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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy, with another addition of Infinite Loops.
1:44
And today I'm really excited to have Jay Sanguinetti.
1:52
I practiced that one before we hit record.
1:52
He is the head of the NICE Lab. I love the acronym.
1:58
Nice stands for Non-invasive Cognitive Enhancement, something I can use quite a bit of, at the University of New Mexico. Jay, welcome.
2:08
Jay Sanguinetti: Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
2:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I guess my first question is, could you explain for our listener exactly what that means?
2:13
Because I've read the stuff on you, but I'd like to hear your words on what you're doing and I will preface it listeners with, it's fascinating. So listen closely. Jay Sanguinetti: Sure.
2:27
Well, I'm actually affiliated with two labs now, so we can dig into both of them.
2:32
My current location is in Tucson, Arizona, recently moved, and I'm running another lab called SEMA Lab, which is the Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness lab.
2:37
So I've got two acronyms that we can dig into, depending on what you're most interested in.
2:44
But the NICE Lab, Non-invasive Cognitive Enhancement.
2:50
So we're looking for different neuro technologies that can facilitate cognition.
2:55
So we're looking at brain stimulation mostly and mostly non-invasive brain stimulation.
3:02
So we're staying away from surgical implants and things like that.
3:02
Those are things that Elon Musk is working on, for example.
3:06
So we're using electrodes that you can place on the head that will put a little tiny bit of current into the brain, and that can facilitate brain function, for one example.
3:16
We're also looking at biofeedback, so recording biological signals and feeding those back to the person so that you can enhance biological rhythms.
3:24
So things like that, just different types of neuro technologies that can enhance cognition.
3:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And in one of the things I read you cite that with people who are depressed, it can improve their mood.
3:37
Talk about that a little bit and for how long?
3:42
Is there something that could be more permanent, et cetera? Jay Sanguinetti: Sure.
3:46
So one of my specialties is actually stimulating the brain with sound, believe it or not.
3:49
It's usually when you think about brain function you think chemicals and you think electricity, but we're actually putting sound waves into the brain and you can very gently, so we're using low intensity ultrasound, so high, high frequency sound.
4:02
And with low energy as we're talking about the energy levels they use for imaging on the fetus, for example, with ultrasound imaging, you can focus a beam of sound into the brain and you can change brain activity temporarily.
4:10
So this is a safe procedure.
4:15
We're not doing damage or anything like that.
4:15
And you can target that beam of sound into parts of the brain that deal with depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction.
4:19
So we're starting to get somewhat of an understanding of the circuitry of these different disorders.
4:32
And with what we call ultrasonic brain stimulation we can target those brain regions and try to help people with those disorders.
4:37
So with depression, we have a general sense of what's going on in the brain of depressed folks.
4:43
And what we're doing in one of my studies is we actually try to elevate the mood in depressed people.
4:47
So we target the part of the brain in the prefrontal cortex with focused ultrasound.
4:52
And we were able to elevate mood on a daily basis for up to five days, and then pre to post we had trouble modulating depression, because it's really hard to change depression within a week, but we actually significantly reduced anxiety.
5:10
So depressed people usually have a comorbidity with anxiety, and we were able to reduce that.
5:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fascinating.
5:18
And how could this be reconfigured so that it could be something that somebody could perhaps use at their home?
5:25
Jay Sanguinetti: That's a great question.
5:27
The cool thing about ultrasound is you can fabricate these transducers relatively cheaply.
5:33
New cell phones will have ultrasound transducers in them, some cars use ultrasound to use for navigation and things like that.
5:38
So the ultrasound industry in general is a really, really fast growing industry.
5:44
And that's one of the reasons that researchers like myself are interested in it, is because if you think about scaling it outside of the lab, which is what we all ultimately want to do, we want to create things that help society.
5:58
Ultrasound's a nice pathway if you can figure out how to make it safe, how to make it affordable and things like that.
6:02
So we're not quite to that point yet where we're going to see it scaling out of the lab, just because there's a lot going on that we're trying to understand about the science and about how to actually focus it in the brain and lots of basic questions.
6:15
But I think very soon we will start seeing it scale out and you would probably see devices going into the clinic first.
6:19
So we'll see clinicians using ultrasound brain stimulation to treat depression, anxiety, maybe migraine, things like that.
6:31
But I think very soon after that we will see consumer devices coming.
6:35
And this is an exciting time, because you're moving away from pharmaceutical interventions and you're moving towards more targeted intervention.
6:39
And I think that's what we really need to start scaling out some of this stuff to the larger population.
6:45
And part of the reason I say that is because most of these brain disorders like depression, they're not one disorder we're starting to learn that there's subtypes of these different disorders.
6:55
And when you try to blanket treat depression with an SSRI, like Prozac, for example, works really well in some people, and then a large part of the population are not served by that drug.
7:13
And so what we're working on as ways to more target those brain systems on an individual basis so that you can boost the effect for more people.
7:18
And that's really exciting to me.
7:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And to me as well.
7:24
What I like about it the most, I think, is the non-invasive nature of it.
7:28
And also the idea that the SSRI uptake inhibitors, when you look at them against placebo, some interesting data gets generated.
7:35
And do you do tests like that?
7:35
Do you do verse a placebo type situation, or no?
7:41
Jay Sanguinetti: We do one group that actually gets the stimulation.
7:44
And then another group of people who will get placebo and we'll test them.
7:48
In other trials we're actually looking at dose response curves as well.
7:53
So one of the open questions for ultrasound brain stimulation is, how long does the effect last?
7:59
It looks like minutes to hours, but if you do multiple doses within a depressed participant, does that last for a week or two after?
8:04
We just don't know at this point, so we're sort of testing those dose response curves as well.
8:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So that leads me to the question.
8:12
Are there levels of ultrasound treatment that are dangerous for people's brains?
8:21
Jay Sanguinetti: For sure if you increase the intensity, so with any type of brain stimulation or drug, if you take too much of a dose, it can be dangerous.
8:28
The nice thing about ultrasound is that we have a long history of imaging on the body, all over the body, from the fetus, all the way up to the adult brain.
8:33
So we know relatively well what the threshold is for danger, just in terms of energy.
8:39
We're always staying way below that threshold.
8:44
But then there's a question of how the brain responds when you stimulate it with an energy level?
8:49
We are doing studies to test that.
8:49
So we know that a few sessions is safe, but if you did a 1,000 sessions, we just can't say whether that's safe or not.
9:00
More than likely it is, but it's an empirical question.
9:04
But we do know if you come into the lab and you get four or five sessions for a depressed participant, for example, in our lab that was safe, we didn't see any adverse events.
9:14
And we followed up with people a month later and we still don't see any adverse events.
9:19
And that's because we're using very, very low levels of energy.
9:19
So we would expect that to be safe. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
9:24
So just to follow up, because I am actually a believer in the placebo effect.
9:24
I have done deep dives on it, and it's really kind of crazy how you can give people sugar pills and just the thought that they were going to get better made them better.
9:35
What are you finding on the placebo versus the actual treatment?
9:40
Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah, we think placebo is fascinating, and placebo in our lab is not necessarily a bad thing.
9:50
It's just something that needs to be controlled for.
9:50
And in the clinic, if you get a placebo effect and someone gets better, the outcome is to get better.
9:53
So, in the clinic it's actually not such a bad thing.
9:59
You just need to understand it so you can use it.
9:59
Actually, I was talking to a group recently who was thinking about creating a $100 placebo pill and selling it.
10:09
There's actually a study where if you know that you're taking a placebo pill, it can still work, okay? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
10:16
And if you pay a $100 for it, it's really going to work.
10:19
Jay Sanguinetti: It will work better.
10:19
Yeah, there are studies on that.
10:22
So it's, for us we understand that it's something we need to control for and understand.
10:26
And so that's why we run placebo conditions in our studies.
10:26
And we certainly find that there is a placebo effect, depending on the conditions and what problems the subjects are presenting with.
10:37
But in our lab we're putting this sophisticated apparatus, it's this big helmet that has a pretty big ultrasound transducer, it's super sci-fi looking.
10:42
If you look up my name in SEMA Lab, University of Arizona, you'll see a bunch of pictures of this kind of sci-fi looking helmet.
10:52
So that's priming people.
10:52
They're like, "Oh, you're putting this thing on my head.
10:57
You're putting some non-invasive energy in my head."
11:02
And so we certainly do see some placebo effect with that.
11:02
But when we compare that against the stimulation condition, then we see a bigger effect.
11:07
And so we just subtract out the placebo.
11:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Very interesting.
11:13
Jay Sanguinetti: Well, particularly when you're talking about mood and emotion, there's often a placebo effect.
11:14
So in a lot of our studies, we do a lot of self-report to ask people, "How did this feel?
11:20
What was this like for you?" And people are smart.
11:25
They're always trying to guess your hypothesis and they're trying to guess what you want to hear.
11:29
And so it's funny, it's a funny game of trying to consent the subject.
11:34
You want to make sure they understand the risk of what's happening to them, but at the same time you don't want to give away too much of your hypothesis.
11:38
And so it's this dance about making sure you're fully make them aware of what's happening to them, but not telling them too much about what you're trying to do in terms of the hypothesis.
11:48
And then the subject trying to guess.
11:51
So yeah, human subjects are complicated subjects.
11:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah, no doubt.
11:57
Which is why we have so many rat studies. Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah.
12:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So you mentioned that there's a comorbidity with say depression having ancillary other problems that are feeding it.
12:06
What have you found is a condition that is the most, that reacts most favorably to the therapy?
12:11
Jay Sanguinetti: So far we're seeing that anxiety response well.
12:14
We're taking people with various levels of severity, and as most of your listeners know, anxiety and depression have increased to heartbreaking amounts during the pandemic.
12:25
So we're running mostly undergraduates in my lab and even the folk who are not diagnosed are coming in with elevated anxiety, unfortunately.
12:37
And so we do a lot of screening.
12:37
We give anxiety scales in our studies.
12:37
And what we tend to see is by targeting some of the brain networks that deal with emotion and emotion regulation, we can get a nice effect on anxiety.
12:48
Like I said, with the depressed people.
12:52
One of the other groups that's been really interesting for us early on is affecting memory.
12:57
So we've done a pilot study in folks with dementia and Alzheimer's.
12:57
And we have found that with people who are recently diagnosed with dementia, we can move the needle very slightly on memory.
13:08
Now that's pretty incredible because with dementia memory's always going down, it's a downward trend.
13:13
And we saw a little bit, so this is a pilot study, so I can't say too much yet, it's a very small sample.
13:16
But we were actually seeing that we could stabilize memory and actually increase it just slightly for people who are just diagnosed.
13:26
Now, if they had progressed into the disease within four or five years, nothing we could do.
13:31
So that's pretty exciting to see that we could tick the needle on that.
13:31
And we're really excited to get a new study going.
13:35
We're trying to raise some money for that right now in the lab.
13:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is incredible if you can enhance memory.
13:40
My father died at age 97 and unfortunately the last three years of his life dementia was pretty serious.
13:46
I mean, he still recognized me and it's funny, because he used to, he loved to quote poetry and kind of anything that had entered his brain that went into long term memory, he was fine. Jay Sanguinetti: Yep.
14:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: He could quote T. S. Eliot, Love Song of J.
14:03
Alfred Prufrock too in its entirety.
14:03
If you know that poem, you know it's a very long one.
14:08
But then things like my grandchildren, which we had a picture of them in front of him at his desk, and when I was visiting he would ask me, "Those kids are so cute, who are they?"
14:18
And I would tell him, "They're your great grandchildren, dad." And, "Oh, oh, oh right."
14:23
And then by day three, he had it.
14:23
And so, but I do understand, having dealt with it, if you can offer any assistance there I think especially the children and loved ones of the person who has dementia would be just thrilled.
14:33
I wonder, another question that I have is, this seems to be sort of treating the symptoms, or am I wrong there?
14:38
Do you think you could get at the underlying cause with this treatment?
14:48
Jay Sanguinetti: That is a great question.
14:48
And that sort of transitions to my new lab at the University of Arizona.
14:50
So in SEMA Lab, which stands for Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness.
14:56
So, sonication is what you call it when you're ultra-sounding the brain, you're sonicating the brain.
15:01
We're really focused on mindfulness practice, compassion practice, and sort of these deeper inner practices that are giving you the skills to address what you're talking about, the deeper problems.
15:12
People are dealing with depression and anxiety at a higher level right now, because they're lonely.
15:17
Loneliness is an epidemic in our society.
15:21
It makes sense because we're all hiding in our houses from the coronavirus.
15:26
But you sort of have these cascading situations when you're dealing with something like loneliness, you're dealing with these giant problems like climate change, ecological collapse, the supply chain now is getting messed up.
15:39
I mean, there's lots of stuff going on that's much bigger than the individual depression symptom, but it's pushing on people to have these issues.
15:44
And so, one thing we're doing at SEMA Lab is we're trying to help people gain the inner tools to confront a lot of these problems.
15:54
So mindfulness is one of them.
15:54
It helps you to be more present with these issues, not get so sucked into some of the emotional issues that can come up and really be able to apply yourself in a present way.
16:04
And we're actually using ultrasonic brain stimulation and other technologies to help people learn these mindfulness skills.
16:10
And part of the goal of the lab and part of my work in general is to try to find ways not to just to treat the symptoms.
16:21
So in depression the symptom might be mood disorder.
16:26
So we can treat that, and that's one thing.
16:26
But to help people orient themselves to a much larger agenda.
16:31
The agenda might be something like human flourishing or human happiness or fulfillment or meaning, these sort of deeper things that are underneath that are connected to depression.
16:44
Depression may be a disorder of meaning, for example.
16:44
And so one of my collaborators, the co-director of my lab, his name is Shinzen Young.
16:50
He's a famous mindfulness teacher, have been teaching for about 50 years.
16:54
He's really a scholar of contemplative practice.
17:00
And one of those beautiful minds, just the person who lights you up when you're around Shinzen.
17:05
So he's actually got a model of happiness, and by happiness we mean fulfillment meaning purpose.
17:10
We don't mean just the state of happiness, but we mean what the Greeks were talking about, the good life.
17:16
And he has a model of that, where he looks at the sort of core components of what makes up a fully flourishing, happy, fulfilled human being.
17:27
And in his model, you can see how mindfulness might impact all of these different components to help you feel fulfilled.
17:33
So for example, one of them is social connection.
17:33
Another is understanding yourself, having insight.
17:37
Another component is relieving suffering.
17:43
So the depression dimension where you want to get rid of some of that negative emotion, that's just one component of this much bigger model.
17:47
And what we like to do in the lab is flesh this model out so that when you are interacting with our technology, what you're doing is you're understanding that getting rid of the depression symptom is one piece of this bigger puzzle of meaning for you.
18:03
And so that's exactly the heart.
18:03
Your question is at the heart of what we're doing.
18:07
And we're really motivated to try to get some of that out into the world.
18:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That sounds absolutely fascinating.
18:12
And I think what a great project to be working on.
18:17
It reminds me of Anthony de Mello, the awareness writer, very interesting backstory.
18:17
He was an Indian born in India, but then became a Jesuit priest, again disconnect for me, but then kind of got booted out of the church when he basically had an awakening.
18:31
And these are all things that he talks about in his books in terms of the ability to become more aware and understand that things like happiness are not a goal in and of itself.
18:44
People chasing happiness in my opinion, don't understand that it's a byproduct often of doing something that you find fulfilling or find just in sync with.
18:58
And low and behold, you're happy.
18:58
And I've been lucky in my life that I've been happy most of my life because I guess I've been able to kind of do things that I love doing.
19:04
I'm interested, especially in the second one, do you have envisioned a clinic or whatever that would be a destination for people who would want to go through "a course" where they could learn all of these things?
19:19
Jay Sanguinetti: I think eventually, yeah, we will work towards that.
19:23
You know, the idea is, depending on what the person's goals are, and that's part of Shinzen's model, he calls this the Periodic Table of Happiness Elements.
19:27
So if you look up Shinzen Young and look that up and you get a sense, Shinzen's a really, really big science advocate and a scientist himself, and puts a lot of his mindfulness teaching in the sort of metaphors of science, which is great.
19:42
And so, what he's saying is that you come to this periodic table and these are the elements of happiness for you.
19:47
And you can work on all of these elements through mindfulness, you can work on it other ways as well.
19:54
But you get to define what these things mean for you.
19:54
And I think that that's really important for the creators of this technology to really understand what Aristotle was talking about when he defined techne.
20:05
Techne means it's an expression of an idea in form.
20:11
You're shaping the clay into your idea in a sense.
20:11
And understanding that when you create something, let's say like Facebook or whatever it is, you're putting your ideas into that technology and then putting that into the world.
20:22
And so when you're building technology that's trying to help people with mental wellness, happiness, wellbeing, fulfillment, your ideas about what that is are being built in.
20:33
Even if you're trying not to build that bias in, it's going to be biased in.
20:38
And obviously I have certain biases given my privilege in this world and I'm building that in.
20:43
And so what we're really trying to do is use a model like Shinzen's to make sure that the user, the subject in the lab, for example, or the user of the tech can sit down with the tech and define what they're looking for with their own goals.
21:00
So, you might want to ask the person, "Well, what does it mean for you to be happy right now?"
21:03
And you might want to do a little psycho education to say, "We believe that you are not a fixed thing that you develop, right?
21:12
You develop from childhood to adolescence, to adulthood, by the way, you're going to keep developing until you die.
21:17
So wherever you define happiness now might be different five years from now.
21:22
And part of the technology can help you evolve that into the future."
21:28
And I think we're getting to that point with our tech where we're gathering so much information about people that we can sort of see how they're changing.
21:33
We've got sort of Google probably has all the information about how you've changed over the past few years.
21:41
So one thing we'd like to do with the tech is try to figure out how to get the user to engage in a way that's developmental, where they understand that they can put their goals into the system and then grow that over time to become more fulfilled, become happier, gain the tools like mindfulness and wellbeing tools that help them figure out what that looks like for them.
22:02
And I think it's really crucial for the creators of the technology to understand that there's no fixed definition of happiness or wellbeing or any of that stuff.
22:13
It will change for that user.
22:13
And it's going to be different for different cultures.
22:13
It's going to be different for someone in the southern part of Mississippi, relative to someone up in New York or someone over in Silicon Valley, right?
22:24
These are different things and so.
22:29
And that's part of what we're trying to do is help the person do some of that definition for themselves and realize that you're not just going to be able to sit down and take a brain zap and be done.
22:36
The brains zap is just helping you get on the path to your goal.
22:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of which I think your last sentence there is one of the major problems I think we face.
22:44
Everyone just thinks, "Wouldn't it be great if I could take a pill or get zapped and then be made perfect?"
22:48
You can't, I doubt, I could be wrong, but I doubt we'll ever get to that level of either pharmaceutical intervention or non-invasive intervention.
22:59
You got to work at it, especially with these challenges.
22:59
I like very much what you said about that you are very aware that you're putting yourself into the program you are building.
23:09
That's something I think about a lot, I'm very interested in AI.
23:13
I'm very interested in things like this.
23:13
And I can't remember whose quote it is, but it was like along the lines of, "Everyone's accomplishment, be it architecture, be it running labs like this, be it finance, is also a portrait of himself or herself."
23:29
And I find that I talk to some really, really smart people who don't make that connection.
23:34
Like, "Of course not, we have been completely neutral here." Well, I don't know.
23:34
I think we're running the same human OS and it seems to be one of the features, not a bug.
23:39
So I'm really happy to hear you actually say that, because at least in my opinion, I'm commenting on something I haven't seen yet or experienced.
23:47
But I like the idea of the awareness of that going in, which will keep you mindful of that as you're building out the tech.
23:49
I wonder, what sets you off on this path?
23:57
Specifically the use of sound, the ability to marry that to mindfulness, et cetera?
23:59
Jay Sanguinetti: Great question.
24:06
I started my mindfulness practice when I lived on a small island in North Carolina called Wrightsville Beach.
24:12
I lived there right before I moved to Tucson.
24:12
So I lived on an island, literally it was paradise.
24:18
And then I moved to the desert.
24:18
It was quite a hard transition for me.
24:21
But I've had a lot long-term mindfulness practice almost 20 years and it has dramatically changed my life.
24:27
And that dramatic change has not been linear.
24:27
It's sort of really hard.
24:31
My practice doesn't change.
24:31
And then all of a sudden something happens and then you hit this exponential curve, and I'm super fascinated about these, about how complex systems change.
24:41
So I'm really interested in climate change for this reason as well, because you have these stable chaotic systems.
24:46
And then all of a sudden you change one little variable, right?
24:50
Like for example, take a psychedelic and take just a little bit of it.
24:53
Sometimes change the right variables and the whole system can change.
24:57
And I love that from a scientific point of view.
24:57
So I've seen a lot of that happening in my own life.
25:02
And at the same time when I was in graduate school, my background is in visual perception.
25:08
So kind of probably boring stuff for some of your listeners, but trying to understand how the visual system creates visual consciousness.
25:12
And I got really lucky to be involved in a deep brain stimulation study where they do neuro surgeries on human patients that have Parkinson's disease.
25:23
And I got to be in the operating theater and I would watch them do these surgeries, which are pretty amazing, 15 minute surgeries.
25:29
They put two electrodes deep down in these people's brains and they turn the electrode on.
25:39
And the only way I can describe this is like a scientific miracle.
25:39
I know my scientific friends hate that term, but it's like watching a miracle because these people have Parkinson's and they're shaking and their hands are all rigid.
25:48
They, 15 minutes, they just put these two electrodes down, they turn it on and then the whole thing just frees up. Their hands are free. They can move.
25:56
I saw many patients cry in the operating theater because they're like, "Holy cow, I've got my function back."
26:02
The first patient I saw looked at me, because I'm right next to them.
26:08
I'm actually doing an experiment literally while they're having brain surgery, it's pretty crazy.
26:11
And the first patient looked up at me and he said, "I'm going to be able to play golf again."
26:16
And I'm not much of a golfer.
26:16
So I was like, "Okay, cool. You play golf."
26:21
And he said, "You don't understand.
26:21
I worked my whole life to retire to play golf.
26:24
And then I got Parkinson's disease."
26:24
And so, this freed him up for a couple years at least to be able to play golf.
26:29
And so I got really turned on my brain stimulation.
26:35
I mean, I saw it changing people's lives, and that was why I came to science.
26:35
I wanted to do something to change people's lives.
26:41
And so, I got sort of really fascinated by brain stimulation, but then I started wondering, "Well, can you get that effect without doing brain surgery?
26:46
So is there a way to non-noninvasively get these effects?"
26:46
And that's how I got into non-invasive brain stimulation.
26:52
I kind of fell into the ultrasound because it was new.
26:58
And because it seemed to have a lot of advantages of electrical brain stimulation.
27:03
But somewhere along the way this mindfulness stuff was really changing my life.
27:03
And so about three years ago, it all just sort of intersected, the mindfulness work, the non-invasive brain stimulation work.
27:13
And a lot of my deep awareness of what's happening with climate collapse, I think is what we should term it now, ecological collapse.
27:19
What's happening to the bio systems of our planet.
27:24
I started reading a lot of that science and I went through honestly a grieving process myself, realizing this stuff is not in the future, it is happening right now.
27:35
And it's affecting a lot of ecosystems, a lot of people in this planet.
27:35
And sort of that all came together, it was sort of what do I do as a scientist about climate collapse?
27:46
I was experiencing a lot of this mindfulness change myself.
27:46
And then I was really seeing the power of brain simulation.
27:50
And so it all came together and I thought, "I'm just going to pivot my entire research career towards trying to help people gain these mindfulness skills faster with brain stimulation," because I truly believe that if we can do some of the inner work ourselves, become more aware in a way where we can move to action instead of becoming aware and just freaking out and hiding in our holes, which is what I wanted to do a couple years ago.
28:14
But bringing that awareness into the world and bringing it into embodied action, I think that's what we need right now.
28:18
And so I felt this is what I can do.
28:24
As a little scientist over in Arizona in my little lab, this is what I can do as my part of helping humanity move forward.
28:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Jay, I love that explanation because I believe pretty passionately that that's the only way people, individual people can make a difference.
28:44
The only way you can do it is what you've just described.
28:44
So what bothers me is that many times people will get right up to that awareness, hide in the hole, and stay in the hole.
28:55
We don't want you to stay in the hole.
28:55
We want you to, it's like, I read a lot about becoming awake as the Buddha would say.
28:59
And we all, and people using those processes all come to what I call the bridge of Nihilism.
29:04
Which is, they conclude, there is no meaning to life.
29:09
There is no grand purpose.
29:09
And I always say that the real test is you got to walk over that bridge.
29:16
You got to walk through the gateless gate, because when you get over it, that's when all the really cool stuff starts happening.
29:21
Like you with your exponential change in your mindfulness. Jay Sanguinetti: Yep.
29:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I wonder when you were talking about the Parkinson's, I'm sure you're familiar with Locked-in disease.
29:34
Do you think that there could be either a non-invasive or even like they did with the Parkinson patients, actual neurosurgery?
29:40
Jay Sanguinetti: Great question.
29:43
Yeah, so Locked-in syndrome is where you are conscious, and there's various levels of being conscious.
29:48
Some people are completely aware 100% in their brain, but they're completely paralyzed.
29:55
They can't move even their eyes, in some cases. So they are locked-in. It's a horrible disease.
29:59
I've met a few of these patients.
29:59
I think that to help those folks in the short term, something like what Elon Musk is working on is going to be more likely to help.
30:10
So this is a surgery where you embed some electrodes, you have an array of electrodes, you could put it into the part of the brain that deals with communication, for example.
30:19
And we'll probably make more progress with that tech than what I'm working on.
30:24
Because mine is not, mine's a sort of bigger input to the brain, more than being able to read what Elon will do.
30:28
I think in 50 years to a 100 years, what I'm working on will be developed to the point where it'll be able to do a real brain computer, brain machine interface like you're talking about.
30:38
But it's going to take a lot.
30:38
I mean, we know very little about the brain.
30:41
So even if Elon is able to get a 100 billion electrodes in the brain, we don't know what to do with that, to be honest.
30:46
Maybe Elon can send it through some machine learning, and if he's ever listening, I hope he does.
30:50
But there's a lot of bootstrapping that's going to need to happen.
30:54
And so for now we're more at the level of being able to change mood and stuff like that. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
31:01
Jay Sanguinetti: But it's an exciting field.
31:01
I mean, we are at the beginning of some incredible tech and actually the Dalai Lama gave a pretty famous or infamous speech to the society for neuroscience back in, I think 2005. And I was there. I was an undergraduate.
31:15
I was just learning to meditate.
31:15
It was an amazing moment in my life, it changed my whole life.
31:19
He said to a group of about 15,000 neuroscientists, he said, "You have no choice, but to think about the ethics of what you're doing.
31:24
Because eventually you're going to create a technology that is infinitely more powerful than the atomic bomb or the nuclear bomb.
31:36
That has the power to destroy.
31:36
You're creating tech that has the power to interface with the human self, like consciousness.
31:40
You are creating technology that will directly interface with what it means to be human."
31:47
And the sci-fi world, think about it.
31:52
Just all the sci-fi books we have.
31:55
So he was saying, "I implore you neuroscientist to start thinking about the ethics, to create an ethical model and to build that into your work."
32:00
And I think he's absolutely right.
32:05
What I'm working on, what Elon's working on, all this direct brain computer interface stuff, really we're talking about directly interfacing with the human self-identity, human consciousness.
32:16
And that's going to move us into extremely exciting territory because we'll be able to treat a lot of the stuff that we're talking about.
32:21
But with all technologies there's a dark side.
32:25
And that dark side scares the out of people like me.
32:25
And that's why I'm working on ethical frameworks and things like that.
32:30
But yeah, I mean, I think that's where we'll go, we'll be able to interface with people like Locked-in, but we'll be able to probably create things like that as well, to be honest. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
32:40
So I'm an inveterate journal keeper and I've been doing it since I was 18.
32:40
And luckily they're all paper, but this one here is just going through.
32:46
And I wrote about the future.
32:51
And one of the things that I put down was micro man, in other words, and I wrote that in 1982, when it was just like the ...
32:56
It was still just, everything was science fiction back then. There was no internet.
32:58
I mean, there would be computers, everyone thought computers were really cool.
33:01
And like, I was so excited about the one I had because it had 16K and all these things.
33:06
So I think reading a lot of science fiction gives you good ideas, I think often. Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah.
33:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But I think you're absolutely right.
33:14
Like kind of rules for robots.
33:14
We need to have an ethical framework around the things that we're doing.
33:16
Because these kinds of things, I mean, this would turn it into a Marvel movie.
33:20
And they would be the villain, not the hero. Jay Sanguinetti: Right.
33:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: One of the things that I love about the Dalai Lama, I've read and followed him for a long time, is he made a statement.
33:27
I don't recall when it was, but it was, "If science basically proves or proves to our satisfaction that one of our beliefs as Buddhist is wrong, we'll change the belief."
33:37
We're not going to ask science to say, "No, that doesn't work."
33:43
I mean, what a switched on guy that he was able.
33:48
I have another question that's a little off topic, but I've experienced it several times.
33:51
And I just wonder if you have a thought on why it happens.
33:51
It seems like you're the right person to ask.
33:55
The first time I ever entered a Buddhist temple, I was 26 years or 27 years old. It was in Hawaii.
34:03
And literally it was like stepping over a line into immediate tranquility.
34:13
No one had approached me yet.
34:13
I hadn't met one of the monks who finally came up and was quite gracious with us.
34:17
But I mean, is there some kind of energy field that we are unaware of?
34:23
Because it's happened to me, I travel a lot, and in Bhutan it happened to me all the time.
34:26
And we would go visit the Buddhist temples there and kind of the same feeling.
34:32
Now didn't replicate that first one.
34:32
Like maybe it was just Western man.
34:32
And he walks in and I'm like, "Oh, whoa." What do you think?
34:36
Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah, well, this is an excellent question.
34:40
And I think ultimately an empirical question, I think science is getting there.
34:44
And we're not quite to the point where we can measure this stuff, but there's a couple things.
34:48
One thing we know that there is resonance of systems.
34:55
So your body is a complicated system, trillions of cells, billions of neurons, your heart, all these things are oscillating systems.
35:01
And right now actually my heart beat is probably syncing with yours in some sense, not as much as if we were in person.
35:08
But I'm watching you breathe.
35:12
I'm getting subtle unconscious cues and that's linking up.
35:12
And so if we had heart rate monitors on, we'd be syncing in some sense.
35:18
And now that I'm talking about it, we're probably syncing a little more actually.
35:22
So from a basic physiological point of view, we know there's resonances between biology.
35:26
There's also resonances between emotions.
35:32
So we have emotional resonance systems, like if you've ever been on an airplane and there's two babies, one of the babies starts crying, the other baby cries, that's unconscious built-in mechanisms of emotional resonance.
35:42
So there's that level of resonance.
35:42
But I think that there's another level, which is our sort of belief systems also have this resonances.
35:52
And our belief systems are energetic systems, right?
35:52
It's just energy moving in your brain.
35:57
We don't have to move it into magic energy, but it's just energetic systems of brain function.
36:02
And so when you talk about the placebo effect, not to say that you weren't having a real experience, but you had expectations as you walked in about what this was.
36:07
And you've probably read about Buddhism.
36:13
You read Dalai Lama, and you probably have some deep unconscious desires to be calmer, enlightened.
36:19
Maybe you have something deeper down that's one, some of that maybe, I don't know what it is.
36:24
But when you talk about placebo what you're really talking about is the interaction between your conceptual map.
36:29
Your brain is mapping, meaning on top of the input.
36:36
And the input is just photons hitting your eyeballs and air molecules vibrating into your ears and vibrating the little cells, the little hair cells in your ears.
36:46
That's just sensory data coming in.
36:46
And then your brain is wrapping concepts and meaning on top of it.
36:51
And when you talk about placebo, what you're talking about is something about that conceptual map is changing in a way that's changing the way you feel, which is changing the conceptual map.
37:01
And it becomes this nice feedback loop, which literally changes you, right? Placebo is real.
37:06
It's not something to say it's not real.
37:10
And so I think what you were experiencing was something along that dimension of walking into this temple, which has been built to placebo you in a sense, right?
37:18
I mean, I grew up Catholic.
37:18
I grew up around these beautiful churches and I love them.
37:22
Because they're really priming you to get you into a different experience, which is great.
37:27
That's the sort of what they want you to do.
37:27
And then that sort of shifts your whole world.
37:32
It shifts your experience.
37:32
And it's definitely real.
37:36
And I'm not saying you weren't having a real experience, but you're experiencing your belief system, interacting with the temple, interacting with the reverberation of the monks, perhaps interacting with your beliefs about religion and Buddhism.
37:48
And it's giving you a real experience that may have maybe got you to do a little more meditation or something like that.
37:58
And so this is the stuff I love.
37:58
This is why I love placebo because it's real.
37:58
And it's telling us something about the way that our conceptual maps can affect our biology, which is a 100% true.
38:09
We know that if you just put a pencil in your mouth and make a little smile, you just smile a little bit.
38:16
It makes you happier, right?
38:16
And then if you call up in your mind and do a little compassion training, and you think about a moment when somebody was happy, it actually makes you happier.
38:26
It releases oxytocin in your body. It releases dopamine.
38:31
This is your thoughts, interacting with your body.
38:31
It's nothing magic, it's just the way these systems work.
38:35
So, I love that kind of stuff.
38:35
And I think in the future we're going to have a much more complete mapping of placebo, where it's not a bad word.
38:45
It's not something where we're like, "It's not real."
38:45
We're like, "Oh, of course it's placebo, because the whole world is placebo."
38:48
The whole world that I'm interacting with right now is my conceptual map of my brain guessing what's out there.
38:53
And it's an illusion like the Buddhist have been telling us the whole time.
39:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally, it's a total illusion.
39:01
And we all create as Robert Anton Wilson would say, reality tones that we view reality.
39:04
I'm doing the quote mark here for our listeners, our air quote, and that everyone's are slightly different.
39:17
And resonance with one another, rhythmic ceremonies, chanting ceremonies, all of those sort of shamanistic practices.
39:25
They work because of what you've just described, at least to my understanding. Jay Sanguinetti: Yep.
39:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They put people in sync.
39:32
They do a lot of very interesting things, but so where I come from, my day job is asset management and we're quantitative investors, meaning we need empirical data.
39:43
And if we don't have empirical data, we can't test our hypothesis.
39:43
And so I loved hearing you say that you're also looking for the empirical data, because ultimately that would get me super excited because it's one of those things that you know it's there, you know that as you are perceiving the world, it is perceiving you, so to speak.
40:05
And so finding a little bit of empiricism around it I think he just so cool.
40:05
I think of things like, I don't know if you're familiar with Dr.
40:11
John Sarno, The Mind-Body Connection.
40:15
Jay Sanguinetti: Oh yeah.
40:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you know, it's always kind of been one of my goals to, wouldn't it be great to be able to fund a clinic where people could go in that are experiencing these debilitating mind-body syndromes and where a collection of various modalities of treatment could be used to let them conquer that.
40:30
And that's why I'm so fascinated in this, I'm always very interested to talk to people like you, because I'm kind of hunting, I guess, for components to it.
40:48
You did a study talking about the brain and perception that I want to have you talk a little bit about.
40:53
And that was, you put sort of hidden images in a picture that they were not going to be consciously aware of.
40:59
Because if I recall, I read it a bit ago, but if I recall correctly, the dominant hypothesis was no, no, the brain is going to only take in what it's focusing on or what you are consciously, I could be getting this wrong.
41:08
But your results showed no, it definitely takes in those hidden images.
41:15
Can you talk a little bit about that? Jay Sanguinetti: Sure.
41:21
Yeah, this goes back to my dissertation work.
41:24
And the basic question was, does the brain look at the meaning of objects that you never see?
41:30
So this gets back to the way that the brain is fundamentally processing information.
41:36
We've got a lot of really powerful machine learning algorithms and computer programs that can identify objects.
41:41
Like on Facebook they tell you like, "Hey, this is your face."
41:45
And that's a really hard problem actually, those algorithms are solving.
41:45
So they're based on feed forward processing.
41:49
And a lot of the assumptions going back to David Marr at MIT, we're assuming that everything in the brain is just sort of feed forward.
41:55
But what we know is that there's lots of feedback and interaction going on in the brain.
41:59
And so what we actually were asking is, when the brain decides there's no object.
42:04
So this hidden object is in the background.
42:08
Does it actually access the meaning for that object, even though you don't see it consciously?
42:14
And the answer was yes, actually the brain is seeing a lot more than what you consciously see, which we kind of know, there's a lot of unconscious stuff going on in the brain that you don't have any access to.
42:23
But it's doing it at a fundamental sense.
42:28
It's doing it at the earliest levels in the visual system.
42:33
And I think that gets back to the thing that we were just talking about with placebo, that the brain is, it's like black box in there.
42:38
It doesn't know what's out here in the world.
42:44
And every minute it's working, every millisecond to 10 milliseconds it's working really hard to try to figure out what's out there.
42:49
And then what it's doing is it's taking thousands and thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of bits of information from the retina, right?
42:58
The retina is a flat two-dimensional input, but you don't see 2D, you see 3D somehow.
43:03
That's given to you by your brain, which is a pretty cool process.
43:03
And so the brain is constantly taking all this information.
43:10
A lot of it's noisy, in your visual system you have a blind spot actually.
43:14
So it's actually filling in the blind spots and stuff.
43:14
And then it's just taking a guess about what's out there.
43:19
And sometimes that guess is wrong.
43:24
Sometimes you see a shadow and you think you see something moving and there's nothing moving, right? The brain got it wrong.
43:28
But when we were evolving, that might have been a tiger.
43:33
So you got to make sure you pay attention to that stuff.
43:33
And so that's kind of what we were looking at, even in the basic level of the visual system, the brain doesn't know.
43:41
And so it's taking a guess and it's saying, "I think maybe I see an object in the background."
43:45
And then another part of the brain is saying, "No, no, no, no, the object's in the middle."
43:49
And it starts inhibiting and saying, "Don't worry about that."
43:49
And it sends the hypothesis to the next level, and the next level's doing the same.
43:54
And then it's sending the hypothesis to the next level.
43:58
And the current way to talk about this is that the brain is guessing at many levels all the way up and down the hierarchy.
44:02
And then finally, through some type of magic that we don't understand right now, at the highest level you get consciousness.
44:13
And the brain says, "Okay, here's what I think is out there."
44:13
And it just gives you the image, and that's what you're looking at right now.
44:17
You're looking at a highly refined set of guesses about what's in reality.
44:21
And that's why it can be messed with by charlatans and the marketing, you can do lots of things to sort of modulate what people see, because it's just a guess.
44:34
And you can change your setting, as Timothy Leary used to talk about.
44:38
So change your mental set and it can actually change the way you experience something like a psychedelic, which is such a pretty cool thing. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
44:45
So I've read a lot of Timothy Leary and I've read Robert Anton Wilson, who was a man, in my opinion, 20, 30 years ahead of his time. Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah.
44:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And they were doing, I think I'm a big supporter of Johns Hopkins and maps who are doing the psychedelic tests, because I just find it incredibly sad that we decided that non-addictive incredibly powerful drugs that can be medicine were going to be, you're going to go to Fed max if you were using those.
45:13
And so I have financially made donations to maps and to others because the use case that broke this open, I think, was the work with veterans with PTSD.
45:27
And I get reports on this stuff, because I'm a donor, and the breakthroughs are stunning and amazing.
45:32
And what I think about, and that's why I mentioned earlier kind of the multiple modality treatment of things.
45:37
Because I do believe that at some point in the future, and I hope I'm still around to see it, that we will be able to make use of disciplines like yours with several other disciplines.
45:47
That's why I'm fascinated by this entire field of study, but also consciousness, right? Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah.
45:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm a layman, I'm not a scientist.
45:58
I can read a lot, and I do, but I find the idea of say qualia, how are we going to ever figure out ...
46:07
And again, the empiricist in me is like, "Okay, so how are we ever going to be able to figure out how to get those defined accurately?"
46:09
And the other question that I was thinking in the back of my mind when you were talking about the guy who's going to be golfing.
46:16
Do you think that these technologies ultimately given human nature will be used recreationally? Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah.
46:25
I'll take the second one first, because it's an easy one.
46:27
Yes, I do think, I mean, it's so hard to predict this stuff in the future.
46:32
And I think partly as a scientist thinking about systems, and I love what you said about the multimodal systems, that's the approach we need to be taking across the board from treating depression to treating climate change.
46:41
So I think as we move forward, it's becoming harder to predict both these technologies, how they'll be used, but also partly because of what's happening with the global systems and how they're changing.
46:51
We're moving into, the air bars of prediction are getting worse, right?
46:55
It's becoming harder and harder to actually predict, because everything is sort of unwinding so quickly.
46:58
But I do envision that and I worry about it a bit.
47:05
So part of the reason I'm so vocal about the ethical frameworks for the use of these technologies is because as I said, ultrasound, transducers could be made quite cheaply.
47:16
And I think in the future they may be printable actually as with a lot of things, these 3D printers, this revolution is coming.
47:20
This is the third wave of industrial revolution.
47:25
And that's awesome and also scares me, because it fits the tools of a lot of, the powerful tools of science into the hands of the citizens, which I think is a good thing.
47:33
I think that should be done.
47:33
But at the same time, you'll be able to create a piece of technology that you can zap your brain at home and zap the deep structures like the dopamine center.
47:41
That's the part that deals with opioid and addiction.
47:46
So very quickly you can see how replacing opioids with brain stimulation can happen. And I worry about that.
47:51
And so, that's partly for me, I don't think you can stop that.
47:55
I think what you can do is create a use case where you say, "Here's one way that this technology can be used and it's powerful."
47:58
And listen to all these people who are having transformative life changes, who are talking about happiness and fulfillment and all of that, through engaging with technology in terms of human happiness and flourishing.
48:16
And that's what we want to do in our work is create a model that says, "This is one way you can engage with it."
48:21
And now there's lots of other ways.
48:21
And we're seeing a lot of the other ways that technology can be deployed in our world.
48:24
And most people, most rational, awake sane people are saying, "This is not good."
48:29
So I think that the future will just have all these interesting scenarios of these use cases.
48:34
And our goal is to say, "Here's one way to do it, engage with the technology in terms of human flourishing."
48:43
And let's try to get as many people on that side as possible, just invite people into that way of using it.
48:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So another one of my deep, deep dives is on complex adaptive systems because I think that's what the stock market is.
48:54
That's what the economy is. Jay Sanguinetti: Yep.
48:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Have you read any Mandelbrot by any chance?
49:00
Jay Sanguinetti: Yes, a lot. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay. Okay.
49:01
So it's very hard for people to understand, even really bright people, it's been my experience, to understand that complex adaptive systems you cannot impose a top down solution on them. It won't work.
49:17
Jay Sanguinetti: You're preaching it.
49:17
You're preaching it, brother.
49:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: In fact, there's a great quote by Oppenheimer that says, "Yes, of course, I think the world is going to hell," and I'm going to botch this, but this is the spirit of the quote.
49:26
"Yes, of course the world is going to hell.
49:26
And honestly, the only way that we might be able to change that is to not try to do anything about it."
49:30
Because what he was really saying was, "We're going to try a top down solution.
49:35
I know that's not going to work."
49:35
And so my interest and why you're on the podcast, and this has been a fantastic conversation, is because I do think that emergence from complex adaptive systems is what you're doing.
49:40
It is emerging from an understanding of complex adaptive systems and it's using them the right way as opposed to this top down.
49:52
Yes, this is going to do everything that we ...
49:52
Thinking you can master a complex adaptive system is a really bad thought. Jay Sanguinetti: Yep. I agree. Yeah.
50:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I think that that applies to what I do.
50:04
I think it applies certainly to science, it applies to climate science, it applies to economic science.
50:09
It applies across the board.
50:09
And I think that the way through this is exactly as you've described.
50:15
That yes, people this is a really cool new technology, but we want to really make sure that we're really careful because as you say, you don't want them to get addicted to the tech.
50:27
They get off their opioid addiction and then suddenly they're on the tech all the time. Jay Sanguinetti: Yep.
50:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I guess a built in safeguard there could be a timer or a switch that turns it off. Jay Sanguinetti: Yep.
50:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But I like Doug Adams a lot and he says that people who try to make systems foolproof do not understand the ingenuity of fools.
50:47
Jay Sanguinetti: I love that. That's good.
50:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I think that that's something that always has to be present and at the forefront of your mine. So what's next?
50:51
What are you planning at your new spot in Arizona?
50:56
Are you working on what's going to be the major work, or do you have something on the horizon?
51:03
Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah, that's a good question.
51:04
And just to riff a little bit on the complexity question.
51:09
What we're trying to do is actually build in the strengthening of the underlying systems, because the brain is a system of systems embedded in a system of systems, body, brain interaction.
51:21
And then you're a human being in a social system, in a historical system.
51:21
You're in a monetary economic system.
51:25
There's lots of interacting systems, right?
51:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
51:30
Jay Sanguinetti: And so when you think about what you just said about how to make the system more resilient.
51:32
So, that's one thing we're trying to do with climate change, for example.
51:37
A lot of people are talking about seeding the atmosphere with certain metals or certain chemicals to block the sun.
51:43
So that's a top down approach to climate change, and talk to any climate scientist, they will worry about that.
51:54
We're headed there by the way.
51:54
But the way that you deal with climate change is you make our systems more resilient.
51:57
So you go to the Everglades in Florida and you make them healthier.
52:03
And then that's a complex system in and of itself.
52:03
So you go in there, you make it healthier, it becomes resilient.
52:08
It then affects the mangroves in Florida, which is another system that you want to make healthier.
52:13
So you need to get down in the system of systems and make the smaller systems healthier so the bigger system can be complex and dynamic and do its thing.
52:23
And if you apply that same model to the brain, that's really what we're trying to get to right now in our own work.
52:26
Is for depression, for example, we're not just trying to remove negative emotion.
52:30
That's one thing you want to do, but we want to give them the tools of resiliency to deal with the stress of this world.
52:40
They're depressed for a reason and it's not because of their brain.
52:40
Depression is clearly a brain disorder, but it's because of what's happened to them, right?
52:44
So we got to get back to big problem.
52:49
And it's going to keep happening.
52:49
If they're stressed, they're probably going to deal with big stresses again.
52:54
And so you want to help them deal with a negative mood state, but you also want to boost things like emotional resiliency.
52:59
You want to boost something like their ability to deal with grief or whatever's going on for them.
53:04
You want to boost mindfulness.
53:09
So this is like boosting the Everglades.
53:09
This is like boosting the mangroves.
53:13
And that's, I think that's really the key to what you're talking about.
53:17
If we want to create resilient human systems and give that to people themselves, we have to use our technology to figure out what are the pieces that we need to boost?
53:27
What are the skills, the things inside of the body that we can boost that allow people to deal with all the stress that is coming to us all the time?
53:32
And I think that's, when you get that, when we switch to just trying to treat the symptom, which is all that we're doing in medicine right now, to really thinking about how do we put a human being on a path to resiliency, on a path to happiness, on a path to good human relationships.
53:53
That's when people will start talking about it and saying, "Oh, we really like this brain zap thing because it's like helping me figure out how to have a good relationship."
54:03
That's when they'll start telling all their friends about it.
54:03
And that's when it starts growing as a big social network.
54:06
So, I think that's the kind of stuff we have to switch to.
54:11
And I actually, I gave a talk last night, downtown at the Fox Theater in Tucson and it was on compassion.
54:16
And I gave the science of compassion, and I talked about how good compassion can be for you in terms of mental health.
54:22
But at the end I said, "Science is recommending compassion and meditation.
54:28
It's also recommending working out and it's recommending healthy diets."
54:33
And I looked at the audience and I said, "We're living through a pandemic.
54:37
You've got all this crap to worry about.
54:37
Now I told you, you need to go be compassionate.
54:41
You got to worry about compassion now."
54:41
And everyone laughs, like okay.
54:45
And then I put this big image of climate change and fire and we've got all this suffering.
54:51
Suffering is coming and it's increasing.
54:51
And if you've got children, you're starting to worry about the world that we're leaving our children.
54:55
I mean, this is real serious stuff.
55:00
And if you think about suffering on that scale, you actually don't want to do it.
55:00
You actually sort of collapse into inaction, because I don't think we evolved to think about suffering of a billion people.
55:12
We evolved to think about it in like four or five people in our group, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep. Yep.
55:18
Jay Sanguinetti: And so, what I sort of implored the audience to do is, think about these problems. These are big problems.
55:22
But when you think about what can I do, you have to feel like there's something that you can do individually.
55:27
That's what we can grasp, even if you're super smart, and you're thinking about creating this technology.
55:33
You got to start with yourself, you got to learn self-compassion.
55:38
Then you bring that into your family and into your friends.
55:38
Like just one off, you got to do one next person.
55:43
And then what we actually have found in the science is that if you do a compassionate act or you elevate your happiness, it tends to impact three other people.
55:54
And those three people get elevated and they impact three people.
55:59
So now you've got an exponential.
55:59
Now you've got nine people and those nine people impact, on and on and on.
56:03
And I really think that's what the science can tell us.
56:09
We're designed to work in small groups and our actions reverberate out just a little bit, but those actions can reverberate out and it can grow exponentially, but you got to get society doing that together.
56:20
And that's what we're not doing.
56:20
We're all sitting at home, we're alone because of the pandemic obviously.
56:25
And we've got fear, uncertainty and doubt spreading through the network, through our social medias and things like that.
56:30
And so we got to flip the model where the technology is giving us the skills to reverberate out some of this compassion, happiness, the goodness, these other things as well.
56:42
And I'm right with you, that's where you got to start.
56:48
You got to start small locally in your own community.
56:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No question.
56:53
And you know, amen, you are preaching to the choir. I could not agree more.
56:56
And fear, uncertainty, doubt.
56:56
Those are the three words and they're the model of the propagandists, and they're very dangerous.
57:03
And they can cause social organisms like a super, I think of society as a super organism.
57:08
And if you just are attacking it constantly at the level of, you should worry, you should worry.
57:12
Alan Watts once said that, "Worry is an infinitely peeling onion that once that worry goes away, you're going to find two more. Worry is exponential."
57:24
And what happens if you let yourself get caught in that cycle, you're useless.
57:30
You're useless to yourself and you're useless to your friends and love the ones and everyone else. So, I mean, amen. I'm totally with you. Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah.
57:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well this has been awesome and incredible.
57:44
We always ask our guests at the end a question.
57:44
And so I'm going to ask you.
57:44
Have you seen the movie Inception? Jay Sanguinetti: Yes. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
57:52
So we are going to tell you that you are emperor for a day of the whole world, not just America or not just your little neighborhood.
57:57
And you can incept the world when they're asleep that evening with two ideas that they're going to wake up in the morning and think that that thought was their own, and they're going to actually act on it.
58:08
You can't kill anyone, you can't round anyone up and put them in camps, but two ideas that you would think would exponentially help us and our problems here on our little planet?
58:24
Jay Sanguinetti: I think the first one would be that your behavior is reverberating in the world.
58:28
It's affecting out, every behavior that you have, and giving people a deep insight into that.
58:34
So if you're being mean that meanness is reverberating, if you're being nice, that nice is reverberating.
58:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Karma, right?
58:42
Jay Sanguinetti: It's true. It's the true karma law.
58:43
And then the next one would be that kindness has a much deeper impact than you think.
58:47
And so taking those two together, now that kindness will spread out into the world in a way that people ...
58:53
It's like you have a responsibility to it.
58:57
And I think if you could get that as an inception into people, you would see big impacts.
59:02
I mean, we see that in the science already.
59:02
And so if you could just incept that into people, it'd have a huge impact.
59:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
59:09
And you know, the kindness one, I particularly love because I think one of the semantic problems people have is they use the word nice when they mean kind. Jay Sanguinetti: Yeah.
59:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And they're very, very different things. Jay Sanguinetti: Yep.
59:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And kindness, talk about reverberating back to you.
59:27
I've talk to some of the most [inaudible] people that I view as very, very selfish.
59:32
And I've actually convinced a few that if you change your modality of action here and you are kind, I'll say, "Try it for a week, just try it for a week and see what happens."
59:43
And when I hear back from them, it's like, "I had no idea." And so I love those two.
59:49
Well, listen, Jay, this has been absolutely phenomenal.
59:49
I'm going to turn the recording off. Thank you.
59:52
Well, first, before I do that, let's, you tell people where they can find you on the web? Jay Sanguinetti: Sure.
59:55
If you look up SEMA Lab S-E-M-A, SEMA Lab at the University of Arizona, you can also go to The Center for Consciousness Studies.
1:00:01
I'm the assistant director there, and you can find us there.
1:00:06
We have lots of talks on YouTube.
1:00:06
You can look me up and you can also look up Shinzen Young.
1:00:09
He's a mindfulness teacher, science geek and got lots of great content on YouTube.
1:00:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Perfect.
1:00:11
We'll put all that in the show notes as well. Jay Sanguinetti: Cool.