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[Music] welcome this is a series in which i am going to endeavor to put together pretty much all of my work my name is John Vervaeke i'm an assistant professor at the university of toronto i'm in the psychology
John Vervaeke introduces a series unifying his work, arguing the mindfulness boom, interest in wisdom, psychedelics, and meaning are linked to a deep cultural meaning crisis.
Key Takeaways
- The mindfulness revolution, wisdom interest, psychedelic research, and meaning-in-life focus are linked and share a common cause.
- A meaning crisis underlies both the flourishing of interest in well-being and the spread of nihilism, cynicism, and mental health decline.
- Meaning is central to human evolution and well-being, and understanding its origins is key to addressing modern problems.
- Self-deception is an endemic human threat that helps explain why culture is saturated with dysfunction.
- The meaning crisis interacts with environmental and socioeconomic crises, making it a central issue to address.
What the video covers
- John Vervaeke, a University of Toronto cognitive science and psychology professor, introduces a series drawing together his lectures into one unified argument.
- He notes a growing convergence between Buddhism and cognitive science, which underlies the popular 'mindfulness revolution'.
- Public and academic interest in wisdom, Stoicism, and ancient philosophy is rising, which he sees as a hunger for wisdom.
- Psychedelics show promising therapeutic results, with PTSD treatment success rates reportedly rising substantially when combined with psychedelic-assisted therapy.
- Interest in meaning in life is growing, and meaning is strongly predictive of well-being.
- He contrasts these positive trends with dark factors: rising suicide and mental health crises, nihilism, declining trust in institutions, and falling religious and civic participation.
- Vervaeke argues cultural narratives such as zombie apocalypse and superhero stories reflect a collective sense of being stuck or out of touch with reality.
- He proposes that both positive and negative trends share a unifying explanation: a profound crisis of meaning in contemporary culture.
- The series will explore the evolutionary origins of meaning-making, humans' capacity for self-deception, and the role of shamanism in the Upper Paleolithic transition.
- The lecture also touches on how cognition evolved as an adaptive mechanism and on forms of knowing such as participatory knowing that matter to therapy.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and series overview
- 00:41Mindfulness, wisdom, and the Buddhism-cognitive science confluence
- 07:31Psychedelics and the growing interest in happiness
- 11:30Dark factors: mental health crisis and loss of trust
- 15:30Zombies, myth, and cultural crisis narratives
- 19:30Outline of the series: meaning, self-deception, and human evolution
- 24:00Evolution of meaning-making and early human cognition
- 30:00Shamanism and the Upper Paleolithic transition
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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department and in the cognitive science program and i also teach for the buddhism psychology and mental health program i've produced a lot of videos on a lot of various topics some of you have perhaps seen them but what i want to do now in this series
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is draw it all together and present to you a overall unified argument and that can show you the interconnections between pieces that you might have seen before now how this got started is i got very interested in a particular
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phenomena i got interested in the fact that there seemed to be a growing confluence between people who are interested in buddhism and people who are interested in cognitive science we'll talk a little bit later as we go on
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what cognitive science is but you know some of this already in the world at large because we're going through what's called the mindfulness revolution mindfulness is being spoken of everywhere i was in a bookstore yesterday chapters and there's a whole section just on mindfulness itself so
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why is the mindfulness revolution occurring well it's occurring particularly because of this intersection between buddhism and cognitive science but why is this happening and why is it you know so explosive in nature and what do we mean by mindfulness some of the
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work i've done is trying to get clear about that we're going to talk about that in this in this series now there's also a lot of other things that in my mind seem to be convergent with this growing confluence between buddhism and cognitive science
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there is an increasing interest both academically and in the public at large in the topic of wisdom something that people did not talk about very much not that long ago wisdom is now a very hot topic within psychology and cognitive science and books offering to train you in
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wisdom are again becoming popular same bookstore experience yesterday i bought my son a book called how to be a stoic right this is a this is like how is it that a philosophical position from the hellenistic era has become a popular
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book that people are seeking why is there this hunger for wisdom and why are people meeting it with these kinds of things the stoicism the philosophies of the hellenistic period i'm going to talk about that i think there's good reason for that
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of course there's increasing academic and public interest in psychedelics i just gave a talk earlier this week yale about psychedelics and the increasing interest in psychedelics and psychedelic experiences you're seeing radical things with them people can be released from treatment
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resistant addiction they can overcome post traumatic stress disorder like the normal with the best therapy right solution rate for people with post-traumatic stress disorders about right you know things go really well 20 or so you introduce psychedelics into the
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therapy and you can get the right the healing rate up to 80 percent so what's going on there why is there this interest there's an increasing public interest which is matched by a huge academic in in the topics of happiness
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now we've always been a happiness-oriented culture life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and so forth right but it's taken a particularly interesting turn the topic of meaning and meaning in life is coming to the fore people and more and more talking about not just sort of sheer contentedness
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but what it is for a human life to be meaningful and it turns out that meaning in life is terrifically important it's very predictive of well-being it's very predictive of how well you are doing in your life in
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general so it is no wonder that our people are seeking a note now my my contention and what i'm going to argue is it's no coincidence that all of these things are happening right now it's no coincidence this confluence
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between buddhism the mindfulness revolution the interest in wisdom and ancient philosophies like stoicism the increasing public interest in psychedelics and transformative experiences and mystical experiences right the increasing academic and public interest and meaning in life there's all a reason for there's there's a unifying account for why this is
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happening but there's another set of things this is sort of the light side of what i'm talking about there's a there's this there's a set of dark factors that seem to be converging as well right we have what seems to be although
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they're you know people of disputing it but i think the evidence is becoming clearer and clearer the cdc just released some data recently we're going through a mental health crisis suicide is spiking and it's right now there are some socioeconomic factors but there's
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clearly other things that are at work right there's increasing sense many people are expressing it of losing touch with reality we encounter more and more often in individuals and groups nihilism expressions of cynicism expressions of deep kinds of frustration and futility
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you have the abandonment of trust in any of our public institutions we're losing right we've completely lost any sort of faith or trust in our political system we're losing faith in our judicial system right religious affiliation is declining consistently throughout
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people's participation in right clubs organization is in decline in general and my co-authors on the book on zombies in western culture the 21st century crisis uh chris master pietro and philip mysevich we we argued right that the this sense of being out of touch has gone on with an increasing
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sense and we'll talk about this because i'm going to use this term technically we're going to talk about this and frankfurt's use of it there's an increasing sense of more and more [ __ ] everywhere pervading and if you take a look at the book we actually chart how this has been spiking
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and it's concorded with all kinds of other increases in these dark factors people are getting the sense that we're spending and you can see this already in the public media but it's it's also within the academic world that we're
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spending too much time in our virtual environments there seems to be increasing evidence for example of right a connection between various social media increased depression increased loneliness and then more in general and we'll talk about how this shows up a little bit
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more implicitly it shows up in the entertainment we seek and the mythologies we like like the zombies we're going to talk about that why are zombies so big right why are superheroes so big right now right there's an increase
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this these mythological and we'll talk about myth means these mythological forms i'm going to argue are expressions of a cultural sense a sense that we're stuck somehow one way you can note that is just by noting how pervasive
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almost to the point of being a constant factor in our background is people talking about crisis and collapse apocalypse the zombie apocalypse the imminent collapse of civilization all of these things are now pervasive they're taken for granted at one point right the you know movies demonstrating
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this had to be sort of science fiction they were considered radical right but now this is becoming a pervasive background sense now i think all of these negative factors also have a unifying explanation in fact what i'm going to argue throughout the course of this series is
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that the positive factors and the negative factors all point to a unified explanation this is going to be an idea that our culture is experiencing a profound meaning crisis a crisis in meaning now we're going to have to talk about
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what does that meaning mean no i'm not claiming that this is the only crisis we're facing far from it what i want to do in fact is talk about how the meaning crisis is interacting with other crises the environmental crisis
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the socio-economic crisis but in addition to those which are quite well discussed in the public at large there is a meaning crisis which is being discussed quite significantly within academia but needs to be brought to the public at large because one of the things i'm going to argue is that these
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three crises are not inter not independent from each other they're interdependent in important ways but what is this meaning let's come into crisis why do we hunger for it how do we cultivate the wisdom because that's what i'm going to argue wisdom is
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ultimately about to generate enhance this meaning wisdom is about realizing in both senses of the word becoming aware and making real it's about wisdom is about realizing meaning in life in a profound way do we cultivate this wisdom what does it mean and i'm not going to talk
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about that just practically i'm going to talk i mean not just theoretically i'm going to talk about that practically as well what are some practices that people can engage in and are engaging in to try and address this need for the cultivation of wisdom what role for example do
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do mindfulness practices play within the cultivation of wisdom so here's the three questions that are we're going to keep coming back to again and again and again what is this meaning why do we hunger for it and how do we cultivate the wisdom to realize it
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so some of the topics of course we're going to be addressing are centrally the meaning crisis how did this kind of meaning evolve why like what is it why is it so important to the evolution of our humanity then more specifically the history of
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the meaning crisis why did it arise what are the historical factors by doing that we'll get in a historical account of meaning we'll get a sense of what this meaning is that has come into crisis that people individually feel
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they are lacking or losing in their lives we want to talk about connections between meaning wisdom and importantly self-transcendence it's going to turn out that this notion of self-transcendence again which we'll have to develop and explicate is something that's a core need because it performs core functions for human beings
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it's bound up with these ideas of wisdom and of course meaning and along the way in fact right from the beginning we're going to start to see that there's deep connections between meaning wisdom self-transcendence and altered states of consciousness why do human beings
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seek to alter their consciousness in fact not just human beings other intelligent organisms seek to do this right caledonian crows will tumble down roofs in order to make themselves dizzy for no other purpose than to alter their state of consciousness what is going on why does intelligence
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need to be conjoined to an altered state of consciousness and why in particular have human beings developed very sophisticated processes for generating harnessing and interpreting these altered states of consciousness we're going to talk about that in connection with shamanism
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and ritual we're going to talk about that in connection to the flow state this is when you're in the zone and why people seek it and why it's so powerful we're going to talk about it as i mentioned in connection with psychedelic
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experiences more importantly the mystical experiences that can occur within some psychedelic experience because it turns out it's the mystical experience that is more important and transformative but there's a subset of those mystical experiences that are very crucial these are awakening experiences these are experiences in which people
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come back from the mystical experience and say that was somehow more real than this and i need to change my world i need to change myself they engage in what l.a paul has called a transformative experience what is also known as quantum change a radical transformation of their lives
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and we know we've got good research now showing that they're right their lives get better after these awakening experiences we're going to talk about that in depth and dare i say it maybe we can bring all of this together and actually propose
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and and maybe some people will be affronted by this but propose a scientific a cognitive scientific account of what enlightenment is and why it alleviates the suffering from lack of meaning that is particularly pertinent for us today but has always been a perennial threat
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since the axial revolution now that means of course we're going to have to also talk about topics that have connection with the darker aspects as i said of meaning making what's the connection because they're deep and profound between
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this meaning making that is so central and our endemic capacity for self-deception for self-destruction there's a reason why we are so awash in [ __ ] because [ __ ] is a perennial threat to us self-deception is endemic
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that means it'll be important to talk about foolishness as something different from ignorance ignorance is a lack of knowledge foolishness is a lack of wisdom foolishness is when your capacity to engage your agency pursue your goals is undermined and threatened by the self-deception
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and the self-destructive behavior that is uh like a perennial vulnerability to your cognition in fact what i'm going to argue is the very same machinery that makes you so adaptively intelligent is the same machinery that makes you susceptible
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to foolishness that will take us into some of the topics that are relevant to people's existential experience meaning crisis topics like absurdity alienation futility horror real horror most horror movies aren't horror we'll talk about what horror really is and what people experience
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when they're actually experiencing horror their sense of grip on reality is being undermined and people find that as you can imagine terrifying we're going to talk about meaninglessness and why and why more people experience this state the state of despair
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and once we do that right as we're moving into these kinds of topics we will be moving gradually from the historical account of the origin the meaning crisis will give us some sense from the history of what this meaning is but we'll be moving into the cognitive
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scientific study of cognition the cognitive scientific investigation of meaning and meaning making look when people use this word meaning it's a metaphor they mean there's something in their life that is analogous to how a sentence has meaning the pieces fit together in some way
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they make an impact on your cognition and connect you to the world in some way there's something about our lives that is analogous to the way sentences have meaning we have to unpack that metaphor what why is the metaphor used and what does the metaphor point to
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when we talk about the meaning of our lives how is it in fact that some of the most meaningful experiences people have are precisely ones that are completely ineffable to them that they can't put into words what's going on we're going to have to
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talk about different kinds of knowing some of them that have fallen off our cultural radar precisely because of the meaning crisis we tend to have reduced all of the ways that the ancients talked about how we know to one thing to to know is to have a special kind of
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belief and so we are very belief-centric which is why we are so focused as a culture on ideologies but it turns out that we're going to have to have a much more expanded notion of what knowing means there is much more to knowing than having justified true beliefs
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there's the kind of knowing that's involved in knowing how to catch a baseball there's the kind of knowing of what it is like to be having this experience right now there's the kind of knowing that is knowing what it's like to be in
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something you're participating in like a relationship we're going to talk about all of that now of course some of you might be aware of those other kinds of knowing because you know how integral and important they are to therapy which is another thing that is booming
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in our culture part of why it's blooming is the meaning crisis part of why it's booming is because people seek out therapy precisely because they're trying to recover these lost kinds of knowing the kinds of insight that is needed the kind of transformation not of your
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beliefs but of how you see things your sense of self and your sense of realness have to be transformed often in therapy that is why the psychedelics are so important for therapeutic success because they transfer they transform these other kinds of knowing
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we're going to talk about all of that this will give us this will give us a structural functional account of meaning what is the structure of it what are its cognitive processes what are its cognitive mechanisms how do they function
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how can they fall into dysfunction we're going to have this historical account and this structural functional account and we're going to make them talk to each other they're going to inform and constrain and enable each other and from that dialogue
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what i propose audacious as it might sound is a real response to the meaning crisis an awakening from the meaning crisis that's what this series is about awakening from the meaning crisis not in some ideological fashion but in a profound transformative and
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existential manner so this is not something that i can do simply because this is not a problem for which there are simplistic answers if anybody offers you an answer to this crisis in an hour i would wager that they are deceiving you manipulating or they are themselves
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significantly self-deceived there's a reason why we're stuck there's a reason why this is hard this is a complex and difficult thing we are undertaking so this series is going to be several videos long because i'm going to carefully and i hope responsibly build an argument
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to try and show how we can awaken from the meaning crisis how that meaning crisis interacts with the mental health crisis how it interacts with the environmental crisis how it interacts with the socio-economic crisis now this is my commitment to you
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i will always do my best to offer rigorous rational argumentation i will try my best to give proper scholastic credit to other people please understand that i'm aware that i'm not and nobody should be claiming to offer you the absolute uncontested truth i'm going to offer you good arguments
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good evidence but i don't want this to be an academic series i do my academic work and i'm proud of it but this i want this to be for people who are coming to this precisely because of a genuine personal existential
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interest so i will try to keep jargon and technicalities to a minimum i will have to introduce terms to you and i hope to explain them carefully along the way so my commitment to you is to i i can't be unbiased that's that's not a thing
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what i will try my best to do is to present to you my arguments my viewpoints and why i think they can be understood to be highly plausible so i want to start with how and why is this meaning so so so much a part of our
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humanity why is it sowing in uh to our humanity so much and i think the thing that we want to we want to understand is i have to start somewhere right and that can be misleading because i think and and one of my my co-authors
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philip misovich this is something that he's very concerned with right i think this is a continuum question i think the the deep connections between meaning making and cognition go deeply back into our evolutionary heritage way before uh our humanity but
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that's right so the fact that i'm starting somewhere is not meant to indicate that this is the absolute starting point what i want to do is point to a time when many people think our humanity the kind of people we are now
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came into form not fully like the way it is now because of course there's been lots of historical and cultural processes but the kind of humanity that we would recognize as us and how much this was bound up with meaning making in
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the way that i've been talking about so this period is known as the upper paleolithic transition it occurs around 40 000 bce now what's interesting about this is that biologically as a species we've we had existed much longer than this we existed about
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you know it of course there's some controversy around this but conservatively since about 200 000 bc but around again roughly 40 000 bce there's a change a radical change now again picking a pacific time makes it look like there's this there's nothing before
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there are no precursors some people have presented the upper paleolithic transition that way i'm not doing that i think that's a mistake there's a continuum you can see it back but at some point there's this radical change the upper paleolithic transition you see things human beings doing things
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they're not doing before they're making art they're making representational art they're making sculpture they're making cave paintings we have good evidence they start making music what else are they doing well we have some pretty good evidence right that there's significant enhancement in their cognition
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how do we know this well we have the first use of calendars obviously not with numbers and dates because numeracy hasn't been invented but you have the symbolic representation of the phases of the moon and the passage of days
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and so human beings are keeping track of time across very abstract patterns so that they can enhance their hunting abilities something else is happening which again it's so intrinsic to our humanity we right we're developing projectile weapons we're developing projectile weapons
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so the neanderthals who are contemporaneous with uh homo sapiens at this time don't have projectile weapons their spears are thick shafted heavy stone they're thrusting tools we know that they were getting in close to their quarry because they have bone damage that's similar to the kind of bone damage we
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see in human beings who are involved in cowboy rodeos where you're messing around with large angry mammals the homo sapiens do something different they start to develop very thin spears not with stone tips but with bone tip and bone is much harder to use
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the point about these is right they're very good as projectile weapons they're very light and human beings develop the spear thrower and sling and they start to develop the ability to carry multiple missiles and project them at a long distance
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now that requires right increased development of your frontal lobe area which is going to turn out to be of course very important as we'll see for enhancing your intelligence think about how deep this is in your cognition this idea of like throwing
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right like think about how you talk about how you have a project that you're working on right project from your throwing or people will talk about oh there over there there's an object that means thrown against or i'm the subject
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that means thrown under all day long cognitively you're throwing that's because this throwing task is such a complex task i mean we take it so trivial that you know there's a moving target and i throw something i can hit it but if you try and build artificial intelligence to do
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that as the military is discovered that turns out to be a really really hard problem so there's the projectile weapons are developing the calendrics the music the sculpture the paintings right what's going on why is all of this
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stuff exploding now notice how all of this is associated with different aspects of what we mean by meaning obviously there's art and there's music that's somehow meaningful but there's also time is being made more meaningful it's being measured and
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understood in calendars and even time and space are now more meaningful because they're being used right in this highly dynamic way in projectile weaponry so what's going on why did it occur well there's a lot of good work done by this uh david lewis williams matt rosano's
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work in his book supernatural selection i think is superlative his articles like did meditating make us human i got the pleasure of meeting matt and he argues for what's going on at this time is a radical change in human cognition
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that's in line with the work of other people like michael winkelmann we know that before the upper paleolithic transition about 30 000 up to 60 000 or 70 it's unclear because there's various times of what this might be happening we know that we went
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a near extinction event human beings almost went extinct we were crunched down they think maybe to maximum of ten thousand individuals we'd almost died off part of it seems to have been the overall climactic change of the end of the last ice age
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in africa part of it there's a super volcano that goes off around 70 000 years ago not sure but what happens is there's tremendous pressure put on human beings they move to the coasts in general to try and survive but
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human beings seem to have adopted an interesting response to this now first of all they diversify their diet and blah blah blah blah that's all important we'll talk about that but what's really interesting is that is the they don't come up so
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much with a technological response because climate's too huge and too poorly understood they come up with a sociocognitive response what human beings do is they start creating broader trading networks you see because when you do that you're not as subject
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to individual environmental variation you have much more resources both in terms of what people can have what kind of discoveries they're making and so what happens is people start forming these much broader trading relationships now that's very significant because it opens up the scale at which human
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cognition has to operate in an important way and human beings plausibly responded by developing things that we see now as pervasive they developed a bunch of rituals and we're going to talk a lot about why ritual is so important
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for dealing with both the environmental challenge and the enhanced social network that they were creating to deal with it by the way we're going to talk about that a lot in this series how your cognition is very much participatory you participate in distributed cognition
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large networks of cognition meaning way before the internet networked computers together culture networked brains together in order to provide some of our most powerful problem solving abilities so what are the rituals okay so you need various trading rituals because the the thing you're doing now
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and again think about how this you take this for granted in living in a city it is the deep presupposition of civilization you hang around with strangers lots of them and that's just like oh yeah well it's not oh yeah that's a hard thing other species don't do that
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so what's happening is we're getting this shift we're having to interact with people that are not in our kinship group in our hunter gatherer group and we have to form relationships with them so we start to develop rituals
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to that have the function of enhancing our ability to come into communication and relationships of trust for individuals that we do not personally know you say okay that that's why you still do stuff that makes no sense you meet somebody
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and like you do that you stick out your hand and they grab it and then they move it up and down right this is to show you have no weapons this is allow the person to touch you to see
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if your hands are clammy or not there's all kinds of intuitive stuff going on i can feel how tense you are most of us don't pay attention to this stuff anymore but it's there when you shake hands when you ask how are you now again that
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has become trivial so we don't want an answer how are you we don't well or somebody starts answering you oh no but originally that reflects something because think about what important skill has to be enhanced for these rituals i have to be able to take your
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perspective i have to know what's going on in your mind i have to know how you feel i have to be able to move from a first person perspective to a third person perspective really really well because if i can't do that i'm not going to be able to trade with
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you now that ability to take enhanced perspective on others especially people that you don't know really means you have to develop ability daniel siegel calls mindsight the ability to pick up on other people's mental states and here's the thing as
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you start to increase your ability to pick up on other people's mental states you increase your ability to pick up on your own mental states and that of course is going to be part of the origin of things like
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metacognition and mindfulness then the next type of ritual you need it goes in the other direction the trade rituals is how i deal with strangers the problem is now when i'm starting to interact with all these people right my commitment and loyalty to my group is
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now more in question than it used to be in the past it could be taken for granted because you just were with these people and they were with you all the time but now if you allow me the word there's
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temptation from the stranger which of course is now part of all of our myths the way the stranger can come in and tempt us right and so what do we do well we we create initiation rituals rituals that are designed to show
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right our commitment to the group and those rituals often require risk threat sacrifice now our rituals our initiation rituals have been very tamed down right but if you look back back in time these initiation rituals are often very traumatic
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dramatic people are put into situations in which they they might experience tremendous pain or fear we'll talk about some of these as we go through the series so why like why make somebody go through pain and fear because if they go through pain and fear
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that shows that they're really committed to you they're really committed to your group but what does that mean cognitively what does it mean for how the mind gets trained you have to really improve your ability to regulate your emotion
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you have to really improve your ability to call do what's called de-centering to let yourself right be in the hands of other people a non-egocentric perspective because what's important now is no it's not centered on you the ritual centered on you but you through the ritual are
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being centered on the group so this is having again tremendous impact on your cognition now there's a third kind of ritual that starts to emerge and it seems to have picked up on these cognitive enhancements that the trade rituals and the initiation rituals bring
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so i need to introduce an idea to you that's going to become pervasive this is the notion of exception acceptation now originally this is an idea from biology but the work of michael anderson has brought it directly into understanding how the brain operates how
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cognition operates exception in biological terms is an evolutionary mechanism so for example i'm using my tongue now to speak okay tongues did not evolve for speech if they did all the animals that had tongues would be speaking at you and that'd be
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terrifying especially your cat if your cat talks to you i'm sure that would be terrifying so what did tongues evolve for they evolved to move food around in your mouth they're very flexible and they're poison detectors so they have all this is your last
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defense right for poison yeah right so they have all of these nerve endings so you have this highly sensitive highly flexible muscle now just because of the way we evolved this muscle is also in the air passageway because evolution is not an intelligent designer you use
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the same tube for breathing and for food very bad design but nevertheless that's how it is so your tongue can interrupt your airflow flexible sensitive muscle that can interrupt airflow that's what i need for speech so the tongue was exacted evolution didn't have to make
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a speaking machine from scratch it took something that evolved for one purpose and was able to exact it and use it for another so what michael and anderson and others are arguing is very often this is what the brain does the brain will develop a
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mechanism a little machine a set of cognitive processes for doing one thing and then it will use how to learn how to reuse that for something totally different we're going to talk about that repeatedly through this series so what happens is that these enhanced mental abilities
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that are coming out of the trading and initiation rituals seem to be taken up into another set of rituals exacted into that seem to be also pervasive these are shamanic rituals these are shamanic rituals we know that the ability to become aware of the mind
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right to control the mind to control your emotions are being trained as i said we know that human beings just because and we'll see more about this later just because they're highly intelligent creatures with sophisticated consciousness seek out altered states of consciousness
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in shamanism what you have is you have a cultivated practice for altering your state of consciousness that taps into and exacts this enhanced mind site this enhanced ability to manipulate and control your mental state and your emotional state
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now michael winkelmann's work shows that pervasive through hunter-gatherer groups are right shamanic individuals in fact the shaman is such a pervasive historical figure that i think you can make a good case that it has become an archetypal figure
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something like you know the wise old man so yoda and merlin these are all shamanic figures what we know about shamanism is that they're the best best healthcare you're going to have for a long time right and we'll talk about how and why that's the case we know that if you've got a
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shaman in your group it's going to help to reduce right discord within your group it's going to enhance your hunting abilities of your group now i i'm a scientist i don't believe in any supernatural abilities or spirits or things like that so i seek an alternate
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matt rosano and michael winkelmann i seek an alternative explanation of why are shamans so effective what is going on and what i want to talk about is how central shamanism was to the upper paleolithic transition because a plausible case can be made that it's the advent of shamanism that
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helps to explain how human beings are capable of this sudden explosion in their cognition this of course the thesis is the thesis of several people as i mentioned michael winkelmann lewis williams and others matt rosano because here's the issue right
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it's not a hardware change the brain has already existed for 160 000 years it's not changing significantly during the upper paleolithic transition it's much more likely that it's not a hardware change in the brain it's a software change in how human
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beings are using the brain and what part of what i want to argue is that shamanism is probably playing a significant role in that software change so now i need to introduce yet one more other term and again this is going to be important
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this is the idea of a psycho technology okay so technology means the systematic use of a tool this is a tool right here all right first thing to understand and this is andy clark's phrase you're a natural-born cyborg your brain has evolved across several species to
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use tools in fact when you start using a tool even for a very short period of time your brain will start to model it as part of your body that is why you can do weird things like when you're parking your car you can feel where the edge of your car is and
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all that sort of stuff you're a natural-born cyborg you have evolved to be integrated with machines look at me i'm a cyborg look at this around me the only thing that's natural here biologically is naked me everything else is a tool everything else is these are tools
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i wasn't born with clothing i use this in order to modify my ability to move through environments and carry stuff around this is a tool this is a tool this is a tool this is a tool these are tools
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now what's interesting is that can be accepted your brain's ability to attach to a tool can move off of a physical thing onto a cognitive thing so a physical tool fits your biology see fits your biology and enhances it right i can leave permanent marks that i
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can't otherwise do biologically on this board i have a bottle it fits my hand and i can carry liquids around if i had to carry like that's the amount of liquid i can carry is minimal it fits your biology and enhances it a psychotechnology fits
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your brain and enhances how it operates and you you say what are you talking about what's a psychotic look here's one right here it's called literacy you're not born literate you're born linguistic you're born learning how to talk right noam chomsky all that sort of
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thing but you're not born literate in fact for most of our history we were completely illiterate what does literacy do for you it's a standard set of tools that standardize how you process information notices how it enhances your cognition i don't have to hold all these terms in
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my mind i can leave them there on the board i can write stuff down and come back to it later so notice what i can do i can take my brain now and link it to my brain back then and my
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brain in the future so those are i'm networking all these instances together i'm improving my cognition i can also network my brain with your brain and improve my ability to solve problems think of if i were to do this to you i'm going to
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take literacy out of your brain right now and you can't and i mean literacy in your head too you can't imagine words you can't put stuff on paper you can't reflect on your own cognition i take that out of you
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your brain is the same hardware but then the problems you can solve collapse down dramatically that's what psycho technologies do they do they enhance the software of your of your cognitive machinery now shamanism is a set of psychotechnologies
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for altering your state of consciousness and enhancing your cognition so what does what does shamanism look like what are the kinds of things you do when right you're a shaman there are many people of course claim to be practicing shamanism today and that's another thing why this rise in
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neo-shamanism what are people thinking they're trying to get from it okay so the shaman does a lot of interesting things in order to get into a particular state so the shaman will often engage in things like sleep deprivation
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intense long periods hours of singing dancing chanting the shaman will often engage in imitation put on the clothing mask that represents some other figure some other animal right sometimes the shaman will go into periods of isolation social isolation
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go out into the wilderness and of course although it's not necessary but it has been pervasive shamans will make use of psychedelics in order to help bring about an altered state of consciousness so so what what's going on here steve taylor in his book uh waking from
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sleep talks about these disruptive strategies that people even today use in order to try and bring about what are called awakening experiences these radical transformations in people's sense of self and reality we're going to talk about that but one of the main ideas here is what a shaman is typically doing
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is trying to disrupt the normal ways in which you're finding patterns in the world why would you want to disrupt the normal way you find patterns in the world because the way you find patterns and remember i said this the very thing that
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makes you adaptive also makes you subject to self-deception the way you find patterns right is very profound so this is something i study as a scientist right many of you may have seen this all right so this is called the nine dot problem
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you have to join all nine dots with four straight lines you you have to start the next line from the terminus of the previous line and when people see this they initially say well this very easy of course i can do
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this right one two three four oh wait i missed the middle dot okay one two three wait one two wait one two and then they pause this actually turns out to be a very difficult problem for people to solve
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joining all nine dots with four straight lines but why is it hard one line two lines three lines four lines what was hard about that now when you do that of course people get angry at you they say you cheated
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you went outside the box you went outside the square that's where think outside the box comes from now why that was hard is because you projected a pattern here the square and then you engaged unconsciously unconsciously your skills of connecting the dots when you were a kid you connected the dots
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and when you connect the dots you're not supposed to do this make a non-dot turn if you do that you won't get a picture of a picnic table you'll get like an acid trip psychedelic thing right so unconsciously you project a pattern
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and then you activate the appropriate skills and then you're locked and you're blocked you can't solve that problem not because of anything there in the data but because of the way you have framed it you have to disrupt your framing we're going to talk a lot
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about that in order to get an insight in order to get an insight now let me tell you something again to start to introduce this to you saying to people think outside the box and this is kind of funny if you think about it saying to people think outside the box does not
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help them with this problem giving them the belief that they have to go outside the box does not help them to solve this problem that's what i meant when i said you shouldn't reduce all of your sense of
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knowing to believing what's involved here is not believing that you have to go outside the box it's knowing how to go outside the box how to alter your attention how to change your perspective on what's so what's salient to you what's relevant how to alter
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what's important or real to you now what shamanism is is it's a set of practices disruptive practices and attentional practices that are designed to disrupt everyday framing so that the shaman can get enhanced insight well now what kind of insight insight into patterns in the environment
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that other people might not be picking up on enhanced insight mindset into other people and and and here's this that this sense of participatory knowing that i mentioned when the shaman is enacting the animal the shaman isn't having
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beliefs about the deer the shaman is becoming the deer i don't mean metaphysically but the shaman is trying to get together the sense of the skills the way the kind of perspective the deer has the way the deer thinks the kind of
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world the deer lives in and by becoming the deer by having this participatory knowing of what it is to be a deer it enhances the ability to track and find the deer now these enhanced capacities for insight and mind sight participatory annoying means the shaman
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combines a lot of things that are for us in separate individuals shamans are highly charismatic imagine if you could take a rock star like a super rock star a super therapist a super artist put them all in one individual and then they come to you when you're sick
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they can enhance your ability to trigger your own placebo effect the placebo effect is real thirty to forty percent of all real medication the ones we sell as real drugs is placebo effect if you have an individual can that can trigger that
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and that's all you have at that time that's still 30 to 40 percent better than you had before see so what are the shamans doing notice what they're doing they're really enhancing their capacity for cognition now what we're going to do in the next video is we're going to come back to the
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shamans we're going to talk more about what they're doing how they're enhancing their cognition and why this played such an important role in making human beings into the kind of meaning makers there are but we'll see what it is right but you can
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see already notice in order to tap into all these kinds of knowings in order to bring about this altered state of consciousness notice how much the shaman is manipulating the meaning of things which isn't the same thing as being a charlatan
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so we're starting to see right from the beginning the connections between meaning making altered states of consciousness an enhanced capacity to be in touch with the world and then what's the connection to wisdom the word shaman means one who knows one who sees
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one who has insight shamans are considered wise people and that's why you know that's why we have all these words like the word wizard means a wise person okay so that's it for our first video you'll get a sense uh from this of how we're going to
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proceed thank you very much for your time [Music] you
Topics:meaning crisisJohn VervaekemindfulnessBuddhism and cognitive sciencewisdompsychedelicsmeaning in lifeStoicismshamanismself-deception
