 Boom. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. Very excited to be talking about Neuromodulation Enhanced Mindfulness. We have Dr. Jay Sanguinetti joining us on the show. Hello. Hi. Great to be here. Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. I'm super excited. Very grateful to the Awaken Future Summit that we were both just at as well. Such an awesome congregation of psychedelics, meditation, technology, and you were speaking there. Which was awesome. And now we have you on the show. Really excited, Jay's background. He is a research scientist at the University of Arizona focused on how neuromodulation can augment cognition and mindfulness using transcranial, magnetic, electrical, ultrasound, and near-infrared light stimulation. He's also the assistant director for the Center for Consciousness Studies, which runs the largest conference on the study of consciousness. And you can find the links in the bio below to his website, JaySanguinetti.com, as well as the Twitter. So let's jump into things with one of our favorite questions to ask, Jay. What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? Start with a big question. Well, you know, I think that it is one of the most interesting times to be alive as a human, which is a big statement I know and probably any time that you're alive as a human feels like the most interesting time. But there are these two extremes that are facing us. And one of them is economic and environmental change on a scale that I don't think humans have lived through before. We are growing together as a species. There's almost eight billion people on the planet. And our economies are intermixing in this global economy, which is leading to all kinds of interesting disruption, you know, flow of goods and things like that. And at the same time, we have this environmental crisis. And I think that there's enough data there now to start becoming fearful, to start worrying about the future over the next couple of hundred years. And so on one end, there's a lot of reason to be scared about what it looks like to be a human over the next 50, 100, 150 years. On the other end, we have all this amazing technology and technological advancement, both on the end of having magical little boxes in our pocket that have all the information humanity seems to have ever created, right there at your fingertips to the advances in medicine broadly that are going to drastically extend human life. So I think we're nestled between these two interesting situations. We're on one end, we have a crisis that is solvable and we still have time to solve it. And on the other end, if we can make it past some of these significant thresholds and just hold on to the environment long enough, we're going to see a future unlike anything that was ever written in the great sci-fi books in the 1950s. I mean, we're going to see a future we can't even imagine. And so it's super exciting if we need to, if we can just activate ourselves to solve some of these crises that are facing us, especially the environmental crisis, we're going to get to a future that's going to be amazing to live in. And so I'm optimistic about it. I think that human nature is to be curious and to solve hard problems. We've done that all through our history. And so I think if we can get together collectively and get over, you know, our individual needs and work as a group, a global group, then I think we're going to solve these problems. And our children's children are going to see a future that we wouldn't even recognize. Excellent synthesis. That was a great one. All right, let's go into the journey now. So Natchez, Mississippi. Natchez. Natchez, Mississippi is the birthplace. And then how did you get hooked into neuroscience when you were younger and then teach us about the transition all the way to the University of Arizona? It's a good question. I really wasn't that much of an academic kid. I struggled all the way up to high school, really. I think I was sort of bored in school. And so I was always interested in things like astronomy. In the south, we have the NASA camp in Alabama. You know, I did things like that. It sort of got me interested in science. But as a kid, I always thought I was going to be a professional soccer player or a basketball player, maybe a race car driver. I had aspirations that had nothing to do with science. And I think I probably thought that was kind of geeky growing up. Somewhere around my junior year of high school, I realized that I wasn't going to get into college with my grades that I had. And so that kicked my butt in the high gear. I started taking what are called AP classes, advanced placement classes in North Carolina. And it was actually in a class on psychology and neuroscience that really sort of woke me up, woke up my sort of intellectual curiosity side that I think was always there, you know, as a kid. It just I never had the right environment to really bring it out. And it was an AP psychology. Actually, the professor, the teacher at the time who's now a professor, said something that really challenged me as a kid. He said, everyone in this room is going to become like their parents. And he said this class by the end of this class, you'll know why I'm saying that. And I was like, no way, you know, 16 year old teenager, I'm not going to become like my parents. But by the end, we have learned about genetics, brain science, the role of environment on all of those things. And by the end, I wrote a term paper on it. And I said, yeah, I'm probably going to be like my parents, that's okay. You know, now I think that's okay. And so really, through that, it just activated me. And that's really what I wanted to do from that point on. Yeah, whoa, cool. I love shifting moments like that. That's great. And then how did from there, then you go, okay, University of Arizona is where I want to go and do this PhD. How did that transition happen? I got two undergrad degrees. One was in philosophy. And it was really focused on philosophy of science and sort of consciousness studies generally defined. I learned pretty quickly that there was a whole nother side to that question, which is what's the brain have to do with that. And so I got a degree in psychology and neuroscience. We had a psychology program and I worked in a neuroscience lab. And I really got to see that question from both dimensions, what is what are the cells and networks of cells have to do with creating consciousness and what are the questions around that? And then what are the philosophical rational traditions around consciousness, what we know about consciousness, things like Kagi to Ergo sum, you know, Kagi to Ergo sum, things like Descartes said, you know, so I kind of learned about the historical tradition, which really framed the way that I think about how the brain is involved in consciousness, how consciousness evolves from the brain and things like that. So I applied to several universities for graduate school, I didn't think I was going to get into any of them. So I applied to like 15 schools. And the U of A University of Arizona was the one that really had both a strong philosophy program, and a strong neuroscience program and a strong psychology program. And so I ended up getting into a few of the schools and chose the University of Arizona specifically, because it was right at the center of all these interests that I had. I had also seen a movie called What the Bleep Do We Know? Some of your viewers out there might know that movie. At that point, I really like the movie. Now I think it's portraying quantum physics and consciousness in a totally wrong and incorrect way. But there was a guy in that movie, Stuart Hammeroff, that I sort of gravitated to, you know, even an undergrad. And he was at the University of Arizona. He runs the Center for Consciousness Studies, which now I'm the assistant director to. And so I think on some subconscious level, I had this wish to kind of work with him. I never actually thought it would happen. But I think uncons, you know, there's all this unconscious stuff that drives your behavior, actually. And I think that was one of the things that kind of drove me there. I ended up meeting Stuart about three years into graduate school, and now I work with him, and he's a good friend. So kind of worked out. And what an awesome intersection, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience. I think therefore, and there's so much to end up still in the next century, this seems like it's going to be that century of neuroscience, understanding consciousness is going to be very exciting, along with lots of other subjects. But let's do the, okay, cognition and neural systems. This is what was the focus up until 2014. And you were give us give us the thesis on the visual on the visual system that you were understanding and working with. Sure. So my PhD was in a program called cognition and neural systems. And the idea was really to look at cognition, which means memory, perception, emotion, these are cognitive constructs that actually come from Aristotle's philosophy. He had on his library just broken consciousness into these concepts. And so today, we think that they have a real place in the brain somewhere, and we're sort of looking for them. But they're good organizing constructs for looking at brain function. And so we start with a question like what is perception? How does perception work? What are the organizing principles for the perceptual system? And, you know, how the brain takes all this information from the retina, and figures out what's out there. It's actually a really, really difficult question. And when you try to teach a robot how to do that, which is happening right now all over the country, all over the world, it's very hard actually to teach a robot how to parse the visual scene. And so we start with that question. And then we ask how what does the brain have to do with that question? How is the brain systems and the neural systems underneath sort of extracting information in a way that's relevant for building perception on top. And so it's the intersection of psychology and neuroscience is a short way to say that. So when I entered school, I really wanted to study consciousness. That was the question. What is consciousness? How does it emerge from the brain? Or is it is it everywhere? You know, can we can we even answer that question? When I pitched this early on in graduate school, the answer was you'll never get a job asking that question. Most people in the neuroscience is they're going to think you're crazy. And you should probably not use that word when you're at certain conferences. And so the idea was to study something tractable, meaning, is there a question that we can actually get answers to the question of consciousness, we may never actually have an answer because we're too stupid to figure it out, for example. So pick a question that we can actually study and define. And me as a small limited individual human scientist, you know, a question that I can advance the field very incrementally. And so the question became, how does memory influence what we see? And that's a sort of fundamental question about how perception works. Because leading up to about the 1980s, the idea was that the visual system completely takes the visual scene apart. So for example, if I show you an object here, it has a definable line, but this is actually a very hard problem for a robot. A robot would have a hard time telling you that this is a cup, because it's clear the edges are hard to see and it won't be able to define them. But you look at it and you see there's an edge and there's an edge. And so somewhere in the visual system, there's a little bit of a neuron, there's a little system with neurons that picks out this little bit, this little bit, this little bit, this little bit. And it says, there's an edge. It feeds it up to the next level in the brain. And that part of the brain takes all of that and says, okay, we have a line. And then another part of the brain says, I think that line belongs to this area. Right. And that's the problem the robot has. The robot may see the line and say it belongs over here. And then it'll say there's a cup, you know, cup space way over here or something and it'll screw it up. But our brain says there's a line. And there's some object. And then it feeds it up. And the other part of the brain says, I think it's a cup. And then you can reach and you can grab it and you can pick it up. And so the question is how does the brain do that so quickly? You could throw that cup at me with water in it. And you could stay the water could stay in the cup and I could catch it and I could drink it. You know, most robots at this point couldn't do something like that. And so the idea was that over time, over the 30 36 35 years, however old I am, I've had all this experience of dealing with the world and dealing with clear cups. And I figured out that that situation right there on that table is probably a clear cup and not a clear elephant or a clear cat or something like that. And so the brain must be using memory from higher levels, feeding it back down to the visual cortex and telling the visual cortex what to expect increasing efficiency, increasing excitability, efficiency, expectation is one way to think of it. And so the brain is saying there's more than likely a cup there and not a tiny clear elephant, right? And if you see a tiny clear elephant, you've got a problem probably or you're on a psychedelic, right? And so the brain is constantly priming the rest of the brain past based on past experience. And that was really what I wanted to study. How does that happen? How early in the visual processing stream does that priming actually happen? And it turns out Ancestrally, perhaps, I mean, yeah, maybe there's some older memory that's tuning the system. And that's likely that's probably what genetics is doing to the brain. And so we basically used a neuro imaging technique a way to look at brain activation to ask how quickly in time does memory feedback into the visual system. And we found very, very early. Whoa, okay. Basically, the visual hierarchy is feeding back all the way to the earliest inputs of the visual system called V1 and V2, as we think. And it's really priming the system at the earliest level, which just sort of went against some of the basic models about the way the visual system works. So we could say that our deepest, let's say libraries of memory, it has a feedback to the earliest parts of the information coming in through the visual system. And so that feedback mechanism that's occurring increases efficiency. Okay, okay. Sure, increases efficiency updates the model as a way to think about it. The visual system is constantly creating a model. I mean, what I'm looking at right now in the world is a model of the visual input. I'm not actually looking at the visual world. And that model is based on past experience. And of course, you can tune that model in interesting ways through psychedelics, brain stimulation, or try not eating for 36 hours or 72 hours. That also will change the model and you can have some pretty interesting experiences. So, you know, the model is constantly being updated based on incoming information and old information. And it's just constantly tuning this model based on the best, the best possible guess about what's out there in the world. But you know, that was one of the sort of take home messages from my research and from my whole training is that what I'm looking at is just the best guess that my brain can give me. It's not really the actual data. It's an interpretation of the data based on past experience and based on input. And it's a very good guess, of course. I mean, it lines up pretty well. Yes, yes. And then there are ways to hack into that icon that we've turned the cup into an icon. And so if we want to get really in a space of awe about it, we can do potentially things like a psychedelic or we can do something that resets us to that child like state. And so there's different ways to kind of tap into maybe some of the earlier ways that we were initially have had awe around a chair or human or building or a location around the world. We have an image, the first image, your brain sees things you don't. You were just explaining this to us. Okay, so walk us through this. Sure. So these are the stimuli we used in my experiment. And typically these are flashed for about 100 milliseconds, a tenth of a second, very fast on the screen and they go off. And the typical percept, the perception that the subject has is of a black novel object. So we ask them what do you see? They just say novel. And we also show them things like a tree, you know, a black tree, a black basketball, and they'll say familiar. So it's novel familiar, novel familiar novel. So here's a novel stimulus. But what we've done actually is we've embedded a familiar stimulus on the outside. So the border is actually a seahorse on both sides and those seahorses are making the novel object in the middle. And the question was, does the brain also see a seahorse even though the subject doesn't consciously see the seahorse? And there were two different theoretical ways that different theories predicted different things, basically. One theory said the brain is going to assign the object. This is called border assignment in visual neuroscience. The brain says there's a border and then it says the border belongs to the black object and then you consciously see novel object. So that's a feedforward theory of vision. The feedback theory, the one that we believed in at the time, said the brain sees a border and it considers both situations. It considers maybe there's something out there that's familiar. And then another part of the brain says, no, no, no, it's novel. And the other part says, I think it's a seahorse. And then, and they start competing. There's a competitive process in the brain. I had that exact thing happen when I first saw that. Yeah, right. And if you're tuned to it, maybe you can feel like, wait a minute, there's something going on here. There's an argument that happened here. Right. So basically the idea is there's an argument happening in the visual cortex. And a part of the visual system says, I'm 80% sure there's a seahorse. And it's got all kinds of things going off seahorse alarm bells. The other part says, I'm 99% sure it's novel. And the 99% wins. And that's what pops into your consciousness. And so it was really a demonstration that the brain is seeing objects that you're not. And that was what led. We got a lot of news publication out of this and news titles where your brain sees things that you don't. Which is true, your brain is seeing a lot that you don't. In hundreds of milliseconds, this argument is happening. And then we become consciously aware of what the final decision was. That's a very good question. That was one of the fundamental things I was interested in is, you know, I was really interested in consciousness. And how do we study it on a fine grain scale? It turns out that you can try to figure out the exact moment when someone is conscious of a stimulus that you flash for just a millisecond, or five milliseconds, or 10 milliseconds. It seems to be somewhere between 200 and 400 milliseconds. So if I flash this on a screen, it's a totally black room, you're conscious of something in your head, what you're thinking of, but then you have this flash of an object. How long does it take from the retinal impinging on the neurons, firing all the way to your lateral geniculate nucleus into your visual cortex? That takes about 50 to 100 milliseconds. Probably not conscious then. But then you can see the information volley up the visual system, volley up into the memory system. And at some point along that line, it seems like consciousness emerges of that visual object. And where does the volley go from the visual system to where does it relate to the memory system? What area is that? It kind of goes from visual system, which is in the back, to temporal cortex, into the sort of memory system in the brain. And this is all highly interconnected system. But the question is, when does consciousness emerge and where? And to those questions we don't quite know just yet, but it seems like if you're really measuring the neural timing with electrical ways of recording brain activity, seems to be somewhere around 200 to 400 milliseconds. And what we found, interestingly, is that the brain is still processing an object that you'll never consciously see after that point in time. And so the brain is still holding on to it. And the question is, why? Why is the brain doing that? And I think it gets back to this notion that the brain is giving you a guess. It doesn't really know what's out there. And as I said, this is a very, very difficult question for the brain. What's out there? What are all these objects? And so the brain is going, I'm going to hold on to this just in case I'm wrong. If I get some more information that actually says, no, it's a seahorse. And you need to eat that seahorse. If you're trying to eat, you know, if you're hungry and you're out searching for things, you may come back and scan again and say, okay, that's something that I want. So both of the probabilities live, and then we collapse one of the two, and then that becomes what we're consciously aware of. But then somehow the memory system also retains the second one that we didn't actually collapse and make the decision of, wow, there's a lot of yeah, quantum mechanical similarities. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's things aren't as definite when you look in the brain. I mean, we have this definite percept and we feel like this is reality, I'm looking at it, clearly this is a chair, I can feel it. But the brain is saying it's probably a chair, you know? Yeah. Which that's very similar to quantum mechanics in the sense that there's probabilistic wave fields and they collapse into an object, but really behind that there's still a probabilistic field. And the brain is just dealing with probabilities all the time. 99.99% sure that's a chair. So I was making the point that what we are perceiving as a model and it's a best fit model that the brain has given us. It's the best guess at what's out there. If you go back into the philosophy of science and you ask questions like, can we know the truth, the actual truth, the stuff behind the stuff? You know, can we get at the person behind the curtain? If you think about what I'm saying here, it's very similar to what Immanuel Kant argued that what we are perceiving is interpretation of the sensory datum. He called it the numina and the phenomena. The numina is the data coming in, the phenomena is what we're looking at. It's a model being wrapped around the datum. And if that's the case, we're always going to be stuck in the interpretive model. And Kant actually said space and time, causality and I think 12 total categories are actually given by our brains or our minds to the datum. So space and time aren't actually out there. Space and timer in our heads and they're added to the data because that's the only way we can understand the world. We have to have data spatially and temporally organized otherwise this would just be a mess. And if that's the case, then what does that say about our models in science? They're models. They're just going to be good models and we can keep getting closer and closer to the truth but we're always stuck inside the model. And that's a crucial point. You know when we're teaching our students in the lab now, we try to get that across. You know you don't have to pretend like we're going to know everything because we're scientists. You got to understand that this is a model and it's probably a better model than astrology for example. If I can pick on astrology for a minute. You know astronomy versus astrology. The astronomy model is a much better model of what's going on out there. Astrology is talking about other things maybe but if it tries to predict the movement of the stars and things astronomy is a better model. It's never going to be the complete model of the cosmos. And so we have to sort of understand that because we're locked in these perceptual models. This would be a mess if it wasn't temporally and spatially organized. Yeah that's quite cool. Okay and then also that we're limited to the model and we're going to constantly be trying to update the models to get closer and closer to the source code of the reality and maybe we can get to some things of the source code hopefully and then also run our own simulated worlds. Yeah but I think that's also the power of science is that it's giving us an updated model that seems to be moving closer. Now a philosopher is going to interject and say wait a minute isn't this circular right? You're using a model to understand the model and you're moving forward but by testing the model with data and with feedback from a community of other scientists there seems to be a way to move maybe I can give Plato's cave as an analogy. In Plato he says that the situation that we're actually in is we're tied to a cave. There are these people in this cave they're tied to the cave and they're looking at shadows. The sun is illuminating everything and creating shadows on the wall. The people in the cave think that's reality it's all they know they see shadows on the wall but reality is that there's a cave there's the world out there and that the shadows are actually being caused by the sun and so the nice thing about science is we're just creeping out of the cave very slowly by taking the empirical data and testing the model and there's one one one girl over there in the corner who's saying you know you guys are looking at that shadow but or you're looking at reality but if you if you look at it from this angle the whole thing changes the math changes or whatever she's doing right she's doing something to challenge that model and I think that's really the power of science is even though it may never be complete it's somehow moving closer to getting us a little bit outside of the cave and it may even one day say there's the sun everything's actually be illuminating by this other source that nobody was looking at quantum physics or something beyond quantum physics whatever it is and then so then how did then the idea come up that you wanted to do the postdoc with army research labs your nice labs as well and and the non-invasive cognitive enhancement lab okay so walk us through the movement from doing all this to that sure so back in graduate school in Tucson U of A I started doing an experiment where we were recording from inside people's brains it's recording EEG the electrical signal from patients who are undergoing brain surgery so I'm scrubbed up I look like you know a medical doctor I've got the blue garb on and they're putting electrodes down in the brain to try to help help Parkinson's patients sort of deal with that issue of the motor trimmer we know the parts of the brain to put an electrode you turn that electrode on the trimmer goes away and they can open their hand up and so we had this nice opportunity to actually go in I literally they had a hole in their brain and the hole in their head electrode in their brain a wire coming out I'm standing there at the operating table the patient has to be awake because it's brain surgery and there's a lead going into my EEG system and I'm recording their brain and so I started getting fascinated with this notion of brain stimulation because I saw how powerful that technology really can be you turn the stimulator on and their tremors go away I mean this person's life has changed and really that's why I signed up for science I want to I want to understand consciousness and use that knowledge to change people's lives that's that's the goal and so this was the first case where I was out of my visual perception lab and it's sort of in the operating room and seeing people's lives being changed and I got sort of obsessed with brain stimulation at that point now if you back up a little bit when I was back in a neuroscience lab I'd actually seen the Dalai Lama give a speech and the Dalai Lama said basically if somebody a brain scientist can create a surgery or something like that to give him the effects of meditating without having to meditate he would sign up that was back when I was an undergraduate I heard that and so there's a little nugget he implanted it in my head you know as a as a student who was really like susceptible to having that happen um and so here I was I was seeing a brain surgery I was seeing someone's life being changed and at that time I was meditating myself and I was sort of seeing the changes that meditation can give you and I started thinking wait a minute the Dalai Lama said brain surgery giving you the effects of meditation and so I really started sort of thinking is there a way to do this is there a way to do something like this brain surgery but of course not with the brain surgery that would modulate the brain and give someone the effects of meditation or maybe if that isn't possible help someone learn how to meditate quicker which I think is a more realistic goal which even the Dalai Lama endorses which the Dalai Lama endorsed controversially I think of the people around him didn't want him to say things like that but it really sort of woke me up to this possibility what would that look like and what would it look like for someone with Parkinson's to be able to be in control sure and yeah so there's so much potential with neuro stimulation and you got fascinated being there with a literally a hole in the cranium and then electrodes in and then you're re-getting the EEG feedback yourself that's what a cool moment as well to be present there yeah patients would cry I cried the first time I saw it sometimes the new nurses there would cry I mean you see it and it's like this is changing someone's life this is what we all signed up for this is what we want to do and here's a very clear situation where you're seeing that happen for someone so you know it sort of changed me it's it's sort of changed the direction that I wanted to go in so I started looking for other ways to modulate the brain at that point there were these other systems where you didn't have to drill a hole you could put electrodes on the head you could use very strong magnets so if you've got a magnetic field you've got an electric field this way right going back to basic physics class and so if you put a magnet and the magnetic field is moving this way you can induce an electric current in the brain it can actually cause the brain to fire so I kind of knew about these technologies and I started wondering can we use something like that to accelerate meditation and mindfulness and I started sort of moving down that path that's when I met Stuart Hammeroff so I was actually doing one of these surgeries it's called a deep brain stimulation surgery on an OCD patient she had actually flown from a different country took her very a lot of trouble to sort of get to the operating room and she had OCD which as you know is a very difficult disorder you have to be awake during the surgery and so it took eight hours just to get her down on the table to get the hole in her head and somebody in the operating room figured out that I have good bedside banners and so they asked me to talk to her the whole time and so I was going through this whole surgery and seeing how painful this was you know if this works for her it was going to change her life but this was a very painful process I was leaving the operating room and really I think searching for something else thinking okay this is going to work for this person but isn't there a better way to do this and I literally ran into Stuart Hammeroff in the hall like I bumped into him and he turned around and said hey what are you guys doing here and he said we're going to go have a beer that was a really long surgery and Stuart said oh you're doing deep brain stimulation there's actually a better way and he sort of showed up with this answer right the non-invasive brain stimulation the non-invasive way and this way was actually using focused ultrasound which was a kind of new concept at the time so instead of using electrical or magnetic ways to stimulate the brain which kind of makes sense because the language of the brain is sort of electrical gradients this is actually using mechanical energy and using that mechanical energy focusing it into the brain and actually trying to stimulate the brain and let's pull up that second asset that we have and we can start unpacking this with visuals as well okay so yeah taking an ultrasound transducer and targeting stimulation into specific areas how the hell do you do this so the trouble with electricity and magnetism is that it's hard to target it specifically and deeply so with electricity it just spreads everywhere path of least resistance with magnetism it's hard to get it deep without causing a seizure and you don't want to cause seizures in your subjects and your patients the nice thing about ultrasound is that you can actually focus the beam through the skull and if you can do that properly and I'm not going to hype this too much it's a very hard problem to get the ultrasound through the skull but if you can solve that problem you can actually focus the beam anywhere in the brain theoretically and in a couple studies they've actually focused it down to the thalamus which is one of the deepest spots in the brain yeah so I think on the next slide we might have a picture of actually focusing it through the skull so this is another lab this is not my lab this is win leagans lab at university of minnesota and we're looking at the top of the head so imagine you slice my head and now you're looking down into my brain the focused ultrasound is coming through the side of the head and focusing it into the thalamus and you can see how focal that beam is yeah so the red part is where we think the modulation is going to actually happen and you can target in a 3d space yeah with ultrasound because it somehow goes into like a conical exactly yeah it's kind of like an egg shape coming from a single transducer now what a lab recently did a different study actually showed that you can wake a patient up from a coma by stimulating their thalamus so this is a person who has I think a traumatic brain injury they've gone into a coma they put this person in the MRI they find the thalamus by targeting different parts of the brain and then they stimulate it in a way that gets the thalamus back to its normal rhythm now the thalamacortical rhythm is thought to be very fundamental to consciousness expressing throughout the brain if you want to think about it like that and so if you can get that rhythm going you should be able to get consciousness to kind of jump start and that's exactly what they seem to have done in this patient it's one patient and they have to replicate it but if that's true that really shows the power of something like this you can get deep you can do things like wake people from a coma which is something like you see in the movies right yeah and it's a relatively simple technique I mean you have to have an MRI to do it at this point so it's expensive but getting the ultrasound through the skull and focusing is a pretty simple technique actually okay great so this was the big aha moment for you which was enough of this drilling holes through brains let's figure out how to do this without that and then waking people through comas there's so much targeted so where else were you hoping to get targeting and what were you actually doing with the army research labs and nice labs where were you actually targeting what were you actually yeah helping solve so in the beginning what we did is we targeted through the temporal window so this piece of the skull on the side of the head is the thinnest spot here and there's another spot in the back so like I said it's hard to get ultrasound through the skull and so we decided to try to target parts of the brain that we think we can get ultrasound to and in the beginning we did a bunch of pilot tests and we stimulated different parts of the brain we had people consent into this pilot and it turns out that basically stimulating the right prefrontal cortex made people feel better we actually enhanced mood and so we thought okay this is pretty cool we have a mood enhancer we can use that for treatment for mood disorders depression anxiety things like that so the first 200 subjects we ran through several studies and we basically showed that by stimulating right through the temporal lobe sorry the temporal window we can hit the right inferior frontal gyrus and we can basically make people feel better then we did that on a group of depressed patients we reduced depression over the first day but with a five-day protocol we actually reduced anxiety over five days and so it seems to be like a treatment that we can use okay a couple questions so we got new slides we have new slides yes so a couple questions one of the questions is that there's a question about is this through Hertz is this a frequency is this what is the frequency what is the amount of power behind this that's a crucial question if you're asking about safety now the thing about ultrasound is that high intensities can destroy tissue you can heat the tissue up or you can cavitate you can create bubbles the bubbles will move and the bubbles will burst and that causes a sonic wave and that's actually used to treat things like kidney stones so that's been well mapped of course you can use ultrasound for imaging as well so fetal imaging brain imaging they actually use ultrasound to image the brain in the hospital for stroke and so what's nice about this field is the whole energy spectrum has been relatively well mapped not 100% of course but we know below a certain wattage so below about 720 milliwatts per centimeter square it's safe to use on the body on the fetus on the fetus brain on the fetus body all the way up to the human brain and the adult brain and the adult body if you go above 720 milliwatts up to a couple watts there's a gray region we don't really know how safe that is it's probably safe and as far as I can tell it's safe we don't have a lot of empirical data so we don't do that if you go above many watts you start heating up the brain or cavitating the brain so we definitely want to avoid that and anybody out there who reads about my research or hears about it who wants to create a device they have to understand this you know this is kind of a fear that I have actually is I'll tell people you can use ultrasound to enhance your meditation they try to build an ultrasound device and instead of 0.1 watt or 0.1 or 0.5 watts they use 10 watts or 100 watts that would hurt a person quickly or quickly could kill someone actually yeah so you know that there's a danger range here that is a little bit different than using electricity and magnetism and that's why we have to do this in the lab we have to do it with scientific controls and medical controls we have a hospital that's in walking distance to my lab I collaborate directly with medical doctors everything has to be very controlled and like you said within 100 to 700 let's say milliwatts and not 10 watts yeah this is a this is especially with the biohacker movement lots of people are neurohacking they're really trying to get into how to hack themselves and so this is a warning yeah public service announcement don't do it yeah and make sure that if you are that you're being extremely vigilant with yeah with yeah yeah okay doesn't matter evil always wins and that's the bottom line yeah I'd say evil wins in the short term and the good wins in the long term yeah this planet is littered with lost civilization thanks for being you so then okay so then what then that was power and then what about so powers in milliwatts what about then a frequency yeah so there's power there's duty cycle there's the fundamental frequency so the ultrasound frequency and then there's how often you pulse that and actually for safety all of these interact and so it's not just power it you could actually potentially do damage at the FDA limit if you did it continuously for 10 hours and so it's not just the wattage it's how often you pulse it how often you're doing it to that brain how much of a break you give to the brain and so what we do on the human skull going through the skull is usually about half a megahertz megahertz is a million oscillations a second and that seems to be the sweet spot for getting ultrasound through but doing it as safely as we can 500,000 oscillations a second so 500 kilohertz or half a megahertz 500 megahertz 1,000 oscillations a second yeah it's a lot damn that's a lot yeah whoa okay all right so all of these things come together to the safety okay critical and also just just barely starting getting into the weeds of the science it's such a yeah and the technicals it's very interesting stuff okay what do we have here this is from another lab this is from Kim's lab in South Korea what they're doing is they're trying to focus the ultrasound down to the visual cortex so of course I like this because this is a visual stimulation study and the idea is if you can cause visual cortex activity you could actually cause someone to see something that's not there so a little hallucination that's called a phosphine and you can actually get a phosphine if you just press on your eyeball uh-huh they'll press too hard but if you press then you see the little little lights little flurries they're kind of fun that's a phosphine so you're getting that because you're actually causing the retinal cells to fire you're actually pushing on those cells and you're causing some firing so you can also do that by pushing on the visual cortex directly if I drilled a hole in your head I pushed on it with some electricity then I would get you to see things that aren't there so they're doing that with ultrasound you can see the little transducer this is actually being done in the MRI which is pretty neat and what you see on the screen is actually the ultrasound causing visual activation and for I think about 70% of the subjects although it's been a while since I've read this 70% of them got the stimulation and they actually saw little visual flurries so little visual phosphines that weren't actually there and that shows it's focal and you can actually cause brain activation which is pretty neat and does it it requires a substance that acts as a conducive as well or yeah in the scanner usually use water ultrasound passes right through water you can use water so there's a big water bag you lay your head back in the water bag and the transducers behind the bag oh okay so that's the best way to do it in the scanner there's some heating things you have to worry about in the scanner so water is the best for that in the lab we usually use ultrasound gel so you just use the same gel they use for fetal imaging you can use that interestingly there's a paper out of the UK I think that showed that KY jelly works better than ultrasound gel for ultrasound transmission just for various you know physics reasons and also KY jelly is cheaper than ultrasound gel but we don't usually keep that in the lab because it looks weird it all depends on what lab it is yeah yeah yeah yeah and the market the stock price of KY went up after that segment yeah we can get them to sponsor us that episode this episode is sponsored by KY jelly lube so what did they what did you see when you did the when they were doing this this visual cortex stimulation here what did the lab say yeah what was happening when it was successful the stimulation ultrasound stimulation here so basically it caused the subjects to see that visual percept but what was really neat is how without oh yeah without pressing or yeah just in so the person just sitting in the scanner the ultrasound is shooting into their visual cortex and they're just looking at a blank screen I think or just looking into the scanner and every once in a while they get a pulse and they would just see a flash pulse they'd see a flash and there was nothing flashed for them nothing actually in front of them and they were reporting actually where it is because the visual cortex has a retinotopic map so there's a map here I can split it like this right so this quadrant actually has a spot this quadrant has a spot and then you can just map the whole thing and so if you actually move the ultrasound around I can actually move the little hallucination around your visual scene to make it dance yeah and ultimately what my lab is actually working on is trying to actually you have to be careful about the way you say this because it sounds scary if you say it wrong but you could create a holographic ultrasound image in the skull so you could create like a ball or a square for example you could hit that into the visual cortex with ultrasound beam and then I would see a little ball correct right and then I could see a little ball over here so basically this is already happening right now potentially we're working on it yeah we want to demonstrate well it'd be pretty neat yeah yeah to do ultrasound stimulation be able to see yeah things that are not actually physically there but are stimulated in this could already be happening what you're describing of being able to stimulate things into the physical world could already be what we are in fact experiencing right now right yeah so easy to hypothesize easy to hypothesize if you're already talking about it like this okay all right and then the next slide as well with this all right so this is a model that we've created in our lab so it's kind of hard to see on the screen but there's a brain there's some brain tissue underneath and this is an actual person's skull and as I was describing the real trick is trying to get the ultrasound through the skull as a focus beam the skull has different sort of thickness around different parts of it it has little deviations and aberrations and as you push the ultrasound beam through the skull it bends it or reflects it it absorbs it does all kinds of things that are not good for trying to get it through the skull and so part of what our lab is doing is trying to find novel ways to focus that beam and do what's called aberration correction correct the beam as it's going through and if we can do that the best way would actually create this crazy sci-fi helmet where you had tens of thousands of little ultrasound elements and all of them are shooting down into the brain at once that's the best way to do it ultrasound 10,000 little ultrasound yeah I'd put a million if I could a million of them and then there's a billionaire watching who wants to give me a lot of money and then I'll make this device yeah and then you can like hyper-target with a million of ultrasound rather than just one yeah okay and then interesting but that would also it would still have to go from the skull in so you I mean it would still be partially stimulating all of the regions on the way in right so it still partially stimulates on the way in does it right it depends on how much energy each say the the non-target regions so yeah the ultrasounds going through all of that but if you had enough tiny elements each one of those could emit you know say 50 milliwatts everybody's sending 50 milliwatts which shouldn't affect the brain all that much as far as we can tell so 50 milliwatts is coming down and then it sums to 700 milliwatts got it okay that would kind of be the idea got it okay and then the non-target areas aren't even being yeah as stimulating they're getting a little energy a little jiggle but then they just say okay going back to normal okay cool cool all right the other neat thing about that is you need to be able to image at the same time so the brain is moving if you just slosh around your brain moves around a little bit every heartbeat actually moves the brain so you need a real-time measure of where the brain is and where the sensor is the electrode or the ultrasound transducer in real-time now of course ultrasound can image we know all about that because you do fetal imaging and so you could actually image with ultrasound you could actually look at brain activation with ultrasound looking at the bold or the blood activation and you could stimulate all at the same time so this is my like Ferrari you know dream car of brain stimulation helmet I mean this is really where you could go and actually a couple labs in France have shown recently that in animals if you take the skull off which they do in animal labs which makes me feel bad for the animals but take the skull off you can actually get real-time fine-grain images of the brain beautiful images if people look them up they'll see them actually better resolution than an ephemeride so the structure you can see all this beautiful structure and then if the animal is doing a task you can see the brain activation with ultrasound so that's my dream have that for humans but leave the skull on right okay so you can get real so you're trying to get you're trying to get the neural activity real-time being mapped as you do a neuromodulation yeah and then constantly be able to see what's happening moment to moment right and that would allow us to solve this problem the aberration correction problem because then we'd be able to see what we're doing while we're doing it and then we can correct yes yes yeah okay and let's go to that next image Ron okay and what was the scale the decibel scale and what's this scale same scale oh this is missing so this is a wattage scale so this is a wattage scale total watt so the other one was decibels yeah you can look at the total amount of sound energy you're putting in in decibels or you can convert that to wattage oh got it so there's different ways to look at the energy and is this in watts and not milli watts this is an overall watt so there's a little subtlety here there's two ways to measure wattage really there's more ways to measure it in the brain you can measure it over space you can measure it over time or over space and time and like I said we think in space time so we need to really think about both dimensions and really if you think about it over space I could just ask how much total wattage is there here but if that's all I reported as a scientist it would be a little bit of trickery because really I want to know how much wattage is that neuron right there getting right because you really want to be careful about the overall overall wattage for very small spaces and then you could ask how much is it getting over time which is another question so the overall wattage that the FDA limits to the body and the brain is in um actually over 100 watts total but you could say that's 100 watts over 10 years right I mean how how much time right yeah so if you take the time into account the FDA says per centimeter square of tissue or bone or brain over time you're limited to 720 milliwatts so I could put another scale for how long so that that's also that's taking time into account so time goes into the equation automatically okay over oh so 720 milliwatts per cubic centimeter centimeter of tissue yeah over per second per total stimulation per total stimulation time so that's one thing that they haven't regulated yet which they will at some point is how much so I could burst within a micro second you know a tenth of a millisecond to a millionth of a millisecond and in that burst I could deliver all 720 milliwatts now does the brain does that damage the brain we don't actually know and so that's what I was saying there are these subtleties in the science that we haven't mapped yet and someone who doesn't understand the subtleties may say oh I can do all 720 milliwatts within one microsecond and then they get vascular damage or micro hemorrhages in their brain right I mean stuff like that could happen yes yes so right now we follow protocols that come out of the animal literature that we know are safe because they cut up the brains of the animal and they look at it from different dimensions okay and then here's some of the data the figures of data yes teach us about this if you go back to the other side real quick okay so one question we started asking is can we modulate parts of the brain that are really starting to show up from the mindfulness literature really what we're interested now is accelerating mindfulness practice and so here looking from the top down we're ultrasounding into the interior cingulate cortex it's a very important part of the brain for error monitoring so if I gave you a task and I said every time I use the word the put your hand up and every once in a while I'd say three and you put your hand up that's an error that part of the brain would send a signal to other parts of the brain to make the brain ready for the error in the future so the motor system has to get ready the social system has to say oh I'm so stupid you know now I got to act smarter you know there's all these systems that deal with the error so that seems to be emerging from the interior cingulate okay now that's really important for mindfulness because what's happening in mindfulness is say you're supposed to focus on the breath your object is the breath feel the breath out of your nose doing it over and over every once in a while I'm going to start thinking about something else that's essentially an error and now you have to go bring the attention back to the breath yes bring the attention back so that's a really important part of mindfulness we think that the ACC the interior cingulate is involved in that process and so the idea was if we put a little ultrasound energy into the ACC can we make someone more mindful or can they learn mindfulness faster excellent okay yeah yeah this yeah so that this is a similar thing with the when the font comes on the screen and it says the word red but it's written in blue yes stuff like that and then your brain's like ah okay now I know to not make that mistake and then the social like you said that's and same thing with meditation when you're following your breath and then everyone experiences this when they meditate you go to your calendar or your email or your yeah social life and then so the the the the the ACC seems to play a pretty serious role in the body's ability to reclaim the attention and bring it back at least monitor at least monitor it's the monitor piece and then the signaling piece and then if you make another mistake you know it's that sort of monitoring within monitoring that's going on it's involved in a lot of other things as well just sort of cognitive control or regulation in general the list is crazy yeah yeah yeah of what there's an abundance of spindle cells which is a completely different shape neuron than normal there's like there's crazy stuff there yeah but let's yeah let's stick on on on the effect on neural modulation with it the ACC and then how that affects mindfulness yeah sure so basically we brought subjects into the lab this location was a control site for our mood studies because we were claiming stimulating here made people feel better but what if it's just stimulating anywhere in the brain maybe the default mode is stimulate with ultrasound you feel better so we targeted at the top of the head and that was going right down into the interior singulate and we claimed that that shouldn't do much to mood in the way that the right stimulation was doing so in the end of the study well pre and post before and after the study we gave a mindfulness scale which is just a scale that asks you know how much are you paying attention currently how much are you thinking about the past how much are you thinking about the future it's not a great scale but it tries to get at this notion of current attention in the moment so we just gave this to people these people are not meditators none of them have meditation experience they weren't meditating during the study they were just sitting there doing nothing and we just gave them the scale just to see what would happen and the idea was maybe stimulating the ACC would give them some attentional control so they would be more mindful more in the moment more likely to engage currently with what was going on instead of sort of talking to themselves and that kind of stuff and then so then the so the neuro modulation that you performed with ultrasound was to the ACC for how many milliwatts over how long how many sessions they got 30 seconds so we what we're trying to do is the smallest dose possible to get an effect effect okay it's called the Allara principle in medicine you just use as little possible to get the effect yeah so 30 seconds seemed like way too little for us but we were actually getting it there so we tried 30 seconds for how many people in that study there was over 30 like 35 or something like that and then the next asset is what you had as yeah okay yeah cool so this is the data from the mindfulness scale and essentially moving up the scale means you're more mindful your attention is more in the moment on the left it's the pre versus post for people who got ultrasound so basically in the orange bar there people who got real ultrasound to the ACC reported more mindfulness on the scale we also did placebo of course in the placebo condition they moved down slightly it's not a significant difference but really there was no difference in mindfulness which is what you'd expect and so it seems like just stimulating that region alone led to people having more reported mindfulness in the current moment so pretty neat actually yeah yeah okay and then this is just the beginning of being able to apply a neuromodulation for enhanced mindfulness yeah so this was a tiny little hint I mean we didn't really make much of this this was just a hint that maybe we can modulate those brain regions that show up in the mindfulness literature and actually help people learn mindfulness quicker and you have an illustration here the next asset that kind of breaks down mindfulness a little bit more yeah yeah so in the lab we're always doing what we call operationalizing things that means you need to define it in a way where you can empirically study it and mindfulness is notoriously hard to define what is mindfulness what is meditation what are these higher states you know what is enlightenment I mean I don't think we'll ever have a definition for something like that if it's real but even coming down to mindfulness and just defining it so we can measure it is very difficult so I've been working with a meditation teacher Shenzhen Young very well known mindfulness teacher a brilliant person someone who really does have a beautiful mind every time you're hanging with him you just learn something new and he blows your mind Shenzhen has a very scientific and objective reductionist way of sort of thinking about mindfulness so he's a great person for someone like me to team up with because you know he's already thought about how do you operationalize mindfulness how do you define it how would you study it and so Shenzhen and I have been working together for almost two years now I think I'm trying to figure out how do you define mindfulness how do you measure it and how do you modulate the brain to help people learn mindfulness faster that's really what we've been talking about and really to be honest Shenzhen's the reason I've gone down this path I mean he's really sort of changed my life 50 years of experience yeah 50 years yeah you only have to spend a couple minutes with him to have your life changed mine so that's how brilliant and and sort of convincing he is and so sensory clarity concentration power equanimity yeah so Shenzhen has broken mindfulness down into three core attention skills and he really talks about it in terms of acquiring these skills equanimity basically means having a balanced mind so being able to allow sensations thoughts and emotions to arise and fall rise and fall without sort of resisting them without getting attached to them without sort of holding on to them so if you've ever had an emotional moment where you need to let go because you need to have an interview with someone and you got to stop thinking about it the more equanimity you have the more you can just let it go and pay attention so that's a skill sensory clarity and concentration power are skills of concentration so sensory clarity is being able to track visually auditorily sensorily sort of what's happening as a vision scientist I really like this one because I can measure that I can give you a bunch of visual stimuli really fast on the screen and I can ask how much do you see and someone who meditates a lot so Shenzhen for example if you give him a visual paradigm he can track all these visual stimuli really fast and so that's a trainable skill damn versus actually having maybe like a little bit more of like a clouded yeah yeah right view of not even knowing that you know I can show you two stimuli really fast you may have just seen them together as one whereas someone who's trained their attention would say oh it's a bird and a plane it's not a bird plane like you saw concentration power is just being able to focus on what you're trying to focus on so that's a really important one for the modern world because our attention's being split across everything everything you know Facebook and Twitter and our phone and vibration you know the phone is going off and so our attention's really being split and we're perhaps nobody knows yet but we might be actually losing our ability to focus on what we're trying to focus on agreed and we find in many ways the most meaning in our lives from sustained periods of focus on things that are our North Star that's great yeah I mean one of the central claims of some forms of Buddhism is that actually having concentration power leads to insight insight about the nature of the self the nature of the way things work you know these deep insights that like kind of change the way you see the whole world so that's called insight meditation and the idea is that you get things like insight when all of these things are working together so Shenzhen's claim really is any one of those is a good skill to have if you're a basketball player for example Steph Curry he's probably got all of these really but you know if Steph Curry really focused on concentration power he's going to make more free throws right so there's sort of practice level practical effects from these things but the claim from Shenzhen is that as these things are working together that's what mindful awareness is having them all together in unison gives you the ability to get out of your way to get out of your own emotional turmoil or whatever's going on and just pay attention to the present moment and then as you do that over and over throughout your life what tends to happen is you become happier you know you start finding more meaning out of everyday life you start tasting your food hearing your music enjoying hanging out with the people that you know previously were sort of making you upset or annoying you or whatever so really it's sort of just by using these skills your general sense of well-being begins to change and that's really the good stuff as Shenzhen talks about it yeah the mindful awareness combination of these three things can just radically change our lives our family community civilizations live so to be able to do something like a neuromodulation to hack the processes at the top of the list because then we can potentially update the code of our world in a more in a way that drives us closer towards that prosperity right and that's kind of where we're you know where we're heading with the new SEMA sonification sonication enhanced mindful awareness right okay and the image on the way there this is an image of the default mode network the next one Ronny right is that what this one is that's right okay so part of the question is if Shenzhen is right or at least in the right direction of what mindfulness is can we stimulate different parts of the brain and help people have a little more equanimity or stimulate a part of the visual system and give you more concentration power so that when you try to learn mindfulness you can sort of do that faster you can learn the practice faster you can see what is it like for me to actually have equanimity yeah and now that I have equanimity what's it like to try to concentrate on something oh wow holy cow now I'm not getting distracted by thinking about you know Donald Trump messing up the world oh my gosh you know that's okay let that go for a minute bring my attention back you know once once people sort of feel that you know in their experience then they can get motivated to do it more or they can actually learn you know how to do that quicker and so the question is if that's possible what are the brain regions that we target and that's where things like the default mode come in so on the left this is a picture of what happens when you put someone in an MRI and you just don't give them a task so you just set them in there they're maybe waiting for the task or whatever if you look at what's going on in their brain you typically see the same pattern in different subjects that's called the default mode pattern and it was called that because it was thought that's the default mode the person is usually closing their eyes or laying in the scanner it's very loud and when they're in there they're in their head they're thinking about something right usually what am I gonna do after this I got homework I said that stupid thing to my girlfriend oh my gosh I'm sort of usually going that negative loop so that's the default mode is the rumination rumination's part of it but it's really about self-referential thinking self-referential thinking so selfing is sort of a turn that you can talk about selfing has a lot of dimensions right it's planning it's thinking it's thinking negative thinking positive there's all these different dimensions to selfing but this core pattern so the posterior cingulate the medial prefrontal cortex and some parts of the prior lobe that shows up when most people are selfing it doesn't matter what culture you're in what your socioeconomic status is past experience whatever it is that shows up and so some people are claiming this is the neurophysiological basis of the self that's probably not true we may never know what that is but at least it has something to do with thinking about the self referring to the self and that kind of stuff so what happens is if you have a depressed person in the scanner you'll see more red more red means more activation more self-referential thinking more selfing right and it's usually negative selfing so in depression you ruminate you get stuck in negative thought loops I'm so stupid why did I say that Alan asked me this question and I really should have explained it differently that's a normal process and that's a good process to have but if I do that for the next five weeks while I'm giving a talk or while I'm with my girlfriend that's a problem because then it's taking me out of what I need to be paying attention to that happens in depression and so you'll see way more red in the blue here this is long-term meditation in blue means less activation relative to control people and so the blue brain is the mindfulness brain is actually the opposite that you see to like the depressed brain for example that makes total sense because mindfulness is all about putting your attention into whatever is going on if you start selfing you pay attention to it but then you don't engage with it right and then you bring your attention back to Alan and then I bring my attention to the sound okay when I sit down in a chair and I don't have my laptop I don't have TV I don't have my phone I don't have anything to distract me but I just sit down in a chair whether I'm outside or inside wherever if there's a lot of people walking a lot of buses or whatever versus if I'm just looking at some trees without anyone else there or if I'm just in the studio so there's no one else here what is the difference between me having a mindful presence in the chair versus me having a selfing default mode network experience in the chair that's a great question if you figured that out you'd get a really good science paper but we have some clues and the clues are so you can think about it as mind wandering versus mindfulness if you want to put it on a spectrum and there's ways to study and probe mind wandering mind wandering is just letting your mind do whatever it wants sometimes it'll pay attention to the sound sometimes it'll think about what to eat later sometimes it'll think about stupid stuff I said it's just kind of balancing all around mindfulness is effortfully focusing on an object that's one way to do it so but if then the mind wanders to a place I can that is not a place of excessive rumination like we were saying earlier but if it wanders somewhere cool like ah I'm seeing the plant in a new way if I can I be mindful with that thought that came up is that the idea so yeah there's another mindfulness practice that's not effortfully focusing it's effortfully paying attention to whatever the mind is doing so it's almost like a third perspective if you zoom out from it it's called metacognition in psychology so that's called open awareness practice you can do open awareness where if I just try to start paying attention to the whole room it almost feels like my consciousness expands around the room so that's also mindfulness because you're paying attention to whatever's going on and you can let your mind wander it's it's fine to do that but by paying attention to what the mind is doing it's less likely to get looped it's stuck in those loops okay so then there's a based there's the sides are our mind wandering and mindfulness and mindfulness could be in a way a meta perspective on the mind wandering sure okay it could do that whereas mind wandering and doing it intentionally with potential towards unity with this or a development of an idea that one is having yeah yeah and not the excessive rumination so doing it intentionally yeah the intention is really important and the intention from a brain point of view gets into things like the interior cingulate because if you you know this is a not the right way to talk about the brain but if you tell the interior cingulate another part of the brain says hey start paying more attention the ACC is going to get a little bit more resources and give you more ability to start tracking what's going on and if the ACC is saying well tell me when the attention tell me when you lose the ability to pay attention to what's going on so that's the open awareness piece if you just start getting lost you start thinking about food you think about where your food comes from you think I want India Indian food you start thinking I should go to India because I need to learn how to meditate now you're getting lost this is a Sharon Salzburg analogy that I really like and Sharon actually went to India to learn mindfulness to learn meditation and then turned it into mindfulness in the west and so you can get lost down that track that's not mindfulness mindfulness would be paying attention seeing that happen and seeing it lead to the next thought and then bringing your attention back to whatever is going on and then hearing the birds and then feeling the sensation how hearing the birds sounds nice actually and then saying okay come back you know and just continuously bringing yourself back this is an award-winning science paper this discussion is fascinating okay and more for part two at some point to unpack more depth into this more slide yeah yeah yeah correct so and then this is the most recent endeavor so this is now you're doing this at the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona but sonication enhanced mindfulness aware so this is kind of where we built up to you are now going to be doing this with most of your time is conducting this research of ultrasound neuromodulation to areas like the anterior cingulate to catalyze mindfulness right okay yep and what we did in the beginning is Shenzhen and I started talking about the feasibility of this what would the science look like how would we know we have a good effect and a little bit of worrying I don't see Shenzhen worry much because he's such a mindful person but if he worries about one thing it's about what if we do something bad what if we disrupt sleep or disrupt someone's ability to make new memories I mean we are talking about the brain we're talking about modulating something that we have very little knowledge about how it actually works and so we talked about all this for a year and Shenzhen and I talk a lot about this and we decided okay this is worth doing because if it's real we'll have clinical interventions for almost every disorder if you can reduce suffering at its cause you should be able to reduce suffering and chronic pain addiction all the way down the list you should be able to create an intervention for all of these things and we thought that the risk was worth trying but we wanted to do it on people in the beginning who have a lot of experience exploring their consciousness if you want to think about it like that so people who know what altered states are like and they have the skills to deal with being altered people with a lot of mindfulness experience have that skill and so we decided all right the first subjects will be very long-term meditators who have enough experience and practice to be okay if we sort of push them in a weird direction for a couple minutes they can bring themselves back turns out Shenzhen signed up to be the first study the first subject the first study was going to be Shenzhen he consented into the study and he was so overjoyed to be part of this I mean just being around Shenzhen at this point would make anybody happy he's just so happy so we put Shenzhen through a two-week protocol and we started sonocating the default mode and other parts of the brain that we think should basically enhance equanimity you're now not just sonocating from to the interior singular you're doing other areas okay which ones are you doing so we did the head of the caudate nucleus which is part of the basal ganglia wow that's a deep structure it's an important structure for basic motor function all the way to learning and memory and sleep and other things and so that's a that's a high risk actually area but we did that because Shenzhen found this very very fascinating disorder called Aethiomhormia yeah yeah yeah I've talked about that in a TED talk recently locked in the present moment right these people have bilateral lesions of their basal ganglia and what happens is if you get the right lesions at the right place these people go into what seems like a pseudo arhat if you're a Buddhist or if you're interested in philosophy they're completely conscious without any content like imagine just being completely conscious of everything but no contents within that consciousness everything is just consciousness god that'd be interesting right to be able to tap into and yeah yeah yeah so in buddhism pseudo arhat means someone who's fully awakened fully enlightened however you wanted to find that but they can turn it on and off yeah yeah and in some traditions you turn it off to become a bodhisattva so you can come back and give give love and the practice back to the people yes which is what the Buddha did so Shenzhen looked at this and thought aha now we have a spot in the brain we can target that if we could safely target just for a couple minutes or a couple seconds give someone a taste of that whatever it is that would radically change someone's life or if not it would at least help them zoom into a meditation practice but the real goal is radically change someone get them out of their egoic turmoil long enough to see that this is a beautiful existence we're all together we're all one and if we see that maybe we'll work together to save the planet and do all the other things that we need to do so we went after the head of the kade we went after the default mode network we went after a couple other structures in Shenzhen and we gave this one in a million I think I gave it Shenzhen was giving it one in 10,000 something like that we just thought this will be fun Shenzhen and I will try this and then we'll go home and laugh about it and that's it the first experiment Shenzhen basically said I think I have more equanimity we did it again three days later he's like there's more equanimity we did it three days later again he's like this is working holy crap a lot of explicatives came out and how many milliwatts were you? at that point it was 400 milliwatts so I actually halved the legal limit just to make sure we were being safe for 30 seconds at this point it was I don't know the total it was 60 pulses so the pulses are very short they're micro pulses so probably not even 30 seconds total and on four different regions and just two ACC and just we did just the basal game just the basal game in the beginning just because I didn't want to do too much we don't want to undo the networks in the brain over time Shenzhen has a relatively old brain he's 73 I think at this point every three days you're doing this for for an hour total so it's 60 pulses over an hour over an hour okay the pulses are very short we turn it off just to make sure everything's okay and turn it back on now Shenzhen's meditating the whole time yeah whole time so what he's doing is he's really introspecting he's watching the watcher you know he's watching what's going on he's using different meditative practices and we give him a little burst a little jiggle by the second week he was like I think we're on to something you should think about doing this more often and I thought well I'm not going to give up my whole career you know for this kind of crazy meditation person who shows up in my life and tells me to do this really sort of interesting thing but you know okay let's try the trial again so we waited several months just to make sure everything was okay I did cognitive testing on him we'd actually taken MRI on him a couple times everything seems fine so then we did a multi-week study over three weeks this time spaced it out over three days by the third week Shenzhen started really deeply experiencing those insights that I was talking about this was really doing something to him that was opening up the meditation practice when the pieces came together the equanimity sensory clarity concentration power right which he already has a lot of but you know meditation practitioners you know we we have our habitual patterns that get locked in and by stimulating a different part of the brain different parts of the brain for Shenzhen it sort of opened up a new door or something for him and now you're going to be doing this more with experienced meditators right okay so with Shenzhen we thought okay this is interesting but I'm still not going to give up my whole life path Shenzhen's very biased I'm very biased because I'm a meditator we want this to work and so we thought okay we can't even really tell anybody about this because it's just Shenzhen so then we replicated this on five people in the lab we came in they did four days of the intervention and there was a control I did a placebo on them so I knew they were getting placebo but they didn't so it's single-blinded yeah when they got the real stimulation almost all of them said way more equanimity now these are all students of Shenzhen mostly at least so they know the language they know the lingo but they're also biased again by being students of Shenzhen and they all said holy crap way more equanimity like being on a retreat like you know days and days of unplugging and focusing for hours a day but this was just one hour one hour yeah and a couple of them were very skeptical they were like this is silly you guys Shenzhen project and Jay you know doing this and whatever but mindfulness works meditation works why do we need brain stimulation we converted most of them at the end they all said okay this is something that can potentially change the world keep doing it okay great and now this is going to be rolling out to hopefully more now trials for you at the University of Arizona right so right we continued replicating on more people kept getting a similar effect it doesn't work in everyone it's not it's not going to just be a hundred percent effect but we got enough there that we thought we got to do this you know we got to do this full time because if this is real this is going to apply to all the different disorders clinical applications that we want to apply it to and if that works it's going to apply to everybody else as well there's suffering throughout life for everybody not just people who have depression or chronic pain we all have that and if we can give people the ability to learn mindfulness skills quicker that's going to apply to that suffering and it's going to help reduce suffering globally global scale I mean that's the way we're thinking we're thinking across the globe this is an intervention that could work yes yes and there's still so much to understand about where to induce neuromodulation in order to amplify mindfulness yeah that's such a cool so right we have the big we have the big goal and we know what we want now we have to validate it so now we're doing double-blinded studies I won't be the one doing the stimulation I need to be removed at this point so I'll train people we'll be doing it in the MRI scanner because you can do them simultaneously so that way we can see that we're targeting and activating what we think we're activating yes and also look at the brain over time to make sure we're not increasing this node and decreasing another node because the brain is this hugely dynamic system and we need to make sure that we're not giving you equanimity power at the expense of language production right or learning or something you know along those lines and so we'll be looking at all of those different dimensions to make sure that this is a possibility excellent yeah that complex dynamic that you just said there good luck measuring that right that's very very difficult I'm basically partnering with people who are smarter than me and further along their path yeah and basically finding people who've already solved some of these problems teaming up with them convincing them this is a worthwhile goal yes and then using their tools yes and I think at this point in science in general it's got to be collaborative when you're talking about something like this with you know Buddhist concepts turning into reductionist mindfulness and then talking about the brain it's got to be a collaboration to do something like that I would love to see this process blow up and have more and more people that are going through this at the lab and and then leaving with transformative results sounds like a beautiful beautiful thing right yeah but even as you say that you know thinking if you're transforming someone you have to support that person there's a supportive process part of you know part of what we hope for is transformation part of what we worry about is transformation right it's this sort of two-sided coin because we want to make sure that person transforms into a happier person you know defining that broadly and deeply not just a state of happiness but happiness as a more meaningful life really is what we're going after yeah so this is a this is a long process everyone who comes through the lab we're going to be following for years that's giving them support making sure everything is okay like a psychotherapist right yeah right yeah so it's a long process yes yes and the the Center for Consciousness Studies yeah what is that what are you guys doing there so it is a center at the University of Arizona that was founded back in the early 90s by Stuart Hameroff and a couple professors at the University Al Kazniak and a couple others to attempt to define the problem space for consciousness studies because before that point you know in the 80s 70s 60s 50s you couldn't even say the word consciousness in a lab I mean if you were alive in the 50s and B.F. Skinner was reigning the behaviorist you know they were saying consciousness isn't really real some of them were I don't know exactly what B.F. Skinner was but some of the behaviorists were and they were claiming that cognition and consciousness no point in studying it just study behavior behavioral responses conditioning fear responses that's all there is all this other stuff is a delusion it's a lie you know the Buddhist also say that this is all a delusion it's a lie but you know from there through the Chomsky revolution through the cognitive revolution it became okay to talk about cognition memory perception all these other things and actually look for them in the brain as I got my PhD in and so the Center for Consciousness Studies was right at the the beginning of being able to talk about a science of consciousness what does that look like what are the dimensions of that what's the science what's not the science you know how do you define the barriers and the boundaries they then hired David Chalmers who was at the University of Arizona he's a very famous philosopher who's basically at the conference back in the early 90s defined the what he called the hard problem which is that you can study the neural correlates of consciousness what's going on in the brain as I'm conscious all day but it doesn't tell you how that creates consciousness that bridge is the hard problem so that was kind of the center in the beginning they spun out a consciousness conference which is now the biggest consciousness conference in the world every other year it's in Tucson and then we do it international so this year it's an interlock in Switzerland and I just learned that I'll be going this year someone's gonna help me go which is really cool so I'm very very excited about that and the idea is basically open the doors to anybody who has something meaningful to say about consciousness studies now the trick is we don't have any idea about what's generating consciousness I think it has something to do with the brain because I'm studied in brain science and I think things can be reduced until you find the bits that create consciousness and it emerges but also I kind of feel like everything is conscious I'm also sort of a pan-psychist yeah right and there's this other bit of me you know the experiential bit of me through some experiences I've had that make me think like you know the Bhagavad Gita the Hindus were right everything is imbued with consciousness so I and myself hold contradictory views and I have no way to test those as a scientist and so the consciousness conference has been very open to letting everybody come together biologist, chemist, physicist all the way to medical doctors and very well-known people like Deepak Chopra and we just open the doors and we say everyone come together try to put your ego aside for a minute try to put some of your bias aside for a minute and talk about this problem and let's see if that's fruitful and it seems to have been helpful we haven't solved the problem of consciousness it's hard to know how much we've advanced the field but it's at least given people now the modern parlance is a safe space although that term is kind of funny to say but it's given a safe space to talk about consciousness studies now we've taken a pretty big hit recently from academics because we let in all kinds of weirdness you know weird people if you want to say it sometimes the weird stuff is weird ideas on the right track sometimes right but Einstein's ideas were weird weird too right and so we're open to weird ideas you know and letting that in and trying to trust the rational discourse to decide what is right and really we're trying to create that context to make sure that it's moving in the rational discourse sense great great and the Center for Consciousness Studies is what month is that going to be in Switzerland it's next month next month in Switzerland okay excellent and then and there's online materials for people to be able to check out too yeah you can check it out we just posted for next year we're having it back in Tucson I think it's in June again next year in Tucson we have it at this beautiful resort called Lowe's Ventania Resort I don't make any money from them I'm not giving a shout out to them because I'm biased up but it's this beautiful resort 400 rooms we sell out the whole thing there's about 500 600 people who come and what's the URL that's a good question search for Center for Consciousness Study we will we'll make sure that that URL is in the bio everyone okay quick question on the way out are we in a simulation my intuition is yes we're at least in a model and I can tell you that with high probability I can't tell you for sure because I'm a scientist but we are looking at a model we're interacting with a model all the time and if you want to call that a simulation I think it is now if the simulation has been created by something higher than us I can't tell you but it would be cool if that was the case and then what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world the most beautiful thing in the world I am a practicing mindfulness person and I'm going to say the present moment if you can bring your attention and your full consciousness in the present moment that's where beauty is this has been so wonderful Jay thank you thank you thank you for coming on the show thank you for teaching us about everything that you're up to yeah this has been great thanks for having me you're super super welcome and I would love for everyone to get chatting more about things like neuromodulation for enhanced mindfulness get talking to your friends your families your coworkers people online on social media about what this is what our future is like with these technologies and give us your thoughts in the comments below on the episode check out the links in the bio to Jay's work also check out the links in the bio to simulation the entrepreneurs the organizations the artists around the world that you believe in support them support us help us continue scaling and impacting and growing huge shout out to Ron Vagus for producing and directing thank you very much and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon peace