Voiceover: It's so easy just to take our consciousness for granted. We wake up in the morning, open our eyes and there it is, there's the world and here's the self again. Back to my, back to my routine. That is such a remarkable phenomenon, the fact that there is anything it is like to be you, to be me, to have the experience of the world, the taste of coffee. It's just absolutely remarkable that this collection of atoms, molecules, chemicals is able to somehow to be the source of or identical with an experience.
Dr Rupy: Anil, I thought as we're going to have such a grand conversation about consciousness, we could start with something fun. Now I've seen you do this on your Ted talk and obviously in your book as well, you've got these, these sort of, I don't know how you describe them, illusions or brain tricks, but this one caught my eye, literally, the twisting snakes, is that what it's called?
Anil Seth: Oh yeah, yeah, the rotating snakes.
Dr Rupy: Rotating snakes, yeah. So just for the listeners of the pod, what I'm looking at is a collection of circles with intersecting oblong shapes and even though I know that this is a 2D image and it is static, it looks to me like there are rotating circles. What on earth is going on here?
Anil Seth: Well, it's, you're right, it's an illusion. That's the way I like to call it anyway. It's, it's a pretty classic one from a Japanese researcher. And what's happening here, it's, it's playing with a basic property of how our eyes are organised and how our visual brain is organised. It's very easy to think that we just see things exactly as they are. And if something is moving, we'll see it as moving, and if it's not moving, we won't. But everything we experience is really the brain's kind of best guess about what's going on. And that includes movement too. So what's happening in this, this illusion is that there's kind of lots of edges, lots of little contrast between these coloured oblongs. And what happens is when, when we look at it in the right way, which is just to say, just put it in front of you and move your eyes around a bit, it generates all these, all these transients in the brain. The brain sort of, whenever there's this, this, this contrast between the colours, something kind of fires off in the brain and the brain infers that there's movement happening there. But at the same time, as you said, you know there isn't and nothing else is signifying movement. So we have this very strange experience of seeing what we see as a static image, but also there's the sensation of movement kind of superimposed on top of it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's quite disconcerting when you see it because even with the knowledge that I know that this is static, it still continues to move. So it's almost like my brain is programmed to see this as moving and I can't rationally override it. Is that, am I right in saying that?
Anil Seth: That's exactly right. I mean, there's this, there's this very jargony term psychologists use called cognitive impenetrability. Which is far too long, but it just means exactly what you said. There are some illusions that even if you know what's going on, you still can't help seeing it as an illusion. Knowledge doesn't override perception in that way. So that's true for some things, it's not true for other things, but for basic low-level visual illusions that have to do with colour and movement and shape and length and things like that, these tend to override thought and cognition. So we will, we, we're just condemned to see these things the way we do.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And is this, is this something distinct to our visual system? So this cognitive impenetrability that you mentioned there, is this something that we only see really with our, with our eyes or is it, are there in other domains of, let's say smell or, or touch, texture?
Anil Seth: I think it's likely in all domains. It's certainly true in sound. It's probably true in touch, taste, smell, all the other senses that we have. It's just a little easier to demonstrate with vision, which is why we have all these books of optical illusions.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, on the subject of other optical illusions, this one is particularly, um, not troublesome for me, but it's, it's, it's really irritating because in the knowledge of what I now know is true, I still can't unsee it. Um, so this is, is this Adelson's checkerboard?
Anil Seth: Adelson's checkerboard it's called, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Adelson's checkerboard, yeah. And so again, just for the listeners, what I'm looking at is a 3D chessboard or checkerboard with a cylindrical object to the sort of top right side and it's casting what I see as a shadow and there are two pieces that are, that seem to be different colours. But perhaps you can sort of explain what's going on there.
Anil Seth: Yeah, this is another great one and it's a great one because it always works and it is also impenetrable in the same sense. I've seen this thousands of times and it's still as striking to me now as it was the first time I saw it. So yes, what we have is this, this checkerboard with dark grey and light grey patches and this green cylinder casting a shadow. And when we look at it, there are two patches which are marked which just look different shades of grey. They do to me now, one is light, one is dark. But if you took away all the surrounding context, the rest of the checkerboard, the cylinder, you'd see that these two patches are exactly the same. They are the same luminance, the same colour. But you put the context back and they're all different again. And I think this to me, it reveals that what we experience is this construction. So it's not just the brain takes sensory information from the world or from a particular part of the eye and says, okay, this is grey or green or red and so that's what I'll see in that particular location. The brain is always trying to infer what's going on overall, using all the information it can. And deep inside your brain, inside my brain, inside everybody's brain is knowledge that we may not be aware that our brain has, that objects under shadow appear darker than they really are. I mean, it sounds trivial to say, but it's a pretty profound fact of how light and shade work. Now, our brain knows this. And it also knows that a checkerboard, in a checkerboard, basically things tend to alternate. You have light, dark, light, dark, light, dark. So you put these things together and the brain reaches the conclusion that the patch B must be actually lighter than it really is in terms of its own luminance because it's under shadow and it's part of a checkerboard in the right place. So we see B as lighter than A, these are the two patches A and B. But you take away that context and then the brain doesn't have anything else to go on. So our experience of the lightness or darkness is just directly now related to what's actually on the page. Now the key thing for me is that it's really fun to look at these illusions. They're great fun to play with. But we make a mistake if we think, okay, that was just an illusion. And when we put the book away, we see the world as it is. I think these illusions are not only fun, but also a beautiful window into how our experience works all the time. Our brain is always constructing our experience, using everything it can get hold of and all the prior knowledge and beliefs and expectations that it has from millions of years of evolution to where you grew up, to what you did this morning. All of this stuff comes together to generate this beautifully rich experience of the world around us. It's not to be taken for granted, it's not a given, it's this kind of neuronal fantasy that coincides with reality but is not the same thing as reality.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, and I totally get that and I think the way you've eloquently contextualised it gives me reason to think about how I need to almost question what, not only what I see, but also how that infers thought and reaction in my day-to-day life. Driving to work every day, simple things, like how this can affect my mood throughout the day and how this ultimately affects my health and wellbeing. And I think regular listeners to the podcast might be asking themselves, okay, I get this, I understand the illusions, I understand how this is affecting my perception, but why should we actually care about consciousness as it pertains to living a healthy and fulfilling life? I'm sure you get asked this a lot, people questioning why you decided to even research consciousness in the first place.
Anil Seth: Well, it's something I ask myself as well. Why have I spent so many years thinking about this, working on it from a background in neuroscience and so on? Because if it didn't make a difference to people's lives, to my own life, it would be a bit strange. I think there's a, there's a very simple answer. And the simple answer is that consciousness, our ability to have experiences, to be more than just objects, that's really everything that matters to us. Unless we consciously experience something, it doesn't matter. We would just be complicated objects whirling around in the subjective dark. And that, that simple fact that consciousness is what makes life worth living, underpins everything else. So that's a very basic reason we should be interested in it. Within that, there's how we might strive or perhaps striving is the wrong word, but how we might wish to have a life that is satisfying, increase, enhance, maximise wellbeing. And here, I think the study of consciousness can be useful in very specific ways too. One way we've already touched on, which is understanding more about how perception works helps us recognise this gap between how things seem and how they are. You mentioned driving to work in the morning or going about your daily routine. We tend to become a little bit automatic in our daily rhythms. This can be good, but it can also be distressing sometimes if our emotional state is not so good. And recognising that our emotional response to a situation, our perceptual response to a situation is not inevitable, opens up a little gap that I think we can work with. In a sense, it's a bit like meditation. Meditation, for those people who do it in a very disciplined way, which isn't, which is not me, will say that one of the outcomes is that you recognise that the thoughts you have, the emotions you feel are just that. They are thoughts, they are emotions, they can be reacted to like clouds passing in the sky. You don't have to buy into the picture of the world that they paint. And the study of consciousness can get you to a similar place by a different route. It just, certainly for me, I think in my life, it's allowed me to step back a few times and just recognise, have a reflex to my reflex, if you like. So the first reflex might be to feel in a particular way, but the second reflex now is to recognise that that feeling is itself a construction. Yeah. And that it will come and go, it will be transient. It's useful information, but it is not the be all and end all.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. I think, so I'm someone who meditates most days. I wouldn't say I'm an expert meditator, but I try my hardest. And what you said there about thoughts, um, is, really does resonate with me. And I think whenever I sit down and I, you know, stay in silence for about 10 minutes every, every morning as part of my routine, I constantly have to remind myself that my, whilst my thoughts exist and they whirl around my head and, you know, they are shaped by lots of external inputs that are outside of my control. I am not my thoughts. My thoughts are separate to me. And me, whatever that might be, is separate to that. I understand that at a very sort of basic level. Um, what I was going to ask there is, do you feel the study of consciousness can almost be a parallel to meditation in a way that makes us more harmonious with our, our thoughts and our day-to-day and our, our mindset and how, you know, we become healthier, happier beings?
Anil Seth: I think it can be. I'm also not a, well, I'm much less diligent meditator than you. I've, I've dabbled and it's not really the kind of thing that dabbling gets you very far in. But yes, both the study of consciousness and meditation, well, they're related in many ways. I mean, one, one super interesting way is that meditation brings about a fairly characteristic state of consciousness. So there's, there's an interest there. So what's happening in the brain when people are meditating? What, what distinguishes that as a state of consciousness? And the emerging story there is it seems to have a lot to do with the control of attention. I think that's, at least in the meditation that I've done, it tends to be about noticing what your attention is doing and bringing it back, bringing it back. And in daily life, we tend not to notice what our attention is doing. It can be very scattered, it can be focused on counterproductive things. So learning how to control one's attention, I think can be very, very helpful. Um, but there is this more fundamental relationship as well. And it comes down to what you were saying about the self. You know, you recognise that the thoughts that go through your mind are not identical with you, whatever you is. The emotions you feel are not identical to you, what, whatever you is. The urges and intentions you feel, the same thing. So this raises the question, what is, what's left? If all of these things are not you, then what remains that is? And it may be, and I think this is where my work in neuroscience and psychology and philosophy has gone over the years, is that there is no essence that is any of us. You know, this sense that there is an unchanging, stable meanness or youness, well that too is a kind of illusion, in much the same way that the visual illusions we started with are illusions. They're perceptions. They don't directly reflect how things are. Now the experience of being a self, we tend to think of the self as the recipient of all these perceptions of the world. We experience the world, we have an emotional response to it, we decide what to do, we think about it. But all of these aspects of self, emotion, thought, they're also kinds of perceptions. They're things the brain does. And I think, I, you know, whoever, I think that what we experience as the self is just the whole collection of all these things going on. The emotions, the thoughts, the intentions, the body, you know, the sense of this object here is my body. I'm holding my hand up in front of me. This table is not. All of these things together collectively characterise what the experience of being a human self is like. And there is no residue beyond that. Of course, meditation teachers and especially spiritual writers and thinkers and Buddhism have been saying this for ages, right? That this idea that there is a stable, permanent youness or meanness is, is part of the way the world presents itself. It's, it's an illusion too. Doesn't mean it's not important, but it does tell us that things change, there's an impermanency, there's a transience. And that need not be disorienting. That can be very liberating, it can be very illuminating. Um, it can be very good for us.
Dr Rupy: You know, it's interesting you, you mentioned there, um, philosophers and spiritual teachers of, of years and years ago. Um, I wonder if there's a parallel with your work. So whenever I look at something within nutrition, particularly let's say gut health right now, and there is a huge explosion of interest in gut health since the sequencing of our microbiotas, how we now understand that bacteria are neither good nor bad, they just are. And actually 99% of the bugs that live in and around our body are actually doing us good rather than harm, which is in stark contrast to the sort of germ theory that has dominated the way we've thought about, um, food and, and medicine. And when you go back far enough, you actually see a lot of teachers of ancient medicine talking about how the root to health is through the gut. And there's a lot of things that we're now discovering and looking at through the lens of modern science that have been talked about for, for millennia. Um, and not to say that everything that, you know, has been practiced or thought of in the past has been true, but it's just an interesting quirk of sort of straddling both sides of the fence, looking at both ancient medicine and ancient traditions around nutrition and what modern nutrition science is telling us today. Do you sort of see parallels within your work? Because, you know, in your lab, you're speaking with, collaborating with philosophers, neuroscientists like yourself, mathematicians. Uh, and what you've just mentioned there about ancient spiritual teachers and what they've also been talking about, uh, with regards to consciousness. Do you, do you see quite an overlap there or, or do you see it differently?
Anil Seth: Yeah, there's, there is a synergy and this has been something that's been going on for quite a long time, especially with Buddhism, actually. There's been a, I think within the field of, of Western philosophy and, and neuroscience, the interaction with Buddhism has been particularly productive because there's been an openness there. So it's not that, um, Buddhist scholars typically will say, we already have all the answers, you know, you guys are just fumbling around in the dark. There's a, there's an actual dialogue. And it's a very enriching dialogue. In part because one of the things that's happened over the last hundred years in Western science and philosophy is the emergence of a relatively impoverished view about what consciousness can be. We tend to have associated it just with rational thinking. That was Descartes some hundreds of years ago. And even, even now, most people in my field focus on visual experience. You put an image in front of someone, as we did with these illusions, you see what happens in the brain, you see what they see. It's very experimentally accessible. But it is just one part of what being conscious is all about. And you only get so far looking for the car keys where the light is. You need to expand the region of conscious experiences that you look at. And this synergy between Buddhism and, and neuroscience, I think has been really productive. It could happen with other spiritual traditions too. I think there's a lot to learn from many of them. Um, but the dialogue has to unfold in the, in the right way. If it becomes sort of adversarial, like who's right, then I don't think you get very far.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And is there a description that you've come across, um, perhaps from a Buddhist philosophy that you feel really does encompass what we know today about consciousness and how we would go about defining it, even if that's, that's sort of possible in a, in a sentence or two?
Anil Seth: Definitions are always really, really tough. They tend to be fairly self-referential within each tradition. I mean, my, my family background, like you probably, is from India. And whenever I speak to Hindu scholars, there's this beautiful, poetic but kind of inevitable circularity for, for defining what consciousness might be. But again, I think there are also, there's a lot in common between Hinduism and Buddhism here. And I think rather than a specific definition, there are themes which keep resurfacing, which I think are very meaningful. One of them is, is this concept of Maya, you know, the manifest world as being somewhat illusory, but not arbitrary. Just indirectly related to reality as it is. And this has precedence in Western philosophy as well with Immanuel Kant and his, his idea that there is a real world out there, but we will never, we can never have direct access to it. What's added here is that applies also to the we, to the I, to the you, to the self. That's something that is, that is part of an ongoing flow of experience, not something that's set apart from it. And I think that's the other emerging theme is the nature of the self. What is the self? Is it a thing? Is it an essence? Is it a process? And of course, there are differences too. I think one of the, the major differences lies in what happens after we die. And here we see quite stark contrast between there being a continuity of some sort, which many spiritual traditions maintain, and the story from neuroscience, which can be a bit, a bit starker, which is basically when your brain stops, you stop.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Is that something, I know we're mixing belief, I guess, and tradition and religion here. Um, is there anything that you would take from those religious traditions about the afterlife that you think could be explained in some way through science or is that completely outside the realm of what is even possible to be, to be studied?
Anil Seth: I think it's almost impossible. I think there's, there's a need to retain a bit of humility about these, about these issues. I think it's extremely unlikely that me as Anil Seth will continue after my brain stops working. And I think it's so hard to envision an alternative to that purely because I'm changing all the time anyway. And there's so much evidence that if you change part of the brain, the experience of self changes too. Um, now, this does not totally rule out that some kind of experience persists. But I just find that very hard to, to make sense of. We know that if you put some, and you'll know as a doctor, if you put someone under deep enough anaesthesia, it's very different from a state of sleep. They basically cease to exist for a while. They're gone and they're back and no time seems to have passed for them during that period. Um, was there some kind of background consciousness happening? Well, if there was, it's so different from anything that we experience at any stage of normal conscious life that it seems misleading to talk about it in terms of the afterlife at all. And I don't think there's any, there's any really good evidence for it. But of course, you might say, well, it's not the kind of thing that evidence is relevant for.
Dr Rupy: Sure, yeah. Um, going back to this definition of consciousness, because I think this is more so for me, perhaps some people get it quicker than me. Uh, you mentioned themes. So there's themes and there's overlap between, uh, what spiritual teachers or ancient philosophy has, has taught us. Um, I understand so far that, uh, consciousness is self and it's awareness, would you say, of the fact that I have thoughts and I have experiences and I experience the world through my various sensory, uh, inputs, uh, be it visual, be it touch, etc. Are there any other themes outside of that or have I got the sort of sense of self bit incorrect as well?
Anil Seth: So I think the best way to think about consciousness is to strip it down to its very simplest manifestation. And as human beings, we tend to do the opposite. We tend to load onto this core concept things that are distinctively human, but which may not be necessary for consciousness in all its manifestations. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, I think he puts it for me in the best way. And he, he says very simply that for a conscious organism, there is something it feels like to be that organism. Okay. Not necessarily in an emotional way, just in the way that for you and me, it feels like something to be you and me. We're having experience. We're different from an object. For this table, it doesn't feel like anything for the table to be a table. But for many other animals, for a dog, for a cat, for a mouse, for a fish, maybe, it feels like something to be that fish. Um, but then for other things, it doesn't. And that's very, very simple. It's almost circular. You just say for something to be conscious, there's experiencing happening. But I like it because it's intuitive. You know, another way to put it is it's what goes away under sufficiently deep general anaesthesia. And there is nothing it is like to be under really, really deep anaesthesia or dead or not yet born. At least that's the parameters of the definition that I want to work with. And then on top of that, then you can start to say, okay, how does conscious experience play out for a relatively typical human being? Well, then there's the self. So we all experience being a self as well as just being the locus of experience. But that may not be necessary. Maybe some non-human animals, maybe a mouse has experiences but doesn't experience being a mouse. Almost certainly doesn't have thoughts. You know, thoughts as we typically think of them require language and even newborn human infants, as you'll soon discover, don't have language, right? So, but they're conscious, or at least we think so. It's an interesting question, how do we really know, of course. But all of these things like thought, like language, like explicit sense of self, and this reflective aspect, which is central to practices like meditation, those may all be optional aspects of consciousness. But they, we, we treat them as definitional if we take the human way of being as an insight into consciousness as it has to be. And I think that's a mistake. We've done this in humanity always. We take the human case as definitional when it's really just one way in which things can play out.
Dr Rupy: So, you've probably been asked this question before because I, I get that animals can be conscious, particularly, I have a, I have a little dog, uh, called Nutmeg and she, I'm, I'm sure that she is conscious and she can manipulate me and my wife quite well, but, um, outside of the realm of, of cats and dogs and pets and, um, livestock, uh, what about plants? Because plants, using some of those sort of features of what you've just described as how we feel and how we communicate, they have their own language. They secrete different phytocides into the, into the atmosphere. They signal to, you know, trees far and far away, mushrooms in particular, you know, there's a fascinating world of fungi and their networks that embed in the soil and how they communicate kilometres and kilometres away. Is there an argument to say that plants also have consciousness or a spark of life or are aware?
Anil Seth: Well, I think they're alive, definitely. Um, but I, it's, it's another claim to say that everything that is alive is, is also conscious. Some people will say that. I tend not to think that that's the case. Plants are really challenging. I want to say something nice about plants before I, before I start dissing them. They are so much more interesting than people often give them credit for. Because they operate at a different time scale. You know, we as humans, we don't often see where the real action is, which can be under the ground rather than on the surface. This is especially so for trees and as you say, like these beautifully complex mycelial networks of fungi. Um, rich behaviour, some evidence of communication, um, does any of this amount to consciousness? Is there something it is like to be a tree? My bet, and it is a bet, because I think we have to be comfortable with uncertainty here, is that it's unlikely. And the reason I think that is that the only basis at the moment we have to infer whether something else is conscious, whether it's a tree or another animal or a computer or a bunch of neurons in a dish in a lab, is based on what we know about those cases of consciousness where we're sure of, which is in human beings, primates, other mammals, let's say. And there's a few things. I mean, we, we know that consciousness can be pretty easy to lose even in those cases where it exists. It also seems to be there for particular reasons. Like everything in biology is best understood through the lens of function. What's it for? Why did it evolve? Why are we conscious? What, how does it help us? And here, I think there's accumulating evidence that consciousness is particularly useful for an organism when it combines many, many different sources of information about the world and the body in this sort of unified scene that can guide our behaviour when we could respond in many different ways. We're very complex organisms, we can, we have a lot of flexible potential to our behaviour. Consciousness is really useful then. It's less useful when behaviour can be more automatic, programmed, reflexive and so on. So it's not clear that plants face the same challenges that animals faced that led to the, to the evolution of consciousness. And then more prosaically, they don't have nervous systems. Okay, yeah, yeah. People sometimes say they, they do, but they, they don't really. They don't have the same kind of nervous systems that, that animals have. Maybe that's not necessary too, but I've yet to be convinced of a good explanation of how consciousness happens that doesn't rely on, on the operation of a nervous system.
Dr Rupy: Totally, yeah. I think, um, if we're going to define, uh, a, a living thing as, uh, being conscious only if they have the presence of a nervous system, then by that definition, you know, plants are out. They don't have that, that capacity. But pushing back slightly, I know this is completely above my pay grade here, but, uh, hopefully you'll find this enjoyable. Um, looking at the inputs that you just described there in terms of how we might react to, um, visual inputs or, um, through the lens of evolution, plants also have that sort of, uh, that drive to survive. They react to temperature, they react to different, um, pests, they, you know, different soil quality, for example. There are a lot of implements that they are actually reacting to that has happened over millennia for the reasons why they can survive in so many different places. So by that definition, they, they are sort of responding, but they don't have a nervous system. So perhaps that's the qualifying information for consciousness itself.
Anil Seth: It might be. And I think, again, I have to admit to humility here that, that we don't know. Um, but saying we don't know doesn't mean we know nothing. It just means we can't, we can't be certain. And I'm also not satisfied with a definition that says, yes, you have to have a nervous system, otherwise you're not in the game. You know, this just smacks of this arbitrariness that has darkened the human history of what we think of as conscious or not over centuries. Like, do you have language? If yes, you're, you're okay. If not, you're not in the game. Um, and we don't want to make that mistake again. Uh, so what's necessary is an explanation of why having a nervous system is the difference that makes the difference in this case. And we're not quite there yet. And the, the strategy that, that I think is the only one we really have is, is this sort of slowly reaching out from where we can be relatively sure, um, pushing the boundaries and recognising uncertainty where it is. So, you know, right now, I think we're beginning to see common principles in the nervous systems of mammals that don't rely on language or things like that, that we can then start to ask interesting questions about animals who aren't mammals, insects, fishes, octopuses, creatures like this, birds. And we can start to make more confident guesses about whether consciousness of some kind is present for, for these creatures. And part of that is recognising that if there is something it is like to be a sparrow, it's going to be very different from what it's like to be a human being. And this matters in terms of the ethical and moral decisions that we make, because it might not be that being conscious is what matters. It might be that the ability to suffer in particular ways is what matters for how we make our, our ethical and moral decisions. But as we sort of reach further and further out, I think we, we change the sort of the circumference of, of uncertainty. Right now, it's, it's very hard to say anything sensible about plants. But if you have, if you're forced to say something, none of the, or very few of the signatures that we would take as indicative of consciousness are present in plants. But we should look for them. We shouldn't just dismiss it because they're so, so different. And you're absolutely right that, yeah, if you, if you look for signs of behavioural complexity, they're most definitely there in plants and to different degrees in different plants.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And this sort of, because we've spoken to Prof. Nutt on the pod as well, who I know has worked quite, quite well with him, uh, Carhart-Harris. Um, this stripping away of sort of the ego is something that I've heard told multiple times. And what we've been talking about is this awareness, this sort of sense of self and the perceptions and thoughts around that. Um, is there any evidence that you become, I mean, you just talked about the randomness there, but is there a sense that you become more aware of the fact that you are a conscious human being and that has sort of lasting effects thereafter or what's your opinion on that?
Anil Seth: There are two ways people tend to interpret a psychedelic experience, let's say of something like ego dissolution, which is this feeling that your self has just dissolved. It's not, it's not really there anymore. The ego death in, in the more extreme cases. Um, one response to these kinds of experiences is to take them as a more accurate perspective on how things really are. Um, so people might say things like, I now know that consciousness is the primary way the universe manifests itself. On the basis of the experiences I had on a DMT trip or something like that. Um, the other response is to take it as evidence for the kinds of experiences that are available to a human brain. Um, and to challenge some of our assumptions about how experience has to be. It's very easy to assume that experience has to involve an ego, has to involve a self. I think the latter interpretation makes more sense to me. I don't think the content of a psychedelic experience is any better at revealing how things really are than normal experience, perhaps even less so. But what it is very good at is providing this evidence that, no, experience can be many, many different ways. And we shouldn't take it for granted that it has to involve, um, a self or a, or a perspective or some of these other things. I think the best illustration of that is, is another kind of unusual experience, which is an out-of-body experience. So these experiences have been reported for centuries, millennia, I think, and, and in various contexts, spiritual contexts, and more recently in, in quite, in medical context, in operating theatres, people often report out of body experiences. And the characteristic of that is that you have the experience that your consciousness is no longer in your body. You may see your body from above or from a different perspective, or you may feel that you're, that you're just separate from your body and you're somewhere else. Um, again, there are two ways to interpret it. You could say, well, the fact that I've had an out-of-body experience is evidence that my consciousness can be separated from my brain and can actually go flying around. Or you could just say that having an out-of-body experience tells me that my normal experience of being within my body behind my eyes shouldn't be taken for granted. It's something the brain is doing. And again, I think the latter explanation is the more reasonable one. People have tried to find evidence for the former one, you know, by hiding things on shelves in operating theatres and, and so on and seeing whether they can be seen, which is just a, a bonkers experiment because like if your consciousness left your body, it doesn't even have any eyes. So how is it going to see anything? It's, it's there are so many problems with that. Um, so it seems much more reasonable and still very enlightening to take away the, the recognition that this first-person perspective that is with us all almost all the time is not to be taken for granted. It's something the brain is doing. That gives, I think, a deeper insight into what the self is, what, what consciousness is. And the same would go for psychedelics. You know, it's just, it's just, it's not giving us direct access to reality as it is, but it is revealing the things that we might assume are necessary about our experiences.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Like, um, like you were saying earlier, uh, viewing, uh, our brains through the lens of evolution and how everything is sort of designed to protect us and to procreate and everything. Perhaps the way we interpret an experience like that, that gives us more meaning for life when we are back to normal, quote unquote, is something that we've, is like a learned behaviour, something that is a, an understandable adaptation to being of low consciousness or, or like having a near-death experience in that, in that way. Perhaps that's a rational way of thinking about cherishing one's life when you are, you know, back in your body and, and you're, you're suddenly conscious again.
Anil Seth: I think that's exactly right. I think one of the main lessons, certainly that I've taken from studying this thing for a long time, and this wasn't an intention, but it makes you take things less for granted. It really does. It's so easy just to take our consciousness for granted. You know, we wake up in the morning, open our eyes, and there it is, there's the world, and here's the self again, back to my, back to my routine. That is such a remarkable phenomenon, the fact that there is anything it is like to be you, to be me, to have the experience of the world, the taste of coffee, even if it's a difficult emotion, the fact that it's there is, is extremely remarkable. And, you know, I think this is, this is not, um, there's nothing revolutionary about this. People often say that, that surviving an illness or, or emerging from a challenging situation, you know, one way to, to deal with that is, is to allow a sense of gratitude. And that's certainly true when it comes to consciousness as well. It's just, it's just, it's just absolutely remarkable that this collection of atoms, molecules, chemicals is able to somehow to be the source of or identical with an experience, a self.
Dr Rupy: Do you have a gratitude, uh, practice yourself? I know you don't have a meditation practice, but perhaps a gratefulness exercises?
Anil Seth: I, you know, yes, but it's, it's not very systematic again. I think it's, it's been very sporadic. Um, a couple of years ago, what are we now? 2020, yeah, two and a half years ago, I came down with long COVID. I had a COVID infection, and I've had illnesses before, but nothing that was ever that kind of chronic and ongoing. And that was very challenging for me. It still is in, in a way. And actually caused me to think about a lot of the other things we've been talking about, like the microbiome, the gut, nutrition, the immune system, a very important part of what the self is. I mean, the immune system is all about, um, differentiating self from, from non-self. And it's not something I'd paid that much attention to before. But I'm sure it's part of the story. Uh, but just the experience of being so affected for months and months by this condition, you know, did lead me to, to think about what, what I can, what's still there and what I can still be grateful for. And that was an important part of, of coping with it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've, we've done some episodes on long COVID actually. I'll make sure to send them to you afterwards. Um, and that idea of our immune system recognising self and non-self is something that I'm acutely aware of, you know, as a medical doctor and something that we, we obviously have an interest here, uh, looking at nutrition, but I haven't really thought of that as almost being part of like, you know, what it is to be me.
Anil Seth: I think it's a very open question. I mean, we certainly know that, that sort of immune related processes affect mental states. There's a wonderful book by Ed Bullmore called The Inflamed Brain, I think it's called that.
Dr Rupy: The Inflamed Mind, I think.
Anil Seth: The Inflamed Mind. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, there it is. Um, which is this idea about depression, very different from the sort of prevailing ideas of depression as being, you know, an imbalance or a lack of serotonin in the brain, these very chemistry-based approaches to something that is much more about, you know, inflammation, that neuroinflammation might be the core or a core, um, mechanism for, for depression. I found it, I found it pretty convincing. So there's, there's that. And certainly, I think in these chronic conditions like long COVID and so on, there seems to be this systematic, persisting inflammation. Yeah. Which, which, you know, it's, it really does seem to have a direct or a fairly, fairly close relationship to one's emotional state. But there's really very little work on, let's say, the immune system and the psychology of being a self. And I think that's, there's, that's a very exciting area.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I'd love to see some collaboration between you and a microbiologist, uh, looking at sort of how inflammation or how the state of one's gut, uh, can influence, you know, their, their sense of self, their sense of consciousness.
Anil Seth: There is work going on in this area by, by other, other people. Um, there's a French researcher called Catherine Tallon-Baudry who's, who's looking quite a lot at, uh, gut-brain interactions. Um, I'm not sure if she's doing microbiome stuff, but there's a lot of interest there too. I mean, one thing about, about the gut is there are a lot of neurons down there. A lot of brain cells in the gut. And some people call it the mini-brain, right? And it's organised very differently. Um, there are a lot of serotonin neurons down there, generate a lot of this chemical that, that is associated with all kinds of brain function. And also there seems to be, uh, electrical coupling too. So, you know, if you put electrodes on your head, you measure this thing called the electroencephalogram, the EEG. And the rhythms tend to be quite fast, maybe 10 hertz or something like that, 10 times per second, the alpha rhythm. But you can do the same thing on the gut and it's the electrogastrogram. And you can get these electric rhythms that you can see generated by, um, muscle contractions, often, but perhaps also some neural activity in, in the gut. And there's some research which has shown that these things are actually coupled. That there is this, you know, there's a constraint on the activity of the gut in terms of its electrical activity that is, that is really tightly coupled with the brain. So this idea that the, the gut and the brain speak to each other, I think is substantiated in many ways.
Dr Rupy: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. We, we're constantly going on about the gut-brain axis. And, um, there's a book actually, I'll recommend, um, by Dr. James Kinross, he's a, uh, GI surgeon. We recently had a chat with him. He, um, he's written a book called Dark Matter and it's one of the best books, I think I've read on the microbiota, um, because it's the, he obviously brings his clinical experience, but his experience as a, um, a microbiome researcher as well in, in the lab. And I think that sort of academic slant to everything is, is just fascinating. And he talks about neuropod cells and how we taste with our guts as well and how that can actually have an influence on our, uh, nutrient seeking behaviour, what we prefer, how that affects appetite, etc. So there's a whole fascinating world there. Um, I want to turn our attention, um, from one sort of super intelligent system, our gut, um, to, uh, artificial intelligence and this sort of question that I'm sure again, you've been asked tons of times about whether AI or machines can ever become conscious sentient beings. Um, and I know in your Ted talk, you, you talked about how the idea of just something being super, super intelligent doesn't necessarily equate to being conscious. But I guess over the last year and a half, uh, I certainly wasn't, uh, expecting to be that blown away by what we have, uh, today with all these different, uh, AI and, and chat systems. Um, perhaps it was on your radio, I'm not too sure, but I'm just super impressed at like what I'm seeing so far and it does beg the question even in my mind that whether these could be conscious at one point. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Anil Seth: It's very natural to, to ask those kinds of questions, right? I mean, when I gave the TED talk, that was 2017. Things have changed enormously since then. I was not imagining the kinds of large language models and so on that, that we have today. I don't think anyone was really. It's, it's taken, one of the surprising things is how surprising AI has been to people who develop this stuff. It's taken everybody by, by surprise. Um, but my view about whether AI could be conscious, that is, does it feel like something to be chat GPT? I still think this is very unlikely. And I think our tendency to think that it is likely is more a reflection of our psychological biases than a likelihood about what's actually going on. We talked about plants earlier and non-human animals and how do we make inferences, best guesses about whether something is conscious or not? You know, there is, of course, figuring out, well, how much of what we know, uh, is necessary for consciousness in humans and animals, is there in AI? The other part of the story though is recognising the influence of our own biases. And we as human beings, we tend to mix together three different kinds of bias. We're very anthropocentric, which is to say we see the world through the lens of human values. We're also very human exceptionalist typically, you know, we tend to think of ourselves as superior to and on the top of everything else, whether it's the tree of life or, or something else. And we are distinctive, you know, things like language really do seem to set us apart from most other living creatures. But we tend to couple these things together. You know, we think we're super intelligent compared to other animals, and we know we're conscious, so we tend to associate the two together and just sort of assume that as something gets more intelligent in a human-like way, then consciousness will come along for the ride. And I think that's just our bias. And the third one is anthropomorphism. You know, we tend to project human-like qualities into things on the basis of what might be superficial similarities. And here again, language is key, right? If something speaks to us, we tend to project everything into it. Like, okay, it's, it's intelligent, it's got a mind, and also it might be conscious. Um, and it's really hard not to do that. I mean, we might be in a similar position with these visual illusions, right? We might be unable to resist attributing consciousness to things like language models, even if we believe they're not conscious. So there might be, we might, uh, suffer from cognitively impenetrable illusions of consciousness in, in AI. Um, so if you bracket out, if you try and just recognise the influence of our, of our biases, even if we can't think our way out of them, just knowing they're there is, is useful. Then we have to ask, okay, so really, what's the evidence that, that AI systems could be conscious? And here views really, really differ. Um, and I think the actual evidence is, is pretty weak. You know, there's so many differences between AI systems and, and brains. I mean, even AI is part of the problem here. The term AI. If it was, if it was called the field of applied statistics, you know, no one would be thinking the same things. And also, you know, we don't, we don't worry, AI is not just language models, right? It's all kinds of other things. DeepMind here in London does these beautiful AI applications in things like drug discovery and material design. No one thinks these systems are conscious. But, you know, they're, they're very similar in many ways to, to chat GPT. But the simplest, the simplest challenge is to put it like this, right? Um, some things, if you run them on a computer, they actually are the thing. Like a computer that plays chess actually plays chess. Chess is something that's defined in terms of a set of rules and, you know, how, how things operate according to those set of rules. But some things, if you run them on a computer, you don't actually produce that thing. So if you have a computer simulation of a weather system, it's just a simulation. No one's confused about that. No one expects it to actually rain inside the Met Office's massive simulation of the British weather. So is consciousness more like chess or is it more like the weather? People tend to think it's more like chess, that computation, information processing, these terms are very, very common. We tend to think that, well, obviously that's what consciousness is. It's some kind of computation, it's some kind of information processing. That might be right, but it is one huge assumption. It may well be that consciousness is just not the kind of thing that a computer could in principle have, however you program it. And that in fact, consciousness may be much more of a biological property. Something much more like digestion or metabolism. Sure, you can simulate metabolism on a computer. But to actually have it, you know, you need the right kind of chemistry. My intuition is that that's the case for consciousness, but it's, it's very hard to make that a watertight argument. And you know, I don't know that that's the case. But what I am confident in is people often run with this assumption rather unexamined. And this is partly because we have this metaphor of the brain as a computer. It's a good metaphor, but it's just a metaphor. And we always go wrong when we confuse a metaphor with the thing itself, when we mistake the map for the territory.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, if I can be fooled, going back to the start of our conversation by visual illusions, I can imagine being easily fooled and my mind running with the idea that the computer that I'm interfacing with via my, my laptop keyboard is actually real, is actually speaking to me, particularly if you put voice on that actually. So, you know, going towards those three biases that you just mentioned, put a Siri voice on top of chat GPT and getting me to have a conversation with it, it simulates me having a conversation with a human, so it's easy to conflate that with genuine intelligence, artificial general intelligence, I think it's, it's referred to as. Um, whereas actually it's just a very good computer that won't ever be conscious itself.
Anil Seth: That's right. But again, we don't want to confuse AGI or even artificial general intelligence with consciousness.
Dr Rupy: Gotcha.
Anil Seth: So AGI is, this is the sort of buzzword in, in the industry, right? AGI is an AI system that has the intelligence capabilities either of or more than a typical human being. Now that itself is a bit of a, a bit of an illusion. Like there's no stable point where this will happen. AI systems are already much better than us at many things. So, you know, we will never have sort of this AGI equivalence. But wherever we go on the spectrum of intelligence, none of that means that consciousness is part of the, part of the story too. It might be, it might not be. But I think this, this, this topic really matters because a lot of the, the debate in this area, you know, is mixes up these things. And it really matters because AI is everywhere. We, we, we're not going to be able to avoid it, just in the same way we're now completely dependent on, on our cell phones. Um, and there's one question which I think is very difficult to answer. I think it's, whether AI will actually be conscious. I think my intuition is that this is not going to happen. Um, but we don't really know. It depends on your theory, it depends on your, your, your philosophy. Um, but the other question is, what should we do as a society when we are in a situation interacting with systems that we can't help feeling are conscious? And that's already here, or almost already here. As you said, you know, you couple a language model with some video and audio, with a deep fake and generative audio. You know, it's going to be very, very hard for our puny human minds to be able to discern whether the, you know, the person you're talking to on video is actually a real person or not. I mean, now you can still catch them out, but that's going to change. And this is really problematic. You know, we have to think very carefully about, you know, do we want technologies like that? How do we regulate them? How should we interact, um, with them? Um, just as we might offload some of our memory, uh, or our navigational competence to an iPhone, what are we going to offload if we have, let's say, a digital twin? And I, I really worry about some of the, I think extraordinary psychological naivety that you see in some applications. So there's, there's, there's companies I've, I've seen who want to do things like, um, digitally reanimate a dead relative.
Dr Rupy: Oh, yeah, I've seen, yeah, I've heard about those.
Anil Seth: Yeah. You know, like train a language model on whatever somebody has said. And for all of us now, there's more than enough training data. I mean, especially you, you've been doing so much. You know, your digital reincarnation will sound exactly like you in a podcast studio, maybe not like you at home. But, you know, you train a model on, on the data and, and there's enough video as well. Um, and then you can digitally reincarnate a dead relative. Why would we want to do this? You might think, oh, that's great. I can still talk to, you know, I still dream of my father who died 11 years ago. And this is great. But I think if he were there in digital form, oh my god, I mean, the whole process of grief, of moving on would be so inhibited. Plus, you know, there's a huge threat of manipulation. So who is deciding what my digitally reincarnated father would say when I ask him for investment advice? Maybe it's not what he would actually say. Maybe it's what, you know, some machine learning company is, is tuning him to say. So these, these are, these are huge issues. And these are the present, the here and now. And we get distracted when we focus on these sci-fi scenarios of terminator robots and conscious artificial intelligence. I think we need to, we need to really understand what's happening now and in the next few years and make sure we, we do things in a way that's complementary to our society, to our psychologies. And just not going in there like a bull in a China shop.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. I think to your point, focusing on our psychological weak points is probably something that we should be paying more attention to rather than the sort of like terminator, um, scenarios because, I mean, just looking at, um, uh, companies like Meta, for example, and how, uh, whether external, uh, governments or whether internal companies are manipulating what I see on my home screen is influencing my political persuasion or my thoughts about, uh, society in general in the UK, Brexit, for example, etc, etc. We already know that this has played out. And so if you apply an even more sophisticated, uh, AI model on top of that, you can just so see so how, um, clearly our psychological weak spots could be, um, exploited.
Anil Seth: Yeah, and I think another aspect of this, which has been widely commented on is that, uh, there's a sort of meta effect, which is if we know that it's hard to tell the difference between what is real and what is machine generated, then our general trust in anything is reduced. And, and we just think, well, there's no, I don't trust what any news source says. I don't trust what, you know, any objective or, or approximately objective report is. And that's very problematic because we rely on a certain amount of consensus. You know, just in the same way, if we, if we're driving around, we just rely on the fact that people know that they should drive on one side of the road and not, not the other. It's not, if it was anything goes, it wouldn't work. Exactly the same thing applies here. If we, if we don't have, you know, a solid consensus on things, you know, at least roughly on what's going on, which allows for massive differences of opinion. But there has to be some, some amount of consensus, otherwise we'll just have the story of people driving on whatever side of the road writ large. And you and I probably both been in India in, and we know what that's like, and it's not great.
Dr Rupy: This actually, uh, sort of comes back to this idea of, uh, controlled hallucinations that I think you, you spoke about both in your book and in your TED talk, um, and how, you know, our perception are essentially hallucinations or visual illusions that we agree on. Have I got that right?
Anil Seth: Say that again.
Dr Rupy: So perceptions, our perception are hallucinations that we all agree on. So we agree in large that this is a table, this is beige, we're speaking into a microphone, this is something that we all recognise in this, in this room. And hallucinations in the psychological, in the psychiatric context are uncontrolled hallucinations. Have I got that right?
Anil Seth: Sort of. I mean, it's, it's, it's, this is a problem that, it's where language struggles. We don't have the perfect words to describe what's going on. And all the words that one might choose have baggage, have connotations. So I still am attracted to this idea of describing perception as a kind of controlled hallucination. And the reason I think this is useful is because when, when most people hear hallucination, what, what comes to mind is an experience that's internally generated, right? Not something that's a direct, accurate reflection of what's going on, but something that's coming from within. Um, and I think all of our experiences are like that. You know, they are all the brain's predictions, best guesses of what's going on that come from more this inside-out direction rather than the outside-in reading out the world direction. But the qualifier controlled is critical here. So our hallucinations are controlled when they're reined in, calibrated by sensory signals that come from the world, which is why you and I both agree there's a table here. They're, they're tuned to the world, but they don't, they don't reveal the world directly as it is. So perception is not arbitrary, it's generally useful, generally reliable, but we don't see things as they are, we see them, you know, as we are or as it's useful for our brain to do so, as evolution has decided it's useful. And then hallucination as it appears in a more clinical, medical, psychiatric context, you can think of that as uncontrolled perception. So we still have this dance of predictions going from the inside out and sensory signals coming from the outside in. But now the, the balance and the dance has gone awry a little bit. And the brain's predictions lose their grip on the world as it is. So people start perceiving things that are not there or that other people don't. But instead of hallucination being a completely different phenomenon, I think it's more accurate to say they're just different points on this scale. Every experience we have is this balance between the brain's predictions and what sensory signals are telling the brain. And you can fall on this, this scale in many different ways, in many different states. I mean, if we go outside now, maybe there's some clouds and we might see faces in, in clouds. That's a kind of hallucination. It's, you know, it's called pareidolia in, in, in the Greek. Um, but it's not really a fully fledged hallucination. But I think it, it reveals that the brain is always interpreting, it's always trying to make sense of sensory information, which is fundamentally ambiguous.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, and I guess, you know, riffing off that idea of pareidolia, if I'm in a happy state, let's say, I might be more inclined to see fluffy images or something that evokes a positive feeling in a random mixture of clouds than if I'm in a negative state. And perhaps, you know, going back to the idea of mindfulness and meditation and trying to have a positive affect in general, perhaps that does influence in a significant way my perception of the world. And this is what we should be all striving for and putting ourselves in, um, environments, intentional environments to, to create that sort of more positive experience.
Anil Seth: Yeah, I think the first step is definitely this recognition that there can be an interaction. There's an Israeli researcher, Moshe Bar, who, who pioneered a lot of this stuff, showing that our emotional responses and, uh, let's say visual experiences are pretty, you know, they, they, they influence each other. And they do this in, in very measurable ways. And to me, this makes sense because my overall story about how the brain works and how to understand consciousness is really that this brain is, is fundamentally this prediction machine that evolves and develops to control and regulate the body. So interoception in the sense comes first. Um, it turns out that being able to make predictions and update these predictions is a very, very good way to implement control. Um, once you can predict something, you can control it. And that only later these same mechanisms of prediction were sort of extended to deal with the outside world through vision, hearing and so on. That's a very sort of simple story. But it just means that these, these are all, they're all grounded on the same thing. There's this fundamental principle of brain operation about regulating the body, keeping the body in the physiological states that it expects to be in. Um, and everything is built on that. So then it's no surprise that there, um, you know, there are deep interactions between how we visually experience something and our emotions. But it's, this is a relatively new perspective because for a long time, psychology tended to put things in boxes. You know, you've got reason here, you've got vision here, you've got memory here. And they tend, and we often try to separate these systems rather than thinking of them as different expressions of the same underlying principle.
Dr Rupy: You've really widened my understanding of consciousness as being more thematic and more sort of all-encompassing rather than just one thing. Um, and sort of clarified the language around consciousness. Um, I'm really intrigued as to, uh, this might seem like a bit of a left-field question, but what, what you do in, in your lab? I think a lot of people listening to this, this is great, you know, consciousness, I get it, I understand that it's an important, um, subject matter that demands attention. But what does your day-to-day actually look like?
Anil Seth: It changes. I mean, one of the great privileges I think of studying, working in this area is, so I had this fear about becoming an academic. That, you know, when you're at school, you do, I don't know, 10 subjects at GCSE, then three or four A levels, and then one subject at university. And I thought, by the time I'm, you know, a professor, I'm going to know everything about something that nobody else cares about. And there was just this, this endpoint of specialisation. I was legitimately worried about this. One of the joys of researching consciousness is that it's the exact opposite. There was this bottleneck, I think, doing the PhD when you, you really focus. But consciousness and there are many other things really, you know, the, the richness is in the interdisciplinarity. You know, in my lab, depends quite when you visit, depends on what funding I've got at any particular point. But, you know, we've had mathematicians and physicists and psychiatrists and psychologists and philosophers and neuroscientists. I've worked with artists and theatre designers and filmmakers and, and storytellers. And the breadth of the, you know, of perspective and technique and methods has just been, has just been a joy. Um, so, you know, a typical day might, might be, you know, I'm working with a, a long-time postdoctoral researcher, a good friend of mine, Lionel Barnett. Um, we work on, on mathematical measures of emergence. You know, how do we say, like, we've got all these neurons in the brain. You know, how do we say when they're doing something that's more than the sum of the parts? You know, in the same way that you see a flock of birds sometimes, there's, the flock seems to have an autonomy and identity of its own. So how do we develop mathematical measures that characterise that? And maybe that's going to be a useful technique in figuring out what's happening when the brain is, is in a conscious state or not. So there's that. And then another experiment, which I'm very excited about at the moment, is more directly related to this controlled hallucination idea. So we've discussed informally that, yeah, we might see, experience different things because we might have different emotional states, we might have, fundamentally, we all have different brains. So even if we're in the same shared reality, like you and I are now, who's to say that you're experiencing the colour of these books behind me in the same way that I am? When I look at them, who's to say we're experiencing time passing at the same rate? I think we really underestimate this inner diversity. And so we have this experiment in collaboration with a philosopher, Fiona Macpherson at Glasgow and Collective Act, who are this brilliant organisation, to look at perceptual diversity, to understand, actually get some data on questions like, you know, if I am, you know, for instance, if I see this illusion in a particular way, am I more likely to see a face in a cloud than not? How do we have perceptual personalities? And people talk a lot about neurodiversity. And it's a very important topic. But it's tended to have become associated with specific conditions, like autism and ADHD. And ironically, I think this has reinforced the assumption that if you're not neurodivergent, then you're neurotypical and you see things as they are. I think this is just really unfortunate, unintended consequence. I mean, neurodiversity was always supposed to apply to everyone. Um, but so I, I prefer this term perceptual diversity because it doesn't have that, that baggage. And I really want to understand how different our experiences are, even when those differences might not normally surface. We use the same words. And so that's, that's an experiment that's going on. And it, I don't know, I don't know what we'll find. We've got about 40,000 people have done several hours of experiment each. So it's a massive data set. It's huge. And we collected it over the course of a year and a half. Um, so it's going to be a unique resource that we'll make available to the, the whole research community. Uh, and it might have a lot of clinical application as well. You know, it might turn out that, you know, we see, we want to see these spectra as, as a whole, you know, not just look at the extremes, but look at the whole distribution and, and figure out what correlates with what, why that might be. And, you know, just as an appreciation of diversity has been socially enriching when it comes to differences in skin colour and height and body shape and so on, I really think the same thing can, can be true when we have a, a deeper appreciation of the diversity that's within us all.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, you know, my bias being a clinician is always to think of, okay, this is, this is great and I'd love more data and information to better educate people on how they can lead healthier, happier lives. And so within that data set, if we understand the differences between perceptual diversity and perhaps what the associations are with the type of, uh, information they're drawn to or, uh, how they learn things in a particular way, uh, or maybe there's random associations that we've got no, uh, we had no prior knowledge of of like, you know, taste differential, what kind of cuisines you're more likely to be attracted to, you know, putting my nutrition hat on. So that kind of stuff, I think is just super interesting, um, with a, with a clinical sort of slant.
Anil Seth: Yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of starting points likely to come out of this. There's not many endpoints. We don't know anything about taste, for instance, because we, we were restricted to doing things people could do on a computer at home. So it's mainly about vision and hearing and, you know, some more general questionnaires. But it provides, it's going to provide a lot of starting points. Now, a problem for this kind of thing, of course, when you've got a vast amount of data, you will always find something. So, um, what I expect will happen is we'll use this to sort of seed lots of little follow-up studies that might look into, you know, relationships that emerge from the data, but each of those needs to be tested by itself. But I think there will be a lot of clinical angles. One other thing we want to look at, for instance, in an extension of this, is, um, we want to look at differences over age. You know, we've already got people in their 70s and 80s who have done this. Um, and so we can look at how perception changes, you know, in the different decades of life. And then in a collaboration with, with Andrew Budson, another colleagues in the US, this is something doesn't exist yet, but this is a goal is we want to see if we can identify like perceptual signatures of cognitive impairment, early stages of dementia and so on. Um, and that, you know, could have significant clinical impact too, both in diagnosis, but perhaps also in sort of, um, you know, coping strategies, cognitive training strategies and so on.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, even gender differences. I mean, we're spending a lot of time at the moment looking at, uh, menopause as a health goal in the Doctor's Kitchen app. Um, and I've had multiple conversations with menopause experts and stuff and, you know, just the knowledge, the new knowledge I have about how fluctuations in cholesterol arise at different times of the month in, uh, a person who is menstruating, let alone post-menopausally where you have a vastly different hormonal picture that's having an influence on the brain and the increased likelihood of things like dementia and increased likelihood of of metabolic disease as well. That would be fascinating to know about if there is differences in terms of perception. Um, and you know, there's just so many questions that it's just a fascinating field to be, to be part of. I, I want to bring this conversation to a close. I'm aware that we've been going for almost two hours. Um, we have a sort of, uh, I mean, our audience, as you know, is, you know, nutrition, healthy lifestyle focused. Is there anything in your research that you think stands out, uh, as a learning point that has perhaps influenced the way you live or perhaps you've seen has influenced how other people have lived to, to lead a healthier, happier life in the knowledge of how our brains are these sort of prediction machines and how we can easily be, um, fooled or, or, uh, we can perceive things differently as a result of the inputs day-to-day.
Anil Seth: I think for me, it comes down to this, this mantra-like thing that how things seem is not how things are. It's a very easy thing to say, but the study of how consciousness works, how perception works, just allows that basic statement to take root and to really impact everyday life. So when I walk around the world, you know, there is often part of me that's reflecting on how the experience I'm having is just indirectly related to what's going on, how the experience of self that seems to be at the centre of this experience is itself a kind of construction. That opens up a bit of space. It's a good place to finish because it's sort of where we started. I think if we can open a bit of space between how things seem in our immediate experience and how things might actually be, um, we gain some power, we gain some autonomy. Um, some motivation to, to alter things because it's, there's an indirectness, there's space to work with. I think that can be, that can be very, very helpful.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I think you're probably more in a meditative state than you probably give yourself credit for. Do you know, you're walking around the world and you're, you know, being conscious of this, these sort of inputs and stuff. It sounds like you're, you know, you're in a calm, meditative, grateful state.
Anil Seth: I feel very distracted very, very often, but I'm hoping there's, there might be in the Venn diagram of all these different things, maybe there's a bit of useful overlap, maybe.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that sense of self and actually that, that understanding of who I am. It's funny, I was having a chat with my, um, one of my best friends and he's someone who struggles to exercise regularly. And I'm someone who exercises, you know, I'm pretty strict and disciplined in my, in my routine. But I was trying to figure out because he was, you know, he's, he's one of those stop-starters, like he'll start exercising and then he'll stop because life gets in the way or whatever. I was trying to figure out like, I have similar, similar sort of pulls on my time, new pulls on my time with a, with a baby on the way. But I think it's because I identify as someone who exercises every day, if not, you know, most days. Um, my sense of self is very much tied to my exercise regime and, and now my meditation regime. And I wonder if that holds true in some, some way for, for other people. If you could sort of mold that sense of who you are and what activities you do on a day-to-day basis, maybe that has an impact on your motivation and the consistency piece for healthy living that so many people struggle with.
Anil Seth: I think that's exactly right. I think, and it, it fits beautifully into this overall story we've been exploring today, which is that all our ways of perceiving, experiencing things depend not only on the data that the brain gets, but on its priors, on its beliefs about the way things are. And we have these beliefs about the self. I'm this kind of person. And they're all predicated on there being a stable essence of you or, or me. And by relaxing some of those beliefs, now psychedelics can do this too in a very much rapid way, right? And I don't know, it really depends on what you do after whether it's useful. Um, but sure, if, if we can change the sort of the brain's priors about what kind of self is, is, is going on here, then yeah, that, that may be necessary for change. It certainly may facilitate change in, in very useful ways. But to allow that to happen, you have to have yet a higher order belief, which is that identity is itself flexible. Identity is a process. It's, it's not a, it's not a thing. Just last week, I was, I was back, um, visiting my mother and I found some diaries of me at the age of six and at the age of nine. And it's just crazy, right? I mean, it's, in some sense, it's the same person. But, you know, reading, I haven't seen these for, I don't know, 40 years or something like that. Um, it's so hard to reconcile reading those diaries with the identity that I feel that, that I am now. If we look for this balance, of course, if you throw everything to the wind and say, well, there is no, you know, there's no stability at all, um, to what it is to be me, I think that could also, also lead to problems. I think the, the, the key is, and this will take us right back to spiritual lessons and so on. What's the right metaphor for thinking of the self? You know, maybe it's some kind of process, something like a flock of birds, you know, that, that is, that it has an existence, has an impact. Um, but it's always changing. It's always made up of different birds. It's always changing shape. It's never the same flock. I mean, the philosopher, I forget which, sadly, but there's a classic philosophical idea that, you know, no man can step into the same river twice because it's not the same river and he's not the same man. And this is the second part of that that's absolutely key.
Dr Rupy: Gosh, this has been such an enlightening conversation. I appreciate you, Anil, coming on and and sharing your wisdom. It was, this is brilliant.
Anil Seth: Oh, thanks very much for inviting me up here. It's been a real pleasure to you. Thanks so much.
