[Music] welcome
this is a series in which i am going to endeavor to put together
pretty much all of my work
my name is John Vervaeke i'm an assistant professor at the university
of toronto i'm in the psychology department and in the cognitive science
program and i also teach for the buddhism psychology and mental health
program i've produced a lot of videos on a lot
of various topics some of you have perhaps seen them
but what i want to do now in this series is draw it all together and present to
you a overall unified argument
and that can show you the interconnections between
pieces that you might have seen before now how this got started is
i got very interested in a particular phenomena i got interested in the fact
that there seemed to be a growing confluence
between people who are interested in buddhism
and people who are interested in cognitive science we'll talk a little
bit later as we go on what cognitive science is
but you know some of this already in the world at large because we're going
through what's called the mindfulness revolution mindfulness is being spoken
of everywhere i was in a bookstore yesterday chapters and there's a whole
section just on mindfulness itself so why is the mindfulness revolution
occurring well it's occurring particularly because of this
intersection between buddhism and cognitive science
but why is this happening and why is it you know so explosive in nature and what
do we mean by mindfulness some of the work i've done is trying to get clear
about that we're going to talk about that
in this in this series now there's also a lot of other things that in my mind
seem to be convergent with this growing confluence between buddhism and
cognitive science there is an increasing interest both
academically and in the public at large in the topic of wisdom
something that people did not talk about very much not that long ago
wisdom is now a very hot topic within psychology and cognitive science
and books offering to train you in wisdom are again becoming popular same
bookstore experience yesterday i bought my son a book called how to be a stoic
right this is a this is like how is it that a philosophical position from the
hellenistic era has become a popular book that people are seeking why is
there this hunger for wisdom and why are people meeting it with these kinds
of things the stoicism the philosophies of the
hellenistic period i'm going to talk about that i think there's good reason
for that of course there's increasing academic
and public interest in psychedelics i just gave a talk
earlier this week
yale about psychedelics and the increasing interest in psychedelics and
psychedelic experiences you're seeing radical things with them
people can be released from treatment resistant addiction
they can overcome post traumatic stress disorder like the
normal with the best therapy right
solution rate for people with post-traumatic stress disorders about
right you know things go really well 20 or so
you introduce psychedelics into the therapy and you can get the right the
healing rate up to 80 percent so
what's going on there why is there this interest there's an increasing public
interest which is matched by a huge academic in in the topics of
happiness now
we've always been a happiness-oriented culture
life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and so forth
right but it's taken a particularly
interesting turn the topic of meaning and meaning in life is coming to the
fore people and more and more talking about
not just sort of sheer contentedness but what it is for a human life to be
meaningful and it turns out that meaning in life is terrifically
important it's very predictive of well-being it's very predictive of how
well you are doing in your life in general so it is no wonder
that our people are seeking a note now my my contention and what i'm going to
argue is it's no coincidence that all of these things are happening right now
it's no coincidence this confluence between buddhism the mindfulness
revolution the interest in wisdom and ancient philosophies like stoicism the
increasing public interest in psychedelics and transformative
experiences and mystical experiences right the increasing academic
and public interest and meaning in life there's all a reason for there's there's
a unifying account for why this is happening
but there's another set of things this is sort of the light side of what
i'm talking about there's a there's this there's a set of dark factors that seem
to be converging as well right
we have what seems to be although they're you know people of disputing it
but i think the evidence is becoming clearer and clearer the cdc just
released some data recently we're going through a mental health crisis
suicide is spiking and it's right now there are some
socioeconomic factors but there's clearly other things that are at work right there's increasing sense
many people are expressing it of losing touch with reality
we encounter more and more often in individuals and groups nihilism
expressions of cynicism expressions of deep kinds of frustration
and futility you have the abandonment of trust in any
of our public institutions we're losing
right we've completely lost any sort of faith or trust in our political system
we're losing faith in our judicial system
right religious affiliation is declining
consistently throughout people's participation in
right clubs organization is in decline in general
and my co-authors on the book on zombies in
western culture the 21st century crisis
uh chris master pietro and philip mysevich we we argued
right that the this sense of being out of
touch has gone on with an increasing sense and we'll talk about this because
i'm going to use this term technically we're going to talk about this and
frankfurt's use of it there's an increasing
sense of more and more [ __ ] everywhere
pervading and if you take a look at the book we
actually chart how this has been spiking and it's concorded with all kinds of
other increases in these dark factors people are getting the sense that we're
spending and you can see this already in the public media but it's it's also
within the academic world that we're spending too much time in our virtual
environments there seems to be increasing evidence
for example of
right a connection between various social media
increased depression increased loneliness and then more in general and we'll talk
about how this shows up a little bit more implicitly it shows up in the
entertainment we seek and the mythologies we like like the zombies
we're going to talk about that why are zombies so big right why are superheroes
so big right now right
there's an increase this
these mythological and we'll talk about myth means these mythological forms
i'm going to argue are expressions of a cultural sense a sense that we're
stuck somehow one way you can note that is just by
noting how pervasive almost to the point of being a constant
factor in our background is people talking about crisis and collapse
apocalypse the zombie apocalypse the imminent collapse of civilization
all of these things are now pervasive they're taken for granted at one point
right the you know movies demonstrating this had to be sort of science fiction
they were considered radical right but now
this is becoming a pervasive background sense now i think all of these negative
factors also have a unifying explanation in fact what i'm going to argue
throughout the course of this series is that the positive factors and the
negative factors all point to
a unified explanation this is going to be an idea
that our culture is
experiencing a profound meaning crisis a crisis in meaning
now we're going to have to talk about what does that meaning mean no i'm not claiming that this is the
only crisis we're facing far from it what i want to do in fact is talk about
how the meaning crisis is interacting with other crises
the environmental crisis the socio-economic crisis
but in addition to those which are quite well discussed
in the public at large there is
a meaning crisis which is being discussed quite significantly within
academia but needs to be brought to the public at large because one of the
things i'm going to argue is that these three crises are not inter not
independent from each other they're interdependent in important ways
but what is this meaning let's
come into crisis why do we hunger for it how do we cultivate the wisdom because
that's what i'm going to argue wisdom is ultimately about
to generate enhance this meaning wisdom is about realizing in both senses of the
word becoming aware and making real
it's about wisdom is about realizing meaning in life in a profound way do we cultivate this wisdom what
does it mean and i'm not going to talk about that just practically i'm going to
talk i mean not just theoretically i'm going to talk about that practically as
well what are some practices that people can engage in and are engaging in to try
and address this need for the cultivation of wisdom
what role for example do do mindfulness practices play within the
cultivation of wisdom so here's the three questions that are
we're going to keep coming back to again and again and again what is this meaning
why do we hunger for it and how do we cultivate the wisdom to
realize it so some of the topics of course we're
going to be addressing are centrally the meaning crisis how did this kind of meaning evolve why
like what is it why is it so important to the evolution of our humanity
then more specifically the history of the meaning crisis why did it arise
what are the historical factors by doing that we'll get in a historical
account of meaning we'll get a sense of what this meaning is that has come into
crisis that people individually feel they are lacking or losing
in their lives we want to talk about connections
between meaning wisdom and importantly self-transcendence
it's going to turn out that this notion of self-transcendence again which we'll
have to develop and explicate is something that's a core need because it
performs core functions for human beings it's bound up with these ideas of wisdom
and of course meaning and along the way in fact right from the
beginning we're going to start to see that there's deep connections between
meaning wisdom self-transcendence and altered states of consciousness
why do human beings seek to alter their consciousness
in fact not just human beings other intelligent organisms seek to do this
right caledonian crows will tumble down roofs in order to make themselves dizzy
for no other purpose than to alter their state of consciousness what is
going on why does intelligence need
to be conjoined to an altered state of consciousness and why in particular have
human beings developed very sophisticated processes
for generating harnessing and interpreting
these altered states of consciousness we're going to talk about that in
connection with shamanism and ritual
we're going to talk about that in connection to the flow state this is
when you're in the zone and why people seek it and why it's so
powerful we're going to talk about it as i
mentioned in connection with psychedelic experiences
more importantly the mystical experiences that can occur
within some psychedelic experience because it turns out it's the mystical
experience that is more important and transformative but there's a subset of
those mystical experiences that are very
crucial these are awakening experiences
these are experiences in which people come back from
the mystical experience and say that
was somehow more real than this and i need to change my world i need to
change myself they engage in what l.a paul has called
a transformative experience what is also known as quantum change
a radical transformation of their lives and we know
we've got good research now showing that they're right
their lives get better after these awakening experiences we're going to talk about that in depth
and dare i say it maybe we can bring all of this together
and actually propose and and maybe some people will be
affronted by this but propose a scientific a cognitive scientific
account of what enlightenment is and why it alleviates the suffering from
lack of meaning that is particularly pertinent for us today but has always
been a perennial threat since the axial revolution now that means of course
we're going to have to also talk about topics that have connection with
the darker aspects as i said of meaning making
what's the connection because they're deep and profound
between this meaning making that is so central
and our endemic capacity for self-deception
for self-destruction there's a reason why
we are so awash in [ __ ] because [ __ ] is a perennial
threat to us self-deception is endemic that means it'll be important to talk
about foolishness
as something different from ignorance ignorance is a lack of knowledge
foolishness is a lack of wisdom foolishness is when your capacity
to engage your agency pursue your goals is undermined and threatened
by the self-deception and the self-destructive behavior
that is uh like a perennial vulnerability to your
cognition in fact what i'm going to argue is the very same machinery that
makes you so adaptively intelligent is the same machinery that makes you
susceptible to foolishness
that will take us into some of the topics
that are relevant to people's existential experience meaning crisis
topics like absurdity alienation
futility horror real horror
most horror movies aren't horror we'll talk about what horror really is and
what people experience when they're actually experiencing
horror their sense of grip on reality is being undermined
and people find that as you can imagine terrifying we're going to talk about
meaninglessness and why and why more people
experience this state the state
of despair and once we do that
right as we're moving into these kinds of
topics we will be moving gradually from the
historical account of the
origin the meaning crisis will give us some sense
from the history of what this meaning is
but we'll be moving into the cognitive scientific
study of cognition
the cognitive scientific investigation of meaning and meaning making
look when people use this word meaning
it's a metaphor they mean
there's something in their life that is analogous
to how a sentence has meaning the pieces fit together in some way they make an impact on your cognition
and connect you to the world in some way there's something about our lives that
is analogous to the way sentences have meaning we
have to unpack that metaphor what why is the metaphor used and what does the
metaphor point to when we talk about the meaning of our
lives how is it in fact that some of the most
meaningful experiences people have are precisely ones that are completely
ineffable to them that they can't put into words
what's going on we're going to have to talk about different kinds of knowing
some of them that have fallen off our cultural radar precisely because of the
meaning crisis we tend to have reduced all of the ways
that the ancients talked about how we know to one thing
to to know is to have a special kind of belief and so we are very belief-centric which
is why we are so focused as a culture on ideologies
but it turns out that we're going to have to have a much more expanded notion
of what knowing means there is much more to knowing than
having justified true beliefs there's the kind of knowing that's
involved in knowing how to catch a baseball
there's the kind of knowing of what it is like
to be having this experience right now there's the kind of knowing
that is
knowing what it's like to be in something you're participating in like a
relationship we're going to talk about all of that now of course some of you might be aware
of those other kinds of knowing because you know how integral and important they
are to therapy
which is another thing that is booming in our culture part of why it's blooming
is the meaning crisis part of why it's booming is because people seek out
therapy precisely because they're trying to recover these lost kinds of knowing the kinds of insight that is needed the
kind of transformation not of your beliefs
but of how you see things your sense
of self and your sense of realness have to be transformed often
in therapy that is why the psychedelics are so important
for therapeutic success because they transfer they transform these other
kinds of knowing we're going to talk about all of that
this will give us this will give us
a structural functional account of meaning what is the structure of it what
are its cognitive processes what are its cognitive mechanisms
how do they function how can they
fall into dysfunction we're going to have this historical
account and this structural functional account and we're going to make them
talk to each other they're going to inform
and constrain and enable each other
and from that dialogue what i propose audacious as it might
sound is a real response to the meaning crisis an awakening from the meaning crisis
that's what this series is about awakening
from the meaning crisis not in some ideological fashion
but in a profound transformative and existential manner so this is not something that i can do
simply because this is not a problem for which
there are simplistic answers if anybody offers you an answer to this crisis in
an hour i would wager that they are deceiving
you manipulating or they are themselves significantly self-deceived
there's a reason why we're stuck there's a reason why this is hard this is a
complex and difficult thing we are undertaking so this series is going to be several
videos long because i'm going to carefully and i
hope responsibly build an argument to try and show
how we can awaken from the meaning crisis
how that meaning crisis interacts with the mental health crisis how it
interacts with the environmental crisis how it interacts with the socio-economic
crisis now
this is my commitment to you i will always do my best
to offer rigorous
rational argumentation i will try my best to give proper
scholastic credit to other people please understand that i'm aware that
i'm not and nobody should be claiming to offer you the absolute uncontested truth
i'm going to offer you good arguments good evidence
but i don't want this to be an academic series
i do my academic work and i'm proud of it but this i want this to be for people
who are coming to this precisely because of
a genuine personal existential interest
so i will try to keep jargon and technicalities to a minimum
i will have to introduce terms to you and i hope to explain them carefully
along the way so my commitment to you
is to i i can't be unbiased
that's that's not a thing what i will try my best to do is to
present to you my arguments my viewpoints and why
i think they can be understood to be highly plausible
so i want to start with
how and why is this
meaning so so so much a part of our humanity why is it sowing in
uh to our humanity so much and
i think the thing that
we want to we want to understand is i have to start somewhere
right and that can be misleading because i
think and and one of my my co-authors philip misovich
this is something that he's very concerned with right i think this is a
continuum question i think the the deep connections between meaning making and
cognition go deeply back into our evolutionary heritage way before
uh our humanity but that's right so the fact that i'm
starting somewhere is not meant to indicate that this is the absolute
starting point what i want to do is point to
a time when many people think our humanity the kind of people we are
now came into form not fully
like the way it is now because of course there's been lots of historical and
cultural processes but the kind of humanity that we would
recognize as us and how much
this was bound up with meaning making in the way that i've been talking about
so this period is known as the upper paleolithic transition
it occurs around 40 000 bce now what's interesting about this
is that biologically as a species we've we had existed much longer than this
we existed about you know it of course there's some
controversy around this but conservatively since about 200 000 bc but around
again roughly 40 000 bce there's a change
a radical change now
again picking a pacific time makes it look
like there's this there's nothing before there are no precursors
some people have presented the upper paleolithic transition that way i'm not
doing that i think that's a mistake there's a continuum you can see it back
but at some point there's this radical change the upper paleolithic transition
you see things human beings doing things they're not doing before
they're making art they're making representational art
they're making sculpture they're making cave paintings
we have good evidence they start making music what else are they doing well we have some pretty good evidence
right that there's significant enhancement in
their cognition how do we know this
well we have the first use of calendars
obviously not with numbers and dates because numeracy hasn't been
invented but you have the symbolic representation of the phases of the moon
and the passage of days and so human beings are keeping track of
time across very abstract patterns so that they can enhance
their hunting abilities something else is happening which
again it's so intrinsic to our humanity we
right we're developing projectile weapons
we're developing projectile weapons so the neanderthals who are
contemporaneous with uh homo sapiens at this time
don't have projectile weapons their spears are thick shafted heavy stone
they're thrusting tools we know that they were getting in close
to their quarry because they have bone damage that's
similar to the kind of bone damage we see in human beings who are involved in
cowboy rodeos where you're messing around with large
angry mammals the homo sapiens do something different
they start to develop very thin
spears not with stone tips but with bone tip
and bone is much harder to use the point about these is right
they're very good as projectile weapons they're very light
and human beings develop the spear thrower
and sling and they start to develop the ability to carry multiple missiles and
project them at a long distance now that requires right
increased development of your frontal lobe area
which is going to turn out to be of course very important as we'll see for
enhancing your intelligence think about how deep this is in your
cognition this idea of like throwing right like
think about how you talk about how you have a project that you're working on right
project from your throwing or
people will talk about oh there over there there's an object
that means thrown against or i'm the subject that means thrown under
all day long cognitively you're throwing that's because this throwing task is
such a complex task i mean we take it so trivial that you
know there's a moving target and i throw something i can hit it but if you try
and build artificial intelligence to do that as the military is discovered that
turns out to be a really really hard problem
so there's the projectile weapons are developing the calendrics
the music the sculpture the paintings
right what's going on why is all of this stuff exploding now notice how
all of this is associated with different aspects of
what we mean by meaning obviously there's art and there's music
that's somehow meaningful but there's also time is being made more
meaningful it's being measured and understood in calendars and even time
and space are now more meaningful because they're being used right in this
highly dynamic way in projectile weaponry so what's going on
why did it occur well there's a lot of good work done by this
uh david lewis williams matt rosano's work
in his book supernatural selection i think is superlative
his articles like did meditating make us human
i got the pleasure of meeting matt
and he argues for what's going on at this time
is a radical change in human cognition that's in line with the work of other
people like michael winkelmann we know that before the upper
paleolithic transition about 30 000
up to 60 000 or 70 it's unclear because there's various times of what this might
be happening we know that we went a near extinction event human beings
almost went extinct we were crunched down
they think maybe to maximum of ten thousand individuals
we'd almost died off
part of it seems to have been the overall climactic change of the end of
the last ice age in africa part of it there's a super
volcano that goes off around 70 000 years ago not sure but what happens is
there's tremendous pressure put on human beings
they move to the coasts in general to try and survive
but human beings seem to have adopted an
interesting response to this
now first of all they diversify their diet and blah blah blah blah that's all
important we'll talk about that but what's really interesting
is that is the they don't come up so much with a technological response
because climate's too huge and too poorly understood they come up with a
sociocognitive response what human beings do is they start
creating broader trading networks you see because when you do that
you're not as subject to individual environmental variation
you have much more resources both in terms of what people can have
what kind of discoveries they're making and so what happens
is people start forming these much broader
trading relationships now that's very significant because it
opens up the scale at which human cognition has to operate
in an important way and human beings plausibly responded by
developing things that we see now as pervasive they developed a bunch of
rituals and we're going to talk a lot about why
ritual is so important for
dealing with
both the environmental challenge and the enhanced social network that
they were creating to deal with it by the way we're going to talk about
that a lot in this series how your cognition is very much participatory you
participate in distributed cognition large networks
of cognition meaning way before the internet networked computers together
culture networked brains together in order to provide some of our most
powerful problem solving abilities
so what are the rituals okay so you need various trading rituals
because the the thing you're doing now and again think about how this
you take this for granted in living in a city
it is the deep presupposition of civilization you hang around with
strangers lots of them
and that's just like oh yeah well it's not oh yeah that's a hard thing
other species don't do that so what's happening is we're getting
this shift we're having to interact with people
that are not in our kinship group in our hunter gatherer group
and we have to form relationships with them
so we start to develop rituals to that have the function of enhancing
our ability to come into communication and relationships of trust for
individuals that we do not personally know
you say okay that that's why you still do stuff
that makes no sense you meet somebody and like you do that you stick out your
hand and they grab it and then they move it up and down
right this is to show you have no weapons this
is allow the person to touch you to see if your hands are clammy or not there's
all kinds of intuitive stuff going on i can feel how tense you are most of us
don't pay attention to this stuff anymore
but it's there when you shake hands
when you ask how are you now again that has become trivial so we don't want an
answer how are you we don't well or somebody starts answering you oh no
but originally that reflects something because think about what important skill
has to be enhanced for these rituals
i have to be able to take your perspective
i have to know what's going on in your mind i have to know how you feel
i have to be able to move from a first person perspective to a third person
perspective really really well because if i can't do that
i'm not going to be able to trade with you
now that ability to take enhanced perspective on others
especially people that you don't know really means you have to develop ability
daniel siegel calls mindsight the ability to pick up on other people's
mental states and here's the thing as you start to increase your ability to
pick up on other people's mental states you increase your ability to pick up on
your own mental states and that of course is going to be part
of the origin of things like metacognition and mindfulness then the next
type of ritual you need it goes in the other direction the trade
rituals is how i deal with strangers the problem is now when i'm starting to
interact with all these people right
my commitment and loyalty to my group is now more in question than it used to be
in the past it could be taken for granted because you just were with these
people and they were with you all the time but now
if you allow me the word there's temptation from the stranger which of
course is now part of all of our myths the way the stranger can come in and
tempt us right
and so what do we do well we we create initiation rituals
rituals that are designed to show right
our commitment to the group
and those rituals often require risk threat sacrifice
now our rituals our initiation rituals have been very tamed down
right but
if you look back back in time these initiation rituals are often very
traumatic dramatic
people are put into situations in which they they might experience tremendous
pain or fear
we'll talk about some of these as we go through the series so
why like why make somebody go through pain and fear
because if they go through pain and fear that shows that they're really committed
to you they're really committed to your group but what does that mean cognitively what
does it mean for how the mind gets trained you have to really improve your
ability to regulate your emotion you have to really improve your ability
to call do what's called de-centering to
let yourself right be in the hands of other people a non-egocentric perspective
because what's important now is no it's not centered on you the ritual centered
on you but you through the ritual are being centered on the group so this is having again tremendous
impact on
your cognition now
there's a third kind of ritual that starts to emerge and it seems to have picked up on
these cognitive enhancements that the trade
rituals and the initiation rituals bring so i need to introduce an idea to you
that's going to become pervasive this is the notion of exception acceptation
now originally this is an idea from biology
but the work of michael anderson has brought it directly into
understanding how the brain operates how cognition operates
exception in biological terms is an evolutionary mechanism
so for example i'm using my tongue now to speak
okay tongues did not evolve for speech
if they did all the animals that had tongues
would be speaking at you and that'd be terrifying
especially your cat if your cat talks to you i'm sure that would be terrifying
so what did tongues evolve for they evolved
to move food around in your mouth they're
very flexible and they're poison detectors
so they have all this is your last defense right for poison yeah
right so they have all of these nerve endings so you have this highly
sensitive highly flexible muscle now just because of the way we evolved
this muscle is also in the air passageway because evolution
is not an intelligent designer you use the same tube for breathing and for food
very bad design but nevertheless that's how it is so
your tongue can interrupt your airflow flexible sensitive muscle that can
interrupt airflow that's what i need for speech so the tongue was exacted
evolution didn't have to make a speaking machine from scratch
it took something that evolved for one purpose and was able to exact it and use
it for another so
what michael and anderson and others are arguing is very often this is what the
brain does the brain will develop a mechanism
a little machine a set of cognitive processes for doing one thing
and then it will use how to learn how to reuse that for something totally
different we're going to talk about that repeatedly
through this series so what happens
is that these enhanced mental abilities that are coming out of the trading and
initiation rituals seem to be taken up into another set of rituals exacted into
that seem to be also pervasive
these are shamanic rituals these are shamanic rituals we know that
the ability to become aware of the mind right
to control the mind to control your emotions are being trained as i said
we know that human beings just because and we'll see more about this later just
because they're highly intelligent creatures with sophisticated
consciousness seek out altered states of consciousness in shamanism what you have is you have a
cultivated practice for altering
your state of consciousness that taps into and exacts this enhanced mind site
this enhanced ability to manipulate and control your mental state and your
emotional state now michael winkelmann's work shows that
pervasive through hunter-gatherer groups are
right shamanic individuals in fact the shaman is such
a pervasive historical figure
that i think you can make a good case that it
has become an archetypal figure something like you know the wise old man
so yoda and merlin these are all shamanic figures what we know about shamanism is that
they're the best best healthcare you're going to have for a long time
right and we'll talk about how and why that's
the case we know that if you've got a shaman in your group it's going to help
to reduce right discord within your group it's
going to enhance your hunting abilities of your group
now i i'm a scientist i don't believe in any supernatural abilities or spirits or
things like that so i seek an alternate matt rosano and michael winkelmann i
seek an alternative explanation of why are shamans so effective
what is going on and what i want to talk about is how
central shamanism
was to the upper paleolithic transition because a plausible case can be made
that it's the advent of shamanism that helps to explain how human beings
are capable of this sudden explosion in their cognition
this of course the thesis is the thesis of several people as i mentioned michael
winkelmann lewis williams and others
matt rosano because here's the issue
right it's not a hardware change the brain has
already existed for 160 000 years it's not changing
significantly during the upper paleolithic transition it's much more likely
that it's not a hardware change in the brain
it's a software change in how human beings are using the brain
and what part of what i want to argue is that shamanism is probably playing a
significant role in
that software change so now i need to introduce yet one more other term and
again this is going to be important this is the idea of a psycho technology okay so technology means the systematic
use of a tool this is a tool right here all right first thing to understand and this is
andy clark's phrase you're a natural-born cyborg your brain has
evolved across several species to use tools
in fact when you start using a tool even for a very short period of time your
brain will start to model it as part of your body
that is why you can do weird things like when you're parking your car you can
feel where the edge of your car is and all that sort of stuff you're a
natural-born cyborg you have evolved
to be integrated with machines look at me i'm a cyborg
look at this around me the only thing that's natural here biologically is
naked me everything else is a tool
everything else is these are tools i wasn't born with clothing i use this
in order to modify my ability to move through environments and carry stuff
around this is a tool this is a tool this is a tool
this is a tool these are tools now
what's interesting is that can be accepted your brain's ability to attach
to a tool can move off of a physical thing
onto a cognitive thing so a physical tool fits
your biology see fits your biology and enhances it
right i can leave permanent marks that i can't otherwise do biologically on this
board i have a bottle it fits my hand and i
can carry liquids around if i had to carry like that's the amount of liquid i
can carry is minimal it fits your biology and enhances it a
psychotechnology fits your brain
and enhances how it operates and you you say what are you talking
about what's a psychotic look here's one right here
it's called literacy you're not born literate
you're born linguistic you're born learning how to talk
right noam chomsky all that sort of thing but you're not born literate in
fact for most of our history we were completely illiterate what does literacy do for you
it's a standard set of tools that standardize how you process
information notices how it enhances your cognition
i don't have to hold all these terms in my mind i can leave them there on the
board i can write stuff down and come back to
it later so notice what i can do i can take my brain now
and link it to my brain back then and my brain in the future so
those are i'm networking all these instances together i'm improving my
cognition i can also network my brain with your brain
and improve my ability to solve problems think of if
i were to do this to you i'm going to take literacy out of your brain right
now and you can't and i mean literacy in
your head too you can't imagine words you can't put stuff on paper you can't
reflect on your own cognition i take that out of you your brain is the same hardware but then
the problems you can solve collapse down dramatically
that's what psycho technologies do they do
they enhance the software
of your of your cognitive machinery now shamanism is a set of
psychotechnologies for altering your state of consciousness
and enhancing your cognition so
what does what does shamanism look like what are the kinds of things
you do when right
you're a shaman
there are many people of course claim to be practicing shamanism today and
that's another thing why this rise in neo-shamanism
what are people thinking they're trying to get from it okay so the shaman
does a lot of interesting things in order to get into
a particular state so
the shaman will often engage in things like sleep deprivation intense long periods hours of singing
dancing chanting the shaman will often engage in
imitation put on the clothing
mask that represents some other figure some other animal
right sometimes the shaman will go into
periods of isolation social isolation go out into the wilderness and of course
although it's not necessary but it has been pervasive shamans will make use of
psychedelics in order to help
bring about an altered state of consciousness
so so what what's going on here
steve taylor in his book uh waking from sleep talks about these disruptive
strategies that people even today use in order to try and bring about
what are called awakening experiences these radical transformations
in people's sense of self and reality we're going to talk about that but one of the main ideas here is what a
shaman is typically doing is trying to disrupt the normal ways in which you're finding
patterns in the world why would you want to disrupt the normal
way you find patterns in the world because the way you find patterns and
remember i said this the very thing that makes you adaptive also makes you
subject to self-deception the way you find patterns right is very
profound so
this is something i study as a scientist
right many of you may have seen this all right so this is called the nine dot
problem you have to join
all nine dots with four straight lines you you have to start the next line from
the terminus of the previous line and when people see this they initially say
well this very easy of course i can do this
right one two three four oh wait i missed the
middle dot okay one two three wait one two wait one two
and then they pause this actually turns out to be a very
difficult problem for people to solve joining all nine dots with four straight
lines but why is it hard one line two lines three lines
four lines what was hard about that now when you do that of course people
get angry at you they say you cheated you went outside the box
you went outside the square that's where think outside the box comes from now why that was hard is because you
projected a pattern here the square and then you engaged
unconsciously unconsciously your skills of connecting the dots when
you were a kid you connected the dots and when you connect the dots you're not
supposed to do this make a non-dot turn
if you do that you won't get a picture of a picnic table you'll get like an
acid trip psychedelic thing right
so unconsciously
you project a pattern and then you
activate the appropriate skills and then you're locked and you're blocked
you can't solve that problem not because of anything there
in the data but because of the way you have framed it you have to disrupt
your framing we're going to talk a lot about that in order to get an insight
in order to get an insight now let me tell you something
again to start to introduce this to you saying to people
think outside the box and this is kind of funny if you think about it saying to
people think outside the box does not help them with this problem
giving them the belief that they have to go outside the box
does not help them to solve this problem that's what i meant when i said you
shouldn't reduce all of your sense of knowing
to believing what's involved here is not believing
that you have to go outside the box it's knowing how to go outside the box
how to alter your attention how to change
your perspective on what's so what's salient to you
what's relevant how to alter what's important or real to you
now what shamanism is is it's a set of practices
disruptive practices and attentional practices that are designed to disrupt
everyday framing so that the shaman can get enhanced
insight well now what kind of insight
insight into patterns in the environment that other people might not be picking
up on enhanced insight mindset into other
people and and and here's this that this sense
of participatory knowing that i mentioned when the shaman is enacting
the animal the shaman isn't having beliefs about the deer
the shaman is becoming the deer i don't mean
metaphysically but the shaman is trying to get together the sense of the skills
the way the kind of perspective the deer has
the way the deer thinks the kind of world the deer lives in
and by becoming the deer by having this participatory knowing of what it is to
be a deer it enhances the ability to track and
find the deer now these enhanced capacities for
insight and mind sight
participatory annoying means the shaman combines a lot of things that are for us
in separate individuals shamans are highly charismatic imagine if you could take
a rock star like a super rock star a super therapist
a super artist put them all in one individual and then
they come to you when you're sick they can enhance
your ability to trigger your own placebo effect
the placebo effect is real thirty to forty percent of all real
medication the ones we sell as real drugs
is placebo effect if you have an individual can that can
trigger that and that's all you have at that time
that's still 30 to 40 percent better than you had before see so what are the shamans doing notice what they're doing
they're really enhancing their capacity for cognition now what we're going to do in the next
video is we're going to come back to the shamans
we're going to talk more about what they're doing
how they're enhancing their cognition
and why this played such an important role in making human beings into the
kind of meaning makers there are but
we'll see what it is right but you can see already notice in order to tap into
all these kinds of knowings in order to bring about this altered state of
consciousness notice how much the shaman is
manipulating the meaning of things which isn't the same thing as being a
charlatan so we're starting to see right from the
beginning the connections between meaning making
altered states of consciousness an enhanced
capacity to be in touch with the world and then what's the connection to wisdom
the word shaman means one who knows
one who sees one who has insight
shamans are considered wise people
and that's why you know that's why we have all these words
like the word wizard means a wise person okay
so that's it for our first video you'll get a sense
uh from this of how we're going to proceed thank you very much for your time [Music]
you