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Discussing Dr. Srini Pillay on 'Your Mind Predicts Reality' · Tracking Wisdom

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  You're listening to the Tracking Wisdom Podcast, exploring the universal truths that we see woven through culture, consciousness, and the human experience.
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  Good morning, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Tracking Wisdom Podcast.
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  I'm Ryan.
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  And I'm Peter.
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  And today I wanted to talk about an interview on Timothy Schultz YouTube channel named Lottery Dreams and Fortune.
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  Timothy Schultz was a winner of the powerball back in 1999, and before he won, he had a very specific dream that he won.
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  This is a story he shares often, and now he's become quite interested in finding other people who have similar stories.
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  He explores some content around manifestation and laws of attraction.
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  But today his episode is yous Mind Predicts Reality.
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  His guest was Dr.
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  Serini Pillay, who is a Harvard trained psychiatrist and neuroscientist.
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  He also has a book, which I'll link.
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  And so Peter had a little bit of resistance to some, which was not surprising, to be honest.
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  I sort of.
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  I sort of tried to prime you.
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  So my comment was I like what Pillay talks about and the way he talks about it.
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  I think he's balanced.
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  And my comment to Ryan was he's talking about enlightened ideas, but the context is this is how you can make money.
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  Now, he's not saying that.
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  Right.
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  But the show is setting up that context now.
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  And to be fair, I am not familiar with the show, I'm not familiar with this interviewer, but at the end of this video, there's a teaser for the next video, which is about winning more money.
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  And so they talk about the law of attraction.
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  And in my limited experience, these kind of conversations are all about gaining wealth, material wealth.
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  And so, not that I don't think people should be successful, but it makes me uncomfortable because it seems to be purpose driven into, well, let's look into enlightenment.
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  Why?
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  Because then we can get rich.
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  Which.
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  That's where I have all this resistance now.
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  Thinking about it for a few moments, I think, well, is it so terrible if people go to podcasts or channels about winning lotteries and attracting wealth and then start to learn about awakening?
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  And it's like, well, maybe it's a, you know, a lot of packaging.
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  A gateway.
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  Yeah, a gateway.
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  You know, but it's not a gateway I'm comfortable with.
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  Like, I can see it as a gateway and.
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  But I'm putting that there myself because this is only one interview.
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  I don't know who, you know, who else this guy talks to on his channel.
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  A lot of his content is around lottery winners sharing their experiences and the curiosity around precognition dreams in understanding better this experience that he had before he won and its prevalence in the community of winners.
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  So this interview with Dr.
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  Pillay is somewhat anomalous to his content thus far, but is very much aligned with the curiosity that he has around that experience.
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  And I would predict that this kind of content, like interviewing people like Dr.
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  Pillay to gather more insight around the physiology of what is commonly called the law of attraction or manifestation, which those terms in particular rub me the wrong way.
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  And we've talked about.
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  I'm just like, yeah, I have the.
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  Same reaction, but we have the same reaction for different reasons.
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  And I think that his audience has a tendency towards content around manifestation, law, attraction.
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  I think this stuff is probably showing up on their feed and they became algorithmically in contact with him because of their prevalence of consuming content around this kind of thing.
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  I don't think this show is really intended to be like a primer on manifestation.
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  The purpose of his show is not to give, get people rich.
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  I think people who want to win the lottery or whatever probably watch this show, but that's not the purpose of the show.
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  I think that there is a predominance of people who consume content listed as manifestation and love attraction to be interested in material gains.
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  In fact, it reminds me of a story that I shared on a previous episode of a young woman who had pursued this kind of thing and was online advocating against it because it was the work of the devil.
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  And her evidence for that was she did it and she was getting these things and those things didn't make her happy, which I found interesting.
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  The subtext is that material pursuits don't make you happy and you're upset about it.
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  And you're upset about it and it's not always wealthy.
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  Right.
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  I think there's altruistic ways of pursuit and that money is a resource that supports pursuit.
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  One thing that is important, one's perceptions and expectations around money dictate to some extent the ability to manifest.
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  So those who are in that mindset of needing money and like really pursuing it, the whole idea behind loss of attraction and manifestation is calmness and openness and playfulness.
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  That it's almost a double edged sword where so many people are trying and that trying is keeping it away from you.
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  Right.
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  That makes a lot of sense.
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  So that's not at all the content.
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  No.
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  Of this interview.
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  So that's your framing of the law of attraction.
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  And I think what I mean is that's not Schultz's framing.
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  I don't know what his Framing is.
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  He doesn't like teach on it.
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  Right.
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  It's closer to though, the way Pele talks.
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  And again, Schulz doesn't say much in this interview.
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  He doesn't say much in most of the interviews.
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  It's mostly questioning the guest.
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  Yeah.
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  So I'll say a couple things about what I like about what Pelay said.
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  So first is that he's non dogmatic.
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  I think his overall message is very simple.
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  It's be open, don't limit your beliefs.
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  Which is a very reasonable message to my mind.
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  And he offers a course that's.
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  How should I say.
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  He describes the methods of attracting good stuff to you as brain training and orienting your brain as opposed to invoking the law of attraction.
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  Right.
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  And he puts those two in a kind of opposition that you can talk about the law of attraction and is popularized by the book the Secret.
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  He says, but what I'm more interested in doing is showing people how to train their brain to tune it to this kind of reality where things come to you.
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  And he's basically saying the same thing, but in a language which is much more palatable to me because I'm very much into brain training and neuroplasticity.
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  And transitioning into fundamental well being is about training your brain.
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  You've transitioned because now your brain works in a way it didn't work before.
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  Right.
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  Which we touched on a previous episode begs the question of like, does your consciousness work that way because of your brain or is your brain existing the way it is because of your consciousness?
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  I did like Pillay's emphasis on a kind of non dogmatic attitude.
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  And then I slightly uncomfortable with the way he deals with science.
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  I shouldn't say the way he deals with science.
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  This was an overall thing I had watching this episode.
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  I kind of have this arrogant feeling of like, well, I'm understanding this the right way, but I don't think other people understand it the right way.
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  Which is to say it's very easy to turn what he says into pseudoscience.
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  He's referencing science that supports his worldview.
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  And I'm not saying this is inappropriate at all.
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  I think this is very appropriate.
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  I'm.
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  I guess I'm confused with my own position in belief in terms of science and skepticism versus woo and spiritualism and belief.
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  And so this kind of tweaks that discomfort for me.
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  Right.
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  Because I now live in a more open way.
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  I don't want to say I live more in a world of belief, but in a way I do.
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  It's this Transition of coming from this technical background, you know, coming from my skeptical rationalist background, and then finding myself now very much more open.
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  There are people who know me who would hear me say what I'm saying right now, and they're like, I don't know what you're talking about, you know, so I'm trying to say something meaningful about my discomfort.
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  And I guess the problem is that he doesn't have time to delve into any of the specific studies that he's talking about.
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  And I know a little bit about a bunch of the people he mentioned.
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  I'm like, yeah, but you have to say what they did, you know, like, he mentions Penrose, he mentions Raiden.
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  These are.
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  These are all people that we've talked about.
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  But that's all he does.
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  He just name drops.
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  He doesn't really do any kind of explanation except in the most.
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  He just kind of touches on it, which again, in this context, he can't do more than that.
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  And so, I don't know, I guess I'm attracted to it and it makes me uncomfortable.
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  No, I think that's really interesting.
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  And obviously the context of this interview was not a scientific discussion.
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  Right.
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  There was a handful of studies that he didn't go into depth about, but gave the basic abstract conclusion and named a name.
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  Now, I wouldn't say that was very far from, say, Donald Hoffman's interview, where in his book he goes into much deeper detail.
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  But in the original interview that we listened to, I think was on par with this study by this person said this thing and we kind of took it.
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  Yeah, I think the problem is context.
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  Yeah, of course, he did mention specifically that a lot of this language is woo woo.
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  And to many people that's not a very palatable way to discuss it.
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  But that because of his experiences, he feels a little more comfortable in that environment.
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  And one of the things he said is that he thinks it's important to entertain the hypothesis that the possible quantum nature of brain function, which we've mentioned another episode that these quantum phenomena in the brain connect to a
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  consciousness outside ourselves.
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  And so I guess the problem is the word consciousness, because we use it in so many ways now.
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  And for you and me, I think we've comfortably settled into this working model that consciousness is the ultimate nature of reality, that matter arises out of consciousness.
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  This is, you know, cutting edge, unproven, whatever, but everything we hear about it feels right.
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  And so when I hear him say connecting to consciousness outside ourselves, it's like, well, not really right, because we are consciousness not we are conscious human beings, but we are consciousness as existing, which is, again, in the context
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  of the conversation, much more subtle than if we talk to him in person.
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  I'm sure that he wouldn't really blink an eye if we had that conversation.
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  Maybe we should get him on the show.
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  So just to comment on that.
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  But I like the kind of openness of the way he expresses that.
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  I felt like there was a fair amount of.
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  This is thesis, right?
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  Not necessarily absolute fact.
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  He did talk about the way the brain works, and I think that much of what he had said is relatively accepted.
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  Unfortunately, I think in this kind of interview, the language that uses really important, because you're introducing so many ideas in such a small amount of time, you basically have two sentences for each of these ideas and researchers that
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  he's referencing.
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  And so there are some things that he's talking about, talks about, which, again, I just.
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  I don't know how people interpret the things that he's saying and how he really means it, because I have a different understanding of what he's saying and what he means.
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  So he talked about a study by Grau and others where he got people from India and France on the Internet.
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  And this was a little confusing to me because he was like, well, when you're connected by the Internet, thoughts can travel between people.
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  I'm like, okay, I think that's what the Internet's for.
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  I mean, I'm being facetiously making fun of it, because that's not the point.
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  The point is that these people aren't speaking.
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  They can't hear each other.
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  Right.
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  They're merely connected in some way.
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  And he doesn't explain at all.
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  So it's like, well, what does that mean?
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  Right?
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  Possibly it means that there are just some electrodes on this person, and the electrodes are plugged into a computer, and that's connected to the Internet, to another computer with electrodes which connects to another person.
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  Therefore, like, there's no screen involved.
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  But he didn't say that.
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  So it's that kind of thing where it's like, well, that's pretty much all he said about it.
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  And then he talks about mirror neurons, which lots of people refer to the phenomenon of mirror neurons for different contexts.
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  And he says, because when you see me or when I see you, there are mirror neurons in my brain that match up to what you're experiencing.
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  Like you're expressing an emotion, and my mirror neurons are activating because you're expressing happiness.
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  So my happiness, mirror neurons are activating.
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  And he says, and so you're actually living in me and I'm actually living in you.
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  And I thought, well, that's.
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  He said it a little different than that, though.
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  Okay.
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  He said that he was starting with the mirror neurons, but then said, I see you and I hear you and I have this image in my head.
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  And therefore, through that mechanism, you are essentially living inside of me.
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  Me inside you.
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  And to me, that sounded a lot like the icons in the interface.
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  That is our perception, through our interaction that creates this icon, which is your existence within my head of you.
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  But it's not actually you.
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  Now, obviously, he didn't say that part specifically.
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  He was saying that, you know, you exist inside of me and I inside you.
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  And I suppose at that point I'm in.
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  I'm layering my own understanding on that.
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  And what do the other people think about what he said?
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  I don't know.
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  I'm not responsible for what other people think.
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  I was just saying that it was a way of expressing it that I found confusing.
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  Sure.
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  Because, I mean, I think you're paraphrasing it as there's a version of you in my head, which to me is clear.
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  Sure.
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  And there.
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  And to take it from a different context, there are spiritual ways of thinking in those terms.
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  Right.
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  But that's not this context, and that's not what he was talking about.
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  And so I found it kind of jarring.
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  So I'm just picking out some little things.
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  I'm glad you picked that out, though, because that was one of the things that I thought was really interesting because to me, I made a relation to Hoffman's idea of the icon in the interface and how the conscious
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  agent is interacting with an icon, which I think specifically he's also saying, like, you over there, but you aren't.
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  What I see over there is the image in my head.
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  Right, exactly.
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  I don't actually see you.
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  Right.
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  And there's a way of experience in finders that it's like there's zero distance between things.
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  Like, you actually have the visual perception experience of everything's flat, like nothing is at a distance.
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  So those stars are right in front of you.
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  They're not at a distance.
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  And in part, that's an expression of visual perception, and it's also expression of this iconography or interface phenomenon, because space time is a representation of relationships, of conscious elements.
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  So, yeah, I mean, it's weird, once you start adapting different frameworks, conversation gets really confusing because, like.
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  Like I said, we're.
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  We're kind of adopted Hoffman's framework or it's not.
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  It really can't call it Hoffman's anymore, but that's where we first heard of it.
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  But it's the idealist paradigm.
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  But one thing that I, I liked was this idea of whole body psychology.
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  So he said, he jokes that he doesn't really believe in psychiatry because he knows that because it doesn't end at the end, at the neck.
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  Yes.
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  And he's talking about this whole body psychology as opposed to brain only psychology.
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  And he.
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  He names, for instance, the hypothalamic pituitary access adrenal axis.
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  And he talks about how I think like 80% of neural transmissions are going into the brain versus how much is coming out of the brain.
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  Because if brain was really in control, then most of the work would be the brain telling the body what to do.
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  And so 80% of the messaging would be going from the brain, making sure that everything's under control.
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  And Instead, you know, 80% is going the other direction, which really goes to something else that I just learned about.
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  And I felt there was a little synchronicity here of polyvagal theory, which I can't say too much about, but it's basically this same idea that our thoughts and emotions are very much dependent on the body outside of the
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  brain.
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  So to his point, the whole body psychology, as opposed to brain focused.
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  And then he got to the default mode network.
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  I think this is the big.
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  That's his big thing.
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  Big thing, yeah.
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  Which is the activity in the unfocused brain.
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  And this is basically the whole rest of his talk, is by unfocusing your brain, you can allow it to optimize it.
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  And part of that optimization results in realizing the very positive things that you intend.
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  Cars and money.
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  Potentially.
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  Potentially.
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  But not exclusive.
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  But not exclusive.
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  I mean, he has a very interesting story about how he got into Harvard, and he didn't.
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  It's not by wishing.
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  He was just open to the idea that someone told him, you should go to Harvard.
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  And he was like, okay, I'll call Harvard.
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  And he just literally called Harvard and said, I'm sitting in a little dorm room in South Africa and I'd like to go to Harvard.
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  And the person online is like, harvard's a big, big place.
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  Yeah.
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  You know, this is just the reception.
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  Who do you want to talk?
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  Like, what school do you want to talk to?
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  And just off the top of it, it's like, oh, medical school.
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  And then he gets to medical school.
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  And medical school, same thing.
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  It's like, this is a big place.
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  Who do you want to talk to psychology.
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  And and then here's where the twist is.
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  Through just happenstance, the secretary of the head of the department of Psychology is away and the head of the department of Psychology actually friggin picks up the phone and talks to him.
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  And I mean, there's still work to do.
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  And he says all along the way he'.
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  Work.
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  But if he hadn't made those phone calls, he literally spoke to the head of psychology at Harvard from his dorm room in South Africa, said, I'd like to come to your school.
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  And the guy said, yeah, send me an application.
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  And he sent an application.
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  He got in and it's like, obviously it was a good application, but if he had just sent his application with everybody else, there's no way we would have gotten in.
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  And that was his point in that story, was I had the CV to get there, right?
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  Like I had done the work.
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  It wasn't that there was no hard work involved, but to your point, being open to and taking action, he was qualified.
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  But he was the only one in all of South Africa, probably all of the continent of Africa who called and spoke to the head of this department.
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  The only one.
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  And it's kind of bizarre.
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  It was somewhat confirmed afterwards, through a conversation that it was because of that call that he got in.
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  And his point is that it's not that it magically happened, it's that he didn't stop it from happening by saying it's not worth calling.
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  Right, that could never happen.
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  Right, exactly.
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  And then he lists a whole bunch of ways of getting to this unfocused mind or the default mode network.
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  He talks about daydreaming, he just names a whole.
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  Doodling is one thing he mentions.
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  One thing that I thought was very interesting is around doodling.
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  He said, there's a study that showed that doodling does this, blah, blah, blah.
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  He goes, now of course there are always contradictory studies.
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  I thought it was really interesting that he acknowledged that.
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  So he addresses the nature of anecdotal evidence, which I think goes to this idea of openness versus belief.
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  Right?
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  And this is, this is like answering my concern because he's not saying, well, look, this happens once to one person, so it proves that this is the way this works, which is the way most of the public interprets.
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  When a scientist says, I did this study.
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  Oh, he proved that this is the way that.
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  No, he did an experiment.
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  The experiment supports the hypothesis that this is the way it works.
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  And I think play in this very small tidbit.
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  And this is the Thing that, on the contrary, bothers me because it's like a throwaway.
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  Right.
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  And I'm like, oh, this is so important.
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  I really want people to understand.
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  He says, you know, don't ignore the anecdotal evidence and say, oh, it's obviously not true because if it was true, it would have been proven by all these studies.
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  Ignore all this anecdotal evidence until we have definitive experiments that prove beyond a reasonable doubt or whatever your terminology is.
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  You know, he's just saying be open to the possibility of it, don't believe it.
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  And that's a subtlety, that's a nuance that I want to take the opportunity to point out because I think that it's not a commonly understood nuance.
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  Yeah.
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  To that point, he even called out some of the studies he did cite as being small, small scale, they're small.
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  And which one thing he mentioned was his, I guess, almost resistance to the possibility of being able to eliminate the confounding factors of what a study like that would be, because he was basically saying it'd be very difficult
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  to get people, large scale group of people that have the same beliefs, the same motivation, the same openness, that the internal state of each person is unique enough that it'd be unlikely to be able to get a large
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  scale sample to be able to study with confidence.
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  So you're talking about the difficulty of the research into this.
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  And he's talking about training people to actually apply these methodologies or practices that act to prime the brain for the introduction of luck, if you will.
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  And what I was thinking about was, well, there are no metrics for luck, so you couldn't track the outcomes.
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  Because I was thinking, oh, if he's going to do this, you know, this training program, then he can measure.
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  No, he can't.
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  Yeah, it would be difficult, unfortunately.
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  I think.
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  But before I forget, his book is Tinker Dabble Doodle Try Unlock the power of the Unfocused mind.
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  And that was, as you had said, the culmination of the interview was around what happens with the unfocused mind.
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  He said the brain is a prediction machine to predict where to go next.
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  The more information we feed it, the more likely it is to use that information in pursuit of the goals.
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  And said how stimulating the visual cortex of the brain is essentially creating this blueprint in the brain which gives instructions to the brain's navigator to take you to your goal.
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  And I was taking my own interpretation that as an evolutionary development, our brains were primed to be able to take in the desire, say, like hunger or whatever, and then take that information and find a pathway to the
• 24:55
  goal.
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  So I could see how there would be evolutionary benefit to that.
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  But now we're talking about trying to use that mechanism in a way to achieve different kinds of goals.
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  So we've kind of touched on this before with the split brain research.
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  When you talk about evolution and the brain has evolved to do this, but we've trained ourselves to believe that the brain has evolved to think, meaning left brain function is the most important thing.
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  That's what's really evolved.
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  That's really what makes Homo sapiens.
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  And really what he's pointing to is what we pointed to before, which is re emphasizing the intuitive function of the brain.
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  And the way he describes it is, I believe he said something like, luck happens when the brain is optimized for faith, prediction, calm, openness and miracles.
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  And we have hard work and persistence.
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  And he, to be really fair, he is pretty meticulous about including hard work and persistence.
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  And I think it's easy to see how common openness facilitates hard work and persistence.
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  Right.
• 26:10
  One thing I did find interesting was his description about groups of people were challenged to act out being an eccentric poet versus a librarian.
• 26:24
  And basically the short synopsis of it was those who took on even acting as that, like eccentric poet were able to solve problems better because they were open to creative solutions.
• 26:37
  Which all of this, again, when you mentioned the split brain, is like, we're talking about right brain, the right brain being the unfocused mind versus the left brain being the focus mind.
• 26:48
  Yes, yes.
• 26:49
  It was clearly an instruction designed to elicit left and right brain.
• 26:53
  And it was solve this problem and this group.
• 26:57
  You need to imagine you're a poet.
• 27:00
  He said, a daydreaming poet, I think.
• 27:02
  And you need to imagine you're a strict librarian.
• 27:05
  And I think it was only imagining.
• 27:08
  I don't think it was even acting.
• 27:09
  He's just imagine you're throwing on a cloak, striding, you know, and for me, that's very evocative.
• 27:15
  Like, you picture this romantic person in a flowing cloak being poetic and approaching a problem.
• 27:23
  Oh, that was the positive, constructive daydreaming.
• 27:25
  Yeah, that really caught my eye as well.
• 27:28
  There was another thing that I thought was really interesting about this.
• 27:31
  So all of this is talking about the brain and helping you get to goals and outcomes and the way that the mind can impact and also how the environment impacts the mind.
• 27:44
  But placebo effect is something that I'm quite interested in, and it wasn't discussed in this.
• 27:50
  But the way placebo effect works would presumably.
• 27:56
  I think he did actually bring.
• 27:57
  I think he did placebo, but yeah, it wasn't in depth.
• 28:00
  But this has been something that continually comes up to me, which is placebo is recognized within the mainstream scientific community as an observable phenomena.
• 28:11
  But placebo is interesting to me because I've seen significant placebo effect listed on like drug trials.
• 28:21
  Upwards of like 70% of people getting better on a placebo.
• 28:25
  Placebo, I think is crazy weight loss.
• 28:28
  That's what he is.
• 28:29
  So he said people are given placebos and told that they're getting weight loss placebo and they lose weight.
• 28:36
  Whereas people who have no pill at all don't lose weight.
• 28:39
  Right.
• 28:39
  Or less weight.
• 28:40
  But yes, it's interesting that people who are told they're getting a placebo and swallow the pill still lose weight, lose weight.
• 28:48
  Yeah.
• 28:48
  It's my understanding that there is some clinical use of placebos.
• 28:52
  Oh, really?
• 28:52
  Yeah.
• 28:53
  I have to look it up.
• 28:54
  I think it's not.
• 28:54
  It's not a completely unknown or unpracticed thing.
• 28:58
  Right.
• 28:58
  And it just points to the higher suggestibility, I mean, the mind over matter thing.
• 29:05
  And that as certainly within the American culture that we live in, pharmacology is a very strong component of air quotes, well being, which I think is probably a stretch.
• 29:18
  But as far as health and the placebo effect often has significance.
• 29:26
  Obviously it's not as strong as the drug itself, otherwise it wouldn't be brought to market.
• 29:30
  Right.
• 29:31
  They have to prove it significant above placebo.
• 29:34
  But the placebo has such significance is interesting as far as that whole mind over matter thing.
• 29:40
  And you wonder how much trying to actively train ourselves to change our mind and perception about a thing would improve the outcome.
• 29:48
  And I think it's probably well documented even in pharmacology and hospitalizations and stuff.
• 29:54
  People who have better attitudes about the situation are going to have better outcomes versus somebody who's receiving the same treatments and therapies that has a negative perspective on it.
• 30:06
  Yeah, Yeah.
• 30:07
  I thought he had some interesting anecdotes of his personal experience with this, which I've mentioned in other episodes how it seems like many of the scientists who pursue this kind of work seem to have had some sort of
• 30:22
  personal connection to this kind of experience.
• 30:26
  Anyways, I thought this was an interesting video.
• 30:28
  I appreciate you entertaining it because I had a sense you might have some resistance to it, but I think it was a good part of the conversation.
• 30:36
  I had some, but it was very interesting.
• 30:38
  And overall I really liked his message.
• 30:40
  It seemed quite pragmatic even though it also seems very woo woo.
• 30:44
  So I'm very curious about his training, which is an eight week course followed by a 21 day challenge.
• 30:51
  I'm glad that we came into contact with Dr.
• 30:54
  Pillay because he seems interesting.
• 30:55
  Yeah, yeah.
• 30:56
  So I will put links and such in the comments and we look forward to hearing from you guys.
• 31:03
  Till next time, Bye.
• 31:07
  Thank you for listening to the Tracking Wisdom podcast.
• 31:09
  Join us next time as we continue the discussion.
• 31:12
  Don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and visit www.eth-studio.com for more information and content.