TRIGGERnometry - Neuroscientist：＂We Live in a Controlled Hallucination＂

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00:00:06.520 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

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00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:00:22.660 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:00:27.120 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

00:00:30.360 It's very easy to assume that we all experience the world the same way.

00:00:34.940 You're wearing a kind of mauve purple shirt and a blue shirt, and it seems like that's out there in the world.

00:00:40.320 Those colours are out there in the world. They're not being made up in my head.

00:00:43.440 But that's not true. We don't see the world as it is. We see it as we are.

00:00:48.020 So there's some classic studies about the effect of language that native Russian speakers distinguish more shades of blue.

00:00:56.580 These categories are imposed in a slightly different way.

00:00:59.260 If we see things in a different way, then we're talking about two different realities.

00:01:05.380 In a sense, I've been fond of saying that our experience is like a controlled hallucination.

00:01:12.940 We have these social media echo chambers, but we also have to some extent perceptual echo chambers too.

00:01:19.180 We all live in different inner world, unique inner worlds, and we'll probably seek out perceptual information to reinforce the way we encounter the world, even at these lowest levels.

00:01:31.520 And what's out there, who knows? Ask a physicist.

00:01:34.180 The way we experience it is always coming from the inside out.

00:01:48.420 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:51.300 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:52.520 I'm Constantine Kissing.

00:01:53.460 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:59.000 Our brilliant guest today is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex and author of a best-selling book, Being You, A New Science of Consciousness.

00:02:06.720 Neil Seth, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:08.340 Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:02:10.120 It's great to have you on the show.

00:02:11.340 So before we get into the main interview, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, obviously neuroscientist, but how are you, where you are?

00:02:18.040 What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:02:21.580 I've always been interested in one of these, I think, fundamental mysteries, which is this mystery of consciousness.

00:02:27.500 I think it's a mystery that even before you put a name to it, appears when we're all kids.

00:02:32.820 Like, who am I? Why am I me and not somebody else?

00:02:35.600 Where was I before I was born? What happens to me after I die?

00:02:39.240 And then as I got older, that basic question evolved into deeper questions, like, how is it possible that this lump of electrified pate inside my head can give rise to an experience?

00:02:54.180 You know, an experience of the world, the redness of red, the pang of an emotional experience, the sense of free will.

00:03:01.680 And it's not that I set out with this plan to be an academic researching this stuff.

00:03:07.360 I just kind of never lost interest in it and gradually wound my way through different disciplines at university and afterwards studying psychology and physics and then computer science.

00:03:19.880 And by about 20 years ago, when I'd finished my PhD, around that time, the study of consciousness was coming back onto the radar in academia and neuroscience and psychology and philosophy.

00:03:32.180 And so I was lucky to get a position back at the University of Sussex.

00:03:36.620 I did my PhD there. I went to America for a few years, California, and came back and started a group trying to understand how the brain works,

00:03:45.640 but specifically trying to understand this big question of how and why we experience the world and the self the way we do and also what applications this understanding can have for medicine,

00:03:59.260 for mental health and neurology, for technology, how we develop and interact with AI and also for society as a whole.

00:04:06.500 Understanding how we perceive the world and how we perceive ourselves, I think, has a lot of implications for society in general.

00:04:14.400 So that's kind of how I got.

00:04:16.380 Yeah. Well, it sounds like you've taken like a childhood passion and just kept going until you became quite successful in that field.

00:04:23.400 And that's why it's interesting to have you on. So what is consciousness?

00:04:28.660 People will disagree. For me, it's very simple. We all know what consciousness is.

00:04:32.640 It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go under general anesthesia, which have you done that?

00:04:39.400 Have you been under general anesthesia? So, you know, it's like it's completely different from sleep, isn't it?

00:04:43.680 I mean, you you have no idea how much time has passed. Certainly the times I've had general.

00:04:49.600 You you go under, you come back and you're not just sort of dozing. You are just not there.

00:04:56.060 It could be 10 years later. It could be 10 years later. And it's that is that oblivion.

00:04:59.660 That's it's that is unconsciousness. And the flip side of that is consciousness.

00:05:03.940 So when that's not happening, you are conscious. The philosopher Tom Thomas Nagel puts it, I think, very nicely.

00:05:10.900 He says for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism.

00:05:16.200 Like it feels like something to be you or me, probably many animals.

00:05:22.240 It feels like something to be that animal. But for for you under general anesthesia or for a table or a chair.

00:05:28.460 There's nothing going on. There's no subjective experience going on at all. So that's consciousness.

00:05:34.760 So what? But forgive me, but to me, that's quite an unsatisfying way of describing it, because I suppose what I'm so I thought I imagine as part of that.

00:05:44.320 Yeah. And also then experience whatever that is, physical, you know, emotional.

00:05:49.800 Well, that's all consciousness. Right. Right. So I think I think you can. Yeah, that's a starting point.

00:05:55.380 Just just. Yeah. So that definition is useful, partly because of what it excludes.

00:06:01.560 So it's saying consciousness is not the same thing as as intelligence.

00:06:05.380 It's not the same thing as having language or behaving in a particular way.

00:06:09.840 It's just any kind of experience. But what does that mean? How do you work with that?

00:06:15.780 So the way I approach it is to think of three different aspects of consciousness that cover this broad idea.

00:06:24.900 One of them is level, like what happens in the brain when you you lose consciousness entirely, like in anesthesia or in other conditions, something that affects globally how conscious you are.

00:06:35.940 Then there's conscious content, which is when you are conscious, you're conscious of something you open your eyes and a world is there and has colors and shapes and people and places and objects and things are happening.

00:06:49.060 And how does that occur? Because the brain can take in information and respond to it without consciousness being involved.

00:06:58.620 And we can perceive things unconsciously. Not everything that that reaches our senses affects what we're aware of.

00:07:06.320 So what in the brain generates the experience of a world?

00:07:11.120 And then finally, what in the brain underpins the experience of the self?

00:07:17.740 Because it's tempting to think of the self as like you just take it for granted.

00:07:22.140 It's this mini me inside my brain somewhere that is doing all the perceiving and then deciding what to do next.

00:07:29.280 But the way I think and a lot of others in this area think is that the self is not the thing that does the perceiving.

00:07:37.920 It's not something to be taken for granted.

00:07:40.380 The self is another kind of perception.

00:07:43.860 The brain is creating the experience of self in the same way that it's creating the experience of the world.

00:07:50.480 I think dividing it this way gives gives certainly that's what structures the way I do my research.

00:07:57.400 I try and understand these areas. They're all joined up in some ways, but you can approach them at least a little bit separately.

00:08:03.860 I feel like I'm high again. Over to you, mate.

00:08:07.060 And so if that being the case, so we all experience consciousness.

00:08:11.300 Yeah.

00:08:11.540 So why is our consciousness different? And how different is our consciousness, if you see what I mean?

00:08:19.060 Yeah, I think this is a really, I mean, this is in fact something we're working on at the moment.

00:08:22.920 And it's very easy to assume that we all experience the world the same way because our experience has that character.

00:08:33.000 You know, I open, I'm looking at you guys now and you're wearing a kind of mauve purple shirt and a blue shirt.

00:08:39.360 And it seems like that's out there in the world. Those colours are out there in the world.

00:08:43.580 They're not being made up in my head and the same for everything else I'm experiencing.

00:08:48.820 But that's not true, right? The way it's actually working is, of course, there's a real world out there.

00:08:53.720 Of course, you guys are actually out there and there are things, there are these objects that you're sitting on and wearing.

00:08:58.940 But the way I or anybody or any animal would experience them is dependent partly on what's there, but to a large extent on what's, how the brain decides to make sense of it.

00:09:13.000 Colour's a really good example. You know, you take a piece of white paper from in here, outside, and it still looks white, even though the light waves bouncing into your eyes have changed completely.

00:09:24.280 The brain takes into account all the ambient lighting in order to decide what colour something should be.

00:09:31.040 And the same is true for everything that we experience, which means that we're all going to experience things differently, even though it seems as though we each see the world just as it truly is.

00:09:47.220 And sometimes these differences can be quite large.

00:09:50.140 You know, sometimes people see things that other people don't, you know, they start actively hallucinating.

00:09:57.320 Or they might have what we would call a neurodivergent condition, where it's autism or ADHD or something.

00:10:03.820 So their experience of the world is quite dramatically different in a way that can often be challenging.

00:10:09.160 But I think, and there's some evidence for this now, that even if you don't hallucinate actively or describe yourself as neurodivergent, we all experience the world differently.

00:10:20.800 In fact, there's no sort of single true way to experience it.

00:10:25.260 You know, our perceptions are tied to reality, otherwise they would be useless.

00:10:29.600 But there's, but there's, but there's always a construction and the constructions will always differ.

00:10:36.060 Quite how much they differ is something that we were looking at.

00:10:39.780 We have this project called the Perception Census, which is a set of online little brain teasers and interactive experiments and illusions.

00:10:47.840 That is trying to map out this hidden world of inner diversity.

00:10:53.520 Because, you know, I think we know in society that we've come to hopefully, optimistically cherish the externally visible diversity we have in sort of height and skin colour and so on and cultural background that we can see on the outside.

00:11:07.940 And so I think recognising and learning to cherish the inner diversity that we have too could be equally transformational, but we just need to know what it looks like.

00:11:18.900 That's such a profound point, the inner diversity, because how much of this inner diversity, Anil, is chemical, biological, whatever way you want to put it?

00:11:28.540 And also, how much of it is a product of our childhood experiences and our culture and what we have been taught growing up?

00:11:35.840 This is a very good question, and I don't think there's going to be any single clear answer to it.

00:11:40.620 We're all, you know, as individuals, this complicated mix of inheritance, you know, what's in our genes, development, how we grew up, childhood experiences, the culture, the language we speak.

00:11:54.260 And just what happened to me yesterday is going to affect how I encounter the world and the self today.

00:11:59.760 Teasing these things apart is very, very difficult, but there's some clues that can help us.

00:12:06.900 So there's some classic studies about the effect of language that native Russian speakers distinguish more shades of blue.

00:12:15.580 So you're a native Russian speaker.

00:12:16.760 So probably, I mean, you know, like the light wave spectrum, the electromagnetic spectrum is basically just a continuous set of light, of wavelengths.

00:12:26.280 But our brains carve it up into distinct colors, which is why a rainbow has these distinct bands.

00:12:32.800 It doesn't just look like a continuous band of color.

00:12:35.860 But that's our brains imposing these categories.

00:12:40.840 And it turns out that for native Russian speakers, these categories are imposed in a slightly different way.

00:12:47.720 Entirely useless here because the sky is always gray.

00:12:49.840 The sky is always gray.

00:12:51.020 This is true.

00:12:52.480 But it's one example of how language can affect perception.

00:12:57.080 I've always thought this, you know, like I noticed that when my wife and I, if we're speaking Russian versus when we're speaking English, I am speaking Russian or English to people.

00:13:06.440 If I'm, I've always thought the language is identity to some extent because I am a different person when I'm speaking Russian to when I'm speaking English.

00:13:14.740 I say things differently.

00:13:16.240 It's almost, I almost would say I have slightly different opinions.

00:13:20.040 Interesting.

00:13:20.780 When I am in the different, I don't know if you find this Spanish.

00:13:23.880 Yeah, I find it because I wouldn't say I'm a native Spanish speaker, but I learned Spanish at the same time I learned English.

00:13:29.740 Right.

00:13:30.340 But I feel that way when I speak Spanish.

00:13:32.980 I'm more demonstrative.

00:13:34.260 I'm more open.

00:13:35.080 And then when I speak English, I'm more kind of...

00:13:37.300 I also speak, I speak Spanish, but not as well as you.

00:13:39.980 I learned it as a sort of a late teenager, embarrassed about my inability to speak anything but English.

00:13:45.260 And I think, yeah, that resonates. 0.98

00:13:46.900 I feel just much more stupid when I speak Spanish. 0.99

00:13:49.340 I speak it really badly. 0.98

00:13:51.040 But it does seem to affect the thoughts.

00:13:52.780 It's not just the ability to express the thoughts.

00:13:55.320 I start having simpler thoughts about where the bus station is and what's on the menu.

00:14:00.980 Yeah.

00:14:01.480 So one of the interesting things that I've always thought, and, you know, this idea that perception is projection, right, essentially, to a large extent.

00:14:09.300 And that's kind of a part of almost every spiritual tradition.

00:14:13.460 It's part of, if you do personal development, this is the first thing they'll teach you. 0.92

00:14:17.540 You know, you're projecting your crap basically onto the world and then you're upset at what's coming back at you. 0.52

00:14:22.880 So what does it mean? 0.96

00:14:26.500 Particularly because, as you say, when we look out into the world, the world is an infinite amount of information.

00:14:33.440 And is it the case that the reason we see certain things is like, right now, there's a wealth of information behind you, but I'm looking at you.

00:14:41.420 Yeah.

00:14:41.760 Because you're a human being.

00:14:42.920 And I'm seeing certain things about you that I'm primed to receive.

00:14:47.300 And so we're all essentially creating our own experience for us, for ourselves.

00:14:52.440 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:14:53.740 I think you're quite right that a lot of traditions, whether it's in Western culture of personal development or in Eastern spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism and the concept of Maya and that things are illusory in their surface appearance.

00:15:06.740 There's a lot of, a long history to thinking this way, that what we experience is a kind of projection.

00:15:14.880 But what I think neuroscience is bringing to the table is instead of this being metaphorical, it's unpacking it literally.

00:15:23.520 Like, how does this actually happen?

00:15:25.240 How deep does it go?

00:15:26.380 What does it mean in terms of some of our more basic encounters with the world?

00:15:31.360 Just our experience of shape and color, for instance.

00:15:34.980 And that's not given.

00:15:36.760 That's also a projection.

00:15:39.140 And what's literally happening, at least I think, and this is the idea that I've been exploring in my work and in the book, is that the brain is a kind of prediction engine.

00:15:49.720 Yes.

00:15:50.080 And instead of just passively soaking up information from the world or the body, the information that comes in is ambiguous.

00:15:59.980 It's noisy.

00:16:00.860 It's just this, as you say, this almost infinite morass of signals, whether it's electromagnetic radiation or sound waves or whatever it might be.

00:16:09.860 The brain has to make sense of this to conjure a definite world, a world that just sort of clicks into position, these things that we see.

00:16:17.780 And so the way it does that, it has to actively interpret the information that it gets.

00:16:25.180 And how does it do that?

00:16:26.740 Well, here's what the theory says.

00:16:28.360 The theory says that the brain is constantly throwing out predictions about the likely causes of sensory signals.

00:16:36.500 Like, what's most likely to be out there in the world to give rise to the information that's coming in?

00:16:42.820 And then it uses the sensory information to calibrate its predictions, to update them, to tune them to the world.

00:16:49.960 So just zooming out a little bit again, what this means is our experiences are not just passive registrations of an objective reality.

00:17:07.060 They're always active, top-down, inside-out constructions.

00:17:12.360 We actively generate our worlds.

00:17:14.820 And we also, I think, the same goes for the body, too.

00:17:17.720 Our emotional responses are perceptions of what's happening to the body in response to the world.

00:17:25.360 I think this really, for me, this keeps nagging at me, even just in everyday life, because we walk around and it just seems as though we see the world.

00:17:33.640 And it's kind of, we're reading it from the outside in, and it's continually challenging and counterintuitive to think that's not what's going on.

00:17:42.600 We're always, you know, what's out there?

00:17:44.740 Who knows?

00:17:45.140 Ask a physicist.

00:17:46.260 But the way we experience it is always coming from the inside out.

00:17:50.500 That's very interesting.

00:17:51.640 And, of course, anyone who's looked into this for half a second knows it's true.

00:17:55.540 And, on the other hand, I feel like that puts, that makes it quite difficult to live life, in a way, because it's like I get that I'm projecting my thoughts and whatever onto reality.

00:18:09.100 So how do I then navigate the world?

00:18:11.240 Because, like, I know, for example, if I jump out of that window, I am going to hit the ground.

00:18:15.400 That's real, right?

00:18:16.700 If I drive my car into something, that's a bad outcome for me and for the car and for whatever.

00:18:22.380 So how do we navigate reality then, knowing all of this?

00:18:28.220 How does this change the way we live life?

00:18:32.320 Unfortunately, evolution has designed the way the brain constructs experience so that we don't do things like jump out of windows or drive cars into walls.

00:18:41.680 I've been fond of saying that our experience is like a controlled hallucination.

00:18:47.100 It's a hallucination in the sense that it is generated by the brain, but the control is equally important.

00:18:54.860 So evolution has shaped our perceptual mechanisms, our brain circuitry, so that the experiences we have are tied to the world in ways that are very useful for guiding our lives, for survival in the broader sense of the word.

00:19:13.260 So this means also that we're likely to have somewhat, well, substantially similar experiences.

00:19:22.300 Yes, we might experience slightly different shades of red, but unless you're actively, frankly, hallucinating, we all look out of the window and see there's a big drop.

00:19:33.020 And we know that that's a bad thing to just launch ourselves into.

00:19:36.400 So I think that's fine.

00:19:39.040 I think that actually the novelist Anais Nin said it very well.

00:19:42.940 She said, we don't see the world as it is.

00:19:44.820 We see it as we are.

00:19:46.100 And evolution has made sure that we see things as we are in a way that's usually aligned with what we need to do to survive.

00:19:57.480 Of course, this is a challenge in some respects because we have technologies now where we're unable to sense some things which might be damaging to us, like radiation, for instance.

00:20:06.940 We just don't detect it.

00:20:09.020 That's not part of our controlled hallucination.

00:20:12.200 Evolution didn't shape us to be sensitive to these kinds of things.

00:20:16.100 And then we might also perceive other things like the rate of change of carbon in the atmosphere.

00:20:23.840 And we're very bad at perceiving things that unfold over time scales that evolution hasn't deemed relevant to our ongoing survival.

00:20:32.520 And in the world in which we live, our perceptual tuning is becoming less adequate to the challenges we face.

00:20:41.080 But it's still perfectly adequate to the here and now, to not jumping out of windows or running in front of buses.

00:20:48.680 Isn't that the problem as well, that essentially we're all on social media and social media has been designed almost to hack our very consciousness so that we judge our success and failure in life by what is happening in this virtual world?

00:21:03.580 Yeah, I think it's amplifies and we're very familiar, I think, from social media with this idea of social media echo chambers.

00:21:11.180 I mean, we seek out news that confirms what we already think, there are these drives of dynamics of polarisation.

00:21:18.780 And we enter this situation where it becomes very hard to even understand that another person can have the beliefs that they have because the way our own beliefs have been shaped have been rooted in very different sources of information.

00:21:37.800 And I think you can almost draw a parallel here with perception too.

00:21:43.140 Yes, we have these social media echo chambers, but we also have to some extent perceptual echo chambers too.

00:21:49.240 You know, we all live in different inner world, unique inner worlds, right down to the level of how we experience them.

00:21:56.420 And we'll probably seek out perceptual information to reinforce the way we encounter the world, even at these lowest levels.

00:22:05.020 How do you solve that?

00:22:05.840 I, this is an enormous challenge, but of course, recognising that we live in echo chambers is essential prerequisite to overcoming the problems that they pose, right?

00:22:17.380 If you don't know, you live in what?

00:22:18.940 If you don't know, you live in a bubble, you'll never get out of it.

00:22:21.060 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:22:27.760 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:22:37.020 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:22:43.720 Now through June 7th, 2026, at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:22:48.040 Get tickets at murbush.com.

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00:24:45.980 And therefore, the question is, if we all experience reality in inverted commas subjectively,

00:24:53.440 then is there any such thing as truth, really?

00:24:58.040 You know, people argue about the truth and this is the truth.

00:25:02.260 Is there any such thing as the truth?

00:25:03.840 Well, that's a very loaded term, right?

00:25:05.460 I mean, it can mean different things in different contexts.

00:25:09.000 If you think about truth as in objective reality, it's true to say that we're all sitting on chairs, right?

00:25:17.460 But then a physicist might come along and say, well, you know, of course, a chair is just an approximation for a bunch of atoms behaving in a particular way.

00:25:24.800 And there's no such thing as a chair.

00:25:26.440 And Wittgenstein would come along and say the whole concept of chair is a problem.

00:25:31.400 You know, there's just this sort of vague category of chairness.

00:25:35.200 But for those of us who are not that clever, I mean, we can all agree we're sitting on chairs.

00:25:39.140 You know what I mean?

00:25:39.620 Well, so that's what I mean.

00:25:40.440 I think there's, you know, there's a level of truth, which is just, you know, the right level of consensus, which has, you know, which is reinforced by experience.

00:25:49.620 So, yeah, it is true that we're all sitting on chairs.

00:25:51.960 I think that's fine.

00:25:53.060 So the fact that we all construct our experiences doesn't mean that we have to get rid of the concept of truth and that nothing is true.

00:26:01.980 No, I don't think that's right.

00:26:03.360 Yeah.

00:26:03.540 I guess what I'm getting at, I'm curious, is this will be a shocking example. 0.53

00:26:07.820 But, like, is there a difference between us consensually agreeing that we're sitting on chairs and people in Nazi Germany agreeing that the Jews are evil?

00:26:16.860 Like, is there a difference between that?

00:26:18.860 Or is that just people creating this objective consensual reality based on what's going on in society?

00:26:23.560 I think there's a massive difference.

00:26:25.600 Forget morality.

00:26:26.460 I'm just talking on a practical level.

00:26:27.840 But I think, yeah, because the fact that we're sitting on chairs is something that can be immediately verified by the fact that, you know, you sit down and you don't immediately fall through onto the floor.

00:26:40.380 Yeah.

00:26:40.660 And the consequences of our belief that we're sitting on a chair is just reinforced by what happens next.

00:26:48.020 As you get further and further away from the ability to test your perceptual beliefs against reality, then they can become more and more divorced.

00:26:59.860 And so I don't think you can get away.

00:27:02.420 The key difference there is morality.

00:27:04.100 The idea about what some people in Nazi Germany thought about Jews is a moral ethical position.

00:27:11.780 And that is not something, the truth of which is established, like sitting on a chair.

00:27:17.440 It's clearly wrong anyway.

00:27:19.740 But that kind of claim, even if it was a morally good claim, even if it was a different kind of claim, that, you know, the claim that everybody should be free to marry whoever they want or something like that.

00:27:32.400 So that's not something that can be verified in the same way that sitting on a chair can be verified.

00:27:38.080 So there is a difference.

00:27:39.580 And since we are on the subject of politics, I suppose the question that we end up with, you mentioned polarization.

00:27:45.240 We've obviously had an awful amount of it in recent years.

00:27:51.140 Is there any point having political discussions?

00:27:55.380 It seems to be our only chance, right?

00:27:57.200 I mean, one of the language is one of the most, probably the most distinctive features of the human species.

00:28:05.960 And we like to think as humans, we're special.

00:28:08.380 And we usually think we're more special than we actually are.

00:28:11.560 And the whole history of science, I think, has been a history of deflating this human exceptionalism and realizing that we're more continuous with the rest of nature than was previously thought.

00:28:24.160 But language, I still think, is distinctive for humans.

00:28:30.060 And it gives us so much potential in both directions.

00:28:33.940 It's language that allows us to build culture, build civilization.

00:28:37.500 But, of course, it's language also that can be used to bootstrap these dynamics of polarization.

00:28:46.420 I don't know.

00:28:47.400 I mean, sometimes it seems fruitless, doesn't it?

00:28:50.960 It does.

00:28:51.320 But what else are you going to do?

00:28:53.520 Yeah.

00:28:54.000 Do you sometimes think, Anil, that because, so early on in the year, I did a mushroom ceremony where I took magic mushrooms and then I took tobacco as well.

00:29:05.260 And I had very powerful hallucinations.

00:29:07.220 And people said to me, like, what was the experience of that?

00:29:11.300 And the reality is, is that language isn't enough at times.

00:29:17.260 Do you think that's also part of the challenge, that we are experiencing this consciousness and we have this marvelous tool that is language, but sometimes it isn't enough to adequately convey our emotions and the way that we perceive the world?

00:29:29.400 I think that's absolutely right.

00:29:30.780 I mean, this is why we still have a space for literature, isn't it?

00:29:33.980 I mean, there's something about good writing that can evoke an experience, a setting, more than most of us are able to do with words.

00:29:42.580 But I think there is still a fundamental limit, because this is almost a necessary trade-off with language.

00:29:48.680 Language, it has to gloss over fine distinctions in order to be useful at all.

00:29:55.800 If I had a word, and this gets back to the fact that we might experience the world in subtly different ways, without even going as far as a mushroom ceremony.

00:30:06.320 If there was a separate word for every possible experienceable shade of blue, then we would be using different words and we would never communicate.

00:30:13.900 So it's the fact that language abstracts away from the fine details of experience, that's actually what makes it useful, because we can then communicate.

00:30:24.460 But the trade-off is, as you say, language will not capture the fine grain of experiences.

00:30:33.020 And there are some experiences like psychedelics that will really challenge the boundaries of what language can achieve.

00:30:42.060 But this is perhaps why sometimes these kinds of experiences can be quite valuable, because they provide a first-person sort of kick.

00:30:52.520 They've got a first-person opportunity to realise that the world we experience is a construction of the brain, that it's not just a direct window onto the way the world is.

00:31:04.340 It can open a gap, I think, between our lived experience and how we relate to that, in the same way that meditation can do as well, but over much longer timescales with much more practice.

00:31:16.100 Do you think that's part of the problem as well, is that since we all experience a world in a different way, it makes it so much more tricky to be harmonious?

00:31:29.920 Because if we see things in a different way, then we're talking about two different realities, in a sense.

00:31:38.340 I mean, you remember that photo from a few years ago of the dress that was half the world saw as blue and black and half as yellow and white.

00:31:49.020 And that's a great allegory for your point, isn't it?

00:31:52.400 Because, I mean, the division over that was extraordinary, and it was just a photo of a dress.

00:31:56.760 But people could not understand that it was possible to see it another way, because it seemed to them that they were seeing it as it really is.

00:32:05.780 And so that does, you know, you put that in a more contentious context, rather than just the colour of a photo of a dress.

00:32:13.940 Tax policy, you know, strikes, whatever.

00:32:16.520 Yeah, you're going to get into trouble.

00:32:18.660 And I think that's part of the reason why this recognition about how perception works, how conscious experience works, it's not just sort of mere scientific interest.

00:32:30.720 It's of direct social relevance, because we need to understand.

00:32:35.300 When you kind of bed in this understanding as widely as possible, that perception is dependent on us.

00:32:43.960 We see things as we are.

00:32:45.080 And to cultivate a little bit of humility about our perceptual encounters with the world, which this is me being a bit sort of optimistic and panglossian, you know, might end up in cultivating a bit of humility also about our beliefs.

00:33:01.440 And allow us to, you know, if we can get people, for instance, imagine this, imagine you have people disagreeing violently about some political issue, and you get them to sit down and look at this photo of the dress.

00:33:13.500 And they see it different ways, but then you kind of take them through how and why they see it different ways, and the fact that it's a construction and so on.

00:33:20.640 You know, would that process of understanding the nuts and bolts of perspective taking, you know, would that give them a better platform for communicating about the beliefs they violently disagree about?

00:33:35.240 I don't know, but maybe.

00:33:37.140 Well, speaking of contentious issues, I suppose one of the most obvious questions here is, well, there's two questions, actually.

00:33:45.460 First of all, human beings throughout our history have had some kind of belief in a supreme being or a set of supreme beings or super, whatever, you know, some version of that.

00:33:58.020 Do you have any insight as to why we do this?

00:34:01.100 Is it because we are connected to a supreme being that exists?

00:34:04.200 Is it because our brain produces, you know, what can you tell us about that part, first of all?

00:34:09.480 I think this is, it's such a common feature of human culture, isn't it?

00:34:14.800 Of course, everybody, different cultures have their own different supreme beings, and this is where a lot of the trouble starts.

00:34:22.280 But I think you asked the right question.

00:34:24.360 Why are we compelled across cultures to have some belief that fits that description?

00:34:31.740 And this is a little bit out of my wheelhouse, but the intuition I have is it's really something to do with the fact that we might be two things going on.

00:34:43.120 First is perhaps another distinctive, maybe this isn't distinctive about humans, but we know we are mortal.

00:34:48.900 You know, we know we will die.

00:34:51.360 At least we know that in the abstract.

00:34:52.880 It's very hard to actually understand what that means.

00:34:55.740 And in the face of that, you know, we have that conflicts with what evolution over millions and millions of years has shaped brains to do, which is to persist, to keep the body alive.

00:35:10.740 And that basic kind of operating system of our psychology to continue, to keep on going, is just incompatible with the knowledge that at some point we don't.

00:35:24.540 And to resolve that contradiction, you know, we need something.

00:35:30.260 And one of the things that comes up is a supreme being.

00:35:34.440 I think the other interesting idea about this, and this is not my idea at all, I can't remember where I first read this,

00:35:40.440 was that the concept of a god or a supreme being came about as human society changed in ways that groups of people living together got stronger and stronger,

00:35:54.960 got bigger and bigger rather, so that in order to reinforce the hierarchies, to allow larger groups of people to keep going together without sort of dissolving into conflict.

00:36:08.220 This is the shared myth, so you all know the Ferrari, for example.

00:36:10.900 Yeah, that's probably it.

00:36:12.080 I mean, and I don't think it's very hard to find any evidence for that, but some appeal to something beyond a single individual human,

00:36:20.800 it seems in principle that can reinforce hierarchies very, very strongly.

00:36:24.180 I don't know whether it's true.

00:36:24.920 I tend to think it's this distinction, it's this tension between knowledge of our mortality and the deeply baked in drive to stay alive that's at the heart of it.

00:36:38.340 And the second question that's interesting to me is whether it's psychedelics, whether it's spiritual experiences that I've had,

00:36:44.920 talking to other people about certain things,

00:36:47.080 I got the sense very strongly that when people experience that freedom of this constant brain processing,

00:36:54.600 the immediate surroundings and whatever, quite often they all have the experience of ultimate connection with other people and the universe, whatever that is.

00:37:03.520 Do we have any thoughts on where that comes from?

00:37:07.380 I think so, yeah.

00:37:08.120 I think this is something where neuroscience might shed a bit of light on because it goes back to earlier part of our conversation about what is the self.

00:37:17.080 Now, the idea, there's the sort of immediately superficially appealing idea that the self is this immutable essence of you or me that's just there and might survive after death or whatever,

00:37:29.540 compared to this other view of the self that it's a perception, that it's a construction of the brain.

00:37:36.360 And it might change over time as well.

00:37:39.720 The way we experience being a self is not fixed.

00:37:43.020 It does evolve, even though we don't necessarily perceive it evolving.

00:37:46.900 And if it's a construction of the brain, it can also be tuned down or even go away.

00:37:53.540 And there's this concept from meditation, from some psychedelics research as well, from some spiritual traditions about ego dissolution.

00:38:02.320 And I think, again, this is not necessarily a metaphorical thing.

00:38:05.980 It can be quite grounded in a way of conscious experience happening in which the experience of self is either absent or at least attenuated to a great degree.

00:38:22.680 One of the things the brain does, I think, in normal everyday life, at least for people in our culture, is it's always establishing distinctions between self and other, whether it's other people or the rest of the world.

00:38:37.760 Now, these distinctions are not complete and they're very fluid.

00:38:42.260 Part of what it means to be me is how I experience myself refracted through the minds of others.

00:38:49.780 Part of me is really residing in the minds of my friends and colleagues and so on.

00:38:54.440 But at the same time, I see this hand in front of me.

00:38:59.160 I know that's my hand.

00:39:00.780 Those hands are not.

00:39:02.000 This chair is not part of my body.

00:39:04.000 There are some aspects of the construction of self which impose a relatively clear distinction.

00:39:10.100 But those distinctions can be done away with.

00:39:13.460 It doesn't mean they go away in the real world.

00:39:15.340 Like my body is still separate from the chair.

00:39:17.200 But the brain might, in some states, it might not draw these distinctions in perception.

00:39:25.040 And that could be what's going on that underlies this experience of connectedness.

00:39:29.380 And in fact, if you look inside the brains of people on high doses of psychedelics, you see things compatible with that idea.

00:39:36.940 You see sort of more mixing of the brain circuits.

00:39:39.960 Whereas typically there's parts of the brain that are more associated with self and when they're active, other parts of the brain more associated with experience of the world.

00:39:50.680 They tend to be largely separable.

00:39:53.040 But under psychedelics, everything gets a bit mushed together.

00:39:56.780 So it's when the self is reduced in self-prominence, that's when our ability to connect with other things becomes stronger, essentially.

00:40:08.640 Well, I think that's when we have the, I think there's a difference here between ability and experience.

00:40:15.780 Yes.

00:40:16.020 So we enter a state where we suddenly feel more connected with other people, with the universe in general, with the stars, with the trees, with the grass and so on.

00:40:26.660 But if experience is partly projection, I would imagine then in that state you're much more likely to behave with other people in a way that makes it easier to connect.

00:40:35.260 I mean, I know this experientially, like the less self, the more I can, we can, we can connect.

00:40:43.160 Maybe.

00:40:43.700 I think it might, it might be a sort of a balancing act, right?

00:40:46.600 I think if you, if you're in a total state of ego dissolution, then, then the concept of interaction becomes a bit pointless because there's no you anymore at all.

00:40:55.680 So it's about finding the balance and I think the, the value of, of transient experiences of, of things like ego dissolution is that when you come back out of the other side, you relate to your everyday self and therefore others in a bit of a different way.

00:41:11.640 But it's still, it's still, yeah, it's still back.

00:41:13.980 So we, we talk about hallucinations and in a sense, this is a hallucination.

00:41:21.100 There's, well, we all know, I'm the music producer, Pharrell, who says that he sees music, certain notes of certain colours.

00:41:30.280 And what does that mean then in terms of hallucinations, in terms of creativity?

00:41:36.120 Do, are creative people, as the, the, the saying goes like, they're more volatile, they're more passionate.

00:41:43.780 Is that such a thing?

00:41:45.320 Do they tend to feel things more deeply?

00:41:47.440 Do they tend to see a different type of hallucination?

00:41:51.260 I think it's very hard to pin down what the secret source of creativity is.

00:41:56.680 You know, people can be creative in all sorts of different ways.

00:41:58.860 But there are, in individual cases, I think you can see that specific and interestingly different ways of experiencing the world can be a spark that fuels one person's creativity.

00:42:14.160 I mean, the phenomenon you're describing there is called synesthesia, which is super interesting.

00:42:18.580 It's like a, broadly speaking, it's a mixing of the senses.

00:42:22.620 And for most of us, vision and hearing, you know, they're separate, right?

00:42:26.820 If I hear a sound, it might conjure up a particular image in my mind, but I don't literally see things.

00:42:32.820 But in synesthesia, the connection is much more, is much closer.

00:42:37.460 And people, indeed, different notes can evoke experiences of particular colours.

00:42:43.180 That's one form of synesthesia.

00:42:44.680 Tastes can have shapes.

00:42:46.040 There are many forms of mixing the senses.

00:42:48.620 I mean, even for us, even for non-synesthetes, the senses mix in some ways.

00:42:54.740 Like, this is what we call metaphor.

00:42:56.200 You know, some notes are high, others are low.

00:42:58.520 And taste is sharp or dull.

00:43:01.600 I mean, we don't, you know, we encounter our world as a mixture of senses anyway.

00:43:07.740 But for synesthesia, it's like more direct.

00:43:11.880 And there's good examples of musicians, painters, Kandinsky was a synesthete.

00:43:17.860 The novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote Lolita, was a synesthete.

00:43:22.020 And this is understandable, right?

00:43:23.400 You have a different way of encountering the world that can provide associations that other people don't have.

00:43:29.740 And that being the case, at what point does these types of conditions go into something like mental illness, with schizophrenia, where people are seeing things or perceiving the world in ways which are just completely have no bearing on reality?

00:43:48.760 So this gets back to this idea of perceptual diversity and this continuum or spectrum that we might think of.

00:43:56.680 And most of us live in the middle bit, you know, just as most of us are between, I don't know, like nearly five feet and six feet or whatever of height.

00:44:06.560 And most of us will see the world in different ways, but in ways which is still well adapted to what's really out there and sufficiently similar that we can communicate.

00:44:17.100 But as you go further off that, then you get into the territory where you might start to ascribe people, either with something like a neurodivergent condition or with something like a mental illness.

00:44:29.060 But the key point here is that the fact that you experience the world differently does not in itself mean that there's a deficit or that there's a particular condition or that there's a mental illness going on.

00:44:43.500 You know, that's something that happens when your way of seeing something poses challenges for the environment you live in.

00:44:52.500 Like even something like schizophrenia, which is very, very distressing for people that experience it.

00:44:59.100 You know, you hear voices in your head that are instructing you to do things.

00:45:02.120 Often it's a lot of auditory hallucinations.

00:45:04.360 You feel dissociated from yourself.

00:45:07.000 You know, in some cultures, these experiences were sort of celebrated as somebody channeling some spiritual energy rather than being thought of as mentally ill.

00:45:20.200 And hopefully the recognition that we all construct our experiences, we all differ in some ways, gives us greater empathy for people who are mentally ill in one way or another.

00:45:34.880 And that's at least, you know, the hope.

00:45:37.920 And also, just sorry, one other point on this is that there's plenty of people who hallucinate, who are out of that middle range, who aren't mentally ill.

00:45:51.140 And there's a hearing voices, for instance, is actually quite common for people.

00:45:56.100 I can't, I'm not sure what the statistics are.

00:45:58.360 I have a colleague, Charles Ferniehoff in Durham, who's led this project called the Hearing Voices Project.

00:46:03.760 To understand, like, how widespread it is.

00:46:09.540 Because for most people, if they hear a voice in their head, there's a great taboo against talking about it because you don't want to be labeled as suffering psychosis or as mad or mentally ill.

00:46:21.700 It's only a problem when these voices become a problem in virtue of what they're saying.

00:46:26.820 For some people, they're just kind of benign.

00:46:29.060 If they're saying go to the gym, like, that's fine.

00:46:31.260 Yeah, exactly.

00:46:32.740 And visual hallucination is the same.

00:46:34.640 Some people see things, but it's not always distressing or problematic.

00:46:39.200 So the range of altered experiences, I think, is much, much broader, much richer than we typically think.

00:46:44.320 So I find that very interesting because I have ADHD and I remember when I got diagnosed with it, I entered, not a period of mourning, it's a strong way to put it, but almost a week of just sadness, really, when I received the diagnosis.

00:46:59.380 And then it's a process of understanding with myself in that the way I see the world, in the way that I move through the world, is very different to the way other people do.

00:47:12.700 And as a result, it's not just an acceptance of myself, but it's also, how can I put this, a journey to try and understand other people so that we can meet halfway.

00:47:23.900 Do you see what I mean?

00:47:25.100 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:47:26.120 And I think that's a really important way of looking at it.

00:47:29.620 Because if you just go down the path of, well, this is me, the world needs to change around me, the world is never going to do that.

00:47:35.440 Right.

00:47:35.760 And you have to accept that.

00:47:36.900 But if you find a way for you to be able to exist more cohesively with the world, I think that's how you gain a greater sense of acceptance.

00:47:48.180 Do you see what I mean?

00:47:48.960 Yeah.

00:47:49.200 And I think the bar should be higher than acceptance as well.

00:47:52.380 And here I come to this metaphor of biodiversity.

00:47:55.780 Like in ecosystems, we're just aware that having lots of different kinds of plants and animals is a good thing for a flourishing ecosystem.

00:48:04.360 You don't want a monoculture.

00:48:06.220 And I think exactly the same is true for human cultures.

00:48:10.980 And whether this is diversity on the outside, again, skin color and whatever, but especially diversity on the inside.

00:48:17.320 It's not that we're...

00:48:17.760 Yeah, I think that's much more important, actually, personally.

00:48:20.300 Yeah.

00:48:20.540 And you want to get to a point where differences in the way we encounter the world are not merely accommodated, but in rich society.

00:48:27.380 Well, if you think about the fact, I mean, Francis talks about ADHD, most comedians have come out as having ADHD in the last year just for some reason.

00:48:35.160 But it kind of makes sense.

00:48:36.540 Like, Francis is brilliant when we do our live streams at, like, making random jumps from one thing to another.

00:48:42.820 I imagine ADHD is part of that.

00:48:44.780 And there will be other conditions that fuel other forms of creativity and whatever.

00:48:49.780 They're not maybe even a condition.

00:48:50.940 There's just a way of a different way of being in the world, which has tradeoffs, right, as all ways of being do.

00:48:57.780 So I'm curious to come back to the political side of the conversation, because I'm just wondering, you know, how...

00:49:09.120 Because on the one hand, you could say, well, look, people have their own version of reality, and that's just what it is, and that's fine.

00:49:15.500 But yet we do go through, like, periods, don't we?

00:49:18.960 You know, you have Thatcher, and there's a particular way of seeing the world.

00:49:21.820 And then you have, you know, Blair, and there's a particular way of seeing the world.

00:49:25.140 And then you have the current government, and there are philosophical and political ways of looking at the world that change over time.

00:49:32.880 And at the same time, you know, if you read more about history, actually, the political battle between the sort of more lefty, more compassion, more empathy,

00:49:41.720 but perhaps slightly less of the rationality and pragmatism versus the overly rational, overly pragmatic, lacking in empathy.

00:49:50.740 That's been going on since forever, right?

00:49:54.560 So how do we navigate the political world?

00:49:58.900 I mean, like, you know, I'm doing question time tomorrow.

00:50:02.700 Is there any point in me saying anything?

00:50:05.260 Well, you asked earlier about what's the value of political conversation.

00:50:08.900 I think making these points is exactly what's needed.

00:50:13.240 I mean, there are some currents, as you say, that have just almost always been there,

00:50:17.640 some tensions between individualism and collectivism in politics very, very broadly.

00:50:22.820 And the pendulum swings, and the pendulum swings for all sorts of reasons, right?

00:50:28.800 Partly because people tend to react against the status quo.

00:50:31.780 People have short memories.

00:50:35.120 People always are attracted to change for change's sake, often.

00:50:40.540 So this sets up, you know, a dynamic where it's very hard to retain stability.

00:50:45.700 And it looks like, you know, we're leaving one period and maybe entering another period.

00:50:49.220 So now, after whatever, 12 years of Western politics seems to have this kind of cycle.

00:50:57.160 And I think what's really helpful is trying to get under – you probably can't stop that from happening.

00:51:05.060 But, you know, nonetheless, there might be some shared core beliefs that that can be built on.

00:51:09.940 And what I really personally find troubling about politics is this kind of tit-for-tat responsive thing,

00:51:16.280 rather than the inability to build on previous positions, previous political eras,

00:51:26.940 in a way that's cumulative, even if it might not seem like it.

00:51:30.120 Because whether you're on the left or the right in England, for instance, or the UK,

00:51:35.360 you probably still have some core beliefs about access to healthcare and so on.

00:51:39.240 People should have some.

00:51:41.280 And why can't we still find those areas of consensus and build on them

00:51:47.100 without too much just doing something and then undoing it and doing something else

00:51:51.260 and then undoing it and going back and forth?

00:51:53.340 Well, it seems like that's happening because we're all too attached to the idea

00:51:56.880 that our particular interpretation of reality is the one true thing.

00:52:01.380 And anyone who disagrees with it is a heretic and must be, you know, cancelled, destroyed, evil, whatever, you know. 0.93

00:52:07.360 That seems to me to be quite a big part of it, probably driven by social media to a large extent.

00:52:12.720 Although I imagine, you know, political debate has always been fraught and sometimes violent, actually.

00:52:18.520 Right. I mean, it's getting a lot more peaceful than it has done over history.

00:52:21.680 And I think there's people like Steven Pinker who do quite a good job of pointing out,

00:52:26.120 in fact, there are a lot of things that are getting better, even though it really doesn't seem like it.

00:52:30.880 And again, partly because of how the media's attention works.

00:52:36.100 And things that change slowly don't tend to get much focus.

00:52:40.680 Things that change quickly and dramatically do tend to get focus.

00:52:45.100 And I think in the same way, the differences between positions tend to attract attention

00:52:49.860 rather than the commonalities between positions.

00:52:53.400 And one of the things that I've been quite surprised at as I've gotten older is actually the consensus

00:52:58.860 between different political parties on things.

00:53:01.380 Because you just don't hear about it in the media and you tend to assume that everything is treated differently.

00:53:06.980 But it's not always the case.

00:53:08.160 That is a really interesting point.

00:53:09.740 And of course, you're right that people want change often for the sake of it.

00:53:13.960 I remember, I can't remember who it was,

00:53:17.100 but there was a period when there was quite a lot of agreement and concordance

00:53:22.360 between the positions of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party.

00:53:24.880 And what happened?

00:53:25.780 You get people from the left like George Galloway and people from the right like Nigel Farage

00:53:29.780 coming along and saying, well, it's Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

00:53:32.740 There is no difference between the two cheeks of the same backside.

00:53:36.520 And people are clamouring then for a new way of doing things when there is that consensus.

00:53:41.180 So I guess this is kind of the human condition, isn't it?

00:53:43.660 We go around in these circles.

00:53:44.980 Yeah, and I think you see this, especially now with the rise of identity politics.

00:53:50.140 You know, people needing to have almost as an extension of their experience of self.

00:53:56.040 You know, you have the body, you have the perspective, sense of will,

00:53:59.940 you have your social network, and then, you know, you need a political self too.

00:54:04.740 And, you know, this is, again, something that can be valuable

00:54:08.760 because it can serve to highlight underrepresented groups.

00:54:13.460 This is a valuable thing.

00:54:14.740 But taken, again, taken too far, it becomes just a bit pointless really

00:54:20.920 because, again, it emphasises the differences rather than the commonalities.

00:54:28.000 You're disconnecting yourself from other people.

00:54:29.720 Yeah.

00:54:30.080 Yeah.

00:54:30.200 So what role does hormones or do hormones play in this,

00:54:35.160 in the need to become part of the tribe, in the need to, you know, have a group

00:54:41.580 and also have an enemy, which is literally hardwired into us?

00:54:46.480 It's a survival mechanism.

00:54:47.620 It's a really good question.

00:54:50.640 I mean, I don't know enough about what happens in the brain that shapes social affiliations.

00:54:58.220 I mean, clearly there's something, whether it's a football team,

00:55:01.000 whether it's a group of friends, whether it's a political party,

00:55:03.800 our minds do work like this.

00:55:05.240 And it's not only human minds.

00:55:06.580 I mean, it's many other species, social creatures in general,

00:55:09.640 are very, very bound to this dynamic of social affiliation.

00:55:17.740 Hormones, emotional responses are clearly very, very important in this.

00:55:21.620 And they're important in general.

00:55:22.760 I think this just generally highlights something that's still incompletely understood

00:55:30.700 and lacking when we think, when people talk about the brain as some kind of computer often

00:55:35.860 and there's still this hangover from, I think, philosophers like Descartes in the Enlightenment

00:55:42.920 who emphasise rationality as this sort of ideal of human mind

00:55:49.680 and what set us apart from other animals.

00:55:52.720 But our rationality is completely dependent on our emotional responses too.

00:55:59.140 There's plenty of examples of that, people who lack emotional responses

00:56:03.060 and they don't make good decisions.

00:56:06.040 We need emotional responses to be practically rational.

00:56:11.620 People like Antonio Damasio in my field have been writing about this for decades

00:56:15.200 and it's abundantly true.

00:56:18.300 And not taking into account the emotional responses of people

00:56:25.380 is a big mistake in whatever sphere you're in.

00:56:29.080 Even if you're trying to understand the brain as a neuroscientist,

00:56:31.860 we have to think about the way, I think, the way we experience anything

00:56:36.060 is fundamentally grounded in our body's response to the situation.

00:56:40.960 Our nature as living creatures is fundamentally important

00:56:43.600 to our experiences of the world and the self.

00:56:47.780 And then back out into the realm of society and politics,

00:56:52.640 there's obviously a play on people's emotions

00:56:56.360 to drive these dynamics of polarisation.

00:56:59.720 But this is often disguised, right?

00:57:01.560 It's often presented in the guise of a rational argument.

00:57:05.060 But really what's going on is a play on emotions

00:57:08.240 and emotions of tribalism often.

00:57:11.560 Because you talk about, you know, it's important to have emotion,

00:57:14.520 but if you are too emotional, you can't be rational either.

00:57:17.460 If you are someone who feels emotions very intensely,

00:57:20.560 then you get blinded by your emotion.

00:57:24.500 We'll see. I don't know.

00:57:26.420 I mean, this is, again, something we want to look at a bit

00:57:28.820 with this perception census to try and understand

00:57:31.180 how all these different parts of the puzzle fit together.

00:57:34.600 Clearly, at the extremes, I think you're right.

00:57:36.660 You know, if you're just washed over by massive waves of emotion

00:57:40.980 breaking on you all the time, you're not going to be able to do very much.

00:57:44.220 So like most things, it's a balance.

00:57:46.920 But downplaying or failing to recognise the way in which emotion

00:57:51.260 structures our thought is a big mistake.

00:57:56.060 And we shouldn't aspire to get rid of this emotional response.

00:58:00.640 I think that's another mistake.

00:58:02.140 People often think that I would make better decisions

00:58:05.440 or I'd be more rational or be more effective

00:58:07.460 if I could suppress my emotional reactions to a situation

00:58:11.800 and really think it through.

00:58:13.080 And that's just, I don't think the evidence bears that out at all.

00:58:18.720 And in fact, it's not what people in practice end up doing.

00:58:22.720 Most people always go with their gut reaction.

00:58:26.500 And what's a gut reaction?

00:58:27.460 Well, that's a recognition of the emotional contribution.

00:58:31.280 Is there not a difference between like what you're talking about,

00:58:34.100 which is intuition and like, oh, I'm afraid and therefore I must do this

00:58:38.960 or I'm angry and I must do this

00:58:41.120 or I'm, I don't know, horny and I must, do you know what I mean?

00:58:44.260 Like, is there not a difference between intuition?

00:58:47.160 Uh, and my wife is very into this, uh, as a lot of women are, uh, and, uh, 0.88

00:58:54.560 like an emotional reaction.

00:58:57.640 Is there not a difference between those two?

00:58:59.900 Okay.

00:59:00.200 Maybe.

00:59:00.580 But also I think the reliance on intuition is definitely not gender specific.

00:59:04.320 Right.

00:59:04.700 I mean, I think my wife would disagree, but that is her right.

00:59:08.780 Um, yeah, there's, there's, there's a difference in, in type, but I'm not sure there's a really

00:59:14.240 fundamental difference.

00:59:16.180 Um, what does that mean?

00:59:17.800 An emotion, well, an intuition to me is still an emotion.

00:59:20.200 It's just an emotion that is, it has a less, maybe a less immediate target and it may, may

00:59:28.260 unfold over a longer time scale, but it's still, it's still like a perception about something,

00:59:35.080 you know, this is good.

00:59:36.000 This is bad that is shaped in a large part by the brain's response to the body.

00:59:45.000 Um, and an emotion of fear and anger is more transient.

00:59:49.760 One would hope anyway, and more directly, um, associated with a specific thing.

00:59:55.200 I'm afraid of X.

00:59:56.340 I, you know, I'm, and, uh, and so it's contours, maybe more easily definable, but essentially

01:00:04.680 my intuition about this is how I describe it.

01:00:08.580 Because again, I honestly, I don't think there's a, there's a fact of the matter, but the way

01:00:13.240 it appears to me is that intuition and, and fear and, um, uh, are just different.

01:00:21.200 That there's part of the same spectrum.

01:00:22.940 And that spectrum is spectrum of how the brain interprets a situation based on perceiving

01:00:29.800 its body's response to that.

01:00:31.660 It's interesting you say that because experientially, I would very strongly disagree with that.

01:00:36.360 Like for me, I've got a very powerful intuition as well that I've used for, to achieve a lot

01:00:42.340 of the things that I've been able to achieve in life.

01:00:44.500 And to me, it's very, it's literally the opposite of emotion.

01:00:47.760 If I'm emotional about something, I'm almost certain to do the wrong thing.

01:00:51.220 Whereas intuitively, if I, if I have a, a calmer space to experience that sense, that's when

01:00:58.320 I get the good stuff, the good advice and my wife likewise, and I know other people also

01:01:03.560 who I've talked about this, that also have like, to me, intuition is a deep knowing and

01:01:09.000 emotion is a, is a reactive force that is often destructive.

01:01:13.480 Right.

01:01:13.840 I mean, we might just be using the words in slightly different ways back to the problem

01:01:17.100 with language, that, that, you know, a deep knowing, um, that, that, that makes sense

01:01:23.640 to me in some ways.

01:01:24.900 But what I would still like to suggest is that deep knowing is not sort of just a, an

01:01:31.320 aspect of disembodied rationality.

01:01:33.880 No, no, no, no, it's nothing to do with rationality.

01:01:35.900 That's grounded in the body too.

01:01:37.200 That's, that's like, that's grounded in the body response.

01:01:38.760 It's definitely not rationality because knowing is not rational.

01:01:41.800 Knowing is knowledge.

01:01:43.200 There's no rationality to it.

01:01:44.620 It's just like, you must do this or, or you, this, this would be the right thing to do.

01:01:49.380 Yeah.

01:01:49.620 I mean, I think there's also something interesting about intuition is that, and this isn't

01:01:53.760 me thinking about it off the top of my head now, but intuition has a kind of opacity

01:01:58.160 to it, right?

01:01:58.920 Like if you can explain why you've come to a particular decision, then it's no longer

01:02:04.020 intuition, um, intuition depends on an inability to unpack it into sort of fine aggrained elements.

01:02:12.660 Um, and that may not apply so much to, you know, if I'm angry and I do something, then

01:02:16.780 it's a pretty transparent causal link, right?

01:02:18.820 You know, I was angry.

01:02:20.260 So I did it.

01:02:20.820 Although even in these cases, you know, we may, we may misattribute things.

01:02:25.400 We may do things because we think we were angry, but in fact, there's other reasons.

01:02:30.120 There's all sorts of old ethically dubious psychology experiments from the sixties and

01:02:34.540 seventies where people were manipulating people's emotional responses in particular ways.

01:02:39.360 Tell us about that.

01:02:40.180 There's one, I get a classic one.

01:02:42.480 I mean, I'm not sure it totally illustrates the point.

01:02:44.460 The classic one is, um, an experiment by, um, Dutton and Aaron, two, two psychologists

01:02:51.580 just in California in, or in Canada, Western Canada, actually in the 1970s.

01:02:57.040 And they were trying to make the point that, um, the emotion we experience is going to be,

01:03:07.180 it's the, it's, it's the brain's interpretation of what's happening in the body.

01:03:11.600 Um, and so what they did was they got a bunch of students to walk over a bridge and this was

01:03:17.500 kind of a scary bridge.

01:03:19.140 It was like a, this sort of little rope bridge, like Indiana Jones, high above, uh, um, a raging

01:03:24.800 torrent.

01:03:25.600 And so it would get the adrenaline going, you know, the body would be put in, in a particular,

01:03:29.620 um, state.

01:03:31.500 And at the end of the bridge, there would be, there was all male students.

01:03:34.960 And at the end of the bridge, there was an attractive female researcher who got them to 0.99

01:03:39.140 fill out a questionnaire and at the end of the questionnaire, and if questionnaire was,

01:03:43.240 I can't remember what it was, that was sort of irrelevant, but at the end of it, there

01:03:45.720 was a, you know, she would say, if you have any further questions about the study, here's

01:03:49.940 my number, give me a call.

01:03:52.080 And, um, and so there are a bunch of students that went over that bridge.

01:03:56.820 There was another bunch of students that went over a, like a much less scary bridge, um,

01:04:01.360 a couple of feet above the river, nice stable, same thing.

01:04:05.060 And so what happened was the students that went over the scary bridge, of course, a lot of

01:04:08.720 them called, uh, called the number, um, and asked the girl out for a date. 0.99

01:04:15.220 And the interpretation of this experiment was that the, the guys on the rickety bridge

01:04:21.960 were misinterpreting their physiological arousal caused by the scariness of the bridge as a, an

01:04:28.840 attraction with the, with the girl.

01:04:30.860 And that, so they were, they were, yeah, they're, they'd been encouraged to misinterpret the

01:04:38.440 state that their body was in as being something else.

01:04:43.060 So that for me is kind of interesting because it reveals that it's the emotion that we have

01:04:47.920 is not just a reflection of the state the body is in, but it's, it's, it's deeply shaped by

01:04:54.160 the context, the overall context that we understand the body state to be in as well.

01:04:59.260 And that can, you know, that, that's a misinterpretation, right?

01:05:03.280 The reason that the person was in that state of physiological arousal was because of the

01:05:08.920 bridge, not because of the girl.

01:05:11.060 Which brings, uh, to sort of start heading towards the end of the interview, but you mentioned

01:05:16.020 the arousal and to take a slightly deeper than that, what is love?

01:05:21.640 Yeah.

01:05:23.560 Um, I have, I have no idea.

01:05:26.180 I have no idea.

01:05:26.860 Sorry to hear that.

01:05:29.500 I have some idea, but I have, I have like, in terms of, in terms of what's happened, I

01:05:33.600 mean, is it, is it a particularly human thing?

01:05:38.540 That's one, one question.

01:05:40.240 I'm not sure, but it's, it's, um, yeah, I mean, there's something, there's something

01:05:46.480 very perplexing about it because there's something almost counterintuitive about the depth, the

01:05:55.540 psychological depth that that emotion can have, you know, the selflessness that it can bring

01:06:00.340 about, whether it's love of another person, a partner, you know, or a love of a country.

01:06:05.140 You know, it can lead to, to behavior, which on the face of it is just a bit perplexing.

01:06:10.260 On the other hand, you know, it is, it's what makes life worth living.

01:06:13.800 Um, and it's the most rewarding experience that is possible to have quite why our human

01:06:22.400 psychological architecture has such a special place for it, I think is, is a bit mysterious.

01:06:27.320 Clearly it's got something to do with the fact that we, we generally pair bond and we need

01:06:31.980 to bring up kids and so on.

01:06:34.180 And you need some psychological anchor to stop new parents drifting apart and kids fending

01:06:40.800 for themselves and so on.

01:06:42.480 Um, so there's, I think there is, there is probably quite good evolutionary reason why

01:06:49.420 we have this experience, but quite what it is and quite why it's so different from other

01:06:53.840 experiences.

01:06:54.660 That's, that's extraordinary.

01:06:56.320 I don't have a good answer, but I'm glad it exists.

01:07:00.300 Anil, it's been a wonderful interview.

01:07:02.540 Thank you so much for coming on.

01:07:03.800 Before we do our questions for locals, which only they get to see, we always end on the same

01:07:08.580 question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really

01:07:13.640 should be.

01:07:14.820 We've already talked about the one, one of these things, which in this interview, which

01:07:19.200 is the fact that we see the world differently.

01:07:21.580 And I think most people assume that's not the case.

01:07:24.540 The implications of that are very important.

01:07:26.900 The thing we haven't talked about much today, um, that maybe fits into the, the various arc

01:07:33.460 of the topics we've covered is, is death, um, we all die, um, until now this has been one

01:07:42.020 of the great equalizing forces in society.

01:07:44.020 One of the things I worry about enormously is that that may change and that, um, with the

01:07:51.100 amount of investment going into life extension companies and things like that, it may soon

01:07:56.940 be the case that people at one end of the spectrum, not only have a lot more money during their

01:08:03.380 lifetimes, but have a lot more lifetime as well.

01:08:05.760 I think that would be incredibly disruptive for society.

01:08:09.640 But it's already true, by the way, to a large extent.

01:08:11.660 I mean, if you're wealthy, you probably live about 10, 15 years longer.

01:08:14.540 Yeah.

01:08:14.640 Yeah.

01:08:14.820 But I mean, to me, that's still, that's, that's a minor difference.

01:08:17.480 You think it's going to be 50 years?

01:08:18.540 50, a hundred, something like that.

01:08:20.100 A hundred.

01:08:20.540 The potential, we don't know, right?

01:08:21.860 But there's, there's, there's, that could happen.

01:08:25.040 Right.

01:08:25.220 If you want to invest in trigonometry, I want to live, well, I don't want to live forever,

01:08:29.020 but an extra hundred years, I'd settle for.

01:08:30.860 But, but, but, but, so that's something I think we need to take seriously the possibility

01:08:36.020 of something like that happening.

01:08:37.740 And what is the, what are the disruptive consequences that you, you fear?

01:08:41.860 Well, then you just get this entrenched, the set of interests that, that is common among

01:08:47.720 all people becomes smaller, right?

01:08:49.860 You know, society depends on some common process that applies to all of us.

01:08:55.700 And if you have some people who are living a hell of a lot longer, their interests diverge

01:09:01.820 a lot more from people who don't have access to that.

01:09:04.680 You go back to a real aristocracy and the peasants. 0.96

01:09:07.700 Yeah.

01:09:08.020 It's a pretty dystopian situation.

01:09:09.700 Just accompanying that though, I think in, even in the current world in which we live, where

01:09:15.180 we do all die, there's so little focus on that as, as part of life.

01:09:21.180 And I think we, we neglect the end of life in a way that's, that's really unfortunate for

01:09:28.000 the society, but for each of us as individuals as well.

01:09:32.020 Well, we started talking a little bit about anesthesia, um, in a definition of consciousness,

01:09:40.160 anesthesia being its absence.

01:09:41.660 So anyone who's had anesthesia kind of has a little premonition of what it's like to be

01:09:47.980 dead.

01:09:48.420 You don't exist.

01:09:49.300 And I, I read a wonderful book, a novel by Julian Barnes.

01:09:53.260 The title is nothing to be frightened of.

01:09:56.180 And I think he means that in two ways.

01:09:58.120 You know, we're all frightened of oblivion, but then oblivion really is nothing.

01:10:01.440 There's nothing going on.

01:10:02.520 And we were not, we're not worried about all the time.

01:10:06.000 We didn't exist before we were born, but we are worried about the time afterwards and,

01:10:12.100 um, coming to terms with, with mortality is something that I think is necessary.

01:10:20.820 And I think it's something that is within grasp because a deeper understanding of, of the self

01:10:25.800 that it keeps changing, that there isn't an unchanging, immutable essence of you to cling

01:10:31.960 onto can give us a greater accommodation with the prospect of, of not existing.

01:10:39.420 And when we reach that, that accommodation, I think that enhances the use we make of the

01:10:46.600 days we do have.

01:10:49.420 Anil, it's been a wonderful interview.

01:10:51.900 If people want to find you online, if they want to buy your book, where's the best place

01:10:56.400 to do that?

01:10:57.720 Easiest place to find me is my website, which is www.anilseth.com.

01:11:03.140 And the book being you, new science of consciousness, pretty much everywhere.

01:11:07.320 I would hope.

01:11:07.580 It is everywhere, even in airports and everywhere.

01:11:09.420 You've done really well, man.

01:11:10.420 Thank you.

01:11:11.460 And, and if anyone is keen to help us with this research into perceptual diversity, um,

01:11:17.880 please take part in the perception census and you can find that again on my website,

01:11:22.980 um, or on dreammachine.perceptioncensus.world.

01:11:27.560 But that's a bit complicated.

01:11:29.120 Just look at my website.

01:11:30.280 Anil, thanks for coming on.

01:11:31.400 Thank you for watching and listening.

01:11:32.760 We'll see you with another brilliant interview like this one or also, all of them go out at

01:11:36.980 7pm UK time.

01:11:37.940 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:11:42.500 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:11:44.160 See you on Locals for the bonus questions.

01:11:45.920 Take care.

01:11:47.880 Do we have free will?

01:11:49.660 This is a very good question.

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01:12:02.240 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs

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01:12:15.360 The Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise, April 28th through June 7th, 2026.

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TRIGGERnometry - February 27, 2023

Neuroscientist：＂We Live in a Controlled Hallucination＂

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

TRIGGERnometry - February 27, 2023

Neuroscientist： ＂We Live in a Controlled Hallucination＂

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Neuroscientist：＂We Live in a Controlled Hallucination＂