20__transcript.txt

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast,
where we discuss science
and science-based tools
for everyday life.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor
of neurobiology
and ophthalmology
at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today my guest is
Dr. Sam Harris.
Dr. Sam Harris did his
undergraduate training
in philosophy at
Stanford University
and then went on to do his
doctorate in neuroscience
at the University of
California at Los Angeles.
He is well known
as an author who
has written about
everything from meditation
to consciousness, free will.
And he holds many
strong political views
that he's voiced on social
media and in the content
of various books as they relate
to philosophy and neuroscience.
During today's
episode, I mainly talk
to Dr. Harris about his
views and practices related
to meditation,
consciousness, and free will.
In fact, he made
several important points
about what a proper meditation
practice can accomplish.
Prior to this episode, I
thought that meditation
was about deliberately changing
one's conscious experience
in order to achieve
things such as deeper
relaxation, a heightened
sense of focus or ability
to focus generally,
elevated memory, and so on.
What Sam taught me and what
you'll soon learn as well
is that while
meditation does indeed
hold all of those
valuable benefits,
the main value of a
meditation practice,
or perhaps the greater value
of a meditation practice,
is that it doesn't
just allow one
to change their
conscious experience,
but it actually can
allow a human being
to view consciousness itself.
That is to understand what the
process of consciousness is.
And in doing so, to
profoundly shift the way
that one engages with the
world and with oneself
in all practices, all
environments, and at all times,
both in sleep and
in waking states.
And in that way
making meditation
perhaps the most potent
and important portal
by which one can access novel
ways of thinking and being
and viewing one's
life experience.
We also discussed the so-called
mind-body problem and issues
of duality and free will.
Concepts from philosophy and
neuroscience that, fortunately,
thanks to valuable experiments
and deep thinking on the part
of people like Dr.
Sam Harris and others,
is now leading people to
understand really what free
will is and isn't.
Where the locus of free will
likely sits in the brain,
if it indeed resides
in the brain at all.
And what it means to
be a conscious being
and how we can modify our
conscious states in ways that
allow us to be more functional.
We also discuss perception,
both visual perception auditory
perception, and especially
interesting to me,
and I think as well, hopefully
to you, time perception,
which we know is very
elastic in the brain.
The literal frame
rate by which we
process our conscious experience
can expand and contract
dramatically depending
on our state of mind
and how conscious we are
about our state of mind.
So we went deep into
that topic as well.
Today's discussion was indeed
an intellectual deep dive
into all the topics that I
mentioned a few moments ago,
but it also included
many practical tools.
In fact, I pushed
Sam to share with us
what his specific practices
are and how we can all
arrive at a clearer and better
understanding of a meditation
practice that we can
each and all apply.
So that we can derive these
incredible benefits, not just
the ones related to stress
and focus and enhanced memory,
but the ones that relate
to our consciousness.
That is to our deeper sense
of self and to others.
Several times during
today's episode,
I mentioned the Waing Up app.
The Waking Up app was
developed by Sam Harris,
but I want to emphasize that my
mention of the app is in no way
a paid promotional.
Rather the Waking Up
app is one that I've
used for some period of time
now and find very, very useful.
I have family members
that also use it.
Other staff members here
at the Huberman Lab podcast
use it because we find it
to be such a powerful tool.
Sam has generously offered
Huberman Lab podcast listeners
a 30-day completely free
trial of the Waking Up app.
If any of you want to
try it, you can simply go
to wakingup.com/huberman to
get that 30-day free trial.
During today's
discussion, we didn't just
talk about meditation
consciousness and free will.
We also talked
about psychedelics.
Both their therapeutic
applications for the treatment
of things like
depression and PTSD,
but also the use
of psychedelics.
And we discussed Sam's
experiences with psychedelics
as they relate to expanding
one's consciousness.
I also asked Sam about
his views and practices
related to social media.
Prompted in no small part by
his recent voluntary decision
to close down his
Twitter account.
So we talked about his
rationale for doing that,
how he feels about doing that.
And I think you'll find that
to be very interesting as well.
Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize
that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research
roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my
desire and effort to bring
zero-cost-to-consumer
information about science
and science-related tools
to the general public.
In keeping with
that theme, I'd like
to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast.
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And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Sam Harris.
Dr. Sam Harris.
SAM HARRIS: [LAUGHTER]
ANDREW HUBERMAN: We're
just talking about this.
SAM HARRIS: Yes, doctor.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
are indeed a doctor.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
SAM HARRIS: I cannot save
your life, but I am--
I might save your non-existent
soul if we talk long enough.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: [LAUGHTER]
Well, neither of us
are clinicians, but
we are both brain
explorers from the
different perspectives.
Some overlapping.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: And I'm
really excited to have
this conversation.
I've been listening to
your voice for many years
learning from you
for many years.
And I'd be remiss
if I didn't say
that my father, who's
also a scientist,
is an enormous fan of
your Waking Up app.
SAM HARRIS: Nice.
That's great.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: And
has spent a lot of time
over the last few years.
He's in his late 70s.
He's almost 80.
He's a theoretical
physicist walking
to the park near his
apartment and spending
time meditating with the app.
Or sometimes
separate from the app
but using the same sorts
of meditations in his head.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: So he kind
of toggles back and forth.
And even-- I
shouldn't say-- even
but-- yes, even in
his late 70s, has
reported that it
has significantly
shifted his awareness of self
and his conscious experience
of things happening
in and around him.
And he was somebody
who, I think,
already saw himself as
a pretty aware person.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Thinking about
quantum mechanics and the rest.
So a thank you from
him indirectly.
SAM HARRIS: Oh, that's great.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: A thank
you from me now directly.
And I really want to use that as
a way to frame up what I think
is one of the more interesting
questions in not just science
and philosophy and
psychology but all of life,
which is what is this
thing that we call a self?
As far as I know, we have
not localized the region
in the brain that
can entirely account
for our perception of self.
There are areas, of course,
that regulate proprioception,
our awareness of where
our limbs are in space.
Maybe even our awareness of
where we are in physical space.
There are such circuits,
as we both know.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: But when
we talk about sense of self,
I have to remember this kind
of neuroscience 101 thing
that we always say.
When you teach memory, you
say you wake up every morning,
and you remember who you are.
You know who you are.
Most people do.
Even if they lack memory systems
in the brain for whatever
reason, pretty much everyone
seems to know who they are.
What are your thoughts on what
that whole thing is about?
And do we come into the
world feeling that way?
I would appreciate answers from
the perspective of any field--
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: --including
neuroscience, of course.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
Well, big question.
I mean, the problem is we
use the term self in so
many different ways, right.
And there's one sense
of that term, which
is the target of
meditation, and it's
the target of deconstruction
by the practice and by,
as you said, any
surrounding philosophy.
So you'll hear, and
you'll hear it from me,
that this self is
an illusion, right.
And that there's a
psychological freedom that
can be experienced on the
other side of discovering
it to be an illusion.
And some people don't
like that framing.
Some people would insist that
it's not so much an illusion,
but it's a construct, and
it's not what it seems, right.
But it's not that every use of
the term self is illegitimate.
And there are certain types of
selves that are not illusory.
I mean, I'm not saying
that people are illusions.
I'm not saying that you
can't talk about yourself
as distinct-- yourself
as the whole person
and with as
psychological continuity
with your past experience
as being distinct
from the person and
psychological continuity
of some other person, right.
I mean-- because
obviously, we have
to be able to
conserve those data.
It's not fundamentally
mysterious
that you're going
to wake up tomorrow
morning still being
psychologically continuous
with your past and
not my past, right.
And if we swapped lives, that
would demand some explanation.
So the illusorines
of the self doesn't
cut against any of
those obvious facts.
So the sense of self
that is illusory.
And again, we might want to
talk about self in other modes
because there's just
a lot of interest
there psychologically and
ultimately scientifically.
The thing that doesn't exist--
it certainly doesn't
exist as it seems
and I would want to argue
that it actually is just
a proper illusion,
is this the sense
that there is a subject
interior to experience
in addition to experience.
So most people feel
like they're having
an experience of the world.
And they're having their--
an experience of their bodies
in the world.
And in addition
to that, they feel
that they are a subject internal
to the body, very likely
in the head.
Most people feel like they're
behind their face as a kind
of locus of awareness and
thought and intention and that
every-- it's almost like
they're-- you're a passenger
inside your body.
You don't-- most people don't
feel identical to their bodies.
And they can
imagine this is sort
of the origin, the
psychological origin,
the folk psychological origin,
of a sense of that there
might be a soul that could
survive the death of the body.
I mean, most people are
what my friend Paul Blum
calls common sense do lists.
You-- you're just the
default expectation
seems to be that whatever the
relationship between the mind
and the body, there
is this-- there's
some promise of
separability there, right.
That the-- and whenever you
really push hard on the science
side and say, well, no,
no, the mind is really
just what the brain
is doing, that
begins to feel more and more
counterintuitive to people,
and there still seems
some residual mystery
that at death maybe something
is going to lift off the brain
and go elsewhere, right.
So there's this sense of
dualism that many people have.
And obviously, that's supported
by many religious beliefs.
But this feeling it is a
very peculiar starting point.
People feel that in a--
they don't feel identical
to their experience.
As a matter of experience,
they feel like they're
on the edge of experience.
Somehow appropriating
it from the side.
You kind of on the
edge of the world.
And the world is out there.
Your body is, in
some sense, an object
in the world which is
different from the world.
The boundary of your
skin is still meaningful.
You can sort of loosely
control your body.
I mean, you can't control it--
you can control your gross
and subtle voluntary
motor movements,
but you can't-- you're
not controlling everything
your body is doing.
You're not controlling
your heartbeat
and your hormonal
secretions and all of that.
And so there's a
lot that's going
on that is in the dark for you.
And then you give someone an
instruction to meditate, say.
And you say, OK, well,
let's examine all of this
from the first person side.
Let's look for this
thing you're calling I.
And again, I is not
identical to the body.
People feel like their
hands are out there.
And when-- if they're
going to meditate,
they're going to close
their eyes very likely.
And now they're going to
pay attention to something.
They're going to pay attention
to the breath or the sounds.
And it's from the point of view
of being a locus of attention
that is now aiming attention
strategically at an object,
like the breath, that there's
this dualism that is set up.
And ultimately, the ultimate
promise of meditation.
I mean, there are
really two levels
at which you could be
interested in meditation.
One is very straightforward and
remedial and non paradoxical
and very well subscribed.
And it's the usual set of claims
about all the benefits you're
going to get from meditation.
So you're going to
lower your stress,
and you're going to
increase your focus,
and you're going to stave
off cortical thinning,
and there's all
kinds of good things
that science is saying
meditation will give you.
And none of that entails
really drilling down
on this paradoxical claim
that the self is an illusion
or anything else of that sort.
But from my point of
view, the real purpose
of meditation and
its real promise
is not in this long
list of benefits.
And I'm not discounting
any of those
though the science for many
of them is quite provisional.
It's in this deeper claim that
if you look for this thing
you're calling I. If
you look for the sense
that there's a thinker
in addition to the mirror
rising of the next thought,
say, you won't find that thing.
And you can-- what's more,
you cannot find it in a way
that's conclusive and
that matters, right.
And it has-- there's
a host of benefits
that follow from that
discovery which are quite
a bit deeper and more
interesting than engaging
meditation on the
side of its benefits.
You know, de-stressing,
increasing focus,
and all the rest.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have a
number of questions related--
SAM HARRIS: Sure.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: --to
what you just said.
And first of all, I agree that
the evidence that meditation
can improve focus,
reduce stress, et cetera.
It's there.
It's not an enormous pile of
evidence, but it's growing.
And--
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: --I
think that especially
for some of the shorter
meditations, which
I these days view more
as perceptual exercises.
I've talked about this
in the podcast before.
But for those who haven't heard
it before about perception.
You can have extra perception
extending to things
beyond the confines
of your skin.
Interception, which
is, I think, also
includes the surface of the
skin but everything inward.
And meditation through eyes
closed typically involving
some sort of attentional
spotlighting, something
we'll get into more.
Interior receptive versus
external receptive events,
et cetera, including thoughts.
And-- so I think of--
at a basic level
meditation as somewhat
of a perceptual exercise.
You can tell me where
you disagree there,
and I would expect and
hope that you would.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: But I would
like to just touch on this idea
that you brought up because
it's such an interesting one.
Of this idea that our bodies
are containers and that
we somehow view
ourselves as passengers
within those containers.
That's certainly
been my experience.
And the image that
I have is of--
as you say, that is
of myself or of people
out there that sit a few
centimeters below the surface
or that sit entirely
in their head.
And, of course,
the brain and body
are connected through
the nervous system.
I think sometimes
a brain is used
to replace a nervous
system, and that
can get us into trouble
in terms of coming up
with real directions
and definitions.
But the point is that
there is something special
about the real
estate in the head.
I think for as much
as my laboratory,
and many other scientists
are really interested
in brain-body connections
through the nervous system
and other organ systems that
the nervous system binds
that if you cut
off all my limbs,
I'm going to be different, but
I'm fundamentally still Andrew.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Whereas if we were
to lesion a couple of
square millimeters out
of my parietal cortex,
it's an open question
as to whether or not I would
still seem as much like Andrew
to other people and to myself--
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: --even.
And so there is something
fundamentally different
about the real estate
in the cranial vault.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
I mean, we are--
ANDREW HUBERMAN: You can
even remove both of my eyes,
I'd still be Andrew.
And those are two pieces of
my central nervous system
that are fundamental to my
daily life, but I'd still be me.
Whereas-- and this
doesn't, I think,
just apply to memory systems.
I mean, I think
there are regions
of the frontal cortex
that, when destroyed,
have been shown to modify
personality and self-perception
in dramatic ways.
So it's a sort of obvious
point once it's made,
but I do think it's worth
highlighting because there
does seem to be something
special about being
in the head.
The other thing is that
sitting a few centimeters
below the surface or
riding in this container
makes sense to me.
Except I wonder if
you've ever experienced
a shift as I have when
something very extreme happens.
Let's use the negative
example of all of a sudden
you're in a fear state.
All of a sudden, it feels as
if your entire body is you
or is me.
And now I need to get this
thing-- the whole container
and me to some place of
safety in whatever form.
This is also true, I
think, in ecstatic states--
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: --where
you can feel really--
when people say embodied,
I wonder whether or not
we normally oscillate below
the surface of our body.
When I say oscillate,
I mean in neural terms.
I mean, maybe our
sensory experience
is not truly at
the bodily surface
but sits below the
bodily surface more
at the level of organ
systems and within our head.
And then certain
things that jolt us--
our autonomic nervous system
into heightened states
bring us into states of--
bring us closer to the
surface and therefore include
all of us.
Again, I don't want to take us
down a mechanistic description
of something that doesn't exist.
But does any of that
resonate in terms
of how you are thinking
about or describing the self?
SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah.
There's a lot there.
First, on the point of
the brain being the locus
of what we are as minds.
Yeah, I mean, there
are people who
will insist that sort of
the whole nervous system
has to be thought of as a--
when you're talking
about our emotional life
and the insulas
connection to the gut.
And just the sense of self
extends beyond the brain.
But I totally take your
point that a brain transplant
is a coherent
idea, and you would
expect to go with the brain
rather than with the viscera.
And so, in that
sense, we really are
the old philosophical
thought experiment
of being a brain in a VAT.
I mean, we essentially
are already--
the VAT is our skull, and we're
virtually in that situation.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
A horrible movie.
I'm sorry I can't
help but interrupt.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: When
I was a teenager,
my sister and I used
to go to the movies
every once in a while,
and we'd trade off
who could pick the movie.
And she took me to see once
the movie Boxing Helena.
SAM HARRIS: Oh yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
David Lynch film--
SAM HARRIS: Which I
never saw that again.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--where he amputates
the limbs of a woman who he's
obsessed by and keeps her.
It's a really horrible--
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: --film.
And about 20 minutes into it,
my sister just turned to me
and said, I'm so sorry.
And the question there
was whether or not
two siblings should actually
persist in a movie like that.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: And we
decided to persist in the movie
so that we could
laugh about it later.
But it was rather disturbing.
I don't recommend the movie.
Nor do I recommend
seeing it with a sibling.
But in that movie, the woman,
he takes her as a container
and restricts her movement.
Quite sadistic and
horrible thing really.
David Lynch, interesting
mind perhaps.
But the idea was to question
how much of the person
persists in the absence of their
ability to move, et cetera.
Could there be love?
Could there be these
other affections?
Anyway, a rather
extreme example.
But one that still haunts me.
And I suppose I'm
thinking about still now.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.
SAM HARRIS: Well, so just
to follow that point,
there's a lot about us that we
don't have access to unless we
enact it physically.
Like if I ask you, do you
still know how to ride a bike?
There's no place in
your memory where
you can inspect but just
sitting in your chair
that you've retained
the knowledge of how
to ride a bike.
Procedural memory
is different from
semantic or episodic memory.
If I asked you, do
you know your address?
Yes, you can recall your
address just sitting there.
But if you had had a micro
stroke that neatly dissected
out your ability to
ride a bike and left
everything else
intact, you might
think you could ride a bike.
But suddenly, you
stand up next to one.
And you have no idea
what to do with it.
And that would be
a discovery that
would only happen if
you were motorically
engaged with that object.
And I'm sure we could
probably come up
with 100 things about us
that really seem core to us
and not separable from
our personhood which
seemed to only get
invoked when we're
out they're moving in the world,
and we have limbs, et cetera.
No, it's the seat
of consciousness,
the right framework
to talk about all
of this, from my
point of view, is
consciousness and its contents.
So we have consciousness.
The fact that there's something
that is like to be us,
the fact that the world
and our internal experience
is illuminated.
It has a qualitative character.
And then, there's
the question of what
is that qualitative character?
What kinds of information
do we have access to?
What does it feel like to be us?
How do different states
of arousal change that?
So you talked about fear.
Yeah, fear can change
a lot of things.
And various neurological
deficits, or you
can add drugs to the mix.
You add psychedelics
that radically transform
the contents of consciousness.
From my point of
view, consciousness
itself is simply the
cognizance, the awareness,
that is the flood lights
by which any of that stuff
appears.
So consciousness doesn't change.
But its contents change.
And to come back to meditation
for a second, many people
think meditation
is about changing
the contents of consciousness.
There are some contents you
want to get rid of like anxiety.
Other contents you
want to encourage,
like calm, and unconditional
love, or some other classically
pleasant, prosocial emotion.
And that's all fine.
That's all possible.
But the real wisdom of
the 2000-year-old wisdom
of meditation that really is the
chewy center of the Tootsie Pop
is a recognition of what
consciousness itself is always
already like regardless
of the contents in it
and the changes in contents.
And this is why we
might talk about this.
But this is why they're
mutually compatible.
Psychedelics and meditation,
for me, are somewhat orthogonal.
Because psychedelics is all
about making wholesale changes
to the contents
of consciousness.
And there's some wonderful
consequences of doing that.
There can be some harrowing
and terrifying consequences
of doing that.
But generally speaking,
I think used wisely,
they can be incredibly valuable.
And the therapeutic
potential there is enormous.
But the crucial disjunction
here is that there really
is something to recognize about
ordinary waking consciousness,
the consciousness that's
compatible with my driving
a car to get here on time.
You don't have to have the
pyrotechnics of being on LSD
to see to transcend the
central illusion that I'm
saying is the thing
to be transcended,
which is the sense that there
is a duality between subject
and object in every
moment of experience.
And to take it back to something
you said about just all
of our different modes
in ordinary life,
the interesting thing is I
think people are constantly
losing their sense of self.
And they're not aware of it.
And there's probably an
analogy to the visual system
here, which is to visual
saccade, which perhaps you've
spoken about at some
point on your podcast.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Not enough.
So please.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
So what happens every
time we move our eyes,
this is called a saccade.
And we do that about three times
a second or so just normally.
There is the region
of motor cortex
that affects that
movement sends what's
called an efferent copy of
that motor movement, which
is used as information
that propagates back
to visual cortex, that
suppresses the data of vision
while the eyes are moving.
Because otherwise if
you weren't doing that,
every time you
moved your eyes, it
would seem like the visual scene
itself was lurching around.
And people can experience
this for themselves
if they just touch one of
their eyeballs on the side,
not all that hard,
and kind of jiggle it.
And then, you can
roll it around.
You can jiggle it
from side to side.
You can see a movement
of the eyeball that's
not governed by your
oculomotor system
delivers a jiggling
of the world.
Because your brain is
not anticipating it
in the same way.
And you're not producing
that same predictive copy
of the movement.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's
a little bit like--
we have some action sports
filmmakers on our staff
here that the gimbal,
that holds an iPhone,
like you see the
kids on surfboards
or skateboards or something.
They're going to hold a
phone while moving around
or the people, the
vloggers-- does anyone
even still use that for phrase?
SAM HARRIS: I don't know.
I guess.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Moving around
and it's image stabilization,
essentially, that keeps
the camera steady.
And these are more than
cameras, of course,
for those listening,
point at my eyes.
But they do far more than
just what a camera would do.
But this internal system
of image stabilization, I
can see perhaps where
you're going with this,
that it allows us to remain in
a self-referencing scheme, as
opposed to paying attention
to just how confusing it
is to track the visual
world at some level.
SAM HARRIS: Well, actually
where I'm going is,
that people are having this
suppression of vision three
times a second on average.
And they're not experiencing it.
You're effectively going blind.
And you're not noticing it.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's very fast.
SAM HARRIS: Yes, it's very fast.
Now there's an analogous
suppression, I would say,
of the sense of self that
occurs every time attention gets
absorbed significantly
in its object.
We even have this concept of
losing yourself in your work.
Classic flow experiences
have this quality.
And this tends to be why
they're so rewarding.
If you're in some athletic
activity or an aesthetic one,
or you could be having
sex, or whatever
it is, some peak experience,
its peakness usually
entails there being
some brief period
where there was no distance
between you and the experience.
For that moment,
you were no longer
looking over your own shoulder
or anticipating the next moment
or trying to get somewhere,
where you weren't,
or micromanaging errors.
There's just the flow of unity
with whatever the experience
is, a surfer on the wave.
And we love those experiences.
And then we are continually
abstracted away from them
by our thinking about them.
We're thinking, oh my
god, that was so good,
or how do I get back to that?
Or you're looking at a sunset.
It's the most beautiful
sunset you've ever seen.
And then you're continually
interrupting the experience
of merely seeing it with
a commentary about how
amazing this is.
And I wonder, what real
estate prices are here?
I mean, is it possible
that I could move here.
And your mind is just
continually narrating
a conversation you're having
with yourself, however
paradoxically.
I mean, you're telling
yourself things
that you already know as
though there are two of you
rather often.
I'm looking for--
which is the water.
And it's, oh, there it is.
But I'm the one seeing it.
Who am I saying,
oh, there it is to.
Is there someone else
who needs to be informed
about the thing I already saw.
So there's something about
our internal dialogue
that is paradoxical.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Is there
any neurologic condition
call it soulectomy or anything
like that where somehow people
feel more unified with the
self on a continual basis,
the observer and
the actor within?
State more as a
complete sentence.
Is there any known
neurological syndrome--
makes it sound like a bad thing,
but it could be a good thing.
--whereby people
feel that the actor
and the observer within them
are unified continually?
SAM HARRIS: There's
not a pathological one.
Some the work on the
default-mode network
suggests that that's at
least part of the story.
So the default-mode
network, which
has been talked about a
lot of late because it
has come up both in the
meditation literature
and in the psychedelic
literature.
But its original discovery
was that-- and the reason
why I was called the
default mode was is
that in virtually every
neuroimaging experiment ever
run, they found that between
tasks, when the brain was just
in its default state, these
midline structures would
increase their activity.
And then they would
reliably diminish
whenever the person in
the scanner was on task.
And usually, that meant
some outward looking
visual discrimination task.
But it could be visual.
It could be semantic.
But it tends to be
their eyes are open.
And they're paying
attention to something
that's being broadcast to
them through monitor goggles,
or they're looking at a mirror
that's showing them a computer
monitor.
But so the general
insight was, there
are these midline
structures in the brain that
seem to be increasing
their activity when
the brain is idling
between tasks, waiting
for something to happen.
And then further
experiments found
tasks that actually upregulated
activity there beyond baseline.
And those tasks seem
to be self referential.
So that when you ask people--
you give them a list of words.
And you say, well, do any
of these apply to you?
Or you ask people
to think about--
Actually, one experiment I did.
When you're challenging
people's beliefs, when you're
challenging beliefs
that have more
of a personal significance, like
political or religious beliefs,
you get an upregulation
in these regions
as opposed to just generic
beliefs about you're
in Los Angeles.
This is a table.
That is something to which
people are not holding fast
as a matter of identity.
So anyway, both meditation
and psychedelics
seem to suppress activity
in these regions, which
we know are associated with
both self-talk, mind-wandering,
and explicit acts of
self representation.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Could we say that they
are somewhat
autobiographical because they
access memory systems?
And in the way you're
describing them,
and in the way that
a colleague of mine,
who's been a guest
on this podcast--
I don't know if you've
interacted with him before.
But I think you'd very much
enjoy whatever interaction you
would have. --is David Spiegel.
He's our associate
chair of psychiatry.
He and his father
actually-- his father
then he founded hypnosis as
a valid clinical practice
in psychiatry.
And hypnosis, which is obviously
a heightened sense of attention
with deep relaxation, is
known to dramatically suppress
the default-mode network.
He talks about this a lot.
And I always wonder as
we take down activity
within the default-mode
network, what what surfaces
in its place, does that
somehow reflect that the two
are normally in a push-pull?
Because that's not
necessarily the case.
When I fall asleep,
I can hallucinate.
But that doesn't mean
that during the day,
the fact that I'm
looking at objects
is what's preventing
me from hallucinating.
If I close my eyes,
I can get imagery.
But there's this
different illusion,
the illusion of antagonistic
circuitry sometimes.
I don't want to
take us off course,
but the default-mode network
seems to "want to be there,"
quote, unquote.
It seems to be fighting
for our attention,
unless we give ourselves
a visual target,
or an auditory target, or
some salient experience
of some kind, it sounds like.
And then, I'm surprised to
hear that meditation reduces
activity in the default-mode
network at some level
because meditation
to me oftentimes
involves paying attention
to some perceptual target.
Maybe you could
eventually explain
as to how it might do
that or why it might.
SAM HARRIS: And I don't
think it's the whole story
because, obviously,
outward-going attention is
not--
even if you're having
the kind of egoic
saccade that I'm talking about,
where you're actually not
clearly aware of yourself.
You're not clearly
defining yourself
as separate from experience for
the moment of paying attention,
so you are sort of losing
yourself in your work.
That's not the same
thing as having
the clear meditative insight of
selflessness that I'm claiming
is the goal of meditation.
But to wind back to the
original point I was making,
and the reason why I drew the
analogy to visual saccades,
I do think there's a continuous
interruption in our sense
of self that goes unrecognized.
But the conscious acquisition
of the understanding
that the self is an illusion
is a different experience
because you're then
focusing on this absence.
Actually, there's
another analogy
to the visual system
that applies here,
which is to the optic
blind spot, which
is a good analogy for
me because it cuts
through a bunch of
false assumptions
as to where you
would look for this
or how this relates to
ordinary experience.
So as many people know
that in both eyes we have
what's called the
blind spot, which
is a consequence of the
optic nerve transiting
through the retina,
unlike cephalopods.
I think cephalopods
have their optic nerve,
as an omniscient being
would have engineered it,
connecting the
retina from the back.
And therefore, there
is no area of blindness
associated with its transit
back through the retina.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: But our
receptors are one the outside.
SAM HARRIS: Exactly.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Humans, for whatever
reason, put photoreceptors--
well, I always
say I wasn't consulted
on the design phase.
Something put photoreceptors,
combination of things,
put photoreceptors in the back.
And so you actually have to
send the highway of information
through the pixel
center of the eye.
Cephalopods and
drosophila, basically
invertebrates, the design
is more at its face logical.
Mammals, very illogical
design, at least as far
as our judgments go.
SAM HARRIS: But it
gives me a good analogy.
So I'll take it.
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SAM HARRIS: So in
any case, we have
this blind spot, which I
think most people learn
this in school.
Although, my daughters had not
been taught this in school.
I just showed them this for
the first time a month ago.
And they were
briefly fascinated.
And then they went to
return to their screen time.
But anyway, you can
take a piece of paper.
And you make two marks on it.
And then you cover one eye.
And you fixate on one mark.
I mean, you can
look this up online
if you need details
about how to do this.
And while staring at
one fixation point,
you move the paper
back and forth.
And you can get it
to a place where
the other mark disappears.
And you can run this
experiment long enough
to satisfy yourself
that there is
in fact a blind spot in
your visual field, which
with one eye closed you
don't normally notice.
The reason why you
have to cover one eye
is because each eye
compensates for the blind spot
of the other.
Which is to say that
if you close one eye
and survey the visual scene,
something really is missing,
whatever you're looking at.
If you're looking at
a crowd of people,
somebody is missing a head
and you're not noticing it.
And it's not easy to notice
because the brain doesn't
tend to vividly represent
the absence of information.
I mean, it's just part of the
game that's not being rendered.
It's not showing up as a
break in the visual field.
It's just not there.
And I mean, people have
argued that there's
a filling-in phenomenon
that happens,
but I think that can be
misunderstood or exaggerated.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: But the
eye movements themselves,
that you described before--
I guess, I should say
that the saccade analogy
about transiently and
repetitively erasing the self
works perfectly here because,
indeed, microsaccades,
little smaller saccades, occur
all the time also prevent
our eyes from fixating
in one location
long enough to observe
our blind spot,
even if one eye is closed.
So if the experiment's done with
paralytics to essentially lock
eyes at one location, basically,
things start disappearing.
SAM HARRIS: It just fades away.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: We
all love to think
that we start hallucinating, but
actually, we start going blind.
And those experiments
have been done on humans.
I hear they're quite terrifying.
SAM HARRIS: I mean, you can
do that for yourself too.
It begins to just all
melt away in a warm glow.
No psychedelics required.
But the interesting
point there is
that when you ask
yourself, OK, so
because as a consequence
of the eyes' anatomy,
there's this thing
you can see that is
absent from your experience.
But the question
is, where is that
in relationship to the
rest of you, to your mind?
Is that deep within?
Or is that in some sense right
on the surface of experience?
And there's expectation
that people have.
Again, I think
conflating meditation
with a search for changes in
the context of consciousness.
They're looking for
much more subtle things
to notice about the mind or
much vaster things to notice.
Psychedelics sets
up this expectation
that you do a massive
dose of mushrooms or LSD,
and everything changes.
I mean, you get this
full beatific vision.
And you get not only visual
changes, but emotional changes.
And you get synesthesia,
where you have
much more mind in so many ways.
So they begin having
these experiences,
or reading the mystical
literature, you begin to think,
OK, well, then freedom is really
elsewhere or it's deep within.
It's not coincident with
the ordinary awareness
that can see this
coffee cup clearly
and that can just
transition attention
to reading an email
with the full sobriety
of ordinary waking
consciousness.
But the truth is, this
insight into selflessness,
this insight into the nonduality
of subject and object,
is as close to ordinary
consciousness as this insight
into the optic blind spot.
Where do you have to
go to have this insight
into the blind spot?
you don't have to go anywhere.
You just have to set up the
experiment correctly such
that you can see the data.
But the data is
right on the surface.
It's almost too close
to you to notice.
If it's at all hard
to notice, it's
because it's so close,
rather than it's
deep within or far away.
And there are other
analogies like--
I don't even remember.
There's Mind's Eye,
pieces of artwork,
that were the random
dot stereo grams, where
we have an image that pops out.
I always find it very difficult
to see those because I
have a very dominant eye.
But some people can see.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
People can't see those.
These images that used to
be at the touristy shops.
But people say, oh,
there it is, the whale.
And I'm thinking,
I don't see it.
Kids that swim a lot
when they're younger,
and they tend to breathe
just to one side--
I don't know if this was you.
This was definitely me.
They tend to keep
one eye closed.
You set up a pretty
strong ocular dominance.
Biasing your vision to one or
the other eye early in life,
whether or not you're learning
how to be a bow hunter
or you're learning how
to throw darts or shoot
billiards or anything that,
involves selectively viewing
the world through one eye
for even a couple of hours
can set up a permanent
asymmetry in the weighting
flow of visual information
from the eye to the brain.
It's reversible, but only
through the reverse gymnastics
of covering up the
other eye intentionally.
So actually I had to be
reversed-patched for a while
because I was seeing
double, because I
lost binocular vision.
I don't stand a chance in hell
of seeing an image pop out
of a random dot
stereogram, which
is kind of ironic because I did
my PhD on binocular circuitry.
But nonetheless, if
people can see these,
or if they can't, I
think they provide
a really terrific
example of what you're
talking about as a larger theme,
which is that perceptually you
see a bunch of dots.
And then all of a sudden,
what you thought wasn't there
is suddenly there, but
can just disappear again.
There are certain
visual illusions,
if we were to include others,
that once you see them,
you cannot unsee them.
So there's the faces-vases,
figure-ground type stuff.
SAM HARRIS: Bi-stable percepts.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Bi-stable percepts.
And then there's sort
of ocular competition.
You show two different images to
the eyes, each of the two eyes.
And it is near
impossible for people
to perceive them
both simultaneously.
So it's a little bit of
what you're describing.
I mean, these seem to
be fundamental features
about the way the neural
circuits are organized,
that they don't want to stay
fixated on any one thing
for very long.
To do so either takes training,
intense interest, intense fear,
intense excitement.
When I say intense, I guess,
I come back to this idea
that the autonomic
nervous system is somehow
governing our ability to
spotlight at any one location
for very long.
Is that a useful framework?
Or is that going to take
us down a different path?
SAM HARRIS: Well, it's sort
of a different path for this.
I mean, the only
point I was making
is that the
seemingly paradoxical
claim that something can
be right on the surface
and yet hard to see.
And again, this seems to
justify the expectation held
by, I would think,
the vast majority
of people who get interested
in these spiritual things,
for lack of a better word,
that the truth must somehow
be deep within.
There's some distance between
the one who is looking
and the thing that
has to be found right
and that you have to go through
this long evolution of changes.
I mean, there are many
metaphors that set this up.
It's like you're at
the base of a mountain,
and you have to
climb to the top.
And so you have
to find the path,
however secure it
is to get you there.
But there really is a distance
between your starting point
and the goal.
And what I'm arguing--
and this is a kind of a nondual,
to use a term of jargon--
this is a nondual
approach to meditation,
as opposed to a dualistic one.
The path and the
goal are coincident,
that you have to unravel the
logic by which you would seek
something that's outside
of the present moment's
experience, i.e. not available,
really not available to you
now.
Because so many things
worth having, so many skills
worth acquiring, really are
not available to you now.
It's like if you
want to be a pianist,
or if you want to
speak Chinese, there's
something you don't know.
And then you want
to learn that thing.
And there's a whole process.
And you might not be
capable of doing it.
And real mastery is far away.
If you've never hit
a golf ball, and you
want to hit a golf ball
300 yards straight,
I can pretty much
guarantee you're not
going to do that initially.
And you're not going
to do it on day two.
And you're not going to do it
reliably for the longest time.
And there's real
training in front of you
to be able to do that reliably.
An insight into, and
really the core insight,
I mean, the insight that is the
core of the Buddha's teaching,
to take one historical
example of this,
really is available now.
I mean, granted, it can be
very hard, one, for people.
I mean, I had
probably spent a year
on silent retreat in one week
to three month increments
before I got the
point I'm making now.
I mean, literally,
these are retreats
where you spend 12 to 18
hours a day just meditating,
trying to unpack the kinds
of claims I'm making now.
So it's possible to
rigorously overlook this.
It's possible to stand in
front of the mind's eye image
and stare in a way
that is guaranteed
not to give you
pop out and to be
adept at staring in that way.
So it's possible to be misled.
And so what I'm
trying to argue here
is that there's a fair
amount of leverage
you can get with better
information, which
can cut the time course of
your searching for this thing
and cancel your false
expectations about just
where this is in relation
to your ordinary waking
consciousness.
And it's possible to
get bad information
and to have a bunch
of experiences.
You go you go and do
an ayahuasca trip.
And it's incredibly valuable.
And it's valuable
for all the ways
in which it changed the
contents of your consciousness
in startling ways.
And you had insights
into your past
and into your relationships
and into why you're
not as loving as you might be.
And there's lots to think about.
And you're like, OK,
that's all great.
That's all something
that we can talk about.
But it truly is orthogonal.
I mean, it makes a
point of contact,
or what I'm talking about,
it's really just at one point.
And it's at the point
where this sense
of subject-object
division in consciousness
is illusory and vulnerable
to investigation.
And if you investigate it as
the right plane of focus--
you pick the analogy you
want, whether it's setting up
the optic blind spot experiment
in just the right way,
so that you can see that
the data is not there.
I mean, the bi-stable percept is
great because when you see one
of these images, like
the vase-face diagram,
or the Dalmatian that it
looks like a mess of dots,
and then you see the image
of a Dalmatian dog pop out--
once you see it, you
really can't unsee it.
I mean, once you have the
requisite conceptual anchor
to it, then every time you look,
you're going to find it again.
And eventually, it
becomes effortless.
And that's what,
ultimately, meditation is,
I mean, this kind of meditation.
You ultimately
learn to recognize
that there's no
separation between you
and your experience.
There's not the
experience on the one hand
and the self on the other.
There's just experience.
There's just seeing, hearing,
smelling, tasting, touching,
thinking, feeling,
proprioception,
add whatever channels of
information you want to that.
But there's just the totality
of the energy of consciousness
and its contents.
And it's not that
you're on the riverbank.
And this is how it can
seem in the beginning,
even when you're practicing
meditation fairly diligently.
You can seem like
you're on the riverbank,
watching the contents of
consciousness flow by.
And meditation is the act
of doing that more and more
dispassionately, so you're no
longer grabbing at the pleasant
or pushing the unpleasant away.
You're just kind of relaxing in
the most non-judgmental frame
of mind, just
witnessing the flow.
But if you're doing
that dualisticly,
you feel like the meditator.
You feel like the
subject aiming attention.
And so now you're
on the riverbank
watching everything go past.
But the truth is,
you are the river.
Experience itself is that there
is just experience itself.
You're not on the
edge of experience.
And everything you can
notice is part of the flow.
And there's no point from
which to abstract yourself away
from the flow to
stand outside it
and to say, OK, this is my life.
This is my experience.
This is my body.
Yes, you can do that.
I mean, those are
all just thoughts.
But that's more of the flow.
And so there's a process by
which you would eventually
recognize that there's
no distance between you
and your experience.
And again, you can wait
for those moments in life
where experience gets so
good, or so terrifying,
it's just so salient.
Your amygdala is
driving so hard.
I mean, so you're
in a war, and you
can't think about anything
because the enemy is
shooting at you.
And this is the most
thrilling video game
you've ever played in your life.
And your life is on the line.
Or you're at the peak
of some athletic event,
where you don't know how you're
doing the things you're doing,
but it's all happening
automatically.
But those are 1/100
of 1% of one's life.
And you know what I'm
calling meditation
is a way of simply understanding
the mechanics of a tension
whereby you are denying yourself
that unity of experience
so much of the time and
recognizing that it's
based on a misperception
of the way consciousness
always already is.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, if
there wasn't an incentive
to learn how to meditate
properly, that was one.
And I've been meditating
for a fair amount
since I was in my teens, but
more along the lines of paying
attention to breath and
open-observer type meditation,
or focused-attention.
I would suppose more of
the focused-attention type.
We'll get into these
a little bit later.
But I have a number of questions
related to what you just said.
SAM HARRIS: Sure.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I love the idea
that this thing that we would
all do well to understand to
observe consciousness of self
as opposed to trying to alter
the contents of consciousness
may sit much closer to
us than one might think.
And because it sits
so close to us,
that might be one of the
reasons why we miss it.
I go right to a
visual system example.
I mean, if you're
wearing corrective lenses
and there's a
speck on your lens,
typically you're looking
out through the lens,
and so you wouldn't
observe that speck.
Any number of different
analogies could work here.
The fact that there
are states, however
few, positive and negative,
extreme ecstasy and extreme
fear being the two, I
think, most obvious ones
that seems like
we agree on, that
allow us to capture the
sense of completeness of self
or the unity of the
observer and the actor.
The fact that those are
seldom for the nontrained,
for the nonmeditator,
suggests to me two things.
I think one perhaps worth
exploring more than the other.
But one is that what's really
being revealed in the states
where we can feel the
unity of the observer
and the actor is understanding
something fundamental
about the algorithm, not
the online algorithm,
but the algorithm that
is our nervous system.
Just as you mentioned
cephalopods.
I mean, mantis shrimp see an
enormous array of color hues
that we don't.
Their maps and
representations of the world
are fundamentally different.
Pit vipers see in the infrared.
We're restricted to
somewhat of a limited range
within the color
spectrum, but still more
vast than that of dogs or cats.
So understanding
that for seeing what
a pit viper can see for
moments would be informative.
Perhaps sensing-heat emissions
as a human might be invasive,
maybe that's why we don't do it.
So the question is, to just
make it straightforward,
why would the system
be designed this way?
Again, neither of us were
consulted in the design phase.
But that brings me to, perhaps,
the more tractable question
was, which is about development.
I'm a great believer that the
neural circuits that encouraged
healthy parent-child relations,
or unhealthy parent-child
relations as the case
may be, in childhood stem
from the initial
demands of internal
versus external states, which
is exactly what we're talking
about, which is that a young
child feels anxious because it
needs his diaper change.
It doesn't really know it needs
its diaper changed or it's cold
or it's uncomfortable or it's
hungry or it's overly full.
And so it vocalizes.
And then some external
source comes to us
and relieves that hopefully.
And so the fundamental
rule that we first learn
is not that we have a self or
that things fall down, not up.
But it's that when
uncomfortable,
externalize that discomfort.
And it will be relieved
by an outside player.
And then, of course, there's a
repurposing of that circuitry
for adult romantic attachments.
I don't think
anyone doubts that.
And that can explain a lot
indeed about attachment
and so forth.
So something about our
developmental wiring
and the algorithms that
these neural circuits run
tend to bias most people,
the nonpractice meditators,
to live a somewhat
functional life at least
without this awareness
of actor and observer.
And so what you're
really talking about
is a deliberate intervention
to understand and resolve
that gap in the algorithm.
Do I have that right?
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I'm more or less
restating what you said
in a way that, I'm hoping,
will serve as a
jumping off point.
Why questions are always very
dangerous in biology, or any.
SAM HARRIS: Or in relationship.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: What's that?
SAM HARRIS: Or in relationship.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Or in relationship.
Right.
Exactly.
Although, I think it all
does really hearken back
to this early
developmental wiring which,
of course, is modifiable.
That's the beauty of
the nervous system is,
it's the one organ that seems
to be able to change itself
at least to some degree.
So what are your thoughts
about the organization
of the circuitry to essentially
under normal conditions to not
reveal what seems to be one of
its more important and profound
and, for dare I say,
enlightening features.
It's almost as if we are
potentially like mantis shrimp.
We can see so many more
colors than we actually see.
And yet, we don't.
Most people opt not to.
And I would argue that
one of the great strengths
of the Waking Up
app, for instance,
is that it essentially walks
you through the process of being
able to arrive at these
things without having
to go to one-year or three-year
long silent meditation
retreats.
So if you could just elaborate
for a moment before we move on.
What are your thoughts
about how the circuitry is
arranged by default versus--
and what that means for there
to be an intervention, that we
have to intervene in the self
in order to reveal the self.
SAM HARRIS: Well, so there
are two big questions there,
one about evolution and
one about development.
So with respect
to evolution, it's
important to recognize
that evolution doesn't
see our deepest concerns
about human flourishing
and human well-being.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's
all about the offspring.
SAM HARRIS: We are set up
to spawn and to survive
long enough to help our progeny
spawn if we can do that.
And that's it.
And so anything that was
good for that, including
tribalism and xenophobia and all
kinds of hardware and software
flaws that revealed
themselves to be flaws
in the present time, when
we're trying to build
a viable global civilization.
But they redounded to the
advantage of our ancestors
somehow, or there are things
about us that were simply not
selected for, they
just came along
for the ride, what Stephen
Jay Gould called a spandrel.
So we are not set
up by evolution
to be as happy as
we possibly can be
and to do almost anything
that interests us well.
I mean, we're not
set up by evolution
to be mathematicians
or musicians
or to create democracies
that are healthy.
I mean, evolution
can see none of this.
And we are doing
these things based
on cognitive and
emotional hardware
that we are leveraging
in new directions.
I mean, we are primates.
And we're communicating
with small mouth noises.
I mean, we're
language-using primates.
And all of that is
clearly evolved.
And we're doing these amazing
things, including science.
However improbably,
where we're actually
able to, almost
entirely with language,
understand reality
that at a scale
that exceeds us in
both directions,
I mean, the very vast and
the very small, and also
temporally, the very old.
We have visions
of the far future.
We can figure out
where an asteroid
is going to cross Earth's
orbit 1,000 years from now
if we just do the math.
And it's amazing that we
can do all of those things,
but evolution is
blind to all of that.
And so in terms of what we care
about and certainly in terms
of what's going to ensure
our survival as a species,
we have flown the perch that
was created for us by evolution.
I mean, it's not just
the primate things.
And so it is with learning
how to regulate our emotions
and punch through
to a self concept
or beyond a self
concept that is more
normative, psychologically, that
allows us to not be terrorized
by our ape-ish genes as
fully as we seem to be,
even in the presence of more
and more destructive technology.
I mean, we're still
practically chimpanzees armed
with nuclear weapons.
And that is increasingly
dysfunctional.
And very soon we're going to
be in the presence of minds,
or apparent minds,
that we have built
that are as
intelligent as we are
and very quickly, probably 15
minutes after that, far more
intelligent than we are.
And so what we do with all
of that is, again, something
that we have to figure out
based on the minds we have,
the minds we can build,
the minds we can change.
We can meddle with
our own genomes now.
And that will produce
its own consequences
in ourselves and in
future generations
if we meddle with the germline.
And again, all of that
is just evolution.
It's just sort of the
womb we came out of,
but it didn't
anticipate any of that.
Mother nature simply not had
our best interests at heart.
And we might die off, and
from the point of view
of mother nature that's fine
because 99% of every species
dies off.
So there's that.
But when you're talking
about the individual,
developmentally-- we all
come into this world,
again, as a fairly
hairless primate
that needs a tremendous
amount of care by others.
And the logic of that is
that the reason why we're not
a gazelle that can run 45
minutes later and then,
basically, do all the
gazelle things perfectly soon
thereafter.
The reason why we have
this time of immaturity,
and has become
functional for us,
is that we're far
more flexible, and we
can learn based on the needs
of an environment to do so much
more than a gazelle can.
And language is part of that.
And in the last
10,000 years or so,
culture increasingly has been
more and more a part of that.
And there's probably a layer
at which we can plausibly
talk about cultural evolution
and cultural evolution
interacting with biological
evolution to change us.
But when you're talking
about the development
of an individual, each of us
comes into this world, I think,
not recognizing
ourselves in any sense
that would make sense to reify.
I mean, it's not that
there's nothing there.
I mean, there could be some kind
of proto-self differentiation.
But I think it
takes a long while.
And there is very
likely a coincidence
between really
recognizing others.
We recognize others first.
certainly in
relationship immediately.
And we orient to human faces.
And we even detect other humans
as good and bad moral actors
very early, I mean,
certainly long
before we recognize
ourselves in a mirror.
The experiments run, again, this
is Paul Blume and colleagues,
experiments run on the
moral hardware and software
of developing toddlers.
But I think at
this point, they've
pushed it down all the
way to six months of age,
where you'll get these infants
staring at a puppet show.
And they'll show
a greater interest
in classically good actors
versus bad actors, cooperators
versus defectors, in
various puppet show games.
So it's not that we have no
mind and no proto-awareness
of others and of self, but
what eventually happens,
certainly as we become at
all facile with language use,
is that we become aware
that not only are we
in relationship to others,
but we are an object
in the world for them.
So we have enough people
pointing at us in our cribs
and impinging upon
our experience.
You're being physically moved,
and prodded, and touched,
and consoled, or not consoled.
And just imagine
what all of these--
you're on the receiving end
of 10,000 interventions.
And you're completely
helpless for the longest time.
And all of that
attention, you have
all of these people
coming up to the crib
and making faces at you--
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Cheering for you.
SAM HARRIS: And it's
all pointed at you.
There's a classic
magical narcissism
that gets constructed
there if you
take the psychological
literature, at least
a certain strand
of it, seriously.
And I think it's largely apt
to think of a child at that age
as a kind of--
there is a kind of
narcissistic structure
there, where it's all
kind of going inward.
And at a certain point
you realize, OK, I'm
the center of all of this.
It's not just a movie where
you're completely absorbed in,
and you've lost
your sense of self.
I mean, to talk to yet
another example of what
it's like as a grown up
to lose our sense of self.
And one of the things I
think we find so fascinating
about television and film
is that when we get totally
absorbed in it, we're in this
very unusual circumstance where
our brain is
basically reading it
as we're in the classic
social circumstance.
We're presented with the facial
displays of other people.
In fact, sometimes these
people are 10 feet tall
or their faces are 10 feet tall.
You have a close-up
in a movie theater.
So it's like a super stimulus,
in terms of evolution.
And they can be making direct
eye contact with a camera,
so you have this gigantic
face staring at you.
And yet, you're totally
uncomplicated socially.
You can't be seen.
And something you know
you can't be seen.
And so you completely
lose self consciousness.
And yet, you're able to examine
with completely free attention,
again, because you're
totally unimplicated,
the facial minutia and the
mimetic facial play of people
at a very close range.
I mean, you have physically
just about to kiss your spouse,
like that's what a
close-up is in a film.
You never get that
close to people.
And yet, here you're
in a situation
where you're unobserved.
And you know that.
And so I mean, this
is a bit of a tangent,
but it's the other side
of what's happening
developmentally for a kid.
When you're in a movie
theater watching a movie,
you are truly invisible.
And yet, you're right there.
However harrowing
the human drama
is, you're seeing it play out.
And you're seeing it up close.
And it is, in principle,
a social encounter
that your genes are ready
for, but they're not ready
for you to be invisible.
And so that's what's
so magical about it.
But what happens developmentally
for a kid is that you're not
invisible, you are an
object that is constantly
being overrun, the boundaries
of your sensory engagement
with the world are constantly
being impinged upon by others.
And at a certain point,
you recognize, OK, I'm
at the center of this.
And the way this gets
enshrined as a self, I think
is probably coincident
with our learning
the language game we
learn to play with others.
We're talking to others.
People are talking to us.
And at a certain point,
we're talking to ourselves,
even when the other
people leave the room.
And you can hear it.
If you ever have
been with a toddler
when they're externalizing
their self-talk,
you hear them talking
to themselves.
They're playing.
And they're having
a conversation.
They were talking
to you, the parent.
But then you left the room,
and they're still talking.
You come back in, and
they're still talking.
And what happens
to us, strangely,
and this comes back to
the logic of evolution,
we never stop because
evolution never
thought to build us an
off-switch for this.
I mean, language is so useful.
And it gets tuned up
so strongly for us.
And there was never a
reason to shut it off.
There was never a reason
to give you this ability
to say, oh, wouldn't it be nice
to have four hours of quiet
now, like no self-talk.
And so for most of
us, I mean, I think
there are people who, for
whatever neurological reason
or idiosyncratic reason,
undoubtedly there'd
be a neurological reason for
it, don't have any self-talk.
But for most of
us, we are covertly
talking basically all the time.
And there's an
imagistic component
of this for many people.
You're visualizing
things as well.
But there's just a ton of
white noise in the mind that
feels a certain way.
And what you discover
in meditation,
ultimately, is that
the self is what
it feels like to be
thinking without knowing
that you're thinking.
A thought arises uninspected
and seems to just become you.
Like you and I are talking now.
And people are listening to us.
They're struggling to follow
the train of this conversation
because it is competing
with the conversation that's
happening in their heads.
So I'll be saying something.
And a person listening will
say, well, what does that mean?
Or like, oh, but wait a minute,
he just contradicted himself.
And there's a voice
in your head that
is also vying for your
attention much of the time.
So the first discovery
people make in meditation
is that it's just so
hard to pay attention
to anything, the breath,
or a mantra, or a sound,
whatever it is, because
you're thinking.
You're thinking about the thing
you need to do in an hour.
And oh, it's so good that
I downloaded this app.
This is really good.
This is going to be good for me.
But that chatter
isn't showing up.
You're not far back enough in
the theater of consciousness,
so as to see it emerge.
It is just sneaking
up behind you.
And it feels like me again.
It feels like when someone is
thinking the thought, well,
what the hell does that mean?
They're not seeing
it as an emerging
object in consciousness.
It just feels like me.
Subjectively, is like
the mind contracts
around this appearance
in consciousness.
And it really is just a sound
with the voice of the mind.
If you actually can inspect
it, it is deeply inscrutable
that we ever feel identified
with our thoughts.
I mean, how is it that
we could be a thought?
A thought just arises
and passes away.
And when you inspect it,
when you go to inspect it,
it unravels.
It's the least substantial
possible thing.
But yet, it could be a
thought of self-hatred.
It could be a thought,
that unrecognized,
totally defines your mood.
I mean, again, this all
can seem kind of abstract.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Well, no, but I think
it's extremely concrete
from the perspective
of the neural circuits
that will return
to maybe in a few minutes.
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If you could elaborate a bit on
this notion of internal chatter
and external stimuli and
the bridge between them
because I think for some
people that might be intuitive.
I think for others,
it's not so obvious
that language is
ongoing in the backdrop.
And then sometimes, I
think some people are
more tuned into that language.
For some people,
it's louder volume.
For some people,
it's more structured.
I have a colleague
at Stanford who's
been on this podcast
called Deisseroth.
He's one of, like, the
preeminent bioengineers.
He's also a psychiatrist.
And he has a--
he doesn't call it a
meditative practice,
but he has a practice
where each evening,
after his five kids are put
down to sleep, you know--
they're older now--
and in the quiet of the
late hours of the night,
early morning, he
sits and forces
himself to think in
complete sentences,
with punctuation, for an hour.
This is the way that he has
taught himself to structure
his thinking, because of
the very fact that you're
describing, which is
that ordinarily, there
is an underlying structure
to what's internal,
but it's disrupted by external
events, And these are--
typically, it's
not coherent enough
to really make meaning from.
So it's almost like
somebody sitting down
to write in complete
sentences, but forcing
himself to do it in his head.
But for many people,
including myself,
that's a foreign experience.
And we only experience structure
through our interactions
with the world and other people.
I've taken the time to try and
explore ideas with eyes closed.
And I've been able to do that.
There are certain
pharmacologic states
that we could talk about
that facilitate that.
And no, those are
not amphetamines.
Those do exactly the
opposite, by the way.
But I think people
exist in varying degrees
of structured and unstructured
internal dialogue,
and in varying
depths of recognition
of that internal dialogue.
And so the question,
I suppose, is,
just the recognition that
there's a dialogue ongoing,
internally-- is that,
itself, valuable?
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
And that also can
take some time.
So, I mean, here's
a claim I would
make that some people
might find surprising.
But I think this is an
objectively true claim about
the subjectivity of most people,
which is that unless you have
a fair amount of training--
let's say you just happen to be
some kind of savant in this
area, which most people,
by definition, aren't, or
you have a remarkable amount
of training in what's called
concentration practice
in meditation--
I believe this is a true claim--
that if we just put a stopwatch
on this table, and people
could just watch it 30 seconds
elapse, and I set all of our
listeners, or your viewers,
the task, for the
next 30 seconds,
just pay attention to anything--
your breath, you know,
or the sight of your hand,
or the sight of the clock,
or any object--
without getting lost in thought,
without getting momentarily
distracted by this conversation
you're having with yourself.
A couple of things would happen.
One is no one would be
able to do it, right?
And this is not just a
superficial inability.
I mean, if your
life depended on it,
you wouldn't be able to do it.
I mean, if the fate of
civilization depended on it,
none of our listeners
would be able to do this.
And yet, some percentage of them
are so distracted by thought
that they will actually
try this experiment
and think they succeeded.
Right?
And for these people,
what happens is
you put them on a
meditation retreat,
and you have them
spend 12 hours a day
in silence, doing
nothing but this.
Right?
So the practice is just
pay attention to the breath
when they're sitting,
and then eventually, you
incorporate everything--
sounds and other sensations.
And then you interleave that
with walking meditation, where
they're paying attention just
to the sensations of lifting
and moving and
placing their feet.
And then once the
practice is going,
you incorporate sounds
and sights and everything.
So you can pay
attention to everything,
but the goal is,
for every moment,
you are going to cultivate
this faculty of mind,
which increasingly is
known as mindfulness.
Right?
And mindfulness is nothing
other than this very careful
attention to the contents
of consciousness.
But the crucial
piece is it is not
a moment of being
lost in thought.
Right?
You're not blocking thoughts.
Thoughts themselves can arise.
But in those moments
of being truly mindful,
you're noticing
thoughts as thoughts.
Whether it's language
in the mind or images,
you're noticing those, too,
as spontaneous appearances
in consciousness.
So if most people-- you know,
certainly anyone who thinks
they can pay attention to--
who can do the experiment
successfully that I just
suggested-- pay attention
to something for 30 seconds
without being lost in thought--
you put those people on a
meditation retreat, what
they're going to experience
is, you know, on the first day,
they're going to
feel, like, oh, yeah.
I was with the breath, or
I was walking-- you know,
I was with the
sensations of walking--
and I'd be there for, like,
five minutes solid, and then
I would get lost in thought.
And then I'd come back.
And then five more minutes,
I'd be lost in thought,
and then get back.
But as the days progressed--
even, you know, 10 days in to
a silent meditation retreat--
they're going to experience
more and more distraction.
It's going to seem
like, OK, wait a minute.
Now I can't pay
attention to anything
for more than 5 seconds.
Right?
That is progress, right?
Because what they're discovering
is just how distractible
they are.
Right?
And you know, for
some people, that
will be immediately obvious.
For some people, it'll
actually take a lot of practice
to realize just how
distracted they are.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: What you
just said, which was that,
at some point, we can start
noticing our thoughts--
I can notice my thoughts--
but what you're talking about,
as a goal state, is not
being distracted by thoughts,
but actually seeing
the relationship
between thoughts, self, and
other types of perceptions.
And here, I think recognizing
and seeing thoughts
is a form of perception.
It's just an
internally-directed perception.
This raises a topic that
I'm also obsessed by,
which I think neuroscience
can somewhat explain,
but still incompletely--
that the circuits and
mechanics, et cetera,
are not yet known-- which
is about time perception.
And you know, a
simple analogy would
be that there are a lot of
small objects flying around
in the space that we happen
to be having this discussion,
but they're moving so fast
that I can't perceive them.
Or they're entirely stationary,
so I can't perceive them
because of the reasons
we talked about
before in the visual system.
My eyes are moving
in perfect concert
with these small
object movements,
and therefore, I
am blind to them.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: A slight
shift in time perception--
think of this, perhaps, as
a change in the frame rate,
right?
Camera frame rates.
A faster frame rate, you
can capture slow motion.
Slower frame rate,
you're going to get
more of a strobe-type effect if
the frame rate is low enough.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right?
Could it be that our time
perception is not one thing,
but we have one rate of
perceiving time for external
objects at a given distance--
which we know is true--
another frame rate for
objects that are up close-- we
know this to be true, even
if those objects are moving
at the exact same speed, right?
I mean, this would be
the sitting on a train,
the rungs on the fence seem to
be going by very, very fast,
but the ones in the distance
seem to be moving slowly.
This is the way the visual
system and time perception
interconnect at some level.
You're up on a skyscraper--
the little ants
of cars and people down below.
You know they're moving
much faster than you
perceive them to move, but
it's a distance effect.
SAM HARRIS: I mean,
you see a plane,
it's going to be going
300 miles an hour.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Exactly.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And it's not because
of the lack of resolution.
The lack of resolution
is incidental.
We know this because in
animals, such as hawks,
that have twice the degree
of acuity, as far as we know,
they have the same
distance-associated shifts
in time perception.
So could it be
that we are running
multiple streams of time
perception, multiple cones
of attention, that include cones
of attention to our thoughts,
and that somehow,
through meditation,
we start to align the frame
rate for these different streams
of attention so that they
all fall into the same movie,
if you will--
although it's not just
a movie with visual content.
What I'm doing here
is clearly, I'm
becoming a lumper
rather than a spreader.
I'm sure this violates certain
rules of time perception
and neural circuitry,
but I'm not sure
that it's entirely
untrue, either.
And does it survive at
all, as a possible model
for what you're describing?
And if the answer
is no, I'm perfectly
comfortable with that.
SAM HARRIS: Well, it's dependent
on what you mean by meditation.
This is where, sort
of, the particularities
of what one is doing
with one's attention
under the frame of
meditation really
matter, because there are
ways to practice mindfulness,
in particular, where
the frame rate really
does seem to go way, way up.
Right?
And there's actually been
some research done on this,
where you take people before
and after a three-month silent
meditation retreat, and you
give them some kind of visual
discrimination task where
they have to detect--
I think they used
a tachistoscope.
Is that the tool for?
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I'm not familiar.
SAM HARRIS: Something
that presents, you know,
very quick pulses of light.
And in any case, just
in any sensory channel,
I would imagine you can make
finer-grained discriminations
if you're practicing mindfulness
in a very specific way, which
is to be making these
fine-grained discriminations
more and more, and do nothing
else for three months, which
is a way of practicing.
So the classic
mindfulness practice
in what's called
Vipassana meditation
is to pay scrupulous attention
to seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting, touching in a way
that breaks everything down
into these kind of
microscopic sensory moments.
So you know, rather than feel
your hands pressing together,
what you're trying to
feel with your attention
and you're feeling
more and more is
all of the sensations of
pressure and temperature
and movement such that
the feeling of hands
completely disappears.
You realize that a
hand is a concept,
and all you have is this cloud
of punctate and very brief
sensations.
And so anything you think you
have as a datum of experience,
as you bore into it
with your attention,
it resolves into this kind of
diaphanous cloud of changing
sensation.
And that can be even something
as captivating as, like,
a serious pain in your body.
I mean, you can have could have
injured your neck, you know?
And so you have some
excruciating pain in your neck.
If you just are willing to
pay attention to it, you know,
and just pay 100% attention to
it, a couple of things happen.
One is your resistance
to feeling it goes away,
by definition, because now your
goal is to just pay attention
to it.
And you recognize that so much
of the suffering associated
with the pain was borne of
the resistance to feeling it.
You're bracing against it and
all of your thinking about it,
you know?
You're thinking,
like, well, you know,
why did I do this to
myself, or should I
see an orthopedist, or how
long is this going to last?
And maybe I herniated a disk.
Like, all of that self-talk
is producing anxiety.
And I'm not saying there's never
anything to think about there.
But either you can do something
about it in the moment or you
can't.
And so much of our suffering
in the presence of pain is
the result of resisting it,
worrying about it, thinking--
just all of the--
everything we're
doing with our minds,
but just feeling it, right?
So when you just
feel it, again, it
breaks apart into this
ever shifting collection
of different sensations.
And it's not one thing, and
it never stays the same.
So two things happen there.
One is there can be a
tremendous amount of relief that
happens there where you can
achieve a level of equanimity,
even in the presence of really
unpleasant physical sensation.
And this is true of
mental sensation as well.
As it's true of emotions.
The classically
negative emotions
like anger, depression, or fear.
The moment you become
willing to just feel them
in all of their punctate
and changeable qualities,
they cease to be what
they were a moment ago.
When you're talking
about emotional states,
they cease to map back on
to you and your self concept
as meaningful in the same way.
So that suddenly, the
anxiety you feel, let's say,
before going out on stage to
give a talk, a moment ago,
it had psychological meaning,
it felt like, I'm anxious.
How do I get rid of this?
Why am I this sort of person?
Should I have taken
a beta blocker?
This is the conversation
you're having with yourself.
The moment you just
become willing to feel it
as the pure energy of the
physiology of cortisol release,
it ceases to have any meaning.
It ceases to be a
problem in that moment,
because it's no more--
it no more maps onto
the kind of person
you are then a feeling
of indigestion or a pain
in your knee maps onto the
kind of person you are.
It's just sensation, anyway.
Back to the main
point here, which
is that, if you train
your attention in this way
to notice the particularities
of sensory experience
and emotional experience,
you're looking
for the atoms of experience.
You get better and better at
that and certain things happen.
But one thing that I
really do think happens
is there's a kind of frame
rate change in the data stream
where you really are just--
you're just noticing much,
much more.
All of that is a very
interesting way of training.
It's not what I tend
to recommend now.
It's a great
preliminary practice
for what I do recommend,
because it really
teaches you the difference
between being lost in thought
and not, it really teaches
you what mindfulness is.
But it tends to be done by 99.9%
of people in a dualistic way,
which, again, you're set
up to think, OK, I'm over
here as the locus of attention.
And I'm continually getting
distracted by thought.
And the project is to not
do that anymore and actually
pay attention to the breath
and sounds and sensations.
And every time I
get lost in thought,
I'm going to go back here.
But this whole dance
of I'm lost in thought,
now I'm strategically directing
my attention again, all of this
seems to ramify
this sense of self.
The of there's one
to be doing this.
There's somebody holding
the spotlight of attention
and getting better
at coming back
to the object of meditation.
Again, it's inevitable
that 99.9% of people
are going to start
there and stay there
for some considerable
period of time.
But the thing I like to do
when I talk about all of this
is undercut the false
assumptions that are anchoring
all of that as
early as possible,
because where, I
think, you want to be
is recognizing that there
is no place from which
to aim attention.
This whole dualistic setup
of subject and object
is the thing that is
already not there.
And it's not that it's there
and you meditate it out
of existence successfully.
It's really not there.
And if you learn
how to look for it,
you can see that it's not there
and feel that it's not there.
And it no longer
seems to be there.
It's like it's not--
and it becomes like, again,
like a bi-stable percept where
you looked at it long
enough and you thought,
OK, now I see the vase and
the face and I can't unsee it.
And every time I look,
it's there again, right?
So yeah.
So to come back
to the example you
gave with your
colleague at Stanford
whose book I know I have.
I haven't read it.
This is a-- he wrote
a book, Projections.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.
SAM HARRIS: So it's
on my stack to read.
But it's the opposite--
what I'm recommending
is, essentially,
the opposite end
of the continuum
of the internal
exercise he was doing.
So rather than-- so
he's doing something
very deliberate and controlled,
and he is deliberately
thinking in complete
sentences and commandeering
the machinery of thought
and attention in a way
that I would imagine.
I mean, I'd be interested
to talk to him about it.
But I would imagine, he really
feels like he's doing that.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
He's an engineer--
as you've describe it in
this way, it reminds me,
he's a physician, but
he's also an engineer.
So it's really about
taking the raw materials
of thought and engineering
something structured from it.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
Right.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I haven't
been in Carl's mind.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
But if we got him
talking on that,
I'm sure we would get
a sense of what it is.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: We'll do that
conversation at some point.
It's the exact opposite
of what you're describing.
SAM HARRIS: Exact
opposite would be
to recognize that the sense of
control is a total illusion.
Because you don't know what
you're going to think next.
And even he, in the most
laborious way, I mean,
he could just get as
muscular as he wants with it.
He still doesn't know what
he's going to think next.
Because thoughts simply arise.
You can run this
experiment for yourself.
And this connects up to
the topic of free will
which we might want to touch.
But I mean, just think
of any category of thing.
If I asked you to think
of the names of cities
or of friends you have or of
famous people you can remember
exist or think of
nouns or anything.
And just watch what
comes percolating
into consciousness right now.
There are things
you can't think of,
there are things you
don't know the name of.
There are languages
you don't speak,
there are famous people you've
never seen or never heard of.
So you have no control
over that part.
Like those names
and faces are not
going to suddenly come
streaming into consciousness.
But the totality of
facts and figures
and faces and names
that you do know,
only some will come
vying for inclusion.
And there's a sort of--
we could make guess
and we know something
about the neurology of this.
But you depending
on what channel
you're waiting for
thoughts in, I mean,
it's going to be
different if it's visual
or semantic or episodic memory.
I mean, all of these
things are different.
But wherever you
point your inner
gaze of attention and wait
for the next face or name.
Certain things are going
to come and certain things
aren't going to come.
And how you land on one--
there'll be this process
if you're paying attention,
you might think, let's say we
go with names of cities, right?
So you'll think of Paris,
you'll think of London,
you'll think of Rome,
you'll think of Sedona.
So these names will come.
And if I ask you to
just say one, right?
So just--
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Minneapolis
is what came to mind.
For me, it was very
straightforward.
It was Minneapolis, the
famous person was Joe Strummer
and they just like--
I can give you reasons why
I think those came to mind.
Recent conversations.
SAM HARRIS: OK.
So we know a fair bit
about much of this.
So one, we know that
your reasons, obviously,
could be right or wrong.
They're very likely
to be wrong because we
have this confabulatory
storytelling mechanism even
in an intact brain
where we just--
we seem to never
lack for the reasons
why something came
to mind, and we
can know we can
manipulate people
in ways that prove that
people are just reliably
wrong and confident.
You know, confidently
so about the reasons
why they thought of
things or did things.
But leaving that aside, even
if you're completely accurate,
there are people's
names who you know
and cities names that you
know that inexplicably just
didn't come to mind.
And if we ran this
experiment again and again
and again, they
wouldn't come to mind
if your brain was in
precisely the state
it was in a moment ago.
If we could return
your brain to the state
it was in a moment
ago, correcting
for all the deterministic
changes and all
the random changes that would
have to be corrected for,
it to just get--
all the synapses
and the synaptic weights
and everything in the state
it was in to produce Joe
Strummer in Minneapolis.
If we rewind that movie, that
part of the movie of your life,
you are going to say Joe
Strummer in Minneapolis
a trillion times in a row.
So this is why, in my view,
the notion of free will
makes absolutely no sense.
And you can add as much
randomness to that process
as you want.
It still doesn't get you the
freedom people think they have.
There's another conversation
to have about why none of that
matters and why
things only get better
once you admit to yourself
that free will is an illusion.
And yes, you can get in
shape and you can diet
and you can do all the
things you want to do
and you don't have to
think about free will.
But from a contemplative,
meditative point of view,
the thing to notice is
that everything is just
springing into view.
There's no place from
which you are authoring
your next thought, because
you would have to think it
before you think it.
Like there is just this
fundamental mystery
at our backs that is disgorging
everything that we experience.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
What if I'm speaking?
So if I'm talking
about something
and I have some command
of that information,
I can often sense what I'm
going to say next and then
find myself saying it.
And hopefully, that's what they
say and not something else.
I certainly said things
I didn't intend to say
or never thought I
would say in life.
But when engaged in
speech or action,
it at least gives us
the illusion, I think,
that we somehow have more
command over our thoughts.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
Well you have a script.
I mean, it's like there are
things you know a lot about
and you've talked
about them a lot,
and you know you
have the things you
want to say about those
things and the things
you don't want to say or
you wouldn't want to say.
And you know you can--
it still is a bit of a high wire
act, because you can misspeak
or you can fail to get
to the end of a sentence
in a grammatically correct way.
And again, all of this--
objectively, this whole process
is mysterious to you.
You don't know how you follow
the rules of English grammar.
Like your tongue is doing it
somehow and when it fails,
it fails, and you're just
as surprised as the next guy
that it failed.
And you mispronounce
a word, and OK, I
don't know what happened there.
But if it keeps happening, I'm
going to worry I had a stroke.
And if it stops, I'm not
going to worry about it.
So it's still
mysterious even when
you're doing it in a very rote,
deliberative, and repetitive
way.
But when you're
talking about something
you've talked about a
lot and you know where
you're going to go, right?
We have many
conversations like this,
it is somewhat analogous
to like a golf swing.
Where it's like, you know
how you want to do it,
it's going to be
all kinds of errors
that are going to creep
into your execution of it
in real time.
But there's like you,
basically, have a pattern.
And so you have certain
linguistic patterns
which you're following.
Again, none of this is
a proof of free will,
but I will grant you that
phenomenologically, it
feels different than just
waiting for the next thought
to come.
But my point is that,
even if you are--
I mean, you can trim it down
to the simplest possible thing.
Like you take two things
you like to drink.
You like coffee
and you like tea.
And you're deciding
which to have.
Both are on offer.
You've got two cups
in front of you.
And the question is,
here I've got water
and I've got coffee, which
am I going to drink next?
Incredibly, it's as simple
as possible decision.
And no matter how long I
make this decision process,
I could literally sit for
an hour trying to figure out
which to reach for next.
And I could have my
reasons why, and I
could have all my self talk.
There's going to be a
final change in me that's
going to be the proximate
cause of me deciding one
over the other.
And that, no matter
how laborious
I can make it seem in terms
of my reasoning about it,
it is going to be fundamentally
mysterious as to why I went
with one rather than the other.
Whatever story I have--
because it's like-- it's still
going to be as mysterious
as you thinking of Joe
Strummer when you absolutely--
you know of the existence of
Marilyn Monroe just as much.
And yet she simply
didn't occur to you.
It's fundamentally mysterious.
Like there are people who
are even more famous than Joe
Strummer to you.
I mean, I'm sure he may be
somebody who you have thought
a lot about, but
there are people
who like if we could just
inventory your conscious life
going back the last
10 years, there
are people who you've thought
about more than Joe Strummer
yet they didn't appear.
And that is mysterious.
And they could have,
but they didn't.
What I'm saying is that
this mystery never gets
banished in our experience.
Whatever stories.
We have to tell about it.
Because if the story is, oh,
well, I went for the water
because I think I've been
drinking too much coffee.
I listen to Andrew
Huberman's podcast
and he was talking about
caffeine, and I think--
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's good for us,
but you don't want to overdo it.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah.
SAM HARRIS: OK.
So let's say that is,
actually, the causal chain.
Like, I listen to
your podcast, you
say something
about caffeine, now
I'm self conscious
about my coffee intake.
But that's just adding a
couple of links to the chain.
There's still this
fundamental mystery of, well,
why did I find that persuasive?
And why did I find it persuasive
now and not five minutes ago
when I was drinking the coffee?
Like why did I just remember it
now, or why was it effective?
You only have-- your
experience in every moment
is precisely what it is
and not one bit more.
And this subsumes even moments
of real resolve and effort
and picking yourself
up by your bootstraps
and changing everything.
It's like you're on
a diet and you're
tempted to eat chocolate.
And you think you're
about to reach
and say, no, I'm not
breaking this diet.
This diet is actually
going to stick.
Why did that arise in
that moment and not
at this analogous moment
on your last diet?
And why did it arise now
to precisely the degree
that it did?
Why will it be as
effective as it
will be and have the
half-life that it will
have and not 10% more or less.
All of those are always
mysterious to you.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, could
we give, as we did before,
an evolutionary and a
developmental explanation?
An evolutionary
explanation might
be that directed attention
and action is metabolically
demanding.
It would be inefficient
or impossible
for us to be in constant,
deliberate action with access
to all the relevant information
as to why we would do anything.
So our ideas, literally,
spring to the surface
at the last possible
moment in order
to offset the great metabolic
requirements of having ideas
that are related to
goal-directed action
or that goal-directed
action is expensive.
That's one idea.
The other idea would
be-- and we know
this as a fact, which is
that, initially, the brain is
fairly crudely wired.
That's not true within the
neural circuits that control
breathing, heart
rate, et cetera,
but within the neural circuits
of sensory perception, thought,
et cetera.
They're fairly crudely wired.
And then across
development, there's
a progressive pruning
back and also in parallel
to that, a strengthening
of the connections
that underlie directed
action and thought.
And here, I don't mean directed
as in free will, I mean,
just that I can decide
to imagine an apple
and imagine that
apple, for instance.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
But your decision--
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
There seems to be
some maintenance of the fine
random wiring in systems.
I mean, we've seen
this even in worms,
in flies, in so-called lower
invertebrates and lower
vertebrates.
And we see this in humans.
And it seems to be that
there's a lot of background
spontaneous activity.
I mean, I've sunk electrodes
into the brains of humans,
macaques, carnivores, and mice.
And in every case, most of
what you hear is called hash
and it has nothing
to do with hashish.
Is just [VOCALIZING]
on the audio monitor
which is picking up a
bunch of action potentials.
As you're listening to a
chorus of action potentials.
But it's rare to find a neuron
that faithfully [VOCALIZING]
fires to represent some
sensory stimulus in the world.
And you can arrange that
marriage experimentally
so that you can arrive at those
strong signal to noise events.
But I was always struck
by how much noise there
is in the system all
around all the time.
And people argue, is the
noise really noise, et cetera?
There's still a lot
of debate about that.
But I can imagine that some
of the spontaneous nature
of thoughts just
relates to the fact
that there's a lot of
background spontaneous activity
in the brain.
Now, why that is a
whole other discussion.
But if I were to set up two
constraints that there's
a lot of spontaneous
activity, it's
going to generate
random thoughts.
Thankfully, not
much random action,
although there's a little bit
of random action in our daily
lives.
And then against that say,
well, any deliberate thought
or motion is going
to be expensive.
It's a metabolically
expensive organ to begin with.
And so you just have to--
evolution has arrived at a place
where spontaneous geysering up
of things upon which like
deliberate thoughts and action
are superimposed is
the best arrangement
overall for this very
metabolically demanding organ.
I mean, what I
basically gave was just
kind of a biological description
of just one narrow aspect
of it.
But can we get
comfortable with that?
And the reason I say get
comfortable is that I'm--
and here, admittedly,
I'm forcing a little bit
of a striptease
towards what I think I
and everyone else wants to
know, which is how to meditate
and why, in particular,
meditation convinces us
that something
doesn't necessarily
have to be eliminated, but
that was actually never there.
I feel like we've now set
up a sort of almost like a--
you're not contradicting
yourself by any means,
but in my mind, there's
a contradiction.
And here's the contradiction.
I love this statement
that meditation over time
or done properly reveals
to us that we're actually
not trying to make the gap
between actor and observer
go away.
It was actually never there.
To me, that's one of the
more important statements
that I, perhaps,
have ever heard.
And it inspires me to go further
down this path of meditation,
because I've never
experienced that.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Not
deliberately, and certainly,
not through meditation.
If I ever experienced it,
it was transient enough
that I'm intrigued to
experience it more.
So on the one hand,
you're telling me
something was never there.
And there's a
profound experience
to be heard by anyone that's
willing to do the work
to arrive at that experience
of the loss of that illusion.
On the other hand, I'm
hearing that there's
a profound gap that
really does exist,
which is that we believe
that our thoughts are somehow
from us.
And indeed, they're from in the
cranial vault someplace, maybe,
in the body a bit as well.
But that we over attribute the
degree to which we are that
and that is us in a way that's
volitional, that we control.
And so once I'm hearing
that there's something--
there's an illusion that we can
eliminate and on the other hand
I'm hearing that there's
an illusion that we can't
eliminate, and maybe
these are unrelated
and I'm bridging them in
an unimportant way, that
seems only important to me.
But somehow, I can't
resolve these two
and maybe the thing
to do then is, can we
separate them in terms of
a practice to witness them?
That would allow us to
resolve them separately.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
So I think I'm
hearing the problem.
There's this-- let me bracket
the whole free will discussion
because it really is the flip
side of this coin that I'm--
the obverse of which is
the illusion of the self.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: So at least--
I might be on the right track.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: They are
the opposite sides of a coin.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK.
Great.
Because to me they seem
very different in essence.
SAM HARRIS: No.
Because what I'm calling
the sense of self
and what I think
most people feel
as their core sense of
self is this feeling of--
I mean, it's the feeling of
being the locus of attention,
but it's also the feeling of
being the locus of agency.
I can do the next thing.
Like, who's doing this?
Who's reaching for the cup?
I am.
Right?
I intended this, and
now I'm doing the thing.
And my conscious intention
is the proximate cause
of my reaching, right?
And so I'm the author of
my thoughts and actions,
essentially.
And my specific uses
of attention, right?
So I can pay attention to the
breath, I get lost in thought,
I come back to the breath.
But on some level, the thoughts
themselves are more of my
doing something with
almost authorial intent.
Like I'm thinking like, what the
hell is this guy talking about?
Who's thinking these thoughts?
I am.
The person who really
doesn't get what I'm saying
is thinking something like that.
What the fuck is this
guy talking about?
I know I'm here.
I'm a self, I'm a
body, I'm a mind.
I can reach for things.
That these intentional
actions are
different from things
that happen to me.
A voluntary action is different
from an involuntary one.
So having a tremor is
different from consciously
deciding to pick up a glass.
So obviously, everything
I'm saying about meditation
and the self and
free will in order
to be a sane picture of a
human mind and of reality
has to conserve the
data of experience
such that, yes,
I can acknowledge
the difference between a tremor
and a deliberative voluntary
motor action.
And the things you
do volitionally
are different not just
psychologically and
behaviorally, but they just
have different implications
for like in a court of law.
You accidentally hit
someone with your car
or you did it on
purpose, that's still
a distinction that matters.
Importantly, it tells us a lot
about the global properties
of your mind such that we
have a sense of what you're
likely to do in the future.
If you're someone who
likes running over people
with your car,
you're a psychopath
who we need to worry about.
If you're is someone
who did it by accident,
well then you may be culpable
for the level of negligence
that allow that to happen.
But you're a very different
person and we you differently
and we're wise to.
So anyway, we can
bracket all of that.
There's this-- I mean,
there are some fundamental--
there are some false
assumptions about the underlying
logic of this process, which,
I think, is worth addressing.
Is actually-- there was a kind
of found object in the news
that I talk about at one point.
I forget where it
is in Waking Up app.
But there was a story that
I stumbled on the internet.
I think it's about
12 or 13 years old.
Of a tourist bus in--
I think it was in Norway.
It was somewhere
in Northern Europe.
And it had about
30 people on it.
And one person was
described as an Asian woman.
And they went to a rest stop
and everyone got off the bus.
And shopped and had lunch.
And this Asian woman changed her
clothing for whatever reason.
And they all got
back on the bus.
I think the relevance of
it being an Asian woman
is that there were
language barriers that
explain what later happened.
So everyone gets
back on the bus,
the Asian woman has
changed her clothing.
And the bus is about to leave
but then someone notices, hey,
there was an Asian woman who
got off the bus who isn't--
it hasn't come back yet.
And they tell the driver this.
And this poses a problem.
So now everyone's waiting
for this person to return.
But in fact, everyone
was on the bus.
This woman had just
changed her clothing,
and was not recognized
by her fellow travelers.
So everyone gets concerned as
this tourist doesn't show up.
And they start looking for her.
And they can't find her.
And so a search party is formed.
And the Asian woman, because
of whatever language barrier,
heard that there was
a missing tourist,
so she joins the
search party, which,
in fact, is looking for her.
And this goes on into the night.
And they're readying
helicopters for a dawn patrol
to find the missing tourist.
Now, at some point
along the way,
I think it was at like
3:00 in the morning,
this tourist realizes that she
is the object of this search.
And obviously, the
whole thing unravels.
She confesses that she changed
her clothes and the problem
is solved.
But the problem is not
solved by the logic
that the seeker is expected.
So it's like, it's
not true to say
that the missing
tourist was found
in the way that was expected.
Because a missing
tourist was never lost.
The missing tourist was
part of the search party.
So when you think about
it from her point of view,
like what happened, she's
part of the search party.
She's looking for the
missing tourist not knowing
that she, in fact, is
the missing tourist.
So what happens at the moment
she realizes that everyone's
looking for her?
The search isn't
consummated in the way
that is implied by the logic
of everyone's use of attention.
And yet the problem evaporates.
And there's something
deeply analogous
about the structure of that
and the meditative journey.
Precisely in, again, not talking
about all the possible changes
in the contents of consciousness
that could be good,
which, again, they
come along for the ride
anyway when you do the
thing I'm talking about.
It's on this point of
looking for the self
and not finding it.
And there is this sense
that, OK, the self is here,
and it's a problem.
It is the string upon which
all of my conscious states,
mostly unhappy ones, are strong.
It's the thing that is at
the center of my anxiety.
It's the thing that I
don't feel good about.
It's the thing that when
criticized, I let implode.
It's the center of my
problem, and now I'm
trying to feel better.
And meditation has
been handed to me
as a possible remedy
for my situation.
And it's billed as a remedy.
And in fact, I'm
hearing from this guy
that this is the thing that is
going to cause me to realize
that my self isn't where--
or as I thought it was.
So now I'm going to look.
And so again, the
sense is, I start out
far away from the goal here.
I start out with a problem.
I'm now meditating on the
evidence of my enlightenment.
I can feel my problem.
I feel that I'm distracted
and distractible.
And I feel as this sort
of cramp at the center
of my life, that's me.
And I'm not as happy as
I want to be, I'm not
as confident as I want to be.
I'm more distractible
than I want to be.
And now, I'm paying
attention to the breath.
This is what the search
party feels like.
This is what the
confused tourist feels
like in her own search party.
And she's looking for
the missing person.
So the angle of--
the inclination of
all of this is--
and the logic of it is all
wrong, understandably so,
given how we all get
into this situation.
But it's useful
to continually try
to undercut it and recognize
that the thing that's
being looked for is actually
right on the surface, which
is, there is no one looking.
There is no place
from which you are--
if you're paying attention
to the breath or to sounds
or noticing the
next thought arise,
this sense that you
are over here doing
that thing is actually what
it's like to be thinking
and not knowing that
you're thinking.
There's an
undercurrent of thought
that's going uninspected
in that moment.
And so there is just--
there's a continually
looking for the mind,
looking for the
center of experience,
looking for the one who is
looking, which, again, which
is the orienting practice here.
And there's a lot more I
say about this, obviously,
over waking up.
But it's the experiment you
have to perform in order
to get ready to recognize that
the search party was formed
in error, essentially.
And the problem
that you're trying
to solve with this
practice does evaporate
in a similar way, which is
like, you don't actually
get there in the way
that you're hoping for.
It's like you drop out
the bottom of this thing
in an unexpected way.
There's actually another
similar parable or anecdote
that I don't remember
if it's Zen or Sufi or--
I mean, I'm sure it's
been re-appropriated
in many different ways or by
many different traditions.
But the case of somebody who's
lost in a town and they're
asking for directions and you
can put this in Manhattan.
Let's say, you're wandering
Manhattan and you're a tourist,
you don't know
where anything is.
And you stop and ask someone,
where is Central Park?
And the person thinks for a
second and they says, oh, yeah.
Unfortunately, you can't get
to Central Park from here.
Now, that is a very strange--
I mean, you think about
that for a second.
You realize, OK,
that's an absurd.
There is no place that you can't
get to from the place you're
starting on Earth.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: A
failure to describe
the physical relationships
between anything in the world.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
That's just not the
world we live in.
So but it's a funny thing.
But on some level that
is true of meditation.
It's like you can't
get there from here.
The sense of view as
subject isn't brought along
to this thing
you're looking for.
It's almost like
you're making a fist
and you're trying to
get to an open hand.
The fist doesn't get to
take that journey as a fist.
The fist doesn't go
along for the ride.
The fist comes apart.
And on some level,
the subjectivity
is an attentional fist.
It is a contraction of energy.
Again, it's so much bound up
and thought for most of us,
most of the time.
And when properly
inspected, there's
just this evaporation
of the starting point.
But there's not this fulfillment
of, I'm going to get--
this fixed is just going to--
if life gets good enough, if
I get concentrated enough,
focused enough, if
I austere enough,
if I renounce enough,
if I desire less, if I--
with enough good
intentions, this fist
is going to move into some
sort of sublime condition.
That's not the logic
of the process.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I really
appreciate these models
and analogies for
conscious experience
both as most people experience
them and harbor them
and as a way to frame
what's possible through
a proper meditation practice.
I do want to talk about
what a proper meditation
practice looks like a bit.
But at some point, I do want to
raise a model of, maybe, even
just perceptual awareness to
see if it survives the filters
that you've provided.
But first, briefly, and
then we can return to it.
What does this meditation
practice or set of practices
look like?
Obviously, the app
is a wonderful tool.
I've started using it.
As I mentioned at the
beginning, my father's
been using it for a
while and many people
have derived great
benefit from it.
But if we were to break
it down, meditation
into some basic component
parts as we have broken down
normal perceptual experience in
some of its component parts--
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: --I can
just throw out some things
that I associate
with meditation,
and maybe you can elaborate
on how these may or may not
be applied.
For instance, there
is almost always
a ceasing of robust
motor movement.
I know they're walking
meditations and so forth.
But it seems like sitting or
lying down and, perhaps, not
always but often limiting
our visual perception,
closing the eyes.
SAM HARRIS: Right.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Directing
a mind's eye someplace.
Is there a dedicated effort
toward generating imagery?
What are the component parts?
And where I'm really going
with this is, why would those
component parts, eventually,
allow for this dissolution
of the fist or the
realization that there
is no distinction between
actor and observer and so on.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so to answer the second
question first, ultimately,
meditation is not a
practice that you're
adding to your life.
It's not a doing
more of anything.
It's actually ceasing
to do something.
It's ultimately non-distraction.
I mean, ultimately, you're
recognizing what consciousness
is like when you're
no longer distracted
by the automatic
arising of thought.
It's not the
thoughts don't arise,
it's not that you
can't use them,
it's not that you become
irrational or unintelligent,
I mean, all of that-- you
still have all of your tools,
but everything is in plain view.
I mean, there's an analogy in
Tibetan Buddhism which I love,
which is you're kind of in
the final stage of meditation,
thoughts are like thieves
entering an empty house.
There's nothing
for them to steal.
So in the usual case,
thoughts are-- there really
is something in jeopardy.
Every time a thought comes,
I'm not meditating anymore,
and not only that,
I feel terrible
because of what I'm thinking
about most of the time.
And so it's totally
understandable
that thoughts seem like a
problem in the beginning.
And for certain
types of meditation,
they are explicitly
thought of as a problem
because you're trying
to focus on one thing
to the exclusion of everything
else, including thought.
And that is what I called the
concentration practice earlier.
And that's a training
that can be good to do.
It becomes a tool that you can
use for other kinds of insight.
But it's a very specific
and it's kind of brittle
skill in the end.
I mean, it's a skill.
Just like I'm going to
pay attention to one thing
and I'm going to do that so
well that everything else is
going to fade out.
And it's somewhat
analogous to what you
described in the visual system.
If have a laser focus
to one fixation point,
everything else in your visual
field begins to fade out.
But meditatively, if you have
a laser focus on any one thing,
whether it's the breath or a
candle flame or whatever it is,
not only does--
I mean, let's use the
breath for a second.
Because your eyes can be closed.
I mean, you can lose
all sense of everything.
I mean, you can lose
all sense of hearing
and your physical
body can disappear.
I mean, like, literally, it
can become incredibly subtle
and vast and drug-like.
And many people
approach meditation
thinking climbing the
ladder of those changes
into subtlety and vastness,
that's the whole game.
And it can be a deeply
rewarding game to play.
And it also does come with all
kinds of ancillary benefits.
I mean, all the
focus and the calm
and the smoothness
of emotional states.
I mean, all of that comes
with greater concentration.
And it can be quite wonderful.
But again, at best, that's a
tool to aim in the direction
that I'm talking about now
with respect to meditation,
which relates to more what
I would call mindfulness
generically.
And ultimately,
non-dual mindfulness.
So mindfulness
generically and for most
people, certainly
in the beginning,
dualistically is
just the practice
of paying careful attention to
whatever is arising on its own.
Now in the beginning, it's
natural to take a single object
like the breath as
a starting point.
It's an anchor.
But very, very quickly, over the
course of even your first week
of doing this, teachers and
various sources of information
will recommend that once you get
some facilities-- once you know
the difference between
being lost in thought
and actually paying attention
to the breath, well,
then you can open
it up to everything.
You can open up the sounds
and other sensations
in the body and
moods and emotions.
And even, ultimately,
thoughts themselves.
So very quickly,
you can recognize
that thoughts are
not intrinsically
the enemy to this practice.
They are also just spontaneous
appearances in consciousness
that can be observed.
But for some considerable
period of time,
people will feel that
there is a place from which
that observation is happening.
There's just, I'm now the
one who's being mindful.
And however attenuated that
sense of self can be, I mean,
again, it can get
very expansive.
I mean, you can lose--
as you get anything, just
a modicum of concentration,
you know it becomes
very drug-like
and you get the boundaries
of your body dissolve.
And your feeling of having
a body can disappear.
And you if your eyes are closed,
you know your visual field--
I mean, most people, when they
close their eyes initially,
they just forget about
their visual field.
But if you close
your eyes right now,
you notice your visual
field is fully present.
And we call it dark,
but it's not quite dark.
There is a sort of scintillating
some field of color and shadow
that's there in the darkness
of your closed eyes.
And that can become
a sky-like domain
of vast visual
expression that opens up
as you get more concentrated
with your eyes closed right.
So you can very much be aware
of seeing with your eyes closed
in a meditative practice.
But from the point of
view of mindfulness,
the logic is not to care about
any of the interesting changes
and experience that come
as a result of practicing
in this way, because
the underlying goal
is to be more and more
equanimous with changes.
So it's not to grasp at
what's pleasant or interesting
and not to push what's
unpleasant or boring
or otherwise not
engaging in a way.
What you want is just a kind
of a sky-like mind that just
allows everything to appear.
And you're not
clinging to anything
or reacting to anything.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Could I ask
you what your thoughts are
about the differences between
nouns, adjectives, and verbs
in the context of what
we're talking about
in you're describing?
And the reason I bring this
up is that as you know,
I know everything in
biology is a process.
We would never ever
say, oh, the perception
of that red line on
a painting is a noun.
I mean, it's an event
in the visual system.
You're abstracting
some understanding
about that thing in
the outside world.
And I think it's very useful
in thinking about the brain.
People will notice I notice--
I, excuse me, actively avoid
the use of the word mind,
because I figure, especially,
with sitting across from me,
that I'll step in it if I do.
But the brain generates
a series of perceptions
or what have you by through
processes, not nouns.
And so when thinking about
biology, I think of development
is an arc of processes.
Aging is an arc-- perception
is an arc of processes.
They just exist on
different time scales.
And so a little bit
of what I'm hearing
is that inside of an
effective meditation practice,
there's a little bit of
certainly non-judgment
but discarding of the
noun and the adjective
modes of language.
Like red apple.
OK.
It's a red apple,
but then you need
to eliminate some other
adjectives about it.
It's a rotten apple,
it's a ripe apple.
And instead view the
appearance and disappearance
of that apple as just a thing, a
process as opposed to an event.
And now, events,
we could really get
into the language aspect of it.
That just reveals how
diminished language
is to describe the workings
of the brain at some level.
I don't know if any
of these resonates.
But it seems to me, the
goal or one of the goals
is to start to understand
the algorithm that
is the fleeting nature of
perception but to not focus
on any one single perception.
And then to not even focused
on one single algorithm,
but to, at some
level, there's a--
what is revealed to
the meditator over time
is some sort of
macroscopic principle
about the way perceptions
work at a deeper level.
That there's a deeper principle
there that sits below our--
certainly our normal
everyday awareness.
But that in paying attention to
the mechanics of all this stuff
and not judging those mechanics,
not naming those mechanics,
or just naming them
and let them pass by.
That there's some
action function,
some verb is revealed.
And that maybe that
verb-- may be the word
to describe that
verb is mindfulness.
Maybe mindfulness is really
just a verb to describe that.
I don't know.
Is there anything here?
Or am I-- I don't know
if I'm creating just
like useless straw or
if there's actually
a seed here of something real.
But to me, any time I want
to understand something
in biology or psychology, I
try and broaden the time domain
and think in terms of verbs,
not nouns or adjectives.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No.
That's very useful,
and that's somewhat
adjacent to this
distinction I'm making
between dualistic and
non-dualistic ways
of experiencing the world.
So even dualistically,
everything is still a process.
And we're misled
by the reification
that noun talk gives us.
And this applies not just to
something like mindfulness,
but even to something
like the self.
So the sense of self
is also a process.
I mean, it's a verb,
it's not-- so we're self
in more than we are ourselves.
And there are-- even appropriate
uses of the term self
that don't go away
even when you recognize
that the core subject,
self, is an illusion.
There are states of self where
you can recognize in your life
that you inhabit very different
modes of being depending
on the context.
So like there are
moments where you--
just by walking into
a certain building,
you suddenly transition into
a different state of self.
Like suddenly, you
pass through a door
and now you are a customer
in a store, right?
So we know what that
customer feeling is.
Like, you're now the person
who's getting the attention.
It's a very formalized
type of attention
from the person who is running
the store or a restaurant.
You're a customer
at a restaurant.
That's a-- I just remembered
something that's funny.
That was born of a
mismatch of this.
I'll come back to
that in a second.
So there are-- so
we go through it.
You can be a student in
the presence of a teacher,
you're going to be a
parent in the presence
of a son or a daughter,
you can be a spouse
in the presence of your spouse.
And all of those shadings of--
like the change in context
really does usher in some
fundamental
psychological changes
in just the states
of consciousness
that are available to you.
And some of this is really--
I mean, I'm sure we could
understand a lot about this
personally and generically.
But it is pretty mysterious.
I mean, there are
people who I know
who I'm with them
in a certain way,
and based on something
I'm getting off of them,
I can't be that--
I'm effortlessly
one way with them,
and there's no way I could be
that way with somebody else.
I don't know if it's the
pheromones or their facial,
just the way they are,
their facial expression.
But I mean, there are
people with whom I'm really
kind of effortlessly
funny, and there
are people with whom
I couldn't even--
it would never occur to me to be
funny no matter what happened.
And I have long
standing relationships
with these people, so all
of that's very mysterious.
But anyway, the
difference there is not
in this core sense of
subject in relationship
to all the objects, it's in
kind of the states of self.
And all of that is very verby.
All this is a
pattern of changes.
It's a pattern of
what's available
and what's not available,
the capacities there that
come online or not in
those various contexts.
But no, the memory
I just had, which
I hadn't had in a long time.
But it was one of
these moments where
I realized the power of
these shifts in context
for states of self.
So once, I was a young man.
I think I was probably
22 or so, and single.
And like, you're just
like, trying to figure out
how do you meet women?
And how does one get
confident to do this well?
And I walked into a restaurant
and a kind of a woman
was walking toward me, toward
the front door of the restroom.
But she was walking toward me
in a way where I just by default
assumed she was the
hostess in the restaurant.
But she wasn't the
hostess, she was just
someone who had just
eaten there, I guess.
So I walked through,
and she comes out.
And so there's a fundamental
misunderstanding in me
that's set up by literally just
this change in architecture.
And so I just said
hi to her in a way
that I presumably I would
say hi to any hostess who
was coming up to ask me
where I wanted to sit.
But what had
actually happened is
I had said hi to a
total stranger in a way
that I tended at
that point never
to say hi to total
strangers because I was shy
and it was just like that.
But apparently, I gave her
like a 10,000 watt high
of all of the confidence
you would have if you
were that sort of person.
And it just ushered
in a complete like--
so I went to my
table, and this woman,
I came back into the restaurant
and gave me her phone number,
which was something that
was just a completely
foreign experience to me,
and it was based completely
on my misunderstanding of
the situation I was in.
And so anyway--
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Among
the misunderstandings
that one can have and then
action and engage in life,
I would say that was a
somewhat adaptive one.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but
then you realize that, OK,
but then there
are certain people
who recognize this
machinery to whatever degree
or have kind of natural
aptitudes for bringing
certain things online or not
such that they can consciously
make these states of self,
this level of gregariousness,
say, available to them
in the circumstances
where it's is actually
useful to them.
So if you're single and
you want to meet people,
well, it's actually very
helpful to feel confident enough
to just go say hi to strangers
and ask them how they're doing
and to be online in that way.
Where at that point in my
life, in that circumstance,
by default, I was
going to ignore
this stranger who I was
passing by in the doorway
of a restaurant.
But thinking she
was the hostess,
I was engaging her fully.
So anyway, you can
consciously-- again,
this does not invoke
free will at all.
But yes, you can
consciously decide
to play with these
mechanisms such
that you can decide
what states of self
would be more normative to have
given what you want in life.
And you can become increasingly
attentive to the ways in which
you get played by the world.
You're a kind of instrument.
Your mind is a
kind of instrument.
Your brain is a kind of
instrument that is continually
getting played by the
situations you are in,
and you can become more
of an intelligent curator
of your conscious states and
your conscious capacities
just by noticing
the changes in you.
Like, in graduate school,
it's something I talk about.
I think at some
point in waking up,
this became very stark for me
because I was an old graduate
student.
I had taken 11 years off at
Stanford between my sophomore
and junior year.
So when I went back to school--
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Talk
about a leave of absence.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but I
mean, Stanford had this,
you might know this.
They have this stop out policy
where you never really drop
out, you just stop as you want.
You can always go back.
You don't have to
write letters saying
that you still exist
every two years as you
do in other schools.
So anyway, I showed
up after 11 years.
So I was really on a deadline,
and I felt late for everything.
So I'm kind of
finishing my degree
as quickly as I can
as an undergraduate,
and then I jump into
graduate school,
and I'm an old graduate student.
There's a real sense of urgency.
Like, I'm late.
I should have done this earlier.
I want to get this stuff done.
But then 9/11 happened.
And just as I had finished
my coursework getting my PhD,
and I was just getting
into my research but 9/11
intersected with my
life in such a way
that I just had to drop
everything and write
my first book.
And I did that.
And then I just had to
drop everything and write
my second book because of the
response to the first book.
And so essentially, I
had like, four years,
where I was AWOL doing my PhD.
But I still had a toe in
the lab and I was still
showing up occasionally.
But I was becoming this
kind of cautionary tale
from the point of
view of grad school,
but I was also becoming kind of
a famous or semi-famous writer
because my first book had been
a New York Times best seller,
so I was getting some
notoriety as a writer.
And so I was doing things
like, I was giving a Ted Talk
but I still hadn't
finished graduate school.
So it was I think that
timing's is right, maybe
I had just finished
graduate school when
I gave the Ted Talk.
But anyway, so I was
rowing in two boats
and one boat was
sinking or showing
every sign of being damaged.
And I was literally
like, getting letters
from the head of the
department saying,
we're concerned about you.
But on the other hand, I was
becoming a quasi celebrity
in that world too, at least in
a world that was overlapping.
So I was having the experience
of going in the moment where
this crystallized for me
in a fairly peculiar way
was, I had a meeting
at like 3:00 o'clock
with my advisor who
was just this guy,
Mark Cohen, in the brain
mapping center at UCLA who's
a fantastic guy.
Great advisor.
I did not extract as much wisdom
from him as I should have.
Brilliant scientist.
And for him, I'm late.
At least, in my head--
he is not that he was riding
me so hard but in my head,
I'm very self
conscious about how
I'm not living up to his
expectations at this point.
So I have a meeting with
him at 3:00 o'clock,
and I'm just kind of
wilting under his gaze
and my own imagined
inner gaze of his.
But two hours later,
I have a meeting
with his boss, a dinner
meeting with his boss
who wants to meet with me to get
advice on launching his book.
We have the same
publisher but I'm
like, the much bigger
author at Norton,
and he's coming
to me for advice.
And so I'm ricocheting between
two diametrically opposite self
states that are-- again, this
comes down to architecture.
It's literally like
the state I was
in walking into one building
and then leaving and walking
into another building
on the same campus.
And they were completely
opposite self concepts.
Like, in one context,
I am a fuckup.
In another context,
I'm a celebrity.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: And you
have mastery and virtuosity,
and we're developing
it very quickly.
SAM HARRIS: But so
again, this is a kind
of a stark version of that.
But everyone has
some version of this
just in bouncing between
talking to their mom
and then talking to
their best friend
and then talking to a stranger
and talking to someone who's
very successful,
talking to someone
who's not very successful.
You notice your vulnerability
to all of this stuff.
And ultimately, what
you want is a level
of psychological integrity that
is truly divorceable from that.
Now, I'm not I'm not
saying you're ever
going to get it perfect, there's
always going to be some--
I mean, I can't talk about
the ultimate fulfillment
of this process.
I'm not a Buddha, I'm not saying
I've finished the project.
But I think there's more and
more as you become sensitive
to these changes and you become
sensitive to what it's like
to actually not be
psychologically reactive
and not be definable by your
own self-concept, your own--
you're not identifying
with anything,
you're not hanging
your hat on anything,
you're not thinking about
yourself in the kind of terms
that you would export
to others and then
care about what they
think about you.
There's a kind of
invulnerability
that arises that's not borne
of being well defended,
it's born of being evaporated.
It's like, you're no longer
keeping score in those ways.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Once
again, I really appreciate
that description
because these days,
I'm really intrigued
by something
we've known for a long
time that you're certainly
familiar with is the prefrontal
cortex's ability to establish
context dependent rule sets.
A Stroop task would
be basic example
of reading numbers
or letters on cards
and then switching
to having to report
the colors that the letters
and numbers are written in.
It's a basic task.
But prefrontal cortex,
obviously important for setting
context dependent thought and
behavior and directed action.
But within the context of all
these different variations
of the self, depending on
graduate school or relationship
where sitting alone
in one's room,
there are different
rule sets arise
and somehow, we are able to have
a coherent sense of self that
encompasses all of those.
Functional people can toggle
between them as needed and not
overlap them inappropriately.
At least not to the
extent that it's
career failing or life failing.
Although there are sad
examples of that, many of which
exist in the Twitter space.
I know several colleagues,
not directly of mine,
but people who threw mistakes
made with their thumbs,
where they forgot
context or forgot
to realize that the context on
social media is near infinite.
But the context that
existed in their head
might not be clear in the
way that they communicated
something, and they
lost their jobs
by saying what were perceived
as insensitive things.
In some cases were, in fact,
offensive, insensitive things.
In some cases, it's debatable.
In any case, I think that the
image that now comes to mind
relates to something you've said
several times, that it's not
about eliminating
something, it's
about revealing that something
was never actually there.
And then in terms of
sensory experience
and these different
aspects of the self,
I have this image
in my mind of--
I'm not an experienced
scuba diver,
but I've done enough of it.
I've worn a wetsuit.
You wear a complete
wetsuit with the hood.
And this idea if you were
born into that wetsuit,
you might think that yeah,
you nudge up or lean up
against a wall and you
experience it one way.
But were you to
shed that wetsuit,
you go, wow, there's
this incredible landscape
of somatosensory experience
that I had no idea.
It goes way beyond
levels of sensitivity.
Right now you're talking about
fine two point discrimination
and light strokes,
and this could
be positive or negative
pain in other ways too.
But what you're
describing is essentially
that the wetsuit was
never really there,
but was created through
a series of action steps.
And I think what we're
migrating towards here
is a set of for most,
non-intuitive or non-reflexive
action steps that reveal
to us that in fact, we're
not wearing the wetsuit.
Now, you raised one
topic, which I think
is analogous to
this wetsuit, which
is this notion of distraction.
That normally, distraction is
masking what would otherwise
be a better experience of life.
I can think of
distraction as falling
into two different bins.
One would be the
kind of distraction
that is internally generated.
Like, the fact that
thoughts arise and pull me
down different alleyways
and avenues of my brain
and my thoughts
and my experience.
And that would compete
with my ability
to really focus on something.
And then another
form of distraction
which captures my ability
to focus intensely
but has me focusing
on the wrong things.
And here, I think
the judgment of wrong
is reasonable to include
if, for instance, I'm
being impulsively yanked to
something on social media.
I'm being impulsively yanked
to someone else's pain
and experience and
somehow confusing
that with my own experience.
This isn't empathy but
just being yanked around.
My attention as a spotlight
is kind of like over
here, over there.
I'm not feeling
as if I'm the one
standing behind that
spotlight controlling it
or I'm not the spotlight,
just to keep with what
we've been building up here.
So could you tell us a
little bit about distraction
and tell me whether
or not these two
forms are in any way
accurate or inaccurate?
I'd be happy for them
to be inaccurate.
And whether or not there are
other forms of distraction
that we need to be
on the lookout for.
And again, I think
what most people
are seeking is, what is the way
to not just enhance our ability
to focus but to shed this
wetsuit-like cloak that limits
our experience that I'm
calling and that you've
called distraction?
SAM HARRIS: Yeah, distraction
is one component of it.
The other aspect of it is
identification with thought.
And the feeling of self
is bound up in the sense
that I'm the thinker,
I'm the one attending,
I'm the one vulnerable.
I'm the inner homunculus that's
vulnerable to experience.
And it can be
gratified by it or not,
and it's constantly trying
to improve it or mitigate
negative aspects of it.
It's the sense that
there's kind of a rider
on the horse of
consciousness as opposed
to just consciousness
and its contents.
So again, it rides atop this
illusion of control, et cetera.
So to go all the way back to the
question you asked about, just
what is in it, what I
recommend as a starting point
for meditation.
Some of your assumptions
are, in fact, true.
Yes, I often recommend
at the beginning people
close their eyes and you
do a sitting practice
and it's different from
a walk in practice.
I mean, you can do
both, but people
tend to start sitting
with their eyes closed.
But again, ultimately
where this is going
is it's not an art
of-- meditation
properly recognized is not
an artifice that you're
adding to your life.
It's not even a practice,
it is less rather than more.
And therefore, it is also
coincident with potentially
every waking moment.
There's nothing that you
can do with your attention
once you know how to meditate.
That in principle
excludes meditation
because meditation
is just a recognition
of an intrinsic character of
consciousness in each moment.
And all you have
in each moment is
consciousness and its contents,
whatever you're doing.
So in the beginning, you'll be
very deliberate and precious
about deciding to
practice meditation,
and you'll set aside 10
minutes in the morning,
and you'll do that.
And it'll seem very different
from the next 10 minutes
when you're spilling
out onto your to-do list
and you're trying to figure
out what the day looks like.
But ultimately,
you want to erase
this boundary between formal
practice and the rest of life
such that it's just
not remotely findable.
And that's achievable.
And I think even from
the very beginning,
you can relax this conceptual
distinction between meditation
and its antithesis, because it's
not at the level of anything
you're doing, it's at
the level of what's
happening in your
relationship to thought.
Like, what can you notice?
It's + transition from
the by-stable percept.
You're looking at the
image and you see nothing.
Let's say it's the
Dalmatian, it's
just the spots on the paper.
And you don't see anything.
And then all of a sudden the
Dalmatian or the face of Jesus
or whatever the image is
pops out and then you see it,
it's the transition from
nothing to something.
The practice becomes
the transition
from being lost in thought
and then waking up.
And breaking the
spell of thought,
and identification of thought
is very much like waking up
from a dream and having--
it's like that transition.
Like you're having a
dream and couple of things
are true there.
I mean, it's a psychosis
that is just not--
we don't problematize
because you're safely in bed
and you're not moving
or unless you've got
some kind of sleep disorder.
You're not walking
around harming
yourself or anybody else.
But to be in bed
and to not know it
and to think you're
running along a beach
or you're getting tried for
murder in a court of law
or whatever the
thing is that you're
completely delusional
about, that is psychosis.
And it's like
you're fundamentally
unaware of your circumstance.
And then two things
can happen there.
You can either become lucid
within the dream, which
is interesting, and there's
a whole phenomenology
of that which can be practiced.
But more commonly,
you can just wake up
from the dream and
all of a sudden,
the problem you thought
you had is no longer there,
and you have a completely
different context
for your conscious life.
Now, you know you're safely
in bed all the while.
There really is
something analogous
when you break this
identification with thought.
You're having a
thought that seems
to be some kind of moral or
psychological emergency and yet
the moment you see
daylight around,
the moment you see
that the mind is larger
than this mere appearance,
then suddenly you
have a degree of freedom
that a moment ago was
just unthinkable.
And you recognize, you
sort of come to in a way,
you recognize your
circumstance in a way
that you weren't a moment ago
when you were just talking
to yourself, when you were just
identical to that conversation.
So this is all to say that
ultimately, meditation--
I mean, so again, there's
another apparent paradox here.
Many people who don't
know much about meditation
will say things
like, well, for me,
running is my meditation
or skiing or rock climbing
or playing the guitar
or something they like
to do that gives them an
experience of flow, that's
what they go to feel better
and that's the opposite of all
the chaos of their lives
or their time on Twitter
or whatever it is.
And virtually every
case, it's not
true to say that that is
effectively meditation.
By learning to play
the guitar, you're
not going to learn what
I'm calling meditation.
And you're not going
to learn it by cycling
and getting-- no matter how good
you get at any of those things,
you're not going to learn
it by doing those things.
But paradoxically, I
mean, not really, but it
can seem like a paradox.
Once you know how to
meditate, then you
can meditate doing
all of those things.
Meditation is totally compatible
with playing the guitar
or skiing or doing any
ordinary thing you like to do.
So once you know
how to meditate,
and again, it's totally
natural in the beginning
to formalize it and to set
aside time each day to do it
because it is a training.
I mean, it is something
that in the beginning,
you have to get used to.
But once you're
getting used to it,
then there is no good reason
not to be experiencing
this thing I'm
calling meditation,
this insight into the center
looseness of consciousness,
the non-selfhood
of consciousness.
You should experience
it when you're
playing your favorite
sport or when you're having
a conversation with somebody.
Then to come back to
your initial assumption
about eyes closed,
a lot of practice,
even formal practice
can be done eyes open.
And it's important
to do it as open
because so much of our
anchoring of our sense of self
is based on visual cues.
I mean, we know that you
can if you give people
the right visual cues,
you can translocate
their sense of self.
You can give them an
out-of-body experience
with a video display,
where you can literally
make them feel like there's
a body swapping illusion.
You can make them feel that
they're in another person's
body looking back
at their body if you
run the cameras the right way.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I've done this
in VR, seeing an image of--
they create an avatar
for you and then
your bodily movements generate
the movements of the avatar,
and you start gaining presence
as they call it in the VR lingo
very quickly.
And then pretty
soon, you lose sense
of your own bodily
representation.
And it's a little eerie.
What's eerie is to me
is going back into,
of course never left, but back
into your actual body when
the VR goggles pop off.
The world seems
almost overwhelming
the number of
sensory stimuli that
are in a laboratory room,
which is actually quite sparse.
So exactly what
you described, this
translocation of notions of
self through visual experience.
SAM HARRIS: But
conversely, when you
lose the sense of
self, the sense of self
I'm talking about,
it can be especially
vivid and salient
with eyes open.
Because so many of your
reference points to selfhood
are delivered
visually, especially
in a social situation.
So like, I'm talking to you,
you're looking back at me.
So the implication
of your gaze is
that I'm over here behind my
face implicated by your gaze.
So the sense that you're
looking at something
is the sense of self
in that social context.
And if your facial expression
changes, I'm saying something
and if you kind of
furrow your brow, like,
what the hell is he-- and I can
read into that facial change,
some interstate of yours
that is salient to me.
All of a sudden, we've
got this sort of dance of.
Like, I'm noticing
you reacting to me,
and that's changing the way
I'm feeling about what I'm--
That's the purview of
every neurosis everyone
didn't want, right?
ANDREW HUBERMAN: And
every relationship.
I had a girlfriend when I was
a post-doc who was very, very--
she was brilliant,
really, still is.
And she always said that
every relationship, there
are four arrows.
She used to say she's a
neuroscientist, still is.
And said there's the arrow of--
she was talking to me,
so she said, me to you
and kind of what you
perceive coming from me.
And then there's
you to me, and then
there's an arrow from the middle
going right back at of each one
of us, which is our
own perception of what
the other person is
thinking about us,
and it's feeding back
on the other arrow.
And she gave me this
very clear but model
of basically relationships.
The relationship failed, but
it was good while it lasted,
I should say.
But the four arrow
model of relationships
actually shows up in every type
of one-on-one relationship,
and is probably an
under description
of the total number of arrows.
But is I think it's exactly
what you're describing
is that perception of self
through the eyes of other
whether or not we're empathic
or not strongly shapes
the way that we access
different context dependent rule
sets about what we're
going to say or not.
And it's very dynamic, right?
SAM HARRIS: Yeah.
But the freedom that I think we
want and people can sometimes
experience this
just haphazardly,
but the center of the bull's
eye from the meditative point
of view is to get off that
ride entirely and to--
so that losing the sense
of self in this context
of a social encounter is to
give up your face, essentially.
And what that entails
is or what that gives
you is the free attention to
actually just pay attention
to the other person.
And the other person
is now no longer quite
an object in the
world for you, there's
really just a kind of a totality
of which that person is a part.
And actually, Martin Buber,
the mystical Jewish philosopher
talked about the
I-thou relationship.
And I think it's been a long
time since I've read Buber.
But and I don't know
if he goes far enough
to be truly non-dualistic, but
there's distinction between I
and thou because the thou
part of it is, I think,
potentially this.
Again, it's been several
decades since I read him.
But there's a way of
beholding another person where
you have the free attention
to simply behold them.
You no longer care what
they think about you.
You don't feel neurotically
implicated by their gaze.
You don't feel-- you're simply
the space in which they're
appearing, and so you're free.
So by definition, you're
no longer self-conscious.
And this phrase,
self-consciousness, really
does get at this,
what I'm calling
the self, the illusory self
as a kind of contraction.
And you can notice
this for yourself.
Just imagine what
it's like to go
from not being self-conscious to
suddenly being self-conscious.
And the proximate
cause of this almost
invariably is suddenly
recognizing that somebody
is looking at you.
It's like you're in a
Starbucks and you're alone
and you're reading the
newspaper or whatever it is.
And this now sounds
highly anachronistic.
It's been three years since
I've held a physical newspaper
in a Starbucks.
But you're just minding
your own business.
And you look up,
and you're seeing
a room full of strangers.
But then you notice that
someone is just looking at you.
And so that moment
of eye contact,
suddenly that throws you back on
yourself as a kind of suddenly,
you're the object in the
world for that other person.
That recognition is
the tightening there,
the kind of contraction there
is a further ramification
of this feeling most of us
have most of the time of being
the center of experience.
It's like we're all
walking around with a fist.
And in moments of
self-consciousness,
the fist gets really tight.
And that's the thing that gets
fully relaxed when you discover
this, what in various point's
called the nature of mind
or the non-dual nature
of consciousness.
It's just that there is no
center to this experience.
And when you
recognize no center,
then even when your gaze is
aimed at another person's gaze,
there is no implication
going back to the center
because there is no center.
And rather than that being an
experience of weird detachment
or confusion, it's
actually an experience
of greater relationship because
you're no longer defending it.
You're not defending
anything over here.
You're not braced
against anything,
you're just the space in which
that person is showing up.
And so it's an
experience of being
much more comfortable in the
presence of another person,
whatever your relationship,
because you're not contracting.
Again, and this is meditation.
This is meditation that is
totally compatible with having
a conversation with somebody.
And then when you notice
your self contracting,
when you notice you're
not meditating anymore,
you're actually reacting.
Like, they just said something
or looked a certain way
and now, you're cast
back upon yourself
in relationship to
them, that becomes
a kind of mindfulness alarm.
Then it becomes the
unsatisfactoriness of that.
Psychologically becomes
more and more salient.
Because one, that's not
the way you want to be.
I mean, it's like,
it's the antithesis
of it being as comfortable
as you were a moment ago.
But two, it's something
you're doing unnecessarily.
it's like, again, you're
making a fist when
you don't have to make a fist.
Again, you can leave aside
all those circumstances
where it's appropriate
to react to someone.
And I'm into martial
arts and self defense.
And yes, you're not supposed
to be just this puddle of goo
out in the world who can be
just mistreated by people
and never put up resistance.
But it's psychologically
even if a state like anger
or contraction is sometimes
normative and appropriate,
the question is, how long is it
normative and appropriate for?
How long do you want
to stay angry for?
In my experience, these kind of
classically negative emotions
like anger and fear are
appropriate as salience cues.
They orient you to an emergency
or a potential emergency.
But then in dealing
with the emergency,
they're almost never the
state you want to be in.
Like, it's better to actually be
calm in an emergency in a way.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Oh, absolutely.
And again, the language is
insufficient to describe
what you're telling us.
But I think what
comes to mind for me
is this distinction between
situational awareness
and self-awareness.
And we need both
but under conditions
of emergency, true emergency,
or motivated desire.
We need to dial down the
amount of self-awareness
in order to be more effective
within the situational
awareness.
But you said something
very important.
And my lab has been
working on fear-like states
for a long time, so I confess
I'm going to rob this from you,
but I'll credit you
every time I describe it,
is that the fear of the
threat detection state
or set of events acts
as a flag but is not
meant to persist in the
way that the flag went up
if one is to be in their
most adaptive state.
Actually, Jocko Willink and
I were talking about this.
He talks a lot about detachment
and open gaze, things
that my lab is interested in
visual system and autonomic
interactions.
So why broadening
the gaze literally
broadens the time
domain of thinking
and you come up
with new solutions
to complex problems in
real time and so on.
And you're describing
an everyday set
of interactions where
that could be very useful.
And yet, there seems to be
something that about the way
you describe meditation and
what you've managed to arrive at
and what practitioners of
meditation can arrive at,
which is something
more than that.
It's not just about being
effective or optimizing,
all the language we see thrown
around a lot in the space
that I live in these days, but
something fundamentally more
important about how to
experience life and the self.
This realization
that what you thought
was there was
never really there,
but that there are
constraints that limit that.
And so to try and fracture
those constraints one by one.
Would you say that
meditation as a practice done
for a few minutes each day
or with the app, that it's
kind of a step function?
Is it very non-linear in
terms of people's progress?
I'm certainly going to go start
doing more meditation based
on this discussion, truly.
Because any time
someone describes
that there's kind of a myth
that we've been living in,
I become obsessed with the
idea of dissolving that myth.
That's a very seductive
phrase, so thank you
for using that one.
There is no better
marketing tool,
which is I realize what
you're not trying to do here.
But that's for me to
capture my efforts.
You tell me that there's
a myth that I'm living in
and that it can be
dissolved, and that opens up
a better landscape.
What is the process like?
Do some people make
progress very quickly?
Do some people experience
kind of step functions
towards progress?
What does the meditation
practice look like over time?
Do you still meditate or
have you just threaded it
through your jujitsu, your
writing, your daily life,
your coffee, your time
with your wife, et cetera?
SAM HARRIS: Yeah,
also just to come back
to talk about the
myth for a second.
So what you just enunciated
was a kind of a second doorway
into this whole project.
So like, the usual door is
through the door of suffering,
for lack of a better word.
When people feel unhappy in
a variety of ways and they
get more sensitized
to the mechanics
of their own unhappiness.
And meditation is
one of the things
on the menu that
is explicitly built
as a remedy for unhappiness.
And it is.
And that's I think
that's probably
the most common path to this.
But another path is just
intellectual interest.
I mean, just wanting
to know what's
real about the mind subjectively
in a first person way.
And there's no contradiction
between those two things,
and I'm motivated
by both of them.
But it's a totally
valid doorway into this.
There are definitely
step functions.
I mean, I would say
there are at least two,
and they really are
articulated along
the lines of the
framework I've been
describing of dualistic and
non-dualistic mindfulness.
So in the beginning,
you're going to start out--
99.9% of people will start out
dualistically paying attention
and noticing the difference
between being distracted
by thought and then being
on the object of attention,
whether it's the breath
or sounds or whatever.
And eventually, that opens
up to all possible objects
of attention,
including thoughts.
And there's still
this fluctuation
between being distracted and
then being mindful of whatever.
And the fact that it's open
to all possible objects
differentiates this
type of practice
from anything that is
narrowly focused on one
object like a mantra
or a visualization
as I was just saying.
Those are other
paths of practice
that are more
concentration-based and
interesting.
But the benefit of mindfulness
is that very quickly, you
realize it's by definition
compatible with all possible
experience, because
you're not artificially
contracting your attention
down to something,
you're just being aware
of the next thing.
A sight, a sound,
a taste, a thought.
So the first step function
is to very clearly experience
the difference between
being lost in thought
and being clearly aware
of any part of experience,
including thought.
And to notice the freedom,
the comparative psychological
freedom that gives.
So something's made you
angry and now you're
thinking about all
the reasons why
you should be angry and
have every right to be angry
and what you're going to tell
that person when you see them,
and then you notice
you're thinking.
And you notice the connection
between the thought
and the anger.
Like, the minute spent lost
in thought about what's
making you angry
is the thing that
dragged through the
physiology of anger.
And the moment you notice
that once you're mindful,
once you can be mindful, you
can notice thought as thought
and how quickly that dissipates.
That's just the language
and the imagery.
You couldn't hold on
to it if you wanted to.
And then you notice the
physiology of the anger
is just this kind
of meaningless,
kind of inner incandescence
that has its own half
life and degrades very,
very quickly when you're
no longer thinking
about the reasons
why you should be angry.
You can't hold on to the anger,
the anger itself dissipates.
And from the point of view of
the one who's being mindful,
this is tremendous relief.
And at minimum, it's
a degree of freedom.
You can at that point
decide, well, how long
do I want to be angry for?
Is it useful to stay angry?
Do I want to be angry for
one minute, two minutes, five
minutes, 10 minutes?
And before you have that
capacity to be mindful,
you're going to
helplessly be as angry
as you're going to be
for as long as you're
going to be that way
just based on the time
course of your thinking
about it, brooding about it,
telling your wife about it.
It's just going to be this
conversation-based misadventure
in negative states
of mind, and you
are going to be the
hostage of that for as long
as you'll be the
hostage of that.
You have nothing
you can do apart
from just deciding to check
out and watch Game of Thrones
again for the third time.
You can divert your attention
to something else, which is
sometimes a good thing to do.
But mindfulness, even
dualistic mindfulness
gives you this capacity to just
observe the mechanics of this
and then get off the
ride whenever you want.
So that really is
a step function.
First, there was a time
before you could do that,
and then there's a time
after which you can do that.
The other step function
is noticing that there
is no one who is doing that.
I mean, this is the
non-duality, the selflessness,
the centralessness of awareness.
The fact that there's no place
from which the mindfulness is
being aimed but the
fact that there's just
this open condition in which
everything is appearing,
thoughts included.
To have you at that point, your
mindfulness no longer becomes--
it's no longer this
dualistic effort
to strategically pay
attention to anything
as opposed to being
lost in thought,
it's just what's left when
the present recognized
thought unravels.
Even before it unravels,
what's recognized
is you are simply identical
to the condition in which
everything is appearing.
Now, again, I'm not making
a Deepak Chopra-like
metaphysical claim
about the mind.
I'm not saying the mind isn't
what the brain is doing,
and I'm not saying
that you're recognizing
the consciousness that
gave birth to the universe.
I'm not making any broad
claims about metaphysics,
I'm just talking about as
a matter of experience.
There is just this condition in
which everything is appearing.
And what you're
calling your body,
again, as a matter
of experience--
I'm not saying that we
can't have third person
conversations about physical
bodies in the physical world.
But as a matter of
experience, the only body
you're ever going to directly
encounter as your own
is in appearance
and consciousness.
So consciousness is
not in your body,
what you're calling your
body is in consciousness.
Visually, proprioceptively,
it's like everything is just
appearing in this condition.
And again, this
is not a spotlight
that you're aiming
at the body, there's
just this condition in which
everything, including anything
you could call
yourself is appearing.
And so yeah, the
second step function
is to recognize that
this is already true.
Consciousness is already
without this thing
you've been calling your
ego and hoping to unravel it
through meditation.
Consciousness is not going to
get any more selfless, any more
centerless, any freer
than it always already
is recognized as such.
And so the step
function at that point
is your mindfulness
at that point,
the thing you come back to when
you're no longer distracted
is that recognition
again and again.
And then it becomes compatible
with anything you would do.
And so to answer
your question, yes,
I still practice formally,
sometimes, frequently.
But I definitely miss days
and I don't do it for--
I mean, I don't rule
out the possibility
that I will go back on
retreat at various times
just to check in with that and
see if that makes a difference.
But I tend to sit for--
I mean, I've designed
my life so that I
can spend a lot
of time meditating
without having to be
formally meditating.
Like, so, I'll go for
a hike for two hours.
And what I'm doing
when I'm hiking
is identical to what I'm doing
when I'm quote, "meditating",
sitting in a chair, doing
nothing but meditate.
So yeah, I'm very
interested in erasing
the boundary between what
people are calling meditation
and the rest of life.
And so in teaching
these things, I
tend to emphasize that
from the beginning
because I think it's
very easy to set up--
to get gold by a
bunch of assumptions
that cause you to be
very split in your sense
of what your life is about.
And I'm sort of banking
my meditation over here
because I'm meditating two
hours a day diligently,
and it's going to be
really good for me.
And then over here, this is the
rest of my life, which is not
nearly as wise or as
useful or as like,
this is the stuff that is
still the area of my problems.
And I think it's useful to
recognize you've got one life,
and you've got this single
condition of consciousness,
and its contents in
every mode of life.
And there's something
to recognize about it.
And you're always free
to recognize that.
And truly even in your dreams.
I mean, it never stops.
So that's what I
tend to emphasize.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: So
earlier, you told us
that meditation is not
about changing the content
of conscious experience.
And in a different
podcast that you were on,
I heard you say something to
the effect of that normally we
are in our daily experience
and unless we are trained
in meditation, unless
we've dissolved
this illusion of the gap between
actor and self and observer,
that we require certain sensory
events to create collisions
within us and with the natural
world that sort of blast us
into a different mode of being.
I want to use that
as a way to frame up
this idea that some things
such as psychedelics
but also a very long hike,
a very long fast, who knows?
A banquet, different
types of life experiences
do exactly the opposite of what
you're describing meditation
does, which is
that they actively
change the content of
our conscious experience
so much so that we
often remember those
for the rest of our lives.
Could you tell us why
psychedelics can be useful?
And here, I'll give the
caveats that maybe you'll
feel obligated to give as well,
but we're talking about safely
and responsibly,
age-appropriate,
context-appropriate, ideally
with some clinical or other
type of guidance, legality
issues, obeyed, et cetera.
All that stated, it
was psychedelics to me
are an experience of
altered perception,
internal and external
perception, altered space time
relationship,
somewhat dreamlike.
I think it was Alan Hobson at
Harvard for a long time talked
about the relationship between
psychedelic-like states
and dream-like states because
of this distortion of space time
dimensionality.
And I haven't experimented
with them much.
I've been part of a clinical
trial, three doses of MDMA,
which certainly
altered the quality
of my conscious
experience in ways
that led to a lot of
lasting and at least for me,
valuable learning.
So what are your what are your
thoughts about psychedelics
in terms of how they
intersect with the discussion
that we've been having?
And what utility do they play
in recognition of the self
or in other sorts
of brain changes?
SAM HARRIS: Well so, let's
just price in all those caveats
that people can anticipate.
These drugs are not
without their risks.
And one problem is that we
have this single-term drugs
or psychedelics, which
names many different types
of substances, and
they're not all the same.
So like, MDMA is not even
technically a psychedelic.
I think it has immense
therapeutic value,
and it actually
was my gateway drug
to this whole area of concern.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Amphetamine pathogen, right?
It's a sort of an
amphetamine and a pathogen
at the same time.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah, I mean
it's, often called--
ANDREW HUBERMAN: M pathogens.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah,
and a pathogen--
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Not a
pathogen, M pathogen.
SAM HARRIS: And a pathogen or
an entactogen, it's been called.
But it doesn't tend to
change perception in the way
that classic psychedelics do.
And it's also serotonergic,
but it has to be in some part
differently.
And even LSD and psilocybin,
which are much more similar
and classic psychedelics,
both are also serotonergic
but they're not merely,
and they're also different.
And the higher dose you take
of these drugs, the more--
at lower doses everything,
can kind of seem the same.
At higher doses, they
begin to diverge.
And we can talk about the
pharmacology if you wanted to.
But I would just say
that for many of us,
and certainly for
me, psychedelics
were indispensable in the
beginning in proving to me
that this was--
the first person interrogation
of the mind was worth doing.
Because I was somebody
who at age 17 or 18,
before I had any real experience
with MDMA or LSD or psilocybin,
if you had taught me how
to meditate at that point,
I think I would have just
bounced off the whole project.
I think I was so cerebral
in just my engagement
with anything.
I was so skeptical of any of
the religious and spiritual
traditions that have given us
most of our meditation talk
that I think I just would have--
And I know many of these people.
I have tried to teach Richard
Dawkins to meditate and Daniel
Dennett to meditate.
I've ambushed them
with meditation
both in a group
setting and one-on-one.
Not Dan but Richard, I
ambushed on my own podcast
with a guided meditation.
And he closes his
eyes, he looks inside,
and there's nothing
of interest to see.
He doesn't have the
conceptual interest in him
that would cause him to
persist long enough to find out
that there's a there there.
Now, this is not a problem
with LSD or psilocybin or MDMA.
I know that if I gave
him 100 micrograms of LSD
or 5 grams of mushrooms or
25 milligrams of psilocybin--
that's probably not
the analogous dosage
to the 5 grams of mushrooms.
5 grams of mushrooms
would be more than that.
I forget what it is of
MDMA, maybe 120 milligrams.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I think
the maps dose, which
is the one that's under clinical
trials is 125 milligrams
with an option of a
75 milligram booster.
Funny, I remember it.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah,
that's strange,
the facts that come to hand.
But there's just no
possibility that nothing's
going to happen right now.
Something with a psychedelic,
with MDMA, most people
tend to have certainly
under any kind of guidance,
tend to have a very positive,
pro-social experience.
But with a
psychedelic, you might
have a somewhat
terrifying experience
if you have quote, a bad trip.
And I've certainly
had those experiences
on LSD and to some
degree, on psilocybin.
But the prospect that
nothing is going to happen
is just in nearly a million
cases out of a million just
not in the cards.
I mean, just
neurophysiologically,
something is going to happen
with the requisite dose of one
of these drugs.
And if that thing that
happens is psychologically
at all normative and pleasant
and interesting and valuable,
which it is so much of
the time and certainly
under the appropriate set
and setting and guidance,
it can be a lot of the time
for virtually everybody.
Again, there are caveats.
If you're prone,
if you think you
have a proclivity for
schizophrenia or bipolar
disorder, this is almost
certainly not for you.
And anyone doing the
studies at Johns Hopkins
for the therapeutic effects
of any of these drugs,
they're there ruling
out people with--
first degree relatives with any
of these clinical conditions.
So for somebody
like me at 18 who
didn't know that this was
an area of not only interest
but would it be the
center of gravity
for the rest of his life, if
only he could pay attention
clearly enough to
see that it could be,
I was someone who very likely--
again, I don't have the
counterfactual in hand.
I don't know what
would have happened
if someone had
forced me to meditate
for an hour at that point.
But I know I wasn't interested
in it until I took MDMA.
I know I wasn't having
these kinds of experiences
spontaneously that
showed me that there
was an inner landscape
that was worth exploring.
I was a very hard-headed skeptic
who was very interested in lots
of things, but there was no
alternative to me just thinking
more about those things.
I mean, the idea that there's
some other way of grasping
cognitively at the
interesting parts of the world
beyond thinking about the
world, that just wouldn't
have computed for me at all.
No one ever gave me a book
to read or I never had--
The noun, meditation,
very likely
meant absolutely nothing to me
before I took my first dose of,
in this case it was MDMA.
So what the drug experience
did for me is it just proved--
So one of the
limitations of drug
is that, obviously, no matter
how good the experience,
the drug wears off
and then you're
back to in more or
less your usual form,
and now you have a
memory of the experience.
And it can be a
fairly dim memory.
I mean, some of
these experiences
are so discontinuous with
normal waking consciousness
that it can be like
trying to remember
a dream that just degrades
over the course of seconds.
And then it could have been the
most intense dream you've ever
had and for whatever reason,
you can barely get a purchase
on what it was about.
And there are some
psychedelic experiences
that are analogous to that.
But for most people
most of the time,
there's a residue
of this experience.
And with something like MDMA,
they can be quite vivid.
Where you recognize there
was a way of being that
is quite different than what I'm
tending to access by default,
and it is different
in ways that are just
obviously better and
psychologically more healthy.
I mean, it's possible to
be healthy psychologically
in a way that I never imagined.
And then when you link it up
to the traditional literature
around any of this stuff,
again, so much of it
is shot through
with superstition
and other worldliness
of religion.
And as you know and I think
you're listeners probably know,
I've spent a lot of time
criticizing all that.
But there is a baby in the
bathwater to all of that.
It's not that somebody
like Jesus or the Buddha
or any of the matriarchs and
patriarchs of the world's
religions, it's not that they
were all conscious frauds
or temporal lobe epileptics,
there's a pathological lens
that you can put
on top of all that.
But once you have one of these
experiences on psychedelics
or on a drug like MDMA, you
know that there's a there there.
You know that unconditional
love is a possibility.
You know that feeling
truly one with nature.
I mean, just so one
with nature that you
could spend 10 hours
in front of a tree
and find that to be the
most rewarding experience
of your life.
That's a possible
state of consciousness.
Now, it may not be the
state of consciousness
you want all the time.
You don't want to
be the crazy guy
by the tree you
know who can't have
a conversation
about anything else.
But once you have one
of these experiences,
you recognize, OK, there's
some reason why I'm not having
the beatific vision right now.
And I can't even figure out
how to aim my attention so as
to have anything like it.
And that's a problem,
because it's available,
and it is among the best things
that has ever happened to me.
And now I can just only dimly
remember what that was like.
So how do I get back
there on some level?
So that invites, again,
a logic of changes.
A logic of seeking changes in
the contents of consciousness,
which sets someone up for
this protracted or seemingly
protracted and fairly
frustrating search
to game their
nervous system so as
to have those kinds of
experiences more and more.
And again, it's not that
that's in principle fruitless
but it is from the point of
view of the core insight,
the core wisdom of
what I would take
from a tradition like
Buddhism, which is not
the only tradition that
has given voice to this,
but I would argue it's
given it voice to it
in the most articulate way.
Again, leaving aside
any of the superstition
and other worldliness
and miracles that we
don't have to talk
about at the moment.
And you certainly don't
need to endorse in order
to be interested in this stuff.
And so that's the
bifurcation between all
of the utility of
psychedelics and what
I'm talking about under
the rubric of meditation
is at this point of OK, once you
realize there's a there there,
what do you do?
And what's the logic by
which you're led to do it?
And it's possible if
you're only framework
is the good
experiences, the good
feels you had on
whatever drug it was
and a further discussion of
what that path of changes
can look like--
and that can become in
a religious context,
it can come in just a
purely psychedelic context
or some combination of the two.
I think you can be
misled to just seek
lots of peak experiences.
You're just trying
to string together
a lot of peak experiences hoping
they're going to change you,
every one of which,
by definition is
going to be impermanent.
It's first it wasn't
there, then it's there,
and then it's no longer there.
And then you've
got a memory of it.
What I think what
everyone really
wants whether they know it or
not, and they're right to want,
is a type of freedom that
is compatible with even
ordinary states of
consciousness, which
can ride along with them
into extraordinary states
of consciousness.
So I hadn't done
psychedelics for 25 years
because, again, they were super
useful for me in the beginning,
then I discovered meditation on
the basis of those experiences,
got really into
meditation and realized,
OK, this is a much more--
conceptually, this makes
much more sense to me.
This is delivering the goods
in terms of my experience.
There's no need to
keep having these--
seeking these peak
experiences with drugs.
But it had been 25 years
since I had done that
and there was this resurgence
in research on psychedelics.
And I was being asked
about psychedelics,
and I was talking about
their utility for me,
but again, these were
distant memories.
And there was also one type
of psychedelic experience
I was aware that
I had never had.
I had never done a high dose
of mushrooms blindfolded.
Every mushroom trip
I'd ever had I'd
been out in nature
and interacting with--
it's just been a very
transformed sensory experience
of the world and
of other people.
But I'd never done it
alone, blindfolded,
just purely inwardly directed,
and at a high dosage.
I'd done high doses of
LSD but not mushrooms.
So I did that and
it was very useful.
And I spoke about it on my
podcast, and there's actually--
I think if you search
"Sam Harris mushroom
trip" on YouTube, you
get the 19 minute version
of my describing that trip.
It was incredibly useful,
but what was doubly useful
was my mindfulness training in
the context of that explosion
of synesthesia.
I mean, it was such an
overwhelmingly strong
experience, and there
were so many moments where
it could have gone
one way or the other
based on my sense
of just, OK, I'm
going to try to resist this.
It was in truth irresistible
because it was just so much,
but there were moments where
I was aware of, OK, this is--
letting go of self
in this context
is the thing that
is going to make
the difference between
heaven and hell
here because there
are experiences that
are so extreme
that you can't even
tell if it's agony or ecstasy.
Everything is turned up to 11.
And the difference
between the two is--
the tipping point is just--
really it's a high
wire act in some sense.
You could just fall to
one side or the other.
Yeah, so what I think
people want is--
they certainly want
to be able to extract
from the psychedelic
experience, wisdom
that is applicable to ordinary
states of consciousness.
It's like, what is the
thing you can realize
in a moment of
having a conversation
with your child that
isn't distracting you
from that relationship?
It's not a memory of
when the world dissolved
or when you were
indistinguishable from the sky,
but it's just a way of
having free attention
and unconditional
love in this totally
ordinary and potentially
chaotic human experience, which
can be psychologically
fraught and you
can meet iterations
of yourself that you
don't like that
are not equipping
you to be the best possible
person in that relationship.
And what we want to do is
cut through all of that
and actually be in
love with our lives
and with the people in our
lives more and more of the time.
And I'm not saying that repeated
psychedelic journeys can't
be integral to that
project, but you
know that the project can't
be being high all the time.
So whatever is extractable from
the occasional psychedelic trip
has got to be manageable into
ordinary waking consciousness.
And the real point of contact
does run through this--
what I've been calling
the illusion of the self.
And again, that part
is discoverable without
any changes in contents.
So you don't have to suddenly
feel the energy of your body
rush out and be continuous
with the ocean of energy that
is not your body.
That's an experience
that's there to be had,
I mean, there's no doubt.
But the truth is just
looking at this cup
is just as formless and
as mysterious as that when
seen in the right
way, and that's
what meditation encourages
one to recognize.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
share the experience
that MDMA significantly
altered my perception of what's
possible in terms of an
emotional stance towards self
and others, including
animals, something that
runs very deep for me and that
I had been actively suppressing
in anticipation of having
me put my dog down.
But also, I don't know how
to frame it except to say,
my lab did animal
research for years,
and I was always very conflicted
about it because I love animals
and yet I wanted to
understand the brain
and we need to work on
animal brains, and we--
SAM HARRIS: Rodents or what?
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, I'll
be very direct about this.
I've worked on many species.
I've worked on mice and rats.
Admittedly, I've worked on--
I've done some cat experiments.
I've worked on large, non-human
primates including macaques.
I no longer work on
any of those species.
I've worked on cuttlefish,
cephalopods, a discussion
for another time, brilliant
little creatures, maybe
as smart as us, or who knows?
Maybe smarter.
And now I work on humans
because I couldn't reconcile
the challenge inside me,
which was my love of animals
and working on them.
I just couldn't
do it any longer.
And MDMA didn't set
that transition,
that transition actually
had been set a lot earlier.
It's something I
really grappled with.
It didn't keep me up at
night, but it was always
in the back of my mind.
In any event, I hope
what we discovered
was worthwhile, but this
that's a bigger debate.
And I've strong
feelings about this,
and maybe it's a topic
for another podcast.
But I'm very happy that
now I work on humans,
and they can tell
me if they want
to be part of the
experiment or not,
and I trust them and
I trust their answers.
I think that MDMA, in its role
as an pathogen, I think really
did set an understanding
of what's real and true.
So I think truths
like that become--
I felt that they didn't
hit me square in the face.
The feeling behind the
conflict made itself evident,
and what to do about
it made itself evident.
So I suppose MDMA did
assist the transition
to purely human research, as
opposed to animal research.
The other thing that
I noticed it did
is it made it not
scary to confront
things that were scary to
confront in my conscious life.
And I could think about
things in my conscious life,
but it brought
them close in a way
that I could get closer
and closer to the flame
and then gain some
understanding.
I'm still amazed at how answers
arrive, both during the session
and in the weeks and
months that follow if one
puts the attention to it.
I think that's why
it's important to have
a guide of some sort
or to have some pseudo
structure because otherwise
one can get attached
to the sounds in the room.
And there's probably
meaning there,
but I wanted to do
some deeper work.
I have not had experience
with psilocybin, at least
not since my youth.
And I don't recommend
young people do it.
I regret doing LSD and
psilocybin as a young person.
I don't say that for politically
correct reasons or liability
reasons, I just think my
mind was not developed.
But I'm intrigued by something--
so here's the question--
how is it that psilocybin
in particular and high dose
psilocybin and the ego
dissolution that people
talk about on psilocybin--
how do you think that lines up
with some of the
experiences that you've
been describing for a
adequate meditation practice?
Because that's something that
I did not experience on MDMA.
In fact, if anything, I
experienced for the first time
what really feeling like
a isolated container was,
and the difference-- and how
empathy and being bounded--
having, in other words,
good boundaries and empathy
could be symbiotic.
I experienced that for
the first time there.
And I do think that
there is learning inside
of these states that
translates into everyday life
when one is not on these states.
And the last thing
I'll say is, no, I
don't feel the impulse to go
and do 20 more MDMA sessions.
I think the three as
part of this study
were very effective for me.
As I say, if you hear the
calling again you might do it,
but I'm very curious about
psilocybin in particular
and this notion
of ego dissolution
because we've been
talking about the self.
SAM HARRIS: Well, so
there are different ways
In which the sense of self
can be eroded or expanded.
There's lots of experiences that
can still have a center to them
but be very novel
and transformational.
And one can reify
those as a goal state.
There's a concept in Buddhism
that I think is useful.
It doesn't translate
well to English,
or it can set up false
associations in English
that are unfortunate.
But so there's a concept of
emptiness in Buddhism, which
sounds, again, gray and
dispiriting in English,
but it's cognate terms are
things like unconditioned,
unconstrained, open, centralist.
When I'm talking
about non duality,
when I'm talking about the
loss of a sense of subject
and then what's
left, in Buddhism,
they would often describe
what's left as emptiness.
But an emptiness
is not a something.
Importantly, it's not
the same thing as unity,
so it's not a oneness
because it's--
When the center drops
out of experience,
it's not like you are
suddenly merged with the cup.
Now, granted, this is
where psilocybin and other
psychedelics can give
a false impression of I
think what the goal is.
You can have seeming
merging experiences--
you can have unity experiences
on psychedelics, which
can be quite powerful,
especially with other people
and with nature,
where you can just
feel the energy of
your body becomes
incredibly vivid and powerful.
It's like everything is just
buzzing with life energy.
And then when you touch
another person's hand
or you touch a
tree, there can be
this continuity of
energy, which can be
this overwhelming experience.
And again, this is
a 20 megaton change
in the contents
of consciousness.
This is a non ordinary
state of consciousness.
To give some indication
of how this happens--
back in the day
when I was in my 20s
and I was experimenting with--
this was LSD, but
some friends and I
had decided-- we had
this brilliant idea.
We would camp above Muir woods
and then take some LSD at dawn
and then walk down like a
mile I think from the campsite
into the actual
proper grove of trees
and commune with the giant
redwoods, the tallest
trees on Earth.
And so we dropped the acid at
dawn, and we start walking,
but the acid came on
almost immediately.
And we didn't get--
I mean, we got nowhere
near the woods,
and we got stopped by
a tree that was just
like an ordinary
20 foot oak tree,
the most boring
tree in the world.
And that tree absorbed
the next six hours
of our conscious attention
because it was just--
it was the tree of life.
I mean, there could
be no better tree.
So we're talking about
nonordinary states
of consciousness wherein
a merging with life
and with the world is possible.
So I'm not saying that kind
of experience isn't possible,
but there's a sort of
expanded self reification.
It is a kind of ego dissolution,
but there's a kind of egoity
that goes along for
the ride as well,
or can go along for the ride.
And the real insight into
emptiness, the real centerless
center of the bull's eye is a
recognition that in some ways
equalizes all experiences.
And again, it's just
as available now
in this ordinary
podcasting experience
as it is when you're merging
hands on with an oak tree,
and on 400 micrograms of acid,
and this is the whole universe.
And so it's the equality
of those two experiences
that this concept of
emptiness captures, which
a concept of oneness doesn't
quite capture because oneness
is really this peak experience
of being dragged out
of your somethingness into
a much bigger somethingness.
Emptiness is just
no center and then
everything is in its own place.
There's still sights, and
sounds, and sensations,
and thoughts, and feelings, but
there's no there's no center
and there's no
clinging to anything.
There's no clinging
to identity, there's
no clinging to the good
stuff, there's no there's
no resistance to the bad stuff.
So pleasant and unpleasant
get strangely equalized,
and it's very expansive.
And most importantly, it
doesn't block anything.
So yeah, if for whatever
reason if your nervous system
is set up to have
the, oh my god, I'm
now merging with the
tree experience, that's
possible from the
state of no center.
And on my recent--
now not so recent,
three years ago, it
was right before COVID,
but my last big psychedelic
experience, I was very
much experiencing that.
Whereas, insofar as I--
at the peak, there was no me
to remember any of this stuff.
But insofar as I could
experiment with--
is this really different
from anything else?
There is a equalizing to
the emptiness recognition,
even in the presence of
a completely transformed
neurophysiology.
Again, there's a
point of contact.
I mean, the real point of
contact between psychedelics
and meditation for me is--
but for my experiences
on psychedelics,
I think there's
just no way I would
have had the free attention to
be interested in the project
at all.
And there are other
aspects to the project.
It's not just having this
insight into selflessness,
it's all of the ethical
ramifications of that.
It's just like, what kind
of person do you want to be?
What are your values?
What is a good life,
altogether, when
you are talking
about relationships,
and political engagement,
and the changes you can
make in the world or not make?
It's just, what kind of
person do you want to be?
There's a much
larger consideration.
And I mean, as you discovered,
an experience on MDMA
can really both expand your
model of what is possible,
and what is desirable,
what is normative.
I mean, just what kind of self
do you want to be in the world?
And it can also help
you cut through things
that are inhibiting
your actualizing any
of those possibilities in
ordinary waking consciousness.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I've certainly
found that to be the case.
I mean, you raise a really
important point, which
is that once these
learnings take place,
these understandings
take place inside
of psychedelic journeys--
I do believe they translate
to neuroplasticity.
I do want to highlight
the point for people.
Oftentimes people
say, oh, you know,
this mushroom or
this psychedelic
it opens plasticity, but
of course, plasticity
has to be directed someplace.
Plasticity is just a process
like walking or anything
else, underlying neural process.
And I think it's
impossible for me
to understand what
compartments of my life
have been impacted by
these three MDMA sessions.
But in some ways, I
wonder whether or not,
not just the transition
away from animal research,
but also a deeper
realization of the love
for learning and
sharing information.
I won't go so far as
to say this podcast
is happening because of
that particular session,
but these things they splay
out into multiple domains
of the self.
And I do think that
the key features that
feel most important
to me to mention
are that it really identified
true loves, things that I truly
love, and made me less
cautious about feeling
how intense those
loves really are.
And then also lowered
the inhibition point
of exploring, well,
what would that mean?
And one of the reasons
I bring this up,
and why I think it's so
important that you mentioned
some issues around
politics and ethics
and that many things
have splayed out
from your exploration of
psychedelics, meditation,
neuroscience, philosophy,
all the things that are you,
and of course, that's only
a subset, is that so much
of what I hear and see, so
much of what I hear and see
in the self-help space,
contradicts itself and leads
back to the origin
without a lot of progress.
For instance, we
hear absence makes
the heart grow fonder but then
out of sight, out of mind.
You hear about
radical acceptance,
but then what if it's radical
acceptance of non acceptance?
I mean, there are
some experiences
in people for which I radically
accept the fact that I
want nothing to do with them.
Am I supposed to transcend that?
So these are the questions I
think that keep a lot of people
from exploring things like
meditation because they
feel like, well, is the idea
to just be OK with everything?
Is radical acceptance
just like--
we'll just bulldoze me
with things even if they--
and my goal is to
somehow surpass
the idea that they're harmful.
And I don't think
that's actually
the way any of this stuff
is supposed to work,
although I don't claim to be
the authority on it either.
I think notions of
radical acceptance,
and radical honesty, and any
number of different sayings
that one can find out there are
really the most salient beacons
and guides that most people have
in order to try and navigate
tough areas in their
life, including
the relationship
to self, but others
and political orientations.
And so I feel like
almost all those things
can be used to anchor down in
a stance that may or may not
be informed or to
open up to ideas.
And so I think that
none of this can really
be solved in a single
practice it sounds like,
but it does seem to me, based
on what you've told us today,
is that only through a deep
understanding of the self
as it really is, as
opposed to this illusion
that you framed up,
could we actually
arrive at some
answers about what's
actually right for each
and every one of us.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah,
I mean, there's
one generic answer that
I think can be extracted
both from psychedelics
and from meditation
and from just
thinking more clearly
about the nature of our lives.
And it's to become
more process oriented,
and to be more and more
sensitive to the mirage
like character of
achieving our goals.
Now, I'm not against
achieving goals.
I have a lot of goals.
I'm very busy.
There are lots of things
I want to get done,
and I'm satisfied as
anyone to finish a project.
But if you look at
the time course of all
of that fulfillment and--
there are a few lessons
everyone I think has to draw.
One is, most of your life
is spent in the process.
The moment at which the goal is
fully conquered, that is just--
I mean, that has
a tiny duration,
and it has a very
short half life.
The moment you arrive
at it, it begins
to recede because,
in the meantime,
you have all these
other goals that
have appeared on the horizon.
You've got people asking
what you're going to do next,
and in some sense, if
you're focused on goals,
you can never arrive.
And I think what we're
all looking for in life,
whether we're ever
thinking about taking
psychedelics or practicing
something like meditation,
we're looking for
good enough reasons
to let our attention
fully rest in the present.
That is the logic of success.
The sense like, I've got all
these things I want to do--
if I could just get rich
enough, or fit enough,
or dial in my sleep well enough,
or improve my life in all
of these ways, get the
right relationship,
wouldn't it be
great to be married,
I want to start a family,
I want all of these things.
Why do I want these things?
I want these things because
I'm telling myself--
all of those things
are wonderful,
I'm not I'm not discounting
those relative forms
of happiness or
sources of happiness
because it's all
completely valid,
it's completely valid
to want those things.
But one thing is
absolutely clear,
it's possible to be miserable
in the presence of all
of those things.
And you can add great wealth,
and fame, and everything
on top of that, and It's
possible to be absolutely
miserable having everything
anyone could seemingly want.
You just have to
open a newspaper just
to see people living
out that predicament--
spectacularly wealthy, famous,
healthy, successful people
who could do anything they
want in life, apparently,
and yet they're
doing this thing that
is completely dysfunctional
and making them needlessly
miserable.
I won't name names,
ANDREW HUBERMAN: There's
enough of them out there.
SAM HARRIS: Some people
come to mind at the moment.
So there is a clear dissociation
between having everything
and happiness that's possible.
And it's also possible to
have very little, and almost
nothing, and to be quite happy.
I mean, you might not
have met these people,
but I have met people who have
spent 10 years alone in a cave.
And they come out of
that cave not floridly
neurotic or psychotic,
they come out
of that cave beaming
with compassion and joy.
And I mean, they've been taking
MDMA for 10 years, essentially,
and they come out
of the cave and now
they're going to talk about it.
And I'm not necessarily
recommending that project
to anyone.
I'm just saying, that is a
psychological possibility.
So you have a double
dissociation here,
whether you can have
everything and be miserable,
or you can have nothing and
be beaming with happiness.
So what is it that we actually
want in all of our seeking
to arrange the
props in our lives
and to have a
convincing enough story
to tell about ourselves that
we're doing the right thing?
What is all of that
effort predicated on?
It's predicated on this
desire and this expectation
that if we could get all of
this stuff in the right place
and not have anything
terrifying to worry about,
everyone we love is healthy for
the moment, and we're healthy,
and we've got something to
look forward to on the weekend,
and there's not a
plumbing leak in the house
that we have to
immediately respond to,
and we like our house, and
our career is going fine,
and there's something
good to watch on Netflix,
and we have all of it, now
can we just actually give
up the war?
Can we fully locate
our sense of wellbeing
in the present moment?
Can we relax the impulse
to brood about the past
or think anxiously about
the future for long enough
to discover that all
of this here is enough?
Because our life our life is--
we have this finite
resource of--
I mean, we absolutely have
the finite resource of time,
but within this the
finite continuum of time,
we have the even more
precious resource
of free attention that can find
our fulfillment in the present.
Because even if we're even
if we're guarding our time
to do the things that
are most important to us,
we can spend all of that
time regretting the past,
or anxiously
expecting the future,
and just bouncing
between past and future
in our thinking about
ourselves and our lives,
and basically just
dancing over the present
and never making
contact with it.
So I think what we want
is a circumstance where
a tension can be located in the
present in a way that's truly
fulfilling.
And unless you have had
some kind of radical insight
that allows you to
do that on demand,
you are in some sense hostage to
the circumstances of your life
to do that for you.
You're constantly
trying to engineer
a state of the world
that will propagate back
on a state of self
that will make
the present moment good enough.
And what meditation does, and
psychedelics to some degree
does this, but meditation
very directly does this,
it reverses the causality
and lets you actually
change state such that
you can be fulfilled
before anything happens.
Your happiness is
no longer predicated
on the next good
thing happening.
You can be in the presence
of the next good or bad thing
already being fulfilled
and already being at peace.
I mean, there's a--
I think there are
misleading nouns
we can throw at
what is left there,
but it is tranquility, peace,
freedom, lack of contraction,
lack of conflict.
I mean, all of that can be
more and more of a default.
And all of that is also
compatible with deciding, yeah,
why not get in shape?
Why not engage this project?
Why not change your career?
I mean, it's not it's not that
you need to be somebody who--
I mean, to your
point, you can notice
all of these non optimal
things because no matter
how much you meditate,
you're very likely going
to spend a lot of your time
still lost in thought, still
identified with it,
and still caring
about the difference between
dysfunction and normativity
in your life.
The question is, what can you
what can you locate when--
the question, it's
like, how much can you
puncture that seeking happiness
project with the recognition
that you're already free?
That's what meditation
makes possible.
You can keep just
1,000 times a day
letting some daylight
into this search space.
But it is still compatible.
I mean, working out
is a great frame
in which to look at
this because, I mean,
in working out, when
you really work out--
I'm thinking mostly of--
I mean, it's really
anything, but it's
resistance training, or cardio,
or something like jujitsu.
You're intentionally
putting yourself
in classically unpleasant
circumstances, physiologically.
I mean, imagine what it's like
to do anything to failure.
Well, if you just
check in on what
that is like at the level
of sensation, I mean,
that is basically-- it feels
like a medical emergency.
If you were having
that experience
for some other reason,
like if you woke up
in the middle of
the night and felt
what it feels like
to be deadlifting
on your 10th rep on a set
where you would fail at 11,
that's an emergency.
But because you understand
what you're doing in the gym,
and you've sought
out, and it's actually
something you like doing, and
you can get a real dopamine hit
from doing it, what
you're doing when you're
doing that is you're owning a--
you're actually transforming a
classically negative experience
into something that's almost
intrinsically positive,
certainly the net
on it is positive.
Being able to do
that is more and more
the experience of being
actually at peace,
even while exerting
really intense effort
in one direction.
So you can be straining, and
I'm sure physiologically showing
a lot of stress, I mean,
I'm sure the cortisol is up,
and blood pressure's up,
heart rate is certainly up.
So it's like, as far as the
body is concerned, it's stress
as far as the eye can see.
But you really can
be deeply equanimous
and at peace, again, because
of the frame around it,
because of the concepts
attached to it,
because you know
what you're doing,
you know why it's
happening, and you want it.
So that's an attitude
you can bring
into other stressful things
that take effort to accomplish.
And so it's not
that you just need
to be a pushover when you
learn how to meditate,
or when you take MDMA, or
work on yourself in any
of these ways.
But what I think
you want to find
is you want to find
your point of rest
in the midst of any struggle.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I would
say that, certainly
MDMA but, and again, I have
less experience with meditation,
but they really I think
put us, ultimately,
in positions of what can only
refer to as real strength.
These can make
what before seemed
like impossible
decisions, or even
concepts or emotional
states to even think
about for any period of
time without deliberately
distracting or avoiding
in some other way
and be able to lean into
those with open eyes.
To me that's my
definition of strength.
I don't know what
other people consider.
But there's definitely something
real there in each case.
This may seem like a divergence
but I and many other people
are very curious about a
recent decision that you made,
which was to close your
account on Twitter.
You still have an Instagram
account I noticed.
SAM HARRIS: I mean,
my team manages that.
I've never--
ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's a lot
friendlier over at Instagram.
I've been there a lot longer--
SAM HARRIS: I've
never even seen it.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Oh, it's
pretty good actually,
considering-- imagine
what would happen
if you did pay attention.
They're doing a
good job with it.
But your decision to close
your account on Twitter I think
grabbed a lot of eyes
and ears, and there's
a lot of questions about why.
It was a very large account.
It correlated with a number of
things that, for the outsider,
people might be wondering
about new leadership, people
who had been booted off, brought
back on, or at least invited
back on, and so on.
You are certainly not obligated
to explain your behavior
to me or anybody
else for that matter.
But I'm curious if you
might share with us
what the motivation was for
taking the account down,
and how you feel
in the absence of--
I mean, your thumbs
presumably are freed up
to do other things.
SAM HARRIS: Yeah, I was
getting like an arthritic right
thumb I think, and I think it--
ANDREW HUBERMAN: If
you don't mind sharing,
I think there's a
lot of curiosity
about you and your routines.
You've been very generous
in sharing your knowledge,
but also what makes
you tick, what
motivates pretty big
decisions like that?
It was a major platform for you.
SAM HARRIS: Right, yeah, so
it was the only social media
platform I've ever engaged.
I mean, like you said,
I have an Instagram,
I have a Facebook
account, but I've never
used those as platforms.
I was never on them, I've
never followed people.
All the posting has
just come from--
it's just marketing
from my team.
But Twitter was me, I
mean, for better or worse,
and I began to feel
more and more for worse.
And it was interesting
because it was very--
I've talked about it
a lot of my podcast,
about my love/hate relationship
with Twitter over the years.
Many good things came
to me from Twitter,
and I was following a
lot of smart people.
And it had become my newsfeed
and my first point of contact
with information each day.
And I was really attached to it
just for that reason, just as
a consumer of content.
And then it was also a
place where I genuinely
wanted to communicate with
people and react to things.
And I would see some article
that I thought was great,
and I would signal boost
it to the people following
me on Twitter.
And that was rewarding,
and I could literally
help people on Twitter.
I mean, there are people who
have raised lots of money
for on Twitter just by signal
boosting their GoFundMe's.
And so I was engaged in a
way that seemed productive.
But I was always worried that it
was producing needless conflict
for me and was giving
me a signal in my life
that I was being lured into
responding to and taking
seriously that was
out of proportion
to its representation of any
opinion or set of opinions
that I should be
taking seriously.
So I was noticing that--
and again, this
evolved over years,
I mean, this long predated
recent changes to Twitter,
but I was noticing that many
of the worst things that
had happened for
me professionally
were first born on Twitter.
I mean, just like some conflict
I got into with somebody,
or something that I felt like
I needed to podcast about
in response to on Twitter.
Just so much of it, either
it's genesis was Twitter,
or it's the further spin of it
that became truly unpleasant
and dysfunctional
happened on Twitter.
It was just-- Twitter was
part of the story when
it got really bad.
And I've had vacations
that have gone sideways
just because I got on
Twitter and said something,
and then I had
produced a controversy
that I had to
respond to, and then
I had to do a
podcast about that.
And it was just, this is a mess.
And so at that
point, I have friends
who also had big
Twitter platforms who
would say why are you responding
to anything on Twitter?
Just tweet and ghost.
Joe Rogan--
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, post and ghost.
SAM HARRIS: sat me down and
tried to give me a talking
to, as did Bill Maher.
And both of them engage
Twitter in that way.
I mean, I think they
basically never look
at their ad mentions.
They never see whats
coming back at them.
They use it effectively, the
way I use, or don't even, use
Instagram or Facebook.
I mean, I don't even see what's
going out there in my name.
And so I could essentially
do that for myself
on Twitter, presumably.
And I did that for
some periods of time,
but then I would
continually decide, OK,
now it's all balanced
again, maybe I
can just communicate here
because it was very tempting
for me to communicate
with people
because I would see
somebody clearly
misunderstanding something
I had said on my podcast,
and I think, why not clarify
this misunderstanding?
And my efforts to do that
almost invariably produced a--
sometimes it was a meandering
process of discovery.
But often, it was just
a stark confrontation
with what appeared to me to
be just lunacy and malevolence
on a scale that I'd never
encounter elsewhere in my life.
I'd never meet these
people in life,
and yet I was meeting these
people by the tens of thousands
on Twitter.
And so the thing that began
to worry me about it--
and again, I
understand that people
have the opposite experience.
I mean, depending on
what you're putting out
and the kinds of
topics you're touching,
you could have just
nothing but love
coming back at you on Twitter.
But because I am very--
essentially, in the
center, politically,
and because this is
now on my podcast,
this is not in
the Waking Up app.
I'm often criticizing
the far left
and criticizing the far right.
I'm basically pissing off
everyone some of the time.
It's different, if you're
only criticizing the left,
no doubt you get
hate from the left,
but you have all the people on
the right who just reflexively
and tribally are expressing
their solidarity for you,
and who are dunking on
your enemies for you
and when your enemies
come out of the woodwork.
And if you're only
criticizing the right,
you get a lot of
pain from the right,
but you've got the people
on the left who are tribally
identified with the
left, who are just going
to reflexively defend you.
If you're in the center
criticizing the left as hard
as anyone on the right
ever criticizes the left,
and you're also criticizing
the right as hard
as anyone on the left
criticizes the right,
you're getting hate from
both sides all the time,
and no one is
reflexively and tribally
defending you because you
pissed them off last time.
You might be getting
hate from the left now,
and the people on the
right agree with you
but they can't forget the
thing you said about Trump
on that podcast
two podcasts ago,
so they're not
going to defend you.
And so I basically
created hell for myself
on Twitter because it
was just a theater of--
it was just pure cacophony
most of the time.
And what I was seeing was--
I mean, there's no way
there's this many psychopaths
in the world, but I was
seeing psychopaths everywhere.
I was seeing the most
malicious dishonesty, and just
goalpost moving, and hypocrisy.
I mean, some of it's
trolling, and some
of it's real confusion, and
some of it is psychopathy,
but it's like, it was
so dark that I worried
that it was actually giving me
a very negative and sticky view
of humanity that was--
I mean, one, I think it
is inaccurate, but two,
it was something that I
was returning to so much
because, again, I was checking
Twitter at least a dozen times
a day, and I'm sure there were
some days where I checked it
100 times a day.
I mean, it was, again, it was
my main source of information.
I was constantly reading
articles and then
putting my own stuff out.
That it became this
kind of fun house
mirror in which I was looking
at the most grotesque side
of humanity and
feeling implicated
in ways that were
important because it
was reputationally important,
or seem to be important.
I know a lot of these people.
These weren't just
faceless trolls,
these are people with whom
I have had relationships
and in some cases
friendships, who
because of what, largely,
Trump and COVID did
to our political landscape in
the last half a dozen years,
we're beginning to
act in ways that
seemed starkly dishonest
and crazy making to me.
So I was just noticing that I
was forming a view of people
who I actually have had
dinner with that was
way more negative, based
on their Twitter behavior,
then I think would ever be
justified by any way they would
behave in life with me.
I mean, I was never going to
have a face-to-face encounter
with any of these
people that was
this malicious, and
dishonest, and gaslighting,
and weird as what was
happening hourly on Twitter.
And so I just began
to become more
sensitive to what this was--
just the residue of
all of this in my life,
and just how often the
worst thing about me
in my relationship with
the people in my life,
like just talking to
my wife or my kids,
was just the fact that I had
been on Twitter at some point
in the previous hour.
And there was some
residue of that
in my interaction with them.
It's like, what are
you stressed out about?
What are you annoyed about?
What are you pissed off about?
What can't you get
out of your head?
What is the thing
that you now feel
like you need to spend
the next week of your life
focused on because it
went so sideways for you?
All of that was Twitter.
I mean, literally 100%
of that was Twitter.
And so I just, at one point,
it was actually on Thanksgiving
day, I just looked
at this and I just--
I mean, there was very
little thought went into it.
I mean, literally,
there was more
thought involved in whether I
wanted coffee when you asked me
when I showed up here.
I mean it was just like,
at a certain point I just I
just saw it, and I just
ripped the Band-Aid off.
And to answer your
other question,
it's been almost
wholly positive,
as you might expect given the
litany of pain and discomfort
I just ran through.
But I mean, it's
surprising to recognize
how much of a presence
it was in my life
given the sense of
what is now missing.
I mean, there's no
question there's
an addictive component to it.
And when you see--
I mean, like when
I look at what Elon
is doing on Twitter, forget
about his ownership of it--
I've got a lot to
say about the choices
he's making for the platform,
but just his personal use of it
is just so obviously
an expression of--
I mean, I don't
know if addiction
is the clinically
appropriate term,
but his dysfunctional attachment
to using the platform.
Again, forget about changing
it and owning it, but just
the degree to which it
is pointlessly disrupting
the life of one of the
most productive people
in any generation.
That was also instructive
to me because I know Elon,
and from a friend's eye
view of the situation,
it's so obviously
not good for him
that he's spending this
much time on Twitter.
I just brought that back to me.
It's like, well, if
it's not-- if this
is what it's doing
to Elon, and he's
got all these other
things he could
be doing with his attention,
how much of my use of Twitter
is actually a good idea and
optimize to my well-being
and the well-being of
the people around me?
So anyway, there was an
addictive component to it I
think, and so when
that got stripped off,
I do notice that there's--
I mean, there are times
I pick up my phone
and I realize this is
like the old me picking it
up my phone for a reason that
no longer exists because there's
not that much--
I have a Slack
channel with my team,
and I've got email,
obviously, but it's
like, that is not much of
what I was doing with my phone
really in the end.
And so it's just my
phone is much less
of a presence in my life.
And so it's almost
wholly good, but yeah,
I think there is
some danger in--
or some possible
danger in losing touch
with certain aspects of
culture, which, again, I'm
not even sure--
I mean, there's this question of
how much is Twitter real life,
and how much is it
just a mass delusion?
I don't know.
But insofar as it
actually matters
what happens on
Twitter, or insofar
as I was actually getting
a news diet which I'm not
going to be able to
recapitulate for myself,
or I'm just not in fact going
to recapitulate for myself even
if I could, if any
of that matters,
I haven't discovered that yet.
I mean, it was taking up an
immense amount of bandwidth
and it's impressive.
I think I said, it was like
I amputated a phantom limb.
It was not a real limb, but it
was this continuous presence
in my life that--
it's weird, it actually
relates to the concept
of self in surprising
ways because I
felt there was a part of
myself that existed on Twitter.
And I just performed a
suicide of that self.
This is ending right
now, there's no residue,
there's nothing to go
back and check, it's gone.
And I didn't go back
and look at my--
what's interesting to
consider is that I'd
been on Twitter for 12 years.
I don't keep a journal.
I mean, Twitter, in
my timeline would
have been a kind of journal.
I could have gone back
to a specific hour
and a specific day and looked at
what I was paying attention to.
I mean, that could have
been an interesting record
of just who I've
been for a decade,
and probably a pretty
humbling record of who I've
been for a decade in terms
of the kinds of things
that captivated my attention.
I didn't even think to
go nostalgically just
look at any of that,
or see if any of it
was worth saving, or
archiving, or thinking--
I just-- delete.
And so my actual sense of
who I am and my engagement
with my audience, the world of
people who could potentially
know me.
What does it mean
to have a platform?
Where do I exist, digitally?
My sense of all of
that got truncated
in a way that is
much less noisy.
I mean, it's amazing
how much can't
get fucked up now in my life.
It's like with Twitter,
almost anything could happen.
The next tweet was
always an opportunity
to massively complicate my life.
There is no analogous
space for me now.
And so it's what I'm going
to say on your podcast, what
I'm going to say on
my own podcast, what
I'm going to write next.
That's much more deliberative
and the opportunities
to take my foot out of my mouth
or to reconsider whether any
of this is worth it.
Is this the Hill I really
want to die on now.
It can be much more considered.
I mean, I think all
of that's to the good.
But even more important
than that is there's not--
I'm not getting this
continuous signal
that is always
inviting a response,
whether on Twitter, or on my
own podcast, or anywhere else.
And it's just much less noisy.
I mean, life is much
less noisy and cluttered.
And that definitely
feels better.
That's 100% better.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'm
happy to hear that.
I know a number of people miss
you there, but you sound happy.
I sense the genuine happiness.
And several things
come to mind--
first of all, thank you for
sharing your rationale there
and how it went.
I think for a lot of
people they think,
oh, you must have walked
around in circles for hours
talking about whether
it was delete,
as many good decisions
are executed.
I'm a big fan of Cal
Newport's work, deep work.
In many ways, Cal's--
I've never met him,
but we know each other
through the internet space.
He's really ahead of his time
with this notion of deep work
and limiting distractions.
I think he's even got
a book about a world
without email or
something, really extreme.
SAM HARRIS: So I mean,
he deserves some credit
because he had been somewhat
a proximate cause to this.
He had been on my
podcast, and he
had encouraged me
to delete Twitter
because I had been I had been
reaching some kind of crisis
point with it prior
to that podcast
and so we talked about it.
And I had recorded that
podcast but hadn't released it.
I actually recorded
the podcast the day
before I wound up
deleting Twitter,
but I hadn't yet released it.
So in my podcast with
him, in the intro to it,
I then give a post-mortem
on my deleting it.
But he was one of the
last people who was
in my head around these issues.
And actually, it
was not by accident
I had invited him on the
podcast because I increasingly
wanted to think about whether
this was totally dysfunctional.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well, I'm
a big fan of Cal Newport.
And I am on social media.
I'm on Twitter.
I had some high-friction
interactions there,
and I have a process
for dealing with those.
I tend to avoid high-friction
confrontations online.
But Instagram is a much
friendlier place by the way.
If you want to come over
to where the nice kids--
the cool kids
actually hang out--
SAM HARRIS: Strangely, I'm
not looking for a substitute.
ANDREW HUBERMAN: Don't let
me entice you over there.
But I think that
this notion of really
being able to access what
Cal calls deep work, what
Rick Rubin talks about
being able to touch
the source of great creativity
and focus on a regular basis,
does require that one
have certain types of,
and in some cases,
zero interaction
with certain platforms.
That merely being on a
platform and blocking
people that just won't provide.
I think a lot of
energy opens up.
And I'm fascinated by
this concept of energy.
I mean, we only
have so much energy,
neural energy, to devote.
And in many ways
what you described,
there's really I think
striking parallels
to what we've been talking about
all along these last hours,
which is that sometimes
the thing that
feels so powerful, that has
such a gravitational pull,
and that we think this is
experience, this is life,
this is just the way it is,
actually is an illusion.
And when you step
away from it, you
realize that there's this whole
other dimension of interactions
that was available all along but
that we, for whatever reason,
were intervening in by way
of our reflexive, distracted
behavior.
So I think there's
a poetry there.
SAM HARRIS: I was a
hard case, but yeah, I
got religion on this point,
and it's a good change.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Well, Sam, I want
to say a couple of things--
first of all, every time
you talk I learn
so much, and that's
in the dimensions of
neuroscience, even
hard core neural circuitry
type stuff, which is my home.
When you talk about philosophy,
or meditation, or psychedelics,
and even politics, a topic that
I'm woefully undereducated in,
but you have this amazing
ability to blend and synergize
across things.
And I think, today,
what occurs to me
is that not only
is that no accident
because of your
training, and the rigor,
and the depth at
which you've explored
these different topics, but
also your openness to it.
But I think, at least
for me, above all
it's because I think you
are able to encapsulate
this idea of the self
and the different ways
in which we each and
all can potentially
interact with the environment
and our inner landscape.
Your description of
meditation, I have to say,
now has forever changed the
way I think about meditation.
I would no longer just think
of it as a perceptual exercise.
On the podcast, I've
been talking about it
as something to do for these
various benefits, the benefit
set of more focus, lower stress,
of which certainly exists.
But what you describe
today, has such an allure
and holds such a promise
that, as I mentioned,
I'm certainly going
to change my behavior.
And I know I'm
speaking on behalf
of many, many
people, when I just
want to extend my thanks
for your coming here today
to teach us even more
because, of course, you
have your podcast and the
app, the Waking Up app.
And the fact that, regardless
of the political landscapes,
regardless of what neuroscience
feels about psychedelics,
or where things are
at any point in time,
you strike me as somebody who
is very committed to sharing
knowledge and thoughtful
deep discourse
so that people can benefit.
And there are very
few people like you.
In fact, there's
probably only just one.
And so I feel very
grateful to be
sitting across the table from
him for these last hours.
SAM HARRIS: Oh, nice, nice.
Well, I really
enjoyed this, and I
want to congratulate
you on what you've
built here because your podcast
is everywhere, and I'm a fan.
And even more than
that, I'm continually
seeing the evidence of you
reaching people and benefiting
people, and this is one of
the best examples of new media
just carving out a space
that people didn't really
know existed because this is
not television, it's not radio,
it's not--
and all of a sudden,
people have time
to hear a conversation
of great length
that goes into nitty gritty
scientific detail on hormones.
I mean, who would have thought
that was even possible?
And so, yeah, I would
just-- congratulations,
it's fantastic to see.
And I'm just very happy
for the opportunity
to talk to you and your people.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Well, thank you,
it's very gratifying to hear.
And I feel very blessed,
in no small part because
of our conversation today.
Thank you so much.
SAM HARRIS: Nice,
well, to be continued.
ANDREW HUBERMAN:
To be continued.
We'll do it again,
and again, and again.
Thank you for joining me today
for my discussion with Dr. Sam
Harris.
I hope you found it to be
as enlightening as I did.
And be sure to check out
the Waking Up app that Dr.
Sam Harris has made free to any
Huberman Lab listeners for 30
days by going to
wakingup.com/huberman.
Please also check out
his incredible podcast,
the making sense podcast.
And you can find any number of
Sam Harris's different books
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You can find links
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