Latest / Lucid Interval Podcast / Neuroscience of Meditation, Self-Transcendence, and Psychedelics - David Vago, PhD

Transcript

Neuroscience of Meditation, Self-Transcendence, and Psychedelics - David Vago, PhD · Lucid Interval Podcast

• Andrew Heacock: Dave, thanks for joining me. David Vago, PHD: Andrew, great to be here with you. Andrew Heacock: So when you're when s you meet someone like on an airplane and they turn to you and say, So Dave, what do you do? Well, how do you answer the question? David Vago, PHD: sometimes sometimes I lie and I say I collect rocks. Andrew Heacock: I'm not sure. David Vago, PHD: because honestly, it gets into a longer conversation. if I start talking about psychology and neuroscience and neurobiology of meditation and the self and how the self is transformed. and sometimes I I'm not looking for that conversation, but I do usually if I'm honest about what I do, I'm you know, I could just start with my appointments really as and what defines my identity. currently I'm an adjunct professor at in the division of medicine at in in in the University of British Columbia. research lead for a Center for Mindfulness there that's in the BC Children's Hospital, actually. they have a number of programs for adolescents, parents and caregivers, all intended to help improve dealing with you know being in a in a hospital environment. And we're doing a bunch of research on on on some of the the the ways that mindfulness practices can help them manage a lot of the stress associated with being in that hospital. but it also gives me an opportunity to be to have my own research lab that goes beyond just sort of clinical science. I'm also a research associate at Mass General Brigham at Harvard Medical School. I'm a former research fellow at the Mind and Life Institute. I am a current sorry current research fellow at the Mind and Life Institute where I was the research director there. I'm formerly an associate professor at Vanderbilt University Medical School and the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. and that's where I was also the research director for another clinic called the OSHA Center for Integrative Health or Integrative Medicine. And like we we could talk about what integrative health is or how it relates to functional medicine, but I was helping create a program and research there for about six years. I'm currently the president of a nonprofit. academic society called the International Society for for contemplative research. and we have about 300 plus members around the world. We hold an annual conference and we help support academic research in the field of contemplative science. I'm also a science advisor. so I act as either a fractional chief science officer or just a consultant on a number of different I would say well-being and longevity health industry related startups and and apps that are looking to build science into their products. so I I'm I I I wear a lot of hats, I do a lot of things. the thing that you know really sort of summarizes my research though is that I aim to clarify the neurobiological and psychosocial mechanisms that underlie Mind-body practices. So these are things like meditation, yoga, breath work, and psychedelics. Psychedelics is definitely part of those mind-body practices, and we want to better understand how all of these help manifest the mind, give you insight into the nature of the mind, and help you flourish as a human being. So that's my my sort of origins of where I'm coming from and how I position myself in my self-identity. As a as a non-traditional academic, I like to I'd like to at least think that I I I walk a more nontraditional path, but I'm very interested in in the the nature of mine. Andrew Heacock: I always ask this question every guest, basically the same way. Like when people ask you, what do you do? How do you answer? And you're the first person to actually understand the question, which is that it's weird that we define our identities that way. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and you know, you've got all these roles, and it does get it to what a lot of what I'd love to discuss with you today, which is like, what is the self? David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: and I I know I became interested in the question. at some point, you know, I was talking to someone in a mental health treatment center that I was in many, many years ago, and she became a therapist and then a teacher and a friend and She told me right when she met me that I was not my thoughts. And I was like, What what do you mean? How can I what do you mean I'm not my thoughts? I have the best thoughts. What else would I be if not that? And people always laugh when you say, But no, really, what is the self? I'm I'm really I I need to know that answer. And I'm still looking for an answer. I don't know if there is an answer, but it is this incredible riddle. And I think it's really, really cool that it's your job to investigate that mystery. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, that that's one of my biggest interests actually is is trying trying to understand who we are as a self-entity in this reality that we inhabit. define it both conceptually and theoretically, and think about it from a human experience, phenomenologically, what is that experience like and how do we even transcend that when we want to develop greater insights into the nature of consciousness itself. So, you know, we are you know very limited in our capacities as humans. We have very limited sensory apparati that that transduce environmental noise into a signal that's meaningful and you know it allows us to live and have an experience of I, me and mine. So I I do when I talk about the self, I do talk about I, me and mine as sort of the the the the concept. to describe the conventional sense of self that includes all of our needs, our wants, our fears, our expectations, you know, our attitudes, everything that creates this sort of independent construct of of self-identity and who we are. yeah. So that that's how I I start talking about the self. If you want to go there, we can we can really unpack what we mean by I mean mine and how it how it sort of does transform. Through these mind-body practices, because I think that's where we're where we're really where the where the rubber hits the road. and even the most profound contemplative historical traditions talk about the self as being the target of all practice. Andrew Heacock: So I agree. I mean mine is like the door to it's like it's like the portal to kind of understanding to getting into a lot of what your research is about. Before we get there, I think there might be some people for whom they're listening to this and they're not even aware that there's like that the that this would even be in doubt that there is a self or what that is. can you maybe I could kind of catch people up a little bit on like what is this even about? And and also another thing that Ivan mentioned is you have an you have an amazing ability to kind of cross the lines from we have now Western material science, but also to understand these questions from like a contemplative perspective too. So maybe that might be a decent place to start with what people thousands of years ago were were thinking about it. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, sure. And you know, and I can unpack what we mean by I me mine and then relate it to the Buddhist perspective. and that might be helpful. just Andrew Heacock: Sure, whatever you think. David Vago, PHD: just so we can all be on the same page. the I mean mine complex, we can really think of it as a complex, is really a metaphor, and we can it could be represented by a house. I usually like to think of use this metaphor a lot because in the metaphor, the I Is the feeling of being a self in the world. I am, I it's I'm acting as an agent. and you can represent yourself, your I, as the structure and the foundation of the house. You that's the basic sort of structure. Like you are you have a a structure that's you that was comes up from your genes that you were born into, and that's this foundation of the house. It's the primary identification point when you point at who. Andrew is, he's that that's the house. and so that's where we start. And then each room in that house can represent a different aspect of me, which you can have various roles or attributes that you identify with, right? So each room can be you know, the kitchen, the bedroom, the study, the all the all the different personas that we have. And there's a there's a there's a therapy that a lot of people are using these days called Internal family systems, IFS. And in that system, they break down those Mies into different components so you can better identify with your role as a parent, as an employee, as a friend, you know, as a spouse, who you're you you take on all these different roles all the time and you act kind of differently across them. and the people in those communities know you in different contexts as that, right? So your identity of who you are is is defined by how you behave and act as those little mi's in those different rooms of your house. And mine is really just all the stuff we put into the house and encompasses all the material objects that we consider ours, belonging to us. This is mine, this is mine. And all those things, you know, like your mountain bike or your skis or your really nice jacket. That identifies with you or you identify with it because it's a material possession that you own, like a car. People love to identify with their cars, for example. And so even our our beliefs and memories and emotions can be mine, because I have I have a memory, I have an emotion. When we talk about that as as owning it, that becomes the the the as the the complex I mean mind. So when we talk about self-identity, It's helpful to think of that metaphor as a complete construct of the self. And from the Buddhist perspective, there's a problem with this whole construct of I mean mine. From from the Buddhist perspective, we we cling to the to positive experiences and we fear negative ones. So it leads to this sort of roller coaster of emotions. We push away some things, we say, that's not mine. That's not me, or that is me, and we cling to it. that's a form of attachment and that's that's one way that that causes suffering and the second part to sort of the Buddhist philosophy on the self is that there's dualities that there's a separation between self and other in the sense that your you there's a there's a you and there's a good and there's a bad you know and and and that sort of distinction between self and other Actually leads to a lot of conflict, those dualities. And so there is a lot of emphasis on when we do meditation practice to move away from the dualities and into a more non-dual state of awareness. And we can talk about that a little later. And the last part of at least the Buddhist perception of why this I me mind complex is is not very helpful to for our us to succeed as being flourishing human beings is that it's impermanent. the as all aspects of I mean mine are subject to change. The house can burn down, all the material objects can disappear or degrade in some way, and even yourself will eventually die and disappear. So clinging to any sort of part of the I mean mine complex is you know, it's a changing entity, it's going to lead to suffering. And suffering is really when From the Buddhist perspective, it was really refers to just dissatisfaction or unhappiness, really. And and that kind of suffering is really the the goal of of practice is to sort of eliminate that kind of suffering. And there are ways to do that. Does that help? okay. Andrew Heacock: Yes. Yes, it does. It it also opens the door to more questions. Like you said, we you mentioned dualism. You know, there's David Vago, PHD: Yes. Andrew Heacock: just a lot of terms that to me are almost synonymous with self, like ego and identity. and you David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: also have personality, you know, in these kind of ideas. And and I'm curious to know to what degree that they're they are synonymous or are they distinct and how do they fit in with this model? David Vago, PHD: Yeah, that's a good it's a good point. So when we talk about the self, I I when I break it down into more cognitive and psychological constructs, I break it down into 500 millisecond chunks. So you have you have this process, your entire life is full of 500 millisecond moments of of being a self in the world. So the I mean mine exists. in 500 millisecond chunks and you can move through time and space and experience those aspects of self. So there are different pieces of it, right? There are the the way that that it can be described as I have a model I call the spacer model and it's actually the M-spacer model. And the idea is that's just a mnemonic for for thinking about how those moments are made up. So first you have memories. Memories really help identify the the the program, the schema that you're entering into. Like right now we're in a podcast context and inter interviewing. And so you have an idea of what that is supposed to be like, right? So we have predict predictions and prior experiences with podcasts that that determine how we should act in in the world. And so that's informing what's going to happen. before it happens. that's memory. Then before there's even awareness, there's still processes that are happening. When we are receiving input sensory input we call this this is the S of my of my model somatic or sensory experiences are being processed and filtered through your as it enters into your body you some of it is is transduced Right, the parts of our sensory capacity that we we have access to, right? We have limited access to say sound between 20 and 20,000 hertz. So between that spectrum of sound, we can interpret what's relevant to us and what's not. If I hear like the sound of a fan in the background, I may not pay attention to it, right? but if there's something that you ask as a question, That's something I have to pay attention to and how we selectively filter out what's relevant and what's not is a critical piece of our attentional system. And so then before you even have awareness, there is this resource allocation management system in your brain, in your brainstem and parts of your early parts of your sensory cortex that determines whether it should be processed further or not, whether you should have awareness of what's happening right now. Is it relevant? Is it salient? Should you pay attention? And if you do, you make it to that point. If that that sensory stimulus makes it to that point, then you have awareness. And awareness in the present moment requires working memory and it requires sensory primary sensory cortical activation and requires processing that information in a way that's meaningful. And that's where things start moving along in time. By the time you're about 350 milliseconds past a stimulus presentation, you finally have you're finally starting to understand what you're seeing in front of you, right? I I use the example. here comes a mug. Now you know you see a mug. And only after about 350 milliseconds after seeing the object, do you start to evaluate what you're seeing? what's this mug? it looks like a Unusual mug, it has some mountains on it. that's interesting. And you start to evaluate, and this is our cognitive process that only happens at the last 150 milliseconds of this 500 millisecond moment of time. So then I'll just say the last part of the model is response of behavior. What do you do with that information? You usually respond. You you either do something with the information that you have or you process you you you you file it away for some other use that may not be relevant to you right now. or you're like, I that reminds me of something else and then some other idea might come into mind. And the last part of this sort of model is this idea of of meta awareness. So to know that you are seeing something at all requires the meta perspective of what's happening at any moment. And again, the idea here is that we go through life through this sort of experience of string of moments. And each moment is involves what we would call a self-specifying process. And I'll just reiterate all the different components of somatic or sensory, present moment awareness, cognitive evaluation and emotional feelings, behavioral responses, and then a meta. kind of perspective that allows you to have awareness of where your mind is. And all of that happens on a timescale of half a second. You know, it's like, boom, there's your 500 millisecond moment. and you can process that. you know, that's about you know, 31, I think billion or million seconds, right? And how many of those moments you have in a year can sort of reify Who you are as a self, because what you do with that 500 milliseconds matters into developing patterns of behavior, thought processing, emotions, and over time those grooves that of patterns that are established are become yourself. This is how we have a cycle of mental habits and dispositions or Self-conditioning, self-perpetuating, that repeat themselves and they're continually informing the present state of awareness. So you're becoming a self just through your experience of the world across time. And that's how we can better understand how your self-identity is created over time. So if you have traumatic experiences, if you have thoughts that are negative, I'm not good enough, or core beliefs that are are are are very destructive, lots of fear, lots of anxiety, lots of jealousy, greed, those thoughts are actually ident are are are are creating or what we would call reifying your self-identity. So the best way to sort of describe this is that there's a there's a quote by the Buddha that I often like to say our li he he said in it's written in the Dhammapada our life is shaped by our mind and we for we become what we think. And it's a profound kind of way to to think about how some of our thoughts and emotions that make up the content of our mind have either negative or positive consequences for our health and well being. So that's sort of the take home for all the work I do. is that we have to better be we have to be more mindful of the thoughts and emotions that we experience because they will determine our health and well being outcomes. Andrew Heacock: So I think my friend who told me I'm not my thoughts may have been wrong. Because I mean it does sound like a little bit of what you're saying is that we become our thoughts, or at least that's what the Buddha thought. Yeah. David Vago, PHD: That's right. That's right. So yeah, so if you you're things that so we often talk about things like that are are common to our experience as being human. Life is unfair, I'm losing control, I'm not good enough. And that that's that's turns into anger, anxiety, fear, sadness, and those types of emotions are only negative. They're only negative, and this is important to think. That's their emotion is not negative until it's experienced often. can ha produce a risk of injury of yourself or people around you or interferes with your social functioning. And if it does those three, it's likely to have a dramatic negative influence on your life and health outcomes. Andrew Heacock: And so, are you saying that they're like the quality of our thoughts, like let's say the if there's like a valence to the words we're using. I mean, this'll all be like this episode's gonna be run through an AI and it's gonna give me clips that are rated on virality. Okay. I'm David Vago, PHD: Uh-huh. Andrew Heacock: assuming they've attached an emotional weight to every word and that they're just simply totaling that up, right? So like words do kind of have a valence. And I've noticed in my own life, I used to say things were like horrible, terrible, this is a disaster. What I like have a big vocabulary. And so when you have a big vocabulary, there's there's actually way more ways to describe bad things than there are good things. I've I just simply was I took the coaching eventually to stop talking that way out loud and to myself. And I started replacing that with words like interesting, like, I've lost my cell phone charger. Hmm, that's interesting. and that fits me better because I like to think of myself as someone who's interested in everything, which I am. and it has kind of changed the quality. And so I think just to summarize what you're saying, like the quality of our internal thought life. does kind of dictate our emotional life and that's gonna color all David Vago, PHD: Hundred percent. Andrew Heacock: of our experience. David Vago, PHD: And our and our internal physiology changes. Like our inflammatory processes in our in our bodies are responsive to our own thoughts and emotions. And there so there's like a I I I often cite this statistic also that there's like a two and a half X, two and a half times greater risk of dying prematurely of a heart attack if you have An angry temperament, meaning angry thoughts, and actions. So you know, when you get, you know, your your stress response gets turned on and you're very reactive emotionally to somebody or something or some thought, if you have those frequently, you increases your risk of cardiovascular dying of cardiovascular disease faster by almost three times. So Yeah, and then there's other examples of this where your thoughts can have a direct impact on your risk of dying. There's this great study by Ali Crumb at Stanford who was looking at this risk of of dying. and some by actually an older study by Keller et al. in nineteen nineties and they found that that People who claim to have high levels of stress are actually very resilient to to to problems and and can live long lives. But if their perception of their stress is that stress can lead to negative health outcomes, so stress is like a bad thing in your life, that you're more likely to die prematurely. Of cardiovascular disease by like 40%. You have 40% increased risk of dying if you just believe the stress is a threat. Right? So we have stress in our lives. Everyone has stress. But it's the perception of the stress that matters. And it's such an important piece for for probably people to understand is that stress can be actually a good thing. In fact, your brain has the most amount of neuroplasticity, like the most amount of opportunity for change. when it's experiencing stress. So when we experience stress as a challenge instead of a threat, there's so many positive things that can happen. But if we experience it as a threat, it's more likely to engage our stress response system, cause inflammation, and feed all the negative aspects of what we call inflammaging which is how we How we grow and age in our lives with inflammation. So the more we have this sort of negative perception of stress and and negative experiences around stress and negative thoughts and emotions that populate our mind, the more likely we're going to have increased inflammation and die prematurely. Probably the take home. Andrew Heacock: so as what's the intervention there? David Vago, PHD: Ha ha. The intervention is meditation and mindfulness is one of the the greatest tools from it comes from the Buddhist you know practice, spiritual practice, but it's now entered into the medical mainstream as a evidence-based tool for stress reduction. and stress reduction just meaning how to learn how to to respond instead of react. to take a moment to stop. And there's a there's a famous acronym in mindfulness circles called stop where you stop take a moment show awareness right and then observe what's happening around you before you proceed so st op and the idea there is you know to use your your insight and wisdom to drive a wedge through the stimuli that are around you that's that might, you know, cause you be to be impulsive, to lose your control or anger, and respond more thoughtfully. so that that's I think that's the the take home about mindfulness is that at least at the level of a novice who practices meditation, it teaches you how to gain insight into the awareness of your thoughts and emotions so much that you can stop the the the negative, destructive types of feelings, thoughts and emotions that can lead to this inflammaging response and then respond in a way that's better for your health and more adaptive. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. So the idea is that it's just it creates more space for better behavioral, just behaviors patterns, right? Like instead of using alcohol as like an easy example, but you're probably also more likely to remember to wear your seatbelt. Like I I assume we're looking at all cause mortality, right? Yeah. So like I David Vago, PHD: Everything. Andrew Heacock: mean, you're you're less likely to get hit in the head with a piano. Yeah, I mean, or presumably, you know, to die from to die from any cause David Vago, PHD: Yeah, you're more you're Andrew Heacock: at all. David Vago, PHD: you're you're less likely to certainly die from cardiovascular disease, which is driven by stress-related thoughts and emotions. and this this inflammation trend is real too. Meaning the more you have stress that's uncontrolled or you know perceived as a threat, you're going to you know, your high blood pressure and all of the atherosclerosis that's been building up will lead to a heart attack. so cardiovascular disease is just one of the number one killers in the world and it's preventable. It's preventable by changing how you respond to different thoughts and emotions and how you interact and engage with the world and the people are in your life. Andrew Heacock: Do we have a way of measuring the effect size and comparing this against other interventions like exercise? David Vago, PHD: yeah, so exercise will probably win when it comes to like direct comparison of how it can be a great tool to fight inflammation or cardiovascular disease in general. So exercise that you know there are recommendations for how much you should be exercising you know, moderate levels of exercise, 30 minutes a day or something, or at least I think it's a few a few times a week, thirty for thirty minutes at a moderate level is the best thing you can do for your body and brain. But and I always say if you're if you're really looking for an answer to your problems, exercise and eat well and sleep before you start to meditate. because the meditation is really the icing on the the cake of of of health and it's going to help you gain insight into your patterns. It's going to help you change your patterns but the Patterns that need to be changed are things like exercise, eating right, and then having positive relationships with yourself and others. Andrew Heacock: there are some forms of exercise that involve mindfulness. And I would like I would call that like I would call them exercise yoga as an example, Tai Chi, many David Vago, PHD: yeah. Andrew Heacock: martial arts, things like that. And I've heard you've refer to these as embodiment practices. can there's a multiple different forms of mindfulness, I think. can we kind of go through what those would look like in terms of how you're thinking about them as a scientist? David Vago, PHD: yeah, sure. So, you know, when I talk about mindfulness, it is a very specific the the term is very broad and and and and and in the literature most people have to str are still struggling trying to operationalize it correctly. but the simplest definition for mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way, non-judgmentally and in the present moment. And that's it. You're just being aware of what's coming and and passing through your mind without of trying to evaluate it or stop and try to follow a thought and think about it whether it's good or bad or labeling it as good or bad. It's just an observation, it's awareness more than anything else. That's mindfulness. It does come from the the the sati word sorry the Pali word sati which has a connotation or it's been operationalized as remembering and the idea there's even with the Tibetan translation gom, S-G-O-M, both Gom and Sati really refer to to mindfulness as a way of of familiarizing yourself with your own mental habits, with your mind. And so if you think of mindfulness both from the more contemporary definition of paying attention in the present moment, non-judgmentally, and as a way To become more familiar with your own mental habits, it's a good way to just think about mindfulness in general. Meditation can be a lot of things. And the simplest definition of meditation is self-regulation of attention. You're you're learning how to regulate your attention in a very sustained fashion. but it does also come from its roots in both Sanskrit, Dharana, dhyana. from the Hindu Vedanta traditions. remember Buddhism sort of came out of many of the earlier traditions, and yoga is one of those earlier traditions that come from the Hindu Vedanta, Vedantic, and more Asian the those those Asian cultures in probably the god it's like the sixth century BCE when yoga was the tr the the main spiritual model for how to live in the world well. And there's one particular model from that time that was emphasized, the Patanjali sutras, and those sutras talk about Ashtanga. The Ashtanga model is an eight component model for living in a good, positive, healthy way. So it involves not just Hatha styles of yoga, which is what we do. And when we think of yoga today, it's you know getting in a steamy room with a bunch of people on a bunch of on a mat and doing asanas, you know, poses. and those poses are then supposed to be done with pranayama, which is another component of how to control your breath. And together the asana, the movement of the body with the breath is intended the whole intention of that yoga practice. was to stabilize your mind and get it ready and prepared to sit in meditation. And that's where the real work was supposed to begin, where you learn to focus your attention so much to the point of of concentration and absorption into a single point and an a non non-perturbed kind of focused attention. And that is often described in another Sanskrit term called samadhi. Which is just the ultimate form of absorption and concentration where nothing can perturb you. And there's other components like pratyahara, which is sensory withdrawal. So all your senses withdraw when you're focused on on just an object like a breath, or it could be a mantra, or it can be another object like a light. But the idea is that you're learning how to stabilize your attention through this practice. So there are these eight limbs, and I won't go into all the all the eight limbs, but that's a yoga practice. you know, and and there are in contemporary meditation research, we we actually talk about six core mindfulness based practices. So six practices in which you bring this state of awareness, of non judgment, of present moment awareness, of curiosity into your practice. So they're they are contemplative by nature because they're introspective. They are states that are regulating your attention intentionally. But and all of them require a a state of mindfulness that that sort of carries through all of them. So the th the the six are focused attention practice like I was just referring to where you focus on a particular object Where it could be your breath, it could be a mantra, like a re repeating a sound, or it could be an object, like a flame or c of a candle. But the idea is that you're stabilizing your awareness and your intention over and over again onto one object. That's like the ultimate form of it was actually the first meditation practice that was described by the Buddha in the Satipattana Sutta. Satipattana actually means sati. is mindfulness, patana is just of the movement of the breath. And there's that sutta is is described as really the the path to realization or awakening. And you can really just do that practice alone and that's supposed to be enough to take you to 10 stages of of shamata or or stabilizing attention and you will eventually achieve insight into the nature of your mind. in a profound non-dual way if you do that. Now that's a that's only the first practice. The second core practice is what we call open monitoring or open awareness practice. And that is what is often also referred to as a mindfulness meditation because when you do this practice, you are instead of focusing your concentration, you are having more diffuse attention towards any object That arises and passes through your scope of awareness. And the greatest metaphor for this is the sky. So if you think of your sky of the sky as awareness, and clouds are passing objects of attention, your sky of awareness is just allowing the clouds to pass by and you observe each attention or observe each thought or emotion. that or sound or stimulus, any sort of sensory stimulus that that comes through your your awareness with without the judgment, without the evaluation, without clinging to it, without saying that's mine, or I don't like that feeling, or I don't want that thing. it's just awareness. And so that requires a little bit more effort. It's a little bit more challenging to do than the concentration practice. So you have the focused attention, the open monitoring, Then you have these constructive styles of practices. Now they vary, but the the most common one is referred to as loving-kindness or meta practice. And that's where you learn to c to cultivate self-love. you learn to cultivate love for people around you that are are direct, you know, family members or s a spouse or parents or children. And then you also work to develop that love that's non-conditional for people who are strangers to you. And lastly, you cultivate that same love for people you dislike. So people in your in your orbit that that you actually have a problem with. And that becomes a practice. And it's quite a profound practice. It's not so simple to try to cultivate compassion for someone you you've you really dislike. and there's no perfect practice. there's no perfect guru either, teacher, who can do this. These are all we all aspire to have a non non-conditional love for ourselves and the people around us. So those are the constructive practices. So that's number three. Number four would be yoga. So yoga would be the traditional asana and pranayama practice that we typically talk about. So breath work is a sort of separate. Core practice because now it's it's it's taught separately from asana, but they both come from the yogic traditions. But in this context of contemporary meditations, we consider it one of the six. And the last one is what we would refer to as everyday mindfulness practice, where you bring mindfulness into your everyday behaviors. So brushing your teeth mindfully, doing the dishes mindfully. Driving the car mindfully. So how do we do those kinds of informal practices in our lives every day with a sense of awareness, without the judgment, without the reactivity, with a sense of curiosity, responding instead of reacting? So that's focused attention, open monitoring, constructive or or or loving kindness and compassion, yoga, breath work, and everyday informal practice. Those are the s the six. Andrew Heacock: I love that. I love that also there's kind of some of those I'm better at than others. You know, it's interesting that there's the focused attention practice is one of the hardest for me to do. But David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: open awareness I'm much, much better at. If I'm kind of like expanding and David Vago, PHD: Mm. Andrew Heacock: drinking in the sensory input of what's going on, it just seems to be easier to get there. And yoga has been good. I practice this style of yoga called ashtanga. It's different from the ashtanga that you were mentioning, the eight limbs. although that, you know, I'm I've Would like to find more instruction around the full eight limbs of yoga and the different styles of meditation. Cause there's so much of meditation is basically like vipassana style, you know, Buddhist meditation is where you're starting. But there's like this huge universe of all these different ways to meditate that I think a lot of people in the West don't really even know about. but I was thinking about when you were talking about yoga, it's kind of being like about converging everything to a single point of focus. That's a really interesting idea to me because I I've I started my meditation journey with Buddhism because that was from a from a completely non-theistic perspective, it was the least threatening one to start with. it was a good it was just it was easy. And I've Zen Buddhism kind of influences a lot of how I do photography as I shoot film and you have to let go of any kind of result. Like if you get anything, it's a miracle. Like and you really have to be in the moment because you only get so many frames. I hit, you know, you're and you need a lot of light. And so you're the shutter's wide. So your hands shake, the it'll be blurry. So you have to hit the shutter on the end of an outbreath. And it to me, really, you just have to be kind of waiting for the moment to arrive and then be ready to hit the shutter. And sometimes it kind David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: of feels like it's I'm hitting the shutter. but for me, like Buddhism seems to be a lot about emptiness, and yoga seems to be much more about focus, more about like a singularity of of focus. And what I was thinking about when you were saying that in mantra is there's a number of different examples of people having ecstatic religious experiences. and I'm thinking of like in the Christian context, people that get like the stigmata, or they'll have they'll see God. I mean, things like the St. Francis of Assisi or St. Paul's not really a good example, but people like Saint Francis that are contemplatives, David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: they're saying the same prayers over and over and over again for hours a day, for years at a time. And that's a lot like how mantra works. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and I think they're just they're getting such intense laser focus that I'm assuming the ego starts to go away at a certain point. but I just I was thinking of that and I wanted to to share it with you and see if you had any thoughts. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, you know, it br it brings up the this this concept of spirituality, right? and across religions, we experience something greater than ourselves. And what it means, I I you know, I think the way that John Kabatzin has talked about this concept too, which is a bit it's a difficult concept in science because it's been defined in so many different ways. But s and spirituality means s you know, something so different to so many people. What John says, I I've always liked loved his sort of way of operationalizing it. He said once spirituality is really just what it means to be truly human. you know, and then people like Richie Davidson doesn't, you know, he he would say that he doesn't talk about spiritual because he doesn't know really know what it means. what we're talking about of when we talk about the things that people experience during a spiritual experience is part of every human being's capacity. basic innate capacity that we all have the capacity to be aware, we have the capacity to express compassion and love and kindness. And those are parts of you know spiritual expression. And there's a whole sort of emphasis right now by the National Institutes of Health, although I don't know how long that will last under the current administration, but the focus on spiritual health and how important that is to people, in fact, There have been studies that show that that people often go to spiritual spiritual experiences or spiritual health when they are when they need healing. That in fact there was one study in 2004 that showed like 35% of respondents found to use some kind of prayer or meditation to help them with their health concerns. and that some other Gallup poll in 2022 is I think they found that like one and a half million people from 152 countries found that people who are spiritual have better well-being than people who are not spiritual. And so there is this sort of common sort of experience of spirituality across traditions, whether it's Buddhist, you you know, you know, Hindu Vedanta Yoga or or Christian contemplative. either way, a sense of being connected to something greater than oneself, and this is where we start talking about transcendence, is something that that helps people somehow be more in alignment with their health and feel more purpose and meaning in life. even the the greatest scientists. I've talked about spirituality, but we still have such a hard time operationalizing it or or using it in a way that that that we can prescribe it. Carl Sagan said science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality. So that's kind of where I have been heading a lot of my my work is that so we have these six, you know, meditations, but what's the ultimate sort of transformation of that self? identity over those the string of moments in our lives is to transcend that construction of ourself and to feel more connected to to everything and that's the idea of self-transcendence I wrote a a paper with David Yadin and Jonathan Haidt and Andrew Newberg back a few years ago and we created a model for this experience and the first component is annihilational meaning you dissolve the the bodily sense of self and the distinction between self and other that's physical. And so you have reduced boundaries of self. You feel like you're more connected to the world around you, including the natural world, nature. And then the second piece is relational, which you feel connected. unfortunately, we live in a very disconnected world. We often feel very lonely. It's one of the worst parts of of you know our sort of technical revolution, a technology revolution is that that we feel disconnected, even though that we're connected to everybody every on it all the time through our computers. But that feeling of disconnection is profound. And spirituality or spiritual experiences, whether they're psychedelic or meditative or or prayer, all of them seem to give us a better sense of connection to not only ourselves and the people around us, but to the point of oneness or unity with everything. And so that's that's where we start our description of of you know of self-transcendence. Andrew Heacock: So I'm glad we got to this kind of seamlessly. I'm kind of pleased with how that worked out because I I've had a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, I've I've had ego dissolving experiences. I think probably the first one that I really touched it with was doing kundalini yoga. I think we talked about this when we met. I mean, it was just my first experience with kundalini yoga, which is kind of amazing, you know, because I think a lot of people will will sit in that practice for years without really experiencing anything non-ordinary. but my understanding is that. We have this thing called an ego, which is like a construct of our mind. And that is a thing that makes us feel that we're separate from everything else because there's a bunch of advantages that follow from that by because we live in social and we are we're highly social creatures. So it helps other people not steal our food, you know, basically. Like there's it it it it benefits us to have a sense of separateness. But that separateness also seems to be a source of immense stress because then you can ask questions like, Well, why does God hate me? Like there needs to be a me. you know, to to be hated and to ask that kind of question. And that when we can tug on the edges of the self or or annihilate it altogether, there's this bliss on the other side of it where you feel connected to all things. And that that to me really is the big story and I about spirituality. And I completely agree with the definitions you've given, which were beautiful. I've never heard them, that spirituality is a capacity that we all have. It seems to just be a feature, maybe a byproduct of the architecture of our mind. That we can have these experiences that are transcendent and that enable us to feel, I guess, connected to everything, or I would call it the everythingness of everything. It's not everything, it's just what whatever gives everything, it's everythingness. There's like a property of everythingness. And it's just it to to try to describe it in words almost sounds silly, which is another, David Vago, PHD: Yeah yeah. Andrew Heacock: I think a defining characteristic of these experiences is that they're ineffable. Right. So it's like David Vago, PHD: totally. Yeah. Ineffable. And and that's a great you should pause on that one because ineffability and non conceptuality are critical pieces to that spiritual experience. There there are no words to capture you know, the maybe something like awe only, you know, because it is it is fleeting and it is it it's beyond words. Andrew Heacock: Right. Well, so in this I one of the things that fascinates me about what you do is that given the nature of that, how do you study it scientifically? David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Right. yeah, I I get very excited about this. one of my studies that is ongoing right now is we're looking at phenomenology paired with physiology. And the great thing about the technology technological revolution, AI, it is to leverage the the the its impact or leverage its its ability. To find patterns in data. And so we using AI machine learning approaches to put all the different modalities of experience into one model and look for patterns that are reproducible for people to have during a transcendent kind of experience. We're looking also at regular experiences through meditation. So somebody who's focusing on an object. versus being open just open awareness practice. we're looking at those two. but the when there is that transcendent kind of experience and it could be as simple as just a flow state, right? Just being lost in a peak experience. It could be while you're running, it could be while you're skiing or paragliding or you know swimming. Andrew Heacock: Swimming. Swimming. Yeah, for distance. You're literally flowing. I mean it it's a good way to do it. Yeah. David Vago, PHD: Flowing, exactly. Wherever that flow state is for you, you lose yourself. You're not, you don't realize you're a self anymore, right? You're just you're moving through time. and time sometimes slows feel feels like it's slowing down, but it can be a peak experience. it can be a feeling of awe. but it is typically non dual, meaning you don't feel like a sense of an independent self anymore. You feel like you're connected to different things. There the sense of boundaries are disap disappearing. And during those states, we're curious about not only the physiology, so we have some ideas of what comes, what happens during that state in in our brain through looking at EEG. And for example, we'll look in the brain and during a non-dual state of compassion, where you feel compassion for all sentient beings, you see increased activity of of gamma band activity, which is 40 hertz activity across most. electrodes but mostly in the frontal and parietal parts of our brain. And so when we have that that's one correlate for this experience of non duality. others is the phenomenology. And so s one of the things that I've been trying to focus on is is really this idea of of capturing different characteristics of Of the phenomenology, right? So we broke down your experience into four categories, for example: cognitive, emotional, sensory, and self-transpersonal. And there's different subcomponents to this that we ask you questions about, like, you know, how stable was your attention? This would be the cognitive domain. How stable was your attention? How much meta awareness did you have, or how much awareness did you have of where your mind was? How How how much how many thoughts were you having? How dense was your was your your your thinking? Were your lots of thoughts or less thoughts? How spacious was your experience? how much effort were you putting into your experience? I mean, was it an effortful meditation or not? And so that's just one dimension. Then we look at things like, you know, positive, negative, neutral feelings, what came up in terms of valence? how how balance how quickly were you able to come back to a baseline? That's equanimity, how much? craving or attachment did you have or aversion pushing things away? was there agitation or restlessness? in the sensory world? Was you were you feeling arousal or were you kind of sleepy? Andrew Heacock: I I need to ask, are are you asking these questions like just for qualitative answers from the subjects? Or are you are you and David Vago, PHD: Yes. Andrew Heacock: then you're trying to correlate that with with the data that you're receiving in large numbers David Vago, PHD: That's right. Exactly. Exactly. Andrew Heacock: with AI? David Vago, PHD: Yeah. And the hard part is doing it in real time because you know, people have sort of a non dual experience and then it's over. So so you're asking in retrospect. Andrew Heacock: And you forget. Yeah. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. So so you can capture what's happening in the brain and the body, and then you have to ask them later, like what was your experience like? And so that's the limitation. But when you combine Yeah, yeah. Andrew Heacock: Can I can I ask about that real quickly? if someone is having a non dual experience, like if someone was on a few episodes ago is talking about five E O DMT, like the the David Vago, PHD: huh, yeah. Andrew Heacock: psychedelic molecule, which is leads to a profoundly non dual experience. There's could a person even answer your question? Would there be anything there to answer if you ask questions? I mean, David Vago, PHD: that's interesting. Andrew Heacock: or would that interrupt the the non dual state? Would it, would it interrupt the data? I mean, why why not try to do that? Because it almost in David Vago, PHD: Uh-huh. Andrew Heacock: a sense, it's almost like being in a trance, right? Or is it different? David Vago, PHD: Yeah, I know yeah, and and I'll I'll I'll admit I've I've tried the five MO MEO and the and it's different from an N N DMT. Of course it's those are two different analogs to dimethyltryptamine and which also has an endogenous po activity in the brain and the body and it's not just the pineal gland, by the way. but that experience, yes, it can be profound, especially with the five MEO. and the and sometimes it it's a little bit different for different peop for different folks, different strokes for different folks, different experiences. Everyone has a very individual experience. we've also had people in the in who are just in deep meditation in our scanner who have had what what's called cessation, where they have a cessation of all time and space. this is refr referred to as from the the the Hindu Vedanta tradition is what's it called the cessation is naroda naroda samapati samapati is this is this cessation of all time and space and in that case no you cannot probe and ask them what's happening during the pr experience you can only ask after it's complete so in retrospect. But the five MEO, I would say, from my own experience and from what's happening at different labs, so Chris Timmerman, for example, or even work that Faddle Zaydan is now doing with John Dean at UCSD and Robin Carhart Harris, people have been putting main lines into into people's venous system and giving delivering boluses of DMT to keep the experience going for longer than the five to fifteen minutes that most people experience it and to continually probe what's happening in their phenomenology. So we need that kind of data to better understand what is happening in in real time. Otherwise we are stuck with you know having to do it in in retrospect. And that's always the case with phenomenological interviewing. we do it also right now I'm also doing some work with dark retreats, people who go into darkness for four four days at a time with no absolutely no light. And they have voice recorders and they can talk and we're you're better understanding the phenomenology that happens. the phenom the voice recorders turn on only when they're speaking. So it could capture something, an experience that they have and they can Talk about it if they're able to. I think it does take you out of the experience a little bit, but a lot of of advanced practitioners can report while it's happening and stay subtly in in that state. it really depends on the individual. But yes, that is a methodological challenge. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. I'm thinking I've heard about this research with like kind of giving the extended, yeah, I mean I guess of DMT because it is it will metabolize very, very quickly, as I understand David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Yes. Andrew Heacock: it. So they're kind of getting a continuous steady dose intravenously, almost the way that we would David Vago, PHD: That's right. Andrew Heacock: do ketamine therapy in in like an IV. and I imagine David Vago, PHD: Yes. Andrew Heacock: that's very different from like ingesting it, like I mean, from things like ayahuasca. Obviously there's a lot going on there that's that's kind of messy from a scientific perspective, but it lasts longer. But it's I don't think it's qualitatively David Vago, PHD: Yeah. It lasts on because it has a Andrew Heacock: the same as as like a DMT trip. David Vago, PHD: Well, it is and it isn't. It can be, right? And because DMT is is part of the ayahuasca brew. It's just the it also the ayahuasca has the A O I A O I, the monoamine oxidase inhibitor in it as part of the the brew, which really just blocks the degradation of the DMT. So it's DMT is is degraded by monoamine oxidase, which is an enzyme that just breaks down all monoamines. including including DMT. And so it stops the breakdown of it. and so that's why the the the experience is extended. the the hard part for me has been, you know, just sort of a sidebar here is like the NN DMT, which is very phenomenologically different from the five MEO, is still we're still trying to figure out what's going on here. But the in the NN experience there are a lot of entities that come out. There's a lot more visual experiences. It's a lot more like otherworldly, other dimensions people experience, you know, like a whole nother world. they're opening up a portal to something that that you don't typically have access to. Whereas five MEO is more like a death like experience. It's you feel like there is no self, you're it there is no I singular individual who's having an experience. But at the same time, other people have said and and meditators who have have who've taken five MeO have actually experienced it as like a profound state of non-dual awareness similar to what they would experience in a deep meditative retreat like Dzogchen or a Mahamudra in the in in what's called Rigpa which is a deep state of of non-dual awareness. So I I think different ways to Andrew Heacock: So I ahead. David Vago, PHD: experience, you know, th those nondual states in it and it is challenging to to to capture those states, but we're working, I think, through multiple modalities to piece together patterns of brain body activity as include and include the phenomenology. The phenomenology is key because so many people experience it differently. Andrew Heacock: So I'm really fascinated by this, just the the overlap of interest between psychedelics and meditation, spiritual, contemplative practices. And even there's almost, I it's becoming almost an archetypal like interest going back to people like Ram Das or I mean even earlier, people like Alan Watts or Terrence McGinnis that had psychedelic experiences and then became avid meditators. What's the connective tissue there? I mean, other than we're talking about non-dual experiences, do you think it just it really comes down to that? That's the the overlap between the two? David Vago, PHD: I I love this question because it's one of the things that I'm also very interested in. In and it's it's what what we we refer to as integration. You know, what what is it about the psychedelic experience that matters for transformation? and that's a really important question. some people think that they can eliminate the psychoactive component of psychedelics and just at you know go after the 5 HT2A receptor and have the more prof and still have the profound transformative shifts in people like who have depression or or eating disorders or tr PTSD. But I think you know when you really think about what the drug is doing, there's also a tr traditional kind of narrative That this is not just a drug to produce hallucinations, but that you're summoning spirits from another dimension to teach you something. And that the plants offer a part of consciousness that you don't even have. So that the plants are a form of spiritual teacher that summon. you know, from the other dimensions, some kind of teaching. And I think that that context is still not integrated into how we are are thinking about psychedelics. a lot of the traditional shamans or or you know spiritual teachers who use these substances in traditional context don't talk about it as a psychedelic. they talk about it as, you know, plant medicine and a a str a dialogue or or a interaction, engagement with teachers. So you're teaching, you're learning something, you're getting an experience. You have to you it's it's facilitating the insight that you're looking for related to yourself and the issues that sort of have have populated your self-identity over time. And so the integration piece is where I think there's some really interesting work. we're developing a a model really for integration and you know this model doesn't look at integration as just simply what happens after your meditation or after your psychedelic experience is over. Like, how how are you going to integrate that into your everyday life? We are seeing this as a multi-component process where integration, like how you incorporate the experience into your everyday life, starts with your goals and your intentions. And I guess kind of touches upon manifestation because you mentioned that you're interested in manifestation. And if manifestation is a thing, like how do you how do you predict basically the future? you know, the causal sort of nexus or the causal chain of events that that populate your life has a past and a future. and if there is no space-time, then then this you should be have access to the future, which is much harder to to think about. it's much easier to think about what happens in the past, right? So you can go over your string of moments of 500 milliseconds moments from the birth to today and say, what happened? What led to today? There's the whole causal chain, right? I think that the both meditation and psychedelics can provide insight into the nature of the mind of how it's been developed over time and where it's going. And that allows you to put the love, the positive intentions, and connection to the greater sort of karmic energy that. Is your calling, so to speak, and allows you to manifest the things that allow you to be the best of your ability. Who are you in your best form? Your purpose, your meaning that you give back to the world all comes from when you're in that kind of state. And when you can break down All the barriers of ego and the my this i me mine, you often reveal the true essence and nature of your self-identity, which is this karmic kind of purpose and meaning that is transcendent and feeling of of just being in the world, and and it it it's a part of the process that goes between. Deciding I'm going to do, I'm going to meditate regularly, or deciding I'm going to take a psychedelic and have some positive experience where my myself can transform into something positive. And through the entire practice, from intention to experience to post session and weeks down the road, you are integrating the whole time. And so I think integration is a really big part of what you're getting at when it comes to. you know, how does this all kind of impact our our ourselves and and transform it in positive ways? Andrew Heacock: Yeah, I love that. I I want to double click on the manifestation and because there's kind of a karmic explanation there, which I think is kind of amazing and and interesting. But yeah, with the integration, I to me it does seem like why for people like myself who like I was I would have described myself as an atheist for many, many years. I was interested in religion and I always have been. I I think I needed, but the looking at it from the point of view of dogma was never gonna be right for me because I'm a free thinker. So like I would I would just always have questions. And and the explanations I was given didn't always add up because sometimes we don't have those explanations. But once I had a psychedelic experience, I became profoundly interested in spirituality and in wanting to engage in spiritual practices kind of all the time. You know, it's sort of a drag that we have to do anything else, you know, but like we that's the world that we've built for ourselves now. And I think there's probably a a different conversation to be had about why there's so much unhappiness, because we're so disconnected from things like that. And neoliberalism, all of those things. But yeah, it it's really about a total way of living, a way of thinking about living, a way of thinking about thinking, a way about thinking about experience and relating to it. that for me, what like where my life has gotten so much better as a result of my my spiritual practices, which includes psychedelic practices, is it it's a lifestyle almost. I mean that you know, lifestyles makes it sound a little bit a little bit kitschy. It it seems more more there's more gravitas to it than that. But Yeah, it's just like a total worldview, I think is another way of thinking of it. It's the entire way I view the world is different. And things like meditation are highly relevant to me, to me, and the worldview that I'm now living in in w in a way that they just weren't before because I didn't really know that there was a there there. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, and let me ask you, Andrew, like when you when you have these transcendent experiences that you you've now talked about, like so you you were you were had your own indoctrination right around Christianity or any specific Andrew Heacock: I was raised Catholic. Yeah, I was raised in the Catholic church. It there was no I don't think there was any kind of spiritual abuse or anything like that. It was just the regular Catholic thing. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. which is a story in itself, you know, like what how it all how one God was created and and and how humans were were also created in the in the l in the in the light of God, the light of that image. and it's a it can be a powerful reflection back on your own like upbringing, right? But then what, you know, what is it that led to this sort of broader identity and meaning For yourself, right, from that reflection back upon like your own self-identity and experience. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. it's it's it's really interesting the way that you worded the question about in terms of reflection on self and identity and experience, because there are some medicines where they're very much about your narrative sense of self, like where that really matters. Ayahuasca is a perfect example of that. Psilocybin, I think, is a lot. And I think why those are so healing. Cause so much of our wounds are relational. What really changed it for me was you know, I've I've I've had when I was younger, I had experience with with psychedelics. I like take acid up in the mountains and it was stupid. Like it, it was not a good, you know, like it was just the the context, the set and setting were not right. later in life I've found it through through indigenous ancestral practices where there's a ceremonial container and there are there's just kind of like I would call it almost like a schmorgas word of holiness. There's holy symbols, there's instruments, there's smells, there's sounds, there's people singing songs and the experience of being with these medicines is that it heightens the sense of holiness to the point where it becomes almost you can almost cut it with a knife. And the interesting thing is I still don't believe in any kind of supernatural agent. Like I'm I'm pretty confident in planting that flag that the thing, even the word God, and I know it's a it's an it's a weird placeholder for something we is ineffable. To me, that just sounds like a person. And I'm sure that that's a trick of our mind because we're people and we that's what we read everywhere. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: So it's st a ver there's a very non-theistic view that I have about things, but it's there is a there there. It's like there's a veil. And I think that our for purposes of evolution and efficiency, our brain occludes that from us, for lack of a better way of putting it, because it's not super salient to our survival. And if we were just constantly walking around and talking about how we're all one and everything like that, we we would never get anything done, you know. Arguably you would never mate. You know, I mean, it's just like there's something better to do, you know. David Vago, PHD: Right. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: And what my I had one experience that was really, really profound where I I would say I experienced what I was told what I experienced was ego death. And if this wasn't it, then I haven't experienced it. and at the time the music that was playing, the music is probably the most important part of this practice for me. you know, I mean, I heard the San Francis prayer by Sarah McLaughlin, you know, and it was just it just broke me. Yeah. I mean, like the emotion that David Vago, PHD: That's cool. Andrew Heacock: gets pulled out. Yeah. And then also the when it really I think it really took place was I was this the Ganesha mantra. was playing. And the Ganesha mantra is the mantra for letting go. And David Vago, PHD: Yeah, yeah. We will have to custom. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I didn't even know who Ganesha was. I didn't I just this the music was so David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: ecstatic was another way of thinking of it. and I was just gone. And it was like the problems of little old me were like gone. I mean just because the ego had gone from being, I guess, the only thing there was to just a tiny little inconvenient detail over here. But For months and months and months and months after that, I'm my I used to be extremely neurotic, Dave. I mean, I arguably I have OCD. I've I have real challenges with rumination. and all that negativity, all that negative self-talk, that's when that changed. where it almost felt David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: selfish to think about. It almost felt like it's like this is a selfish waste of time. I need to be thinking about loving other people and helping them. But the the thing I kept coming back David Vago, PHD: That's it. Andrew Heacock: to was the songs really is I've I'm taking voice lessons now. I've got a guitar that I've touched a couple of times, but like I I'm not a musician, but that's the thing that keeps me coming back is the music, the holy songs. And in certain traditions, David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: there are a lot of songs that are specific to that that you you wouldn't really perform outside of of a ceremony. So that's been a lot of it for me, and what's kept me interested in it to where there's a feeling, what I describe as spirituality is like it's like a suite of There's a phenomenology to it. It's a suite of emotions and cognitions and experiences. So there's things like awe and wonder and connectedness. I can get like an emotional hedonic recall of it when I walk into an ashram or even a really gorgeous cathedral. and and I don't have to be intellectually pissed off about the stuff I don't agree with. Like it it's like, David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: yeah, that's there, but I don't need it. It it doesn't really matter to me. And it's so funny you ask this because none of this really has much to do with my beliefs, like an ontological reality. I mean, there's a materialist case for what I'm experiencing, but I David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: don't care. That's their main thing. And that I think that people who've not had this experience that are like that are atheists, David Vago, PHD: An experience. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: they just like, but it's just a drug. It's just a thing, it's all in your head. And it's like maybe, although I'm not prepared to say for sure that that's what's happening. But David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I will say is that it doesn't matter to me at all. Like it makes no difference to me whether any of that. David Vago, PHD: It's profound. Andrew Heacock: What I'm experienced is real. It's just it's real to me. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. I you know, a few a few thoughts in response to that. And that's really amazing that you describe your experience that way. that sounds like a very transformative and healing perspective of like what you've gone through. and you know, you've gained a lot of insight in your experiences, sounds like. is that safe to say? Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yes, yes. And and and I'm now on an an endless search now. And you're part of that now. So thank you. Yeah. David Vago, PHD: So here here's I'm gonna try to put a little science. I'm gonna put a little science to it because it might be helpful for you and the listeners. So one of the things that we see consistently in both meditation and psychedelics research in terms of what it does to brain networks, you know, and and I'll say, you know, it's a very relatively young science. We neuroscience is is a young science. We don't use neuroscience with a lot of consistency yet for diagnostic purposes or for understanding symptoms even. But we can say there's 13 of these resting state networks that that are basically parts of the brain that that that synchronize in with with frequency, using very particular frequencies, that synchronize when they are active together. And those networks have very specific functions that they support. So the most in most robust network In our brain is called the default mode network. It's probably one of the most consistently talked about networks. I get a little annoyed about how much people emphasis people put emphasis on this network, but one of the most important things that this network does is supports self-reflective processing. So when we're doing nothing, when we're just mind-wandering, close our eyes and we're laying in our bed and just relaxing, our mind. It starts thinking about thoughts. Thoughts just start emerging. And most of them are self-reflective and evaluative. and often they are negative. We're very hard on ourselves when we're sitting in that ruminative kind of state. and this is again goes back to like what are you gonna put into your mind? You know, you are what you put into your mind. So if you're thinking negative thoughts, then you're gonna be a negative, you know, person. And it's gonna have a negative effect on your body and how it functions and decrease your or increase your risk of cardiovascular disease. But the point is that that meditation and psychedelics have been shown to decrease activity in this network. This is called the default note mode network. Not only decrease its activity, generally speaking, over time during the practice and even outside of the practice. There's some evidence for that. But there's An interesting effect that psychedelics specifically has been showing even more than meditation, which is what we call demodularizing the the the nature of these networks and how they communicate. So the way they communicate is that you have these independent networks that fire and wire together, right? Thirteen of them. And when you take a psychedelic, suddenly, and and they define sort of the patterns of your life as you move along in your experience, your your pre your your predispositions or your previous experiences are are setting up predictors for what life will happen in before it happens, right? And that those predictions come from the way the brain is organized across these networks. You take a psychedelic. And suddenly all the modules that are sub are are are mak making up this sort of net these networks, these 13 networks, are demodularized and they're they're now there there's more entropy and it's called the entropic brain hypothesis and is developed by Robin Carhart Harris. And the idea is that you when you're in that state, you're more susceptible to the plasticity of the serotonin. That's free and available to lay down new paths across the different networks. So there's a dramatic neural mechanism, neurobiological mechanisms by which change and transformation can happen when you're in that state. That's one of the coolest things that we've seen in the data. And I'll just add to that when it comes to manifestation, if you think about this, when attention Is less dominated by the self-evaluation that comes with the default mode. When it's less dominated by feelings of craving or wanting or desiring or pushing away the things that we don't want, when it's less dominated by ruminative types of thinking or fear of failure, people start to perceive options and relationships more flexibly. And this doesn't necessarily make every goal. obtain attainable, but it can reduce the internal friction that blocks the action towards the manifestation of something that you desire or that a deep intention is looking for in your life. I think it's important. We have this mantra in our house called intention over fear. And it's been very helpful for me personally because when I when I realize that I'm fearing something, it's more likely not to it's gonna prevent it's gonna cross a blockade of whatever I'm looking for. you know, we picked up and moved from Nashville to sort of Vancouver in 2022 because our intention was to live in a place where we we really want to live and do the things that we really want to do without feeling the the the the sort of being the restrictions of our careers or you know Goals or whatever it is. And that was a big thing for us to manifest our true desires and and goals through this deep-seated intention, positive intention. And it only happens when you can strip away the pieces that are in your way, right? The the again, the self-evaluation, the rumination, the fear, the fear of failure, the all of that is just excess. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, I I when you were talking about manifestation the first time, and I was just thinking like, you know, I think of manifestation just on a basic level, you're like, okay, you think something and then you somehow create it into existence. Your explanation to me seems to make a lot more sense, which is that by manifestation basically works by preventing you from preventing it from coming into existence. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's it's at least that's the first step. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: You know what I mean? Like it you you you get out of your you get out of your own way. Basically you stop frustrating your your true purpose, your highest your highest purpose. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, and I think that's a big part of it. It may not be the whole part, right, whole you know, whole process, right? Like you that's the first step. You really do have to get rid of the self evalu self kind of judgment and self evaluation. or the craving and the clinging and the why don't I have this? I want this, I don't have this, he has it, and I I don't. You can't get anything if you're stuck there. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: These things are all really unhelpful. Like they're really unhelpful, basically. I mean, it that was a hard thing for me to learn. Again, that's like this kind of softness that comes. what you're saying from like demodularizing things, it lasts for a while after. And David Vago, PHD: Yeah, right. Yep. Right. Andrew Heacock: dialectical thinking becomes a lot more a lot easier. I mean, I used to be in my one would like to in a minute maybe talk about transdiagnostic factors and and how things in psychiatry with diagnosis are changing around around things like rumination. but I used to be incredibly negative and very, very rigid. You know, you could see how like militant atheism would be like a really appealing to someone that's really, really depressed existentially, because it it there's a kind of a rigidity to it. There's almost a fundamentalism to it. And there I began to start to have realizations a couple of years ago, and it was an important part of my just my happiness, my development of, you know, trusting people kind of doesn't make any sense. Like just from a purely rational perspective, like they might hurt you. What do you get out of it? but life's just so much better when you do. So it's kind of like, would I rather be right or would I rather be happy? Yeah, I mean, you know what I mean? Like those kind of thoughts are it's kind of what we're talking about. And David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: constantly worried about being right or not being hurt or being relentlessly self-critical, all of these cognitive David Vago, PHD: Right. Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: states that come with various psychiatric diagnoses like depression and PTSD, are really counterproductive. You know, like they they make it. They th they do make it seem like a like a futile waste of energy to try David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: to do anything that might give you the life that you want. And I think that from an evolutionary perspective, that might have to do with what depression is, is to help us conserve David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: resources in the in the face of hopelessness. David Vago, PHD: Mm, that's yeah, that's a really interesting perspective. Yeah. Yeah, too, yeah. I mean Andrew Heacock: Well, yeah. I mean, if you're if you have been cast out of the tribe or are about to be cast out because of something you're doing, David Vago, PHD: Saving resources. Andrew Heacock: you you better sit still and think about what did you do wrong and not repeat the mistake. There's kind of an anal it's it's called the analytic rumination hypothesis. I had a previous guest on Paul Andrews that that thinks this is thinks a depression is adaptive, not a disease. and David Vago, PHD: Yeah, that's that's one that's really cool. Andrew Heacock: yeah, well it I mean The thing is it what he would say is it puts us into type two cognition, like Danny Kahneman would say, like the the type two more deliberative, David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: analytic, ruminative. That's basically what rumination is. I think when it becomes maladaptive is when you can't turn it off and it's it's without resolve. David Vago, PHD: That's right. That's a really important point. and maybe we should just put a pin in that for a second because Andrew Heacock: Let's do it. Yeah. David Vago, PHD: the idea there. So we often talk about non-judgment in mindfulness, right? And people get stuck on that. Like, what does that mean? Non-judgment, I don't want to judge at all. I'm not gonna evaluate it all. I'm just gonna be, right? Just just awareness and and and I'll be better. And and there is a s sense of spiritual bypassing that comes when people do that, right? Spiritual bypassing meaning that But just by avoiding that kind of evaluative content or the stuff about that in in my life that's challenging or difficult, I can just be aware or focus my concentration on my breath and everything will be better and I'll be enlightened. That's not true. Andrew Heacock: People do this with manifestation too. A lot of like they'll like, I'm calling in abundance, but it's like, yeah, but like you're not you don't work. Like like I mean, you know what I mean? There's there's there's David Vago, PHD: Yeah, and you're not you're not getting yeah. Andrew Heacock: a saying in the Bhagavad Gita, I think it's like you can pray to move a mountain, but you better wake up next to a shovel. David Vago, PHD: Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And the only enlightenment you're gonna get Andrew Heacock: You know, something like that, you know. and yeah, that it is a form of spiritual bypass. David Vago, PHD: at sorry, I was gonna what was that one last one? Andrew Heacock: I mean, yeah, that's just another form of spiritual bypassing. It's like, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna call things in. Yeah. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like the only enlightenment you're gonna get at the top of Everest is the enlightenment you bring up there with you. Andrew Heacock: I mean maybe negative enlightenment. Maybe like what the hell am I doing in my life? I just got to Everest and like the the and I'm I don't feel I'm not complete yet. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, right. This is it. I've done everything. I've got to the highest mountain possible and I'm I've got no more fingers left, but I still haven't gotten what I need. Andrew Heacock: Right, right, right, right, right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But we were we were saying I I I was talking about like yeah, without resolve, rumination without resolve. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, so again, going back to this idea of non-judgment for mindfulness, right? It's like we we get stuck on this. But what what's important is to realize is that there is a time and a place for self-reflection and positive forms of rumination where where you are in your head thinking. we now know very clearly there is great data that mind wandering which is mostly referred to this sort of self-reflective ruminant process, can have dramatic positive effects on creativity, on on goal setting, and for planning, like for the future. So manifestation, if anything, is gonna come out of that. Because you have to envision and think about what it would look like and how what are the things that are the pieces that need to move for it to manifest, right? So you're no longer just stuck in this again, self, you know, deprecating kind of thoughts, but you're thinking about how things can literally move in your life to allow this to manifest. Right. So you you're you're not only removing the things that are in your way, you're also shifting from this idea of like wanting things to to just being, right? But then you're also actively constructing what that that that self of you in the future can look like. And you can track the the causal chain out into the future. And that is what manifestation really is. So I do think that there's an important piece to that that, like you said, const the constructive parts of depression. Or even anxiety. There's only a few people that talk about the constructive aspects of anxiety, but they're out there. Tracy Tracy Dennis, she talks about it. anyway, the point being is that there can be positive pieces to depressive ruminative states, like you said, and you said your guest has also talked about it. And same with anxious thoughts, right? you know, they they can prepare you for for the possible Andrew Heacock: Keep you safe. Like you don't get eaten by predators. Like, I mean, I I used to see David Vago, PHD: Exactly. Exactly. Andrew Heacock: people that like I I'm from Louisiana. I've spent a lot of time down in New Orleans navigating the French quarter. And I've always just had a sense of like, we're not going down that street. Like we're not walking down this alley. You just kind of can sense it like there's danger there. And maybe it's hyperactive, but you know, like survival favors people that don't take that risk. You know. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, you're you're learning but you're taking it also not necessarily as a threat. You can also see it as a challenge, right? It's like, okay, maybe there's risks that are down the street, and I will become aware of those risks as I navigate them, and I'm I feel prepared to handle them if they do arise. that would be a way to manifest your ability to go through a street without fearing it. And to get through the, you know, that maybe that's gonna lead you somewhere that that's gonna be very positive for you. So I yeah, there's a lot of constructive ways of using that kind of ruminative process. And this is why I don't like when people sort of reify this idea that DMN, the default mode network, is a bad thing. Right? We want to activate the DMN in appropriate context. And there's actually a theory or a a hypothesis that says the Default mode and activity or mind wandering activity is functional, highly functional for creativity and planning and goal setting as long as it's done in the context outside of ongoing task demands. So if you're doing something else and ruminative states interfere, it's going to disrupt that task. But you know, go hang out, you know, in a meditation cushion. And let those thoughts come because and you can follow them. I often will start my if I haven't meditated in a long time, I'll sit on the cushion for like 30 minutes and just follow every thought to to down the rabbit hole. And eventually I've seen it from every perspective. I've thought about it and what the its meaning is, and eventually it just disappears because I've examined it in every possible shape or fashion. So I think of it as sort of the control out delete. function on computers where you you have to go through all the the gunk and then finally you you reset and there's nothing left to s get stuck on. Andrew Heacock: I love that idea. I'm gonna take it because I I do a lot of this. I mean, I spend David Vago, PHD: Okay. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: you when we first met you asked like what my background was. It's a it's David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: an interesting question because I've never set foot in a, you know, science class basically, other than I I did I did play with fruit flies when I was eighteen in my freshman year of college, but it we didn't we didn't talk about psychology or the mind. I just think about it a lot. I spend most of my time thinking about thinking. A lot of unstructured time. You're so right though, where you can't multitask this. And I'm kind of I'm I abhor multitasking because you don't do anything's what either thing well and it's really stressful. So like it's my sensory input and I have a kind of a sensory gating thing. We could actually maybe talk about what that is because it comes up with medicine work. ketamine in a in a doctor's office is like a nightmare because I can hear people typing two doors down. You know, the typing is like a machine gun going off. So you know, I don't, I don't, if I'm looking at my phone or I'm responding to a text, I pause whatever's on the podcast or whatever, I don't have multiple forms of stimuli because It fragments my attention for a long time after the other night. Some of the work that I'm doing with this podcast is challenging this because I have to do lots of communication and different things on my phone. I'm using different apps to communicate with people. I'm posting to different apps and I'm not yet in a position where I can just pay other people to do it all. and so it it comes at a cost in my ability to wind down at the end of the night in my thoughts race. and it's a challenge. I'm okay with it, but David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I I I kind of have to bake into my day just unstructured time. I love to go on walks and think. And like Einstein did this a lot too. I'm not saying I'm Einstein. Although I did David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: we I did have a a neuropsychologist named Rex Young on, who's an expert in in creativity and intelligence and genius. And you you need time to daydream to come up with new ideas. And that's kind of how David Vago, PHD: Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Einstein, I mean, he had an he had thought experiments is what he would call. And when you're except for when you're in elementary school, it's called, you know, being a bad student, you know, not paying attention, but David Vago, PHD: Ha. Yeah. Right. He's mind wandering Andrew Heacock: You know, you need to just kind of follow the thoughts out. David Vago, PHD: again. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, your mind's wondering and you're not paying attention to, you know, quadratic equations because he's like, Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how light works. Like, you know, I'm thinking about what it would David Vago, PHD: Right, right. Andrew Heacock: be like to ride on a light beam and that you couldn't read a clock from, you know, moving away from you and like, what's that about? David Vago, PHD: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. This is a problem in our educational systems. yeah, I I mean, again, the one of the hardest things to do as a human is this sensory gating issue. So just for your listeners' benefit, sensory gating is really just refers to the brain's capacity to suppress, you know, redundant or predictable or irrelevant input, right? So it's just how do you selectively filter out what is relevant to you. and you know it it depends on a lot of factors like you know just timing or you know how how salient something is or if it's you know showing up right in your face and you you have to respond to it. but there are really interesting effects of mental training that can reliably reduce your distractibility. So this is relates to distraction. and that you have this what's called a P50 response. It's like a response at 50 milliseconds after your after a stimulus is present and you see a a a blip in your sensory cortex. And you can suppress that. And that means that you're doing a good job of like being in the flow state or you're paying attention And you're able to block out stimuli. It's it's also referred to as inhibitory control. And this is just a a a product of mental training through through things like meditation. ketamine you mentioned is an NMDA antagonist. I mean it's glutamate antagonist, so it it actually blocks or disrupts sensory gating, so it so you're it it's allowing a lot of things in, which is problematic, but. it it does have therapeutic benefits in the right context. the ket ketamine yeah the set of yeah exactly Andrew Heacock: The sensory gating the disruption? Yeah, yeah. So it's just a it's an un unwanted side effect of the yeah. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, it's an unwanted side effect. the the the the positive side effects of it. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: No, yeah. Yeah, ketamine definitely has benefits. Yeah, no question about that. I'm just saying for in in my experience. I the other plant medicines do that too. It's mostly with sound. And it's the best way I can describe it is that like the way salience works in the brain is like there's a cue. Like you also would say, like I VISOL thought of it in terms of the task manager on your computer with control or delete. You can prioritize and deprioritize certain processes. And the brain's kind of doing that all the time based on what's important. And so like things that are continuous like the sound of an air conditioner, that there's no novelty there. It just deprioritizes it. But air conditioners are the bane of my existence whenever I when work with medicine because they're loud, but there's also a David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: fan and that displaces air and I can hear the air displacing and then I can count the hertz of the fan. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, like that. And so I'm like, okay, this is David Vago, PHD: Yeah, right. Andrew Heacock: eight hertz and I'm going to hear this for the next three hours. Like, and it's like it's David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: right there. it's an interesting, it's been an interesting experience to, and I've had to use mindfulness to be like, Okay, acceptance to basically be like, that's interesting. This is what this is gonna be like tonight. I'm gonna I'm gonna count this fan for, you know, however long it is and what'll I learn from that? I mean, you have to have equanimity with it, it it does help. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, schizophrenics also have these sensor gating deficits. In fact, they have so much so that it becomes hard to d d differentiate what is you know a real sound and what's a hallucination and what sort of exacerbates from like just the sound of woah, woa, woa, woah, woa, woah to something. that it becomes something else. Andrew Heacock: Meaningful. Yeah. David Vago, PHD: meaningful. Exactly. They put some sort of, you know, narrative around it and suddenly it's, you know, communicating to them. But n interestingly, nicotine will ill will also downregulate that sensory gating deficit. So it's something that they do to self medicate. yeah. Andrew Heacock: So it will it will counteract the problem, nicotine. So okay. So there that's interesting David Vago, PHD: Negative. That's obviously. Andrew Heacock: because there's a lot of ceremonial tobacco that's used in these ceremonies. I'm wondering if that might and it's considered grounding, quote unquote, like hope. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I wonder if I wonder if that's what people are using it for in those contexts is to to try to help tune that out. David Vago, PHD: I mean, they're not explicitly stating so, but I'm sure that they're experiencing it like we're saying. that yeah, the tobacco is a powerful plant for ceremonial purposes. we don't use it for that in say, you know, a Johns Hopkins psilocybin experiment for chronic low back pain, but that's something that I'd love to see built into some you know, future therapeutic. context, you know, like the the traditional the traditional types of plant medicine treatments or or rituals that that that are put into it are there for a reason, right? So you do some sort of offering to the spirits and use a natural plant like tobacco and it's supposed to be a sacred plant. and all these plants are sacred because they they are all connected to some form of consciousness that we're just not aware of. There's a lot of research that's happening now That's looking at the natural world as as you know all being part of consciousness and that we're just receivers, you know, in a in in in a sort of panpsychic kind of world, whereas where consciousness is everywhere. And you know, so if if ever consciousness is everywhere, then these plants are meaningful in some conscious way that it's contributing to your own experience. So we we're just yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I'd love to I'd love to to double click on that because we've got 20 minutes left. That that's enough time to talk about the hard problem of consciousness, right? so you've David Vago, PHD: yeah. Andrew Heacock: been we've been I've you know it's interesting every time I have these interviews, I've got multiple processes running in my head because there's multiple threads that we can take and I'm trying to file things away. I make notes. David Vago, PHD: Uhhuh. Yeah, right. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: You've mentioned so many times things like awareness. When we're talking about mindfulness, there's also awareness, meta awareness. Meta awareness comes pretty damn close to what I would understand. word consciousness to mean? Like that you're aware that you're aware. David Vago, PHD: Mm. Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: what I mean what can you tell us about like what does that word mean to you consciousness? How could we define it? Is it definable? And you know, I mean, yeah, you mentioned things like panpsychism. I mean, it's hard for me to conceive of like this pen as being a conscious being and yet people say that there may be consciousness in it, that consciousness composes of it. That kind of I it's it's hard to bend my mind around that. So I was hoping that you might be able to to help me do the bending. David Vago, PHD: yeah, sure. I can I can try here. so if you think about when we were talking about earlier about the self, and it has, you know, these different processes that are happening across time. Mem your memories are feeding into your your expectations, and those expectations then are matched with the sensory world that comes in, then you have awareness of what's happening around you, then you evaluate it, and then you respond. Right. So that's sort of a string of of processes that are happening every moment. meta awareness is a sort of a second secondary kind of cognitive process where it allows you to reflect on the process of of what your mind is doing at any moment. Now, if it's metacognition, it means that you're having a thought about your own thoughts. so you're thinking like, I'm interestingly, I'm experiencing the taste of my my tea in my mouth right now. you know, because I just had a you know a little sip. That that is a thought about your experience, metacognition, meta awareness not only gives you the what we call the sort of the the disidentification with the experience, so the distance, the psychological distance between your experience and the object, or self another, or your thought and yourself, in this particular sort of experience of self, right? It's let's just use an example of I'm thirsty, right? So I say I am thirsty, as if myself is thirsty. and I'm connected to that experience. It's now part of who I am, is a thirsty Dave. or I am angry and I am angry, Dave. And it's again part of my experience of who I am. But the meta-awareness allows you to disidentify with that experience, to say, I am Dave. But I'm having a thought that's out here that's thirsty, or I am Dave, and I'm having a feeling that is anger that's here. And I'm not that anger, I am not the thirsty. It's just a feeling or a thought. And that disidentification is the critical piece to meta-awareness, number one, is disidentification with the thought or feeling. And the non-reactivity, a non-emotional reactivity. Is the second piece to the meta-awareness, where there's not a second thought or a second feeling that is generated in response to I am angry or I am thirsty, right? It becomes just awareness and there's no response to it, it's just awareness. So meta-awareness is different than the metacognition, whereas you can be having thinking thoughts or emotions about something that could be metacognition. I actually haven't heard the concept meta emotion. Having an emotion Andrew Heacock: I have I think about it all the time. Think about that all the time. Have ever since treatment. Because I I yeah, yeah. so a good example of David Vago, PHD: Emotion about an emotion? Andrew Heacock: that is if you feel you're an emotion that you believe that you should not feel, you might feel shame about. Like if you feel afraid of something, but you're like, I'm such a coward, that's a shame thought. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: You're having shame that you're afraid. and I've thought about this a lot since I had to literally learn how emotions work. There's something called somatic experience therapy. If you have a lexithymia, you you need David Vago, PHD: Yeah. I really Andrew Heacock: to you need to learn what emotions are. And you start what worked for me was somatic experience, which is that there are places in the body that apparently emotion will appear consistently. So I went David Vago, PHD: In your body. That's right. That's right. Andrew Heacock: to this treatment center. There was a little drawing of a man on a board or a a person, a shape of a David Vago, PHD: yeah. Andrew Heacock: person. And there were words, emotions on different parts of the body. And then David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: there was a list of emotions up on the wall that were their list of emotions, which I know is not exhaustive because it I was like disgust is an emotion. It's not up there. But like, you know, you never said I'm disgusted, but you would have to say, well, you know, I heard that when you said this thing, I made up this story in my mind or it made me think this. And that thought made me feel and about that thought I feel anger, shame, joy, you know, compassion, fear, things of that nature. Guilt, sh so, guilt and shame is a hard one to differentiate between. so that's really the work of therapy is trying to figure out, wait, I feel something in my body, what would that be? Okay, what does the context tell me is appropriate? I guess this feeling is I'm feeling shame. I'm feeling fear. And sometimes it's kind of still kind of complicated for me, but What I learned is that a lot of bad mental health or a lot of mental health comes from recognizing that the first layer of emotion is involuntary. The second layer is absolutely within our control. Like the story that you tell yourself, the the emotion that you you come up about the first layer of emotion, that's totally within your control. And shaming yourself for stuff that comes up automatically is is counterproductive. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There is a there's a model called the hypervigilant emo avoidant model emo of emotion. And it speaks d directly to a hypervigilance, to anything that's emotionally salient or or or related to your fears or or or concerns or your past trauma. And you respond to it very quickly, even non-consciously, in a in maybe a maladaptive way, like avoidance. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Yeah. I think that th talk therapy, traditional talk therapy might unfortunately have the effect of increasing that because the more you talk about your problems, the more available they are to you. You have an availability, we have an availability bias. David Vago, PHD: and more serious him, yeah. Andrew Heacock: And at a certain point, you know, talking about your David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: problems makes you really good at talking about your problems. But like there there is a divergence at a certain point where there's a move now towards experiential therapy, you know, which is you know involves a lot of what we've been talking about today. where The talking actually, you know, you need the the basic awareness to set those intentions. and for the experiential therapies, but then you kind of have to go out and do the doing. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because one of the major problems in trauma treatment has been using meditation to help you with your trauma. And the problem has been when you do the focused awareness practice, I'm sorry, the open awareness mindfulness practice, just allow your thoughts to come and go and just be aware of them. You're bringing up all those traumatic. thoughts that are typically suppressed or avoided and it's overwhelming. all those thoughts and emotions are not, it's not there. The therapy is not to just let all of those emotions come in without knowing what to do with them because that's what the meditation is trying to get you to do. What works better for in trauma patients, and this is where we're optimizing how we use these meditative practices for different Context. What works better is movement. Movement and labeling and finding where in the body those emotions are residing. So noting and labeling your emotions in your body while you're moving is also another really therapeutic technique that works better for people with traumatic histories. That was just a sort of a sidebar there. yeah. Andrew Heacock: I love it. I mean, there's there's first of all, there's just Wendy Suzuki, do you know who she is? The neuroscientist. She's David Vago, PHD: Yes. Andrew Heacock: a new in my she calls exercise a bubble bath for the brain. And David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: anything that you're doing with that bubble bath is gonna be easier and better for you mentally than than without it. And so if David Vago, PHD: Mr. Mary. Andrew Heacock: you're just if you're on a walk or a if you're doing a power walk or whatever while doing all these things, you just have the wind at your at your back. And it actually it I I meant to bring this up earlier. For a long time, part of my recovery was meditation and exercise. And for a long time, it's all I could do was just walk. and just get out of bed, start moving, you know, get my body going again. But I got to where I was exercising so that I could meditate. and like the meditation wasn't necessarily like the reward after it was the exercise was my ideal was raising plasticity so that whatever the benefits of the meditation I would get, I would get faster. David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: and but there is also kind of a there's like a stimulus response connection that happens there to where now exercise is kind of like my mouth is already salivating to use the the Pavlovian metaphor. Like when I'm exercising, I'm I'm ready to just be mindful. Like when it's when it's David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: done. I'm it kind of puts me in that place. David Vago, PHD: Well we talked about with the Patanjali Sutras were were specifically intended to use asana and breath work to get you ready to meditate. That was what its intention was. That's as as you describe it. So in in many cases, we want to exercise and do breath work and then sit because it's going to allow you to to have a much better productive meditation session. Now that actually hasn't been tested science in science, interestingly enough, but that's how it's theoretically been described. Andrew Heacock: That's definitely how I view yoga. Like most, you know, would you what you described as yoga that most people would think of is something that I want to stay as far away from, which is like an exercise class with a bunch of like David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: women in spandex and they go so fast and it's a million degrees in there. And like I hate that. I hate it so bad. I'm like, I you know, I just but there are traditional forms of yoga, like what would we call itanga, which is a newer art. But it's just David Vago, PHD: Yeah. That's right. Andrew Heacock: a there's a sequence. What I loved it with, I would go to a class, I couldn't keep up because I couldn't process visually what was going on, I would feel all the shame. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Like I would make up all these things in my mind. And it was very counterproductive to my mental health. Ashtanga is just an individual practice in a Mysore style in a Mysore room. And so you just are learning a new movement. It's kind of like learning a kata in martial arts or learning, I guess, whatever that equivalent would be in Tai Chi. But it's the same thing every time and you're counting your breaths and you can take as long as it takes for you to do the breaths. There's no hurry. There's no keeping up. It's a very individual practice And that really helped me a lot because I also learned about things like Drishti, which is like a focusing of your your gaze and you know the object of your breath. But the meditation, you know, at the end of Ashtanga, you know, you you wear yourself out. That's the kind of the knock on the practice is it's incredibly physically exhausting. But I think that's the point. I think that like the David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: neural fatigue is actually the point because I've never sat more still in my life. David Vago, PHD: yeah. Andrew Heacock: And I think the word has it that it was designed. To get hyperactive eight and nine-year-old boys to sit still so that David Vago, PHD: Mm. Andrew Heacock: they could listen to their wrestling coach is basically how he I think he developed it. But you I'm like for an ADD brain or for a traumatized David Vago, PHD: totally. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: nervous system, you're too tired to fidget. So it's just deep calm. Gotta get the wiggles out, dude. It and it David Vago, PHD: Yeah, you get the wiggles out. You gotta get the wiggles out. Andrew Heacock: works. It has been by far the deepest and easiest entrance to meditation I've ever had. to just I can just sit. And as soon as the effort stops. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: It's like David Vago, PHD: It's a really good point. And we we often in a lot of even meditation contemporary meditation retreats, you know, we don't focus on doing a lot of exercise first. But there are some traditions that do that, especially the yogic ones, that that will do the the the you know, you want to get your physio physiological arousal up high enough that you're, you know, consuming energy throughout your body, throughout your brain. actively moving your metal metabolism, you know, and this speaks to how energy is consumed. And we're not gonna probably have time to get into this, but energy is another really cool construct that is transforming in the science world about how meditation, psychedelics, and yoga are all transforming how our energy is metabolized and and used more efficiently in our brain and bodies. Like we now know my study that that I got published in PNAS just recently last year. And we're still looking at this effect in Vanderbilt actually, is the glymphatic system. The glymphatic system is metabolic waste removal of in your brain. You need to sleep in order to for that metabolic waste to be removed, because it activates these glial cells around your penetrating arteries. It dilates them by like 60% so that all the metabolic waste can flow through them and outside out of your body. When you meditate, you activate the same system. Or when you use light and sound at the same frequency at 40 hertz, you also activate that system. So energy and the way that mitochondria use energy and replenish energy are completely dependent on your mental state. And you can look at Martin Picard's work on that one. Fascinating kind of stuff. So I think we're also at this like really cool place in science where not only are we shifting the paradigm on consciousness, like consciousness is no longer a I, me, mind experience, but it's a more panpsychic one, meaning all sentience that are around you, every object, even rocks, are carrying some element of conscious experience that we're just tapping into in our limited sort of bandwidth of sensory capacity. Right. That sort of consciousness is how we're seeing consciousness changing, especially as we do more research on meditation and psychedelics and other mind-body practices. So There's a lot of things that are shifting. We're learning much more about energy and and and putting more science to it. That there's a biofield around us. There's a biofield around nature and how we interact with it is having influencing on us. Air. Air is something we can't see, but it it it has a whole you know, we call the microbiome, in the what's going on in our in our in our in our bellies, but there's a like an aerobiome. of the all the different bacteria and and molecules that are in the air that we breathe and it has a direct influence on our on our our minds and on our bodies. So there's a lot of really cool science that's happening and meditation, mind body science is is pushing the field of science further than any I think any other sciences right now. Andrew Heacock: That's so exciting. and I we do have to wrap up soon, unfortunately. This is why I told you to two hours is never enough. Like, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's no, it's never enough, but for you, it's David Vago, PHD: You know, just 'cause I I love talking about stuff. Andrew Heacock: definitely not enough. Because there's so many more ways that we could go with which is what you said. You just kind of drop a bomb about energy and the way our mitochondria are working. And I'm like, we could have started there and still have been on that. David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I'm wondering, have you had any ideas for for potential research or experiments just based on the conversation we've had? David Vago, PHD: well, I do think it was interesting we talked about this you know meta emotion. you know, because we talk about metacognition a lot and meta awareness, but we haven't we no nobody talks about meta emotion. So that's that's one area that I think is really interesting. It's like having emotions about your emotions. you know, and emotions remember are are not just feeling, but it's it's a subjective feeling state. But it's also a behavior and it's a thought. So it's a three-component process. At least that's how it's most often defined these days, although you'll see arguments about that. so that I think is important. It's about how we use emotions to really better understand our own emotions, could be a really interesting idea to pursue. but then also, you know, I I'm focused a lot on phenomenology. I think it's important that we what we But we talk to people who are are are meditators or psychedelic users or what are they experiencing and and how do we use that and integrate that into our models of of what's the patterns that are happening and what how can they cause it's a little bit different for everyone else. Like we were talking about the five MEO experience may be different from you than it is from someone else. And why? Why is that? And maybe it's Andrew Heacock: That yeah, yet another fascinating mystery. Or it's somewhat David Vago, PHD: Yeah, right. So we that Andrew Heacock: with like I've seen with with things like ayahuasca, the same person with two different cups in the same night of the same batch. I mean, it's just got a different concentration of sediment in it, of plant material, and it's a totally different experience. David Vago, PHD: Totally different experience. And then how we integrate, you know, plant spirits, you know, talk it talk to them or refer to them more as teachers instead of, you know, a drug. I think that's an important context that and ritual that that's that's going to change as well. and how we examine the lymphatic system, I think through br breath work or through some of the other practices, I think are important. We're gonna be doing that too, and we have to better understand that. So I appreciate the conversations around it. You know, and then just again, going back to this sort of self of of experiencing I me mine across time is is something that we can work on. This model needs to be developed further, needs to be examined further, and needs to be tested. But the idea is that again, you know, experience and of how our self is constructed comes in these little snippets across time and what we, you know, put into our minds really matters. and how we relate to each other is also critical. Like you can't be you're just not isolated in your own house, right? The house is the metaphor of I mean mine, but there's lots of houses on the block. And then you look outside planet, and then there's lots of planets. so and interdependence is another concept that we we didn't talk about a lot, but I think is gonna be an important one to explore further. Andrew Heacock: Like inter being, like the Buddhist notion of interbeing. Yeah. David Vago, PHD: Interbeing, yeah, Tik Non Han's description of that. Yeah, how we're all connected. It's an important it's a really important piece of of the equation of how meditation Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Andrew Heacock: So we have lots of lots of fodder for a part two and probably a three or four. I'll I'll say like on the on the the meta emotion, I mean, I'm I'm surprised there's not more literature on that because you know, I mentioned David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: transdiagnostic factors and we didn't get into it. but I'm excited about them because they're gonna get psychiatrists thinking about the mind and in a less mechanistic way that just is just a brain disease. and I think that meta-emotion has got to be transdiagnostic for a lot of things. Because if especially if that second layer emotion is shame, you're not gonna be able to admit the first layer. You like you're not gonna be able to work with it. It like I mean, it that that's a shame is particularly pernicious, especially if you're ashamed that you're ashamed. I mean, I would have an experience in like, I can't meditate or whatever, and I'm uniquely broken until you just give up and you don't even tell anybody about the process because you you're ashamed. You know, that then so just eliminating and and meditation really, that's probably the biggest effect my meditation. practice has had in my life is recognizing that that second layer, that there's two layers there, basically. And that the second one is there's an element of choice with that. I mean, I think I think emotions are instincts. They're they're essentially David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: involuntary. and so it's kind of it's silly to shame yourself for them. I mean, there's there is a voluntary element of it. But you know, if I feel afraid of something, it's just like, well, that's just where I'm at. And you know, so much of Especially shame is a critical one because it affects your sense of self. And that's what needs to change. I mean, that's kind of the the narrative thread of what we've talked about is your narrative identity changes and these transformative experiences and that's why you get better. And if you work David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: back from that, that means that what was keeping you sick was your sense of self. And of course that's reinforced David Vago, PHD: Yeah, that's right. Andrew Heacock: if you have constant shame thoughts about David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: or shame narratives about whatever you're feeling. That of course, of no wonder, like you would be you would be deeply unhappy. And so that that's an interesting thing that that that's not being studied, but I think there's real promise there. And also the other thing I want to mention is David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: we didn't even talk about the fact with like psychedelics and ceremonial use, there's usually multiple substances there. And I don't David Vago, PHD: Mm-hmm. Andrew Heacock: think we've even scratched the surface of trying to look into that. But the one that we've talked about already is the use of ceremonial tobacco, like in the midst of of like an ayahuasca ceremony, for example. That's interesting that like, I mean, people say that it's grounding. David Vago, PHD: Right. Andrew Heacock: and you know, you're saying nicotine could could blunt the effects of like the down regulation of sensory gating. David Vago, PHD: Yeah, that's right. Andrew Heacock: that that's interesting. I think there's there's a lot of these kind of exciting possibilities to just figure out why do people why do they use hope A when they're also using this other medicine. Why are they doing it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So David Vago, PHD: Yeah, right. What's the optimum? Yeah. Yeah, what's the optimum exactly to do if you're looking for a particular experience. Yeah, I I I I think it's I love that yeah, following that because we we w that that's that's an area that's that's growing and growing fast and we need to put more thought into how integration works. and that means like where do the mind and body practices, where do the intention practices go, where how do we conceptualize the the plant medicine sort of traditions and in and putting that into the context of your or set and setting of your experience so we can better have a transformative adaptive outcome. Andrew Heacock: It's so exciting. It's exciting to talk with you about it. I'm I'm envious that you get to be doing some of this research yourself, but I know it's tons of work. But David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: it's it's been really so much fun to be able to talk with you. I'm getting to talk with lots of other people and this has David Vago, PHD: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: been the product of me spending lots of time thinking about thinking. David Vago, PHD: That's awesome. A little bit of metacognition and maybe a meta emotion. That's great. That's great. Well it's great to be with you, Andrew. I love Andrew Heacock: It that's just yeah, it's proof that this is where it goes. I haven't made a living out of it yet, but I'm I will. Yeah, so thank thank you so much, Dave. David Vago, PHD: love what you're doing. Keep doing what you're doing. I we're we're all trying to help reduce suffering in this world. So appreciate your efforts. Andrew Heacock: Thank you so much and appreciate yours too, sincerely. David Vago, PHD: Right.