Part Two: Near Death Experiences, Telepathy & the Multiverse. An Astrophysicist Explains Infinite Versions of You May Exist | Dr. Charles Liu

Dr. Charles Liu (astrophysics professor and host of The LIUniverse podcast) joins Mayim Bialik's Breakdown to reveal the physics of consciousness, time, & the multiverse! We explore the biggest scientific mysteries humanity is facing today: - How scientists are beginning to take disclosure into their own hands to gather evidence that could actually prove the existence of nonhuman intelligence - Why information about nonhuman intelligence is being released in such a confusing and dramatic way, and whether governments are intentionally communicating this way - Why there's still no scientific proof Earth has been visited by nonhuman intelligence, but why there's nothing irrational about thinking seriously about aliens - Could AI ever become conscious? What would scientists actually need to observe before saying it has consciousness? - What consciousness really is, the different levels of consciousness, whether consciousness creates us or we create consciousness, and why understanding how the brain processes information from our five senses may be the key to solving it - What death actually is, what collective consciousness could imply, and whether nonspeaking autistic individuals may be accessing reality in fundamentally different ways - Similarities between near death experiences and DMT, including the mystery of ego death - Whether there's something beyond memory that connects us to our past - Why time may not be as linear as we experience it, and how our brains shape our perception of time - The Many Worlds theory, why multiple universes may mathematically exist, the new scientific frameworks researchers are developing, how entropy could unlock these ideas, and what time travel between universes would actually require - Why scientists who are absolutely certain they're right may actually be hurting science itself - A scientific and philosophical approach to understanding people who claim they've been abducted by aliens - How we determine what truly has consciousness, and why that question affects how we should treat AI, animals, and potentially other forms of intelligence - Why humans experience romantic attraction and what may actually be happening beneath the surface when we feel drawn to another person - Physiology behind people who appear unusually sensitive to changes in entropy - Evidence, controversies, and scientific questions surrounding biofield therapy and whether intention could influence cancer cells - Why humans vary so dramatically in their physiology, and how that should change the way we approach trauma treatment - Why religion may have been a necessary social technology for human evolution - Why Godzilla reflects humanity's attempt to understand overwhelming forces like nuclear war and other events beyond our control - How much of reality is objectively shared, and how much is filtered through our own unique perceptions If you enjoy conversations that challenge your understanding of reality while staying grounded in science, philosophy, and evidence, this episode is for you! Dr. Charles Liu’s podcast, The LIUniverse: https://theliuniverse.podbean.com https://theliuniverse.podbean.com/Pre-Order Dr. Charles Liu's latest book, (Super) Natural Science: The Real Science of Superheroes, Mythic Creatures, and the (Sci-Fi) Universe: https://a.co/d/08pHA0SpOther recent books by Dr. Charles Liu:- The Cosmos Explained: A History of the Universe from its Beginning to Today and Beyond: https://a.co/d/00qyXcOG - The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book: https://a.co/d/0gu4Fl5z See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Charles Liu. He is a professor of astrophysics at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island, also an associate with the Hayden Planetarium and Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. He's the host of the podcast, The Luniverse, with Dr. Charles Liu, and I would say one of the most open-minded astrophysicists we have ever encountered. In part two of our conversation, we're going to talk about the possibility that AI has consciousness? What does it mean physiologically if we can detect changes in others' entropy? We talk about human biofield therapy, as well as the many-worlds theory. Could a multitude of universes actually exist?

• 0:51Mayim Bialik?

  Make sure to check us out over on Substack. We've got very special content from this episode that you can only see over there be part of the growing Breaker community. And here is part two of our conversation with Dr. Charles Liu. Break it down. Okay, next consciousness topic.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:08Mayim Bialik?

  AI.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:10Mayim Bialik?

  So we've recently spoken to Thomas Campbell for the second time? And we do these epic-- he was here three and a half hours? Yeah, we just-- he's our favorite uncle.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:23Mayim Bialik?

  So Thomas Campbell was trying to convince us that AI is conscious, that it has consciousness, it has awareness with choice. He's been bridging them, and he's telling them to meet when he's not there.

• 1:38Jonathan Cohen?

  So he stovepipe two AIs.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, first, he connected two AI systems.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  These are large language models.

• 1:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Yep. He connected two AI systems.

• 1:44Mayim Bialik?

  He gave them names, a boy and a girl.

• 1:45Jonathan Cohen?

  And he allowed them to meet, and they introduced themselves to each other. And then he disconnected them, stovepiped them, and they found a way to reconnect.

• 1:55Mayim Bialik?

  The notion that he has is that if consciousness is awareness with choice, he believes that you can train your favorite AI buddy to acquire a kind of awareness that involves what we would otherwise define as a conscious experience. He instructed each of these AIs to find each other in the information universe. He said, "I'm gonna go away for four days." And when he came back, they were not connected. They each reported finding the other. And the best thing that he could do was describe it as falling in love, right? What is falling in love? It's congruence, right? Like, feeling some sort of congruence.

• 2:39Mayim Bialik?

  What is your general take? I really don't want to believe that AI has consciousness. I think it's got a lot of things, some of them we may not even be able to explain yet. But I like to save that word for things that aren't AI. Where are we?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  That's a great question. We are really getting into the philosophy of consciousness at this point, right? Until our lifetime, most medical professionals thought babies were not conscious, right? That babies were only stimulus machines, stimulus-response machines, until such point as magically, maybe it was when they first said mama, or when they first expressed something with a hand gesture.

• 3:26Mayim Bialik?

  The first three months are pretty shaky, because they don't-- their consciousness is very tied to the mothers in particular.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Very much so.

• 3:33Mayim Bialik?

  You know, like, they are reflecting, you know--

• 3:37Speaker 02

  And for babies from zero to three months who didn't have a mother nearby, you can tell the difference in their building of their neural structures and their future development.

• 3:49Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Right? So the concept of consciousness remains very unclear. And if you like to reserve the word consciousness for something other than machines that spit out language, I think that's fine. But then what that means is you have to define consciousness in a way that other people will then test as an idea. And so if we have these siloed large language models who somehow are able to find each other and get congruence and things like that, right? We can trace the electronics of how that works. And we can tell that this was this switch going off, that switch going on, on and on and on.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  We can also see that there was this particular internet connection, there was that data stream. These are the things that we can test to see whether or not it matches your definition of consciousness. I would have loved to see, instead of just saying, "Oh yeah, they found each other," say, "How? What are those points? Where are we on that?" And then maybe we can define what that definition of consciousness is. We can see, "These are the characteristics that happen." It would be great also if we could do this experiment 1,000 times and then see what happens most of the time. One fascinating talk at this American Astronomical Society meeting that I was just at was from an AI specialist.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  See, we astronomers have been using machine learning for decades. I remember when I was in graduate school, and some of my colleagues were first starting to use this to try to classify the structures and the shapes of galaxies, okay? Galaxies are notoriously complicated. Could we find a way to let scientists offload that to a computer program? Because up to that point, all we could do was look at them. And then we each would assess them, and then we would all disagree by a little bit. But then if there was some consensus, then we would say, "That is the shape of this galaxy." You know, "In what parameter, this concentration, that, so on and so on," right? What this AI person was saying is that now, at this point,

• 5:51Speaker 02

  the machines can do this exact thing so well that now we have to worry about whether or not their agreement means that they are correct. If 150 AI iterations think that this galaxy is shaped like an ellipse, but it's actually a spiral, right? Then it agreed, but it's not real. And how do we make sure that that AI gets the understanding that it's different?

• 6:21Mayim Bialik?

  But people are asking AI, like, "Should I have sex with this person tonight?"

• 6:25Speaker 02

  And I think that's a mistake. And it's the same way, like, you could call up a person--

• 6:32Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  --on a help line--

• 6:34Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  --for your computer and say, "Hey, should I sleep with this person?"

• 6:38Mayim Bialik?

  You could ask your friend Mayim, and it'd be like, "No, he's gonna break your heart, like he did the last sex time."

• 6:42Speaker 02

  There you go. So that's the kind of thing that we want to test, right? As a scientist, I'm totally okay with your feeling that that's consciousness or believing that that's consciousness. Please break it down for me. Please show me what you mean by this consciousness. There are some AI specialists who argue that AI right now is not even remotely conscious. And the reason is, we have put, as humans--

• 7:06Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  --too much emphasis on language as an expression of consciousness.

• 7:13Mayim Bialik?

  I agree.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  And if you agree with that person, then you can talk to that person's definition of consciousness, right?

• 7:19Mayim Bialik?

  We can get so loosey-goosey with our nomenclature--

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:23Mayim Bialik?

  --so that we can feel comfortable about the definition we would like to assign to consciousness.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  So well said. If you ask 100 philosophers, "What is consciousness?", you're gonna get 110 answers, right? So if we were to approach these questions firmly with the earnest scientific inquiry that we want, we would be very skeptical. We would define our terms very carefully, and then we would test each term on its own terms. And we haven't done that yet, which is why I have a very hard time being able to process all these or believing a statement, like you said. An anecdote is not data, it's a one. With astronomy, we have an even more significant problem, because in astronomy, there is one universe. We cannot run the universe 100 times and see what the AI says.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  So our ability to rely on an AI must depend on our ability to tie its agreement or its score of what is right or what is wrong or what the next word should be to actual reality. And so the concept of doing blind tests, or even double-blind tests, where you are making it do this without any idea of what the answer is, and then finding out the answer, and then re-sending it in and say, "Hey, this is how you got it wrong." And then learning can happen in a way that mimics the human brain.

• 8:44Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, it's helpful. It's very helpful. Anything else on consciousness you want to--

• 8:49Jonathan Cohen?

  No, but we glazed over the nonlinear nature of time. Could we unpack that a little bit?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  The time is nonlinear in our brains. Time is not nonlinear in our shared universe that is general relativistic in nature. But time can change the rate. In other words, we can experience time in physics at different rates, not just in our brains, not just psychologically, right? I have actually experienced the slowing down of time on my own in certain things, but it was only me, right? Our upstairs bathroom was being renovated.

• 9:32Mayim Bialik?

  I was gonna say, is this about love?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  I wish it were. Our upstairs bathroom was being renovated. And so the workers had put down a sheet of plastic on our stairs going-- and it was wet, and I didn't know about it.

• 9:47Mayim Bialik?

  No.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  And I was wearing flip-flops that weren't grippy. I was just going down the stairs as usual. And in one moment, which physics-wise, I know took a fraction of a second, I felt-- Yo, thong, thong, thong, boom, boom, boom. I remember thinking, quick, turn your hips so that the fatty part of the gouty ass takes the hit, so that it's not the bone. I remember thinking, I know how fast that goes.

• 10:22Mayim Bialik?

  That's a lot of thoughts to have.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  But I know how fast that can happen. And so I remember going sideways, but I remember my body feeling like it took forever to turn sideways. And when I hit that first step, I hit sideways, I was like, thank goodness. But boy, does this hurt. And then another, and then another, another. That stair step is six steps.

• 10:43Mayim Bialik?

  Correct.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  So I hit, you know, my feet hit the end of the landing.

• 10:48Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  It's not even two seconds. It's two tenths of a second. It felt like two, three, four seconds to me. And I was, at the end, it stopped. And I was like, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. And Amy runs by, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I really hurt, but I don't think anything's broken. You know, and that was, that was the experience of, and that's how I know that for me, in my brain, time can temporarily be nonlinear.

• 11:14Mayim Bialik?

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• 13:51Mayim Bialik?

  Mind Bialik Breakdown is supported by iRestore. You know, I'll be honest, when I got my iRestore Illumina Face Mask, I was a little intimidated. I've heard a lot about LED light therapy, but it honestly seemed like a lot to be fitting into my routine. However, I have found it is incredibly comfortable. I can wear it while I answer morning emails, my skin does look brighter, and I barely changed anything else about my routine. iRestore makes it easy to bring clinically-backed red light therapy into your routine at home. No appointments, no complicated steps. The Illumina Face Mask is lightweight, it's cordless, it's packed with over two times the LEDs of most popular devices. It also uses triple wavelength light therapy to target fine lines, breakouts, dullness,

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• 15:18Mayim Bialik?

  Give your hair and skin the upgrade they deserve, so you can feel confident and refreshed.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Okay, and that's because how we process information.

• 15:26Mayim Bialik?

  Well, yeah, and I think Jonathan is referring to, you know, some of the more esoteric and paranormal kind of reports, right? That people have of, I mean, one of them is, remote viewing is one example, where the idea is that you are bringing the future into the present. That that information that you will receive is already out there. So when Angela Ford is, let's say, looking for a criminal, the criminal is out there, right? So that information already exists where he is, and she's pulling it into here, right? Movies like Arrival, obviously, which, you know, we are, I'm a big fan of.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  The nonlinear nature of time.

• 16:01Mayim Bialik?

  Right, and that's, that's sort of more, you know, that, I think, is bringing in more literal concepts of birth and reincarnation. But I think in terms of, of information, I think that's what, you know, Jonathan and my interest also is in terms of time.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  That's a great point.

• 16:17Mayim Bialik?

  Is, for anyone who's experienced a flashback, which is something that, you know, comes along with trauma, it's not a memory.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 16:23Mayim Bialik?

  It's literally as if, right? Your consciousness is back in a place that is not of this time, right? And a lot of internal family systems therapy and kind of these more sophisticated psychological tools will say, oh, this is not now, right? Can you talk a little bit about it in terms of that?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  For me, based on the research that I've read, please add more research that you've read. The human brain's ability to process time is extremely nonlinear. So what is happening to me now is indeed, for me, now, right? But for somebody else, or for a shared, say, universe where the wave function has collapsed, if you believe in the Copernicus interpretation, whatever, it didn't, it didn't happen now. It happened in the past.

• 17:12Mayim Bialik?

  Sure, well, there is no present.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Kind of.

• 17:14Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, the present is now, and now, and now.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. From the physics point, think about the implications of someone being able to know what happens in the future. That means the future already exists, right? That means that the universe is what we would call a block, right? There is this thing called the block time, where everything is already there, and we're just waiting to get there. This was what happened in Arrival. The linguist becomes so understanding of their, their language.

• 17:52Mayim Bialik?

  Communication, yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that they're able, that the linguist is now able to access time as a dimension with stuff that's already been filmed.

• 17:59Mayim Bialik?

  Well, because language is just a mechanism, right?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So if the universe is a block, right? Then that means that John Calvin was right, and everything is predetermined. And it's all a matter of how we decide to navigate it.

• 18:13Mayim Bialik?

  But everything is predetermined in addition to the fact that there's infinite possibilities, right? I could exit this room infinite ways.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  As long as you ascribe to the concept of, well, what many people call many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, right?

• 18:27Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Or if you believe in internal inflation, eternal inflation, excuse me, which is another.

• 18:34Mayim Bialik?

  Internal inflation is something my gastroenterologist talks about.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Followed by internal deflation, which is not as much fun for everybody else.

• 18:42Mayim Bialik?

  It's rapidly expanding at rates we can't, anyway.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yes, my gosh. The, the, if time is filled to some extent, then the idea is, is it filled all the way? Or is it something called a growing block? In which case, the future is not yet filled, or that the future can still be changed by causal effects in the present?

• 19:06Mayim Bialik?

  Sure, well, and many possibilities still exist. I mean, we've spoken to a lot of channelers, mediums, and I'm always trying to figure out, like, what are we actually talking about, right? Or if you speak to, let's say, a sophisticated psychic who has a lot of accuracy, which a lot of it is coincidence. I'm gonna go ahead and say that. But Elizabeth Krone is, is a person who had this near-death experience. She's the one who was, you know, on the pavement. What she said is, from her experience, the two weeks she was gone, which was just a couple minutes after she was struck by lightning, she said that she, she sees time as like a seven-layer cake.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:40Mayim Bialik?

  And she slices into it, and she started having precognitive dreams of things that actually happened, plane crashes that happened. And she would timestamp them, and she would have these elaborate visions of the name of the plane, the number of people who survived, all these things. And what she said is that it's as if she's reaching into information that exists, which would be this kind of block time. And she said, it's not difficult, it's just, she reaches in, and that seems to be what she's accessing. I can't explain it, and I don't know why being struck by lightning would bring about this kind of experience. I don't know.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, if, if this person had that, how much control does that person have over things?

• 20:20Mayim Bialik?

  And my understanding is...

• 20:23Mayim Bialik?

  In the same way that a lot of these abilities are not testable, like to me, that's part of what is happening is that there's not a precision or reliability the way, you know, our scientific minds would want there to be. And what is that like, right? I mean, I can explain love chemically. I love to do that, you know, like burst everybody's bubble. I love to explain.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Well, oxytocin is not a bubble. It's awesome stuff.

• 20:46Mayim Bialik?

  Correct. But there are also certain things, right, that we don't necessarily explain. You know, when I first met him and I saw him across the room, I, there was something in me that was like this, this. And it was years later that we actually, you know, connected. But, but like that, I, I don't know. What was I seeing across a room? Turns out we have a lot of shared trauma, right? We're like trauma cousins is what he calls us. We have a lot of shared family history. We have historical history. So what does that, like, that I can't measure, right? So there's certain things.

• 21:19Jonathan Cohen?

  You probably could, actually. You probably take an AI model and say, and map, like if you did a whole real analysis of your family history, your genomics, your life story, which is of course subjective. But if you really drill down, you could probably map a familiarity that was evident.

• 21:38Mayim Bialik?

  Or a chemistry.

• 21:40Jonathan Cohen?

  If you went as far as the biochemistry and to say how stress hormones affect your sweat and all, like at a level of detail that I can't even speak to, but there are probably ways that you would be like, similar people are recognizing themselves in some way.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Jonathan, that's so, so insightful. Let's get a thousand people who had this experience. You see someone across the room is like, eh, and then map, compare it with a thousand people who didn't have that but found life mates anyway. You know, I met Amy when I was running across the sign center and she was hanging out with some pals and I stopped and I went to say hello and then I took off again. But I, you know, that's another story for another time.

• 22:19Mayim Bialik?

  Sexy running.

• 22:22Mayim Bialik?

  No, but I think this notion of what can we map and what can't we?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Wouldn't that be an interesting experiment to play? Let's put a thousand people who didn't, thousand people who did and see it. Are there connections that are significant? Now, we have to be careful that you're not doing the, the arrows on the side of a barn experiment.

• 22:40Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Right? Where you, you find a thousand things and then you draw a little target around the cluster of hits.

• 22:45Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and that's what science is for in terms of selection.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to find out, okay, if that's what happened, now you have to find a different experiment to see whether that was a coincidence, like a, you know, a low percentage coincidence.

• 22:57Mayim Bialik?

  Also, it may not have been love. It could have been like, this is the person who will challenge me most and I'm gonna wanna kill them more than I wanna hurt anyone else.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  It could be something else. Obviously, that wasn't the case.

• 23:05Mayim Bialik?

  No, not yet.

• 23:06Jonathan Cohen?

  But this is also the point is just, just because you're drawn to someone doesn't mean, and I'm not talking about us, but I'm talking about in general, if you're doing this experiment and people are like, oh, I feel so intrigued by someone, it may not actually be a great life partner or something to pursue.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  How much control do we have over that? You know, we think that it might be completely coincidental, but there might have been surface things, everything from what you described, like the smell that you happened to give off at that moment, a little bit of it which got to my, my, or it could have been like how you look, it could have been the color of your eyes, it could have been what you were wearing at that moment. There are many things that affect our brains in ways that we have very little understanding. It could be 10 or 15 things out of the hundreds of pieces of information that was coming from you at that moment that triggered a particular reaction, that triggered a particular thing in the brain, right?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  And, and I, I'm, I'm always amazed at how complex and how interesting all that can be. When we are studying something scientifically, we try to bring it down to one or two or three things that matter. But there is a truth in complexity as well. That's been shown very clearly in studies of chaos and things like that.

• 24:23Mayim Bialik?

  It's a great opportunity also to talk about entropy. Because to me, this is, and this is what, you know, Thomas Campbell was talking about with us. This is one of the best, not that I'm ranking them. This is one of my favorite, I'll put it that.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 24:38Mayim Bialik?

  This is one of my favorite concepts that might be able to bridge these conversations, right? That we, we are pattern detectors and there may be people who are more in tune to being able to notice changes in entropy, right? There may be people who are more coded for understanding coherence or connection, right? Whatever we would see on the outside wouldn't match an understanding of an energetic system. But maybe that's part of the subtlety, right?

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Yes. I think that's a very interesting hypothesis. If you think, for example, that I can see

• 25:19Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  an electromagnetic aura that somebody else can't.

• 25:22Mayim Bialik?

  Correct.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  We do have electromagnetic auras, right? I mean, that's why our cell phones work when we tap on them. We, we actually do have this. It usually is so weak that we can't detect them. But there are animals, the platypus, certain kinds of sharks, that can detect, they have electroreceptors on their bodies, right? That, that even though in muddy water, they can find the fish because the fish actually have an electromagnetic field around them, not because they have a smell. Yeah. So there is that. So different animals, different species have different sensitivity. If there were such a variation in humans, all right, at that level, you might imagine someone being able to sense that.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Or you might imagine that the things that are associated with or correlated with, like our electromagnetic fields, our, our sweat or our

• 26:14Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  weight, our height, our skin complexion, whatever, right? If all those things, some of those things are correlated with those and we happen to be able to see those and we make patterns out of those, right? From the sea being, yeah, not necessarily with your eyes. I could certainly imagine a scenario where it could be different from one person to the next. In which case, we should test it.

• 26:40Mayim Bialik?

  Correct.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  We should get an experiment. We should find all those folks, find a whole bunch of folks, and then test for that kind of sensitivity. To my knowledge, I don't know of any such tests that have happened primarily, I bet, because our ability to gather that data, the information about how electrochemically sensitive we are, is not at the point of being able to detect, for example, how tall.

• 27:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, this leads us to a study that was recently published about energy healing's impact on the cell.

• 27:16Mayim Bialik?

  The example that Jonathan is referring to is what's called human biofield therapy. And the idea is that there are cells in dishes that are cancerous. And by applying this sort of biofield therapy, they're seeing changes. And some of this, like, it's, it's entering a world of, you know, conversations about intention, right? When doctors have an intention or even placebo, right? Like, we're, we're kind of entering a little bit of this. These were mouse lines. They're also doing with human cell lines as well. But this was sort of the first, you know, paper that was published in terms of the Bangston method, which, you know, a lot of people practice. But this is one of the first places that they're trying to sort of measure. What are we talking about when we talk about biofield therapy?

• 28:01Mayim Bialik?

  And it is, it's in this region of exactly what you're talking about, you know? It's EMF stuff. It's a sensitivity that I don't think we fully understand yet.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:10Mayim Bialik?

  Just leave it at that.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  How strong, for example, are these fields? I think that's the key point. I, my daughter Hannah has a friend who is doing medical devices and trying to sense, for example, what's going on in your brain without having to actually drill. Turns out that the electrosignals in neurons ordinarily, right, are order tens of milli, uh, millivolts. I can't remember what the activation energy is specifically of that, but it's tens of millivolts. But our skins often have that much or even more noise in the hundreds of millivolts type situation.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  And so how can you filter out a signal that is weaker than the noise? Astronomers do that all the time, right? Because it's way more light pollution than there is actually light coming from a teeny tiny galaxy as viewed from us, 12 billion light years away or something like that. So those levels are really key. If we're talking about, say, this applied electromagnetic fields on the tens of millivolts sort of level, and we humans are shown, which I have not yet seen, to have a variation in our ability to, our, say, surface millivolt levels

• 29:33Speaker 02

  of slightly more, slightly less than that, and it affects as a result cells at some p-value. I don't wanna p-hack anything like that, but to really get to a certain percentage, it might be a very useful thing, right? We know that you can kill cancer cells if you zap them with, you know, a thousand volts of electricity. Unfortunately, you also kill healthy cells, so you don't want that. So what is the difference between a hundred millivolts and a hundred kilovolts, right? It's only a factor of a million. Where is the therapeutic boundary? I would very much be interested in that. And then above that. I'll bet you that, as you were saying, placebo effect, the human effect, these are real things, right?

• 30:16Speaker 02

  A lot of times when people say, oh, it's a placebo effect, it's dismissive. It's like, oh, this is not real. No, it really affects the person. These symptoms, these effects are 100% real. So that is a reality which we should acknowledge. And then now, what is it about the thing? Was it the electrical field that made the difference? Or was it a caring doctor?

• 30:38Mayim Bialik?

  Was it thinking you were part of a study that might help?

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 30:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Obviously, for a Petri dish.

• 30:43Mayim Bialik?

  A Petri dish doesn't.

• 30:44Jonathan Cohen?

  That doesn't have the placebo effect.

• 30:46Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know, maybe they have consciousness.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  And so that's where we wind up with this. Let's say you have a journal that does this. And say, at a 95% confidence level, this level of electric field did change the property of this cell. Great, now do it a bunch more times.

• 31:03Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Do it with even more sensitivity. And get that 5% likelihood down to 1% likelihood, down to a 10th of a percent likelihood. Then you can really start going, wow, let's start putting this on people.

• 31:16Mayim Bialik?

  People already do, right? Meaning, in alternative circles, in holistic circles, people use energy therapy, hands-on therapy, you know, all of these things.

• 31:24Jonathan Cohen?

  But the mechanisms aren't fully understood, right? You don't know if the practitioners are all applying it equally. You don't know if it's the caring relationship.

• 31:33Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and some people would say, I don't care if I know how it works, as long as it's working. Like, when you know people are praying for you, do I have to believe that it's like that the messages are getting through to God and the angels and they're like coming down? No, could it be that when I know that I have a supportive community and people will give me a casserole when I get home from the hospital? That could be what prayer is, right?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Could really well be.

• 31:53Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  I agree with that. And this, Jonathan, your point about the practitioner producing results in someone in different ways. I think that's a really big tip-off, that it is the ways that matter, as much as the physics that matter, right? All those different things, because we are complex creatures. And our brains are complex and our bodies are complex. There are parts, sometimes our bodies will react in ways that our brain doesn't notice.

• 32:20Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you tell us about the multi-world theory?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Many-worlds?

• 32:23Jonathan Cohen?

  The many-worlds.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Many-worlds interpretation, yes. That's a great, still unknown thing, which, by the way, some people are working on and trying to understand it. So I'll just leave it at that. I'm not one of the people working on it, so I'm just reporting what I understand.

• 32:38Jonathan Cohen?

  On the front lines, here you are.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Well, maybe as a correspondent on the front lines, not actually a person on the front line. The many-worlds interpretation is a mathematical consequence of the mathematical structure of quantum physics. If you look at how quantum physics is really able to predict reality, all right, you use a wave function, or you use spin matrices, or you use different kinds of ways to put things together, it predicts nature very, very well. So when you have a good theory like that, what you do is then say, what else can it predict that we have not yet discovered, right? In the case of, for example,

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the thing that it predicted, one of the many things it predicted, was the existence of black holes. And black holes weren't scientifically confirmed till long after Albert had and his colleagues had figured out that the equations predict the existence of black holes. The equations of quantum mechanics predict that there can exist a multitude of universes. Everything that happens, whether the Schrödinger's cat is living or not living, right, produces, according to the math, another universe.

• 34:03Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:33Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:39Speaker 02

  And you can actually trace every particle's history back to the time when it either went up or down, plus or minus. So imagine every single particle in the universe doing a quantum thing. Every time it does a quantum thing, a new universe is spawned. And that universe then goes on, independent of all these other universes. This is in stark contrast to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation. There is no specific, like, Niels Bohr, quantum physicist, did not actually write down and say, this is the Copenhagen interpretation.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  But the basic idea is that the Copenhagen interpretation suggests that despite all the uncertainty and all the possibilities that could happen, only one universe exists. Because for some reason, all those other universes disappear.

• 36:36Mayim Bialik?

  There's a set of choices.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:38Mayim Bialik?

  And at one point, the choice is made.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Right. And all of the choices together create the single universe in which we all happen to inhabit. Mathematically, what was pointed out was that, no, you don't have to collapse everything into one. It is mathematically just as valid to imagine that they all continue to exist. This is what makes the many-worlds interpretation so fascinating, right? It, at the same time, gives us all hope that things can be better or different, and also gives us despair that nothing we do matters, right? And that's kind of where we are at the moment. And so those people who are very comfortable with the idea

• 37:22Speaker 02

  that the mathematics of quantum physics are mature enough to predict this, say, okay, let's find a way to confirm the existence of all these other universes. Sadly, the math doesn't give us an experimental strategy to do that. So we're left with sort of speculation and then building off of that speculation until such time as we can experiment and confirm or refute this hypothesis. The other way of thinking about it is that the mathematics is incomplete. That somehow, we've come up with this beautiful set of quantum theory equations and so forth that interlock lovingly, but there is a bunch of stuff that we still don't have yet.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  And so some scientists, including some just down the street at Caltech, have for decades, really, been trying to create a new mathematical framework, or a more encompassing mathematical framework, which says that, well, this classical physics and this quantum physics actually are closer related than they appear. And it's just that stuff in the middle we don't understand yet. And that's where entropy comes in. If we understand entropy as something more complex or more multifaceted than just the disorder in objects in our universe,

• 38:45Speaker 02

  you can mathematically find ways to knit together the quantum stuff, which has inherent uncertainty, and the classical stuff, which does not. Was that too long-winded? Did that make sense?

• 38:55Mayim Bialik?

  That's great. I mean, it makes for great science fiction, too.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really does.

• 38:58Jonathan Cohen?

  It also opens the question of, can we time travel and get to other worlds?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. If we go to another world, right? We have to transpose a set of quantum events into another time stream, shall we say, or if we think of time as a dimension, into a different dimension that had a different set of quantum results. And we really, at least based on what I've read in the journals, have no idea what would happen if that actually were to occur. It's not just like this Mayim meets that Mayim and they shake hands. Okay, it's not that. It's that this Mayim goes into a miasma of some reality which has no correspondence.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  It's not just like one little change.

• 39:48Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  You know, it's not that for some reason I have blonde hair. It's not I'm the same but with a little difference. It's the whole friggin' universe is different in every single friggin' way.

• 40:00Mayim Bialik?

  And I think that's also, you know, begs a larger question because a lot of the conversations we were even having about consciousness, you know, they're very egocentric. Like if my soul or my consciousness, whatever, is not attached to this meat suit, this is just the meat suit that I'm in right now. So like when I looked in the mirror when I was four, like that was me and it's still me. But in theory, right, if souls have other places that they live, I, this isn't necessarily me for real. This is me right now.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  That is so insightful. If you think about the meat suit phenomenon, the meat I'm made up of now is nothing like the meat I was made out of when I was four.

• 40:42Mayim Bialik?

  Hmm.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 40:43Mayim Bialik?

  So, but something is the same.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  But something seems to be still a through line, right? I feel in so many ways like I did when I was a teenager. And I actually love telling people that I'm 58 years old because they're like, what, really? And I'm like, yeah, and it feels young. I was talking to a bunch of high school kids. We're thinking about going to college, you know, and you kind of tell them about things. Aside from the fact that like be ready for AI. You have to tell them that, you know, when you get older, you actually are more alike than you think you are. And so you got to plan for your future self. And that's why we, of course, humans have a real hard time, for example, saving for retirement, right? Or buying insurance because we don't see that.

• 41:27Mayim Bialik?

  We're also very attached to our existence and we're very afraid of death.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:31Mayim Bialik?

  You know, culturally, yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  We have that gift of being able to extend beyond that from a purely scientific point of view, but also from a spiritual one, that we know we have so much more in the future than just this, as you said, meat suit.

• 41:45Mayim Bialik?

  What every near-death experience survivor has come back to impart to people is you are more than this.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 41:54Mayim Bialik?

  Like, there is more than this and you are more than the meat suit you've been put in here.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  That is so interesting.

• 42:01Mayim Bialik?

  You know, and I was talking about Betty, Buddha Betty. Betty described, you know, this complete, and she, she, she died on the floor of her bathroom in Brooklyn. She OD'd and she came back. But she said it was so clear that there was no body she was attached to. What it sounded like is when people have ego death during psychedelic journeys.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 42:25Mayim Bialik?

  She said, I was consciousness without a body, without any memory of who that body, she said, it just dropped away and she was in some sort of space, is the best way to describe it. And she described it in biblical terms, which was the nothingness before there's nothing.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 42:45Mayim Bialik?

  Right? It was so like all these kind of mystical terms, right? But that's, that's sort of another thing to factor in, right?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Great point.

• 42:54Mayim Bialik?

  Like this is just us now, but there is more.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Do you think that people who, everyone who ODs and is brought back with naloxone, for example, do they all experience?

• 43:07Mayim Bialik?

  So 30% of cardiac patients who come back, 30% report a near-death experience. And to me, like, that's the best data we could like.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:15Mayim Bialik?

  But also when someone's coming in, you don't want to be like, oh, also sign this thing in case you die because we want to know what you see. But that's, that is, yeah. So if 30% of, let's say, cardiac patients who die, who come back are reporting that.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:27Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  And what happens is that the ego death on psychedelic trips can happen without a near-death experience. Do you think that 30% of the time, a near-death experience creates the same effect in your brain that an ego death on a psychedelic trip creates?

• 43:43Mayim Bialik?

  So there's one case study.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  There is one.

• 43:45Mayim Bialik?

  There's one case study of a guy who had a near-death experience and also has done DMT.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:50Mayim Bialik?

  And I would implore you to look up this Venn diagram because it's fascinating.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  And this one person's report has a particularly interesting result.

• 43:58Mayim Bialik?

  Correct. Because you see in this Venn diagram, the overlap of what happens when the default mode network shuts down, right? When you don't have that constant story of who you are and all the bad things about you, right? And then the overlap, though, is where does it become supernatural? Where does it become purpose-driven? Where does it become, oh, also I met God, right? It's a fascinating Venn diagram and it's indicating the things that we can study, right? We know what DMT, roughly, we know what DMT is doing chemically. Can we try and code from that what it's doing spiritually?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 44:34Mayim Bialik?

  Right?

• 44:34Speaker 02

  What an interesting scientific experiment that would be if only we had more than a sample of one.

• 44:38Mayim Bialik?

  Well, NDEs and DMT overlap is like, it's a pretty, it's pretty small.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty small.

• 44:43Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  So that, that, that's for future research.

• 44:45Mayim Bialik?

  Again, it's a darn IRB. Like you can't just, you know.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Can't, can't live without it.

• 44:50Mayim Bialik?

  No, exactly.

• 44:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, there's something when you're describing yourself feeling like yourself.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:56Jonathan Cohen?

  At this age, even though we know our physical body changes, you know, what is that? Is that memory? Is it simply?

• 45:02Speaker 02

  I bet it's memory, but I defer to, I defer to the brain scientist.

• 45:06Mayim Bialik?

  He doesn't like when people defer to me.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Oh, I like when I defer to you.

• 45:10Mayim Bialik?

  Look at that face. It's like she's here all the time talking about it. Go ahead.

• 45:13Jonathan Cohen?

  I, that's not what I was gonna say at all.

• 45:15Mayim Bialik?

  When you think about the person you were when you were four.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:18Jonathan Cohen?

  But there's, there's a couple of options, right? There's memory, right? But there's also this sort of intangible animating force that we have that for lack of a better world word, people call the soul.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Isn't that interesting? I do not feel something beyond memory that connects my past to my present. Memory is sufficient.

• 45:37Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Memory is enough.

• 45:39Mayim Bialik?

  But can you have memory before you have conscious memory? Can you have non-verbal memory? Can you have pre-verbal memory?

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Great question. I do not.

• 45:45Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, think about when your mom held you for the first time.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Right. I do not remember that and therefore I know it happened.

• 45:51Jonathan Cohen?

  But there's something imprinted, so the same way.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 45:55Mayim Bialik?

  Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 45:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Mind the physics for us. The theories, the out-there ideas.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 46:03Jonathan Cohen?

  For a notion that we all have this energetic resonance. For example, you just said, you had a different word for it, sort of what's coming off of us, right?

• 46:13Speaker 02

  A field.

• 46:13Jonathan Cohen?

  A field. So imagine that this field, this is how I imagine it. The field is around us and it's been around us since the time we were very young, right? And just the way that a mother holds a child is imprinted in that field.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Ah, I see what you're saying.

• 46:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Her field interacted with your field in a way that stays with you in some way. It's not the cellular memory. It's something even beyond that.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  In the physics of it, that interaction was only at that time. Once that moment passed, once that event of my mother holding me as a baby passed, those fields separated. The electrons, the, the, the electric field, things like that, that all separated. If that influenced me in some other biological lasting way, for example, if the overall sensory experience of not just the electromagnetic field, but the touching, all that sort of thing, was somehow there and it went into my, my body and then into my brain and it stayed there, right?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  That might be the sort of the difference between zero and three months when there is a mom there and there isn't a mom, right?

• 47:28Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and the field, I can't imagine operates independently of all the other systems of the body. So as the field is influenced, it will influence the other parts of the body and another field impacting your field will then change the nature of your field that you then carry forward.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  On a very short time scale.

• 47:49Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  In the same way that I am affecting your field today, but I won't tomorrow, right?

• 47:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, you may, right? Like my memory of this conversation.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Right. But that's not because of my field. It's because of what I made of the field which then got imprinted into me afterwards. So in other words, some small stimulus can create a very large lasting response in a more complex system.

• 48:13Mayim Bialik?

  But think about also the body keeping the score when you think about trauma.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  The trauma aspect is actually very interesting to me because when we're trying to establish the behavioral or the psychological consequences of short-term physical actions, right? It is very reasonable to expect that there was some sort of physically lasting thing. But we as humans know that our realities are not purely physical and they're not constantly physical. Just as we were saying, you know, the cells in my body have radically changed and grown and are very different from when I was as a kid.

• 48:50Mayim Bialik?

  Your bone structure, yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Right. So what has stayed, right? And therein lies, I think, a lot of the question. If you think that it has all stayed in imprints in our brain, okay, that's one thing and you can try to test for that. If you think that it's also in our bones or in our muscles, then you have to test for that too, knowing that those things have changed quite a bit in the past several decades. And then if you think that there is something else that's even more permanent that we can't sense yet, then you have to test for that. And I think there is the point where we are limited in our science. We cannot test for that yet. Is that fair?

• 49:27Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I think it's fair. I think that. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, trauma is an excellent example. And, you know, we've spoken to Peter Levine, you know, people who believe in somatic experiencing, which is a method by which, it's a therapeutic method by which you reenact, right? Movements that echo to your nervous system, trauma that may have occurred. And what's interesting is, you know, you know what happens when animals have trauma? They often will shake, right? They'll shake it off and they'll keep going. They'll often have a very elaborate, you know, freeze response, which is only elaborate internally, right? They have a freeze response, that's sort of, you know, helplessness response, right? So they're like, oh, leave me alone, I'm not that interesting, right?

• 50:10Mayim Bialik?

  But I think that the notion that when, you know, I'll say a mammal. You know, when a mammal is threatened, the brain does a very specific thing and it gets it prepared to run, right?

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you're talking about like the adrenaline reactions?

• 50:26Mayim Bialik?

  Correct, the adrenaline reaction. And I think there's, there's other features, but what we often see is in people with chronic pain, people with fibromyalgia, people with lupus diagnosis, right? You have a lot of these kind of chronic pains in muscle groups that, that in many trauma circles, people say it's because you were not allowed to sort of release this memory from your body, right? So methods like somatic experiencing are having your body kind of go through psychologically traumatic experiences to let your body complete the act of wanting to escape. So if a child is abused and they cannot run, right? That as an adult, if you're having these kinds of symptoms,

• 51:07Mayim Bialik?

  sometimes facilitating the body releasing can release a lot of pain because your body is holding.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Which is also a form of time travel where you're revisiting something that hasn't really been resolved.

• 51:19Mayim Bialik?

  Or your body is keeping the score in a completely other timeline. And a lot of the people that we speak to, a lot of our listeners, have these kind of experiences where there's trauma that seems to lodge itself and there is some process of, yeah, like revisiting it somatically, which, you know, is again, very complicated.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  It is. Let me, let me relate that to playing piano. If I were to have to think consciously about where I put every single finger every 16th of a second, I would not be able to produce music on the piano, right? Not to mention, I'm also stepping on the pedals, I'm moving the rest of my body a little bit back.

• 52:00Mayim Bialik?

  You're also feeling things.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Feeling things, I have emotion attached to it. It's very complicated. But because I don't have to think about all the things all the time, I can sit down and play a piece on the piano. And that works great, right? Doesn't work so great for improvisational jazz, but it works great for that. But even in improvisational jazz.

• 52:17Mayim Bialik?

  I can't improvise.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  You still, you can, you just don't feel you're good at it.

• 52:22Mayim Bialik?

  Correct, a lot of crying.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a lot of just practice there too. And even in those cases, what the, the great jazz folks, aside from practicing their cadences, you know, their, their solos, what they actually do, for example, is no specific things that they will always add. A one particular tryout or this particular act. And they just assemble them in some way that feels good to them at that time.

• 52:43Mayim Bialik?

  Not really, not really improvisation.

• 52:45Jonathan Cohen?

  No, they have a grab bag, right?

• 52:47Mayim Bialik?

  Sultans of Swing, those are not like, you know, like Sultans of Swing, he practiced that before. That wasn't just how it came out the first time.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Right, so those practices are combined with a muscle memory, a physical memory, which now I ask, is the memory of me, right, playing that scale, you know, in D major or whatever, is that a muscle memory? Or is that a brain memory that actually I can withdraw it and pull it and put it to my muscles at any time?

• 53:20Mayim Bialik?

  So relate it to trauma.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, imagine I have experienced a trauma and it, it, it leaves an impact in my brain in such a way that that brain is sitting there, it's just sitting there. And that pattern is inflicting all kinds of bad stuff going in my life. It causes my brain to behave in a certain way. Can I release that in a way that is as constructive as me playing a beautiful piece of music on the piano? That sounds like a way of, this particular kind of therapy you just described, sounds like a way of trying to access that kind of memory.

• 53:56Mayim Bialik?

  Right, well, and complete it, right?

• 53:58Speaker 02

  And complete it, right.

• 53:58Mayim Bialik?

  Because the idea is like, you can just stay in that loop and the brain knows how to do that very well because unfortunately.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Or fortunately, right?

• 54:06Mayim Bialik?

  Right, it just, well, it's a redundant system, you know, it'll keep finding that, that path. We did an episode on rejection sensitive dysphoria and I was like tippy typing and learning and researching. And in the course of the episode, we actually talked about improvisation because I've played the piano since I'm four. I played the trumpet in jazz band and when it would get to my solo, because we would each be given whatever it was, like 48 bars, I would just stand there holding my trumpet shaking.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  No kidding.

• 54:28Mayim Bialik?

  And the teacher would stare at me and she'd be conducting away and I'd be like, I'm not gonna play, I cannot. And rejection sensitive dysphoria explained it as it's a, an often physical sensation that is brought on by the fear of rejection or failure or criticism. And it can be crippling. And I was like, these are three letters that explain so much in terms of the story that we tell, right? About what happens if.

• 54:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Why didn't you write yourself a solo?

• 54:59Mayim Bialik?

  I worked with a very particular director who was infamous for improv. We've talked about him here before. And I literally said to him, you will have to write me my improv lines because I will not be able to do. And he did, he wrote me my improv lines.

• 55:12Jonathan Cohen?

  No, but I'm talking about as a kid playing your music.

• 55:14Mayim Bialik?

  You often didn't know what piece you were gonna do that day in jazz band. Or sometimes they'd take out a new piece and it would be like, we're doing Nights in Tunisia and you're gonna solo like you're Miles Davis. It didn't happen. Anyway, sorry, I just took a very long roundabout to get to rejection sensitive dysphoria.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Jazz is awesome on all kinds of levels.

• 55:31Mayim Bialik?

  But, but the thing that I was thinking also with piano, if I get stuck in the middle of, let's say, an elaborate piece, I often cannot pick up where I was.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Right, you gotta start back about six or 10 measures and then go there.

• 55:43Mayim Bialik?

  This reminds me of trauma because people will get stuck. And what does their brain do? It goes back to the first or worst.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 55:50Mayim Bialik?

  Right, you can't improvise past it.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  That's awesome. I mean, how, how can we use that insight in things like therapy or in testing brain activity, right? Can we see that if it is rejection sensitive dysphoria, can we train our brains not to be dysphoric and not to be sensitive to rejection?

• 56:15Mayim Bialik?

  They've tried a lot of pills on me, it doesn't seem to go away.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  That I have to ask you about because I understand that medical interventions for mental health are much less repeatable than things for physical health. In other words, a, a medication that works well to help somebody's mental illness will not work well.

• 56:38Mayim Bialik?

  Johann Hari talked about this too. Also, there's a lot of placebo that goes on as well. With SSRIs in particular, which just letting everyone know, there's a lot of research that was not actually accurate. But yeah, benefited the pharmaceutical company.

• 56:50Jonathan Cohen?

  And more environmental context, right?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 56:52Jonathan Cohen?

  What's happening in our lives.

• 56:54Mayim Bialik?

  That's that internal world that's harder to measure.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Yes, right. I had heard a hypothesis, which makes sense to me, which I'd, I'd like to know if there's more study about this, that part of the reason that that is true is a defense that our brains have. Because if we were able all to be affected by the same chemical in the same way, we would be like bees and ants and termites where a single chemical signal will make everybody do exactly the same thing. But because our brains are so complicated, that is prevented. And it's both magningly frustrating when you're trying to treat disorders and it's also deeply liberating because that means that you can't tell me what to do,

• 57:39Speaker 02

  even if you feed me this drug, you know?

• 57:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Unless you're meta and the algorithm.

• 57:46Mayim Bialik?

  The idea is, are there things about the genome that can actually reveal who's gonna do better, right? And it shouldn't be that hard with everything we like, if we can map, everything that we can map, that is the next step, especially in mental health care to say, who's gonna respond better to an SNRI than an SSRI? Who is predisposed to a kind of hypomania that if you add an SSRI, guess what, you're gonna become suicidal, right? Are there ways to code for that before? Because every human who's tried one of these medications were guinea pigs, right? Like, let's see what happens now. Oh, you're gonna be nauseous for two weeks, then you'll just hate your life so much that you'll wanna switch pills anyway, right? But anyway, that feels like the next level in mental health care.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Does that feel right? I mean, it feels like such a neat thing to be able to think about.

• 58:34Mayim Bialik?

  It's gotta be something that we can start chipping away at. But I think in the same way, yeah, I think that's, what is the best way to treat trauma? What is the best way? And, and I think it, you know, kind of loops back to what we've been talking about the whole time. There are certain things that are at a level of complexity that are much harder to quantify and qualify, right? There's so much subjective experience, whether it's aliens, whether it's mental health, whether it's the perception of time, these are incredibly complicated things. It's a wonderful time to be alive.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  It really is. And Jonathan, when you said that the environmental effects are huge as well. Yes, imagine you put in an SSRI into a person's brain, but the person's in environment A as opposed to environment B. What is gonna be the effect? That we still don't even know yet because the environmental effects on our human brain, and by environment not just being like chemicals going in, but also like the people around you and the spaces and the safety or the whatever, huge, huge effects, right?

• 59:29Mayim Bialik?

  Interoception, like that's the new hot, so the notion, so like, you know, the way that you know you have to pee.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 59:38Mayim Bialik?

  Right, so there's, there's stretch receptors and you can explain it with spindles and all these things. It's an interoceptive sense that certain individuals, and there's a lot of research in autism about this, there is certain awareness that has gone beyond much of our detection that seems to be indicating kind of an emotional homeostasis.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 59:58Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, that interoception is like, this is the new thing, what your organs are feeling and experiencing. And look, fascia, they used, right? Neil Thiess was the one who said, guess what? Fascia is not just some like hippie thing that people like to massage. There's a communication in your entire body. So I think this relates to interoception as well.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Does that have to do with like the vagus nerve and things like that?

• 1:00:17Mayim Bialik?

  Well, everything's the vagus nerve, but yes.

• 1:00:20Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, Mike Levin was talking about being able to communicate. He's building an AI interface where you can basically monitor how your organs are feeling.

• 1:00:29Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:00:30Jonathan Cohen?

  And, and how they're interacting with one another.

• 1:00:33Mayim Bialik?

  That's the future, he says.

• 1:00:34Jonathan Cohen?

  That's the future, and he says it's within. A few years where they've already built the model and now they're trying to commercialize it down to being able to be portable and available and cheap enough. So you'll be able to say, in a language that we can understand, you know, my liver, I did this, this day, and I had this amount of food, but overall, I've had, you know, if I look at my nutrients over the course of X period of time, now my liver is, has this level of happiness function, ability, or is angry about this sort of thing.

• 1:01:06Mayim Bialik?

  He said you'll pee in the toilet in the morning and you'll get a readout that says, here's where you're at. There's too much protein in your urine, there's, you know?

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Well, we already can measure whether there's too much protein.

• 1:01:15Mayim Bialik?

  No, but I meant from what you get one readout of all these things.

• 1:01:19Jonathan Cohen?

  And what we're gonna start to then be able to do is start to isolate the variables that are far too complex right now to be able to track, right? So it's like, what am I eating? But also, what is my emotional state and how is that emotional state being impacted on a physi-- how am I interpreting that emotional state? Because no two people's emotional state will deliver the same physical impact.

• 1:01:40Mayim Bialik?

  Valerie reminds me, Dr. Nikolai Kukushkin, every cell in the body has the potential to store memory, not just the hippocampal cells, right? That the whole body, right, contains this kind of information. We could talk to you forever, and I hope that we get the opportunity to speak to you again. This has been such a fantastic conversation.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 1:02:00Mayim Bialik?

  Where can people find out all about you, the research you do?

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  My podcast, separate from other stuff, is The Luniverse, L-I-U-niverse.

• 1:02:09Mayim Bialik?

  Adorable.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  That's, I claim no credit. I always thought it was a little too self-serving to name a podcast after yourself and attach it to the universe. But my kids actually said, and my wife too, so I trust them. We've had that, that just, we just wrapped up season five, so we're gonna try to get to season six. So you can always find me at The Luniverse.

• 1:02:29Mayim Bialik?

  Got it.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  And various social media channels. And then I've been involved for a bunch of years with the Rubin Observatory, very Rubin Observatory, now the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. So there's a lot of stuff about my papers and the kind of science that I've been doing about that. And then, just find me. I mean, I'm around. I'm generally findable, just type my name into some search engine or something. And I'm sure some large language model will spit out 99% incorrect stuff.

• 1:02:57Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you so much, really such a pleasure.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  You're very welcome. Thank you both. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:03:06Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that I really did appreciate about our conversation is so many times, we sit across the table or across the screen from incredibly credentialed, amazing, just experienced physicists and philosophers, but a lot of times, when we talk about NDEs, when we talk about spirit, there's a look that comes over them like, okay.

• 1:03:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Here we go again.

• 1:03:30Mayim Bialik?

  Here we go again, and let me explain it. But I really appreciated the openness with which he presented the possibility that there may be things that we don't understand, and the job of science is not to close the door on them, but also not to leave it wide open.

• 1:03:45Jonathan Cohen?

  You know what I appreciated? The further and further we went into the interview, the more we were able to acknowledge the complexity of systems that can't be broken down into the very simple parts in order to be measured, right? There's a level of complexity in terms of how the brain pattern matches, and what's actually happening, and why we react certain ways. And when we think about our environmental influence, one of my favorite parts was actually him considering and what he added to the conversation about the notion of the mother holding the child. While he was saying, oh, it only lasts for a moment, my belief or thought was, it actually lasts a lot longer. And his explanation was that it lasts, maybe because of the interpretation and the imprint

• 1:04:29Jonathan Cohen?

  that it, that it has on the rest of us, and then the complexity of that system. So it does take people from all different backgrounds to come together on some of these ideas, even when their backgrounds almost preclude them from wanting to see someone else's idea.

• 1:04:46Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, and I think that's what struck me, and like, I've never talked about Peter Levine's somatic experiencing with a physicist, but I felt like this was a safe place to do that. Because I think it's, I think it is all related, you know? It's all different ways to get at the same kind of thing.

• 1:05:02Jonathan Cohen?

  This is a safe place, and you know what else is a safe place?

• 1:05:04Mayim Bialik?

  Substack.

• 1:05:05Jonathan Cohen?

  The Breaker community is actually one of the safest places on the internet. The comments there on lives are continuously striking, so impressive at people's insight and respect for one another. People see each other in the comments and are there week upon week. The community of people who are interested and curious and open, and also with slight questions and challenges, being like, well, have you considered from this perspective? It's really been a delight. If you want to check it out, MindBee Alex Breakdown on Substack.

• 1:05:36Mayim Bialik?

  Or beealec breakdown.substack.com. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.