Chasing Consciousness

Why are religious and mystical experiences important to our sense of meaning and purpose in life? What is a spiritual emergency and how can it actually help us in the long run? Are transpersonal experiences illusions of the mind or can they tell us anything about the nature of reality?

In this episode, we have the extraordinary topic of Transpersonal Psychology to learn about. With the steady rise in popularity of western secular spirituality, meditation, psychedelic research, altered states of consciousness and embodied practices in general, during the 60’s some psychologists felt there was a part of psychology missing from the old humanist and behaviourist models. It was as if the overwhelmingly materialist scientific view of humans, that sees our bodies and brains as fundamentally separate from other beings, the natural world and any hypothetically transcendent reality, was missing out a huge source of data about the way our minds work. So a bunch of them coined a new term, Transpersonal psychology, and with it came a new field of study and practice. 

It’s a really wide field and at its cusps starts to get into areas that science can’t actually study using the method; some of which we’re going to touch on towards the end of this episode. But above all it makes a place for the importance of the transpersonal that crosses those boundaries between our bodies and brains and everything else out there, both known and unknown. So fortunately today’s guest has over 25 years of experience both as a psychologist and a workshops leader, David Lukoff.

Dr. Lukoff has published over 80 articles on spirituality and mental health, and is an active workshop presenter internationally on spiritual competency, grief, death, recovery, and spiritual crises. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Sofie University, previously known as the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, in CA and previously served on the faculties of Harvard University and UCLA. He is also the co-founder of the Spiritual Competency Academy, that offers mental health professionals courses on the skills and knowledge to become more spiritual competent.

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro

05:30 A psychedelic psychotic episode and a spiritual crisis

07:00 Spirituality and religion as resources and practices

07:42 The history of transpersonal psychology 

14:00 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs VS behaviourism

16:45 Spiritual emergencies 

18:00 Jospeh Cambell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ and Jung’s ‘Compensatory psychosis’

22:30 David’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) entry

24:00 The post scientific revolution meaning crisis, and spiritual assessment as a solution

29:45 Ceremonial, shamanic and plant medicine approaches

32:30 Bringing altered states into mainstream psychology

37:00 Holotropic breathing: simulating an LSD-like research after LSD research was banned

40:15 The strength of the mystical experience correlates with positive outcomes

41:15 Stan Grof: NDE, OBE, psi, afterlife and interdimensional communications

45:00 The Spiritual Competency Academy: forgiveness, compassion, mindfulness

References:

What do machine learning, physics and biology have in common? What maths emerges when we apply learning dynamics to physics, and can it reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity? If we see all nature as neuroplastic and constantly learning, like a neural network, what can this tell us about the fine tuning in the universe and the emergence of life and observers?

In this episode we have the fascinating possibility that the world is like a neural network to consider. On the show we’ve already deeply considered the way in which particles and sometimes even minds seem to be inter-connected in the universe, even beyond the apparent causal links in space and time. We also covered the brain science of neuroplasticity, for listeners who want to understand how that works. Applying that idea to the universe, that in some way the dynamic evolution of systems in the universe, over time adapt depending on the requirements could explain the extraordinary fine tuning we see in the universe, that permitted the arising of life in the first place. Along the way it could potentially fix some of the other gaping holes of disagreement in our best theories of physics. 

Our guest in this episode, the Russian physicist Vitaly Vanchurin, has not only developed this theory from the ground up, apparently reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, but is connecting it with biological systems and even developing a new type of computer processor to model it. After many years at the University of Minnesota, he’s taken a position at the National Institute of Health, and has more or less simultaneously launched a new multidisciplinary company ‘Artificial Neural Computing’ that connects physics, biology, and machine learning.

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro

05:21 The world as a neural network

06:00 Deep learning in the systems of the universe, neural learning and machine learning

09:00 The universe is learning as it evolves

11:30 Cosmic storage of learning, leads us to a cosmic consciousness model

12:40 The efficiency of learning defines its level of consciousness

13:30 A super-observer

16:00 It’s a useful model, but it’s likely how the universe actually works too

18:20 Fast changing non-trainable variables VS slow changing trainable variables

20:00 When the trainable variables change they could modify the laws of physics

21:20 Trainable variables in machine learning, are similar to genetic adaptation in biology

22:00 Connecting machine learning, physics and biological adaptation

31:40 What experiments could confirm this model?

42:00 At large scale entropy’s actually reduced by learning.

43:00 The emergence of life has a low chance of emerging by chance, more likely by pursuit of learning

44:50 Learning theory explains fine tuning in the universe

49:20 Neuroplasticity at a cosmic level: increasing efficiency and collective consciousness

54:30 The observer problem solved - hidden variables are trainable variables learning

58:30 Getting comfortable with variances from our best theories: models are only mental constructs

01:01:30 Vitaly’s new company 'Artificial Neural Computing’ - an interdisciplinary method marrying machine learning, physics and biology

01:11:00 What is emergent quantumness?

01:13:15 The implications of neuromorphic machine learning technology

01:17:30The implications for AGI

01:18:30 Self-driving car efficiency

01:21:00 Biology is a technology

01:27:40 You can think of space-time as many communication channels or neural connections

01:28:30 We are like one organism, a super-consciousness

References:

How Can Ultrasound destroy cancer cells and even increase immune response elsewhere? Are there any implications for a resonant field based understanding of matter?

In this episode we have the fascinating invention of Histotripsy (https://histotripsy.umich.edu/), the non-invasive destruction of cancer cells using ultrasound to look into. Alongside the other headline news that bioengineers are also using acoustics to pattern replacement heart tissue, makes the field of bioacoustics one of the most exciting for the future of medicine. 

It is of course the implications of this for the resonant vibrational nature of matter that make this of interest to us on the show, as we attempt to get closer to a true understanding of the nature of reality through our shows on the implications of Einstein’s ‘matter is energy’ findings and quantum mechanics. We get into this after 45 mins or so.

We are lucky enough to be speaking today with one of the inventors of Histotripsy technology, Zhen Xu, Associate Professor and Graduate Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Michigan University. She’s won many awards for her research, including from the American Heart Association and from the National Institute of Health. 

00:00 Intro

07:25 Destroying Cancer Cells with Ultrasound 

08:50 Issues with tissue heating and toxicity in other non-surgical techniques

09:50 Cavitation: the creation, expansion and collapse of bubbles - gas pockets in the tissue

11:40 Ultrasound propagates through the vibration of tissue particles

13:36 Acoustic Scalpel: Cavitation bubbles are highly visible on ultrasound imaging, for high accuracy treatment

14:45 No spread of tissue heating, so no healthy tissue damage

16:00 The discovery happened by mistake

19:45 She developed new devices for a new phenomenon 

21:40 Toxicity of the destroyed tumour is removed from the body in a few months

24:30 Immune response to tumerous cells after treatment, possibly from the debris

25:40 Live cancer cells alter signal pathways to confuse the immunes system

28:00 But once dead the the debris can are noticed by the immune system 

29:45 Future tumours or relapses in different locations are picked ups by the immune system

33:30 Treating neurological disease, brain blood clots and epilepsy too, across the skull protection

40:30 Patterning and forming new cell structures using sound (Stanford Med research): Structuring vs destructing using sound

44:30 Resonant frequency in various types of matter and biological tissue

45:00 No evidence from the lab for a resonant theory of tissue/organ health

48:50 Nikola Tesla, “If you want to find the secrets of the Universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration”

52:00 The implications of a wider wave-length fields, for the creation and maintaining of matter and biological life’s structure

56:30 Bioelectric component in organ development (TUFTS Study): The formation of life depends on more than DNA

1:01:00 A field based understanding of physical matter, rather than matter generating fields

References:

What are the benefits and risks of transhumanist technologies, and why are they so taboo? How do we legislate to avoid existential risks, without holding back too much the enormous possible benefits? How do we secure the mental health, rights and equal access of the public as it inevitably rolls out?

So today we have the tricky and somewhat taboo topic of how to ethically guide the ever-increasing application of transhumanist technologies. With the recent advances in bio-technology, and some technologies already making their way into our bodies, it seems that the move towards a transhumanist vision of how to improve our standard of living is already well under way. So the question now is how do we educate ourselves the public and legislate tech corporations and governments, to be sure that people’s mental and physical health, access to opportunities, and personal freedoms are not being compromised in the gold-rush.   

Fortunately our guest today is a sociologist and bioethicist with over 25 years of debating exactly these kind of questions. He is the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies or IEET, and he is the Associate Provost for Institutional research, Assessment and Planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston, James Hughes.

He is a Buddhist and techno-optimist, and was executive director of the World Transhumanist Organisation from 2004-2006. He argues for a democratic transhumanism in which human enhancement technologies should only be allowed if available to everyone, with respect for the rights of the individuals to control their own bodies.

He’s the writer of many articles and papers and the author of the book,“Citizen Cyborg: Why democratic societies must respond to the redesigned human of the future”. He is currently working on another book about moral enhancement, tentatively titled “Cyborg Buddha: Using neurotechnology to become better people”.

Being a techno-optimist and futurist myself, yet extremely cautious of mankind’s reckless and often blind curiosity when developing technology, I felt it was an important time to take a balanced multi-perspectival look into the ethics and policy development of transhumanist technologies. The interview offered me a process of re-evalutation of my own preconceptions and triggers, so I hope it helps you question your own opinions on this complex topic. 

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro

08:00 Difficulty accepting our inevitable transhumanist future

14:00 The taboo of transhumanism and debating toxic issues

19:45 It’s not the tech that’s the risk but the way we use it and legislate it: Max Tegmark

33:20 The History of Transhumanism

44:50 Is Eugenics connected to Transhumanism?

51:00 The roadmap towards markets rolling out transhumanist technologies 

52:30 The Kurzweilian paradigm: Smaller, smarter and faster 

55:45 Backing up memories - replacing and supplementing brain function

57:00 Instantiating brain backups in robot bodies, cloned bodies or computers

58:45 The Metaverse and brain-internet interfaces assessed

01:03:00 Augmented reality will be more popular than virtual reality

01:06:00 Technology interfering with the evolution of brains and culture

01:10:00 Selective scientific publication about the negative mental health outcomes

01:21:00 Neurolink: brain computer internet interfaces assessed

01:27:00 Gene therapy assessed: the risks of yet further inequality of wealth and power

01:43:50 The Singularity explained

01:56:20 Inequality leads to dangerous conflict VS Transnational collaboration leads to peace

References:

What evidence is there for quantum effects in biological systems? What are the implications for life in general?

Today we’ve got the relatively new field of quantum biology to assess. For years the idea of quantum effects in biological cells was dismissed because live cells were ‘too warm and wet’ to host these sensitive quantum phenomena. But new research into quantum coherence in avian navigation, quantum tunnelling in DNA mutations, in enzymes, even in smell - has brought new interest and study to the field of Quantum Biology.

What are the implications of Jung’s theories about the Collective Unconscious, Archetypes, Synchronicity and Individuation? What can they suggest about the nature of reality and the anomalies of modern science?

In this episode we have the fascinating topic of the metaphysics implied by Carl Jung’s theories to discuss. Jung is one of the great hero’s of this podcast, we covered the collective unconscious in episode #6 and synchronicity in episode #14 for listeners who want to go into detail about that. And the topic of The Shadow is coming up too, so look out for that. But to understand the metaphysical implications of his theories we need a special guest.

He is philosopher and author Bernardo Kastrup. Bernardo is the executive director of Essentia Foundation and his work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental (he has a PHD in philosophy). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (he also has a PHD in Computer science!). He has written many academic papers and books, has appeared on many media outlets and writes regularly for the Scientific American. 

What exactly are time and space? What are the implications of them not being as they seem? What is the relational interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? What are the implications of its leading to no universal laws of nature?  

In this Episode we have the non-linearity of space and time to get our heads around. In Episode #28 with physicist Paul Davies we talked about the implications of Einstein’s work in general, and in this episode we delve deeper into the implications of relativity, particularly of time, but also of space and extension. A subject that our guest has worked on extensively.  

What theory of reality could accommodate a phenomena of remote viewing? What are the implications of its success?

In this episode we have the extraordinary phenomenon of Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) to get our heads around. Thanks to declassification of US government documents and several freedom of information act requests, enough official paperwork and declassified accounts about the top secret Stargate remote-viewing program has been gathered to give credibility to a book Phenomena by Pulitzer Prize finalist and military journalist Annie Jacobson, and a documentary film about this controversial psychic phenomena. The film ‘Third Eye Spies’ follows laser physicist Russel Targ, who along with Hal Puthoff, was employed by the Defence Intelligence Agency to do some tests on allegedly ‘psychic’ test subjects at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970’s. This was at the height of the Cold War, when intelligence was coming out of Russia that the military were doing psychic research successfully. To cut a long story short, the experiments were successful and the program went top secret shortly after the scientists published their first results. A protocol for ‘viewing’ distant times and places in the minds eye was developed by their first talented subject, Ingo Swann. The program ran for over 20 years costing over 5 million dollars of military funding, which is actually very little for military projects. The technique was used for intelligence work for the CIA, DIA, NSA, the army, and the navy, including assisting the finding of lost aircraft and profiling of Russian bases, before being declassified in the mid 1990’s after a CIA report determined the technique wasn’t accurate enough, despite getting some good, statistically significant results.

After it was declassified, the instructors went over to the private sector and began teaching the technique to members of the general public. Two such instructors were Lyn Buchanan and Mel Riley, who met my guest today Lori Williams; and became her mentors. In 2001 Lori became the first non-military certified instructor. Her experience includes not only teaching the technique but working with law enforcement to assist in missing person cases, conducting professional sessions for corporations that have had a direct effect on profit margins, and working on archeological mysteries.

In this episode we have the fascinating proposition that what we call reality is in fact a hallucination we all agree on, to consider. We’ve already heard in this second series in Episode #28 from physicist Paul Davies on ‘The implications of Einstein’, that indeed matter is energy and as such the world we see as solid objects with space between them, isn’t truly like that. We’ve also heard from cognitive scientist Don Hoffman that we see the world optimised for ‘fitness’ in the evolutionary sense, and not for truth i.e not to see it as it actually is. So in the same vein in this episode we’re going to find out from a brilliant neuroscientist that we are in what he calls a ‘controlled hallucination’. That neuroscientist is none other than Anil Seth.

Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He is also the co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He has published over 100 scientific papers and is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford University Press publication ‘Neuroscience of Consciousness’. His TED talk ‘Your brain hallucinates your Conscious reality’ has more than 11 million views.

Is our subjective experience of Free Will, supported by the experimental evidence? If not, how do we take moral responsibility for our actions? Why do meditators, who’re used to watching their thoughts arise and pass without identifying with them, find this data easier to integrate?

In this episode, we have the tough job of evaluating the experimental evidence for the existence of Free Will. The debate has raged for centuries in Philosophy, but now with advances in neuroscience and psychology experiments, we have some actual physical evidence to examine, and its implications to reflect on. We’re going to discuss how most of those who accept this evidence have chosen to carry on as if it they still have Free Will, which sounds contradictory. Do the implications for personal moral responsibility require us to do that? We’re also going to get into meditation and Zen, as our guest today and another famous advocate of the illusion of free will, Sam Harris, are long term practitioners. It seems those who use some kind of mindfulness meditation, and hence are used to watching the way thoughts arise and pass without identifying with them, are less troubled by the idea that they may not have free will. What does all this mean for the reality of a ‘self’?

In this episode we explore a User Interface Theory of reality. Since the invention of the computer virtual reality theories have been gaining in popularity, often to explain some difficulties around the hard problem of consciousness; but also to explain other non-local anomalies coming out of physics and psychology, like ‘quantum entanglement’ or ‘out of body experiences’. 

As you will hear today the vast majority of cognitive scientists believe consciousness is an emergent phenomena from matter, and that virtual reality theories are science fiction or ‘Woowoo’ and new age. One of this podcasts jobs is to look at some of these Woowoo claims and separate the wheat from the chaff, so the open minded among us can find the threshold beyond which evidence based thinking, no matter how contrary to the consensus can be considered and separated from wishful thinking.

So who better than hugely respected cognitive scientist and User Interface theorist Don Hoffman to clarify all this.

Donald D Hoffman is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, where he studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and colour, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. So he is perfectly placed to comment on how we interpret reality.

What are the implications of Einstein’s predictions? Has our understanding of reality integrated the implications of this thinking? His General and Special theories of relativity have completely changed the way we see gravity, energy, mass, space and time, even size - but how? Physicists may find it easy to understand what his ideas mean; like this quote “The distinction between the past, the present and the future is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion”. But for us, the general public, just thinking that the the arrow of time is an illusion, is enough to give us a bad headache and leave us wishing that Newton was right after all. But that’s not what we do on Chasing Consciousness, our mission is the same as always, to update our world view to match new theories. Now this sounds like no small feat, but have no fear, all will be be clarified by a man with a skill for presenting complex ideas in a way we can all understand, one of the worlds most published popular science writers, Professor Paul Davies.

Paul Davies is a Cosmologist and Professor of Physics and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. His work has covered topics as far reaching as Cosmology, Quantum Fields and Astrobiology, with a sprinkling of the Search for Extra terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and cancer research to boot. He’s the bestselling author of almost thirty popular science books, his many awards include the Templeton Prize and the Faraday Prize of the Royal Society. He is a Member of the Order of Australia and even has an asteroid named after him! Quite a career!

How can out of body experiences be explained? What theory of reality could accomodate such a phenomenon?

Today we have the extraordinary topic of the science and physics of Out of Body Experiences to get our head around! Many brain scientists have reduced this common experience to a mix of physiological and brain chemical effects, maintaining that no perceiving consciousness actually leaves the body, rather it is a form of hallucination and distortion of body schema. Not knowing when these experiences will spontaneously occur has made them hard to study in the lab.

However, certain researchers have developed a method for inducing the experience, allowing for deeper study. Following that study some new theories of reality have developed that could include such an experience and even others like Near Death Experience or NDE, and Controlled Remote Viewing which we’re evaluating in this second series.

One such scientist is our guest today physicist Dr. Tom Campbell! He’s an experimental physicist who’s worked for over 20 years developing US missile systems for the Department of Defence, specialising in developing cutting edge technology, large-system simulation, technology development and integration, and complex system vulnerability and risk analysis.

He began researching altered states of consciousness with Bob Monroe at Monroe Laboratories in the early 1970s. He helped design experiments and develop the Binaural Beats technology for creating specific altered states, and became an experienced test subject and trainer too. After many years studying consciousness, and out of body experiences he wrote the book ‘My Big TOE’, as in ‘Theory of Everything’, which describes his model of existence and reality from both the physical and metaphysical points of view.

PART 1: Testing Out of Body Experiences

00:00 Intro

06:00 Balanced left right brain thinking

09:00 Out of Body Experience is a bad term, but neutral

13:00 Consciousness is not projected from the body

21:30 Testing Bob Monroe’s OBE phenomena

32:00 The experiment that confirmed it was real

36:00 Alpha Numeric information is not the same type as image, pattern or metaphor

46:00 The weirdest stories Tom’s encountered

55:00 Non-embodied consciousnesses encounters

01:05:00 Binaural beats to aid getting out of body explained

01:20:00 Theta brainwave is the state you need to be in to explore your consciousness

PART 2: The physics of Tom’s ‘My Big T.O.E’ (Theory of Everything)

01:25:00 Consciousness evolves by lowering entropy, finding more order and structure

Why is Panpsychism gaining popularity? Is it coherent to say consciousness emerged out of non-consciousness? What can we deduce from a universe fine tuned for life?

In this episode we have the important job of finding out what Panpsychism is all about, and why the philosophical position is gaining more and more traction in philosophy, but even with physicists and other scientists. The idea that consciousness is the fundamental nature of the physical world is by no means a new one, and it does seem to resolve some of the problems of how consciously experiencing lifeforms could have evolved out of non-conscious non-living material. But most materialists balk at the idea and consider it absolutely bonkers, for reasons we’ll find out as we attempt to pay respect to the criticisms of the position too.

So fortunately, to navigate this tricky philosophical quagmire we have one of the best known and most passionate supporters of panpsychism, author and professor of philosophy at Durham University Philip Goff. Philip’s research focuses on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview. He argues that the traditional approaches of materialism, that consciousness can be explained in terms of physical processes in the brain; and dualism, that consciousness is separate from the body and brain, face unresolvable difficulties.

In this episode we learn everything we need about how food relates to our mood and state of mind. We’re going to lay out the fundamentals of how different food groups and qualities of food influence directly our mental and physical health; how the gut species depletion and inflammation are key consequences of the changes we’re seeing in western industrial diet, and we can counter that tendency with some simple tricks.

Alex Laird is a medical herbalist with more than 20 years' clinical experience. Trained in biomedicine and plant pharmacology, she treats patients in the only NHS herbal clinic based in a UK hospital at Whipps Cross, and she is a fellow and council member of the College of Practitioners of Phytotherapy (CPP). She worked with Breast Cancer Haven UK for 20 years, using nutritional therapies for cancer. Alex has undertaken clinical research, is a visiting lecturer, has published numerous research papers, and is the co-founder of the charity Living Medicine. She is also the author of the new book ‘Root to stem’ which talks about seasonal foods and remedies for strong health and immunity that can be found growing literally in the hedgerow around your house!

Audio Note: There’s a short background sound at 10 mins, it only lasts for 5 mins and it was during an important a point about the role of feelings in reasoning, which was too crucial to the topic to cut out.

In this episode we have the fascinating topic of understanding how feelings play a part in reason and consciousness. We’re also going to be learning how feeling is different from sensing, and if internal feelings and homeostasis, which evolved far earlier than other elements of our perceptual systems, can tell us anything about the evolution of human consciousness.

Can we have conscious experiences after clinical death?

In this episode we have the bizarre phenomena of Near Death Experiences to examine. The intense experience reported by about %25 of patients whose hearts are restarted after a short time of clinical death, has fascinated researchers for many years going right back to Plato. However, advances in cardiology techniques in the last 50 years have permitted doctors to save many more people, and thus to study the phenomenon in a controlled manner: so, exactly how many people have the experiences, exactly how dead they were at the time and so to start assessing the controversial part of this discussion, whether these experiences can be explained in simply neurobiological terms or if there is evidence that consciousness can ‘survive’ clinical death, if that is in fact the best way to talk about it.

So who better to help us understand this than cardiologist, scientist and author Dr. Pim Van Lommel from The Netherlands. During his 35 year career as a Cardiologist, Dr. Van Lommel saw the need for a detailed study on this to nail down the physiological variables like medication, length of time without oxygen and to connect those to the psychological data, about the content of the experiences and how long they remained influential in the patients lives.

The prospective study he spearheaded was published in the respected Lancet medical journal in 2001, and his book about the research ‘Consciousness beyond life, the science of the near death experience’ was published in 2007. He also recently won second prize in the Bigelow Foundation for consciousness studies essay prize, which discusses the study and its implications.

How do we integrate the intense experiences of psychedelic therapy for long term benefits? Can we apply those learnings to existential exploration in general?

In this episode we have the fascinating topic of ‘psychedelic integration’ to get our head around. Integration is a crucial part of any psychotherapy process, but perhaps even more so when those suffering experience psychedelic compounds in their treatment program. Many subjects of the new psychedelic treatments for depression and ADHD, have life changing experiences that often go against everything they have come to believe about themselves and the world. So regardless of how positive that can be to the meaning of their lives, it’s clear that some pretty sensitive guidance and processing needs to take place for the therapy to shift their day to day life long-term. And interestingly the same tools we’ll discuss can be used for all of us to navigate our own existential exploration.

This episode covers the fascinating science of mindfulness meditation. The massive explosion in popularity of meditation, has brought about a quiet revolution to the frantic western mind with the result of a complete change in our societies approach to stress management, happiness and well being. Today we’re going to get to the bottom of what happens to the brain when we meditate and why it’s so beneficial. But we’re also going to find out what happens to our levels of happiness, satisfaction, mental health and physical health if we meditate regularly over a long period of time. We’re also going to think about how society and business at large will evolve if these techniques continue to be introduced to our schools and companies.

So who better to help us find out what all the buzz is about than award winning professor of clinical psychology at Santa Clara University, Dr. Shauna Shapiro. She’s a fellow of the Mind and Life Institute co-founded by the Dalai Lama, who we’ll be discussing a bit today. She also lectures about and leads mindfulness programs internationally; and she’s even brought mindfulness to pioneering companies including Cisco Systems and Google. She has published over 150 articles and is the author of several books, like ‘The art and science of Mindfulness’, and ‘Good Morning I love You’ and has just released The ‘Good morning I love you’ guided journal.

What we discuss in this Episode:

00:00 Intro

05:37 Study results: Increased attention, memory and academic success, lowered activation of the Amygdala, reaction to pain

09:00 Better regulation of the nervous system

10:00 Effects of longer term meditation practice

11:00 Our happiness base line can be changed with practice

13:30 Intention and repetition’s relation to neuroplasticity

16:00 Journalling to set intention and maintain practice

17:00 Journalling for memory, health, mood, immune system and sleep

18:00 Morning theta state - more malleable brain

20:00 Advice for beginners getting started on meditation

22:00 Breath as a tool for relaxation

24:20 ‘Name it to tame it’ - Increased resilience and acceptance

27:00 Historical undervaluing of the coping function of emotion

28:30 Emotions only last 30-90 seconds, apart from their intellectualisation

30:00 Rise of polarisation and negative bias hacking by media - Mindfulness and compassion as a solution

33:00 Self-compassion leads to wider compassion and implicit bias reduction

34:00 The insular (compassion centre of the brain) is muted when someone is very different to you.

35:00 Knee jerk reactions (amygdala) reduced with regular meditation

37:00 Shauna’s meditation workshops in the military and companies

References:

In this episode we have the challenging job of getting our head around the psychology of altered states of consciousness or ‘exceptional human experiences’ as today’s specialist calls them. Are they mere illusions of the mind? Does their ability to radically change our world view and sense of meaning in the world give them a special status in psychology and mental health? And how do we talk scientifically about significant similarities between such experiences across different times and cultures that appear to imply the existence of an alternative kind of ‘reality’ what ever ‘reality’ is.

Fortunately, to navigate this bag of worms, we have a researcher who has devoted his career to the study of these experiences both psychedelic and other, Dr. David Luke. David Luke is currently a module leader of the Psychology of Exceptional Human Experience in Greenwich Universities Psychology and Counselling Department, a course he has been running since 2009.

He is also currently an Honorary Senior Lecturer for the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Division of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London. He was President of the Parapsychological Association between 2009 and 2011, and received the Faculty's first Inspirational Teaching Award (2016) from the University of Greenwich.

In this episode we have the extraordinary theory of Biocentrism to consider: the hypothesis that the space, time and matter arose from life, and not the other way around. This theory obviously flies completely in the face of material science’s Darwinian view that life and consciousness evolved slowly out of ever more complex systems of matter.

Now we’ve heard in multiple interviews on the show so far that similar theories like Panpsychism, the hypothesis that consciousness is fundamental to the physical world, are hugely increasing in popularity and not only among philosophers but also among physicists, perhaps because many of the anomalies coming out of quantum experiments can be explained in a panpsychist model. But this is the first time as far as I know that a scientist has argued that life itself is fundamental to the physical world. Perhaps to many scientists it would sound absurd, but as the theory has been popularised by award winning Stem Cell biologist Robert Lanza, it seems important that we give this theory a closer look.

In this episode we look at an alternative child psychology approach to parenting and care-giving, than perhaps the one we’re used to from our own childhoods: one based on connection rather than threat based motivations. This episode is a little closer to home than usual, as a few years ago we hit the wall with our eldest boy, who after the birth of our second child when he was 6, became extremely aggressive and uncontrollable. This led us to try Hand in Hand parenting, and we got an improvement of wellbeing and behaviour within just 2 weeks!

We were scheduled to be speaking with the founder, child psychologist Patty Wipfler. Patty sent her apologies as sadly her health had taken a turn, but what a silver lining as Patty sent us Hand in Hand’s program director and Clinical psychologist Dr. Maya Coleman Ph.D. Since 2007 she has been providing trauma treatment for children and support for parents. She spent 3 years at the Children’s National Medical Center giving behavioural and developmental consultancy, and last year joined Hand in Hand as program director.

In this episode, we have the tough task of examining the evidence that our society is losing its ability for prolonged attention, focus and concentration. We talk about what are the main factors leading to this, and what we can do to mediate it individually, but also collectively through regulation if necessary, before it becomes intergenerational. Is this also another symptom, like depression and addiction, of growing up with less and less face to face social connection and non-focused attention?

Fortunately today’s guest, the New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari, has written about Depression and Addiction, and his new book “Stolen Focus: What you can’t pay attention and how to think deeply again”, focuses on this very issue of Attention.

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:

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:

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:

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?)

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.

'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.

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:

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

How important is story to to human understanding?  

Today we take a step away from science per se, to look at the role of story in the formation of our world views, for generations our only method alongside direct experience of understanding the world, as opposed the more modern method of hard data from scientific research that we tend to examine on Chasing Consciousness. So we’re continuing the all important job of our first series: to establish the limits of what science can know. And today we’re going to start understanding how some of the story like information found in the psyche, and perhaps in the way our lives unfold, can give us clues to the nature of human reality and so support our scientific research in psychology.   

So who better to help us navigate this troublesome academic area than award winning social anthropologist Dr Carla Stang! Carla earned her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.  She has held the position of Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and Associate Researcher at the University of Sydney, and was awarded the Frank Bell Memorial Prize for Anthropology from Cambridge. Based on her fieldwork with the Mehinaku, Carla wrote a book called “A Walk to the River in Amazonia” which we’ll be talking about in a bit. She writes for the Dark Mountain collective which advocates ‘uncivilisation’, and has created a mysterious new project ‘Imaginal Futures’. Most recently she co-created the first Masters of Philosophy at Schumacher College, and is currently at work on a new book, an ecological, cross-disciplinary and collaborative project.

What we discuss in this episode: 

Part 1 

00:00 Tarzan of Greystoke

10:00 How much of a problem is our propensity for narrative over fact? 

14:00 Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey or Monomyth examined

24:00 Critiquing the destructive power and domination of others presented in the mono myth

40:00 The uninitiated: we’re a society of children

49:00 The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdoch and healing the wounded feminine

55:00 Different types of ‘events of consciousness’ and mythos

Part 2 

1:05:30 The importance of interdisciplinary research to get big picture understanding

1:17:00 What’s quotidian Amazonian life like; ‘A Walk to the River in Amazonia’ Carla’s 2011 book

1:53:00 Imagining the stories of the future we want, we can form the world

References:  

How easy is it to change our Habits?

Today we have the important job of working out what neuroplasticity is all about. 50 years ago we thought the adult brain remained the same after reaching maturity. Now since the discovery that in fact our neural networks remain ‘plastic’, which means adaptable, a host of research has opened up fuelled by our desire to thrive and improve rather than just survive. Along with that knowledge, as so often with popular science, has come a host of exaggerations and quick fix claims, that prey on the wishful thinker, and today we’re aiming to sort the facts form the fiction and really understand what can change in our neural networks in adulthood and perhaps even offer some tools to facilitate that.

Who better to discuss this with than developmental neurobiologist turned freelance science writer Moheb Costandi. He writes stories and articles for various popular publications like New Scientist and the Guardian, is often cited from his Neurophilosophy blog, and is the author of the books Neuroplasticity and 50 Human Brain Ideas You Really Need to Know.

Things we discuss in this episode:

00:00 A good psychology teacher

04:30 The controversial history of neuroplasticity

11:46 Longterm potentiation (LTP)

12:41 Stem Cells and the tipping point for neuroplasticity

14:47 What’s the significance of neuro-genesis?

16:00 What actually happens when neurons adapt?

18:00 Electro-chemical neurocommunication at high speed

22:00 Are there neurons all over the body?

23:30 The gut’s enteric nervous system (ENS)

25:00 Calling out spurious false rumours about neuroplasticity

31:40 ‘Awareness of plasticity doesn’t empower us in any way’

33:00 The wellness, self help and new age industries have manipulated neuroplasticity to exploit the public

37:05 Can we use plasticity to reprogram negative habits?

40:30 The bidirectional link between brain and behaviour.

44:00 The longer we have a particular behaviour the stronger those pathways become

47:00 Stress hormones stimulate plasticity. Negative emotions encode memories more strongly.

50:00 Microglia: the brain’s immune cells

53:00 Plasticity even in white matter tracts of myelin

55.00 Mitigating age-related cognitive decline using plasticity

01:01:00 Learning a musical instrument or new language can help mitigate dementia

1:05:00 Are there any limits to how plastic the mind can be?

1:12:00 Are brain computer-interfaces going to cause a plasticity adaptation in the brain?

1:16:00 Technology could cause a lowering of brain function rather than a bionic super race

References:

How much of our consciousness is shared?

In this episode we have the fascinating job of trying to get to get to grips with Jung’s concept of the Collective unconscious. I’ve always loved Jung and I think his ideas can offer a brilliant framework in which to maximise our mental health, to use life’s challenges to harvest meaningful lessons, and just to navigate the subjective experience of being alive. But this is a science podcast, so we do want to get clear on what is just a useful idea and what is a scientifically proven reality. Jung was very shy to speak about scientifically unprovable ideas because he was a rigorous academic, but as his career progressed he was encouraged more and more to elaborate on the tools he was using with his patients; and as we’ll discuss today he felt there was a huge value in acknowledging the active role of what lies outside of the sphere of testable knowledge, rather than just dismissing it as non-existent.

So I am extremely happy to have Jungian analyst Dr Monika Wikman with us to help locate the threshold between these two very different fields of knowledge and to explain in detail the collective unconscious. Monika is the author of ‘Alchemy and the Rebirth of consciousness’ and received her PHD in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology and then deepened her knowledge of Jungian Analysis at the Jung-Von Franz Center for Depth psychology in Zurich. She is an expert on topics including the anima mundi and environmental issues of our time, archetypal phenomena surrounding death, dreams, active imagination, and alchemy. Her work with the dying culminated in a research project called ‘Dreams of the Dying’ at UC San Diego Medical Center, which is the foundation of her most recent book, Alchemy of Life, Death and the Wedding Veil.

What we discuss in this Episode:

Part 1

12:20 The humility of the ego to identify suffering that creates an opening for us to grow: Dissent, the renewal of consciousness

14:30 What is the Collective Unconscious?

19:00 How can motif’s from ancient myths appear in the minds of those who’ve never learned about these myths?

20:00 The healing function of connecting with this archetypal strata of consciousness

29:00 The importance of dreams to scientific discovery

40:00 Monika’s ‘2 weeks to live to cancer free overnight’ experience

50:00 Ego consciousness making a bridge to the symbolic field of the collective unconscious

Part 2

1:03:00 How do we use knowledge of the collective unconscious in therapy? 

1:11:20 Chaos as a catalyst forcibly setting off a chain reaction of transformation

1:15:00 The Implicate and Explicate order, David Bohm and the big question about where does all this information reside

1:27:30 ‘Exploring Holotropic Breathing’ 

1:35:00 Peak experiences, psychedelics and the dangers of getting hooked on transformation

References:

What does entanglement actually mean?

So in this episode we’re going to be trying to get our heads around one of the most extraordinary phenomena ever recorded in subatomic physics: Quantum Entanglement. Famously dismissed by Einstein as ‘Spooky action at a distance’, it has been proved to exist in the lab over and over again since then. This non-local phenomenon is when sub-atomic particles remain connected so that the physical properties of one will affect the other, no matter what the distance is between them. It’s been in the news a lot recently not only because it has been photographed by a team at the University of Glasgow, but also because of a host of successful so called ‘Teleportation’ experiments, in which entanglement has been used to send information instantaneously between two computer chips that have no causal connection between them whatsoever. I believe the implications of this non-local phenomenon are among the most important scientific discoveries of our time, most importantly to update our purely classical ‘cause-and-effect’ understanding of the world. But it also begs the question, through what medium is that information passing between those two entangled particles, if not through Space and over time?

To help us get our heads around this mind-bending reality is theoretical Physicist Dr Chris Fields, an independent scientist interested in both the physics and the cognitive neuroscience underlying that human perception of matter in space and time.

Chris began his career as an experimental physicist, obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science at the University of Colorado and was an early developer of automated DNA sequence analysis tools at the Human Genome Project. He has published over 130 peer reviewed papers in nuclear physics, artificial intelligence, molecular biology and cognitive psychology.

What we discuss in this episode:

00:00 The Human Genome Project

07:00 What is Entanglement?

15:30 “Spooky action at a distance”

16:24 Einstein’s mission to remove non-locality from physics

20:00 Quantum theory challenges all classical intuitions

22:30 Re-think what we mean by locality

22:42 Is the intuition of separability false?

26:24 What Is spin?

29:12 The difficulty of using classical analogies for quantum concepts

31:06 The difference between quantities and qualities of information

35:00 John Wheeler and the way you ask questions changing the answers you get.

37:00 The interaction of information exchanging systems as a model for panpsychism

41:00 Hiding the distinction between Semantics and Syntax in information theory

43:36 Predictability VS Meaning

44:30 Observation is interaction

47:50 Is objectivity achievable? Intersubjective agreement.

50:00 The disaster of ‘Shut up and calculate’

52:00 John Wheeler’s ‘Participatory Universe’ bridging the gap

53:00 Physical systems are question askers and answer receivers

54:00 Was Wheeler a panpsychist?

Part 2:

58:00 The implications of Entanglement

1:02:00 What does it mean to give and receive information to and from the world?

1:10:00 Are the observer and the system they are interacting with not in fact one and the same thing?

1:17:00 La Place: Non-local forces like gravity imply that all the information about the system must be uniformly available to the whole system.

1:23:00 What effect will quantum understanding have on the general world view of society in the future?

1:28  Does Meditation lead to a non-separate world view?

1:34 Moving attention and interest away from the self

References: