00:00:30.360It's very easy to assume that we all experience the world the same way.
00:00:34.940You're wearing a kind of mauve purple shirt and a blue shirt, and it seems like that's out there in the world.
00:00:40.320Those colours are out there in the world. They're not being made up in my head.
00:00:43.440But that's not true. We don't see the world as it is. We see it as we are.
00:00:48.020So there's some classic studies about the effect of language that native Russian speakers distinguish more shades of blue.
00:00:56.580These categories are imposed in a slightly different way.
00:00:59.260If we see things in a different way, then we're talking about two different realities.
00:01:05.380In a sense, I've been fond of saying that our experience is like a controlled hallucination.
00:01:12.940We have these social media echo chambers, but we also have to some extent perceptual echo chambers too.
00:01:19.180We 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.
00:01:31.520And what's out there, who knows? Ask a physicist.
00:01:34.180The way we experience it is always coming from the inside out.
00:01:53.460And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:59.000Our 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.
00:02:11.340So 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?
00:02:18.040What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:02:21.580I've always been interested in one of these, I think, fundamental mysteries, which is this mystery of consciousness.
00:02:27.500I think it's a mystery that even before you put a name to it, appears when we're all kids.
00:02:32.820Like, who am I? Why am I me and not somebody else?
00:02:35.600Where was I before I was born? What happens to me after I die?
00:02:39.240And 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?
00:02:54.180You know, an experience of the world, the redness of red, the pang of an emotional experience, the sense of free will.
00:03:01.680And it's not that I set out with this plan to be an academic researching this stuff.
00:03:07.360I 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.
00:03:19.880And 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.
00:03:32.180And so I was lucky to get a position back at the University of Sussex.
00:03:36.620I 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,
00:03:45.640but 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,
00:03:59.260for mental health and neurology, for technology, how we develop and interact with AI and also for society as a whole.
00:04:06.500Understanding how we perceive the world and how we perceive ourselves, I think, has a lot of implications for society in general.
00:04:16.380Yeah. Well, it sounds like you've taken like a childhood passion and just kept going until you became quite successful in that field.
00:04:23.400And that's why it's interesting to have you on. So what is consciousness?
00:04:28.660People will disagree. For me, it's very simple. We all know what consciousness is.
00:04:32.640It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go under general anesthesia, which have you done that?
00:04:39.400Have you been under general anesthesia? So, you know, it's like it's completely different from sleep, isn't it?
00:04:43.680I mean, you you have no idea how much time has passed. Certainly the times I've had general.
00:04:49.600You you go under, you come back and you're not just sort of dozing. You are just not there.
00:04:56.060It could be 10 years later. It could be 10 years later. And it's that is that oblivion.
00:04:59.660That's it's that is unconsciousness. And the flip side of that is consciousness.
00:05:03.940So when that's not happening, you are conscious. The philosopher Tom Thomas Nagel puts it, I think, very nicely.
00:05:10.900He says for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism.
00:05:16.200Like it feels like something to be you or me, probably many animals.
00:05:22.240It feels like something to be that animal. But for for you under general anesthesia or for a table or a chair.
00:05:28.460There's nothing going on. There's no subjective experience going on at all. So that's consciousness.
00:05:34.760So 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.
00:05:44.320Yeah. And also then experience whatever that is, physical, you know, emotional.
00:05:49.800Well, that's all consciousness. Right. Right. So I think I think you can. Yeah, that's a starting point.
00:05:55.380Just just. Yeah. So that definition is useful, partly because of what it excludes.
00:06:01.560So it's saying consciousness is not the same thing as as intelligence.
00:06:05.380It's not the same thing as having language or behaving in a particular way.
00:06:09.840It's just any kind of experience. But what does that mean? How do you work with that?
00:06:15.780So the way I approach it is to think of three different aspects of consciousness that cover this broad idea.
00:06:24.900One 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.
00:06:35.940Then 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.
00:06:49.060And how does that occur? Because the brain can take in information and respond to it without consciousness being involved.
00:06:58.620And we can perceive things unconsciously. Not everything that that reaches our senses affects what we're aware of.
00:07:06.320So what in the brain generates the experience of a world?
00:07:11.120And then finally, what in the brain underpins the experience of the self?
00:07:17.740Because it's tempting to think of the self as like you just take it for granted.
00:07:22.140It's this mini me inside my brain somewhere that is doing all the perceiving and then deciding what to do next.
00:07:29.280But 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.
00:07:37.920It's not something to be taken for granted.
00:07:40.380The self is another kind of perception.
00:07:43.860The brain is creating the experience of self in the same way that it's creating the experience of the world.
00:07:50.480I think dividing it this way gives gives certainly that's what structures the way I do my research.
00:07:57.400I try and understand these areas. They're all joined up in some ways, but you can approach them at least a little bit separately.
00:08:03.860I feel like I'm high again. Over to you, mate.
00:08:07.060And so if that being the case, so we all experience consciousness.
00:08:11.540So why is our consciousness different? And how different is our consciousness, if you see what I mean?
00:08:19.060Yeah, I think this is a really, I mean, this is in fact something we're working on at the moment.
00:08:22.920And it's very easy to assume that we all experience the world the same way because our experience has that character.
00:08:33.000You know, I open, I'm looking at you guys now and you're wearing a kind of mauve purple shirt and a blue shirt.
00:08:39.360And it seems like that's out there in the world. Those colours are out there in the world.
00:08:43.580They're not being made up in my head and the same for everything else I'm experiencing.
00:08:48.820But that's not true, right? The way it's actually working is, of course, there's a real world out there.
00:08:53.720Of course, you guys are actually out there and there are things, there are these objects that you're sitting on and wearing.
00:08:58.940But 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.
00:09:13.000Colour'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.
00:09:24.280The brain takes into account all the ambient lighting in order to decide what colour something should be.
00:09:31.040And 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.
00:09:47.220And sometimes these differences can be quite large.
00:09:50.140You know, sometimes people see things that other people don't, you know, they start actively hallucinating.
00:09:57.320Or they might have what we would call a neurodivergent condition, where it's autism or ADHD or something.
00:10:03.820So their experience of the world is quite dramatically different in a way that can often be challenging.
00:10:09.160But 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.
00:10:20.800In fact, there's no sort of single true way to experience it.
00:10:25.260You know, our perceptions are tied to reality, otherwise they would be useless.
00:10:29.600But there's, but there's, but there's always a construction and the constructions will always differ.
00:10:36.060Quite how much they differ is something that we were looking at.
00:10:39.780We have this project called the Perception Census, which is a set of online little brain teasers and interactive experiments and illusions.
00:10:47.840That is trying to map out this hidden world of inner diversity.
00:10:53.520Because, 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.
00:11:07.940And 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.
00:11:18.900That'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?
00:11:28.540And also, how much of it is a product of our childhood experiences and our culture and what we have been taught growing up?
00:11:35.840This is a very good question, and I don't think there's going to be any single clear answer to it.
00:11:40.620We'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.
00:11:54.260And just what happened to me yesterday is going to affect how I encounter the world and the self today.
00:11:59.760Teasing these things apart is very, very difficult, but there's some clues that can help us.
00:12:06.900So there's some classic studies about the effect of language that native Russian speakers distinguish more shades of blue.
00:12:16.760So probably, I mean, you know, like the light wave spectrum, the electromagnetic spectrum is basically just a continuous set of light, of wavelengths.
00:12:26.280But our brains carve it up into distinct colors, which is why a rainbow has these distinct bands.
00:12:32.800It doesn't just look like a continuous band of color.
00:12:35.860But that's our brains imposing these categories.
00:12:40.840And it turns out that for native Russian speakers, these categories are imposed in a slightly different way.
00:12:47.720Entirely useless here because the sky is always gray.
00:12:52.480But it's one example of how language can affect perception.
00:12:57.080I'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.
00:13:06.440If 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.
00:14:01.480So 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.
00:14:09.300And that's kind of a part of almost every spiritual tradition.
00:14:13.460It's part of, if you do personal development, this is the first thing they'll teach you.
00:14:17.540You know, you're projecting your crap basically onto the world and then you're upset at what's coming back at you.
00:14:26.500Particularly because, as you say, when we look out into the world, the world is an infinite amount of information.
00:14:33.440And 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.
00:14:53.740I 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.
00:15:06.740There's a lot of, a long history to thinking this way, that what we experience is a kind of projection.
00:15:14.880But what I think neuroscience is bringing to the table is instead of this being metaphorical, it's unpacking it literally.
00:15:39.140And 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.
00:16:00.860It'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.
00:16:09.860The 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.
00:16:17.780And so the way it does that, it has to actively interpret the information that it gets.
00:17:14.820And we also, I think, the same goes for the body, too.
00:17:17.720Our emotional responses are perceptions of what's happening to the body in response to the world.
00:17:25.360I 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.
00:17:33.640And 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.
00:17:42.600We're always, you know, what's out there?
00:17:51.640And, of course, anyone who's looked into this for half a second knows it's true.
00:17:55.540And, 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.
00:18:16.700If I drive my car into something, that's a bad outcome for me and for the car and for whatever.
00:18:22.380So how do we navigate reality then, knowing all of this?
00:18:28.220How does this change the way we live life?
00:18:32.320Unfortunately, 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.
00:18:41.680I've been fond of saying that our experience is like a controlled hallucination.
00:18:47.100It's a hallucination in the sense that it is generated by the brain, but the control is equally important.
00:18:54.860So 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.
00:19:13.260So this means also that we're likely to have somewhat, well, substantially similar experiences.
00:19:22.300Yes, 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.
00:19:33.020And we know that that's a bad thing to just launch ourselves into.
00:19:46.100And 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.
00:19:57.480Of 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.
00:20:09.020That's not part of our controlled hallucination.
00:20:12.200Evolution didn't shape us to be sensitive to these kinds of things.
00:20:16.100And then we might also perceive other things like the rate of change of carbon in the atmosphere.
00:20:23.840And we're very bad at perceiving things that unfold over time scales that evolution hasn't deemed relevant to our ongoing survival.
00:20:32.520And in the world in which we live, our perceptual tuning is becoming less adequate to the challenges we face.
00:20:41.080But it's still perfectly adequate to the here and now, to not jumping out of windows or running in front of buses.
00:20:48.680Isn'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?
00:21:03.580Yeah, I think it's amplifies and we're very familiar, I think, from social media with this idea of social media echo chambers.
00:21:11.180I mean, we seek out news that confirms what we already think, there are these drives of dynamics of polarisation.
00:21:18.780And 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.
00:21:37.800And I think you can almost draw a parallel here with perception too.
00:21:43.140Yes, we have these social media echo chambers, but we also have to some extent perceptual echo chambers too.
00:21:49.240You know, we all live in different inner world, unique inner worlds, right down to the level of how we experience them.
00:21:56.420And we'll probably seek out perceptual information to reinforce the way we encounter the world, even at these lowest levels.
00:22:05.840I, 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?
00:22:18.940If you don't know, you live in a bubble, you'll never get out of it.
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00:25:03.840Well, that's a very loaded term, right?
00:25:05.460I mean, it can mean different things in different contexts.
00:25:09.000If you think about truth as in objective reality, it's true to say that we're all sitting on chairs, right?
00:25:17.460But 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.
00:25:40.440I 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.
00:25:49.620So, yeah, it is true that we're all sitting on chairs.
00:26:03.540I guess what I'm getting at, I'm curious, is this will be a shocking example.
00:26:07.820But, 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?
00:26:16.860Like, is there a difference between that?
00:26:18.860Or is that just people creating this objective consensual reality based on what's going on in society?
00:26:26.460I'm just talking on a practical level.
00:26:27.840But 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.
00:26:40.660And the consequences of our belief that we're sitting on a chair is just reinforced by what happens next.
00:26:48.020As you get further and further away from the ability to test your perceptual beliefs against reality, then they can become more and more divorced.
00:26:59.860And so I don't think you can get away.
00:27:19.740But 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.
00:27:32.400So that's not something that can be verified in the same way that sitting on a chair can be verified.
00:27:39.580And since we are on the subject of politics, I suppose the question that we end up with, you mentioned polarization.
00:27:45.240We've obviously had an awful amount of it in recent years.
00:27:51.140Is there any point having political discussions?
00:27:55.380It seems to be our only chance, right?
00:27:57.200I mean, one of the language is one of the most, probably the most distinctive features of the human species.
00:28:05.960And we like to think as humans, we're special.
00:28:08.380And we usually think we're more special than we actually are.
00:28:11.560And 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.
00:28:24.160But language, I still think, is distinctive for humans.
00:28:30.060And it gives us so much potential in both directions.
00:28:33.940It's language that allows us to build culture, build civilization.
00:28:37.500But, of course, it's language also that can be used to bootstrap these dynamics of polarization.
00:28:54.000Do 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.
00:29:05.260And I had very powerful hallucinations.
00:29:07.220And people said to me, like, what was the experience of that?
00:29:11.300And the reality is, is that language isn't enough at times.
00:29:17.260Do 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?
00:29:30.780I mean, this is why we still have a space for literature, isn't it?
00:29:33.980I 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.
00:29:42.580But I think there is still a fundamental limit, because this is almost a necessary trade-off with language.
00:29:48.680Language, it has to gloss over fine distinctions in order to be useful at all.
00:29:55.800If 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.
00:30:06.320If there was a separate word for every possible experienceable shade of blue, then we would be using different words and we would never communicate.
00:30:13.900So 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.
00:30:24.460But the trade-off is, as you say, language will not capture the fine grain of experiences.
00:30:33.020And there are some experiences like psychedelics that will really challenge the boundaries of what language can achieve.
00:30:42.060But this is perhaps why sometimes these kinds of experiences can be quite valuable, because they provide a first-person sort of kick.
00:30:52.520They'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.
00:31:04.340It 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.
00:31:16.100Do 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?
00:31:29.920Because if we see things in a different way, then we're talking about two different realities, in a sense.
00:31:38.340I 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.
00:31:49.020And that's a great allegory for your point, isn't it?
00:31:52.400Because, I mean, the division over that was extraordinary, and it was just a photo of a dress.
00:31:56.760But 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.
00:32:05.780And so that does, you know, you put that in a more contentious context, rather than just the colour of a photo of a dress.
00:32:13.940Tax policy, you know, strikes, whatever.
00:32:16.520Yeah, you're going to get into trouble.
00:32:18.660And 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.
00:32:30.720It's of direct social relevance, because we need to understand.
00:32:35.300When you kind of bed in this understanding as widely as possible, that perception is dependent on us.
00:32:45.080And 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.
00:33:01.440And 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.
00:33:13.500And 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.
00:33:20.640You 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?
00:33:37.140Well, speaking of contentious issues, I suppose one of the most obvious questions here is, well, there's two questions, actually.
00:33:45.460First 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.
00:33:58.020Do you have any insight as to why we do this?
00:34:01.100Is it because we are connected to a supreme being that exists?
00:34:04.200Is it because our brain produces, you know, what can you tell us about that part, first of all?
00:34:09.480I think this is, it's such a common feature of human culture, isn't it?
00:34:14.800Of course, everybody, different cultures have their own different supreme beings, and this is where a lot of the trouble starts.
00:34:22.280But I think you asked the right question.
00:34:24.360Why are we compelled across cultures to have some belief that fits that description?
00:34:31.740And 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.
00:34:43.120First is perhaps another distinctive, maybe this isn't distinctive about humans, but we know we are mortal.
00:34:51.360At least we know that in the abstract.
00:34:52.880It's very hard to actually understand what that means.
00:34:55.740And 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.
00:35:10.740And 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.
00:35:24.540And to resolve that contradiction, you know, we need something.
00:35:30.260And one of the things that comes up is a supreme being.
00:35:34.440I think the other interesting idea about this, and this is not my idea at all, I can't remember where I first read this,
00:35:40.440was 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,
00:35:54.960got 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.
00:36:08.220This is the shared myth, so you all know the Ferrari, for example.
00:36:24.920I 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.
00:36:38.340And the second question that's interesting to me is whether it's psychedelics, whether it's spiritual experiences that I've had,
00:36:44.920talking to other people about certain things,
00:36:47.080I got the sense very strongly that when people experience that freedom of this constant brain processing,
00:36:54.600the immediate surroundings and whatever, quite often they all have the experience of ultimate connection with other people and the universe, whatever that is.
00:37:03.520Do we have any thoughts on where that comes from?
00:37:08.120I 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.
00:37:17.080Now, 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,
00:37:29.540compared to this other view of the self that it's a perception, that it's a construction of the brain.
00:37:36.360And it might change over time as well.
00:37:39.720The way we experience being a self is not fixed.
00:37:43.020It does evolve, even though we don't necessarily perceive it evolving.
00:37:46.900And if it's a construction of the brain, it can also be tuned down or even go away.
00:37:53.540And there's this concept from meditation, from some psychedelics research as well, from some spiritual traditions about ego dissolution.
00:38:02.320And I think, again, this is not necessarily a metaphorical thing.
00:38:05.980It 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.
00:38:22.680One 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.
00:38:37.760Now, these distinctions are not complete and they're very fluid.
00:38:42.260Part of what it means to be me is how I experience myself refracted through the minds of others.
00:38:49.780Part of me is really residing in the minds of my friends and colleagues and so on.
00:38:54.440But at the same time, I see this hand in front of me.
00:39:04.000There are some aspects of the construction of self which impose a relatively clear distinction.
00:39:10.100But those distinctions can be done away with.
00:39:13.460It doesn't mean they go away in the real world.
00:39:15.340Like my body is still separate from the chair.
00:39:17.200But the brain might, in some states, it might not draw these distinctions in perception.
00:39:25.040And that could be what's going on that underlies this experience of connectedness.
00:39:29.380And in fact, if you look inside the brains of people on high doses of psychedelics, you see things compatible with that idea.
00:39:36.940You see sort of more mixing of the brain circuits.
00:39:39.960Whereas 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.
00:40:16.020So 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.
00:40:26.660But 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.
00:40:35.260I mean, I know this experientially, like the less self, the more I can, we can, we can connect.
00:40:43.700I think it might, it might be a sort of a balancing act, right?
00:40:46.600I 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.
00:40:55.680So 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.
00:41:11.640But it's still, it's still, yeah, it's still back.
00:41:13.980So we, we talk about hallucinations and in a sense, this is a hallucination.
00:41:21.100There's, well, we all know, I'm the music producer, Pharrell, who says that he sees music, certain notes of certain colours.
00:41:30.280And what does that mean then in terms of hallucinations, in terms of creativity?
00:41:36.120Do, are creative people, as the, the, the saying goes like, they're more volatile, they're more passionate.
00:41:45.320Do they tend to feel things more deeply?
00:41:47.440Do they tend to see a different type of hallucination?
00:41:51.260I think it's very hard to pin down what the secret source of creativity is.
00:41:56.680You know, people can be creative in all sorts of different ways.
00:41:58.860But 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.
00:42:14.160I mean, the phenomenon you're describing there is called synesthesia, which is super interesting.
00:42:18.580It's like a, broadly speaking, it's a mixing of the senses.
00:42:22.620And for most of us, vision and hearing, you know, they're separate, right?
00:42:26.820If I hear a sound, it might conjure up a particular image in my mind, but I don't literally see things.
00:42:32.820But in synesthesia, the connection is much more, is much closer.
00:42:37.460And people, indeed, different notes can evoke experiences of particular colours.
00:43:23.400You have a different way of encountering the world that can provide associations that other people don't have.
00:43:29.740And 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?
00:43:48.760So this gets back to this idea of perceptual diversity and this continuum or spectrum that we might think of.
00:43:56.680And 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.
00:44:06.560And 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.
00:44:17.100But 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.
00:44:29.060But 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.
00:44:43.500You know, that's something that happens when your way of seeing something poses challenges for the environment you live in.
00:44:52.500Like even something like schizophrenia, which is very, very distressing for people that experience it.
00:44:59.100You know, you hear voices in your head that are instructing you to do things.
00:45:02.120Often it's a lot of auditory hallucinations.
00:45:07.000You know, in some cultures, these experiences were sort of celebrated as somebody channeling some spiritual energy rather than being thought of as mentally ill.
00:45:20.200And 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.
00:45:34.880And that's at least, you know, the hope.
00:45:37.920And 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.
00:45:51.140And there's a hearing voices, for instance, is actually quite common for people.
00:45:56.100I can't, I'm not sure what the statistics are.
00:45:58.360I have a colleague, Charles Ferniehoff in Durham, who's led this project called the Hearing Voices Project.
00:46:03.760To understand, like, how widespread it is.
00:46:09.540Because 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.
00:46:21.700It's only a problem when these voices become a problem in virtue of what they're saying.
00:46:26.820For some people, they're just kind of benign.
00:46:29.060If they're saying go to the gym, like, that's fine.
00:46:34.640Some people see things, but it's not always distressing or problematic.
00:46:39.200So the range of altered experiences, I think, is much, much broader, much richer than we typically think.
00:46:44.320So 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.
00:46:59.380And 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.
00:47:12.700And 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.
00:47:36.900But 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.
00:47:49.200And I think the bar should be higher than acceptance as well.
00:47:52.380And here I come to this metaphor of biodiversity.
00:47:55.780Like in ecosystems, we're just aware that having lots of different kinds of plants and animals is a good thing for a flourishing ecosystem.
00:48:20.540And you want to get to a point where differences in the way we encounter the world are not merely accommodated, but in rich society.
00:48:27.380Well, 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.
00:48:50.940There's just a way of a different way of being in the world, which has tradeoffs, right, as all ways of being do.
00:48:57.780So I'm curious to come back to the political side of the conversation, because I'm just wondering, you know, how...
00:49:09.120Because 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.
00:49:15.500But yet we do go through, like, periods, don't we?
00:49:18.960You know, you have Thatcher, and there's a particular way of seeing the world.
00:49:21.820And then you have, you know, Blair, and there's a particular way of seeing the world.
00:49:25.140And then you have the current government, and there are philosophical and political ways of looking at the world that change over time.
00:49:32.880And 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,
00:49:41.720but perhaps slightly less of the rationality and pragmatism versus the overly rational, overly pragmatic, lacking in empathy.
00:49:50.740That's been going on since forever, right?
00:49:54.560So how do we navigate the political world?
00:49:58.900I mean, like, you know, I'm doing question time tomorrow.
00:50:02.700Is there any point in me saying anything?
00:50:05.260Well, you asked earlier about what's the value of political conversation.
00:50:08.900I think making these points is exactly what's needed.
00:50:13.240I mean, there are some currents, as you say, that have just almost always been there,
00:50:17.640some tensions between individualism and collectivism in politics very, very broadly.
00:50:22.820And the pendulum swings, and the pendulum swings for all sorts of reasons, right?
00:50:28.800Partly because people tend to react against the status quo.