Annaka Harris On Consciousness

What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take ‘experience' for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we? Our guide for today's philosophic and scientific exploration of these mysteries is Annaka Harris. An editor and consultant for science writers specializing in neuroscience and physics, Annaka is the author of the children's book I Wonder, a collaborator on the Mindful Games Activity Cards, by Susan Kaiser Greenland, and a volunteer mindfulness teacher for the Inner Kids organization. Annaka's work has appeared in The New York Times and all of her guided meditations and lessons for children are available on the Waking Up app, the digital meditation platform created by her husband Sam Harris — the renown author, public intellectual, blogger, and podcast host. Annaka’s latest book — which recently hit the New York Times bestseller list and provides the focus for today’s conversation — is entitled, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. A must-read for any and all curious about one of the Universe's great mysteries, it's a brief yet mind-bending read that challenges our assumptions about the nature, origin and purpose of consciousness. Equal parts nerdy and fun, this is a deeply profound conversation that tackles the very nature of consciousness itself — and what it means to be a living being having ‘an experience'. We discuss how Annaka became interested in this field and the path undertaken to writing this book. Parsing instinct from scientific fact, we deconstruct our assumptions about consciousness and grapple with its essential nature — what is consciousness exactly? And where does it physically reside? We discuss meditation and artificial intelligence. We dive into plant consciousness. We explore panpsychism (a theory I quite fancy). And we muse about the role of spirituality in scientific inquiry. All told, this tackles the current limits of science and human understanding and leaves us wondering, is it possible to truly understand everything? The visually inclined can watch our entire conversation on YouTube here: bit.ly/annakaharris460 (please subscribe!) An intellectual delight from start to finish, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Annaka and I sincerely hope you enjoy the listen. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:05Annaka Harris?

  So challenging intuitions is something that I think is incredibly interesting, and it's a very important part of the scientific process, which I think most people know, but they don't really think about or realize. That every time we make a scientific breakthrough, or understand reality at a more fundamental level, or reach a deeper truth about the nature of reality, that always requires that we challenge our intuitions, at the very least. Sometimes we have to completely let go of intuitions that are actually giving us false information about reality. Basically, everything that matters to us, any ethical question, it has to do with consciousness. If we're talking about an unconscious system, we don't have any ethical obligations towards

• 1:49Annaka Harris?

  them, we're not worried about them, we don't have to think about suffering. All of suffering happens in consciousness. And so, the difference is everything. If we brought in some advanced AI that looked like another human being who just came in, was introduced to us, if the scientist who brought this robot in said, "Don't worry, this robot's not conscious," it's everything that matters in terms of mattering. I mean, if this being starts to suffer in any way, if we think they're having an experience, we want to help it. That's Annaka Harris, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:33Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome or welcome back. Today, my guest is Annaka Harris. Annaka is an editor and consultant for science writers specializing in neuroscience and physics. She is the author of the children's book, I Wonder, and she's a volunteer mindfulness teacher for the Inner Kids Organization. She also happens to be the wife of author, public intellectual, blogger, podcast host Sam Harris, and is a contributor to his Waking Up Meditation app, which I highly recommend everybody check

• 3:13Rich Roll?

  out. And her latest book, a New York Times bestseller, and the focus of today's conversation is entitled Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. And it is quite the compelling, mind-bending read, which really challenges our assumptions about the nature, origin, and purpose of consciousness, one of the great mysteries of the universe. It's a fantastic conversation. It's all coming up in a couple few, but first.

• 3:53Rich Roll?

  Okay, Annaka, so this is a really great conversation. It's deep, it's nerdy, it's profound, at times, mind-blowing, but also just really fun. We talked about many things: human consciousness, what is it, and where does it physically reside? We discussed how Annaka got into the study of consciousness and writing this book about it. We talk about meditation, artificial intelligence, plant consciousness, yes, this is a thing, something called panpsychism, which is really a mind blower, and why it's a taboo subject in science. We discussed

• 4:35Rich Roll?

  the limits of science and human understanding. In other words, is it even possible to know everything? And many other related topics. I really enjoyed this conversation, and hope you do as well. So, this is me and Annaka Harris.

• 4:54Rich Roll?

  Annika, welcome to the podcast.

• 4:55Annaka Harris?

  Thanks.

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  I have to say, before I read your book, I listened to your interview, your interview, your appearance on your husband's podcast. And it's so funny, because he says, "Welcome to the podcast," and then you just start giggling.

• 5:12Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 5:13Rich Roll?

  And then he says, "So, Annika..."

• 5:16Annaka Harris?

  You probably remember it better than I do.

• 5:17Rich Roll?

  "Tell me about the book." And then you just go, "Really? Like, that's the question you're gonna ask?" And I just immediately felt like, oh, I'm all in on Annika. I was like, you're just like, taking the piss out of him. I thought that was fantastic.

• 5:29Annaka Harris?

  Right, thanks.

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  So...

• 5:31Annaka Harris?

  I'm glad you saw it that way.

• 5:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I love the book. Congratulations on it making the New York Times Bestseller list. That's very cool.

• 5:39Annaka Harris?

  Thank you, thanks.

• 5:40Rich Roll?

  And I'm excited to talk to you. This is a fascinating subject.

• 5:45Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 5:47Rich Roll?

  A subject, the more that you think about it, the more, sort of, amazing and wonderful and mystifying it becomes, right?

• 5:56Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:57Rich Roll?

  So, before we kind of delve into consciousness, why don't we contextualize this a little bit? Like, how did you get interested in this field?

• 6:06Annaka Harris?

  I also, I just wanted to ask you, though, is this something you were interested in before you read my book? Or was it, have you been thinking about it since reading it?

• 6:13Rich Roll?

  Well...

• 6:14Annaka Harris?

  I ask just because there's kind of the category of people who have just been fascinated with it always, and then everyone seems to become fascinated with it once they learn a little, but I'm just curious.

• 6:23Rich Roll?

  It's impossible to not be fascinated by it, once you start to learn a little bit about it.

• 6:27Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 6:28Rich Roll?

  I would say that I have an interest in it that is longstanding, although I don't know that it rose to the level of, you know...

• 6:37Annaka Harris?

  Obsession, like mine?

• 6:39Rich Roll?

  It's not that.

• 6:40Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 6:41Rich Roll?

  But through my journeys in...

• 6:45Rich Roll?

  In addiction recovery and then being introduced to meditation and yoga and various spiritual practices, it's certainly become more and more interesting to me.

• 6:55Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. So actually, I became interested in meditation, I think mostly because of my fascination with consciousness. But they're obviously related. So as I said, it was a lifelong fascination, something I've just always been interested in and, you know, as I got older, read a lot about. And then for the last almost 15 years, I've been working with scientists who write for the general public. I've been doing mostly editing, but some coaching for TED Talks and things like that. And so I got actually deeper into the neuroscience and I basically have just for my,

• 7:38Annaka Harris?

  because of my own interest, been taking notes all of this time for myself. And a few, maybe like two and a half years ago, I started really formally writing, not really for any purpose, except to think through my own thoughts because I was interested. And I felt like the topic is so complex, I needed to do some writing just to sort out for myself where I was with all of it and what I thought could be true. But my, so my book is really the science and philosophy of consciousness. And I tried to make it as accessible as possible, which was really the main goal.

• 8:17Annaka Harris?

  And I, I'm focused on kind of consciousness, what the most fundamental aspect or consciousness in the most fundamental sense. And why it's so deeply mysterious, why it's so difficult for neuroscientists to study it.

• 8:36Annaka Harris?

  Why it just always has been perplexing to scientists. So I walk the reader through what I think are some of the most interesting theories and research and consciousness studies, but this is all kind of in the context of challenging our intuitions about what consciousness is.

• 8:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not, it's less about drawing any specific conclusions rather than it is about, let's confront what we think it is and deconstruct that a little bit to make us realize that it's so much more complex and vast and confounding.

• 9:08Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, and awe inspiring and yeah, one of the great mysteries. So yeah, so I kind of, part of me just wanted to spread that, the idea that this is one of the great mysteries and if you haven't discovered it yet, you know, it's like it's as, it's as fun to contemplate as the idea of black holes or the, you know, the beginning of the universe or, you know, all of the things that we, that we pretty easily understand are great mysteries and interesting to contemplate.

• 9:36Rich Roll?

  Right, from, from black holes all the way down to particle physics.

• 9:39Annaka Harris?

  Right, yeah, yeah. And that this actually fits in with, with some of the mysteries that, that pop up there as well. So yeah, so, so challenging intuitions is something that I think is incredibly interesting and it's a very important part of the scientific process, which I think most people know, but they don't really think about or realize, that every time we make a scientific breakthrough or understand reality at a more fundamental level or reach a deeper truth about the nature of reality, that always requires that we challenge our intuitions at the very least. Sometimes we have to completely let go of intuitions that are actually giving us false information about reality.

• 10:23Annaka Harris?

  So this is true in everything from understanding that the earth is a sphere and not flat as our senses lead us to believe. And you know, this actually took a lot of science to to get enough information to realize that our intuitions were wrong. There were celestial observations that convinced people over a long period of time, because it was it was it's so counterintuitive, it's actually hard for people.

• 10:47Rich Roll?

  Right, once the

• 10:48Annaka Harris?

  To get their minds around.

• 10:49Rich Roll?

  Once the science is hardened fast, there's still an extraordinarily long lag period before people will still adopt it.

• 10:55Annaka Harris?

  Yes, and that's true for scientists. It's kind of like the scientists come first, but there's always this period of time of wrestling with intuitions before the scientists first are kind of able to accept the evidence that that has come in that's counter to our intuitions. And then the public obviously comes a little bit later. But that's, you know, the germ theory of disease is another great example that I like to give, that the idea that microscopic things that we can't interact with or sense at all can kill us, you know, is just something that took people a long time to see enough evidence for.

• 11:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:32Annaka Harris?

  That they could accept it.

• 11:33Rich Roll?

  Scientists priding themselves on their objective lens are still, you know, held prisoner by our own cognitive biases.

• 11:41Annaka Harris?

  Well, absolutely. And it's part of the scientific process. We have to kind of check everything against our intuitions. But and it is just this process of checking and checking and saying, no, you know, that can't be right, that information that just it feels so wrong, it can't be right. And then you can finally get to a point where you start to shift your intuitions, or you learn how to just not trust them in that particular area.

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  In the case of consciousness, though, I feel like after reading this book, we're barely out of the starting gate.

• 12:11Annaka Harris?

  Yes. So that was, that was why I, that was one of the main reasons I wrote this book. And really, the goal of the book is to shake up our intuitions about consciousness as much as possible, because I think if we're able to make progress, if we're able to, and the human brain, I think, is not capable of understanding everything. And so it may just fall into that category. But if we can understand consciousness better. It will require that we that we really challenge some strong intuitions that we have.

• 12:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Annaka Harris?

  And I think we're at we're at that point with regard to consciousness.

• 12:43Rich Roll?

  I like that you say that the human brain isn't capable of understanding all of these things. I feel like there's a hubridic flair that that kind of emanates across the scientific community that that that we can indeed understand everything. And perhaps that's true at some future point or with the.

• 13:03Annaka Harris?

  I think it's I think it's an aspirational. It's interesting because most science I know and typically scientists more than other people I know are much more willing to say they don't know something or we may never know or, you know, this is this is deeply mysterious physicists in particular, but scientists in general. I think the messaging that comes out, and I would partly fault the media, but I think it's also just a natural circumstance of the messaging. When we learn something new, it's it's kind of declared as if we we know all these things and everything is knowable.

• 13:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:41Annaka Harris?

  But I don't actually think that's the stance of science.

• 13:43Rich Roll?

  Well, particularly with physicists. I mean, the more you you.

• 13:47Annaka Harris?

  I mean, they're just throwing their hands up all the time.

• 13:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like it's like, how do you even begin to understand what these things mean?

• 13:53Annaka Harris?

  I've been watching these wonderful videos of this physicist, Nima Arkani-Hamed, who's brilliant and hard to understand, but I do my best. But he he spends most of his time talking about how spacetime is no longer something that we think is fundamental, that there's something that's more fundamental than spacetime, that that basically there is no, at a fundamental level, there is no space and time. So, yeah, I mean, if we're we're never going to get our minds around that, even if we can believe it.

• 14:24Rich Roll?

  Well, time is a is a is a is a focus of the book in the in the later chapters, and I want to get to that. But let's start with, let's just let's just define our terms here.

• 14:35Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, that's a good idea.

• 14:36Rich Roll?

  When we're talking about consciousness, like, what do we actually mean?

• 14:40Annaka Harris?

  So people do use the word many different ways, and it's confusing. The way I'm using the word in the book and what I think most people mean when they're talking about the mystery of consciousness, the kind of the consciousness in the most fundamental sense. Is the closest word I can get to is experience. And I use Thomas Nagel's description of consciousness from his essay called What It Is Like To Be A Bat, which is a great essay and I recommend from the 70s. And he says in that essay, "An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism." And that language for a lot of people, they kind of get it right away. Actually, for me, that happened.

• 15:23Annaka Harris?

  I knew exactly what he meant, but the language really isn't very precise and it can be confusing. So I usually follow that up with a series of questions, especially for someone who just says, "I don't know what that means to say it's like something." And so I'll say, "Is there something that it's like to be you right now?" And I run through this in the book. And of course, whoever I'm asking, we all know we're having an experience, right? We're conscious and we're having an experience. And then is there something that it's like to be this book on the table? And our intuitive answer is no. And despite what's actually true in the world, the fact that we can imagine a collection of matter in the universe that entails no experience at all, the lights are not on from the inside, right?

• 16:08Annaka Harris?

  That's non-conscious material. And then a collection of matter in the universe, like your brain, where there's something that it's like to be that matter. That difference is consciousness and it's how I'm using the word in the book. Although I do actually prefer experience. I think it's slightly less confusing.

• 16:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I've been thinking about that definition over the last week. And I can't escape this sense that it's still reductive in the sense that we're looking at experience through our own experience, right? We're defining what experience means only through the lens of what it means and feels like to be human. And it doesn't leave a lot of space or room for contemplating that experience could take another form that we can't relate to.

• 16:52Annaka Harris?

  Well, yes and no. No, I think, but that's where I'm talking at a more fundamental level. So I think, and that's partly what I try to do in the book, is strip away everything that could be human. Like you could radically change an experience, but the fact of any experience at all, and I get into these more far out theories, but even if you contemplate that a single cell or bacteria has some minimal level of experience, that you and I could never imagine what it would like to, what it would be like. If there's any experience, I mean, the most minimal experience you could imagine, if there's something it's like, then that is consciousness. And that could be completely unlike any human experience.

• 17:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:32Annaka Harris?

  It's just whether, whether it's completely dark and dead, you know, whether the stars, there's, there's no experience there at all. It's a collection of atoms that are doing their thing, but there's nothing that it feels like at all.

• 17:50Annaka Harris?

  Or, or there is.

• 17:52Rich Roll?

  Or there is, right? In a very binary way.

• 17:54Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, well, and yes and no. I mean, it's in a binary way. Once you go from nothing to something. But then, of course, there's this gradation of what's possible in, in experience, once you have experience. But yeah, I think you can, you can say that it's either there or not.

• 18:11Rich Roll?

  Right. The fact that it exists begs the question of the evolutionary advantage of having it at all. Like, what is the reason that we developed this?

• 18:22Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Rich Roll?

  As opposed to, you know, the sort of zombie example that you use in the book?

• 18:27Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, no, and I think that's, that's a, that's a very interesting question. And that's kind of where I, where my thinking started. And it's early on in the book that I pose these two questions that I think. So I have, I have two categories of intuitions that I want to challenge. One category is our intuitions about consciousness itself. And then intuitions that occur in other areas that are in our lives that strongly influence or inform our intuitions about consciousness. And so I kind of put those into two separate categories. And I start with consciousness. And I just, for, you know, for myself and in my own notes, I just wanted to get at what are the most basic, strongest intuitions we have about consciousness? And so I asked these two questions in the book.

• 19:12Annaka Harris?

  One is, is there behavior we can point to from outside a system that we can use as conclusive evidence that consciousness is present in that system? Right? Is there, is there something we can witness from the outside? Some physical behavior that we could say, yes, anytime we see behavior A, B, or C, that's absolute evidence of consciousness? And I think our intuitive answer is, is yes. And it's a very strong yes. And even after dissecting this for 15 years, my answer is still yes. So an example of that would be.

• 19:47Annaka Harris?

  I mean, there are so many, but I often use, you know, my daughter. If my daughter's fallen down and she's crying and asking for a Band-Aid, all of that behavior, to me, absolutely signifies that there's consciousness present, right? She's having an experience of pain.

• 20:03Annaka Harris?

  And so I wanted to start there because I thought this is an important exercise in all areas of science, and this is where our strongest intuitions are. But could we be wrong? Is it possible that the behavior that we think is evidence of consciousness is not necessarily evidence of consciousness? And so you can kind of go in the direction of AI and imagine we might, in the future, create something that seems like a child who was crying because she fell down, but the lights are actually not on, there's no consciousness there. But I think the flip side of that is also interesting, which is even if we can come up with behaviors, and for myself, I can't, and I think it's super interesting that we can't.

• 20:44Annaka Harris?

  But on the other side of that, we know that consciousness can be present with no behavior at all.

• 20:50Rich Roll?

  Right. So you use the Diving Bell and the Butterfly as an example of that?

• 20:54Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. Have you read that book?

• 20:56Rich Roll?

  I saw that movie.

• 20:57Annaka Harris?

  It's so beautifully written.

• 20:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, so that's based on a writer who had something called locked-in syndrome, where I believe his was due to a stroke, but it can, it can happen a variety of ways that damage the brain, like a stroke. And it left him completely paralyzed, but with a full experience of consciousness, as full as our experiences right now, as full as his experience was before the stroke. He could hear, see, think, write a book, but he had no way, he was completely paralyzed, except for, in his case, his left eyelid, there was some mobility left in his left eyelid, and miraculously, his caretakers noticed this, and they were able to develop

• 21:41Annaka Harris?

  a way for him to write through, I don't know the exact details, but yeah.

• 21:46Rich Roll?

  Creating a language.

• 21:47Annaka Harris?

  He made a, created a certain letter, and then he would spell out words and, and wrote this beautiful book. But so, so that's a case of, even if we can find behavior, there's this other problem in terms of behavior, which is there can be zero behavior and still be. A tremendously detailed experience of consciousness.

• 22:07Rich Roll?

  The philosophical zombie example is super interesting, and I think it's related directly to what we're facing now with the advent of AI and this uncanny valley. Like, we see these videos online of robots doing things that look very human, and it freaks us out. But to extrapolate that example to its extreme, whether it's a zombie or a robot, that is manifesting human behavior in all of its forms, knows exactly what to say and how to behave, and demonstrates an outward manifestation of things like empathy and et cetera, but technically the lights aren't on. The closer, you know, it's like this asymptotic curve,

• 22:51Rich Roll?

  like, the closer it approximates human behavior, the question of consciousness almost in and of itself seems to fall away. Like, what is the relevance of consciousness if somebody is mimicking it to such a precise degree?

• 23:06Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Rich Roll?

  Is it even a thing?

• 23:08Annaka Harris?

  Is a consciousness even a thing?

• 23:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, you know what I mean?

• 23:11Annaka Harris?

  Well, it's clearly a thing, because it's actually the only thing we can be sure exists. I mean, everything else might not be what we think it is. We could literally be brains in a vat or in some computer-generated

• 23:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Annaka Harris?

  alternate

• 23:30Rich Roll?

  Right, the matrix.

• 23:31Annaka Harris?

  virtual reality.

• 23:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Annaka Harris?

  But the experience you're having is the experience you're having, right? Like, whatever it feels like, that is what consciousness is. And so, I think, yeah, so the thing that's interesting with AI is, we will have no way of knowing unless we have a better understanding of consciousness ahead of time.

• 23:57Rich Roll?

  But then, I guess my question is really, like, does it matter, then, if it's so...

• 24:02Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, no, I know what you mean. And I think it has to matter, because it is why anything matters, right? Like, if someone, I mean, you can use a lot of examples, but... Basically, everything that matters to us, any ethical question, it has to do with consciousness. If we're talking about an unconscious system, we don't have any ethical obligations towards them. We're not worried about them. We don't have to think about suffering. Like, all of suffering happens in consciousness. And so the difference is everything. If we brought in some advanced AI that looked like another human being who just came in, was introduced to us, if the scientist who brought this robot in said,

• 24:47Annaka Harris?

  "Don't worry, this robot's not conscious," we would have, I mean, it would still be hard for us.

• 24:53Rich Roll?

  Change our relationship.

• 24:54Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's everything that matters in terms of mattering. I mean, if this being starts to suffer in any way, if we think they're having an experience, we want to help it.

• 25:08Rich Roll?

  It's strange times that we're heading into.

• 25:10Annaka Harris?

  I know.

• 25:11Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Well, the kind of operating definition for everybody who's walking around without any kind of more precise familiarity with this is this alignment of consciousness with identity and a sense of self, right? And another one of the intuitions that you try to, you know, break down a little bit is the fundamental illusion of self. And the distinction between consciousness and our, I guess, lack of selfhood. And also drawing a distinction between consciousness and complex thought. So talk about that a little bit.

• 25:51Annaka Harris?

  So, yeah, so these kind of fall into this other category of illusions that show up in other areas of life, but I think strongly inform our ideas about what consciousness is. And so the self and conscious will, which is not exactly free will, and I can talk a little bit about distinguishing between the two. But for me, the important piece is the idea, the feeling that we have conscious will and the feeling of being a self, a self being kind of a self-contained.

• 26:28Annaka Harris?

  Individual entity that, I mean, our intuition is actually, it's strange when you say it because you realize there's something false about the intuition just in describing it, right? But what I feel myself to be, even though I've worked with a lot of neuroscientists, I understand that everything I'm experiencing is due to all of this processing in my brain. There's some sense that there's a me, that's this kind of distinct me that is in some way separate from brain processing, that can, that can make these decisions, you know, even if my brain, my brain is, you know, pushing me in one direction and, you know, telling me I am, I should go get a coffee right now because I'm feeling tired or thirsty or whatever. And then I decide, oh, you know, now is not the right time to get a coffee.

• 27:13Annaka Harris?

  So there's, there's somehow, there's this sense that I, there's the me that can choose to follow my instincts or not. And that is the thing that is making all of the choices. And so it, the self and conscious will are really part of the same illusion. And it's the sense that there's a separate self that has this will. And so there's a lot of neuroscience now disproving, I mean, showing that these are, that these are truly illusions. And you can, and many people have had the experience of breaking through these illusions in meditation through use of psychedelics. And we now know actually the, the kind of network in the

• 27:57Annaka Harris?

  brain called the default mode network is responsible for creating this, this sense of self. And so when that is quieted through meditation or psychedelics or by other means, people talk about having the same kind of experience of realizing that that way they usually experience themselves is, is a kind of illusion.

• 28:18Rich Roll?

  Right. That consciousness exists outside of the self.

• 28:23Rich Roll?

  Our sense of, our illusory, our illusory sense of who we are.

• 28:27Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. Well, and then, and then also just in terms of how the brain processes things and how many things are happening before it rises to the level of our awareness. So that often, if not always, I mean, there's a lot of research suggesting that this is basically always the case, that every time we feel like we've made this free decision, you know, we're contemplating two different choices and we decide to go with option A, that that has already taken place in terms of processing before we are aware of it. And there are other systems that are, that we know much more about, actually, that are just like this. And binding is one of them that I talk about in the book.

• 29:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So binding is the way for people to really grok what this is all about in the sense that we receive these inputs from the outside world at differing speeds. Like we see something before we hear it. There is this delay mechanism wherein our brain assembles all of these inputs in some kind of final cut pro program and then presents it to us in a cohesive whole. But that's not the way, yeah, that's not the way it actually happens. And that the, the kind of behavioral reactions that, that we manifest in, in, in response to those occur prior to our conscious awareness of having done so.

• 29:48Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 29:49Rich Roll?

  Which is kind of a bummer.

• 29:51Annaka Harris?

  Depends on how you think about it. I think it's kind of magical. Yeah, you couldn't, I, I mean, I can see.

• 29:58Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 29:59Annaka Harris?

  I mean, it's also realizing that our experience of will, our conscious will, isn't what it feels like. Either can be a bummer, but I think there's another way to look at it. It's very magical.

• 30:09Rich Roll?

  I mean, we want to believe that we're sentient beings that are in control of our actions and reactions. And truly, we are not.

• 30:14Annaka Harris?

  It's a very controversial point, actually, because people get very emotional about it. And I thought long and hard before I included it in the book, actually. Dismantling conscious will.

• 30:25Rich Roll?

  Well, your husband has written extensively about this idea.

• 30:28Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Rich Roll?

  So it's not, it's not new to anyone who's coming to you via him.

• 30:32Annaka Harris?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 30:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Annaka Harris?

  But still.

• 30:34Rich Roll?

  But still, yeah, I had, um, I had, uh, this guy, Dr. Judd Brewer in here two days ago. And he's done a lot. He's done a lot of work on the default mode network.

• 30:46Annaka Harris?

  Okay.

• 30:46Rich Roll?

  Doing FMRI's on people's brains after mindfulness and meditation practices. And we talked a lot about.

• 30:52Annaka Harris?

  He studies psychedelics as well.

• 30:54Rich Roll?

  Um, a little bit, but more, he's more in the mindfulness space.

• 30:57Annaka Harris?

  Okay.

• 30:58Rich Roll?

  And it was super interesting to see that relationship of, you know, sort of toning down or turning off the default mode network and the dissolution of our, our sense of identity or self.

• 31:08Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Rich Roll?

  Allowing pure consciousness to enter and kind of the impact of that experience.

• 31:13Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. Um, so yeah, I actually would be curious to know how, how many people experience that as positive versus negative, but there's definitely, there's a positive way to experience that, and it can be extremely positive.

• 31:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:26Annaka Harris?

  It's part of the reason why there's been so much success with this psychedelic research on PTSD.

• 31:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:32Annaka Harris?

  Um, that it part, part of the healing is actually realizing that the sense of a separate self, um, is an illusion and there's kind of a connectedness with everyone and everything, um, that comes about when, when you're quiet, that default mode network.

• 31:51Rich Roll?

  So yeah, I, I think the, the experience, if you've had it, is universally positive because it, it, it provides a sense of connected connectivity to the world.

• 32:01Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 32:01Rich Roll?

  Um, but I think intellectually it's, it's, it's hard to grapple with.

• 32:04Annaka Harris?

  It's a bummer. You know? And very hard to grapple with. Yeah.

• 32:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's completely counter to it. And I think that's part of the reason why this process is probably going to take a long time. Like the process, even just of the neuroscience we now have and know to be true, it's taking forever, even for some of the neuroscientists who are doing the work to really be able to accept the implications. Um, because it is just deeply, it's not the way we're wired to think about things. It's not the way we're wired to experience things. But again, it's the reason why I think it's such an important thing to be doing right now with consciousness, because I think it is the only path to deeper understanding and to, to better understanding.

• 32:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:55Rich Roll?

  We have this idea that our consciousness, there's a locus for our consciousness and it resides in our head, you know, behind our eyes.

• 33:03Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Rich Roll?

  And that's fundamentally, you know, the makeup of who we are. And a way of looking at that or defying our intuition about that is to, you've talked a lot about this on other shows, but, but on a neuroscience level, understanding that neuroscientists have not been able to find that, it's not like, oh, it resides right here in this part of the brain. We see it flaring up when we activate it.

• 33:31Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 33:31Rich Roll?

  And also this practice of, from that book about, you know, pretending you don't have a head or like what it's like to not have a head.

• 33:39Annaka Harris?

  On having no head, yeah.

• 33:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, having no head.

• 33:41Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 33:41Rich Roll?

  To understand that consciousness can't be, can't be located in any geographical precise location.

• 33:47Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. I think that consciousness can, in some sense. The self can't. I mean, there is no self.

• 34:00Rich Roll?

  Now I'm confused. Go ahead.

• 34:03Annaka Harris?

  So the, so there are different ways of looking at it. And as I say in my book, that I'm kind of 50/50 on this at this point, but we basically assume that consciousness is created by, at the very least, a brain and a central nervous system. So we can kind of look at it from that perspective. There are all these other theories that I carefully talk about in my book, which I completely rejected myself for many years and didn't even think they were, they merited my reading much about them.

• 34:37Rich Roll?

  If you're talking about panpsychism.

• 34:38Annaka Harris?

  Talking about panpsychism.

• 34:39Rich Roll?

  We're gonna get to that, trust me.

• 34:40Annaka Harris?

  Well, we've already gotten to it, so I need to give a little disclaimer before, before it's, we start really talking about it. But panpsychism is this category of theories that posits that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, down to the level of atoms, even possibly originating out of some sort of field, the fluctuations of which give matter this intrinsic.

• 35:11Annaka Harris?

  Property of experience, so that there are all these physical properties of matter. And then there's actually an intrinsic property of all matter, so that there's some level of experience wherever there is matter present. So you can kind of answer this question of where consciousness is in spacetime from either angle, from if we just assume consciousness exists only in brains. We know that that is, I mean, there's no like pinpoint location, right? But the brain itself is creating a certain experience that it does not exist in your chalkboard, right? Your chalkboard is not participating in the experience of my brain. And so, as far as we know.

• 35:56Annaka Harris?

  So there's some sense in which you can talk about a physical location in a brain-based view of consciousness. But even if you go down some panpsychic rabbit hole, it's still, at least for the theories that make sense to me, the way that I, and there are, there are theories that don't make sense to me within panpsychism. I mean, I definitely, when I consider those views, and so, so as I was saying, I rejected it categorically for a long time. It just sounded completely crazy to me and went against everything that I understood about the brain. And the more I fixated on this subject, and the more I read, and the more I thought about it, the more open I actually became.

• 36:39Annaka Harris?

  My own thoughts actually started leading me there, like what, what if? And then I realized there was this category of theories called panpsychism, and so then I started doing research there. And there are actually many mainstream, well-respected scientists who take some view either within panpsychism or some, you know, basically a panpsychic view, whether or not they consider, they call it that by, by the name, which I've said many times, a terrible name. We need a new name. But it's so taboo for scientists to consider something like this. And a few have actually done it publicly, which I think is incredible. Most of them, there are many more of them than I realized because they won't admit it publicly. Right.

• 37:24Annaka Harris?

  Because it's such a career ender. So I do truly believe it's a legitimate category of theories that we should be open to.

• 37:34Annaka Harris?

  And now I forgot your question. I was answering some other question.

• 37:36Rich Roll?

  It doesn't matter. We're talking, we're all in on panpsychism now. So.

• 37:39Annaka Harris?

  Oh, consciousness, the physical location of consciousness. So within panpsychism, still, each area of matter would entail whatever experience makes sense for that area of matter, even under panpsychism. So I think that there's some, there's a sense in which consciousness, no matter how you look at it, is tied to matter.

• 38:00Rich Roll?

  Right. That consciousness can be redefined, and perhaps it's not exactly what we think it is, and it's a fundamental aspect of all matter, going down to, you know, the atom all the way up to the human being and beyond. And I have to say that that like, that activates my, you know, new age proclivities, you know, it's like, I want to believe that that's true so badly.

• 38:26Annaka Harris?

  The beyond, the beyond part?

• 38:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I just, I just think it's cool. You know, it's like, wow, think about that. Like, wouldn't that be amazing? That everything we thought about consciousness, it, you know, it's so much more complicated and vast to be an essential property of what

• 38:44Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 38:44Rich Roll?

  the universe is comprised of is an amazing idea. And it's, it's, I guess it's a reality, but it's sort of disheartening that there are certain ideas out there that would be career enders for scientists just to talk about and think about, because science is about, like, science at the cutting edge has to be about asking questions that no one's willing to ask and exploring them as open-mindedly as possible.

• 39:06Annaka Harris?

  Yes, I agree. And I think, I think it's kind of the right time to start making noises about this because, you know, there are a variety of reasons, but I can see why it's gotten such a bad rap, and I can see the ways in which science gets threatened, and also the ways in which certain theories get co-opted by some ridiculous, you know, pseudoscientific new age idea. And Then those scientists kind of get implicated in this pseudos, you know, they have to be careful.

• 39:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 39:42Annaka Harris?

  But it is, it's a legitimate category of theories and it's incredibly interesting. And given that we've made no progress on what's called the hard problem of consciousness, the fact that it's still so deeply mysterious and that it doesn't seem that more understanding of brain processes will give us more information about this fundamental nature of consciousness, what it actually is. This is, I mean, this is where I started is this is, these are the moments in science where we have to start challenging intuitions and be open to maybe we've been thinking about it all wrong.

• 40:21Rich Roll?

  The kind of way in here seems to me to be by challenging this emergent, you know, the emergent phenomenon of consciousness. This idea that, yes, we understand as human beings that we are conscious and that perhaps animals are, but as you slide down the scale, at what point is something that is technically alive, that is cellular, not conscious? And, you know, from a binary perspective, is it a switch that gets flicked? At what point does a fetus become conscious?

• 40:51Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Rich Roll?

  There has to be some demarcation line, right? And the more you look and dive into that, you realize like, oh, this is, it's a gradation kind of thing, but is there a, you know, does semi-consciousness become consciousness? And then if so, what is semi-consciousness? It all falls, it falls apart.

• 41:08Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. No, I mean, in some sense, it kind of has to be binary. There, if there's a spectrum, either the, all of reality is, is the spectrum, or you drop off the spectrum at the end of the spectrum. So at that point, it's, it's binary.

• 41:21Rich Roll?

  Right. So if.

• 41:22Annaka Harris?

  And that is, that's just this eternal mystery that we don't seem anywhere close to. Having any idea how to solve. And so I do think kind of flipping the question is incredibly interesting, especially since so much of the science is actually very intuition challenging already. And we can kind of start there and just see. I mean, my book is all about asking questions. I think it's interesting, even if, you know, what we're, what we're asking is, is wrong and there's a clear, and what we, what our intuitions are telling us is right. There's no reason not to say, let's just totally break this open. Yeah.

• 41:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So if you were to define consciousness at, you know, at the molecular level, like, what would that definition be?

• 42:06Annaka Harris?

  I think the definition is always the same, even though it's, it's hard to have a definition. But I think it's always the same, as long as you're talking about consciousness in its most fundamental sense. So experience is the best word I can come up with. But if there is any experience at all, if there's something that it's like to be that matter, to be that collection of atoms, then there is consciousness present there. If it's completely dead and lights are out and there's absolutely no experience being had, then it's, it's not.

• 42:42Rich Roll?

  But you need a very broad definition of experience. Experience, not in the sense of what we would qualify as experience.

• 42:51Annaka Harris?

  Maybe, although I, but so this is the problem with a lot of these words. I think experience is the cleanest word. I think awareness brings in other things that aren't necessarily conscious. Experience, we usually think of it as something more complex, because more complex creatures having a very complex, complex experience. And so it's kind of the problem with all, talking about consciousness in general, is we are these incredibly complex systems. The brain is the most complex thing we know of in the universe, right? And that, and our experience is being that. So we assume that consciousness is complex because we associate it with our own experience and don't know how or if we can apply it to other

• 43:35Annaka Harris?

  things. But I think there are ways that we can imagine. There are little thought experiments. And there's in the beginning of one of my chapters, one of the chapters in my book. I do a little bit of like a guided visualization to try to get someone to imagine, even you know, from the perspective of a baby. I don't use a baby in this sense, but at least that brings it to the to the human level. What experience is like when you start stripping away all of our inputs like without sight, without hearing, without, you know, if you're just talking about super minimal. I think there's some way in which we can imagine, you know, a worm, say, which many people think worms aren't conscious, but you can imagine there's something that it's like to be a worm. There's some level of consciousness there.

• 44:20Annaka Harris?

  It would be so incredibly minimal, right? Like whatever the feeling is, it would be probably not even in the sense of a localized self. It might be like pressure or heat or

• 44:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:33Annaka Harris?

  And so I think we can imagine experience being very, very minimal. And my guess is that if it does go as far down as worms or even deeper, it just gets more and more minimal.

• 44:49Rich Roll?

  Right. Along those lines, I want to talk about the the consciousness in the plant kingdom.

• 44:57Annaka Harris?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:58Rich Roll?

  Because there's some super interesting stuff, especially like the Douglas fir

• 45:01Annaka Harris?

  Yes.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  example that you use.

• 45:03Annaka Harris?

  Right. So I didn't know a lot of this before I wrote my book. I did all of this research, most of the research for the book. And what's interesting is I brought in plant behavior, kind of to prove the opposite point. I didn't bring plant in plant behavior because I think plants are conscious. Although this point kind of makes you question whether they are. But I brought it in because I was addressing this issue of are there behaviors we can point to that that are evidence, absolute evidence of consciousness?

• 45:35Annaka Harris?

  And there are so many plant behaviors that are so much more similar than I realized, and I think than most people realize, down to the mechanism. So it's kind of like behavior that you would describe in similar terms to the way we describe human behavior, but they're also similar genes, similar processes of cell changes resulting in electrical signals in much the same way that our brains do. And of course, they're very different, but they're similar enough that I use it because we assume plants are not conscious. And so you can kind of play this trick on yourself by saying, okay, if plants do these things that when humans do them, we say that that's evidence of consciousness, but we assume

• 46:20Annaka Harris?

  plants are not conscious. They're doing all of this without consciousness. Why maybe we don't need consciousness for these behaviors in humans? And this was just part of the intuition challenging that I was doing. But yeah, so you spoke about the tree behavior, the Douglas fir and the birch. This is the work of Susan Samard. I don't know if you've seen her TED Talk. It's so worth watching. She did work in the Canadian National Forest. And I actually think she grew some of her own trees in her own like lab setting to study the communications that happen underground in what are called mycorrhizal networks. These are fungal networks under the ground. So there are root systems, but there are

• 47:05Annaka Harris?

  also systems of fungus that help trees communicate to each other, share carbon with each other. They share defense signals. There is this incredibly elaborate system of communication happening underground. Some of which, and I use this in my book because it mimics human behavior to some extent, where the trees that have dropped seedlings, she refers to them as the mother trees, are able to recognize through these networks which trees that have grown in the forest are their own kin.

• 47:40Annaka Harris?

  And they send them more carbon and they send them defense signals that they're not sending to other trees. And there's a sense in which they're protecting.

• 47:50Rich Roll?

  They are literally protecting their kids. It's unbelievable.

• 47:54Annaka Harris?

  They make more room for their roots. And you can see how this could all happen without consciousness, right? Like, it's all trippy, but you could still say, okay, that's so interesting. All that that happens was all this communication and cells talking to each other. And and that could all just be happening in the dark, right? That could be happening in the same way that we imagine our computer processing systems are happening in the dark. And if that's true, why do we think all of these things that we're doing require consciousness? And so I think that's an interesting starting point. But it does also make you wonder if trees are conscious.

• 48:29Rich Roll?

  I mean, what comes up for me when I think about that is, is the beautiful symbiosis of these ecologies, right? Like, we're caught up in our sense of self, where we separate ourselves from others. I mean, you talk about stardust, and yeah, we can go, yeah, we're all stardust. But when you really think about that, we don't. Yeah. And when you think about the limitations of free will, and the fact that we're just truly reacting to our environments, and there is no, you know, impermeable barrier between ourselves and the world and the sun and all of these things that we're reacting constantly to our environment, and that we are very much in that

• 49:09Rich Roll?

  same place of responding to our environment and adapting. Trees and forests and, you know, all of these sorts of things are instructive, because they show us that that integration is so undeniable when you drill down on it.

• 49:24Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, I know. So I've been using plants more recently. I've been getting into more hairy discussions about free will. And you can use plant behavior to talk about this as well, because you wouldn't, you don't think the plants are making this decision, like, okay, now, now, I'm going to give more carbon to you over there. And they are, as you said, there's this complex way in which they are connected and responding. And we don't, in plant behavior, we don't mistake that response.

• 50:03Annaka Harris?

  However, complex and interesting it is for free will.

• 50:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:07Annaka Harris?

  And I think you can, you can map that onto human beings as well, that, that there's a sense in which it's all a system from the brain to our bodies to the air we're breathing to the sound waves that I'm speaking that are bouncing off your ear. I mean, there, there's this connection that we don't see, but that is, is there.

• 50:26Rich Roll?

  Not only do we not see it, where our brains are rigged to convince us that it's something very different.

• 50:32Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I don't know what to do with that, though.

• 50:38Annaka Harris?

  I know.

• 50:39Rich Roll?

  I can tell you this, as somebody who's, who's been vegan, like plant-based for a very long time, like in the Twitterverse, like the plant consciousness argument comes up a lot.

• 50:49Annaka Harris?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah.

• 50:51Rich Roll?

  So.

• 50:52Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. I actually just heard someone for the first time use it for the reverse argument, which I'd never heard before, which was they, they're so complex and they seem like, you know, the sense that they, he'd spent, it was, um.

• 51:06Rich Roll?

  Was this a podcast that you did?

• 51:07Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Rich Roll?

  I think I listened to it. He's the guy who went to the Amazon.

• 51:11Annaka Harris?

  Yes.

• 51:11Rich Roll?

  And he was immersed in that, that biosphere and it gave him such an appreciation.

• 51:15Annaka Harris?

  Corey Allen. Yes. But there was some sense of like, I'm, how am I, how is this type of consciousness any more important than that type of consciousness?

• 51:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:23Annaka Harris?

  And I don't follow that path. And I think there are reasons to think that suffering, there's, there's definitely a range of suffering. And even if plants are, are conscious and I mean, even if everything's conscious, I think you can definitely make a good argument for some things being able to suffer a lot more than other things.

• 51:40Rich Roll?

  Well, what was interesting about that is that he said he was a long time vegetarian and then he had that experience in the Amazonian rainforest. And then he began eating meat after that because he saw himself as just part of this greater whole. But I couldn't help but thinking, yeah, but eating all those animals is actually contributing to the destruction of this thing that you fell in love with. So it's like, I don't know.

• 52:02Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. Yeah. No, there, there are ways to see it.

• 52:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 52:06Annaka Harris?

  Differently for sure. But it does, I think all of that shaking up our intuition, specifically about self and free will and, and just about consciousness in general, get us to see things very differently. And I think, I mean, for me. It brings me a lot of joy and it was really the first reason I decided to turn my notes into something that I was writing for the public was really just to share this feeling of awe that I get in contemplating all of this. And I think it can, it can do that. I think it can be kind of a spiritual, a source of a spiritual experience. And that's another word we can use about 100 different ways.

• 52:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:48Annaka Harris?

  But yeah, for me, as someone who's not religious, and I feel like I'm a fairly spiritual person, a lot of it comes from, from contemplating things like this.

• 53:00Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 53:01Annaka Harris?

  And kind of surrendering to it.

• 53:02Rich Roll?

  How does that work with your famous atheist husband?

• 53:05Annaka Harris?

  I think he's a very spiritual person, too.

• 53:08Rich Roll?

  I think he is, too.

• 53:09Annaka Harris?

  He and I don't like, he used the word.

• 53:11Rich Roll?

  I think he is. I really do.

• 53:13Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, neither of us like the word for obvious reasons, but he actually used it, I'm forgetting now which book I should know, but he used it in one of his books and he gives, oh, in Waking Up, he uses the word spiritual. And he talks about why he thinks it's a necessary word and it shouldn't mean all the things that, that people have used it for. And there's actually a new, sorry, it's not that new, but Thomas Metzinger is a philosopher who's wonderful. And he wrote something about spirituality. I don't know how long ago, but not, not that long ago. And I actually posted an excerpt of it on my website because it's so beautiful and brilliant and is, is a kind of an argument for taking the word back to mean something very different from what it generally means

• 53:58Annaka Harris?

  in pop culture now. His, his essay is called Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty, or maybe the other way around, Intellectual Honesty and Spirituality. But he equates spirituality with a kind of a scientific mindset of seeking truth. And

• 54:18Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, so his article has made me think a lot about spirituality and what I mean by spirituality when I say it. And in the same way that I think of myself that way, I absolutely think of Sam that way. And yeah, for me, it's more of a kind of staring into the unknown while seeking truth and feeling this intimate connection to the rest of the universe. And so, you know, that can be done through meditation. I mean, it can be done in a variety of ways.

• 54:52Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think, well, first of all, you know, a guy who stops out of college because he has an experience and goes on a 10-year journey that takes him to ashrams and all these, I mean, this guy's a seeker, you know, you can call it spiritual or whatever, but he's on a journey for greater, deeper understanding. And I don't see science and spirituality as incompatible at all. In fact, your book is testament to that. The more you drill down on these crazy ideas, the more room you provide for awe and wonder at just how mysterious and amazing all of this is.

• 55:22Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, no, that's what I think. That's why, yeah, no, that's why I call it, I hesitantly call it a source of spirituality for me, yeah.

• 55:37Rich Roll?

  So, another intuition that you confront and debunk about consciousness, or what we think about when we think about ourselves, has to do with, you explore it through like these split-brain experiments and toxoplasma that allows you to realize like that, hey, we're not, we're not so much in control, or that consciousness isn't exactly this unified entity.

• 56:06Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. So, yeah, this is some of the research I use to help, help people break through or see this sense of self and conscious will as illusions. So, the split-brain research, I think, does this incredibly well. And this, do you want me to explain?

• 56:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Annaka Harris?

  So, this is research that was first done by the neuroscientists Michael Gazaniga and Roger Sperry. And they were doing research on patients who'd had a surgery to essentially split the brain. Into, this sounds like a horrific procedure, but it was, it actually helped a lot of people with epilepsy, because an epileptic seizure is essentially an electrical storm that can spread. The most devastating, most dangerous ones spread throughout the brain. And so they, they discovered that if they, they cut the brain through the corpus callosum and essentially split it into, into its separate halves, it would prevent the electrical storm

• 57:07Annaka Harris?

  from, from spreading to the entire brain. And many patients got incredible relief from this. And for the most part, you couldn't tell, they, they seemed normal and healthy after the fact. Through this research, they discovered that there was a sense in which the person, the, the split, the two split sides of the brain were kind of like separate people in terms of their consciousness and in terms of their, their will as well. And so essentially, the patients end up like conjoined twins almost, where they're, they have like separate minds, but they're sharing this body.

• 57:50Annaka Harris?

  So, one of the, the, the famous experiments is of a split brain patient. So, the way the brain works is our visual field, the right side of the visual field gets projected on to the left hemisphere, the left visual field is projected onto the right hemisphere. The same is true for a lot of things like our hands, the, the sense perceptions from our hands go to the opposite hemisphere. And so they were able to kind of separately question and communicate with each side of the brain. So they would Flash a word, I think in my book I use the one where they flash the word "key",

• 58:35Annaka Harris?

  and they flash that to the left visual field, which would only go to the right side of the brain, because that's where it goes. And normally that would be shared across the corpus callosum, but this has been split, so it stays, it only gets received by the right hemisphere. So the right hemisphere has seen the word "key", the left hemisphere hasn't seen anything. And when you ask the person, also, the speaking center of the brain, language, communication is not always, but usually in the left hemisphere. In this patient, it was in the left hemisphere. So the experimenter asks the person, "What word did you just see?" And they say, "I didn't see anything." And that's because the speaking part of the brain is the left hemisphere. Then they'll say, there'll be a bunch of objects on the table,

• 59:18Annaka Harris?

  rocks and coins and things for them to choose from. Then they'll say, "Reach out and pick up the object of the word you just saw." And the person with their left hand, because it's controlled by their right hemisphere, who saw the word "key", will reach out and pick up a key. And this is just replicated over and over again with the same results. So, and there are different ways that they can ask various questions. There was a child, I'm forgetting the name they used for him. I think they kept his name anonymous, but they used a name, but he was famous, for having the ability actually to speak with both hemispheres. And so they were able to get a lot of information from him. But they would ask him questions, and he would have different answers

• 1:00:01Annaka Harris?

  depending on which hemisphere they projected the question to. That's crazy. So he wanted to be, you know, one side wanted to be, I forget now, but you know, one side wanted to be a draftsman when he grew up, and the other side wanted to be something else. Oh my god. There are bizarre cases of someone, one half of their brain being an atheist and the other one being a Christian. The whole, the whole range is possible, but it really is like you end up with conjoined twins rather than a single unified brain.

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  And so what do you make of this? Like, how does this inform how you think about consciousness?

• 1:00:36Annaka Harris?

  Um, so there, there are a couple of ways. Um, and actually the interpreter is something that comes up here that I, that I didn't mention, which is super interesting, which is the, the language side of the brain. Um, I think it was Michael Gazanaga and another scientist kind of came up with this term, the interpreter for this experience that they noticed or phenomenon they noticed again and again in these patients where, um, they would give a command to the, to the patient, um, to get up and walk to the end of the room. And so the patient would do this. Um, sorry, the details are always so confusing.

• 1:01:15Rich Roll?

  I know, I know the example.

• 1:01:17Annaka Harris?

  So, so it's, so it's to the right hem- they tell the right hemisphere, get up and walk and they'll get up and start to walk to the back of the room. Um, then they ask the person, so the speaking left hemisphere is going to answer, why, why did you just get up? And the left hemisphere is not aware of that command. So the left hemisphere doesn't actually have information about why his body got up and started walking. And in most cases, it will come up with an instantaneous response that kind of makes sense that it doesn't seem that it's a lie. It doesn't seem like the person fabricated this. It's, it's a function of the brain to kind of have an answer. Um, and he'll say, oh, I got thirsty. I was get, I was standing up to get a glass of water.

• 1:01:58Annaka Harris?

  And this is a little bit of an insight into, into conscious will. Um, the idea that, and, and many neuroscientists think there's something like this, that there's a kind of an interpreter effect happening all the time, um, or a lot of the time where we have this unconscious brain processing, it kind of rises to the level of consciousness and we think we know the reason. And we may not be right about that reason.

• 1:02:23Rich Roll?

  Right. We're sort of post hoc, coming up with rationalizations for behaviors that are already underway.

• 1:02:29Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  Right. You use an example also of you being startled from a noise in the middle of the night before you were, like, your body moved before you heard

• 1:02:38Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Rich Roll?

  the thing.

• 1:02:39Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. Yeah. And that was more kind of an interruption of the binding process, which I think is, and there are these disorders that interrupt binding so that people don't actually experience the sights and the sounds of things in the same moment, happening at the same moment.

• 1:02:53Rich Roll?

  How does that manifest in an individual? Like, if they're not binding properly, it's this mishmash of everything coming in at different times.

• 1:03:01Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a category of disorders called agnosia, which is the inability of the brain to process sensory information together. So there's a whole, I mean, there's strange things that can happen. I just discovered there's something called finger agnosia, which is the inability to differentiate between your different fingers. But basically, everything we experience is, the brain is doing all of this for us, right? Like, once you start to pull these things apart, and the split-brain research does the same thing. It's like, everything that we kind of take for granted and think, this is the way things are, you manipulate the brain a little bit and you realize.

• 1:03:41Rich Roll?

  It just breaks down. Yeah. Like, if you've split somebody's brain, and, you know, one side's an atheist and one side's a Christian, what does that say about how we think about who we are?

• 1:03:54Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 1:03:54Rich Roll?

  What is the self?

• 1:03:55Annaka Harris?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:03:57Rich Roll?

  Or is there no such thing?

• 1:03:59Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:04:00Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Rich Roll?

  That gets back to the bummer part.

• 1:04:04Annaka Harris?

  I guess. I always, I always see two paths there. Like, there's a fork in the road. You can go the bummer path, but you can also go the, kind of like, surrendering to this bizarre universe we're in and just letting it be something different than you thought it was. Yeah. I mean, at all, I feel like, whatever we discover, it's all kind of magical. I notice, I'm sure you notice this, having kids, they ask you to explain everything, and they don't understand anything, and you realize, every answer is crazy, right?

• 1:04:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're just, you're answering it, and you're like, why am I saying, yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:38Annaka Harris?

  Something about the sky is blue, and when we breathe, are we breathing the sky? And, you know, she's just trying to understand. The universe.

• 1:04:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Rich Roll?

  Extending the the micro risel example is this toxoplasma.

• 1:04:55Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 1:04:56Rich Roll?

  Example that you use, which just also further enhances the mystery of all of this. When you realize like that your your neurology can be hijacked by these microscopic entities that then take over and control your behavior.

• 1:05:12Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, all the parasite research is so interesting.

• 1:05:18Annaka Harris?

  And I knew a little bit about it before I started writing the book as a book, but I did a lot more reading and it just gets creepier and creepier. But parasites control the behavior of their hosts and they do it with neurochemicals because not not always, but but often. They're either mimicking the neurochemicals of the creature it's invading, or they're just disrupting some system so that they get the creature to do what it needs it to do for its own needs. So, yeah, toxoplasma, that's that's an interesting one. That's one a lot of people know about in cats, where it needs to reproduce in the intestines of a cat.

• 1:05:59Annaka Harris?

  And so in order to but then it it it part of its life cycle happens outside of the cat, but it needs to eventually make its way back to a cat. And so, you know, rats who are that are infected with this parasite, who have normally have a natural fear of cats, this parasite alters their brain chemistry in such a way that they actually become less fearful in general. But they are less fearful of cats. They can be drawn to cats. They're drawn to the smell of cat urine, like they suddenly become.

• 1:06:31Rich Roll?

  They just run headlong into the cat.

• 1:06:33Annaka Harris?

  They do so in some cases, yeah. And that's just this parasite needing to get back. But my point about all of that is there's some sense in which we're already in that circumstance, right? Like, we are.

• 1:06:48Annaka Harris?

  Our conscious experience is really at the mercy of whatever processing

• 1:06:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Annaka Harris?

  we are a part of.

• 1:06:54Rich Roll?

  There's some interesting science happening right now in the microbiome where they're discovering this nexus between the quality of your gut flora and the foods that you crave.

• 1:07:04Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Rich Roll?

  And that again, you think like, well, my body's telling me I need this. It's like, no, actually this thing inside of you, that's what it feeds on.

• 1:07:12Annaka Harris?

  Well, and your body is hardly your body. I mean, I forget the numbers, but it's some ridiculous percentage.

• 1:07:17Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:07:18Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. Well, the ultimate kind of wrench in this whole thing that just takes it off a cliff is time. So let's talk about time.

• 1:07:27Annaka Harris?

  Okay. I feel like I'm not qualified to talk about time, although I will say I keep recommending his book because I think it's so beautifully done. Carlo Rivali's new book on time called The Order of Time. I think one of the reasons I love it, but it's just, it's, it's a great book on an accessible way to kind of understand where the science is at, at this point. But he does this, he ends the book on consciousness and he kind of talks about how the two are interrelated. And I love that because I end my book on time. And there is some sense in which, you know, whether at the level of physics they're interrelated,

• 1:08:07Annaka Harris?

  you know, we don't know, but our conscious experience certainly couldn't exist without time. There's something, it is, it's in many ways, all about time.

• 1:08:18Rich Roll?

  So explain that. Like, how is it, how does that work?

• 1:08:25Annaka Harris?

  So I think, I think many people have this experience in meditation and a lot of the kids that I teach get, have, communicate this experience quite often, that it starts to make them wonder what the present moment is. So we have, so our experience is just forever in what we feel is the present moment. Right? It's this experience of what's now. When, when you start to pay closer and closer attention to that, It's hard to even understand what we mean by now and in what sense time is moving. And it's interesting that we use the word moving. It's like we talk about time in spatial sense.

• 1:09:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:09:08Annaka Harris?

  And yeah, so I think, I think it's interesting even just, you know, how my, I talked about this in the last chapter, how much time do we need for a conscious moment, right? And this may be different for humans than for other animals.

• 1:09:24Rich Roll?

  Is it come in flickering intervals or is it a continuum?

• 1:09:29Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 1:09:30Rich Roll?

  And it gets into, you then explore this, this, these two kind of countervailing theories of presentism versus eternalism and how we think about time.

• 1:09:39Annaka Harris?

  Yes. Yeah. And I think, I could be wrong, but I think Carlo Rovelli actually says neither of them are right. Although he basically says there is no such thing as, as time as we experience it and we, we think of it to be.

• 1:09:56Annaka Harris?

  That it just, it, it completely falls apart. There, there's no present moment in the universe that is consistent throughout the universe. Right? There's things at, at the quantum level, there's no past and present even, like things go in both directions and you can't tell one from the other. What was your question?

• 1:10:14Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 1:10:15Annaka Harris?

  I'm confusing myself.

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  So we consciously, we experience time in, in a, in a presentism context, like it's flowing, you know, in a narrative, linear way.

• 1:10:25Annaka Harris?

  Right.

• 1:10:26Rich Roll?

  But the science suggests that it's really, it probably is more of an eternalism kind of thing, that all of these things are happening simultaneously in multi dimensions and in a way that we can't even really fully understand.

• 1:10:38Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. Well, and I think whether or not eternalism is the right way to describe it, like the block universe, I think is a, is a controversial concept, the idea that it's, it's a static thing, that every point in time exists always. But

• 1:10:54Annaka Harris?

  Presentism doesn't seem accurate either. I mean, it's clearly not accurate, but it's interesting that that's the way we experience the world. And there's something about our experience that kind of lights up these different, we call them moments, and we're only experiencing them one at a time.

• 1:11:17Rich Roll?

  So, why explore time, though? Like, what is the relationship between how we're trying to understand time and how we are trying to think about consciousness?

• 1:11:29Annaka Harris?

  I mean, for me, the reason I brought it up in the book mostly is just because I think it's incredibly interesting that our experience of the present moment is something we can't even quite get our minds around our own experience of what it is. Actually, Donald Hoffman is doing this work. I don't know if you're aware of him. He's very interesting. He has a book coming out in August called The Case Against Reality. And he is a very, he's doing this with this very rigorous science. And I think some scientists are questioning what he's doing, but I think it's very interesting, and he's certainly grounded in science.

• 1:12:10Annaka Harris?

  But he's, his question is, should we, are we thinking about it backwards? So, is it, is it so hard to understand consciousness because we're thinking we're living in this non-conscious universe that somehow gives rise to consciousness? That that's not the right way to think about it? Is it possible that consciousness is fundamental and gives rise to the physical world?

• 1:12:32Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:12:33Annaka Harris?

  And so, you know, even he will say, I might be wrong, but we should explore this.

• 1:12:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's

• 1:12:39Annaka Harris?

  And so, those are the types of places that these intersections happen between the mysteries we're coming up against in quantum mechanics and

• 1:12:48Rich Roll?

  Right. In your research

• 1:12:50Annaka Harris?

  What we don't know about consciousness.

• 1:12:51Rich Roll?

  In your research for doing the book, what really out-there ideas did you come across that didn't make the cut? You know what I mean? Like, you went out on a limb to include, you know, this para-psychism.

• 1:13:05Annaka Harris?

  Pan-psychism.

• 1:13:06Rich Roll?

  Pan-psychism, sorry.

• 1:13:07Annaka Harris?

  Pan-psychism is even worse.

• 1:13:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  And I know in your podcast with Sam, he's like, you know, he's saying like he was trying to talk you out of this, but I would imagine you came across some other stuff too. You're like, that's just a little too out there.

• 1:13:25Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, I think there are some, my feeling is that some people have taken what I think are legitimate questions within panpsychism to make all kinds of claims, like the universe is, I mean, there's something called the combination problem in panpsychism, which I talk a little bit about in the book because I actually don't see it as a problem. I think it's partly because we're confused about being selves and that illusion that's misleading us there. But within this, the combination problem is essentially the philosophical problem. If panpsychism is true, how is it that these smaller points of consciousness in the atoms of my body and the cells come together to create this other form of consciousness?

• 1:14:10Annaka Harris?

  And I actually, I don't think about it that way. When I contemplate panpsychism, that's not the way I think about it. But so then the natural next question is, is there some kind of human, you know, larger human consciousness or consciousness of the universe? There was an article recently, I think titled, is the universe conscious? So I think, again, confusing consciousness with complex thought.

• 1:14:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:14:35Annaka Harris?

  I think it's really a misunderstanding of the implications of panpsychism that lead people to what look to me like slightly religious beliefs that for many people give them some, gets them out of the feeling that they're bummed that this is what we're coming across and they want to believe that there's, it's interesting, it's not comforting to me, it's interesting, but I get, I get why it would be comforting. But yeah, no, the idea that there's some, there's some plan, there's some path, there's this higher consciousness, we know, you know, we can let go of God, but now we're going to use this other thing as a placement for, for God. But the idea that Human brains that aren't connected would have some bigger mind that, I mean,

• 1:15:19Annaka Harris?

  you know, those are the types of theories-

• 1:15:21Rich Roll?

  With a plan for every single person, right?

• 1:15:22Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Rich Roll?

  But that aside, it's undeniable that there is an organizing principle on some level going on here that I don't know that we'll ever fully be able to comprehend-

• 1:15:33Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Rich Roll?

  But is certainly true nonetheless.

• 1:15:37Annaka Harris?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:15:38Rich Roll?

  What that is, I don't know.

• 1:15:39Annaka Harris?

  Whatever's true is true.

• 1:15:40Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you're somebody who has been a meditator for a long time, and I know your entry point to that started with migraines, right? Which is something that my wife deals with and has dealt with. She was just recently, the last two days, like down and out, just tried everything. It's been a real challenge for her.

• 1:16:02Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, it's awful.

• 1:16:03Rich Roll?

  But that's originally, if I'm not mistaken, what kind of brought you into that world?

• 1:16:07Annaka Harris?

  Yes, when I was, yeah, I was about eight years old when I first started getting migraines, and there was a moment at which I was in a particularly, having, experiencing a particularly bad one, where, I'm sure this happens to your wife too, it's the strangest thing where you're in so much pain, and it's actually, a migraine is kind of hard to even pinpoint where the pain is, but any tiny little movement, like just taking a big breath or adjusting myself, would be like this crash to my head. And so I had to stay incredibly still, and I guess because I was so focused on like all these little micro-movements and just, you know, I think when you're in that much

• 1:16:50Annaka Harris?

  pain, and I know other people have had this experience, just the slightest adjustment in one way or the other can make a huge difference. So it can bring you just a little bit of relief, it feels like a lot in that circumstance, in the same way that the movement that makes it more painful does. So I was aware of that, and I think as I was staying really still, I was able to notice that just the psychological state I was in, that I had gotten myself into, or maybe that's not a fair way to describe it, but I realized that I was kind of like fighting the pain,

• 1:17:34Annaka Harris?

  it's hard to describe, but with my psychological stance, right? Like my way of-

• 1:17:43Annaka Harris?

  My way of kind of looking at the pain or being with the pain was with a lot of resistance and like wanting it to go away, although that's not the right way to describe. It wasn't with words.

• 1:17:54Rich Roll?

  With willfulness.

• 1:17:55Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, it almost felt like a movement, right? And so I just decided in that moment, I don't know why, but I just decided to stop doing that and to just get curious about what I was experiencing and to kind of get closer to the, to just really let it be there and really kind of, almost like facing your fear, like, let's just get into this, like, what, what is this? And I, that was kind of the first moment for me of noticing that curiosity could be helpful and kind of be an antidote to different types of pain, which is, I think, part of

• 1:18:35Annaka Harris?

  a realization that comes through meditation also, but more specifically just not resisting something and kind of having a stance of being curious and letting things be. Even when you're in terrible pain, it creates just the, you know, the slightest bit of relief. And that was a powerful insight for me that I then, when I was able to, or when it occurred to me, I was able to apply to other areas of my life, not just physical pain, but psychological pain too, to just getting curious about what is this thing that I'm resisting made it a little more tolerable.

• 1:19:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting. That's, that's something, something that Judd Brewer was talking about the other day here, like using, like his, his work is really in cravings and addiction and using mindfulness techniques.

• 1:19:27Annaka Harris?

  It's a kind of pain.

• 1:19:28Rich Roll?

  And the idea of like, like letting go of your, you know, willful impulse to try to combat this and releasing your self judgment and all the emotions that swirl around it and just being curious, like being present with it, being curious about what it is. And when you approach it from that perspective, it's, it almost like it, it's like it dissolves the solid.

• 1:19:51Annaka Harris?

  Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, no, I think that it's, I hadn't thought about it in that context, but it must be a great tool because it kind of, it gets you to see thoughts and even sensations like pain as, almost as energy, right? It's, it's this thing that is pretty amorphous that when you look at it very closely. And craving is a really interesting one. And I actually, it's not quite craving, but it's in my meditation practice, the thing, when I, if I'm sitting a long retreat, the thing that I now, that I now welcome, because I think it's so interesting, is the desire to move.

• 1:20:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:20:27Annaka Harris?

  Like, what is, it's very hard to pinpoint what that feeling is. Like, you know, I know a touch to the hand, I can kind of know what that feeling is pretty clearly, but wanting to move is very hard to find in.

• 1:20:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not localized in any particular place.

• 1:20:45Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, and so any kind of like craving or wanting, when you take a closer look at it, I think becomes a kind of, you realize it's a kind of energy.

• 1:20:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and then it starts to break down.

• 1:20:54Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Rich Roll?

  When you look at it from that perspective.

• 1:20:56Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Rich Roll?

  Talk to me about the work that you do with kids in meditation.

• 1:21:01Annaka Harris?

  So, yeah, so I've been teaching meditation to children for close to 15 years, I think. I've stopped counting, but it's about 15 years. Ever since I discovered Susan Kaiser-Greenland's work, which I think is truly brilliant, and unlike any of the other work that has been done with children, although there's a lot of great stuff out there now. She created a secular program for children in schools, based on the Vipassana teachings, but truly turned it into a completely secular program.

• 1:21:39Annaka Harris?

  And I had just finished a meditation retreat where I kept thinking about how beneficial it would have been to, for me to learn to meditate as a child, and how I was kind of naturally inclined, as I think a lot of, I noticed this in my classes, so I think it's like any other ability or talent, where most people can learn it, but some people are like truly gifted at it, and can learn it much more easily. And I think, actually, in general, I think children can learn to meditate more easily than adults. But then they're the ones who really take to it pretty quickly and just fall into it right away, and then they can get, derive all of this benefit from it when they're

• 1:22:23Annaka Harris?

  young. So I came out of that retreat mostly wondering why we don't teach this to children.

• 1:22:32Annaka Harris?

  And thinking about it in the context of physical education that, you know, like, we consider this to be mandatory, like, we have to keep our bodies healthy. And this is such an incredibly powerful tool for keeping our minds healthy. Why this, how different things would be.

• 1:22:46Rich Roll?

  Let's wait until everybody accumulates all sorts of baggage and trauma.

• 1:22:49Annaka Harris?

  And can barely learn how to meditate.

• 1:22:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and is completely closed off to the idea. Yeah, the openness, the open-mindedness of children seems to be, you know, perfectly suited for, because they're not like, they'll, they, they want to be in that place of awe and wonder and exploration.

• 1:23:07Annaka Harris?

  Right, and they still, they're in that place all the time. It's like my daughter asking if she's breathing the sky and like, why her breath isn't blue. And you know, it's all mysterious and, and there's no idea that it should be one way versus another way. And so much of that is an obstacle to learning how to meditate when you don't know what a self is, or what free will is, or what, you know, you're just very open to the next experience.

• 1:23:32Rich Roll?

  How many of the kids that you teach end up adopting like a consistent practice?

• 1:23:36Annaka Harris?

  Oh, I wish I knew. That's a great question. It's all over the place, I'm sure. I, I've heard from many parents, I get these wonderful emails and sometimes photo. I actually got this text a couple of years ago from a mom who said, we couldn't find, I will, I'll use a different name, Rebecca, we couldn't find Rebecca. We were visiting my parents, we couldn't find Rebecca, we were looking all over the place. And then I found her and she showed me the picture and she's sitting, meditating under a tree in the backyard.

• 1:24:10Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 1:24:12Annaka Harris?

  It's amazing. And it's, the most wonderful thing about it is that what I was hoping was true is true, that she clearly was deriving so much benefit from it. She, she was, this is something she wanted to do on her own. She just decided to go do it in a moment that she felt like she wanted to or needed to or whatever.

• 1:24:31Rich Roll?

  How does it work with your own kids?

• 1:24:33Annaka Harris?

  Much harder.

• 1:24:35Rich Roll?

  Tell me about it.

• 1:24:37Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. Yeah, I keep thinking I need someone else to record all of my guided meditations for my kids.

• 1:24:42Rich Roll?

  I don't want to hear it from you.

• 1:24:43Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, so I, all of my meditations and lessons are now on, on, on the Waking Up app. And I have a, a long page and it's maybe slightly intimidating because there's so much text. But I put everything in there that I think is actually really important to know before you teach kids how to meditate. And one of the points I make there is that it's really important to not force kids, to not, really to not put pressure on them at all to do it or to learn it. And that I think the best thing that parents can do is model it for their children, which is true of so many things. And my kids, especially my older daughter, she's 10, is definitely interested. And I got very lucky, actually. They invited me to teach a meditation class at her elementary school.

• 1:25:33Annaka Harris?

  So I taught her class kindergarten first for three years through second grade. And, you know, that's not advice I can give to other parents. It's, you know, it just kind of stops there. But what's interesting is I think children really learn meditation better in the context of a group or a school or like a learning setting. And I think at home, you really just have to offer it and talk to them about it so they know it's something that's available and show them how it helps you. And I actually think it's important to do it in front of them. I think they become interested without telling them they have to do it. Just actually sit down and set a timer.

• 1:26:18Annaka Harris?

  And the parents I know who meditate, who have kids who meditate, that, that is how it's happened.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's like any good behavior that you want to instill in your kid. If you create restrictions and mandatory rules around it, it's, that's a recipe for disaster.

• 1:26:36Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. I mean, it, it can go both ways. But meditation is definitely that way because it's totally an internal experience. So you can't, you know, you can tell them to say thank you to someone.

• 1:26:47Annaka Harris?

  When they've given them something, but meditating, you can't control, it's like you can't force someone to go to sleep, right? Like that, that's just not something.

• 1:26:55Rich Roll?

  Is there an optimal or appropriate age to introduce this?

• 1:27:00Annaka Harris?

  My favorite age to teach is nine and 10. And I still generally think that's the best. If there's one time that you're going to introduce it to children, I think that's the time, partly because it stays with them. I think when they learn around fourth grade,

• 1:27:19Annaka Harris?

  those memories stay.

• 1:27:20Rich Roll?

  Stays with them.

• 1:27:21Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. And they're also at this really beautiful stage of still being kids, but they're starting to think like adults. And you can have basically every conversation you would have with an adult about meditation with a child that age. And so I think the learning is just very deep. And I think they learn as well as as younger children. But I am always proven wrong when I think a group of children are too young and I'm invited to try to teach them. Now, the youngest I've taught is four and a half, and they absolutely learned. And it's different, you know, each age is different.

• 1:27:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58Annaka Harris?

  And I would say not every child in that class was meditating for sure. Maybe four or five of them got it and a couple had some really interesting experiences. So I think they can learn as young as four. I think it depends on the context.

• 1:28:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I heard you.

• 1:28:14Annaka Harris?

  It depends on how they're learning.

• 1:28:15Rich Roll?

  Speak about that and just the epiphany that one young child had about what the present moment is. Like that in and of itself, if nothing else.

• 1:28:23Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, no, that's so often the epiphany and it's, I love it. It's so interesting to hear them talk about it. But yeah, this was a little boy, I think he's five, or was five at the time. And yeah, he, I mean, he barely had the language to describe what he was talking about, but it was similar to what that, the other, the girl in second grade who I mentioned in my book. It's a similar realization. And he, he talked about it in terms of it going fast. He said, It just keeps going. I don't even remember exactly what he said, but it was something about it moving fast, which was one of the first realizations I had when I really got and was able to concentrate for long enough to kind of stay moment to moment for a significant period of time.

• 1:29:03Annaka Harris?

  There's something kind of energizing about it because it really, it is, it's, it's a good way to describe it. It's moving fast. We should be teaching this in schools. We should be teaching it in schools and more and more schools are.

• 1:29:16Rich Roll?

  We need to institutionalize this.

• 1:29:17Annaka Harris?

  I know that. Yeah. Yeah. I think we might, we might be headed there.

• 1:29:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. I was not optimistic about that five, 10 years ago. And now I actually think we're headed there. So I now have the opposite concern, which is it's happening too fast and I don't want programs that aren't.

• 1:29:36Rich Roll?

  Vetted and legit.

• 1:29:37Annaka Harris?

  Yes.

• 1:29:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right, we're gonna, we gotta land this plane, but perhaps leave us with, all right, so you've, we've challenged all our intuitions about consciousness, like where, where does this leave us? Like I finished the book and I'm like, okay, like I don't know, now I'm like, I'm, I learned a lot.

• 1:29:56Annaka Harris?

  Spend the rest of your life in awe.

• 1:30:00Rich Roll?

  You know, what are we, you're asking questions, right? So what do we do with these, these threads that we're pulling on in terms of how we can, how they can inform how we live our life day to day?

• 1:30:11Annaka Harris?

  Yeah. I'm not sure I have the greatest answer for that.

• 1:30:15Rich Roll?

  I guess I'm not expecting you to.

• 1:30:16Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, no, luckily we now have this research actually that shows that being in a state of awe is actually very good for us. And there's, I mean, we kind of can feel that. We know that it feels good. But it's, it increases our wellbeing to, to think about these things and to contemplate mysteries and the bigger questions. And so I think if, if anything, there's that, there's that, you know, if you enjoy wondering about these things, keep doing it.

• 1:30:44Rich Roll?

  And if you think you know what's going on, think again. Right? I love the book.

• 1:30:51Annaka Harris?

  Thank you.

• 1:30:52Rich Roll?

  The subtitle is A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. It is brief. It's a, it's a small book, but don't be confused. This is, this is a very dense, but you gotta take your time. You know, you're not going to rifle through this. You could read it in a short period of time, but the concepts themselves are, are, are very deep and they're asking you to think deeply about them, which is great. So congratulations, I loved it.

• 1:31:15Annaka Harris?

  Thank you.

• 1:31:17Rich Roll?

  Good, how do you feel? You feel all right?

• 1:31:18Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:18Rich Roll?

  Good, we did it.

• 1:31:19Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Rich Roll?

  Thanks so much. If you want to connect with Annika, where are the best ways for people to?

• 1:31:26Annaka Harris?

  Probably my website is the best. It's just Annaka harris dot com, but it's A N N A K A harris dot com.

• 1:31:33Rich Roll?

  And are you doing any public events or speaking or any of that kind of stuff?

• 1:31:38Annaka Harris?

  Very little.

• 1:31:41Annaka Harris?

  Yeah, nothing to announce now, although I do, I do announce everything that's coming up on social media.

• 1:31:46Rich Roll?

  All right, good. And if you have children and you're interested in, in exploring meditation with them, the Waking Up app, you can find all of Annika's programs there.

• 1:31:54Annaka Harris?

  Yes, and some of my guided meditations are on my website also.

• 1:31:58Rich Roll?

  Cool, thank you.

• 1:31:59Annaka Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Rich Roll?

  All right, peace. Blads.

• 1:32:04Rich Roll?

  I thought that was great. Did you learn something? How cool is Annika? I really enjoyed that. I hope you did as well. Please do me a favor, check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com and let Annika know how this one landed for you. You can share your thoughts with her directly on Twitter at Annaka Harris or on Instagram at Annaka Harris Projects. And don't forget to pick up a copy of her new book, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Like I said in the podcast, it is a brief book, but it's also quite dense. And I would say that weeks and weeks after reading it, I still find myself grappling with its profound ideas. If you would like to support our work here on the podcast, there are a couple

• 1:32:49Rich Roll?

  of simple ways to do that. Just tell your friends about your favorite episode. Share the show on your favorite social media app. Take a screen grab, share it on Instagram or Twitter, tag me and I'll reshare it sometimes. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube and Google Podcasts. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you can also always support us on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis for additional audio engineering. And Margot Lubin as well for videoing and editing the podcast for YouTube.

• 1:33:32Rich Roll?

  Jessica Miranda for graphics. DK for advertising relationships. And Ali Rogers for portraits. And in closing, theme music as always by Analemma. Appreciate the love you guys. I will see you back here next week with another great conversation with Humble the Poet. It's a good one. You're not going to want to miss it. Until then, peace. Plaid. Allah stay.