THE MIND IN MOTION, with Dr. Michael Mannino

 

In this episode

 

Michael

In order to perceive, we must move. But in order to move, we also must perceive.”

 

Intro

 

Fred

Modern western culture implicitly accepts the separation between the brain and the body.

 

We tend to focus the development of human potential via specialization: athletes achieve amazing physical prowess and leave intellectual pursuits to others, while knowledge workers spend hours and hours sitting indoor in offices, working their minds while their bodies atrophy.  

 

Ancient societies preferred a more hybridized approach and were intuitively skeptical of this mind-body split. The ancient Greeks were aware of the pitfalls of this. -Theucidides once wrote “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”

 

Much of our approach goes back to French philosopher René Descartes, whose famous line “I think, therefore I am” not only holds the view that minds and bodies are separate things, but that the mind and abstract thinking are superior to physical movement.

But since the 80’s, neuroscientists have been working on a new model – one they call “embodied cognition” – to look at the ways in which brains and bodies are actually deeply intertwined, and part of a holistic system of cognition and physical embodiement.

They’re finding more and more of these connections – as small examples, one large Scandinavian study famously found that cardiovascular fitness predicted cognitive performance, another study found that gesturing helps people – particularly children – better complete difficult puzzles, and another found that small postural changes can almost instantly affect our hormone levels. We’re just scratching the surface of this exciting new mind-body paradigm – it’s very clear that it’s not I think therefore I am, it’s I am, therefore I move and I think!

To help me make sense of this, I interviewed Dr. Michael Mannino, a great young neuroscientist and philosopher who is deeply involved in cutting edge research using this perspective. He combines neuroscience, computer modeling, and AI tools to find new connections between the way we move, the way we think, and the way we perform at various tasks.

 

He’s an encyclopedia of knowledge, and what’s really cool is that his philosophy background allows him to connect these new scientific findings to age-old questions we’ve had as a species, like what it means to be human, and how to forge an authentic spiritual connection with others and the world around us. In this age of AI, these old questions seem to be becoming more, not less relevant.

 

Michael is also the Chief Science Officer of the Flow Research Collective, and so we discuss some of his exciting new research on group flow, which led to him developing a new technology product he’s launching soon, to help groups and teams better achieve flow states to reach new levels of performance and enjoyment together

 

This conversation bridges philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality. In my view, Michael is the kind of new school scholar that can best help us understand how science and technology interface with the human experience, and really redefine what it means to be human – I learned a ton here and I hope you all enjoy this one, here is Dr. Michael Mannino.

 

 

– Music –

 

Fred

For people who don’t know you, you’re a philosopher, you’re a young guy, you’re a – And I don’t mean this in a kind of a vague, wishy washy way. You’re actually a philosopher. You’re a highly rated professor of philosophy at University of Miami Dade – which I always feel like they should just change it to Wade, like, top to bottom, you know. Like they did during the playoffs. They should just should just go Wade all the way. But you’re also, an applied neuroscientist. So your research area focuses on computational neuroscience. So modeling complex brain networks like real data driven, peer reviewed neuroscience. And correct me if I’m wrong, I think you entered neuroscience only after studying philosophy. Right?

 

Michael

Yeah. That’s correct. Yeah. Largely because, I thought and still think that a lot of the problems from philosophy and that a study within philosophy will be answered – are being answered now when we fully understand the brain and how it functions and, how it relates to a body, as we’ll get into. Yeah. But that was the large inspiration. In fact, some professional – philosophers, Paul and Patricia Churchland, they’re well known, physicalists, actually, in the philosophy of mind, they’re big prominent philosophers in the philosophy of mind. They came up with this idea of neuro philosophy and where philosophy needs to go from here into the brain. So that was inspired by that. And, then it was also inspired just by the questions that I was asking in philosophy itself : What is consciousness? What is the mind?. And I thought that, philosophers try to answer that question, but neuroscientists, you know, philosophers need a good understanding of neuroscience, to answer those questions. And then. So that’s sort of the “content intellectual side of it”. The practical side of it, for me personally, was – the practical application of it. Like brain computer interface, the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. And there’s the technology that’s coming out now. There’s much more, you know, momentum and progress in the field of neuroscience and how that’s just going to change our lives as well. Like, for example, I’ll just give you an a really cool example – A study just came out last week or two weeks ago showing that we can now read people’s thoughts using artificial intelligence by just reading their neural activity in their brains, putting them in a brain scanner, scanning their brains when they’re watching a movie, or looking at a story or reading a story. And the artificial – noninvasive – the artificial intelligence can just get the gist of the story, the narrative that they’re reading, or the story of the movie that they’re watching just by reading their brain activity. So that’s like why, you know, that practical, scary, but sort of optimistic side is one of the big reasons that I switched from philosophy into neuroscience.

 

Fred

Wow. That’s crazy. So you guys can actually track, let’s say the playing out of a story inside the brain. And you can map that out in a way that the subject – like you guys present that information to the subject and kind of validated after with what was actually going on in their in their minds.

 

Michael

Yeah. Good question. So this is actually called brain reconstruction. And it’s actually been one of the – it’s a little less about like 5 to 10 years old. Originally, I think this comes out of Jack Gallant’s lab in San Francisco. But yeah. You basically, put people in scanners, have them watch visual information like a movie and then we can reconstruct, what they’re watching. Now, It’s pretty good. Back then, it was pretty crude. But now it’s pretty good in terms of the resolution. So if you’re seeing a plane, that has a specific neural representation, a specific neural activity, or neural markers that are associated with you watching that plane, and we can read that information and then reconstruct it and then yes, afterwards, validate. Not only that. It’s more profound than that. You can actually think of your own stories. And then, the AI can reconstruct what you’re thinking and the story that you’re telling yourself. Same with handwriting. Like, we can – AI can now reconstruct. You can just think about writing an A, and then the AI will put an A on the screen, for example.

 

Fred

Wow! That’s crazy! So that’s like the beginnings of, like mind reading in a lot of ways. Like with a technology interface. It’s mind reading…

 

Michael

And not only that. Think about this. What we can do now and what we will be able to do very soon: You put people in scanners, go to sleep, have a couple dreams, and then we’ll play your dreams on a video.

 

Fred

Oh, my God, that’s so cool. That’s awesome. That’s crazy…

 

Michael

Imagine the therapeutic uses of that. I mean, imagine the possibilities with that.

 

Fred

So we’re going to dive into some of this stuff. Just before, just on a general sort of approach level; So, the way you presented it, you were studying philosophy, you were asking all these different questions about the brain, about consciousness. Then you realized that a lot of the answers can come from neuroscience. Is that the way you see it? So like, almost like philosophy is like proto science in a way? It’s a way for us to try to start to grapple with different questions that eventually will be answered by science? Or do they kind of overlap to where they’re exploring the same problems? Maybe with different tools that also have some validity to it?

 

Michael

I see it most. I see it as both, but mostly actually the latter. So philosophy is a second order kind of thinking. Right? And I’ll give you an example of that in a second. But it’s a metacognitive sort of second order thinking and philosophy can give you the tools and the critical thinking and the skills to be able to do things that, let’s say, neuroscientists can’t. And so, I’ll give you two examples, and then I’ll get into the directionality between philosophy and neuroscience. Okay. It’s in that particular domain. So, take science, so scientists they – just in neuroscientists in particular, but scientists in general – use the hypothetical deductive method, right? They go on test hypotheses, they try and figure out what’s real in the world and try and uncover laws. A philosopher will come in and say: “Well, what is special about your methodology that differentiates between another method of knowledge acquisition? What is a law? What is a hypothesis? Why – Karl Popper right – why can hypotheses be only falsified and not proven right? What’s going on there?” Scientists don’t ask that question. Philosophers of science ask – those questions. And those are distinct question that need different sorts of reasoning and rationality I think to approach that. Science is a really interesting thing itself. So in science, in philosophy of science, there’s two views. There’s one called scientific realism. And then there’s another one called scientific anti-realism. And so scientific realism says: “Look science works because it’s really uncovering the actual truth of the universe. Like what’s really out there that’s independent of the mind?” And it works. It’s functional. Like we can fly planes, we can heal people, we can figure out the germ, right? Those kinds of things. So it makes progress. Scientific anti realists, philosophers of science that are anti realists come in and say: “Well, true, but science changes. So maybe there’s no real such thing as scientific progress.” The phlogiston theory, was replaced by the caloric theory of heat. You know. Newton’s theory was replaced by relativity in Einstein. And so maybe it’s just sort of a replacing… And then you have people in the far end of the spectrum, a guy named Paul Feyerabend who thinks that: In the philosophy of science that, actually, there’s no rules; Anything goes. He calls it epistemological anarchism.  And that is like: “We really have no – scientists don’t really have any set of rules and guidelines and methods and processes they found.” So that’s a good example. Like the scientific method. People thought: “Oh my God, there’s a fixed scientific method and if we follow that method we’re just going to figure out how the universe works.” But then people came in like Thomas Kuhn, who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and other people were saying: “Wait a second…”

 

Fred

The paradigmatic

 

Michael

Exactly.

 

Fred

All of small science operates within a paradigm, operates within like known methods and known ways of doing things. But then sometimes you realize, you know, that the paradigm itself, imposes certain assumptions, imposes a certain frame on reality. That we can question that we can sort of think above and maybe –

 

Michael

That we can’t get out of.

 

Fred

We can’t get out of and to transcend the paradigm, we have to do something other than sort of, let’s call it “little science”, or just the “experiments”, or just figuring out – like setting up experiments with the assumptions of the paradigm in the background.

 

Michael

That’s right. Exactly. He said, and so, like the scientific method is maybe not so fixed and rigorous. Maybe it’s more messy and more back and forth and more human. And so he was a philosopher of science. So he asked those questions about what the scientists are actually doing. I think there is something special about science personally that, makes it very unique in terms of our ways of understanding reality and how the world really is. That is – I want to say, better. It’s different, but maybe better for certain purposes in terms of like, understanding reality. So, yeah, I’ve taught Thomas, I think Thomas Kuhn said, like “all theories are observation laden” or “all observations are theory laden”. In other words, when you go and observe something under a microscope or blood under a microscope, or germ under a microscope, or a black hole or star or something like that, you’re making that observation through the lens of a theory that you already – that I came to, discover that. So, now, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think –

 

 

Fred

It’s almost like you have little assumptions built into your very act of cognition, your very act of perceiving something.

 

 

Michael

Correct? Yes, exactly. It is shaped by – and we know this, neuroscientists know this very well now. At the level of brain perception is shaped by your mood, your language that you speak, the culture that you’re from, your physiological state, your expectations, your beliefs about the world, all of those. So perception is an active, constructive process. It doesn’t the brain doesn’t record reality like a 1 to 1 camera. Right? And so that filters. But science is the one thing, I believe, that gets us past that. It’s the most objective logical thing, I think, that we have to get us at what reality really is like. And I think there is a reality out there that is mind independent.

 

Fred

I think it’s a really nice segue also to get into the brain body connection. But I’m curious to know if you would add a caveat to that, which is science properly construed as a process, where the assumptions and the hypotheses that we have and how we set up the experiment are made transparent and very clearly kind of, laid out right, and not sort of implied. Which I think, the proper scientific, proper scientific methodology imposes that.

 

Michael

Yeah. I mean, yes, I mean, I really don’t think there’s anything such – like an official thing called the scientific method. It’s, you know, it’s a process. It’s just an attitude, really. I think that’s what distinguishes that. It’s a way of, coming at the world that is just, you know – you want to figure things out how it works. And, so there’s an attitudinal disposition or inclination to that, I think. And the method can change.

 

Fred

Maybe like, not pre-determining the outcome, or just being open to where the experiment goes.

 

Michael

Correct confirmation bias, wishful thinking. The scientific attitude cuts that. That’s the beauty of critical thinking, I think in my – critical thinking, which I’m very passionate about and I teach. And so, going back to your question real quick about philosophy and neuroscience. So there’s neuro philosophy and then there’s philosophy of neuroscience. And there’s a distinction there. So neural philosophy is trying to use neuroscience. The findings of modern cognitive computational neuroscience to answer philosophical questions. What is the self? What is selfhood? Is memory involved? Well now we know about the default mode network in brain science. What is the mind body – How can we solve the mind body problem? Well, let’s look to some of these experiments in neuroscience. So can we answer philosophical questions with the findings and results of neuroscience? Philosophy of neuroscience is a little bit different. It’s a little bit different. So the idea there is that, can we use the concepts, and methods, and things, and tools from philosophy to help clarify and interpret the data and results in neuroscience? I’ll give you an example. I wrote a paper myself, and my advisor, on causality in the brain. And so philosophers are using – I’m  sorry – neuroscientists doing experiments and showing “look at this part of the brain back here causes this part of the brain to become active”. And so there’s a causality in the brain, but they never really considered, like the rich philosophical literature and thinking that Aristotle, Hume (David Hume), Bertrand Russell did about what causality is. So maybe we can use some of that thinking to help interpret the results from the data, from the fMRI experiments that neuroscientists are doing. That’s philosophy of neuroscience.

 

Fred

And have you witnessed that being done productively in terms of enriching the experiments that you’ll do in neuroscience, or maybe interpreting the results.

 

Michael

Yeah, not enough, I think. I think, and Patricia Churchland, I think makes this point well, and Sam Harris, I’ll throw in there too, that I don’t think enough. I think neuroscientists need to pay more attention to, you know, how to think philosophically and some of the philosophical theories out there in concepts, I think they need to pay more attention to that. I think philosophers are now starting to pay much more attention, thanks to those people’s work, of what the what we’re finding out in neuroscience. But, probably not enough on that direction either.

 

Fred

Interesting. So, an area where we can, maybe find some progress or maybe more emphasis on that area. So, I want to start from the top with you, and I mean, literally the top: The brain. So the, the act of thinking. Right. There’s this idea that’s been enormously popular in the West, namely, that everything that we are is inside the brain, that the act of thinking is, you know, the only source of the self, the source of our identity, all of our thoughts. It all happens up here in your TEDx talk. You take a brain. I don’t know. Probably wasn’t a real brain. Just, a mock up. And here you are like: “This is all of you”. And this is like, philosophically, this is the famous Descartes dictum, right? “I think, therefore, I am.” But there is another way to look at cognition that’s at the root of a lot of your work, namely, that we are and have always been brains in a body. And so you’ve opened up my mind to the view. I think you expressed it this way once said, brains didn’t evolve just for thinking, but they evolved to optimize the movement of the organism in the outside world. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you conceive of the brain and our thoughts on one hand, being connected to the body and this notion of embodied cognition?

 

Michael

Yeah. So I would change Descartes’s dictum not to: “I think, therefore I am”, but “I move, therefore I am”. And I think that’s a little bit more relevant based on – yeah, based on modern neuroscience. and it’s interesting too, because like, you know, embodied cognition is not just neuroscience. Neuroscience, meaning the brain. But embodied cognition, is an overlapping, interdisciplinary field of research that involves cognitive science, culture, anthropology, philosophy, especially in neuroscience and computer science and things like that. But, yeah. So I think we – I think it’s, overwhelmingly clear now that brains evolved for movement first, and out of that came mind, came mental states. One of the first people to think about this was Rudolfo Llinás, who wrote a book called I of the Vortex: Neurons to Self. And the idea there is that the brain – he really was one of the first to like sort of theories that brains are prediction engines. The brains evolved from movements, right? If there’s no brain, if there’s no central nervous system, there’s no movement. But when you move, you have to make predictions about – your environment, what’s going to be around that bush. The way your body’s moving in relation to the environment. And so you need to start making predictions about things. And so that’s from an evolutionary perspective. But that’s, that’s – And so now we know that the brains really are these – at the heart of how brains work is this sense of prediction. It’s about predicting what was going to be the outcome of your body’s movement on the world, on the environment, and how the environment is going to respond, and then what you need to do to optimize that for survival, really. That’s an evolutionary perspective. Now we think of embodied cognition as really, it’s just that embodied cognition and embodied consciousness is really the view that, the body plays a central role in shaping cognitive processes and even maybe the nature of consciousness itself. The body and how it moves in the world and how it interacts with the environment and the fact that is coupled to the environment. And so, when I say cognition and cognitive processes, I mean thinking, like you said, decision-making, perception, attention, emotional regulation, like those kinds of things. I refer to as cognition or cognitive processes. So that’s the view there that, consciousness does not really – it’s not only in our head. It’s – we have to think about consciousness not as something that’s, you know, up in our heads with, and there’s a neural brain activity that you can say correlates with the experience of consciousness or consciousness as experience. No, we say now we think that consciousness is something that we do. We enact or that we embody. And so this idea of this “perception action cycle”. In fact, JJ Gibson said, I put this in my Ted talk, too: “In order to perceive, we must move. But in order to move, we also must perceive.”

 

Fred

So do you subscribe to this bi-directional model? So it’s not just, there’s the way that you move changes, maybe the way that your cognition works, but also, you know, mindset effects or belief effect or like, what we have around placebo effects. Like also the way that you’ll think will also affect the body.

 

Michael

100%. Yes. And the reason those things exist is not because there’s two things and they’re connected. It’s just there’s one thing. And that’s a philosophical view that I think is largely being confirmed with neuroscience. So right. In philosophy of mind, you’re a dualist, you can be a dualist or a model –

 

Fred

What would you call it? Okay. So what would you call it? The mind body dualism I remember again, Descartes, he’s like there’s two substances: there’s the mind and then there’s, what would you call this? Okay. If it’s really one thing with maybe two modalities that are playing off each other like this, what would you call that, philosophically or in the world of ideas? Like, what’s that is it some form of monism, I guess?

 

Michael

Yeah, that’s a good call. I think there’s a word, there’s a couple of titles, I think, emergent physicalism. So it’s a physicalism –

 

Fred

Sounds nice and complex and kind of scientific.

 

Michael

Right! So I think emergent physicalism is the view, and I haven’t studied this in a while, but that, that it’s a physicalist view. But you that the mental states mind right is explainable through physical things. Neurons, brain firings, brain cells. but are not reducible to neurons. You can’t just –  reduce, an emotion to neurons firing. But you can explain it – through that and now through this idea of dynamical coupling. I think the brain is a dynamical system. And, we can get into that. But so it’s so that’s not just an information processing thing that produces consciousness. Right? It’s this dynamical embodied system that interacts with the environment. And out of that coupling, that interaction emerges and its emergent property of like, you know, consciousness. Let’s say. Or sensation. Let’s say – This comes from complex adaptive systems too.

 

Fred

I think this is a really it’s a really big idea. I think that really, kind of transcends a lot of our models, like the regular models that people have when they think of the brain, when they think of thinking. And I think it’s – as I was grappling with your work and with the different ideas involved in it, I’m like, this is like, perhaps in the words of Kuhn, like, this is perhaps a new paradigm that’s emerging. It’s maybe, like, it’s bigger than just – another idea. It’s really, really big. And I’m like, okay. So a lot of things that you just said now, you said, you know, the thinking is not just in the brain. It’s an embodied process. So –

 

Michael

That’s right. No. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. Fred you hit the nail on the head. It’s – thinking in consciousness and cognition, it’s clear that that’s not just in the head. It’s not just in the head. Right? It’s not just – It can’t be reducible to neurons firing. That’s pretty, I think, that’s pretty clear. And, I think, there’s plenty of experiments and data that are coming out now that sort of really illustrate that and demonstrate that. One example, one study that came out recently showed that, let’s see if I can describe it right. But so like gestures, right? Gestures. So I’ll give you two experiments. Gestures are a really good example I think of embodied cognition. So the meaning of words, right? They, trained people to translate foreign words – in one group and then another group, they did the same thing, but they were using gestures and body movements to, like, associate with those words. Of course, the people in the second group remembered the translation of those words better. But not only that, when they put those people in brain scanners and they asked them – and you’re not moving in a brain scanner, you’re just like, you know, you’re stationary. When they ask those people in brain scanners to translate the words that they had learned with the movements, parts of their brain that were lighting up, that were not involved in the memory, but involved in movements, body movements and gestures. And then in another experiment, they actually asked people to think about the sizes of objects and compare the sizes of objects with brain scanners on like so “cup” or “broom”, and then objects that were not manipulable but really huge, like lampposts or building. And in one experiment they, had them restrain their hand movements but able to look at their hands. And then in the other one, they were able to freely not move their hands – they were able to freely move their hands, but they were still told to just keep them down, but they were able to move them if they, you know, they wanted to. And so they the bottom line is they found that – when you constrain people’s hand movements, they have difficulty understanding the semantic meaning, the semantic content of the sizes of objects. When you restrict people’s body movements, they have trouble not only like identifying the sizes of objects, but understanding the meaning of the sizes of objects when they think about it.

 

Fred

And I’m just curious, is, your is your proud Italian heritage part of the reason why you’re so, passionate about this, this all this research about gestures and cognition.

 

Michael

Possibly there’s some. Transgenerational epigenetic component.

 

Fred

It’s MaNNIno. Not man Mannino. Okay. Don’t Americanize my name.

 

Michael

Possibly. Possibly. Yes.

 

Fred

That’s really interesting.

 

Michael

Yeah.

 

Fred

And when I think of this idea, when I think of this idea of like the embodiment, like it happens, like, all over the body or maybe, like, different parts of the body are contributing to, you know, the emergent, reality of consciousness. I think also of something that a lot of scientific-minded people are very skeptical of. So all the literature around chakras and things like the kind of like very New Agey, and I understand a lot these people like when they start talking about science and they start going into the quantum realm, a lot of people roll their eyes and they’re not like, you know, impressed with that. And, on the other side, I think a lot of academics like, you know, what do they do all day? They sit and they think. Like, they’re not very – they’re not hiking, they’re not fighting. They’re not super connected to their bodies, it doesn’t seem. But from your perspective, this idea that cognition happens in many places in the body. So I don’t know, I think of like an energy center where there’s a lot of neural connections like the heart or the gut or these other major sort of centers in the body. It would seem to me that in an embodied consciousness “frame” that it would be maybe a little bit easier to conceive of something like, you know, like the chakra literature or something like that. Right?

 

Michael

Yeah. Wow, Fred, you just, definitely, lit up something in my thinking right there. That was – that that – Yes, possibly. Yeah. There’s, very interesting, you know, science out there that is now sort of like revamping or maybe, you know, giving a little bit more validation or credence to some of these older views, by the way, just in general. Some of those things, it’s confirming and validating and then science, disconfirms and invalidates other things, right? Even within the same framework. Again, I want to emphasize that it’s not only that, the body plays a major central and constitutive role in forming consciousness and cognition and thinking and decision making in that kind of thing. But it’s also movement, right? It’s the way the body interacts with the world and shapes the world. And I cup in near to here better, like, you know, that kind of thing. So it’s the environment too that then shapes us. So it’s this bidirectional coupling. It’s like that’s the key word right. It’s a relational thing.

 

Fred

So it’s in relation with the environment. So it’s not just ever in the body. It’s like – so it’s a much more multifaceted, phenomenon than just like neurons firing in the brain. It’s not just the body, but it’s also the environment.

 

Michael

Yeah, it’s a brain-body-environment system. And coupling out of that comes this self-organization thing of consciousness and cognition. That’s what I would say. And so yes. And so to answer – So back to a little bit of a personal story. I started with Eastern philosophy. Right. So I started with – that’s what really was passionate about. I was passionate about Zen Buddhism. I was passionate about Zen philosophy and Eastern ways of thinking. And then I got into Western philosophy. I ended up doing my master’s in Western philosophy. And what really inspired me way back, way, way back now is this connection between quantum physics and consciousness. So “quantum consciousness”, that’s what I was like, wow, this is you have quantum physics, which is incredibly crazy and mind blowing and we can’t still interpret the results yet. Still many open unanswered questions. And people were like trying to explain consciousness with that. Like we shape our own reality. I was really into that movement, really, really into.

 

Fred

The Joe Dispenza stuff of like, you know, you enter the quantum realm and then everything is possible.

 

 

 

Michael

Yeah. Gary Zhukov, Fred Alan Wolf, these were actual physicists, and neuroscientists, who study these kinds of things. And then there were actual like – and then Erwin Schrödinger. Oh my God. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum physics, wrote a book called What Is Life? that enormously inspired me. And, he created molecular biology with that book, pretty much. And Erwin Schrödinger was a guy who studied the Upanishads and Vedic texts and tried to like himself – Werner Heisenberg wrote a book called Physics and Philosophy. Werner Heisenberg of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.

 

Fred

And Breaking Bad. And Breaking Bad.

 

Michael

And Heisenberg in Breaking Bad. With the Black hat. Good. So those guys were really inspiring to me. And I think there’s a still a lot of open and unanswered questions. And then I wrote a book – I read a book called Zen and the Brain by [James H.] Austin. So this understanding of Zen philosophy, by looking at neuroscience. So I got into Western philosophy, got my masters in Western philosophy with a little bit of, learning from the East as well. Still, and then – and then it became clear, I think, that there was no – quantum mechanics and quantum physics, how interesting it is, it really doesn’t have much to say about, like, consciousness. I think people still disagree. Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, but there’s Quantum Realm and there’s the classical realm. And I think we have to think about consciousness in the classical realm. And maybe nonlocality, superposition, entanglement, uncertainty. All of those things do matter for consciousness. But, you know, maybe not. It’s certainly not in the way that people were thinking about, like the Joe – in my opinion. In my humble opinion – the Joe Dispenzas that continue to promulgate these ideas, I think that’s been largely overwhelmingly, we’ve moved on from that.

 

Fred

It’s hard to follow those leap sometimes.

 

Michael

In my opinion.

 

Fred

Yeah. Of course. I mean, who knows ultimately. But it’s hard to follow those leaps. Like, these things happen in the quantum realm and then, like, this is what it means to you. You know, it’s like, well, that’s kind of a huge leap, right? I mean, we can use things as metaphors. We can maybe, approach certain environmental challenges or personal challenges through the use of metaphors or certain ideas, but it doesn’t sort of necessarily dictate if you’re going to apply a little bit more scientific scrutiny to it. Sometimes it’s hard to follow that chain. And for me, it kind of invalidates. And oftentimes it’ll be connected to certain practices that could be maybe amazing like in their own right. But it’s like, yeah, the theoretical chain. And then the practice. And then I’m just like, okay. Like I don’t really understand.

 

Michael

I think that we should keep those things separate. That’s all. We shouldn’t try and explain one with the other because it’s turned out pretty, pretty fruitless and pretty empty. So, like, you know, but those other things have their place, right? Intuition. You know. So anyway, to answer your question, the metaphysics of it. Right. Like, there’s a lot of different metaphysical systems of explanation. There’s scientific systems of explanation. And in my opinion, those two things diverge. They diverge quite, quite starkly and quite profoundly when trying to explain reality. Some of it like – but science is now confirming meditation – contemplative neuroscience, the neuroscience of meditation is now really answering a lot of very interesting questions that people thousands of years new. You know. Transgenerational epigenetics is another field that’s like, “Wow, like there are deep connections of our ancestors”. And yes, we’re learning those things and we’re going to learn a lot more things. But now back to like, certain metaphysical – But even within metaphysical – I read a book called The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. And that book enormously inspired me. And he tries in that book to connect eastern mysticism with quantum physics. But even within eastern mysticism itself, you have, with one view, you have like differing ideas and philosophies and theologies. So like, again, it’s hard to like extrapolate and match those things more than what we’re actually doing is like, we’re coming with confirmation bias. We’re coming to the world with what we want to be true and figuring out what we know to try and say, yep, look, that’s true, rather than the scientific outlook. And the scientific attitude is coming to the world like, “let’s figure out what – let’s keep an open mind, let’s figure out what’s true. And if it disagrees with some of our deeply held worldviews, then we have to accept that”. And that’s been shown, I think, time and time again. Right. Like Darwin, with evolution, like, you know, separated: “humanity’s at the top. It’s qualitatively distinct”. Nope. We’re not a matter of difference in degree. We’re not a difference in kind. We’re just a difference in degree. And we’re part of this entire ecosystem. you know, Copernicus did it with taking the sun. You know, the Earth out of the center of the solar system. and, you know, the sun is the center of the solar system, and we’re just one solar system now, among many of hundreds of, you know, billions of exoplanets out there in many galaxies, right? Like, you know, I think there’s a lot of times science cuts through the anthropomorphism, in my view, that people like, you know, who have it with quantum physics have followed that sort of –  followed that way of thinking. So with chakras, now that’s a global level answer. Let’s get back to your specific question about chakras and things like that. Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think that, you know, there are different parts of the body that may not hold, like memories and aspects of our personality that’s up here, and that has to be thought of. But we cannot – make the distinction now with embodied cognition. Right. And so, in some ways, embodied cognition actually aligns more with chakra philosophy. In many ways it might be metaphorical, but it’s that way of thinking that embodied cognition may confirm.

 

Fred

Yeah that’s it, like after that, we sort of layer this representational model, right? That’s kind of like has a lot of theory built into it. Who knows how much of it is true? How much of it is not true? Right? But I’m thinking also with embodied cognition, it’s such a rich frame because something like, for instance, like meditation, okay, where you’re doing something with your body, you’re doing something with your mind, you emerge from it with a meaningful experience. I remember personally when people who were scientifically minded thought that was all like New Agey, like bullshit. Okay? And it turns out today, as you’ve said, like it’s been proven – now we can neuro scientifically prove, that a lot is going on with meditation and then all the sort of the benefits to wellbeing, concentration, stress, anxiety, all of that. So it turns out that the people who, sort of, held onto that as a meaningful experience were correct. In a sense, they were more scientific because they were embodied in their cognition. They had a meaningful experience. The theoretical models of science at the time didn’t fit with their experience, but they believed in their experience. It was like empirical.

 

Michael

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

 

 

 

 

Fred

It’s like more scientific almost than like saying: “Well, you know, the scientific sounding theory of the world”. That’s just a theory. Who knows? That’s just a paradigm. Maybe eventually we’re going to completely transcend that paradigm.

 

Michael

So that’s the anti-realist position. And this extrapolates –  the things like psychedelics right. And it extrapolates to like even like cosmological things like quantum physics is really weird and we don’t know how to interpret it yet. Right. And we don’t know what consciousness is. We may have some good ideas, right? But we don’t know how consciousness fits within the paradigm of the universe, or whether the universe is conscious itself. Like one of the biggest theories of – one of the biggest, or if not the biggest scientific theory of consciousness that exists right now, which is enormously rigorous, highly mathematical. It’s called Integrated information theory. And it was started by Giulio Tononi, and Anil Seth, one of my colleagues, actually writes about that quite well in his new book, Being You?. So plug there for Anil’s book, Being You? A New Science of Consciousness. Integrated information theory looks in Information theory and looks at the integration of different parts of a system and, it quantifies consciousness and it comes up with a quantifiable metric. It’s called phi. And so consciousness is quantifiable. A lot of consciousness, high phi. Low consciousness, like maybe an amoeba, low phi. But more than that, it’s almost like panpsychist in its view. And that is like that: Everything in the universe, atoms, my phone – Everything has some level of consciousness. We don’t have any answers to that. That’s a really weird, very Eastern – in some Eastern, not other Eastern – way of thinking.

 

Fred

It’s also interesting. It’s also interesting how, people who deny that human beings have consciousness like a hard physicalists, like, “the world is closed on to physics and there’s no place for consciousness and just just physical laws”. And you’ll do like “Zombie theory of Man”, what I call it. Very often they’ll say: “Well, look, you know, like, animals don’t have consciousness. Rocks don’t have. What makes you think a human being has consciousness?”. In a sense that’s more, comfortable for them to consider that, than the opposite, alternative that maybe all of these other things also have consciousness, right?

 

Michael

Right. Yeah, exactly. It’s the opposite. It’s more comfortable to, like, sort of, you know – I mean, but – not only neuroscience, which is, you know, the dealing with the brain, of course, but like, even, cosmology and astronomy, like, you know, the Big Bang. Now we’re going beyond the Big Bang with the James Webb telescope, you know, figuring out, like, looking at “the birth of the universe”. I put that in quotes. We still don’t understand questions like, what is the edge of the universe? Is there an edge of the universe? Are there other universes like a multiverse that exists? Are there like, are there other this exact situation happening now in other universes? Those are very unanswered. Like it gets – like in other words, the empirical method, the beauty of the scientific “method” that we discussed earlier to find and figure out how reality works is itself shot like with quantum physics. Relativity, neuroscience, like tearing those boundaries down and so it almost does borderline into like really different ways of thinking than the West, like, like the Eastern ways and Eastern philosophy.

 

Fred

Yeah. And it’s almost like the branch of philosophy, like metaphysics. Right. It’s also – Like if you’re thinking literally of like what happened, let’s say pre Big Bang or the edge of the universe, those questions by definition will be metaphysical because it’s not something that you can measure today with our instruments. Like you have to take that leap into metaphysics, which is really weird.

Michael

That is correct. And quantum physics was the first to show that with the measurement problem itself, because it asks : “What is measurement?”. The act of observation is in measurement, and that requires some, I guess, level of consciousness. So you do have to step into like some other ways of thinking that are more metaphysical and philosophical. So 100%, yeah, I agree with you.

 

Fred

That stuff is – Wow.

 

Michael

Yeah, it’s crazy like, you know, and out of like these ideas – to this like really, what we’re talking about here is like the, you know, the you’ve heard the term “woo-woo”, right. Like the woo-woo. Like think about like feng shui. Feng shui is a really maybe interesting example. Or acupuncture, like, you know, the woo-woo, the pseudoscience out there. Right. So like, Karl Popper was one of the first scientists – philosophers of scientist to ask: “What is what distinguishes science from pseudoscience?”. And, continually that distinction – that demarcation he called it the demarcation problem – continually to this day, I don’t think there’s a clear answer. And maybe there’s not supposed to be a clear answer. Like, I think I read just feng shui, which was considered like woo-woo, you know, by a lot of circles is now you know, like they just did a couple of experiments and it turns out that, yeah, like there’s some real results there that sort of validate the outcomes of feng shui, if not the ontological explanation of feng shui; Like that there’s these dragon lines passing through and that there’s chi out there.

 

Fred

Yeah. The representational model doesn’t have to be true. The representational model explaining the thing, it doesn’t have to be true, but the thing itself can be valid. Acupuncture, too. There’s been studies recently showing that, there are real effects on inflammation and so forth, like real hard science. I’ll look up. I’ll put as a link to this interview. But, I read that recently as well.

 

Michael

Yeah. And, you, use the word true. And so like, that’s the whole point is : What is truth? Is truth objective? Is it relative? Is it somewhere in between? And there’s a whole – like philosophers are really working on that problem and much better than I can represent their work here. But, you know, there’s a lot of it.

 

Fred

I have almost like an Aristotelian view on this. On truth. I look at truth from the perspective of the concept of utility. If something is useful. So is it true that meditation works? Well f it does something useful? Then it works. Now, my explanations about meditation can be complete B.S., right? “Oh well my theorie is there’s the mind and there’s this…” it’s like, yeah, that’s just me theorizing, okay? But the practice itself is doing something real. To me it’s like, if it’s true, if there’s utility it’s not exactly the same because – yeah, some of our representational models are really robust and are really true, and we could base future experiments on them and so forth. But, if something translates to something real? Then it’s true.

 

Michael

Yeah. That’s pragmatism. Right. I think in a nutshell, like William James. Right. Going back to William James and Dewey and those guys, I think pragmatism. Right. And Charles Sanders Peirce and I think some of their work like that, truth is sought in pragmatic application and utility and usefulness and things like that.

 

Fred

But I know that’s not unanimous. I know a lot of people are – So pragmatically, this mind body, embodied cognition perspective. We talk about – we just dipped into the metaphysics of it. But there’s also like real, very, very immediate embodied – like, I know you’re very involved in different movement practices. I almost say, like when I see, like, your explorations into neuro yoga, I look almost like as, like movement practices, as philosophical explorations. Right? Like, so physical things that you’ll do – that will actually give your brain a workout or that will change the way you think. And I know your work in, in neuro yoga, you’re a practitioner of that. From your perspective, can developing and engaging the body also help develop and engage the brain and the mind? And give me some concrete examples of how you do that in your life.

 

Michael

Yeah, absolutely. That’s there’s a whole field called neuro sports or sports neuroscience and we now know different kinds of movement and sports change the brain in a multitude of different ways helping with memory, helping with learning, helping with thinking, helping with emotional regulation, helping with attention and focus. You know. Running, promotes brain derived neurotrophic factors, which is like fertilizer for the brain, increasing neuroplasticity. So that field is huge now, and we now know very well that all different kind of high intensity interval training, low intensity, steady state, strength training. A study just came out showing that – well not just came out but maybe like last year, even two years ago – that strength training deep in elderly women, for example, decreases, white matter lesions, in elderly folks, in elderly women. So like the white matter is the parts of the brain, the wires of the brain that connect one part of the brain to another part of the brain. That’s called the white matter. It’s those axons that connect those parts of the brain. So, like, there’s a very rich literature, a lot of data on that as well, just as a whole. Right, like as a whole, the different ways of movement. Walking, for example, changes cognition. Creativity, innovation, those kinds of things. Decision making, attention, all of those kinds of things have been studied. Different cognitive processes in relation to different types of movement, and different kinds of exercise and workout. So, I think being multimodal, like doing a lot of – that’s how I live my life. I do a lot of different types of movement, that I just explore, you know, and change my way of thinking about myself. Right. And how I am. Self-image. Right. And the way I move my body in relation to others, right when I’m with other people, whether it’s my wife or, you know, or my child or, you know, or just people in another sports team, that kind of thing. And that’s when applied embodied cognition. So what I was just talking about a sports neuroscience but, applied and body cognition is really like, yeah, how do we know that, you know, your ability to focus and pay attention and make decisions is relative to your body and how it moves and what’s going on in your body and how the body interacts with the environment. So you could design training. You can design processes and methods in different sports to optimize or emphasize that. The same in education, right? Like think about Montessori education or different educational paradigms like that is not just like stimulus response, because that’s the old paradigm, like the neuroscience right now, it’s action perception. And so you could design, more hands on, experiential, active, embodied ways of learning that can help with memory and knowledge retention and knowledge acquisition.

 

Fred

You mean being forced to sit down on a desk for eight hours without, like, being able to? You think, you’re saying that’s not optimal to – That’s not an optimal way of learning?

 

Michael

No, that’s correct.

 

 

Fred

But that comes from the old. That comes from Descartes, that comes from “I think, therefore I am”. It’s like you are, sitting on a chair thinking like the brain, the disembodied brain. Right. And so now, like embodied cognition would change that. I would say it’s crazy, especially for, little boys that have got all this energy and all this, and then it’s like the teachers call you and they’re like: “Well, you know, he’s talking to his friends and he’s getting up”. And I’m like: “Well, I hope he’s doing that. Like, you want to put him on pills”. And then we prescribe pills like they’ve got A.D.D.. It’s like, maybe they just have energy. You know? Maybe they need to move a little bit more. Maybe they need to go for a little walk. Maybe they need to have a lecture outside. Maybe they need to, you know, play a little bit more sports, I don’t know.

 

Michael

And then on, even on top of that, it actually changes how you learn, right? It changes your ability, Like your brain’s understanding of the world. Right. And it’s like a really deep, profound kind of thing. It’s incredible. Yeah. It’s not just like – yeah so…

 

Fred

I’m thinking of that old difference between Plato and Aristotle. Plato was the Academy. Aristotle was the Lyceum. The Academy is, top down education. Sit down. Listen to the master. The Lyceum was the peripatetic school. You’re walking around. Moving around. Yeah. The teacher’s, like, telling you about stuff. You’re in the market. You’re taking a look at something. You talk about this product versus that product. You talk about the nature of the sun. It’s much more sort of embodied.

 

Michael

And now think about the use of technology like virtual reality. So you can do the body transfer illusion in like – the rubber hand illusion that I talked about in my Ted talk. You can now – think about this like you’re going to like – wow, I just had a thought. With the body transfer illusion they’ve done, they’ve used virtual reality to make you think you have another body, maybe like another gender or another sex. Right. And the experience therein that lies. You can think about the learning and the educational connection we can make with other people, and how we can use virtual reality in an embodied way. Right? To be able to apply embodied cognition through virtual reality, to enhance education again in that way. Right. That could be really powerful. And therapy too, is another example.

 

Fred

Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s really interesting. I was thinking also of an experiment I saw where it’s like, you know, when we come into into contact with, something really vast like mountains or like, you know, bodies of water and whatever. Some people, get to an age where they can’t really move around. Well, maybe with VR, you can give them access to some of those experiences and give them some of those benefits that they can’t have in the physical world anymore.

 

Michael

Incredible. Yeah, absolutely. There’s all kinds of potential and possibilities. Yeah.  And so like, that’s – Yeah. I mean, back to your point, I think there’s a lot of room for exploration to how, like we apply like once we change our thinking about cognition and who we are in consciousness, then, like, the application becomes – people are going to find new kinds of applications and new fields of domain and new domains, all the time.

 

 

 

Fred

Before we move on to flow, I want to talk to you about group flow. Just to close the loop on embodied cognition. Do you feel like it’s something like – not just to use the big word paradigm, but do you feel like it’s, an emergent paradigm or a different paradigm than the, let’s call it, mind body dualism or, the disembodied mind paradigm? And as a practitioner in the field, do you feel that there’s a little bit of tension there? Do you feel that there’s resistance or a lot of the work is just being done and kind of, emerging in a way that’s not, kind of conflictual. Like, do you have camps? Do you have like little cliques that are like some people believe that some people believe that?

 

Michael

Like there are, there’s differing views, of course, in the literature. absolutely. There’s a lot of – people are still, you know, in the philosophy of mind and philosophy especially, like you always have endless sort of like back and forth and argumentation, which, in my personal opinion, might be a, drawback of that. But some people might say, that’s its strength, not a weakness. In science, I think you do have like, you know, we ask questions, we figure out what the data say, and it’s very data driven in that way. Right. So there is this like empirical objective component to it and philosophy to I’m, I’m going down a rabbit hole, which I shouldn’t be going down to, but there are different viewpoints. I think – neuroscience is definitely moving down a direction of, if you’re asking if this is what I’m hearing, you’re asking neuroscience is definitely converging and moving down the direction that is coming – that is sort of validating, embodied cognition, number one.

 

Fred

Like, is it almost like the emergence of a new paradigm, not to kind of use that big word just for a big word, but is it is it similar to paradigmatic shift towards like, okay, it’s a vastly different understanding. And now we need to start looking at this differently.

 

 

Michael

So I don’t think it’s a vastly different understanding. I think – you know, I do think science progresses like I don’t think Kuhn is right. And there’s just – we move to different paradigms that are incommensurable, you know, from one another. And there’s not this like, you know, I think Kuhn was arguing that there’s no scientific progress in that sense. I do think there is a, progression we’re advancing our knowledge, that is helping us optimize ourselves to the world, in my opinion. And I think neuroscience is definitely, you know, making like, you know – especially the intersection of neuroscience and AI. Right? We are now doing amazing things that are going to help a lot of people make a make life worth living, fulfill purpose. I know that’s your thing. We can talk about that. Like even the neuroscience of purpose is, you know, a huge thing. So like, I think it’s very exciting. I was going to say something about – Oh so! artificial intelligence, going back to that real quickly. You know, it’s like if embodied cognition is true and brains are dynamical systems, complex adaptive dynamical systems that interact with the world. Right then then there’s a certain sense where, artificial general intelligence AGI, artificial general intelligence, you know, might not be possible without embodiment in some way, shape or form. Right. And so that’s very interesting. Right. Like, so we talk about narrow AI, we talk about strong AI. But embodied cognition is true. That’s going to have some very big ramifications on the future of AI. And thinking about like consciousness. And can we make machines conscious and things like that.

 

Fred

And is that because AI is, in a sense, disembodied, like so AI doesn’t have a heart, doesn’t have, like a motivational kind of interaction with the environment. So it’s funny because just the way you said it now, you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head. You’ve kind of pointed at something that I was I was talking to a friend of mine who’s usually very optimistic about technology. And, and he’s terrified of AI. And because for this exact problem, it’s going to turn into the general AI and it’s going to take over and so forth. And I was just like, I just get a hunch that we’re underestimating H.I., you know. Every time he talks about AI, it’s sort of anthropomorphizing it. It’s like – it’s a biological creature with desires, with the will to dominate, with the will to replicate.

 

Michael

Great. Well, what about compassion? Empathy? Like you got to humanize those. Like if you’re going to be anthropomorphic. I agree with you completely. I am a techno optimist. I was just speaking about this earlier today at school. I’m definitely a techno optimist and I’m not – I mean, I’m concerned, but I’m not scared. I’m not overly anxious at, you know, the creation of, like, these big sci-fi, scary robots that are going to like, you know, say they’re going to be gods and we’re going to be ants. And so, I think a lot of the evidence from neuroscience and from my field of neuroscience, that is complexity theory, nonlinear dynamical systems, you know, movement and body cognition, though, that’s what I’m trying to say. Back to your earlier question. That’s where neuroscience is going. The neural representation theory has been thrown out. Largely, if I can –

 

Fred

What is the neural representation theory?

 

Michael

Like stimulus-response. You know, that that the brain, just responds to stimuli in a way and that it optimizes for survival? That the brain creates representations of reality and it’s information processing like a computer. The brain is the hardware, the mind is the software. That’s the von Neumann way, old way of like – that’s not the right way.

 

Fred

Like that’s been thrown out? That’s been conclusively thrown out by neuroscience in your view?

 

Michael

I mean look. There’s always going to be detractors. But I would say that’s been thrown out. I would say absolutely. My advisor’s advisor, Walter Freeman, was one of the first people to like, you know, prove that you can throw that out. And he did amazing experiments, where he showed that the way it’s not stimulus response, it’s response stimulus. A wonderful prominent neuroscientists out of New York University, colleague Gyorgy Buzsaki wrote a book called The Brain from the Inside Out. We used to think it was the brain from the outside in: stimulus response. We now know modern neuroscience had, yes, overturned that view. And that’s important for the implications of what –  being scared about artificial intelligence. That’s my whole point here that you’re also making and that you made me think of. It’s like the brains work from the inside-out. Right? Anil Seth writes this point and it’s really brilliant. That the brain hallucinates reality. And that’s how the brain works. It’s a Bayesian prediction engine based on movement and the coupling with the environment, as we were talking about earlier. And so, like, it’s really not so much like: “Hey, there’s this machinery in here and it’s a hardware and you just type in things and then the brain creates a mental representation based on environmental stimuli and a response to that in an appropriate way”. No, it’s the other way around. It’s the brain is actively it’s more from the inside out, not from the outside in. That’s Buzsaki point with the title of his book, the brain, is actively organizing and interpreting and predicting and it’s a dynamical system that changes over time. And so when we think about the brains from that way, that has enormous implications for artificial intelligence, and in my opinion. No one not Sam Harris, Lex Friedman, you know, like these people out there who are having these conversations, are still, you know, giving analogies to this old way of thinking in neuroscience.

 

Fred

Totally agree with you. And it just for me, I’m not a professional in this field, it just feels a little bit off. It just feels like we’re anthropomorphizing. It feels like we’re underestimating what goes on in human perception and human consciousness. And when I got better acquainted with your work on embodied cognition, I think that seems a lot more kind of, in tune with what’s really going on. It’s kind of this very rich combination of experiences, sensorial experiences, emotional experiences, interactions with the environment and then memory. You also mentioned memory, right? There’s this kind of evolution of identities and these broader constructs that we build our, our lives around.

 

Michael

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Compassion, empathy, as we mentioned, memory, all of those things, emotional regulation, which is largely involved in movement, breath like which is so interception we now know so much about it interception is another example. Like being able to sense what’s going on inside affects cognition and thinking and decision making and attention and all of these kinds of things. People with higher levels of introspective sensitivity and accuracy are higher levels of mental well-being and mental wellness. That’s well known now. And so, like all of those, there’s – the breath is an amazing connection between the body and the brain. And so back to artificial intelligence. So like I was going to say, this notion of a body cognition and, and the brains as dynamical systems.

 

 

Michael

So again I just want to preface this with a caveat that I could be wrong. We don’t really know. You know, there could be multiple instantiations or multiple systems out there that could fit the bill to produce consciousness. This is one way the wetware inside of here, with a connection to a body and a spine and moving, exploring and sensing with sensors that’s one way that consciousness and empathy and all these things happen. It might not be the only way. Right? Like, you know, it might turn out that, you know, like the brain is really an information processing device. I mean, I totally think there are – that the brain does process information in the Shannonian, for your listeners, like a Shannon entropy and information, you know, computational, let’s just say way, of course, you know, but I think that neuroscience is really moving away from that.

 

Fred

Like it’s not reduced to that, it’s not only that is what you’re saying.

 

Michael

Correct. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Exactly. So – like even still, it still attenuates and mitigates this argument of like AGI is going to be gods and we’re going to be ants and, you know, like that kind of thing. yeah. Right.

 

Fred

So, one expression that you had, I think is a perfect segue between, the concept of embodied cognition and the concept of flow, and that’s controlled perception, right? Csikszentmihalyi talks about flow as order and consciousness. Right. Ordering your consciousness from moment to moment. And so you’re also the chief science officer for the Flow Research Collective, founded by Steven Kotler, whose work is amazing. And if anybody is not, cognizant of it, I think, definitely strongly recommended. But there’s a rich scientific literature and experimentation around the concept of flow. So just a quick recap. You know, the states where people feel amazing and also perform at their best.  Csikszentmihalyi always says that, you know, we don’t feel at our best when we’re on a hammock sipping, sipping a drink. We feel at our best when we’re actively challenging ourselves with something, growing from the experience, bringing order and consciousness, transcending our limitations. You know, athletes talk about being in the zone, so kind of being fully focused and immersed on an activity, having 100% focus around the thing that we’re doing. And it’s not just peak performers. There is a lot of initial work around flow for peak performance. Also, ordinary people who, you know, report having more happiness and joy and purpose when they experience more, more flow and engagement in their lives. So, there’s obviously the concept of flow and that’s a whole huge thing.

 

Michael

Yeah.

 

Fred

But I want to I want to direct your attention on a kind of an aspect of flow that doesn’t, have as maybe rich a literature that people are maybe less aware of and that you’re very involved in researching and in studying and that’s group flow. So entering kind of flow states as a group. Right. Not just as an individual but also as a group. So, you know, the difference between an agglomeration of individuals, everybody being active and a synchronized group right around shared goals, maybe shared values even, I don’t know. Can you talk a little bit about the science of flow as it relates specifically to group flow. And what can maybe lead to it because I know that’s an area that you’ve researched a lot that very deeply.

 

Michael

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. there’s a lot to unpack there. Thank you. Let me see. Let me see if I can – and I think I got Aneil Seth’s, quote in my head just came back to me as you were talking to you, so. Yeah, I’ll put that back in the backburner for now. So, group flow is this phenomenon of – and it’s collective flow, shared flow, team flow. There’s a bunch of ways to sort of phrase it. And there, I mean, it’s been studied now psychologically, Keith Sawyer studied it. He was one of Csikszentmihalyi’s first students or a student of his. And there are certain sets of, you know, triggers or preconditions that make group flow more likely. A guy named JJ Vanden Hout, has, I think his work is like sort of top notch and state of the art when it comes to team flow. And he talks about, you know, team flow is when you’re actively pursuing, goals, right? There’s a shared goal commitment, there’s a collective ambition. And, there’s open communication and there’s, mutual commitment and there’s high skill integration and there’s psychological safety and there’s, like, yeah, shared goals and aligned personal goals. When those seven prerequisites, you know, are dialed up and, you know, existing, you get this idea of collective flow, sorry, of team flow. And team flow. What are the characteristics that show up? You know, a sense of unity, a holistic progress, trust. These – those are these characteristics that show up when all those seven prerequisites sort of are met and are dialed up in their existing. And so it’s interesting that that team flow has been studied now at the level of the brain. So flow itself, individual flow, has really been studied at the level of the brain. And you know, although there’s differing data sets out there and differing data and different experiments, I think we can now – not I think – we can now conclusively say that flow is a real thing at the level of the brain. Individual flow is a real thing at the level of the brain. Right? It’s not just a psychological thing.

 

Fred

It’s measured.

 

Michael

It’s measured at the level of the brain. And now it turns out there’s one study, just one that came out in 2021, that showed that team flow also has a neural marker at the level of the brain, but not of one brain of many brains. In this case, not many two brains. Because he studied they studied dyads. And, it turns out that flow, team flow, our group flow or team flow – let’s say in this case, because they study team flow – is not just the addition of a bunch of individuals each in flow. Team flow itself is a nonlinear “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” state that exists. Not only – So there’s a neural marker that correlates with team flow, but that neural marker doesn’t exist in one brain. You have to look at the system. It only exists in the system level.

 

Fred

How does that work? How is that measured?

 

Michael

it’s measured with, different ways of looking at brain activity and consciousness, like really advanced statistical methods using, you know, and so like, integrated information theory.

 

Fred

It’s a relational thing between the brains. It’s not necessarily something that you can measure at the individual brain level.

 

Michael

That is correct. Wow. That is correct. You just framed it very nicely and articulated it perfectly. And you can use integrated information theory. This theory of consciousness that I was actually referring to earlier in this conversation to –  they use that, they use that. And they showed that team flow was really a global, thing that exists at the system level. And so, those are some of the antecedents to team flow and, another antecedent – So there’s, you know, there’s still a lot of research and open questions about, you know, how to measure team flow. what’s the framework around it? you know, what are the actual antecedents? One of them is, yeah, synchrony, interpersonal synchrony, has been studied, and they studied this in the in this paper, they found that the brain synchronize. There’s their level of interpersonal synchrony. Brainwaves sync up not only in team flow, but just in collaboration. In general. We know that, like, teams on the same wavelength perform better. Brain waves sync up like a pilot and a copilot. Their brainwaves literally sync up when they’re taking off and performing the same task at the same time. not only brainwaves, but, like, heart rates, respiratory rates, galvanic skin response, a bunch of other markers. Biomarkers. Physiological biomarkers synchronize when people, you know, that predicts group cohesion and team performance and truth, cooperation.

 

Fred

Performance must be so – I’m thinking like at the individual level, when you look at the way, individual performance, skyrockets when people are in flow, I would assume that there are performance benefits at the group level when the group enters this kind of synchronous like group flow, state.

 

Michael

100%.

 

Fred

It would almost be like, okay. You know, when we’re a bunch of selfish individuals that each have their own personal goal, it would seem like the group loses something. Is that an idea that you can vibe with?

 

 

 

Michael

Yes, I can vibe with that for sure. Like when you have aligned personal goals. That adds to the group in their collective ambition. So, yes, 100%. Especially with like the task that you’re trying to do or the problem that you’re trying to solve or decision that you’re trying to make as a group. And so, yes, absolutely. And, performance does increase. I mean, not only like, yeah, I mean, when people get in sync, performance increases, like, not only in, like, music or sports as we, you know, those are paradigmatic examples, but like, just, you know, building, putting something together with your with their hands or, or figuring out like, you have a problem to solve together. And you’ve done experiments, like all kinds of scientific experiments out there where they, they get people in sync, and then the performance goes up rather than if they’re just working together but not in sync.

 

Fred

Is there anything that could knock the group out of flow, like certain behaviors or certain? I guess one of the seven triggers that you mentioned, like if one of them were removed or if – what could knock a group out of flow where it could like the performance would go down and the synchrony would go down?

 

Michael

That’s a great question. yeah. Like so some of the original group flow triggers that like, Keith Sawyer looked at were, like ego blending, equal participation, familiarity, like open communication, familiarity. There’s a trigger called “Yes And” so being additive right to the conversation; If you’re in a situation where you’re having a conversation that’s not going to the sound doesn’t apply, you know, to a jazz quartet or, you know, a football team. But, yeah. So he studied improv and any study jazz musicians actually as well. So, yeah, things can things that – those are the group flow triggers if they’re not all, like individual flow, if they’re not all there or they’re not all dialed up. Flow exists in a spectrum. So does group flow, I believe. I think the research will bear that out, first of all. But then there are I guess group flow blockers. Just as our individual flow blockers; distraction, limiting beliefs, self-sabotage, overwhelm, those kinds of things.

 

 

Fred

Would you put like, I just, I don’t know, I had this idea when you mentioned, you know, interruptions or, you know, just tuning out of the moment. University students, surfing on social media while the teacher is – I don’t know if you have that at the university there, but I have a lot of my friends teach at the university level, and they just say, like “look you can’t say anything, because if you say anything, they’ll give you a bad rating”. As a prof, it’s almost like there’s like the client relationship now, but that behavior doesn’t seem to be conducive to group flow or like establishing some kind of a, synchronous group dynamic around the exploration of an idea or learning.

 

Michael

Yeah, I know that the research out of Susan Dicker lab at University of Montreal and one of my colleagues, Guillaume Dumas, they’ve studied, education and this idea of synchrony in education. And they found out that when students are paying attention together, you hit the nail on the head, man, they found a joint, a neural marker of joint attention when students were focused on the same lesson and paying attention together in a classroom. And they were students in a classroom with EEG sets on their heads, and they were focused on the same lesson, and they found a joint neural marker for attention. So that is this joint neural marker it’s a a neural marker for attention, but only exists at the joint group level of the students. So learning and memory enhances when students get into sync. And so you can actually like, if we’re going to take a test together let’s all get together. Or if we’re about to learn a lesson, let’s all pay attention together and know that we’re all paying attention and we have a shared goal in that kind of thing. So that’s been shown like interpersonal synchrony in education for paying attention has been shown.

 

Fred

Such a fascinating science group flow, because I find that as a society, a lot of our challenges will require a group. We can’t just solve it as a bunch of like, separated and like selfish individuals. We’re gonna have to attack shared problems, turn them into shared goals, and then and then become effective as groups. And I find that, you know, the science of group flow, that’s kind of our team flow. Collaborative flow that’s emerging. It’s just refreshing how, first of all, it’s completely apolitical, right? It’s really just structured around we can talk about, you know, what the goals should be. But to the extent that we can agree on goals and to the extent that we can agree on problems, we’re going to have to get better as a species in this kind of practice of group flow, find ways to kind of sync up together as productive teams and attack these complex problems as opposed to, I don’t know, just endlessly arguing over minutia detail to figure out who gets the power to figure out who is the top monkey in the hierarchy. You know, that we currently have, like attacking these problems like politically or through a culture war paradigm. It’s like, okay, like let’s agree, there’s a there’s a problem. There’s a level of the problem at which we can agree that there is a problem. Okay. Now how do we mobilize our attention and our resources as a group to solve that problem? So I find it’s a great, it’s a really, really cool, discipline that’s emerging. And with the scientific understanding backing it up, that, it’s really an area where I hope there’s more research, more attention, more, awareness that gets built around that because it’s potentially really unbelievable from a human progress perspective.

 

Michael

Yeah. You hit the nail on the head, man. And, Steven Kotler actually makes this point, very well at the end of his book, the, with that he wrote with Peter Diamandis, The Future is Faster than You Think, this idea of the hive mind and the group flow is the, you know, the most pleasurable state on the planet that everybody – and everybody, you know, knows that and experiences it. When you’ve experienced group flow or team flow, it is you know, it’s like all of the pleasure chemistry that you get and motivation chemistry that you get in individual flow, which is a very pleasurable state, is like amplified when you’re a group flow. And so he makes the point that this is what we need to tackle these global problems. we need – he makes the point that you’re making right now, we need to figure out, what collaboration, how to collaborate. But getting in that state facilitates cooperation and collaboration and human connection. And so getting in sync, right, is part of  that equation. And we absolutely need to figure out how to do that. I think when we learn how to do that, when we learn how to get in sync, we learn how to take each other’s perspectives. And this is actually also this has actually been shown. Guillaume, one of my colleagues, as I mentioned before at the University of Montreal has shown empathy increases when we get in sync. Okay. So like between mother and child, between strangers, between friends, like, when we get in sync, literally. And I’m not talking about like “hey, we’re in sync” colloquially, I’m talking about like, biologically when we get in sync, when we’re in synchrony, empathy, those things increase. So we can take each other’s perspective. Because there’s two kinds of empathy. There’s affective empathy, like, you know, literally putting yourself in, not literally putting yourself in someone’s shoes, but you’re feeling literally the way they feel. So you’re putting yourself in their shoes. And then there’s cognitive empathy, which is taking their perspective on a more intellectual level. Not so much the affective level, but the cognitive level. And, he showed that those two happen when, when people get into sync. So think about like conflict resolution, disagreeing about same sex marriage, you know, disagreeing about gun regulation and these kinds of things. so those things, in my opinion, I – I’m very passionate about critical thinking and I think critical thinking, if people learn to think critically in the skills and strategies therein will help those situations. But even more than that, just going beyond that from like an intellectual critical thinking, getting into sync and getting into group flow will be the way we can really affect those at the level of brain. Again, I can take your perspective. I can understand where you’re coming from and we can then, you know, resolve conflicts, tackle problems and understand each other better, right?

 

Fred

Find pragmatic solutions to these problems in a way that incorporates the perspectives of others and not just kind of forcing your perspective through, for example, a political solution or a legal solution and locking out, you know, millions of people out. So it’s very interesting there. Yeah, a lot of implications here at the social organization level that touch sort of every level from like individual to small team to bigger team to sort of, okay, now we’ve got a community right in a large territory, all the way up to these really big problems, really fascinating.

 

Michael

And Fred, it shouldn’t be lost on the viewers that it can go the other way too. Like flow is value neutral, right? Like so is group flow. Think about National Socialism, think about the Nazis. Think about like, you know, like there was a lot of group flow there probably.

 

Fred

Around the wrong goals, around the wrong goals. I guess the goal discussion is the kind of primordial one that we need to have and, and agree on as a society. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I want to end with a kind of a weird one for you because you sometimes in your work it’s clear that you’re doing real peer reviewed, data driven science at the highest level with computer models and so forth. But once in a while you’ll let a word like soul or spirit through. Okay? And I know that you have this kind of multimodal, multi-layered, conception of consciousness of the human spirit, and I don’t know why I connect it to the notion also of free will up into a certain point, because it’s like, to what degree can we direct consciousness to what degree are we kind of, a harmonious, integrated, conscious creature which a lot of materialists believe that we’re not, you know, again, this, kind of – I forget which one it was, I think the stimulus response model. But what do you think of these notions, like soul, like spirit? Is it where they metaphors that we like, maybe proto-science, like metaphors that we came up with in different religious traditions or spiritual traditions that we can now maybe understand in a more, sophisticated way through scientific means? Or is it just a manner of speech? How do you see these concepts playing out?

 

Michael

it’s interesting you say the matter of speech because going back to embodied cognition, George Lakoff, wrote a book called Metaphors We Live By, and that was actually one of the first instantiations of embodied cognition. You know, warm, you know, like, we think of the future, we move forward, we think of the past, we move backward. And, we use metaphors. And those metaphors are embodied kind of things in the way we move our bodies. And so they actually, like, have a lot of traction with meaning and cognition itself. But to answer your question, I think, there’s a great quote from Carl Sagan, one of my biggest gurus and heroes, he says science is not only compatible with spirituality, it’s also a profound source of spirituality. And, I’m very spirit soul. I, you know, like, I’m a physicalist. I’m a materialist. I don’t think there’s anything like sort of nonphysical out there, but I think there are emergent properties that we discussed earlier that are –  they can be described as nonphysical, you know, that can’t be reduced to physical things? so when we’re talking about brass tacks here, you know, I don’t think there’s any such thing as, spirit or soul in addition to something that is already here. I don’t know what work it would do. I don’t know what function it would serve. I can’t, you know, I don’t think there’s – and I really think there’s probably any evidence, to that effect. Having said that, I mean, you know, if you want to talk about consciousness, like, in other words, agency, there’s some other soul agency. Yes, exactly. That was given from the outside. Right. Like outside of like what came up and emerged from evolution and from, physics, itself. I don’t think like that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t think there’s anything like that. but having said that, enormously spiritual, myself, you know, in – and just in consciousness in general, I think the funk, the beauty of consciousness is that it gives us the ability to reach out. And this is Freeman’s point, not my point. My advisor’s advisor, Walter Freeman, again, Freeman was one of the first people to really apply mathematics and chaos theory to the brain to try and understand the brain at that level. A computational neuroscientist, and he threw out the old neural representation view of cognitive neuroscience that I was talking about earlier, that we were talking about earlier. But like intentionality, not from philosophy of mind, intentionality from like, neuroscience, like the consciousness can give us this ability to reach out and discover the world and make the world more like us and make us more like the world. And that’s a really powerful thing. We can do so many things with that and connect with each other so much better. And that’s a very spiritual thing for me.

 

Fred

It really is. But so I’m interested because you define the agency as something that would come from the outside. But I’m curious. And then the emergent properties. Could agency just be an emergent property that nonetheless gives us the ability to have something like an intention, to have something like self-awareness or wanting to, like, intentionally, you know, moving our consciousness from one place to the next or…?

 

Michael

Yes, yes. And I want to give an experiment that was done too and I want to talk about that real quick. But, yes, that’s the way I look at agency. Right. And, Stuart Kaufman talked about this as well. You know, so I think consciousness I don’t know if, Steven Kotler and I, we’re writing a paper on this actually, right now, believe it or not. And we are, on intuition and agency and consciousness and whether what comes first and that kind of thing. So, but – So what I would say is that I think, in terms of like, free will and, I mean, I’m not a – I’m by no means an expert in the philosophy of free will or the neuroscience of free will with like, experiments that were done, you know, showing that, there’s no such thing as free will to level the brain, blah, blah, you know, which have been, talked about at length. Right. Which you know, about. Yeah. So like, I don’t, I mean, it depends really on, of course, how you operationalize free will and define free will. And that’s been largely the problem. So we can say yes, it exists. On one hand we can direct consciousness. I think we have the ability to direct consciousness, to pay attention to what we want to pay attention to. Going back to Csikszentmihalyi, he said the optimal state of consciousness is one in which there’s order in consciousness. The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there’s order in consciousness; what you said. And that I think like, is the ability for us to be able to direct that and get into a flow state is – that gives us agency and that allows us, that’s one of the beautiful things about being human, I think. And other animals as well. So, and there’s a really interesting experiment that was done with babies. Who she was looking at, [Rovee-Collier] I’m not pronouncing her name right, but she was looking at babies, and she was looking at infant memory. And she did the mobile, the infant mobile conjugate experiment where the baby was connected to the mobile. Right. Like this is the mobile above the baby. The baby’s in the crib, and she connected a ribbon to the baby, to the baby’s, leg, and then connected that ribbon to the mobile. And so before she connected it, the baby’s just, you know, looking at the mobile and blah, blah, blah, and you know, being enjoying the movement of the mobile and amused is what I’m looking for. When the baby gets connected to the mobile, it starts, you know, the spontaneous kicks of the baby’s leg go from non-spontaneous to like “Oh my God, I can make the mobile move more and that’s making me be amused more”. So there’s a positive feedback loop. You see what I’m saying. So when the baby was connected to the mobile with the ribbon, the leg movements went from spontaneous to like, not spontaneous, like organized, intentional, like, oh, I realize I’m making them the mobile move. My advisor…

 

Fred

So there was awareness, there was awareness. And then there was like a response, like based on that awareness.

 

Michael

Based on that awareness. Right. Exactly right. And she was studying like how long when you remove the ribbon, would the baby remember that it was making the mobile move like six months, nine months? She was studying infant memory due to infants, remember? Scott Kelso, one of my advisors in, at the center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, where I did my PhD, replicated that experiment, but with mathematics and with the laws of coordination dynamics. And they replicated the data, and they found that’s really powerful because that explains the data that she found, it describes it and makes predictions about the data. And they extrapolated that or interpreted that, that there is agency, like there’s a there’s a self-organized coupling between the baby’s movements and the environment in the world. And out of that comes this Eureka like “I”, I’m like, “wow, I’m doing that”. That’s like, it’s a self. Out of that comes self. Right. And Rudolfo Linas made this point with when I was making the predictive imperative, as well. So, yeah, it’s I think neuroscience is now explaining this idea of agency. Now to get back to spirituality and the sole, you asked this really personal questions. I was like, I was trying to like.

 

Fred

No, it’s good. It’s I think you’ve reconstructed very quickly, an alternative understanding of agency that doesn’t require an external agent.

 

Michael

Right. Self-organization.

 

Fred

Yeah. Self-organization that’s right.

 

Michael

Self-organization organization. That’s the key. Hurricanes, all of these biological and ecological systems that come out of self-organization, the brain, consciousness, agency, it’s a self-organized process. And that is like enormously spiritual, like, you know, in a, in a very, you know – how can you not be like, wild and all, by like what’s going on in the universe?

 

Fred

And it’s a deeply relational self. It’s not just an individual self. Like, it’s not just a ghost of like one human being. It’s now something that’s also a function of not only the laws of nature, but all these surrounding entities that contribute to the formation of the self. So you can have agency, but that agency includes a relationship with the outside.

 

Michael

That’s the yes, it necessitates it’s a result associated. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Agency as a result.

 

Fred

Which is crazy. Which would now give us a scientifically rooted way to sort of connect the self with the world, the interconnected nature of all life. Right. Which is also a deeply spiritual idea. So now, yes, this is the merger of like science and spirituality that –

 

Michael

That’s exactly. Yes. That’s my point. Like that’s exactly my point. Like you and I are related. We are related, like you look at an ant you’re related to that ant like literally like a cousin. Right. Like we are all cousins. Think about that. Like you go back far enough and you will come up. You will come to an individual. Not that far by the way. Right. Like who spawn people that spawned you and I, all human beings are related. They’re cousins. All life on the planet is related. When you think about that and you think about like now the possibilities in the universe, like you have to stand in awe of the results of what science is showing us that in my opinion, theological could not even come – like, you know, like theological theories in these different systems could not even come close to like the craziness that is science is unveiling. And that to me is very spiritual.

 

Fred

The nature of our connections. We almost need to model that out with, with the use of computers just to give us images. Right. That could kind of represent these ideas.

 

Michael

Right.

 

Fred

The level at which we’re interconnected. I know I was thinking of Paul Stamets, his work, and how the mycelium are kind of like this, this network. There’s this, this conscious subnetwork that connects all of life. And like, without them, we can’t live. And we kind of co-evolved with them over, you know, hundreds, thousands, millions of years, who knows and how okay. Like now we live in this kind of co-evolved relational state with them. I mean, that’s why, you know, there’s forms of communication that can occur between different living beings. Again, I don’t know of like traditional religious, doctrines that are as mind bending and unbelievably awe-inspiring as that and that. And it emerges from a lot of scientific work.

 

 

 

Michael

Yes, exactly. I was like some of them are kind of boring, like they’re fantastical stories. But when you look at them compared to like what science is unveiling, they’re like, you know, they like, wow, okay. Some of them are not boring. And maybe like Scientology or like these fantastical. You know, like stories like that. Yeah, maybe. But they’re stories that the mind, yeah, comes up with, which is based on our experience and our confirmation bias and our, you know, our experience of the world. When we move to science, it’s very counterintuitive “What? Like why you and I are related? Like, wait a second. Like, wait, an electron can be in two places at one time”. You know, like wait, “time travel is possible”. Like, you know, like there’s a multiverse. There’s people – there’s probably life on other planets, you know, like, wait a second. You’re telling me, like, looking at the sun, I’m looking at the eight minutes in the past, you know, like, because it takes eight minutes for the light from the sun to get here. In fact, when you like, look at anything, you’re always looking at it in the past because it takes time for the light to travel and then your information to process the brain. So you’re always seeing the past. You’re not seeing the now. But then Einstein comes along with relativity and says, you know, like, actually there’s no such thing as that now. Like, time is relative. You know, it’s not an absolute thing that marches on depending on how fast you’re moving with one another. And it’s like you go through all these scientific facts that we’ve discovered and there’s so freaking counter intuitive. It’s like you have to just stand in awe of all of these kinds of things, and it’s like, it’s amazing. It’s just incredibly, fascinating, amazing. That’s what like, that’s my part of my purpose is understanding that.

 

Fred

Unbelievable. So look, I mean, I think it’s a great way to end this conversation. I’m going to put your encyclopedic knowledge of all these different studies and books to the test, where I’m going to come up with a little list. Okay. We’ve got the transcript of we’re going to go with a little like reading list based on this conversation and kind of lump it together in themes, because I think this could be an amazing jumping off point for a lot of people to explore a lot of these different concepts. And I’m, I’m going to vet that list with you because I it’s unbelievable what you came up with. Just the references in this talk alone, it could be a multi-year exploration for people into all these different interconnected, questions.

 

Michael

There are so many. Thanks. I just love, you know, I’ve been inspired by a lot of people, and I just love referencing their work and their books. And another one that you made me think of, like, throughout the conversation, which I didn’t even mention, is Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, which is one of my top three books. It’s just an absolute game-changer for me. and for many people, like he really started computational science and computer science and, just I can rattle off a bunch of books to you right now, but that one, you made me think of that during our conversation when we were talking about analogy. He talked about analogy is the core of cognition, being able to compare and contrast things, which is a very embodied, relational thing. Right. And so, yeah, Gödel, Escher, Bach.

 

Fred

Amazing. I’m glad you got to mention it. And, listen, with all the amazing work that you’re doing with Steven, with others, the Flow Research Collective, the AI lab at Miami-Dade, I’m gonna’ look forward to having this conversation again, with you just to kind of keep pace with all these different, interesting ideas that you’re working with and all these different, explorations that you’re going under and kind of merging all these different concepts together. The embodied cognition, the flow, the AI, the nature of cognition. Love it. I just think that’s super fascinating.

 

 

Michael

Thanks. I’m happy to come back. And amazing questions you asked very intuitive, insightful questions. And just, thank you for your work too. On purpose and your Ted talk. And I just want to, you know, reciprocate. It’s just been incredibly inspiring. And, sure to inspire a lot of other people to help find their purpose and keeping these conversations open like this was such a wonderful conversation. I definitely got into a personal flow because I just looked at the time, it was like, oh my God, that was like an hour and 36 minutes. I thought, like, I did not realize. So like, time flew by, man. Super fun.

 

Fred

Yeah, that’s it’s so cool. And like some link in our approaches. It’s also my kind of holy grail is a rational, evidence based approach to meaning and purpose. So I don’t think that you need to think of these things as a kind of, the from the perspective of received religions or rejected with a materialist scientific perspective. I do believe that there’s, science and rational frameworks emerging where we can understand these things in a way that’s compatible with science. So I think that’s one of the things that kind of links up our approaches.

 

Michael

Yeah, 100%, man. Absolutely amazing.

 

Fred

Very cool. Yeah. All right, Michael, thank you so much. All right.

 

Michael

Thank you. Thank you so much for the conversation, man.