Transcript for:
The Science of Intuition and Consciousness

[Music] intuition is real we can understand it with all the science we already have we can unpack some simple rules for when we should or shouldn't use it following those rules I really think can improve people's decision- making in a sort a harmonious way my guest today is Dr Joel Pearson a neuroscientist and psychologist on The Cutting Edge of understanding The elusive nature of the unconscious mind so it turns out our body has access to information our brains that we don't what can the brain do with information when it's unconscious this is an expertise he learns to companies like Google and Pixar and expertly elaborates upon in his book The intuition toolkit if you think you don't have Intuition or you can't use it I think you probably can but you need to start practicing practice with the small decisions and then see how you can improve that over time what was the most surprising discovery that you made about tuition how long have we got yeah let's we got plenty of time let's get comfortable [Music] so today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show [Music] possible all right Joel so nice to meet you likewise rich just to kind of contextualize your work as a whole I mean basically your mission is to demystify Consciousness through Neuroscience is that an accurate yeah and the lab I guess slightly more specifically what what we try and do is figure out ways to measure things in the mind that people have traditionally thought you can't measure so we did that with visualization mental imagery we've developed a couple of ways to objectively and reliably measure that we've done that with intuition and we've done that to a certain degree with hallucinations inducing hallucinations in people so there three things and I'll use this phrase like a blood test for the mind right so the idea that you don't go to the doctor and say you know how you feeling I'm feeling like my vitamin B is too low my D vitamin D is too low I'm feeling like that's just too subjective and when it comes to measuring how you're feeling your mind depression or anxiety or anything in the mind you want to move towards that objective reliable test and so a lot of the time we use questionnaires which are great but they're not always that reliable so we try and sort of develop new techniques or sort of Technologies for measuring the mind and they tend to sort of yeah focus in on things around Consciousness aspects of the Mind aspects of Consciousness a aspects of experience that we know to be true we've all experienced them uh but perhaps we lack a scientific understanding of where they're located and how they operate yeah yeah exactly yeah so what Drew you you to intuition as a field to look into and had anybody you know kind of actively with any scientific rigor attempted to deconstruct that prior to you yeah I mean people had been working on it uh using other techniques to try and measure it um and they'd use techniques which were kind of heavily reliant on semantics so ideas and words but I kind of didn't like those techniques as much because I was so heavily weighted on word the relationship between words for example and things like that um and at the time we'd been studying so one of the ways we we study Consciousness and conscious awareness is to get information into the brain that we can render unconscious right and then and I can go into how we do that it's pretty Technical and pretty nerdy but happy to it um so we get the information into the brain and people don't know it's there and so the question is what can the brain do with information when it's unconscious so that's kind of a a way to study Consciousness by studying the capacity of the unconscious M and so you can pipe information in there and then figure out you know can you does your brain perceive color for example or movement or shapes and things like that unconsciously so we're already doing that kind of research for a while and then I had a graduate student coming to the lab and said he wanted to study intuition and I was like hm interesting uh how do people study it currently and people sort of will take a questionnaire approach or use this heavily weighted word methods and they'll study you know expert chess players these kinds of things but I want I thought there was a better way to do it right and we sort of take this tabaza this first principles approach and we sort of Whittle down the definition of what we thought the best definition of intuition was and then from that sort of built a method to measure it back up like sort of bolting together different techniques and Neuroscience to try and measure it right so we came up with this definition of the sort of productive use of unconscious information for better decisions then later on we added actions as well right so how do you begin to figure out how to test for that yeah so we do this technique and I call it emotional Inception like the Christopher Nolan film Inception lonardo DiCaprio right and we present images or pictures just photographs to one eye and then the exact same time we flash all these bright colors in the other eye um and what that does it renders the photo unconscious so it's kind of like if I just if I just look at you this ey seeing you this ey seeing my hand but if I make the hand really bright I'll stop seeing you it actually suppresses whatever is going to the other eye so my eye is still processing it it turns out my visual cortex is still processing it it turns out if it's an emotional image the emotional parts of my brain are still responding even though I never see anything MH so that was this basic ingredient we could do that we could do that with emotional images nice images or nasty images like an image of a snake or a spider or a shark or something um and we could see the brain was still processing it but an individual would have no idea we're doing that so we had that basic ingredients how can you get emotional information into the brain that's unconscious right and then we needed the decision-making part of it so at the exact same time as that's all going on we have people make a super simple decision in real time and then we can kind of monitor how good people are at learning to use the unconscious emotional information MH and we saw that over sort of 10 20 trials they start to utilize it their their decisions get better and more accurate uh faster and if you ask them how confident they are their confidence goes up as well so I know people people listening going wait a second intuition this is not intuition this sounds like some super technical lab right right right you're trying to drill down on like well first of all we are our brains are incredible filtering machines right when we walk into a room there's all kinds of stuff that's getting input through our senses and our brain has to make decisions about what to pay attention to and all the remainder of that gets you know shunted to some aspect of our unconscious awareness and intuition is our ability to leverage that data which is there um but yet but that we're not aware of uh to that that then kind of um drives decisions Behavior emotions Etc yeah so we I mean we set out to operationalize it or to measure it or whatever language you want to use in this very sort of a way that I know some people listening will will react to and think it that's not how I think of intuition right and and one of the one of the elephants in the room is what is how do you define intuition because some people Define it as something quite different to how I'm going to Define it or how I just defined it they'll Define it as something quite you know more spiritual more uh unexplainable MH uh and I wanted to have a definition that was very practical and that could we could build a science around so that was sort of my priorities right and if you're saying intuition is sort of tapping into some Global Information of the universe and of all people on the planet that's very interesting but it's very hard to build a practical science around that how you get to measure that yeah so and so you know it's I think definitions in science are flexible so it may we may have to stage but for now I think this is the best the most useful and hopefully the most helpful for people because we can sort of build a guide once we understand what it is and what it's not so something is happening in our brain when we make an intuitive Choice uh and at the same time something's happening in our body like somatically like you know we all know you know the phrase like I you know my gut told me or I feel it in my gut so what have you discovered or understand about what what's happening in the brain and what's happening in the body yeah so let me give an example of to I think to bind it all together to make sense for people so you walk into a cafe right and the second you walk through that door sometimes maybe you think like I don't know if I like this Cafe let's go across the road to the other Cafe we saw okay so the second you're walking in there your brain's like you said processing hundreds or thousands of different things and you're not logically going hm it's hot in here oh it's very sunny oh the music's odd or the the floor's slightly dirty I don't like those table clo or the hairstyle of the person making the coffee or the like whatever it is right but you you see all this and your brain processes it and through hundreds or thousands of times you've been into cafes before your brains learn associations so it's learned that certain cues in the environment will predict good coffee or bad coffee or good food or bad food so because of all that prior learning you built these associations so you walk in there and you got a red flag green flag and you're feeling it in your body and you may think the energy in here is off bad you have no idea right you just feel it and this this is the gut response that people talk about I feel it here sometimes people feel in the chest or or palms sweaty palms or fingertips and so that's we we talk about that as interoception which is the word that describes internal perception of the body right if I'm hot cold need to go to the bathroom hungry so it turns out which is something really cool that that our body has access to information in our brains that we don't by Dent of the gut brain access and the veg nerve or how no so it's just so the UN unconscious information in the brain the body will respond to so I can show you a picture of a spider I can render it unconscious but your heart rate will go up you'll start sweating ever so slightly more so your body responds to the spider but you'll be like what spider so and it's similar with actions as well you know in sport and there's lots of illusions that your visual system will fall for but not your movements so that's why in the definition I have not just decisions but also actions so a good way to think about it is that the body is tapping in to the unconscious sort of utilizing that our physiology changes and so you feel that in the gut it's not necessarily about the gut like the the the neurotransmitters in the gut it's a you feel it internally in the body as because your physiology is changing because it has access to these learned associations and are you doing scans on the brain to see the areas within the brain that are getting activated turned on as a result of intuitive decision making we can we haven't done that so far with the because it's all happening it's a very fast process we tend to use other skin conducts or EG or other faster methods but yeah we we tend to when we do the experiments I described people will wear like a little clip on their fingers which measures slight changes in sweating with a little electrical current and so we can see that when they're doing that their conductivity changes so they are sweating that ever so slightly more when we're showing these emotional images that are unconscious and the better they get uh this intuition in the lab we can link that through to that physiological change right and also if we give them a questionnaire and say how do you make decisions in everyday life when they say they make them more intuitively they're better they're more able to utilize these unconscious images so it seems to link through to Everyday decision making yeah I mean intuitive decision making applies to those kind of snap judgments made in the moment you know throughout our daily lives or you know the guy in the basketball court who just knows to zag left because he's done it a million times um but it also applies to these big decisions like should I leave my career you know my gut is telling me I need to you know walk out on my job or or or what have you so the scope you know to which this applies is pretty broad yeah and that's interesting you brought that up because one of the things it's it seems that yeah when people are faced with a big decision you know get married get divorced move country or buy a house sell a house the emotions come ight and they start talking about oh my guts telling me to do this or that but they often will rely on that less with small decisions and so one of the things I talk about in the book is to try and practice using intuition with smaller decisions first so you're very comfortable with it so you understand how it works how it feels so when it does come to the big decisions you're not getting thrown off by anxiety or stress or just emotional thinking and how do you you distinguish uh intuition from Instinct for example like how are those two things distinct yeah so in the book in Instinct seems to I would classify or it seems to be like a more permanent hard wide thing so one example might be you know if you give a baby a lemon or something and they taste it their face screws up right that's there really early on and it's typically there throughout our lifespan there's other things like that like um a fear of uncertainty is one right that seems to be in almost all humans all primates and most animals have this built-in dislike for uncertainty and that doesn't change it's hardwired and so when something's hardwired it can be an advantage or it can become maladaptive right as the world becomes more uncertain right it can be maladaptive to have this fear of uncertainty or Comfort would be another one right we have this pull most of us have this drive that we want to have comfort right sit down and relax and maybe not do exercise or not like this this draw towards comfort with which Once Upon a Time was very adaptive now it's maladaptive so there are examples which I would classify as instincts that we're born with mhm um whereas intuition is something that's Dynamic that can change with the environment with the associations with the learning so that's how I would sort of separate those two I know those two words get used interchangeably a lot right right but they are very different things yeah I think it's good to and that's one of the things in the book I talk about sort of separating those too just to be clear you have this uh acronym smile to help us kind of understand uh the nature of intuition but also um how to develop it when to deploy it and when to kind of resist it and I love it because it really gave this Frame to something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about because you know listen as a podcaster in kind of the self-help world there's a lot of talk about like trust your gut and your instincts well you're You're Not Your Instinct your intuition will will never lead you astray and you know if it's telling you if your heart you know follow your and you know your heart will not lead you astray Etc um But the lens through which I kind of have come to understand this is through my experience in addiction and Recovery um and as I'm sure you know uh people who are who are in the throws of addiction uh their intuition is not so good right like you are absolutely captured by your compulsive Tendencies and behaviors and as a result you spend a lot of time making a lot of bad decisions that get you into a lot of trouble and I had that experience and then it took me a very long time in recovery to begin to trust my intuition in any regard um and I learned early and often that I should run my decisions by other people to get feedback uh and in the early days like most of my you know kind of intuition around I should do this I should do this we're we're all haywire and and wrong even though I was no longer drinking or using um and to this day I still stress test my decisions large and small with other people that I trust who have like more expertise or experience in a certain area and it's been a very gradual process and a lot of internal work to get to a place now where I feel like I can trust my intuition so I've gone on this journey from you know my intuition is garbage I can't rely on it at all to now you know I'm in this position where I look back on what got me to this place and most of it has been intuition-based it wasn't goal-based or strategic necessarily in in any in any given way so when people talk about intuition sorry for the long monologue I'm something good but all these ideas flying through my head yeah yeah and this this gets to the smile acronym and what we're going to talk about when people say uh you know trust your intuition my kind of reflexive response to that is I think most people are so disconnected from themselves and and and lack such a degree of self-awareness and really um overestimate their experience in Mastery in any given area and and really um underestimate the extent to which their decisions and their impulses um and their behaviors are being maybe not manipulated but you know compelled by forces outside of them that they're unaware of like I think that decision- making in general like I think a lot of people are just living their lives reflexively and probably think that their intuition is trustworthy when in fact it it it is the furthest from that yeah I mean that's I'm fascinated how long did it take do you think to years so years years I mean listen all you have to do it's like I know you use the example of intuitive eating which is just absolute garbage because like if you're like yeah my body my body is telling me you know that I need this food is it really like you know well so this is what yeah I agree I don't think with modern Foods now if you're going to be eating whatever then I think intuitive eating is a terrible IDE apply to relationships oh I'm attracted to this person my intuition is telling me I should be in a relationship with this person but you're completely unaware of like the childhood trauma or whatever your patterning is from growing up that's leading you to make that decision I mean choose any Fe any kind of bucket of decision- making and you can kind of lay that template on top of it so one of the rules in the book is as you know is is is to not confuse intuition with the pull towards addictive behaviors or substances but most people think that they are immune from that pull yeah you know it doesn't I mean you know on the one hand there's addicts and alcoholics but I think on some level we're all like uh you know we all succumb to levels of compulsive you know behaviors and we like to believe that we're more s the phone whether it's social media just my email exactly right so um you know what does that say about just the Human animals disposition and relationship with intuition in which we kind of um over index on like our sensient independent abilities oh says a lot of things but um I'm fascinated by sorry I'm still thinking about that you're you're going from not trusting were your were your was your were your decisions too impulsive well there's there's the decisions that are made when you're in the throws of addiction where you're just so thoroughly captured Ed by this substance or this Behavior whatever it is um that it just overrides your better judgment I don't have to tell you that you know that but in sobriety basically you take away the medication and you're this Live Wire without any kind of tools for living and you're processing all of these emotions that are coming up that you've repressed for a very long time without the capability of really being able to make sense of them and compartmentalize them or the tools to kind of uh you know be in relationship with them from a self-awareness perspective so those emotions then override your best judgment and your decision- making because you're being impulsed by resentment and fear and you know all manner of like you know kind of untreated alcoholism for lack of a better word and so through recovery you develop the capacity and the tools to begin to you know heal all of that but then there's a whole other like mental health aspect of it too like the the childhood trauma piece or other things that have happened that um I think create a story about who we are and the kind of person we are and what we're capable of and what we're not capable of that drive you know an infinite decision Tree in terms of how we show up in the world and I think that speak that that's that has a lot to say about you know how we think about intuition and practice it yeah I mean that the s for smile is is self-awareness it's really tapping into this like if you are in any emotional state wherever it comes from um and it's not just negative right it's you know if you just won the lottery or just just met someone you think you're falling in love right you're going to be jumping around and skipping and you're not going right I know it's right I know it's right fantastic yeah I'll invest in that what like you're not like your intu you can't trust it right you can't trust your intuition and you shouldn't if you're stressed anxious depressed this time I can I know I made a mistake last the last 10 times but I'm telling you Joel this time I'm on top of it so as a blanket rule I think yeah that's that's the sort of fundamental number one rule is don't trust your intuition if you're in any sort of emotional state bring yourself do whatever you you go to the toolkit bring whatever you know do anything you can to bring yourself back down to a baseline maybe you can do that you know in a short period of time but maybe not maybe it's something that's going to take a while um but yeah get back into that sort of medium slightly positive State before you can trust your intuition right so that's the ESS in smile yeah yeah um do you think that people have a healthy accurate relationship with their own self-awareness no well I don't know who might to say but I mean self-awareness is part point this part of you know emotional intelligence you can think about it like that which is something we've seen basically declining over the last decade right and that has been linked in young people to to Tech use to social media use and so there's a whole piece there um but yeah it does unfortunately seem to be going down and so I don't think people are you know they're often just not aware when they're when they're getting upset or angry or stressed until it's too late right until there something is already happened externally or even being confused about the difference between need and want is in things in the world they might NATO want yeah I mean as a as an example of how one would um deploy their intuition saying uh you know this is right for me I need this I need this in my life versus I want it or is there some emotional discontent that's driving a need or a want oh yeah you know as opposed to well my intuition is I should go to the store and buy this thing yeah but that's that would fall under like the sort of an addictive pull towards something or drive or well all of these every every like letter in This Acronym that we're going to go through they they blend together and in order to really rely on your intuition you have to have all all of them in check yeah and maybe we'll discover more as well as time goes on but yeah this was I mean in in psychology sort of this this was this view that intuition is Black or White right people were saying oh it's good you can trust it other people saying no no you can't trust it leaves you with all these terrible biases it'll Lead You astray you can't trust it and once you understand what it is the way the brain works it's like it's not black and white at all it's it's gray and sometimes you can and for some things you can trust it but other things not at all and other times not so much right self-awareness is key yeah M Mastery mhm right so I meent we mentioned learning before this Association you're walking to the cafe right your brain has to learn all these different cues in the cafe all these things in the cafe predict certain things predicts good or bad coffee in this example right so if you've never played chess before you can't just sit down and be an intuitive chess player doesn't work like that you have your brain has to build these associations so you need a certain level of experience or Mastery with intuition whatever the thing is right so how much how many hours it depends on the thing it depends how emot it is so with the cafe the coffee example you're going to need to go a lot of cafes to learn that right CU it's not highly stressful when the learning is more emotional and there's a whole sort of way to unpack that um like so PTSD would example where you have very strong learning from a single instance right that would be the other end of sort of the extreme right so there's no simple answer of how much learning you need to trust your intuition but you need a certain amount it's not the 10,000 hours either MH right that doesn't really hold up in Neuroscience um learning is not sort of poor Malcolm Cloud yeah I know um it's not linear like that it's very nonlinear right so sometimes you only need a tiny bit of learning other times you need a huge amount but yeah you need to have right learning so in essence the brain is tapping into this massive data set and doing all this processing in the background uh that you're unaware of that's helping you to develop an intuitive sense of what's right for you or what decision needs to be made based upon you know you know a copious amounts of past experience yeah and that and with that the intuition becomes more trustworthy but the fallible human uh can be counted on to then think if they have Mastery in this area and their intuition is reliable that they must have reliable intuition in all areas of life or in this other area in which they lack Mastery and that's where we get into trouble that's where we get into trouble and that's really the e at the end of smile environment but we can chat about it now so I mean I talk about Steve Jobs as one example of this uh where he had he wrote and spoke about intuition he went to India he was a fan of it um and he used it in apple apparently and he was really good at it right he they made some beautiful products then when it came to his home life uh and his health decisions towards the end of his life everyone around him sort of reports that he made some really poor decisions he put off uh the treatment for his cancer until it was basically too late and that's the sort of a way to think about that so when you remember something you're listening to in your car you get a a flashback of the car right and that's because the environment when you learn something gets imprinted on that learning right so if you learn something at work in the office right it's not just a thing you're learning it's it's also imprinted in the environment the context right so this is why you know if you're studying in your bedroom at home for an exam or something and then you go to the exam you know go to school to take the exam that changing context makes it much harder to remember thing and it's all these memory hacks you know like chewing G or fragrance and things to try and make the environments more similar so that's so the Mastery and the the learning behind intuition is context specific to some degree so it won't transfer that well so we need to be careful with that as well uh and then the I is for impulse impes and addiction which we already kind of uh which we already kind of cover um the interesting kind of Ripple here and and to my point about how these all kind of overlap and you need all of them when you lack self-awareness you then don't really appreciate when you're being driven by an Impulse or an addiction yeah you wouldn't feel you don't aware just you think you're you're you're acting on your Intuition or in your best interest and unaware of how you're captured because you don't have the self awareness yeah yeah they inter they inter they interlock like that M but I think it's as a blanket rule like I'll sometimes fall for this thing like I better go check my email just in case or like some like I've got a feeling that an important email is like and I'm like maybe I'm tapping into something that's and I'm like no no no settle down it's it's it's it's it's it's the you know I'm addicted to checking my email so it's not my intuition tapping into something that something thing that's telling me something important is happening it's not put it aside relax I'm glad to hear that uh it's still a struggle for you I mean you know with all this work right are you a master of your own intuition um I don't know if I don't know I'm a master I the the context thing I find hard especially when I'm traveling or if I go for for a run and very different environments then there are lots of subtle things when you're traveling that you have to be aware of whether it's gestures and habits or driving or going for a run you know in a forest and navigation is very different because the sun's rising and setting in a different more to the North or the South or things like that so I find the context one hard to remember to just be very careful with trusting my intuition in very different context uh I'm I've gotten pretty good at yeah realizing when I'm emotional or stressed and just to try and ignore the emotional things you know if I'm anxious about doing this thing it is anxiety right if I'm anxious about I don't have anxiety for flying but people that's one thing that comes up a lot people talk about their their anxiety to get on the plane is intuition about a plane's going to crash and it's not right it's it's something else I mean that gets into the the next letter the L low probability right another thing that humans are really bad at is is having a rational relationship with probability yeah which is terrible for that very example that you gave or and the other example you always talk about is sharks the like I'm not going to go in the ocean because of sharks like it doesn't it you know our relationship with abilities and risk and and Behavior Uh is highly is highly irrational in so many ways and you can tell people that and then as soon as they imagine the shark they're like no no no like well it's safe it's safer to swim unless right exactly yeah yeah if you can't conjure the mental image of the shark then you're gonna have a different relationship with brisk yeah which I I guess I should Define that for people which is the the lack of mental imagery or visual mental imagery the capacity to visualize right so do you have imagery Rich uh I do yeah I'm highly visual way that I process and learn so if you think about what an apple looks like what do you you see yeah I can see it clearly for example uh if I'm trying to recall something I learned in a book my memory or my brain will go to what it looked like on the page like I can see the text on the page photographically you can reread it kind of thing well no but I I'll that's I map to that oh yeah and in another way uh if I'm listening to an audio book or a podcast um it's it's much more difficult for me to retain the information but if I were to relist to a podcast that I listened to a month ago just randomly pick the middle of the p i will immediately flash to like where I was when I heard that like I so I see you know I was on this Trail or I was driving at this intersection that's relevant to intuition this idea that memory prints the location where you are when you make that memory or learn something new so that that's interesting that can tie into yeah the next topic so it turns out that if you yeah if you imagine the thing so imagining things is like a a virtual reality simulation in other words you're simulating you know the shark and maybe the Jaws music you're kind of tricking other parts of your brain into thinking it's real and so you start really fearing it and turns out that when you imagine something if you have imagery that's much stronger than just thinking in words or reading the words words it somehow fires the emotional system of the brain much more by having that image MH um which makes it no surpris that people with aant aphantasia um don't suffer PTSD to the extent that someone without it would because they don't have that recurring mental image that is triggering that emotional state yeah it they they can still have sort of a diagnosis of PTSD but it seems to be rarer and the symptoms is very different so we've done run experiments um where people come into the lab and they watch sort of this this quite a real real footage of a car crash and then they sort of sit and they have to report how many times they think about it while they're still in the lab and they go home and have like a digital diary thing that pops up and ask them questions and we track over five or six days how often they have flashbacks of the film and people with a Fantasia just have significantly less it just pops up less and when it does pop up OB it's not visual M it's takes on some other format right so it has kind of a different veilance to it yeah I suppose the last uh letter in the acronym is e for environment we kind of talked about that it's it's really just about context right yeah and this is kind of important I think during CO as well where people went from the office to all of a sudden working at home they changed their context like that uh and the learnings they had for work at work in terms of intuition wouldn't apply that well at home so when you change context like that you just need to be careful and sort of carefully think through what you're going to do and probably rely on intuition a little less what I like about this acronym is it really helps make sense of this mystical magical uh mysterious thing um but it's also very actionable I mean basically your message is like you can train this like you can improve like here are some ways to think about it and to uh you know deploy your Intuition or Reserve uh using your your intuition in you know various contexts um with like strategies for making it better yeah yeah I mean that was the that's the main idea behind the book is to help people right how can you practically help people make better decisions sort of bring this rational decision- making with the emotion together to improve their lives right and and intuition you as we've said is such a fascinating topic and it has sort of a range of different definitions and way people think about it and so it's the first sort of my first attempt at trying to bring all that together wow people with some of the science but also yeah something that's practical they can sort of use it almost like a field guide right carry it around and I talk about having a daily practice I think it's a good idea to practice you know if you think you don't have Intuition or you can't use it I think you probably can but you need to start practicing right with very small decisions and try and feel that internal inter receptive feeling mhm track how good your decisions are like did the feeling Lead You astray or did it lead you in the right direction and track that over time so when it comes to these larger decisions you're sort of well rehearsed you know how it feels you're used to going you know through this five rule checklist kind of thing you should create an app for this that would be good you know thought about it yeah you know like how how can you uh you know really track it over time yeah to extract from your own behavior and decision making um if you're moving in the right direction or not yeah I think it's idea yeah I presume that some people are just born with more Intuition or more reliable intuition than others like how do you think about that there seems to be yeah there seems to be large individual differences so whether we test them in the in the lab with our methods or we give someone a questionnaire some people will say yeah I basically use intuition for all my you know decisions other people like no no I make everything carefully logically and rationally and that bears out in our lab test as well why that is we don't know yet uh I think it has probably has something to do with this interception or sensitivity in terms of interception M that the body is probably still tapping in to the the unconscious but people aren't even noticing so but we need we're doing more research on that now and so yeah we need to I mean intuition is it's a young science you want to think about it at least in the modern day with you know modern brain scanning and the sort of modern era it's a it's a young science and so it's just beginning and we really need to build it out now I think we have of measuring it understanding it we can start doing large scale studies um we have a good definition now so hopefully it'll spread science can be slow but but hopefully this will kick things off is there any sense that there might be a genetic piece to this I don't know but they could be yeah and what about uh you know back to the gut brain access like what what what what do we know or not know about the microbiome and how this might be impacting intuition well we know yeah that that the the microbiome does is linked to mental health and it is linked to cognition to some degree um I and it's a bidirectional relationship I think it seems to yeah it seems to be and and that's sort of that's that's a fascinating field that is also not new but the again the there's a new sort of era of this coming to Bear now um whether that plays a role in intuition it's hard to know at this moment I think it probably influences decision- making generally just because the neurotransmitters involved that are made in the gut will influence decision- making but yeah we don't know [Music] yet I bet there's a lot of you out there who've been pondering that new website you'd like to have but just haven't pulled the trigger well with Squarespace it's easy and affordable to build your own beautiful designer website so Squarespace has been a long time partner of the show and what I love about it is it just mystifies everything about what's required to make a website you don't need to be a designer you don't need to know how to code everything is right at your fingertips they make it super simple and they've got these unbelievably beautiful templates to choose from that are oriented around whatever your needs may be whether you need a simple landing page or a full-on online shop snap crackle pop Squarespace has the tools you need to launch your business including e-commerce templates and and inventory management so make that website you got it click the link in the description below for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use offer code Rich Roll to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or [Music] domain you're an interesting character uh I mean you studied architecture you studied art you studied film making all of this before becoming a neuroscientist and yeah I'm curious around your kind of Arc and path to to Neuroscience to neuroscience and and how all of those experiences kind of inform this unique approach to science that you have that you call Agile science yeah how long have we got yeah let's we got plenty of time get comfortable so I mean it it really started in high school right I was kind of either in the art room painting drawing or sculpting or I was in one of the science labs doing science and that was kind of my two passions and it felt at the time it felt like being pulled kind of opposite directions or at least different directions and then this kind of thing continued um university I started off my University track record is kind of all over the place but I started off doing science got a bit bored completely changed track to Fine Arts was doing painting drawing and then majored in digital film and was going to be a filmmaker um at that point I started you know you mentioned Consciousness I started reading about the nature of the universe what is consciousness what is the nature of reality and I was like this just drew me in what how do I how do I study this at the time you know Consciousness wasn't part of Neuroscience of psychology it was still a bit taboo and I was like well I could try and study you know quantum mechanics all this kind of physics this sort of that approach but it just didn't it didn't sit well with me and I it felt like everything was so subjective that you have to study the experience so so so Psychology and Neuroscience so before I graduated from the Fine Arts degree actually changed back to science then finished the undergraduate did a PhD in Sydney Australia then came over to the US uh and worked at vanderbelt University for a few years uh there wasn't until a bit later I realized the thing that kept pulling me in these two directions was sort of Discovery is the best way I can describe it whether it was how you know filming certain things and adding a soundtrack to it making a short film sort of created this emotion almost from nowhere just in me and anyone watching it it was like a discovery kind of was like stumbling on something and in the same way figuring out how the brain works how the mind works how decisionmaking you know intuition Works was also like Discovery and the best way I can describe that is like being an Explorer you know on one of those old wooden boats and bumping into a some land mass somewhere and saying you know what is this WOW we've just discovered a new territory and that's what it sort of feels like being Explorer to me so it's that that the thread through both those is Discovery and that's what was like a I don't know like like a drug or something it just it just pulled me into this like like wow and that's I think and do you think and also like maybe the architecture piece providing the structure or the lattice work like on which to hang all of these ideas and and and make sense of them but do you think all of those things kind of conspired to make you this individual who could approach this terrain this subject matter from a first principal perspective I think so yeah I mean the way I the way I do science and the way I come up with ideas it is different to most of my colleagues and most people I talk to so I became aware of that um I seem fairly good at mixing different ideas maybe that you call it in a creative manner um and then this agile thing you mentioned before started sort I started seeing this pattern and it's a bit the agile science idea is a bit like sort of the way people do startups right you have this um agile startup idea you know you have you want to test something straight away and we could I started doing that in science fairly early on the kind of science we were doing in cognitive Neuroscience wasn't the kind of thing you had to sort of test participants for a year before you knew what was going on you know if you're studying visual perception or or mental imagery the kind of thing I was doing sometimes you could design experiment and test it on one person on myself and that's like super agile right so I can design something program it up test it on myself and maybe it worked didn't work the first go on i' iterate it try again try again so you could iterate in a couple of days sometimes rather than getting a big Grant or writing a proposal getting a grant getting a giant population of people and you know running some kind of randomized controlled trial that is very elaborate and timec consuming yeah I mean you would do that afterwards but the idea was to drisk it to to figure out like the chances of you designing the perfect experiment first go are pretty low especially if this is a whole new thing unknown area and so you can do all that or you can re you know you can read and and study for six months year and think you've designed the perfect experiment um but you probably won't so you mostly need to iterate a couple of times anyway so the idea is to iterate through a pilot experiment with low cost quickly as possible on a small scale before you upscale right so you can sort of go through this sort of um this sort of pilot experiment loop as quickly as possible to drisk the experiment before you invest a lot of time and money and effort so that's kind of the approach I have to science and that's the spirit in which you're lab kind of operates right it is on some level sort of a startup like it's a unique kind of hybrid organization that uh you know defies one's expectations around what a lab would look like and how it would function like it's sort of an agency it's sort of a consultancy it's also a lab uh but it's in a you know like in a office space that would you know look like a startup company like a tech startup so that's the other side of it yeah so before a year or two before Co we got some money for University to set up this new lab and try and work work with companies and startups small to large you know massive companies and that was the idea was trying to get this science The Psychology and Neuroscience we're doing out from the University from behind these closed doors into the hands of people that could use it and that was you know assessing products and services but it was also building workshops for companies you know how to deal with uncertainty in this Modern Age was sort of a theme and we ran some workshops on that for example so I was just trying to put all this stuff to good with people rather than you know a lot of what I mean science is fantastic and I love it but a lot of what academics will do not all but a lot is you know apply for a grant get a grant write papers apply for another Grant write papers and some of those papers will often just get read by you know a 100 other academics and then it's kind of rinse repeat repeat which is fine but it's kind of a closed loop system right and you end up the research you do can often be dictated by the people who are reviewing the grants rather than taking a step back and saying you know what does Humanity need what do people need which is kind of a different approach which doesn't always fit with the with the funding models other than the a Fantasia piece you know field in which you're an expert um this is kind of where your world and Ed kl's World overlap right like how do you take these ideas and apply them in the workplace to improve uh the happiness quotient of a workplace or the productivity and the creativity of of you know a shared Mission yes I met Ed many years ago at a a conference on a Fantasia and so he has a Fantasia and we started we hung out a lot and talked and then we he shared some data from Pixar and we played around with some things he was looking at there and we've done a few events together and we just kept in contact so yeah really interesting guy it's it's he's this sort of amazing mix of you know mathematical computer versus ART versus business and he sort of learned all this business stuff on the Fly and as you know yeah it's he's amazing um you're a filmmaker uh we had you have experience in film Mak youve studied film Mak we had um yesterday we had Tom shadia in here uh the comedy director of all the Jim Carrey movies um who who who kind of went on this personal Journey where he walked away from Hollywood um to find greater meaning and purpose in his life and he ended up making this he like gave away all his possessions like it's an incredible story he made this documentary called I am that kind of Chronicles his um his you know search for happiness basically and in that he kind of travels around the world and he talks to philosophers and Mystics and academics and he's trying to understand meaning purpose happiness and there's one sequence in the movie where he's with some scientists of some sort or another and they're running this test where um they're showing him like images that are either uh fear inducing or neutral so a picture of a snake that looks like it's poised to attack or a coffee mug and they have his they have some kind of uh EKG situation where they're monitoring the heart and according to you know these people these scientists uh the heart is actually responding to the image before the visual cortex uh is has enough time to respond to it before yeah so basically the it's the point being like the heart is is more Central to our kind of emotional experience of life or our relationship to Consciousness than previously thought and I don't know if this is you know legit science or not but uh I thought I would throw it out at you like just the idea of of um the bir directional nature of the sematic with you know the neurological yeah I I'm not aware of that those studies or that study but there's been a lot of recent studies now looking at perception like visual perception but also time perception and linking the heart the way the heart beats with the brain and our capacities and it does seem to change based not just like when your heart's pumping faster but as the heart squeezes versus relaxing that from there to there will change cognition on quite that sort of micro level just over half a second or so so there is these you know and also with breathing so the body and the brain are really connected conected right and we often think about the two as you know two separate things like this dualism idea that that that we are something else and our body and brain are something else but it's all linked together right it's all yeah you know when you do breathing and you relax your body's relaxing your brain relaxes and it changes and vice versa when you're getting excited and pumped up it's it's all changing together MH so yeah the heart is intimately linked to how we think and how we feel and how does that inform how you think about the hard problem of consciousness yeah I mean it's a fascinating thing right this so this what it seems to so it feels like we are something and separate to our to our body right that in other words you could get rid of my body and I'd still be me but it doesn't seem all the evidence suggests that's not the case that we are our brain or we are what our brain does it would be another way to say that so being Joel is just what it feels like to have a brain like mine that has a history like my brain does and so the the question I think becomes so why why does it feel like anything to have a brain like mine or a brain like yours does it feel like something to have a circuit like in a phone or in a computer we don't know so why is something special about the wetwear the biology is it about the complexity the information that's held in the brain is one Theory um and we don't know yet we don't have the answer and this this is this is you know we can go into AI with this because right the question is are any of the AI systems conscious and we have no evidence of that but the elephant in the room is we don't have a test for Consciousness really so how would we know right how do I know you're conscious I take your word for it because you behave like you're conscious and I I'm conscious so I presume you are so how do I know that one of the AI systems platforms is conscious or not we don't right and if the AI platform is so sophisticated that it can mimic Consciousness to such a staggering degree that no human could tell the difference does it even matter in terms of how a human would interface with such an advanced intelligence yeah I mean that's the question isn't it you could say it doesn't matter but I think everyone would say it does matter ethically right so as soon as an AI system is conscious and sentient then what like what do we have like what's our respons we're responsible for that right but such a close approximation of that we would treated as such anyway yeah I mean yeah I don't know if there's going to be some like step function or some perfect threshold where it's like not conscious conscious maybe it's just a smooth thing uh and so then it's arbitrary when you'd say it's conscious in a sort of pany way yeah yeah so panum this that's sort of come back into fashion recently this idea that everything's conscious to a certain degree the book the microphone the glass uh they're only slightly conscious and as you have more or larger more complex things like the internet humans then there's more Consciousness what does your intuition tell you about the veracity of that theory and I say that uh to somebody who has self-awareness and a level of Mastery in the field in which I'm inquiring I don't know but I'm could be a bit stressed now make we're in the right environment it's context uh specific it's it's hard because I don't have experience of the different things right so there's this most people have a comfortable this intuition that you know you go humans monkeys I don't know cows and dogs and mice and then I don't know a little slug or something some point the the switch has to go off and at what point does it go on Mouse and people have this whenever I ask this to you know students in my in my lectures it's come some somewhere around there right so this is intuition about that but that I think that's mostly driven by behavior and and and driven by socialization and cognitive bias about what a mammal is capable of and what their interior experience is which we have no idea yeah and we're we're really bad at so we do something called anthropomorph and this is a big deal with AI right and there's these classic old experiments where you'll have like a a square and a triangle and the square will you know if you're watching this video will will bang into the triangle the triangle will like go away and like and it'll like come up and and people go you watch that for like 10 seconds you're like Po triangle the square is a bully and it's hurting the triangle and it's just two outlines just and it's just the way they move you start layering on these human characteristics right so when it comes to anything more like a mouse or AI or something where we're kind of helpless to not think there's something there right there's something behind it if we feel that already with two little outlines right you give something a human sounding voice and it sounds intelligent we're a sucker already to think it's it's it's somewhat sentient or it's conscious or it's intelligent so how are you thinking about artificial intelligence right now what should we be paying attention to and worry about yeah so this is my next big thing so I'm working on a book on this topic not on the AI itself but on the human side of the equation because I don't think there's anywhere near enough attention on this I think we should be focusing our attention on how to prepare Humanity for this because the next decade is going to be crazy right there's almost everything's going to change not everything but it's changing dayto day and week to week with such an accelerated Pace it's insane yeah I mean schools universities jobs companies economies you you name it all those structures are going to radically change and the big elf in the room is that that that creates a lot of uncertainty and uncertainty is like a fear stimulus it creates people get very anxious because of uncertainty so that simple idea how can we prepare like everyone to deal with uncertainty better first of all why does uncertainty why is uncertainty so disconcerting for the human animal yeah so it's humans primates most animals seem to find uncertainty there's experiments on this really uncomfortable and it's like showing someone you know a picture of a snake or something like right you can see the fear centers the brain respond and it seems to be built in through Evolution right you could say it's we talked about I mentioned it before in terms of like a hard wide Instinct MH uh and it seems we think it's there because of evolutionary reasons right at one time when the world was a simpler Place staying away from uncertainty kept us alive yeah now when you know the level of uncertainty is ratcheting up almost day by day um it becomes maladaptive right so we need to find ways of enjoying uncertainty being comfortable thriving with it and there are examples you know of horror films scary movies and roller coasters or fancy restaurants where people don't know what food they're going to get right and people will pay good money for those experience and so there's some contexts where people like uncertainty when there's a bit more control around it and so I think there's a reframing piece around that that we can try and re try hard to reframe it but those are contained contexts in which we know everything's going to be fine so how uncertain are they really like it's a controlled uncertainty so some of us work we've done trying to help people with uncertainty like the first step is to understand what it is and that it's your brain responding that way so primate brains respond to uncertainty and it can in some people more than others but in most people it will induce some form of anxiety and discomfort right and so if you're feeling that you don't know whether your job's safe or not or how everything's going to change with AI it's not don't blame yourself don't think I'm an idiot you know like I'm feeling this way because I'm worthless it's just because of the biology of your brain it's just the way it's wired up so that's kind of this first step to try and understand something around that and then try and work with that I think you can try and reframe it as you know an uncertainty wave we could try and Surf and there is posi ity around that um and then trying to do the the more standard things to bring down the anxiety bring down your physiology the breathing things um whatever the things in the toolkit you have exercise sauna all that all the kind of the usual characters that people have heard of um but yeah it's something we're working on because I think we need to have something to deliver and scale up for people to do individuals at home and and so in the context of AI obviously we're we're kind of ushering in this unprecedented uh moment or era of uncertainty um but with respect to the artificial intelligence itself um what is your intuition uh around what we should be paying attention to to that technology and and where is some of our kind of attention misguided like are we thinking about this correctly um is there a lens that you have unique because of who who you are and the work that you do um that could uh you know help us kind of better understand how it could benefit our lives and the areas in which it poses a Potential Threat yeah so it's happening whether it's not going to stop right so there's there's these the nations are competing and companies are competing and just like this competition all the way down kind of thing so it's it's coming it's coming fast there's no remember that letter about how that was just a performance art yeah it's it's so it's coming and it's going to be it's going to bring some amazing things right just like the internet and social media has done but there's going to be dark sides to this as well and like we saw with social media right that it's really hit young people really hard right we've seen the data more recently around that so what I'm trying to come in to sort of Ring the Alarm Bells um around that that we don't want to repeat the sort of things we've seen with Facebook and other social media platforms and realize it once it's too late because I think once AI comes into multiple fields there's going to be lots of things like that in other words it's going to be a thousand or you know some high number many times worse than what we've seen with social media so for quick example so with like deep fakes and synthetic media one of the things that we don't understand a lot about what we do know that that once you see something that is not real so if I if I go and watch a bunch of videos of you saying really horrible and hurtful things or you know hurting torturing an animal or something right and then someone says oh no that's that's fake don't worry about a Joel that stays with me doesn't matter just telling me it's fake doesn't undo it it's it's called the continued influence effect and it stays with someone it's quite hard to undo that you've got to put a lot of effort in I basically have to sort of reestablish a whole story in my head about who you are it helps if you tell me it's fake before I watch it that also helps I was going to ask that does that make a difference that does help yeah and so we don't we know a lot about this with fake news and text and written things but there's not many studies on this with video they're just they're happening now so that's one thing so so just using you know cyber tools to label something as fake doesn't really do the job we need to work on the psychological side of that and that's just one example we're not too far away from a world in which literally you have to question every single thing that you see uh in terms of whether it's real or fake like deep fake technology like we're seeing stunning work already but this is the worst it's ever going to be right and uh and there are too many uh you know vested interests in fomenting dissent and creating confusion and Chaos uh to make the social media landscape or anything that we consume on the internet our information silos um from being trustworthy like every article every video every photograph uh and that in terms of like what that does to us psychologically even if we're even if we enter that domain knowing like we I don't know if any of this is real like what does that do to us psychologically what is that doing to us neur neurologically how does that translate into our behavior in the world our mental health our anxiety our fear that relationship with uncertainty and then kind of scaling out from that what does that do to us as a society and to uh you know the the the how does it imperil like the future of of democratic systems like it's a it's it's it's quite terrifying yeah you know solve this you took the words out of my mouth yeah I mean it is scary and it's it's everything you just said is not going to be not going to be positive right it's going to induce Stress and Anxiety it's going to destabilize people people's worlds people's identity right when they start seeing versions of themselves played back doing and saying things we don't know how that's going to influence if I see you know syntic media of me over and over again I'm going to start doubting who I am wait did I say that or maybe that is maybe that's true maybe that is me but it's going to destabilize yeah so there's a lot of psychological work we need to do rapid research on this and then we need to rapidly deploy that into services and products that can scale up and help people and prepare them uh get them into the right State get them so people can survive and thanda though it feels you know what I mean like from a neurological perspective uh just think about an algorithm that's just serving you up whatever it is that's getting you uh you know engaged with whatever content uh you know you're scrolling on your feed you know of course you're gonna you're going to keep scrolling on the stuff that is is producing outrage and fear we already know that and psychologically like how detrimental is that to the human being and what does that do to our ability to cohere as a society and effectively communicate with each other in a healthy way like the downstream implications of this are tremendous and in terms of safety measures I sort of think of it like performance-enhancing drugs like they're always one step ahead of the ability to detect and this technology is moving so rapidly that any effort to police it I feel like is always going to be you know leagues behind yeah exactly I mean and there will be policing there will be rules and things will come in but like you said the it it'll already be happening so that's why I think we need to really focus on the psychological side of things and how to prepare people educate people you know come up with new ways of thinking about this like I think we can do all this I don't think it's like complete Doom or Gloom but I'm trying to get my colleagues to sort of like you know if you're in Academia and this sounds like you know this is something that we're all facing the whole globe's facing this for the next next decade right maybe take a step out of what you're doing the research you're doing and put some time and effort into this right we need rapid deployed research and then we need translation of that research rapidly into like I said services and products and so we sort of us like scientists need to sort of take a step towards this and embrace this right because it's we can't go to We Can't rely on the tech CEOs and the tech people building the things to do any of this we need to do this ourselves and terms of you know scientists um so that's where that's something I'm working on at the moment um and it's a multi-prong approach as I said I'm working on a new book on this but it has to be more than a book it has to be a movement it has to be products and services and it would be great if the the companies putting billions and billions and billions into the actual Tech development could also put some money into this and put that money aside in whatever way possible yeah do you are you optimistic about that then putting money aside yeah Oh They'll put money aside but they'll put small amount they already are doing that but very like I don't know some tiny tiny percent of their budget for other things like all of you I work very hard which is why I always also rest hard unwinding recharging is essential if we want to show up in the world as our best selves and cozy Earth is here to help curate your relaxation ritual with gamechanging bedding bath and loungewear that truly raises the bar on comfort and luxury their Fabrics are buttery soft their pillowcases duvet and duvet covers have officially replaced all our home bedding and their sheets are fantastic fashioned from temperature regulating material which keeps me perfectly comfortable all night long the quality is also Second To None offering an incredible 10-year warranty on all their products so here's what you're going to do go to Cozy earth.com now and get up to 30% off with a free item when you use my code Rich Roll at check out or simply hit the link in the description below shifting gears here uh I'm curious about the relationship between uh intuition and creativity like what do we know or not know about creativity yeah it's something I thought a lot about and unfortunately we don't have the best tools to measure it so we've done some studies on creativity and a Fantasia cuzz one of the things that people reach out to me and say you know oh the reason my career hasn't gone this way the reason I haven't been a successful musician or whatever it might be it's because they have a Fantasia MH and then we did all the tests so the way the way we sort of academics tend to try and measure um creativity is with kind of funny task one is the multiple use of an object task which is kind of a weird thing where you say like here's a paperclip um you have 3 minutes write down as many different wacky uses of the paperclip or brick or whatever it is right and based on those you get someone to score them and how many there are things like that you get a sort of creativity score and that's measuring something and that's interesting but it's heavily biased again towards words and semantics is that creativity so when I ask people that people kind of go H doesn't sound like creativity to me so we haven't got the killer way to measure creativity yet so that's sort of something well precedent to that you also need the killer definition don't you first in the way that you've defined intuition like weing creativity that drives how we think it and study it right yeah so so typically it's this sort of this diverent the thing I just described was a Divergent thinking task where you go out try and get as many crazy ideas as possible and then you converge those back in again that's this is a very common way of thinking about brainstorming or coming up with ideas for products these kinds of things and is that different from imagination or are those synonymous yeah and this is this is this is an interesting thing that comes up I will use imagination as a very broad sort of title that will cover some creativity visualization mental imagery all under that one Banner when I'm being more specific I will say mental imagery visualization or creativity and keep them separate now they sort of overlap somewhere in there um just going back to that research piece that we did we didn't see any higher performance in people with mental imagery compared to those with a Fantasia in that those Divergent thinking tasks and this is a much more common thing right then I think our intuition would would would would would think right a Fantasia four 4% or something like you talk about this all the time and there's always people that raise their hand and say I think I have this yeah so the thing is so so bunch of people have done studies using questionnaires and that's sort of you know imagine you know think of a Sunset and then give it a number how strong how Vivid do you rate that Sunset those kind of questionnaires the problem is yeah I'll give a talk on and someone will go someone will go who whoa whoa stop like what do you mean that you are conscious of something when you think about an apple what what are you talking about I'm like well yeah I think about an apple I don't see the Apple like I do if I hold an actual Apple but I am conscious of the experience of an apple and there like maybe some people listening you know they're like no I'm like yeah and they're like what what do you no and they're like there's this moment of like like stress and confusion and misunderstanding and they're like and they you know might be 30 or 40 or something like my whole life I just thought metaphor that it a thing it was just the way the people use to describe thoughts about something and they're really shocked and so because of that and and then you say okay have you feel a questionnaire on imagery before and they say yeah yeah yeah I say what did you rate it they say I rated it quite high so because of that so people with because of the way the questions are phrase they're phrase but they don't even the issue is that people who have a Fantasia often don't know what imery even is so they don't know that you can be conscious when you visualize something and so like color blindness col blind yeah so you've never experienced uh red and blue uh red and green then you don't you know you you have this sort of grayy brownie you can differentiate them slightly you don't know what other people are experiencing and so you live your life it's just a metaphor visualization imagine is a metaphor and so if somebody is listening to this and they're reflecting on the their own a Fantasia for the very first time what is somebody supposed to do with that information like what what you know what is the that diagnosis like what does that mean and not I don't like using the word diagnosis because it suggests like it's a clinical or it's a problem they have to get seen to or something so we we can Define it um we can measure it PE people will use the word diagnose it but I don't like yeah I don't like that so is it a form of neuro Divergence yeah so that's how you know this is normal distribution let's say like a nor it's normal distribution and most people the bulk of people are probably somewhere in the middle here and you have these two Tales people with a Fantasia so no imagery at all and then the other tale where people have this really strong hyper Fantasia at the other end and there people I've met who say they can watch a movie and they can replay it and they swear to me that replaying it is the same as watching it and I can't I can't do that wow um what percentage of people have that and what you know how does that like translate into some kind of superpower yeah so that's an interesting question so we're studying that now because that's way less defined right we haven't done the kinds of objective reliable studies we've done with a Fantasia with Hyper Fantasia is that related to photographic memory or is that something different it could be yeah I mean there's just other memory you know there's there's there's memory conditions where you can remember every every day of your life you know in photo detail I think that's different but we don't know how that's related to imagery I presume those people are experiencing it as strong Vivid image in the mind's eye but we we have we haven't done that research yet interesting um but one thing I'll quickly say is that the people with this hyper Fantasia that I've talked to will confuse they'll they'll imagine a scene like like a conversation and then they'll get confused whether they actually had the conversation or not they'll genuinely think wait because it's so realistic they think it just happened when it happened years ago yeah so unlike like a dream where you tend to forget most of our dreams right very quickly in the morning people with very vivid imagery very strong imagery will imagine something and then that gets sort of locked into their long-term memory and they'll get confused whether it actually happened or they just imagined it um in the same way that someone who's blind is apt to develop uh hyper sensitivity in their other senses like hearing for somebody with a Fantasia who can't form those mental images do they have some other capacity that's overdeveloped or is there some kind of hidden uh cognitive enhancement that takes place with somebody who has that we haven't seen anything which would fit that description I think you could think about at least the Silver Lining if you want to say it like that as less likely to get PTSD or anxiety if you have a Fantasia so you you become the military yeah I mean that but you quickly think that in people with this First Responders everything else being equal you're you know less likely to go on to get PTSD right be better capable of handling you know the intensity of a job like that yeah long term the data would suggest that I don't like say that but yeah the will suggest that and we've run other studies uh where we get someone they sit in a sort of dark room and they read out like scary stories on a computer screen and we have that skin conductance thing on their finger and if they have imagery you know it's like you're swimming and's a Dark Shadow something bumps your foot and then the shark comes if you so you have imagery you see this skin conductance response goes up sort of this linear fashion if you have a Fantasia it bounces around pretty much flat lines and so there's this interesting link between reading scary things without imagery and reading it with imagery that translates to this idea of imagery being this sort of this link between emotions and thoughts right so if you have these thoughts and you have imagery it's going to amplify the thoughts with a with a sort of vivid picture there and there's a lot of discussion boards where people who have a Fantasia saying they don't get the same emotional response when they're reading fiction for example so it kind of would play out there a bit and other scenarios that would have implications for things like empathy I would imagine yeah funny you bring that up so we have yeah we've done a study on that we haven't published it yet but we do see differences in scores of empathy um between people with imagery and imagery in other words more challenging for them to be in emotional contact with that yeah that thing yeah and so it's it's kind of like anything you think would be different with with like think of imagery is like virtual reality or something that's built in so anytime you're going to have this virtual reality picture in your mind it's going to you're going to feel more based on what you're seeing in your mind's eye so anything that would be different there some some moral dilemmas empathy risk stuff we're doing experiments on risk at the moment that does seem to be a bit different so any of those scenarios where yeah simulating something would have would be in play seem to be a bit different and risk also I I would imagine relates to your fear reaction as well yeah so if you have a Fantasia you have a different relationship with risk you may be more uh you know open to taking certain kinds of risks because you're not like cycling fearful images in your right right that's so interesting but these things are on a spectrum like it's not one thing right yeah exactly they're on a spectrum and I should also say that you know when you start looking at the literature in terms of mental health challenges it's not just anxiety we know that um schizophrenia and Parkinson's are both also associated with very strong imagery so we've done some research with Parkinson and most people who have Parkinson's disease go on to get have visual hallucinations and they closely that's closely linked to strong mental imagery so you have anxiety PTSD schizophrenia and Parkinson's all seem to be linked with very strong imagery so I I don't think it's you know when people say oh killed have super strong imagery I don't know whether they really would want that and when you know and this is one of the things that comes up because a lot of people say well can you treat it I don't like saying that but can you give me imagery I don't have imagery MH and so I think that could be possible with a training regime and maybe brain stimulation what worries me about that is giving someone imagery who's never had imagery before let's say we do it for two weeks then bang you have imagery and it's non-reversible all of a sudden your thoughts have pictures you have all these strong pictures bouncing around if you can't control that that's going to be pretty unpleasant and probably lead to some uncomfortable mental health situations or the fact that you you know don't have that capacity is somehow tied to some kind of adaptive strategy that you've developed over the course of your life because of something that happened or some circumstance yeah exactly so I we haven't done that that study yet for those for that reason that I don't know about the ethics of that because even though people think it it would be fantastic to have strong imagery I worry that once they have it and it's irreversible they wish they hadn't done the study so well if you've learned anything from the history of humankind and science you know the unexpected result is the most predictable right yeah and this is actually so there's a new thing with psychedelics now there's some a couple of case studies that people who seem to have a Fantasia then took psychedelics and had imagery during the experience and then the imagery stuck with them afterwards wow and so a lot of people have been asking about that and so we've just written a piece it's not out yet about that it's sort of almost like a warning so I didn't want I don't want people to go out and saying MH you know I I want imagery I want to take psychedelics they get imagery and then maybe maybe like I said before it's not a great outcome and it's also something there's a lot of psychedelic experiments happening and treatments happening for other things around the world at the moment and so it should be one of the things that's discussed before someone goes into one of the Psychedelic experiments or treatments that's that's super interesting um but you know caution advised yeah I I get concerned about uh the mainstreaming of these psychedelic compounds and certainly and I've said this many times before there's there's a ton of science coming out in IND disa that uh there are all of these um effective treatments for PTSD Etc uh depression anxiety um but I feel like the way that translates or percolates down into kind of our Collective mainstream awareness makes us feel like they're innocuous or just part of our Wellness protocol yeah that we should be you know all exploring well I think it's for that it's important to think about it's it's not like other treatments it's not like taking a pill and it's the thing that you're taking it's not the substance let's say it's LSD it's not just the LSD getting into your body is like it's not just that it's the experience you have and the context and who's with you and so the music and the who's you know everything you go through is just as important as having the substance so it's and people I don't think fully get that they think like you said they could just it's like taking a pill and if you take the pill in a medical office with supervision and relaxed atmosphere and dim lighting and someone guiding you through it and you know all that comfortable you that doesn't matter I can just take it at home and that doesn't seem to be the case right um I want to get back to creativity uh and I'd asked you about the relationship between creativity and intuition because when I reflect on creativity however you might Define it uh my mind goes towards um that Lial space uh that kind of lives beyond uh our intellectual mind when you talk to people who are very in touch with their creativity they will tell you by and large that their job is to sort of get out of the way and be this vessel or this channel um for whatever needs to kind of come out of them whether it's writing a song or a verse or um strumming a guitar or a paintbrush on a canvas there is this sense of of being kind of a passenger right which makes me think about Intuition or the unconscious mind at work and then of course we can get mystical also I love talking that you're a scientist I don't know if you want to go there but sure um you know creativity much like intuition is something that we don't quite have a handle on and we have this sort of sacred relationship with like the great artists are in reverence of the greater Collective creative force that kind of comes through them um and I wonder as a scientist like how you think about that and is there a way to study that or to tie it to Intuition or is this something different alog together I think the flow state is something that's really interesting and that there's some research on but not a lot of research I'd like way more research on that and some sort of more hardcore Neuroscience on that so one of the fascinating things is when you're in a flow State you kind of lose track of yourself and self-awareness just disappears so does time perception right so one it's like you're out of the way then it's kind of how you described it and that's I think an interesting way to think about the creative process that when you're in there doing the thing um it doesn't feel like you exist it's just happening right and that applies to games and sports and other things and so what is the relationship between that feeling that it's coming from somewhere else and Flow State and and self-awareness and time perception in a flow State I think those things are intimately linked I haven't seen a lot of good data sort of trying to slice that up and see how it all works together I think the intuition for creative ideas is really interesting and I've talked to a lot of artists and people in the creative industry about that and they're kind of they like the ideas in the book because it can bring legitimacy to this idea that they are experts in their field and when they're feeling the thing it is legitimate they don't have to try and explain something to other people outside because they're deep in it they've worked in that space for a long time um and everything's working and they're in the Flow State could let's say let's say that you know some of these rules weren't met and you had like a what you thought was a flash of a creative idea but it was being driven or being nudged by anxiety or something else right or or depression or something yeah I don't know I don't want to say too much X it might go the other way right this this history of of um Association at least between seeming mental health challenges and creativity in many artists in many different ways and so that might speak against that right so it's it's a complex relationship there that I don't think we know a lot about but it's a fascinating yeah if you were to go about trying to Define and measurement like how would you design that I think you probably want to take two approaches one is have people trying being creative doing a creative practice in the lab wearing some some neural Tech something like try and get them comfortable enough so they're doing that that's one approach and then the other approach would be to go out to artists of all kinds and study them and work with them so they have quite different approaches and try and work with those until they meet in the middle somewhere yeah that's how I think about it um somebody must have done MRIs or other kind of brain scans on Creative people or creative people in the midst of a creative act to glean some understanding what's going on in the brain I don't think anyone's brought like the Flow State intuition all into that and sort of modeled out the Dynamics or thought about how it would work and when you're in a flow state so here's a question so can you have a negative Flow State I'm you're terrified and I'm chasing you or something like that is that still a flow state so we we've discussed that in the lab before well it depends on how you define it like if you're outside yourself and you're like lost in the moment right lost in the moment time perception's gone kind of sounds like it right but it's not the way people normally talk about Flow State as a positive thing um Can creativity be negative I guess it kind of can I don't know yeah it's it's it's interesting I'd like to jump in there I'd like to start with the definitional things what try and really Tas I get to a first principles definition of creativity that again like I talked about with intuition is gets to something practical and useful that can help the science but help people as well um yeah my Intuition or my bias uh or my choice around how I think about creativity or even some aspects of intuition is that there's still copious room for entertaining the mystical Beyond our ability to understand I think humans need to Humble themselves a little bit in terms of of our capacity to truly understand the nature of reality and Consciousness um and I'd like to believe and I do believe that there are other forces out there and capacities available to us if we can get out of the way if we can you know get into a state of of of presence where we make ourselves available like an antenna to be a channel for you know higher states of awareness and understanding so I guess I'm curious uh what your relationship is to kind of the unknown in that regard as somebody who is you know this hardened scientist who wants to Define these things and I hope I'm not hardened hard but I mean like rigorous I guess is the word I would I would so one of the things I think most I don't know about most but a lot get wrong is this idea that when you see something like that or something you can't explain that is really interesting and fascinating they'll just go ah it's not scientific whatever forget about it like what's the point and they confuse the idea of the scientific method and this F like the first witnessing of something weird or curious that piigs your interest right it's a very first sort of sign that something interesting might be there and you kind of want to follow of course it's not scientific CU you're not doing science at that point you just notice something but that's a crucial and really interesting part of science that's not really discussed that often so a lot of scientists will you know I use my intuition in science like we'll notice something I'll just be like hm there's something odd about that or just there's something unusual or intriguing and that's like a pull towards that thing right the discovery thing I talked about earlier and of course it's not scient you know scientific you've got to then figure out how would you design an experiment and then then bring the science to that thing and for things we don't understand it's it's very hard to do that because you're going to get the experiment wrong the first time pretty much guaranteed right so you've got to do Agile rapid iterations and try and come at this thing with no preconceptions so I'm personally very open to this I think I think anything that looks really interesting just because it hasn't been shown before doesn't mean there's something interesting there um in the current framework the way science is mainly funded in most countries it's very hard to do that because it's classified as high-risk science and one of the sort of criteria that that reviewers of Grants government grants is that it's very feasible that it's going to work and so which means basically you've got to do a lot of the stuff first before you get the money for it which is a whole other thing um so for multiple reasons it's hard to do that research um I'm quite interested in it right and we're actually starting to do a little bit of we're dipping our toe in the the pond in that direction at the moment I can't talk about it yet but it was something where we to to look into and do some work on um just it is it's it's fascinating and I think you know the way like Venture capitalists uh you know I was in pal Alto last week talking to venture capitalists and the way they they think about Investments is that most of those investments will be all gone but all they need is one this one like 1% chance this one thing will blow up to be a big Google or a big whatever huge company and I think that's an interesting way to think about science right if you know if you're going to look at this usual mystical or whatever kind of thing you can't explain if there's even a small percent chance that it could blow up and be something that changes the whole way we think about humans and the brain and the mind it's worth investing in that because if it works out it's going to change everything and that's but I don't think most scientists think like that yeah I like that I mean I think when you reflect on how much we don't quite understand um and appreciate like the limitations of the human mind when it comes to uh understanding the fundamental nature of reality like time space like you know we experience time and space in a linear fashion but that's not reality right you know there are other dimensions there is a fourth dimension there's things like quantum entanglement out there that are so fascinating and mysterious that for me like that that just basically is is nourishment for like a spiritual relationship with you know the undefined I guess and so I guess I'm asking you on a personal level like maybe not as a scientist like how does a scientist think about um you know the the world of spirituality and I'm not saying in a woow woo way but in in appreciation for the unknown as somebody who's trying to understand the unknowable I guess yeah yeah fantastic question um I think about it a lot and I'm fascinated by all the unknown whether it be everything from you know Mystic spiritual things through to near-death experiences um my I don't I think science is the simplest way to think of science is this the best way to get the truth of something so I'm a massive fan of applying science to any of those things and I don't think doing that kills it or takes away the magic I think you can have both coexisting at the same time the more you learn crazier it gets right yeah yeah and you mentioned like quantum mechanics and I'm often jealous because some the the some of the the theories with Quantum things and things you know moving forwards and backwards in time and SP like the craziness of that if I started talking like that with neuroscience and psychology people just laugh me out of the room right I get jealous of the guys or the people that is reality yeah I know but when you they can I guess they back it up with equations in math but and we didn't even say you know we didn't even talk about free will the illusion of free will we can go there yeah um but no everything that we can't explain yeah fascinates me to some degree um I get pulled in lots of different directions I would love to have infinite amount of time to to go deep dive into all these different things from near-death experiences to to you know psychedelics through to you know holotropic breath work through all kinds of things spirituality and and and deep dive into all of those but yeah I've got to focus on a couple of things at a time like and focus is a really hard thing I struggle to focus and um and and and and well Som things um what is what is like the big like nagging question or study that you would like to perform that you think could help answer some questions that are gnawing at the back of your mind that you haven't yet explored that you that you have the Liberty to talk about I guess I would say yeah so there's that caveat there um there's a fascinating history of things that we couldn't explain from ESP to to I don't even know the right words we could call them parapsychology but I don't like saying about things that there's little tidbits from all over theile basically yeah right and and if you start going through all the the Declassified military stuff there's there there's hundreds of fascinating experiments and a lot of them you know some of them are really good um they're not done with modern day techniques um so there there's there's interesting stuff there I think I don't know I don't I don't think you know is it true or not is the right way to think about it um and I think it's hard to study these things when you don't know what is going on whatever the mechanism is uh and going in there and just running a single experiment and then deciding oh it didn't work forget about it it's all kind of thing is not the right approach MH so yeah there's a whole there's a whole lot of Juicy stuff there um that I think it would be fun to if we had infinite resources to Deep dive into with the Advent of AI are there tools on the horizon in the Neuroscience context that you think will be helpful in better understanding the brain when you think of like the however many neurons there are in the bra like it's this incomprehensible organ right that's so complicated that I can't help but think this machine learning tool that's so good at analyzing and synthesizing information from massive data sets must have some kind of application your field that could elucidate kind of of these answers and and make sense of some of the Mysteries absolutely I think all scientists are like getting more and more excited to see how AI can plug in right we're seeing um uh what is it Google's deep mind coming up with this protein folding stuff and I think that that AI will plug into every form of Science and not just so the obvious thing is that you can get it to just like read all the papers that exist and the you know hundreds of papers that come out every day that know human can read and process all that and and look for the commonalities the overlaps the missing themes and all this sort of stuff so there's all that analysis side which will be interesting in itself and then there's that yeah the brain is hugely complex and trying to use AI to analyze the data will rapidly speed things up and let us do things that we can't do at the moment so that that that that is on the near Horizon if not happening already yeah I was going I was wondering if there isn't already you know some tool that so people have yeah put it to good use there's been papers out sort of doing real time decoding of what people are thinking or seeing right so you can look at a look at a bottle and you've been wearing a thing and using AI you can decode and it will say it'll recreate a picture of the bottle I'm looking at it's not perfect but you can see what it is so you can take that one step further to imagery to imagining I'm thinking of something and I can decode it from my brain activity put it up on a screen then you have dreams right you can record someone's dream so I think that will all happen at some point there's the the actual neurotech as well that needs to sort of improve getting high resolution more data from the brain more detailed more time-sensitive data and then the AI tools um to analyze that so I think that that's happening already yeah what is your sense of neuralink and its potential to kind of fulfill that promise it's interesting I mean other university Labs have have done what they've done already so they're not I think they're I don't think theyve they they they're more advanced than other groups or other university groups that have implanted things and had people um you know control the computer or control a robotic arm and do these kinds of things but certainly the speed and the yeah the speed of the engineering side of it doesn't typically exist inside University so when you add that into the mix I think it could probably go further faster so it'll be really interesting to see I mean it does seem like there's been some interesting breakthroughs here and and you know given Moore's Law and you know everything that's happening so quickly here that you know it's probabilistic that it's going to get figured out in a meaningful way yeah I think and I don't know how to feel about that which bit well this sort of transhumanism aspect of it and uh you still got to have surgery right it's not like everyone's going to be lining up to get a thing put in their I don't think I'd like that and listen if you're if you have a spinal injury or some you know to the extent that there are therapeutic use cases for it like of course but to the extent that uh we're becoming these kind of hybrid animal I guess we already are right like our phones are adjunct to us already their appendages and and this is only going to accelerate and you know lead us into some strange Brave New World yeah right yeah there's so many I mean yeah talk about exponential functions right there's all these exponential functions happening simultaneously and they're intertwining in all these different fields like and they're all mixing and they're bouncing off each other and it's hence the uncertainty right that and you can't predict what's going to happen there's too much Happ right yeah there's too much uh they say may you live in interesting times but maybe maybe a little too interesting I don't know you know um with respect to intuition in in in um all of your research and and and study of this what was the most kind of surprising or unexpected discovery that you made about the nature of intuition I I think it was just was there anything counterintuitive I guess you didn't expect probably not counterintuitive I I think it was it was I mean intuition aside just the where your intuition around intuition LED you astray so matter um the fact that we you know in real time our brain can mix conscious and unconscious signals these two data streams and they're mixing together and and influencing us at every moment of our of Our Lives or Waking lives at least actually all our lives um that simple fact was really I think just like call it Intuition or whatever you want that our brain is constantly mixing these two sources in and what does that mean for you know we think of ourselves these complex fully conscious beings right but we're going to have these feelings we don't know where they're coming from that will drive behavior and you can think about that and you can apply that to you know elections and people saying oh I'm going to vote for this person and then they go into the voting booth and they probably have some emotion that hits them in the gut or something and then they do something totally different to what they said they would right or you have these momentarily urges that people will follow and so just questioning how fully conscious most of us are most of the time I think is really interesting so I think a lot about that and how that can be weaponized like a full understanding of that can be um used to manipulate people for whatever end yeah so talk about free will like one of the I know this is a deep sub two hours fre um one of the parts of the conversation that people don't often talk about is that that we you know you walk into a supermarket and you're being controlled and biased by all you know things at eye level things of certain colors and they're grapping your attention um and so your behavior is any shop or any website is being manipulated and you can think about that as taking away free will and you don't even notice taking away free will that you didn't have anyway go ahead well no but but but as a point right so if if I can control let's say control your behavior but the pernicious part is that you believe you're a free agent right that believe that you have agency and choice when in fact you're being manipulated in subtle ways that you're you're not cognizant of that's happening to us all day long every day my point every algorithm is creating realities based on that but we don't feel it and so this idea because people think oh I feel like I have control of I have free will therefore I must my point is that I can can take away I can sort of up and down regulate how much I can control your behavior in the lab and you don't feel any different so I can like bias You by brain stimulation or by priming you in different ways to do this or choose that and you don't feel anything you don't know when you're being controlled as my point but that gets to my point about how we overestimate our agency when it comes to Intuition or we we over trust our intuition because we are completely unaware of the many many ways every single day that we're being nudged and impulsed to make decisions in a particular way just think about how many um you know things you scrolled on and billboards you saw all the stimuli that's that's like percolating this Brew in your unconscious mind all the time that's driving your intuition and creating decisions under the illusion of Free Will and agency yeah and that's only going to ratch it up like EXP itially with the AI you know kind of tools that we were talking about yeah yeah I mean I don't think we have I don't think there's any evidence we have free will which might be a controversial statement maybe it's not anymore but um it's certainly crucially important that we feel like we do when we see like in you know depression and mental health situations where people feel like they've lost control they don't have agency or free will it's quite devastating so a loss at least thinking you don't have free will is is a really bad thing so it's really important we feel we have agency in control even if we don't so you as a neuroscientist Who convinced we have no free will but still has to play a trick on your own mind to convince yourself that you have free will must create like a like this dissonance within you kind of yeah yeah but it's important that I that yeah that I I must persist in this delusion that I have free will in order to be a happy person I must remind myself of this every single day pretty much is that is that bad well it's nihilistic to believe otherwise right it's certainly not going to make you happy if you think you have no agency in your life and everything is predetermined but but you're here to say that it actually is I say there's no I don't I haven't seen any convincing evidence that there's any free will we have free will put it that way yeah um did you see this uh limited series called devs uh that came out a couple years ago Alex Garland the filmmaker Civil War the quantum stuff yeah it's it's uh it's basically uh Nick Offerman play this Tech wizard who has this Ultra powerful Quantum Computing machine that was cool I really en so powerful it can it can basically absorb and synthesize every data point in the known universe with such Precision that it can predict the future with uh you know complete Fidelity so it knows everything that's going to happen um and what does that do you know to us and our behavior and our lives and how we think of ourselves and the human race yeah yeah that was that was a great that was a great Series yeah so I don't know what to do with that I feel like we're going in a really pessimistic Direction here Lift us up like give us some uh hopefulness and intuition is real some inspiration is real if you if people doubt it or think ah it's all Bs it is real we can understand it with all the science we already have right we can understand that we can unpack some simple rules for when we should or shouldn't use it following those rules I really think can improve people's decision making and sort of a way to guide and blend the emotions and the rational decision- making together in a sort of harmonious way so I encourage people to to to have a daily practice of intuition practice with the small decisions have maybe there'll be an app at some stage but otherwise have a like little diary or something or have a little table where you keep track of what you felt where you felt it and what the decision was and what the outcome was and whether you're happy with that and then see how you can improve that over time like training or practice going to the gym or whatever it might be I like that it that it emphasizes and underscores the importance of paying attention to how you feel because we're in a culture that you know overemphasizes the intellect at the cost of you know those somatic experiences which we're kind of trained over time to just repress or ignore but those are powerful signals that are guiding us and and you know trying to lead us in in the direction we're meant to go right and when we're repressing them or ignoring them or denying them and just living entirely in our heads we're missing out on the fullness of human experience but also um you know the intuition that is there for a purpose which is to you know guide you responsibly yeah well so there's an Eastern there is an Eastern mysticism in there too like the head versus heart and the relationship between the intellect and you know and and all of these bodily signals that are um I think much more uh important than we give them credit for kind you're it's a call the book the book and your work is a call to action to like remember this I think so you know yeah yeah yeah and so there's something ancient about that too there is and it's something that I mean it's funny because intuition is you know it was what a decade ago it was huge in the US military right there was had whole programs trying to look at you know these Spidey scents they call it in the military and then it's you know was that part of the men that Stare at Goats stuff that was different that was more of like that's more of an ex fil thing you'll be studying that soon soon enough right secret I can't talk about that rich I can tell you but I'd have to kill you and wipe all your hard oh now I know defense contractors that's how you're making a living uh new parents right you you know having kids you know you you you have intuition very quickly about like the different tones in the way a baby will cry it's serious or not serious you learn that rapidly right through to the more Mystic in the spiritual like there's something and and sports right playing any kind of sport is a is a you know you have have to use you have to take rapid action and you know Run This Way run that way pass the ball you don't have time to logically you got to feel it there's two options this feels better do it right that's a form of intuition um and so it's something that's plugged into so many different fields and left and right and you know in so many different ways that I think it can tie everyone together in really interesting ways yeah beautiful man yeah uh well my intuition is that this conversation went quite well and I have a certain level of Mastery in this this domain here so I say that with confidence um that was brilliant man I I love the work that you do and and and like I said at the outset like I really do think it is profound anybody who's decided to commit their life and their work and their mission to better understanding the Mind Consciousness it's really getting at the root level of you know solving the most fundamental problems that play humankind and trying to find a way to kind of allow us all to level up because if we can improve not just our intuition but our relationship with um our conscious awareness and our lived experience um that is truly the only way that we as you know a collective are going to be able to solve these very real dire and existential problems that we got all pessimistic about yeah so thank you no thank you Rich thanks for supporting me and thanks for supporting the mission behind the book to get this intuition out there into the hands of everyone and improve their decisions and their lives so yeah thank you for the support yeah beautiful man so the intuition toolkit is available bookstores everywhere do the hold yeah hold it up show it to everybody just be shamess shamess yeah um it's brilliant work thank you and uh uh much luck and please come back and share with me your adventures especially when you get Super X Files about stuff stay tuned and uh I come to Australia from time to time so maybe I can drop in and visit you I'd love I'd love to see the lab and kind of what you're up to there yeah anytime Reach awesome man thank you thank you peace [Music] Joel that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. roll.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review Andor comment this show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free to check out all their amazing offers head to Rich roll.com SLS sponsors and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced in engineered by Jason celo the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davey Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel siss and thank you Georgia Wy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry matys appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plants namaste [Music] h [Music]