Reimagining trauma and neuroscience

Transcript

00:00:01But it's a curiosity as to where we are, what we are. That existence, the physical universe, is basically playful.

00:00:08Welcome to the Curious Humans Podcast. I'm your host, Jonny Miller.

00:00:14Hello there, curious humans. Today, I'm super excited to share a conversation that I think

00:00:19explores one of the most important scientific questions of our time. I'm speaking with

00:00:25the theoretical neuroscientist, Michael Edward Johnson, who after spending seven years researching

00:00:31consciousness and writing the book Principia Qualia, has developed a revolutionary theory

00:00:37that could change how we understand trauma, meditation, and human flourishing.

00:00:43Mike's theory of latches, which we'll be doing a deep dive into,

00:00:48may provide a testable and concrete biological mechanism for how trauma gets stored in the body.

00:00:55This might sound nerdy and abstract, but I really believe that if his claims can be tested and

00:01:04validated, it could revolutionize the medical system and allow the somatic modalities or things

00:01:10like MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to be compared and tested side by side for their efficacy.

00:01:16Without any further ado from me, I give you this pretty nerdy, in-depth, and utterly fascinating

00:01:22conversation with the modern-day polymath, Michael Edward Johnson.

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00:03:14Welcome to the Curious Humans podcast, Mike. It is a real pleasure to have you here.

00:03:19Thanks, Johnny. I'm glad to be here, and it was really great to meet you this summer too.

00:03:25How are you feeling?

00:03:26I'm feeling in this precise moment in three words.

00:03:31A little nervous, centered, and warm.

00:03:43Well, the question that I like to start these conversations with is, do you consider yourself

00:03:48to have been an exceptionally curious child? And if so, can you recall a story about something that

00:03:55you were curious about?

00:03:56Ah, interesting. So, the answer is definitely yes. I think that I had this interesting feature

00:04:08or drive that I felt that I always had to figure things out by myself to figure out my own way,

00:04:18which sometimes was a challenge and sometimes did virtually well.

00:04:24Yeah.

00:04:26And in terms of just curiosity, I guess I was omnivorous, but I would read literally anything.

00:04:35Dictionary is...

00:04:37Dictionaries, travel brochures, yeah, just anything.

00:04:41That fully tracks with my experience of you today.

00:04:47I don't know the backstory here, but how did you find your way into theoretical neuroscience and

00:04:54co-founding QualiaResa?

00:04:57know the work that you're doing today with open theory what's the what's

00:05:00arc of the journey there?

00:05:02Yeah, that's an interesting question.

00:05:06So I helped my dad out with his algorithmic market trading interest.

00:05:15So he's a farmer, he trades the colonies markets.

00:05:19I helped a little bit on that.

00:05:23So that was right after graduation.

00:05:25And then I guess I was just looking around for something that was personally meaningful,

00:05:32something that would sort of, I don't know, make everything make sense in a way.

00:05:43Or we could also phrase it, I was looking for the biggest dragon to slay.

00:05:50So I was looking around.

00:05:53And then I found this.

00:05:55I got really interested in sort of this question of pain and pleasure, of what makes some things

00:06:03feel better than others.

00:06:05What is depression?

00:06:06What is happiness?

00:06:08Etc.

00:06:10And I was expecting I could find the right things to read.

00:06:16It would take me a few months, and I would sort of understand that.

00:06:20And maybe I could contribute a little bit.

00:06:25But I really dug into it.

00:06:26And the more I read about the topic, the more clear it was to me that everything out there

00:06:38was just confused.

00:06:41That this was potentially the most important question in the world.

00:06:46And people had no clue about even what a proper answer would look like.

00:06:53So I was like, okay, I'm going to do this.

00:06:58I'm going to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to

00:07:03figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how

00:07:13to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how

00:07:17to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how

00:07:18to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out how to figure out

00:07:25that if you're really digging into these deep philosophical questions,

00:07:31at first, you really need to sort of be a particularly careful philosopher.

00:07:41You need to get the metaphysics right.

00:07:43You need to sort of understand the role of each kind of word that you're trying to use

00:07:48and to understand kind of what kind of question this is or that is and so on

00:07:57and what kind of answer you're looking for.

00:08:01But I found that the more I dug into it, the less it became philosophy

00:08:07and the more it became sort of theoretical neuroscience,

00:08:11that if you want to understand these deep questions about the mind,

00:08:15eventually you are going to run into questions

00:08:17about the mind and the mind is going to run into questions about the mind.

00:08:18And of the brain as well.

00:08:20So that kind of got into different, I would say, different theories of self-organization

00:08:29and sort of the free energy principle and harmonics and whatnot as it applies to the brain.

00:08:38Yeah, so I guess that's the super short version.

00:08:43But I think when it gets down to it, this has been,

00:08:50I think, a very broad and personally exciting quest to understand.

00:08:56And if I can help myself, then I can understand, you know,

00:09:01what kinds of things humans are in general.

00:09:03That's beautiful.

00:09:04And that really resonates with, I think, where my curiosity comes from as well.

00:09:09And to give some context for this, my desire for this podcast episode

00:09:13is to both try and convey just how important I think,

00:09:18your research is, and also selfishly better to understand these theories for myself,

00:09:24because there's a lot of blind spots in my understanding of your work as well.

00:09:28So as a starting point, potentially, when we were in California a few months ago,

00:09:33you mentioned fairly offhand that the human nervous system,

00:09:38which is something I'm really curious about, is almost like a set of wind chimes.

00:09:42Could you share what do you mean by that?

00:09:45Right.

00:09:46So.

00:09:48I think that's a very important thing in, I guess you could say,

00:09:55in the system of vessel computation, is that we can sort of

00:10:00distinguish stuff that's going on in the nervous system, sort of narrowly defined nerves and neurons, and then things that are happening in the muscular system, and especially the vasomuscular system.

00:10:13And both of these sort of have a particular computational role.

00:10:20But in terms of the wind chime analogy, I think that essentially, you know, there's just so much data coming in, information coming in, and sort of hitting our nervous system.

00:10:34And I think that like a very simple story about the nervous system's role in this is it has a bunch of harmonics.

00:10:47It has a bunch of potential ways that it can

00:10:49vibrate or resonate or whatnot, and sort of distribute all over the body, but also mostly managed in a way that they're independent.

00:11:02Like one pattern won't interfere with another pattern, or if it does, like there's some interesting, useful functional logic to how patterns propagate.

00:11:13But so basically, I think of the nervous system itself as this

00:11:19very sensitive sort of chimes.

00:11:23That as you sort of feel your environment, as information, as data kind of hits, hits

00:11:34this system sort of homes in different ways.

00:11:39And then based on which residences are present in the system.

00:11:48And so I'm sort of imagining sort of a sort of a

00:11:49which resonances are absent in the system, you can get a feel for your environment.

00:11:57And, you know, I think that we can tell a certain story like this in terms of how the brains,

00:12:05like how the visual systems feature detectors work, that light comes in and you have various

00:12:13circuits checking for edges and checking for high contrast or checking for like,

00:12:20is this a hand and so on. But then also you have kind of, I guess I would say the lower frequency

00:12:28harmonics of like, is this a safe situation? Or like, how do I feel right now? And I think that

00:12:37this is kind of the same thing, just maybe shifted a few octaves.

00:12:43Super interesting. Well, one of the reasons that I'm really excited by your research is that I think,

00:12:49at least from my read, it provides a plausible mechanistic theory for how trauma, or I call it

00:12:57emotional debt, is stored in the body. Which, as far as I'm aware, is a pretty open question

00:13:02in mainstream neuroscience. Like, they haven't really figured this out yet.

00:13:07And one of the more famous kind of phrases is the idea of the body keeping the score from

00:13:13bandicoot. But no one really understands the mechanism. As a consequence, practitioners like

00:13:19myself, it's been very difficult to objectively track progress when it comes to somatic modalities.

00:13:27Because they aren't really before and after things besides subjective. Oh, I feel differently,

00:13:32or I'm noticing less triggers, et cetera. With that as context, perhaps as a jumping off point,

00:13:40could you share the...

00:13:41As an overview of the focus of the focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus focus

00:13:43of your principles of VASO computation and how you came to even discover it? Where did

00:13:48this emerge from in the first place?

00:13:52Sure. For any interesting theory, there are so many on-ramps that are possible.

00:14:00We can take one on-ramp today and another one tomorrow and so on. But I think that today

00:14:08I would tell the story about how we think of the body's intelligence as encoded into our nervous

00:14:19system. But actually, I think there are two systems that do global processing like this.

00:14:26And the first is the neural system, and the second is the VASO muscular system. So all

00:14:36your blood vessels are sort of connected to the nervous system. And so, you can see that

00:14:38the nervous system is sort of wrapped in a thin layer of smooth muscle. These are VSMCs,

00:14:44vascular smooth muscle cells. And basically, they can contract or relax, or they have a

00:14:52smooth muscle has a special third setting that it can latch. And basically, that's glue

00:15:00itself into a contracted state. And then you don't have to hold it. It's just that's the default then. And I would say that the role of the vascular system in this sort of computational story is it actively manages the neural system in a way where it steps in and

00:15:28micromanages if the neural system is messing up. If the neural default flow dynamics are producing, we can say, prediction errors. And this is a nod to the free energy principle,

00:15:45for processing systems

00:15:48which is that the neural system is a very complex system. And basically, if your nervous system shows that it cannot be trusted with its full range of freedom, the vasomuscular system will contract, cut off blood flow to different areas of the nervous system, and then basically freeze the pattern in those areas.

00:16:15So blood flow varies by a factor of three.

00:16:1820 or more in healthy tissue.

00:16:20That's wild. I heard you say that before. I had no idea. That's incredible.

00:16:25Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this touches on the, it's called the vaso, or it's the

00:16:32hemoneural hypothesis by Moore and Kao. That's from 2007 or 2008. And they basically put forth

00:16:43this idea that blood flow regulates neural dynamics.

00:16:48And basically, the gain of networks, that if some network of neurons, if it has a lot of blood flow, then if it's 20x, it can listen very carefully to what's going on. It can update, it can change. It's very dynamic.

00:17:15But then if we dial blood flow down,

00:17:18so from 20x to 1x, basically just enough, the trickle that is sufficient to survive, but not sufficient to pay for updating, being very sensitive, etc. Basically, if we starve neurons of blood, they go into safe mode.

00:17:39And then they don't update.

00:17:44Just whatever pattern that they were using.

00:17:49They were holding. They keep holding. Basically, there's sort of a local freeze of pattern there.

00:18:00And yeah, basically, whenever the vasomuscular system detects that, okay, there's a problem, the nervous system can't be trusted to have full freedom in this.

00:18:19And so, the way that we do it is we'll take the blood flow away.

00:18:25We'll freeze the pattern into kind of a known good configuration, a known safe configuration.

00:18:33And this engages this special smooth muscle capacity.

00:18:37It's called the latch bridge mechanism.

00:18:40The myosin and the actin basically get glued together, I think, with phosphate groups.

00:18:47And the way that we do it is we'll take the blood flow away.

00:18:48But these smooth muscle latches, basically they lock local blood vessels shut.

00:18:58And they're also in play in the digestive system and pelvis and bladder and all over.

00:19:03But I would be very...

00:19:05I think the particularly interesting story here is about latches in the vascular system.

00:19:14And so, these latches they can...

00:19:16You know, they they may be taken.

00:19:18you know a few seconds to minute to to set and a few seconds to minute to dissolve but they can

00:19:28last for days weeks months years a whole lifetime so I mean this this idea of or this question of

00:19:41how does body keep the score what actually happens I would tell a pretty simple story

00:19:49that when when it's seen as needed when you can't or

00:20:00have time to address a challenge with high-level strategies when it's sort of life or death or primal or early on in development where we don't have the high-level strategies or so on.

00:20:18The nervous system sort of congeals these patches and they can stick with us for a long time.

00:20:28Basically, for as long as we have them, then if we want to call them trauma, and I think that's probably fair, the trauma will stay with us.

00:20:41One question that's come to mind is, and you've touched on this a little bit, but what do you think is the adaptive reason for these latches locking down?

00:20:52Can you just kind of double-click on it?

00:20:54Why is it sensible for the body to develop this?

00:20:58Is it an evolutionary mechanism?

00:20:59Sure, sure.

00:21:02So, I think it's an unreasonably effective way to manage the nervous system.

00:21:10And we may think very bad thoughts about trauma, that, oh, you know, it's a very bad way of living and being and feeling, and, oh, I wish, you know, you could just open up.

00:21:24But from the perspective of evolution, I think it's a very good way to manage the nervous system.

00:21:28From the perspective of the body.

00:21:31I mean, we're sort of born into sensory chaos, what William James calls looming, buzzing confusion, which is a beautiful phrase.

00:21:45And then we have a very strong imperative to make sense of our chaos, to predict our chaos.

00:21:57And that's what we're doing.

00:21:59And there are so many degrees of freedom in terms of, you know, if you think of all the information that a baby's nervous system is kind of absorbing, you know, there's data from the eyes and data from the ears and data from all the skin sensors and internal data, interoceptive data about what's happening in the stomach and what's happening in the heart and so on.

00:22:23It's just a flood of data.

00:22:27And, you know, I think it's a very good way to manage that.

00:22:28I think that, you know, evolution has needed to sort of take shortcuts and latch the most predictive or safe things that, okay, well, if we sort of remove the ability for this network to dynamically change and we sort of hold it into a pattern, then all the rest of the system gets more predictable.

00:22:57And, you know, I think that's a very good way to manage that.

00:22:58I think that the more we hold, the more predictable the system gets.

00:23:01Now, obviously, we don't want to hold everything and we can't, but it's just a very useful systems intervention to sort of take the variability out of a component.

00:23:18Yeah, yeah.

00:23:19So that makes complete sense to me.

00:23:21And I've recently finished reading Andy Clark's book, The Prediction Machine, which kind of talks about a lot of this as well.

00:23:27Yeah, yeah.

00:23:29Something that I'm wondering, so now kind of based on what you just shared, I'm wondering

00:23:33how do practices such as say breathwork or MGMA assisted psychotherapy, what is the mechanism

00:23:42by which they are able to create the conditions for the release of these latches?

00:23:48Is it to do with they're almost introducing more chaos into the system such that the current

00:23:55way of latching on no longer really makes sense.

00:23:59So the body's like, okay, we need any strategy.

00:24:01Like we need to do something else.

00:24:02Is that roughly what's happening?

00:24:04What's your read of how is it that these modalities, particularly let's just use kind of MGMA

00:24:11assisted psychotherapy and breathwork for now, how are they able to create the conditions

00:24:15for the releasing of these latches?

00:24:18Yeah, that's a great question.

00:24:20So in terms of the sort of chaos.

00:24:25Thesis, we could say.

00:24:27I wrote a piece in 2019, Neural Kneeling, where it's sort of a temperature model or

00:24:37a thermodynamic model for the brain, for the nervous system, where if you get the sort

00:24:44of, we can think of the brain as having a temperature parameter, not a literal temperature

00:24:48parameter, but kind of the amount of energy in the system.

00:24:53And if that gets above some...

00:24:55Certain threshold, we can call that the melting point of brain

00:25:00networks. And maybe different networks have different melting points, etc. Then you get sort of entropic disintegration. This is a term used by Robin Carter Harris in his Entropic Brain paper. And then you get reorganization, and then a cooling process, and annealing, which is what happens when you sort of

00:25:28cool metal down. You get kind of recrystallization of microstructure.

00:25:37This would be one approach to say, okay, well, breathwork increases the temperature parameter. MDMA

00:25:44increases the temperature parameter. I'm always interested in exploring new angles. And I would

00:25:59get a little bit more specific for psychedelics, such as LSD, maybe MDMA. I'm not sure. I have a

00:26:11working-out-of-a-pet hypothesis about MDMA. But basically, I expect them to have

00:26:18huge effects on the vascular system. And so for psychedelics specifically,

00:26:30basically, these latches, these smooth muscle latches, these glued clenches that sort of are

00:26:39restricting blood flow, and then sort of limiting the ability of the network to change. It's

00:26:49basically just this hard muscular clench. And it's this question of, well, what releases hard muscular clenches?

00:26:58And it's this question of, well, what releases hard muscular clenches?

00:27:00And there can be, I think, some dynamics where the most effective

00:27:08approach is to cycle. It's like, okay, we have vessel dilators.

00:27:15They are chemicals that we know kind of open up blood vessels.

00:27:22But I actually think a much more effective way to open these latches is not just slide the system with a

00:27:30vessel dilators but also to sort of cycle clench release clench release

00:27:38and i think that something like lst may be doing that uh that lst is sort of known as a strong

00:27:47vessel constrictor but i think that this is actually just a a slight misnomer because i think

00:28:00what to be happening is uh it will produce constriction and then a wave of real action

00:28:09and then a wave of constriction wave of real action and you can basically

00:28:15randomly pop ledges with this uh with uh very very results we can say

00:28:24so a couple of things come to i mean a bunch of things come to mind one is that um

00:28:27i noticed in myself like when i

00:28:30when i'm in a process i will sometimes start humming and that almost creates more ease and

00:28:34i'm aware that humming releases nitric oxide which is also a vasodilator so that kind of

00:28:39track like maps into that theory i think one thing that i'm really curious about is

00:28:44um it's also very possible without the use of either breath work or any kind of psychedelic

00:28:52substance um if there are conditions of sufficient internal and external safety

00:29:00and permissioning then these processes and these these like incomplete reflexes that i've studied

00:29:06somewhat seem to be able to complete themselves do you have a sense of what might be is there a kind

00:29:13of biological correlate to that felt sense of safety which the system is is like the wind

00:29:20trine that you mentioned earlier is picking up on and then is allowing this latch to unfold

00:29:26what's your sense there yeah that's a that's a good question yeah and

00:29:30I understand too I'm sort of

00:29:32getting ahead of myself on questions

00:29:34you had asked about breath as well

00:29:36that's great

00:29:36just to touch back briefly

00:29:41on breath work

00:29:42I think that yeah like humming produces

00:29:44NO

00:29:46but also breath work

00:29:49leads to

00:29:52CO2

00:29:53build up

00:29:54and everyone

00:29:56like it's sort of

00:30:00health thesis or a common medical thesis that CO2 is bad and that you need a CO2 meter. I actually have a CO2 meter right here, but too much is bad. But I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Ray Peet, a very interesting sort of metabolism-focused biologist.

00:30:28He does bioenergetics, I guess I would say, or he recently passed. His thesis is that CO2

00:30:41is actually incredibly important for cellular respiration, cellular metabolism, and that

00:30:48it can be a problem if we lose too much CO2.

00:30:52It increases oxygen uptake via the Bohr effect, if I'm not mistaken. So it actually

00:30:58helps the cells to be more oxygenated, counter-intuitively.

00:31:01Right. And I would say that NO is… I mean, this is a complicated topic, of course,

00:31:12but the simple story that I would tell is NO is sort of the emergency release for the

00:31:20vascular system, whereas CO2 is the more sustainable release type.

00:31:28And so they both have their benefits. But I think that if you suffuse tissue CO2,

00:31:38you'll probably just sort of push everything toward relaxation and release. And then if

00:31:47you do that, you might sort of pop some arches.

00:31:52Which explains… I'm remembering in Jamie Weal's recap to the rapture, he has the kind of history of the rapture.

00:31:58Yeah. So it's like a hedonic engineering protocol where there's breathwork and then

00:32:00there's inhaling nitrous oxide or nitric oxide, and it creates this incredible ecstatic,

00:32:06deep psychedelic experience. And that's maybe just multiple latches popping.

00:32:12So then that brings me to another, I think, really important question, which is that in

00:32:19these, let's say, peak states, we can experience what it's like momentarily for these latches

00:32:28to be open and for all of this energy to be flowing more naturally. And then when the

00:32:32psychedelic or the breathwork wears off, we kind of come back to our normal state. What

00:32:37do you think is required for the latch to create a new prediction, I guess, such that

00:32:43it is safe to be open permanently? And I guess this connects to the integration phase of

00:32:49somatic work and things like this.

00:32:51Sure, sure. So I would say that there can be at least two flavors of

00:32:58sort of temporary release, we can say. And the first is where the latch doesn't actually

00:33:06open, but a little bit more circulation trickles in. And so, you know, the sort of physical

00:33:17latch is still there. The sort of muscle is still gluteshod, but a little bit more blood

00:33:23gets kind of pushed in.

00:33:24Yeah.

00:33:25that will sort of give a little bit more activity range back to the network,

00:33:33but it will wear off.

00:33:35This is a very sort of contextual thing.

00:33:40And then there's the second scenario where you actually pop a latch.

00:33:49And this is a pretty big deal to pop a latch.

00:33:52And then maybe everything is more sort of chaotic and vivid and pleasant, but also dangerous.

00:34:03And then you sort of reflexively clench.

00:34:08You get scared of that sort of freedom slash chaos.

00:34:15And you sort of clench back to the pattern that you know.

00:34:22And maybe that turns into a sustained clench, not a latch.

00:34:25Or maybe it just relatches.

00:34:28So I do think that sort of, you know, you mentioned this integration processes and so on.

00:34:38And I think that, yeah, like, it's absolutely essential to sort of be able to ideally give yourself a sense of safety.

00:34:52Yeah.

00:34:53Even or especially when things kind of feel good but out of control,

00:34:58to sort of not sort of

00:35:02So this is what I'm really keen to explore and talk about with you. What might be some of the implications for these theories? And specifically, if everything that you've said is true and is the case, then you'd think we'd be able to look at, let's say, PTSD trauma survivors, and they would very likely damage their lives.

00:35:28So, you know, highly restricted blood flow in certain areas compared with control populations or like super advanced meditators. Like, is that something that it seems very testable, right? Can we do that?

00:35:41Yeah. So it should be extremely testable. And like, I've had discussions about using

00:35:48something like Doppler ultrasound or fMRI with contrast to sort of track fluid flow around the

00:35:59find the dark spots, find the black holes, find the places where basically there's only a trickle

00:36:06of fluid flow. And you can kind of assume, okay, these are the places which sort of are latched.

00:36:13Blood can't really flow there very easily. So I think that, I mean, making a map like this,

00:36:21or sort of validating this with neuroimaging, say, okay, you know, this person has PTSD.

00:36:29We can actually find the places of low circulation. I've heard of sort of body

00:36:36workers using thermal imaging, higher-res thermal, and basically the places on the outside,

00:36:45which are cooler and probably getting less circulation. And so I think that would be one

00:36:53example. So yeah, I think that there are...

00:36:59There are deep scientific and clinical implications. And there are also implications for sort of...

00:37:08I'm going to give two threads here. One is mapping personality or mapping agency, rather.

00:37:17And in terms of like, if your latches are the set of constants in your nervous system,

00:37:26things that just absolutely...

00:37:28Yeah.

00:37:29Will not change until you... And like, I think that probably blood flow and attention

00:37:37are very coupled. And it would be a lossy summary, but an interesting one to say that

00:37:47blood flow and attention are kind of the same thing, where there's blood flow, there's tension,

00:37:51where there's tension, there's blood flow.

00:37:53That's a big claim. That's...

00:37:56Yeah.

00:37:57Yeah. Wow.

00:37:58Yeah.

00:37:59Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

00:38:01If there's not blood flow to an area, you can't put your attention there.

00:38:08And you just don't have freedom in those networks also. And so if you can sort of

00:38:17build a full map of someone's body of, okay, here's their nervous system, and here's what

00:38:25parts of their nervous system are latched.

00:38:27Yeah.

00:38:29And you kind of have a map of agency. Here are the things that they can't think about,

00:38:36they can't feel, they can't change. Here are the places in their body which correspond with

00:38:43various things in the cognitive and emotional realm where they can't put their attention.

00:38:51And I think that that would be very valuable to sort of map out a body like that.

00:38:59And the second topic is kind of poking at this idea of what is classical Buddhist enlightenment.

00:39:10So I can say a few words there or if you have any questions.

00:39:14Yeah, well, I mean, I absolutely want to get on both threads. Let's start on the agency

00:39:18one, because that's something which... Agency was interestingly the common thread that I

00:39:23came to in my work with Nervous System Mastery. And I have a framework of rise out of reactivity.

00:39:29we were able to cultivate interoceptive awareness which is certainly correlated with blood flow

00:39:34um a sense of embodied safety or self-regulation and then emotional fluidity which is another way

00:39:40of saying how able are you to not clamp down in the midst of some kind of emotional intensity or

00:39:47wave um and when those pieces are in place like you say there is more there's more freedom between

00:39:54stimulus and response without the kind of knee-jerk reactive kind of classical reactions

00:40:00reactions whether it's like emotional reactivity or the classic hyper or hypo arousal which are like the body's protection strategies i guess

00:40:08So, that to me is fascinating.

00:40:13If there were some researchers listening to this, and I know that there will be at least

00:40:17a few, how might you design or suggest that they design an experiment to test this out

00:40:24and conclusively show that this is the case?

00:40:29Maybe there's before-after sessions.

00:40:32You mentioned, I think, before that there might be a distinguishable density signature

00:40:36associated with these latches.

00:40:38What would you recommend to some researchers who might want to explore this for themselves?

00:40:44Yeah, that's a good question.

00:40:47So just playing up some notes here.

00:40:49I would say that the four things that one could try to use to sort of map someone's

00:41:01nervous system, one is Doppler ultrasound, another is fMRI plus contrast.

00:41:08These are sort of researcher-grade stuff.

00:41:12Then there's the thermal imaging, which I think is more, you know, hobbyist.

00:41:18I think it's a good thing.

00:41:19You can just buy a thermal imager on Amazon or whatever until you're up with it.

00:41:25And I think if I was a massage therapist, I would sort of try and see if this can predict

00:41:36the places which are sort of least functional in a person, where they had the least feeling

00:41:45to or whatever.

00:41:46And sort of are worth...

00:41:49I would also say that like a big part of this to...

00:41:59Okay.

00:42:00And also if you can sort of do density imaging, probably with ultrasound, of the vasculature,

00:42:10most probably these smooth muscle latches will have a distinct density signature.

00:42:18Yeah.

00:42:19That you should be able to pick up.

00:42:24I would also say that a lot of this also revolves around not just the latches, sort of crystallized

00:42:37points of constant pattern in your nervous system, but also your reflexes.

00:42:46As you were saying, emotional flexes.

00:42:49Yeah.

00:42:50And just sort of what is your response reaction?

00:42:53Can you sort of do this in a better way?

00:42:59And this actually, I was kind of thinking about, oh, what topics would be fun to discuss

00:43:06on this podcast?

00:43:08And there are so many, but one that I've been thinking about a lot recently is...

00:43:19And I think every tradition is going to have their different terminology here.

00:43:24I would put it in terms of different forms of virtue.

00:43:32And I would say that there's a nervous system virtue.

00:43:41And this is sort of, if you are just in a natural flow state.

00:43:47Yeah.

00:43:50and just let the energy go if you just kind of are in the moment.

00:43:58How trustworthy is that?

00:44:01Can you trust your nervous system to do that and produce good results?

00:44:08And your vasomuscular system has a strong opinion on that.

00:44:14It has a very strong opinion on how virtuous your nervous system is.

00:44:18And if it has a good opinion, then it'll just kind of hang out.

00:44:23It'll let you flow.

00:44:25It'll let you just kind of, you know, energy just kind of naturally manifests

00:44:36whatever your nervous system wants.

00:44:41But if it has a bad opinion of this virtue, if it thinks, oh man, like,

00:44:48I trusted it last year and it caused so much trouble.

00:44:53Yeah.

00:44:54And like, or like, you know, I trusted it and then my

00:45:00fell down and broke his arm and like, no, like we're not gonna sort of trust your natural flow reflexes. We can say we're gonna micromanage. We're gonna make sure we're gonna be a little bit neurotic, but we're gonna make sure that you're safe. And so what I would expect, like I see behavior as kind of this handshake or trade-off between these two systems.

00:45:26Your nervous system just left to its own devices. It's, it feels very pleasant. It feels very easy. Maybe, maybe it's a little schizo. Maybe it's a little, a little lazy. And maybe sometimes just when, when activity flows through your nervous system, maybe sometimes

00:45:56bad things happen. Like you get impulsive about this or you, you know, eat a kilo of ice cream or, you know, who knows. And so then when the nerve, when the vessel muscular system kind of has to micromanage this, when it thinks that your nervous system doesn't have, or like lacks some virtue, then you get sort of more controlled feeling, emotion, and so on.

00:46:25movement, cognition, more neurotic, more anxious, et cetera, but more careful, basically. And so I would expect that the vessel muscular system, like, would be a lot more active in this second scenario, that you're sort of engaging a lot of muscular reflexes that are meant to sort of micromanage neural patterns.

00:46:56Yeah, I think, to, to a large degree, I think sort of, uh, deep wellbeing comes from turning that system down and also leveling up your nervous system so that you can afford to turn that system down.

00:47:16Yeah, there's a piece around building capacity, as well as openness. And what, what's come to mind for me is the, the framework of,

00:47:25um, to me, by me, through me, and as me that are almost like increasing levels of openness or nervous system openness. And I love the idea of like a nervous system virtue as being reflective of to what degree is the vessel muscular system kind of clamping down.

00:47:43And maybe there's also a kind of a top down, it's like bottom up and top down virtues. And the top down one is more of like, to what degree can you remain in a kind of curious, open,

00:47:55loving, loving, even courageous awareness of the clamping that may or may not be happening. And it seems like there's, there's this interplay of these two systems happening at the same time.

00:48:06Yeah, absolutely.

00:48:10And I also think, I'm sort of very interested in sort of,

00:48:17If you're aware of the, the clamping,

00:48:22the lump,

00:48:24like,

00:48:25feel latches can you feel them when can you sort of create a menu option of okay some trauma

00:48:34happened or like some some sort of very painful thing happened and now i feel like oh there's like

00:48:42there's a pain in my heart and like this sensation that i i sort of connect with

00:48:49maybe this could be a latch forming and then if i let it form i'll be more closed

00:48:57uh maybe i can choose to just feel the pain sit with the pain accept the pain not create the latch

00:49:08so what one two things come to mind one is um i have a very visceral kind of memory of that exact

00:49:16experience i was kind of

00:49:19like a year into a grieving process and i remember approaching this memorial bench

00:49:24and this like these like waves of intensity kind of came through and at a certain point it felt

00:49:30like something just like imploded internally and this huge amount of energy was released through me

00:49:36and it didn't even it didn't even feel bad or it was almost more akin to ecstasy and rapture and

00:49:45joy what do you think is happening there when this

00:49:48you know

00:49:49this torrent of energy is being released in the system and and and perhaps an even more challenging

00:49:55question is like because i still don't have a good answer for this but like what what the heck

00:50:00that energy? What is that experience that we have when these things happen, to the best of your understanding?

00:50:08I suspect that if it's a discontinuous experience, that something happened and then this energy came and it was very intense, I would suspect that that would be a latch opening.

00:50:28Another way to frame that is you gave enough evidence to your vasomuscular system that you could handle it. You could handle freedom in that matter.

00:50:43That's interesting. It's almost like you have to show to your vasomuscular system that you are trustworthy of being able to have ownership or stewardship of this much capacity or this much energy.

00:50:56Yes.

00:50:56Interesting.

00:50:58One question that Oshan Jaro shared, which I think is relevant to bring up here, is he had this sense that there's probably lots of priors and latches in our system, many of which are likely very useful.

00:51:14What are the markers that differentiate between unhelpful or maladaptive latches versus those which are actually still serving us? Is there a distinction that you have there?

00:51:25I would have to say that the…

00:51:28The logic of the body is sometimes strange. That maybe there'll be some sense of, oh, I have to keep this muscle clenched or else something bad will happen. And then if you investigate, okay, well, what do I feel? What bad thing would happen if I released this? And then if you can successfully ask your body that and get a feeling and response.

00:51:57Yes.

00:51:58The answer might be kind of bonkers, might be nuts. And it's like, no, I don't have to worry about that body. But we do have to respect the body's logic too. I think to answer this question, I'm going to transition to this second thread.

00:52:19Great. I was about to kind of bring us there as well. Let's get that.

00:52:22Nice.

00:52:23Yeah, yeah.

00:52:24Perfect.

00:52:25So a very simple story about…

00:52:28um these these latches and we can say radical well-being is once again we're sort of born into

00:52:38sensory chaos um everything is happening all at once and it's very confusing and we have

00:52:48tons of predictioners and uh sort of to become functional in this uh the body sometimes kind of

00:53:01gets a little greedy we can say or like uses the this very simple ancestral approach of uh finding

00:53:13places to pinch uh it sort of

00:53:17make

00:53:18the rest of the system more stable and you know i i would expect

00:53:25uh you know especially around the age of one and a half and had two years old and i think uh romeo

00:53:31has talked about this as well but basically you know a lot of latches get get set up and

00:53:39mostly they're very useful uh and i i think especially like we talk about the self horizon

00:53:46in this

00:53:48time frame and uh you know the the thing that the buddhists say so many bad things

00:53:54about um but it's it's sometimes useful so very very useful generally yeah it's a

00:54:04it's predictive it's defensible uh if you're sort of in some sort of adversarial social uh

00:54:14interaction then like yeah you you have to have a certain sort of

00:54:18you better have a self to be able to sort of maintain as invariant the things that are good for you to have.

00:54:39But I mean, evolution is like this sort of reflexive clenching, sort of cringing into certainty, we can say.

00:54:51And a clench and a cringe and a flinch, all kind of the same basic reflex, kind of, you can say, the

00:55:00The first muscle reflex. It's the base. And it's sort of the reflex that the system is built from. That we find a safe pattern and we grab and we clench it and keep it. Or like we find something useful and we keep it that way.

00:55:20And then, you know, okay, and we're two and we have a lot of these. We sort of have learned to grab this and we keep it and maybe we hold it tight enough that it latches on. And we grab this and we keep it and it latches on.

00:55:37And then we grow up. And we use these in many, many circumstances.

00:55:49And maybe often they're helpful and sometimes they prevent us from, you know, our sort of full freedom. But they help us survive.

00:56:00Then we can say, and we can phrase this in terms of personal development or just, you know, you hit, you know, 2025 and you get a new toolset.

00:56:14You get a toolset of high-level moves to the next level.

00:56:19And then you can start to manage uncertainty.

00:56:22And these moves are much more nuanced and careful and rich and multidimensional than the sort of plunge or like, you know, flinch into certainty.

00:56:38And you can start sort of managing ambivalence and uncertainty with these sort of higher-level tools.

00:56:47And we can talk about, you know, Keegan levels.

00:56:49And we can Keegan 3, Keegan 4, Keegan 5, whatever.

00:56:52Yeah. Just like one question there.

00:56:55Do you think, and I imagine the answer is yes, what is the connection between like these latches and certain beliefs or, you know, people who have a tendency to go into binary thinking or to have a very low tolerance to be with uncertainty?

00:57:11Do you think that that is almost like a correlatory latch in their system that is related to their inability to be with the uncertainty?

00:57:20Sure.

00:57:21It definitely could be.

00:57:22I mean, it's going to be a little bit different in each circumstance.

00:57:25But I could see that, yeah, I mean, if you have a latch on some felt sense, on some feeling, on some sort of small network, and then someone is talking about a concept that maybe touches on this pattern.

00:57:46But it's like it would need.

00:57:49Yeah.

00:57:49That network to be holding a different pattern.

00:57:55It's like you're holding a certain pattern and that maybe is has latched and it's basically a permanent part of your identity.

00:58:02And you do very physically, physiologically.

00:58:06You can't change that thought for as long as the latch is there.

00:58:12It's like maybe you can like to instruct some complex.

00:58:16A re-inclin of your nervous system.

00:58:19where you can like uh act as

00:58:22Yeah.

00:58:22As if you can.

00:58:23But it always sorts of collapses and like says, okay, like there's just no freedom there.

00:58:31There's no it's not negotiable.

00:58:35It's a physical thing.

00:58:39And when someone's attention is pointed at something that is latched, that's actually a really unpleasant thing.

00:58:51Because it's like, no, they like literally can't put their attention there.

00:58:58It's latched.

00:59:00The blood won't physically go there.

00:59:02And so then you get sort of deflection, projection, many of these sort of psychological defense mechanisms.

00:59:13And, you know, I think it's part of the challenge.

00:59:19Being a human and living with other humans.

00:59:22Like some things are just not easily negotiated.

00:59:30They're more sort of held at a physical level rather than a useful psychological level.

00:59:36Yeah.

00:59:37I'm really curious to unpack a little bit more of the idea of attention basically being highly connected with blood flow in the system.

00:59:46And I'm thinking of my friend Michael who has, he's an Alexander technique kind of practitioner.

00:59:52And the idea of when we expand our awareness and we become aware of the space behind us, the sides of us, in front of us, there is this sense

01:00:00of ease and effortlessness and relaxation. Is it really as simple, like is a lot of meditative practice, for example, in the beginning especially, just learning to direct blood flow around the body? Is it that simple?

01:00:17I would expect that. Actually, this June, I had a conversation with someone who had done a lot of meditation, and he literally had to stop because there was this maybe too much blood flow.

01:00:39Blood flow is kind of a lens of attention, and the more blood flow there is somewhere, then

01:00:45the more differentially amplified that region of the brain is. He said he would just get this

01:00:54sensation of this ball of blood in his head, and he just had to stop because he didn't know what was

01:01:04going on, and he had to sort of lean into that. I think it's a rare occurrence. I don't think

01:01:12people would question it. Yeah, yeah.

01:01:15That brings me to, and maybe this will kind of bring us back towards the

01:01:19enlightenment track that I'd love to speak to you about, but something that I was thinking

01:01:24about yesterday as I was anticipating this conversation is, and I've had many people

01:01:29ask me the question of like, what is qi or prana or energy in the system? From my kind

01:01:37of lived experience, it almost seems as if there's two vectors. One is arousal energy,

01:01:44which kind of is the energy that's going to be in the system, and the other is the energy that's going

01:01:46chi prana which also has corresponding connections to nerve clusters in the central channel generally

01:01:52for me higher arousal is more kind of head neck chest and heart and then lower arousal more belly

01:01:59pelvic floor um that that kind of area and that also correlates to some degree with the jhanas

01:02:04as well which which we haven't touched on yet um so yeah what is energy and and would you say

01:02:12is the experience of because it seems like there is literal energy like volts of energy going

01:02:18through the nervous system but then there's also our experience of that which it sounds like you're

01:02:23saying is increased um blood flow into these areas sure it's a it's a great question uh

01:02:32i think that uh i mean i'm sort of answering from a position of curiosity here uh

01:02:41but i would say

01:02:42that uh first of all i would expect that to understand energy in the body

01:02:48we should have kind of a short list of the most electrically active cells

01:02:57and in terms of you know what cells have the biggest polarity from

01:03:01from inside to outside a negative charge inside and charge outside so and and also sort of

01:03:08communication um and just kind of have

01:03:12big of a splash they make in the

01:03:14EM field when they fire, when they discharge.

01:03:17And, I mean,

01:03:18neurons have a very strong EM

01:03:20signature, but

01:03:22actually, heart muscle

01:03:24has a stronger signature.

01:03:26A much...

01:03:2737 feet or something, I think the heart

01:03:30sends out?

01:03:31It's crazy. Somewhere between

01:03:344x to

01:03:3610x, the magnetic

01:03:38field of the brain.

01:03:40Very, very strong.

01:03:42And I would also say that

01:03:45fascia and

01:03:46collagen are

01:03:48sort of very

01:03:51electrically relevant

01:03:52cells, or like

01:03:54tissue types.

01:03:56And so,

01:04:01I'm not going to give

01:04:02a full answer at this point.

01:04:04Some things are still in the oven

01:04:06and cooking, but

01:04:08I would expect that

01:04:10sort of

01:04:12EM

01:04:12if we understand this as

01:04:14sort of

01:04:16the shape of electrical charge

01:04:18in the body

01:04:20and the amount,

01:04:22we might say,

01:04:24roughly speaking,

01:04:26if we could measure the voltage

01:04:28potential, the differential

01:04:30in charge between

01:04:31the inside

01:04:33and the outside of

01:04:37I'm going to

01:04:38punt and say the energy body.

01:04:40Or like,

01:04:40you know,

01:04:42measure key parts in the brain,

01:04:44like the inside of the brain,

01:04:45the outside.

01:04:46This came up in discussion with

01:04:48Max Odeck,

01:04:50but also, you know,

01:04:51in the heart as well.

01:04:54Basically,

01:04:56the amount of voltage potential

01:04:58may correspond with the

01:05:00intensity of the experience.

01:05:01And so, if you're having a very intense experience, there's probably a higher voltage of potential

01:05:08between sort of your core and your outside.

01:05:12And I mean, this would be very testable.

01:05:17I would anticipate that this would sort of go down over age, with age, go up with some

01:05:24sort of tense experiences, go up with psychedelics, go up when, I guess, this gets into the enlightenment.

01:05:37So, yeah, let's go there.

01:05:41And perhaps, like, where my curiosity, I have many curiosities, but the question's coming

01:05:47up at the moment is, like, is there a difference between someone who has experienced, like,

01:05:54an experience, let's say, abiding, kind of classical awakening, like, kind of their

01:05:59default state is more or less in a non-dual state, versus being relatively free of latches?

01:06:08Because I've met people who have, you know, have had that experience of being in non-abiding

01:06:14awakening, but they still have nervous system challenges, let's say, and, like, things,

01:06:19traumas will arise at the same time, but they're more able to kind of have a much greater

01:06:24distance from it.

01:06:26So what's your sense of the connection between the process and the journey of awakening versus

01:06:34latches?

01:06:35Sure.

01:06:36Yeah, that's a good question.

01:06:38And this should get back to this idea that there are multiple kinds of virtue, that we

01:06:44can say it's, I don't know if it's a virtue, but it's a good thing, ultimately, all else

01:06:51being equal.

01:06:52Yes.

01:06:53You know.

01:06:54So, you are latches.

01:06:55You have a near system.

01:06:57It lets you feel more alive.

01:06:59It lets you sort of access more cognitive, emotional freedom, behavioral freedom.

01:07:07You can be anything.

01:07:09You feel free.

01:07:11Everything's on the menu.

01:07:12Things are more vivid.

01:07:14Probably time passes slower.

01:07:16I mean, the benefits go on and on.

01:07:22But.

01:07:24You can have, you know, few latches in your system, relatively speaking, but yet be very

01:07:31reactive.

01:07:33You can, you can sort of have a nervous system, your vascular system doesn't trust, and you

01:07:40get these sort of strong reactions and uncontrollable reactions.

01:07:45And these are not exactly apples and oranges, because, you know, that they're like strong,

01:07:54like, strong.

01:07:54And, you know, reflexive, like, reflexive reactions often will lead to latches.

01:08:00But if you sort of.

01:08:05Focused your self development on opening latches, but not sort of toning down your reflexes

01:08:12or not nervous system virtue, then you could kind of take this track of, well, yeah, few

01:08:18latches.

01:08:19But.

01:08:20A lot of sort of.

01:08:22Strong.

01:08:24Reflexive.

01:08:27InScripts.

01:08:30InScripts.

01:08:33InScripts.

01:08:33sort of the, I want to say

01:08:38InScripts.

01:08:41InScripts.

01:08:42idea that when you're

01:08:45InScripts.

01:08:47InScripts.

01:08:49InScripts.

01:08:51InScripts.

01:08:54InScripts.

01:08:54more tools, you can sort of use these high level approaches to

01:09:00manage situations in ways that can sort of not require these

01:09:06touches. However, if you've made it to 2025 30, whatever, you

01:09:15basically just have this sort of foundation of latch networks.

01:09:20And then sort of the the healing journey, we can say, or the sort of

01:09:29more classical Buddhist approach as well involves Okay, let's let's open

01:09:36these up and get my freedom back, basically. And I see this as a, like, I

01:09:46think the Buddhist way is, is long, but it's not as long as the Buddhist

01:09:52safe and good.

01:09:56It's sort of

01:09:56you trust the body

01:09:59of

01:10:00when to open. You're not sort of doing crazy drugs to try these open. I see the process of meditation as, I mean, first of all, okay, you have all these slashes, kind of hard constants in your nervous system, which we can call the self. And then, okay, you go to a very safe environment,

01:10:28so a nice meditation hall. You have a teacher that you trust, and you kind of do the process. And maybe it takes some years, many retreats. You go on a two-month retreat, and you get symmetry. And basically, I think to dig into the technical process,

01:11:00I can speak very narrowly and from a place of humility about an inspiration, we can say, in terms of the posthumous insight meditation. So, my teacher is Anthony Markwell. He describes it as you're present, you're not in the future, you're not the past, but you're in the present moment. You're inside.

01:11:28You're in general. You're not trying to put your attention out there. You're in here. And then you're centered. And by centered, he means not trying to chase good feelings, not trying to run away from bad feelings.

01:11:45And then, with this foundation, you try to develop a noting practice, where you sort of try to notice each sensation.

01:11:56Often, you'll have to draw them out.

01:11:58focusing on the breath and you inhale the rising and falling as well. And so you note

01:12:09the sensation and then you try to know the sensation, you try to kind of fully feel the

01:12:14sensation and you let it go and do with the next one. And to put this in a Bayesian frame

01:12:25here, you're sort of, I mean, first of all, the safe environment says, okay, it's safe to

01:12:37experiment a little bit here. And then with the noting practice, I mean, you're sort of dialing

01:12:48down, all this practice dials down your vascular reflexes. You're not trying to

01:12:55control your sensations. You're just trying to feel them. But then I think if you actually

01:13:04follow through on this practice, you get really weird sensations, really sort of, you get to a

01:13:13pretty strange place. And in a Bayesian frame, I think you're basically showing your nervous

01:13:24system.

01:13:24wildly out of distribution data. data, that it is absolutely failing to predict.

01:13:33And then you're saying, okay, nervous system, you didn't see this coming. Like this, this is,

01:13:43you're totally failing at predicting this, but maybe if you opened a few latches,

01:13:51you could predict it. It wouldn't be out of distribution.

01:13:55It would be, uh, sort of predictable and it's not trying to force these latches open, but it is

01:14:06trying to tease, teasing. Yeah. It's like the, the Huxley's doors of perception, like the aperture

01:14:11opens a few degrees more to let in even more of the, the, the chaos outside.

01:14:18Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

01:14:20And I think that, uh, I mean, in, in result,

01:14:26you don't suddenly become a perfect person, but

01:14:33by, by all accounts, it's a significant step change.

01:14:39Yes. If you can kind of, and I, I think that there's like,

01:14:45there's a lot of, it's, it's like that. Uh, I think it's toast. I quote, um,

01:14:53all happy families are alive.

01:14:55Like all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

01:15:00can kind of adapt it to nervous systems and say, all unhappy nervous systems are unhappy

01:15:14in their own ways.

01:15:16And it can take many, many, many years until people can even begin a recognizable meditative

01:15:29path.

01:15:30And maybe that's their particular set of latches that they have to work through and their reflexes

01:15:40and so on.

01:15:42But then it's this funnel where things become more and more similar as you're sort of digging

01:15:50into these sort of nigh-universal latches that almost everyone has.

01:15:55One curiosity I have, internal family systems is becoming increasingly popular,

01:16:00certainly in the circles that I'm in.

01:16:02And I'm wondering if what Dick Schwartz labels as the protector parts, like the firefighters,

01:16:09et cetera.

01:16:10Is he just describing different types of latches that we're then able to kind of have a dialogue

01:16:17with and we experience as being like two parts in tension?

01:16:21I might suggest that he's not necessarily describing different kinds of latches,

01:16:27but different kinds of reflexes.

01:16:30Different kinds of vasomuscular reflexes.

01:16:35There's going to be a pretty wide spectrum of reflexes.

01:16:40There's going to be a set of strategies to sort of reduce uncertainty.

01:16:46Respiratory chair.

01:16:47Yeah.

01:16:47And those could be things like the developmental reflexes that like the Landau reflex.

01:16:53We kind of learned these in our breathwork training that sometimes can become, what's

01:16:58the word?

01:17:00Basically just like stuck and incomplete.

01:17:03And then again, through this process, they can be completed.

01:17:06So it seems like there's both incomplete reflexes and latches.

01:17:10And those are two separate but related things.

01:17:14Yeah.

01:17:16I mean, it's interesting to dig into that and to what degree are they fully separate

01:17:24or could be overlapping.

01:17:26So one example is like if I turn a burner on and start cooking something, I'll hold

01:17:35something in my nervous system until I turn the burner off.

01:17:40Yeah.

01:17:40I'll be like, okay, I got to remember this.

01:17:42Like I have to burn it off.

01:17:45And it's like very useful to do that.

01:17:47I've forgotten that many times.

01:17:49It's in my wife's frustration.

01:17:53Yeah.

01:17:54Yeah.

01:17:55I think that like step one in exploring this is like respecting the body of like, okay,

01:18:00there's some logic of what it does.

01:18:04And so, yeah, like I sort of naturally reflexively hold this.

01:18:07And then I turn the burner off.

01:18:10I can let go of that thing, whatever that I'm holding, some tension.

01:18:17And then I can go about the next steps.

01:18:24But some things I would expect that you never get that release.

01:18:30And you just kind of hold.

01:18:32And there's no catharsis.

01:18:34There's no closure.

01:18:37There's no

01:18:37Now just kind of some sort of a held thing.

01:18:41You're in process.

01:18:42You're in the middle of something.

01:18:43You're holding some state.

01:18:45You're holding some context.

01:18:49And sometimes that may just be a muscular thing.

01:18:55And that sort of regenerates when you wake up and so on.

01:19:00But sometimes that might get physically latched, like with a bad breakup or something.

01:19:09So yeah, I suspect that there's some of that.

01:19:12If you can never get closure, then maybe your body just latches it and says, okay, let's

01:19:19move on.

01:19:19Just treat it constantly.

01:19:21Got it.

01:19:23So slight tangent, but I've heard you mention the role of metabolic health in this as well.

01:19:29And I've recently been listening to some of Dr. Jack Cruz, who is a very controversial

01:19:34figure.

01:19:35But he has some interesting ideas around.

01:19:37He's a very controversial figure.

01:19:37He thinks that mitochondrial cells emit low levels of UV light and that sunlight also

01:19:42plays a crucial role.

01:19:43In your model, what is the role of metabolic health in the encouragement of latches to

01:19:52release?

01:19:53Sure.

01:19:54Yeah, that's a great question.

01:19:58Metabolic health I've really been getting

01:20:00into, and I think it's at the core of so much in health. And if you don't have energy, then you start to fall apart. And if you do have energy, like this is the right beat stuff that he has a very nice quote, as energy flows through tissue, order accumulates. And it's just that this flow of energy allows us to maintain ourselves.

01:20:25And to accumulate more order. Now, I think that metabolic health and vasocomputation are

01:20:37intimately linked. Because like the sort of latch solution, then okay, muscle can sort of

01:20:51be issued sort of freely cycling. And it takes a lot of energy,

01:20:55to freely cycle takes a lot of fuel. And, and actually, the contracted state is the

01:21:02metabolically insufficient state. If you like rigor mortis comes from, okay, you ran out of ATP.

01:21:10So yeah, really kind of a little counterintuitive. But so it actually,

01:21:17you know, in in one formulation, this and the details are a little complex, but it takes more

01:21:23energy to relax than that. And so, you know, it's, it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a,

01:21:25you know, it's a little bit of a, you know, it's a little bit of a, you know, it's a little bit of a,

01:21:26that's interesting. That's really interesting. I mean,

01:21:29that that applies to a lot of like stressed out type A people who struggle with relaxing.

01:21:34Totally. And I would also say, yeah, yeah. This, this idea of metabolic health too. Like,

01:21:44when the body is sort of bumping into metabolic insufficiency. When it's saying, okay, basically,

01:21:53we have rolling gratis.

01:21:55here uh in the body that one of the one of the core moves that it can do is it can sort of

01:22:06go from like this this muscle freely cycling state and it can just latch that muscle it then

01:22:14it doesn't have to spend energy to to hold things open or hold things shut it can just say okay

01:22:20let's set this lock now maybe it's not perfect maybe it's not ideal but we'll we'll deal with

01:22:28that later um it's cheaper because we can just sort of not have to pay the muscle

01:22:38and so i expect that you know if if you're and then if it's sort of latched pretty tight

01:22:47it's hard to get blood into the muscle

01:22:50the tissue and the blood would sort of you'd need the blood to pay for the metabolic cost

01:22:58of releasing the lat so it's right right right yeah that's such a fascinating insight that it

01:23:06takes more energy to be tense than it does to relax right that's that's incredible so i mean

01:23:13if someone is is really into sort of

01:23:21healing trauma release meditation all these things i think metabolic health is just going

01:23:29to be very centrally important that i mean you can you can sort of uh to to create the conditions

01:23:38for release uh it really helps if you're sort of above the waterline in terms of okay you you have

01:23:46more energy than than you absolutely need you can afford it and you can afford it and you can afford

01:23:50to uh that the body can kind of feel oh yeah like maybe i need to keep that slouch for this reason

01:23:59but at least metabolically speaking i can afford to relax and so then then at least you have

01:24:06the possibility of release whereas i think if if you're metabolically insufficient um

01:24:13i think basically you know you get a lot of random micro spasms in your vasomuscular system

01:24:20and you know this is a probably very important yeah it um it speaks to or reminds me of like

01:24:28the dieta kind of before ceremonies that is traditionally practiced um are there any specific

01:24:34um supplements or things that you think are supportive for people listening who might be

01:24:41engaged in in this type of work and might be curious like how do i increase my metabolic

01:24:45health and how can that also be measured is there some there's some objective way of doing that

01:24:50or is there some way of measuring that sure yeah the the best measurement um so i mean my my thought

01:25:00tends to go to the thyroid and markers of thyroid health.

01:25:04And the sort of mainstream way to do this is measuring TSH and T3, T4, etc.

01:25:13But the repeat crowd, which I would include myself in that, says that actually measuring

01:25:23your body temperature when you wake up is actually an even...

01:25:28It's practiced in Ayurvedic lineages as well.

01:25:32Nice. Yeah. Nice. And so just kind of tracking that over time would be great.

01:25:38In terms of metabolic health, I would say that most of the low-paying fruit, so as in everything in life,

01:25:53most of the low-paying fruit is in the form of stop eating yourself.

01:26:00And so I think it's mostly about removing things from your diet, from your environment,

01:26:07things that are... I think that I sort of buy the repeat view that

01:26:15people used to have much more active metabolisms, and now we've sort of become

01:26:25like body heat is I think

01:26:27I think a full degree Fahrenheit lower now than I was in 1870 or something.

01:26:34And I think that it's sort of the iceberg meme where you have the surface and then the

01:26:43next level, and you can keep going pretty far down metabolic metabolic health rabbit hole.

01:26:52Yeah.

01:26:54Yeah.

01:26:57Yeah.

01:26:57oils so it's sort of this idea that um oils that are generally made from seeds um are not

01:27:09particularly healthy uh they have forms of fat that are very reactive easy to oxidize

01:27:18and like humans are like for for cows you know whatever they eat uh they have four stomachs

01:27:29their remnants with with these four stomachs and then the bacteria in the stomach um like turns

01:27:35whatever fat that they eat into sort of cow fat uh iron such as fat and so on

01:27:44humans don't have four stomachs

01:27:47whatever forms of oil we eat we put into ourselves pretty much as is so it's not like

01:27:55proteins where we we eat something we break it down into amino acid building blocks and then

01:28:02we build proteins we need it's that we just grab a fat molecule and we use it

01:28:10and so if these fat molecules are um

01:28:15um

01:28:18particularly uh

01:28:21not ideal we could say uh if they're reactive if they break down in light if they uh

01:28:28are easily oxidized um if they aren't a good fit for for what we need then slowly

01:28:38we rebuild ourselves out of these sub substandard fat molecules so fat quality is important in ways

01:28:46that protein

01:28:48i mean for protein it's just you know get enough amino acids and uh you know there's

01:28:54are you that glycine is especially important and so on but for fat it's really

01:29:01you know you you become what you eat and the seed oil hypothesis is that um unsaturated fat and

01:29:11and especially polyunsaturated polyunsaturated fat or the the acronym is poof polyunsaturated fatty

01:29:20acid uh is particularly unhealthy and uh there's a lot of voices like very loud voices on on both

01:29:36sides that uh you know if you ask the the american heart association they'll say oh

01:29:41yeah

01:29:41you know uh unsaturated fat is better than saturated fat and i think that's deeply wrong

01:29:49and i think that um like if you want to focus on metabolic health

01:29:56uh a simple thing like replacing canola

01:30:00oil or corn oil or soybean oil or these sort of mainstream vegetable oils with coconut oil.

01:30:07That's a great book.

01:30:09Coconut oil is almost entirely saturated rather than proof.

01:30:18It's interesting that, almost maybe ironic, that a lot of meditation retreats,

01:30:23they will serve their food with seed oils.

01:30:25I've been to many where that's the case.

01:30:28It seems maybe very counterproductive.

01:30:31Yeah.

01:30:31And I think that's going to be surprisingly important.

01:30:36I think there's a real space to open up for a retreat center that is sort of like pro-med

01:30:43bald health, like explicitly this is the priority.

01:30:49If step one is not eating seed oils, there's many, many, many steps.

01:30:55But you can just go down the list.

01:30:58Yeah.

01:30:58Fascinating.

01:30:59Well, another kind of switching gears slightly topic that we briefly spoke about in California

01:31:06was polyvagal theory.

01:31:07And you shared that polyvagal theory is likely useful, practically useful, but kind of wrong

01:31:16in interesting ways.

01:31:18But I don't think we have time to kind of unpack what you meant by that.

01:31:20So I'm curious, in what ways do you think polyvagal...

01:31:23What does polyvagal theory get right?

01:31:24And what does it do?

01:31:25Was it kind of not quite...

01:31:27Was it Mr. Markham?

01:31:29Yeah.

01:31:30So I mean, the vagus nerve, it's kind of the wandering nerve, it's called, and sort of

01:31:37travels throughout, up through the spine and I think by one ear.

01:31:45Yep.

01:31:45And yeah, like vagal tone is, I would expect, centrally important throughout.

01:31:53I think that really...

01:31:55And then there's the sort of frame of...

01:32:00Okay.

01:32:02There's this very tonal and parasynthetic tone and kind of the side of the body.

01:32:09The audio has just gone kind of fuzzy and...

01:32:12Oh okay.

01:32:13How is this?

01:32:14That sounds better.

01:32:15Yeah.

01:32:15Okay, cool.

01:32:17That's great.

01:32:18All right.

01:32:20All right.

01:32:20think that um you know there's there's a

01:32:25lot to like in in this framing but it's not exactly a gears level approach i can't like there's

01:32:39little actionable physical mechanism involved like you know it's this it's like this meme you know

01:32:46is this polyvagal tone in the room with us right now i know and well

01:32:55maybe not uh we can't measure it we can't um like uh we can't directly manipulate it we can

01:33:02hypothesize that there is such a thing as polyvagal tone so i think i'm i'm most excited about um

01:33:10approaches that eventually will cash out in something physical something measurable something

01:33:16yeah me too me too and do you have a sense of um so one frame or concept from polyvagal theory that

01:33:24i find useful is

01:33:25this idea of the window of tolerance and also that we have they call it um dorsal shutdown

01:33:31it's kind of like one reactive mode and then like sympathetic overwhelm is kind of the other

01:33:36reactive mode when we're we're outside of the window of tolerance do you have a sense of

01:33:40what might be happening there and and is it connected to latches in in any in any way

01:33:46short answer is i'm not sure i i need to do my research there yeah okay um it it seems like

01:33:55the system almost get there's there's almost like too much energy in the system and it could be you

01:34:00know connected to an emotion um and when when this when the energy reaches what you mentioned earlier

01:34:06was like a temperature threshold then it tends to have like a protective reactive reaction which

01:34:12can either be to kind of like withdraw and go numb and collapse and shut down or it's like

01:34:16be aggressive and and attack but it seems to be connected with the temperature idea that you that

01:34:22you mentioned earlier yeah and

01:34:25i mean just in general like there's there's kind of a very odd trade-off in the nervous system where

01:34:31we will almost like somewhat reliably for pain and failure over uncertainty and ambivalence

01:34:42and like sometimes this manifests as like oh you sort of act to collapse the uncertainty

01:34:51and destroy the situation yeah um and

01:34:55like, why did you do that? That's not optimal, but we,

01:35:00honestly really hard to tolerate uncertainty.

01:35:03And is that because we are wired to minimize prediction errors in our system?

01:35:08I would say so.

01:35:11Beautiful. Well, I had one other question from, I think this was from Steven from

01:35:16the Jhanas or Jhana Tech. How has your work and theories been received in kind of the

01:35:25broader community? Have you had any interesting pushback from smart people also in theoretical

01:35:31neuroscience?

01:35:33Yeah. So I think that people seem cautious and very curious. So I was talking with

01:35:46Michael Levin last year and had a good chat about how maybe this kind of distributed stress

01:35:55optimization could extend to his work. And I think people kind of want this to be true. And

01:36:05like, are kind of looking and saying, okay, well, this is a nice, clean story. What's the next step?

01:36:16And what's the next step after that? And I'm kind of in the position of, well, there's a lot to do.

01:36:26One of me and I kind of want to to tell them more, like, the more full story first before I sort of

01:36:37get into anything.

01:36:40Very, very empirical.

01:36:42But I'm I guess trying to see if some outside groups will test this sort of density differential

01:36:54or double orienteering.

01:36:55ultrasound to find latches and so on.

01:36:59So I guess the feedback that I've got has actually all been positive, which tells me

01:37:09that maybe I need to be a little bit more aggressive at finding the feet of star.

01:37:15And I guess just to give the larger context, so vessel computation parallels the work

01:37:29of Moore and Cowell.

01:37:34They have this 2007, 2008 paper, The Hemodural Hypothesis.

01:37:40They don't talk at all about latches, though.

01:37:42They just talked about, okay, like blood flows.

01:37:45It seems to adjust the gain of neurons.

01:37:49And the latch bridge mechanism specifically seems to be the physiological feature that

01:38:01neuroscience forgot, that there's really no sort of sense in the neuroscience literature

01:38:10that this could be a deeply regulatory mechanism.

01:38:15In a computational sense, like this could regulate computation.

01:38:20And it's sort of building this no man's land that, okay, look, there's this sort of sense

01:38:29that blood flow is sort of important.

01:38:32And like Moore and Cowell show that, or I think they have Moore and Cowell, and then

01:38:37there's some follow-up papers that say that changes in blood flow actually precede changes

01:38:43in neural activity.

01:38:45And it's not that.

01:38:46That's fascinating.

01:38:47Yes.

01:38:48It's not that neurons do stuff and then the blood comes to pay for it.

01:38:54Yeah.

01:38:54It's the blood arrives first and then neurons change.

01:38:59And I mean, I would have imagined that neurons travel faster than blood flow, but I guess

01:39:07that it's still possible that the blood flow arises and then the neuronal changes happen.

01:39:12Right.

01:39:13I mean, that just seems like such a huge.

01:39:15Yeah.

01:39:15Insight that you'd think that would be more widely shared or known in like, that was the

01:39:21first time I'd heard that.

01:39:22Right.

01:39:23Yeah.

01:39:24That's wild.

01:39:26Yeah.

01:39:26And the second thing that I'd say about this is like, I'm pretty optimistic and it's sort

01:39:34of, so I am learning how deeply political academic science is.

01:39:40And I kind of, you know, it's.

01:39:43Oh.

01:39:44Yeah.

01:39:45And I've said about that, but I would say that I'm very optimistic that like this sort

01:39:53of free energy principle, active inference, sort of sense

01:40:00that, well, we have predictions and minimizing prediction error.

01:40:05It's like the nervous system is a prediction machine and minimizing prediction error can

01:40:12be done through making better predictions.

01:40:15And it can also be done through making predictions and then acting in the world to make them

01:40:22true.

01:40:24And I'm incredibly optimistic about vasocomputation offering the physical substrate for the predictions.

01:40:39The clench and like a clench in some network is a prediction that you're sort of holding

01:40:48something constant.

01:40:49You will naturally act in the world.

01:40:52To make that true, to sort of relieve stress on this.

01:40:59And sometimes you latch a prediction and then you might call that something like a strongly

01:41:06held prior about the world.

01:41:08And I think the free energy principle active inference framework is this absolutely beautiful

01:41:20mathematical structure.

01:41:22It's, you know, I won't say perfect, but it's magnificent.

01:41:27But it doesn't talk about anatomy.

01:41:31It's, you know, you can take a look at this and well, can we see the prediction errors

01:41:35on EEG on fMRI and like there are some like loose approaches to do that.

01:41:42But I'm very optimistic that well actually it's vascular tension.

01:41:49Every piece of vascular tension.

01:41:52He's implicitly prediction and every prediction we can find in vascular tension.

01:41:57And I think that this could potentially take the framework from sort of something that

01:42:04really smart neuroscientists talk about to wow, like let's scan someone and find their

01:42:13latches and like we can figure out exactly what their nervous system is predicting.

01:42:19Totally.

01:42:22And one of the thought experiments that I had the other day was like, so I studied innovation

01:42:28prizes and economics like a long time ago.

01:42:31And I was wondering like, you know, if someone were to put up a half a million dollar prize,

01:42:39what do you think the specific, the most useful innovation would be that would enable the

01:42:46blood flow tracking in smooth muscle reflex to exist?

01:42:50And, you know, it could be called like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

01:42:52the body scorecard prize.

01:42:53Like, but I do, I mean, I feel like this would be insanely, insanely useful if yes.

01:43:02So, so let's say like reset, like a team of innovators, people came to you, 20 people

01:43:08that like, okay, Mike, we're gonna, we're gonna do this thing.

01:43:10What, what, what direction would you point them in?

01:43:12Like what would be the most useful thing that they could design that would be able to scan

01:43:17people?

01:43:18Sure.

01:43:18Nice.

01:43:19Yeah.

01:43:20Great question.

01:43:22So I would, I would frame this in terms of distinct steps and step one would be create

01:43:29a blood flow of a body and and then like step 1.5 would be okay.

01:43:38And then like do PTSD sufferers have you know, dropouts on this map and do you know, highly

01:43:49accomplished

01:43:50Yeah.

01:43:52Meditators have light spots on this map that where everyone else has a dark spot, they

01:44:00have normal flow.

01:44:03And then I think step two would be, well, can you, can you induce like, you know, can

01:44:12you take something like ultrasound, which, uh, I'm told, um, like the effects of ultrasound

01:44:19on neurons.

01:44:21Um, there are.

01:44:22There are various stories about how that works and the stories are kind of loose and perfect.

01:44:29Um, that yeah, ultrasound has, uh, effects on populations of neurons, but it's not a

01:44:39precision thing of changing, uh, neurons in exactly this way or that, but that said ultrasound

01:44:50seems even better.

01:44:52Uh, or like using muscle cells as, as targets, like the there of how it

01:45:00affects muscle cells is more clear. It can be more precise when used to target muscles. And so, you know, there's all this interest in focused ultrasound and its magnificent technology. But I just think that basically everyone is targeting the wrong kind of cell.

01:45:22And, you know, I think once we collectively realize that or, you know, certain groups realize that, I think we could be off to the races in terms of okay, well, if we can make a map, can we start popping these latches and then entity the safety protocol for okay, well, sometimes these latches exist for a reason. And like, you know,

01:45:50maybe like the buddhist process grows different kinds of virtue where you need to have in place

01:46:00before you uplatch so like there's not just the buddhist process but like um yeah just like

01:46:08the emotional fluidity stuff and and just kind of nervous system yeah i i mean that that would be

01:46:15that would be my dream in that in the same way that you can go to hospital today and

01:46:20they'll tell you if you have a broken leg or you can do a scan and you see if you have the early

01:46:24signs of a cancer tumor like you could also you know have a scan of your blood flow and see where

01:46:30are these like go latch hunting like you said and find out where the latches are and then your

01:46:35kind of somatic work could be so much more focused and targeted to that particular area

01:46:41obviously with all the caveats of creating safety and ideally having someone to hold space with you

01:46:47while you do this exploration but i mean i think that's the thing that i'm trying to do is i'm

01:46:51would really put somatic work kind of on the map and have mainstream scientists and people take it

01:46:58seriously because right now people seem to say well this thing seems to work but because we

01:47:03don't really understand it we're not really going to integrate it into our paradigm so we're just

01:47:06going to leave it over here uh yeah it feels incredibly exciting to me nice yeah and then

01:47:14yeah it's then it's also like 11 leveling up as researcher as practitioner dealers whatever

01:47:22and like it's it's not the case that just kind of popping a latch is always a good thing and

01:47:29only good things will happen if we do that um i think you know for example cyclic shows that well

01:47:35sometimes good things happen and sometimes people have a have a rough time um but i think it's like

01:47:44this is i find a promising way for the field to grow yeah i i feel like the the people that don't

01:47:52have a good time so to speak it's more because the latch is like forced open as opposed to a more

01:47:58gentle kind of invitational approach yeah yeah yeah beautiful um is there anything else that

01:48:06is alive for you that you'd like to share or talk about before we begin to begin to close

01:48:11uh i think we covered a lot

01:48:16there's

01:48:18uh yeah i guess uh nothing that can't wait until part two okay beautiful well i have a few quick

01:48:25rapid fire questions and then we'll uh we'll wrap this up the first question is if you were to

01:48:30define an emotion in relatively simple terms what might you say i would define an emotion as

01:48:38a low frequency resonance in the earth which

01:48:45essentially functionally acts as a bayesian prior for all the the higher frequency uh resonances

01:48:54in the body what is one idea in neuroscience that you disagree with or you think is given

01:49:00too much weight basically every single way we're using neuroimaging

01:49:04i could go down the list but but it's all like good good technology but oh well

01:49:14sometimes uh but i think that um we need better sort of foundational stories

01:49:20what is one book or paper that you've read that disproportionately impacted your thinking

01:49:25the free and free principle by firston it was a very brilliant paper what is one question or

01:49:32direction that is very alive in your research currently um how to

01:49:42how to

01:49:45how to heal people and i i think that's kind of uh kind of obvious but um i just think it's

01:49:54it's not too obvious to repeat what is your heart's greatest aspiration or

01:50:00vision that you have for your research and your work in the world for the years and decades to come?

01:50:05So I'm going to give a slightly longer answer to that.

01:50:08Please.

01:50:09Research tends to be... It's sort of in three families right now. There's the first

01:50:18branch, which is my philosophical research. And so I wrote this book, Reciproqualia.

01:50:28Probably the big result from the book was the symmetry theory of valence.

01:50:33And I think that that's going to be very important for sort of,

01:50:38quote unquote, solving consciousness. And I talked about that in a recent paper in the summer.

01:50:47It was kind of entitled, A Paradigm for AI Consciousness. So the first branch is very

01:50:57metaphysical. What is consciousness? What is pleasure?

01:51:03The second branch was more thermodynamic. It's narrow kneeling. It's sort of taking a look at

01:51:12music, meditation, psychedelics, has increasing energy parameter, the temp parameter of the

01:51:19brain of the nervous system. And then sort of implications thereof.

01:51:26And the third big branch now is vasocomputation.

01:51:31It's, okay, maybe there's a very simple systems decomposition

01:51:37where we take this complex thing

01:51:39and it's actually made of two much, much simpler things.

01:51:44There's the nervous system

01:51:45and then there's the vasomuscular regulation of this.

01:51:50And so setting aside the second branch for now,

01:51:56I would say that I really want to make sure

01:52:03we're sort of headed into a future

01:52:06with lots of good consciousness,

01:52:10lots of good quality, we could say.

01:52:12So for the first branch,

01:52:15these are the foundational question of

01:52:18what is the domain of value?

01:52:21And if consciousness is the domain of value,

01:52:23then like,

01:52:24okay,

01:52:27what is good?

01:52:28What is a good feeling?

01:52:29What is bad feeling?

01:52:30What makes things pleasant?

01:52:32What makes things unpleasant?

01:52:34I think it's going to be important for the future

01:52:36in ways that I haven't really expressed yet,

01:52:39but maybe kind of obvious.

01:52:42And then for this branch, vasocomputation,

01:52:49I think systematizing the healing of trauma

01:52:57and sort of not just getting people up to normal,

01:53:02but how far can we get them past normal?

01:53:06And I think classical Buddhist enlightenment

01:53:09is an absolutely beautiful existence proof and a recipe for,

01:53:16yeah, like really good states exist.

01:53:20And then the question is, well,

01:53:23how do we very respectfully,

01:53:26and carefully get people there?

01:53:30Beautiful, beautiful.

01:53:31Mike, this has been such a pleasure.

01:53:34I'm so, so grateful that you took the time

01:53:36for this conversation.

01:53:38And I'm deeply excited for the impact

01:53:42and the ripple effects for your curiosity

01:53:46and for this work.

01:53:47And I hope that there are researchers

01:53:50and people with means who listen to this

01:53:52and they're like, okay,

01:53:53these ideas need to be shared more broadly.

01:53:56And I think that we need to apply more resources

01:53:58into these directions because to my sense,

01:54:01this feels like one of the most important questions

01:54:06or problems that we could be tackling.

01:54:09So I'm really grateful to you

01:54:10for just following your curiosity down so many rabbit holes

01:54:15and coming back with some just truly beautiful theories

01:54:18and ideas.

01:54:19So thank you.

01:54:20Thank you so much for your time.

01:54:21Yeah, my pleasure.

01:54:22Thank you.

01:54:23Where can listeners, where can they find you?

01:54:26Read, where would be the best place for listeners

01:54:29to kind of learn more about your work

01:54:30and to kind of read your papers in more depth?

01:54:33Everything is available on my website,

01:54:36opentheory.net.

01:54:37And you can click best of if you want some highlights.

01:54:41Perfect.

01:54:41So I love to close with a line from Rilke.

01:54:45He said, try to love the questions themselves

01:54:49and live them now.

01:54:50Perhaps you will then gradually without noticing it,

01:54:53live your way into the answer.

01:54:56And with that in mind,

01:54:57what is the question that is most alive

01:54:59in your consciousness

01:55:00consciousness right now and what question might you leave our listeners with?

01:55:03I think the question I have is, and I'm sorry to bring this up and not answer it,

01:55:13but I think we build our reality, we build our inner world out of what we learn how to stabilize.

01:55:25And how exactly does that stabilization happen in the nervous system? That's my question that I'm

01:55:33answering right now. Well, I've opened enough latches to be able to sit with that uncertainty,

01:55:39I think. Mike, thank you. Thank you so, so much. Really appreciate you and just

01:55:48super grateful for this conversation. Thanks, Sean. It's my honor.

01:55:52I hope you enjoyed this conversation. It would mean a lot to me if you could take a few

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01:56:19johnny.life. That's johnny.life.com.

01:56:21Thanks for listening.