

that gap in the algorithm.

Do I have that right?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'm more or less

restating what you said in a way that, I'm hoping,

will serve as a jumping off point.

Why questions are always very dangerous in biology, or any.

SAM HARRIS: Or in relationship.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: What's that?

SAM HARRIS: Or in relationship.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Or in relationship.

Right.

Exactly.

Although, I think it all does really hearken back

to this early developmental wiring which,

of course, is modifiable.

That's the beauty of the nervous system is,

it's the one organ that seems to be able to change itself

at least to some degree.

So what are your thoughts about the organization

of the circuitry to essentially under normal conditions to not

reveal what seems to be one of its more important and profound

and, for dare I say, enlightening features.

It's almost as if we are potentially like mantis shrimp.

We can see so many more colors than we actually see.

And yet, we don't.

Most people opt not to.

And I would argue that one of the great strengths

of the Waking Up app, for instance,

is that it essentially walks you through the process of being

able to arrive at these things without having

to go to one-year or three-year long silent meditation

retreats.

So if you could just elaborate for a moment before we move on.

What are your thoughts about how the circuitry is

arranged by default versus--

and what that means for there to be an intervention, that we

have to intervene in the self in order to reveal the self.

SAM HARRIS: Well, so there are two big questions there,

one about evolution and one about development.

So with respect to evolution, it's

important to recognize that evolution doesn't

see our deepest concerns about human flourishing

and human well-being.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's all about the offspring.

SAM HARRIS: We are set up to spawn and to survive

long enough to help our progeny spawn if we can do that.

And that's it.

And so anything that was good for that, including

tribalism and xenophobia and all kinds of hardware and software

flaws that revealed themselves to be flaws

in the present time, when we're trying to build

a viable global civilization.

But they redounded to the advantage of our ancestors

somehow, or there are things about us that were simply not

selected for, they just came along

for the ride, what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel.

So we are not set up by evolution

to be as happy as we possibly can be

and to do almost anything that interests us well.

I mean, we're not set up by evolution

to be mathematicians or musicians

or to create democracies that are healthy.

I mean, evolution can see none of this.

And we are doing these things based

on cognitive and emotional hardware

that we are leveraging in new directions.

I mean, we are primates.

And we're communicating with small mouth noises.

I mean, we're language-using primates.

And all of that is clearly evolved.

And we're doing these amazing things, including science.

However improbably, where we're actually

able to, almost entirely with language,

understand reality that at a scale

that exceeds us in both directions,

I mean, the very vast and the very small, and also

temporally, the very old.

We have visions of the far future.

We can figure out where an asteroid

is going to cross Earth's orbit 1,000 years from now

if we just do the math.

And it's amazing that we can do all of those things,

but evolution is blind to all of that.

And so in terms of what we care about and certainly in terms

of what's going to ensure our survival as a species,

we have flown the perch that was created for us by evolution.

I mean, it's not just the primate things.

And so it is with learning how to regulate our emotions

and punch through to a self concept

or beyond a self concept that is more

normative, psychologically, that allows us to not be terrorized

by our ape-ish genes as fully as we seem to be,

even in the presence of more and more destructive technology.

I mean, we're still practically chimpanzees armed

with nuclear weapons.

And that is increasingly dysfunctional.

And very soon we're going to be in the presence of minds,

or apparent minds, that we have built

that are as intelligent as we are

and very quickly, probably 15 minutes after that, far more

intelligent than we are.

And so what we do with all of that is, again, something

that we have to figure out based on the minds we have,

the minds we can build, the minds we can change.

We can meddle with our own genomes now.

And that will produce its own consequences

in ourselves and in future generations

if we meddle with the germline.

And again, all of that is just evolution.

It's just sort of the womb we came out of,

but it didn't anticipate any of that.

Mother nature simply not had our best interests at heart.

And we might die off, and from the point of view

of mother nature that's fine because 99% of every species

dies off.

So there's that.

But when you're talking about the individual,

developmentally-- we all come into this world,

again, as a fairly hairless primate

that needs a tremendous amount of care by others.

And the logic of that is that the reason why we're not

a gazelle that can run 45 minutes later and then,

basically, do all the gazelle things perfectly soon

thereafter.

The reason why we have this time of immaturity,

and has become functional for us,

is that we're far more flexible, and we

can learn based on the needs of an environment to do so much

more than a gazelle can.

And language is part of that.

And in the last 10,000 years or so,

culture increasingly has been more and more a part of that.

And there's probably a layer at which we can plausibly

talk about cultural evolution and cultural evolution

interacting with biological evolution to change us.

But when you're talking about the development

of an individual, each of us comes into this world, I think,

not recognizing ourselves in any sense

that would make sense to reify.

I mean, it's not that there's nothing there.

I mean, there could be some kind of proto-self differentiation.

But I think it takes a long while.

And there is very likely a coincidence

between really recognizing others.

We recognize others first.

certainly in relationship immediately.

And we orient to human faces.

And we even detect other humans as good and bad moral actors

very early, I mean, certainly long

before we recognize ourselves in a mirror.

The experiments run, again, this is Paul Blume and colleagues,

experiments run on the moral hardware and software

of developing toddlers.

But I think at this point, they've

pushed it down all the way to six months of age,

where you'll get these infants staring at a puppet show.

And they'll show a greater interest

in classically good actors versus bad actors, cooperators

versus defectors, in various puppet show games.

So it's not that we have no mind and no proto-awareness

of others and of self, but what eventually happens,

certainly as we become at all facile with language use,

is that we become aware that not only are we

in relationship to others, but we are an object

in the world for them.

So we have enough people pointing at us in our cribs

and impinging upon our experience.

You're being physically moved, and prodded, and touched,

and consoled, or not consoled.

And just imagine what all of these--

you're on the receiving end of 10,000 interventions.

And you're completely helpless for the longest time.

And all of that attention, you have

all of these people coming up to the crib

and making faces at you--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Cheering for you.

SAM HARRIS: And it's all pointed at you.

There's a classic magical narcissism

that gets constructed there if you

take the psychological literature, at least

a certain strand of it, seriously.

And I think it's largely apt to think of a child at that age

as a kind of--

there is a kind of narcissistic structure

there, where it's all kind of going inward.

And at a certain point you realize, OK, I'm

the center of all of this.

It's not just a movie where you're completely absorbed in,

and you've lost your sense of self.

I mean, to talk to yet another example of what

it's like as a grown up to lose our sense of self.

And one of the things I think we find so fascinating

about television and film is that when we get totally

absorbed in it, we're in this very unusual circumstance where

our brain is basically reading it

as we're in the classic social circumstance.

We're presented with the facial displays of other people.

In fact, sometimes these people are 10 feet tall

or their faces are 10 feet tall.

You have a close-up in a movie theater.

So it's like a super stimulus, in terms of evolution.

And they can be making direct eye contact with a camera,

so you have this gigantic face staring at you.

And yet, you're totally uncomplicated socially.

You can't be seen.

And something you know you can't be seen.

And so you completely lose self consciousness.

And yet, you're able to examine with completely free attention,

again, because you're totally unimplicated,

the facial minutia and the mimetic facial play of people

at a very close range.

I mean, you have physically just about to kiss your spouse,

like that's what a close-up is in a film.

You never get that close to people.

And yet, here you're in a situation

where you're unobserved.

And you know that.

And so I mean, this is a bit of a tangent,

but it's the other side of what's happening

developmentally for a kid.

When you're in a movie theater watching a movie,

you are truly invisible.

And yet, you're right there.

However harrowing the human drama

is, you're seeing it play out.

And you're seeing it up close.

And it is, in principle, a social encounter

that your genes are ready for, but they're not ready

for you to be invisible.

And so that's what's so magical about it.

But what happens developmentally for a kid is that you're not

invisible, you are an object that is constantly

being overrun, the boundaries of your sensory engagement

with the world are constantly being impinged upon by others.

And at a certain point, you recognize, OK, I'm

at the center of this.

And the way this gets enshrined as a self, I think

is probably coincident with our learning

the language game we learn to play with others.

We're talking to others.

People are talking to us.

And at a certain point, we're talking to ourselves,

even when the other people leave the room.

And you can hear it.

If you ever have been with a toddler

when they're externalizing their self-talk,

you hear them talking to themselves.

They're playing.

And they're having a conversation.

They were talking to you, the parent.

But then you left the room, and they're still talking.

You come back in, and they're still talking.

And what happens to us, strangely,

and this comes back to the logic of evolution,

we never stop because evolution never

thought to build us an off-switch for this.

I mean, language is so useful.

And it gets tuned up so strongly for us.

And there was never a reason to shut it off.

There was never a reason to give you this ability

to say, oh, wouldn't it be nice to have four hours of quiet

now, like no self-talk.

And so for most of us, I mean, I think

there are people who, for whatever neurological reason

or idiosyncratic reason, undoubtedly there'd

be a neurological reason for it, don't have any self-talk.

But for most of us, we are covertly

talking basically all the time.

And there's an imagistic component

of this for many people.

You're visualizing things as well.

But there's just a ton of white noise in the mind that

feels a certain way.

And what you discover in meditation,

ultimately, is that the self is what

it feels like to be thinking without knowing

that you're thinking.

A thought arises uninspected and seems to just become you.

Like you and I are talking now.

And people are listening to us.

They're struggling to follow the train of this conversation

because it is competing with the conversation that's

happening in their heads.

So I'll be saying something.

And a person listening will say, well, what does that mean?

Or like, oh, but wait a minute, he just contradicted himself.

And there's a voice in your head that

is also vying for your attention much of the time.

So the first discovery people make in meditation

is that it's just so hard to pay attention

to anything, the breath, or a mantra, or a sound,

whatever it is, because you're thinking.

You're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour.

And oh, it's so good that I downloaded this app.

This is really good.

This is going to be good for me.

But that chatter isn't showing up.

You're not far back enough in the theater of consciousness,

so as to see it emerge.

It is just sneaking up behind you.

And it feels like me again.

It feels like when someone is thinking the thought, well,

what the hell does that mean?

They're not seeing it as an emerging

object in consciousness.

It just feels like me.

Subjectively, is like the mind contracts

around this appearance in consciousness.

And it really is just a sound with the voice of the mind.

If you actually can inspect it, it is deeply inscrutable

that we ever feel identified with our thoughts.

I mean, how is it that we could be a thought?

A thought just arises and passes away.

And when you inspect it, when you go to inspect it,

it unravels.

It's the least substantial possible thing.

But yet, it could be a thought of self-hatred.

It could be a thought, that unrecognized,

totally defines your mood.

I mean, again, this all can seem kind of abstract.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, no, but I think

it's extremely concrete from the perspective

of the neural circuits that will return

to maybe in a few minutes.

I'd like to take a brief break and thank

our sponsor Inside Tracker.

Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform

that analyzes data from your blood and DNA

to help me better understand your body

and help you reach your health goals.

I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done

for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact

your immediate and long term health

can only be analyzed from a quality blood test.

The problem with a lot of blood and DNA tests

out there. however, is that you get data

back about metabolic factors, lipids, and hormones,

and so forth, but you don't know what to do with those data.

Inside Tracker solves that problem

and makes it very easy for you to understand

what sorts of nutritional, behavioral, maybe even

supplementation-based interventions,

you might want to take on in order

to adjust the numbers of those metabolic factors, hormones,

lipids, and other things that impact

your immediate and long-term health to bring those numbers

into the ranges that are appropriate

and indeed optimal for you.

If you'd like to try Inside Tracker,

you can visit insidetracker.com/huberman

and get 20% off any of Inside Tracker's plans.

That's insidetracker.com/huberman

to get 20% off.

If you could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter

and external stimuli and the bridge between them

because I think for some people that might be intuitive.

I think for others, it's not so obvious

that language is ongoing in the backdrop.

And then sometimes, I think some people are

more tuned into that language.

For some people, it's louder volume.

For some people, it's more structured.

I have a colleague at Stanford who's

been on this podcast called Deisseroth.

He's one of, like, the preeminent bioengineers.

He's also a psychiatrist.

And he has a--

he doesn't call it a meditative practice,

but he has a practice where each evening,

after his five kids are put down to sleep, you know--

they're older now--

and in the quiet of the late hours of the night,

early morning, he sits and forces

himself to think in complete sentences,

with punctuation, for an hour.

This is the way that he has taught himself to structure

his thinking, because of the very fact that you're

describing, which is that ordinarily, there

is an underlying structure to what's internal,

but it's disrupted by external events, And these are--

typically, it's not coherent enough

to really make meaning from.

So it's almost like somebody sitting down

to write in complete sentences, but forcing

himself to do it in his head.

But for many people, including myself,

that's a foreign experience.

And we only experience structure through our interactions

with the world and other people.

I've taken the time to try and explore ideas with eyes closed.

And I've been able to do that.

There are certain pharmacologic states

that we could talk about that facilitate that.

And no, those are not amphetamines.

Those do exactly the opposite, by the way.

But I think people exist in varying degrees

of structured and unstructured internal dialogue,

and in varying depths of recognition

of that internal dialogue.

And so the question, I suppose, is,

just the recognition that there's a dialogue ongoing,

internally-- is that, itself, valuable?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

And that also can take some time.

So, I mean, here's a claim I would

make that some people might find surprising.

But I think this is an objectively true claim about

the subjectivity of most people, which is that unless you have

a fair amount of training-- let's say you just happen to be

some kind of savant in this area, which most people,

by definition, aren't, or you have a remarkable amount

of training in what's called concentration practice

in meditation--

I believe this is a true claim-- that if we just put a stopwatch

on this table, and people could just watch it 30 seconds

elapse, and I set all of our listeners, or your viewers,

the task, for the next 30 seconds,

just pay attention to anything-- your breath, you know,

or the sight of your hand, or the sight of the clock,

or any object--

without getting lost in thought, without getting momentarily

distracted by this conversation you're having with yourself.

A couple of things would happen.

One is no one would be able to do it, right?

And this is not just a superficial inability.

I mean, if your life depended on it,

you wouldn't be able to do it.

I mean, if the fate of civilization depended on it,

none of our listeners would be able to do this.

And yet, some percentage of them are so distracted by thought

that they will actually try this experiment

and think they succeeded.

Right?

And for these people, what happens is

you put them on a meditation retreat,

and you have them spend 12 hours a day

in silence, doing nothing but this.

Right?

So the practice is just pay attention to the breath

when they're sitting, and then eventually, you

incorporate everything-- sounds and other sensations.

And then you interleave that with walking meditation, where

they're paying attention just to the sensations of lifting

and moving and placing their feet.

And then once the practice is going,

you incorporate sounds and sights and everything.

So you can pay attention to everything,

but the goal is, for every moment,

you are going to cultivate this faculty of mind,

which increasingly is known as mindfulness.

Right?

And mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful

attention to the contents of consciousness.

But the crucial piece is it is not

a moment of being lost in thought.

Right?

You're not blocking thoughts.

Thoughts themselves can arise.

But in those moments of being truly mindful,

you're noticing thoughts as thoughts.

Whether it's language in the mind or images,

you're noticing those, too, as spontaneous appearances

in consciousness.

So if most people-- you know, certainly anyone who thinks

they can pay attention to--

who can do the experiment successfully that I just

suggested-- pay attention to something for 30 seconds

without being lost in thought--

you put those people on a meditation retreat, what

they're going to experience is, you know, on the first day,

they're going to feel, like, oh, yeah.

I was with the breath, or I was walking-- you know,

I was with the sensations of walking--

and I'd be there for, like, five minutes solid, and then

I would get lost in thought.

And then I'd come back.

And then five more minutes, I'd be lost in thought,

and then get back.

But as the days progressed--

even, you know, 10 days in to a silent meditation retreat--

they're going to experience more and more distraction.

It's going to seem like, OK, wait a minute.

Now I can't pay attention to anything

for more than 5 seconds.

Right?

That is progress, right?

Because what they're discovering is just how distractible

they are.

Right?

And you know, for some people, that

will be immediately obvious.

For some people, it'll actually take a lot of practice

to realize just how distracted they are.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: What you just said, which was that,

at some point, we can start noticing our thoughts--

I can notice my thoughts-- but what you're talking about,

as a goal state, is not being distracted by thoughts,

but actually seeing the relationship

between thoughts, self, and other types of perceptions.

And here, I think recognizing and seeing thoughts

is a form of perception.

It's just an internally-directed perception.

This raises a topic that I'm also obsessed by,

which I think neuroscience can somewhat explain,

but still incompletely--

that the circuits and mechanics, et cetera,

are not yet known-- which is about time perception.

And you know, a simple analogy would

be that there are a lot of small objects flying around

in the space that we happen to be having this discussion,

but they're moving so fast that I can't perceive them.

Or they're entirely stationary, so I can't perceive them

because of the reasons we talked about

before in the visual system.

My eyes are moving in perfect concert

with these small object movements,

and therefore, I am blind to them.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: A slight shift in time perception--

think of this, perhaps, as a change in the frame rate,

right?

Camera frame rates.

A faster frame rate, you can capture slow motion.

Slower frame rate, you're going to get

more of a strobe-type effect if the frame rate is low enough.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right?

Could it be that our time perception is not one thing,

but we have one rate of perceiving time for external

objects at a given distance-- which we know is true--

another frame rate for objects that are up close-- we

know this to be true, even if those objects are moving

at the exact same speed, right?

I mean, this would be the sitting on a train,

the rungs on the fence seem to be going by very, very fast,

but the ones in the distance seem to be moving slowly.

This is the way the visual system and time perception

interconnect at some level.

You're up on a skyscraper-- the little ants

of cars and people down below.

You know they're moving much faster than you

perceive them to move, but it's a distance effect.

SAM HARRIS: I mean, you see a plane,

it's going to be going 300 miles an hour.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Exactly.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's not because

of the lack of resolution.

The lack of resolution is incidental.

We know this because in animals, such as hawks,

that have twice the degree of acuity, as far as we know,

they have the same distance-associated shifts

in time perception.

So could it be that we are running

multiple streams of time perception, multiple cones

of attention, that include cones of attention to our thoughts,

and that somehow, through meditation,

we start to align the frame rate for these different streams

of attention so that they all fall into the same movie,

if you will-- although it's not just

a movie with visual content.

What I'm doing here is clearly, I'm

becoming a lumper rather than a spreader.

I'm sure this violates certain rules of time perception

and neural circuitry, but I'm not sure

that it's entirely untrue, either.

And does it survive at all, as a possible model

for what you're describing?

And if the answer is no, I'm perfectly

comfortable with that.

SAM HARRIS: Well, it's dependent on what you mean by meditation.

This is where, sort of, the particularities

of what one is doing with one's attention

under the frame of meditation really

matter, because there are ways to practice mindfulness,

in particular, where the frame rate really

does seem to go way, way up.

Right?

And there's actually been some research done on this,

where you take people before and after a three-month silent

meditation retreat, and you give them some kind of visual

discrimination task where they have to detect--

I think they used a tachistoscope.

Is that the tool for?

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'm not familiar.

SAM HARRIS: Something that presents, you know,

very quick pulses of light.

And in any case, just in any sensory channel,

I would imagine you can make finer-grained discriminations

if you're practicing mindfulness in a very specific way, which

is to be making these fine-grained discriminations

more and more, and do nothing else for three months, which

is a way of practicing.

So the classic mindfulness practice

in what's called Vipassana meditation

is to pay scrupulous attention to seeing, hearing, smelling,

tasting, touching in a way that breaks everything down

into these kind of microscopic sensory moments.

So you know, rather than feel your hands pressing together,

what you're trying to feel with your attention

and you're feeling more and more is

all of the sensations of pressure and temperature

and movement such that the feeling of hands

completely disappears.

You realize that a hand is a concept,

and all you have is this cloud of punctate and very brief

sensations.

And so anything you think you have as a datum of experience,

as you bore into it with your attention,

it resolves into this kind of diaphanous cloud of changing

sensation.

And that can be even something as captivating as, like,

a serious pain in your body.

I mean, you can have could have injured your neck, you know?

And so you have some excruciating pain in your neck.

If you just are willing to pay attention to it, you know,

and just pay 100% attention to it, a couple of things happen.

One is your resistance to feeling it goes away,

by definition, because now your goal is to just pay attention

to it.

And you recognize that so much of the suffering associated

with the pain was borne of the resistance to feeling it.

You're bracing against it and all of your thinking about it,

you know?

You're thinking, like, well, you know,

why did I do this to myself, or should I

see an orthopedist, or how long is this going to last?

And maybe I herniated a disk.

Like, all of that self-talk is producing anxiety.

And I'm not saying there's never anything to think about there.

But either you can do something about it in the moment or you

can't.

And so much of our suffering in the presence of pain is

the result of resisting it, worrying about it, thinking--

just all of the--

everything we're doing with our minds,

but just feeling it, right?

So when you just feel it, again, it

breaks apart into this ever shifting collection

of different sensations.

And it's not one thing, and it never stays the same.

So two things happen there.

One is there can be a tremendous amount of relief that

happens there where you can achieve a level of equanimity,

even in the presence of really unpleasant physical sensation.

And this is true of mental sensation as well.

As it's true of emotions.

The classically negative emotions

like anger, depression, or fear.

The moment you become willing to just feel them

in all of their punctate and changeable qualities,

they cease to be what they were a moment ago.

When you're talking about emotional states,

they cease to map back on to you and your self concept

as meaningful in the same way.

So that suddenly, the anxiety you feel, let's say,

before going out on stage to give a talk, a moment ago,

it had psychological meaning, it felt like, I'm anxious.

How do I get rid of this?

Why am I this sort of person?

Should I have taken a beta blocker?

This is the conversation you're having with yourself.

The moment you just become willing to feel it

as the pure energy of the physiology of cortisol release,

it ceases to have any meaning.

It ceases to be a problem in that moment,

because it's no more--

it no more maps onto the kind of person

you are then a feeling of indigestion or a pain

in your knee maps onto the kind of person you are.

It's just sensation, anyway.

Back to the main point here, which

is that, if you train your attention in this way

to notice the particularities of sensory experience

and emotional experience, you're looking

for the atoms of experience.

You get better and better at that and certain things happen.

But one thing that I really do think happens

is there's a kind of frame rate change in the data stream

where you really are just-- you're just noticing much,

much more.

All of that is a very interesting way of training.

It's not what I tend to recommend now.

It's a great preliminary practice

for what I do recommend, because it really

teaches you the difference between being lost in thought

and not, it really teaches you what mindfulness is.

But it tends to be done by 99.9% of people in a dualistic way,

which, again, you're set up to think, OK, I'm over

here as the locus of attention.

And I'm continually getting distracted by thought.

And the project is to not do that anymore and actually

pay attention to the breath and sounds and sensations.

And every time I get lost in thought,

I'm going to go back here.

But this whole dance of I'm lost in thought,

now I'm strategically directing my attention again, all of this

seems to ramify this sense of self.

The of there's one to be doing this.

There's somebody holding the spotlight of attention

and getting better at coming back

to the object of meditation.

Again, it's inevitable that 99.9% of people

are going to start there and stay there

for some considerable period of time.

But the thing I like to do when I talk about all of this

is undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring

all of that as early as possible,

because where, I think, you want to be

is recognizing that there is no place from which

to aim attention.

This whole dualistic setup of subject and object

is the thing that is already not there.

And it's not that it's there and you meditate it out

of existence successfully.

It's really not there.

And if you learn how to look for it,

you can see that it's not there and feel that it's not there.

And it no longer seems to be there.

It's like it's not--

and it becomes like, again, like a bi-stable percept where

you looked at it long enough and you thought,

OK, now I see the vase and the face and I can't unsee it.

And every time I look, it's there again, right?

So yeah.

So to come back to the example you

gave with your colleague at Stanford

whose book I know I have.

I haven't read it.

This is a-- he wrote a book, Projections.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

SAM HARRIS: So it's on my stack to read.

But it's the opposite--

what I'm recommending is, essentially,

the opposite end of the continuum

of the internal exercise he was doing.

So rather than-- so he's doing something

very deliberate and controlled, and he is deliberately

thinking in complete sentences and commandeering

the machinery of thought and attention in a way

that I would imagine.

I mean, I'd be interested to talk to him about it.

But I would imagine, he really feels like he's doing that.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's an engineer--

as you've describe it in this way, it reminds me,

he's a physician, but he's also an engineer.

So it's really about taking the raw materials

of thought and engineering something structured from it.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

Right.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: I haven't been in Carl's mind.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

But if we got him talking on that,

I'm sure we would get a sense of what it is.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: We'll do that conversation at some point.

It's the exact opposite of what you're describing.

SAM HARRIS: Exact opposite would be

to recognize that the sense of control is a total illusion.

Because you don't know what you're going to think next.

And even he, in the most laborious way, I mean,

he could just get as muscular as he wants with it.

He still doesn't know what he's going to think next.

Because thoughts simply arise.

You can run this experiment for yourself.

And this connects up to the topic of free will

which we might want to touch.

But I mean, just think of any category of thing.

If I asked you to think of the names of cities

or of friends you have or of famous people you can remember

exist or think of nouns or anything.

And just watch what comes percolating

into consciousness right now.

There are things you can't think of,

there are things you don't know the name of.

There are languages you don't speak,

there are famous people you've never seen or never heard of.

So you have no control over that part.

Like those names and faces are not

going to suddenly come streaming into consciousness.

But the totality of facts and figures

and faces and names that you do know,

only some will come vying for inclusion.

And there's a sort of--

we could make guess and we know something

about the neurology of this.

But you depending on what channel

you're waiting for thoughts in, I mean,

it's going to be different if it's visual

or semantic or episodic memory.

I mean, all of these things are different.

But wherever you point your inner

gaze of attention and wait for the next face or name.

Certain things are going to come and certain things

aren't going to come.

And how you land on one--

there'll be this process if you're paying attention,

you might think, let's say we go with names of cities, right?

So you'll think of Paris, you'll think of London,

you'll think of Rome, you'll think of Sedona.

So these names will come.

And if I ask you to just say one, right?

So just--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Minneapolis is what came to mind.

For me, it was very straightforward.

It was Minneapolis, the famous person was Joe Strummer

and they just like--

I can give you reasons why I think those came to mind.

Recent conversations.

SAM HARRIS: OK.

So we know a fair bit about much of this.

So one, we know that your reasons, obviously,

could be right or wrong.

They're very likely to be wrong because we

have this confabulatory storytelling mechanism even

in an intact brain where we just--

we seem to never lack for the reasons

why something came to mind, and we

can know we can manipulate people

in ways that prove that people are just reliably

wrong and confident.

You know, confidently so about the reasons

why they thought of things or did things.

But leaving that aside, even if you're completely accurate,

there are people's names who you know

and cities names that you know that inexplicably just

didn't come to mind.

And if we ran this experiment again and again

and again, they wouldn't come to mind

if your brain was in precisely the state

it was in a moment ago.

If we could return your brain to the state

it was in a moment ago, correcting

for all the deterministic changes and all

the random changes that would have to be corrected for,

it to just get-- all the synapses

and the synaptic weights and everything in the state

it was in to produce Joe Strummer in Minneapolis.

If we rewind that movie, that part of the movie of your life,

you are going to say Joe Strummer in Minneapolis

a trillion times in a row.

So this is why, in my view, the notion of free will

makes absolutely no sense.

And you can add as much randomness to that process

as you want.

It still doesn't get you the freedom people think they have.

There's another conversation to have about why none of that

matters and why things only get better

once you admit to yourself that free will is an illusion.

And yes, you can get in shape and you can diet

and you can do all the things you want to do

and you don't have to think about free will.

But from a contemplative, meditative point of view,

the thing to notice is that everything is just

springing into view.

There's no place from which you are authoring

your next thought, because you would have to think it

before you think it.

Like there is just this fundamental mystery

at our backs that is disgorging everything that we experience.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: What if I'm speaking?

So if I'm talking about something

and I have some command of that information,

I can often sense what I'm going to say next and then

find myself saying it.

And hopefully, that's what they say and not something else.

I certainly said things I didn't intend to say

or never thought I would say in life.

But when engaged in speech or action,

it at least gives us the illusion, I think,

that we somehow have more command over our thoughts.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

Well you have a script.

I mean, it's like there are things you know a lot about

and you've talked about them a lot,

and you know you have the things you

want to say about those things and the things

you don't want to say or you wouldn't want to say.

And you know you can--

it still is a bit of a high wire act, because you can misspeak

or you can fail to get to the end of a sentence

in a grammatically correct way.

And again, all of this-- objectively, this whole process

is mysterious to you.

You don't know how you follow the rules of English grammar.

Like your tongue is doing it somehow and when it fails,

it fails, and you're just as surprised as the next guy

that it failed.

And you mispronounce a word, and OK, I

don't know what happened there.

But if it keeps happening, I'm going to worry I had a stroke.

And if it stops, I'm not going to worry about it.

So it's still mysterious even when

you're doing it in a very rote, deliberative, and repetitive

way.

But when you're talking about something

you've talked about a lot and you know where

you're going to go, right?

We have many conversations like this,

it is somewhat analogous to like a golf swing.

Where it's like, you know how you want to do it,

it's going to be all kinds of errors

that are going to creep into your execution of it

in real time.

But there's like you, basically, have a pattern.

And so you have certain linguistic patterns

which you're following.

Again, none of this is a proof of free will,

but I will grant you that phenomenologically, it

feels different than just waiting for the next thought

to come.

But my point is that, even if you are--

I mean, you can trim it down to the simplest possible thing.

Like you take two things you like to drink.

You like coffee and you like tea.

And you're deciding which to have.

Both are on offer.

You've got two cups in front of you.

And the question is, here I've got water

and I've got coffee, which am I going to drink next?

Incredibly, it's as simple as possible decision.

And no matter how long I make this decision process,

I could literally sit for an hour trying to figure out

which to reach for next.

And I could have my reasons why, and I

could have all my self talk.

There's going to be a final change in me that's

going to be the proximate cause of me deciding one

over the other.

And that, no matter how laborious

I can make it seem in terms of my reasoning about it,

it is going to be fundamentally mysterious as to why I went

with one rather than the other.

Whatever story I have--

because it's like-- it's still going to be as mysterious

as you thinking of Joe Strummer when you absolutely--

you know of the existence of Marilyn Monroe just as much.

And yet she simply didn't occur to you.

It's fundamentally mysterious.

Like there are people who are even more famous than Joe

Strummer to you.

I mean, I'm sure he may be somebody who you have thought

a lot about, but there are people

who like if we could just inventory your conscious life

going back the last 10 years, there

are people who you've thought about more than Joe Strummer

yet they didn't appear.

And that is mysterious.

And they could have, but they didn't.

What I'm saying is that this mystery never gets

banished in our experience.

Whatever stories.

We have to tell about it.

Because if the story is, oh, well, I went for the water

because I think I've been drinking too much coffee.

I listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast

and he was talking about caffeine, and I think--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's good for us,

but you don't want to overdo it.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.

SAM HARRIS: OK.

So let's say that is, actually, the causal chain.

Like, I listen to your podcast, you

say something about caffeine, now

I'm self conscious about my coffee intake.

But that's just adding a couple of links to the chain.

There's still this fundamental mystery of, well,

why did I find that persuasive?

And why did I find it persuasive now and not five minutes ago

when I was drinking the coffee?

Like why did I just remember it now, or why was it effective?

You only have-- your experience in every moment

is precisely what it is and not one bit more.

And this subsumes even moments of real resolve and effort

and picking yourself up by your bootstraps

and changing everything.

It's like you're on a diet and you're

tempted to eat chocolate.

And you think you're about to reach

and say, no, I'm not breaking this diet.

This diet is actually going to stick.

Why did that arise in that moment and not

at this analogous moment on your last diet?

And why did it arise now to precisely the degree

that it did?

Why will it be as effective as it

will be and have the half-life that it will

have and not 10% more or less.

All of those are always mysterious to you.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, could we give, as we did before,

an evolutionary and a developmental explanation?

An evolutionary explanation might

be that directed attention and action is metabolically

demanding.

It would be inefficient or impossible

for us to be in constant, deliberate action with access

to all the relevant information as to why we would do anything.

So our ideas, literally, spring to the surface

at the last possible moment in order

to offset the great metabolic requirements of having ideas

that are related to goal-directed action

or that goal-directed action is expensive.

That's one idea.

The other idea would be-- and we know

this as a fact, which is that, initially, the brain is

fairly crudely wired.

That's not true within the neural circuits that control

breathing, heart rate, et cetera,

but within the neural circuits of sensory perception, thought,

et cetera.

They're fairly crudely wired.

And then across development, there's

a progressive pruning back and also in parallel

to that, a strengthening of the connections

that underlie directed action and thought.

And here, I don't mean directed as in free will, I mean,

just that I can decide to imagine an apple

and imagine that apple, for instance.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

But your decision--

ANDREW HUBERMAN: There seems to be

some maintenance of the fine random wiring in systems.

I mean, we've seen this even in worms,

in flies, in so-called lower invertebrates and lower

vertebrates.

And we see this in humans.

And it seems to be that there's a lot of background

spontaneous activity.

I mean, I've sunk electrodes into the brains of humans,

macaques, carnivores, and mice.

And in every case, most of what you hear is called hash

and it has nothing to do with hashish.

Is just [VOCALIZING] on the audio monitor

which is picking up a bunch of action potentials.

As you're listening to a chorus of action potentials.

But it's rare to find a neuron that faithfully [VOCALIZING]

fires to represent some sensory stimulus in the world.

And you can arrange that marriage experimentally

so that you can arrive at those strong signal to noise events.

But I was always struck by how much noise there

is in the system all around all the time.

And people argue, is the noise really noise, et cetera?

There's still a lot of debate about that.

But I can imagine that some of the spontaneous nature

of thoughts just relates to the fact

that there's a lot of background spontaneous activity

in the brain.

Now, why that is a whole other discussion.

But if I were to set up two constraints that there's

a lot of spontaneous activity, it's

going to generate random thoughts.

Thankfully, not much random action,

although there's a little bit of random action in our daily

lives.

And then against that say, well, any deliberate thought

or motion is going to be expensive.

It's a metabolically expensive organ to begin with.

And so you just have to--

evolution has arrived at a place where spontaneous geysering up

of things upon which like deliberate thoughts and action

are superimposed is the best arrangement

overall for this very metabolically demanding organ.

I mean, what I basically gave was just

kind of a biological description of just one narrow aspect

of it.

But can we get comfortable with that?

And the reason I say get comfortable is that I'm--

and here, admittedly, I'm forcing a little bit

of a striptease towards what I think I

and everyone else wants to know, which is how to meditate

and why, in particular, meditation convinces us

that something doesn't necessarily

have to be eliminated, but that was actually never there.

I feel like we've now set up a sort of almost like a--

you're not contradicting yourself by any means,

but in my mind, there's a contradiction.

And here's the contradiction.

I love this statement that meditation over time

or done properly reveals to us that we're actually

not trying to make the gap between actor and observer

go away.

It was actually never there.

To me, that's one of the more important statements

that I, perhaps, have ever heard.

And it inspires me to go further down this path of meditation,

because I've never experienced that.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Not deliberately, and certainly,

not through meditation.

If I ever experienced it, it was transient enough

that I'm intrigued to experience it more.

So on the one hand, you're telling me

something was never there.

And there's a profound experience

to be heard by anyone that's willing to do the work

to arrive at that experience of the loss of that illusion.

On the other hand, I'm hearing that there's

a profound gap that really does exist,

which is that we believe that our thoughts are somehow

from us.

And indeed, they're from in the cranial vault someplace, maybe,

in the body a bit as well.

But that we over attribute the degree to which we are that

and that is us in a way that's volitional, that we control.

And so once I'm hearing that there's something--

there's an illusion that we can eliminate and on the other hand

I'm hearing that there's an illusion that we can't

eliminate, and maybe these are unrelated

and I'm bridging them in an unimportant way, that

seems only important to me.

But somehow, I can't resolve these two

and maybe the thing to do then is, can we

separate them in terms of a practice to witness them?

That would allow us to resolve them separately.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

So I think I'm hearing the problem.

There's this-- let me bracket the whole free will discussion

because it really is the flip side of this coin that I'm--

the obverse of which is the illusion of the self.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: So at least--

I might be on the right track.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: They are the opposite sides of a coin.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

Yeah.

ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK.

Great.

Because to me they seem very different in essence.

SAM HARRIS: No.

Because what I'm calling the sense of self

and what I think most people feel

as their core sense of self is this feeling of--

I mean, it's the feeling of being the locus of attention,

but it's also the feeling of being the locus of agency.

I can do the next thing.

Like, who's doing this?

Who's reaching for the cup?

I am.

Right?

I intended this, and now I'm doing the thing.

And my conscious intention is the proximate cause

of my reaching, right?

And so I'm the author of my thoughts and actions,

essentially.

And my specific uses of attention, right?

So I can pay attention to the breath, I get lost in thought,

I come back to the breath.

But on some level, the thoughts themselves are more of my

doing something with almost authorial intent.

Like I'm thinking like, what the hell is this guy talking about?

Who's thinking these thoughts?

I am.

The person who really doesn't get what I'm saying

is thinking something like that.

What the fuck is this guy talking about?

I know I'm here.

I'm a self, I'm a body, I'm a mind.

I can reach for things.

That these intentional actions are

different from things that happen to me.

A voluntary action is different from an involuntary one.

So having a tremor is different from consciously

deciding to pick up a glass.

So obviously, everything I'm saying about meditation

and the self and free will in order

to be a sane picture of a human mind and of reality

has to conserve the data of experience

such that, yes, I can acknowledge

the difference between a tremor and a deliberative voluntary

motor action.

And the things you do volitionally

are different not just psychologically and

behaviorally, but they just have different implications

for like in a court of law.

You accidentally hit someone with your car

or you did it on purpose, that's still

a distinction that matters.

Importantly, it tells us a lot about the global properties

of your mind such that we have a sense of what you're

likely to do in the future.

If you're someone who likes running over people

with your car, you're a psychopath

who we need to worry about.

If you're is someone who did it by accident,

well then you may be culpable for the level of negligence

that allow that to happen.

But you're a very different person and we you differently

and we're wise to.

So anyway, we can bracket all of that.

There's this-- I mean, there are some fundamental--

there are some false assumptions about the underlying

logic of this process, which, I think, is worth addressing.

Is actually-- there was a kind of found object in the news

that I talk about at one point.

I forget where it is in Waking Up app.

But there was a story that I stumbled on the internet.

I think it's about 12 or 13 years old.

Of a tourist bus in--

I think it was in Norway.

It was somewhere in Northern Europe.

And it had about 30 people on it.

And one person was described as an Asian woman.

And they went to a rest stop and everyone got off the bus.

And shopped and had lunch.

And this Asian woman changed her clothing for whatever reason.

And they all got back on the bus.

I think the relevance of it being an Asian woman

is that there were language barriers that

explain what later happened.

So everyone gets back on the bus,

the Asian woman has changed her clothing.

And the bus is about to leave but then someone notices, hey,

there was an Asian woman who got off the bus who isn't--

it hasn't come back yet.

And they tell the driver this.

And this poses a problem.

So now everyone's waiting for this person to return.

But in fact, everyone was on the bus.

This woman had just changed her clothing,

and was not recognized by her fellow travelers.

So everyone gets concerned as this tourist doesn't show up.

And they start looking for her.

And they can't find her.

And so a search party is formed.

And the Asian woman, because of whatever language barrier,

heard that there was a missing tourist,

so she joins the search party, which,

in fact, is looking for her.

And this goes on into the night.

And they're readying helicopters for a dawn patrol

to find the missing tourist.

Now, at some point along the way,

I think it was at like 3:00 in the morning,

this tourist realizes that she is the object of this search.

And obviously, the whole thing unravels.

She confesses that she changed her clothes and the problem

is solved.

But the problem is not solved by the logic

that the seeker is expected.

So it's like, it's not true to say

that the missing tourist was found

in the way that was expected.

Because a missing tourist was never lost.

The missing tourist was part of the search party.

So when you think about it from her point of view,

like what happened, she's part of the search party.

She's looking for the missing tourist not knowing

that she, in fact, is the missing tourist.

So what happens at the moment she realizes that everyone's

looking for her?

The search isn't consummated in the way

that is implied by the logic of everyone's use of attention.

And yet the problem evaporates.

And there's something deeply analogous

about the structure of that and the meditative journey.

Precisely in, again, not talking about all the possible changes

in the contents of consciousness that could be good,

which, again, they come along for the ride

anyway when you do the thing I'm talking about.

It's on this point of looking for the self

and not finding it.

And there is this sense that, OK, the self is here,

and it's a problem.

It is the string upon which all of my conscious states,

mostly unhappy ones, are strong.

It's the thing that is at the center of my anxiety.

It's the thing that I don't feel good about.

It's the thing that when criticized, I let implode.

It's the center of my problem, and now I'm

trying to feel better.

And meditation has been handed to me

as a possible remedy for my situation.

And it's billed as a remedy.

And in fact, I'm hearing from this guy

that this is the thing that is going to cause me to realize

that my self isn't where--

or as I thought it was.

So now I'm going to look.

And so again, the sense is, I start out

far away from the goal here.

I start out with a problem.

I'm now meditating on the evidence of my enlightenment.

I can feel my problem.