Chasing Consciousness

How likely is it that we live in a simulations? Are virtual worlds real?

In this first episode of the 2nd Series we delve into the fascinating topic of virtual reality simulations and the extraordinary possibility that our universe is itself a simulation. For thousands of years some mystical traditions have maintained that the physical world and our separated ‘selves’ are an illusion, and now, only with the development of our own computer simulations and virtual worlds have scientists and philosophers begun to assess the statistical probabilities that our shared reality could in fact be some kind of representation rather than a physical place.

As we become more open to these possibilities, other difficult questions start to come into focus. How can we create a common language to talk about matter and energy, that bridges the simulated and simulating worlds. Who could have created such a simulation? Could it be an artificial intelligence rather than a biological or conscious being? Do we have ethical obligations to the virtual beings we interact with in our virtual worlds and to what extent are those beings and worlds ‘real’? The list is long and mind bending.

Fortunately, to untangle our thoughts on this, we have one of the best known philosophers of all things mind bending in the world, Dr. David Chalmers; who has just released a book ‘Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy’ about this very topic. Dr. Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specialising in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. He’s the founder of the ‘Towards a Science of Consciousness Conference’ at which he coined the term in 1994 The Hard Problem of Consciousness, kicking off a renaissance in consciousness studies, which has been increasing in popularity and research output ever since.

Donate here: https://www.chasingconsciousness.net/episodes

What we discuss in this episode:

00:00 Short Intro

06:00 Synesthesia

08:27 The science of knowing the nature of reality

11:02 The Simulation Hypothesis explained

15:25 The statistical probability evaluation

18:00 Knowing for sure is beyond the reaches of science

19:00 You’d only have to render the part you’re interacting with

20:00 Clues from physics

22:00 John Wheeler - ‘It from bit’

23:32 Eugene Wigner: measurement as a conscious observation

27:00 Information theory as a useful but risky hold-all language tool

34:30 Virtual realities are real and virtual interactions are meaningful

37:00 Ethical approaches to Non-player Characters (NPC’s) and their rights

38:45 Will advanced AI be conscious?

42:45 Is god a hacker in the universe up? Simulation Theology

44:30 Simulation theory meets the argument for the existence of God from design

51:00 The Hard problem of consciousness applies to AI too

55:00 Testing AI’s consciousness with the Turing test

59:30 Ethical value applied to immoral actions in virtual worlds

The difficulty of simulations within simulations

References:

Hans Moravec - Pigs in cyber space 1992

Eugene Wigner ‘Remarks on the mind and body question’ 1961

David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen ‘Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function’

NPC becomes conscious in ‘Free Guy’ movie dir. Shawn Levy, with Ryan Reynolds

NPC torture in ‘USS Callister’ Black Mirrors 4th series, Episode 1

The Turing test for subjective conscious experience

Robert Nozic’s ‘the experience machine’ thought experiment

Future of Life: Max Tegmark's Organisation to reduce existential risk from new technology

What would a post physicalist world look like?

So in this episode we’re going to evaluate the evidence presented by psychiatrist and author Dr. Iain McGilchrist, from his extensive analysis of split-brain studies, that support a broader understanding of the mind and reality. One that pushes beyond the traditional reductionist materialist worldview, to include the implicit, the context dependent and the consciousness dependent.

He’s just released an epic two part book to clarify all of this, ‘The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the world’ in which he asks how we should understand consciousness, space, time and matter, given the apparent over-emphasis on Left hemisphere interpretation of the world.

Iain is an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford; he’s a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists; a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London; a former research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, in Baltimore. And he now lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of North West Scotland.

He has published original research as well as original articles in papers and journals, including the British Journal of Psychiatry, Psychiatry & Psychology, The BMJ, The Lancet, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times on topics in literature, medicine, psychiatry and philosophy. He has taken part in many radio and TV programmes and documentaries, including for the BBC, NPR, and ABC and also took part in a Canadian full-length feature film about his work called The Divided Brain.

This interview was recorded at the start of last year, so the new book is not covered in so much detail.

What we discuss in this episode:

00:00 In communication with the world itself

06:30 Taking the implicit apart and out of context: disembodying it

12:00 John Cutting: noticing consequences of right hemisphere damage

14:40 The differences between the hemispheres shown in many studies

27:00 The Left Brain Interpreter: Denial and invention by the right hemisphere

29:15 Scientism: the belief that science can explain everything

30:48 Imagination and intuition in scientific discovery

33:10 Reason suggests there are immaterial things

37:40 We only know about matter because of consciousness

42:00 Navigating beyond materialism

PART 2

55:00 Implications of the Observer Effect and Quantum Entanglement

57:30 The world changes depending on your attention

58:00 Panpsychism on the up in Anglo-American Analytic philosophy: Galen Strawson and Christian De Quincy etc.

01:14:00 Cells have intelligent novel reactions to the environment, genes store the map

01:19:00 Iain’s new book “The Matter with Things: Our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the world

01:22:00 Why the drop in happiness despite a rise in standard of living?

References:

“The Matter with Things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world” 

“Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World” 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Philosopher and neurologist 

John Cutting - psychiatrist 

Galen Strawson - philosopher 

Barbara McKintoch - molecular biologist 

Can Physics shed light on how synchronicity might work?

“Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” C.J. Jung, from ‘Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principal’

The majority of us have experienced some meaningful coincidences in our lives - perhaps the right person to help with a problem got in touch out of the blue at just the right time to help solve it, or the right book randomly ended up in front of you when you have hit a block with a certain question, or a disaster happened that created total upheaval in your life which in retrospect turned out that without that disaster you would never have arrived at a certain really important change in your life.

Of course there is no way of scientifically testing or falsifying either a potential coordination between the causally unconnected events, nor the meaning of those coincidences to the individual. Despite that, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung thought that meaning could be as rigorous and objective as logical deduction, setting apart synchronicities from mere statistical coincidences.

So, firmly planting ourselves on the subjective, experience based side of the scientific fence, today we’re going to be exploring what Jung meant by a synchronicity and the evidence in physics that might help to explain at least the possibility of a non-local connection across space and time, or between the ‘inter-psychic world’ as Stanislaf Grof puts it, and material reality. We talked to psychologist Monika Wikman in episode #6 about Jung’s Collective Unconscious concept, so please listeners go back to that episode if you’d like to familiarise with that crucial idea too.

So who better to explain the relevant physics than the executive director of the Los Angeles ‘C.G.Jung Institute’ and theoretical physicist, Christoph Le Mouel. Having moved out of high energy quantum physics when he moved to USA in 2007, he is passionate about the connections between physics and psychology and incredibly knowledgable about the history of science.

What we discuss in this episode:

00:00 Superhero scientists and poems from the unconscious

12:30 Einstein and Jung have dinner: Relativity between space and time and between the psyche and the outside world

13:30 Quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli asked Jung to write about synchronicity

16:30 Synchronicity: ‘Meaningful equivalence’ between causally unconnected events

19:40 Symbols appearing widely without previous knowledge of them by the patients

24:55 Is it impossible to investigate synchronicity with science despite the acausality?

26:45 Wolfgang Pauli sought therapy from Jung

34:00 The incompleteness of quantum mechanics according to Einstein and Pauli

35:00 Pauli wanted a neutral language with analogies to connect quantum mechanics with psychology

37:45 They discussed the unobservable parts of reality, strange numbers and other realities

PART 2

48:45 The implications of the proof of acausality in quantum mechanics

55:00 Science cannot deal with meaning, despite statistical significance beyond chance

01:06:20 Uncertainty in quantum mechanics leaves space for creativity and meaning

01:10:00 Jung’s Brain as a transformer idea: transforming ‘Infinite intensity’ of the psyche into extension and frequencies.

References:

Carl Jung ‘Synchronicity: An causal connecting principal’ 

C.G.Jung, Wolfgang Pauli ‘Atom and Archetypes: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932-58’ 

David Bohm’s impilcate and explicate order 

Are our scientific assumptions justified?

In this episode we’re going to be examining the assumptions of Western Science. All science is based on assumptions. In order to isolate systems in experiments and standardise measurements of the target data, other variables need to be pinned down so scientists can form precise mathematical models, that can then be repeated accurately in the peer review process. Today we’re going to look at these assumptions, and establish if they indeed have become standard, fixed and unquestioned as some critics claim.  

One of those critics is Cambridge educated biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who gave a TED talk in 2013 about the assumptions of western science, which was banned by TED’s anonymous board of scientific advisors for not being a ‘fair description of scientific assumptions’. Far from quieting the controversy, the ban caused outcries of censorship, and the ripped video was seen many millions of times on You Tube, probably many times more than had it been left to stand as one scientists opinion. Today I want to examine just how fair his description was.  

To help us examine his claims is one of Rupert’s old friends and supporters, a specialist in the history and philosophy of science, an author and the program director of the Scientific and Medical Network, David Lorimer. He is also President of Wrekin Trust and Chief Consultant of Character Education Scotland.  He is also a former President of the Swedenborg Society, and Vice-President of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Originally a merchant banker then a teacher of philosophy and modern languages at Winchester College, he is the author and editor of over a dozen books, most recently ‘The Protein Crunch’ (with Jason Drew) and ‘A New Renaissance’, and out this year his new book ‘a quest for wisdom’. He is the originator of the Inspire-Aspire Values Poster Programmes, which this year involved over 25,000 young people.   

What we discuss in this episode:

00:00 Compulsory philosophy and death 

07:32 Examining Rupert Sheldrake’s 10 claimed assumptions of western science  

09:10 The ‘Life and nature are mechanistic’ assumption 

19:30 The ‘Matter is unconscious’ assumption 

29:40 ‘The laws of nature are constant’ assumption 

38:26 The Galileo Commission - get everyone to look though the telescope 

43:00 Reality is relational not relative - Apilla Colorado and Leroy Little bear 

44:45 The ‘Nature is Purposeless’ assumption - teleology 

52:30 ‘Biological heredity is only physical’ and ‘memory is in your Brain’ assumptions 

55:00 Morphogenetic fields and memories of previous lives and birthmarks 

1:01:45 ‘Your mind is in your head, your consciousness is correlated to your brain activity’ assumption 

1:05:30 ‘Psychic phenomena and telepathy are impossible’ assumption 

FOR PART 2 TIME CODES AND THE MANY MORE REFERENCES FROM THIS EPISODE PLEASE VISIT: https://www.chasingconsciousness.net/episode-13-assumptions-of-science-david-lorimer

References:

Rupert Sheldrake ‘Science set free’ 

David Lorimer ‘A Quest for Wisdom’ 

David Lorimer ‘Thinking Beyond the Brain’ 

The Galileo Commission - get everyone to look though the telescope 

The Scientific and Medical Network 

Can intention, attention or expectation affect random physical events?

In this episode we’re going to be exploring the subtleties of an odd phenomenon: the Experimenter Effect, where the expectations of the scientist doing an experiment appear to affect the results measured. This is hugely important for the right practice of science, and for understanding why some experiments that seem watertight methodologically can only be reproduced by scientists who expect the same results and not by sceptics of the hypothesis.

Who better to discuss this with than a scientist who ran into this while trying to disprove the the influence of consciousness in a physical system, Professor Garret Moddel; Dr. Moddel is Professor of Electrical and Quantum engineering at Colorado University, specialising in Solar cells, metal-insulator technology and geometric diodes, and optoelectronics among other extraordinary technologies. He also runs a separate psi phenomena lab. He is also one of the former presidents of the groundbreaking research organisation the Society of Scientific Exploration.

PART 1

01:04 The Experimenter effect explained

01:06 The difference between the effect in Psychology and in Physics

19:00 RNGs: Helmut Schmitt and atomic decay Random Number Generator experiments

25:00 1000’s of scientists in a data driven, peer reviewed field of science, in underground labs at top universities; totally unacknowledged by the rest of science

27:30 Garrett didn’t believe it till he read the literature

55:55 Standford Research Institute’s 1970’s-1990’s military psychic spy Remote Viewing experiments

01:03:30 Jessica Utts: The statistical analysis of SRI’s remote viewing research

PART 2

01:08:00 The Observer Effect: simply observing interacts with quantum systems

01:11:00 Wigner Von Neumann and the ‘collapse of the wave function’

01:15:00 Our intention does affect random phenomena, incontrovertibly in the literature

References:

(please note the reported bias towards criticism over support on the wiki entries; the supporters of this science try constantly to re-edit these entries to represent credible support as well as criticism, only for moderators to edit back. Why the need for such disproportional criticism?)

Schmidt, Helmut. Paper "Collapse of the state vector and psychokinetic effect." Foundations of Physics 12.6 (1982): 565-581. 

The Society for Scientific Exploration

Dean Radin at IONS

Radin, Dean, et al. paper "Psychophysical interactions with a double-slit interference pattern: Exploratory evidence of a causal influence." Physics Essays 34.1 (2021): 79-88.

Robert Jahn, Dean of Engineering at Princeton and founder of PEAR Labs Princeton

Robert Jahn, Brenda Dunne paper, ”On the quantum mechanics of consciousness, with application to anomalous phenomena." Foundations of Physics 16.8 (1986): 721-772.

Roger Nelson, Director of PEAR Labs Princeton

Bernie Haisch’s and Garret Moddel’s Zero point energy patent

Garret Moddel et al, paper on Zero-point research

In episode #11 we explore the way emotions work, and particularly fear - the way it’s triggered, what happens in the brain and how much we are conscious of what’s going on. I think this is really relevant as we appear to be an extremely fearful, defensive and argumentative society in general, and perhaps if we understood what was happening inside us we might be able to limit some of the damage these kind of encounters produce. We also look at the the Limbic System and Triune Brain theories of emotions and the evolution of the brain, and find out why these hugely popular theories in Psychology are no longer really considered true by neuroscientists. Perhaps we can salvage something useful from these theories for psychology, as some really effective therapies have been based on them in the past.

So who better to help us clarify all this than emotion and fear specialist, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux.

Dr Le Doux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU in New York in the Center for Neural Science, and he directs the Emotional Brain Institute of NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute. He is also a Professor of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical School. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of memory and emotion and he is the author of The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, and Anxious and his most recent book that we’ll be talking mostly about today “Deep History of Ourselves and the evolution of consciousness”. He has received loads of awards, including prizes from the Association for Psychological Science, the American Philosophical Society, the IPSEN Foundation and the American Psychological Association. His book Anxious received the 2016 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association. Awesomely, he is also the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids and performs with Colin Dempsey as the acoustic duo So We Are.

Jo’s new book “The Deep History of Ourselves: the 4 billion year sorry of how we got conscious brains” 

What we discuss in this episode:

PART 1

05:16 Jo joined Mike Gazzaniga’s lab in the late 60’s

07:00 The neuroscience of being afraid and under threat

09:00 Left Brain Interpreter: Consciousness is a narration making sense of our behaviour (See Episode #3)

16:45 The Amygdala: Raised heart rate and sweaty palms are not the emotion of fear

33:00 A criticism of Paul MacLean’s Limbic system and Triune Brain theories

40:00 The Amygdala is misunderstood when associated with fear rather than threat stimuli processing

45:45 We should keep mental state terms and behaviour terms separate

47:00 Threat hormones like cortisol can affect rational thinking in the frontal cortex

PART 2:

52:00 The conscious experience of anxiety and fear is often where the problem lies, not the physiological mechanisms the medication is treating

59:30 3 types of noetic consciousness: breaking it down to try and learn more

1:14:00 Contrary to darwinism, cognition came before emotions

1:15:30 Reconciling the disconnect between experiences and brain activity

1:24:00 W.H.Auden "The age of anxiety" poem

1:27:00 Focussing on improving how we feel over how we behave

References:

Leon Festinger’s theory of Cognitive Dissonance

 Endel Tulving - 3 types of noetic consciousness

Steve Flemming UCL - subjective self awareness in the frontal pole area

'Psychedelics in a changing World: medicalisation, reciprocity and planetary healing' With: Ben Sessa, Gabriel Amezcua, Nick von Christierson, David Luke, Andrea Langlois & Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner.

This is a recording of a fascinating panel chaired by Chasing Consciousness in the talks tent of Medicine Festival programmed by Ruby Reed. It included psychologists, psychiatrists, psychedelic entrepreneurs and activists at the top of their field. The panel gave a nuanced and positive overview of the issues associated with the now inevitable medicalisation of these psychedelic compounds. With great sensitivity they approached the very difficult issue of how to honour the roots of this therapy in indigenous shamanism, without reducing it to just money or token indigenous board members. Despite positive predictions for the future it became clear by the end of the talk just how complex the issue of reciprocity is.

You can check our interview with Ashleigh Murphy Beiner of the Imperial College team on 'Testing psychedelics for depression' here. And look out for future interviews with panelists Dr. Ben Sessa and David Luke to come soon!

00:00 Introduction to the speakers

02:49 Medicalisation: Just a success story or are there shadows to call out early in the process?

03:10 Ben Sessa: safe, effective medicines as alternatives to long term pharmaceutical

05:00 Getting to the root cause of the problem rather than papering over the symptoms

06:40 'A psychiatric renaissance'

09:20 Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner: Learning from the shadow to confront worldwide depression

15:40 Designing ethical psychedelic treatment models that match its uniqueness

16:15 David Luke: Biomedical model VS subjective psychological model

18:00 Bio-Psycho-social-spiritual models may not work with medicalisation

21:00 Nick Van Christiersen of Woven Science

22:00 Being inspired by Indigenous models: Diagnosis, preparation, peak experience, integration in community

23:00 Psychedelic treatment is a threat to big pharma

24:00 Andrea Langlois: Keeping the door more widely open than just to medicalisation

25:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Accessibility, decolonisation, inclusion of indigenous people in the medical process

28:00 Andrea Langlois: The indigenous idea of Reciprocity. The ailments of modern society like depression and climate change are a call to come back into a relationship of reciprocity with Gaia

31:00 Risk of hijacking of reciprocity, to green wash profiteering

32:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Giving and getting, participation, engagement, respect not money

36:00 Do you think they really want to be ‘preserved’!?

39:00 Nick Van Christiersen: reparations before reciprocity

42:00 David Luke: Is it our right to give them to have a seat at the table!?

45:00 Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner: We have so much to learn and adapt from the indigenous methodology

47:00 The newly founded Association for Psychedelic Therapies

48:00 Ben Sessa: Reciprocity between carer and patient

53:00 Andrea Langlois: Indigenous knowledge should be understood as science and decriminalised

59:00 Ben Sessa: Getting it over the line - decriminalisation

1:01:50 David Luke: Changing our whole world view through psychedelics, to reboot the culture of a species in crisis

1:06:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Psychedelics are confined mostly to privileged white people when they are most needed by vulnerable minorities

1:08:00 De-Regulation of substances, accessibility for poor communities with trauma and PTSD

1:11:00 Andrea Langlois: Earth practice and our own western relationship with plants and the natural world

1:18:00 Closing comments

'Psychedelics in a changing World: medicalisation, reciprocity and planetary healing' With: Ben Sessa, Gabriel Amezcua, Nick von Christierson, David Luke, Andrea Langlois & Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner. 

This is a recording of a fascinating panel chaired by Chasing Consciousness in the talks tent of Medicine Festival programmed by Ruby Reed. It included psychologists, psychiatrists, psychedelic entrepreneurs and activists at the top of their field. The panel gave a nuanced and positive overview of the issues associated with the now inevitable medicalisation of these psychedelic compounds. With great sensitivity they approached the very difficult issue of how to honour the roots of this therapy in indigenous shamanism, without reducing it to just money or token indigenous board members. Despite positive predictions for the future it became clear by the end of the talk just how complex the issue of reciprocity is.

You can check our interview with Ashleigh Murphy Beiner of the Imperial College team on 'Testing psychedelics for depression' here. And look out for future interviews with panelists Dr. Ben Sessa and David Luke to come soon!

00:00 Introduction to the speakers

02:49 Medicalisation: Just a success story or are there shadows to call out early in the process?

03:10 Ben Sessa: safe, effective medicines as alternatives to long term pharmaceutical

05:00 Getting to the root cause of the problem rather than papering over the symptoms

06:40 A psychiatric revolution

09:20 Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner: Learning from the shadow to confront worldwide depression

15:40 Designing ethical psychedelic treatment models that match its uniqueness

16:15 David Luke: Biomedical model VS subjective psychological model

18:00 Bio-Psycho-social-spiritual models may not work with medicalisation

21:00 Nick Van Christiersen of Woven Science

22:00 Being inspired by Indigenous models: Diagnosis, preparation, peak experience, integration in community

23:00 Psychedelic treatment is a threat to big pharma

24:00 Andrea Langlois: Keeping the door more widely open than just to medicalisation

25:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Accessibility, decolonisation, inclusion of indigenous people in the medical process

28:00 Andrea Langlois: The indigenous idea of Reciprocity. The ailments of modern society like depression and climate change are a call to come back into a relationship of reciprocity with Gaia

31:00 Risk of hijacking of reciprocity, to green wash profiteering

32:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Giving and getting, participation, engagement, respect not money

36:00 Do you think they really want to be ‘preserved’!?

39:00 Nick Van Christiersen: reparations before reciprocity

42:00 David Luke: Is it our right to give them to have a seat at the table!?

45:00 Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner: We have so much to learn and adapt from the indigenous methodology

47:00 The newly founded Association for Psychedelic Therapies

48:00 Ben Sessa: Reciprocity between carer and patient

53:00 Andrea Langlois: Indigenous knowledge should be understood as science and decriminalised

59:00 Ben Sessa: Getting it over the line - decriminalisation

1:01:50 David Luke: Changing our whole world view through psychedelics, to reboot the culture of a species in crisis

1:06:00 Gabriel Amezcua: Psychedelics are confined mostly to privileged white people when they are most needed by vulnerable minorities

1:08:00 De-Regulation of substances, accessibility for poor communities with trauma

1:11:00 Andrea Langlois: Earth practice and our own western relationship with plants and the natural world

1:18:00 Closing comments

Can psychedelic therapy help depression?

We are now in the middle of the first psychedelic resurgence since the last bout of research in the 60’s and 70’s led by legends of the psychedelic movement like Dr. Stan Grof at Harvard. This resurgence is taking place on two fronts: Firstly, following promising results from Imperial College’s Psidep 1 study into the use of Psilocybin, the active ingredient in Magic Mushrooms, to treat treatment-resistant depression; there has been a host of studies around the world at leading universities like Harvard investigating many other compounds as well as Psilocybin like famous rave drug MDMA and horse tranquilliser Ketamine. This is an odd turn of events for compounds that have been systematically demonised by governments and accused of worsening mental health conditions.

Secondly, we are seeing a a massive increase in the participation of Ahyuasca rituals, whose active ingredient is DMT, one of the most hallucinogenic compounds in the world, to the point that it has become a fashion among the funky philosophical Burning Man style community.

The world of medicine and personal transformation seem to be converging. But we need a specialist to clarify the details here before we get ahead of ourselves.

So who better to help us navigate this new territory than assistant psychologist on Imperial’s most recent psilocybin study, Ashleigh Murphy Beiner.

Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner is a Trainee Clinical Psychologist and Mindfulness Practitioner. She is a member of the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College London. She is also a scientific researcher and has published research investigating the therapeutic use of ayahuasca. Her research has found changes in mindfulness and cognitive flexibility after ayahuasca use which both play a role in psychological wellbeing.

What we discuss:

00:00 Inequality and suffering and how to deal with that experience

05:20 Victor Frankel and thriving from the fundamental quest for human meaning

07:49 Treatment resistant depression, ruminating about the past and social disconnection

14:00 Psychedelics reduce rumination (DMN) and increase plasticity

16:00 Mazatec and North American Indian traditions of healing using hallucinogens

17:30 Plants have their own agency in the indigenous worldview

18:30 Imperial Colleges 2nd Psilocybin Study for depression explained

28:00 The results and how they compared to Psidep1, the first study

31:00 No magic answer to long-term effectiveness challenges against Depression

33:00 ‘Restoring a quality of life’ despite persistent depression symptoms

34:12 Dr. Rosalind Watts’ ACE (Accept, Connect, Embody) Model of treatment and post traumatic growth

36:30 Avoidance to acceptance, and disconnection from others, themselves and the world to connection to those things

39:00 Embody: allowing yourself to feel the pain

43:30 Yohann Hari and the wider systemic issues of inequality leading to depression

45:30 How it feels to publish your first scientific paper

46:00 Ashleigh’s study of Ahyuasca’s effects on cognition

49:00 The commercialisation of Ahyuasca and reciprocity

53:00 Common threads of between Ahyuasca, NDE and psilocybin experiences

56:20 The value of studying altered states of consciousness

1:00:00 Evidence that trauma is stored in the body

References:

Victor Frankel 

Dr. Gabor Mate documentary 

Yohann Hari book 'Lost Connections' 

In this episode we want to understand how easy it is to change our beliefs when we receive new information, a process that can be really uncomfortable and lead to great resistance in the psyche. The scientific community, whilst educated to update their world view based on new information and theory, are by no means immune to this resistance; today we’ll find out to what extent it is just a human trait we have to accept.

Now that the scientific method has become more water-tight from our biases than ever, and data collection is more sophisticated than ever, the difference between hard data and the opinion we draw from that data should also be more clear. However, the introduction of the internet and the separation of the population by social media algorithms into tribal bubbles of like-minded people, has mixed together data and opinion, confusing the scientific community and the lay population alike. 

So understanding the biology of belief, our discomfort and resistance to new information, and how beliefs play a part in our sense of self can really help us stay open to new data and to update our world view to match it with the necessary flexibility demanded by the sheer speed of change of our current era’s technological revolution; in my opinion this awareness offers essential tools for navigating the next few decades.

So who better to help us navigate this mine-field of human behaviour than cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Jonas Kaplan. His research focuses on the neural basis of consciousness, self, empathy, social relationships, action perception and creativity. Using a combination of fMRI neuro-imaging and behavioural studies he aims to examine the neural mechanisms that underlie our experience of resonating with other people and being aware of ourselves. He is the assistant Research Professor of Psychology at University of South California’s ‘Brain and Creativity Institut’e and Co-Director of the Dana and David Dornslife Cognitive Neuroimaging centre.

Today’s chat will begin discussing his research with Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris into a possible Backfire Effect when faced with new data.

What we discuss in this episode:

00:00 Split brains and 2 separate consciousness’ in one head

07:10 The Backfire Effect explained

09:00 Why do we find it so difficult to change our minds about things that we care about?

12:40 Less flexibility to changing mind associated with activated Amygdala and Insular cortices

16:00 Avoidance of situations that will challenge us to change our minds

18:15 The evolutionary intertwining between emotion and cognition

23:30 The difference between Cognitive Dissonance and The Backfire effect

25:30 Reason is coloured by underlying motivation

29:00 Sam Harris and the neural basis of belief

31:45 The algorithmic belief bubbles of a post internet world

37:20 The Default Mode Network’s narrative about self, is less active in meditators

40:00 Utilitarian values VS idealogical/sacred values

45:00 The Left Brain interpreter and making up narratives to keep our world view consistent

PART 2

58:00 What is self and is it an illusion?

1:01:30 Demasio’s ‘Core’ and ‘Autobiographical’ self

1:04:00 Mental concepts are useful provisional illusions in some sense

1:08:00 The blur between ‘self’ and ‘other’

1:11:50 Belonging and social group membership and it’s influence on beliefs

1:21:00 Self is a narrative about ourselves

1:22:00 Exceptional experience revealing the illusion of self and the fear of ego death

1:26:45 The biology of belief: the mind body connection

References:

The left Brain Interpreter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter

Antonio Demasio ‘Descartes Error’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

Jonas' new podcast