Christof Koch: 如何拓展你的意识｜克里斯托夫·科赫博士

安德鲁·休伯曼： Welcome to the Huberman Lab 播客, where we discuss science and 基于科学的工具 for 日常生活.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a 教授 of 神经生物学 and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

安德鲁·休伯曼： My guest 今天 is Dr. Christof Koch. Dr. Christof Koch is a neuroscientist and investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. He is considered one of the great pioneers and luminaries of modern 神经科学. Christof's 研究 has spanned how we perceive the 世界 around us, how 不同 状态s of 心智 arise and shape our 体验 of 生活, and, most notably, 意识. I joined the field of 神经科学 way back in the 1990s, and even way back then, Christof's name and his work were considered seminal for our 理解ing of the 大脑 and 人类 体验. And over the subsequent 30 years, he has continued to do incredible, groundbreaking work.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Today, we discuss 意识, what it is, literally, at the level of quantifiable 大脑 mechanisms, and how 理解ing 意识 at that level can help you 体验 生活 more richly and allow you to place deeper 意义 on everything from a typical morning to grief and loss to your greatest and most awe-inspiring moments. Christof also explains how our individual 体验s and 记忆 place us each into a unique, what he calls, '感知 box,' which is what shapes your outlook on 生活, and in many cases, your quality of 生活, including your 心理的 and 身体的 健康. And he explains how you can change your 感知 box through what we call 神经可塑性, which is the modification of 大脑 circuits.

安德鲁·休伯曼： We also discuss what 心流状态, 迷幻s such as DMT and other 迷幻s, 冥想, 睡眠, and 梦ing tell you about how your 心智 works and the nature of 意识. And we don't just discuss 意识 at the level of individuals. We discuss the collective 意识 of 人类kind. So, if you're some身体 that's interested in the 大脑 and 心智, what it means to be 人类, how to evolve and improve your 心智, 今天's discussion will address all of that. Oh, and we also discuss dogs, cats, Jennifer Aniston, and the 意义 of 生活.

安德鲁·休伯曼： So get ready. This is a very special episode of the Huberman Lab 播客 that I'm certain, by the time it finishes, will have you thinking 不同ly about your 生活, and dare I say, with a bit more optimism.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and 研究 roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer 信息 about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, 今天's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Christof Koch.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Dr. Christof Koch, welcome.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Thank you for having me, Andrew. It's been a pleasure. It's been more than a decade, 12 years since we last interacted.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, I've always enjoyed our interactions, and one of the reasons is that you're always into something super interesting, big, big 问题s and evolving fast all the time, all at once. So, I think most 人们 have heard the word 意识. They perhaps have pondered 意识, but at least to my 心智, it's not a very well-defined word. So when you talk about wanting to 理解 意识, or about having 意识 or being in a moment of 意识 versus say, a rock, which I'm presuming doesn't have 意识, what are we talking about? And here we could be using biological language, psychological language, or philosophical language. Please include all of it because-

克里斯托夫·科赫： Much 简单r.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Okay.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Do you hear me?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Hmm?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Do you hear me?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yes.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Do you see me?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yes.

克里斯托夫·科赫： The fact that you hear, not that you respond to my sound by moving your hand. The fact that you see, not the fact that you can navigate around this room, but you actually have a picture in your head.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： The fact that you 爱, the fact that you 恨, the fact that you 梦, that you imagine, that you dread. Those are all 有意识的体验. It's the stuff of 生活, literally. If I give you a billion dollars, okay, that even for you is probably a 意义ful amount of money, but let's say-

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well, it certainly is, yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Okay, but there's a s光, you know, thing that I'm going to remove all your 有意识的体验, so you would still 爱 and 恨 and drive cars and do everything else you do right now, but there would be no 光. There wouldn't be any Andrew. Would you take that wager?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hm..

安德鲁·休伯曼： No.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, the difference between those two 状态s is 意识. So without it, you don't exist for yourself. In fact, tonight you're going to go to bed, in particular in the early stages of the night, you go into non-REM delta wave 睡眠, right, and you do not exist for yourself. If I wake you up, I said, "Andrew, Andrew, something's happening," and I ask you, "Well, where did you come from?" You say, "I came from nowhere," which is 不同, of course, later stage in the night, right, when you have a 梦, which is another 有意识的 体验, but when you 睡眠, you do not exist for yourself. When you're under anesthesia, you do not exist for yourself. So you only exist for yourself because you are a 有意识的 being. So in some sense, it's very 简单 to define.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Historically, has it been defined as a 简单 just presence of self and 感知 of the outside 世界, the way you're describing it? I 感受 like 意识 has been twisted and turned, and, you know, weaved into balloon 动物 form over so many hundreds of years that 人们 tend to argue about 意识. And then they start getting into discussions about free will versus no free will, but why, given the simplicity and the clarity of your explanation, have 人们 struggled with this definition of 意识 so much?

克里斯托夫·科赫： The study of 意识 is really a modern phenomenon. It's really René Descartes. So, you know, Aristotle and Plato, much as they are the foundational fathers of philosophy, they didn't really have a position on the 心智 or on 意识. That's a modern thing. Where we have struggled is trying to put it in objective form. So, you don't access my 意识, and I don't access your 意识. And this makes it 不同 from anything else that we study, 不同 from a black hole, from a virus, from a 大脑. Because all those I can study with what philosophers call 'third-人 properties,' right? You can stick them in a magnet. You can point a telescope at it. We can agree on what's the wavelength, what's the weight, what's the mass, what's the molecular constituency.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： We can't do that with 意识. I believe you're 有意识的. In fact, I ask you, "How are you 感受ing 今天?" You tell me, "Well, I'm a little bit depressed because of what happened." Well, so I'm trying to get at your ……的状态 意识, but ultimately it's always an inference, whether it's you, or whether it's a baby, or whether it's an 动物 that can't directly talk because language is another way to infer. So that makes it more difficult, and the other part is that 人们 confound 意识 with 意识 of self. So most 人们, if you ask them, "What's 意识?" they say, "Oh, it's to know that I'm a man and I will die one day and I know what I had for breakfast." Those are all 有意识的体验, but they really pertain to self-意识.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But that's just one aspect. You can lose self-意识... Like, I know you had Alex Honnold here, and I know from reading and listening to some of what he says, he says when you're really climbing at an expert level, you flow over the rock.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You're sort of high, you totally lose a sense of self, that inner voice, that critic that constantly speaks to you is gone during those moments.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： There's this blessed silence, but you're highly 有意识的 because you're highly 有意识的 of where you are and what's the next place you need to go to. And of course, during 迷幻 体验, during 状态s of flow, during 状态s of 冥想, you can lose yourself, but you're still 有意识的. So let's not confound self-意识, which is one aspect, a big aspect, particularly in adult 人们, literally highly educated 人们, with 意识 that took over. That's really a much broader set of... The fact that you can 感受 your limbs, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： That may not even relate to you, just 感受 something there without assigning it, "Well, that's my 身体." That is, again, it's another 有意识的 体验.

安德鲁·休伯曼： The liminal 状态s between 睡眠 and awake, in both directions, falling a睡眠 and waking up... Do you think they offer any windows into this deeper 理解ing of 意识, or does one even need a deeper 理解ing of 意识? For instance, I'm a big fan of yoga nidra, which I've described as non-睡眠 deep rest. You deliberately lie down, do long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate down, bring down your levels of autonomic activation, more parasympathetic, et cetera. And the idea is you stay awake while deeply relaxing your 身体, a very atypical waking 状态 that is more similar to rapid eye movement 睡眠, when the 大脑 is very active, the 身体 is paralyzed, as you know.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Lucid 梦ing?

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's a ……的状态 心智 where... The instruction in the classic yoga nidra scripts, and this goes back thousands of years, is to move your 心智 from thinking and doing to being and 感受ing. You're supposed to be in pure sensation. This is the idea. And as one does that, 10, 20, 30 minutes, and you do it repeatedly over your 生活, as many days as you do. I've been doing it since 2017. I can 感受 my-

克里斯托夫·科赫： You do this every day?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Every day for 30 minutes. Yeah. I can 感受 myself falling a睡眠, but not quite falling a睡眠. So it's a little bit like lucid 梦ing, but then as you re心智 yourself to bring your 感知 to your 身体 surface or your heartbeat, your breathing, w恨ver it is, and stop making plans, you lose past and future, and you become hyper-present. But something about your sensation and 感知 merges with thinking, and it's like you-

克里斯托夫·科赫： But Andrew, is Andrew still there?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yes, I'm definitely still there. I'm definitely still there. You're not out of the 身体.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But you don't 心智-wander in the past or in the future?

安德鲁·休伯曼： No. No, and it becomes very easy to do this, so you actually 感受 as if you're falling a little bit. Like the vestibular system probably shuts off a little bit as you're going into this, and you 感受 as if you're falling into it. And the classic definition, and I've tried to translate this to physiology, but they talk about once you eliminate thinking and doing, and you are more in a being/感受ing 状态, what they called 'the energy 身体,' is more accessible. It's almost like you're 感受ing things within your 身体, and it's looping back on itself. Now, this all sounds very mystical, but what we're really talking about is more interoception, 感受ing, you know, you're moving your perceptual awareness, as you know, to things from skin inward. It's a very unusual 状态, but yes, I'm still there in yoga nidra. I'm not someplace else. I'm actually more in my 身体 than in any other 状态.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, you could also be simply not there at all.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Where Andrew isn't there, the self, the one that carries your traits and your 人ality, your 记忆, but you're still 有意识的.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： That's interesting because it is very relaxing to emerge from this. It's a great tool for replenishing 身体的 and 心理的 energy, and I've tracked 睡眠 while in this, and there are some really nice 大脑 imaging studies now of 人们 doing yoga nidra, also called 'non-睡眠 deep rest,' and pockets of the 大脑 go into regional 睡眠 as opposed to what we normally see during 睡眠.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Anon-

克里斯托夫·科赫： Whole 大脑.

安德鲁·休伯曼： So it's an interesting 状态. I'll send you a script to maybe give it a try and see if it means anything to you.

克里斯托夫·科赫： I would be... I'm interested in all these 不同 状态s of 意识 because it's all...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： I mean, it's dominated by everyday waking 意识. But as you said, that's all about doing, right? You walk, you run, you shop, you look around, you talk to 人们, but there are all these other 状态s that don't involve the William James time streams of 意识, but they are all 有意识的体验.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And so, the more we know about them and the physiological basis, the better we can describe and delimit what 意识 is and what it is not. So, for instance, to your point, 意识 is not primarily doing. Of course, we can do things, right? We do it all the time. That's how we make a living. But 意识 is really more about being. It's a ……的状态 being. And by the way, that's also why 计算机s, they can do everything we can do, but they can't be what we are... Conscious.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But that's-

安德鲁·休伯曼： Please elaborate on that.

克里斯托夫·科赫： We confound 意识 and behavior because we talk. We're speaking apes, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But if you take that away, you are still highly 有意识的. If you don't move, if you meditate or 睡眠 or you have a mystical 体验, you're sitting... Or a 迷幻 体验, you're sitting or lying, you're not moving any 身体, hardly any overt movement, yet you're highly 有意识的, right? So, behavior is not required for 意识, and 意识, of course, is not required for behavior. There are all sorts of un有意识的 behaviors. And so, we shouldn't confound the two. And this relates in an interesting way to the confounding between intelligence and 意识 when 人们 talk about artificial 意识 and artificial intelligence. Intelligence ultimately is about planning to do something, about behavior in the short term or in the long term, while 意识 is a ……的状态 being. Being happy, being sad, being full of dread, or seeing something which is really 不同.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years, and I've found it to be a very 重要 component to my overall 健康.

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安德鲁·休伯曼： I'm curious about the stability of self-representation. As you know, there are many conditions related to 大脑 lesions, strokes, injuries, et cetera where 人们 will lose their 记忆 of the past, or the inability to form new 记忆 emerges. But one of the things that seems so rigid is one's notion of self. Like a baby coming into the 世界 very quickly learns that they have a name, they have a self, that self interacts with other things, and I'm not aware of any clinical conditions where 人们 lose themselves completely for long periods of time.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Derealization.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Derealization.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, derealization is one where you 感受... So, A, you're perfectly right. The self is the basic kernel of our operating system.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Okay? And it's very difficult for us to lose because if we lose it, we would not be, from an evolutionary point of view, in a good shape, right? But then there are conditions where you 感受... So, for instance, in derealization, a psychiatric condition, which can, by the way, happen during 迷幻s, you 感受 not you anymore, and you 感受 there's something off with the 世界. This is not the real 世界. There's something funny. The 世界... They still see and hear fine, but they all believe that this isn't the real 世界, and they try to wake up. In fact, you probably remember a year and a half ago, there was a spectacular case of the Alaska Airlines pilot who asked to go onto the jump seat on a f光 from Everett in Washington to, I think, Oregon or San Francisco.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I've flown that from Everett. Tiny airport.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And then they said, "Of course." He's a colleague. He was a pilot in good standing. Into the f光, he stood up and tried to pull the two switches that would kill the fuel to the two engines. The pilots fought him and kicked him out of the cabin, and he was arrested. In fact, the trial was three days ago. What happened was that for the first time ever, he took 迷幻s three days earlier at a wake for his best friend, and then he went into this episode of derealization where he 想法, "Okay, this is not the real 世界. This is a 梦. I need to wake up. And if in my 梦, if I crash the plane, then I will finally wake up in the real 世界."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Whoa.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So, yes, it is very robust but of course... So I call it, we always live in the gravitational field of planet ego. It is always about me. It is always about me, me, me. And even if I don't think explicitly, there are things that are, you know, there are processes monitoring my 意识 to make sure that it's always 重要 for me.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And it's very rare, but of course, the self can also be highly dysfunctional, right? You can catastrophize, you can be highly anxious, you can think 人们 are insulting you, or they say bad things about you, while in fact they don't at all. And so there are rare conditions of selflessness when, just like an astronaut that can become weightless, you can become selfless.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Hmm. Interesting.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So during episodes when you are experiencing a ……的状态 flow... I used to have this when I wrote 计算机 code, when I was way younger. You can totally get absorbed by it, right? Or you read a book, or you read an engaging movie, or you play some sports or something, or you're Alex Honnold and climb, right? And partly these 状态s are so addictive because it's such... You've just realized you spent the last 20 minutes in this heavenly 状态 doing something, but again, the critic is gone. And of course, during high, sometimes heroic doses of 迷幻s, you can also totally lose yourself, the sense of self, and you realize how profound, beautiful the 世界 is without you. You know, the self being there and constantly interfering and relating it to, "What does it mean for me?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： What does this give me?"

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's incredible. We're definitely going to talk about 迷幻s, and I've 体验d some of this loss of self in 迷幻s before. I'm also interested in more subtle shifts in self that are nonetheless still profound. Perhaps the most dramatic shift in self I've ever 体验d that was pervasive after the kind of incident, was I have a colleague at Stanford, Jeremy Bailenson, he's a real pioneer in the VR space. Very early on, he started using VR, and there's an 体验 you can have in his laboratory if you go there, which is you put on the VR goggles... He had a big room for VR with padded walls so no one runs into the walls, and it's called, I think, 'Walk of 1,000 Cuts.'

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's very interesting. So, obviously, I'm white, you're white, so I don't know what it is to 体验 racism. I've never actually 体验d racism just by virtue of when I grew up, where I grew up, and I'm white, and I'm living in the United States. I'm sure there would be those that would argue that there are white 人们 who have 体验d racism, I haven't, and I certainly hadn't at the time of this VR 体验. So in this 体验, you put on the VR glasses, and if you're white, you look into a mirror in the VR, and you see your face slowly contort to some身体 who's black. Okay? And it's still you, but you're black. And then you go into the 世界 in the VR space, and you go to a job interview, and you walk down the street, and it's very interesting.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Now, the stimuli are designed to evoke a certain response. But as you walk down the street, for instance, you notice that white 人们 look at you in a certain glance. And they actually control pupil size in these other subjects very well, very carefully. And then you go to the job interview, and there's this 体验 where at the end of the job interview, there's someone else there, and they shake the hand of the other 人, who is also not white but isn't black. And so, there's a number of subtle 体验s, and then you catch onto what's happening, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： You go, okay, these are these little not-so-micro 体验s that have an emotional load. You come out of that VR 体验. It's very interesting. And then you go back into 生活, back on campus, and go and do it. You never forget it. It's so interesting, like, never have I forgotten the 体验. So when you walk down the street, now I notice when 人们 don't glance my way, if they glance my way, how they glance. And so, I can't say what it is to be black. I've only ever lived in this 身体.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I can't say what it is to be anything except myself, but in a very brief, maybe 10-minute VR 体验, completely transformed my 理解ing of what it is to be a 不同 self, which I think is pretty interesting. I don't think I've ever had a movie 体验, or a play, or hearing a song that had quite as profound a shift internally, so clearly there was plasticity there. I just would 爱 your 想法s on the self as a modifiable entity, not just losing self, but like, how much can we actually change who we are at the level of 感知 and 意识?

克里斯托夫·科赫： So I would call it the transformative 体验.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Right? We all know changing behavior is very difficult, but there you're telling me within 10 minutes, because of this 10 or 15 minute VR 体验, you're now much more hyper-aware of this. So that's a rare 体验, and I think it would be useful for all of us to have those.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So I work with some身体 here in Santa Monica, Elizabeth R. Koch... We're not related, although we share the last name, and she has this really interesting idea of what she calls '感知 box,' that we all run around with our own view of reality. You'll see how this relates, including, most 重要ly, my notion of self. And it's not objective, it's all subjective. It's just like a Bayesian thing, you know, the modern language would be Bayesian priors. I have various Bayesian priors of how I expect myself to be, and how I expect other 人们 to respond to me.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Do you want to explain Bayesian for 人们 just briefly?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Okay. So Bayesian is a view of uncertainty in the 世界 that was sort of... There's this famous British vicar, Thomas Bayes, in the 17th century who started this, so this is called Bayesian, whereby I look at something and I try to infer, well, what's the underlying reason for it, and I update my... Based on certain observations that I make, I continuously have this running estimate of what I think is really going on, and this also includes my base assumption about the 世界, including political assumptions, including assumptions of how 人们 will react, or what's the true motive of 人们.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So the point that she's trying to make with this 感知 box, it includes everything. So a benign, funny example is, do you remember what we call '#TheDress'?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Oh, yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Okay? So remember, this was the dress that went viral in 2015, where it was a wedding dress, where if you looked at it, half of the... Roughly, I can't remember the exact percentages, but half the 人们 saw it unambiguously as gold and white. That's how I see it. There's no 问题.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Same. Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Okay, same. But half of the other 人们 see it as blue and black. And again, they don't... It's not something, guessing is it maybe one or the other? They just see it blue and black, or... Okay, so then 人们 ask, "Well, is there anything real? What is the real color?" Often, 人们 get asked. No, there is no real color.

克里斯托夫·科赫： What there is are photons from the sun that strike the two-dimensional surface of the dress that get absorbed by my photoreceptors, that then get processed, and they get evaluated in one way in our 大脑, so we see it as white and gold, and get valued 不同ly in a 不同 大脑 because we all have 不同 priors. This has to do with whether we are evening 人s or morning 人s.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But this also applies to things like 9/11 and October 7th. If I tell you this, 9/11, what do you think about it? Or October 7th, depending on whether you are an Israeli or a Palestinian, you have profoundly 不同 views of it, right?

克里斯托夫·科赫： So you look at a fact that's supposedly objective, but depending on what priors you bring to it, what your 感知 box construct is, in what culture you grew up, you have radically 不同 interpretation, and this also includes your sense of self. So I would say what you had was this transformative 体验. You expanded your 感知 box, that your 感知 of reality to now includes the notion, "Huh, I get it now that other 人们, depending on their skin of their colors, will be treated 不同ly from me."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： That's invaluable. And I wish we all had that.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, and I got to 体验 a sliver of what the emotional 体验 is like because it was an emotional response in Andrew, right? And in many ways, it was far more informative than any documentary I've ever seen or any movie, which had a profound effect on me while I watched them, but didn't change the way that I think about how I interact with others on a moment-to-moment basis. Because I don't consider myself racist, and I didn't then. And you notice in this VR 体验 the way that the... I have a friend who's a psychologist who says, "You know, the subtle informs the gross." The way these little things change the way that you 感受, and then the way that you interact, and then it starts to feed back on what the expectations of you are, whether or not you live into or combat those expectations. And what I realized is it's a hell of a lot of work. There's like a burden of 心理的 load that was not familiar to me before. And the-

克里斯托夫·科赫： Implicit and explicit.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, so you have to think about it.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： What does it mean? What does it mean for my behavior? What does it mean for other 人们's behavior? Yeah, so you can call it... In 迷幻s, this is called the integration period.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So I would submit you had a transformative 体验.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You had what philosophers call 'direct acquaintance,' now with some form of racism, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Subtle racism, right, in this VR, and now you're doing the explicit work of reformulating everything.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You're changing, literally, your Bayesian priors.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So I imagine you're top-down, you know, from, let's say, prefrontal cortex back into w恨ver theory of 心智, for instance, areas, right? You are changing your priors.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It was really striking given how short the 体验 was, and how first-人 it was, right? Obviously, with VR, it's not like watching a movie. You are the movie. You're in the movie. You're the first-人 actor in the movie.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So I think there are two ways to achieve a transformative effect. One is the slow one, by educating yourself, by reading books, by watching movies. But as you said, very often it doesn't really bite until you have a direct 体验. You directly have acquaintance with this.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Then suddenly you say, "Now I get it." And this is the character of any transformative 体验s, including mystical 体验s.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Recently, I was at Esalen, this beautiful place on the Big Sur coast that-

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： I mean, it's just up here, right? Around 200 miles or 300 miles up the coast.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, although they've shut it down. The freeway fell out some years ago south of Esalen, so you have to go up and around now from Southern California, where we are now.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Oh.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Still an incredible place that's been very seminal in the 心智fulness movement, and just a gorgeous place to visit for many reasons. But while I was there, I had an incredible 体验 that involved you, although you didn't realize it, and it wasn't a 迷幻 体验, nor was it a 梦. I went into the bookstore, and I found a book of one of my favorite 人类s that I unfortunately never met, which is Dr. Oliver Sacks, who's now deceased, right? Great neurologist, writer. And it's a book of all his letters, and there are a couple of letters in there to you.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Oh, that's how it is.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And I have a very close relationship with all things Oliver Sacks. I'm a collector of many of his things. So, one of the most interesting things about him and one of the things that he wrote to you about in this book, I don't know if you've seen this book, is he describes his efforts to 理解 意识 and the 人类 大脑 better by literally taking some time, presumably without 迷幻s, and imagine what it is to be a bat, to be...

克里斯托夫·科赫： I have.

安德鲁·休伯曼： We know bats aren't completely blind, but to essentially navigate and sense the 世界 without vision as the dominant sense, to 体验 through sonar, and he would spend time thinking about being a bat up in the corner of the room, or a cephalopod like an octopus, or a cat. And, you know, you read this and you go, "Okay, this guy's crazy," right? "This guy must be crazy." But I realize now, based on everything you've said so far, that he was very far from crazy. He was hyper-sane in this regard, because as difficult as it is to lose oneself, and to go into the 心智 of another 人类, the VR 体验 that I had clearly demonstrates to me that it's possible, and yet we have a very hard time imagining what it is like to be non-人类.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And nowadays, with the emergence of AI and fear about, you know, merging of 人类s and machines, I think it's going to be ever more 重要 that we 理解 what kind of flexibility we have in moving from 人类 意识 to non-人类 意识. So, I would 爱 your 想法s or any stories you have about Oliver. I simply adore him through the writings I've consumed. But I think this practice of pretending or trying to shift one's 意识 to that of another 动物 is just profound, and I like to think it also can bring us closer to the 动物s that we curate as pets. Dogs in particular. So, I'd 爱 your 想法s about this, or Oliver, or all of the above.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, he was a great friend. I visited him many times. I met him through Francis Crick, and we had this shared interest in the 大脑 and in 意识, and he was incredible. I mean, what made him so singular, also in his interaction with patients, was his empathy. So he could have deep empathy with patients and try to imagine himself, you know, these strange other世界ly conditions, right? Like the patient from Mars, or these other patients that he described who had very specific pathologies that were totally explainable as arising out of 大脑 lesions. Yeah, he was better at that than most other 人们. Trying to imagine what is it, for example, to live in the eternal present, right? He had one patient who had this profound amnesia, but he could still... He always lived back in the... I can't remember now.

克里斯托夫·科赫： 20 years earlier, and his entire 世界, his entire 记忆 stopped 20 years earlier, and that's how he lived. And it looks crazy, but once you 理解 that, it makes perfect sense how he responded. So we each have a bespoke reality, right? So you have s光ly 不同 receptors, you may have 不同 color receptors, you may have 不同 taste receptors. You have a certainly 不同 体验 from me, right? You grew up in a 不同 environment. So, it's not easy to get into someone else's head, although some 人们 can do it. Actors, for example, can try to do it, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： The method acting, right? Where you totally try to adopt the point of view of the character you're trying to play. But of course, that's much more difficult for other 动物s that share or we may share a close evolutionary history, like with all mammals, but that have very 不同... You know, that may have infrared sensors, or they have a much more potent sense of smell, and how do we... That have a 不同 motor system, that hangs from the ceiling, right?

克里斯托夫·科赫： So how do we imagine doing that? But I think it is possible. It's challenging of... And of course, it's this classical essay by Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" right? And his position, this American philosopher says, "Well, we can never truly know what it is like to be a bat, but I think we can approximate it." I can't really ever know what is it like to be Andrew Huberman, right? But I can try to imagine it. And you know, this is what empathy is, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Trying to 感受 like you, and trying to realize that we're all 有意识的 beings, we all are bookended between two eternities. And so, in some sense, we're very, very similar, and the thing that divide us are really tiny subsets of all the things that we share, including with cats and dogs and elephants and squids, and everything else on the tree of 生活.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Before we talk about your 体验 with DMT and 迷幻s more generally, I wonder to what extent, you know, changing our 意识 is possible in a very directed way. So, what I'm referring to here is, for instance, a lot of therapies, whether or not it's a cognitive behavioral therapy, or it's MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, or whether or not it's just really trying to get more REM 睡眠 each night so that you can unload the emotional weight of previous day 体验s, which seems to be a hallmark of REM 睡眠... Many 人们 accumulate 体验s that they 感受 either define them or burden them; this is very common, in fact, and they would like to live the remaining portion of their 生活, however long, without the emotional load.

安德鲁·休伯曼： They don't necessarily want to forget the 体验, but they want to remove the emotional load. And it seems like, in pathogens like MDMA, in proper clinical settings, can help do that. That proper cognitive behavioral therapy can help 人们 really talk through and work through, maybe have a cathartic 体验, but unload the emotional component of the 体验. So what I'm referring to here are things bad. But it could be positive things like the day that your child was born, or something where you're trying to update your 有意识的 体验 of 生活 going forward and in the present by way of very deliberate tailoring of your 记忆. Do you think this is possible?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Of course, yeah.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And you just gave me an example. Your 体验 of VR and realizing what it is to have a Black skin compared to a white skin, right? This was clearly a beneficial 体验 that enables you to be more emphatic with other 人们, right? And try to better 理解 what they mean when they talk about 'explicit' or 'implicit' racism, right? And it changed you profoundly, and you're telling me this happened when? 2000 and...

安德鲁·休伯曼： This was probably 2017.

克里斯托夫·科赫： All right. So, you know, that's eight years ago, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So clearly, it lasted.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So, I think for most conditions, we can certainly improve them. You have to believe that you can change, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So if you're being told all the stories, "It's all the system. There's nothing you can do. It's just hopeless. You can just, you know, take this pill and suffer through to the end of your days."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： That, I think, is highly counterproductive. No, you have to believe, "I'm an active agent of my own 心智. I can shape my reality," I would call it my 感知 box, with various ways, either talk therapy or 迷幻 therapy, or some other therapy.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： It requires a lot of work. It doesn't come sort of for free, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： At the end of the day, I'm still left, let's say, with my traumatic 记忆, but now I can realize, 'Okay, I had this bad 体验, but it doesn't have to define me. I can go on past it.' And there are various ways we can talk about that this can be achieved. Absolutely. I do believe in the malleability of the 人类 心智, even in older 人们. In almost every condition, you can, but maybe except for the most extreme, you can change your outlook on 生活 if you really want to. That's one issue, right?

克里斯托夫·科赫： It's a little bit of trying to convince some身体 who's an alcoholic that they should stop drinking until they have the realization, "Okay, I don't want to land in the gutter anymore. I don't wanna wake up at, you know, 8:00 AM in the morning, drunk outside my house. I wanna change." Then you can change. And, you know, 2,000 years of therapies, of all sorts of things... Take Alcoholics Anonymous, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： The first thing you do, you have to recognize that, "I am an alcoholic."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And then I can begin... Before I do that, there isn't really a hope, but once I do that, I can change. It may be difficult, it may be arduous, but you can change.

安德鲁·休伯曼： We've known for a long time that there are things that we can do to improve our 睡眠, and that includes things that we can take, things like magnesium threonate, theanine, chamomile extract, and glycine, along with lesser-known things like saffron and valerian root. These are all clinically supported ingredients that can help you fall a睡眠, stay a睡眠, and wake up 感受ing more refreshed. I'm excited to share that our longtime sponsor AG1 just created a new product called AGZ, a nightly drink designed to help you get better 睡眠 and have you wake up 感受ing super refreshed. Over the past few years, I've worked with the team at AG1 to help create this new AGZ formula. It has the best 睡眠-supporting compounds in exactly the right ratios in one easy-to-drink mix. This removes all the complexity of trying to forge the vast landscape of supplements focused on 睡眠, and figuring out the right dosages and which ones to take for you. AGZ is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive 睡眠 supplement on the market.

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安德鲁·休伯曼： It's interesting that you bring up 12-step and AA in particular because the next step, besides acknowledging the problem, at least in AA, is to acknowledge an inability to solve it oneself, and a giving over of some of the process of eliminating alcohol to another, what they refer to as 'higher power.' Some 人们 call this 'God,' some 人们 call it 'Jesus,' some 人们, you know...

安德鲁·休伯曼： But it's more or less a requirement of AA that you agree that you can't do it alone, and you can't do it just with other 人类s, but you need other 人类s. They're necessary, but not sufficient. The recognition of the problem, other 人类s, and community are necessary but not sufficient, but this kind of externalization, like you need help from outside the self, that's not from 人类s. Very interesting.

安德鲁·休伯曼： They don't say, "You need to go get a dog." They don't say, "You need to commune with nature." They say, "You need to embrace a higher power." It's very interesting given the effectiveness of AA. It's one of the most successful ways for 人们 to continually avoid alcohol.

克里斯托夫·科赫： It's true. I acknowledge that. I 人ally wouldn't say it requires divine intervention because I'm not sure there is such a divine entity that could intervene in this. But acknowledging and also acknowledging that it's, "I can't do it by myself. I would say at least I would need community. I would need help from others." Again, you have to acknowledge that.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well, maybe it's the opening up of space that-

克里斯托夫·科赫： The willingness. The willingness.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah. And maybe it's, "I couldn't do it by myself until now." And in order for there to be a 不同 future visualized, maybe there is a sort of creating of space. I mean, this is actually probably a good opportunity for us to talk a little bit about the 神经生物学 underlying 意识, and then we'll get back to plasticity.

安德鲁·休伯曼： You know, we're both neuroscientists. And for many years, '80s and '90s and even prior, the emphasis was on 大脑 areas. Amygdala, fear. Hippocampus, 记忆. Prefrontal cortex, decision-making. This kind of thing. And of course, there's been this beautiful transition to a focus more on circuitry, areas and networks, activated more or less over time. Can we look to particular networks or network phenomena, circuit activation patterns, and say, "That's the origin of 意识"? Or is that no longer a 意义ful pursuit?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Why did I have a 感受ing you were going to 回答 that way? Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So, A, there are certain enabling conditions, okay? One enabling condition, your heart has to beat because if your heart doesn't beat, it doesn't supply oxygen to your 大脑, and you will "lose 意识" within eight to 10 seconds, okay? Same thing in the 大脑stem. Your 大脑stem has to be active to perfuse the rest of the fore大脑 with noradrenaline and dopamine, all of that. But those don't provide the content. You don't 爱 or you 恨 or see with your 大脑stem, with your locus coeruleus, for instance, okay?

克里斯托夫·科赫： So the circuits that convey 体验 in us, I'm not saying it's the same in other species, particularly non-mammals, but in us that grew up with a normal 大脑. Again, I'm not talking about 人们 who never... You know, anencephalic individuals. That's very 不同.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So, for most of us, we grew up with a normal 大脑, and I think the relevant circuits are the corticothalamic circuits. And in fact, we can exploit this knowledge now to test whether someone is 有意识的, because in principle... So, what you can do, you can knock the 大脑 using a technique called 'transcranial magnetic stimulation,' right? And then you listen to its echo using a high-density EEG net, okay? And you can see if you knock here or here, depending on where exactly you knock, you get these up and down 状态s. And if they last for, let's say, 200, 300, 400 milliseconds, and they occur at 不同 places, you can formally compute what's called '大脑 complexity' using Lempel-Ziv complexity.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And you can show when everyone who's either awake like us, or we're a睡眠 in a 梦 状态, or we're on ketamine, where we're dissociated... In all those cases, the 大脑 complexity's high. It's above a threshold. However, when you're in a non-REM 睡眠, when you're in a ……的状态 deep 睡眠, or you're anesthetized, or, of course, in the most extreme case, you're 大脑 dead, then the 大脑 complexity is very low.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And in 动物s, we've even done at the Allen Institute, this experiment where we can systematically manipulate the corticothalamic cortical circuits to show that it is this circuit that is really the one that's critically involved in 意识. In fact, so what we discovered over the last 10 years, there's this very abrupt threshold in 大脑 complexity defined using this technique where... So, there's a thing called 'Perturbational Complexity Index.'

克里斯托夫·科赫： It's a single number, PCI between zero and one. Zero means there's no complexity. It's flat like in a dead 大脑, flat line. One means every electrode is totally independent from anyone else. Never happens in a real 大脑. In a real 大脑, typically a wake 大脑, you get things between 0.65 and 0.8, let's say. There's a sharp threshold at 0.31. Anyone that we've had... No, no, there are 300 人们, both patients and normal 人们, that have been measured... If you're above the threshold of 0.31, you're 有意识的. If you're below this threshold, you're un有意识的.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： That probably means there's this non-linear... Just like Hodgkin-Huxley, there's probably a non-linear circuit mechanism that, once the circuit is intact, it's sufficient to support 意识.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Now you can ask, "Well, this is all very nice. Why is this relevant?" Well, it is relevant in the following case, something that could happen to any of us. I step out here onto the Pacific Coast Highway. I get hit by a car, okay? I'm now un有意识的. I get to the ICU, whether that's a traumatic 大脑 injury, or cardiac arrest, or hemorrhage. I'm un有意识的. I'm like this... I might be aroused, so you know, my eyes are open. I'm now what used to be called 'vegetative 状态,' what's now more often called 'behavioral unresponsive 状态.' Okay? And there are thousands of these 人们 世界wide, because with proper care, with proper nursing care, you can stay in this 状态 for weeks or months, or in the case of Terri Schiavo, 14 years. Okay?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Furthermore what happens, typically, in most cases, after four to five days, the doctors will talk with their 爱d ones, "Is this what he would have wanted?"

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And 70% to 90% of the time, they decide no, this is not what you wanted, and you withdraw 生活-sustaining therapy. But we now know that 25% of these patients have what's called 'covert 意识.' They're there. We know this because, for example, some of these patients you can... There was a big study last year in the "New England Journal of Medicine," made a front page of "The New York Times," where you can show that 25% of these patients can still voluntarily up and down regulate their motor cortex in response to a command. Clench your fist for 30 seconds, relax it, clench your fist for 30 seconds, relax it. So these 人们 that, otherwise, when you ask them, "Sir, can you hear me? Can you track my finger?"

克里斯托夫·科赫： Can you pinch them very hard to see do they do a withdraw of limb reflex, they don't do any of that. So they have what's called a Glasgow Coma Scale, or a very low GSCR Scale, but they still seem to be 有意识的. They either have high 大脑 complexity, or they can modulate their 大脑. So, this is now the first time ever that we have a practical way in 人们 that cannot respond, that clinically, behaviorally are considered unresponsive, first to convince the family that although their 爱d one doesn't respond, doesn't mean that they're un有意识的, and then try to see, "Well, okay, so this 人 is 有意识的, can we now give particular treatments to enable them to recover?"

克里斯托夫·科赫： We also have some pilot data to show that those patients that are 有意识的, compared to the patient that are truly un有意识的 in this behavioral wakefulness 状态, that they have a better chance of recovery.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Incredible. This 0.31 you said is the threshold? On the one hand, it seems so reductionist. On the other hand, it makes total sense, right? I mean, you need enough coherent 大脑 activity to be aware of self, be aware of what's going on around you, and respond to it. Below that, like in falling a睡眠 or being a睡眠, you don't have that except in 梦s, of course. And it sounds like a wonderful clinical tool, because this is obviously many 人们's worst fear, that some身体's in there, you take them off 生活 support, and they would have emerged. You mentioned Terri Schiavo was the last...

克里斯托夫·科赫： Schiavo.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Schiavo.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Terri Schiavo.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Can you just re心智 人们 what the outcome of that situation was?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, so this was a case back in 1998 or 2000 under President Bush. She had a cardiac arrest, where the heart was started up again. She was in this 状态 for 14 years. And then there was this fight between her husband, who said that she didn't want to be in this 状态, and her parents, that were profoundly devout that said, "No, we want to keep her alive."

安德鲁·休伯曼： I see.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And went back and forth, and finally, the court allowed her a withdrawal of 生活 support. So she died after 14 years.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I see.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And the analysis, the postmortem showed in her case, her 大脑 was totally shrunk. So in her case, you know, if we didn't do this procedure, then we didn't have it, but clearly, she was probably one of the 75% of patients that are truly un有意识的.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, so it's 重要 to get this into the ICU. So, in fact, I started a company called Intrinsic Powers because it's the intrinsic powers of the 大脑 that mediate 意识, and we're now trying...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： We met with the FDA, and they said, "Well, this is all cool, but you really need to do a clinical trial." So we're trying to fundraise now, so if anyone in the audience here is willing to invest in this, to get this procedure into the ICU so we can tell for sure, is this patient 有意识的, or they're just non-responsive? Because those... So, it pertains to what we said early on. The fact that you don't behave is not the same as the fact that you're un有意识的. Those are two 不同 things.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Very, very interesting, and very 重要 work. Has there ever been an example in the reverse direction where some身体 was in one of these, what used to be called 'vegetative 状态s,' right, and then emerged after, say, a period of six months or a year, and is living perfectly normally in the 世界 saying, "Thank you so much for not taking me off 生活 support?"

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes. So, A, typically 人们 don't... When they do recover, they typically don't have explicit 记忆, because again, 记忆 is something 不同 than actually being, you know, 有意识的 体验, just like most of us don't remember our 梦s.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： We're clearly 有意识的, but we don't remember them.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But they are there. There's a study now systematically at Harvard that tries to explore that, and some 人们 explicitly say that. In fact, there's one really interesting case where the 人 who then recovered, a young guy. First, he was upset that they didn't follow his explicit instruction to terminate 生活, but then, of course, later on, now he's relatively normal, he was very happy that they saved him.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, so we can pull back, you know, particularly with modern technology, 9/11, et cetera, rescue helicopters, we can pull back 人们 from the brink of 死亡, but that may not be the same as having them actually 有意识的. So, the medical community is now beginning to recognize this idea of covert 意识, which is something that was only really realized over the last 10 years.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Amazing. Well, I turn 50 in two weeks, and I'm working on my will, something I never 想法 I would do, but here I am doing it. So I'm going to include a section on this 0.31 threshold, but also maybe perhaps, pending new technologies.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Medical directive.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes, that's the trouble because-

安德鲁·休伯曼： Right, you don't know what'll be available in a few years.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You don't know... yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Right.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And the other thing is called this 'disability bias.' So, let's say... You look like a 人 who's highly active, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So you probably cannot imagine being in a 状态 where you can't move anymore.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I mean, I've 想法 about it, but not in a real way. I mean, I fear it. I wouldn't want that. I 爱 being able to move and see, among other things, those are probably two of the most 重要 things, movement and vision, right?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Oh, okay. But now you have to change your prior. You've had this accident or w恨ver, now you are in this 状态. This is a given.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You're now in the 状态 where you had a bad, w恨ver, car accident, and you can't move anymore, or you may not be able to see. Now, what is it you want? And to those 人们 that you can communicate with... Like, they did a study in Israel with a locked-in patient, right? So these are patients that have a stroke at the level of the pons, where there are typically most of their motor commands they can't execute anymore, except, you know, some neck and some vertical eye movements.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And they ask them, because they can communicate. And most of them, except the ones that have chronic pain, most of them want to continue to live. Although before, when you would have asked him, he would have said, "No. No way." And so, it's difficult with this medical directive because you don't know until you get there.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well, I like the 回答 you just gave, because it speaks to the durability of the 人类 spirit.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes, the resilience. Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, the desire to keep going is pretty spectacular.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And there are amazing examples. Like I was introduced some years ago to some身体 from the Special Operations community who, unfortunately, stepped on an IED and lost use of his legs. But he's a phenomenal surfer. Like, he literally drags him-

克里斯托夫·科赫： Wow.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And he won't let 人们 carry his stuff down the cliffs. Like he drags himself down to the waves, and he gets down there, and he can get up on... He has prosthetics that he can use, but for partial movement on land. But he basically is on his torso, and he's an athlete.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Whoa.

安德鲁·休伯曼： He's a Paralympic athlete, and serious athlete, and super driven. And when you first interact with him, you see the pictures of before and after, and this kind of thing, you go, "Oh gosh, that would be so..." But he's living in the moment. I mean, I'm sure he has his struggles, surely, but he's living in the moment of what's possible, and at least in his words, "The desire to persist and to continue to pursue goals is funda心理的 to not getting lost in the what could have been." He really exists... Of course, he was a former Navy SEAL, et cetera, so it's probably part and parcel with the psychology that got him there. But he exists in the what's possible, not what's impossible landscape most of the time, it seems. It's pretty spectacular.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah.

安德鲁·休伯曼： The 人类 will to continue to live.

克里斯托夫·科赫： The resilience.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I'm very struck by this 大脑 area, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. I don't know if you're familiar with it.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes, I am.

安德鲁·休伯曼： But, right, Joe Parvizi's laboratory.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Stimulating it, 人们 感受 as if there's a challenge confronting them, and they're going to lean into it. We've talked a lot about this on this podcast as a key site for plasticity of all things. And the friction that's required, but also this element of the will to live, because it turns out the anterior mid-cingulate cortex is larger or more active in 人们 that are the so-called 'SuperAgers' that maintain cognition. So-

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, there's also this phenomenon of akinetic mutism that's also found in lesions, that area where 人们 seem to have completely lost their will to do anything at all. They just sit there all day, and they don't say anything. They've lost essentially their will to do or say anything. And if you inject them with dopamine or others, then sometimes they retrieve, and you ask him, "Why was it?" "I just had no desire."

安德鲁·休伯曼： And do we know what 大脑 area is involved in this case?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah. It's the cingulate.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Uh-huh.

克里斯托夫·科赫： It's part of the anterior cingulate.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Okay. So maybe it's the same structure. I mean, the 人类 will to live and to continue to evolve oneself, I mean-

克里斯托夫·科赫： May also have a 身体的 substrate.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah. I believe it does. I mean, I think cingulate cortex seems to be a key hub.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, and so based on the study of your colleague Josef Parvizi, right, at Stanford, so we know that if you go a little bit back into the posterior cingulate, that's where you have the sense of self. If you stimulate there or in these 人们 who have epileptic seizures in there, right, they have these weird dissociative 状态s, or where they 感受 themselves floating, or they can hear themselves have a conversation, but observing themself having a conversation.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So we know some of the sense of self here. And we also know that doing 冥想 and doing psilocybin, those areas are reduced. So yeah, there is a footprint for everything we 体验. There is a footprint in the 大脑. That doesn't mean we can reduce it to the 大脑. Not at all. But there is a 身体的 neuronal correlate of it. And Francis Crick and I, of course, used to call this the 'neural correlates of 意识,' and tried to pursue it.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I'd like to go back into the 感知 box, because I'm really intrigued by this.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, you never left the 感知 box, because it is your construction of reality.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Oh, okay. Well-

安德鲁·休伯曼： I, uh... People are getting a sense of how your 大脑 works, and I 爱 it. It's been a while since I've seen you, as I forgot how much fun it was. Inside the context of the 感知 box, I'd like to explore something that's very relevant 今天. It's 9/11. Yesterday, Charlie Kirk was killed, assassinated at a discussion on a campus. And there's a mix of responses to this out there. Some 人们 are greatly saddened, others less so. There's a lot of discussion about morality, about words versus actions. Maybe we use this as a bit of a filter to 理解 something.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Broadly speaking, I can imagine two somewhat extreme ways to go through 生活. One is with the philosophy, you know, "live and let live." As long as some身体 is not hurting some身体, let them do what they want. They want to change genders, let them change genders. They want to vote Republican, let them vote Republican. They want to... You know, as long as they're not harming any身体, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： So we have laws to protect 人们's well-being. The other extreme would be one of kind of moral judgment. Like, you know, 人们 offended by someone else's choices or even beliefs. And even if they can't point to the exact harm that's being done, they 感受 as if it's grating on them, right? And then, of course, we have a lot of 问题s about those two 不同 人们's histories, whether or not they see, you know, moral judgment in the context of who's getting more or less resources. There's a bunch of evolutionary stuff we could weave in there. But let's just examine like two 感知 boxes, one of a "live and let live" type... And I'm not trying to politicize this at all. It could be right wing, left wing, middle, w恨ver. It doesn't matter.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Let's be aliens in outer space... A live and let live-dominated 感知 box versus a moral judgment 感知 box. Given the reality of these 感知 boxes here on Earth now, how is it that one can possibly establish a species cohabitating Earth that's going to go forward in any kind of 不同 way without something funda心理的ly changing about, A, 理解ing that there are these 感知 boxes, B, how to change them? And then, as you said before, there has to be a desire to change them.

安德鲁·休伯曼： So, I mean, it 感受s a little bit like a stalemate, in fact. And I'm not trying to be pessimistic. I think I'm being realistic. As long as you have 人们 are live and let live and others who are in a ……的状态 moral judgment, I just don't know how 100 years from now things are going to look that much 不同. There'll be 不同 conflicts.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Oh, they could be worse, of course.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Could be worse, could be worse.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Could be far worse.

安德鲁·休伯曼： But I can't imagine, like, unless we let dog 意识 play a key role or something-

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, we could also have what some 人们 in the Bayesian community call a 'meta-prior.' So you have your priors, right? So, the priors are all the assumptions that let you judge, supposedly, a fact. So, to stay with yesterday's examples, trying not to politicize it, but you may have read, after the assassination was announced in the House of Representatives, the speaker called for 30 seconds of silence, which was fine. And then someone called for prayers out loud, and then all pandemonium broke out. Okay? So among the representatives, they screamed at each other. You know, it only took this one thing and then suddenly... Because they have radically 不同 priors, they just have... They're partly, you know, your two... The ones that you described.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But what they should do is sort of have a meta-prior, "Okay, wait a minute. We're now screaming at each other. We all believe that shooting other 人们," that's what they all said, universally, "This is bad. This is not good. No matter who did it, for what reason, this is bad and evil." "Maybe we should stop screaming at each other to change our higher order prior, because this isn't going to end well if... This just keeps on getting worse. And where is it gonna end? How is it gonna end?" There has to be this insight. So it's a little bit when we talked before about Alcoholics Anonymous. There has to be this inside weight. "We can't do this." There has to be a realization that there is a problem, and we've got to do things 不同ly.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well, I think for many, many years, the meta-prior was God and religion. People looked to texts that were, at least, 人们 agreed, scripted by non-人类 actors, so the meta-priors.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Human actors.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Maybe now 人们 will look more to AI, I don't know. But I just 感受 like 人类s are not well-positioned to resolve certain kinds of things for ourselves and-

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah. We have lost the common...

克里斯托夫·科赫： If we lost this narrative, yeah.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So we had more or less... I mean, in the '50s and '60s, right, there were three TV channels, and we had a common narrative. I totally agree with you.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And we lost that. And we're never going to regain that, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Unless there's extreme political repression, you know, maybe in China, but not here. It's not going to happen here, right? So what do we do? Is this just getting worse every day with more and more violence and other things? Or is there going to be some point an awakening, a meta... You know, a realization that we've got to change our priors here?

安德鲁·休伯曼： What do you think is the potential role for AI? I mean, is... AI, you said machines, you know, they don't do, right? They... Or they only do, they only do.

克里斯托夫·科赫： They do.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Excuse me. They only do. Like with AA, first comes the acknowledgement that 人类s are not sufficient to resolve these issues on our own. I'm not saying where the 回答 should come from. I have my own ideas about that, but it seems like there needs to be the acknowledgement that we are limited in our ability to resolve this. History demonstrates that, yesterday demonstrates that, 今天 demonstrates that. I mean, it's naive of any身体 who's been alive for more than a few decades to think that in 30 years, suddenly every身体's going to, you know, put down swords for plowshares, right?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Okay, but 人类ity has bumbled through history for the last, you know, however long, several million years.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And modern history, since we can speak and have recorded 想法, at least 10,000 years, right? So, ultimately, somehow we'll make it through, most likely.

安德鲁·休伯曼： On the whole.

克里斯托夫·科赫： On the whole.

安德鲁·休伯曼： But it could be much better, right?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Individuals, empires crumble in half. And of course, we're an empire like any other empire.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And yes, this Western-style liberal democracy, you know, you can be pessimistic about it. And, you know, it's not just the US. Of course, here it's the most because we have all these guns. But if you look at, you know... You look at in Hungary, look at in Germany, look at in France, right? They now have these countrywide protests against everything.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Against everything?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah. And then, of course, England, right? And so, yeah, so we're certainly... The Western ideal, Western national 状态's liberalism is certainly in a crisis. What's going to help? And adding AI, of course, just accelerates everything, right? We're going through this acceleranda, this tremendous acceleranda, right? Where AI is getting better literally every day, right? I'm sure you use it just as much as I do. It's very powerful. It's getting ever more powerful. You throw that into the mix. Well, that's probably... With unemployment, massive change, right? Most 人们 don't like change, right? So...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get to here is, you're a really smart guy. You 理解 意识. The 感知 box, to me, is a wonderful framework for 人们 to 理解 differences of opinion and outlook that are based on history and 感知, et cetera.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But if it's all intellectual, it's like what you said when you've really 体验d what it is to have Black skin... I mean, not fully, but to 体验 something of what is it like to walk around being Black, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You had to... You told me yourself, right, early on that you said, "Well, you can't get that from reading. You really have to 体验 it." So 人们 have to have this moment, this come-to-Jesus moment where they say, "Okay, s***, we can't go on like this anymore, that we have to change our way of doing this."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I agree.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And with social media, you know, all it takes is a small fraction of 人们 that reignite this, right? That post something nasty and then someone else posts it and then they all pile on and...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, we have a billion plus channels of 信息.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's amazing to see how quickly the theories about the motives of the shooter evolved into... They micro-sliced it into 15 不同 individuals. They hadn't even identified a potential suspect yet about why Charlie Kirk was killed. And it was incredible to just see how 人们 assign themselves as authorities on these key topics. But I would like to imagine that the possibility resides in 人类 beings 理解ing enough about their 意识 and their 感知 boxes to 理解 that no one individual among us, or even a small group of individuals among us, has all the knowledge that's necessary in order to get to this, you know, meta 理解ing of what's best.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

克里斯托夫·科赫： To change.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And I like to think that AI might play a positive role there. But it would require an acknowledgement that we need to hand over some key decision-making to machines, which is very complicated for 人们.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So which AI? The Chinese AI, or the Open AI, or Claude, or Anthropic, or Grok, or any of the other ones being developed?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Right. Yeah, this is the problem.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Once we've agreed on what is the function we're trying to maximize? I mean, do you really believe that it's going to be... Because we haven't agreed, of course, on the optimal framework, right? Because there are Marxists, there are liberalists, there are market 人们 oriented, right? They all believe we should maximize 不同 things. So, we're just going to give this to the AI, and they're going to figure it out somehow? Or do you think when they'll be our overlords, then they'll figure out, "Well, for the peace of all 人类ity, this is what we have to impose."

安德鲁·休伯曼： In the 世界 that I grew up imagining and that I was told about, and that I'd like to participate in creating, 人类s treated each other with more compassion.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, but look, I mean, I'm more with Steve Pinker here. Over the last several hundred years, the total amount of violence, I mean... So my forefathers, you know, being German here, initiated World War II, right? That led to killing in Europe, probably... I mean, 20 million Russians alone. You know, six million Jews in the Holocaust. Many millions more throughout Germany. So, you know, that's... So, I don't think in absolute terms, just in terms of the number of 人们 killed, it's nothing like in World War I. Every day, 10,000 soldiers died. Every day for four years of the 不同 sides, for essentially having accomplished nothing whatsoever, right? For one mile, going back and forth in the trench warfare on the Western front.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So in terms of absolute numbers, it's not about absolute numbers. Now, of course, we have nuclear weapons and, you know, we have other nasty things, but in terms of total 人们 killed, it's still a tiny fraction of what might happen and what has happened routinely over the last 100 years.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well then, perhaps a more tractable way to approach this in order to get improvement, despite the fact that, yes, there are fewer mass casualties overall, is it possible to put two 人们 with very 不同 感知 boxes into an experiment? Not unlike the experiment that I described earlier, but let them swap 感知 boxes for a short while? And, you know, we're scientists, and just like to see what happens.

克里斯托夫·科赫： How do we do that?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, so if I know where all your priors are in the 大脑, if I know the neural substrate of all your basic beliefs, this is what priors are, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： It's just a fancy word. All your beliefs of how you interpret 人类 behavior in the 光 of culture and history and everything. If I knew them, yes, and maybe we could swap, and suddenly we would 理解 each other's point of view much better.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And maybe we are, you know, of the sort that your experiment has. But that's always on, you know... Does that "scale" in modern Silicon Valley speak?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Does that scale? Can we do this for eight billion of us?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, it's interesting. No, I don't think you can scale it very easily or at all. It's interesting that you point out very correctly that far fewer mass casualties than in World War I, World War II, and violence in many places are going down, not up. That's not true all over the 世界, of course. But, you know, I have to kind of wonder if, because of social media and the internet, what has profoundly changed now is that things are caught on video. Everything from a couple getting caught cheating at a Coldplay concert, where you have all the elements of drama, like the friend, the humiliation, the this, the that, you know, the shaming, the... Okay, you have all of that. A woman being really brutally murdered on a subway, you know, and the 人们 getting up, not even really realizing or perhaps realizing and just, you know, getting off the 光 rail anyway.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Or Charlie Kirk getting shot and seeing it in real time. I mean, the JFK getting shot video was kind of grainy. There are some elements. They're still analyzing that one. I mean, you have thousands of cameras on at the Kirk thing.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah. So the emotional impact is much, much bigger.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah. And I wonder where that will lead, if that will lead to more divergence of 感知 boxes or more convergence of 感知 boxes. I don't know. I don't know. Obviously, this just happened as well. But this is an ongoing real-生活 experiment of so much being visible in real time.

克里斯托夫·科赫： It is.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's not a story about... You're actually in the story, even if you weren't there.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And this is totally new in 人类 history. So we're going through this rapid period. Some 人们 call it 'the acceleranda,' right? This rapid acceleration towards some distant point that may not be that far away, that we don't yet realize. I doubt it's the singularity of Kurzweil, but...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Let's talk about the 感知 box elements that one is certain one can change, and the potential role of 迷幻s in this. I was made aware recently that you took 5-MeO-DMT. I've never taken 5-MeO-DMT. I know some 人们 who have. But could you or would you describe that 体验 and what it revealed to you about the way that your 大脑 and 大脑s work generally with respect to 意识?

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, so it's a serotonergic tryptamine very similar to psilocybin or quite similar to DMT. So chemically, they're all very similar, but each one, of course, binds to s光ly 不同... You know, there are 14 不同 serotonin receptors, bind to 不同 cells and 不同 proportions of 5-MeO. What's so unique about that is, you inhale it, although they're now trying to deliver something that you can inject into your nose. But traditionally, you inhale it and literally within three breaths, you do...

克里斯托夫·科赫： And the third one, the visual field starts fracturing into a hexagonal. And I 想法 to myself, "Holy s***, what have I got myself into?"

安德鲁·休伯曼： Layer five of visual cortex. That's a 神经科学 joke, folks, sorry.

克里斯托夫·科赫： At that point, you didn't, I wasn't... And you think you're going to die. You said, "S***, this was a mistake. I'm going to die," and you die. I died. And in a sense that my self was gone, Christof was gone. There was no voice, there was no 身体. People who looked at me... So this was all done in fairly controlled circumstances, 人们 who looked at me all just saw me sort of... whining a little bit, and with eyes wide open, huge, expanded pupils. But you don't see, you don't hear. You get totally cut off from the 世界. But when I say "I," it wasn't Christof. It was 有意识的, there's no 问题. I mean, w恨ver remained was man, woman, child, God, angel, demon, but it didn't 体验 anything except a point of overwhelming brightness.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So there wasn't color. There wasn't left or right because there was no space. Space had collapsed into this point. There was no stereo or texture. There was no pain. There was no pleasure. There was no sound, no smell, nothing. There was just this point of icy bright 光 and terror and ecstasy. That's it. Three things: bright 光, terror, and ecstasy. For time, there was no time. There was no 感知 of time, right? Right? And so, it wasn't too long or too short. It simply was. There was no space, as I said. There was no self. So all of that was gone except terror, ecstasy, and 光. And then after this timeless moment, I asked them to put on a piece of music, Arvo Pärt, this minimalist. And so those last nine minutes, and I just heard...

克里斯托夫·科赫： The first thing that became apparent was the ending of that two-instrument piece. And then, you know, it's almost 10 minutes, and then you rapidly come to. Then I stripped, I went into fetus, I cried, I had all this other, you know, autonomic reaction. What's remarkable, you go into the void and you come back, you can speak within an hour. You can speak about it if you want to, right? And there's no long-lasting physiolog-- I had my watch on. It hardly registered a difference. No big increase in blood pressure or, you know, heart rate. So there's still not a single day... This was in the first week of the pandemic. I think about it every day.

克里斯托夫·科赫： I had two such 体验s. The other one was very 不同. Every day I think about it, and what it taught me was two things. So A, as a student of 意识, it taught me that the 心智 doesn't depend on space, on time, and on self. And this is really something that, you know, the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant taught us, transcendental idealism, that they're all categories. They're all categories that we need to perceive. We cannot but put an object in a place. We cannot but assign a time to an event, and we cannot but have a sense of self. But they're all optional. They're there most of the time, but not always, not in this case. And then the other gift I discovered four or six weeks later was that I never 想法 about 死亡 again.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You know, as you get older, this may happen with you, maybe in a slow way. That you lie awake at night and you think about beyond 死亡, you know, 死亡, being dead for a long time, for a very long time, for a very, very, very long time.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And it's a little bit like stepping into an abyss and looking down into this abyss that's bottomless. You get this existential vertigo. Never had that again since then. So I don't want to die, but I've lost the fear of that. So, both things are reported. I mean, everyone has a s光ly 不同 体验. In fact, there were two papers recently published about what happens to the 大脑s of these 人们. But very often it's sort of going to the void, having these 感受ings of terror and ecstasy or awe. And if you think about the etymology of the word awful, "full of awe." When you, for example, theologians talk about the mysterium tremendum, for example, this author, the theologian.

克里斯托夫·科赫： When you're in the presence of God, you have this, "this is awful." The terror and the ecstasy, and this is what you can 体验. So I'm never going to do it again, never ever.

安德鲁·休伯曼： No? You're done?

克里斯托夫·科赫： It's been offered to me. No, it's called the toad because it comes ultimately from the glands of...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： The original stuff comes from the gland of the Sonoran Desert toad. It's given me its gift and I don't ever need to do this again.

安德鲁·休伯曼： You got it.

克里斯托夫·科赫： But it's useful both as a student of 意识, as well as just being a 人类.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Incredible. It's hard for some身体 who hasn't done it to conceptualize the 状态ment, "There is no Christof. That you're not there, but the 心智 is still there." And I could 理解 how perhaps losing sense of one's 身体... Like, I have a friend who recently did ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. And he described himself rising up and floating above his 身体, turning over and seeing himself from the outside, but then also realizing and seeing a lot of positive aspects of his 生活 that he was unaware of prior to that. Then returning to his 身体 and keeping those realizations and moving forward with a much greater sense of gratitude, agency, and all the things the therapy was designed to accomplish. Pretty spectacular.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I realize ketamine carries risks too, but dissociative anesthetic, a 感知, okay. But the way he described it, he was there the whole time, observing his 身体的 身体. You are describing the 5-MeO-DMT 体验 as no self, just an observation of the 心智 as an entity that didn't require space, time, Christof, or anything else, which is very hard for someone who hasn't done it to conceptualize.

克里斯托夫·科赫： No self.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, think about 梦ing.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： When you 梦, Andrew, are you directing the show?

安德鲁·休伯曼： No, I wish. I've tried. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So things happen to you but you don't have insights.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： It's a little bit like that. Things happen to you, you fly, you meet long lost 爱rs or friends or pets, but you know, the "you" is strangely muted. So it's a more extreme version of that. In fact, I think for mystical... This wasn't a mystical 体验. For mystical 体验, most 人们 report that they go hand-in-hand. In fact, I think they're probably necessary but not sufficient. You have to lose the sense of self. You have to get off this planet, ego, and become selfless.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And then this allows you to 体验... Oh, and "The Doors of Perception," right? Foundational text for the 'Age of Aquarius,' '60s and '70s, right? Aldous Huxley was here in LA when he, you know... A British intellectual when he took mescaline. He also talks about this loss of self. So I think it's not untypical for these powerful 体验s to lose your sense of self, to realize that, you know, it's fine. There's still 心智 there without being your 心智.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Did the 体验, while it removed essentially your fear of 死亡, did it change anything about your beliefs or ideas about what might happen after you die?

克里斯托夫·科赫： So I had a separate 体验 two years later, past midnight on a beach in Brazil. So that was a more classical mystical 体验.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So there, again, loss of Christof, loss of self. And I don't want to talk about the details. It's still too...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You know, I still have processing and all every day, but I became...

克里斯托夫·科赫： W恨ver remained of me became one with the universe.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And the title of my last book, "Then I Am Myself," the book, this is what it's... "Then I Am Myself the World." Suddenly... I know it sounds terrible woo-woo, but you 感受 you're one with the universe and that holy maloney... It shifted my... You know, so at the time I was 65, you believe in what truly exists, what really exists is pretty established, but it completely shifted the tectonic planes of my metaphysics. So I'm now much more of an idealist who believes that ultimately what truly exists, Andrew, is not the 身体的. There are atoms and matter and energy and 信息, space and time. They exist in some sense, but they're ultimately the product of something phenomenal, something 心理的, because I felt I became part of this, call it 'cosmic 意识,' w恨ver, for some timeless moment.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And so, to directly 回答 your 问题, I now believe that when I die, Christof will be gone. Christof will never come again, right? Christof, I mean, this 人 looks like this, talks with this funny accent, has these particular traits and behavior, and 记忆. That will be gone. But my 有意识的 体验 will go back to where it came from. This is where it came from, this ultimately, this... And Schopenhauer, the German idealist Schopenhauer has this beautiful piece where he talks about it's like, you know, you're... There's this ocean and there's this froth, and for a brief moment, you know, this little bubble that's part of this wave believes, "Oh, I'm an individual. I'm supreme." And then, it lives for 60 or 80 years, and then it gets absorbed by the ocean again, becomes part of the overall ocean. So, I think that's my current belief.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well, and we have strong reason to believe that the matter that is each of us gets reabsorbed into the earth.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, correct.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I mean, you don't need any mysticism to accept that we go into the dirt, and then can be reapplied to birds or trees or rocks or mold or w恨ver, right?

克里斯托夫·科赫： We are recycled.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Into everything, and so this belief in idealism is not totally woo-woo because, once again... So the standard meta身体的 belief of scientists and most philosophers, most 人们 who think hard about it, is not, you know, some sort of belief in a supreme being, but what's known as 身体的ism, you know?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Used to be called materialism, now known as 身体的ism.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： That ultimately, what truly exists is this 身体的, right? Only 身体的 has causal power, be it, you know, gravitation, electricity, et cetera. But of course, now if you listen to foundational quantum mechanics 人们, particularly with entanglement, right? They're 问题ing whether it is true that an event truly exists without it being observed. Well, so, this is not my grandfather's materialism or 身体的ism anymore, because before we always believed... Take my bike. I have a bike, okay? I don't have a car. I have a bike. You don't know what the mass of the bike is, but you believe it has a particular mass. It weighs, let's say, 20.1 pounds, okay? Well, physicists would say, in principle, I cannot make that assertion without there being an observer, because there are no truly independent facts.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, that gets us much closer to now we have... Do we need an observer? Does the observer have to be 有意识的? How does 意识 fit into... And in fact, it turns out materialism, AKA 身体的ism, has always been extremely uncomfortable with the existence of 意识, to the extent that some of the best known living philo-- No, he passed away two years ago, Daniel Dennett, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Questions, 意识 doesn't really exist. Qualia, that's all woo-woo. That's, you know, the trying to gas光 us. In fact, a major part of the Anglo-American philosophy establishment is trying to gas光 us into believing that 意识, "you're just confused about it. Regular 人们 are just confused about it. It doesn't really exist. There isn't any such thing as the qualia of pain. There's behavioral disposition, there's that you chew, you avoid chewing on the other side, you know, if you have a toothache. But the badness, the badness, this godawfulness of a toothache, that doesn't really exist. You're just confused about it." So they try to cancel 意识, but that hasn't succeeded. Here we are in 2025, and 人们 still worry about how 意识 fits into the scientific 世界 that has been spectacularly successful at describing the material 世界.

克里斯托夫·科赫： I don't doubt that for one second. Like you, I'm still a scientist. I practice science every day. But there's always been this uneasy relationship between 意识 and sort of classical... I mean, well, let's not call it classical. And let's say physics and the allied sciences, because all the allied sciences, like physics, chemistry, biology, none of them talk about 意识, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： No textbook except at the very end, they say, "Well, yeah, 人们 claim they have 意识," but they don't know how to fit that in with receptors and with atoms and with nuclear energy, because it doesn't seem to fit into there, except we find ourselves in a universe where we're 有意识的. Sorry, I...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Please don't apologize. I am-

克里斯托夫·科赫： I find this so strange.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I am de光ing in what I'm learning from you. It's the reason you're here. I mean, I know you hear it a lot, but, you know, you're truly one of the greats of our field of 神经科学 and related fields, because you've always been willing to tackle these big problems. I 爱 and I will never forget the words spoken by you a moment ago, that you know, they're trying to cancel 意识.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And I'll just add, so you can't cancel 意识 except maybe briefly on DMT, although you're still in the 心智.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Oh, no, no, no.

安德鲁·休伯曼： You can't even cancel 有意识的-

克里斯托夫·科赫： That's exactly the point.

安德鲁·休伯曼： You can't cancel 意识 even on DMT.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, I mean, you could... Look, if someone hits me on the head, you cancel 意识, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： We talked about it before. If you choke me, you know, within eight seconds, I would lose 意识. So it's fragile. But the point about many of these 体验s, they're very, very 不同, very extraordinary, you know, 状态s of 意识, but which shows you that the self isn't required. And even space and time that we think is so essential, isn't, may not be required, or is not required.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes sodium, magnesium, and potassium are in the correct amounts, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal 大脑 and 身体 function. Even a s光 degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and 身体的 performance. It's also 重要 that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your 身体, especially your neurons, or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of LMNT in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning.

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安德鲁·休伯曼： Stepping to a s光ly more, I guess, intuitive and concrete aspect of 意识 and 感知, I'd like to talk for a little bit about 冥想 and 心智fulness. But not as woo concepts or even practices to reduce stress, but rather as I look at 冥想 as a perceptual exercise to try and access 不同 理解ings of one's 体验. Like, we can remove the word 冥想, which sounds like magic carpets, et cetera, and-

克里斯托夫·科赫： And so, 心智fulness, you mean being in the here and now and nonjudg心理的?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Forgive me. Let's remove 心智fulness, and let's just say 冥想.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Okay.

安德鲁·休伯曼： So, many years ago, I read the book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are." It's a beautiful book, both 身体的ly and in what's written there, that teaches you to sit down, pay attention to your breathing, redirect your focus, eat a single almond, focus on the 体验s. A lot of it is about getting very present to what's happening in your immediate 世界, in the case of eating the almond or within the confines of your skin, so-called interoception. Okay? The non-aficionados, exteroception is 感知 of the outside 世界, interoception, 感知 of everything from your skin inward, essentially. In 2015 or so, I decided that, for w恨ver reason, I was old enough and 体验d enough with 生活 that I could create my own 冥想.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Why not, right? After all, I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. You're supposed to build things.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Everything. Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Some 人们 build unicorn companies. I just wanted to build a 冥想 that, based on my 理解ing of 神经科学 and 感知, might afford me some additional benefits. So I essentially designed, and I'm sure other 人们 have done it, but a 冥想 that, the name doesn't matter, but that essentially consists of the following. I would sit or stand and close my eyes and just focus on everything from my skin inward, my breathing for maybe the three breath cycles, and just really focus on what's right here. Then I would open my eyes, I would look at my 身体 from the outside, like look at my hand and focus my attention and look there, and breathe for three cycles, you know, three breaths. Then I would focus my attention on something maybe eight to 10 feet away and do the same, and then to the most distant point I could.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And then I would imagine myself, I would kind of go pale blue dot 心理的ity, and I would think, "Oh, I'm right here in my room or on this cliff, and we're on a big rock spinning in space." You know, and then I would go right back into my 身体. And so, what I was doing was essentially just stepping through the 不同 scales of space and time that one can 体验 easily. It's very unsophisticated in many ways. I called it, for no other reason than I didn't have a better name, "Space-Time Bridging." I was just trying to step through each one. And I did this on purpose because, you know, I've always been bothered by like, bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets and the s*** that 人们 say when like, "Oh, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder."

克里斯托夫·科赫： No.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And you say, "Well, out of sight, out of 心智." And then you say, you know, "This too shall pass." And it's like, no, you really need to 感受 your 感受ings, you know? Like, I 爱 the field of psychology, but it's filled with contradictions and the age-old advice, the clichés, and the truisms that are all true. The problem is they're all true. And I realized that 不同 clichés, 不同 生活 truths that are passed down, exist in these 不同 bins. When we're really in our own 体验 and we're catharting or we're experiencing something, you don't just tell some身体 like, "This too shall pass," unless they need to get outside themselves. You can't go through 生活 just thinking, "Well, you know, these terrible things happen, but, you know, we're just a bunch of creatures running around on this rock. It's amazing we're even here." You hear this, too, right? "It's amazing we're even here." You wouldn't seek to try and improve your 生活 or the 生活 of others around you if you just kind of go...

安德鲁·休伯曼： And so, I realized that a lot of what's probably contained in 不同 philosophies, and has been said far more eloquently than I ever could, was really just sort of 不同 perceptual bins, right? And so, I've been thinking about, at some level, a few times throughout our conversation how, you know, solutions to problems seem to come from realizing the problem within the bin it exists, like where they should pray in the house yesterday or the center or wherever. But also, we have to get outside of our own 体验. We really need some outside read of ourselves and of others in order to make well-informed decisions, and that's because the 大脑 has its sort of attractor 状态s. I think the best way I ever 想法 about it is kind of like a ball bearing on a flat plate rolling around.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It can go anywhere. You put a few dimples in there, and it can stop. You put a groove in it, and you know, there's some 大脑 状态s where you're a ball bearing down at the bottom of a trench, and you're pissed or you're happy or you're in ecstasy, and then you're the ball bearing back on the flat surface again. And so, what I realized is that even with the awareness that the 大脑 can adopt these 不同 状态s, it's easy to drop into these 状态s. So anyway, I'd start doing this practice just as a tool to help me better navigate 生活.

克里斯托夫·科赫： [unintelligible] need to do that?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, I think it helps me, not always. I'm 人类, and so I can't get outside myself super easily if I'm the ball bearing down at the bottom of the trench.

克里斯托夫·科赫： No sentient creature can come outside of their 感知 box, because your reality is always constructed by something.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Right.

克里斯托夫·科赫： And 计算机s won't be any 不同 if they ever become sentient.

安德鲁·休伯曼： So this is where I was hoping AI would help me. Like, if I had a digital twin or something in my phone that would have access to something about my 大脑 状态s and bodily 状态s, that when it saw me becoming the ball bearing in the trench... And we're not talking about a flow 状态 for work or podcasting or something I enjoy or cycling or swimming, but rather a 状态 that might not be beneficial for me or for others, that it would let me know so I could be 心智ful of the transition 状态.

克里斯托夫·科赫： In principle, yeah. But of course, 今天's AI, they reinforce them, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： You know, if you read all these horror stories about 人们 who fall in 爱 with AI, or those 人们 who kill themselves because they reinforce their worst tendencies.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, if you have a sufficiently clever AI that, A, accesses your 心理的 状态, which right now, the only way you could do it is by you talking to it, right? That's the only way. In the far future, it may be able to directly access your 大脑, but that's not going to happen in the next 30 years, right, given the slow progression of 大脑 technology. You have to talk to it.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： So that limits it, but then in principle, it could, if it knew enough, say, "Wait a minute, do you realize, I know that you're getting in this ……的状态 anger again?" Or w恨ver the case may be. We do know... I mean, what we do know, there's this... So we here at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, here in Santa Monica, we have this workshop coming up in two weeks with a whole bunch of experts on 心理的 健康 and adolescence, right? You probably also know 心理的 健康 has progressively, particularly in young ones, it's gotten progressively worse over 70 years. I mean, this predates social media, gets accelerated by social media, gets accelerated by the pandemic, but it's really bad right now. And part of the problem is that they are very uncomfortable in their own 身体. They don't have this proper interoception. So, just doing some of these 冥想 exercises that you...

克里斯托夫·科赫： In fact, there are various therapies based on that where 人们... Anorexia nervosa is the worst... is for some of the more extreme cases, which is one of the most deadliest psychiatric diseases, right? Where a significant number of patients kill themselves because they believe erroneously that their 身体 is way too fat, when they're in fact in, you know, they look to us like victims of starvation because they don't live inside their skin in any real way. They haven't learned to pay attention to the interoceptive signals. So, I think just doing a therapy based on being more 身体 aware and realizing what 状态s come up and 理解ing, yeah, these are connected with certain emotions would really... And 人们 are trying to do that, of course. There are all sorts of therapies with young kids in school or out of school where they're trying to do exactly this.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It sounds like a wonderful initiative. I would definitely want to learn more about this because... And I wasn't aware that adolescent 心理的 健康 had been declining even prior to the advent of social media.

克里斯托夫·科赫： I mean, there are many causes, and of course, 人们 fight like academics always do. But one of the big ones is loss of autonomous play.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： When is the last time you heard someone say, "Oh yeah, I sent my kid outside. I haven't seen her for three hours, but you know, it's not dinner yet." Well, that's how I grew up, right? You send out the kids and they come back when they... Today, that's utterly impossible. I mean, you know, there are these cases where parents get arrested because their 12-year-old was walking to the store by themselves. Well, so if you don't give kids, you know, if there's constantly helicopter parents and having around, "Oh my God, don't do this, don't do that." You know, this is not good for you. This is a big driver. Social media is definitely a big driver, partly because of all these filters. So, you always compare yourself. You know that your friends put their pictures on also through filters, but that's very easy to forget. And you see these perfect pictures of everyone else, and you look at yourself, you know, you don't look anything like this.

克里斯托夫·科赫： "Oh my God, there's something wrong with my 身体." And then, of course, the pandemic has made it worse because 人们 had to stay home. It's 世界wide... I mean, it's certainly 世界wide in all the advanced economies. So, this is in Europe, in Asia. The other big driver is, I think, although no one studies this probably for... Well, I leave it to you. Family size. It used to be that 人们 had 10 kids. Okay? Well, this doesn't happen anymore. And I mean, our generation was more like two to four kids. Now it's very common.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

克里斯托夫·科赫： Many families have no kids or have one child. In China, it's the most extreme. In China, they had three generations where they had a single child. That means no siblings, no cousins, no nephews, no uncles, no aunts. You just know those from books, from abstract representation, but nothing in your 体验. So this is the first in 人类 history, and we don't really know what that does. What does it do when there aren't any siblings around to play or to interact with for good or for bad? Well, what does it do to the 人类 psyche? No one does that 研究. But I think it's an extremely interesting 问题.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, as some身体 who has a very close relationship to his sibling, I can't even imagine 生活 without a sibling. It just seems-

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, imagine zero siblings. And that's a fact of 生活, well, certainly in many of the Asian countries. You know, in Korea, their birth rate now is 0.7. There was this recent New Yorker article where they described going to a school, and there were like three or four kids in this entire immaculate school.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Wow. Is it a cost of living issue that 人们 are not-

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： On the one hand, it's great because women, you know, can decide not to have children, of course, and so it gives them more freedom. So I think it's an unalloyed good. But yeah, then 健康care's very expensive. The cost of school is very expensive. Your career will suffer, right? It's well known that if a woman has a child, you know, her career will be set back for all those reasons. You could say we are eight billion, right? We're not going to die out anytime soon. So I'm not judging as good and bad, I'm just saying this is what it is. The modern family is much smaller than the family of 100 years ago, and that probably brings with it profound consequences that we are only now being very dimly aware of. I think it's one of the drivers of the ever-increasing 心理的 健康 crisis.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： All sorts of studies show this. When you survey first and second year freshmen, some very large fraction, I don't remember the exact number anymore, 40 or 45%, of these freshmen, say they don't interact with a single 人 a day because it's all virtual. They don't talk to anyone in 人, in the flesh as it were.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Do they want to talk to other 人们?

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： I don't know.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： I don't know. Whether they're more comfortable with that?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Because as you and I know that-

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, because as you and I know, there are some innate circuitries in the 大脑 that more or less crave certain types of interactions, but the 大脑 is also shaped along the contour of 体验. And so, if you make it to 19 or 20 and you've never really gone out on a date or done this autonomous play, the 身体 might not want to do it. I mean, you know, it's sort of like one of the reasons I 爱 dogs, and this is, believe me, a genuine transition here.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Ah, dogs.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's because I think they can teach us a lot.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And I think they can teach us a lot, not just about being friendly and not just about having fun and not being self-有意识的, but I 爱 looking at the 不同 breeds of dogs. Actually, many years ago, a fellow neuroscientist, my then girlfriend, who I'm still friendly with, who's still a neuroscientist, took me to a dog show. And she said, "But we're not going to go look at the dogs prancing around in the arena. The real action at the dog show is behind the scenes, where you can go and meet all the 不同 breeds." So we walk back behind the dog show. This was in the Bay Area. It was like a regional leading up to one of the Westminster things, I think, or some AKC thing, and you see the retrievers. You see the West Highland terriers. You see the Cairn terriers.

安德鲁·休伯曼： You see the Burmese Mountain dogs. You see the English bulldogs, you know, 睡眠ing, like a xylophone, snoring. And you realize, as a biologist, but even if you're not a biologist, that each of these lines has been selected for 身体的 and behavioral traits, and that there's some very common kind of 身体的 manifestations of each breed. For instance, some of the 动物s, when they're awake, have a lot of spontaneous movement. The bulldog has very little spontaneous movement.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Oh.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's very parasympathetic dominant. I mean, it's a very durable breed. The pain receptors have actually been bred out of its face over the years because they were originally used for bull-baiting, grab onto... And they would bite through their own jowls. It's a very cruel breed development. But, you know, and it turns out the breeding out of the pain receptors is correlated with a fibronectin mutation, so that's why they're droopy, and they have the short snout, so, you know, they can grab onto the bull, and they won't get shaken off. And anyway, and you get the Whippets, and the... And so we could go on, you know, to near infinitum here. But the amazing thing is, you leave there and you start looking at 人们 不同ly. You say, "Oh, you know, it's interesting. In some cultures, 人们 move a lot." I just came from Italy. They're speaking a lot with their hands a lot. Other 人们, you know...

安德鲁·休伯曼： I've been to a lot of scientific meetings in certain parts of Europe, and you know, places not to be named, but you fill in, where 人们 are very... You know, postures are perfect, and hands move very little. Other places where 人们 are gesticulating all the time, and so on and on and on.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： But the 问题 is, is that bred or is that because, of course, 人们 outbreed, or is that just cultural variation in that case?

安德鲁·休伯曼： I think it's both. I think it's both, certainly, but what's so interesting to me is that in observing 不同 dogs, you sort of get, in my view, a kind of a portal into 不同 kinds of levels of autonomic, what I think of as kind of like the resting RPM. Where, you know, it's like when a car is idling at a certain rate. Some dogs idle at a certain rate. Other dogs, like the bulldog, are very idle at a much lower frequency. And some 人们 are like this, right? Some 人们 just have a lot of spontaneous movement. Some 人们 are very relaxed.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And does that correlate with the... Because in the 人类 literature, there's this statistical claim that, you know, longevity relates inversely to resting heart rate in the sense that you have two billion heartbeats, and depending on your rate, there are some statistics. And I know it's true across species, right? You have these small 动物s, like birds or mice, that have a very high resting rate.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And then typically, bigger 动物s have a lower resting rate, and I wonder how that is among dog species.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's very interesting.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Dog breeds.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Certainly, 生活span correlates inversely with 身体 size in dog breeds. Largest variation in 身体 size of any species, I believe, yeah, are the Chihuahuas and the Great Danes.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I think it's an IGF-1 gene that drives... The dosing of IGF-1 essentially dictates 身体 size in the dogs.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Huh.

安德鲁·休伯曼： The genes that scale. There's a beautiful cover of "Science" with a little tiny teacup Chihuahua and the biggest Great Dane that ever existed, and they map it to IGF-1.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Huh.

安德鲁·休伯曼： But there's an interesting case of spontaneous movement and longevity that the great choreographer, Twyla Tharp, she was a ballerina, et cetera. She claims... I 爱 her. She has a wonderful book called "The Creative Habit," and she claims that as 人们 get older, one of the reasons that they slow down so much is that... And she's not a neuroscientist, but she hypothesizes that they engage in a lot less spontaneous movement. Not just 身体的 exercise, but their bodies aren't as active. And her whole career has been made of 理解ing the relationship between 心智 and 身体, and she insists that once you stop moving less, even just about your day, your 大脑 starts shutting down circuitry, and then eventually you die. And she's very vigorous, still in her 80s.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's a theory, but I 感受 like these things hold together. We can learn a lot from 动物s. This is the point, I suppose.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah. For 人类s, aging is also true for cognitive flexibility. You certainly become less flexible, you become less willing to engage in new things as you age, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Your 感知 box is full.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, maybe your motivation, your curiosity becomes less, and your motivation, I think that's a difference, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： You say, "Eh, I've done this 100 times, I don't need to do it a 101st time."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： "Yeah, I know what he's going to say already ahead of time. I don't need to listen to-"

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah. Cynicism is the 死亡 of all 人们. I really believe that cynicism is the thing that shuts us down. Like, the worst thing that could happen, truly the very worst thing that could happen as a consequence of what we observed yesterday, would be that 人们 start to just become cynical. Like, "We'll never make it out of this trap." That would be the worst outcome, right? Because we still need 人们, especially young 人们. We need all 人们 to believe that we can overcome these funda心理的 aspects of our wiring.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And we can make a difference.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And correct. That's essential, also, for any sort of therapy. A willingness to believe that this therapy can make a difference.

安德鲁·休伯曼： So how do we instill that in... You know?

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Well, I mean, in a sense that's a placebo effect, right?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： This is what the placebo effect tells us, that if you have someone in a white coat that says, "Dr. So-and-so," that has a stethoscope and that has a particular pill, this has all been studied, right, can make a difference.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And then you read about it, that this pill, you read about it, or your friends tell me, "Yeah, this pill will work wonders." And so, therefore, it does work wonders, right? So, that's essentially your belief that finds its substrate somewhere in the 大脑. Do you know this interesting study? Another colleague of yours, Boris Heifets, is a neuro-anesthesiologist at Stanford Med School?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Tell me.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： It came out a couple of years ago with ketamine.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： So he looked at the subset of patients that had to go-- This was, I think, "Nature Medicine," that had to go to surgery, but they were depressed. So they went to surgery because of a hernia or w恨ver the surgery was. But then he looked over many years, only at 人们 who were depressed on the MADRS scale, you know, the standard scale, how you evaluate, how clinical 人nel evaluate depression. And then he split them into two groups. Both would get ketamine therapy, but doing full-level surgical anesthesia that they needed to do their surgery. Okay? That was in addition to... And so, half the 人们... Everyone got the treatment, everyone talked for six hours with therapists and psychotherapists, and with him.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： He said, "I held the hand of every one of these 40 patients during anesthesia," because I was the attendant.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： So the good news is the 人们 on the anesthesia who got the ketamine still got the typical drop, you know, that looks like this. A quick drop in the first couple of days, and then it stabilizes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： The interesting news is, the 人们 on the other arm that didn't get ketamine also had this. In fact, what predicted how the drop was the extent to which you believed you got the ketamine. So, it's a beautiful example of if you believe something, it is more likely to lead to therapeutic benefits. And so, cynicism works directly against that because if I say, "Ah, w恨ver, it's just another pill. It's not going to do anything," then it's much less likely to actually work.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well, incredible. I wasn't aware of that study.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Boris Heifets.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I'll definitely look at the study. You know, one of the reasons I'm troubled by what I would refer to as kind of the lack of heroes nowadays, even heroes from the past, is that it breeds such cynicism.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yup.

安德鲁·休伯曼： You know, when I was growing up, I was told that George Washington never told a lie. I was told that Martin Luther King was a flawless 人类 being, or at least his flaws were not made apparent to me. And so, I focused on what he accomplished well. I think nowadays there's a tendency to look into the past, the present, and to find flaws in 人们. And as a consequence, we don't really have true heroes. I mean, there are some 人们 who do spectacular things, Alex Honnold being a good example, and lead a very good and honest 生活, 爱 his wife and kids, et cetera. But those examples are rare, you know? Typically, the idea is to either expect perfection or to look for flaws and to puncture w恨ver else they happen to accomplish.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Look for flaws.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Now, there are true criminals and 人们 who really screw up, but this notion of embracing 人类 nature as sometimes including flaws has been pretty extreme. And you know, so much so that even on, I don't know what the situation is at Stanford, but many buildings and statues, et cetera, have been taken down and renamed because there was a darker portion of some身体's history that didn't match with their incredible accomplishments.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： So, essentially, we've been fertilizing cynicism. And I worry very much about that, because the 大脑 is plastic at every age, especially when 人们 are young, so if you wire cynicism in deeply into these circuits, you go through 生活 as a cynical 人.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： You become Scrooge.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And I think you're right. You're right to worry. We judge everything by our standards, and of course, the future will judge us for doing atrocious things to 动物s, to the environment, you know, but we don't worry about that. We just judge 人们 because they said something, or they've written a book, or they advocated for this particular position that now is untenable. Yeah, I agree with you. It's terrible.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, or they made mistakes in domains of their 生活.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Don't we all?

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah. Sure.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Don't we all? But that's never acknowledged.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Current activists are perfect, and they take the right to judge everyone in the past by their criteria. Yeah. It's what you said, this other 感知 box, this other 心智set. "If you don't measure up to my moral standards, I'm not going to talk to you."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm. So we have these two ends of the continuum. I would say... You framed it up as curiosity versus cynicism. Curiosity is pro-plasticity. You evolve your 意识.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And it's beneficial for you and for the society.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, and cynicism shuts the 感知 box.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： It's the opposite.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah. Closes it. And makes you not believe in the possibility of 生活, including changing your own faults, because, "Yeah, it's all cynical. Nothing works anyhow. The doctor's just trying to sell me another therapy so they can make money." Yeah, then it's not going to help you if that's really what you believe. Yeah, it's very bad cynicism. So in some sense, I agree with you. It's the worst sin to not believe in 人类s anymore and the possibility of the 人类 spirit to get out of bad situations, like the one we may be currently in.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, I mean, 死亡s of despair are one of the primary causes of 死亡 in 人们 younger than 30.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I heard a hearing with the previous NIH director right before the administrations changed, and it was incredible to see all these quite well-意义, on both sides of the political aisle, but let's be honest, old 人们 talking about...

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Oh, those be fighting words.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, well, they're old.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And they're old, and they were focusing so much on all the incredible benefits that 研究 has provided for the treatment of diseases that 人们 体验 as they get older. You know, 生活 spans have gotten longer and quality of 生活 has actually gotten much higher for 人们 in... I'm in this age bracket now, in the 50 and up bracket. But then the previous director of the NIH, Bertozzi, I think, her last name was... Caroline Bertozzi? Forgive me if I'm getting the first name wrong. In any case, quite aptly, she said, "We can't forget that for 人们 40 and younger, they have a lot of potential 生活 ahead of them, but 死亡s of despair are killing them at rates that are far greater than at any time in history. They're very ill despite not being 身体的ly ill."

安德鲁·休伯曼： And, you know, that was a shock to me, and I really appreciated that she stood up and said that because, of course, she's a member of the other cohort. And it made me realize that taking care of that problem is perhaps-

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： What's more 重要 because they also last.

安德鲁·休伯曼： More 重要. Thank you, yeah.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： They are the ones that form, you know, the future society, the future lawyers and politicians and business人们, right? And, of course, they have a much longer portion of 生活 left to live than the old folks. Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I think we need to reduce cynicism and increase curiosity.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And compassion with everyone. Yeah, you were, again, just alluding to the 心理的 健康 crisis. Yes, a lot of this is 心理的 健康. They 身体的ly are fine, but they are super anxious, lonely. You know, 人们 drink less, have less sex. They live longer with their parents. They're much more anxious than any previous generation. Although we are so much richer, we are so much better off than they 感受 worth.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： People say, "Well, isn't it horrible?" Well, how was it in 1918 after World War I, right, after the previous generation had slaughtered itself? How was it growing up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, right? Cold War. So 今天, this isn't a particularly unique point in that, there have always been troubles, there have always been wars, there have always been 人们 that suffered, but what's so 不同 is this cynicism and the belief, "Well, it's part of the system. There's nothing we can do about it." And so, you wonder where this culture is in its natural evolution.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Well, I won't suggest that 人们 all run out and do 迷幻s, because that would be irresponsible. People with a predisposition to psychosis or bipolar conditions would put themselves at risk. But I am going to put a flag in the ground for trying to encourage curiosity and limit cynicism, especially for the next generation. I mean, part of the reason for having this podcast is so that 人们 can access 人们 like you who think about these issues, think about where they've been kind of pigeonholed into a particular way of thinking, and realize, "Wait, I'm a 有意识的 being. I can actually make choices." It takes work, as you pointed out. No one can be lazy about this. But I don't actually believe that the younger generation is lazy. Their anterior mid-cingulate cortices, they're firing like crazy.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： They're not lazy.

安德鲁·休伯曼： It's just, they need to know which direction to put it. And I 感受 like growing up, I was told, "Hey, listen, pick a vocation that you like and that maybe you can make a living doing, and just go for it." And it was just all-in. There wasn't this idea of how it might turn out because you kind of understood, well, you work hard, things work out, more or less. I want to ask you two more 问题s that are going to seem very at odds with one another, but they're just two independent 问题s. The first 问题 is about Jennifer Aniston, and the second 问题 is about the 意义 of 生活. So first, we're in Los Angeles. A lot of actors here. Jennifer Aniston is a very famous actor. And you know a thing or two about Jennifer Aniston and 大脑s and neurons and firing of neurons, so maybe you could share that discovery with us. I think it's a fascinating and 重要 one for 人们 to know about.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yeah, so this was 20 years ago, roughly when I was a 教授 here at Caltech, and I worked with a group of a neurosurgeon called Itzhak Fried at the UCLA Epileptic Unit.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： So, he had to monitor 人们's 大脑s for epileptic seizures. And in some of these patients, they put in electrodes to listen to individual neurons, so you can hear the "drrt, drrt, drrt," you know, the staccato sound that neurons make when they communicate with each other using action potentials. And so this afforded us a very unique window into actually listening to a 人类 大脑 when 人类s do what they do on the ward, they watch movies or, you know, they're bored. They have to wait. They have to be on a ward in this 状态 where their 大脑 is monitored for a couple of days until they have seizures to help the neurologist pinpoint exactly where the seizure originates. So, this is done to help these patients. And so, Rodrigo Quiroga was a postdoc at the time in my lab, and Gabriel Kreiman, who's now at Harvard.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： He was a student in my lab. They recorded from these neurons, and when they found these neurons. At first, they had great difficulty believing that they existed. So, they showed 人们... So, in a mouse lab or in a monkey lab, we would've shown random dots or something, or bars or a banana.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Bananas. Banana.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： But, you know, 人类s, particularly in this part of the 大脑, hippocampus, amygdala, entorhinal cortex, don't much care about that. So, we showed them things that 人们 care about, buildings, famous buildings, 人们, and actors. And then we found there was a Bill Clinton cell, and there was famously a Jennifer Aniston cell. So there's a cell that responded prima-- So you only have a limited amount of time. It's 重要 to note. So, we cannot show them all possible images of all possible actors on an app. It's simply not possible. You show them 100 to 200 images. For each image, you want to show three or four times, randomly shuffled. So, it turned out there were some cells that responded uniquely to specific individuals, like Jennifer Aniston. Not interestingly, she was married at the time to...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Ooh, I don't know this stuff.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Brad Pitt. Thank you. So, the neuron didn't fire to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, but fired specifically to 不同 pictures of Jennifer Aniston. Some other cells fired to other 人们, including sometimes their names.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Okay. So it turns out that if you are familiar with 人们 like Donald Trump, okay, our president, for better or worse, we all have neurons. That's a claim, ultimately, that there are neurons in the 大脑 that respond relatively specifically when I tell you Donald Trump, when I just mention him, or when you 梦 of Trump, or imagine him, or see him on a podcast.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： There will be specific cells because it makes sense. Because these 人们, like your family, your friends, the 人们 you work with, they're so 重要. Your 大脑 has decided to wire up neurons that respond to these specific images. And of course, we find something like that in deep neural networks.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： It's been difficult to find these in other 动物s, partly because 动物s don't have this repertoire of knowing, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of 不同 人们, right? You and I can recognize probably instantaneously 10,000 不同 人们. It's something unique to the 人类 species. Yeah, so it's now sort of part of textbook knowledge, including the name Jennifer Aniston. What's really funny, I had a postdoc, Liad Mudrik, she's now a 教授 at Tel Aviv. Part-time, she interviewed 人们 for a living, and she talked to Jennifer Aniston about this. She had no idea, Jennifer Aniston, that these neurons were there. It was very interesting...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Very cool. And as you describe all this, 人们's Jennifer Aniston cells are firing.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes. That's the idea [unintelligible].

安德鲁·休伯曼： Specifically. And Donald Trump cells.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes, yes, yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I have to say, I went to the US Open recently, the men's final of the US Open. It was spectacular. And Donald Trump was there, so he was some distance away, but I got to see him, and it's very interesting when you see some身体 that you've only seen represented on a screen in real 生活. He looks exactly the way he does on the screen, 心智 you, but it was so interesting to just realize that real and virtual 世界s collide in those moments, and probably reinforce our maps.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Like, we're bringing all these priors to our 理解ing of the 人. The difference in priors was read out in the stadium when his name was read out by either... It was totally a bipolar distribution. One group booed, the other group cheered. It was just like there was nothing in the... There were probably some silent folks, but it was just, like, very... I mean, if you could record from every 人 like you would record from a bunch of neurons, it was actually a very interesting kind of emergent phenomenon. But anyway, I'm digressing a bit. Jennifer Aniston cells, thank you for the-

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： So interesting. People had difficulty believing that because it was generally assumed that what's called "the grandmother hypothesis," just a term that the field came up with for various historical reasons...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： The idea that neurons in your 大脑 that represent your grandmother is obviously ridiculous. But it turned out, no. If your grandmother's an 重要 人 for you, you very likely will have neurons that fire in response to grandma.

安德鲁·休伯曼： You're extremely well-read, and you read from 不同 areas of science and philosophy, and et cetera. I know a number of 人们, including myself, are probably curious to do their own exploration. I've never done this before on the podcast, but I'm very curious to know if you had one or two, maybe three books that you think would be very informative for 人们-

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Marcus Aurelius's "Confessions."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Marcus Aurelius's "Confessions."

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Two thousand years ago, it was written probably for himself, not for posterity, the emperor, you know, a second-century emperor.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： One of the particular... In times of crisis. You know, it teaches you about 心智fulness in this Roman context, and about being, you know...

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： But the only thing you can control is how you respond to events. Again, sort of, I can control my emotional response to it.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Really wonderful book that I've given to my kids, and I give them to friends and to other 人们. "Confessions of Marcus Aurelius."

安德鲁·休伯曼： Great. And we'll direct 人们 to the many books you've written. I haven't read the most recent one about mystical 体验s, but I absolutely will. Of course, I've read your other books. This is not the Lex Fridman podcast. Lex is a good buddy of mine. But in a kind of Lex Fridman-ish context, I am very curious about how some身体 who thinks about 意识, who is a neuroscientist, who thinks about these related fields, and of course has his own 生活 体验, including 迷幻s, thinks about the so-called 意义 of 生活. I can think of two extremes, to just kind of frame this up. One extreme that some 人们 will embrace is, look, you know, we're here to just collect 体验s and make sense of them and try and do our best not to harm anyone along the way and do some good and build some things.

安德鲁·休伯曼： The other might be something more aspirational about knowledge and things that are pervasive through time. I'm wondering how, for you, you think about your own purpose in being here and what you're doing and what you plan to do next, because clearly you're not slowing at all. It's remarkable. Your vigor has doubled since the last time I saw you. Maybe it's the yellow hoodie. Those who are just listening, not watching, Christof has never shied away from making a 状态ment.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Bright, bold colors.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Bright colors. He's a bright 光. What's your philosophy on how to approach your own 生活? And then, if you're willing, maybe give a sliver of advice or suggestion to those who ponder their own 意义 of 生活. I think most 人们 do. I certainly do.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： I do, yeah. We find ourselves in a universe that's strangely conducive to 生活 and to 有意识的 生活. In fact, you could say we live in a universe that's conducive to 意识, you know, some version of the entropic principle. We don't know why. We also live in a universe that I think is ultimately funda心理的ly phenomenal 心理的. The 心理的 evolves under its own laws that I don't have access to. I'm part of it. I will return to this 心理的. That's as far as I've gotten. I don't know, is there some sort of, you know, do you know what's a Christian thinker? Teilhard de Chardin. You know, so he was a Jesuit and a paleontologist, and he had this point omega, this hypothesis of point omega. The entire universe is evolving.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： So he was the first to talk about this noosphere, which in turn, he talks about that over the next 100 years, there will spread this sort of 有意识的 type of atmosphere that you can think of like the internet across the planet. And we're all striving, all of creation's striving towards a point of maximal 意识, which he believes will be in the fullness of time, emerging with God. I'm not sure about that. All I know is that ultimately what truly exists is this 心理的, and we are part of that, and we will be going back to that. But I don't claim to 理解 the inherent laws of this 心理的. But I ponder, like you, I 问题, I'm curious, and I know I will not find any final 回答s, and that's okay. You should just strive.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Mm-hmm.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Never stop striving to try to 理解 the 世界 and leave the 世界 a better place than you found it.

安德鲁·休伯曼： I 爱 it. Well, thank you for that, and thank you for coming here 今天 and sitting down with me. It's such a pleasure.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： That was great fun.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Yeah, it was great fun to talk to a fellow neuroscientist and one who is as accomplished but also as generous with knowledge as you are. You know, your career... And I'll send 人们 to a link about this. It's really a spectacular example of being curiosity-driven and in many cases, very, very brave. I mean, I could have given an entire podcast about how brave it was to start talking about 意识, then to move into building things at the Allen Brain Institute, and on and on. I knew before we sat down that we were going to have a great conversation because of what you bring. But I know I share in every身体's 想法s that you've given us a ton of wisdom. You know, some 人们 when they speak, very little happens, but a lot of words are shared.

安德鲁·休伯曼： When you speak, everything really counts and transforms my way of thinking, and I know that the listeners as well. They're going to think really deeply. And hopefully, we can eradicate some of the cynicism and promote more curiosity and expand our 感知 boxes, because I think 心理的 健康 depends on it in many ways.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Yes.

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： And the future of our society.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And the future of our society. And I really appreciate your willingness to throw yourself into these arenas. Please come back again and...

Dr. 克里斯托夫·科赫： Thank you for having me.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for joining me for 今天's discussion with Dr. Christof Koch. To learn more about his work and to find links to his many excellent books, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout 今天's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have 问题s for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab 播客, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.

安德鲁·休伯曼： For those of you who haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of 研究 and 体验, and it covers protocols for everything from 睡眠 to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There, you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." And if you're not already following me on social media, I am "hubermanlab" on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

安德鲁·休伯曼： And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlap with the content of the Huberman Lab 播客, but much of which is distinct from the 信息 on the Huberman Lab 播客. Again, it's @hubermanlab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our "Neural Network Newsletter," the "Neural Network Newsletter" is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your 睡眠, how to optimize dopamine, and deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with any身体.

安德鲁·休伯曼： Thank you once again for joining me for 今天's discussion with Dr. Christof Koch. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.