A Case of Mistaken Identity with Dr. Dan Siegel

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. Episode Chapters: (00:00) - Introduction (02:23) - Defining the Mind (03:34) - The Concept of Mindsight (06:55) - Empathy and Compassion in Medicine (15:51) - Implicit and Explicit Memory (22:34) - Therapeutic Insights and Transformative Experiences (27:03) - Exploring the Mind and Energy Flow (27:29) - Chaos and Rigidity in Patients (28:51) - Discovering Complex Systems and Emergence (31:15) - The Wheel of Awareness (32:21) - Integration of Consciousness Practice (33:52) - Therapeutic Value of Pure Consciousness (36:31) - Redefining the Self and Modern Culture (42:39) - Personal Reflections and Overcoming Childhood Fears (49:53) - The Power of Therapy and Brain Plasticity (51:04) - Closing Thoughts

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We've had a case of mistaken identity. We've equated self with the individual. It sounds so logical. But if we just pause and empower everyone to realize your self, yes, includes your body and me, but it also includes your relationships with everyone else.

• 0:16Heather Berlin?

  Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. We all live inside our own personal, private perception box, built by our genes and the physical, social, and cultural environment in which we were born and raised. In this podcast, we explore how although the walls of this mental box are always present, they can expand in states like awe, wonder, and curiosity, or contract in response to anxiety, fear, and anger. I'd like to introduce our esteemed hosts to incredible and distinguished minds. Dr. Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience

• 1:00Heather Berlin?

  at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and Dr. Christoph Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current meritorious investigator and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.

• 1:22Heather Berlin?

  Hi, everybody. Welcome to Science of Perception Box. I'm your co-host, Dr. Heather Berlin.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  And I'm your co-host, Dr. Christoph Koch.

• 1:30Heather Berlin?

  So every week, we feature an aspect of Science of Perception Box, highlighting the latest research together with our expert guests. And this week on Science of Perception Box, we're joined by Dr. Daniel Siegel. He is clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He is also the executive director of the Mindsight Institute, which focuses on the development of Mindsight and teaches insight, empathy, and integration in individuals, families, and communities. He's authored numerous articles and books and five New York Times bestsellers. Dr. Siegel studies the mind

• 2:15Heather Berlin?

  and how it's connected to the rest of the body. And he even argues that the mind is broader than the brain and bigger than the body. So Christoph, how would you define the mind?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  The mind has both conscious aspect, what I'm currently conscious of. Like, I know I'm a man. I'm sitting here in a chair doing this interview. But also, everything else my brain does. You know, language, running, walking, thinking, all of those things.

• 2:40Heather Berlin?

  So is the mind everything you're conscious of? Or does that include the unconscious?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  It's more, sort of like an iceberg. There's the conscious mind.

• 2:46Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  But then there's this vast processing underneath that does much of what I do every day, all the time.

• 2:52Heather Berlin?

  So is the mind the brain?

• 2:54Speaker 02

  No, it's very different from the brain. It clearly relates to the brain. Without the brain, you're not going to have a mind.

• 3:00Heather Berlin?

  Is the mind what the brain does?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Partly. The mind has a substrate, I would say, which is the brain.

• 3:07Heather Berlin?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  What do you think about?

• 3:10Heather Berlin?

  What do I think the mind is?

• 3:13Heather Berlin?

  In a way, I think, you know, I mean, that's obviously the most fascinating question, is how does the brain relate to the mind? But I think the mind, in my one sense, is subjectivity. It's the things, it's the processes that the brain does. But when it gets to the unconscious, it gets a little murky.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  But your liver doesn't do your unconscious. It's your brain that does it.

• 3:30Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Let's ask our guest.

• 3:32Heather Berlin?

  Well, actually, actually, we are fortunate enough to be joined today by an esteemed colleague and friend, Dr. Dan Siegel. So thank you for being here. It's wonderful to have you. I wanted to ask you, I'll start with a question for you. I mean, we're talking here about the minds, but you have this term called "mind sight." So what exactly do you mean by that?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for having me. It's really an honor to be here with you, Heather and Kristoff. And it's great to discuss these important issues. For me, that word "mind sight" was something that emerged in around 1980. I had been a biochemistry college student. I went to medical school. And I dropped out of medical school because my professors seemed to not focus on the subjective experience that you pointed about, Heather. The feelings people had, what you've written about, Kristoff, in the patient's experience. If they told them, "We've done the laboratory test. You're dying. There's nothing more we can do. Goodbye." I would stop them and say, "Don't you want to talk about how they feel?"

• 4:40Speaker 00

  And my professors of medicine would say, "Why would we do that?" And I would say, "Because there's something very meaningful that happened in you telling them they're dying." And they would just walk away. So I dropped out of school. And in the course of trying out different other professions, I decided ultimately I would come back to medicine. And I needed something to protect me from this kind of mindless world I was entering. So I made up the term "mind sight" for how you perceive subjective experience. So this could be your feelings, your perceptions. So when we talk about a perception box, that might be very relevant. Your attitudes, your beliefs, your longings, desires, your memories. All that stuff was underneath the word "mind."

• 5:25Speaker 00

  And the only one who could know it really was the subject. So we call it "subjectivity" or "first-person experience." And the fact that these professors, who are really devoted to caring for their patients, somehow made the mind absent, they were mind-blind, was intriguing to me. So I kind of went back, almost like an anthropologist, studying the medical socialization process, which later we'd learn, students would enter as medical students with average levels of empathy, very devoted. But every year of medical training, medical school and then training afterwards, they'd have less and less empathy. And we'd learn later on that they'd have more and more distress, even to the point where one time I was teaching at Stanford Medical School,

• 6:10Speaker 00

  when I was later on teaching mind sight. And I would try to teach the faculty there about the importance of mind sight in medicine. And the dean got up and said, "Why do we have a psychiatrist here teaching us about what we already know?" He was an internist. He said, "But here's why we need to have him." And the report from the hospital oversight committee showed that over 50% of trainees in medicine were severely anxious, depressed, and some thinking of killing themselves. And the rates of suicide were rising.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  And you believe that's a consequence of the fact that they did not consider the patient really from a holistic point of view of brain and mind? And just focusing on the brain, on the sort of the mechanistic aspect?

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Yes, and when you only look at the mechanistic aspect, you not only miss your patient's inner subjective experience, you miss your own. So when they were in a state of distress, and I had to speak to 3,000 veterinarians who asked me to come because they had achieved the highest status, the highest suicide rate were veterinarians. Vets. Vets. And so I had to do a survey of the veterinarians, say, "Well, in animal medicine, what's your experience of learning about the mind?" They go, "Zero." So in most medical schools, whether it's for humans or animals, we don't teach the caregivers to care for their own mental experience. So when the mind is absent for your patients or the families that own the pets,

• 7:39Speaker 00

  you know, the mind is absent for yourself. So then, when you get distressed, if you can't monitor what's going on, you can't modify it. So regulation, which I think the mind is a regulatory process, we can talk about, you know, when you can't monitor, you can't modify it. So then, if you're distressed, you don't even know you're distressed.

• 7:56Heather Berlin?

  But there is something also, I think, inherently, almost therapeutic about genuinely connecting with another human. And when you're having empathy, it's almost, it's healing for yourself, right?

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 8:09Heather Berlin?

  And so, you know, like I have some patients who are residents and, you know, who are, you know, basically on the front lines in this patient care. And there's this, you're taught to be sort of removed from it and to be clinical. And, but, but that almost does make it worse because you are human as well and you want to have some level of empathy and understanding that it helps you as well to have that connection.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. I mean, let's take the beautiful thing you just said and let's look at the fantastic thing, Kristoff, you write about with integrated information theory. And just if we can throw a teeny bit of math in, think about two people coming together, person A and person B. They each have their own level of complexity and what's going on in their own systems as a whole. If person A is having an illness and person B, let's say the physician, then is just saying, "Oh, here's your laboratory test and this is it, goodbye." There is not adjoining of the two. There's a transmission of information, but not adjoining. So they remain separate. But if that physician can be taught the presence

• 9:15Speaker 00

  to allow themselves to feel the feelings of the patient, so that the patient A is having this experience that my first therapy patient told me was she thought would help her in therapy, she felt felt. The feeling felt by another person.

• 9:31Heather Berlin?

  Of being seen.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Of being seen is where there's now an AB, there's a we.

• 9:36Heather Berlin?

  Is that what you call mui?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  And that's mui, yeah, because you don't have to lose a me to become a we. But now the system has achieved a higher level of complexity, which is a good thing from a systems point of view. And now what's happening is you feel you belong. So that patient, even with the suffering, feels a deeper sense of meaning and connection. And the physician, just like you're pointing out, has a meaningful life because they're increasing complexity levels.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  In a situation like this, when you have all these patients who are undergoing suffering and some of them will die, how do I prevent burnout by becoming too identified with them?

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, what the research shows is really, really important. When we over-identify with a patient, and I'll give you an example in a moment, but when we over-identify, then we're at risk of burnout. So the better word than compassion fatigue is over-identification fatigue, which some people reduce to the word empathy fatigue, which I think is an error. So over-identification fatigue is where you are too much aligning. So there's a need, if you think about the balance of differentiation on the one hand and linkage on the other.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Integration and differentiation.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Exactly, which is, for me, the use of the word integration combines those two, differentiation and linkage. So when I use the word integration in my writings, it may be a little different from IIT, but it's the idea not just linkage, but you're maintaining some aspect of differentiation. So maybe the wording may be a little different. But that important distinction, let me give you an example. I had a friend of mine's daughter. She became a therapist, she was really great at it. And then she was burning out for exactly the reason you're saying. Too many people who were abused. She cared about them so much, she said, "I've got to quit. I've got to go into a non-clinical profession." I said, "You worked so hard to get here. I've known you since you were a little kid. Why are you quitting?" She goes, "I'm burning out. I have no energy to give myself, to my husband. Nothing, I have nothing left."

• 11:28Speaker 00

  I said, "What are you doing?" She goes, "I'm empathic with my patients." I said, "Tell me what that means." She goes, "What do you mean, what does that mean?" I said, "What does it mean to you?" She goes, "Well, patient comes in. I ask them, 'What's going on?'" They say, "Oh, I'm realizing, you know, I was abused," let's say, just to condense it all. And I say, "Well, then what do you do?" She goes, "Well, I'm empathic." I said, "What does that mean?" She goes, "I think, 'What if my father had abused me like her father abused her?'" I go, "Well, then what happens?" She goes, "Well, then I get totally upset and distressed and get really upset and I get, I just burn out and I can't function." I said, "Okay, let me tell you about a brain study." And this study was done where they had people in brain scanners. They showed them a very horrific photograph of a car accident. And they said, "Imagine if that were you."

• 12:13Speaker 00

  That's condition one. The other condition was, "Imagine what it's like for that person to be that person in that situation." Condition two. In condition one, the brain starts firing off like crazy and completely shuts down. In condition two, the brain fires off and it channels that energy to compassion of saying, "How could I be of service to support that person's reduction in suffering?" So compassion doesn't have a burnout to it. So in terms of me, like, people ask me, "Why do you see so many patients?" Because I still see patients. I said, "Because I feel so much meaning in this." And they said, "Well, how can you be joyful?" And I always quote the Dalai Lama. I was teaching once in Germany with him.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  And someone took the microphone and said, "What's wrong with you, your holiness? You're teaching us to be more compassionate and the world is full of suffering and you laugh and you see someone joyful. What's wrong with you?" And he said this amazing thing. He pauses and he looks at the person and he says, "It's not in spite of the suffering, it's because of it." "I need to be joyful and laughing so that the suffering in the world doesn't win." And so that's, when you realize that, you can be compassionate and caring and still have a joyful life. And that's, I think, the path.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  And so the trick is not to identify myself.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Over identify, yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Over identify with myself with the patient, but still to have compassion with them.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Exactly. I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but I've been a therapist for 40 years. I only feel like I'm 17, so I don't know how I can say those numbers. But I was adding them up the other day. I became a therapist. For the first time 40 years ago. So 40 years I've been seeing patients. So so far, almost every individual, when you can really see into their essence, you know, and maybe in some of your writings, Kristoff, you've called it the soul. When you could see their essence, you can see that there are blockages, whether you call them defense mechanisms or personality patterns, whatever naming you wanna call it, there are blockages to them reaching in and finding this access to wholeness, really.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  And so then what you do as a therapist is you can find a way to work with them in the privacy of therapy. And I'm also a workshop leader, you know, an educator. So in those settings, also, you know, I would say most people, you know, we do this whole thing called the Wheel of Awareness, where people get into pure awareness versus what you're aware of. And I can't wait to talk to you about some of the science of that. But when they get there, what's interesting is, for some individuals, they get terrified and they get a panic reaction to pure awareness. So far, and I just finished a bunch of workshops down in Costa Rica where we did this. So far, every time someone's got panicked, and there hasn't been an exception so far, at least there might be in the future, I'll take some private time

• 15:08Speaker 00

  out of the workshop setting. I'll sit down with the person, and I'll give you one example. I'll just change some things for confidentiality. You know, this person had a big panic reaction to pure awareness in the hub of this wheel. And he said, "I need to talk to you." So I said, "Fine, let's talk." And I sat and I said, "What's going on?" He goes, "I don't know, you know, I'm in therapy, but we never get to this kind of place of that openness." And it was, I had like a glimpse of this timelessness, but then I freaked out and it's so scary. It's so uncertain. I can't, I gotta have something I can hold on to. So I said, "Okay, well, what comes to mind when you think about this terror?" And then he just looks at me and he gets tearful and he goes, "You know, I was in an orphanage for six months." Before I was adopted. And I have no idea what that was about.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  I said, "Well, do you know about the difference between implicit and explicit memory?" He goes, "I don't know what you're talking about." So I explained to him in the brain, you know, how in the first 18 months before the hippocampus matures, we only lay down implicit memory. In fact, we lay it down even in utero.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Memories that we're not conscious of.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Well, here's the way I would say it, Christoph. Maybe we can play with this. Memories that, when they get laid down, they're encoded and then stored. But memories that, when they're retrieved, you don't have the conscious experience of, "Oh, this is from the past." But they can enter consciousness.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say if they're truly implicit, that they don't explicitly enter my consciousness, yet they can profoundly influence my behavior, my action, my emotions.

• 16:32Heather Berlin?

  But he's saying they can move from being implicit to explicit.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  With therapeutic work.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  So let's unpack this, because for this guy, this was the essential issue. And you may not agree with this. So this is what I proposed back in 1990. But so you may not agree with it. But in post-traumatic stress disorder, unresolved states, you can have someone, and my first experience was working at the VA in the 80s. I had a, you know, a soldier who was now, you know, a veteran. And something happened, and it sparked a whole flashback. And he grabbed me and pulled me under the cot in the hospital. And he had blockaded the room. And he said, "We have to fight them. We have to fight them." And he had been in Vietnam. And he was fully in Vietnam. So in terms of his awareness, he was aware,

• 17:21Speaker 00

  I, the soldier, am in Vietnam. I'm with my colleague, which was me. And we are going to fight the enemy.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  And he was really there.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  He was really there. He was in Vietnam. He was sweating. He was looking out for them. He said, "Watch out, watch out, watch out," like this. And he was terrified. So he was fully aware of that. When I went to my supervisor after that, I said, "What's a flashback?" And my supervisor said, "No idea." And that got me, for the first time, even though I was trained by David Hubel about how the brain develops and stuff like that. He was my neuroscience teacher. That got me looking at the research on memory and the brain. And then I got to meet with Larry Squire down at UC San Diego. And what Larry had discovered, along with Dan Schachter in Different Systems, was that there's one layer of memory. One's called non-declarative, one's called implicit, but they're very similar. You know, where it gets encoded, stored. And here's the key thing.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  When it's retrieved in pure form, it enters awareness, but you don't know it's a memory. So that could explain flashbacks.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he had it. He encoded that memory when he was already 18 years old, presumably as a young soldier and not as 18 months. In general, any memory, I've never really seen good evidence that little babies can form reliable memories that they can recount later. Yes, they can tell you, oh, I remember the birthday of my or when my little brother got born. But what they remember is mom showing pictures of the brother. So I'm more skeptical about, can you have implicit memories very early on in the first year that you later on recall?

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Sure, well, so there's a couple of layers. Let's just take it step by step. When a person's traumatized, let's say an 18-year-old who's in Vietnam, you can postulate, just conceptually, that two conditions exist during that trauma that help us understand what we're about to unpack. Number one, you have massive release of cortisol. And we know there are cortisol receptors on the hippocampus.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Stress, it's a hugely stressful situation.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  So you can shut off the hippocampus.

• 19:27Heather Berlin?

  That affects memories.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  And affects memory, explicit memory. But here's what the research shows that's mind-balling. At the same time, you have adrenaline, right? Noradrenaline is being released, which sears in implicit layers of memory. So the physiology of it, the state of the body, the emotions, the behaviors, even the perceptions, those can get laid down in the brain, independent of the hippocampus. Now, here's the amazing thing. When you shut off focal attention, attention with awareness, you can drive things into these memory systems. But for explicit memory, you need focal awareness, focal attention, and you need the hippocampus to work. So the hypothesis that I wrote about in 1990 was that condition of excessive adrenaline

• 20:13Speaker 00

  searing in implicit memory and cortisol shutting off the hippocampus could allow an 18-year-old, just to use the example of the soldier, to actually burn in implicit encoding.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  In a pure form, even though he's 18 years, not one year, where the hippocampus hasn't grown yet. Now, that gets encoded and stored. And then later on, when there's like a loud noise, and it's kind of like the helicopter blowing up where his friend was killed, which is this particular example. It's triggered. It's triggered, so you can trigger an implicit only memory. And here's what all the research shows from Dan Schachter and Larry Squire, that pure implicit memory, when triggered from storage, enters awareness. But you have no, I call it ekphoric sensation. You know, you have no feeling of ekphery. Ekphery is where you say, oh, I'm remembering something from the past. You don't have that sensation. For you, it's the here and the now. It's the here and now.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  And so what I wrote about in 1990 was, here's a possible neurophysiology explanation of unresolved trauma. And then the pathway to resolving it would involve allowing this, what I call a window of tolerance, to be expanded. So you allow the hippocampus to now get involved with the part you're playing as a therapist. So now the conditions of the brain of that individual are changing so that they can hold the fear of their friend and these terrible things that happened to him, you know, and the terror of that in the space. So now going back to the workshop. So I say all this to that person who was freaking out. And I said, you know, what do you think uncertainty was like for you in that adoption place? And this is where, you know, I'm an attachment researcher.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  So we have lots of evidence, Kristoff, that implicit memories laid down in infancy are remembered. Not explicitly, you never say, oh, I'm remembering it explicitly. But they affect your emotions, they affect your actions, they affect the way you feel in your body, they affect your sense of self even. We have lots of evidence from all of our research. But for this person at the workshop, what he did was, he said, oh, you mean, I can actually have a memory of how frightening uncertainty was? But when I'm remembering it, I don't realize I'm remembering it. I just think uncertainty is frightening. And I go, that's right. And I show him this graph, which I had shown the workshop, which we could talk about later on,

• 22:38Speaker 00

  where there's hypothesis that awareness itself, what you describe as pure experience. Seems to correlate with this. If you think about energy as the movement from possibility to actuality, you can graph it out and we can get into the details of this. But where pure awareness is maximal uncertainty. So this guy couldn't go there and then everything changed. And he goes, oh, I see. So this is just a memory I'm having, my panic. I said, yeah, so try the wheel again. And when the panic comes up, just say, oh, I'm remembering when I was in the orphanage. And everything changed for him.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  So this was a transformative experience?

• 23:14Speaker 00

  For the workshop, workshop, not even my patient. It was just a workshop participant.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  A single experience that you changed his attitude. So talking about perception box, it's really, you realize that you understand something bad about you and suddenly the walls, the world becomes more open and you become healthier, more open.

• 23:31Heather Berlin?

  This concept of the perception box is that when it's sort of contracted, the walls that we're more afraid and we're more anxious. And if you can expand it, it brings in this more, you know, awe and wonder. And, and so these transformative experiences that can help change your perspective can get you outside of this very, you know, closed, you know, box, let's say,

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:56Heather Berlin?

  to a greater view. But in this case, it was more of an insight to say, okay, realizing this is just a memory.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  It was an insight that you helped bring about talking to this particular person.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, with the science behind it, which is kind of, I mean, as a scientist who's also a clinician and an educator, it's, it's kind of mind blowing how empowering communication can be. Not just information, but communication around this. Where at the moment, this person in the workshop is saying, I'm terrified. And I go, well, let's look at your terror, which feels intolerable. And let's look at how, maybe it's the terror of a baby where it was intolerable, but now you're an adult. And you can reinterpret the perception box and get freedom.

• 24:38Heather Berlin?

  But the question is, how long does that effect last? Right, like so the next time.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  You have contact with him?

• 24:43Heather Berlin?

  Next time it happens.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Well, this just happened a few weeks ago, but I have contact with other workshop participants, and of course, my patients, where it changes their life.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  The one experience, even a year later, this one experience that happened, this therapeutic experience, even a year or two later can still...

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Well, this is the weird thing that, you know, whether you look at the psychedelic research of controlled psychedelic uses, it was one or two things, and the Wheel of Awareness has this practice, which people have compared to using psilocybin. And in fact, when people get in the hub of the wheel, there's a practice where you're basically moving a spoke of attention around a metaphoric wheel, and on the rim are all the knowns of consciousness, the content. But in the hub is represented the knowing or awareness, pure experience.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Pure experience.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  And then, and we have this thing where, you know, my patient actually suggested it, because we were doing this around a table just down the street here, and she said, "Well, why don't we bend the spoke into the hub?" I go, "Oh, my God, that's a brilliant idea. Let's do it." And she bent the spoke around. This is a person with severe trauma. She bent the spoke around, and for her, unlike it being terrifying, she got this liberating feeling of timelessness, being connected to everyone and everything, this kind of feeling of love.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  So that's like a mystical experience?

• 25:58Speaker 00

  And it was a mystical experience.

• 25:59Heather Berlin?

  Just to understand a little bit about when you're bending this, you know...

• 26:04Speaker 02

  The spokes.

• 26:04Heather Berlin?

  The spokes into the center of this wheel. Like, what is that actually? That's a metaphor, but what does that mean?

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. So just to give you the very brief background,

• 26:15Speaker 00

  you know, in this journey to be... I was trained as a scientist, and then I became a clinician. I was disappointed by the way I was being trained to be a physician. I dropped out for a while, came back, and then realized the mind had to be real, you know, and yet, even if it was absent in medicine.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  So only thing there is ultimately?

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Well, exactly, exactly. So, so that's a bizarre thing, just to talk about the medical world, but that's a whole other topic. So then, then I went on a journey to say, "Okay, well..." What would I study? So I started in pediatrics, but went to psychiatry. And in the course of doing all that, you know, I became a researcher in relationships, parent-child relationships and narratives. So that's my research background through the National Institute of Mental Health. But at that time, the question in me was, as a therapist, was what's actually happening that's allowing people to change? So it was the decade of the brain, 1990. And I thought, well, you know, David Hubel was my teacher. And David had gotten the Nobel Prize for showing that, you know, the kind of energy that streams into the brain changes its structure and function. So I thought, well, maybe a relationship

• 27:17Speaker 00

  has to do with energy flow. And maybe what the mind is is some kind of emergent property of energy flow that's both in the whole body, not just in the brain, but in relationships. So that was kind of exciting. And then I found that every one of my patients had either chaos or rigidity or both as they're suffering. And I would ask my supervisors, so what's with this chaos and rigidity? And they go, what are you talking about? I go, well, every one of the patients I see, without an exception, as either chaos, like flooding feelings or memories or thoughts, or rigidity, they're shut down and depressed. And my supervisors would say, we don't know what you're talking about. So I went looking for an answer to the question.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  This was all Freudian?

• 28:00Speaker 00

  No.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  I mean, why did they all deny the existence of what's so obvious, what's most immediately given to us?

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Well, you tell me, I don't know.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Is this behaviorist influence?

• 28:09Speaker 00

  No, I mean, they were, I don't know what they were. They were psychopharmacologically oriented.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's all about drugs. It's all about norepinephrine and dopamine and serotonin and...

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:19Heather Berlin?

  Well, because you silo off these disciplines. And so like, I'm studying the physiologic substrate. And then there's like, oh, the psychologists over there are studying the mind.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 28:29Heather Berlin?

  And never the twain shall meet. You know, when I was doing my PhD, it was like that. And I was like, well, I want to understand the intersection between these two things. It was like, no, you either have to do... Pure neuroscience and/or you do psychology.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:42Heather Berlin?

  You know, this field of sort of neuropsychology was emerging. But it was really still, and this was in the 90s, but like novel to want to combine those things.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Oh, totally. So what happened with me was I wanted to answer that question. So like, like the two of you, I love science. And so I started going to actually math books. And I found, because in the 80s, of course, mathematicians had gotten together to study complex systems. And what those mathematicians and physicists, and I know you have a background in physics, had shown was that there's something called emergence. And one of the emergent properties of complex systems, which are systems that are open systems, they're capable of being chaotic, and they're nonlinear, meaning small inputs lead to large and relatively difficult to predict outcomes. So if you have those three features, you're a complex system. And if you're a complex system, they showed in the 80s that you have emergent properties.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  One of those emergent properties, which is kind of like the wetness of water, not any single water molecule is wet, but when they interact, wetness emerges. So one of the emergent properties of complex systems is self-organization. So I'm reading about this, and it says, "When optimal self-organization is happening, you get a flexibility, an adaptability, a coherence, an energy, and a stability." That's the way I reorganized it, which spells the word faces, you know. But it's like a river. See, it's obsession. I understand, it's obsession. And then it says, "When you block this optimal self-organization, you go to either chaos or rigidity." And I screamed so loud. Bingo. I said bingo. I woke up my kids, I was going, "Oh, my God, that's it.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  That's the best definition of well-being I've ever seen in a math book of all places." So then I started looking for other places where they were defining mental health. Nowhere, really. There were descriptions, but not definitions. So that's when I came up with this definition. The mind, of course, includes subjective experience. It includes your awareness of subjective experience that we call consciousness. It includes information processing. But a fourth facet of mind, which you could define, is the embodied and relational.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Self-organizing emergent process that regulates the flow of energy and information. Where is that happening? Within the whole body and within the relational world are connections with people and the planet. So with that definition, you could then say what a healthy mind was in terms of this fourth facet. And that's where the notion of balancing differentiation linkage came up. And I'm giving you all that as background to get to the wheel. Because in my office, I had a table which had a glass center, we still have it, and a wooden rim. So I said, well, you know, if integration is the base of health, which is what I was pondering back then, where you're defining integration very carefully

• 31:31Speaker 00

  as differentiation plus linkage leads to integration. And in the integration, the way I'm using that word, you don't lose the differentiation. You still have features of it. So it's not blending. It's a different quality. It's more like a, you know, a fruit salad, not a smoothie. Right? So that in that process, you're optimizing self-organization. That's the basis. So then I said, well, if the other kind of concilian idea is consciousness is needed for change, which I think it is, like the perception box, you really want to bring awareness into that question. How do we change that? So then what if you brought those two together? If integration is health and consciousness is needed for change, what if you integrated consciousness? So I brought my first patient up off the couch. I said, here, come around the table. She goes, what are we doing?

• 32:15Speaker 00

  I said, let's try integrating consciousness. She goes, what are you talking about? I go, check this out. I said, if consciousness has the differentiable aspects of the knowing, which is pure awareness, from the knowns, the content, let's put the knowns on the rim and let's put the knowing in the hub. She goes, OK. And see this thing that holds up the table? I said, let's just pick one of them. Let's call it the spoke. It's like a wheel. And let's move the spoke around to all the knowns. So we'll differentiate, like there are four segments. It's energy flow from outside the body, which is your first five senses. Energy flow from inside the body, which is interoception, your bodily sense. Energy flow probably from the head brain, which is your thoughts and emotions and memories and perceptions and beliefs, attitudes, longings, desires, all that stuff.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  Call that mental activities. That's the third segment. And that's even go to a fourth segment of your sense of relational connections to people and nature. She goes, "Okay." So then we start doing this thing, and she starts having this shift in her kind of stability. And then she says, at another practice, when we're doing this in the office, she said, "Can I bend that spoke around?" And I hadn't even thought about it. I said, "Well, that's a great idea." "Yeah, sure, bend it, see what happens." And she enters this thing. And now I've done this with 50,000 people in person. And I'm not exaggerating that. I had my assistant double-check that number. Before the viral pandemic, 5,000, 50,000 people in workshops that I did this with. And then we get the reports for those who are willing to report.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  So I have a whole bunch of data I can give you about when you have this common stimulus, the wheel, what do people experience in the wheel, but in general, in the hub? And so what that patient experienced, which the parliamentarian experienced, which now thousands and thousands of people experienced, people in Costa Rica last week experienced it, they experienced timelessness, love, connection, God, a feeling of an expansion of a perception of the self.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  So practically, what do you get people to do there during this? They sit for an hour and just contemplate the wheel?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  No, no, no, it's 22 minutes. I mean, it's on my website. We've had lots and lots of people. We give it away for free, so we had lots of people streaming.

• 34:19Heather Berlin?

  So go to the website and look up the wheel.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can do it. I have a whole book on it.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  But it's a form of meditation?

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Meditation. I never called it that because I didn't know about meditation when I invented it. But it's, I call it an integration of consciousness practice. But yeah, my friends now who I teach with, who are meditation teachers, say, "That's a meditation." And I go, "Okay, fine, call it a meditation, whatever."

• 34:40Speaker 02

  And then very often, these people can have a transformative experience during that or afterwards when they share?

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, even before the sharing, the actual first-person immersion, especially when you move that spoke into the hub. And I do it every morning. So I can tell you, it's kind of like, when I read your writings, Kristoff, I mean, we have so much to talk about. I know you use very erotic language about a blissful orgasmic experience of letting go of a separate self.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Every morning, you know?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  You let go of the self?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, you bend the spoke around. And it's not everyone has it, but many, many people practicing the wheel regularly.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  You can have this on a daily basis? Selfless? You leave planet self, planet ego behind?

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Time and everything. And there's a whole... Yes, in fact, this book, "Interconnected," talks about kind of the neuroscience of that kind of expanded sense of self. And yes, every morning I do the practice, every morning I have that experience.

• 35:41Heather Berlin?

  So I think that

• 35:42Speaker 00

  And I'm not alone.

• 35:43Heather Berlin?

  Clearly, there's some therapeutic value to getting to this place.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  Certainly.

• 35:48Heather Berlin?

  Of sort of pure consciousness. There are different ways to get there. You know, one might be these kinds of meditative practices. Sometimes psychedelics, flow states. Like, some people get into a kind of flow state when they're being creative, where they lose their sense of time and self and place, and it feels very pure, right? And blissful. And yes, and maybe even during sex and orgasm, that you have these senses of, yeah, pure, pure, you know, consciousness. But there's something clearly very therapeutic about it. And we should think about how people, not just patients, but everyone, can strive to get to these places to achieve a greater sense of well-being.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Totally. Well, and you can make an argument, and, you know, I took five years to write this book, "Interconnected," which was a plea for our modern culture to look at how the self gets constructed in maybe what you would call a perception box. Where in modern culture, the self is considered the individual. And everyone kind of who initially, like, hears the concept of this book says, "Of course, the self is an individual." I said, "Well, hold on. Just like we used to say, the mind is the brain activity. Let's just take a pause back." And they go, "Well, how could you question self? Of course, self is this body." I said, "Well, let's say, let's see what people really mean, let's see what people really mean by self." And you look at all the research itself, and, sorry, here's another acronym. I'm so sorry.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  But it's the word SPA. It's Subjective Sensation, Perspective, and Agency. So when you look at all the different research, when people use the word "self," that's really what they mean. If you take an identity lens and freeze it in close up, you say, "Yeah, my subjective experience is only in my body. My perspective is only from through these glasses. Or my agency is only on behalf of this body." And then you're frozen in an identity lens that's really tight. But you can teach people, which I do in the book, to widen this identity lens, to realize the three of us are here now. And you can begin to feel, in fact, the subjective experience of our three-person-ness. People listening to us might feel what it's like to be in our conversation.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  You can start to have a perspective of, oh, okay, we're trying to look at these different deep issues of the brain and awareness, the mind, self, all that stuff. So now we're widening our perspective. And agency, and what I try to do in the book is say, when you start realizing you are more than just your body, that you are your relationships with people and all of nature, then the actions you take are to benefit, to increase integration, basically, well-being for all beings. So you care for animals and plants, you care for all living beings, you care for all of nature. And partly, you could say that the pandemics we face, whether it's racism and social injustice, or polarization, or the climate crisis, all these things, you can argue are because

• 38:43Speaker 00

  modern culture is defining the self as an individual. And then we can have a pathway.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  This atomized, we're all this atoms in this large society, right? We stress the atom, the atomized aspect.

• 38:55Heather Berlin?

  Conceptually, like, if you're thinking about the perception boxes, like, if we can expand it wide enough that we can maybe almost like combine our perception boxes to create a larger box that we're all in, for at least a moment in time, you know, where we're connecting perspectives and helping each of us individually expand, but create something more than just, you know, we're greater than the sum of our parts when we connect with people in that way.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  So how can we do this, let's say, at large scale in our schools? How can we achieve that?

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Well, I work with some people at MIT, Peter Sange, Otto Sharma, Amita Boll, to work in schools in something called compassionate systems awareness, where we're literally trying to take these ideas of systems and emergence and teach kids, and kids can learn this. In fact, it's almost like kids unlearn it. They kind of have a natural intuition that we're all connected to one another.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  This is like mid-school?

• 39:47Speaker 00

  This is in elementary school and middle school and high school. I mean, the brainstorm book you have there, you know, I try to do that for adolescents. So you can work in schools. I work in Sweden with something called the Inner Development Goals, where we're trying to work with the United Nations, and we have hubs all around the world, looking at this issue of how, even though the United Nations had said, you know, here are 17 sustainability goals, we have the knowledge on what to do, we have the resources to do it. And every year, we'd get the report card. It's worse and worse and worse. So the inner development goals is there to support the United Nations to say, what's going on in the human mind in modern culture? That's preventing the human family from waking up to the fact that it is creating its own misery.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  And the misery for all living beings on Earth. So what we're trying to do is take, I would assume with, you know, the perception box and say, let's look at the perception prisons of modern culture. And then work, in this case, the United Nations, work with governments, work with companies. But myself individually, I'm also working with schools. I work with parents, so I try to teach parents this. Even here, I mean, this book is a graduate school textbook. You know, I wrote years ago, but this is in its third edition. And in this book, even though it's for graduate students, what I do is I say, look, let me walk you step by step with thousands of scientific empirically established studies, peer-reviewed journals and all that stuff.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Let me show you how thinking of the self as separate is going to kill life on Earth. But let me do this as a graduate school textbook and show you developmentally, which builds on what Interconnected shows, you know, show you how we can have a different kind of world. Now, this is for graduate students, but you can do this for, you know, for everyone on the planet. We've had a case of mistaken identity, where we've equated self with the individual. It sounds so logical. But if we just pause and empower everyone, a kid, an adolescent, an adult, a parent, a teacher, a person running a company, to realize yourself, yes, includes your body and me, but it also includes your relationships with everyone else.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  People, plants, everyone. All of nature, that's the we. You know, I have a funny term, we, M W E, to say, okay, you're both a me and a we. You don't have to get rid of your me, but you want to add the we as part of your identity.

• 42:19Heather Berlin?

  So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests one of the Perception Box questions. So Kristoff, do you have a Perception Box question you'd like to ask?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Yes, Dan. The last time you were angry, what did you make it mean about someone else? Or what did you make it mean about yourself?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm completing my next book, which is kind of all about this issue about subcortical structures in the brain that may be a part of our temperament. And some of them are about our agency for protecting bodily needs, some are about bonding, for relational connections, some are about certainty. So there's a whole framework that I could go into about what I'm about to say, but I'll just give you the example. What I do in the book is overlay these temperament issues with attachment. So early on, we have a need for four S's. We need to be safe, seen, and soothed. And if we get those on a reliable basis, and when there are ruptures and they're repaired, we can be the fourth S, secure.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Secure.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  So with my wife, you know, I came back from a... I was away for a week for like a retreat kind of thing. And I was so excited to see her. It was really great. And I was telling her about all these exciting things. So I was really revved up. And when we have a revved up emotion, we really need to be connecting then, whether it's even we're upset or we're excited. When we don't get that, it activates the whole physiology of shame, right? And I had a very difficult childhood with the way my parents were, for lots of complicated reasons. But so I can be prone to having shame activated like that. And part of my reaction would be to withdraw with fear. I can get very sad, or I can get angry. So you're asking about the angry thing. So in this case, we're walking around the block with the dog. I'm just back from being away from her for a week.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  There's all these exciting things, really upbeat things. And a neighbor walks by who helped us figure out how to do something with some rocks in front of our house in a really cool way. She goes, "Oh, we got the rocks set up like you suggested." You know, and so I'm in the middle of talking, you know? And so a part of me is going, "Oh, she doesn't really love me. She's more interested in rocks than my emotions." And, you know, what's going on here? So I start filling this anger bubble up. And she's busy talking to this neighbor about the rocks. And then she says, of all things, "You want to come over now and see the rocks." And now I could feel my top about to explode. So I take a few steps away just to take some deep breaths.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  And I do maybe what you call a perception box shift. And I, and I talk to myself. I talk to a younger part of myself. And I say. In your head. In my head. You know, because she's busy talking about the rocks. And I said, you could get angry at her now and you could go, you know, storming off. And you could be upset for a day or two and think about how she doesn't love you. Or you could realize there's a younger part of you inside of you, an aspect of you, a state of mind, an implicit memory of, you know, ways your dad was a, you know, raging maniac. And your mother withdrew and, and that combination of a storm and a desert, you know, left you filled with all sorts of potentially shame inducing disconnections.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  So she's just talking about rocks because she's excited to see this neighbor. This is not about her not loving you, I say to myself. And so what I do is I take care of that little boy. And I don't expect her to be my mother that I never had. And so I take a deep breath and within 30 seconds, because I'm in awareness, in this kind of hub of the wheel, really. Because I, maybe I'm practicing that, but I had a great retreat. I can just say to myself, you know, it's okay. She was, got distracted by this and this is not a sign of her not loving you. You don't need to be angry and anger dissipates.

• 46:05Heather Berlin?

  And that's also, I think, really important to have. Yeah, this sort of self-love and self-provide the security and safety for yourself. If it's not being, you know, not depending on other people to provide it for you.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I would just make a minor edit because I have a little nutty about the word self.

• 46:20Heather Berlin?

  Okay.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  I would just put inner before that. Because inner self.

• 46:24Heather Berlin?

  Yes.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  So that we don't say things like self-compassion because you, and you are this self. Because we have this relational self.

• 46:32Heather Berlin?

  There's the inner self and then there's the more expansive self. There are people out there that, that are working not with you in this very, like, you know, we're talking about this very idyllic way in which we all connect and it's, you know, we're really being seen by each other. But there's some people that are working against you, that are, that are, that are people not, who are not good for you to be around, you know, that are triggering these things within you constantly, these insecurities from childhood. And maybe they are not the kinds of people that you want to be spending your time with, right? You know, because I think it's not in this, we're talking about this idealistic world. We're all going to connect and help each other in these different ways. But sometimes there are people that are working against you, that are triggering these negative feelings in you.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  They're resistant to therapy.

• 47:12Heather Berlin?

  Resistant and, you know, or lack empathy. And, and the solution to that might be to not interact or, you know, or keep trying, because you keep trying to integrate with some people that are just not available for that.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 47:26Heather Berlin?

  And I think it's important for some people in those kinds of relationships to consider that as well. But my, so my question is, what are you most afraid that somebody else will find out about you?

• 47:38Speaker 00

  What am I afraid that somebody else might find out about me?

• 47:47Speaker 00

  You mean now or when I was younger?

• 47:49Heather Berlin?

  It could be any, it could be when you were younger.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  You know, because, because I actually don't think I'm too afraid of that. I mean, these days, I feel.

• 47:57Heather Berlin?

  Well, now that you're so evolved.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  I don't know if I'm evolved, but I'm pretty relaxed.

• 48:01Heather Berlin?

  OK, OK.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  But when you were 18.

• 48:04Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, like some sort of insecurity or something where you would feel.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  I, I think there were all sorts of things that happened in my childhood that made me feel like I was potentially a very toxic person.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  And just to say it very briefly, you know,

• 48:22Speaker 00

  when I was four, I got some rabbits. And I was so excited to have them. I gave them some water to drink. And then I got them some leaves to eat. And when I gave them the leaves to eat, they just died in my arms. What? Yeah, because they were oleander leaves. And no one told me that the bush I was sitting next to was poisonous. So I had this feeling like, wow, my exuberance could kill someone. And then 10 years later, the same thing happened with a puppy I was staying there.

• 48:49Heather Berlin?

  I thought you were going to say with a person.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Well, I'll be with a person too. But I always feared it would be with a person. So I always feared that my exuberance for life. Or love of somebody could actually hurt them. So I think when I was younger, I was really afraid to let someone know how how much love I had for them because it could hurt them.

• 49:09Heather Berlin?

  So overwhelming, but killing people with kindness?

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Not even like that, just like there was something wrong with me, like somehow I implicitly learned that if I was too excited, it would kill something I loved.

• 49:23Heather Berlin?

  So how did you overcome that?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  You know, therapy helped, being in relationships helped. And then actually recently, I did a whole thing called the Hoffman Process, which was this immersion in how stuff you experienced in your childhood made you feel unworthy of stuff. And stuff came up that I didn't even know that was really liberating. And I'm just finishing another book.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  So you can overcome that?

• 49:48Speaker 00

  You can overcome that.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  With proper therapy or friends or reading?

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Absolutely, even in the book called Mindsight, I talk about a patient called Stuart who was in his 90s. And he changed so much, his wife called me up and said, Dr. Dan, you know, did you give Stuart a brain transplant? And all we did was we identified what areas of his brain didn't develop because of the non-secure attachment. Once we could name that like a laser beam, we could then focus, because where attention goes, neural firing flows and neural connection grows. So my job as a therapist is to figure out where the blockages to integration are. Once we figure out one of nine domains where it is, or all of them, then focus his attention to get his brain to get activated in areas that haven't been developed yet, even in his 90s. And you'll see in that story in Mindsight,

• 50:37Speaker 00

  you know, this is a, those are all completely true stories. You'll see the way he changes.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  So this is something that neuroscience has learned over the last 40 years, that even in old age, your brain is still, I mean, healthy old age, it's different for dementia. Your brain can still change, you can still learn. You can teach an old dog new tricks.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 50:59Heather Berlin?

  I like to say you're a work in progress until your very last breath.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Amen.

• 51:04Heather Berlin?

  Yes, and on that note. Thank you so much, Dan, for being here. This has been fantastic, as always.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Kristoff. It's really been a real pleasure. Thank you.

• 51:14Heather Berlin?

  And if you'd like to learn more about your own Perception Box, spend some time this week answering the same Perception Box questions that we ask our guests, and check out other questions on the website at unlikelycollaborators.com. And you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.