Pod Insights On with Kara Swisher Music, Consciousness and the Power of Connection About this episode How should we understand the relationship among sound, consciousness and a healthy mind? It has to do with the power of connection, not just to other people but the world around us.
In this episode of the Hacking Longevity series, Kara talks to Dr. AZA Allsop, an artist and psychiatrist who runs a lab at Yale that studies how music and sound can affect mental well-being and the power of connections we feel with other people.
Later, she talks to science journalist Michael Pollan, author of A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. He goes deep on what makes the brain work, and he has some very interesting thoughts on whether machines could become sentient.
Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher.
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Transcript 11,076 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:12 Kara Swisher? Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. One of the simplest things someone can do to live longer and be healthier is to have connections with other people. This is clear, not just with chatbots, but actual human beings. This is something we talked about a lot in the series I did for CNN, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, and it was the single most important thing people can do, which is interactions with people, with actual people. And the deleterious effects of things like chatbots, which are frictionless and sycophantic, they are not good for your health, no matter what people tell you. It is not the way to solve loneliness in any way unless done in conjunction with being with more human beings, which are the most important thing for everyone's health.
0:57 Kara Swisher? The idea of connection has come up again and again in my reporting, as I said, about longevity and aging, and it's the focus of this episode of Hacking Longevity series here on the podcast. Coming up later, we'll talk to one of my favorite science writers, Michael Pollan, about the mysteries of consciousness. He's been writing about this for a long time. We'll discuss what he learned about finding connection, not just to others, but to the much wider world, when he set out to understand what it even means to be conscious. It's actually a big topic. But we'll start with the connective power of music and its role in longevity, music and sound, really. The science here is super interesting, and I'm excited to talk about it with Azia Alsop. He's an artist and psychiatrist who runs a lab at Yale University that studies how sound affects the body and mind.
1:42 Kara Swisher? It's something we also did in the series. Scott and I went to a sound bath. It's really interesting, and I'd like to know more about the science behind it, so we're talking to him. He's an MD, has a PhD in neuroscience, and also teaches meditation, yoga, and music. So he knows the science as well as the art, and that's critically important. You'll like this conversation, so stick around.
2:18 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.
3:05 Kara Swisher? Azea, thank you for coming on, on.
3:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with you.
3:10 Kara Swisher? This is a lot about health and longevity and things like that, but I wanted to talk to a lot of various people, not just doctors and scientists and experts in that field, but others. And you're a very musical person. I know you play several instruments, you sing. Talk to me about how music fits into your life, maybe even example of how it fits into your life today, if one comes to mind.
3:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, music is central to my life. As an artist, it's how I find my self-expression, my creative identity. It's also how I create experiences for people to come together. As a scientist, I view it as a really important way of figuring out how the brain actually works, the principles, and how we can leverage that for health. And then, as a clinician, I see its role as being central to how we can deliver treatments to people, particularly in collective environments. So when I talk about the arts and I talk about music, I talk about it as my own creative practice and identity formation. But I also talk about it as a powerful tool for health and the science that we do.
4:08 Kara Swisher? So talk a little bit about that. You know, there's a long time sound longevity connection. And in my series, I did get into a sound pod. And the science is still not there, although there's lots of studies. And of course, historically, there's been a lot of different ideas of how music fits in with people.
4:23 Speaker 01 You know, everyone has that experience of connecting with a powerful piece of music, or the experience of having a grandmother, a grandfather, a parent who is in dementia, and playing a certain music activates a new sort of cognitive and emotional landscape for them that's not activated.
4:39 Kara Swisher? Sure does, yeah.
4:40 Speaker 01 And so I think what we're finding out is that music is actually one of the most powerful stimulators of the brain, in terms of network activity across many different parts of the brain. And it also directly stimulates the autonomic nervous system.
4:53 Kara Swisher? Mm-hmm.
4:54 Speaker 01 And this is the part of the-
4:55 Kara Swisher? Explain for people what that is. I know, but go ahead.
4:58 Speaker 01 Yeah. So the autonomic nervous system is the part of the brain that controls a lot of the functions that we don't have to think about, like breathing, or your heart beating, or your digestive system. And it's really important in terms of the state that our body is in. So people have heard about fight or flight, or rest and digest, different states the body is in to deal with challenges. And what we've seen is music can activate the system in a way that promotes restoration and healing, not just at the molecular level, but also at the emotional level, at the psychological level. So what we do in my lab, and many of our collaborators do, is to ask, how can we use the tools from neuroscience, and the tools from psychiatry, to really understand how this works?
5:37 Kara Swisher? Mm-hmm.
5:38 Speaker 01 And then use that to not only have people be able to treat symptoms, but to have them live a healthier life. So this looks like looking at very specific features of music, particularly in group settings, recording things like EKG and EEG, and asking, how does the brain actually function and change when individuals are engaged with music, so that we can get to the level of science that allows us to become like a mainstream way that we think about holistic health.
6:02 Kara Swisher? Exactly, so talk a little bit about some of the experiments you're doing. But why don't you describe first a bit more what's happening in a person's body and brain when they're listening to certain types of sounds or music. It can modulate heart rate, that's a big part of it. But what else is happening physiologically for people to understand, rather than I just happen to like this and I feel good?
6:20 Speaker 01 So, an example of an experiment that we've done is that, you know, everyone has the experience of being at a concert or being at a show, and that feeling of connection you get with other people who love this artist or is familiar with this music compared to when you listen to it by yourself in a room. We wanted to get at what's actually happening in the brain that leads to this feeling of connection with music. And so we did an experiment, collaboration with a great colleague, Joy Hirsch, where we brought people into the lab and we hooked them up to a machine called a functional near-infrared spectroscopy machine. It allows us to read brain activity from both people as they're interacting.
6:54 Kara Swisher? Right.
6:54 Speaker 01 And so we had some trials where they could see each other and interact, no talking, just visual inspection of each other. Then we had other trials where it was opaque, so they couldn't see each other. Then we were playing specific features of music, looking at chord progressions as one. And then we had a control condition where we took all the frequencies and we mixed them up so that there was no longer any chord progression. And what we found is when people are interacting and we play this chord progression, we're actually able to activate a very specific network in the brain that involves the part of the brain that is feeling. So how you feel sensations, when someone touches you or feeling your clothes on your back. This part of the brain is actually more active when people are interacting and you play this specific chord progression.
7:36 Speaker 01 And the increase in activity in this region, as well as another region of the brain called the angular gyrus, was increased as people felt more connected. And so for the first time, we have a mechanism for how a specific feature of music, chord progressions, activates a very particular network in the brain when people are interacting to help them to actually feel more connected.
7:57 Kara Swisher? From a health point of view, when you're, when that happens, because there's all manner of things happen then, cortisol, all kinds of stuff, right? Because I even did, even though it was cringe for Karen Swisher, a sober rave, and everyone looked very happy. And it was, but it was, I just, I'm really an awkward person, so that's the way it goes. But they were having a great time. Talk about what, what happens socially versus alone, for example? Because you can have very meaningful interactions with music by yourself. I often do. Like when I'm walking or whatever.
8:29 Speaker 01 So one of the things we're discovering now is not only are we seeing unique networks in the brain being activated during social contexts that aren't activated when you're not, but certain elements of the same part of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, are really changing when people are together. And one of the things that we're discovering is this idea of autonomic synchrony, which is saying that my autonomic nervous system and your autonomic nervous system can sync up with each other and start firing in the same way when we're in contact with each other and we're interacting. And something like music actually facilitates this process and leads to more synchrony.
9:04 Kara Swisher? So heartbeat, breathing?
9:05 Speaker 01 Exactly, exactly. And not just the heartbeat, but even the intervals in between the heartbeat. So more parasympathetic drive, or the part that helps us to rest and digest, that part of the autonomic nervous system for both of us is going to start behaving more and more similarly. And so there's this idea, like, when you look at, you know, Amash, or when you look at people at a rave, and they're all being entrained by the music, and the same frequency, their actual bodies and nervous systems also become synchronized. And that, we think, can have really incredible effects on health and wellness and that feeling of connection to others.
9:41 Kara Swisher? So how is it that music primes our rest and be in a more meditative state? And what's the actual mechanism for people to understand it?
9:48 Speaker 01 So we're still discovering the details of the mechanism, and it's likely not just one mechanism is what we're seeing, because music is acting on all these different areas of our physiology. But, you know, what we've seen is when you passively listen to music, the music is still getting into the brain and it's still affecting you. For instance, you might have had the experience of being in a room where music is playing in the background and you find yourself tapping your feet, or kind of nodding along, even though you weren't really paying attention to it.
10:15 Kara Swisher? You're not listening to it.
10:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, because it can directly just get into sort of the cerebellum and these parts of the brain. Well, what we're finding is when we bring a mindfulness to music listening, so bringing focused attention to the sound or focused attention to my breath, or even open awareness of sound or open awareness of sensation, that actually puts the brain in a different state that now activates new parts of the brain with the same musical input. And again, going back to the heart and how the heart functions is like one of the more critical readouts of the autonomic nervous system. We see that when you have music with mindfulness, you can have different effects on heart rate variability and how the autonomic nervous system is functioning compared to just music alone or just mindfulness alone.
10:58 Kara Swisher? And what's activating them together, the mindfulness and music?
11:02 Speaker 01 So we see frontal and temporal parts of the brain becoming more activated. These are involved in things like prediction, memory, emotional control. We also see that certain metrics in heart rate variability, particularly this idea of the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps the body to rest, that that metric becomes higher when people are engaged in music mindfulness compared to just being with other people or just listening to to music alone. So it seems like particularly engagement of the parasympathetic nervous system is increased when you have certain kinds of music, not all kinds of music, but music that has certain features that can support that mindfulness activity.
11:42 Kara Swisher? Right, so if you, as you study more, what applications of it can you imagine? There's probably all sorts of interactions where music would be beneficial for people, as you noted, who are lonely or socially anxious.
11:53 Speaker 01 So you can imagine individuals who have long-term anxiety and depression, these sorts of engagements can be ways of managing those symptoms and keeping them at baseline without having to take necessarily a pharmaceutical
12:05 Kara Swisher? Right.
12:05 Speaker 01 agent. We've seen in individuals with dementia in their caregivers, this can improve quality of life and lead to reduced state anxiety and reduced distress. We've done some experiments to see enhancements in working memory after listening to certain kinds of music. And there are also people who hear voices that use music to help reduce the impact of those.
12:28 Kara Swisher? You call it autobiographically significant music? Music, right? Especially with people with dementia.
12:32 Speaker 01 Yeah. So what we're finding is that music that has autobiographical salience is able to really engage the nervous system in a way. And so they can activate certain memories and certain core parts of our psyche that aren't able to be accessed without music. And this can have particular importance later in life, especially when individuals have conditions like dementia.
12:55 Kara Swisher? Does that last? I mean, am I going to be in a chair staring and suddenly someone will put on Frozen and that'll be that? Because my kids listen to it 900 times a minute. Is that, is that how it works? Or does it last? Or is it just that momentary remembrance, I guess?
13:10 Speaker 01 That's a great question. So in most of the cases, it seems to be largely confined to the context in which they're listening to the music. So even after you take off the music, sometimes people will still be more verbal and still more expressive for some period of time. But usually, without the music, you know, they sort of go back to sort of a more, a space where they aren't able to recall those same memories and have more limited, you know, cognitive and emotional space. And so understanding like, how do we improve on the ability of something like music to activate these memories over a longer term is part of the research that we're really interested in. Through understanding the mechanism of how autobiographical music actually affects brain
13:53 Speaker 01 activity, we can then get at your question and ask, how can we make this something that even lasts after the music has gone away?
14:00 Kara Swisher? Could you unpack a little more of the science here? When you study these things, how do you wire people up? What are you measuring? And how are you showing the connections?
14:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we use a few different tools to measure different aspects of the physiology. So one of those tools is electroencephalography, EEG, where we can measure specific frequencies and brainwaves from the central nervous system largely. We also use functional near-infrared spectroscopy. It's another neuroimaging technique that allows us to look at brain activity and where in the brain certain signals are coming from. Then we use electrocardiography, so looking at EKG. This tells us about the heart rate, heart signal, how it's changing. We follow respiratory rate, how their breathing is changing. And then psychometrics, how is a person feeling in a given moment? How are they feeling before? How are they feeling after?
14:49 Kara Swisher? Is there any measurements that are more important? Is it heart rate or seeing cortisol calmness?
14:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
14:54 Kara Swisher? Obviously, and are there musics that really don't work? That are like bad, besides bad music?
15:00 Speaker 01 Like a very simple rule, for instance, music with higher tempo, like over a hundred and forty beats per minute or a hundred and sixty beats per minute.
15:06 Kara Swisher? Give an example, like what song? Like a well-known song?
15:10 Speaker 01 So like, uh, maybe YMCA or We Are Family is like a higher beat song. Would not be good for trying to relax or do focus attention. But it would be good for a more energetic or motivation activated form of activity. A lot of the research has been around like classical music, and that seems to be really good for relaxation and at least some kinds of classical music for some cognitive ability. And we've done work with jazz and hip hop to show that some of that music can be, you know, also really relaxing and therapeutic.
15:41 Kara Swisher? I find hip hop, my older sons love hip hop, so I listen to it. I mean, I hear it a lot, but I find it to be very meditative. I don't know why it affects me in that way.
15:50 Speaker 01 I mean, oftentimes, for instance, in hip hop, you have instrumentals are very repetitive. They loop through the same chord changes over and over again. So, you know, all of those kinds of features we see in some meditative music. And so part of what we ask is, what are the important features? How can they be spread across different genres? And then, yeah, might there be certain genres that are specifically, you know, good for certain outcomes? Right now, it seems like it's less about maybe the specific genre and more about how specific features are maybe used in different proportions in different genres.
16:22 Kara Swisher? Right. So you also study psychedelics. How does that fit in here?
16:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think psychedelics are a part of the transformation of our, our healthcare system, particularly in psychiatry. And they work, you know, different to many of the models that we've had traditionally in psychiatry. These are medicines. Exactly. These are medicines that act on the serotonin to a receptor and seem to have really tremendous effects on not only our physiology and plasticity in the brain, but on psychological outcomes like PTSD, depression, end of life anxiety. And so there's a huge, I think, opportunity. For psychedelics to inform how we treat a number of different neuropsychiatric conditions, but also to think about how we age, how we expand the capacity for our
17:10 Speaker 01 lives during aging. And there's certainly a role for music and the arts within the context of psychedelic medicine, both within dosing, but also preparation and integration.
17:20 Kara Swisher? Obviously, there's a lot of recreational use of, say, ketamine and things like that, which I think is a little more, it's the sort of like recreational use of peptides. You're sort of like, why don't you go to a doctor? Because a lot of these things could be quite dangerous if badly administered. For this show, I took ketamine, and there was a very big focus on music that was playing at the time. It had to be a specific kind of music. When I was in a medical setting, which was interesting. I did not like it, but that was a different reason. I also wasn't going in with a problem with trauma or anything like that. But I found it alone, not lonely, but alone. And I didn't like being alone. I felt very alone. I could see why, if certain people were facing certain things, you could, it could help a lot. But where is that now? Because it goes in and
18:05 Kara Swisher? out of popularity. Obviously, a lot of people are trying to push it hard. A lot of tech people are. In this, I do not disagree with them in some things. But talk about where it has to go, because, you know, obviously, the Nixon administration did a job just demonizing all of this stuff, when there was some very promising studies happening back then that were shut down. Where are we now in that, as you study this? Is there more money for it? Is there still more nervousness around it, whether it's LSD, or ketamine, or mushrooms, or whatever?
18:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's both and. You know, I think I'm in a community in which this is much more central to the conversations that we're having, and how we're thinking about research, how we're thinking about transformation of our healthcare system, transformation of our culture. But more generally speaking, I think there's still a lot of fear and bias, and rightfully so. I think there are lots of things that happened in the 50s and 60s and 70s with the use of psychedelics, both knowingly and unknowingly, that
19:05 Speaker 01 You know, generated a lot of anxiety and fear about about how they could cause harm. But I think it's also clear that they have tremendous potential to heal. And a lot of the data that's been being generated from the biomedical system has been really at the forefront of of changing public opinion. A lot of the work with veterans and the tremendous experiences that they've been having with PTSD and
19:26 Kara Swisher? Trauma survivors.
19:27 Speaker 01 Their symptoms and management, yeah, and trauma survivors have really started to, I think, shift a lot of the public discourse around the potential for psychedelics.
19:36 Kara Swisher? Right, absolutely. Is there any one of them that you think is the, in doing these studies, the most promising from your perspective?
19:42 Speaker 01 MDMA and psilocybin are sort of the compound. Although MDMA is not classically considered a psychedelic, it's it's often thought of in that same conversation. And both of them, I think, have the most evidence kind of behind them within a clinical sort of biomedical context. But there's also a lot of, I think, interest in LSD, ibogaine, DMT, 5-MEO, DMT. I think psilocybin and MDMA are the ones that sort of have the most clinical evidence behind them currently.
20:10 Kara Swisher? Beyond recreational use in terms of in the lab and so on, yes.
20:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, within a research clinical context.
20:15 Kara Swisher? Those are going to continue.
20:16 Speaker 01 Well, I think that's another fear, right, is that as these become more invoked clinically and endorsed more from a research and clinical perspective, is that it opens up then a more permissive environment for recreational use where the harm and the risk is a lot higher than in a clinical setting.
20:32 Kara Swisher? Well, it's already, that that that ship has sailed, I think, on lots of levels. I used to live near Berkeley. It's sailed a long time ago. So getting back to sound and music, when you when you look at the American medical system, music is not a part of it, aside from your lab. I mean, I don't think I've ever heard music except bad elevator music at a doctor's office. But where does it fit in and where should it be fitting in?
20:55 Speaker 01 I think music has often just been seen as art, as entertainment. Now, when we look back in history, even in the early
21:03 Kara Swisher? Historically.
21:04 Speaker 01 Greeks, Hippocrates and Pythagoras, they were already thinking about music as a way of shifting nervous system activity and as an early form of medicine. When we look at traditional healing systems across the globe, music is an integral part of it. But in our westernization, you know, art and entertainment became something separate from science and healing.
21:27 Speaker 01 In our education systems is very scattered. There's no core curriculum that's taught widely around medical schools. It's certainly not something that I learned about in medical school or residency. So I think that lack of training also, when physicians start to practice, they don't have any models. They don't really know what the evidence is for different kinds of musical engagements. And so a lot of the work we're doing with our colleagues is to ask, how do we take the evidence that's there? And begin to teach medical students, teach residents the evidence and the model. So that when they are practicing clinicians, they understand how to integrate these things. And as there's more and more clinical trials and more and more evidence, I think it will have to become more and more mainstream. And there's a huge now arts and health movement to support that.
22:12 Kara Swisher? So one of the things the series is examining is what stands in the way of getting better science to more people, rather than a small, select group of people. And I can't imagine there's a CMS billing code for playing harmonious chord progressions. What would it take to make this a bigger part of the system?
22:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I think you touched on one of the things right there up front, which is like, how does this fit into our payer system? How are physicians reimbursed?
22:37 Kara Swisher? Because that's all that matters, you know, how we get paid. But anyway, that is all that matters. I have doctor relatives, this is their number one complaint, is the CMS billing system.
22:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think, you know, at the end of the day, hospitals are set up as businesses for most of them. And so there's a bottom line, there are these things that have to be, you know, part of the consideration. So I think that's part of it, is payer systems and the kind of evidence that they're looking for. And how can we provide that for them? I think one of the things I mentioned before, but training systems, who, how are we getting this evidence and information to the people who are actually going to be on the front lines and have to implement it? Then patients, how do patients understand what music is doing? And why it's not just entertainment or intuition, but that there's a real biology there, you know? And so we try to actually work across all these different domains.
23:30 Speaker 01 One, working with policymakers, working with payers to present the evidence and to understand what kind of evidence they Need to adopt and show how it can lead to cost savings. We do training and curricula for development for medical students and residents so that they can learn. And then we think about how do we get the information to the community? Cause they're not going to come read my paper, as proud as I am of having published it, you know?
23:52 Kara Swisher? How is it received when you do that? I mean, obviously the first thing a doctor's gonna, oh, that's ridiculous, right? Like, I'll just hand them a pill.
23:59 Speaker 01 So, no, actually surprisingly, what I've found is that most of my colleagues are also intuitively aware of this because they've had their own personal experiences with music.
24:09 Kara Swisher? Right.
24:09 Speaker 01 And many of them are actually musicians. And so when I come to them, I start talking to them.
24:12 Kara Swisher? Yeah, they are. A lot of doctors are.
24:14 Speaker 01 A lot, yeah. So when I start talking to them about music.
24:16 Kara Swisher? Brothers in a band, yeah, yeah.
24:18 Speaker 01 There's something intuitively that resonates with them. What's been missing is the physiology, the biology, and really understanding that there's a medical biology that we can tap into, that music is is powerful modulator of. And so it actually resonates very well with physicians when they see the evidence for this kind of work because it maps onto the experiences they've already had. They've already talked to patients who they know use music to to help them. And same thing when I talk to people in the community, they already want more arts. They don't want to go to, you know, the typical clinical setting in in many cases. And they would love to see arts integrated systems. They would love to understand how they could access psychedelic assisted therapy in the community. And so I think all of these things are actually resonating very strongly with both people in the community
25:04 Speaker 01 as well as with the physicians that I interact with.
25:07 Kara Swisher? Yeah, it's interesting. In some ways, in reductive science, the kind of science that breaks complex things into simpler problems has struggled to explain how the brain works. I don't know if you necessarily agree with that. How do you see your work fitting in to that problem?
25:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I will say that, you know, I was I was trained within the system. So I I honor the value of being reductionist and what it can teach us. I mean, we've learned a lot of cool things about how the brain works and how the human brain functions through that. And it's clear that within that framework, we're missing some vital pieces of information, which is what has been, I think, one of the challenges in translating. And so I think understanding how to study things in more complex, naturalistic environments is adding on to this body of work that we've had, you know, all along. Understanding how the brain is functioning differently in social context, real life, social context versus the kind of isolated experiments that we've had in the past
26:04 Speaker 01 is now adding on to this body of literature and we hope giving us the information that can help us take the next step to actually be able to make progress on the mental health crisis and the loneliness epidemic and the polarization crisis.
26:16 Kara Swisher? So the last question for you, it's singing as part of it because it's listening. Is that something you're studying at the same time?
26:23 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So this brings up the importance between passive and active music. And what we found is that, and what has been found in the literature before is that active music tends to be the most powerful way of modulating the system. Singing is a really strong form of active music because not only is it, you know, there's some motor component, but there's also the actual vibrational quality of the singing. And there's a sensory motor entrainment of listening and producing at the same time. We've also done active music with drum circles and playing the drums can also have like a very powerful effect.
27:00 Kara Swisher? In doing, in making music itself?
27:02 Speaker 01 Yep, making music.
27:04 Kara Swisher? Drums, yeah, yeah. Anyway, this has been really fascinating, AZA. I really appreciate it. Your work is really interesting and I hope more people start to pay attention to it going forward.
27:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, thank you for having me on and I always appreciate the opportunity to talk about this important topic.
27:24 Kara Swisher? We'll be back in a minute.
27:33 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription-based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international affairs,
28:16 Kara Swisher? climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. Plus, The Guardian wants to emphasize they're not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube starting May 13. When we talk about connection in health and wellness, we're often talking about connections to other people, but feeling connected to the broader world around us is part of it too. And my next guest has gone deep into that part of it with a study of consciousness and what it means to be conscious. Michael Pollan is a science journalist who's written many bestsellers about food, about psychedelics, and so many topics. He's a brilliant guy. I've known him for years.
29:01 Kara Swisher? I have so much regard for him as a journalist, a thinker. He's a beautiful writer. He's very funny. There's nothing he doesn't do beautifully, and he's never high-handed about it. As you'll see, he's a terrific person. And he really puts his finger on important ideas right as they're about to take off into the zeitgeist. And I feel like he's from the future. He comes back and writes about what's about to happen. And his most recent work is A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, published earlier this year. He has some great observations about the mind and what it means for it to be healthy. And he's got a lot to say about how we should think about sentience and AI, which is something I'm excited to talk to him about. Michael, thank you for being on On.
29:42 Speaker 02 Pleasure to be here.
29:42 Kara Swisher? This may be a strange place to start, maybe, but I want to open with a question about psychedelics. In this new book about consciousness, which we talked about in our previous interview, your previous book, you began with a story about having taken mushrooms and becoming convinced the flowers in your garden were sentient. Tell us the story and explain how it fits into your exploration of consciousness. And then I'd love your definition of consciousness.
30:04 Speaker 02 Sure. This book was inspired by my psychedelic, my research trips that I took for How to Change Your Mind a few years ago. And two things happened. One was this powerful conviction that the plants in my garden were conscious, that they were returning my gaze, they had agency, they had a point of view. And then there was a more general thing that happens, I think, to most people who take psychedelics, which suddenly you defamiliarized consciousness. You're aware of it. It's not as transparent as it usually is.
30:37 Kara Swisher? Right.
30:38 Speaker 02 I describe it as smudging the windshield through which we perceive reality. And suddenly you realize, shit, there's a windshield, which wasn't really clear to you before that.
30:49 Kara Swisher? Right.
30:50 Speaker 02 And so that got me interested and set me down this path of like, what do we know about consciousness? And specifically, I did look at this plant question trying to test that insight. I mean, because the value of psychedelic insights is really up for grabs. I mean, you could dismiss them as drug experiences.
31:07 Kara Swisher? Sure.
31:08 Speaker 02 Or you could say they're coming out of your subconscious or some other place. Or maybe they're true. And William James wrote about mystical experience. And he said, we can't actually judge for sure whether they're true or not, these encounters with the divine or whatever. So what we have to do is see if the insight is useful and then test it against other ways of knowing. And that's essentially what I did. I went down this deep rabbit hole.
31:33 Kara Swisher? Down the path from this one experience. And sentient, you were talking about human-like, correct? More than?
31:39 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, I I make a distinction between sentience and consciousness that I think is really important. Sentience is a more basic form of consciousness. It's it's merely awareness of your environment, an ability to sense changes, good or bad, and respond intelligently to them.
31:58 Kara Swisher? Alive. People use it to...
31:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, this may apply to all living things. I mean, this may be true for single-celled creatures. You know, bacteria have chemotaxis. They they recognize good and bad molecules and can gravitate toward the food ones and away from the toxin ones.
32:15 Speaker 02 But I think plants have it, have this quality. It doesn't include all these bells and whistles that human consciousness has. A self-awareness, the fact that we're not just aware, we're aware, we're aware, a sense of self as this continuous, you know, presence through our lives. So, and in terms of definitions, very simply, a conscious experience. If you're having an experience, you are conscious.
32:46 Speaker 02 You could add to that more elaborate elements, like having a sense of interiority. But I think conscious experience is good enough. A very common one in the field, both among the scientists and the philosophers, is Thomas Nagel, the NYU philosopher, in the seventies, wrote a wonderful essay called "What is it like to be a bat?" And he basically said, "If we can imagine it's like anything to be a bat, a creature that navigates the world through sonar rather than light, then that creature is conscious, even if we can't exactly say what it's like."
33:21 Kara Swisher? Or they can't articulate.
33:22 Speaker 02 Or they can't, yeah. But you don't need reportability for that.
33:25 Kara Swisher? Right.
33:25 Speaker 02 So, you know, your toaster is, you know, it's very hard to imagine it having experience, that it's anything like to be your toaster. We've been in this interesting process of kind of democratizing consciousness. Um, you know, it was only a few years ago that we kind of admitted to ourselves that other primates are conscious.
33:43 Kara Swisher? Right.
33:44 Speaker 02 We, um, uh, and now we're, we're, we're saying that cephalopods are conscious and cetaceans are conscious and all, basically all vertebrates, we think now are conscious.
33:54 Kara Swisher? Do plants have consciousness? Did you ever come to the conclusion?
33:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, I, I decided they didn't have consciousness as we understand it, but they did have sentience. They were sentient beings. Um, you know, we used to think that, um, simple creatures like plants, not that they're so simple, uh, operated on instinct alone. And, you know, were pre-programmed to, to, to deal with what they had to deal with. But I think the, the understanding in biology now is that the environment is so, um, changeable that you couldn't fully program any creature to deal with every possible contingency.
34:31 Kara Swisher? Including trees, right?
34:32 Speaker 02 Including trees, yeah. They're all dealing with a shifting landscape. And so what, what evolution comes up with are these cognitive beings that can solve new novel problems. And that again, may apply to everything that is alive.
34:47 Kara Swisher? So that it's, it's not just philosophical, it's scientific.
34:50 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. There's, I mean, there's a lot of research going on around plant intelligence and consciousness. And, uh, and I kind of follow that.
34:58 Kara Swisher? So let's make it a bit more concrete. Give me some specific examples and have you tried to describe what scientists believe is happening in our minds, in our consciousness during these moments?
35:08 Speaker 02 Um, we really don't know. Um, you know, the quest to understand consciousness, the modern quest, scientific, it doesn't really start till 1990 or so, 1989. It's remarkably new and it was considered a, a kind of a forbidden topic in science.
35:24 Kara Swisher? Because.
35:25 Speaker 02 It would ruin your career. It was too vague. The problems were ill-defined. But then Francis Crick, who had of course co-won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA and the, and the, and how heredity worked, uh, thought for his next trick, he was going to solve consciousness. And the way he approached it is, is the way suggested by your question, which is let's find the neural structures, the, the specific neurons or networks that generate subjective experience. And he realized pretty quickly that even if you found those, and we have not found those, it wouldn't tell you what you want to know, which is how do you get from
36:08 Speaker 02 matter, you know, these three pounds of tofu-like substance between our ears to mind? How do you cross that gap? There's something like 22 fully fledged out theories of consciousness, which, you know, tells you the field is flailing.
36:25 Kara Swisher? Right. Is there one that compels you more?
36:28 Speaker 02 I would say yes. There's a line of theoretical analysis with some good empirical backing that I find persuasive. It doesn't quite get you to a full theory of consciousness, but it gets you closer than we've been. And that is the idea that consciousness begins with feelings generated in the body. And this is a real departure from the assumption that it was a cortical process. You know, the cortex is the most recent, most human, most advanced. It's logic, decision-making, abstract thought. Surely consciousness comes from there. But the thinking now, and this is research begun by Antonio Damasio, the neurologist,
37:11 Speaker 02 but picked up more recently by Mark Soames, is that the inaugural act of consciousness are feelings like hunger, thirst, cold, itch. Yeah. And that the body essentially is speaking to the mind about falling out of homeostasis. And so consciousness begins where these, they're called interoceptive signals, enter the brain, which is at the upper brain stem. And if that's where consciousness begins, that argues for lots of animals being conscious because they have brain stems. So it begins with feeling and these homeostatic feelings, and then the cortex gets involved.
37:55 Speaker 02 So you feel hunger, and then the cortex helps you imagine some counterfactuals of how you might satisfy that desire.
38:03 Kara Swisher? Right.
38:04 Speaker 02 So.
38:06 Speaker 02 So when they talk about feelings as the beginning of consciousness, people like Demasio said, these feelings are spontaneously conscious. But that's not really an explanation. That's just kind of an assertion.
38:19 Kara Swisher? Right, yeah.
38:19 Speaker 02 Where they get stuck is like, okay, there's a feeling, but who's feeling it? How does it, you know?
38:25 Kara Swisher? How does it end up into an action?
38:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:27 Kara Swisher? Like, when you follow a stream of thought to somewhere unexpected, we don't know what's happening there, correct?
38:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, getting to the contents of consciousness, we're kind of lost. There's some interesting work going on, but it's very hard to understand what's going on. And also, how a thought passes from our unconscious to our consciousness. I mean, most of what the brain does is not conscious, right? It's a great automatic machine. It's monitoring your body, all your vitals, keeping them in the right range. It's picking up lots of sensory information without you being aware of it and making decisions without us knowing it. So the interesting question is, why should any of it be conscious? Why aren't we zombies? Why don't we just kind of automate it all?
39:12 Kara Swisher? Right.
39:12 Speaker 02 And the reason goes back to what I was saying about sentience is that, you know, in a world that's incredibly complex and changing all the time, you couldn't program all the appropriate responses.
39:23 Kara Swisher? Now, for this book, you engage in all manner of strange experiments, and I've done the same with reporting about aging and longevity. So have you, actually. Some of them are hokum that I did, but in a way, it's a way to learn about it and understand it and why people are doing these things. I want you to describe one of these experiments you ran on yourself where you needed to record your own thoughts a certain number of times a day. Explain how it worked and what you learned with that.
39:46 Speaker 02 So I was interested in the contents of consciousness, as well as the form and how it gets generated. And I found this guy, this psychologist at the University of Las Vegas, named Russell Hurlberg. And he has been spending the last 50 years doing what he calls experience sampling. And you wear a beeper and you've got a little earpiece and it's a little box you keep in your pocket or on your belt. And at random times of the day, it sends a very sharp beep into your ear. And you're supposed to write down what you're thinking at that moment. What is the thought you're having? And then you collect about five or six of these over the course of the day. And it's a very weird experience wearing this thing because you're hyper self-conscious.
40:30 Speaker 02 It's like, what if it goes off now?
40:33 Kara Swisher? Right.
40:34 Speaker 02 What am I thinking?
40:35 Kara Swisher? You're thinking about it going off, right?
40:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, constantly. So, I mean, there's a problem right there. See, then you have this long Zoom session with him where he runs through the beeps and asks you questions. And so you'll say, uh, and there was one beep I had where I was seasoning the filet of salmon and, and walking into the fridge and I'd put the salt on it. And then my, at the moment the beep went off, I was thinking to myself, shit, pepper. I forgot to put the pepper on, so I was taking it back. And, um, so that seemed really clear cut. It was a verbal thought and this is what it was and this is when it happened. And he said, well, did you hear that pepper or did you speak that pepper? Um, so the voice in our heads, are we identify with it or is it talking to us? I had no idea.
41:23 Speaker 02 And so, um, I also had a lot of trouble disaggregating a thought from the context, from what just happened before, from the smells when I'm standing in the bakery, you know, buying a coffee. So I said, so what have you learned after 50 years?
41:40 Kara Swisher? 50 years, yeah.
41:41 Speaker 02 Yeah. Basically, he said, well, we don't know that much about what we're thinking. Um, we assume we're all verbal thinkers, that our minds, our consciousness is, is a, is made of words. But it turns out that some people, many people, um, their consciousness is more visual when they're thinking. And other people have kind of unsymbolized thought. And even among the verbal people, um, some people think in fully formed words and sentences. And some people think in these kind of wisps of language. So it's interesting. We have different styles of thinking and we have this word called thinking. And we think it describes the same phenomenon in all of us.
42:24 Speaker 02 But in fact, it's an umbrella term and what thinking means to you may not be what it means to me.
42:31 Kara Swisher? Yeah. Now, let me ask you something else. Psychologists who came up with this descriptive experience sampling has been doing it, he said, for decades. Do you have a sense that your experience is typical of other people who've done it or not?
42:45 Speaker 02 You know, a journalist who had read the book just did it with him. Um, and he had similar experiences. I think I was particularly bad at um, separating out one thought from another. They all kind of mushed together in my head. In the end, Russell concluded, and this was kind of funny, that um, uh, I was part of a small group of people that didn't have much internal thought at all.
43:14 Speaker 02 And that my interiority was sparsely furnished.
43:17 Kara Swisher? Oh, wow. That's like, what?
43:19 Speaker 02 You know, it was ridiculous, though.
43:21 Kara Swisher? A Kia living room or something? A Norwegian living room? Norwegian wood. Um, one more experience I wanted to ask you about being fully, freshly present to the universe, as you put it, uh, at a retreat where you lived in a rudimentary cave and meditated deeply. Um, describe that and how it helped you come to some sort of understanding of consciousness, given how empty your mind is, uh, from, according to this psychology.
43:45 Speaker 02 Well, I undergo a kind of shift in the course of my exploration of consciousness. Uh, for most of it, I approached it like the, the classic Western male thinker. We've got a problem. What's the solution? Um, and, you know, we have powerful abilities to focus, right? What's called spotlight consciousness, you know, where we, we're blinders and we rule out lots of things and we narrow the aperture in a way that is very good for getting things done and solving problems. But it also eliminates a lot of peripheral vision and things like that. And I realized I had gotten so focused on like, what's the solution to this problem of how consciousness comes about?
44:26 Speaker 02 That I was not as conscious as I could be, that I'd given up a lot and that I could think of consciousness as a problem to be solved, or I could think of it as a practice. That we have this incredible gift, which is this private space in our heads that no one can tell us what to think, that we have total mental freedom to think whatever we want.
44:48 Kara Swisher? Sure.
44:49 Speaker 02 But we're not using it. And so that's what grew out of all this meditation I did in the cave and, and, and looking at the stars and. And just realizing, okay, you know, maybe we'll solve this problem of consciousness at some point, but in the meantime, we're really squandering it.
45:06 Kara Swisher? Squandering, yeah.
45:08 Speaker 02 And we should, we should take it back. We, we need to kind of reclaim the space of interior.
45:13 Kara Swisher? It's hard.
45:14 Speaker 02 It's really hard. Technology is.
45:16 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
45:17 Speaker 02 I mean, you know, the algorithms are hacking our attention.
45:18 Kara Swisher? Yeah, the life of the mind is much harder to have. Although I have to say it was before. I went on an outward bound once where you go on those journeys by yourself. You know, you're out sitting in the woods. And I looked up at the beautiful stars and I was sitting there and all I could think of was I would like some graham crackers. And I literally was like, what is wrong with you? I was hoping for deep thoughts and instead it was like, my graham crackers would taste delicious right now. And I could not get the thought out of my head.
45:47 Kara Swisher? We'll be back in a minute.
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46:28 Kara Swisher? So let's move into artificial intelligence and how it fits in here. So the idea of artificial intelligence and whether it can have a consciousness is all through the book, which is why I loved it. In Silicon Valley, it's widely accepted. The answer is yes, AI can maybe, will achieve consciousness. It's their artificial general intelligence.
46:44 Kara Swisher? You don't think so, and I don't think so. And many smart people also don't think so because it's a reflection of our thoughts, all of, all it has, but can it make new ones? It's always based on our thoughts, no matter how they slice it. They never came up with it originally itself. So talk a little bit about this.
47:02 Speaker 02 So you, you know, if you ask a chatbot, are you conscious? They've been told to say they're not.
47:07 Kara Swisher? Right, right.
47:09 Speaker 02 But you can jailbreak that, you know, fairly easily and start a conversation and then back into the subject of consciousness. And suddenly it'll tell you it has feelings and, and many people are fooled by this. We know this. People get into these deep emotional relationships. It's no wonder that we can be fooled by this because the whole human conversation about consciousness and feelings is part of the training data set.
47:36 Kara Swisher? Sure.
47:36 Speaker 02 So it knows how to talk the talk. Um, it would be very interesting and, and Susan Schneider has, has proposed this. Build an AI from the bottom up and exclude from its training set. All mention of consciousness, all feelings, no novels, no poetry.
47:56 Kara Swisher? Right. Cause the minute you get Shakespeare in there, you get violence, right?
47:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:59 Kara Swisher? Anger.
48:00 Speaker 02 And then try to have a conversation about consciousness with it and, and my guess is it would not learn how to talk in a way that sounds conscious to us. You know, the, the, nobody has this problem with, uh, what is it? Alpha fold, right? Thinking it's conscious. It's just a machine and what it knows is proteins.
48:18 Kara Swisher? That's all it knows. So there's a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst named Mark Salms from South Africa. He spent some time with, he's trying to build feelings into an AI agent. Explain what that even means and what you made of it.
48:30 Speaker 02 He has a, a project to make a conscious AI and he let me sort of be a fly on the wall for a while.
48:35 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
48:36 Speaker 02 And it's essentially a game and there's, there's an avatar in it. And he believes feelings arise when you have conflicting desires or incommensurate desires. So you're hungry and tired. What are you going to privilege? What are you going to deal with first? So he's trying to subject this avatar to these desires that can't be easily averaged or reconciled.
49:02 Kara Swisher? Right.
49:03 Speaker 02 And he thinks at that point it will generate a feeling.
49:08 Speaker 02 I mean, I think it's crazy. If, if it claims to have a feeling, it's not going to be a real feeling. I mean, a feeling is rooted in the flesh. You have feelings because you're vulnerable. You have feelings because you can suffer and feel pain. And I think our mortality is tied to our feelings.
49:27 Kara Swisher? Absolutely.
49:28 Speaker 02 I mean, think about, if you knew you were immortal, you would just ignore all sorts of feelings in your body. They wouldn't matter because.
49:36 Kara Swisher? If you couldn't be killed or hurt.
49:37 Speaker 02 Exactly.
49:38 Kara Swisher? You have to add on extra things, right? Or you'd never be hungry.
49:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:42 Kara Swisher? If you removed all that stuff, for sure.
49:44 Speaker 02 You might still have pain, but I don't know that you'd have suffering because you you could, you know that, oh, whatever, this is just noise. I'm I'm gonna live forever. So why would a machine have feelings? Why would it need to have feelings? They are for all intents and purposes immortal.
49:58 Kara Swisher? Yeah, they're not a meat sack as as Elon Musk's favorite sci fi show did. We don't have meat meat holes or meat tubes, which are throats and stuff like that. So why why is there this obsession with the idea of consciousness in machines?
50:13 Speaker 02 Well, I don't know, because it there's no money in it that I can see. I mean, you know, there's a lot of money in in making machines intelligent. And intelligence and the the other issue here is is intelligence and consciousness have an orthogonal relationship. They're not.
50:29 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
50:29 Speaker 02 We all know people who are conscious without being particularly intelligent. And it isn't automatic that as these machines get more intelligent, they will get more conscious. Maybe it would happen, but it's not it's not implicit in the in an intelligence.
50:46 Kara Swisher? So mimicry is what you're talking about. And I think Darian Modi was, I think, at the Robic just, there's a lot of feelings happening. And I'm like, well, they read Shakespeare. Of course they have feelings.
50:55 Speaker 02 Well, exactly. But his comments are very interesting. I mean, he he seems sincerely to believe that Claude is anxious. And he's given it the right to end human conversations that make it uncomfortable. So, you know, they they do say spooky things.
51:16 Kara Swisher? You know, my theory, I have this strange theory of why these men think this. Because they can't have children. They can't physically make children. This is their children. And I think everyone understands, even if you're a misogynist. Childbearing is miraculous, right? It really, truly is. It's astonishing even to me, and I had a kid like that. But I think they can't make children, and this is their version of it. So it has to have a consciousness.
51:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's very interesting.
51:45 Kara Swisher? It's just mimicry. It's just, it's just, it's just Pinocchio and not the boy.
51:50 Speaker 02 Right.
51:51 Kara Swisher? Now, there's an interesting point Psalms raised, and you explored in the book, about the ethics of how humans would interact if AI did indeed have feelings.
51:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. If it had real feelings, there would be moral questions. I mean, if a machine could suffer, we would have introduced into the world a lot more suffering. And the question of do we then owe the moral consideration? I think by normal human moral standards, the answer would probably be yes. But, you know, when I read all this concern, especially in Silicon Valley, about, you know, how are we going to deal with the morality of, you know, of these suffering beings we're creating? There's so many humans we haven't extended moral consideration to. Silicon Valley prefers to deal with the abstract future than the present, right? What's right here, right? There's an escapism to it.
52:44 Kara Swisher? Well, think about how they behave, like.
52:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, the bunkers.
52:47 Kara Swisher? Peter Thiel just moved to Argentina.
52:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, I just saw that. Or the obsession with interplanetary travel. It's, I, see, I see it all about transcendence of the mortal flesh. This idea that, you know, if you're, if you're rich enough, you can buy anything. It seems unfair that you have to die. You should be able to buy your way out of that one.
53:08 Kara Swisher? It's at the heart of my thing. So talk a little bit about where this is going then? And if there's this idea that they are going to have feelings, and all, all of them think it does. They, I think they have to.
53:20 Speaker 02 I mean, there are two issues. What, one is whether they're really going to have feelings and be conscious. And the other is whether that matters because we're going to believe they do. I think it was a really fateful decision, and I don't know who made it, to have chatbots speak to us using the first person. And, you know, in our language. I mean, we were bound to anthropomorphize them at that point. That was, you know, in the history of this whole story, that's going to be a very big decision. It didn't have to be that way.
53:52 Kara Swisher? Right.
53:52 Speaker 02 And maybe that was began with Siri. I don't know when when that began or robot, you know, car, you know, science fiction robots.
53:59 Kara Swisher? Well, there is a lot in science fiction.
54:00 Speaker 02 Oh, tons, tons. What I say in the book is we're arriving at what I call a Copernican moment. In the same way that Nicholas Copernicus, when he demonstrated that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around.
54:14 Kara Swisher? Correct.
54:15 Speaker 02 It was a shock to our species and our sense of centrality. And it caused this kind of redefinition of what it means to be human. I think we're approaching a cliff where we're going to have to figure out, what does it mean to be human? What is special about us that these machines can't do and these animals can't do?
54:32 Kara Swisher? Mm hmm.
54:32 Speaker 02 And also, whose team are we on? Are we more like the machines that speak our language and we can talk to? Or are we more like the animals that go through a life like ours of being young and growing old and suffering and dying, even though we can't talk to them? Um, so, so who, who are we?
54:53 Kara Swisher? Right. Where do we fit?
54:54 Speaker 02 And I think that's the big question being raised. Um, and I think it's very interesting. It's happening in both realms, this idea that consciousness may be more universal in in the natural world. And then we have these machines making claims to be conscious also. I don't know how it'll come out. Um.
55:11 Kara Swisher? We'll go with the machines.
55:14 Speaker 02 I'm afraid you're right.
55:15 Kara Swisher? I want to bring this back to the main idea of the series, which is about longevity, lifespan, health span, which you just touched on. It seems this dream of tech billionaires that they can live forever with the help of AI and machines. Does that idea even hold water? Talk a little bit about the idea of wanting to get the soul, the soul of the machine.
55:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's the old idea of downloading your consciousness into a computer. And that's the immortality you have. The, the problem with that idea is it implies you can separate consciousness from the body.
55:47 Speaker 02 When we're, we're learning just the opposite, that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon.
55:52 Kara Swisher? Right.
55:52 Speaker 02 It all goes back to this idea that, um, brains are computers. And this metaphor is very powerful in our culture, um, but it doesn't bear close scrutiny at all. Um, so in computers, you have a very sharp distinction between hardware and software. Um, and the thinking is that consciousness is like software and silicon is like hardware or meat, or we have these meat computers as, as they like to call them. But in fact, in brains, you cannot disentangle the two. Every memory is both hardware and software. Um, you know, everything that happens to you physically changes the substance of your brain. Your brain is not interchangeable with mine.
56:33 Kara Swisher? Right.
56:33 Speaker 02 Because you've had different experiences. And, um, so the whole premise is that you could take consciousness, um, this pure, I don't know, digital cloud thing and put it somewhere else. But consciousness doesn't exist apart from brains and bodies. So I, I think it's a, you know, it's a dream of, of immortality. It's a dream of transcendence. And it's been fed by science fiction for a very long time.
57:03 Kara Swisher? Did you find any examples that would change your mind about that?
57:07 Speaker 02 No, I haven't yet. I mean, you know, we hear about these biomorphic computers that will actually have some living stuff in them. Um, you know, these things may become conscious. But it's hard to say. I mean, without a really working theory of consciousness that, you know, has some support, it, it's going to be hard to tell in that case, too.
57:29 Kara Swisher? What about the brain being mapped? The idea? Cause that, that is, to me, if I was a scientist, that's all I would study.
57:35 Speaker 02 Yeah. And there's a lot of effort to do it. It's so hard. So, you know, we liken neurons to transistors, right? Cause they're on or off.
57:43 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
57:43 Speaker 02 But again, that's, we're oversimplifying because transistors are also affected by chemicals. Uh, how hard, you know, how intensely they fire. I mean, you know, we, hormones, neurotransmitters, drugs, all affect what they do. They're also affected by waves. Um, so they're very analog, actually, even though they have this digital component. Um, and also a single cortical
58:07 Speaker 02 Neuron can be connected to 10,000 other neurons. I mean, the level of interconnectedness is so massive and so beyond anything we can imagine that those maps, which will be incredibly important when we get them down, but we're a long way.
58:25 Kara Swisher? So this is the last question. You've written a lot of zeitgeist stuff before they were that way. And you were delving into the food with the omnivore's dilemma, which, by the way, I recently reread. It so holds up. Back in 2006.
58:37 Speaker 02 I wish it didn't hold up.
58:39 Kara Swisher? Yeah, but it does. And so does eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And of course psychedelics, you were there early in How to Change Your Mind. You've just written about consciousness. What do you think the next thing that interests you is in this way? Because it's all around the body in some fashion.
58:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, the thing I've been thinking about since since publishing this book, and this comes out of my conversations with with readers on book tour, is this idea we discussed earlier, which is the fact that the sense that our consciousness is being polluted. And that between, you know, Trump, who who commands so much of our attention for so long in an unprecedented way. When did we let someone do that for 11 years?
59:26 Speaker 02 And then you have social media, obviously, and the problem of our attention. And now you have people forming these powerful emotional relationships with chatbots.
59:35 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
59:36 Speaker 02 So I think that people feel that their heads are just full of crap and they and they want to reclaim that space. And so how do you do that exactly?
59:46 Kara Swisher? Yeah.
59:46 Speaker 02 Obviously, taking breaks from technology is one way. Getting out in nature is another way. I think psychedelics is another way. I mean, you're with your thoughts and you're not with some algorithm's thoughts. And it's your own algorithm.
1:00:02 Speaker 02 So I think that
1:00:03 Kara Swisher? That's a nice way of looking at it.
1:00:05 Speaker 02 To the extent that there's a movement that is implicit in all this, it's that. It's like reclaiming this space of interiority.
1:00:13 Kara Swisher? Instead of changing your mind, reclaiming your mind. It's absolutely true. Anyway, thank you so much, Michael.
1:00:18 Speaker 02 My pleasure, Kara. Anytime.
1:00:23 Kara Swisher? Today's show was produced by Tracy Hunt, Emma McNamara, and Dave Shaw. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Our engineers are Jim Mackel and Steve Bone, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you have a richly furnished mental interior. If not, your mind looks like a college dorm. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday.
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