How to Expand Your Consciousness | Dr. Christof Koch

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: My guest today 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 neuroscience. Christof's research has spanned how we perceive the world around us, how different states of mind arise and shape our experience of life, and, most notably, consciousness. I joined the field of neuroscience way back in the 1990s, and even way back then, Christof's name and his work were considered seminal for our understanding of the brain and human experience. And over the subsequent 30 years, he has continued to do incredible, groundbreaking work.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Today, we discuss consciousness, what it is, literally, at the level of quantifiable brain mechanisms, and how understanding consciousness at that level can help you experience life more richly and allow you to place deeper meaning on everything from a typical morning to grief and loss to your greatest and most awe-inspiring moments. Christof also explains how our individual experiences and memories place us each into a unique, what he calls, 'perception box,' which is what shapes your outlook on life, and in many cases, your quality of life, including your mental and physical health. And he explains how you can change your perception box through what we call neuroplasticity, which is the modification of brain circuits.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: We also discuss what flow states, psychedelics such as DMT and other psychedelics, meditation, sleep, and dreaming tell you about how your mind works and the nature of consciousness. And we don't just discuss consciousness at the level of individuals. We discuss the collective consciousness of humankind. So, if you're somebody that's interested in the brain and mind, what it means to be human, how to evolve and improve your mind, today's discussion will address all of that. Oh, and we also discuss dogs, cats, Jennifer Aniston, and the meaning of life.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: So get ready. This is a very special episode of the Huberman Lab podcast that I'm certain, by the time it finishes, will have you thinking differently about your life, and dare I say, with a bit more optimism.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Christof Koch.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Dr. Christof Koch, welcome.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Thank you for having me, Andrew. It's been a pleasure. It's been more than a decade, 12 years since we last interacted.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I've always enjoyed our interactions, and one of the reasons is that you're always into something super interesting, big, big questions and evolving fast all the time, all at once. So, I think most people have heard the word consciousness. They perhaps have pondered consciousness, but at least to my mind, it's not a very well-defined word. So when you talk about wanting to understand consciousness, or about having consciousness or being in a moment of consciousness versus say, a rock, which I'm presuming doesn't have consciousness, what are we talking about? And here we could be using biological language, psychological language, or philosophical language. Please include all of it because-

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Much simpler.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Okay.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Do you hear me?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Hmm?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Do you hear me?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Yes.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Do you see me?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Yes.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: 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.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: The fact that you love, the fact that you hate, the fact that you dream, that you imagine, that you dread. Those are all conscious experiences. It's the stuff of life, literally. If I give you a billion dollars, okay, that even for you is probably a meaningful amount of money, but let's say-

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Well, it certainly is, yeah.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Okay, but there's a slight, you know, thing that I'm going to remove all your conscious experiences, so you would still love and hate and drive cars and do everything else you do right now, but there would be no light. There wouldn't be any Andrew. Would you take that wager?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hm..

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: No.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Well, the difference between those two states is consciousness. 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 sleep, 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 different, of course, later stage in the night, right, when you have a dream, which is another conscious experience, but when you sleep, 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 conscious being. So in some sense, it's very simple to define.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Historically, has it been defined as a simple just presence of self and perception of the outside world, the way you're describing it? I feel like consciousness has been twisted and turned, and, you know, weaved into balloon animal form over so many hundreds of years that people tend to argue about consciousness. 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 people struggled with this definition of consciousness so much?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: The study of consciousness 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 mind or on consciousness. That's a modern thing. Where we have struggled is trying to put it in objective form. So, you don't access my consciousness, and I don't access your consciousness. And this makes it different from anything else that we study, different from a black hole, from a virus, from a brain. Because all those I can study with what philosophers call 'third-person 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.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: We can't do that with consciousness. I believe you're conscious. In fact, I ask you, "How are you feeling today?" You tell me, "Well, I'm a little bit depressed because of what happened." Well, so I'm trying to get at your state of consciousness, but ultimately it's always an inference, whether it's you, or whether it's a baby, or whether it's an animal that can't directly talk because language is another way to infer. So that makes it more difficult, and the other part is that people confound consciousness with consciousness of self. So most people, if you ask them, "What's consciousness?" 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 conscious experiences, but they really pertain to self-consciousness.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: But that's just one aspect. You can lose self-consciousness... 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.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: 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.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: There's this blessed silence, but you're highly conscious because you're highly conscious of where you are and what's the next place you need to go to. And of course, during psychedelic experience, during states of flow, during states of meditation, you can lose yourself, but you're still conscious. So let's not confound self-consciousness, which is one aspect, a big aspect, particularly in adult people, literally highly educated people, with consciousness that took over. That's really a much broader set of... The fact that you can feel your limbs, right?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: That may not even relate to you, just feel something there without assigning it, "Well, that's my body." That is, again, it's another conscious experience.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: The liminal states between sleep and awake, in both directions, falling asleep and waking up... Do you think they offer any windows into this deeper understanding of consciousness, or does one even need a deeper understanding of consciousness? For instance, I'm a big fan of yoga nidra, which I've described as non-sleep 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 body, a very atypical waking state that is more similar to rapid eye movement sleep, when the brain is very active, the body is paralyzed, as you know.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Lucid dreaming?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: It's a state of mind where... The instruction in the classic yoga nidra scripts, and this goes back thousands of years, is to move your mind from thinking and doing to being and feeling. 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 life, as many days as you do. I've been doing it since 2017. I can feel my-

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: You do this every day?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Every day for 30 minutes. Yeah. I can feel myself falling asleep, but not quite falling asleep. So it's a little bit like lucid dreaming, but then as you remind yourself to bring your perception to your body surface or your heartbeat, your breathing, whatever it is, and stop making plans, you lose past and future, and you become hyper-present. But something about your sensation and perception merges with thinking, and it's like you-

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: But Andrew, is Andrew still there?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Yes, I'm definitely still there. I'm definitely still there. You're not out of the body.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: But you don't mind-wander in the past or in the future?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: No. No, and it becomes very easy to do this, so you actually feel 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 feel 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/feeling state, what they called 'the energy body,' is more accessible. It's almost like you're feeling things within your body, and it's looping back on itself. Now, this all sounds very mystical, but what we're really talking about is more interoception, feeling, you know, you're moving your perceptual awareness, as you know, to things from skin inward. It's a very unusual state, but yes, I'm still there in yoga nidra. I'm not someplace else. I'm actually more in my body than in any other state.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Well, you could also be simply not there at all.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Where Andrew isn't there, the self, the one that carries your traits and your personality, your memories, but you're still conscious.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: That's interesting because it is very relaxing to emerge from this. It's a great tool for replenishing physical and mental energy, and I've tracked sleep while in this, and there are some really nice brain imaging studies now of people doing yoga nidra, also called 'non-sleep deep rest,' and pockets of the brain go into regional sleep as opposed to what we normally see during sleep.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Anon-

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Whole brain.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: So it's an interesting state. I'll send you a script to maybe give it a try and see if it means anything to you.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: I would be... I'm interested in all these different states of consciousness because it's all...

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: I mean, it's dominated by everyday waking consciousness. But as you said, that's all about doing, right? You walk, you run, you shop, you look around, you talk to people, but there are all these other states that don't involve the William James time streams of consciousness, but they are all conscious experiences.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: And so, the more we know about them and the physiological basis, the better we can describe and delimit what consciousness is and what it is not. So, for instance, to your point, consciousness 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 consciousness is really more about being. It's a state of being. And by the way, that's also why computers, they can do everything we can do, but they can't be what we are... Conscious.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: But that's-

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Please elaborate on that.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: We confound consciousness and behavior because we talk. We're speaking apes, right?

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: But if you take that away, you are still highly conscious. If you don't move, if you meditate or sleep or you have a mystical experience, you're sitting... Or a psychedelic experience, you're sitting or lying, you're not moving any body, hardly any overt movement, yet you're highly conscious, right? So, behavior is not required for consciousness, and consciousness, of course, is not required for behavior. There are all sorts of unconscious behaviors. And so, we shouldn't confound the two. And this relates in an interesting way to the confounding between intelligence and consciousness when people talk about artificial consciousness and artificial intelligence. Intelligence ultimately is about planning to do something, about behavior in the short term or in the long term, while consciousness is a state of being. Being happy, being sad, being full of dread, or seeing something which is really different.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: 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 important component to my overall health.

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This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Today's episode is also brought to us by Our Place. Our Place makes my favorite pots, pans, and other cookware. Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as PFAS or forever chemicals are still found in 80% of nonstick pans as well as utensils, appliances, and countless other kitchen products. As I've discussed before in this podcast, these PFAS or forever chemicals like Teflon have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues, and many other health problems, so it's really important to try and avoid them.

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This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: I'm curious about the stability of self-representation. As you know, there are many conditions related to brain lesions, strokes, injuries, et cetera where people will lose their memories of the past, or the inability to form new memories emerges. But one of the things that seems so rigid is one's notion of self. Like a baby coming into the world 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 people lose themselves completely for long periods of time.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Derealization.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Derealization.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Well, derealization is one where you feel... So, A, you're perfectly right. The self is the basic kernel of our operating system.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: 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 feel... So, for instance, in derealization, a psychiatric condition, which can, by the way, happen during psychedelics, you feel not you anymore, and you feel there's something off with the world. This is not the real world. There's something funny. The world... They still see and hear fine, but they all believe that this isn't the real world, 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 flight from Everett in Washington to, I think, Oregon or San Francisco.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: I've flown that from Everett. Tiny airport.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: Yes.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: And then they said, "Of course." He's a colleague. He was a pilot in good standing. Into the flight, 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 psychedelics three days earlier at a wake for his best friend, and then he went into this episode of derealization where he thought, "Okay, this is not the real world. This is a dream. I need to wake up. And if in my dream, if I crash the plane, then I will finally wake up in the real world."

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Whoa.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: 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 consciousness to make sure that it's always important for me.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Mm-hmm.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Christof Koch: 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 people 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.

This passage develops the interview discussion: Andrew Huberman: Hmm. Interesting.