The curious person’s guide to all things mind!
Have you ever wondered how it is that your thoughts and feelings relate to the grey matter in your head? How space and time came to be out of nothing? How what life means to us influences our day-to-day struggles with mental health?
In conversation with experts in physics, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy, Chasing Consciousness will take you to the very fringes of reality and share with you the groundbreaking discoveries that are dramatically changing the way we relate to the world, the future, and our own minds.
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PLANT INTELLIGENCE, MEMORY & COMMUNICATION - Monica Gagliano PHD #67
Season 2 · Episode 67
Sunday, December 1, 2024 • Duration 01:20:39
How do plants communicate using sound? How do they remember previous stimuli that have proven not to be threat, when at first they seemed like one? Where is the memory encoded considering they have no brain? What are the implications for biology of plant memory?
In this episode we cover the ground breaking topics in plant cognition studies of: plant intelligence, behaviour, memory and communication. The type of experiments presented here have never really been done before, because there has always been an assumption in plant science that the cellular cognition that all living cells have, relies solely on light, touch or chemical interactions; so it doesn’t really permit for plant behaviour, memory and consciousness. So with my guest today, the first scientist to bypass the assumptions and try these tests, we’re going to discuss her experiments with plants; that clearly show not only basic memory and the corresponding updated behaviour based on that memory, but even pavlovian memory, i.e. associative memory that requires arbitrary stimuli to take on meaning to the plant. Obviously all of this has massive implications for distributed memory and memory beyond brains. We’re also going to get into plant medicine and other indigenous approaches to connecting with plant consciousness; and what plant communication and biophilia in general might do for our relationship to the natural world as we face imminent biosphere collapse.
My guest is of course, the research associate professor of Evolutionary Ecology at several universities in Australia, Monica Gagliano. She’s published over 60 scientific papers, across the fields of Ecology, Plant Cognition, Plant Communications and Marine Ecology.
Where is nature’s memory of its evolution encoded? Is there evidence for extended mind occurring beyond individual brains? How possible is it that the sun is conscious?
In this episode we’re going to get up to date on Rupert Sheldrake’s extraordinary theory of Morphic resonance: so Morphic fields, the unfolding of nature’s ‘habits’ and the ‘memory of nature’. We’ll examine the possibility of levels of consciousness larger than our own brains - scaling up in a hierarchy from cellular consciousness right up to planetary and perhaps even stellar consciousness! We’re also going to get into examples of consciousness beyond the brain like ‘the sensation of being stared at’ (clearly a useful skill to evolve) and other phenomena Rupert has reported in his experiments.
Rupert Sheldrake is a Cambridge PHD developmental Biologist whose published over
100 papers on topics as wide as Cellular Biology, telepathy, Pets who know when their owners are coming home, and after-death communications. He is also the author of many books like “A new science of life”,“Science set free”, and “Ways of going Beyond”, among many others.
What were discuss:
00:00 Intro.
06:10 Morphic resonance explained.
08:15 Polar Auxin - death in the midst of life.
09:15 Genes make proteins, morphogenetic fields determine form.
11:30 Nature’s “memory” spread across time.
13:25 Something that has happened before is more likely to happen again.
14:15 Collective memory, like Jung’s collective unconscious.
Dr. Sarah McKay - FEMALE HORMONES: MENOPAUSE & MOTHERHOOD
Season 4 · Episode 57
Friday, May 31, 2024 • Duration 01:49:15
What role do estrogen and the menstrual cycle play in the moods of women? Is ‘baby brain’ a real phenomena or does the brain actually sharpen during motherhood? What are the symptoms of menopause and how natural and effective is HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy)?
- Use the time stamps for those interested only in the neuroscience of Menopause (01:07:45) and Motherhood (37:00).
- NO VIDEO Episode, audio only.
Today we have the important topic of women’s hormones to up our awareness about. A big part of the experience we have of our bodies is thanks to hormones, also called neurotransmitters because they help our nervous system communicate with the rest of the body about what’s going on inside and outside the body. Having accompanied my partner through the process of having two children, and us both having had many unanswered questions about that; and now heading into my late forties having many female friends and listeners heading towards menopause, and speaking publicly about how they wished there’d been given more information about it as it seems not to be discussed much, even amongst women. So I felt the need to make a show about the science and experience of female hormones, particularly with regard to motherhood and menopause; in the hope that women facing these experiences and men hoping to be informed and supportive to those experiences might get more insight. If you’re looking for a show about the comparison or difference between men and women, or Mars or Venus, or the battle of the sexes this is not the show for you: this is simply an informative show about the female brain and particularly about the changes that take place during motherhood and menopause. Unfortunately there is hardly any research into the neuroscience and hormones of trans people, so I apologise in advance for the fact that this show speaks only of those who are born and identify themselves as women.
We are extremely fortunate that our guest today is a neuroscientist and author who has specialised in the Female Brain, both studying the full arc of a woman’s life in her highly accessible yet detailed book ; and most recently in her new 2023 book . She is of course Dr. Sarah McKay, an Oxford University phD in Neuroscience, whose super power is to make neuroscience simple, actionable and relevant to your everyday life. So she chose to leave her research career in favour of science communication, hoping to bridge the gap between the lab and everyday life. She’s the founder of the Neuroscience Academy; has been the neuroscience correspondent for ABC in Australia and has been quoted in the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Grazia and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Jeremy Rifkin - THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION SOLUTIONS
Season 4 · Episode 56
Tuesday, May 14, 2024 • Duration 02:02:09
What technological solutions can mitigate our ecological and economic crises? Why are horizontally integrated 'smart' data sharing networks so important? What are 'Glocalisation' and Bio-regional governance? Will we rise to the challenge in time to survive the next extinction event?
Today we have the technological solutions to our economic and ecological crisis offered by the Third Industrial Revolution to consider. Some may jump to the conclusion that technology and industrialisation are what got us into this mess in the first place and depending on my mood on any one day I might agree with you, but there’s no turning back the clock on the scientific and technological revolutions, so if you can’t beat it then reform it; And many social elements of the digital and internet revolution seem to have started doing just that, quite independently. That said it has been the campaign and deep vision of my guest today for more than 40 years to go further than just talking about it, to push beyond political divides by prioritising life over blind growth and productivity, and get big entities like governments and trade federations to start thinking like this.
He is of course the economist, social theorist, activist and author of 21 books, Jeremy Rifkin. His work focuses on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. Today we’ll be focusing on this new book the “Age of Resilience”, his 2014 book “The Zero Marginal Cost Society”, and his 2011 book “The Third Industrial Revolution”; Rifkin has been an advisor to the leadership of the European Union since 2000 and several other European heads of state, particularly on ushering in the smart, green revolution; he has advised the Peoples Republic of China on the build out and scale up of the Internet in a sustainable low-carbon economy; And he is currently advising the European Commission on the deployment of the Smart Europe initiative.
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro.
06:20 Dysfunctional economic system from 1st and 2nd and Industrial Revolution.
08:00 Exponential Climate change feedback loop from industrialisation.
08:30 New Communication, Energy, logistics and water paradigm changes alter society radically.
Infrastructure paradigms define our world view.
Dropping productivity and efficiency after 2008.
Near-marginal cost economy e.g Solar, wind, internet commerce.
Jeremy’s 3rd Industrial Revolution vision, all at near zero marginal cost.
Component 1: Communication via the internet.
Component 2: Energy internet - sharing surplus globally.
Component 3: Logistics internet fed by the energy internet.
Component 4: The Water internet.
The 3IR infrastructure system is by its nature distributed using data over the internet.
"The Age of Resilience" Book.
Biophilia, Eco-consciousness, and an empathic society.
“Periods of Happiness.. are the black pages of history” Hegel.
Mirror neurones and empathic neurocircuitry.
Extinction events lead to unity.
Shadow 1: Big data. Can this common be democratised?
Bio-regional governance.
“Glocalisation”.
Shadow 2: The internet business model.
Shadow 3: No motivation for corporations to move from multinational investment to ‘glocal’ investment.
Differences between Claus Schwab’s “4th Industrial Revolution” and Jeremy’s 3rd.
The Ginsburg “Moloch” allegory.
Jeremy Rifkin, “The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth”
Jeremy Rifkin, “The Third Industrial Revolution”
Jeremy Rifkin, “The Zero Marginal Cost SocietyThe Zero Marginal Cost Society”
The Human Microbiome Project NIH
Dr. Neil Theise - COMPLEXITY THEORY & SELF ORGANISING SYSTEMS
Season 4 · Episode 55
Tuesday, April 30, 2024 • Duration 01:30:31
Why do complex systems self-organise? What is cellular uncertainty and stem cell plasticity? Can we create artificial digital life that’s subject to the same creative adaptability that nature and life demonstrate?
Today we have the extraordinary phenomena of self-organisation in Complex Systems to look into. We’re going to be looking into the conditions for a system to be considered complex, how a certain amount of randomness in the system releases the creativity required to permit adaptability, and how the feedback loops within that adaptability lead to a self-correcting organisational principle that keeps the system’s order and randomness in balance as it evolves. We’re going to be seeing how that self-organisation is operative at almost every level of scale in the universe and in life and death, and trying to get our heads around what that means for the nature of reality and consciousness.
So who better to discuss this with than stem cell biologist and diagnostic pathologist Neil Theise. Neil is is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity research. In 2018 the news of his discovery of the interstitial, a vast communication network throughout the human body went viral and was featured in the New York Times and Scientific American among many others. Theise is also a long term student of Zen meditation and Kabbalah. And his studies of complexity theory, summarised in his new book “Notes on Complexity: A scientific theory of connection, consciousness and being”, have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in fields as diverse integrative medicine, consciousness studies and the science-spirituality interface.
Since speaking with biologist Michael Levin on Cellular cognition, and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke on collective intelligence, in the last series; I’ve been keen to speak to Neil about stem cell plasticity and self-organising systems, as their elegant sophistication begs so many questions about the nature of reality and consciousness. So without further ado, let’s go!
Peter Levine PHD - TRAUMA STORED IN THE BODY: SOMATIC EXPERIENCING
Season 4 · Episode 54
Sunday, April 14, 2024 • Duration 01:16:09
How are traumatic memories stored in the body? How has Somatic Experiencing helped thousands of people release the symptoms of trauma through bodily practices rather than talky therapy? How did Peter resolve his own devastating childhood trauma? What will a trauma aware society be like?
In this episode we have the fascinating question of the different ways traumatic memories are stored to think about, and how the body itself and not only the brain is instrumental in the way the memory’s are made and processed, and so in how we might ease the symptoms of the trauma later on. We’re going to delve into the brain-body connection in traumatic memory, looking at the way trauma can influence our bodily states and so in turn the way we can use bodily methods in a bottom-up approach, to re-train the brain to feel safe and integrate traumatic memories.
For this there can be no better person than the psychotherapist, Dr. Peter Levine, the creator of the Somatic Experiencing therapy method, founder of the Institute of Somatic Education and author of many books on trauma and therapy, including “Waking the Tiger”, “Healing Trauma”, “Trauma Through a Childs Eyes”, “Trauma and Memory” which we’ll be discussing today, and his brand new book, which this episode is happy to celebrate the release of “An autobiography of Trauma: A healing Journey”.
Minus 1 minute
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro.
06:00 Conscious memories start earlier than we might imagine.
07:00 Descartes was wrong, better “I move, I sense, I feel, I have images, I have thoughts: therefore I am.”
07:30 The mid-1960’s session with Nancy that started it all for Peter.
14:20 The 3 different nervous system bodily states: fight or flight, freeze and social engagement.
20:00 Body/Nervous system bi-directionality: Influences between Polyvagal theory and Somatic Experiencing.
Diana Pasulka PHD - BELIEF IN UFOS: COLLECTIVE VISION OR OBJECTIVE REALITY?
Season 4 · Episode 53
Sunday, March 31, 2024 • Duration 01:28:27
In what way is beef in UFOs religious-like? Is there evidence for collective visions of these objects and entities, or rather for their objective reality? In what way could the experience have elements of both?
In this episode we have the ever more mainstream story of UFO experiences to assess; Not necessarily the important questions around the existence of the phenomenon, which the office of the US director of National Intelligence confirmed in an official 2021 report that they were, in fact, a ‘population of objects’ (see show notes below)- but rather the belief in the phenomenon, in 2008 polled at around %37 of Americans, but by no means confined to the US. This widespread belief, along with less ridiculed beliefs bolstered by the high probability of extraterrestrial civilisations more advanced than our own existing out there in the cosmos, has had a huge sociological and cultural influence on western society.
So in this episode I want to put into a sociological context all of this quasi-religious belief; understand the role of our perception of technology; get our heads around a rare example of a modern myth forming in real time; look at the ways a phenomenon can be both physical and psychological at the same time; and examine various scientific, academic and even philosophical doors into this confounding phenomena that no matter how much the sceptics deny, just won’t go away.
So when we study belief we have to turn to a religious studies specialist, and who better to call on than Professor of Religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Diana Pasulka. She’s also the author of 3 books, “Heaven Can Wait”, a book about purgatory, “American Cosmic” on scientists who believe in UFO’s, and her new 2023 book “Encounters” on multi-disciplinary academic approaches to the UFO phenomenon and experiences with non-human intelligence.
Don’t forget listeners, that we talk about all the science in more detail with Stanford medical School’s immunologist, pathologist and inventor Garry Nolan in this series so check that out too.
What we discuss:00:00 Intro.13:08 Meaningful events propel people towards religious belief.21:30 Heidegger’s warning about underestimating the influence of technology on our culture.27:00 Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” - A just government and the control of information.34:40 Nietzsche, the risk of assigning causal power for synchronicities to higher powers.44:00 Perspective change: The creation of a modern myth, to a real physical phenomenon.45:50 Looking for UFO crash parts in the desert with Garry Nolan, taken blindfolded by a Space Force scientist.49:00 The ‘Antenna’ hypothesis: the brain as a receiver and transmitter.56:00 Physical data analysed by top scientists, and government “management” of information.01:01:00 Where the physical and non-physical meet: idealism or VR hypotheses.01:05:00 Humans may be a sophisticated type of biotechnology.01:06:00 The use of intuition protocols to find technological solutions: intention and visualisation.01:11:30 New Encounters book: a “reorientation”.01:14:00 Iya Whitely: validating pilots experiences.
Stephen Wolfram PHD - THE COMPUTATIONAL UNIVERSE & MODELLING COMPLEXITY
Season 4 · Episode 52
Friday, March 15, 2024 • Duration 02:01:50
Does the use of computer models in physics change the way we see the universe? How far reaching are the implications of computation irreducibility? Are observer limitations key to the way we conceive the laws of physics?
In this episode we have the difficult yet beautiful topic of trying to model complex systems like nature and the universe computationally to get into; and how beyond a low level of complexity all systems, seem to become equally unpredictable. We have a whole episode in this series on Complexity Theory in biology and nature, but today we’re going to be taking a more physics and computational slant.
Another key element to this episode is Observer Theory, because we have to take into account the perceptual limitations of our species’ context and perspective, if we want to understand how the laws of physics that we’ve worked out from our environment, are not and cannot be fixed and universal but rather will always be perspective bound, within a multitude of alternative branches of possible reality with alternative possible computational rules. We’ll then connect this multi-computational approach to a reinterpretation of Entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
The fact that my guest has been building on these ideas for over 40 years, creating computer language and Ai solutions, to map his deep theories of computational physics, makes him the ideal guest to help us unpack this topic. He is physicist, computer scientist and tech entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram. In 1987 he left academia at Caltech and Princeton behind and devoted himself to his computer science intuitions at his company Wolfram Research. He’s published many blog articles about his ideas, and written many influential books including “A New kind of Science”, and more recently “A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics”, and “Computer Modelling and Simulation of Dynamic Systems”, and just out in 2023 “The Second Law” about the mystery of Entropy.
One of the most wonderful things about Stephen Wolfram is that, despite his visionary insight into reality, he really loves to be ‘in the moment’ with his thinking, engaging in socratic dialogue, staying open to perspectives other than his own and allowing his old ideas to be updated if something comes up that contradicts them; and given how quickly the fields of physics and computer science are evolving I think his humility and conceptual flexibility gives us a fine example of how we should update how we do science as we go.
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro
07:45 The history of scientific models of reality: structural, mathematical and computational.
20:20 The Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE)
24:45 Computational Irreducibility - the process that means you can’t predict the outcome in advance.
27:50 The importance of the passage of time to Consciousness.
28:45 Irreducibility and the limits of science.
33:30 Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem
42:20 Observer Theory and the Wolfram Physics Project.
50:30 We ’make’ space.
51:30 Branchial Space - different quantum histories of the world, branching and merging
58:50 Rulial Space: All possible rules of all possible interconnected branches.
01:19:30 The Measurement problem of QM and Entanglement meets computational irreducibility and observer theory.
01:32:40 Inviting Stephen back for a separate episode on AI safety, safety solutions and applications for science, as we did’t have time.
01:37:30 At the molecular level the laws of physics are reversible.
01:45:30 Entropy defined in computational terms.
01:50:30 If we ever overcame our finite minds, there would be no coherent concept of existence.
01:51:30 Parallels between modern physics and ancient eastern mysticism and cosmology.
01:55:30 Reductionism in an irreducible world: saying a lot from very little input.
John Vervaeke PHD - USING OUR COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
Season 3 · Episode 51
Friday, December 1, 2023 • Duration 01:57:41
How has the evolution of cognition led to homo-sapiens being such effective collaborators and how is the collective knowledge and wisdom of the society distributed and passed on to later generations? How can we apply the amplified wisdom of distributed cognition to solve some of humanities biggest problems?
Today we have the important fields of Collective Intelligence and how we can use it to solve our problems as a society, to try and get our heads around. We’ll be discussing the relevance of difficulties arising from cognitive science and physics research that for some put into question the consensus story that embodied feelings were fundamental in the development of reasoning and consciousness; We also discuss the relevance of the work of Carl Jung on the Collective Unconscious; of Neuroscientist Anil Seth’s Controlled Hallucination and Don Hoffman’s User interface theory; of Iain McGilchrist’s split brain research and of Michael Levin’s take on cellular cognition.
There is of course only one polymath who can hold that many topics in a single conversation and that’s the Cognitive scientist, and philosopher John Vervaeke. Vervaeke is the director of UToronto’s Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory and its Cognitive Science program, where he teaches an Introduction to Cognitive Science and The Cognitive Science of Consciousness.
He has been a leading intellectual observer of the modern meaning crisis: the loss of a spiritual worldview in the West, and the decline of wisdom traditions that help individuals find meaning in their lives. His online lectures and practices integrate teachings from many different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, religion, and cutting edge cognitive science. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” and his brand new series, "After Socrates."
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro.
05:35 Losing faith without losing a taste for the transcendent.
Rebecca Dennis - BREATHWORK EXPLAINED
Season 3 · Episode 50
Wednesday, November 15, 2023 • Duration 01:19:50
How does breathwork interact with our nervous system, access memories and help integrate traumatic memories? How has it got results treating auto-immune disease, addiction, agrophobia, PTSD and depression? How can it help sleep, detoxification, digestion, immunity, and taking control of negative thought patterns.
In this episode we have the hugely popular practice of Breathwork to look into. After millennia of it being used in bodily practices like martial arts and yoga, conscious breathing was launched into our modern scientific world view by the work of psychologist Stan Grof, who developed Holotropic Breathing in the 1960’s at Harvard, see our Transpersonal Psychology episode for more on that; Breathwork continued to gain in popularity following the focus on the lungs and breathing in near regulation proposed by Dr. Stephen Porges in his Polyvagal Theory, see our devoted episode with Dr. Porges for detail on that; And gained further in popularity with Dr. Pete Levine’s development of Somatic Experiencing, who I am delighted to announce will be coming on the show in the next series, so look out for that.
So having been present for some time in the trauma community, in the last few years the practice has exploded onto the wellbeing scene as well because of all its benefits both physiologically and psychologically.
So who better to talk to about this than expert in a wide range of Breathwork and body-based therapies, Rebecca Dennis. She facilitates workshops, events and retreats alongside her public speaking and individual sessions. She is a gifted speaker and coach, specialising in breathwork, trauma release, somatic modalities, polyvagal theory and nervous system regulation.
Part of her wide popularity is due to her having written three successful books on the topic, the latest being a new edition of Let it Go, “Let It Go and Breathe – A Practical Guide To Breathwork” which has been featured in Amazon and Sunday Times Best Sellers, and which we’ll be discussing today. And she has also collaborated with Google, BBC, Stylist magazine and Sweaty Betty.
17:15 His scientific education engrained materialism and atheism in him..
18:15 Asian philosophy, psychedelics, Neo-platonism and Christianity.
20:30 Questioning of scientific dogma came before his faith.
22:00 Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm change, an analogy for him breaking with science.
23:50 Rupert’s work denounced as ‘Heresy’ by the editor of Nature in 1981.
26:30 Measuring Morphic fields in experiments.
28:30 IQ tests have got easier for people over time, The Flynn Effect
30:00 Video games have to make new versions harder each time.
32:10 Is subtle energy field research beyond science?
37:00 Bioelectric morphogenetic fields & Michael Levin.
41:20 Bioelectric fields are the interface not the explanation.
42:30 Where are morphic fields recorded in nature?
44:50 Platonism doesn’t explain evolution and change over time.
47:00 Different levels of collective consciousness, up to planetary, stellar and even cosmic consciousness.
56:40 The feeling of being stared at: examples of extended mind.
01:02:55 Mystical experience - being part of a greater consciousness.
01:09:40 Are spiritual & scientific insight compatible?
References:
Rupert Sheldrake, “A New Science of life”.
Michael Levin - Bio-electric morphogenetic fields CC interview
The Sheldrake.org Staring App.
Polar Auxin
QUOTE:
“Morphic resonance leaps across time and space,
It’s not stored anywhere it’s a direct connection with the past.”
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