 So typically the shaman engages in practices that are putting significant changes in their attention. As we mentioned, there's often significant disruptive strategies, sleep deprivation, sex deprivation, social isolation, the use of psychedelics, extended chanting, all of these dancing, all of these things are designed to bring about radical changes in the way in which the brain is operating. Now, part of what a shaman is doing is, I would argue, also getting into the flow state. So the flow state has become something that has discussed both academically and in the popular culture. It was made famous in work by Chick-Sent-Mahai. His book, Flow, The Flow Experience, brought it to the forefront in 1990. So what is the flow experience? So the flow experience is, experience people get into, they often describe it as like being in the zone. So you are involved in a task that is very demanding. In fact, it has a particular structure to it. So these are your skills and these is how demanding the situation is. And the flow state is one in which the demands of the situation just slightly go beyond your skill abilities. And so you get what's called here, Chick-Sent-Mahai often represents this by the flow channel. When my skills can just through, we'll talk about this through like sort of insight and restructuring, when I can just enough exact and extend my skills to meet the demand. So I have to put everything I've got into it. Again into the flow channel. If my skills exceed the demands, I fall into boredom. If my demands exceed the skills, I fall into anxiety. Now of course the thing about you is you are very good at learning in situation. So you need a kind of context in which your skills, as your skills improve, your environment also improves. So one of the things we've created in our culture is we've created flow induction machines. Because what those machines have are a situation where your skills are constantly improving and the demands of the environment are constantly improving. And these flow induction machines have other properties that are very important in them. There's a very tight feedback between what you do and how the environment responds. You're getting very clear information and failure matters. It's like at least symbolically because you can die. And of course some of you are probably realizing that I'm talking about video games. Video games are one of the most reliable ways of inducing the flow state in people. In fact part of the reasons why video games are addictive and they now being considered to be a bonafide addiction by the World Health Organization is precisely because they engender the flow state. Addictions, and we'll talk about this later when we talk about addictions. Addictions run off machinery that is evolutionarily adaptive. That's why it's compelling. So the flow state. What are other things that people do to get into the flow state? They play jazz. They do martial arts. I'm a martial artist, right? One, that's particularly interesting because there's no other explanation for why people do it other than they get into the flow state is rock climbing. Because rock climbing otherwise would be like it's like some sort of torture from Greek mythology, right? You presented it like, here's a rock face. What I want you to do is I want you to go up that. It's going to be really physically demanding. It's going to hurt you. You might fall to you and harm yourself. And once you get to the top, you come back down. It would seem like a torturous thing to do. Well we know why people rock climb. They rock climb because they get into the flow state. And the flow state is deeply, deeply positive for people. It's not the same thing as physical pleasure, right? In fact, the flow state is much more connected to meaning in life. In fact, the more often you get into the flow state, the more likely you will rate your life as meaningful. The more you will experience well-being. Now what's interesting also about the flow state, and remember we're doing this because I'm talking about that shamanism is probably a practice for practicing getting into the flow state. So remember that, right? The thing about the flow state, it's a universal. People across cultures, socio-economic groups, genders, language, environments, age groups, report being able to get into the flow state, and they describe it in detail almost exactly the same way. That's a universal. And universals are important in cognitive science. You pay attention to the universals because they give you profound insight into the machinery. What's it like to be in the flow state? Well when you're in the flow state, right? You feel like you're deeply at one with things. So for example, I'm a martial artist and when I'm sparring, it's like my sense of connectedness to my opponent is really enhanced. And I'm really at one. And that comes with it this kind of spontaneity. So when a strike is coming, my hand is just there. I don't sort of raise your hand now, John. It flows out of me, hence the word, right? The block is there. The hockey player, the goalie just puts out his hand, the glove hand and the puck is there. There's this tremendous sense of atonement. And then closely allied to it is this, right? At one level you know, like the shaman dancing or chanting, that there's tremendous metabolic energy at work, effort. You're making at one level all this effort, but at another level it feels effortless. That's the spontaneity. Again, it just seems to flow from you. Your sense of time is passing differently. Your sense of self is being dramatically altered. So when people are in the flow state, right, their self, a kind of self-consciousness disappears. That self-conscious, you know, we carry around that self-consciousness that's always doing this sort of thing. It's constantly sort of doing our autobiography, how's my day going, how am I doing, who am I, what am I doing, blah, blah. And it's also checking. How do I image management? How do I look? What are people thinking of me? How am I doing? All of that nattering. And oh, am I failing? How am I doing? I knew, and of course, that can get out of hand. Like when you're in depression, you ruminate on all that stuff and it overwhelms you. But we all carry that burden around. It's taxing. And the thing in the flow state, it's gone. Because there's no space for all of that. Because you're so engrossed in the task. The other thing about the flow state is it's super salient. It's like the kind of brightness and vividness you get in a video game. The world seems more intense. And people really like this experience. And not only do they like it, it seems to be where they do their best work. So the flow experience is an optimal experience in two ways. Many people regard it as the best experiences they can have. But it's also where they're doing their very best at what they want to excel in. That's why it's so motivating to get into the flow state. Why is the flow state so good? So this year, 2018, I published some work with Adrian Herobaneth and Leo Ferraro in which we tried to argue for what the cognitive mechanisms are in the flow state. See, Chick-Sent-Mahai tells you the environmental conditions what you need in order to get into the flow state. You need skills and demand to be matched. You need there to be very tight coupling between you and the environment like in the video game. You need very clear information. It can't be ambiguous or vague. And failure has to matter. It has to be costly to you in some fashion. He specified all of that. He also specified the kind of training that helps enhance you to get you into the flow state. And think about this. Think about what I said last time. And we're going to explore this more. Training and mindfulness. The more people have training and mindfulness increases their capacity to get into the flow state. Now, can we come up with a unified explanation for all of this? I think we can. Both for the phenomenology, why we're experiencing what we're experiencing when we're in the flow state? And why is it improving your cognition? And therefore, why would the shaman be enhancing their cognition by getting into something like the flow state through their ritual practices? Okay, so think about the rock climber. Okay? The rock climber is climbing. Remember, we talked about how you frame and find patterns last time. Remember the nine-dot problem, right? And that these patterns aren't just patterns in your mind. They're patterns in knowing how to make sense of things. So you're rock climbing. And if that breaks down, you impasse. You're stuck. And I don't mean just cognitively. You're physically stuck. Now, if you want to be a good rock climber, what you have to do is you have to break that framing. You have to train yourself to break the frame. Restructure. Change what you're finding relevant and salient. And then, change yourself to fit that. And then you refit yourself to the rock phase. You refit yourself to the rock phase. Then you have to do it again. And then you have to do it again. And then you have to do it again. Or the jazz musician. The jazz musician is playing. They pick up on a pattern. They play with it. But they can't stay with it too long. What do they have to do? They have to shift. They have to restructure. They have to shift into a new pattern and then play with that. They have to pick up on it, they have to reframe it, again and again and again and again and again. Do you see what's going on with the rock climber, the jazz musician, the martial artist, is this idea of a cascade of insights. You're having an insight that's leading to another insight that's leading to another insight that's priming. So you know when you have an insight, you have like aha and you get that sort of burst of energy and it's like a flash, that's why we put a light bulb over somebody's head when we want to show them having an insight. There's like that flash. Now imagine if I took that aha and I extended it, aha, that's the flow state. It's an insight cascade. So the more you flow, the more you're training your ability for insight. And direct interacting with your environment. Now the trouble of course with the video game is the environment isn't a real world. But in the shamans world, of course, the shamans flowing in the real world, the real social world, the real ecological world. But there's something more. It's not just an insight cascade that's going on and flow. That in and of itself would be great. There's something else going. This has to do with your capacity for implicit learning. Now notice what's happening here. Notice that although even I'm doing the history, I'm always also doing the cog sigh. Because while I'll be emphasizing the history, the historical account, I'm starting to build what I need to give you the structural functional account. Okay, so implicit learning. This goes back to work done in the 60s by Arthur Reber and a whole bunch of other people. So what Reber was doing is he was really trying to understand how people learn language. What he was doing was he was generating an arbitrary set of rules, completely arbitrary, just make them up on the spot set of rules for how you can link strings of letters and or numbers together. Like the rule might be you can't have more than three vowels in a row, or you have to have two consonants. And then you generate letter strings. Eight, nine, long. These are so long that you can't sort of easily hold them in your working memory. And then this is what you do. You take, you generate, you can generate an indefinite number, you generate a huge number of these strings and you just show them to people. Here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one. Okay, that's the first part of the experiment. Then you do the second part of the experiment. Now you generate a whole bunch of strings, but two kinds. One set of strings is generated by that artificial set of rules. And so follows the same rules as the first string, first set. And then the second set is generated by a completely different set of rules, okay? And what you do is you mix up the first and the second together. And this is the task you give people. Can you tell me the strings that belong with the strings you saw before? There you go. Now, Rieber originally thought what would happen is people would, because it seems like so random. What he found was people score well, well above chance consistently on this. People can tell you, oh no, those strings, yeah, those belong with the old ones. No, that one doesn't. That one does, that one doesn't. Now here's what's interesting. You now ask people why, how do you know that? And they'll give you one of two answers. They'll say I don't know. I don't know. I just feel it, which is, ooh. Or they say, they give you some explanation. They'll give you some rule, a procedure they're using, and here's what we know. They're deceiving themselves or lying to you because that rule that they're using wouldn't actually predict their success. So you are picking up, you have this tremendous capacity outside your conscious awareness, right? To pick up on very complex patterns in your environment. And you say okay, why? What does this have to do with shamanism? Well hang on, because we talked about the shaman picking up on patterns last time. Let's go back to this. Let me talk about an experiment that's really interesting. So there was some work done on this idea that people have psychic abilities and there's the feeling of being stared at. People can tell when they're being stared at. And people reliably report that they think, oh I knew somebody was staring at me. I could just feel it in the back of my neck and stuff like that. And so they ran an experiment in which they did the following. They'd have somebody in a room blindfolded, earplugged, they can't sense anything, nobody's allowed to wear perfumes or anything. That person can't see or hear or feel and they're just standing in the room. Unbeknownst to that person, people would come in and stare at them. And then they had to report if the person at the center of the room had to report if they were being stared at or not. And people were reporting this well above chance. They were saying, I think I'm being stared at and there was somebody there. And of course, first of all, oh, right. But then it turned out that if you made a slight change to that experiment, it wouldn't replicate. So what was going on? You bring people into the room and they say, I think I'm being stared at and the researchers would tell them if they were correct or not. They would say, you're right or you're wrong. So what? You say so what? Well, here's the thing. The researchers thought they were introducing people, the viewers, into the room randomly. But it turns out they weren't introducing them randomly because you know what's very hard for you to do? Random stuff. They were actually introducing people as viewers in a complex pattern. And the person that was blindfolded and earplugged was implicitly learning the pattern because they were getting feedback. If you take the feedback away, if you don't tell them, whenever they say I'm being stared at or not, if you don't tell them they're the right or wrong, their performance drops to chance. See, a lot of what looks like psychic abilities are your ability to pick up implicitly on complex patterns in the environment without being aware of it. So Hogarth in his book on educating intuition made a really, really cool claim. Makes a very good argument, in fact, I think, for this. He says that what we call intuition is a real thing, but there isn't anything sort of magical about it, like the psychics, say, or something like that. Your intuition is the result of your implicit learning. You pick up on all kinds of complex patterns not knowing how you have done that, but you get an ability to detect patterns and you don't know how. That's why your intuition feels the way it does. You just sort of know. Like, you know things. You're doing it all the time. To use a famous example from Dreyfus. You know how far to stand from somebody. And what angle to, like, where you should stand, how close you should stand, what angle you should stand, how, as a conversation or the context changes, you're allowed to move closer or farther away what angles you're allowed to be at. But if I were to ask you to tell me how you do that, you wouldn't know. You would just say, I know how to do it. And yet, when people don't know how to do it, it creeps you out. It creeps you out. Okay, so intuition. Now, Hogarth points out, and this is something very common, right? Hogarth points out that, you know, we have two different terms and we don't realize we're talking about the same thing. We have intuition when we think it's going well, that implicit learning, but we also have bias and prejudice for when we think that implicit learning goes bad. The bigot has got intuitions about races that are wrong. Now, why is, how is it that implicit learning goes wrong? Well, here's the thing. You have some complex pattern in the environment, right? And your implicit learning picks up on it. The problem is there's two kinds of patterns in your environment. There's correlations, there's correlation patterns and causal patterns. What do I mean by that? Correlations is any two things are related to each other. So, let me give you an example of a couple of correlations that you shouldn't confuse with causation. There is a correlation between how large your wedding is and how long your marriage will last. If you have a bigger wedding, your marriage will last longer. Now, you would be a fool to therefore think you should have the biggest possible wedding because the reason why bigger weddings predict longer marriages is not because bigger weddings cause longer marriages, is because, right, they're only correlated, it's because bigger weddings reflect a bigger social network, more financial resources, and having a bigger social network for the couple, having more financial resources, actually does cause a marriage to last longer. Here's another one. So, I'm old enough, right? And I was brought up in a religious household that I was, you know, when prayer was taken out of the schools. And of course, people were very upset about that. Taking, look at crime as going up as we've taken prayer out of the schools and things like that. By the way, crime hasn't been going up. Read some of Stephen Pinker's work. But let's say it was. That's only a correlation. Because here's another correlation. We know that greenhouse gases have been going up steadily. And that's part of the environmental crisis we're gonna talk about. You know what has been also consistently going down for the exact same time period? Caribbean piracy. Having pirates in the Caribbean and wooden ships with cannons and stuff. As that went down, greenhouse gases went up. Now, I hope none of you think that we could solve global warming by being in back piracy. Okay? So there are many things that are, there are many patterns in the world that are illusory because they're only correlational. They're not causal. See the big yet has picked up on correlational patterns, not causal patterns. So what you wanna do is you wanna train your implicit learning to pick up on the causal patterns that are real rather than the correlational patterns that are illusory. Now here's what you can't do. You can't tell people to look for patterns explicitly. Go back to Weber's experiment. If you put people into that experiment where they're looking at the letter strings and you tell them explicitly what they're supposed to do, try and figure out the rules. Consciously, deliberately try to figure out the rules. Their performance doesn't get better. It gets worse. Okay? And Hogarth notes this in his book on educating intuition. We can't replace implicit learning with explicit learning because it is precisely by being implicit that it works so well. What can we do explicitly then? What we can do is set up the right context, the right environmental factors so that my implicit learning machine will tend more likely to get onto causal patterns rather than correlational patterns. So I'll get good intuition rather than bad intuition. How do you do that? Well, Hogarth says the way you would do this is the way you do science. You wanna control the context, right? Because what science is, and you know there's a lot of science, look, science is a way of distinguishing causal patterns from correlational patterns. You set up an environmental situation so that you can distinguish the causal patterns from the correlational patterns. Well, what do you do? Well, in an experiment, first of all, I make sure that everything is very clearly measured. I get very clear information, very clear information. I make sure, I'm looking to see that, right, that the change in one variable is closely followed by a change in another variable. So I change your drug dosage, do your symptoms get better? Right, so I look for clear information, I look for clear feedback, and in science, failure matters. You test a hypothesis and disconfirmation has to be possible, failure matters. Now notice this. What Hogarth says is, well, what I wanna do is I wanna put you into an implicit learning situation where you get clear feedback, like you do in science, where there is a tight coupling between what you do and how the environment responds, and where error really matters, like in science. And he says, what we should do is we should try and do implicit learning in those kinds of contexts. Well, here's what myself and my colleagues argued. Those three criteria that will turn your intuition into good implicit learning are exactly the conditions for flow. Clear information, tightly coupled feedback, and error matters. The rock climber is looking for needs clear information, tightly coupled feedback, and error really matters. That context really means that there's a much greater chance that their implicit learning machinery is gonna pick up on causal patterns rather than correlational ones. So, notice what we've got going on here. The shaman is getting into the flow state, is developing all these techniques for getting into this deeply immersive, comprehensive flow state. And they're getting an insight cascade, and they're also getting enhanced implicit learning, picking up on very complex, real complex patterns. Now, this is intuitive. They don't know how they're doing it. Now, here's what's interesting, too. These two are reinforcing each other, because the insight gets your cognition to explore for new patterns, and then the implicit learning picks up those new patterns. And then those new patterns enhance your ability to restructure, and then, right? You keep exploring for new patterns, acquiring the new patterns for implicit learning, and you keep ratcheting your skills up. Getting into the flow state is deeply, deeply enhancing of your cognition. Somebody who's an expert at getting into the flow state is going to be an individual you want to have around. Now, that individual is going to have some really serious challenges facing them. They don't know how they're getting a lot of the information they're getting. They don't know why they're so insightful. And they're experiencing this radical at one minute with the world, this loss of sense of self, when they're enacting the animal, right? You have to understand these insights aren't verbal insights. Like in the nine-dot problem, it's not words, it's not beliefs. Getting an insight in how the deer moves. It's getting an insight, an intuitive insight in how to talk to this person, to trigger the placebo effect, to help them to heal right now. So, getting into the flow state, notice what's going on here. Notice you're getting something that's almost like a mystical experience. It's a powerful altered state of consciousness. It's enhancing your cognitive processing. And the shaman is making meaning. They're singing, they're dancing, they're telling stories, they're altering people's sense of what matters, they're altering people's sense of identity, they're healing and transforming people.