Michael Pollan:
Consciousness is this incredibly precious gift we have, this space of complete mental freedom. It's very rare in the universe, as we know, and it is something that we are now squandering.
Elizabeth Koch:
Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a Perception Box? It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs, life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences. You could think of it as a reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. This podcast explores how although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity, awe, and wonder or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger.
In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception. I'd like to introduce our esteemed host, Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Christof Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.
Welcome everyone to this very special live episode of Science of Perception Box, I'm Elizabeth Koch, and I brought my copy of Michael Pollan's latest book, A World Appears, you can tell I liked it, there's a few post-its in here and there's lots of hearts on all the post-its too. Michael asked questions in this book, that speaking of hearts have captured my heart for a very, very long time, why do we think what we think? Why do we feel what we feel? And what do we make of this eye that's at the center of all of that? Those questions are also central to the Perception Box.
Each of us experiences the world through a lens shaped by our beliefs, our biology, everything that we've lived through and the meaning that we've made out of all of those events. Michael's book made me even more conscious and even more curious about what's happening inside of that lens. Please welcome our hosts, Heather Berlin, ChristoF Koch, and our esteemed guest, Michael Pollan.
Heather Berlin:
Hello everybody, and welcome to the show. And thank you, Elizabeth, I'm your co-host, Dr. Heather Berlin.
Christof Koch:
I'm your other co-host, Dr. Christof Koch.
Heather Berlin:
And we couldn't be more thrilled to have our special guest, Michael Pollan, he is a journalist and bestselling author of This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, and The Omnivores Dilemma. And his latest book, his 10th book, A World Appears, investigates questions that I know has motivated Christof, myself, and many of the people in this room and the people watching at home.
What is consciousness? Do we need a brain or a body to experience this phenomenon? Is consciousness limited to human experience? Or does it feel like something to be a plant or a lobster or an AI chatbot? I'm thrilled to have this brilliant mind joining us to explore these questions, so welcome, Michael.
Michael Pollan:
Thank you, Heather, very generous introduction, I appreciate it.
Heather Berlin:
Well deserved. Michael, you've written about a variety of different topics, food, plants, psychedelics, and now consciousness, so what drew you to this subject?
Michael Pollan:
I have jumped around a bit, but each book leads to the next in a funny way, there's always a little germ or sourdough starter that I find and I take forward to the next. And in this case, it was the psychedelic book, it was How to Change Your Mind, there is a way in which psychedelic experience de familiarizes consciousness, you're suddenly aware of it. The metaphor I use is it's smudging the windshield, normally there's this perfectly transparent windshield, but once you smudge it by altering consciousness, you realize, it's there, there is a windshield, there's a phenomenon mediating my relationship to reality, and why is it this way and not that way? So suddenly this cascade of questions occurred to me and I thought, really, stupidly, I'm going to set out and see if I can answer some of these questions.
Heather Berlin:
For me personally, I started thinking about consciousness at five years old, where do my thoughts come from? How can I keep them when I die? But you didn't even come to this until later.
Michael Pollan:
Well, I did as a teenager, I had my reading Hermann Hesse period and-
Christof Koch:
Siddhartha?
Michael Pollan:
... Siddhartha, a bunch of his books, I just absolutely love them. And I was writing poetry and I was very aware of consciousness then, but there's a way in which you put it away to live your life.
Heather Berlin:
If you're constantly contemplating consciousness, well, except for researchers that we have in the room, it could interfere with just living and being conscious, but for thousands-
Michael Pollan:
There is self-consciousness.
Heather Berlin:
... Yes, you're too self-aware. But philosophers and scientists and everyday people have been searching for the answers to this question for thousands of years. Philosopher Dave Chalmers coined the term the hard problem, the easy problem of consciousness, which is basically, could we map every conscious perception we have to specific neurons firing in the brain?
Michael Pollan:
And the various functions.
Heather Berlin:
And the various functions, which is not that easy, but theoretically possible, versus what he called the hard problem, which is basically, how does this physical piece of matter create subjective experience? But do you think that describing it in this way as a hard problem is like defeatist in a way? Does it affect our perception box of consciousness?
Michael Pollan:
I think it probably does. I found it persuasive when I first read it, I have such complicated feelings about it. I love his phrase, how do you turn the water of brain into the wine of consciousness? And going from matter to mind is very difficult, it has to do with this intrinsic perspective versus the extrinsic perspective.
Christof Koch:
Why do you feel conflicted about it?
Michael Pollan:
Well, I think it's real, but I'm sensitive the way problems get framed in science, and his framing has been so powerful for so many people, and I wonder if it isn't holding us back in some ways. I don't know what the alternative would be.
Christof Koch:
It's all function, that's what AI tells us, once you explain the functions, nothing more, move on folks, nothing more to see here.
Michael Pollan:
Well, this idea that it's an illusion too, I've never understood [inaudible 00:06:58].
Christof Koch:
But that seems to be the alternative.
Michael Pollan:
I guess that is an alternative.
Christof Koch:
That's a dominant alternative today.
Michael Pollan:
It seems to be an illusion is a conscious experience, but I think consciousness poses unique problems to science and having to do with these two perspectives.
Heather Berlin:
Dave also talked about, he would say even just a simple thermostat has a little bit of consciousness rather than something that's uniquely human or even tied to animals. And so what do you make of that framing?
Michael Pollan:
I see a real strong dividing line between living things and non-living things, stronger than he does, stronger than a lot of AI people obviously, and stronger than Michael Levin, the biologist who sees a continuum from machines, and he thinks all life also begins with a thermostat. I think life is special, and I also think that ... in the book, I make a distinction, and it's not just mine, but I found it very useful between sentience and consciousness, sentience being a more basement level, simple form of consciousness.
Christof Koch:
That's still a form of consciousness.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, it is a form of consciousness. But when we hear the word consciousness, we think of self-awareness, we think of human consciousness usually, and we're imposing that idea on all the other creatures, but I think they have very different forms of sentience. Sentience is simply, the way I use it in the book is, it's awareness of your environment and the ability to sense positive and negative changes and respond intelligently. And I think that may be a property of life, I don't think that's a property.
Christof Koch:
The feeling of being alive fundamentally.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, the feeling of being alive.
Heather Berlin:
But we can do very complex things, approach and avoidance behaviors without consciousness, or an amoeba can approach a void.
Michael Pollan:
It's amazing what we can do without consciousness.
Heather Berlin:
Right. So why the fact that a plant will move toward the sun in a meaningful way doesn't necessarily mean that it has a feeling of that.
Michael Pollan:
Sure, there's lots of automatic pre-programmed behavior, but there's also lots of intelligent behavior you see in plants. And in fact, I start the book by, as you know, looking at plants, because I wanted a really hard case, I could have looked at machines too, and I do later in the book, but I was interested in looking at plants because I love plants and I started out writing about plants, and I'm a gardener, but also this is another way in which the psychedelics influenced me.
I had an experience on psilocybin when I was working on How to Change Your Mind in which the plants in my garden were clearly conscious, they were returning my gaze, they were just present in a way I'd never experienced, I generally don't know what to make of insights on psychedelics. Christof and I have talked about this question, it seemed very real to me, but I also felt like I have to test this idea, it's so crazy and it's so out there. So it sent me down this really fascinating rabbit hole looking at plant intelligence, and there's a whole group of scientists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, they're just trolling conventional botanists by saying that, they know there are no neurons involved.
Christof Koch:
They're suddenly tolling neuroscientists.
Michael Pollan:
They are. And partly because I had read William James on mystical experience, and he says at some point, we can't judge the metaphysical truth of these experiences people have, the test should be, is it useful to believe this? He was a pragmatist, and also, can you find other ways of knowing if you treat it as a hypothesis? So I treated it as a hypothesis, the plants are conscious, and then it started exploring.
And the research is fascinating, plants are capable of so much more than I thought, a corn plant can navigate a maze, if you put a little bit of fertilizer in one quadrant, it will find the shortest route to that fertilizer. They can recognize self and other in a pot, if you put two plants in the same pot and they're genetically related, they will share space, and if they're not, they'll compete for it.
Christof Koch:
Slime can do a lot of things-
Michael Pollan:
Slime moulds.
Christof Koch:
... Slime moulds.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, they can calculate, they do computations. The more you look at simple life forms, you realize they're not so simple and they have capabilities. And the idea that everything can be pre-programmed like phototropism doesn't hold up because there are novel situations you can put a plant in and it will come up with intelligent solutions.
Heather Berlin:
But intelligence is, and I'm just playing devil's advocate here-
Michael Pollan:
Intelligence is not consciousness-
Heather Berlin:
... Is not consciousness.
Michael Pollan:
... I agree.
Heather Berlin:
And Dave would also argue, the zombie, you can do many, many behaviors that are intelligent and animals and bees, and that's to say that they're not conscious. But now when we go down to plants, we're talking about something without a nervous system, just because they can do intelligence thing doesn't mean we have to make the leap to say that they have healing.
Michael Pollan:
No, but they can remember. Without neurons, somehow you can teach a plant something, you can teach a Mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant, to condition it not to respond to a certain kind of stressor, and it will remember for 30 days, but it doesn't have to react when that happens.
Christof Koch:
What it is that-
Michael Pollan:
So where is that being held?
Christof Koch:
... That's a mechanistic question, where's the memory being held? There must be some sub-state, but what is it about life, is it all life? So anything that's alive that evolved is conscious, and what is it about life that makes it conscious?
Michael Pollan:
Sentient, I would say.
Christof Koch:
Sentience. What is it about life that has this form of consciousness, is it feedback?
Michael Pollan:
Well, living things, they have to navigate a very challenging environment, things are constantly changing, so if you had a fixed set of solutions programmed by your genes, you would run into trouble. I think evolution works a lot better or creatures fare a lot better when they're cognitive beings that can solve problems. You need a certain amount, yes, intelligence can do that and you can automate all sorts of things, most of what we do is automated, but there are areas where you need ... it's very useful that sentience becomes this very useful tool to help you be aware of what's happening in your environment and figure out what to do.
Christof Koch:
But there are many situation, like when you meditate, you stare at a wall for an hour, nothing changes, yet you'll still throughout the entire hour see-
Michael Pollan:
Stay conscious.
Christof Koch:
... And see that wall. So you can completely predict it, following predictors, yet you can focus on your breath in and out, completely predictable yet you're always conscious. You can be in chronic pain where you suffer so badly, people shoot themselves, but it's completely predictable yet you're highly, highly conscious of that pain. So it can't just be this predictive processing idea that you want to predict that conscious is all about the deviation from the expected novel.
Michael Pollan:
It's a mystery it doesn't turn off at various times, it does when we sleep obviously or in anesthetics.
Christof Koch:
Well, it's a mystery that doesn't turn off most of the time. I've looked at you for the past 10 minutes and you're still there, blue jacket and all, you don't suddenly disappear because you become predictable to me.
Heather Berlin:
This leads to the question of, first of all, does it need to be a biological system that it evolved in? And also, does it need to be tied to the brain?
Michael Pollan:
Well, we're going to get a test to that with AI and the efforts to make AIs conscious. But just one more thing on plants, just as a thought experiment, one of the things that really I found most amazing was the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out, put plants out, and most people might think plants are already out, but they're not, they have behaviors, they're just very slow. And if you put them in a bell jar and you put some xenon gas or some other nitrous oxide or whatever, a carnivorous plant that would normally snap shut when an insect crossed its threshold will not react, and a Mimosa pudica will not react.
That's interesting, it tells us something about anesthesia maybe, but you have to ask yourself, if there are these two states of being for this creature, what is lost when it responds to the, I won't say is unconscious, but responds to the anesthetic? There's some change, there are two states there, and what is that other state?
Christof Koch:
The loss of some function.
Michael Pollan:
What?
Christof Koch:
There's certainly loss of function in this anesthetized state for the plant, like the Venus trap, it doesn't close anymore. But what you're asking, is there some interior, intrinsic loss or something?
Heather Berlin:
Does it feel like something to be a rose?
Michael Pollan:
No. How can we say? We absolutely can't say. And I'm not prepared to say that plants have experience, but I think they have this very simple form of awareness and I can-
Christof Koch:
But that is a form of experience.
Michael Pollan:
... I guess awareness does imply.
Christof Koch:
Any conscious, if it feels like something, even just very dim, I'm alive versus, I'm not alive anymore, that is a primitive form of experience. In fact, when you travel from now, let's say to China, you wake up in the middle of the night completely jet lagged, completely discombobulated, you don't even know you're Michael, you don't even know-
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Christof Koch:
Completely discombobulated. You don't even know you're Michael, you don't even know you're man, but you know you're alive. There's something there. I mean, that to me seems like sentience.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah.
Heather Berlin:
So there's a couple of questions here. Do you need a nervous system? And maybe not. Does it need to be a biological organic system? And based on your survey in the field, you've delved deep into the research and what is your take?
Michael Pollan:
My take is it does need to be a biological system, but I'm prepared to be proven wrong. When I started this book, this was a question of interest to a small number of people relatively, even though it's a universal-
Heather Berlin:
What do you mean? We're all interested in... No, I know.
Michael Pollan:
Everybody is, but people don't think about it. It's not topical. People have been thinking about this for 2000 years. And then ChatGPT came out in 2022, and that same year, Blake Lemoine, the engineer at Google, went public with the fact that he was convinced Lambda, the name of their chatbot at the time, was conscious, was a person.
Christof Koch:
You interviewed him for your book?
Michael Pollan:
Yes, I interviewed him for the book. And suddenly this issue of can machines be conscious was thrust to the fore, and it was not something I was expecting to deal with and having to explore. I think we're going to learn a lot from the effort to make a conscious AI. I don't think it will pan out, but I could be wrong. I don't think it'll pan.
Christof Koch:
How would you know?
Michael Pollan:
What?
Christof Koch:
How would you know whether it pans out or not?
Michael Pollan:
Well, there's a reportability issue. How will we know if they're conscious? And the problem is, of course, we're all going to be fooled. They're very good at fooling us. And I think that's going to be an enormous problem.
Heather Berlin:
But that's why it's so important that we as neuroscientists have an agreed upon theory of what consciousness is.
Christof Koch:
Good luck with that.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. Well, and then a way to test for it.
Heather Berlin:
And then a way to test for it, because of course we'll be... I mean, right now they're just simulations. And so it's according to what we understand about consciousness, it's not conscious. But what would it mean-
Michael Pollan:
But ask the 72% of American teenagers who are turning to AI for companionship, and a lot of them will tell you it is conscious.
Heather Berlin:
And then at what point does it matter if everybody is fooled?
Michael Pollan:
That's what I'm worried about, if the simulation is that good, but I still think it matters and I think we have to learn how to test. I think Susan Schneider had an interesting idea for how to test for consciousness in a machine, which was build a chatbot from the ground up, exclude from its training set the whole human conversation about consciousness. And I would add-
Christof Koch:
No novels, that means no novels.
Michael Pollan:
I would add no novels, no posts.
Heather Berlin:
Especially not your book. Definitely not.
Christof Koch:
Only tech manuals.
Michael Pollan:
Exactly. And then have a conversation about consciousness with it. And my guess is it will not be nearly as good as Claude is today.
Heather Berlin:
But now what if we build a neuromorphic computer? What if we build a physical system?
Michael Pollan:
Or a quantum computer. So we're just talking about silicon-based computers right now. I have no idea in those cases.
Heather Berlin:
Okay. Let's just go back to the human brain for a moment. Do you think we need a cortex? Mark Solms put forth this... Now I'm just going to lay it out, I debated Mark Solms on this issue and we won according to the audience vote, because I think the science was on my side. But he came up with this idea that we don't need a cortex for consciousness, that it's just about feeling and that consciousness, it is conscious, it's in the brainstem. And I think you've had conversations with him about this. So what's your take on that?
Michael Pollan:
So I found this line of research very interesting and persuasive, and it really starts with Antonio Damasio. And he directed our focus away from the cortex, initially with regard to decision making to the brainstem and to feelings. And this idea that consciousness begins with these, what they both call homeostatic feelings. These are feelings related to our blood sugars, our hunger, our temperature and itch, and all these kind of very simple things that register in the upper brainstem. And then the cortex is recruited later to help solve the problems. I found that very interesting.
I think there's a question whether feelings and thoughts are fundamentally different things, and they would argue I think that they are, and that feels right to me. It's funny, I put this question to Dave Chalmers and he saw no distinction. It's just information between thoughts and feelings. I think feelings are dependent on the body, and I do think that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, like so many other things that we've isolated in our brain.
Heather Berlin:
But the representation... Well, I agree, the start of the feelings begin in the brainstem areas, but then even just our representation of our body and our feelings of our body, you need the cortex to have the conscious experience of that.
Michael Pollan:
Including just the feeling of being alive?
Heather Berlin:
I would argue that, yes. I don't know if Christophe, you disagree.
Christof Koch:
Well, of course I also believe in the primacy of cortex. However, experimentally we have the problem. If you have a patient whose entire way who has massive cortical damage, let's say due to hemorrhage, you can't talk to the patient. The patient's in a deep coma, it's very difficult to interact with them. So how would we know that the patient may still have some little feeling of pain or of being extreme discomfort? That would be empirically, just to demonstrate some epistemic humility, ruling that category out would be extremely difficult.
Heather Berlin:
Well, Mark used the argument of these anencephalitic children, right?
Michael Pollan:
Yes.
Heather Berlin:
But when you really look a bit closer, first of all, they're born that way. So there's some recruitment and there's neuroplasticity of recruiting other areas that otherwise would've been brainstem-like areas that become sort of cortical-like areas. And there's a little bit of cortex actually there. And so it's a very unique case, but normally if you take a fully grown adult... And then even we've had discussions about the Terri Schiavo case where you have these extreme areas of brain damage and it looks like she's orienting and seeing things and we are interpreting it as such, but then when look at her brain, the visual cortex was gone. She wasn't seeing anything. So you get these reactions.
Christof Koch:
A reflex in best case, yeah.
Heather Berlin:
They are reflex that-
Michael Pollan:
And we tend to anthropomorphize.
Christof Koch:
But I find it just difficult to fundamentally rule out that if you're just a brainstem that it doesn't feel a little bit like something in these anencephalitic children.
Michael Pollan:
Well, what about pain? You don't need a cortex to feel pain, right?
Heather Berlin:
Well, I think you do. I would say it starts in the [inaudible 00:22:44].
Christof Koch:
How would you know in a patient whether they feel pain if they don't have a cortex anymore? They can't move.
Heather Berlin:
You can modulate the pain networks in the brain with these shaolin monks and things that we've looked at in our imaging where they can down-regulate these pain circuits in the brain, in the cortex and not feel pain. Yeah, there's gateways that come up through the brainstem, but then I would argue the conscious instantiation of the feeling of pain happens in the cortex and you can actually down regulate those areas.
Christof Koch:
In fact, one operation to relieve chronic pain is when you go into the anterior cingulate and cut and remove that lesion that, and then you ask the next day the patient, "Do you still have your pain?" "Yes." You care about it? "No." So it's this bizarre dissociation. This clearly implicates in this case cortex where they seem to have a pain experience, but the valence is completely gone somehow.
Michael Pollan:
Fascinating.
Christof Koch:
Cingulotomy. This is one of the standard ways to deal in some cases with chronic pain, Cingulotomy. So that seems to imply-
Michael Pollan:
Some involvement.
Christof Koch:
Yeah.
Heather Berlin:
I'm going to talk about, this just brings me to the evolution of you, Christophe, and your views on consciousness and because-
Christof Koch:
My evolution?
Heather Berlin:
Yes, your evolution as a scientist. Because I mean, first of all, already just now talking about, "Well, it's possible that it could happen just in the brainstem," is a novel-
Christof Koch:
The older I guess, the more I learn, the less confident I am.
Heather Berlin:
Okay, that's good. So we've had this debate, and I'm curious where you stand on this, Michael. The mainstream neuroscience view in this field, which you were very prominent in helping to start. The search for the neural correlates of consciousness, but the mainstream neuroscientific view is very materialist. Consciousness comes from the brain and you can see when you have changes in the brain, you have changes in consciousness. But you've evolved to this more-
Christof Koch:
Advanced form.
Michael Pollan:
Enlightened, I would say.
Heather Berlin:
Alternative form. An idealist perspective that consciousness is fundamental. I also debated Deepak Chopra and he had this same view that consciousness is first and that consciousness instantiates matter versus the other way where matter creates consciousness. So you've come to this perspective and we can talk about it a little bit more in depth, but Michael, I'm curious what your take is on this issue.
Christof Koch:
Of idealism? Of consciousness?
Heather Berlin:
Materialism versus idealism. Is consciousness fundamental? And then-
Michael Pollan:
So I started out from a pretty strongly materialist point of view. I simply assumed this was the metaphysics I was raised on and I was taught in school, and surely consciousness is the product of brains and it emerges somehow from a certain arrangement of neurons. That's kind of where I started out.
And the whole story of this journey I was on, it was raising doubts about this in various ways or feeling that, gee, science has really hit a brick wall here. I mean, consciousness science is a huge challenge to science, per se. And so looking at all the theories of consciousness and their limitations and where the field is has left me feeling that an open mind is required at this point, and that we should entertain other ideas. And these are ideas I thought as really far-fetched, panpsychism, for example, idealism.
Heather Berlin:
But is it just because you don't know the God of the gaps kind of, you don't know what the scientific explanation is, so you assume there's something more-
Michael Pollan:
And we may come up with a materialist explanation. It's not out of the question, but I think we make a mistake by limiting ourselves to materialism in this quest. I mean, why limit ourselves? It's worked for a lot of things, but-
Christof Koch:
Well, people say why? Because science is by far the best tool we have to manipulate-
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, but science and materialism are not identical.
Christof Koch:
No, but most people-
Michael Pollan:
Science could have a different metaphysics.
Christof Koch:
Yes.
Michael Pollan:
It just happens to have this one. I mean, not just happens, they're good reasons for it. People working in biology are more wedded to materialism than physicists, for example. They've given up on understanding matter as matter, and they have all sorts of questions about what's going on with matter. While biologists, I think, have been historically more constrained because they have a stable paradigm called evolution, Darwinian evolution.
I mean, one of the subtexts of this book is a story about science and what it can and cannot do, the way we've organized it since Galileo to focus on the third person perspective and leave the first person perspective to the church, that was the soul. These were fateful decisions and we still live in their shadow and they may be limiting how we think about this. I was very influenced in writing this book by my reading of a book called The Blind Spot by Evan Thompson, Marcelo Gleiser and Adam Frank, two physicists and one philosopher.
And it's a very provocative book. They haven't solved the problem. They've kind of diagnosed a problem. They don't really have a prescription yet except to find ways to bring phenomenology, lived experience into third person science. And that's very hard to do, but you have to deal with phenomenology if you're going to deal with consciousness.
Heather Berlin:
But as somebody who, I've want my whole life for consciousness to exist outside of the brain because fear of death, I'd love my consciousness to go on, but also being aware of having an understanding that we're so subjective and we have this phenomenology, but it's so subjective. And science is one of the best ways to get to objectivity, to get around the subject because you might have one idea of what consciousness is via your personal subjective experience, and he might have another, and I have another. How do you get to truth? I think science is one of the best ways that we have that we've developed to get at it.
Christof Koch:
But it doesn't have to assume, as Michael said, that only physicalism is true, as Michael just pointed out, physicists now reject realism. The idea that there's a matter of the fact of what the world was out, it's eternally two independent of the observer. They now reject local interactions. So that's not my grandfather's materialism anymore. That's very, very different view and we really haven't come to grips with that view yet.
And in biologies, it's very strong instinctual rejection. "Oh no, that's all BS. I know what it is. It's matter and that's all there is and somehow if I can't explain it, then I'm going to cancel it." I mean, that's essentially what people like Dan Dennett, bless his soul, ironically, said, "Cancel it. You are all confused about it. You're not in pain and love. All there is behavioral disposition, his behavior and all of that. There's nothing else above and beyond that."
Heather Berlin:
But that's an extremist view. There has to be something in between.
Christof Koch:
But it's very popular. It's very popular. It's not extreme in terms of sociology or philosophy-
Michael Pollan:
Because it solves the problem, and people are hungry for solutions.
Christof Koch:
Yeah, because then you don't have to worry about all the voodoo stuff, experience.
Heather Berlin:
So do you believe that your consciousness exists after you no longer have your brain matter?
Michael Pollan:
No, I have trouble accepting that.
Heather Berlin:
Okay.
Michael Pollan:
But that's not a scientific opinion or even informed opinion. That's a temperamental, yeah. I think when you die-
Heather Berlin:
Then how do we get the truth on this question?
Michael Pollan:
Well, we recently had an attempt. We had the adversarial collaboration, and that was supposed to-
Christof Koch:
That worked out great.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, it worked out really well. And it's funny, when I started this book, I though, oh, that's the frame for this book. This is fascinating. They're having this death match with theories of consciousness.
Christof Koch:
It was going to be the [inaudible 00:30:25] collaboration?
Michael Pollan:
It was.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah, it's a great conference.
Michael Pollan:
I thought that, and I interviewed everybody at Templeton, and that's when I found my way to you at the beginning.
Heather Berlin:
I was at the initial meeting about how do we plan this and what do we... Yeah.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. And I thought, oh, I have my narrative right here. And I was like, didn't take long for that to fall apart. So that was one effort. It's kind of foundered.
Christof Koch:
Why do you think that's so, in your opinion? I'm interested because me and a number of people in the audience were involved in that.
Michael Pollan:
Well, first of all, it was not going to directly test consciousness. It was essentially a neural correlate experiment. And even that-
Christof Koch:
Because that's the only thing we all-
Michael Pollan:
Could agree on.
Christof Koch:
Could agree on.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. So designing these experiments is obviously not easy. And then even in that, the results were kind of equivocal. So anyway, I was disappointed for my own narrative reasons that it didn't produce more, but I don't know how you go about testing idealism. I really don't. I think that's a huge challenge. I see signs that science and biology is willing to entertain some alternatives to materialism right now. I mean, they're little glimmers.
I was very struck by the work I talk about in the book of Michael Levin, the biologist at Tufts, and he does really interesting work that has shown that there can be memory without neurons and that you don't need DNA necessarily to organize a living creature. He creates these xenobots. The xenobots are new organisms created from the skin of tadpole cells that he-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]
Michael Pollan:
... created from the skin of tadpole cells that he puts in a solution, nutrient solution, and freed of their day jobs as skin cells, they clump together and they repurpose their cilia and they start swimming around. They only last about a week, but they come up with an organization that's not dictated in their DNA, by their DNA at all, and he can condition them and things like that. And so they somehow store memory, too.
His project in a way is de-emphasizing both the neuron and DNA. So it's a pretty bold project. And he does it using planaria also, these little worms that can regenerate. They're amazing. You chop off their head, they grow a new head, chop off their tail, they grow a new tail. He can teach them something, chop off their head, they regrow their head, and they remember. So they're storing the memory somewhere else.
I would ask him, "So how's this all work?" And he recently published an essay, and I'm curious to see how much shit he gets for it, where he basically says that there may be patterns that just preexist everything the way there are in math, essentially Platonic patterns that guide evolution in some ways that may have things like intention or agency, or I don't know what else, and that we ingress these patterns, we draw on them. And in his view, machines will be able to draw on them, too.
It's a pretty wild idea, but for someone of his standing to be willing to put forward ideas like that is a sign of either desperation or openness on the part of science.
Heather Berlin:
But we're still talking about biological systems, which brings me to... We also have, we're embodied, we have a microbiome, right? We have, what is it, 30 trillion-
Michael Pollan:
Bacteria.
Heather Berlin:
... bacteria that live with us.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, more genes in our gut than anywhere else.
Heather Berlin:
Amazing. And that must inform our consciousness in some way. We live amongst these other living beings. We are biological beings. Perhaps that's related to our gut feelings or our intuition, and that's different than these AI systems.
So again, we're talking about conscious and biological beings. I mean, do you think that biology is important and these other systems, or the glial cells and all this other, it's not just about the neurons, is important in consciousness, or is it just the information processing or that it could be in any kind of type of matter?
Michael Pollan:
Well, I mean, I looked at this question. I was very intrigued by these claims that AI could be made conscious and that people actively working on it, some in secret and some openly. Mark Solms is someone who has an experiment. He's put together this international team of computer scientists and biologists, and they're trying to make a conscious AI.
And I followed that closely. I was allowed to go to their meetings on Zoom. I think it's crazy. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think the way he's doing it's going to work.
Heather Berlin:
I don't think we should be trying to do it, first of all.
Michael Pollan:
There's that, too.
Heather Berlin:
I think this is very dangerous.
Michael Pollan:
I don't think we want a conscious AI, but I make an argument in the book why I don't think it will happen, at least on silicon-based computers.
And to briefly review it, all the people in Silicon Valley who believe computers can be conscious eventually, and most of them do, which is alarming in itself, subscribe to the idea of what's called computational functionalism. And that consciousness is essentially a computation and it can be performed on any number of different substrates. It can be on brain matter, but why limit it to that?
I think that this idea is based on a faulty metaphor, and that is the metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are certain ways in which the brain is like a computer. It does perform computations, for example. But if you press on that metaphor, it falls apart really quickly. For example, one of the most important features of computers as we know it is this sharp separation between hardware and software. And that in the brain, there's no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory, every experience is a physical change to the brain. So the idea you could somehow extract the software and do something else with it from the hardware just doesn't hold up.
Neurons are like transistors in this one way that is the only way they talk about, which is to say that they fire or they don't fire, but there's so much else going on with neurons. You guys know better than me. I mean, they exist in a chemical environment that influences their behavior, and they're affected by oscillations. So they're digital in one way, but they're very analog in other ways.
Heather Berlin:
So I would say you're like me, which Christoph has labeled the bio-chauvinist.
Michael Pollan:
Or speciesist, as Larry Page has called people like us.
Heather Berlin:
I had a conversation with Larry Page about consciousness and he sort of was like, "I don't understand the problem." I said, "Well, just pain, the feeling of pain." He said, "Well, we can just put that into the algorithm. It's just an algorithm."
Michael Pollan:
Well, so will the pain of a computer be anything like human pain? I would argue that pain and many other feelings depend on having a body and perhaps even more-
Christof Koch:
What about a Tesla? What about a computer and a Tesla?
Michael Pollan:
What about it?
Christof Koch:
Well, that's a body.
Michael Pollan:
It can crash and... Oh, it has a body. Yeah. But it's not a vulnerable body. It's a metal body.
Heather Berlin:
But we can easily create a robot body.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, no, we're making robots.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah. I can feel and-
Michael Pollan:
I talk about a character in the book, Kingsley Man, who is a student of Damasio's or was a student of Damasio's who completely accepts this framework that feelings are key to creating, generating consciousness. So his solution to making a conscious machine is a robot with skin that tears and can be damaged in some ways, and he's going to load it up with sensors so it really feels it.
I don't think those will be real feelings. See, I think Chalmers is wrong. I think there are some important distinctions between thoughts and feelings and that the simulation of a thought is as good as the thought. You can play chess or whatever it is, but the simulation of a feeling is more like the simulation of a weather system: it's not going to get you wet.
Heather Berlin:
I'm on board with you, but I think Christoph might disagree. So this idea that consciousness is substrate independent, that if you think it's fundamental, does it need to be instantiated in a biological system, or what's your latest take on this question?
Christof Koch:
Even if you adopt an idealist position like Bernardo Kastrup has argued for, he would never say the brain isn't necessary. Of course, we know the brain is necessary for you to have consciousness. If I put a hole in your brain with a bullet, you're going to be unconscious. There's no doubt about it.
But he said ultimately the brain is just the way mind looks under a particular appearance. All of matter is mind seen from a particular vantage point. And then there are particularly these types of experiences, called mystical experience, during which this dissociative boundary that separates my mind from your mind and from your mind dissolves. And then exactly people report they become one with everything. And that's where we originally came from-
Heather Berlin:
What if that's just the hallucination or an experience that's being produced by your brain being in a different neurochemical state?
Christof Koch:
Yeah, you can say it's all a big illusion that's a dent, or you could accept it at face value and you could try to say, "Well, how does it relate to the underlying substrate like IIT does?" Or you can say like an idealist, "Well, what that shows, what that demonstrates is a possibility James alluded to: Ultimately there's only mind, and matter is a manifestation of that."
Heather Berlin:
So then can this mind be connected to a non-biological system?
Christof Koch:
Yeah, I don't know what idealism has to say about that. I guess depends on the structure of that substrate.
Michael Pollan:
So then there are these filter theories of consciousness that go back to James and Henri Bergson and are consistent with idealism, I think. And that is the idea: You do need a brain, and the brain is like the TV receiver or the radio receiver, and it is channeling consciousness that exists outside the brain. That's a very attractive theory, but I have no reason to believe it's true.
Heather Berlin:
That's right. It's wishful thinking. I want that to be true. I want desperately for consciousness.
Christof Koch:
There's no way to disprove that because every time I find a correlate, when I say, "So here's a neuron that fires every time you see Jennifer Anderson."
Michael Pollan:
Yeah.
Christof Koch:
Okay, you can say, "Well, that's just the conscious-"
Michael Pollan:
Coming from out there. Yeah.
Christof Koch:
"... out there and that happens to be picked up by that neuron." So I don't know... I don't find that a particularly useful idea, at least that doesn't lead to any further experimental insight. But maybe we can drill a little bit more on the question you asked about this microbiome, these 30 trillion... What do they do for mind, if anything?
Michael Pollan:
Well, I mean, we don't really know, but we know they're doing something.
Christof Koch:
How do we know that?
Michael Pollan:
So I'm researching, I'm reporting right now for a project about the microbiome, which is something I've written about before and have been fascinated by for a long time, but got more fascinated because of this embodiment idea. It's another attack on neurons that I'm waging.
Heather Berlin:
The poor neuron.
Michael Pollan:
The poor neuron. The neurons have looked out for themselves.
Christof Koch:
We only have two and a billion compared to 30 trillion bacteria. Give us a break.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. So-
Heather Berlin:
You're a bacteria-chauvinist.
Michael Pollan:
I mean, we are very cerebrocentric, right? I mean, in 500 years, if we're still around, people will look back and say, "Boy, they were really obsessed with this thing in their heads." And for a long time, you read literature and history, people thought that emotions came from the spleen and came from the stomach and came-
Heather Berlin:
Pineal gland.
Michael Pollan:
The heart and the pineal gland. We've distributed this consciousness around the body at various times. So right now there's a lot of interest in the microbiome and its relationship to the mind. So there's a lot of speculation still, but there's some very suggestive evidence.
For example, various mental disorders have a distinct signature in the microbiome. There is a depressed person's microbiome. There is a Parkinson's microbiome. There is an autism-
Heather Berlin:
We actually were going to do experiments where we implant fecal matter to help treat OCD from healthy people to the OCD patient, but yeah.
Michael Pollan:
Well, you were going to do it and then what happened?
Heather Berlin:
It's a long story.
Michael Pollan:
FDA didn't like the idea?
Heather Berlin:
Yeah, it's a long story.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. If you take the fecal contents of people with these disorders and transplant it into mice, the mice will exhibit those symptoms.
Christof Koch:
Fecal transplantation.
Michael Pollan:
Yes. And the mice will act as though they'll develop a tremor in the case of the Parkinson's, they'll develop social anxiety in the case of the autism. And that's quite stunning. I mean, really. It doesn't necessarily say that there's... The causality, the line of causality is not clear. It's probably more of a loop than anything else, but that is what people are testing now.
Christof Koch:
Well, at least it's true that seemed to imply that at least in mouse you can go from the microbiome that you just injected from the patient back up-
Michael Pollan:
Yes, to the mental disorder.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah.
Christof Koch:
... up the vagus nerve into the brain.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, no, the vagus nerve is definitely implicated in this, but there are other ways that some of these metabolites can get into the brain.
Heather Berlin:
There's researchers now... So one thing that's problematic is that we are losing a lot of our microbiome and-
Michael Pollan:
Oh, we have just completely depleted it.
Heather Berlin:
Right, with antibiotics and things. So there's researchers now that are going to these isolated tribes in these areas that still have-
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. The Hadza in Africa, and there's a group in Venezuela, and we now know what the primordial microbiome looks like, and it's very different than-
Heather Berlin:
And they're trying to now build these biobanks or whatever. They're preserving the-
Michael Pollan:
Right. Yeah.
Heather Berlin:
Right?
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, they have a big stash of Hadza microbes at Stanford, and they're starting to do some interesting experiments. So compared to them, they'll have like 1,300 species and we'll have five or 600 species. We've lost a lot to antibiotics, as you say, generally sanitation, which has of course had a public health benefit, but the downside of it has been compromising the microbiome.
The diet, ultra processed food is terrible for the microbiome. First of all, I mean, you're trying to make food that doesn't go bad. What does that mean? You're killing bacteria or keeping them from growing. And then you have emulsifiers in the food that are shredding the gut lining. We haven't taken the gut microbiome into account when we're approving pesticides, when we're approving food additives, or when we're doing the dietary pyramid. We don't think about it, but we need to.
Christof Koch:
And it's a recent discovery, the last 50 years.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, we didn't know much about it, and we didn't know why it was important to eat fiber, for example. We thought it was for constipation and things like that, but it's really because that's what these microbes like to eat, and they like to eat many different kinds of fiber.
So in terms of affecting our mood, I think what's really interesting as an evolutionary matter is how many really important metabolites or chemical production we have outsourced to these bacteria who have their own agendas. They're making neurotransmitters, they make glutamate, they make GABA. Am I pronouncing that right?
Heather Berlin:
GABA. Yeah.
Michael Pollan:
GABA. They make serotonin, although that serotonin doesn't get into the brain, but they make the precursors of serotonin, they make tryptophan. They're making these really important chemicals we rely on. And somewhere along the line, it was just more efficient to let them do it than to do it ourselves.
But a lot of these chemicals do have effects on the mood, and especially like butyrate is the short fatty acid. It's very important to mood and anxiety and all sorts of inflammatory chemicals or anti-inflammatory chemicals. I mean, the whole idea of gut feelings and gut check and all that is real.
One of the cooler experiments I came across that really shows how the mind and body are more intimately connected than, at least I thought, is an experiment done on moral disgust. Disgust is an interesting emotion because it's here and we feel it here, too. So these researchers had this clever idea. They had divided two groups: One got a capsule or a series of capsules with placebo in it; one got a series of capsules with ginger in it. Ginger calms the stomach. They took their capsules, and then they were presented with these morally repugnant scenarios involving incest and the eating of one's pets and things like that. The ones who had ginger were much less judgmental than the ones who had the placebo, suggesting somehow that the cognitive dealing with this scenario was somehow being channeled through the stomach and back again.
Heather Berlin:
So if we just all ate ginger, we'll make the world a better place.
Michael Pollan:
Well, being less judgmental doesn't necessarily make the world a better place. Could be the opposite. It's very interesting coming to this after the consciousness work and recognizing just how embodied so much of our thinking is and that the mind-body separation is just so false. And we're learning so much, too, about emotion, too, and how emotion begins in the body very often and the brain...
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Michael Pollan:
Emotion begins in the body very often, and the brain's job is to interpret signals it's getting from the body. I think we're very interesting moment in terms of understanding the links between consciousness and bodies.
Heather Berlin:
Do you think that just in this exploration that it has fundamentally changed your perception of things that you will take with you now going forward?
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, I'm much more aware of or trying to tune into what my body's telling me about things. I was very struck in reading Elizabeth's book, her discussion of triggers. I think triggers are really interesting phenomenon, and that is that certain things happen. People say something to you and you clench or contract or have some negative feeling that these are real portals into your emotions and into your psychology. I start to pay attention to that. We haven't talked about the subconscious or the unconscious, but how you access that has been a live topic in psychology for a long time. And Freud thought hypnosis was the way for a while, and then free association and then dreams. It seems like triggers is another. What?
Christof Koch:
And all psychedelics as it did simply the content.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, and psychedelics, exactly, who bring it into it.
Heather Berlin:
I would also say flow states, creativity, getting into these to access.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, yeah. So I think that's exciting.
Heather Berlin:
You've mentioned this term consciousness hygiene. What does that mean exactly?
Michael Pollan:
Toward the end of this book, I sort of shift my approach. I didn't mean to, but I had been very much focused on consciousness as a problem, the hard problem. And this is, I think, a very Western and male way to look at everything. And I was really stuck in that framework and frustrated. My wife was always telling me, she's an artist, not knowing is really powerful too, and it opens you up. And I was like, "Yeah, I really want to know the answer." And I went to interview Joan Halifax, Roshi Joan Halifax, who's a Zen teacher in Santa Fe, Upaya, because I had read that she refers to Upaya, her retreat center as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I was writing a chapter on the self. And I went to see her and she kept ducking me, not sitting down for the interview.
And finally she said, "You know, you're really lost in your head on this whole question." And I should have known she's a Zen teacher, she's allergic to concepts. But she said, "You need an experience." So she sent me to this outpost of her retreat center way up in the mountains in New Mexico where there's a cave and she said, "I think you should spend a few days in the cave." Now, I'm not a camper. This is not my thing, but I did. And one of the things I came to see is that consciousness is this incredibly precious gift we have, this space of complete mental freedom. It's very rare in the universe as we know, and it is something that we are now, I think, squandering. I think the algorithms that have hacked our attention, I mean, what is attention?
Christof Koch:
You mean by social media and scrolling?
Michael Pollan:
Social media, doom scrolling, the endless scroll.
Heather Berlin:
What we're wasting our consciousness on.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. And what is attention, but how we allocate our consciousness. And we have allowed the algorithms to hack our attention to a remarkable degree. When you're scrolling on social media, yes, you're conscious, but minimally so. You're not thinking your own thoughts.
Christof Koch:
It's almost like you enter dissociative state.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, it is a kind of fugue state and it's very...
Heather Berlin:
Well, people do it to escape in a way. It's a kind of escapism.
Michael Pollan:
Well, there are people who want to be less conscious, and I think we have to respect that because there are often people who are in pain. Not that numbing yourself solves the problem, but I respect that instinct. I think now we are about to pollute our consciousness in a much more serious way with our relationships with these chatbots that we were talking about earlier. And that in the way that our attention was hacked by the algorithm, now it's our emotional connection that's going to be hacked by the algorithm. And people are settling for these relationships, these conversations. But when we do, we go down to the level of the machine. We don't bring the machine up to our level. I mean, you think about a conversation with a computer and it's lacking a lot of things we think conversations have, like eye contact, body language. There's an erotics of conversation.
There are all these in synchrony or dyssynchrony. I mean, all these things go on. It doesn't happen when you're talking to a chatbot, but we accept it. It's sort of like when we took the emoji instead of emotion. I mean, we're cheapening ourselves. So I do think we're polluting our consciousness right now, and the algorithms are part of the reason there are other things going on. If that's true, then what's the opposite of pollution in this context? I thought, "Well, hygiene." So what does consciousness hygiene look like? And that's what I've been thinking about a lot since the book came out. I think mindfulness and meditation is a very important part of it. It's an opportunity to be with your thoughts in your head and realize just how weird your thoughts are. I mean, the fact that we have thoughts that think themselves, what's going on there?
I think psychedelics are a form of consciousness hygiene, giving us access to parts of our mind we might not ordinarily have access to. I think thinking about death is a meditation. I have never done one, but how much it, I think, makes you cherish what you have while you still have it. So anyway, I'm open to other ideas. If people have other ideas, I think learning how to defend consciousness is going to be a really important project, especially when the machines become so persuasive.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah. And that becomes down to... I think we were given this brief moment in time to have this conscious experience and it's so precious.
Michael Pollan:
I sense people revolting against the algorithms. I mean, we see it with social media and I think we'll see it with AI. So I think people want to defend this precious space and they may need tools to do it. And I think it'd be an interesting project to help offer those tools.
Christof Koch:
Some will smell an 11th book.
Heather Berlin:
I mean, the first step I think would be to unplug.
Michael Pollan:
Oh yeah. And one of the things I've found most powerful when I do a meditation retreat is the time off from media. Although now there's this cliff of what's waiting for you when you get back on and that kind of ruins it.
Heather Berlin:
I prescribe this to patients. I have patients with anxiety and rumination is that it's not just go for a walk, don't listen to podcasts, just let your mind be free and-
Michael Pollan:
But do listen to this podcast.
Heather Berlin:
Except for this one, this one. Outside of that.
Michael Pollan:
Yup. No, and I think being in nature too. Disconnecting to be in nature is very important to recovering.
Heather Berlin:
But if we start giving people some things that they can do to help in this project, I think it'd be really helpful.
Michael Pollan:
I think they want them. I really do.
Heather Berlin:
On that note, in every episode we ask one question to expand our own perception box. And in this episode, Christof chose the question, this week's question.
Christof Koch:
Heather and Michael, can you recall an event, a concrete event, not just an abstract one, a concrete event in your life where you strongly, very strongly, viscerally, emotionally disagreed with someone in your life, whether that's a loved one or a coworker or someone over politics or romance or business or whatever, and where they convinced you where they tried to convince you and you realized, "Yes, I understand your perspective. I still don't like it. I still strongly disagree with it, but I understand where you're coming from." And how did you feel about that? Did you feel better once you had this perspective, "Okay, I can look at this from your point of view and I get it?"
Heather Berlin:
Do you want to go first?
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, I think I've had millions of those encounters.
Christof Koch:
Millions? Wow.
Michael Pollan:
Or thousands.
Christof Koch:
Yeah. Some people struggle to recall one.
Michael Pollan:
I am. Well, I have a very poor memory, but I've certainly been there with my wife where I've been able to sort of see her perspective, largely because she's so good at articulating it. But yeah. But I can't think of a specific one. I'm sorry.
Christof Koch:
But you recall, does it help you make the fact that you're still upset because you can still disagree with what she wants. How did it affect you? Did it make you feel better or worse or indifferent?
Michael Pollan:
Well, I've been avoiding getting psychoanalyzed into the perception box for four days now, and I'm not going to give up now.
Heather Berlin:
We should explore this block that you're having. Let's talk about it.
Michael Pollan:
I have a perception box block. Yeah.
Heather Berlin:
This is just an incident that happened recently, and I think this speaks to this question. My son, he's nine, and he's a Big Bang Theory fan. So I was taking him out on a special thing to go see Jim Parsons in a Broadway show. And then first we were going to the Museum on Natural History, and I'd be looking forward to this day. He'd been looking forward to this day for a very long time. We're very excited. So I take him into the city and I bring also his sister who's 12 and her friend because it was a family trip. So my son just had this horrible attitude the whole day and he's like, "I'm not going to the show. I'm not going to the museum. I don't want to talk to anybody." And just really, and I was very upset with him. "You're so ungrateful. I did this special thing for you."
And what I discovered then halfway through the day, what I though he was just being really obnoxious, and this is making me feel terrible as a mom, but he said, "Mom, I thought that this was going to be a special day with just me and you. And I didn't think it was going to be my sister and her friend." And I didn't know that. I didn't know that in his mind, because he said, "This is my favorite thing in the world, Big Bang, and this was going to be a special thing. I thought it was my day, me and you." Which of course, talking about parent guilt, I felt so terrible. And he went through the day and he did enjoy it, but there was this, it wasn't what I had expected him to enjoy.
But I understood his perspective in that moment and it changed my perspective too. And just to put a bow on this story, so his birthday is coming up and what I decided to do for him is take... We live in New York, but you can go and visit the Big Bang Theory set at the Warner Brothers Studios. So for his birthday, I'm going to fly him, just me and him.
Michael Pollan:
In LA?
Heather Berlin:
To LA. We're going to go to the visit the studio and we're going to have a special mommy-son trip to make up for this. I know this sounds extravagant and extreme, but this is in lieu of a birthday party and whatever. But it really affected me in that you never know what somebody else is thinking and what they're coming. So anytime somebody is being rude to you or having a bad day, give them the benefit of the doubt that you don't know what's going on with them internally. That's all for this special live episode of Science of Perception Box. Subscribe. Oh, thank you.
Michael Pollan:
Thank you, guys.
Heather Berlin:
Thank you. And if you haven't already, subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. So I want to thank you again, Michael. It's been such a pleasure.
Michael Pollan:
Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me on.
Heather Berlin:
And of course, Christof, my fantastic co-host, and thank you everybody here. It's been great.
Can a Plant, a Chatbot, or Your Gut Be Conscious? With Michael Pollan
In this special live episode, journalist and bestselling author Michael Pollan explains how a psychedelic experience “smudged the windshield” of his consciousness and started the search behind his new book, A World Appears. He explains the difference between sentience and consciousness and shares some surprising plant research: corn that solves mazes, plants that recognize their relatives, and anesthetics that knock out a Venus flytrap. Pollan’s exploration of consciousness reveals a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
03:29 How psychedelics “smudged the windshield”
08:41 Are plants conscious?
16:03 Can machines be conscious?
18:53 Do we need a cortex to be conscious?
23:53 Materialism vs. idealism
33:17 The microbiome and embodied consciousness
34:53 Why the brain isn’t a computer
40:15 How gut bacteria shape the mind
48:55 Consciousness hygiene
55:00 The Perception Box question
Michael Pollan:
Consciousness is this incredibly precious gift we have, this space of complete mental freedom. It's very rare in the universe, as we know, and it is something that we are now squandering.
Elizabeth Koch:
Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a Perception Box? It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs, life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences. You could think of it as a reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. This podcast explores how although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity, awe, and wonder or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger.
In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception. I'd like to introduce our esteemed host, Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Christof Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.
Welcome everyone to this very special live episode of Science of Perception Box, I'm Elizabeth Koch, and I brought my copy of Michael Pollan's latest book, A World Appears, you can tell I liked it, there's a few post-its in here and there's lots of hearts on all the post-its too. Michael asked questions in this book, that speaking of hearts have captured my heart for a very, very long time, why do we think what we think? Why do we feel what we feel? And what do we make of this eye that's at the center of all of that? Those questions are also central to the Perception Box.
Each of us experiences the world through a lens shaped by our beliefs, our biology, everything that we've lived through and the meaning that we've made out of all of those events. Michael's book made me even more conscious and even more curious about what's happening inside of that lens. Please welcome our hosts, Heather Berlin, ChristoF Koch, and our esteemed guest, Michael Pollan.
Heather Berlin:
Hello everybody, and welcome to the show. And thank you, Elizabeth, I'm your co-host, Dr. Heather Berlin.
Christof Koch:
I'm your other co-host, Dr. Christof Koch.
Heather Berlin:
And we couldn't be more thrilled to have our special guest, Michael Pollan, he is a journalist and bestselling author of This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, and The Omnivores Dilemma. And his latest book, his 10th book, A World Appears, investigates questions that I know has motivated Christof, myself, and many of the people in this room and the people watching at home.
What is consciousness? Do we need a brain or a body to experience this phenomenon? Is consciousness limited to human experience? Or does it feel like something to be a plant or a lobster or an AI chatbot? I'm thrilled to have this brilliant mind joining us to explore these questions, so welcome, Michael.
Michael Pollan:
Thank you, Heather, very generous introduction, I appreciate it.
Heather Berlin:
Well deserved. Michael, you've written about a variety of different topics, food, plants, psychedelics, and now consciousness, so what drew you to this subject?
Michael Pollan:
I have jumped around a bit, but each book leads to the next in a funny way, there's always a little germ or sourdough starter that I find and I take forward to the next. And in this case, it was the psychedelic book, it was How to Change Your Mind, there is a way in which psychedelic experience de familiarizes consciousness, you're suddenly aware of it. The metaphor I use is it's smudging the windshield, normally there's this perfectly transparent windshield, but once you smudge it by altering consciousness, you realize, it's there, there is a windshield, there's a phenomenon mediating my relationship to reality, and why is it this way and not that way? So suddenly this cascade of questions occurred to me and I thought, really, stupidly, I'm going to set out and see if I can answer some of these questions.
Heather Berlin:
For me personally, I started thinking about consciousness at five years old, where do my thoughts come from? How can I keep them when I die? But you didn't even come to this until later.
Michael Pollan:
Well, I did as a teenager, I had my reading Hermann Hesse period and-
Christof Koch:
Siddhartha?
Michael Pollan:
... Siddhartha, a bunch of his books, I just absolutely love them. And I was writing poetry and I was very aware of consciousness then, but there's a way in which you put it away to live your life.
Heather Berlin:
If you're constantly contemplating consciousness, well, except for researchers that we have in the room, it could interfere with just living and being conscious, but for thousands-
Michael Pollan:
There is self-consciousness.
Heather Berlin:
... Yes, you're too self-aware. But philosophers and scientists and everyday people have been searching for the answers to this question for thousands of years. Philosopher Dave Chalmers coined the term the hard problem, the easy problem of consciousness, which is basically, could we map every conscious perception we have to specific neurons firing in the brain?
Michael Pollan:
And the various functions.
Heather Berlin:
And the various functions, which is not that easy, but theoretically possible, versus what he called the hard problem, which is basically, how does this physical piece of matter create subjective experience? But do you think that describing it in this way as a hard problem is like defeatist in a way? Does it affect our perception box of consciousness?
Michael Pollan:
I think it probably does. I found it persuasive when I first read it, I have such complicated feelings about it. I love his phrase, how do you turn the water of brain into the wine of consciousness? And going from matter to mind is very difficult, it has to do with this intrinsic perspective versus the extrinsic perspective.
Christof Koch:
Why do you feel conflicted about it?
Michael Pollan:
Well, I think it's real, but I'm sensitive the way problems get framed in science, and his framing has been so powerful for so many people, and I wonder if it isn't holding us back in some ways. I don't know what the alternative would be.
Christof Koch:
It's all function, that's what AI tells us, once you explain the functions, nothing more, move on folks, nothing more to see here.
Michael Pollan:
Well, this idea that it's an illusion too, I've never understood [inaudible 00:06:58].
Christof Koch:
But that seems to be the alternative.
Michael Pollan:
I guess that is an alternative.
Christof Koch:
That's a dominant alternative today.
Michael Pollan:
It seems to be an illusion is a conscious experience, but I think consciousness poses unique problems to science and having to do with these two perspectives.
Heather Berlin:
Dave also talked about, he would say even just a simple thermostat has a little bit of consciousness rather than something that's uniquely human or even tied to animals. And so what do you make of that framing?
Michael Pollan:
I see a real strong dividing line between living things and non-living things, stronger than he does, stronger than a lot of AI people obviously, and stronger than Michael Levin, the biologist who sees a continuum from machines, and he thinks all life also begins with a thermostat. I think life is special, and I also think that ... in the book, I make a distinction, and it's not just mine, but I found it very useful between sentience and consciousness, sentience being a more basement level, simple form of consciousness.
Christof Koch:
That's still a form of consciousness.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, it is a form of consciousness. But when we hear the word consciousness, we think of self-awareness, we think of human consciousness usually, and we're imposing that idea on all the other creatures, but I think they have very different forms of sentience. Sentience is simply, the way I use it in the book is, it's awareness of your environment and the ability to sense positive and negative changes and respond intelligently. And I think that may be a property of life, I don't think that's a property.
Christof Koch:
The feeling of being alive fundamentally.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, the feeling of being alive.
Heather Berlin:
But we can do very complex things, approach and avoidance behaviors without consciousness, or an amoeba can approach a void.
Michael Pollan:
It's amazing what we can do without consciousness.
Heather Berlin:
Right. So why the fact that a plant will move toward the sun in a meaningful way doesn't necessarily mean that it has a feeling of that.
Michael Pollan:
Sure, there's lots of automatic pre-programmed behavior, but there's also lots of intelligent behavior you see in plants. And in fact, I start the book by, as you know, looking at plants, because I wanted a really hard case, I could have looked at machines too, and I do later in the book, but I was interested in looking at plants because I love plants and I started out writing about plants, and I'm a gardener, but also this is another way in which the psychedelics influenced me.
I had an experience on psilocybin when I was working on How to Change Your Mind in which the plants in my garden were clearly conscious, they were returning my gaze, they were just present in a way I'd never experienced, I generally don't know what to make of insights on psychedelics. Christof and I have talked about this question, it seemed very real to me, but I also felt like I have to test this idea, it's so crazy and it's so out there. So it sent me down this really fascinating rabbit hole looking at plant intelligence, and there's a whole group of scientists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, they're just trolling conventional botanists by saying that, they know there are no neurons involved.
Christof Koch:
They're suddenly tolling neuroscientists.
Michael Pollan:
They are. And partly because I had read William James on mystical experience, and he says at some point, we can't judge the metaphysical truth of these experiences people have, the test should be, is it useful to believe this? He was a pragmatist, and also, can you find other ways of knowing if you treat it as a hypothesis? So I treated it as a hypothesis, the plants are conscious, and then it started exploring.
And the research is fascinating, plants are capable of so much more than I thought, a corn plant can navigate a maze, if you put a little bit of fertilizer in one quadrant, it will find the shortest route to that fertilizer. They can recognize self and other in a pot, if you put two plants in the same pot and they're genetically related, they will share space, and if they're not, they'll compete for it.
Christof Koch:
Slime can do a lot of things-
Michael Pollan:
Slime moulds.
Christof Koch:
... Slime moulds.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, they can calculate, they do computations. The more you look at simple life forms, you realize they're not so simple and they have capabilities. And the idea that everything can be pre-programmed like phototropism doesn't hold up because there are novel situations you can put a plant in and it will come up with intelligent solutions.
Heather Berlin:
But intelligence is, and I'm just playing devil's advocate here-
Michael Pollan:
Intelligence is not consciousness-
Heather Berlin:
... Is not consciousness.
Michael Pollan:
... I agree.
Heather Berlin:
And Dave would also argue, the zombie, you can do many, many behaviors that are intelligent and animals and bees, and that's to say that they're not conscious. But now when we go down to plants, we're talking about something without a nervous system, just because they can do intelligence thing doesn't mean we have to make the leap to say that they have healing.
Michael Pollan:
No, but they can remember. Without neurons, somehow you can teach a plant something, you can teach a Mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant, to condition it not to respond to a certain kind of stressor, and it will remember for 30 days, but it doesn't have to react when that happens.
Christof Koch:
What it is that-
Michael Pollan:
So where is that being held?
Christof Koch:
... That's a mechanistic question, where's the memory being held? There must be some sub-state, but what is it about life, is it all life? So anything that's alive that evolved is conscious, and what is it about life that makes it conscious?
Michael Pollan:
Sentient, I would say.
Christof Koch:
Sentience. What is it about life that has this form of consciousness, is it feedback?
Michael Pollan:
Well, living things, they have to navigate a very challenging environment, things are constantly changing, so if you had a fixed set of solutions programmed by your genes, you would run into trouble. I think evolution works a lot better or creatures fare a lot better when they're cognitive beings that can solve problems. You need a certain amount, yes, intelligence can do that and you can automate all sorts of things, most of what we do is automated, but there are areas where you need ... it's very useful that sentience becomes this very useful tool to help you be aware of what's happening in your environment and figure out what to do.
Christof Koch:
But there are many situation, like when you meditate, you stare at a wall for an hour, nothing changes, yet you'll still throughout the entire hour see-
Michael Pollan:
Stay conscious.
Christof Koch:
... And see that wall. So you can completely predict it, following predictors, yet you can focus on your breath in and out, completely predictable yet you're always conscious. You can be in chronic pain where you suffer so badly, people shoot themselves, but it's completely predictable yet you're highly, highly conscious of that pain. So it can't just be this predictive processing idea that you want to predict that conscious is all about the deviation from the expected novel.
Michael Pollan:
It's a mystery it doesn't turn off at various times, it does when we sleep obviously or in anesthetics.
Christof Koch:
Well, it's a mystery that doesn't turn off most of the time. I've looked at you for the past 10 minutes and you're still there, blue jacket and all, you don't suddenly disappear because you become predictable to me.
Heather Berlin:
This leads to the question of, first of all, does it need to be a biological system that it evolved in? And also, does it need to be tied to the brain?
Michael Pollan:
Well, we're going to get a test to that with AI and the efforts to make AIs conscious. But just one more thing on plants, just as a thought experiment, one of the things that really I found most amazing was the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out, put plants out, and most people might think plants are already out, but they're not, they have behaviors, they're just very slow. And if you put them in a bell jar and you put some xenon gas or some other nitrous oxide or whatever, a carnivorous plant that would normally snap shut when an insect crossed its threshold will not react, and a Mimosa pudica will not react.
That's interesting, it tells us something about anesthesia maybe, but you have to ask yourself, if there are these two states of being for this creature, what is lost when it responds to the, I won't say is unconscious, but responds to the anesthetic? There's some change, there are two states there, and what is that other state?
Christof Koch:
The loss of some function.
Michael Pollan:
What?
Christof Koch:
There's certainly loss of function in this anesthetized state for the plant, like the Venus trap, it doesn't close anymore. But what you're asking, is there some interior, intrinsic loss or something?
Heather Berlin:
Does it feel like something to be a rose?
Michael Pollan:
No. How can we say? We absolutely can't say. And I'm not prepared to say that plants have experience, but I think they have this very simple form of awareness and I can-
Christof Koch:
But that is a form of experience.
Michael Pollan:
... I guess awareness does imply.
Christof Koch:
Any conscious, if it feels like something, even just very dim, I'm alive versus, I'm not alive anymore, that is a primitive form of experience. In fact, when you travel from now, let's say to China, you wake up in the middle of the night completely jet lagged, completely discombobulated, you don't even know you're Michael, you don't even know-
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]
Christof Koch:
Completely discombobulated. You don't even know you're Michael, you don't even know you're man, but you know you're alive. There's something there. I mean, that to me seems like sentience.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah.
Heather Berlin:
So there's a couple of questions here. Do you need a nervous system? And maybe not. Does it need to be a biological organic system? And based on your survey in the field, you've delved deep into the research and what is your take?
Michael Pollan:
My take is it does need to be a biological system, but I'm prepared to be proven wrong. When I started this book, this was a question of interest to a small number of people relatively, even though it's a universal-
Heather Berlin:
What do you mean? We're all interested in... No, I know.
Michael Pollan:
Everybody is, but people don't think about it. It's not topical. People have been thinking about this for 2000 years. And then ChatGPT came out in 2022, and that same year, Blake Lemoine, the engineer at Google, went public with the fact that he was convinced Lambda, the name of their chatbot at the time, was conscious, was a person.
Christof Koch:
You interviewed him for your book?
Michael Pollan:
Yes, I interviewed him for the book. And suddenly this issue of can machines be conscious was thrust to the fore, and it was not something I was expecting to deal with and having to explore. I think we're going to learn a lot from the effort to make a conscious AI. I don't think it will pan out, but I could be wrong. I don't think it'll pan.
Christof Koch:
How would you know?
Michael Pollan:
What?
Christof Koch:
How would you know whether it pans out or not?
Michael Pollan:
Well, there's a reportability issue. How will we know if they're conscious? And the problem is, of course, we're all going to be fooled. They're very good at fooling us. And I think that's going to be an enormous problem.
Heather Berlin:
But that's why it's so important that we as neuroscientists have an agreed upon theory of what consciousness is.
Christof Koch:
Good luck with that.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. Well, and then a way to test for it.
Heather Berlin:
And then a way to test for it, because of course we'll be... I mean, right now they're just simulations. And so it's according to what we understand about consciousness, it's not conscious. But what would it mean-
Michael Pollan:
But ask the 72% of American teenagers who are turning to AI for companionship, and a lot of them will tell you it is conscious.
Heather Berlin:
And then at what point does it matter if everybody is fooled?
Michael Pollan:
That's what I'm worried about, if the simulation is that good, but I still think it matters and I think we have to learn how to test. I think Susan Schneider had an interesting idea for how to test for consciousness in a machine, which was build a chatbot from the ground up, exclude from its training set the whole human conversation about consciousness. And I would add-
Christof Koch:
No novels, that means no novels.
Michael Pollan:
I would add no novels, no posts.
Heather Berlin:
Especially not your book. Definitely not.
Christof Koch:
Only tech manuals.
Michael Pollan:
Exactly. And then have a conversation about consciousness with it. And my guess is it will not be nearly as good as Claude is today.
Heather Berlin:
But now what if we build a neuromorphic computer? What if we build a physical system?
Michael Pollan:
Or a quantum computer. So we're just talking about silicon-based computers right now. I have no idea in those cases.
Heather Berlin:
Okay. Let's just go back to the human brain for a moment. Do you think we need a cortex? Mark Solms put forth this... Now I'm just going to lay it out, I debated Mark Solms on this issue and we won according to the audience vote, because I think the science was on my side. But he came up with this idea that we don't need a cortex for consciousness, that it's just about feeling and that consciousness, it is conscious, it's in the brainstem. And I think you've had conversations with him about this. So what's your take on that?
Michael Pollan:
So I found this line of research very interesting and persuasive, and it really starts with Antonio Damasio. And he directed our focus away from the cortex, initially with regard to decision making to the brainstem and to feelings. And this idea that consciousness begins with these, what they both call homeostatic feelings. These are feelings related to our blood sugars, our hunger, our temperature and itch, and all these kind of very simple things that register in the upper brainstem. And then the cortex is recruited later to help solve the problems. I found that very interesting.
I think there's a question whether feelings and thoughts are fundamentally different things, and they would argue I think that they are, and that feels right to me. It's funny, I put this question to Dave Chalmers and he saw no distinction. It's just information between thoughts and feelings. I think feelings are dependent on the body, and I do think that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, like so many other things that we've isolated in our brain.
Heather Berlin:
But the representation... Well, I agree, the start of the feelings begin in the brainstem areas, but then even just our representation of our body and our feelings of our body, you need the cortex to have the conscious experience of that.
Michael Pollan:
Including just the feeling of being alive?
Heather Berlin:
I would argue that, yes. I don't know if Christophe, you disagree.
Christof Koch:
Well, of course I also believe in the primacy of cortex. However, experimentally we have the problem. If you have a patient whose entire way who has massive cortical damage, let's say due to hemorrhage, you can't talk to the patient. The patient's in a deep coma, it's very difficult to interact with them. So how would we know that the patient may still have some little feeling of pain or of being extreme discomfort? That would be empirically, just to demonstrate some epistemic humility, ruling that category out would be extremely difficult.
Heather Berlin:
Well, Mark used the argument of these anencephalitic children, right?
Michael Pollan:
Yes.
Heather Berlin:
But when you really look a bit closer, first of all, they're born that way. So there's some recruitment and there's neuroplasticity of recruiting other areas that otherwise would've been brainstem-like areas that become sort of cortical-like areas. And there's a little bit of cortex actually there. And so it's a very unique case, but normally if you take a fully grown adult... And then even we've had discussions about the Terri Schiavo case where you have these extreme areas of brain damage and it looks like she's orienting and seeing things and we are interpreting it as such, but then when look at her brain, the visual cortex was gone. She wasn't seeing anything. So you get these reactions.
Christof Koch:
A reflex in best case, yeah.
Heather Berlin:
They are reflex that-
Michael Pollan:
And we tend to anthropomorphize.
Christof Koch:
But I find it just difficult to fundamentally rule out that if you're just a brainstem that it doesn't feel a little bit like something in these anencephalitic children.
Michael Pollan:
Well, what about pain? You don't need a cortex to feel pain, right?
Heather Berlin:
Well, I think you do. I would say it starts in the [inaudible 00:22:44].
Christof Koch:
How would you know in a patient whether they feel pain if they don't have a cortex anymore? They can't move.
Heather Berlin:
You can modulate the pain networks in the brain with these shaolin monks and things that we've looked at in our imaging where they can down-regulate these pain circuits in the brain, in the cortex and not feel pain. Yeah, there's gateways that come up through the brainstem, but then I would argue the conscious instantiation of the feeling of pain happens in the cortex and you can actually down regulate those areas.
Christof Koch:
In fact, one operation to relieve chronic pain is when you go into the anterior cingulate and cut and remove that lesion that, and then you ask the next day the patient, "Do you still have your pain?" "Yes." You care about it? "No." So it's this bizarre dissociation. This clearly implicates in this case cortex where they seem to have a pain experience, but the valence is completely gone somehow.
Michael Pollan:
Fascinating.
Christof Koch:
Cingulotomy. This is one of the standard ways to deal in some cases with chronic pain, Cingulotomy. So that seems to imply-
Michael Pollan:
Some involvement.
Christof Koch:
Yeah.
Heather Berlin:
I'm going to talk about, this just brings me to the evolution of you, Christophe, and your views on consciousness and because-
Christof Koch:
My evolution?
Heather Berlin:
Yes, your evolution as a scientist. Because I mean, first of all, already just now talking about, "Well, it's possible that it could happen just in the brainstem," is a novel-
Christof Koch:
The older I guess, the more I learn, the less confident I am.
Heather Berlin:
Okay, that's good. So we've had this debate, and I'm curious where you stand on this, Michael. The mainstream neuroscience view in this field, which you were very prominent in helping to start. The search for the neural correlates of consciousness, but the mainstream neuroscientific view is very materialist. Consciousness comes from the brain and you can see when you have changes in the brain, you have changes in consciousness. But you've evolved to this more-
Christof Koch:
Advanced form.
Michael Pollan:
Enlightened, I would say.
Heather Berlin:
Alternative form. An idealist perspective that consciousness is fundamental. I also debated Deepak Chopra and he had this same view that consciousness is first and that consciousness instantiates matter versus the other way where matter creates consciousness. So you've come to this perspective and we can talk about it a little bit more in depth, but Michael, I'm curious what your take is on this issue.
Christof Koch:
Of idealism? Of consciousness?
Heather Berlin:
Materialism versus idealism. Is consciousness fundamental? And then-
Michael Pollan:
So I started out from a pretty strongly materialist point of view. I simply assumed this was the metaphysics I was raised on and I was taught in school, and surely consciousness is the product of brains and it emerges somehow from a certain arrangement of neurons. That's kind of where I started out.
And the whole story of this journey I was on, it was raising doubts about this in various ways or feeling that, gee, science has really hit a brick wall here. I mean, consciousness science is a huge challenge to science, per se. And so looking at all the theories of consciousness and their limitations and where the field is has left me feeling that an open mind is required at this point, and that we should entertain other ideas. And these are ideas I thought as really far-fetched, panpsychism, for example, idealism.
Heather Berlin:
But is it just because you don't know the God of the gaps kind of, you don't know what the scientific explanation is, so you assume there's something more-
Michael Pollan:
And we may come up with a materialist explanation. It's not out of the question, but I think we make a mistake by limiting ourselves to materialism in this quest. I mean, why limit ourselves? It's worked for a lot of things, but-
Christof Koch:
Well, people say why? Because science is by far the best tool we have to manipulate-
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, but science and materialism are not identical.
Christof Koch:
No, but most people-
Michael Pollan:
Science could have a different metaphysics.
Christof Koch:
Yes.
Michael Pollan:
It just happens to have this one. I mean, not just happens, they're good reasons for it. People working in biology are more wedded to materialism than physicists, for example. They've given up on understanding matter as matter, and they have all sorts of questions about what's going on with matter. While biologists, I think, have been historically more constrained because they have a stable paradigm called evolution, Darwinian evolution.
I mean, one of the subtexts of this book is a story about science and what it can and cannot do, the way we've organized it since Galileo to focus on the third person perspective and leave the first person perspective to the church, that was the soul. These were fateful decisions and we still live in their shadow and they may be limiting how we think about this. I was very influenced in writing this book by my reading of a book called The Blind Spot by Evan Thompson, Marcelo Gleiser and Adam Frank, two physicists and one philosopher.
And it's a very provocative book. They haven't solved the problem. They've kind of diagnosed a problem. They don't really have a prescription yet except to find ways to bring phenomenology, lived experience into third person science. And that's very hard to do, but you have to deal with phenomenology if you're going to deal with consciousness.
Heather Berlin:
But as somebody who, I've want my whole life for consciousness to exist outside of the brain because fear of death, I'd love my consciousness to go on, but also being aware of having an understanding that we're so subjective and we have this phenomenology, but it's so subjective. And science is one of the best ways to get to objectivity, to get around the subject because you might have one idea of what consciousness is via your personal subjective experience, and he might have another, and I have another. How do you get to truth? I think science is one of the best ways that we have that we've developed to get at it.
Christof Koch:
But it doesn't have to assume, as Michael said, that only physicalism is true, as Michael just pointed out, physicists now reject realism. The idea that there's a matter of the fact of what the world was out, it's eternally two independent of the observer. They now reject local interactions. So that's not my grandfather's materialism anymore. That's very, very different view and we really haven't come to grips with that view yet.
And in biologies, it's very strong instinctual rejection. "Oh no, that's all BS. I know what it is. It's matter and that's all there is and somehow if I can't explain it, then I'm going to cancel it." I mean, that's essentially what people like Dan Dennett, bless his soul, ironically, said, "Cancel it. You are all confused about it. You're not in pain and love. All there is behavioral disposition, his behavior and all of that. There's nothing else above and beyond that."
Heather Berlin:
But that's an extremist view. There has to be something in between.
Christof Koch:
But it's very popular. It's very popular. It's not extreme in terms of sociology or philosophy-
Michael Pollan:
Because it solves the problem, and people are hungry for solutions.
Christof Koch:
Yeah, because then you don't have to worry about all the voodoo stuff, experience.
Heather Berlin:
So do you believe that your consciousness exists after you no longer have your brain matter?
Michael Pollan:
No, I have trouble accepting that.
Heather Berlin:
Okay.
Michael Pollan:
But that's not a scientific opinion or even informed opinion. That's a temperamental, yeah. I think when you die-
Heather Berlin:
Then how do we get the truth on this question?
Michael Pollan:
Well, we recently had an attempt. We had the adversarial collaboration, and that was supposed to-
Christof Koch:
That worked out great.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, it worked out really well. And it's funny, when I started this book, I though, oh, that's the frame for this book. This is fascinating. They're having this death match with theories of consciousness.
Christof Koch:
It was going to be the [inaudible 00:30:25] collaboration?
Michael Pollan:
It was.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah, it's a great conference.
Michael Pollan:
I thought that, and I interviewed everybody at Templeton, and that's when I found my way to you at the beginning.
Heather Berlin:
I was at the initial meeting about how do we plan this and what do we... Yeah.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. And I thought, oh, I have my narrative right here. And I was like, didn't take long for that to fall apart. So that was one effort. It's kind of foundered.
Christof Koch:
Why do you think that's so, in your opinion? I'm interested because me and a number of people in the audience were involved in that.
Michael Pollan:
Well, first of all, it was not going to directly test consciousness. It was essentially a neural correlate experiment. And even that-
Christof Koch:
Because that's the only thing we all-
Michael Pollan:
Could agree on.
Christof Koch:
Could agree on.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. So designing these experiments is obviously not easy. And then even in that, the results were kind of equivocal. So anyway, I was disappointed for my own narrative reasons that it didn't produce more, but I don't know how you go about testing idealism. I really don't. I think that's a huge challenge. I see signs that science and biology is willing to entertain some alternatives to materialism right now. I mean, they're little glimmers.
I was very struck by the work I talk about in the book of Michael Levin, the biologist at Tufts, and he does really interesting work that has shown that there can be memory without neurons and that you don't need DNA necessarily to organize a living creature. He creates these xenobots. The xenobots are new organisms created from the skin of tadpole cells that he-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]
Michael Pollan:
... created from the skin of tadpole cells that he puts in a solution, nutrient solution, and freed of their day jobs as skin cells, they clump together and they repurpose their cilia and they start swimming around. They only last about a week, but they come up with an organization that's not dictated in their DNA, by their DNA at all, and he can condition them and things like that. And so they somehow store memory, too.
His project in a way is de-emphasizing both the neuron and DNA. So it's a pretty bold project. And he does it using planaria also, these little worms that can regenerate. They're amazing. You chop off their head, they grow a new head, chop off their tail, they grow a new tail. He can teach them something, chop off their head, they regrow their head, and they remember. So they're storing the memory somewhere else.
I would ask him, "So how's this all work?" And he recently published an essay, and I'm curious to see how much shit he gets for it, where he basically says that there may be patterns that just preexist everything the way there are in math, essentially Platonic patterns that guide evolution in some ways that may have things like intention or agency, or I don't know what else, and that we ingress these patterns, we draw on them. And in his view, machines will be able to draw on them, too.
It's a pretty wild idea, but for someone of his standing to be willing to put forward ideas like that is a sign of either desperation or openness on the part of science.
Heather Berlin:
But we're still talking about biological systems, which brings me to... We also have, we're embodied, we have a microbiome, right? We have, what is it, 30 trillion-
Michael Pollan:
Bacteria.
Heather Berlin:
... bacteria that live with us.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, more genes in our gut than anywhere else.
Heather Berlin:
Amazing. And that must inform our consciousness in some way. We live amongst these other living beings. We are biological beings. Perhaps that's related to our gut feelings or our intuition, and that's different than these AI systems.
So again, we're talking about conscious and biological beings. I mean, do you think that biology is important and these other systems, or the glial cells and all this other, it's not just about the neurons, is important in consciousness, or is it just the information processing or that it could be in any kind of type of matter?
Michael Pollan:
Well, I mean, I looked at this question. I was very intrigued by these claims that AI could be made conscious and that people actively working on it, some in secret and some openly. Mark Solms is someone who has an experiment. He's put together this international team of computer scientists and biologists, and they're trying to make a conscious AI.
And I followed that closely. I was allowed to go to their meetings on Zoom. I think it's crazy. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think the way he's doing it's going to work.
Heather Berlin:
I don't think we should be trying to do it, first of all.
Michael Pollan:
There's that, too.
Heather Berlin:
I think this is very dangerous.
Michael Pollan:
I don't think we want a conscious AI, but I make an argument in the book why I don't think it will happen, at least on silicon-based computers.
And to briefly review it, all the people in Silicon Valley who believe computers can be conscious eventually, and most of them do, which is alarming in itself, subscribe to the idea of what's called computational functionalism. And that consciousness is essentially a computation and it can be performed on any number of different substrates. It can be on brain matter, but why limit it to that?
I think that this idea is based on a faulty metaphor, and that is the metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are certain ways in which the brain is like a computer. It does perform computations, for example. But if you press on that metaphor, it falls apart really quickly. For example, one of the most important features of computers as we know it is this sharp separation between hardware and software. And that in the brain, there's no distinction between hardware and software. Every memory, every experience is a physical change to the brain. So the idea you could somehow extract the software and do something else with it from the hardware just doesn't hold up.
Neurons are like transistors in this one way that is the only way they talk about, which is to say that they fire or they don't fire, but there's so much else going on with neurons. You guys know better than me. I mean, they exist in a chemical environment that influences their behavior, and they're affected by oscillations. So they're digital in one way, but they're very analog in other ways.
Heather Berlin:
So I would say you're like me, which Christoph has labeled the bio-chauvinist.
Michael Pollan:
Or speciesist, as Larry Page has called people like us.
Heather Berlin:
I had a conversation with Larry Page about consciousness and he sort of was like, "I don't understand the problem." I said, "Well, just pain, the feeling of pain." He said, "Well, we can just put that into the algorithm. It's just an algorithm."
Michael Pollan:
Well, so will the pain of a computer be anything like human pain? I would argue that pain and many other feelings depend on having a body and perhaps even more-
Christof Koch:
What about a Tesla? What about a computer and a Tesla?
Michael Pollan:
What about it?
Christof Koch:
Well, that's a body.
Michael Pollan:
It can crash and... Oh, it has a body. Yeah. But it's not a vulnerable body. It's a metal body.
Heather Berlin:
But we can easily create a robot body.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, no, we're making robots.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah. I can feel and-
Michael Pollan:
I talk about a character in the book, Kingsley Man, who is a student of Damasio's or was a student of Damasio's who completely accepts this framework that feelings are key to creating, generating consciousness. So his solution to making a conscious machine is a robot with skin that tears and can be damaged in some ways, and he's going to load it up with sensors so it really feels it.
I don't think those will be real feelings. See, I think Chalmers is wrong. I think there are some important distinctions between thoughts and feelings and that the simulation of a thought is as good as the thought. You can play chess or whatever it is, but the simulation of a feeling is more like the simulation of a weather system: it's not going to get you wet.
Heather Berlin:
I'm on board with you, but I think Christoph might disagree. So this idea that consciousness is substrate independent, that if you think it's fundamental, does it need to be instantiated in a biological system, or what's your latest take on this question?
Christof Koch:
Even if you adopt an idealist position like Bernardo Kastrup has argued for, he would never say the brain isn't necessary. Of course, we know the brain is necessary for you to have consciousness. If I put a hole in your brain with a bullet, you're going to be unconscious. There's no doubt about it.
But he said ultimately the brain is just the way mind looks under a particular appearance. All of matter is mind seen from a particular vantage point. And then there are particularly these types of experiences, called mystical experience, during which this dissociative boundary that separates my mind from your mind and from your mind dissolves. And then exactly people report they become one with everything. And that's where we originally came from-
Heather Berlin:
What if that's just the hallucination or an experience that's being produced by your brain being in a different neurochemical state?
Christof Koch:
Yeah, you can say it's all a big illusion that's a dent, or you could accept it at face value and you could try to say, "Well, how does it relate to the underlying substrate like IIT does?" Or you can say like an idealist, "Well, what that shows, what that demonstrates is a possibility James alluded to: Ultimately there's only mind, and matter is a manifestation of that."
Heather Berlin:
So then can this mind be connected to a non-biological system?
Christof Koch:
Yeah, I don't know what idealism has to say about that. I guess depends on the structure of that substrate.
Michael Pollan:
So then there are these filter theories of consciousness that go back to James and Henri Bergson and are consistent with idealism, I think. And that is the idea: You do need a brain, and the brain is like the TV receiver or the radio receiver, and it is channeling consciousness that exists outside the brain. That's a very attractive theory, but I have no reason to believe it's true.
Heather Berlin:
That's right. It's wishful thinking. I want that to be true. I want desperately for consciousness.
Christof Koch:
There's no way to disprove that because every time I find a correlate, when I say, "So here's a neuron that fires every time you see Jennifer Anderson."
Michael Pollan:
Yeah.
Christof Koch:
Okay, you can say, "Well, that's just the conscious-"
Michael Pollan:
Coming from out there. Yeah.
Christof Koch:
"... out there and that happens to be picked up by that neuron." So I don't know... I don't find that a particularly useful idea, at least that doesn't lead to any further experimental insight. But maybe we can drill a little bit more on the question you asked about this microbiome, these 30 trillion... What do they do for mind, if anything?
Michael Pollan:
Well, I mean, we don't really know, but we know they're doing something.
Christof Koch:
How do we know that?
Michael Pollan:
So I'm researching, I'm reporting right now for a project about the microbiome, which is something I've written about before and have been fascinated by for a long time, but got more fascinated because of this embodiment idea. It's another attack on neurons that I'm waging.
Heather Berlin:
The poor neuron.
Michael Pollan:
The poor neuron. The neurons have looked out for themselves.
Christof Koch:
We only have two and a billion compared to 30 trillion bacteria. Give us a break.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. So-
Heather Berlin:
You're a bacteria-chauvinist.
Michael Pollan:
I mean, we are very cerebrocentric, right? I mean, in 500 years, if we're still around, people will look back and say, "Boy, they were really obsessed with this thing in their heads." And for a long time, you read literature and history, people thought that emotions came from the spleen and came from the stomach and came-
Heather Berlin:
Pineal gland.
Michael Pollan:
The heart and the pineal gland. We've distributed this consciousness around the body at various times. So right now there's a lot of interest in the microbiome and its relationship to the mind. So there's a lot of speculation still, but there's some very suggestive evidence.
For example, various mental disorders have a distinct signature in the microbiome. There is a depressed person's microbiome. There is a Parkinson's microbiome. There is an autism-
Heather Berlin:
We actually were going to do experiments where we implant fecal matter to help treat OCD from healthy people to the OCD patient, but yeah.
Michael Pollan:
Well, you were going to do it and then what happened?
Heather Berlin:
It's a long story.
Michael Pollan:
FDA didn't like the idea?
Heather Berlin:
Yeah, it's a long story.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. If you take the fecal contents of people with these disorders and transplant it into mice, the mice will exhibit those symptoms.
Christof Koch:
Fecal transplantation.
Michael Pollan:
Yes. And the mice will act as though they'll develop a tremor in the case of the Parkinson's, they'll develop social anxiety in the case of the autism. And that's quite stunning. I mean, really. It doesn't necessarily say that there's... The causality, the line of causality is not clear. It's probably more of a loop than anything else, but that is what people are testing now.
Christof Koch:
Well, at least it's true that seemed to imply that at least in mouse you can go from the microbiome that you just injected from the patient back up-
Michael Pollan:
Yes, to the mental disorder.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah.
Christof Koch:
... up the vagus nerve into the brain.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, no, the vagus nerve is definitely implicated in this, but there are other ways that some of these metabolites can get into the brain.
Heather Berlin:
There's researchers now... So one thing that's problematic is that we are losing a lot of our microbiome and-
Michael Pollan:
Oh, we have just completely depleted it.
Heather Berlin:
Right, with antibiotics and things. So there's researchers now that are going to these isolated tribes in these areas that still have-
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. The Hadza in Africa, and there's a group in Venezuela, and we now know what the primordial microbiome looks like, and it's very different than-
Heather Berlin:
And they're trying to now build these biobanks or whatever. They're preserving the-
Michael Pollan:
Right. Yeah.
Heather Berlin:
Right?
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, they have a big stash of Hadza microbes at Stanford, and they're starting to do some interesting experiments. So compared to them, they'll have like 1,300 species and we'll have five or 600 species. We've lost a lot to antibiotics, as you say, generally sanitation, which has of course had a public health benefit, but the downside of it has been compromising the microbiome.
The diet, ultra processed food is terrible for the microbiome. First of all, I mean, you're trying to make food that doesn't go bad. What does that mean? You're killing bacteria or keeping them from growing. And then you have emulsifiers in the food that are shredding the gut lining. We haven't taken the gut microbiome into account when we're approving pesticides, when we're approving food additives, or when we're doing the dietary pyramid. We don't think about it, but we need to.
Christof Koch:
And it's a recent discovery, the last 50 years.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, we didn't know much about it, and we didn't know why it was important to eat fiber, for example. We thought it was for constipation and things like that, but it's really because that's what these microbes like to eat, and they like to eat many different kinds of fiber.
So in terms of affecting our mood, I think what's really interesting as an evolutionary matter is how many really important metabolites or chemical production we have outsourced to these bacteria who have their own agendas. They're making neurotransmitters, they make glutamate, they make GABA. Am I pronouncing that right?
Heather Berlin:
GABA. Yeah.
Michael Pollan:
GABA. They make serotonin, although that serotonin doesn't get into the brain, but they make the precursors of serotonin, they make tryptophan. They're making these really important chemicals we rely on. And somewhere along the line, it was just more efficient to let them do it than to do it ourselves.
But a lot of these chemicals do have effects on the mood, and especially like butyrate is the short fatty acid. It's very important to mood and anxiety and all sorts of inflammatory chemicals or anti-inflammatory chemicals. I mean, the whole idea of gut feelings and gut check and all that is real.
One of the cooler experiments I came across that really shows how the mind and body are more intimately connected than, at least I thought, is an experiment done on moral disgust. Disgust is an interesting emotion because it's here and we feel it here, too. So these researchers had this clever idea. They had divided two groups: One got a capsule or a series of capsules with placebo in it; one got a series of capsules with ginger in it. Ginger calms the stomach. They took their capsules, and then they were presented with these morally repugnant scenarios involving incest and the eating of one's pets and things like that. The ones who had ginger were much less judgmental than the ones who had the placebo, suggesting somehow that the cognitive dealing with this scenario was somehow being channeled through the stomach and back again.
Heather Berlin:
So if we just all ate ginger, we'll make the world a better place.
Michael Pollan:
Well, being less judgmental doesn't necessarily make the world a better place. Could be the opposite. It's very interesting coming to this after the consciousness work and recognizing just how embodied so much of our thinking is and that the mind-body separation is just so false. And we're learning so much, too, about emotion, too, and how emotion begins in the body very often and the brain...
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Michael Pollan:
Emotion begins in the body very often, and the brain's job is to interpret signals it's getting from the body. I think we're very interesting moment in terms of understanding the links between consciousness and bodies.
Heather Berlin:
Do you think that just in this exploration that it has fundamentally changed your perception of things that you will take with you now going forward?
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, I'm much more aware of or trying to tune into what my body's telling me about things. I was very struck in reading Elizabeth's book, her discussion of triggers. I think triggers are really interesting phenomenon, and that is that certain things happen. People say something to you and you clench or contract or have some negative feeling that these are real portals into your emotions and into your psychology. I start to pay attention to that. We haven't talked about the subconscious or the unconscious, but how you access that has been a live topic in psychology for a long time. And Freud thought hypnosis was the way for a while, and then free association and then dreams. It seems like triggers is another. What?
Christof Koch:
And all psychedelics as it did simply the content.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, and psychedelics, exactly, who bring it into it.
Heather Berlin:
I would also say flow states, creativity, getting into these to access.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, yeah. So I think that's exciting.
Heather Berlin:
You've mentioned this term consciousness hygiene. What does that mean exactly?
Michael Pollan:
Toward the end of this book, I sort of shift my approach. I didn't mean to, but I had been very much focused on consciousness as a problem, the hard problem. And this is, I think, a very Western and male way to look at everything. And I was really stuck in that framework and frustrated. My wife was always telling me, she's an artist, not knowing is really powerful too, and it opens you up. And I was like, "Yeah, I really want to know the answer." And I went to interview Joan Halifax, Roshi Joan Halifax, who's a Zen teacher in Santa Fe, Upaya, because I had read that she refers to Upaya, her retreat center as a factory for the deconstruction of selves. And I was writing a chapter on the self. And I went to see her and she kept ducking me, not sitting down for the interview.
And finally she said, "You know, you're really lost in your head on this whole question." And I should have known she's a Zen teacher, she's allergic to concepts. But she said, "You need an experience." So she sent me to this outpost of her retreat center way up in the mountains in New Mexico where there's a cave and she said, "I think you should spend a few days in the cave." Now, I'm not a camper. This is not my thing, but I did. And one of the things I came to see is that consciousness is this incredibly precious gift we have, this space of complete mental freedom. It's very rare in the universe as we know, and it is something that we are now, I think, squandering. I think the algorithms that have hacked our attention, I mean, what is attention?
Christof Koch:
You mean by social media and scrolling?
Michael Pollan:
Social media, doom scrolling, the endless scroll.
Heather Berlin:
What we're wasting our consciousness on.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah. And what is attention, but how we allocate our consciousness. And we have allowed the algorithms to hack our attention to a remarkable degree. When you're scrolling on social media, yes, you're conscious, but minimally so. You're not thinking your own thoughts.
Christof Koch:
It's almost like you enter dissociative state.
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, it is a kind of fugue state and it's very...
Heather Berlin:
Well, people do it to escape in a way. It's a kind of escapism.
Michael Pollan:
Well, there are people who want to be less conscious, and I think we have to respect that because there are often people who are in pain. Not that numbing yourself solves the problem, but I respect that instinct. I think now we are about to pollute our consciousness in a much more serious way with our relationships with these chatbots that we were talking about earlier. And that in the way that our attention was hacked by the algorithm, now it's our emotional connection that's going to be hacked by the algorithm. And people are settling for these relationships, these conversations. But when we do, we go down to the level of the machine. We don't bring the machine up to our level. I mean, you think about a conversation with a computer and it's lacking a lot of things we think conversations have, like eye contact, body language. There's an erotics of conversation.
There are all these in synchrony or dyssynchrony. I mean, all these things go on. It doesn't happen when you're talking to a chatbot, but we accept it. It's sort of like when we took the emoji instead of emotion. I mean, we're cheapening ourselves. So I do think we're polluting our consciousness right now, and the algorithms are part of the reason there are other things going on. If that's true, then what's the opposite of pollution in this context? I thought, "Well, hygiene." So what does consciousness hygiene look like? And that's what I've been thinking about a lot since the book came out. I think mindfulness and meditation is a very important part of it. It's an opportunity to be with your thoughts in your head and realize just how weird your thoughts are. I mean, the fact that we have thoughts that think themselves, what's going on there?
I think psychedelics are a form of consciousness hygiene, giving us access to parts of our mind we might not ordinarily have access to. I think thinking about death is a meditation. I have never done one, but how much it, I think, makes you cherish what you have while you still have it. So anyway, I'm open to other ideas. If people have other ideas, I think learning how to defend consciousness is going to be a really important project, especially when the machines become so persuasive.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah. And that becomes down to... I think we were given this brief moment in time to have this conscious experience and it's so precious.
Michael Pollan:
I sense people revolting against the algorithms. I mean, we see it with social media and I think we'll see it with AI. So I think people want to defend this precious space and they may need tools to do it. And I think it'd be an interesting project to help offer those tools.
Christof Koch:
Some will smell an 11th book.
Heather Berlin:
I mean, the first step I think would be to unplug.
Michael Pollan:
Oh yeah. And one of the things I've found most powerful when I do a meditation retreat is the time off from media. Although now there's this cliff of what's waiting for you when you get back on and that kind of ruins it.
Heather Berlin:
I prescribe this to patients. I have patients with anxiety and rumination is that it's not just go for a walk, don't listen to podcasts, just let your mind be free and-
Michael Pollan:
But do listen to this podcast.
Heather Berlin:
Except for this one, this one. Outside of that.
Michael Pollan:
Yup. No, and I think being in nature too. Disconnecting to be in nature is very important to recovering.
Heather Berlin:
But if we start giving people some things that they can do to help in this project, I think it'd be really helpful.
Michael Pollan:
I think they want them. I really do.
Heather Berlin:
On that note, in every episode we ask one question to expand our own perception box. And in this episode, Christof chose the question, this week's question.
Christof Koch:
Heather and Michael, can you recall an event, a concrete event, not just an abstract one, a concrete event in your life where you strongly, very strongly, viscerally, emotionally disagreed with someone in your life, whether that's a loved one or a coworker or someone over politics or romance or business or whatever, and where they convinced you where they tried to convince you and you realized, "Yes, I understand your perspective. I still don't like it. I still strongly disagree with it, but I understand where you're coming from." And how did you feel about that? Did you feel better once you had this perspective, "Okay, I can look at this from your point of view and I get it?"
Heather Berlin:
Do you want to go first?
Michael Pollan:
Yeah, I think I've had millions of those encounters.
Christof Koch:
Millions? Wow.
Michael Pollan:
Or thousands.
Christof Koch:
Yeah. Some people struggle to recall one.
Michael Pollan:
I am. Well, I have a very poor memory, but I've certainly been there with my wife where I've been able to sort of see her perspective, largely because she's so good at articulating it. But yeah. But I can't think of a specific one. I'm sorry.
Christof Koch:
But you recall, does it help you make the fact that you're still upset because you can still disagree with what she wants. How did it affect you? Did it make you feel better or worse or indifferent?
Michael Pollan:
Well, I've been avoiding getting psychoanalyzed into the perception box for four days now, and I'm not going to give up now.
Heather Berlin:
We should explore this block that you're having. Let's talk about it.
Michael Pollan:
I have a perception box block. Yeah.
Heather Berlin:
This is just an incident that happened recently, and I think this speaks to this question. My son, he's nine, and he's a Big Bang Theory fan. So I was taking him out on a special thing to go see Jim Parsons in a Broadway show. And then first we were going to the Museum on Natural History, and I'd be looking forward to this day. He'd been looking forward to this day for a very long time. We're very excited. So I take him into the city and I bring also his sister who's 12 and her friend because it was a family trip. So my son just had this horrible attitude the whole day and he's like, "I'm not going to the show. I'm not going to the museum. I don't want to talk to anybody." And just really, and I was very upset with him. "You're so ungrateful. I did this special thing for you."
And what I discovered then halfway through the day, what I though he was just being really obnoxious, and this is making me feel terrible as a mom, but he said, "Mom, I thought that this was going to be a special day with just me and you. And I didn't think it was going to be my sister and her friend." And I didn't know that. I didn't know that in his mind, because he said, "This is my favorite thing in the world, Big Bang, and this was going to be a special thing. I thought it was my day, me and you." Which of course, talking about parent guilt, I felt so terrible. And he went through the day and he did enjoy it, but there was this, it wasn't what I had expected him to enjoy.
But I understood his perspective in that moment and it changed my perspective too. And just to put a bow on this story, so his birthday is coming up and what I decided to do for him is take... We live in New York, but you can go and visit the Big Bang Theory set at the Warner Brothers Studios. So for his birthday, I'm going to fly him, just me and him.
Michael Pollan:
In LA?
Heather Berlin:
To LA. We're going to go to the visit the studio and we're going to have a special mommy-son trip to make up for this. I know this sounds extravagant and extreme, but this is in lieu of a birthday party and whatever. But it really affected me in that you never know what somebody else is thinking and what they're coming. So anytime somebody is being rude to you or having a bad day, give them the benefit of the doubt that you don't know what's going on with them internally. That's all for this special live episode of Science of Perception Box. Subscribe. Oh, thank you.
Michael Pollan:
Thank you, guys.
Heather Berlin:
Thank you. And if you haven't already, subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. So I want to thank you again, Michael. It's been such a pleasure.
Michael Pollan:
Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me on.
Heather Berlin:
And of course, Christof, my fantastic co-host, and thank you everybody here. It's been great.
In this special live episode, journalist and bestselling author Michael Pollan explains how a psychedelic experience “smudged the windshield” of his consciousness and started the search behind his new book, A World Appears. He explains the difference between sentience and consciousness and shares some surprising plant research: corn that solves mazes, plants that recognize their relatives, and anesthetics that knock out a Venus flytrap. Pollan’s exploration of consciousness reveals a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
03:29 How psychedelics “smudged the windshield”
08:41 Are plants conscious?
16:03 Can machines be conscious?
18:53 Do we need a cortex to be conscious?
23:53 Materialism vs. idealism
33:17 The microbiome and embodied consciousness
34:53 Why the brain isn’t a computer
40:15 How gut bacteria shape the mind
48:55 Consciousness hygiene
55:00 The Perception Box question
Most of us feel like there's a "me" behind our eyes, a thinker of our thoughts and author of our choices. Author and Waking Up founder Sam Harris argues that when you look closely enough, that self disappears. Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch dig into why the sense of self may be something the brain constructs moment to moment, and why free will, in Sam's view, doesn't hold up to either physics or careful attention. Along the way they explore what meditation and psychedelics reveal about the mind, why denying free will isn't fatalism, and why Sam sees that as grounds for optimism about how much we can change. Sam’s exploration into free will reveals a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
6:50 Self-consciousness and the neuroscience of self
12:50 Do we have free will?
24:00 Waking up: lucid dreaming and meditation
29:20 Intrusive thoughts and what we can control
31:00 Psychedelics and meditation
38:45 Can free will be settled?
Theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku joins hosts Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch to explore what physics can teach us about consciousness and reality itself. Dr. Kaku argues that consciousness is best understood as feedback loops, shaping the walls of our own Perception Box™ long before we're aware of it. The conversation asks if quantum mechanics has anything to do with a "warm, wet" brain, illuminating a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, bestselling author, acclaimed public speaker, renowned futurist, and popularizer of science. As co-founder of String Field Theory, Dr. Kaku carries on Einstein's quest to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into a single grand unified theory of everything. He received a B.S. (summa cum laude) from Harvard University in 1968, then went on to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in 1972. In 1973, he held a lectureship at Princeton University.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:48 Can Physics Explain Consciousness?
03:24 Defining Consciousness vs. Intelligence
09:57 Schrödinger's Cat and the Many-Worlds Theory
12:47 Do Quantum Effects Scale Up to the Brain?
16:13 Could AI Ever Be Conscious?
21:04 Perception Box Question: How Do Others Perceive You?
23:15 Kaku's Multiple Identities Through Life
Stress researcher Dr. Elissa Epel explains why the goal isn't to eliminate stress but to get better at recovering from it. She says that a sharp, short stress response followed by real rest is the hallmark of a young, healthy nervous system. She breaks down the science of why chronic vigilance quietly ages our cells and shortens telomeres. Plus: why lying down can defuse an argument, how someone can recover from years of chronic stress, and why nature, ritual, and even a good nap belong in everyone's stress prescription. Dr. Epel's research reveals a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Elissa Epel, Ph.D., is a professor of psychiatry at UCSF, where she directs the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Center. She co-wrote the New York Times bestseller The Telomere Effect with Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, and her latest book is The Stress Prescription. A member of the National Academy of Medicine, her research has been featured on 60 Minutes, NPR, and in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Chapters:
03:00 What happens in mind and body under stress
05:16 Why too little stress ages you faster
13:20 Is chronic stress damage reversible?
15:12 What a healthy stress response looks like
18:06 Tunnel vision: the Perception Box under stress
24:15 Building recovery into your day
27:37 The stress prescription, part two: practices
31:13 Deep rest as a gateway to transformation
32:38 Recovering from years of chronic stress
38:41 Highly sensitive people and anxiety
40:09 Perception Box question: what do you want people to believe about you?
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Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychologist and neuroscientist, joins hosts Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch to unpack her theory of constructed emotion: the idea that emotions aren't hardwired reactions but stories the brain builds to explain physical signals like a racing heart or a furrowed brow. Dr. Barrett explains why there's no universal facial expression for anger or fear, how the same racing heart can be read as fear or excitement depending on your Perception Box™, and why "you have more control over your interpretation than you think," even if that control takes practice to build.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychological scientist and neuroscientist, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, and originator of the theory of constructed emotion. She is the author of How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Wednesday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend!
Chapters:
03:17 Brain as Prediction Machine
07:41 Why Predictions Feel Invisible
13:55 Feelings Versus Emotions
18:43 No Universal Expressions
30:31 Babies And Basic Affect
32:03 Training Emotional Flexibility
38:42 Rewiring Predictions Over Time
41:45 Letting Go Of Convictions
Why do we speak in euphemisms instead of saying exactly what we mean? Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christoph Koch sat down with cognitive scientist and bestselling author Steven Pinker to explore common knowledge — not what everyone knows, but what everyone knows that everyone knows. Get it?
Common knowledge is an awareness of something that is public or “out there” and it has an enormous impact on our social, political, and economic lives. From unspoken rules of flirtation to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pinker reveals how the social force of common knowledge shapes everything from our most intimate relationships to global financial markets. His work illuminates central ideas of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University where he conducts research on language, cognition, and social relations. Pinker is the author of thirteen books, including his latest book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… and seminal texts like The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and How the Mind Works. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time and The Atlantic.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend!
Episode Chapters:
00:00 Why Honesty Fails
02:56 Defining Common Knowledge
06:38 Awkwardness and Innuendo
15:24 Markets and Shared Beliefs
28:44 Bubbles and Bank Runs
31:05 Freedom of Speech
31:49 Berlin Wall Tipping
32:46 Science Versus Assumptions
What if everything you see, hear, and feel isn't real? What if it's just your brain's best prediction of what's real? Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch sat down with neuroscientist and consciousness researcher Anil Seth to explore the profound question of: What is consciousness? Seth's answer might surprise (and even unsettle) you. Consciousness isn't a window onto reality. It's a controlled hallucination constructed by your brain to make sense of a world it can never directly access. These questions of consciousness illuminate central ideas of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness and more than 200 scientific papers.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend!
Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information.
Chapters:
00:00 Escaping the echo chamber
01:43 Defining consciousness
09:05 Perception as "controlled hallucination"
11:26 Why perception feels like reality (an adaptive illusion)
17:06 When perception shapes social and historical "truth"
19:03 Hallucination as uncontrolled perception
21:57 What is the self?
33:38 Intelligence vs. consciousness
35:42 Anthropomorphizing AI and "bio-chauvinism"
36:10 Biological naturalism: can AI be conscious?
39:44 Should AI be designed to seem conscious?
40:52 Perception Box question
Psychologist Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman explores the difference between victimhood and victim mindset, explaining why learned helplessness is actually our default state—and how developing agency is the key to breaking free. He discusses vulnerable narcissism, the dangers of excessive accommodation, and why growth requires embracing adversity rather than avoiding discomfort. Plus: why Darth Vader is actually an example of overcoming a victim mindset. Dr. Kaufman’s exploration of the victimhood mindset reveals a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Scott Barry Kaufman is a psychologist focused on untapped potential and reframing intelligence. He is a professor of psychology at Columbia University and director of the Center for Human Potential. He has written and edited 11 books, with the most recent being Rise Above: Overcome a Victim Mindset. He has written articles for widely respected publications, including The Atlantic, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review, and he’s also the host of The Psychology Podcast. In addition to teaching at Columbia, he also taught as a professor at NYU and the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Episode Chapters:
00:00 Opening
02:53 Defining the Victim Mindset
03:30 Rumination and Entitlement
05:42 Rethinking Learned Helplessness
08:01 Victimhood vs Victim
09:04 Empowerment Traits
09:44 Genes and Resilience
12:22 Vulnerable Narcissism Link
15:59 Escaping Emotional Victimhood
17:00 Agency Over Accommodations
19:18 Letting Kids Fail
24:56 Villain Or Victim Game
Your body already holds the tools necessary for peak mental and physical performance – you just need to unlock them. Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch sit down with Stanford neuroscientist and “Huberman Lab” host Andrew Huberman to explore the science of how your brain and body talk to each other, and how you can use that conversation to your advantage. Huberman shares his evidence-based solutions for optimizing brain function, mood, energy, and physical performance in order to learn new skills and behaviors that can transform your life. Huberman’s exploration of the brain-body connection speaks to a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Andrew Huberman is a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine and host of the “Huberman Lab” podcast. His newest book, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body publishes in September 2026 and culminates years of research, lab work, and conversations with scientists.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend!
Chapters:
00:00 Opening
06:33 Yoga Nidra and Tactical Breathing
09:25 What Helps Addiction
14:18 Physiological Sigh
17:37 Naming Shapes Adoption
23:05 Alcohol Health Consensus
26:20 Gut Microbiome and Nutrition
27:42 Sex and Wellbeing
30:56 Sleep, Aging and Melatonin
32:42 Protocols Book Overview
35:18 Letting Go and Faith
37:56 Psychedelics
39:44 Perception Box Questions
In a world shaped by dating apps, endless choices, and constant digital interaction, many people feel more disconnected and uncertain about relationships than ever before. In this Spark Salon, Marisa T. Cohen explores the hidden emotional patterns shaping modern love, from attachment and vulnerability to rejection, perception, and communication. Blending relationship science with real-world insight, she examines how our past experiences, assumptions, and unconscious beliefs influence how we seek, interpret, and experience connection.
Drawing from psychology, clinical practice, and years of research on relationships, Dr. Cohen explores what it means to date more intentionally in an age of constant swiping and digital noise. From communication and emotional availability to the stories we carry about love and rejection, she offers a thoughtful framework for building relationships that feel more grounded, mutual, and meaningful.
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How much of your energy is focused on trying to change people who aren't ready to change? Best-selling author and podcast host Mel Robbins joins Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch to explore what happens when you stop trying to control others and start reclaiming your own life. Robbins calls it the “Let Them Theory”: a deceptively simple idea that has struck a nerve with millions worldwide who are using it to address frustration, anxiety, their need for control, and more.
Mel’s “Let Them Theory” touches on a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world.
Mel Robbins is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and host of the award-winning “Mel Robbins Podcast”, with more than 40 million followers worldwide. Her book The Let Them Theory was the top-selling nonfiction title of 2025, selling seven million copies in nine months.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend!
Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information.
Chapters:
05:09 Introducing Mel Robbins
06:43 Parents And Instinct to Rescue
12:32 Helping Without Pushback
14:27 Annoying Spouse Habits
19:00 “Let Them, Let Me” Boundaries
21:03 Losing Control In Modern Life
26:01 The Cold Tea Test
27:12 Flow State Reset
28:51 Why Let Them Works
31:48 Let Them Let Me Boundaries
33:28 Radical Acceptance in Relationships
37:17 Perception Box Reflections
40:24 People Pleasing as Control
43:01 Let Them or Step In Game
Dr. Camilo Ortiz, clinical psychologist and creator of Independence Therapy, joins hosts Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch to unpack why the instinct in modern parenting is to protect kids from every risk may be backfiring. Dr. Ortiz explains how a child's Perception BoxTM starts forming almost as soon as they can speak, why parents today wildly overestimate danger despite living in the safest era on record, and how everyday tasks such as chopping vegetables, walking to the store alone can rebuild kids' confidence and resilience.
Dr. Camilo Ortiz is board-certified in behavioral and cognitive therapy. He holds an MS and PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and serves as a tenured associate psychology professor at Long Island University, bringing 20 years of clinical experience to his role.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Chapters:
06:39 Independence With Guardrails
13:03 Freedom Versus Neglect
16:26 Getting Lost Builds Confidence
18:55 “When Then” Parenting
23:52 Why Parents Overprotect
28:27 Independence Therapy Basics
31:01 When Freedom Backfires
42:07 Independence Or Interference
Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend!
Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information.
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Why do two people witness the same event and walk away with entirely different experiences of what happened? Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch return for Season 2 of Science of Perception Box, exploring the invisible framework, the Perception Box™, that shapes how your brain constructs reality, interprets experience, and defines your sense of self. Each week, they sit down with guests including Mel Robbins, Andrew Huberman and Sam Harris to unpack how perception is built, and how you can gain more agency over your own. New episodes weekly.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes of Science of Perception Box every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Love Science of Perception Box? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend. You can even do both!
Chris Gardner refused to let the circumstances of his childhood define the limits of his future.
In this episode of Corner Office, created in partnership with The Wall Street Journal Custom Content and Unlikely Collaborators, Gardner explores how questioning the beliefs shaped by poverty, violence, and rejection helped him transform hardship into possibility and inspired his lifelong mission to create opportunity for others.
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BJ Miller, MD, Katherine Shear, MD, and Paul Bloom, PhD reframe grief as a natural, necessary response to love and loss — instead of a disorder to fix on a deadline. Drawing from neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy, they explain why grief can resemble love in the brain, why mourning often takes months or years, and how modern culture makes loss harder by rushing people toward “normal” before they’ve had time to change.
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Science can explain how we think, connect, and perceive reality. But it also invites us into something deeper: awe, wonder, and a greater understanding of what it means to be human.
Neuroscientist and physician Andrew Newberg, psychiatrist and happiness researcher Robert Waldinger, and theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili explore the intersections of science, consciousness, meaning, and human flourishing—revealing how discovery itself can become a path to enlightenment and awe.
What do you do when you don’t feel loved?
In a world where we are more connected than ever, many people still feel unseen, misunderstood, or alone. The issue is not always about how much love we have in our lives, but how we experience it.
In this Spark Salon, renowned psychologist and best-selling author Sonja Lyubomirsky explores how our internal lens shapes the way we give, receive, and interpret love. Drawing from her book How to Feel Loved, she challenges the instinct to earn love by presenting our best selves, and instead points to the power of authenticity, including our imperfections and vulnerabilities.
This session explores how the way we show up in our relationships, what we express, what we hold back, and how we respond to others shapes whether love is actually felt on both sides. How do small shifts in how we communicate and engage change whether someone feels seen, valued, and understood? And how, in turn, does that transform our own experience of being loved?
Blending research from well-being and relationship science, Lyubomirsky introduces a set of core relational mindsets that can shift how we experience connection in everyday life, helping close the gap between being loved and actually feeling it.
What does it really mean when you feel lonely? The answer depends on your perception.
In this video, Robert Waldinger, MD, Kasley Killam, MPH, and Ethan Kross, PhD explore why loneliness has become so common and how it affects both the mind and the body. They explain why friendships are disappearing, how loneliness changes our health, and why being alone doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Instead of treating loneliness as a personal failure, they suggest seeing it as a signal that helps us understand what we need and how to reconnect.
What if the voice in your head is less of a witness and more of an interpreter? Two neuroscientists discuss the brain’s drive to explain, narrate, and make everything add up.
Stories do not just entertain us; they may be one of the main ways our brains rehearse experience, assign meaning, and turn scattered moments into something that feels like a self. We are constantly sorting actions, memories and emotion into a version of events that feels coherent enough to live inside. Neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga, PhD and Dean Buonomano, PhD draw on split-brain research to explain the left hemisphere’s “Interpreter”: the brain’s tendency to create explanations for behavior, even when it does not have the full picture. The instinct to create narratives likely shapes far more than self-understanding. It may underpin identity, belief, and the desire to belong in the world.
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The brain isn't separate from the body. It depends on it. Three scientists explain the biology behind one of science's most under-explored relationships.
Your brain didn't evolve in isolation. It evolved to run the economy of your body, and every heartbeat, breath, and moment of thirst or anxiety is evidence of that system at work.
Neuroscientist and author Aditi Nerurkar, neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki, and neurologist-philosopher Antonio Damasio break down the science of the mind-body connection: why it exists, how it works, and why understanding it can change the way you experience the world.
Every time you move your body, your brain gets what one neuroscientist calls a “bubble bath” of dopamine, serotonin, and growth factors. Here’s how to activate it.
Neuroscientists Wendy Suzuki, PhD, Samuel Wang, PhD, and Gary Small, MD explain how movement increases blood flow, boosts growth factors like BDNF, and floods the brain with mood-lifting neurochemicals. The brain and body are in constant conversation, and plasticity means your wiring is never fixed. According to Suzuki, even ten minutes of walking can shift your brain’s chemistry immediately, flooding it in a ‘bubble bath’ of positive neurochemicals.
In other words, the way you use your body today shapes how your brain works tomorrow.
Bad news: your sense of self is made up. The good news is, you’re able to change it. Neuroscience and psychology explain.
Perception feels stable. Your sense of self feels solid. Yet neuroscientist Heather Berlin, psychologist Ethan Kross and neuroscientist Nicole Vignola explain that both are created by the brain. Through prediction, memory and neural pruning, the mind builds a narrative that feels coherent and fixed, even though modern science suggests that it’s continually shaped by pre-existing beliefs and experience. Seeing the construction clearly is the first step toward altering it.
Have you ever woken up after a dream and thought to yourself, “That made absolutely no sense”? According to modern neuroscience, there’s a reason why dreams feel so abstract and bizarre. Two sleep experts discuss.
Every 90 minutes, our bodies go paralyzed while our brains become more active than during waking life. Sleep psychologist Dr. Shelby Harris and neuroscientist Dr. Patrick McNamara, Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University, dig into one of the most fascinating mysteries in human biology: why we dream and what our brains are actually doing during REM sleep. They explore competing theories of what dreaming is for, McNamara makes a compelling case that REM sleep may have been a key driver of early human creativity, and both reflect on why reclaiming our reverence for the dream state could change the way we think and create.
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Happiness researchers Robert Waldinger MD, Tal Ben-Shahar PhD, and Peter Baumann explain why the happiest people aren’t happy all the time.
Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, MD, psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, and author-entrepreneur Peter Baumann share what 85 years of research and lived experience reveal about happiness. They explain why chasing it directly often backfires—and how strong relationships, mindfulness, and embracing every emotion can build a baseline of positivity that actually lasts.
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Humans have always had religion. What does this say about our minds? Reza Aslan, PhD, Lisa Miller, PhD, and Rob Bell, MDiv, explain.
Why has religion been part of humanity since the beginning? Religious scholar Reza Aslan, PhD, clinical psychologist Lisa Miller, PhD, and former pastor Rob Bell, MDiv, explore innate spiritual instincts, the neuroscience of belief, and how faith and science both seek truth. They discuss substance dualism, religion’s role in resilience and mental health, and why our brains may be wired to find meaning, connection, and a sense of something greater.
About Reza Aslan, PhD:
Reza Aslan is a religious scholar, writer, and professor. Author of Zealot, he explores faith, identity, and culture, bringing religious history into contemporary conversations.
About Lisa Miller, PhD:
Lisa Miller is a clinical psychologist and Columbia University professor. She researches spirituality and mental health, authoring The Spiritual Child and The Awakened Brain on the science of faith.
About Rob Bell, MDiv:
Rob Bell is an author, teacher, and former pastor known for Love Wins. He explores spirituality, creativity, and the intersection of faith and modern life.
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People make decisions about your confidence before you ever speak. Authors Robert Greene and Daniel Shapiro explain how posture, presence, and even silence communicate more than words ever could.
Oftentimes, our most effective form of communication happens before we even open our mouths. Best-selling author Robert Greene and conflict negotiation expert Daniel Shapiro reveal how body language silently shapes our identity, influence, and power. From nonverbal dominance to mastering conflict, they break down why we lose arguments and explain how to win them without conflict. By mastering these subtle signals, anyone can master their own influence and create deeper trust, stronger presence, and lasting impact without ever saying a word.
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Your brain makes habits stick. The good news? The same science shows how to replace the bad ones.
Why are bad habits so hard to break?
Neuroscientist Carl Hart, PhD, journalist Charles Duhigg, and psychologist Adam Alter, PhD explain how your brain wires habits as cue-routine-reward loops that control nearly half of your daily life. They show why willpower alone rarely works, why technology fuels new forms of addiction, and why habits can only be replaced, not erased.
About Carl Hart, PhD:
Dr. Hart is an Associate Professor of Psychology in both the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at Columbia University, and Director of the Residential Studies and Methamphetamine Research Laboratories at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. A major focus of Dr. Hart’s research is to understand complex interactions between drugs of abuse and the neurobiology and environmental factors that mediate human behavior and physiology.
About Charles Duhigg:
Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages, and Smarter Faster Better, also a bestseller. Mr. Duhigg writes for The New Yorker magazine and is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School. He has been a frequent contributor to CNBC, This American Life, NPR, The Colbert Report, NewsHour, and Frontline.
About Adam Alter, PhD:
Adam Alter is an Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, with an affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department.
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Failure is inevitable, but your response to it is a choice – and it makes all the difference.
Journalist Tim Harford, PhD, psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, and organizational behavior expert Robert Sutton, PhD, reveal how failure can become the foundation of success when it's examined and built upon. Reframing failure as information, rather than a personal setback, is what sets productive thinkers apart.
Our memories aren’t perfect records of the past — they’re reconstructions shaped by brain activity.
Neuroscientists Lisa Genova and André Fenton explain that a memory is created through neural patterns that can subtly shift each time we recall it. We may unknowingly add or lose details over time. Understanding this science helps us approach memory with more humility and empathy, and deepens our insight into how memories shape one’s identity and beliefs.
What happens when the boundaries of “you” disappear?
James Fadiman, PhD, Jamie Wheal, and Matthew Johnson, PhD explore how supported experiences with psychoactive drugs can dissolve identity and reveal a deeper reality.
What if one experience could make you lose your sense of self, forget time, and feel deeply connected to everything around you?
Experts Jamie Wheal, Matthew Johnson, PhD., and James Fadiman, PhD. give us a deeper look at psychedelic medicine, exploring how substances like psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca change the way we see ourselves and the world. Used carefully, they can bring insight and unity. However, without support, they can be overwhelming and reveal just how fragile our sense of reality can be. These researchers explain the difference.
About Matthew Johnson, PhD:
Matthew W. Johnson, PhD, is The Susan Hill Ward Endowed Professor of Psychedelics and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins. Working with psychedelics since 2004, he is one of the world’s most widely published experts on psychedelics. He has published research on psychedelics and mystical experience, personality change, tobacco smoking cessation, cancer distress treatment, and depression treatment.
About James Fadiman PhD:
Dr. James Fadiman is a leading scientific expert on the use of psychedelics for personal exploration, healing, and transformation. He has been researching, writing and lecturing on the topic for more than fifty years. His research focuses on exploring the potential of psychedelics to help individuals achieve a more meaningful, balanced and enlightened life.
About Jamie Wheal:
Jamie Wheal is the author of the global best-seller and Pulitzer Prize-nominated Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work and the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of ultimate human performance. Since founding the organization in 2011, it has gone on to become the leading voice of evidence-based peak performance in the world, counting award-winning academics, legendary professional athletes, special operations commanders, and Fortune 500 business leaders among the hundreds of thousands of people in its global community.
Around the world, small communities are preserving extraordinary skills and forms of knowledge that have endured for centuries, from rare crafts to rituals that require years of apprenticeship to master. These traditions are not simply artifacts of the past. They are living bodies of knowledge, sustained through discipline, memory, and care.In this Spark Salon, BBC journalist and author Eliot Stein shares stories from his search for the last keepers of remarkable traditions. Through immersive reporting and personal encounters, he explores what it takes to carry specialized knowledge across generations and what is lost when those skills disappear.As modern life accelerates and expertise becomes increasingly digital and disposable, Stein invites us to reflect on the value of embodied knowledge, apprenticeship, and continuity. What does it mean to inherit a skill? What responsibility comes with preserving it? And how do forms of knowledge shape the communities that sustain them?
A neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a psychotherapist discuss how emotions are stories built from old experiences.
By introducing new ones, you can shift the way your past shapes you.
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, psychologist Paul Eckman, PhD, and psychotherapist Esther Perel, PhD, explain how the brain constantly rebuilds emotions from memory and prediction. According to their research, by choosing new experiences today, we can reshape how our past influences us, gain more control over our feelings, and create new possibilities for connection and growth.
About Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD:
Lisa Feldman Barrett is University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She directs the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, where she researches the nature of emotion and the brain’s predictive processes.
About Esther Perel, PhD:
Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and author recognized worldwide for her work on modern relationships. Perel is also a sought-after public speaker with TED Talks reaching millions, and consults globally with organizations on relational intelligence.
About Paul Ekman, PhD:
Paul Ekman is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a leading authority on emotion and nonverbal communication. He pioneered research on microexpressions and developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), used widely in psychology, law enforcement, and security.
Krista Tippett has spent decades convening conversations at the intersection of spirituality, science, and the human condition. Through her work On Being, she has asked some of the most searching questions of our time: What does it mean to be human? How do we live wisely with one another across differences? What kind of inner life makes a different outer world possible?
In this Spark Salon, Krista reflects on the discipline of listening, not as politeness but as transformation. She explores how the stories we inherit, the assumptions we carry, and the meaning we make of our experiences quietly shape how we see ourselves and one another.
This conversation is not about quick fixes. It is an invitation to slow down, to widen our moral imagination, and to examine the interior patterns that shape how we show up in a fractured world. When we shift the way we listen to ourselves and to others . . . something larger becomes possible.
For most of human history, that question lived in myth and imagination. Today, it lives in scientific inquiry.
In this Spark Salon, astrophysicist and astrobiologist Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger, Founding Director of the Carl Sagan Institute and author of Alien Earths, takes us into the search for worlds beyond our own. As scientists explore distant planets orbiting other stars, they are not just gathering data; they are interpreting it.
What counts as life?
What makes a world “habitable”?
How do we recognize something we’ve never seen before?
The search for life beyond Earth is ultimately a search for meaning. It forces us to examine the assumptions we carry about what is normal, possible, and real.
As our view of the cosmos expands, so does our perspective on ourselves. Looking outward into the vastness of space, we may discover something equally profound about how we construct our understanding of life here at home.
📣 Unlikely Collaborators GAME JAM Theme Announcement:
Make AWE playable:
Consciousness and Identity through Awe and Wonder
Build mechanics that create wonder.
Design systems that move identity.
Create moments where perception changes in real time.
🏆 $10,000 in prizes
📅 March 21 – April 7, 2026🔗 igdafoundation.org/gamejam
Sponsored by Unlikely Collaborators in collaboration with IGDA Foundation, Girls Make Games, and International Game Developers Association (IGDA®).
Sleep influences far more than how rested we feel. It shapes how we regulate emotion, connect with others, generate new ideas, and grow from our experiences. But even those who appreciate its importance and want to prioritize rest often find themselves struggling to reach their ideal sleep. Even gadgets, supplements, and sleep hygiene don’t seem to help in the face of life’s changes and challenges.
In this Spark Salon, board-certified sleep psychologist and author Dr. Jade Wu explores a new way to approach sleep that is intuitive and resilient—treating sleep as a relationship to nurture rather than an engineering problem to hack.
Drawing from neuroscience, clinical practice, and her work with high-performing professionals, she helps us understand how working with, instead of against, our unique sleep physiology is the foundation of steadier moods, clearer thinking, and recovery from challenge. This talk offers a grounded, humane perspective on sleep, one that moves beyond rigid rules or quick fixes and instead focuses on the malleable tools we can use to build a healthier, more sustainable relationship with rest.
We are surrounded by bold claims about the future—what’s coming next, what’s inevitable, what we should prepare for. But what if the most important work isn’t predicting what’s ahead but understanding how we relate to it in the first place?
In this Spark Salon, futures designer and author Nick Foster invites us to turn our attention inward. Drawing from his new book, Could Should Might Don’t, Nick helps us notice the stories we carry about the future—and the quiet assumptions, habits, and mental shortcuts that shape our sense of fear, urgency, agency, and possibility. Rather than offering forecasts or frameworks, he offers something more radical: a way to see the future as an extension of the present, shaped by human choices, values, and imagination.
Nick equips audiences to become more discerning thinkers about the future—less reactive, less dazzled by hype, and more grounded in choice and care. Through sharp provocation and real-world examples, the talk brings structure to imagination and expands perspective, helping people navigate uncertainty with greater confidence.
Yum! Brands co-founder David Novak reflects on a lifetime of movement, ambition, and leadership at the highest level. From a nomadic childhood to building some of the world’s most iconic restaurant brands, Novak shares how slowing down, listening more closely, and reexamining his assumptions ultimately reshaped his definition of success and meaning.
Good anxiety isn’t the enemy. Good anxiety is actually your built-in superpower for focus, creativity, and connection when you learn how to harness it. In this Spark Salon, renowned neuroscientist, author, and NYU Dean Dr. Wendy Suzuki invites us to rethink our entire relationship with stress by revealing the remarkable science behind this often misunderstood emotion. Rather than something to avoid, control, or suppress, anxiety becomes a source of energy and insight when we understand the deeper purpose of our brain’s stress responses.
Drawing from her book Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion, Dr. Suzuki shows us how to turn everyday stress into fuel for a stronger, more resilient, beautifully adaptive brain. By learning simple, science-backed strategies to support our brain’s natural responses, we can shift from feeling overwhelmed to feeling equipped. Ultimately, she demonstrates that anxiety isn’t something we simply have to endure. Rather, it’s something we can learn from, shape, and use to live a fuller, more grounded, and more empowered life.
In this provocative Spark Salon, neuroscientist and best-selling author Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, invites us to rethink everything we believe about perception, emotion, and reality itself. Drawing on groundbreaking neuroscience, she reveals that we don’t perceive reality in a more or less objective way., Reality exists only in relation to us. Every sound, color, and feeling is an act of construction by the brain, shaped by culture, context, and memory. Through vivid examples, from a falling tree to a racing heart, Dr. Barrett shows that signals from the world and body have no inherent meaning until the brain processes them. What we experience as reality is a story our brains are constantly writing. Ultimately, she challenges us to recognize that we are not spectators of reality but its architects, with the power to expand our agency, reshape meaning, and reimagine what it means to be fully human.
Grief transforms how we see the world, shaping identity, meaning, and connection in profound ways for all of us, especially for children and teens. In this Spark Salon, Brennan Wood, Executive Director of Dougy Center, and Dr. Donna Schuurman, Senior Director of Advocacy & Education and Executive Director Emeritus, invite us into the often-invisible narratives of kids who are grieving: how they make sense of loss, what they internalize, and the stories they carry forward. Together, they will explore the power of witnessing grief, in ourselves and others, without trying to fix it—how presence itself can be healing, and what it means to be truly “grief-informed.” Drawing from personal experience and decades of leadership in the field, Brennan and Donna will share practical reflections and hard-earned wisdom on how grief, when named and honored, can expand our understanding of resilience, empathy, and the human experience.
Neuroscientist and consciousness researcher Nicco Reggente, PhD, will explore the fascinating, science-backed connection between the heart and the brain in this mind-expanding Spark Salon. Drawing from the groundbreaking, soon-to-be-published study Heartbeat-Evoked Potentials as a Neural Marker of Meditative Depth, Nicco will unpack the ancient wisdom behind “listening to your heart” and what it actually means in modern neuroscience. You’ll discover how the body’s subtle signals, like your heartbeat, shape consciousness, mindfulness, and emotional regulation. Through the lens of interoception (our ability to sense internal bodily states), this session reveals how tuning in to the sensations of the body can help us respond more thoughtfully to life rather than react impulsively.
Nutrition therapist and author Kim Shapira, MS, RD, shares her transformative Six Simple Rules to Become Your Healthiest Self, based on her acclaimed book This Is What You're Really Hungry For. In this engaging session, Kim will introduce key principles from her Six Rules, guiding participants to reframe their relationship with food through science-backed strategies, self-awareness, and sustainable habits. Kim’s empowering and practical approach moves beyond restrictive diets, helping participants reconnect with their bodies, manage emotions in healthier ways, and build lasting behaviors that support physical and emotional well-being.
Join renowned psychologist and author Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman for a powerful Spark Salon exploring themes from his latest book, Rise Above: Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential. In this engaging session, Dr. Kaufman challenges the limiting beliefs and cultural narratives that keep us feeling stuck, offering fresh insight into how we can move beyond a victim mindset to reclaim our agency and become the heroes of our own lives. Drawing on cutting-edge psychology and grounded in empathy and humor, he reveals how to harness emotional intelligence, reframe past experiences, and unlock the resilience and potential within each of us.
In this session, digital workplace expert and author Alexandra Samuel, PhD, explores how AI sycophancy is changing the stories we tell about ourselves and how those stories shape our work, relationships, and well-being. Drawing from her podcast, Me+Viv, and forthcoming book, she shares insights on the intersection of AI and the new workplace, including the hidden tools that can help surface new perspectives, challenge assumptions, and navigate the risks and possibilities of emerging technology.
In a world increasingly marked by isolation and division, artist and urban designer Candy Chang offers a powerful counterpoint: We can still design spaces—physical, emotional, and communal—that foster connection, reflection, and belonging. Best known for her global Before I Die project, Chang has transformed walls, museums, neighborhoods, and even casinos into places of shared vulnerability, creativity, and hope. In this deeply moving and visually rich session, she explores how art can help us process grief, spark dialogue, and bridge the spaces between us. Drawing on a career of participatory installations across more than 70 countries, Candy shows us how to leverage the power of creativity and community to design lives, and environments, where people feel seen, supported, and at home.
Renowned mythologist and story expert John Bucher explores the extraordinary power of story as a force for transformation. Drawing from ancient myths and modern movements, John will reveal how stories have historically reshaped cultural norms, shifted collective behavior, and expanded what people believed was possible. Through compelling examples, John will illuminate how stories can be tools for liberation or limitation, depending on how they shape our internal narrative frameworks. This session will inspire participants to examine the stories they live by and consider how re-authoring those narratives can lead to personal growth, deeper empathy, and even social change.
In this energizing session, Ellen Bennett, founder of Hedley & Bennett and author of Dream First, Details Later, shares the unfiltered truth about fear, failure, and forging your own path. With no safety net and no investors, Ellen built her company from scratch by embracing action over perfection, reframing setbacks as fuel, and turning limited resources into powerful assets. A bold, personal take on pushing through fear, self-doubt, and imposter syndrome, this talk is a powerful reminder that self-belief, persistence, and momentum matter more than credentials or ideal circumstances, and, importantly, that we each have the power to drive our own story forward.
In this mind-expanding Spark Salon, storyteller, illusionist, and entrepreneur Harris III draws from his forthcoming book Start with Wow to explore a powerful shift: the transition from the Information Age to the Imagination Age. Blending magic, neuroscience, and storytelling, Harris makes the case that the future belongs not to those who begin with "how" or even "why" but to those bold enough to begin with "wow." As artificial intelligence and automation reshape the world, Harris offers a compelling framework for human relevance rooted in wonder, curiosity, and creativity. This session invites participants to reawaken their imaginations and see how awe—not algorithms—is the key to innovation, leadership, and purpose in the age ahead.
Sabrina's film is an animated conversation between her past, present, and future selves. The whole film was made using actual audio clips from her self when she was younger and the entire script was based around the limited dialog she could find on old home videos.
The film is meant to capture the vulnerable conversations that happen late at night and the thoughts that keep you up when you're anticipating something important the next day.
Entrepreneur and cultural icon Daymond John opens up about the experiences that shaped his hustle, worldview, and success. From the streets of Hollis, Queens to becoming one of Shark Tank’s most trusted investors, Daymond’s story is one of perseverance, reinvention, and purpose.
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Why are bad habits so easy to form and so hard to break? In this four-part Spark Salon series, renowned psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and mindfulness expert Dr. Jud Brewer will reveal how our brains get hooked on unhelpful behaviors like anxiety, overeating, doomscrolling, and more—and how we can disrupt these patterns by better understanding the science of habit formation. Drawing from cutting-edge research, Buddhist psychology, and clinical breakthroughs, Dr. Jud introduces a practical, compassionate approach to breaking habits, not through willpower but through awareness, curiosity, and kindness. The first session, held both in person and live-streamed from Unlikely Collaborators, will introduce Dr. Jud’s framework and set the stage for the series. The following three online-only sessions will each dive deep into one of the "three gears" of habit change, providing immersive, experiential opportunities for participants to apply these methods in real time. With interactive breakout discussions and practical tools, this series invites you to expand the walls of your Perception Box™ and build a new relationship with your mind.
Jud Brewer, MD, PhD (“Dr. Jud”) is a New York Times best-selling author and leading authority on habit change and the science of self-mastery. With over 25 years of mindfulness training combined with scientific research, he serves as the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and as a professor at Brown University. An internationally recognized psychiatrist specializing in mindfulness for addiction, Dr. Jud has developed innovative mindfulness programs—both in-person and app-based—for smoking cessation, emotional eating, and anxiety. He has investigated the neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback. He has trained U.S. Olympic athletes, coaches, and foreign government ministers. His work has been featured on 60 Minutes and in TED (one of the most-viewed talks of 2016 with over 20 million views), The New York Times, Time, Forbes, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg Businessweek, and more. Dr. Jud founded MindSciences—now part of Sharecare Inc.—to bring his discoveries directly to consumers. He also cofounded Mindshift Recovery, a nonprofit aiding those suffering from addiction. He is the author of The Craving Mind (Yale University Press, 2017), the New York Times Best Seller Unwinding Anxiety (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2021), and The Hunger Habit (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2024). For more information, visit www.drjud.com.
Learn more about Spark Salons at salons.unlikelycollaborators.com.
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For Vijay Gupta, music is not entertainment. It is a lifeline. He sees art as a way to process pain and grief, transforming them into something that heals and sustains. Described by The New Yorker as “a visionary violinist and a radical thinker in the classical music world,” Gupta creates spaces where people feel seen, connected, and whole. In his talks, he invites us to reconsider how we relate to struggle and shows how creative expression can shift the inner stories that shape our lives.
Described by The New Yorker as “a visionary violinist and a radical thinker in the classical music world,” Vijay Gupta is an internationally celebrated musician, speaker, and advocate who bridges the worlds of art, justice, and healing.
He is the founder and Artistic Director of Street Symphony, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit that has presented thousands of musical workshops and performances in shelters, county jails, state hospitals, and prisons—creating spaces of connection for people in reentry from homelessness, addiction, and incarceration. For Gupta, music is not entertainment—it’s a lifeline, a way to process pain, reclaim dignity, and transform grief into belonging.
A member of the first violin section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 12 years, Gupta has performed globally as a recitalist, soloist, and chamber musician and is a founding member of the Darshan Piano Trio and Tesserae Baroque. His recordings span repertoire from Bach to contemporary composers, and in 2024, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
A dynamic communicator, Gupta has given three TED talks that have garnered millions of views. He has delivered keynote addresses for the American Medical Association, The Richmond Forum, The Aspen Institute, Hallmark, Accenture, the Mayo Clinic, the U.S. Psychiatric and Mental Health Congress, and the League of American Orchestras. In 2026, Grand Central Publishing will release his memoir, Restrung, exploring loss, resilience, and the power of music to transform the human spirit.
Learn more about Spark Salons at salons.unlikelycollaborators.com.
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From pregame traditions to team-building exercises, rituals are intertwined in every facet of our lives. Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton, author of The Ritual Effect, shows that rituals play a role in our everyday lives: from building connections to helping us leave work behind at the end of the day. We can transform our unconscious habits into conscious productivity—and rise to challenges and opportunities like never before. Named one of WIRED’s 50 People Who Will Change the World, Michael demonstrates the power of rituals in our teams, our workplaces, our families, and even our marriages.
Michael Norton is a Harvard Business School professor whose work dives into the psychological effects of ritual. His groundbreaking research has proved the importance and flexibility of rituals in our everyday lives—they affect our feelings, thoughts, and even behaviors. Michael shows that rituals can bind us together as a community, which makes for stronger teams who coordinate and find meaning in their work, and explores the role that rituals play in our families, our friendships, and our marriages. Michael shows us the power of ritual in our personal lives and our workplaces. His groundbreaking book, The Ritual Effect, has been called “endlessly fascinating” (Dan Pink, Drive) and “an eye-opening window into why we swear by certain routines—and how we can build more enriching ones” (Adam Grant, Think Again).
Michael has also researched personal finance and spending—specifically, how to use money to get happier. Along with fellow professor Elizabeth Dunn, he’s the co-author of the book Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending, which proved that we’re going about spending our money all wrong. With five practical principles on how to increase happiness by changing the philosophy behind spending, Happy Money is “a rare combination of informed science writing, rollicking good fun, and practical pointers for a more flourishing and compassionate life” (David G. Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness). His TEDx talk, which draws on this research, has been viewed over four million times.
Michael has appeared on National Public Radio, CBS, Fox, and MSNBC, cohosted Talking Green, a podcast on how people really interact with money, and written op-eds for The New York Times, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. His research has been featured in publications like Psychological Science, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Marketing Research, has been covered by The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post, and has been parodied by The Onion.
Learn more about Spark Salons at salons.unlikelycollaborators.com.
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Curious minds. Brave questions. Unexpected connections.
From myth to mindfulness to the science of awe, the Spark Salon speaker series brings together voices that will challenge, inspire, and expand your perspective.
According to neuroscientists and psychiatrists, healing begins with awareness and compassionate connection.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Wendy Suzuki, and Dr. James Doty explain how trauma and anxiety are processed through both the brain and body: trauma isn’t just what happens to us, but how our nervous system holds onto it, disrupting our ability to feel safe, connect with others, and think clearly.
Often a feeling people want to avoid, anxiety actually functions to motivate action and can be leveraged as a tool for focus and productivity. Through breathwork, mindfulness, and reshaping negative internal dialogue, we can begin to retrain the brain, regulate the body, and support a lifetime of growth.
Do Kids Think Rules Are Meant to Be Broken?
HiHo and Unlikely Collaborators teamed up to ask 100 kids just that—exploring how young minds view right, wrong, and everything in between.Inspired by the Perception Box framework.
What if the way you see the world is shaped by trauma you haven’t fully processed?
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, explains how trauma isn't just remembered, it is physically lived and relived through the body and brain.
He describes how traditional talk therapy often fails to reach the survival centers of the brain where trauma resides. Instead, healing comes through visceral experiences that help rewire perception, build a sense of safety, and reconnect the self. Through movement, touch, psychodrama, and even psychedelics, the brain can learn to see the present as safe again.
About Bessel van der Kolk:
Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., is a pioneering psychiatrist and trauma researcher, best known for his work on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He authored the bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score, which explores how trauma reshapes both body and brain. As founder of the Trauma Research Foundation, he has led innovative treatments combining neuroscience, psychotherapy, and body-based approaches to healing trauma. His work has transformed trauma care worldwide.
“I want people to know that their lives matter and that their deaths ultimately will too.” How a journey to Cuba made Alua Arthur confront her own mortality, and ultimately led her to her career as a death doula.
Alua Arthur, a death doula, never expected to find her calling in the space between life and death. Struggling with depression and a sense of not belonging, she was searching for meaning when a chance encounter in Cuba changed everything.
After encountering death in her personal life, she began to confront her own mortality—and realize she wasn’t truly living. This moment, combined with the loss of her brother-in-law, set her on a path to becoming a death doula, someone who supports people through their final days. Now, she is an author, a (public speaker), and has dedicated her career to helping others embrace life by acknowledging its inevitable end.
About Alua Arthur:
Alua Arthur is a death doula, end-of-life care expert, and founder of Going with Grace, a nonprofit dedicated to helping individuals navigate the final chapter of their lives. After struggling with depression and identity, Alua found purpose in guiding others through the dying process with compassion and dignity. She has dedicated her life to empowering people to face death with grace, offering support to both individuals and their families.
Gracie Gold’s battle with mental health nearly ended her career—and her life. This is how she found her way back to herself.
Gracie Gold, a two-time national champion and Olympic medalist, seemed to embody perfection. But behind the medals and the headlines, her obsession with being flawless led her to a breaking point. After the 2016 World Championships, she spiraled into depression, binge-eating, and a complete loss of identity.
Feeling trapped and out of place, Gold hit rock bottom before seeking help at a treatment facility. There, she finally “met herself,” learning to let go of perfection and accepting “okay” as enough. Now, she’s a mental health advocate and a New York Times bestselling author.
About Gracie Gold:
Gracie Gold is an American figure skater known for her technical skill, artistry, and resilience. Born in 1995, she rose to prominence by winning the U.S. national title in 2014 and earning a bronze medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics in the team event. Gold also claimed silver at the 2016 World Championships, solidifying her status as one of the sport’s top competitors. After facing mental health challenges that led to a hiatus, she made a remarkable comeback, advocating for mental health awareness in athletics.
Can psychedelics under anesthesia heal trauma? What is the latest research around ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin? That’s part of what we explore this week on Science of Perception Box. Stanford anesthesiologist Dr. Boris Heifets joins Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christoph Koch to discuss the latest research on the first double-blind study on Ketamine, the placebo effect, and the therapeutic value of anesthesia-induced dreams.
Dr. Boris Heifets, MD, PhD, is a board certified anesthesiologist who specializes in providing anesthesia for neurological surgery. He has practiced at Stanford since 2010. After completing residency training at Stanford, Dr. Heifets completed fellowship training in neuroanesthesiology, also at Stanford. In addition to treating patients, Dr. Heifets directs both clinical research and basic neuroscience. His research group studies how new rapid-acting psychiatric therapies like ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin produce lasting changes in nervous system function, behavior, and therapeutic outcomes.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Ever wonder why time seems to fly or crawl? From ancient philosophers to modern neuroscientists, the nature of time has captivated human curiosity. This week on Science of Perception Box, we investigate the relationships among time, memory, and perception. Dr. Davachi shares the mechanisms of how the brain encodes and retrieves memories, including why emotions and feelings play a role in our perception of time.
Lila Davachi is a prominent neuroscientist known for her research in the field of memory. She earned her PhD from Yale University in 1999 and currently holds a faculty position at Columbia University, where she leads the Davachi Memory Lab. Her work primarily focuses on understanding the processes of memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval through behavioral and cognitive neuroscientific methods.
Dr. Davachi has made significant contributions to the understanding of how memories are formed and maintained in the brain. She has published extensively in academic journals, with her research being highly cited within the scientific community. In addition to her research, she is actively involved in teaching and mentoring students in psychology and neuroscience.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation as well as the current Meritorious Investigator and Former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app or tell a friend about the show.
When was the last time you felt absolutely mesmerized by something beautiful? Whether it’s seeing a breathtaking vista, losing yourself in a piece of music, or being in a crowd cheering for the same team, the feeling of awe can be all-encompassing and expansive. This week on Science of Perception Box, Dr. Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists and a scientific advisor behind Pixar’s Inside Out, shares how we can cultivate more awe in our life and why we need this sometimes overlooked emotion.
Dr. Keltner is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has over 200 scientific publications and six books, including Born to Be Good, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Power Paradox. Dr. Keltner is involved with the education of health care providers and judges and has consulted extensively for Google, Apple, and Pinterest on issues related to emotion and well-being.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School Of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for The Tiny Blue Dot Foundation as well as the current Meritorious investigator and Former President of the Allen Institute For Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Wednesday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app or tell a friend about the show.
How can parents embrace science in order to give their children the best possible environment to thrive in? Cognitive development expert Dr. Alison Gopnik joins us to discuss how navigating challenges fosters healthier adults, likening caregiving to being a gardener creating an environment where various ”plants” can thrive in different conditions. Exposing children to diverse environments helps them develop better coping mechanisms, akin to how the immune system strengthens against viruses.
Dr. Gopnik is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. She is a world leader in cognitive science, particularly the study of children’s learning and development. She is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including the best-selling and critically acclaimed popular books The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter. She is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
We long for love. We die for love. We kill for love. But why do we love? Cohosts Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christoph Koch ask this question to Helen Fisher, PhD. who dedicated her career to researching romantic love. In this episode of Science of Perception Box, we explore how the act of being in love or out of love changes how we view ourselves and the world around us.
Dr. Fisher was a biological anthropologist, Senior Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute, and Chief Science Advisor to Match.com. She used brain scanning (fMRI) to study the neural systems associated with the sex drive, romantic love, attachment, rejection, love addiction, long-term partnership happiness, and the biological foundations of human personality. She conducted extensive research on the evolution, biology, and psychology of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery, and divorce.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
What happens when an irredeemable person receives love, gratitude, and respect? After decades of drug and alcohol abuse, chef and television personality Andrew Zimmern learned firsthand.
As a teenager, Andrew Zimmern experienced deep pain when his mother became permanently disabled, and his father enforced a rule to avoid discussing feelings. Without an outlet, that pain grew into resentment and substance abuse. By 14, Zimmern was drinking daily, and his addiction followed him into adulthood, ultimately costing him his career, relationships, and home.
In January 1992, after hitting rock bottom, Zimmern attempted to take his own life. When he woke up, something shifted. For the first time, he asked for help. His friends intervened, sending him to rehab, where he began confronting his emotions and embracing a mindset of learning and giving.
Zimmern rebuilt his life, becoming a celebrated chef, author, and TV personality. Today, he credits that one vulnerable moment with saving his life and inspiring him to live with purpose and gratitude.
About Andrew Zimmern:
Andrew Zimmern is a chef, food writer, and television personality best known for hosting Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel. A four-time James Beard Award winner, Zimmern has dedicated his career to exploring global cuisines and advocating for culinary diversity. Beyond television, he is a passionate philanthropist, focusing on hunger relief, food sustainability, and social justice. He founded the Andrew Zimmern Project to support food security initiatives and works with organizations like Second Harvest and Services for the Underserved. Through his work, Zimmern strives to create a more equitable food system and inspire cultural appreciation through cuisine.
The one phrase that changed Diana Nyad’s life, and set her on course to become the first person ever to conquer the 110 mile, 53 hour swim from Florida to Cuba.
At 64, Diana Nyad swam 110 miles from Cuba to Florida, facing jellyfish, exhaustion, and tough ocean currents for over 53 hours. But this feat was more than just physical - it was the result of a lifetime of mental endurance.
As a young swimmer, she faced sexual abuse from her coach, which derailed her Olympic dreams and left deep emotional scars. Instead of letting those experiences hold her back, she found a way to channel that pain into something powerful. She talks about developing a "steel trap mind," using her struggles as motivation to pursue her goals.
Diana's journey goes beyond breaking records. It’s a powerful reminder of the human spirit's ability to persevere and heal, no matter the odds. Her swim from Cuba to Florida, completed on her fifth attempt, showcases her incredible willpower and serves as an inspiration to people everywhere.
About Diana Nyad: Diana Nyad is an endurance swimmer, author, and motivational speaker best known for her 2013 record-breaking swim from Cuba to Florida at age 64. Completing the 110-mile journey without a shark cage, she demonstrated unparalleled resilience and determination. Nyad is also a bestselling author, journalist, and co-founder of EverWalk, a fitness initiative promoting community through walking. Her story of perseverance, chronicled in her memoir Find a Way, continues to inspire audiences worldwide.
“I saw that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, and when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer.”
Author and public speaker Byron Katie shares how she transformed her life after discovering ‘The Work’, a method for identifying the thoughts that cause pain and suffering. By asking herself four simple yet profound questions, she found a way to recover from her agoraphobia, reunite with her family, and begin teaching others how to heal.
Katie’s strategy for ending suffering lies in asking yourself four questions about the thoughts you’re having: Is it true? Can you absolutely know it’s true? How do you react when you believe it? Who are you without the thought?
By asking yourself these questions, Katie explains how you can begin to escape the mentalities that hold you back. Her method shows us that peace doesn’t come from changing the world—it comes from changing how we see it.
About Byron Katie: Byron Katie is an author and teacher who helps people find peace by questioning their stressful thoughts. In 1986, after years of depression, she experienced a life-changing realization that led her to create The Work, a simple process of self-inquiry. Her books, like Loving What Is and A Thousand Names for Joy, have touched millions. Through workshops and talks, Katie shares a path to clarity and freedom, helping people live with more acceptance and ease.
Our cultural lenses can expand our Perception Box or contract it, keeping us closed off to new opportunities. So how do we become aware of the personal influences that shape our perceptions? In this episode of Science of Perception Box, cohosts Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christoph Koch discuss the impact of cultural differences on identity and mindsets with guest Dr. Daphna Oyserman. Dr. Oyserman shares her insights on how small changes in context can significantly affect our mindset and choices, impacting our health and academic performance.
Dr. Daphna Oyserman is a Dean’s Professor of Psychology and Professor of Psychology and Education at the University of Southern California. Dr. Oyserman received a PhD in psychology and social work from the University of Michigan and served on the faculty of The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, before returning to the University of Michigan where she last held appointments as the Edwin J. Thomas Collegiate Professor of Social Work, Professor of Psychology, and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
What is the mind? Does the mind exist only in your own Perception Box, or is there a greater connection of consciousness? In this episode of Science of Perception Box, cohosts Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christoph Koch discuss the interconnectedness of the mind, the impact of implicit memories from infancy on childhood attachment, and the wheel of awareness with Dr. Dan Siegel. Dr. Siegel shares his research and practices on healing unresolved trauma, preventing burnout for caregivers and medical professionals, and channeling the Perception Box-expanding power of empathy.
Dr. Siegel is the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute and Founding Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, where he was also Co-Principal Investigator of the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development and Clinical Professor at the School of Medicine. An award-winning educator, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of several honorary fellowships. He has authored numerous articles and books, including five New York Times bestsellers.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information.
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Humans have a symbiotic relationship with plants. Plants coevolved to suit our desires for nourishment, beauty, and altering consciousness. Journalist Michael Pollan has investigated the human connection to plants. This week on Science of Perception Box, Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch ask Pollan about modern trends like ultra-processed foods, industrialized agriculture, and consciousness-altering drugs from plants including caffeine, cannabis, and psychedelics.
For more than 30 years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of eight books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers. In 2003, Pollan was appointed the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. In 2020, along with Dacher Keltner and others, he cofounded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, overcame a challenging upbringing marked by social isolation and family tragedy, channeling those experiences into a life defined by action, innovation, and iconoclasm. Though he’s undeniably earned his reputation as a business trailblazer, McKelvey remains uncomfortable with any attempts to mythologize his journey.
As a child, Bob Stiller felt unmoored. His mother’s death was a loss that fueled anger, insecurity and, as a teenager, lots of partying. He founded rolling paper company E-Z Wider in 1971 and, a decade later, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
Sophia Amoruso (aka Nasty Gal) started a tiny online vintage clothing store that quickly turned into a $350 million business. Fame soon followed, but so did all of her insecurities.
Anxiety can make us feel like we’re trapped in our brain. So how do we open the door and gain freedom? This week in the inaugural episode of Science of Perception Box podcast, Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch invite Dr. Judson Brewer to delve into the roots of anxiety, its impact on our perception, and how curiosity can be the key to lasting change.
Dr. Judson Brewer studies the neural mechanisms of mindfulness. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, where he’s also an Associate Professor at the School of Medicine. Dr. Brewer is a leading expert in the science of self-mastery and breaking habits. His books include Unwinding Anxiety, The Craving Mind, and The Hunger Habit.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Join renowned scientists Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch on the Science of Perception Box, where they delve into the Perception Box—a groundbreaking concept developed by Elizabeth R. Koch, that reveals how our beliefs, biases, and neural wiring shape our reality and define how we experience the world.
Through captivating conversations with expert guests like psychiatrist Dr. Judson Brewer, anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, and journalist Michael Pollan, the show explores how the Perception Box expands in states of awe, curiosity, and love, and contracts during fear, anxiety, or anger.
From mindfulness and romantic relationships to psychedelics and human connection, each episode uncovers transformative insights into unlocking greater awareness, fostering curiosity, and reshaping how we perceive the world.
New episodes drop every Thursday on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow the journey and redefine your reality.
Don’t call yourself “a writer,” just write. Ryan Holiday on how the labels you give yourself can hold you back.
Who would you be without all the labels and identities you’ve collected over the course of your life?
Ego, titles, and societal expectations often shape who we think we are—or who we think we should be. Author, and for simplicity's sake, bookstore owner, Ryan Holiday explains the simple question “What do you do?” can turn into a trap, making us cling to roles that don’t really define us. But what happens when you let go of these labels? What if, instead of focusing on the identity of being a writer, you focused on the act of writing itself?
As Holiday got older, he learned that being busy “doing the verb” is far more valuable than obsessing over the noun. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to fit into the “right” categories and titles, but that often means copying, comparing, and losing sight of what really matters.
About Ryan Holiday: Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author, marketer, and one of today’s leading voices in modern Stoicism. He’s known for taking ancient wisdom and making it relatable and practical for everyday life. Before becoming an author, he led marketing at American Apparel. Now, he writes about strategy, self-discipline, and leadership, weaving history into real-world advice.
When a group of first responders were asked to confront the Perception Box question, "What need inside of yourself have you been neglecting?", their raw and honest responses were deeply moving and sparked profound reflection.
This series (a collaboration with Jubilee Media) is designed for communities with shared experiences to spark deeper self-understanding and connection by sharing their answers to specially selected Perception Box questions. This highlights the power of vulnerability and the importance of creating safe spaces for honest conversations.
“I feel like I had to lose my sight to fully gain my vision.” John Furniss on how becoming blind led him to drug abuse, rehab, woodworking, and finally, to a fulfilling life.
John Furniss, also known as the Blind Woodsman, opens up about his journey from a difficult past to finding peace and purpose. After losing his sight as a teenager, John struggled for years to accept his new reality, battling inner turmoil and substance abuse along the way. It wasn't until he discovered woodworking through a vocational rehab program that he found a way to channel his creativity and start healing.
Woodworking became more than just a skill for John; it allowed him to bring the designs he imagined in his mind to life. This craft also led him to meet his wife, Annie, who has been a constant source of love and support. Through his work and his relationship, John found a sense of belonging and a new way of seeing the world. He reflects on how losing his sight actually helped him gain a clearer vision of who he is and what he’s meant to do, ultimately finding peace in embracing his true self.
About John Furniss:
John Furniss, known professionally as The Blind Woodsman, is a skilled woodworker, author, and disability advocate recognized for his meticulous hand-turned creations. After losing his sight at 16, John faced significant challenges adapting to life with total blindness. In his 20s, he found his passion for woodworking through a class designed for the blind, which led to the development of his unique craft.
Today, John’s work has been featured on platforms such as Good Morning America and The Kelly Clarkson Show. He and his wife, Anni, who is also an artist, use their social media platforms to share their work and raise awareness about disability and mental health. John’s expertise in woodworking and his contributions to the art community have established him as a respected figure in his field.
Kaelynn Partlow shares her story about life with autism, ADHD, and dyslexia, and how finding the right diagnosis helped her embrace her neurodivergent identity.
Kaelynn Partlow, an author, autism advocate, and registered behavior technician, shares her own experiences living with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and more. She talks about how these diagnoses shifted her self-perception from feeling "stupid" to understanding her unique challenges and strengths.
Kaelynn opens up about the misunderstandings neurodivergent people face and the difficulty of connecting in a world that often doesn't accommodate different ways of thinking. She also shares her fears—like wondering if her social difficulties will ever improve—and how she copes with loneliness, especially when not focused on work.
Through it all, Kaelynn emphasizes the value of recognizing your own strengths, even when it’s hard. By taking on challenges and thriving under pressure, she found new opportunities, from public speaking to creative writing. Her story shows that growth often comes from facing fears and redefining success on your own terms.
About Kaelynn Partlow:
In 2015, Kaelynn Partlow joined Project Hope Foundation as a Registered Behavior Technician. She is now a Lead Technician, providing services to middle and high-school-aged clients and contributing to staff training development.
In 2021, Kaelynn was featured on the Netflix series Love On The Spectrum. She has also been a guest on numerous national podcasts and has published several articles, offering insights from an autistic perspective.
With a large following on various social media platforms, Kaelynn uses her reach for autism advocacy, connecting with millions globally. In addition to her online work and role at Project Hope, she is an international public speaker, passionate about sharing tangible strategies for best practices when interacting with individuals on the autism spectrum
Your brain is wired to repeat the familiar. Change this wiring, and it will change your life.
Nicole Vignola, a neuroscientist and organizational psychologist, explains how deeply rooted beliefs can limit our potential and keep us trapped in patterns of thought. These perceptions, often shaped by our upbringing and environment, aren’t necessarily our own—but they can be changed.
Nicole shares how the brain’s natural biases, like negativity bias and confirmation bias, reinforce these limiting beliefs. However, with the right approach, it’s possible to reshape our mental patterns. By practicing metacognition—observing and naming our thoughts—we can start to rewire our perception and create new, empowering narratives.
Our brains are capable of change at any age. By focusing on small wins and challenging automatic thoughts, we can break free from old beliefs and begin using a mindset that better serves ourselves and our futures.
About Nicole Vignola:
Nicole Vignola is a neuroscientist, author and corporate consultant. With a BSc in Neuroscience and an MSc in Organizational Psychology, Nicole works with companies and individuals worldwide, educating them on the science of human optimisation, health and longevity, and how to enable employees to perform better in their daily lives and in turn, bring peak performance to the workplace. Recent clients include Lloyds Bank, Makers Mark and Smeg Ltd.
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Expanding your worldview starts with understanding your brain. Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman explains.
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford and host of the Inner Cosmos podcast, explores how our brains shape the reality we experience and why we often accept our perceptions as the only truth. From a young age, we develop our understanding of the world based on limited experiences and biases, which can lead us to form narrow views about what's true.
Eagleman explains that our genetics and life experiences wire our brains in unique ways, meaning that each of us sees the world a little differently. He introduces the idea of "perceptual genomics," which looks at how slight genetic differences influence our perception of reality. He also discusses how our brains naturally create in-groups and out-groups, a tendency rooted in evolution that affects how much empathy we feel for others.
To overcome these biases, Eagleman suggests that we start by recognizing our own prejudices, understanding the tactics of dehumanization, and connecting with others through shared interests. This approach helps us appreciate the diverse realities others experience, ultimately contributing to a more empathetic and understanding society.
About David Eagleman:
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally bestselling author. He is co-founder of two venture-backed companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck, and he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a national non-profit institute. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw.
Challenging the loneliness stigma can change your life. Here’s how to start.
From a young age, many of us are taught that being alone means something is wrong, leading to negative thought patterns that reinforce feelings of isolation. Kasley Killam, author of The Art and Science of Connection and an expert in social health, explains how these perceptions of loneliness can shape our experiences and influence our lives.
According to Killam, this stigma around loneliness can trigger a stress response in the body, affecting both mental and physical well being. However, by challenging these narratives and reminding ourselves of how much control we really have, it’s possible to redirect our mindsets. It also helps, she says, to understand the difference between individualistic and collectivist cultures, and how each one can influence the way we interpret and discuss our feelings with others.
For those who have struggled with loneliness or felt trapped in a cycle of negative thinking, this perspective can help us break free. By shifting our thought patterns, we can transform our relationships, enhance our sense of connection, and improve our overall well-being.
About Kasley Killam:
Kasley Killam is a social health expert, author, and advocate focused on strengthening connections and enhancing community well-being. With a background in behavioral science and public health from Harvard University, she is a leading voice on the impact of social relationships on mental and physical health.
As the founder of Social Health Labs, Killam collaborates with organizations to develop innovative solutions for combating loneliness and social isolation. Her work has been featured in major publications, and she is a sought-after speaker on the importance of social well-being in creating healthier, more resilient communities.
Ever wonder why your partner goes Tasmanian Devil in traffic jams while you just shrug? Or why you have such a hard time setting boundaries with parents when your sibling has no problem saying "hell no!" Everyone has something that triggers panic or turns their blood cold…and it all starts with the story you made up about yourself when you were too young to know the difference…your Perception Box Seed Story.
A group of LGBTQ+ individuals courageously answered the Perception Box question, "Who or what have you left behind on your journey to become who you are today?" Their honest and insightful responses were deeply moving.
This series (a collaboration with Jubilee Media) is designed for communities with shared experiences to spark deeper self-understanding and connection by sharing their answers to specially selected Perception Box questions. This highlights the power of vulnerability and the importance of creating safe spaces for honest conversations.
How has Kel Mitchell navigated self-doubt, isolation, and the desire to “hit the off button”? He says it’s all faith, community, and personal forgiveness.
After his debut on Nickelodeon, Kel Mitchell began a life-long career as an actor and comedian. He got married, started a family, and basked in professional success. However, behind the scenes, he faced intense personal hardships that pushed him to the brink, testing his resilience and strength in ways he never imagined.
Kel guides us through the lowest points of his life, showing us how faith in himself and his religion helped him rebuild and achieve a fulfilling existence. He reminds us that blessings can often be hidden in hardships and that mistakes play a crucial role in shaping who we are.
By expressing his pain and opening up to others about the things he was struggling with, he was able to find unity, community, and support from those who had experienced similar drawbacks. Mitchell stresses the importance of understanding others, and how deep relationships can change – and even save – lives.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
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Kel Mitchell is a two-time Emmy Award-nominated actor, producer, comedian, and youth pastor hailing from Chicago, Illinois.
Mitchell executive produced and appeared in the new iteration of the beloved Nickelodeon series All That, bringing him full circle to the original award-winning show that was his big break. All That was Nickelodeon's longest-running live-action series, with 171 episodes across ten seasons from 1994 to 2005. The franchise paved the way for a number of successful spin-offs, including Kenan & Kel, The Amanda Show, The Nick Cannon Show, and the feature-length film Good Burger, all of which cemented Mitchell's impact on pop culture.
A two-part visualization to help you gain distance from any overpowering emotion so you can respond to the true need of the moment with something closer to calm.
Harvard physician Aditi Nerukar explains how to rewire your brain’s stress response to live a more resilient life.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “pressure makes diamonds,” this video is for you.
Harvard physician Aditi Nerurkar was working 80 hours a week, and, despite what she was telling herself about resilience, the stress was taking a major toll. She explains how there are two different kinds of stress, aptly named “adaptive” and “maladaptive.” But how can you tell the difference between the two?
Dr. Nerukar explains that healthy, adaptive stress moves your life forward, while unhealthy, maladaptive stress wears you down and diminishes your productivity. When experiencing maladaptive stress, you may find yourself plummeting closer to burnout, or a complete shutdown. To combat these consequences, Dr. Neurkar offers two easily achievable methods for resetting your brain in high-stress situations.
Whether you're navigating a demanding job, balancing multiple life roles, or simply looking to improve your stress management, this information can help you thrive without compromising your well-being. Remember to slow down, take deep breaths, and regularly check in with yourself to ensure your stress remains healthy and manageable!
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