Latest / Luke's English Podcast / Scientists Just Admitted Something TERRIFYING About Your Brain

Transcript

Scientists Just Admitted Something TERRIFYING About Your Brain · Luke's English Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The Woman Who Came Back. She had not spoken in
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: almost two years. Advanced Alzheimer's had taken it all, in
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: the order it usually takes things. First the names of
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: the grandchildren, then the names of her own children, then
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: the ability to feed herself, and after that the ability
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: to recognize the face leaning over the bed, and finally
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: speech itself, until what was left in the room was
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: a body that breathed and turned and made small sounds,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: tended by nurses who had never heard her voice. Then,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: on the last day of her life, she opened her
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: eyes and looked at her daughter and said her name.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Not a syllable, not a lucky noise that a grieving
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: family decided to hear as a word. She spoke in
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: full sentences. She knew who she was, she knew who
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: her daughter was, she knew roughly where she was, and
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: she said the things that people say when they understand
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: they are leaving. Her daughter sat there holding the hand
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: of a woman who had been medically gone for two years,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: and who was, for a little while, entirely present. The
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: next morning, she died. Now here is the part that
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: should stop you, and it is not the part you think.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: This is not a rare story. It has a name
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: in the medical literature. It has been studied at the
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: University of Virginia, funded by the National Institute on Aging.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: and given a formal clinical definition by a panel of
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: researchers who sat down specifically to agree on what counts
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: and what does not. Doctors and hospice nurses have been
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: watching it happen for centuries, and quietly filing it under
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: things you do not put in the notes. It is
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: called terminal lucidity, and one study found that in only
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: about 6% of cases does the person live longer than
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: a week afterward. The lights come back on, and then
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: the house comes down. and nobody, anywhere, can tell you
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: how it works. Let me be very direct with you
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: about what this video is and what it is not,
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: because I want you watching for the next two hours,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: and I am not going to get there by pretending.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: This is not a story about miracles. I am not
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: going to tell you that a soul briefly returned to
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: a dying body. That would be an easy video to make,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: and it would be worth nothing, because it explains a
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: mystery by pointing at a bigger mystery and calling it
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: an answer. This is something much more interesting than that.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: This is a story about a hole in the standard
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: model of the human mind. A hole that mainstream neuroscience
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: knows about, has known about for years, and cannot currently fill.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Because look at what terminal lucidity actually requires. For 400 years,
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: science has run on one assumption about your mind. And
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: it is such a good assumption that most people have
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: never once questioned it. The assumption is that your brain
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: makes your consciousness the way a factory makes cars. Neurons fire,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: chemistry happens, and out the other end comes the experience
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: of being you. The redness of red, the taste of coffee,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: the sound of your own name. Damage the factory and
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: production drops. Destroy the factory and production stops. Simple, testable,
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: and supported by an enormous mountain of evidence that I
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: am going to spend a whole chapter defending because it
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: deserves it. Now apply that model to the woman in
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: the bed. Her factory was rubble. Advanced Alzheimer's is not
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: a software problem. It is architectural demolition. Plaques and tangles
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: and dead tissue and shrinkage you can see on a
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: scan from across the room. There was no intact machinery
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: left to produce a coherent sentence, let alone a coherent person.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: And yet, a coherent person walked back into that room,
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: used the machinery for a few hours, said what she
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: needed to say, and left. A destroyed factory cannot suddenly
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: produce its finest product on the last day of the year.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: So either the factory was not as destroyed as it looked,
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: which is a real possibility we will take seriously, or
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: the thing we call the factory was never the factory
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: at all. Hold that second option loosely for now. Do
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: not commit to it. By the end of this video,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: you will have seen the strongest evidence for it and
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the strongest evidence against it. And I promise you that
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: both are stronger than you expect. Let me take you
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: to the phone call that started all of this. In
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: the year 2000, a young psychology student in Austria named
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: Alexander Batanyi got a call about his grandmother. She had
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: vascular dementia. She had barely spoken in a year. And
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: the family was calling because something strange was happening. and
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: they did not have a word for it, he rang her,
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: and she answered him in the German of his childhood,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: the precise, old-fashioned, carefully constructed German she had spoken to
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: him as a boy. She recalled things they had done together,
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: in detail, the way you recall a holiday from last summer.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: She told him that he had brought joy to their lives.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: It was not the fog talking, and it was not
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: a fluke. It was her, exactly her, the whole person
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: and not a fragment. She died a few days later.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Bhattani filed that away for years. He was a philosopher
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: and a psychologist by training, and there was no scientific
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: box to put it in. So he did what almost
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: everyone does with an experience like that. He kept it
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: as a family story. Then, much later, he read a
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: paper by a German biologist named Michael Nahm, who had
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: collected historical accounts of exactly this thing and, in 2009,
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: given it the name Terminal Lucidity. And Batani realized he
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: had a data point, not a memory. So he started
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: collecting them. He gathered more than 60 cases. Then he
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: and the psychiatrist Bruce Grayson published the results in a
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: peer-reviewed journal under a title that reads like a contradiction.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Spontaneous remission of dementia before death. Read that phrase again, slowly.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: Spontaneous remission of dementia before death. Dementia does not remit.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: That is the entire, brutal, defining fact of the disease.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: the one every family learns in the first week. It
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: goes one direction, and the direction is down. There is
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: no coming back, and every honest doctor tells you so.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: And then a certain number of patients come back anyway,
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: for an hour or a day, in the last week
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: of their lives. And we have collectively decided this is
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: a lovely thing that happens. rather than a scientific emergency.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: It is a scientific emergency. And I want to be
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: fair to the other side here, because the other side
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: has real answers, and this video is worthless if I
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: hide them from you. There are serious, sober, non-mystical hypotheses
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: on the table. Maybe a flood of chemistry in the
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: dying brain briefly reopened circuits that were blocked rather than destroyed.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Maybe the tissue was less gone than the scans suggested,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: and dementia involves a kind of blockade, layered on top
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: of the loss. Maybe the whole phenomenon is family members
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: hearing what they desperately need to hear at the worst
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: moment of their lives, which is a real bias with
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: a real name, and I would be a fraud not
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: to mention it. Every one of those objections is going
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: to get a fair hearing. But keep the last one
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: in mind, because there is a case coming, published this year,
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: that kills it stone dead. A woman with advanced Alzheimer's
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: who spoke coherently for hours, walked without help, and dressed herself.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: She was not dying. She was not close to dying.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Something else brought her back, deliberately. and it came in
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: a capsule. When we get to her, in chapter 8,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: the ground moves. That is one of the threads. Here
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: are the others, because you should know what you are
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: signing up for. Somewhere ahead in this video, a neuroscientist
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: walks onto a stage in front of the world's leading
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: consciousness researchers and hands a philosopher a bottle of wine
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: older than most of the people in the room, He
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: is paying a bet he made 25 years earlier. And
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: the bet was that science would have located consciousness in
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: the brain by now. He lost. That happened. That is
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: where the field actually stands. And it is not where
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: you have been led to believe it stands. Somewhere ahead,
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: four dying patients in an intensive care unit have their
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: ventilators switched off while electrodes record what happens next. The
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: brain is supposed to fade out as the oxygen goes.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Two of those brains did the opposite. They surged. In
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: exactly the frequency band that tracks vivid conscious experience. In
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: exactly the region most suspected of hosting it. In the
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: seconds after the heart stopped. Somewhere ahead, 567 people have
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: cardiac arrests across 25 hospitals, while researchers run the most
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: rigorous study of dying ever attempted, complete with hidden images
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: that only a floating consciousness could see. What they found
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: is not what either camp wanted, and I will give
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: you both halves of it, including the half that the
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: believers never quote. And somewhere ahead is a prism, a
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: very old, very simple idea about light and glass, proposed
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: by one of the founders of modern psychology in 1898,
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: which offers a completely different way of reading every single
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: fact in this video. Not a mystical way, a mechanical one.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: When that prism arrives, in chapter six, everything you have
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: heard up to that point rearranges itself. And I would
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: like you to notice the exact moment it happens. Because
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: here's what makes this topic different from every other unsolved
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: question in science. If we do not know how black
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: holes evaporate, that is fascinating and it is happening somewhere else.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: If we do not know what the mind is, then
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: we do not know what you are. Not in a
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: poetic sense, In a literal, load-bearing, this affects everything sense.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Whether you are the activity of a three-pound organ, or
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: something that organ is currently handling, determines what happens in
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: about 80 years. Determines whether a machine can ever be someone.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Determines whether the person in the bed with advanced dementia
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: is still in there, listening. Families make decisions on that
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: last question every single day, in real hospitals, right now,
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: with no scientific ground under their feet. We are the
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: only thing in the known universe that experiences anything, and
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: we do not know why we do, or where it
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: comes from, or what it takes to end it. And
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: the honest position, the one held by the best people
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: in this field, is not that they are close. It
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: is that after decades of scanners and electrodes and theories
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: and funding, the most fundamental question about ourselves is still open.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: and the last few years have made it stranger rather
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: than clearer. So we are going to walk into it properly.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: We will start with the standard model, and I will
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: give you its best case, its greatest triumphs, and the
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: man whose brain scan should not have been compatible with
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: a job and a family and two children. Then we
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: will look at what the field admits it does not know,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: which is more than you think. Then the evidence, the surge,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: the 567, the mushroom, the anesthetic that may be shutting
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: down something quantum, the creatures with no neurons at all
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: that are solving problems anyway. Then the case against every
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: bit of it, argued as hard as I can argue it.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: And then, at the end, back to a room and
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: a bed and a daughter holding a hand. Because that
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: is the thing about the woman I opened with. Whatever
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: explanation you eventually land on, she still spoke. That happened.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Someone was there, in a body whose machinery had been dismantled,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: and she used what was left to say goodbye properly.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: The question this entire video exists to ask is a
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: simple one, and I want you holding it from here on.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Where had she been? Before we can answer that, we
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: have to understand exactly what science currently believes about the
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: thing behind your eyes, and where that belief came from.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: It did not come from an experiment. It came from
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: a decision made by one man about 400 years ago,
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: for reasons that were completely reasonable at the time, and
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: that we have never gone back and checked. Chapter 2.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: The Decision That Built Science Everything you believe about your
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: own mind rests on a choice that one man made
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: in the 1600s, and he did not make it because
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: he had proved anything. He made it because he was
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: trying to get some work done. His name was Galileo,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: and he had a problem. He wanted to describe the
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: world mathematically, and mathematics is very good at some things
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: and completely useless at others. It can handle a rolling ball.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: It can handle a swinging weight, a falling stone, the
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: arc of a cannonball. What it cannot handle not then
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: and arguably not now, is the smell of rosemary, or
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: the specific quality of the color red, or what it
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: is like to hear a violin. So Galileo did the
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: sensible thing, the thing any working scientist would do. He
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: drew a line. On one side he put the properties
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: that could be measured, size, shape, position, motion, number. Those,
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: he said, are really out there in the world. On
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: the other side, he put color, sound, taste, smell, warmth,
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: everything that has a felt quality to it. Those, he said,
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: do not exist out in the world at all. They
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: exist only in the mind of the creature perceiving them.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: And if you removed all the creatures, they would vanish.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: Then he took that entire second category, the whole of
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: felt experience, and he set it aside, not solved, set aside.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Physics would deal with the measurable half, and the other
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: half would be somebody else's problem later. That decision is
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: the foundation of every scientific triumph of the last four centuries.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: It is also, and this is the thing almost nobody notices,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: the reason we still cannot explain consciousness. We built the
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: most powerful knowledge system in human history by starting with
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: the step of removing consciousness from the picture. And then
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: we spent 400 years wondering why that system has such
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: trouble putting it back. The philosopher Philip Goff has a
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: line about this that I have never been able to shake.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Galileo's method works so beautifully on everything, except the one
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: thing he took out of the box. So what filled
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: the gap? A model. A very good one, and I
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: want to give it a genuinely fair hearing because this
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: video is not worth your time if I set up
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: a straw man and knock it over. The model says
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: your consciousness is produced by your brain. Roughly 86 billion neurons,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: each connected to thousands of others, firing in patterns of
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: staggering complexity. And out of that complexity comes experience. Think
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: of it as a factory. Raw materials go in, which
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: is to say, photons and pressure waves and molecules. Machinery
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: processes them, and the product, somehow, is the felt world
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: you are sitting inside right now. The evidence for this
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: is not a little bit good. It is overwhelming. And
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: if you have been waiting for me to hand you
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: an easy escape from materialism, this is where I disappoint you.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Damage a specific piece of tissue at the back of
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: your head, and you go blind, while your eyes remain perfect.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Damage a small region on the left side, and you
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: lose the ability to produce speech, while understanding it fine.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Damage a slightly different region, and you can produce fluent,
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: confident musical speech that means absolutely nothing, and you do
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: not notice. There is a spot that, when damaged, leaves
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: people unable to recognize faces, including their own, in the mirror.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: There is a condition where people can see an object
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: clearly and have no idea what it is, and another
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: where they can name it but not see it move.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Push further, and it gets more intimate than that. Damage
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: to a region behind the forehead does not take your
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: memory or your language. It takes your personality. The most
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: famous case in neurology is a railway foreman who took
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: an iron rod through the front of his skull, survived,
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: walked away, and was reportedly never the same man again.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: Not injured, different. His friend said so in exactly those words.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Then there is chemistry. A few micrograms of a molecule
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: can dissolve your sense of self. A drink changes your
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: judgment and your inhibitions and your ability to walk. A
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: gas can remove you from existence entirely and hand you
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: back several hours later with no experience of the gap whatsoever.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Every single one of those facts is real. I am
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: not going to explain any of them away. Anyone who
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: tells you the brain is not deeply, intimately, moment to
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: moment involved in consciousness is selling you something. But now
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: I want you to notice something about that whole list,
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: because it is the hinge that this entire video turns on.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Every single one of those findings shows dependence. Not one
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: of them shows production. Those are different claims. If I
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: take a hammer to a television, the picture goes. If
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: I damage a specific circuit inside it, I might lose
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: the color while keeping the sound, or lose the sound
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: while keeping the picture, or get a face that comes
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: through distorted. I could map every fault to a component
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: and build a beautiful, predictive, genuinely useful science of televisions.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: What I could never do from inside that science. is
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: determine whether the television is generating the football match or
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: receiving it. Keep that distinction in your pocket. We are
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: going to come back to it in Chapter 6 with
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: a much better version of the analogy, one that does
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: not have the obvious hole this one has. And when
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: we do, I want you to already be feeling the
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: shape of the problem. Because there is a second problem,
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: and it is worse. In 1995, an Australian philosopher named
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: David Chalmers stood up at a conference in Arizona and
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: split the study of consciousness in half with a single distinction.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: He said, There are easy problems, and there is a
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: hard problem. The easy problems... and he was being a
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: little sarcastic with that word, are things like, how does
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: the brain integrate information from different senses? How does it
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: focus attention? How does it control behavior? How does it
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: report on its own internal states? These are fiendishly difficult
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: and they will take decades, but everyone can see what
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: an answer would look like. You find the mechanism, you
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: are done. The hard problem is this, why is any
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: of it accompanied by experience? Think about what a brain
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: is on the standard account. It is a very sophisticated
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: information processing system. Signals come in, get transformed, produce outputs.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: In principle, you could build a system that does all
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: of that, that responds to light, avoids damage, learns, talks
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: about itself, insists that it has feelings, and for which
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: there is nothing it is like to be that system.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: No inner movie, no felt quality, all the processing, none
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: of the experience. Philosophers call that hypothetical thing a zombie,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: and the point of it is not that zombies exist.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: The point is that when you look at the mechanical story,
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: nothing in it explains why we are not zombies. Because
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: you are not. There is something it is like to
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: be you, right now, listening to this. There is a
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: felt texture to it. And nowhere in the description of
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: neurons and neurotransmitters and firing rates is there a step
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: where that texture appears. You can describe the entire causal
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: chain from photon to eye to nerve to cortex to
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: behavior and never once explain why any of it is
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: experienced from the inside. That is the hard problem. It
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: is not a gap in our knowledge of the brain.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: It is a gap in the kind of explanation we
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: are using. And I want to be honest about the
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: strongest reply, because it is a good one. The reply is,
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: this is what every scientific mystery feels like from the inside,
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: right before it gets solved. People once thought life itself
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: needed a special ingredient, a vital force, because mere chemistry
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: obviously could not produce a living thing. Then biochemistry showed
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: up and the mystery evaporated. Maybe consciousness is the same
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: and we are simply early. Maybe. Genuinely, maybe. Except that
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: the vital force problem was a question about what living
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: things do. And doing is exactly what mechanism explains. The
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: hard problem is a question about what it is like.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: and nobody has yet described the shape of a mechanism
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: that would answer that. Not a bad mechanism. Any mechanism.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: So that is the state of play. Overwhelming evidence of dependence,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: no explanation of production, and a 400-year-old decision sitting under
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: all of it that nobody has gone back to check.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Now let me show you the man who makes this uncomfortable,
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: rather than merely academic. In 2007, A 44-year-old civil servant
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: in Marseille went to a hospital because his left leg
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: had felt weak for a couple of weeks. Married, two children,
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: held down a job in the tax office. Utterly unremarkable.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: Right up until they put him in a scanner. The
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: image is genuinely hard to look at, and it went
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: around the world for a reason. Where you would expect brain,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: there is dark. His ventricles, the small, fluid-filled chambers that
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: sit deep inside a normal brain, had expanded enormously over decades,
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: pushing everything outward, until what remained of his cortex was
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: pressed into a thin layer against the inside of his skull.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: He had been given a shunt as an infant to
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: drain the fluid. It was removed when he was 14.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: Nobody looked again for 30 years, and during those 30 years,
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: he grew up, went to school, learned to read, got
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: a job, met someone, married her, and raised two children.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: all while the inside of his head was quietly filling
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: with fluid. Now let me correct the version of this
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: story you have probably heard, because getting it right actually matters.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: The headline said he was missing 90% of his brain.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: That is not accurate. His brain was not absent. It
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: was compressed, squeezed into a thin sheet by slow pressure
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: over a very long time. The neurons were largely still there,
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: folded into a shape no textbook would recognize. and his
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: testing was not normal. His overall score came out at 75,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: which is low, with verbal reasoning at 84 and performance
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: at 70. He was not a genius with no brain.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: He was a man of below average measured intelligence, living
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: an entirely ordinary life. Here is why the corrected version
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: is still devastating. Nothing in the production model predicts him.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: If consciousness and personality and the ability to hold a
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: job are generated by a specific arrangement of tissue, then
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: radically deforming that arrangement over 30 years should have consequences
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: that are impossible to miss. A colleague should have noticed.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: A wife should have noticed. He should have noticed. The
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: consequence that actually showed up, after three decades, was a
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: weak leg. Whatever is happening in there It is far
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: more flexible about its own hardware than the factory model
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: comfortably allows. And this man is not alone. There are
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: documented cases of people born entirely without a cerebellum, a
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: structure with more neurons in it than all the rest
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: of the brain combined, who walk and speak and live,
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: with difficulty, but they live. The neurologist John Lorber spent
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: years collecting hydrocephalus cases in Britain. and titled his most
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: famous talk with a question that got him a great
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: deal of trouble. Is your brain really necessary? The mainstream answer,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: and I think the correct answer, is plasticity. The brain reorganizes.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: Given enough time and a gradual enough insult, function migrates.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: That is a real phenomenon, it is well documented, and
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: it explains a great deal about the man in Marseille.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: But notice what plasticity actually says when you look at
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: it directly. It says the specific physical arrangement is not
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: what matters. It says the same function survives radical changes
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: in the machinery. And a factory where you can move
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: all the machines anywhere, crush most of them, and still
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: get the product, is starting to sound less like a
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: factory and more like something else. So we have a
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: model with a 400-year-old blind spot at its foundation. no
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: account of why experience exists at all, and a set
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: of patients who should not be functioning. You would think,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: given all that, that the science of consciousness would be
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: a field in open crisis. And it is. You just
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: have not been told. Because the crisis was announced at
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: a conference in New York, in front of the researchers
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: who work on this. And it was announced with a
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: bottle of wine. Bet. In 1998, at a conference in Bremen,
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: two men made a bet over a crate of wine.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: On one side was Christoph Koch, a neuroscientist, at that
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: point working closely with Francis Crick, the man who had
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: co-discovered the structure of DNA and then spent the last
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: stretch of his career hunting consciousness instead. Koch was confident.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Brain imaging was arriving. Electrode arrays were getting better. The
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: tools were finally sharp enough for the job. And the job,
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: as he saw it, was to find the specific pattern
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: of neural activity that consciousness rides on. Find that, and
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: the mystery becomes a mechanism. On the other side was
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: David Chalmers, the philosopher who had put the hard problem
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: on the table three years earlier and had been irritating
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: neuroscientists with it ever since. Chalmers took the other side
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: of the bet. He said that in 25 years, we
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: would still not have it. 25 years is an enormous
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: amount of time to give someone in a field moving
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: that fast. Think about what happened to the rest of
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: science in that window. We sequenced the human genome, landed
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: a probe on a comet, photographed a black hole, and
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: built machines that talk. 25 years is not a rounding error.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: It is a career. The bet came due in 2023,
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: at a conference in New York. in front of the
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, which means in
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: front of essentially everyone who does this for a living.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: Koch walked on stage and conceded. He handed Chalmers a
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: bottle of Madeira from 1978, with five more fine reds
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: to follow. I want you to sit with that image,
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: because it is the single most useful fact in this
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: entire video for calibrating what you should believe. the leading
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: neuroscientist of consciousness. a man who has spent his life
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: on this and who still champions a specific theory, stood
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: up in front of his own field and said, we
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: do not have it, not close enough to call, not almost.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: He paid, and to his enormous credit, he did it gracefully,
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: which is not nothing in a field this territorial. But
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: the concession is not the interesting part. The interesting part
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: is what he was conceding to. Because in the years
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: leading up to that stage, consciousness science had tried something
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: almost unheard of in any discipline. It had tried to
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: settle an argument honestly. Here is the problem they were
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: trying to solve. There are something like 20 serious theories
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: of consciousness currently in play. 20. Not 20 variations on
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: one idea. 20 rival frameworks that disagree about where consciousness lives,
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: what it is made of, and what would count as evidence.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: Everybody's theory has supporting studies. Everybody's studies were designed by
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: people who wanted that theory to win. And so the
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: field had settled into a comfortable stalemate where each camp
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: accumulated evidence for itself and nobody ever lost. So the
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: Templeton World Charity Foundation funded something called an adversarial collaboration.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: And the design of it is genuinely beautiful. Take the
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: two biggest theories. Get their leading proponents in a room.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: Have them agree, in advance and in writing, on exactly
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: what experiment to run, exactly what each theory predicts, and
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: exactly what result would count as a failure for their
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: own side. then hand the whole thing to neutral laboratories
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: with no stake in the outcome, and pre-register all of
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: it publicly so nobody can quietly change the target afterward.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: You cannot move the goalposts if you have already published
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: where the goalposts are. That is the entire trick, and
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: it is the reason this project matters far more than
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: any single result it produced. The two theories in the
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: ring were these. The first is integrated information theory, which
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: is Coqus-side. It starts from a strange place. Instead of
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: asking how the brain makes consciousness, it asks what consciousness
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: is like from the inside, lists the properties any conscious
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: experience must have, and then works backward to what a
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: physical system would need to do to have them. The
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: answer it lands on is integration. Consciousness happens where information
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: is unified, where the whole carries more than the sum
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: of its parts. And the theory points at the back
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: of the brain, a region researchers call the posterior hot zone,
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: as the place where that unification physically happens. The second
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: is global neuronal workspace theory, which comes largely from Stanislas
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: Dehaene and colleagues in France. It says something completely different.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: Consciousness is a broadcast. Most of what your brain does
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: happens in the dark, in specialized modules, entirely unconsciously. Occasionally,
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: a signal wins a competition and gets broadcast to the
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: whole system, made available to memory and language and decision-making,
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: and that broadcast is what being conscious of something consists of.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: The theory points at the front of the brain, prefrontal
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: and parietal areas, as the broadcasting hub. Back of the brain,
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: or front. Unified structure, or broadcast. Two theories that could
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: not both be right about where to look. The experiment
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: used 256 people, watching images on a screen for varying
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: amounts of time, while their brains were measured three different
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: ways at once. Functional magnetic resonance imaging for location, magnetoencephalography
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: for timing, and in some cases, electrodes placed directly inside
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: the skull of epilepsy patients who had already agreed to surgery.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: That last method is the gold standard, and it is rare.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: because you can only get it when someone is having
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: their skull opened for medical reasons anyway. The results came
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: out in nature, and here is what happened. Both theories
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: took damage. Neither won. The workspace theory predicted that the
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: front of the brain should fire not just when a
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: stimulus appears, but again when it disappears, because the workspace
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: has to update. That second signal was not there. That
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: is a clean, pre-registered, publicly announced failure of one of
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: the two dominant theories of consciousness. Integrated information theory predicted
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: sustained synchronization between the back of the brain and specific
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: areas across the length of a viewing. It was not
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: found either. Coca's own words afterward were that the challenge
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: is to come up with ways to explain the null
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: result on the third prediction. Some things did show up.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: Information about what people were consciously seeing turned up in
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: visual areas, in the underside of the temporal lobe and
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: in the inferior frontal cortex. Responses in the back of
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: the brain tracked how long the image stayed. There is
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: real data here, and it constrains future theories. But nobody
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: could stand up and say, we found it. I find
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: this genuinely admirable, and I want to say why. Because
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: it cuts against how most people picture science. The point
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: of the exercise was never to crown a winner. The
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: point was to build a machine that could produce a loss.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: Most of what gets called science in public discussion cannot
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: produce a loss. It produces support, endlessly, for whatever the
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: person running the study already thought. These people built something
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: that could hurt them, ran it, and got hurt. And
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: then the field showed its other face. Shortly after the
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: first results were presented, an open letter began circulating, signed
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: by a large number of researchers, describing integrated information theory
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: as pseudoscience. Not as wrong, not as unsupported, as pseudoscience,
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: which in academia is roughly the equivalent of accusing a
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: colleague of not being a real doctor. The letter set
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: off a war that is still going. Defenders pointed out
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: that a theory does not become pseudoscience because it failed
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: a prediction. and that if that were the standard, most
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: of physics would have to be thrown out. Critics argued
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: that the theory makes claims which cannot be tested even
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: in principle, including the uncomfortable implication that very simple physical
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: systems might have a flicker of experience. Nature ran a
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: piece afterward noting that this kind of language has no
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: place in a process specifically designed to build working relationships
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: between rival groups. I am not going to tell you
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: who was right. What I want you to take from
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: it is the temperature. This is not a calm field
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: patiently filling in the last few gaps. This is a
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: discipline where the leading theory can be publicly branded a
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: pseudoscience by its own neighbors, and where the most decorated
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: researcher in the room hands over wine because the central
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: question is still open. And there is one more thing
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: about that adversarial collaboration that almost nobody mentions. which I
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: only found while going through the follow-up literature, and which
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: I think is the most interesting sentence in this whole chapter.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: The same funding program ran tests on other theories, too.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: One of those theories was the strangest of all of them,
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: an idea about quantum processes inside the scaffolding of your neurons,
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and an anesthesiologist, and
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: mocked for 30 years by nearly everyone with a neuroscience degree.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: Of all the theories tested in that program, it was
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: the only one that produced confirmatory evidence. Hold on to that.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: It comes back in Chapter 9, and it comes back
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: with rats and an anesthetic gas. For now, take the
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: honest scoreboard out of this chapter, because you need it
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: for everything that follows. 20 theories. No winner. A public
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: failure by both frontrunners. A concession speech. a civil war
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: over what even counts as science here. This is not
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: a settled picture with a few eccentrics at the edges.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: This is an open question at the center of a
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: field that knows it is open. Which means when I
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: show you what happens to the human brain in the
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: 30 seconds after the heart stops, you cannot fall back
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: on the comfortable assumption that the experts already have this covered.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: They do not. And two of the four brains they
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: were watching did something that nobody had predicted at all.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: Chapter four, the surge. Here is what everyone assumed happened
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: at the moment of death. And by everyone, I include
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: the neuroscientists. The heart stops. Within seconds, oxygen delivery to
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: the brain fails. Neurons are the most energy hungry cells
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: in your body. They have almost no reserves. and they
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: begin to fail almost immediately. Activity collapses, the trace on
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: the monitor drops toward a flat line, and then it
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: is a flat line, and that is the end. Fade
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: to black. Simple, dignified, and consistent with everything we know
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: about brain metabolism. It is also, at least some of
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: the time, wrong. The story starts with a scientist at
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: the University of Michigan named Gimo Borjigin, who was not
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: studying death at all. She was studying brain chemistry in rats,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: and two of her animals happened to die overnight while
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: being monitored. When she looked at the data afterward, something
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: in the last minutes did not match anything she expected.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: and she could not let it go. So in 2013,
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: she designed a study to look directly. Rats, continuous recording
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: of brain activity, cardiac arrest induced in a controlled way,
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: and then a careful look at exactly what the brain
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: does in the seconds after the heart stops. Most frequency
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: bands did what everyone predicted. They collapsed. One did not. Gamma,
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: the fastest rhythm the brain produces surged. Not a flicker
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: of noise as the system fell apart, but a coordinated, high-powered,
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: highly synchronized burst that lasted about 30 seconds and then
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: gave way to the flat line everyone was expecting. Now,
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: why does gamma specifically matter? Because of everything gamma is
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: associated with when you are alive. It shows up when
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: you are perceiving something consciously rather than missing it. It
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: shows up in vivid dreaming. It shows up in deep meditation.
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: It is one of the most reliable signatures we have
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: that a brain is doing the kind of unified, bound-together
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: processing that goes along with conscious experience. Of all the
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: rhythms that could have spiked at the moment of death,
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: it was the one most tied to being aware. And
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: it did not just get louder. got more organized. The
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: activity in one region began predicting activity in others. The
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: connectivity between the front and back of the brain increased.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: In some measures, the dying brain was more coordinated than
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: the living one had been a minute earlier. There is
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: a phrase in that paper about the brain being assumed
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: to be hypoactive during cardiac arrest, and I love it.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: Because you can hear a scientist realizing that an assumption
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: everyone had been making was never actually tested. Not disproved,
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: just never checked. Rats, though. That is the obvious objection,
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: and it is fair. A rat is not having a
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: life review. Then, in 2022, chance did the experiment nobody
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: could have ethically designed. An 87-year-old man in Estonia was
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: being monitored with electrodes after a fall, because doctors were
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: watching for seizures. During the recording, he had a heart
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: attack and died. Which means that for the first time,
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: there was a continuous, high-quality recording of a human brain
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: across the actual moment of death. Nobody planned it. Nobody
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: could have. His brain did what the rats did. A
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: surge of gamma in the window around the heart stopping,
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: roughly 30 seconds either side, with the same increase in
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: coordination between rhythms. One case, enormous caveats. He had a
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: brain injury and swelling and had been having seizures, all
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: of which can produce strange electrical activity on their own.
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: Nobody sensible built a worldview on it. So Borjigin's team
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: went and did it properly. And this is where the
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: chapter turns. They obtained permission to monitor patients in intensive
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: care who were comatose after cardiac arrest, whose treatment had
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: been judged futile, and whose families had made the decision
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: to withdraw ventilation. Four patients. Continuous recording of the brain
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: and heart from before the ventilator came off, through the
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: dying process, to the end. I want to be careful here,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: because these were four real people whose families agreed to
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: let science watch something unbearably private. And the reason we
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: know anything at all is that they said yes. That
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: deserves acknowledging before we talk about the data. Two of
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: the four showed nothing much. Activity declined, the way the
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: textbook says. The other two did something extraordinary. Within seconds
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: of the ventilator being removed, as oxygen levels fell, gamma
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: power surged. Not a brief spike, a sustained, marked increase.
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: The gamma became phase coupled to the slower rhythms underneath it,
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: which is the signature of organized processing rather than random noise.
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: Connectivity between the two hemispheres increased. Directed connectivity, meaning information
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: flowing in a specific direction between specific regions, increased. And
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: here is the detail that made the paper travel. The
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: strongest activity was concentrated in a region called the temporoparietal junction,
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: where the temporal and parietal lobes meet, a little behind
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: and above your ear. Then it spread, coupling to the
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: prefrontal areas on the opposite side. That patch of cortex
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: is not a random location. It sits inside what integrated
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: information theory calls the posterior hot zone. the exact region
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: proposed as the physical seat of conscious content, which we
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: met in the last chapter. And beyond that, the temporoparietal
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: junction has a specific reputation in neurology. It is the
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: region associated with the sense of where your body is
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: in space, with perspective taking, and with the experiences reported
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: when it is electrically stimulated during surgery. which include the
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: sensation of leaving your own body and looking down at it. So,
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: as the oxygen ran out, the brains of two dying
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: human beings lit up, in an organized way, in the
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: region most associated with conscious perception and with out-of-body sensations,
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: and then went quiet. The lead author put the puzzle
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: plainly in interviews afterward, and I think her framing is
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: the right one. The question is how vivid experience can
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: emerge from a dysfunctional brain during the process of dying.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: Now let me argue against my own chapter, because you
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: deserve that and because the objections are strong. Two of
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: four is not a majority. Both of the patients who
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: surged had a history of seizures, and although neither had
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: a seizure in the hour before death, seizure-prone brains produce
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: unusual electrical activity. And scalp electrodes cannot rule out deeper activity.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Dying from oxygen deprivation is not instantaneous. And in the
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: minutes between the heart stopping and the brain truly ending,
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: all kinds of things can go haywire. So a burst
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: of activity might be exactly what a system tearing itself
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: apart looks like. One critic in Copenhagen said the results
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: were not surprising to him at all. And, most fundamentally,
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: gamma is a correlate, not a certificate. Gamma tracks conscious
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: experience in awake people. It does not prove experience in
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: a dying one. None of those four patients survived, so
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: nobody could ever ask them. All of that is true,
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: and none of it touches the thing that actually changed here.
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: The old model said the dying brain does nothing worth studying.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: It said whatever people report about the moment of death
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: must be constructed afterward, because there was no functioning machinery
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: at the time to construct it during. That was the
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: standard rebuttal to every account of a near-death experience, and
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: it was a good one. That rebuttal is now in trouble.
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: There is measurable, organized, high-frequency activity in the dying human brain,
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: in the specific regions you would nominate if you were
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: trying to build an experience, at the specific moment when
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: nothing was supposed to be happening at all. Which leaves
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: us with two readings, and I genuinely cannot pick between
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: them from this data alone. The first, The surge is
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: the biological source of near-death experiences. A dying brain generates
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: one last extraordinary burst of activity. The tunnel and the
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: light and the life review are what that burst feels
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: like from the inside, and this is a triumph for
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: the standard model rather than a threat to it. That
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: reading is completely coherent, and plenty of good scientists hold it.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: The second is stranger. Notice that the surge happens as
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: resources fail, The oxygen is going. The fuel is going.
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: The brain's normal operations are shutting down. And in the
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: middle of that shutdown, the system becomes more coordinated. That
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: is not what breaking usually looks like. Breaking looks like fragmentation.
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: Something is being released rather than produced. That is at
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: least worth keeping open. Because if you are watching carefully,
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: you have now seen this shape twice. a mind coming
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: back as the tissue fails, in chapter one, a brain
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: lighting up as its fuel runs out, in this one.
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: Two data points is not a pattern, but hold the shape,
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: because in chapter seven you are going to see it
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: a third time, in living, healthy volunteers, under laboratory conditions,
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: with a scanner running. And that version is the one
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: I have never been able to explain away. First, though,
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: we need to deal with the obvious gap in everything
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: I have just told you. Every patient in that study died.
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: Every brain in that data went silent for good. Which
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: means that nobody in the history of that research was
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: ever able to sit up afterward and say what, if anything,
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: it was like. For that, you need people who came back.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: And in 2023, a team at New York University published
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: the results of the largest and most rigorous attempt ever
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: made to find out, run across 25 hospitals with 567
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: cardiac arrests, headphones, hidden images, and a test that consciousness
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: itself was supposed to pass. Chapter 5. 567 If you
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: want to test whether consciousness can leave the body, You
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: need a shelf. That is the whole trick. And it
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: is the best idea anyone has had in this field.
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: People who report near-death experiences very often describe rising to
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: the ceiling and looking down at the room. They describe
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: watching the resuscitation team work on a body they recognize
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: as their own. And for decades, these reports were dismissed
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: with a single reasonable argument. Of course they can describe
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: the room. They have seen hospital dramas. They can hear
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: voices while unconscious, and the brain is very good at
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: assembling a convincing scene from fragments. So put an image
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: somewhere it can only be seen from the ceiling, a
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: shelf mounted high on the wall, or a screen facing upward,
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: with a picture on it that nobody in the room knows.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: If a patient comes back and describes that picture, the
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: argument is over. That test has been attempted before, and
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: the honest history is that it has never produced a hit.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: which brings us to the most ambitious version anyone has run.
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: The study is called AWARE-2, and it was led by
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: Sam Parnia at New York University, working across 25 mostly
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: American and British hospitals. It ran from 2017 to 2020,
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: and rather than relying on interviews afterward, it did something
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: nobody had done. It monitored the brains of people while
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: they were dying and being resuscitated. Here is the setup.
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: and the logistics of it are close to insane. A
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: patient goes into cardiac arrest in a hospital. A team
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: runs in with a crash cart. In the middle of that,
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: someone also attaches electrodes to measure brain activity and a
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: sensor to measure oxygen levels in the brain tissue, and
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: puts headphones on the patient playing the names of three
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: fruits and props up a tablet displaying an image that
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: can only be seen from above. Then, if the patient survives,
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: they are interviewed carefully about anything they can recall. Now
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: the numbers. And the numbers are brutal in a way
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: that has nothing to do with consciousness. 567 people had
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: cardiac arrests during the study. 53 survived. That is a
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: survival rate of about 9%. And if you take one
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: practical thing away from this entire video, let it be that.
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: When a heart stops inside a modern hospital, with a
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: trained team seconds away, nine out of 10 people do
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: not walk out. Of those 53 survivors, 28 were well
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: enough to complete an interview. Of those 28, 11 reported
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: memories or perceptions from the period when they should have
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: had none. 11 out of 28, roughly four in 10.
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: And the team did something I respect enormously. They refused
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: to lump those 11 together. They sorted the reports into categories.
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: and the sorting is where this gets interesting. Some of
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: it was not mysterious at all. Effective chest compressions can
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: push enough blood to the brain to briefly restore consciousness,
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: and some patients surfaced into the middle of their own resuscitation,
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: in pain, aware, hearing the team. That is a real
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: and disturbing phenomenon in its own right, and it needs
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: no exotic explanation. Some of it was dreamlike, fragmentary, the
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: sort of confused material that comes with coming out of
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: a coma. But a subset, around one in five of
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: the survivors, reported something with a completely different quality, and
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: the researchers gave it its own name, a recalled experience
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: of death. The features are consistent, and they are consistent
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: across countries and cultures and centuries. A sense of separating
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: from the body, observing events without pain and without distress,
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: often with a strange emotional calm. And then, most strikingly,
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: a review, which is not simply remembering your life but
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: re-experiencing it, including the effects of your own actions on
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: other people, evaluated in moral terms. Survivors describe understanding, for
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: the first time, how something they did landed on someone else.
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: Parnia's team was insistent on one point, and it matters.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: These experiences were not like hallucinations. not like delusions, not
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: like illusions, not like dreams, and not like the confusion
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: of coming round from anesthesia. They compared them directly against
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: all of those, and the recalled experiences of death formed
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: their own category, structured and coherent, with survivors reporting them
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: as more real than ordinary memory rather than less. Then
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: there is the electrical data, and this is the part
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: that connects straight back to the last chapter. During cardiopulmonary resuscitation,
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: the monitor sometimes showed the brain producing rhythms associated with normal,
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: high-level mental function. Spikes of activity emerging out of the
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: flat trace, in some cases as long as an hour
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: into the resuscitation. Not continuous, not in everyone, but there,
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: in a brain that by every standard definition should have
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: been producing nothing. The hypothesis the team put forward for
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: what is happening is the most interesting proposal in the
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: whole study, and it is not a mystical one. They
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: call it disinhibition. The idea is this. Your brain does
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: not just produce experience, it constantly suppresses it. Most of
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: what your nervous system is doing at any moment is filtering, inhibiting,
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: throwing away. You do not experience the pressure of your clothes,
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: the sound of your own blood, or the memory of
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: your fourth birthday. Not because that information is gone, but
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: because a functioning brain actively holds it back so you
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: can deal with what is in front of you. Now
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: kill the power. The braking systems fail. And what is released,
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: on this account, is access to material that was always
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: there and always suppressed. The full sweep of stored memory, unfiltered,
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: arriving all at once, which is exactly what a life
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: review sounds like. The paper goes further than that, and
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: I want to quote the shape of it because I
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: still find it remarkable that this was published in a
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: mainstream resuscitation journal by a mainstream critical care team. They
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: suggest these processes may open access to new dimensions of reality,
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: including lucid recall of all stored memories from early childhood
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: to death, evaluated from the perspective of morality. New dimensions
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: of reality. In resuscitation. Now the failure. Because there is
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: a failure, it is central. And the people who share
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: this study online almost never mention it. The hidden images
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: did not work. Of the survivors who reported an experience,
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: not one identified the picture on the tablet. Not one
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: reported the three fruit names played through the headphones. Zero
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: for zero on the one measurement designed to be decisive.
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: You have to be honest about what that means. The
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: single test capable of demonstrating that awareness had genuinely left
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: the body and observed the room came back empty, again,
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: as it has every previous time it has been tried.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: There are reasons to be cautious about how much weight
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: to put on that. The number of survivors who both
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: had an experience and had the equipment successfully deployed in
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: time was tiny, single digits, which is not enough to
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: conclude much of anything. People describing these states rarely report
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: paying attention to arbitrary details on shelves. They report attending
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: to the people in the room and to their own situation,
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: which is what you would expect from anyone in a crisis.
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: And the practical reality of attaching a tablet in the
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: middle of a cardiac arrest means the setup often was
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: not there when it needed to be. Those are fair points.
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: They are also exactly what you would say if you
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: were protecting a hypothesis. I am telling you both things
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: at once because both are true, and you should hold
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: the result the way I hold it, not as a refutation,
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: but as a promise unkept. So where does that leave
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: the largest study of dying ever conducted? It leaves us
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: with three findings that fit together uncomfortably. First, a significant
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: fraction of people who survive cardiac arrest report structured, coherent,
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: morally weighted experiences from a period when the brain was
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: not supposed to support experience. Second, the brain during that
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: period is measurably more active than anyone believed, sometimes far
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: into the resuscitation. Third, the one clean test of whether
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: that experience involves anything leaving the body has now failed repeatedly.
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: The most defensible reading is that something real is happening
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: inside the dying brain, and that we have no evidence
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: it happens outside of it. That reading is fine. It
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: really is. But notice the mechanism they had to reach
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: for to explain it. Because the mechanism is the thing
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: I cannot stop looking at. To explain why the richest
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: experiences in human life are reported at the moment the
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: brain fails, The researchers proposed that the brain's normal job
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: includes holding those experiences back, not producing, restraining, filtering. The
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: floodgate opens because the gatekeeper dies. That is not a
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: small concession. That is the standard model borrowing, in an emergency,
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: from a completely different theory of what a brain is for.
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: And that theory did not appear last year in a
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: resuscitation journal. It was proposed in 1898 by one of
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: the founders of modern psychology in a lecture at Harvard,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: and he explained it with a piece of glass. Hold
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: a prism up to a window, and colors come out
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: the other side. Nobody has ever thought that the prism
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: manufactures the red. The glass does not contain a supply
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: of red that it releases when the light hits it.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: The red was in the sunlight the whole time, blended
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: into white, and the prism does one thing. It separates.
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: It takes something broad and undifferentiated and turns it into
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: something specific and usable. Now smash the prism. The colors stop.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: Everything you can measure says the colors depend on the glass.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: Change the angle and the colors shift. Chip the surface
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: and they distort. Crack it in half and one band
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: disappears while the others remain. You could build an entire
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: science of the relationship between glass and color, and every
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: prediction it made would come true. And you would still
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: be completely wrong about where colors come from. That is
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: the argument. It was made in 1898 by William James,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: who essentially founded psychology in America, in a lecture at Harvard.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: And he made it in one careful sentence. When we
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: say that thought is a function of the brain, he said,
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: we are not required to think only of productive function.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: We are also entitled to consider permissive or transmissive function.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: Produce or permit. Generate or let through. James was not alone.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: The idea was worked out in parallel by Frederick Myers,
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: by the philosopher Ferdinand Schiller, and most thoroughly by Henri
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: Bergson in France, who took it somewhere more radical. Bergson
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: argued that the primary job of the brain is not
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: to hold your mind, but to shrink it. Consciousness in
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: its raw state, he thought, is far wider than anything
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: useful for staying alive, and the nervous system exists to
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: cut it down, to select only what bears on action
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: right now, to throw away almost everything so that you
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: can catch the ball and cross the road. On that view,
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: the brain is not a container, it is a bottleneck.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: And that is a strange and unflattering thing to be
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: told about the organ you are most proud of. Aldous
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: Huxley picked this up in the 1950s and gave it
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: the phrase everyone remembers. He called the brain a reducing valve.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: His claim was that each of us is potentially capable
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: of a much wider awareness, and that what comes through
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: in ordinary life is the trickle the valve permits, because
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: that trickle is what keeps us alive on the surface
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: of a particular planet. And he drew the obvious conclusion
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: from that. If you could interfere with the valve, you
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: would not get less experience, you would get more. Keep that.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: It becomes an experimental prediction in the next chapter, and
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: it is one of the very few predictions in this
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: entire field that has actually been tested. Now, the modern version.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: Because if this were only 19th century philosophy, I would
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: tell you so and move on. The most rigorous contemporary
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: form comes from a Dutch philosopher and computer scientist named
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: Bernardo Kastrup, who calls it analytic idealism. His claim is
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: not that there is a ghost in the machine. It
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: is more radical and more careful than that. He argues
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: that consciousness is the fundamental thing, the substrate, and that
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: individual minds are localized patterns within it, the way a
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: whirlpool is a localized pattern in water. and not a
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: separate object added to the river. On that account, a
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: brain is what a localized pattern of consciousness looks like
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: from the outside, in the same way that a fire
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: looks like flame from a distance and feels like heat
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: up close. The brain is not the cause of your experience.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: It is the appearance of it. I am not asking
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: you to believe that. I am asking you to notice
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: that it is not incoherent, and that it makes different
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: predictions from the standard model. So let me do the
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: honest thing and press hard on the whole family of
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: filter theories, because the case against them is serious. Objection one,
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: and it is the strongest. Where is the mechanism? James
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: gave us a prism. Bergson gave us a valve. Huxley
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: gave us a metaphor about doors. Kastrup gives us an
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: argument about the structure of reality. None of them gives
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: you a physical process. Nobody can say, Here is the
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: thing in the neuron that does the receiving. Here is
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: what it interacts with. Here is the equation. And a
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: theory that can absorb any result but predicts no measurement
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: is not yet a scientific theory. It is a stance.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: I take that objection seriously enough that I have built
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: a whole chapter around the one serious attempt to answer it,
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: and it involves microtubules and an anesthetic gas. Chapter 9
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: Objection 2 Memory If the brain is a receiver rather
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: than a store, then memories should not live in tissue.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: But modern work on engrams, which are the specific ensembles
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: of neurons that carry a particular memory, has gone well
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: past correlation. Researchers have tagged the cells active during a
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: mouse's learning, then artificially reactivated exactly those cells later, and
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: the mouse behaves as though it is remembering. You can
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: implant a fear memory of a place the animal has
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: never been, That reads far more naturally as storage and
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: retrieval than as a radio tuning a station. Bergson has
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: a reply, which is that the brain stores the mechanism
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: of recall rather than the content. I think that reply
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: is available but strained, and I would rather tell you
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: it is strained than pretend the objection was easy. Objection 3,
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: and this one is philosophical. A radio receiving a broadcast
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: requires a broadcast. What exactly is the brain filtering? If
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: your answer is a universal field of consciousness, you have
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: explained one mystery by inventing another one, and you now
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: have to explain how a field of consciousness is organized
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: enough to contain your specific memory of your childhood kitchen.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: That is not a small bill to pay. So why
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: does the idea refuse to die? Because of one asymmetry,
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: and it runs through everything we have seen so far.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: The production model predicts a monotonic relationship. More functioning brains,
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: more mind. Less functioning brain, less mind. That is not
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: a caricature of the theory. That is the theory, and
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: for most cases it holds beautifully. The filter model predicts
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: something different. It predicts that reducing certain kinds of brain
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: function should sometimes increase the richness of experience, because the
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: constraint has been loosened rather than the producer damaged. Not always.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: Not with a hammer. but under specific conditions the curve
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: should bend the wrong way. Now count what we have
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: already looked at. A woman whose brain was structurally devastated,
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: who returned as her complete self on the last day.
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: A man whose cortex was compressed to a sheet and
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: who filed tax paperwork for 30 years. Two dying brains
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: that became more coordinated as the oxygen left. And the
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: largest study of cardiac arrest ever conducted, which needed a
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: mechanism for why the most vivid experiences people ever report
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: occur when the machinery is failing, and reached for the
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: word disinhibition, which is the word production theorists use when
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: they are describing a filter without wanting to call it one.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: Four cases where the curve bends the wrong way. Now,
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: I want to be careful, because you can build a
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: story out of four anecdotes, and I have just watched
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: myself do it. Each of those has a conventional explanation. plasticity,
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: blocked rather than destroyed tissue, metabolic chaos, a brain releasing
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: suppressed material from its own storage. Every one of those
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: explanations is available, and none of them requires anything outside
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: the skull. Here is my honest position, and then we
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: move on. Filter theory does not currently deserve to be believed.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: It is underspecified. It has a mechanism problem it has
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: never solved. And it has an unfortunate tendency to attract
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: people who want it to be true for reasons that
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: have nothing to do with evidence. But it deserves to
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: be tested. And the reason it deserves to be tested
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: is that it makes a prediction the production model does not.
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: And the prediction is checkable in elaboration. on healthy volunteers
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: with a scanner. Take a living human being, give them
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: something that reliably produces one of the most intense and
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: meaningful experiences a person can have, and measure what the
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: brain does. If the production model is right, the brain
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: should light up. More experience, more machinery running. That is
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: not a subtle prediction, and there is no way to
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: wriggle out of it. If Huxley was right about the valve,
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: the opposite should happen. The most overwhelming experience of someone's
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: life should show up on the scanner as less activity,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: not more. They ran that experiment. Repeatedly, in multiple countries,
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: with multiple compounds, over more than a decade. And one
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: of those two predictions is wrong. In 2012, a research
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: team at Imperial College London put 30 volunteers into a
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: scanner and gave them psilocybin, the active compound in certain mushrooms,
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: through an intravenous line so they could watch the effects
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: arrive in real time. Everyone knew what the images would
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: look like. there had been no serious debate about it.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: A compound that produces one of the most overwhelming experiences
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: a human nervous system can generate must be driving that
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: system harder. Colors that are not there, geometry that is
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: not there, the dissolution of the boundary between a person
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: and the room they are sitting in, and, in a
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: substantial number of cases, an experience that people describe afterward
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: as among the most meaningful of their lives. ranking it
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: with the birth of a child. That is not a
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: quiet brain. That is a brain on fire. Everyone expected
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: the scans to come back lit up like a stadium.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: They came back blue. Blue, in these images, means less.
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: Reduced blood flow. Reduced activity. And not scattered reductions in
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: random places. The drops were concentrated in specific hubs the
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: heavily connected regions that coordinate traffic across the rest of
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: the brain. And the biggest reductions were in a network
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: with a name you should know. It is called the
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: default mode network. It runs across the midline of your brain,
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: front and back, and it is the system that becomes
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: most active when you are doing nothing in particular, lying
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: in a scanner between tasks, waiting for a bus. Its job,
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: as far as anyone can tell, is you. It handles
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: self-referential thought, autobiographical memory, the narrative that runs continuously about
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: who you are and what you did and what people
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: think of you. It is the machinery of the self.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: And when you are not busy, it is the thing
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: that will not shut up. Psilocybin turned it down. And
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: then the finding that turns this from an interesting result
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: into a genuine problem. The size of the reduction predicted
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: the intensity of the experience. The more the network came apart,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: the more profound the subjective effects the volunteer reported. Not
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: correlated with more activity somewhere else, correlated with less activity
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: in the network of the self. There is a specific
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: phenomenon at the extreme end of that curve, and it
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: has a technical name because researchers needed to measure it.
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: Ego dissolution. The complete loss of the boundary between self
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: and world. reported as the person still being present and aware,
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: while the sense of being a separate individual simply is
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: not there. It is one of the strangest reports in psychology.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: It comes back consistently, and it tracks directly with how
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: thoroughly the default mode network has been disrupted. Now, this
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: could have been a fluke of one compound in one laboratory.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: It was not. Ayahuasca, in Brazil, showed reduced activity across
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: the same network, LSD showed the same pattern of the
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: network losing its internal integrity, while connections between networks that
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: normally stay separate increased. A systematic review pulling together studies
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: of psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca found the disruption of that
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: network to be one of the most consistent features across
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: the entire literature. So let us go back to the
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: two predictions from the end of the last chapter. The
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: production model said more experience means more machinery running. That
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: prediction failed, not narrowly, it failed in the opposite direction, repeatedly,
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: across compounds and countries and imaging methods. Huxley's valve said
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: the most overwhelming experiences should come from a loosening of
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: constraint and should therefore show up as less. That prediction held.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: Now let me spend the rest of this chapter arguing
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: against the conclusion I just handed you. Because if I
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: do not, I am being dishonest with you. And this
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: chapter is where honesty matters most. Objection 1. The relationship
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: between blood flow and neural activity is not simple. Functional
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: imaging measures blood oxygen changes, which is a proxy for activity.
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: And under a drug that affects blood vessels directly, that
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: proxy can mislead. And in fact, an earlier study using
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: a different technique, positron emission tomography, found psilocybin-increasing brain metabolism,
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: particularly at the front. So the picture is not uniformly
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: one of reduction. It depends on what you measure. Objection two,
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: and this is the serious one. Reduced activity in one
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: network is not reduced activity overall. The consistent finding across
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: this literature is not simply less, it is a change
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: in organization. Connectivity within tightly knit networks goes down, and
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: connectivity between networks that normally do not talk to each
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: other goes up. Regions that keep to themselves in ordinary
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: consciousness start exchanging signals. Researchers describe the resulting state as
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: higher entropy, less hierarchical, more fluid. That is not a
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: brain doing less. That is a brain doing something differently.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: And a materialist can explain the entire experience with that
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: without any filter, without anything outside the head. The self
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: is a construction maintained by a specific network. Disrupt the network,
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: the construction destabilizes, and the person reports that their self
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: has dissolved because it has. The unusual crosstalk between normally
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: separate systems produces the unusual perceptions. Every bit of it
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: stays inside the skull. And the model that explains it,
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: sometimes called the anarchic brain account, is elegant and well-supported.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: I think that is the strongest position available, and I
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: think it is probably correct about the mechanism. But watch
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: what it costs, because this is the part that nobody
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: points out. To explain the psychedelic state, mainstream neuroscience now
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: says that your ordinary sense of being a unified self
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: is not a fundamental given. It is a construction, actively maintained,
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: moment to moment, by a particular network, which can be
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: switched off. And when it is switched off, awareness continues
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: without it. Read that again. Awareness continues without it. The
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: self goes... The experiencing does not go. Something remains that
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: can perceive, that lays down memories of the state, that
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: reports afterward with more conviction than it reports ordinary life.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: Whatever that remainder is, the network we would have nominated
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: as the seat of the person was offline while it happened.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: That does not prove filter theory. It does something more interesting.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: It dissolves the assumption that the self and the consciousness
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: are the same thing. which is the assumption almost everyone
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: walks into this topic carrying. And now, put the psychedelic
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: finding beside the two we already have. A brain deprived
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: of oxygen becomes more coordinated. A brain whose self-network is
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: chemically suppressed produces the most vivid experience of a person's life.
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: A brain destroyed by dementia releases the complete person for
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: one afternoon. Three different insults, three different mechanisms, same direction
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: of surprise. I do not think that is a coincidence,
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: and I also do not think it is proof of anything,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: and holding both of those at once is the honest
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: place to stand. There are two more pieces of this
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: puzzle that I did not want to bolt on earlier,
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: because each of them deserves a moment on its own.
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: The first is meditation. Experienced meditators, people with thousands of
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: hours behind them, show reduced activity in exactly the same network,
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: the default mode network, during deep practice. No drug involved,
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: no damage, just a person sitting still, deliberately doing less,
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: and the machinery of the self quieting down while awareness
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: stays completely intact and, by their own consistent report, becomes
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: clearer rather than dimmer. That matters because it removes the
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: obvious objection. If the only route to this state were
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: a chemical, you could say the chemical is manufacturing the
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: experience the way a hallucinogen manufactures a hallucination. But you
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: can get there by sitting on a cushion. Two entirely
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: different methods, one pharmacological and one behavioral, converge on the
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: same neural signature and produce overlapping subjective reports. The reports
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: across contemplative traditions, separated by continents and centuries and with
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: no contact between them, describe the same thing in different vocabulary.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: The self thins out, awareness does not. The second piece
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: is the overlap that nobody in either field can quite
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: explain away. There is a compound called dimethyltryptamine, produced naturally
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: in trace amounts in mammals and found in plants across
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: the world, which when administered produces an experience that volunteers
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: describe using almost exactly the vocabulary of a near-death experience.
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: Separation from the body. A sense of passing through something.
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: Encounters that feel like meetings. And, crucially, the same insistence afterward.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: that the experience was more real than ordinary waking life,
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: which is one of the most consistent and least explicable
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: features of the whole literature. Researchers have run this comparison formally,
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: scoring the accounts of people who took the compound against
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: the standard scale used to rate near-death experiences. And the
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: scores land in the same territory. Same phenomenology, one arrived
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: at by cardiac arrest and one by an injection in
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: a laboratory in the afternoon. A materialist reads that as
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: the end of the argument, near-death experiences are a brain state,
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: we can now produce that brain state on demand, mystery solved.
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: And that is a completely fair reading. It is probably
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: the correct one. But you can read the same fact
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: the other way around. And the other reading is not stupid.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: If the same state can be reached by dying, and
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: by a molecule, and by decades of meditation, three utterly
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: different roots, then what the roots have in common is
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: not their mechanism. What they have in common is that
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: all three interrupt normal function. Three different ways of taking
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: the ordinary brain offline, and the same territory on the
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: other side of all of them. I do not know
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: which reading is right. Nobody does. What I know is
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: that no theory of consciousness currently on the table predicted
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: that convergence, and any theory that ends up being correct
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: is going to have to account for it. Here is
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: what I think the psychedelic work genuinely establishes, stated as
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: narrowly as I can make it. The relationship between brain
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: activity and richness of experience is not monotonic. It is
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: not a dial where more tissue running means more mind.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: Under specific, reproducible, laboratory conditions, reducing the activity of specific
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: systems increases the intensity and reported meaningfulness of conscious experience.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: Any theory of consciousness has to accommodate that. The simple
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: factory model, as most people carry it around in their heads,
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: does not. And there is a loose thread here that
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: we are going to pull in the very next chapter.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: And it may be the single best thread in this
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: entire video. Because notice the shape of what psilocybin does.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: It goes into a brain, it releases something that ordinary
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: function was holding back, and out comes an experience the
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: person insists is more real than reality. Now remember the
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: woman in chapter 1, whose complete self returned through devastated tissue.
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: And remember that the standard explanation for terminal lucidity involves
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: a flood of chemistry in the dying brain. somebody put
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: those two facts side by side. Then they did the
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: obvious thing. They gave psilocybin to a woman with advanced
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: Alzheimer's disease who was not dying at all. Chapter 8.
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: The woman who was not dying every explanation of terminal
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: lucidity ever offered has leaned on one word, and the
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: word is dying. The chemistry of the dying brain. The
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: cascade of neurotransmitters released as systems fail. The final metabolic storm.
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: Whatever brings the person back, the assumption has always been
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: that it is something about the specific physiology of the
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: end of life, which is convenient, because it keeps the
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: phenomenon safely inside the standard model, and it also makes
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: the thing effectively impossible to study. You cannot run a
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: trial on the last day of somebody's life. You cannot
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: schedule it. You do not know when it is coming,
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: and by the time you know, it is over. That
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: is the reason this phenomenon has been documented for centuries
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: and researched properly for barely 15 years. Not because scientists
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: were closed-minded. Because there was no way in. And then
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: a report came out, and it takes the word dying
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: out of the sentence entirely. A woman with advanced Alzheimer's disease.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: Late stage. The stage where the person is understood to
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: be gone. She was given a high dose of psilocybin.
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: She spoke coherently for hours. Not a word. Not a
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: lucid flicker. Hours of coherent speech. And alongside it, things
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: that no observer bias can manufacture and no grieving family
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: can imagine into existence. She regained continence. She walked unaided.
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: And she dressed herself. Those last three matter more than
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: the speech does, and I want to be precise about why.
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: When a family reports that a dying relative spoke clearly,
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: a skeptic has a genuine reply. People in unbearable grief
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: hear what they need to hear. Memory is reconstructive, and
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: a few slurred syllables can become a farewell speech within
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: a week of retelling. That objection has always been the
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: strongest one against the entire terminal lucidity literature. and I
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: gave it to you honestly in Chapter 1. You cannot
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: apply it here. Continence is not a matter of interpretation.
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: Either the person managed it or they did not. Walking
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: unaided is not a matter of interpretation. Dressing yourself involves sequencing, planning,
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: motor control, and knowledge of what clothes are and what
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: order they go on in, which is a cognitive stack
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: that late-stage Alzheimer's is supposed to have taken apart permanently.
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: and she was not dying. That is the whole thing.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: There was no metabolic storm, no failing organ, no final cascade.
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: There was a molecule, and then there was a person.
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: So what does that do to the explanation? It splits
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: it in half. It separates the return of the person
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: from the physiology of dying, and those two things had
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: been welded together in every account anyone had offered. If
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: the person can come back without the dying, then the
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: dying was never the cause. Something else was doing the work,
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: and the dying process was simply one route to it.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: Which raises the question this chapter exists for. If the
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: person can be brought back on purpose, in what sense
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: was the person ever gone? Consider what late-stage dementia has
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: to be. If this case is real, the standard picture
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: is subtraction. The disease destroys tissue, and each piece of
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: tissue destroyed removes a piece of the person, until there
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: is not enough left to constitute anyone. On that picture,
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: recovery is not merely unlikely. It is meaningless in the
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: way that unburning a log is meaningless. But if a
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: compound can restore hours of coherent selfhood in a brain
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: that far gone, then at least some of what looked
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: like destruction was obstruction. The capacities were not deleted. They
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: were unreachable. There is a difference between a book that
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: has been burned and a book that is behind a
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: locked door. And every family who has sat beside a
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: parent who no longer knows their name has been told,
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: with total confidence, that they are dealing with the fire. Blockade,
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: rather than loss. Or more likely both, in some proportion
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: nobody currently knows. Before we go further, I want to
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: deal with the objection that this whole area is soft, anecdotal,
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: and not really science. Because that used to be true,
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: and it stopped being true recently enough that most people
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: have not noticed. Here is what has happened in the
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: last few years. A panel of researchers sat down and
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: used a formal consensus method, the kind used to standardize
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: clinical definitions across medicine, to agree on what counts as
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: a lucid episode in a person living with dementia. That
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: sounds bureaucratic, It is the single most important thing that
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: could have happened to this field, because until you agree
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: on what you are counting, you cannot count anything. And
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: every skeptic can dismiss every report as a different phenomenon
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: being lumped together by wishful thinking. Then researchers stopped collecting
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: stories after the fact and started watching. There is now
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: perspective work, meaning trained observatories, and caregivers documenting episodes as
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: they occur in people with advanced dementia, rather than interviewing
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: families weeks later about what they think they saw. That
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: change alone removes most of the memory reconstruction objection, and
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: it is the difference between folklore and data. What that
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: perspective work found is worth knowing. most episodes are short,
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: under an hour. But not all. One participant had episodes
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: reported independently by both clinicians and family caregivers lasting a
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: full day, and another lasting two days, that second one
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: occurring in the final 10 days of life after a
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: sharp decline. And across every validated episode, the common features
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: were the same. More speech, better speech, and more complex
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: speech than that person's own established baseline. That last detail
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: is the one that closes the door on the easy dismissal.
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: These episodes were not scored against what a healthy person
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: can do. They were scored against what that specific individual
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: had been able to do the week before. Something clearly
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: and measurably above their own floor. This work is funded
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: through the National Institute on Aging. It appears in Alzheimer's
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: and Dementia which is the flagship journal of the field.
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: In 2019 a group of researchers, including an anesthesiologist and
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: consciousness scientist at Michigan, published a paper arguing that paradoxical
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: lucidity may represent a potential paradigm shift for the neurobiology
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: and treatment of severe dementias. Paradigm shift is not a
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: phrase that mainstream neurology throws around casually. It is in
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: the title. Now, I have to slow down here and
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: be careful with you. Because this is exactly the point
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: in a documentary where the narrator gets carried away and
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: the viewer gets sold something. This is a case report.
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: One person. There is no control group, no blinding, no
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: replication yet. Case reports are the weakest form of clinical
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: evidence and they are weak for excellent reasons. The world
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: is large. Strange things happen. and a single dramatic result
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: can be a coincidence dressed up as a discovery. Nobody
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: should be giving psychedelics to their grandmother on the strength
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: of this. I want to say that plainly, because somebody
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: watching is going to be tempted. And the risks in
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: a frail elderly person with a compromised brain are real
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: and not theoretical. And there is a conventional explanation available,
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: which does not need anything exotic. Psilocybin acts on serotonin
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: receptors and produces a temporary reorganization of brain networks, exactly
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: as we saw in the last chapter. Perhaps that reorganization
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: roots around damaged pathways, the way water finds a new
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: channel when the old one silts up. Perhaps the disease
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: has been suppressing networks that were injured but not dead,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: and the compound temporarily overrides the suppression. That would be
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: an enormous finding for medicine. It would not require consciousness
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: to exist anywhere but in the head. I think that
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: is probably the right explanation. I want to be clear
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: about that. And there is even a hint of a
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: mechanism from an unexpected direction. Recent imaging work using tracers
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: that bind to a specific early form of amyloid found
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: that these deposits fluctuate regionally over time in ways that
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: do not follow the steady accumulation everyone assumed. One area
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: lights up, then goes quiet while another lights up, which
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: means the brain in advanced Alzheimer's may not be a
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: uniformly ruined landscape. It may be a shifting one, with
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: regions moving in and out of blockade on their own schedule.
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: If that holds up, terminal lucidity might have a completely
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: physical answer, and it might arrive within a decade. I
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: would take that outcome happily. Any answer here is better
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: than the silence we have had. But hold the shape
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: of the finding even if the mechanism turns out to
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: be entirely ordinary. Because look at what the mechanism would be.
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: Not restoration. Release, nothing in that story rebuilds the person.
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: Nothing regrows the tissue or reconstructs the memories or reassembles
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: the personality. The story is that the person was present, obstructed.
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: and something removed the obstruction for a few hours. You
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: have now seen that story four times. The dying woman,
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: released by whatever happens at the end. The volunteers in
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: the scanner, released by a compound that reduces the activity
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: of the network that holds the self together. Two brains
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: in intensive care, released by the failure of the oxygen supply.
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: And now a woman with advanced dementia, released deliberately, in
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: a room with a dose and a clock. four different obstructions,
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: four different removals, the same direction every time. Which brings
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: me to the question that has been sitting underneath this
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: video since chapter two, and which I have deliberately not
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: asked yet. If the brain restrains as much as it produces,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: and if we can now name several ways to lift
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: the restraint, then what is the physical thing doing the restraining?
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: Where in the tissue is the valve, What is it
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: made of? What does it act on? And what would
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: it take to point at it in a laboratory? For
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: 120 years, that question has had no answer. James had
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: a metaphor about glass. Bergson had an argument. Huxley had
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: a phrase. Nobody had a mechanism, and I told you
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: in Chapter 6 that this is the single strongest objection
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: to the whole family of ideas. But there is a candidate,
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: There has been for about 30 years, and it was
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist and an anesthesiologist
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: from Arizona, and the field treated it as an embarrassment
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: for three decades. Then somebody gave rats a drug that
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: binds to the structures the theory depends on and put
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: them under anesthetic gas and timed how long it took
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: them to lose consciousness. Chapter 9 the gas nobody understands
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: roughly 300 million times a year, somewhere in the world,
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: a person is deliberately removed from existence and then handed back.
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: That is what general anesthesia is. It is not sleep,
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: which is a state you can be woken from and
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: which your brain organizes for itself. It is not unconsciousness
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: from a blow to the head, which is trauma. It
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: is a controlled, reversible, chemically-induced absence of the experiencer. You
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: count backward, and then there is no you, and then
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: there is a ceiling and a nurse, and four hours
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: have happened to your body without happening to you. It
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: is arguably the greatest gift medicine has ever given the
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: human race, and here is the fact that should be
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: more famous than it is. We do not know how
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: it works. Not in the sense that some details are unresolved.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: in the sense that after nearly 200 years of daily use,
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: the mechanism by which these compounds abolish consciousness is genuinely open.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: There is a list of candidate targets, and it is
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: a long list. Ion channels in the membranes of neurons,
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: receptors of various kinds, mitochondria, synaptic proteins, and the internal
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: scaffolding of the cell. Anesthetics bind to a great many things,
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: Which of those bindings is the one that switches off
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 1: the person? Nobody can say for certain. And there is
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: an old puzzle sitting on top of that, which has
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: bothered anesthesiologists for a century. The compounds that work are
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: chemically unrelated to each other. A simple gas like xenon,
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: which is an inert element that barely reacts with anything,
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: will do it. So will a range of complicated organic
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: molecules that have nothing structurally in common with xenon or
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: with each other. What kind of target accepts keys of
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: such different shapes? Now let me introduce the theory that
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: everyone laughed at. In the 1990s, Roger Penrose, a mathematical
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: physicist who would later receive a Nobel Prize for work
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: on black holes, teamed up with Stuart Hamroff, an anesthesiologist
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: in Arizona. Penrose had arrived, by way of mathematics and
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: Gidel's incompleteness results, at the conviction that human understanding cannot
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: be entirely computational, and that if it is not computational,
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: then something in the brain must be exploiting physics beyond
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: the classical kind. Hameroff had spent his career putting people
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: under and thinking about where the switch might be, and
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: he had a candidate structure. Microtubules. They are protein tubes,
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 1: part of the internal skeleton of every cell in your body,
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: arranged in lattices, And in neurons, they are everywhere. They
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: had always been treated as plumbing and scaffolding. The girders
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: that hold the cell up and the rails that cargo
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: moves along inside it. Penrose and Hameroff proposed that microtubules
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: are where consciousness happens. that quantum states are maintained inside
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: those lattices, and that the collapse of those states, orchestrated
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: by the structure of the neuron, is what a moment
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: of conscious experience actually is. They called the theory orchestrated
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: objective reduction. The reaction was withering and the central objection
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: was excellent. It came most forcefully from the physicist Max Tegmark,
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: and it goes like this. Quantum states are unbelievably fragile.
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: Physicists spend fortunes cooling equipment to near absolute zero and
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: shielding it from every vibration in order to keep such
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: states intact for fractions of a second. Your brain is
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: 37 degrees, wet, chemically busy, and vibrating constantly. Any quantum
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: coherence in there should be destroyed billions of times faster
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: than a thought takes. Warm and wet, the phrase went,
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: and the case was considered closed. For 30 years, quantum
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: consciousness was the thing you did not mention if you
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: wanted to be taken seriously in neuroscience. Then two things happened.
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: The first is that biology kept finding quantum effects where
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: they were not supposed to be. Photosynthesis in warm, wet
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: leaves appears to use quantum coherence to move energy with
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: efficiency that classical physics struggles to explain. The magnetic sense
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: that lets some birds navigate seems to depend on quantum
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: states of electron pairs inside proteins in the eye, again
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: at body temperature. Warm and wet stopped being a knockdown
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: argument because life turned out to have found ways. The
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: second happened in 2024 in an undergraduate teaching laboratory at
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: Wellesley College, and it is one of my favorite pieces
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: of experimental design in this entire video precisely because it
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: is so simple. Mike Wiest and a team of undergraduates
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: reasoned as follows. If anesthetic gas causes unconsciousness by acting
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: on microtubules, then stabilizing the microtubules first should make it
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: harder for the gas to work. If the gas acts
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: somewhere else entirely, Stabilizing microtubules should make no difference at all.
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: There is a class of drugs that stabilizes microtubules. They
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: are used in chemotherapy. So they gave rats a microtubule
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: stabilizing compound, then put them under an anesthetic gas, and
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: simply timed how long it took each animal to lose consciousness.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: The treated rats took significantly longer to go under. That
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: is the entire result. And it is a causal result.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: not a correlational one, which makes it rarer than it
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: sounds in this field. Something was done, and the outcome
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: changed in the direction the theory predicted. Wiest's own comment
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: on it was direct. Since we do not know of another,
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: classical way that anesthetic binding to microtubules would generally reduce
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: brain activity and cause unconsciousness, he said, this finding supports
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: the quantum model of consciousness. and there is a clinical
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: observation that fits alongside it, which I find quietly compelling
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: because nobody was looking for it. Patients who have had
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: taxane chemotherapy, which stabilizes microtubules, have been reported to be
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: unusually resistant to anesthesia. Anesthesiologists noticed this as a practical
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: nuisance long before anyone connected it to a theory of mind.
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: Remember the adversarial collaboration from Chapter 3? the one that
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: failed to crown a winner between the two leading theories?
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: The same funding program tested other theories, and this one
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: made two predictions, that quantum effects would show up in
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: microtubules at ordinary temperatures, and that anesthesia would inhibit them.
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: Of all the theories in that program, this was the
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: only one that produced confirmatory evidence. Now the cold water,
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: and there is a lot of it. These were rats,
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: and the measurement was how long they took to fall over.
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: which is a long way from a theory of experience.
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: Microtubule stabilizing drugs do many things to a cell, and
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: any of those other effects could be responsible for the
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: delay without a single quantum state being involved. Establishing that
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: anesthetics act on microtubules would be a major finding on
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: its own, and it would still not establish that the
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: relevant action is quantum. That last step is the enormous one,
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: and it has not been taken. most neuroscientists remain unconvinced,
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: and their skepticism is reasonable. One clean experiment in a
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: small laboratory does not overturn a consensus, nor should it.
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: But look at what this chapter gives us, even at
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: its most conservative. In Chapter 6, I told you the
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: single strongest objection to filter theory. No mechanism. James had
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: a prism. Bergson had a valve. Huxley had a phrase.
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: and none of them could tell you what physical thing
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: in the brain does the filtering. Here is a candidate,
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: not proven, not accepted, but a specific structure present in
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: every neuron with a proposed physics, making testable predictions, one
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: of which has now been tested and passed in a
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: peer-reviewed journal. And notice how neatly it fits the anesthesia puzzle.
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: If consciousness depends on a delicate physical state inside microtubules
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: rather than on a specific receptor, then the mystery of
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: why chemically unrelated compounds all work dissolves. They do not
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: need to fit the same lock. They only need to
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: disturb the same delicate thing, and there are many ways
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: to disturb something delicate. Whether or not Penrose and Hameroff
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: turn out to be right, and the honest odds are
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: against them, The shape of what they proposed is the
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: shape we keep running into. A physical structure that maintains
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: a state. Interfere with the state and the person is
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: not there. Restore it and the person comes back, reporting
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: nothing from the gap. Which raises one final question before
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: we can go anywhere else, and it is the one
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: that quietly undermines every assumption in this video so far.
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: We have spent nine chapters arguing about neurons. whether they
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: produce consciousness or filter it, whether the quantum states inside
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: them matter, whether the tissue that holds them can be
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: destroyed and still let a person through. All of it
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: assumes that neurons are the relevant thing. There is a
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: creature in the forests near you, right now, with no
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: neurons at all, no brain, no nervous system of any kind,
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: that is currently solving a problem you would need to
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: think about. Chapter 10 Minds Without Brains There is a
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: Yellow Organism that lives on rotting logs and looks like
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: something spilled. It has no brain. It has no neurons.
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: It has no nervous system at all. And in the
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: strictest sense, it does not even have a body in
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: the way you have a body. Because it is a
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: single enormous cell with many nuclei sharing one continuous blob
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: of living material. It is called a slime mold, and
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: it can solve a maze. Put oat flakes at two
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: points in a maze, drop the organism in, and it
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: will spread through every corridor, find the food, and then
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: withdraw from every dead end until what remains is a
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: single living tube connecting the two rewards along the shortest
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: available route. It does not wander into the dead ends again.
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: The problem, once solved, stays solved. Then a team in
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: Japan did the experiment that made this famous. They laid
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: out oat flakes in the pattern of the cities around Tokyo.
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: at the correct relative distances, and let the organism grow.
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: They added bright light in the places where mountains and
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: water make rail construction difficult, because the organism avoids light.
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: And they waited. What it built was a network of
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: tubes connecting all the food sources, and when they compared
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: it against the actual Tokyo rail system, designed over decades
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: by engineers with committees and surveys and budgets, The two
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: were remarkably similar in efficiency, in total length, and in
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: fault tolerance. A brainless smear of protoplasm reproduced the work
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: of a national transport authority in about a day. And
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: it gets stranger. It can be trained, expose it to
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: a mildly unpleasant substance at regular intervals, and it will
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: react less each time, which is a form of learning
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: called habituation. Leave it alone for a while and it forgets,
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: and can then be trained again, Most remarkably, if you
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: fuse a trained individual with an untrained one, the untrained
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: portion acquires the learned behavior. The information transfers through the fusion,
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: with no nerves involved, and nobody yet knows exactly how.
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: Here is why I have brought you here after nine
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: chapters about human brains. Every argument in this video, on
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: all sides, has assumed that neurons are the relevant hardware.
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: The production model says neurons make consciousness. The filter model
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: says neurons let it through. The quantum proposal says the
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: structures inside neurons hold the state. All three are arguments
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: about the same organ. This organism does not have the organ,
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: and it is doing things we would confidently call cognition.
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: if we saw them anywhere else. Memory, anticipation, decision-making, optimization
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: under constraint. Now, does that mean it is conscious? Almost
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: certainly not in any sense you would recognize. There is
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: a real and important distinction between processing information intelligently and
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: there being something it is like to be the thing
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: doing it. And a slime mold is a very poor
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: candidate for the second. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: But it is a devastating counterexample to a hidden assumption,
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: which is that the kind of information processing we associate
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: with minds requires the kind of hardware we happen to have.
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: And it is not alone. Plants signal, and the more
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: we look, the less comfortable the word signal feels. When
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: a tree is attacked by insects, it releases airborne compounds,
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: and neighboring trees receiving those compounds begin producing defensive chemistry
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: before they are attacked themselves. Underground, root systems are connected
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: through fungal networks so extensive and so involved in the
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: transfer of resources that ecologists half-seriously call them a wood-wide web.
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: There is evidence that plants can distinguish their own root
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: systems from strangers, and compete differently with each. There is
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: contested but serious work suggesting some plants can learn to
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: ignore a harmless stimulus and remember that lesson for weeks.
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: None of that requires plants to have feelings, and I
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: want to be careful because this area attracts a lot
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: of overreach. What it requires is that we stop treating
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: neurons as the only substrate on which the relevant kinds
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: of processing can run. Go smaller. Single-celled organisms with no
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: nervous system by definition alter their behavior based on past exposure.
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: Bacteria in a colony coordinate their gene expression based on
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: how many neighbors they detect, which means they are, in
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: a functional sense, taking a census. A single-celled predator called stentor,
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: when repeatedly disturbed, works through a sequence of escalating responses
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: in a consistent order, trying one strategy, then another, then
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: finally detaching and swimming away. That is a decision tree
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: in a creature, with no cells to build one out of,
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: because it is only one cell. Researchers have started calling
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: this whole area basal cognition, and the field is growing quickly.
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: In part because of a simple question that turns out
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: to be very hard to answer. What is the minimum
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: system that counts as having a point of view? Which
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: brings us to the position that has been quietly rehabilitating
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: itself in philosophy departments for the last decade. And which
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: I need to introduce honestly because it sounds ridiculous for
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: about 30 seconds and then stops. It is called panpsychism.
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: And the claim is not that rocks have thoughts or
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: that your kettle has feelings. The claim is that experience,
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: in some extremely minimal form, is a basic feature of matter,
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: the way mass and charge are basic features of matter.
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: Not consciousness as you have it. Something vastly simpler, with
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: no thoughts and no self and no perception. Present wherever
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: there is physical stuff at all. Why would anyone take
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: that seriously? Because of a problem with the alternative. If
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: matter is entirely non-experiential, and human beings are made only
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: of matter, then at some point in the history of
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: the universe, or in the development of each embryo, experience
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: had to appear where there was none. Not new arrangements
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: of experience. Experience itself, from nothing, produced by complexity alone.
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: And nobody can describe what that transition would even look like,
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: which is the hard problem all over again. Panpsychism dodges
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: that by refusing the transition. If experience is basic, nothing
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: needs to emerge from nothing. What complex systems do is
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: not create experience, but organize it into something unified and rich.
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: The cost of that move is immediate, and it is severe,
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: and it is called the combination problem. If every particle
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: in your brain has its own flicker of experience, How
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: do those trillions of flickers combine into your single unified
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: point of view? Why are you not a crowd? Nobody
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: has answered that, and it is not obvious that anybody can.
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: So the score in philosophy is roughly this. Materialism has
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: the hard problem. Panpsychism has the combination problem. Dualism has
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: the interaction problem, which is explaining how a non-physical mind
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: pushes a physical neuron around, without breaking conservation of energy.
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: Every position on the board has a hole in it,
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: and the honest people in this field openly admit that
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 1: they are choosing which hole they find least intolerable. And
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: I will tell you something I find genuinely funny about
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: Chapter 3, in retrospect. Remember the open letter calling integrated
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: information theory a pseudoscience? A significant part of what infuriated
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: its critics was that the theory, followed to its conclusion,
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: implies that very simple physical systems have some minimal degree
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: of experience, which is to say the leading mathematical theory
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: of consciousness, developed by mainstream neuroscientists using information theory, arrives
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: at a conclusion that looks a great deal like panpsychism,
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: and this is one of the main reasons its opponents
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: wanted it thrown out of science entirely. That is the
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: state of the field. Not a settled materialism with a
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: few mystics at the edges. A genuine, unresolved, occasionally vicious
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: argument about what kind of thing minds are, running right
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: through the center of respectable science. So here is where
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: we have arrived. Ten chapters in. A phenomenon nobody can
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: explain at the end of life. A field that publicly
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: conceded it cannot locate consciousness in the brain. dying brains
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: that surge instead of fading. The largest study of death
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: ever run, which needed the concept of disinhibition to explain
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: its own results. A 120-year-old theory that the brain restrains
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: rather than produces. Laboratory evidence that reducing brain activity can
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: increase the intensity of experience. A woman brought back from
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: advanced dementia by a molecule. a possible physical mechanism involving
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: structures inside every neuron, and now a set of creatures
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: with no neurons at all that are doing things we
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: call thinking. It is a compelling case. It has momentum.
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: It builds. And that is exactly when you should be
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: most suspicious of me. So in the next chapter, I
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: am going to take everything I have just spent nine
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: chapters constructing, and I am going to attack it as
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: hard as I possibly can, not politely, not with a
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: paragraph of caveats bolted onto the end. I am going
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: to make the strongest case that the standard model is correct,
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: that every anomaly in this video has a boring explanation,
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: and that the entire filter theory tradition is a comfortable
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: error that people believe because they want to. Because if
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: the case cannot survive that, it does not deserve to
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: survive at all. Chapter 11 The case against everything you
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: just heard let me now try to destroy this video.
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: Not soften it. Not add a balancing paragraph. I want
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: to build the strongest possible case that the standard model
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: is correct, that every anomaly you have heard is a
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: boring problem wearing a costume, and that the filter tradition
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: is an error that persists because of what people want
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: rather than what they can show. Start with the woman
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: in chapter one. because if that case falls, the frame
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: falls with it. Terminal lucidity has a mundane explanation available,
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: and it is not even exotic. Advanced dementia is not
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: only tissue loss. It is inflammation. It is disrupted chemistry.
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: It is a brain drowning in signals that interfere with
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: whatever function remains. Now begin dying. Organs fail, and the
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: chemical environment of the brain changes drastically and quickly. There
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: is every reason to think that in some patients, this
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: shift briefly suppresses the interference, and networks that were suppressed
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: rather than destroyed come back online for a few hours.
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: Look at the psilocybin case in Chapter 8 through that lens,
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: and it stops being mysterious at all. It becomes evidence
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: that dementia involves reversible blockade. That is a major medical finding.
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: It says nothing whatsoever about where consciousness comes from. because
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: on this account the person was never elsewhere. The person
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: was in there, inaccessible, in tissue that was damaged but
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: not dead. Notice how much work I did in Chapter
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: 8 to make Blockade sound like it favors the filter view.
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: It does not. Blockade is a completely physical story about
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: a completely physical organ, and it is almost certainly the
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: correct one. Now the surge. A brain deprived of oxygen
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: is not a brain having a spiritual experience. It is
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: a brain in violent metabolic crisis. Neurons maintain their resting
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: state by constantly pumping ions against a gradient, which is expensive.
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: And when the energy stops, the gradients collapse and cells
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: depolarize in cascades. Of course you see synchronized high-frequency activity.
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: That is what a system tearing itself apart looks like
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: when you put electrodes on it. Two patients out of
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: four is a coin flip. Both of those two had
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: a history of seizures, which is the single most obvious
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: confound available. And scalp electrodes cannot rule out deeper seizure activity.
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 1: If I designed a study, got a result in half
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: my sample, and both positives happened to have the one
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: pre-existing condition most likely to produce that exact signal, my
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: reviewers would rightly ask me to go away and get
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: more subjects. The lead researcher would agree with that incidentally
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: she has said the work is only beginning. And gamma
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: is a correlate, nothing more. Gamma rhythms track conscious perception
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: in awake people. Reading them as proof of experience in
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: a dying brain is like finding tire tracks and concluding
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: there was a driver. Now the near-death experiences. And here
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: I want to be unsparing, because this is where the
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: wanting shows. The single cleanest test in this entire field
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: is the hidden target. Put an image where only a
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: floating consciousness could see it. It has been tried repeatedly,
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: over decades, by researchers sympathetic to the phenomenon. and the
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: largest and best-funded attempt ever mounted produced not a single hit. Zero.
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: That is not a technicality, and it is not bad luck.
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: That is the decisive experiment coming back negative again, and
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: there is a deeper problem with the reports themselves, which
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: is timing. A person who reports a near-death experience is
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: reporting a memory, and they are reporting it after they
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: woke up. There is no way to establish when that
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: memory was laid down. The brain surfacing from a period
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: of oxygen deprivation is a system in an extraordinarily unstable state,
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 1: flooded with stress chemistry, assembling coherence out of fragments. That
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: is precisely the condition under which vivid, convincing, and entirely
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: constructed memories are formed. The person is not lying. They
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: are remembering something that their brain built during the recovery.
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: and stamping it with a feeling of realness that has
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with when it happened. We know the
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: brain does this. Confabulation is not a fringe phenomenon. It
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: is a documented feature of damaged and recovering brains, and
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: the confabulating patient is always sincere and always certain. Add
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 1: to that the fact that the reported content maps onto
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: known neurology with uncomfortable precision. Stimulate the temporoparietal junction during neurosurgery.
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: and patients report leaving their bodies. Deprive a pilot of
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: blood flow to the brain in a centrifuge, and you
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: get tunnel vision, a bright central light, euphoria, and sometimes
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: brief dreamlike scenes. Every major element of the classic account
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: has a physical trigger that can be reproduced without anyone dying.
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 1: Now the psychedelic argument from chapter seven, which I called
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: the strongest thing in the video, and which I now
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: want to take apart. I already gave you the honest
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 1: version and then moved past it too quickly. The consistent
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 1: finding is not less brain activity. It is reorganized brain activity.
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: Connectivity within tightly bound networks falls, connectivity between networks rises,
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: and the overall state becomes more disordered and less hierarchical.
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 1: That is not a reducing valve opening. That is a
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 1: control system losing its grip on a system that is
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: now generating far more unconstrained activity than usual. And here
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: is the part that genuinely damages the filter reading. The
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: compound in question binds to a specific receptor. Block that
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: receptor with another drug and the entire experience does not happen.
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 1: There is no ineffable expansion of awareness. There is a
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: molecule sitting in a slot on the surface of a cell.
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 1: And if you occupy the slot first, nothing occurs. That
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: is not what you would expect if a compound were
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: opening a valve onto a wider reality. It is exactly
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: what you would expect if the experience is generated by
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: the tissue. The imaging is also less clean than I implied.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: Different methods give different answers, and at least one study
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: using a different technique found increased metabolism at the front
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: of the brain. I picked the finding that fit my story.
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: I am telling you that, because you should notice when
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: a narrator does it. The microtubule work. One laboratory, one
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 1: animal study, an outcome measure that is how long a
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: rat takes to fall over. Microtubule stabilizing drugs have many
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: effects on cells, any of which could produce that delay
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: through completely classical means. And the leap from anesthetics act
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 1: on microtubules to consciousness is a quantum phenomenon is not
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: a step, it is a canyon, and the paper does
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: not cross it. The original objection about warmth and moisture
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: has been softened by findings in photosynthesis and bird navigation,
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: but softened is not answered. Now the deepest objection, and
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: it applies to the entire filter tradition regardless of any evidence,
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: it does not predict anything. Ask yourself what observation would
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: refute it. Brain damage impairs the mind, the filter is damaged.
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: Brain damage occasionally does not impair the mind, the filter
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: is flexible. Drugs distort experience, they alter the filter. Drugs
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: enhance experience, they open the filter. Stimulating a region produces
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: an out-of-body sensation, the filter was disturbed. Every conceivable result
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: is absorbed. And a theory that can absorb every result
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: has told you nothing about the world. Compare that to
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: the production model, which is falsifiable in a hundred ways
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: and has survived every one. It predicted that specific damage
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: would cause specific deficits. And it was right, thousands of
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: times over, in a way so reliable that neurologists localize
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: lesions from symptoms before they scan. That is what a
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: working theory looks like. And then there is the historical record,
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: which is not kind. Every previous instance of this pattern
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: went the same way. Life needed a vital force until biochemistry.
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: Combustion needed a special substance until oxygen. Heat was a
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: fluid until molecular motion. In every case, people looked at
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: a genuine explanatory gap and concluded that something beyond the
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: physical was required. and in every case the gap closed
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: from the inside. The base rate on this bet is
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: not encouraging. So here is the strongest form of the
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: case against everything in this video. Consciousness is produced by
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: the brain. The hard problem is real, but is a
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: limitation of our current concepts rather than evidence of a
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: second ingredient. Terminal lucidity is reversible blockade. The surge is
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: metabolic collapse. Near-death experiences are constructed during recovery from oxygen deprivation,
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: which is why the hidden images have never once been seen.
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: Psychedelics reorganize networks through a specific receptor. The quantum proposal
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: is a single suggestive rat study. And filter theory survives
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: not because it explains the data, but because it cannot
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 1: be touched by data, which is the property of a
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: comfort rather than a theory. That case is strong. I think,
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: on the current evidence, it is more likely to be
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: right than wrong. And I still have one thing left,
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: which the whole of it does not touch. The hard
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: problem is not an anomaly to be explained away. It
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: is a structural feature of the kind of explanation we
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: are using. And it was built in 400 years ago
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: when Galileo took experience out of the box in order
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: to get the mathematics working. Every triumph of the production
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: model is a triumph about function, about what brains do,
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: about which tissue does which job. Not one of those triumphs,
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: not a single one in four centuries, has explained why
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: any of that doing is accompanied by experiencing. You can
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 1: concede every argument in this chapter, and I mostly do,
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 1: and still be standing in front of a wall that
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: has not moved a centimeter since 1623. So what do
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: we do with that? What does a person actually do
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: with a question that is this important, this unresolved, and
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: this resistant? We go back to the room. Because there
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: is one thing in this entire video that neither model
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: can take away from you, and it was sitting in
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: chapter 1 the whole time chapter 12 what dies go
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: back to the room it is the last day the
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: machines are quiet because there is nothing left to do
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: with machines a daughter is in a chair beside a
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: bed she has sat beside for two years next to
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: a woman who stopped speaking so long ago that the
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: daughter has had time to grieve her twice, once for
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 1: the mind and once, still coming, for the body. And
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: her mother opens her eyes and says her name. I
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: have spent 11 chapters taking that moment apart. I have
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: given you the neurochemistry and the blockade hypothesis and the
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: amyloid tracers and the honest, unglamorous likelihood that a physical
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: explanation is coming within a decade, and that it will
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: not involve anything leaving anything. None of that reaches into
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: the room. Whatever the mechanism turns out to be, someone
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 1: was there. Someone who had been unreachable for two years
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 1: used a ruined organ to find her daughter's name and
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 1: say it out loud on the only day left to
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 1: say it. That happened. It is happening tonight, somewhere. in
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 1: a hospice you will never hear about. So let me
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: tell you what I actually think, after everything, and then
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: let me tell you the one thing I am certain of.
• 2:09:28
  Speaker 1: What I think is that the standard model is probably
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: right about mechanism, and definitely incomplete about explanation. I think
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 1: terminal lucidity will turn out to have a physical account.
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 1: I think the surge in the dying brain is metabolic.
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 1: I think the hidden images have failed too many times
• 2:09:46
  Speaker 1: for that failure to keep being an accident. I think
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: Penrose and Hameroff are more likely wrong than right. And
• 2:09:53
  Speaker 1: I think the psychedelic data, examined honestly, is about reorganization
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: rather than release. And I think the hard problem is
• 2:10:01
  Speaker 1: still sitting exactly where David Chalmers put it in 1995,
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 1: untouched by any of that. Because none of it is
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: the kind of thing that could touch it. Here is
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 1: the shape of where we have ended up, and it
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 1: is worth saying plainly. We can locate function with extraordinary precision.
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: We can tell you which patch of tissue holds your
• 2:10:22
  Speaker 1: ability to recognize a face, which one lets you name
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 1: a tool, which one keeps you from saying the first
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 1: thing that comes into your head. We can switch you
• 2:10:31
  Speaker 1: off with a gas 300 million times a year and
• 2:10:34
  Speaker 1: switch you back on. We can predict from a scan
• 2:10:38
  Speaker 1: what you are looking at. And we cannot tell you
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 1: why there is anyone home. That is not a gap
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 1: in the data. 400 years ago, a decision was made
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: to build a science out of the measurable half of
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: the world, and it worked so well that we forgot
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 1: it was a decision. Every instrument we have inherited from
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: that choice is superb at describing what things do and
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: structurally silent about what anything is like. Asking that toolkit
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: to explain experience is like asking a scale to weigh
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: an argument. The scale is not broken. So what happens next?
• 2:11:16
  Speaker 1: This is the part I am genuinely excited about, because
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: for the first time this question is becoming experimental rather
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 1: than only philosophical. Terminal Lucidity now has a research program,
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: a clinical definition agreed by panel, funding from the National
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: Institute on Aging, and prospective studies in which trained observers
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 1: watch for episodes as they happen instead of collecting stories afterward.
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 1: And it now has something it never had before. a
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 1: possible way to induce it on purpose. If that psilocybin
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 1: case replicates, and I want to say clearly that it
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 1: may not, then a phenomenon that could only be witnessed
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: by accident becomes a phenomenon that can be studied on
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: a Tuesday afternoon. The dying brain work is expanding, with
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 1: multi-site studies of monitored patients rather than four cases in
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: one hospital. Consciousness science has learned to build experiments that
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 1: can produce a loss, which is the single most valuable
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 1: thing to come out of that whole adversarial project, more
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: valuable than either result. There are further collaborations running now
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 1: with other theories in the ring. And there is a device.
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 1: Christoph Koch, the man who paid the wine, has been
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 1: involved in developing an instrument that pulses the brain with
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 1: a magnetic field and measures how the response spreads, producing
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 1: a number that tracks how conscious a person is. It
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 1: works on unresponsive patients. It can distinguish someone who is
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: truly absent from someone who is present and unable to move.
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: Whether or not the theory behind it is correct, and
• 2:13:00
  Speaker 1: Coach is quite open about that, the instrument works, and
• 2:13:04
  Speaker 1: it is already answering questions in intensive care units that
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: families have been asking without answers, for as long as
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 1: there have been intensive care units. That is the practical
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 1: stake here, and it is much larger than any metaphysics.
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: Because think about who this question is actually about. It
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 1: is about the person in the bed with advanced dementia,
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 1: and whether the family sitting beside them is talking to someone.
• 2:13:32
  Speaker 1: It is about the patient with a devastating brain injury
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 1: who cannot signal and whether the room they are lying
• 2:13:38
  Speaker 1: in should be treated as occupied. It is about how
• 2:13:42
  Speaker 1: we handle the end of a life, and what we
• 2:13:44
  Speaker 1: say in the doorway, and whether we say it at all.
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 1: Every day, in every hospital in the world, people are
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 1: making decisions that depend entirely on an answer nobody has.
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 1: And every day, in some of those rooms, the assumption
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 1: that nobody is home turns out to have been wrong
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 1: for a few hours. There is one more thing worth
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: saying before I let you go. and it is about
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 1: what an answer would even look like, because I do
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 1: not think most people have ever considered the question. Imagine
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 1: that tomorrow a team announces they have found it. The
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 1: precise mechanism, the exact physical process that turns tissue activity
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 1: into felt experience, written down, predictive, complete. What would that
• 2:14:28
  Speaker 1: announcement have to contain? It would have to contain more
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 1: than a location. because we already have locations and they
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 1: explain nothing. It would have to contain more than a
• 2:14:39
  Speaker 1: correlation because we already have thousands of correlations. It would
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: have to explain why this particular physical arrangement is accompanied
• 2:14:47
  Speaker 1: by an inside in a way that also tells you
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 1: which other arrangements would be and which would not. It
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: would have to be able to answer from first principles
• 2:14:57
  Speaker 1: whether an octopus has an inside, whether an ant does,
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 1: whether a sufficiently complex machine does, and what happens at
• 2:15:04
  Speaker 1: the moment during a pregnancy when someone starts to. Nobody
• 2:15:09
  Speaker 1: currently knows what the form of such an explanation would be.
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 1: Not the shape of it, not the vocabulary, not the
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 1: branch of mathematics it might live in. That is a
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 1: very different situation from not yet having the data. And
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 1: it means that one of two things is true, and
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 1: they are both interesting. Either the explanation exists and we
• 2:15:31
  Speaker 1: are missing a concept, the way people trying to understand
• 2:15:34
  Speaker 1: heredity before the discovery of the structure of Dina were
• 2:15:37
  Speaker 1: missing a concept and could not have described what they
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 1: were missing. In that case, someone, possibly alive right now,
• 2:15:46
  Speaker 1: possibly quite young, is going to have an idea that
• 2:15:50
  Speaker 1: makes all of this obvious in retrospect, and the 20
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: theories will collapse into one the way they always do
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 1: when a real answer arrives. Or, the explanation does not
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 1: exist in the form we are demanding, because we are
• 2:16:06
  Speaker 1: asking the wrong question, and consciousness is not something that
• 2:16:09
  Speaker 1: gets produced by anything at all. It is not an output.
• 2:16:14
  Speaker 1: It is the condition under which there are outputs to notice,
• 2:16:18
  Speaker 1: in which case the hunt for a mechanism will continue
• 2:16:21
  Speaker 1: producing brilliant, useful, technologically transformative results forever without ever landing,
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 1: the way a search for the edge of a sphere would.
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 1: I lean toward the first. Most days. Ask me at
• 2:16:36
  Speaker 1: three in the morning and I am less sure. So
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 1: here is the one thing I am certain of. And
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 1: it is the strangest fact in this entire video and
• 2:16:45
  Speaker 1: possibly in the universe. You have spent two hours watching
• 2:16:49
  Speaker 1: an arrangement of matter argue about whether arrangements of matter
• 2:16:53
  Speaker 1: can have an inside. Take that seriously for a moment.
• 2:16:58
  Speaker 1: because it is easy to slide past. There is a
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 1: lump of tissue behind your eyes, made of ordinary atoms,
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 1: forged in dying stars, obeying the same physics as the
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 1: rock in your garden. It weighs about as much as
• 2:17:12
  Speaker 1: a bag of sugar. And it has spent the last
• 2:17:16
  Speaker 1: two hours entertaining the question of its own existence, disagreeing
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 1: with itself, changing its mind, feeling something about the answer.
• 2:17:26
  Speaker 1: Whatever consciousness is, that is the fact that needs explaining.
• 2:17:31
  Speaker 1: Not whether it survives death, whether it should be here
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: in the first place. The materialist and the idealist and
• 2:17:40
  Speaker 1: the panpsychist and the dualist are all standing in front
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 1: of the same astonishment and reaching for different vocabulary. And
• 2:17:49
  Speaker 1: if you have followed this whole video and come out
• 2:17:51
  Speaker 1: the other side certain of the answer, then I have failed,
• 2:17:54
  Speaker 1: because nobody who works on this professionally is certain of
• 2:17:58
  Speaker 1: the answer. But I would rather leave you with the
• 2:18:01
  Speaker 1: room than with the argument. A woman had not spoken
• 2:18:05
  Speaker 1: in two years. On the last day of her life,
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 1: something came back through tissue that could not support it,
• 2:18:11
  Speaker 1: found her daughter, and said her name. We do not
• 2:18:16
  Speaker 1: know what she was. We do not know where she
• 2:18:19
  Speaker 1: had been. We do not know what left, or whether
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 1: anything left at all. We only know that on the
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 1: last day, for a little while, she was there. And
• 2:18:29
  Speaker 1: that the same thing that made her possible is the
• 2:18:32
  Speaker 1: thing currently listening to me describe it. In a body somewhere,
• 2:18:37
  Speaker 1: in a room somewhere, tonight, whatever you are, you are
• 2:18:41
  Speaker 1: the only kind of thing in the universe that can
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: ask what you are. Do not waste that. Ring the
• 2:18:48
  Speaker 1: person you have been meaning to ring. Sit with the
• 2:18:51
  Speaker 1: one who has stopped speaking. And speak anyway, because the
• 2:18:56
  Speaker 1: evidence does not rule out that someone is listening, and
• 2:18:59
  Speaker 1: the evidence never has. Stay curious. And when the answer
• 2:19:05
  Speaker 1: finally comes, from a scanner or a molecule or a
• 2:19:09
  Speaker 1: theory nobody has written yet, remember that it will arrive
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: inside a mind, which is the only place anything has
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 1: ever arrived.