 Boom, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are now on site in Manhattan in New York City, New York. We are at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, slash Wild Cornell Medicine. We are going to be talking about all things neuroscience, all things consciousness, all things mental health and well-being, all things future. I'm super excited to be talking to Dr. Heather Berlin. Hello. Thank you for joining us on the show. I'm so glad you're here. Great. We appreciate it. And I'm really excited because Heather is super prominent in the neuroscience field, very world-renowned, and her background is super long. So I have a Cliff Notes version of her background. She's a multi-award-winning neuroscientist and science communicator, assistant professor of psychiatry at Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, practices clinical neuropsychology at New York Presbyterian Hospital, slash Wild Cornell Medicine. And she's a host of PBS. The science goes to the movies, Discovery Channel, Superhuman Showdown, Star Talk, All Stars, and a big promoter of women in steam. This is really exciting. You have such a cool background. You're a huge role model to me and so many others in the field of neuroscience. And let's do this. Let's have a good chat. Heather, I always like to take a big history perspective on things to start. And I like the word that you used. You used the word sculpting. I like that word with the mind. So we now find ourselves as stewards of Earth after so many billions of years of evolution on Earth. And now our mind has evolved a lot over the last six million years to become what it has. The nervous system has evolved much longer than that. But, okay, so now we're here. We're absorbing much different stimuli than we were even a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago. So tell us about the sort of big history take on the evolution of the mind and now we sculpt forever and we sculpt until we die. So we have to be constant learning. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a number of issues. One thing that kind of is particularly interesting I think, you know, so we've evolved these brains in basically over thousands of years but really to adapt to this sort of caveman environment. And the rate of growth of technology is way quicker than our biological evolution. So we have something actually in the mental health field called the mismatch theory or hypothesis of about psychiatric illness. And basically it's that you can explain almost every psychiatric illness by basically a mismatch of the modern environment with a caveman brain like what we've evolved to adapt and respond to. And so, you know, if you even anything right now what we're on this 22nd floor, right? Well, you know, we've evolved to have a fear of heights because that's adaptive. You don't want to fall off the cliff or whatever. But now you have some people who are standing on the 22nd floor and looking out. It's totally safe. We know that. But these mechanisms are still going on. And so now that we have this extreme horrible anxiety and fear of heights even though it seems irrational it actually would be rational if they were in an environment that our brains evolved to be in. So we're slow in terms of biology of catching up to where technology is. And we are kind of like these caveman brains in, you know, modern societies and there's going to be some mismatches. So, you know, that being said that's like sort of the overview picture but then of course each individual within our own individual lifespan is evolving over time in our own way to the environment. But you still have these programs that are running that are, you know, evolutionarily older as well that are driving us and motivating us. So we're kind of like it's always like there's a bit of a we have this prefrontal cortex that's sort of telling us to do these rational things in this world that we find ourselves in but we have these basic basal drives that are like evolutionarily older. Yeah. I like how you make this really interesting way of understanding how the biological circuitry and systems within ourselves has evolved at a biological pace but technology is exponential and the stimuli now are so we find ourselves on the 22nd floor we find ourselves getting the ding ding ding ding ding ding like information foraging all the time. So there's all these different we're eating such processed crazy food in such abundance. That's another thing. I mean that's why obesity is such a problem because like we've evolved to like store fat and things because we don't know the next time we're going to get a meal right if you're hunting and you know but now just everything is readily available so these mechanisms that make us crave like fats high fat foods and because that was evolutionary adaptive or sugars it's no longer really adaptive when everything is available in front of you and then you start getting these problems like obesity and other diseases that are related to diabetes. Yeah. And then you also have this real I want to we'll move into you have a really good way of explaining this too. There's this sort of there's processing that occurs in our minds and the processing can be you know we normally think as oh I see things or I touch things or I taste things and it registers in my mind and evokes some sort of a memory that I've associated with that item and that collective we've learned that this is red and that your glasses are red and that this food is this taste and then there's this unconscious sort of mind that does our blinking and our breathing the autonomic nervous system so yeah tell us a bit about because sometimes it doesn't even feel like there is free will so tell us a bit. There's not it's just an illusion. Wait what was the question? What do you already say? Let's go into unconscious and conscious processing. So I mean with so basically we put so much value into consciousness because that's how we sort of experience the world but really much of what's happening in the brain is happening unconsciously outside of awareness and not just things like controlling your you know automatic nervous system an autonomic nervous system your heart rate and your gut metabolism all the rest but really these decisions that we make our behaviors much of it is being decided by processes that are occurring in the brain outside of awareness and then we're sort of consciousness is like the last to find out about it and then we have this feeling like oh I made that decision or I had that intention but when we look at a whole slew of neuroscientific studies you can see that we can measure your brain activation and see it moving let's say if you're gonna go to the left or the right even seconds before you're consciously aware of your intention to go left or right let's say. So you know in a sense you know free will is an illusion it's sort of happening after the fact you're feeling like oh I have the intention to do this but your brain has already decided sometimes say like we might have our unconscious brain has free will we're just like the last to know about it or something you know because it's the brain is doing the deciding and you're sometimes you're conscious of it sometimes you're not you know sometimes you get conscious access to what your brain already decided and sometimes your brain just decides outside of awareness and it never comes to consciousness but either way the brain is doing the deciding and you know consciousness is a side sort of aspect to that so we're there's what there's so much additional aspects to over time that we've evolved with this we have this gut that somehow we work with this massive gut bacteria and tons of neurons as well in there we have an environment that is that we think like you said that we get to move ourselves around and but these decisions we are have we're mapping that these decisions we become aware of only seconds after the unconscious makes up at the mind yeah and I mean the gut is another great example I mean there's more neurons and serotonin neurons in your gut than parts of your brain and it's like well why isn't that conscious but it is giving information there's a you know a lot of psychiatry is looking at the relationship between the gut and the brain and how that relates to psychiatric illness and even some experimental research in for treating obsessive-compulsive disorders looking at fecal matter you know implants as a treatment so like repopulate this microbiome is actually affecting brain function so there's just a lot going on or even other things like outside of the disease realm but like who you choose to be your mate or who you're attracted to there's all these unconscious things that are at play that are attracting you from you know smells and the behavioral signals that we're not even consciously aware of and you know there are women who you know when you're in certain parts of your cycle that you're going to be more attracted to certain people than others than others which is interesting so there's just a lot going on and we think we're so much in control and we're really it's our biology our underlying biology that's motivating a lot of it what we do yeah yeah and then there's this very strange way that we this these are called these these this quality of this subjective experience of living and even that feels once you have went to have a meta perspective on it it feels weird to feel living yeah well just to have subjective states I mean that that's the thing really like when we're talking about consciousness you don't need language you don't need self-awareness to have conscious we're talking about basic sensory sensation experience so first-person subjective experience just simply feeling pain not like oh it's me who's feeling the pain or that feels like this or that it's just the feeling of pain or seeing the color red and with AI systems for example like they might be able to do very intelligent things like lots of complex processing of like you know they can do mathematical equations and things much quicker or better than we can but the simplest thing of just having a feeling or a sensation they might never ever do we don't know I mean this might be distinctly biological I mean there's there's arguments on both sides but you know and humans aren't the only ones other animals other species have this have subjective states as far as we can tell again it's always subjective it's always first-person like I don't know your conscious I assume you are but I only know I am but I assume other beings are and that may also be a sort of this this this complex biological processing that's going on at the level of hundreds of billions of neurons and glial cells versus maybe like dozens in a fly right and so is that a level of consciousness that's just much much less than ours is so there's different arguments there it might just be a different type of consciousness it depends on the theory of consciousness that you sort of adhere to so if you look at the integrated information theory of consciousness that basically says that consciousness is a property of the universe like gravity is and so anytime there is any kind of a system that has a high degree of integrated differentiated information it's basically about information processing and you can calculate that you'll get a number of phi that it's called and basically that number corresponds to the amount of consciousness in that system so you could say a fly has a lower phi less amount of integrated differentiated information than our brains do so they have some sort of consciousness but it's different than ours I mean I like to say it's like either you have sensation or you don't it's kind of like an all or none and then there's different aspects to that sensation maybe they're enhanced the more you have and and in Julia to know you came up with this theory of the integrated information theory talks about that a bit in that that's somewhat panpsychist right it's a yeah it is it is somewhat and that is panpsychist it means that like which basically is saying that any system doesn't have to be a biological system or anything that has some degree of integrated information can have it a light switch has a bit of information it's on or off so it might have some degree of phi conscious but that's sort of meaningless to me because it's not the kind of consciousness that we're really talking about when we're trying to understand consciousness like switches aren't building 22 floor buildings and airplanes right right but you know other animals like dolphins we know are pretty aware and intelligent we know they have self-awareness they can pass this mirror recognition test like basically recognize themselves in a mirror and you know but they don't have the appendages that we have like the development of our thumbs was a really important thing that we can grasp things and hold tools and that led to a lot of other things dolphins maybe could have done the things that we do but they're limited by their you know appendages basically and they do have language it appears they speak to each other so you know I don't think it's distinctly human but panpsychic anything can have it to some some degree but basically this this theory the more you have in your kind of repertoire the more like that conscious experience is so like basically let's say your experience of red if the only colors you know knew of let's say you had some sort of form of color blindness and the only colors you were capable of seeing let's say is red blue and green and according to this theory and the way the calculations are done your experience of red would be very different because you're experiencing you're experiencing red in terms of what it's not and if your repertoire of what it's not is only two other things red is gonna have a different feeling different quality to it then if you had a million colors in your in your you know wheelhouse yeah like the word love in the United States versus in English versus the word love in Hindi where there's so many different ways to to say that or to talk about what that feels like across similar to you what you mentioned earlier wherever the nervous system sort of finds finds itself evolving is where those different stimuli build up such as a dolphin in the oceans will have a nervous system that builds up certain talents in the in an ocean setting a plant another decent example is just though it was very interesting seeing a plant communicate to other parts of the plant when an insect bit it and then there was a communication of hey like with the stress hormone we got stress happening right now we just got bit right so that's kind of like consciousness and that's some form of you know some form of it we might say information information yeah so Heather does a lot of brain behavior relationships specifically the prevention and treatment of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric disorders so this is this is really crazy because this is like seeing this is a lot seeing patients dealing with different ailments providing solutions to those ailments you even have to go to court sometimes to say that yeah I was in court yesterday I know yeah how many patients do you think you've seen through your career oh my god I mean there's on the order of thousands I don't know maybe probably yeah I mean I've been doing clinical you know I've been working with patient populations since I could make me for a really old right now but 2000 probably 2000 maybe like actually starting in like 1999 I would say so what's like 20 years two decades I feel old now see I knew that would mean but whatever yeah so two decades of a lot of people seeing on I can imagine I'm not really good at estimating but I imagine it's a lot of patients and and plus I've worked in you know in hospital wards where you get large groups of patients here but but but mostly the patient populations that I've worked with or done research on are either people who have some sort of either traumatic brain injury in terms of the neurological patients or like some sort of lesion because they had a tumor removed or a stroke so neurological lesion patients and traumatic brain injury patients and and also patients with movement disorders more recently who need we do deep deep brain stimulation to treat like Parkinson's and those kinds of things and neuropsych testing of all these patients these neurological patients and then also psychiatric patients and those have mostly been people with anxiety disorders impulse control so anxiety disorders mostly like obsessive compulsive disorder impulse control disorders things like pathological gambling and mostly people in the impulse of compulsive spectrum and also some personality disorders so I did a lot of work with people with borderline personality disorder and and then what I did which was sort of novel when I was pursuing this is my PhD work was comparing people who have specific brain lesions where we know kind of like where the hole in the head is to psychiatric patients on neurocognitive measures to see where they were similar where they're different because a psychiatric patient there's no one place in the head you can point to but if we see overlapping symptomology we can know that that part of the brain is involved I've done a lot of neuroimaging and psychopharmological studies so that the techniques I use is mostly neuropsych testing functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychopharmological studies yeah and this is a big deal because there's I think it's on the order of 10 million people in the United States have PTSD and there's just a lot of depression OCD anxiety going on around the world there's a lot of in transgenerational global trauma that has built up over time yeah and and we have now the tools with deep brain stimulation all these interesting tools are evolving and we can potentially manipulate the emotions in a beneficial way yeah I mean well first of all I think I read a student's what they said the thing that causes the most human suffering is actually anxiety and mood disorders and things like depression and anxiety because some and you would think that sounds a little strange but other things I don't know maybe you're talking about like terminal cancer whatever but then people end up dying or whatever but when you're looking at the living and suffering psychiatric illness causes the most suffering over a lifetime than any other kinds of you know diseases that so so the fact that we can actually and also the other cabinet psychiatry hasn't really in the last 50 years there haven't been really huge major breakthroughs in terms of psychopharmacology you know we do a little tweaking of okay well maybe this SSRI serotonin reuptake inhibitor selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor is going to you know affect this serotonin receptor and we'll do a little tweak and it's going to do this serotonin receptor or that but we haven't really cured the diseases but with more more recently things like deep brain stimulation is very promising it's been used for many years with with movement disorders and a lot of work being done here at Cornell is deep brain stimulation for like Parkinson's and other kinds of movement disorders and now we're moving into the realm of psychiatric illness where we can go in and stimulate parts of like certain sort of circuits in the brain to help with depression and OCD there's also as alternative treatments things like ketamine has become really a big thing right now with treating people especially for treating suicidality and depression major depression and other things like psychedelics and the use as like with a therapist. Yeah, psychedelic psychotherapy we just had Rick Doblin on the show again. We love maps. Yeah. Huge fans. Maps is cool. Maps is cool. So there's all of that you know MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for you know anxiety. So yeah. Yeah. So I think you know we are moving towards helping these people but it's still it's a path. It's a long path. Yeah. And you're showing very promising results with treating with OCD and with depression. You're over 50% on helping remove people from having those sort of tendencies significant growth away from those tendencies. You mean with the DBS? Yeah I think so. Yeah. Well basically yeah these are like treatment refractory patients. They're refractory patients and they're treatment resistant. So these are patients who are very severe and they have tried a number of different drug trials and other like things like ECT electroshock therapy and really nothing has worked and then what they used to do is go in and lesion parts of the brain for these and sometimes it would work but if it didn't you have a lesion in your brain. So that's not great but you know when you're desperate that was the alternative. And now with these deep brain stimulation it's adjustable it's reversible and you can control it remotely, you can turn it up, turn it down. If it doesn't work you haven't really lesioned your brain but you're seeing pretty nice results. I mean it's not everybody who gets it but you know if you can get even 50% improvement and maybe 70% of patients that's like a big deal. Yeah. And then there's this is also important to say correct me if I'm wrong but there can be these people whose behavior can be changed by by tumor growing in their prefrontal cortex or pressing on their amygdala and these are the times when they can potentially turn from a great citizen to someone that becomes a pedophile or someone that kills their family and this is then you see the neuroimaging then you have to go and testify and say that this is what happened. You can also go and remove the tumor and then they come back to normal to their normal self. Yeah it's like these these where we're going from correlation to causation so basically you know you are your brain so when things happen if you have a tumor if you get a brain lesion if you have a stroke it depending on where it is it can affect your personality you know what makes you you it's really just a construct of your brain and if your brain changes it can change fundamentally in many ways who you are your personality and those are classic cases especially with the prefrontal cortex lesions that you see with like the case of Phineas Gage back in the 1800s in this big metal tamping I went through his prefrontal cortex completely changed his personality and then there's more modern cases like this person who developed pedophilia in his 40s and was going to be imprisoned and then they decided a huge tumor in his prefrontal cortex take out the tumor symptoms go away you're later the symptoms come back and the tumor had gone back and so it really starts you to get questioned about well how much control do we really have and you know everybody has subtle differences in their brain but does that is an excuse for bad behavior but I like it too I think in the legal system it's does the person have the capacity to have self-control and if they do we hold them responsible for their actions so but if they have a huge tumor if they have under activation of certain parts of the brain we say they don't have the capacity to be responsible and you know then we have different like consequences for them yeah and you you've been a big proponent of greater sense of compassion and empathy towards other people's ways that they've their minds have been sculpted in through their environments and that sort of of essence and camaraderie across the planet can can really be those that that crucial next step for us to really find that sense of unity amongst each other is to care more about how we got how did you get to that point where you feel that way now yeah I mean you know because I look at I look at people as people but also you have to remember you can't get angry at someone if you're like okay that person is whatever you take a bit like they're so annoying they're so neurotic or they always get really upset the littlest thing or whatever you know that might just be their genetic underpinning that's the way their brain developed that's who they are you get mad at someone for their predilections you can ask them to understand what their predilections are and to try to you know modulate them but people are wired in different ways and they have different you know different size amygdalas and different connections and you can't expect everyone to behave the way you want them to behave you have to take into consideration and even people at extreme ends who are pathological you know I mean you can a very good example is of the United States right now I mean he does things that people really are just you know like how can somebody do that or you know people who are sociopaths and have no empathy I feel bad for them because they have sort of that's abnormal they have a disorder it's a brain disorder and you have to kind of have empathy for them and say I understand that's what that person is they can't help it so if we can have more compassion for other people and not expect them that they should behave in this way or that way but just understand that they're it's their biology yes we can have some control over it we're not all running around you know doing whatever we want and but to the extent that they have the capacity to have control over those things you know and some people just don't and we that also that compassion and empathy can drive us to a more nuanced discourse amongst each other on how to best move forward because there's a lot and this is a good segue there's a lot to deal with as we move into the world of neuro prosthetics as we move into the world of these augmentations there's a there's a lot that we have now the power to manipulate emotion to increase intelligence to augment metabolism there's a lot of things that we're going to be playing around with genetic engineering with this also neuro prosthetic additions now what do you what what what are you what I guess there's just there's so much there's so much to hear the conversation around the ethics and the geopolitics and things in the conversation across the wealth and the quality of things you know where how do you what are your what's your synthesis on this so I think that the the technology is going to continue to develop because let's say things like neural implants because it's helping treat disorders right everybody wants that like you see these Parkinson's patients and you know they're they're able to function or psychiatric disorders and that those are the neural deep brain stimulation but there's also brain computer interfaces where you implant these micro electrodes and basically you can use your thoughts to control a prosthetic limb and now more recent studies showing that like at Caltech you can get sensory information back to the brain and stimulate it so these prosthetic limbs only can you control them with your thoughts but they will send that you can feel them and so they really are becoming like your real limb where people who are in who are completely paralyzed who can now communicate using these brain computer interfaces so these are great things and they will continue to develop but what will happen is inevitably that people start using them in a healthy brain to enhance it instead of for cognitive enhancement and then then you get into these ethical questions of like who can afford the implants is that I mean because obviously if somebody has one they're going to have a huge advantage and say if you can increase your memory capacity over the people who don't so maybe nobody's allowed to have them or and the same thing with genetic modification I mean right now it's not legal we can't we I mean technically we could make designer babies but legally we're not allowed to because we're not even allowed to sort of experiment in that in that way single point mutations that are causing severe diseases those are ones that should be eradicated right but so it's it's this it's a really hard because there's positive and there's and there's negatives and what do you do and so I mean we thought the same thing with stem cell research and then it was allowed anyway it was at the time a very big deal of I remember George Bush like wasn't going to allow stem cell research and then we finally can do all these amazing things to help cure disease so the thing with the genetic mutation is that you might change something for one thing but then you don't know what the consequences are going to be for other things you know it's not excuse me it's not as straightforward as in some cases it is you can just it's a single point you know mutation you take that for other things it's more like we find the genetic relationships in autism and whatever but then you might take something out that could have coded for some other thing we don't know about so that's very complicated and that's harder but if you're just talking about brain computer interfaces it's inevitable that someone is going to pay for their implants to help them do something you know to become superhuman and then what do we do then so these are academic debates we're having now but in our lifetime there will be real questions that we have to answer in real time yeah there's a lot of potential with malevolence and we gotta work ourselves through we have to work ourselves through transcending malevolence and transcending ego and finding the unity and love between each other before it seems that at times we're rushing to the transhumanist era and that rush can be harmful because we don't have the capacity for oops moments anymore the seat belt and the air bay killed tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of people but existential risks are not okay for the civilization yeah we'll probably kill ourselves with climate change or something before then who knows I'm so optimistic I'm from the east coast so we are a little bit more we're a little bit more like no but I like that I like the I could switch into an optimistic world view let's say if I was to do that what would that look like yeah it's G.A. to the east coast New Yorkers no but I mean I think that it's I'm sorry I have to be pessimistic again I think that it's the last of like a second last of a second yeah well it's just that I'm a realist maybe that's it I'm more like I feel that way too yeah and I think that you know humans are not that evolved we like to do that's right that's right okay but we're really not that evolved and some humans are more evolved than others that's right but as a species if you take the average and I can tell you this is gonna sound terrible but like you know even if you're talking about like intelligence or whatever you know which is not everything I mean there's so many other things but if you do I do a lot of like intelligence testing for various reasons and the average is a hundred on IQ on IQ and if you see what a hundred looks like yeah you know I mean we're not that evolved you know we're just trying to get by most people are trying to get by yeah so this idea of like we're gonna transcend everything and be above it all I'm not that up to say but also it's not just because of that but I just think that we're still like animalistic we have these basic drives we have you know Freud talked about a lot of that as well you know we have a kind of sort of death impulse as well as a kind of like life impulse in a way or that kind of what do you call it like some catexes or whatever he had like you know but the positive kind of what is this it was your libido you have like a kind of positive energy but then there's a negative and when it comes down to it like you can really test how far humans evolved when they're scarcity yeah yeah that's right because then we're fighting right away yeah yeah like if you take the most evolved people and then put them in like a the Titanic and see who's gonna go that's right you're gonna get now within the population you're gonna get a couple who are really noble and like you know what I'm gonna die or whatever and women and children first yeah and you'll get some of those people in the but that's not gonna be the majority you know and then you're gonna have a lot of people who are just looking to themselves and survive so I just I don't know how I guess that's why I'm saying I'm not that optimistic that we are going to like evolve past all these kind of basal basic drives but there are there are good people there are good people everybody is good and bad okay everybody but there are people who are more selfless who are more giving and maybe they'll over time if those people have more children they'll be more people like that you know I mean one of my husband's shows about evolution he said the key to everything is just don't it's women have control of who we choose to mate with yeah and his whole thing was just don't sleep with mean people so we if women just only choose altruistic are good people to procreate with over time that's how we can change the course of human evolution and our species yeah who do the mean guys procreate with them there's a lot of questions that arise you actually had this good you had a bell curve up for a moment with at the center of the distribution being 100 on the on IQ and then half of people being below that half people being above that towards like 140 and towards 60 and those are the types of moments where I do have a deeper sense of realism that if that is in IQ is just of course like we said there's one way but at the same time if you take a potential like a hierarchy and you and instead of sorting the hierarchy based on socioeconomic status based on wealth maybe you sorted based on altruism and ones that have transcended their ego maybe the ones that are furthest along in their spiritual journeys on earth because if that was the case then if we put more of them into positions of deciding on some of the resource flows and the frameworks for increasing the baselines across the world we just move so fast we're not slowing down and thinking we're living in this the basal limbic systems of thinking and not the slow down prefrontal speculative functions, plan things, help have that empathy and that altruism but it's so hard when you have to run around and just to feed yourself and pay your rent and stuff so we it's a really it's a slow down and think and it's a stop fighting against each other so much but I agree I mean just with the thing like IQ is not the thing but you know because you could have an average low IQ and be a hugely like evolved spiritual however you want to say person and I think that like you're saying one of the keys is the people who are in power unfortunately aren't those types of people who seek out these power positions right because they're not about ego and so you know we'd have to rearrange society in such a way that we at least have someone like that on teams of where people are making decisions because that's the only way like things are going to change in a more global scale like you need the decision makers to have either themselves have some empathy or compassion or have people around them that have that one thing to have faith in is the decentralization of power and the distributed computing systems that are going to enable us to democratize data and democratize resource flows in better ways and I think that they may be able to help quite a bit Heather, okay this is an important field for us to talk about now I think I've identified it and you correct me if I'm wrong I feel like a big part of being a creative person is to go to the edge of your own capacity and also aim to get to the edge of kind of what the collective knows and try and make things around that edge of knowledge tell us about the neuro basis of creativity and yeah it's something that I've been really interested in so I think creativity it's very hard to quantify now all the way back when I was an undergraduate my senior thesis I wanted to do a study on creativity I wanted to look at the effect of music on creativity and different types of music and how that affected but I got stuck because there was no way to quantify creativity at that time and there's some tests about divergent thinking so like you know how many different ways can you use this paperclip or not but that wasn't really satisfying like what I was thinking outside the box that's divergent thinking it's sort of part of creativity but there was nothing so I ended up looking at the effects of music on productivity because that was easier to measure and I was only I wanted to graduate so I didn't want to be there forever so we had to modify a bit but but basically I think creativity is knowing all the basic facts you take in all the knowledge you do your homework you consciously take in all the information and then when you can make these novel associations between ideas or put the information together in a new way that nobody thought of before that's sort of sometimes you call it genius but it really has to do with creativity as well and so if you use people like as examples like Darwin or something you know say he's a genius but what he did was he took information that was readily available to everybody and put it together in a way that you know was creative and nobody else had thought of that or there were some people sort of tangentially thinking about the remark and stuff but you know and that's how I see creativity and what it is is that the unconscious is an unlimited capacity, consciousness is limited so it can only do hold a number of variables and minds and do calculations on them but if you take in all the information consciously you relegate it to the unconscious to consume much more and that's when people say they have like a flash of insight or suddenly comes up from the unconscious you have to like kind of let your unconscious work on it and I think also when people are in these being creative in the moment like spontaneous creativity or improvisation we find that there's a certain brain state or a neural signature that they get into in this kind of flow state and where you get decreased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation which is kind of like the filter system in the brain it filters your behavior to conform to social norms it's about your ego as well so people, your ego is turned down people say it's like flowing through them or coming from somewhere else because you don't have that sense of self and then you have increased medial prefrontal cortex activation which is like the internal generation of ideas so it's coming from within the filter system is turned down so it allows for novel associations between ideas love it and then people are, it's associated with very positive emotions people want to get to that state because also parts of your prefrontal cortex that ruminate and like are anxious and think about the future consequences of things it's kind of like turned down for a bit when you're in these states you're in the moment and that is really like I think it could be very therapeutic for people because you're shutting down the inner critic, the inner voice that's always like what are people thinking what about this what if something happens or and just you're in the moment creating or maybe just doing some activity that you're really focused in rock climbing or it could be a physical activity as well but that's the sweet spot that you want to get to and we're starting to understand the neural underpinnings of that state yeah, yeah the flow seems to be one of the most meaningful experiences that we can have in life and it's super creative and it drives us towards hopefully towards our goals that you know we're in flow going towards towards things that we found most fulfilling in our lives I would say it's a state where we feel most I think it's meaningful but also where you're at most sort of almost at peace or at ease or you're in you're most productive or something but you're feeling you're doing what you're supposed to be doing in that moment in a way but I think another source of meaning is connection with people and so like a flow state or being in these spontaneous creative states can be all about you but there are also other meaningful things when you're connecting with other people or even if you're performing with an audience and there's a feedback loop between you but I think that also is very meaningful and powerful I'm happy that you also picked on the multidisciplinary understanding of reality when you do go deeper into different fields and make connections across those fields it can give you really cool insights into how things work there's been a lot of talk about neuroplasticity we want to get as far away from neurodegeneration as possible we want to retain our cognitive capacities as long as possible at the peak of our cognitive capacity so tell us about what your thoughts are around that space a patient I was just talking about earlier I was running late because I was going over a patient it was neurodegenerative disease and I was going through all the different there's many many different types of neurodegenerative diseases and it's very hard to quantify who has what but the patient's like well what can I do well there's nothing we can do this is what's happening and you feel really frustrated as a neuroscientist or if you're treating someone as a doctor you're like there's nowhere to go from here but the brain is malleable over the lifetime so if you're getting away from the idea let's say you don't have neurodegenerative diseases but just the normal aging brain we can have cognitive reserve which is like a protective factor against those things so if in your life you are active mentally you keep your brain active you know you read constantly using it like a muscle you're going to develop more connections and pathways that might be redundant in that you might be able to lose one but still have kind of a backup and that's what we have reserved so you can change your brain as you are living and develop it so that it will be protective more protective if these certain neurodegenerative diseases kick in or just the normal effects of aging but we haven't figured out how to kick the actual diseases yet so it's almost as though the more that we stay in states of flow and the more that we stay in curious states and creative states the potentially the hopefully the longer we can offset neurodegeneration more active we stay or the effects of the neurodegeneration the effects of it we'll take longer to kick in Heather have you been looking into the the neural importance of meditation so it's not research I've done on my own but I have looked at some of the work and what's interesting is that some of the similar patterns that you see in creative flow states you also see during types of certain types of meditation also in certain types of hypnosis daydreaming and REM sleep there are similar kinds of patterns of activation when you're in these states but they're usually associated with novel associations free-floating thoughts that doesn't have to be any structure or order to them and that whenever that happens you're kind of turning down executive control prefrontal cortex function they're usually associated with very positive feelings it seems that meditation may be one of those keys towards unity on earth I do really think so well I think anytime you are in a state where you can get your ego to dissolve temporarily I have patients who don't have a sense of self at all and that's not good either so our egos are important in some ways and that's why we evolved to have them there are people who have no sense of self and they dissociate and they're not really connected to themselves so I think the idea of meditation and getting to these states where you lose your ego to dissolve is good as long as you can control it if you can't get back in that could also be anything sort of taking to the extreme can be problematic but the more we can do that when people get this feeling of oneness with the universe and with everything I think it does it can change how we interact with each other so it's good to be in those states and have those insights and feel what it feels like to be sort of ego-less so that when you go back to your everyday life you can maybe have more compassion for other people yep there's no hate there there's only love there that's nice it's so damn important okay Heather you've been you've now been doing science communication across hosting shows across doing all your work is translational also directly impacting patients you know this is you go and speak in so many different places now science communication is so crucial it's like the ones that are at the edge of knowledge in their different scientific fields need sometimes need help getting the word out in more fun relatable entertaining creative ways that can inspire new people to work themselves up in that scientific awareness so tell us about that my impetus towards scientific communication and I mean it really for me it kind of evolved and this was a natural process so I was doing just being an academic and going to conferences and giving talks like academic conferences and I really say really like enjoyed giving talks and I was getting very positive feedback from it which was nice and I also had always actually all the way from the time I was in elementary school all the way through college I did theater I was a theater and fine arts minor in college so I acted in plays always that helps yeah so I really I really like enjoy being in front of audiences connecting and that energy because not everybody likes to public public speaking but I really enjoy it and I like I can feel kind of an energy of an audience and you know I can see like if something's not working how to like bring them back in and so but I was just doing my thing and then I did some it was actually like a debate I was doing at the intelligence where no no this was long before that this was like I was doing a debate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute okay it was like a serious like it was a serious debate with all these academics but it was filmed and it was put online and then like somebody from Discovery Channel saw it and called me like do you want to come I get this call like in now we fly to London like next week and audition for this show and I'm just like what you know it's awesome like that's how you do it that's how you do it you just get a call on there you're like okay and what it turned out was this is just sort of like my origin story or whatever but like sort of what started getting me into this path because like I wasn't sort of seeking it out and it just but I was doing like public talks for the public a bit anyway so they find me out there and it turned out they had been auditioning for like months for these hosts and they were and everything were like whittling it down and they were down to their like last like ten and I just got like flown in in the last minute like and so I didn't have a lot of pressure on me because like these people were like really like and I was like oh whatever free trip to London I'll go so I was really relaxed and had fun and they auditioned all these like Discovery execs were there and there it was like really serious and I was just like whatever and um and then they like offered to me like okay so you're gonna be on the road in like a few weeks and you're gonna fly around the world and do this and that and it was just like trial by fire I had to learn and before like within a few weeks I literally was flying around the world meeting people with extraordinary abilities trying to explain how they could do what they can do via science and experiments and film crew following me around and like it was just like you know I learnt as I went and it was a great experience um which I just I loved and I enjoyed and then I said you know like actually I think I can do like it's it it is actually a skill that you have to develop and people think it just comes actually you really have to learn especially if you're a hardcore like a scientist how do I talk about these things that are complex in a way that people who are not experts in the field are gonna like connect with it and engage with it and um so it's a learning curve but you know then it's kind of a snowball effect and once you start doing it then people ask you to do this or that and and over time you you yeah you know I don't know I don't know how it all happened but I really enjoy it I love getting people excited about science um and but I always will have to have my like I can never just do that like I always need one foot in like doing the the word the science um and then I but but if I did all just that and know it would be like a bit too serious for me I need also the like communication parts I like have fun and get people excited whatever but if I did all that I would feel like it would maybe be a little too superficial for me like I need both I need the it's like ying and yang um for me personally but I love it I want to get young girls I want to get involved and when I was growing up there was no for me female role model scientist you know I remember seeing the film contact with Jody Foster and I was like oh my god like we could be you know and and that was really cool for me but there wasn't a lot of role models so I think things are getting better and I think um there's obviously now is huge movement in that direction and you know I just I do what I do I try to mentor young girls like who are coming up and um get them excited about science and it can be cool and you don't have to you know you can have fun and it's not like you're all nerdy or whatever the stereotype was or is so I'm really passionate about it and I really get excited um to get other people excited about about science and the brain yeah it's as though we have both adults that are scientists that don't know that even speaking about what they're doing to the public even exists as an option so having them be introduced to it as an option and then testing themselves out in it that's that's great and then with like you were pointing out with young girls as well it's like we again just is it an option you have to see it to be it right you have to have that mentorship to get it done yeah become that yeah and I've been fortunate to have people in the sort of field of science communication kind of be mentors for me um like Neil deGrasse Tyson and and Bill Nye you know this is fortunate enough that they kind of were mentoring me along the way and um you know I learned a lot from them so I think it's all about yeah you have to see that it's possible and then say like why couldn't I do that too you know yeah okay I want to power around on a couple questions okay these are questions that we typically ask on the show on the way out okay what is a core driving principle of your life whoa oh you mean just like basic simple questions simple questions I thought it's like you know like pizza or whatever whoa okay wait just like out on a simple note so what is the basic a core driving principle of your life core driving principle of my life oh my god um we're just keeping it light here okay wow you didn't give me any time to think about this either um improv I know improv um well for me there's a couple of things I guess I mean this is really off the top of my head but what drives me is um the pursuit of knowledge I want to understand why we're here how things work I just I want to understand you know that just is a driving factor to me however you want to however that manifests it's just this drive to to know to understand how things work why we're here where do we go you know how does the brain work um and another thing that drives me is to be present like be to because this life I'm so always aware and maybe hyper aware of how short it is and how lucky we are to be here and what does this all mean but like don't forget to just be and enjoy it and appreciate and the people around you um the time with them is so precious whatever it may be like with your children or your parents or your grandparents or your friends those time those moments are so precious so I want to be there and I would sacrifice like you know for me it's not about success in a career that drives me like I don't care about that much I care about the pursuit of knowledge and that's kind of what drives me but it's not about awards or accolades it's really I would give up things like that to spend time with people I care about because that's to me so important in life um so I guess that's sort of like a driving force a motivator in terms of just how I organize and structure my life um you know I'll give up some things that might seem prestigious because like spending time with my kids is invaluable um yeah I think I think those are pretty good and you know so typical like so gonna leave the world a better place I do try to like help I think I want to have an impact by helping people and it's not even about making a big scientific discovery but it's really for me where I get the most gratification personally is helping individual people like live a better life and that's where I feel like I can have an impact because whatever you know if I'm gone like you know you probably won't remember me but that doesn't matter it's about the impact that I make on individuals while I'm here that makes a difference yeah yeah so it's a couple of driving forces sorry that was not a quick okay those are great those are really important Heather thank you okay if you could rebuild civilization from scratch wow so now I'm god okay how would you design it oh my god what are these questions if I could rebuild civilization from scratch how would I design it okay from scratch I don't know I can't go that far back but let's just say I'd like it to end up being I don't know how we're gonna get there but where I kind of like the idea of like there's no money you know like we're all equal it's I guess it's kind of like socialist but like everybody has their basic needs met it's maybe it's like a barter system or something right and this would be like civilization like how we kind of live I think that we should it's totally possible if we could start over again from scratch and forget where we got to now but it's totally possible with the resources we have on this earth to everybody live at a comfortable level and you know it's that is possible and you know I don't know how we could get there from where we are now but if we could start from scratch I would love that money is not a thing it doesn't matter everybody gets equal all like good quality of life that would be ideal for me you know for I think that people don't have to worry struggle think about how they're gonna pay the bills everybody gets health care you know there's not the super rich and there's not the super poor it's just homogenous and then we can actually like maybe spend time enjoying our lives where we people have the time to actually enjoy the time that they're given here and not have to spend it all just trying to survive and get their basic needs met so a redesign where the baseline of basic necessities that are needed to survive are quite high that are filled and then from there wherever people want to creatively endeavor they may so pursue and that way we're not like you said just trying to survive but rather enjoying the time here yeah freeing up people's time so they can be creative they can write a book they can paint they can do the thing that they want to do in this life yes yes okay we this wouldn't be simulation if we didn't ask you is this a simulation Oh is this a simulation I'm going to say the probability it's possible the probability is low from what I understand of our basic physics however our experience of all of this is a simulation in the brain so you know I'm not going to say the physical things here are a simulation but I think our perception of reality is a simulation we're all running simulation sort of or I don't know if that's what you mean by simulation but yeah I mean definitely and we're creating this reality in our mind which doesn't necessarily correlate to the real reality but I do think there is like a real physical world out there we're just limited in our capacity to experience it because we're just experiencing it via these like little three pound pieces of matter I mean they're pretty complex and interesting but we're limited and we might be limited in ever knowing you know what it all means or because we're sitting here with these tiny little cavemen brains trying to figure it out but um so yeah we're kind of running a simulation in our own head but I do think that this is really out there okay the code is being tapped into so that we can better understand if it is actually simulation or not code is math in so many ways oh yeah no math is the language of the universe I love math is like I love math it's everything well there you go language of the universe simulation pretty much yeah Heather what's the most beautiful thing in the world for me my children I'm like going to cry now I can't believe that that's all it takes for me I can't explain they're just when I look in their eyes and it's just their life it's life it's everything that's it they're the most beautiful thing in the world to me that's the only thing like if god forbid like if my time comes and I'm like all I want to do is like if I get one last thing to look at would be to look in their eyes that's it I mean like you know the typical response would be like a sunset or something but no it's just like we've had a lot of replies really good replies to that question and that was a good one we also you have your photos of you you know you speak this like a true mother that's cradling their their child right past post birth that I've I've aimed to get behind my own mother's eyes as she's teaching me about the story of holding me and and that is so profound yeah yeah it's just it's just everything it's who we are it's humans it's like to me there's just nothing more like beautiful than that yeah that I can think of yeah and that's and that's that's the last question and I would I would normally be ending the show right now but because we have so much creativity improv freestyle flow I want to see do you want to do you want to do a freestyle improv me me and you both we're gonna freestyle improv yeah let's do it like what like we're gonna let's do a beat with some sort of a flow maybe yeah yeah we can switch we can switch back and forth I can't be okay where do I start with the beatbox and then and then you can just do something I'm gonna do like a freestyle wrap yeah yeah and we'll make it around like you know science that's what I always try and do I try and make it around something thought provoking you are aware that it's my husband who's the I know I know you guys did you guys did that off the top we did the show off the top but he freestyled not me so I'm just like this is I am not looking at the camera for this one I am not a freestyle rapper I'm not a rapper thing of rap it's all my husband but I'll you know I'll play along let's do it okay so I'll give you a beat to start are you a freestyle do you do freestyle I dabble for fun because I try and again this is the whole thing is the more that you process this the more practice this the more it kind of feels good and and whatnot okay we're gonna do it okay okay here we go you're gonna beat you're into the beat okay okay here we are at coal or nail it's tomorrow's gonna snow and I'm trying really hard just to get into the flow we're talking about science and I don't know what else to say I'm gonna switch it over to him okay awesome here we go Heather so right she has been in some good flow talking about neuroscience let's go it's been great talking about side calm Heather is so brilliant it's been such an honor talking to her talking to you aiming to inspire you here we go we're gonna build the future you and me and her and us all together let's go yeah so stuff like that yeah I like that I like that can I do a closing I can do a closing okay okay okay ready okay okay we're almost at the end I'm gonna say goodbye there's nothing more beautiful than my daughter Hannah Sky I don't know how to rap but that's okay I'm living in the moment don't know what else to say that's it it's not a simulation yet but who knows what happens when the we have all the internet ooh I love it thank you for joining us for that little bit thank you so much thank you Heather thank you and there's so much to learn about what's actually going on in our minds and in our worlds and Heather has been such a pleasure to have on the show thank you again we greatly appreciate it thanks everyone for tuning in huge thank you we'd love to hear from you in the comments below let us know your thoughts let's get some chat going on about some of the topics we discuss on the show also go and check out the links below to Heather's work and we would love for you to build the future go and manifest your dreams into the world everyone and join us so we can continue supporting this project doing cool things like coming out to great places to interview amazing leaders so thanks everyone see you in the future much love and we'll see you soon peace