Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Top Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman Presses Steven Bartlett on Prayer || SLP677

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Top Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman Presses Steven Bartlett on Prayer || SLP677 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know what?
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: It it's one of the things that made me think a lot about religion was having a DT experience where what I experienced felt indistinguishable from this reality in terms of the vividness and the realness of it.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: And me just pondering this concept that a tiny little inhale of smoke could completely change my material reality.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: So therefore I concluded that my material reality is j is literally I mean, tell me if my logic's wrong, is a small amount of chemicals.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Our biology and psychology, let's mold those together, are extraordinarily good at accomplishing certain things.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: But there are certain things that are outside the abilities of our psychology and biology.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if we are asking our psychology and biology to satisfy something that our psychology and biology simply cannot satisfy, we're going to miss out on a lot of potential meaning in life.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what I to be very direct about it, like at the point where I decide to really embrace the idea of faith of a God, right?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: That there are powers outside of human understanding that can be very useful.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Everything got better.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: It it relieved me of the pressure to control everything internally and externally.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I find it not just intriguing, but absolutely captivating that a force outside of us, some people call it God, the universe, right?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Some people might think it's Jesus, some people might think it's it's something else, might actually hold some power in how we could potentially behave, be better, be wouldn't it be wonderful if there's this thing planted in us, or some of us, which is a question about things outside of us that if we were to embrace, could allow us to get to a better place as a species.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why would we think that a a technology like AI would do that?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: AI is wonderful, but why would we think that it would come from computers?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's of us, right?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why would we think it would come from anything that humans and only humans could do?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: To me, the embracing the notion of a God and having faith, which by the way is about having doubt but still doing the things, the practices, prayer, is like to me one of the most liberating and educating things, not just about stuff of God and the universe, but about the human brain.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I've got some questions.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it's like we're not meant to solve this on our own.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Your understanding of the world is an abstraction that occurs inside your skull on the basis of photons that come in through your eyes, sound waves that hit your ears, mechanical forces that hit your skin, and chemicals that go in your nostrils and in your mouth.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then you create, you abstract reality in here.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the laws of physics dictate how those things, like photons have properties, sound waves have properties, and those are converted, they're transformed into signals, but then you abstract the world with enough accuracy so I can pick up this pen, okay, and not miss it, at least for now.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if you understand neuroscience that way, and then you go, we don't see infrared in this room because we don't have the sensors, but a pit viper does.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Does that mean that there's a god?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: No, not necessarily.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: That alone doesn't prove that.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: But what it does prove is that we only have access to the physical events in the world that we have the filters within us to extract, which is a kind of mealy-mouthed way of saying you can't see it because you can't see it.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have the sensors.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: You can throw on infrared goggles and then you can see it, but that's a technology.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: There will I don't think there will ever be the God goggles.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: The emotional goggles, so to speak, come from this thing that we call faith.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Faith is the infrared goggles of human understanding about why we're here.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman goes on to Diary of a CEO.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's been out five days as of now, and it's had nearly five million views, and I can see why.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Here is a scientist talking about faith, and we had always been told that faith and science are opposites.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: But here, Andrew Huberman and then Stephen Bartlett, the host, is going to give us between them three arguments why the faith versus science conflict is not actually a conflict, and perhaps science and faith belong together.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: We'd like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: If you like thinking about these kinds of things, even just for a little bit, why don't you give the channel a subscribe?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: The conversation begins with the idea that life is more than all that we see, touch, taste, and feel, and that actually the context in which we see, touch, taste, and feel is already a greater context than what our empirical sense data is delivering to us.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of world, there's not very much of us, and the way in which we make sense of all this empirical data is actually in non-material ways, is actually in terms of a first-person sense of self that is not reducible to neurons firing.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: There is more, and sometimes that more is accessed via drugs.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes Huberman says it's accessed via faith.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Prayer might be a way of, he says, opening the aperture of your soul, which is to use language from photography.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's letting more light in so that you can see things you otherwise wouldn't see.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: He gives the example of a pit viper.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: And a pit viper can see infrared naturally.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't need any goggles.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: We need goggles to see infrared.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what is it that's going to help us to see what is really there?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what's so important about this goggles analogy.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: Faith is not about turning away from this reality and looking up to some other alternative universe that's full of pixie dust.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: It is to pay attention to this world through a certain lens.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: Faith is not an alternative reality.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Faith is a way of seeing what is really there.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Faith and science are not opposites.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: Faith is a way of seeing that doesn't constrict your vision, but that actually helps you to see things that are really there.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's the first analogy Andrew Huberman helps us with.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: The Goggles analogy, the vision analogy.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: Faith is not the opposite of science, it's not the opposite of reality.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: It is the lens through which you see reality, and actually, I would add to this, everybody has a faith.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: Your faith might be that all that is really in existence is what you can see, touch, taste, and feel.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: I suggest to you that those are very thick lenses and they don't let a lot of light in.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: The lenses of Christian faith, I put to you, are those which help you see that which is really there.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Can we really believe that?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Andrew Huberman gives you a second reason to believe that, because with those particular lenses on, you're able to make sense of something that would otherwise not make sense.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: Here is the argument from desire.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there are regions of the brain that when stimulated, people get a god-like experience, the experience of God, not as themselves, but they feel it.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: You had this idea.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so people have said, oh, well, then there's a God region of the brain, and it's just a brain region.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a brain region.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: That can't be.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: But we have brain regions.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Arthur says this much more eloquently than I could.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: There are brain regions for thirst, which in the philosophical way, again, this is coming from him, not me, would say, well, that proves the existence of water.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: The thirst proves the existence of water, right?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a thirst circuit for gaining understanding of this thing that we call life and whatever comes after it.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in that thirst, I decided to open the aperture to the idea that it's that the thing, the stimulus, the water, the photons, I'm not able to extract that through thought, through my eyes, through my ears.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Just like my dad couldn't come to understand quantum mechanics by thinking really hard about it, you have to do the math.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: There is a region of the brain that is sometimes called, you know, the God circuitry part.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's the part that lights up when people are having religious experiences, or they're praying, or they're taking certain drugs.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: There is that part of the brain, and then the argument that Andrew Schuberman brings is, well, we have thirst because there's water.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: We have bread because there's hunger.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps we have God circuitry because there's God.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's an argument from desire, really, and that argument from desire was popularized by C.S.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis last century.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: This is not a watertight argument, but in the context of what Andrew Schuberman has just said, it is one example of the ways in which faith lenses help you see what is really there.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: With the lenses of faith, you can account for real facts in the world.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: A real fact in the world is that we have thirst.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: And we know that because there is water.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: A real fact in the world is we have hunger.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: And the explanation for that is there is food.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: A real fact of the world is that there is God hunger.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: There is a desire for God.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: There is God circuitry.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: That is a real truth in the world, an actual fact about human experience and the lenses of faith do not shrink your world.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: They reveal to you perhaps the best explanation for those desires.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: We have a desire for that which this world cannot satisfy because we were made for another world.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: That is C.S.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis's argument.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think when you hear it from a neuroscientist with a neuroscience spin, God circuitry in the brain, it helps you to see that again, God and science are not opposites.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: So there are two arguments for why you should take God seriously as you're thinking about God and science.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: The first is that faith does not help you to look away from reality, but helps you to see reality.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's a pair of goggles by which we see more clearly.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: The second argument is from desire.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: Science can show you a certain God's circuitry, and maybe that is best explained by the fact that there is God.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's a perfectly reasonable thing to think, and it's something that scientist Andrew Huberman also thinks.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Here's a third reason why you might think that faith is worth engaging in this scientific age, and it's actually given to us by Stephen Butlett.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: First, he defines the problem that we have, and then he gives us a solution.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Here's the problem.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to be an antidote that a lot of people are reaching for now based on the way that we've kind of designed our lives over the last couple of decades.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: The sort of individualism, the loneliness, the I don't know, nihilism, the me, me, me, the material success, the you could say like low-level narcissism of being on social media and trying to cut get as much as many followers as you can, and we've become islands.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's the problem with modern life.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Stephen is describing the spiritual anorexia that Andrew Huberman was diagnosing.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe that's because we have such a contracted vision of the world and we're living smaller lives because we are not opening our eyes by faith to what is really there.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: If that's the problem, what's the solution?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: Stephen has some wisdom for us.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell And I've been thinking a lot about this idea of like God and meaning, because it does appear to me that we are meant to be like anchored to, you know, ourselves and our family, and then like, I don't know, our community, and then maybe our city, and then maybe our country, and then maybe the planet, and then something above.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're an ambitious guy.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Go bigger, man.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to push you like No, no, please.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Bigger, the biggest thing is the that is a non-human force in the universe that wants goodness.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Someone will work out the neuroscience or not.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna keep praying because my life is that much better.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell When you when I heard you talk about it, I started praying a little bit.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, right on.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Not all the time.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: But there's several moments where I thought, do you know what now would be a good time to just pray?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm it someone like you saying that you do it gives a lot of other people permission to try and to investigate for themselves.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, you like if I'm in the Huberman camp, maybe I'm someone that really cares about scientific rigor and precision.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and then if you were if that if you change that camp to also be open-minded to spirituality and religion and these sort of other pursuits, I can still be sort of ideologically who I believe I am while also investigating these other things.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: So what I it was really uh impactful for me to hear you talk about prayer because it impacted my it gave me permission, I should say, at some weird level to also investigate.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, like I report the same findings as you that it helps.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: It helps.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: It helps.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that is fantastic.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: And and there's the third argument.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: There's the third argument for integrating faith and science.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: Integrating faith into the practicalities of our day.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: We were sold a lie when we were told that faith makes you escape from this world to some kind of second-story annex where some religious hobbyists can hang out with the beanbags and the lava lamps and the groovy vibes.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: We were sold a lie when we were told that is what faith is.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Andrew Huberman is giving us permission to put on the goggles, to see what is really there, to explain the hunger and the thirsts that we have because we were made for something more.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then Stephen follows through and says, that means we should access that thing.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: And prayer is therefore a scientific experiment that you can do.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Here is the hypothesis.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: The hypothesis is there is so much more to this world than what you see, touch, taste, and feel.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: And you can open the aperture and see more of what's going on when you put on the faith goggles.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: How do I try that for myself?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Andrew Huberman says, pray.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Stephen Bartlett said, I have prayed, and it helps.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there is confirmation of the hypothesis.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: We've had the hypothesis, we've done an experiment to test the hypothesis, and there is some confirming evidence that the hypothesis is in fact true.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you pray?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you perform the scientific experiment and check out whether prayer works for you?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there's another thing you can do if you want to check out whether faith is right for you.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you go to 321cour.com and do the 321 course.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's entirely free and it's life according to Jesus.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's a kind of a Christianity 101 that assumes no prior knowledge.
• 15:10
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• 15:13
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• 15:14
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• 15:14
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• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you go and do 321course.com and let us know how you found it.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that'll do for this video.
• 15:23
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• 15:27
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• 15:30
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• 15:31
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• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: God bless.