Dr. Sam Harris: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind

Huberman Lab

Scicomm Media

Science, Health & Fitness, Life Sciences

4.8 • 26.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2023

⏱️ 262 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

My guest is Sam Harris, Ph.D. Sam earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Stanford University and his doctorate (Ph.D.) in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the author of multiple best-selling books and is a world-renowned public-facing intellectual on meditation, consciousness, free will, psychedelics and neuroscience. He is also the creator of Waking Up and the host of the Making Sense podcast. In this episode, we discuss meditation as a route to understanding “the self” and experiencing consciousness, not just changing one’s conscious state. Sam describes several meditation techniques and their benefits, including how meditation fundamentally changes our worldview and how it can be merged seamlessly into daily life. It can help us overcome universal challenges such as distractibility and persistent, internal dialogue (“chatter”) to allow for deep contentment and pervasive shifts in our awareness, all while acknowledging the more immediate stress-lowering and memory-improving effects of meditation. We also discuss the therapeutic use of psychedelics and the mechanistic similarities between the benefits of a psychedelic journey and long-term meditation practices. And we discuss the rationale behind Sam’s recent decision to close his social media (Twitter) account. This episode should interest anyone wanting to learn more about the higher order functions of the brain, the brain-body connection, consciousness and, of course, meditation and why and how to meditate for maximum benefit. For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman Levels: https://levels.link/huberman WHOOP: https://join.whoop.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman InsideTracker: https://www.insidetracker.com/huberman Supplements from Momentous https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman Huberman Lab Premium https://hubermanlab.com/premium Timestamps (00:00:00) Dr. Sam Harris (00:04:36) Levels, WHOOP, Eight Sleep, Momentous (00:08:54) Sense of Self & Meditation, Dualism of Self (00:18:07) Sense of Self in Brain & Body (00:25:28) Consciousness vs. Contents, Meditation (00:28:25) Interrupting Sense of Self & Attentional Focus, Visual Saccade (00:33:30) Observer & Actor, Default Mode Network & Meditation, Blind Spot (00:40:48) AG1 (Athletic Greens) (00:41:57) Mediation & Paths to Understanding Consciousness, Non-Dualistic Experience (00:57:32) Sense of Self throughout Evolution (01:07:40) Sense of Self from Human Development, Language (01:18:42) InsideTracker (01:19:46) Internal Dialogue, Distractibility & Mindfulness (01:26:27) Time Perception & Mindfulness, Vipassana Meditation, Resistance & Pain (01:37:13) Consciousness & Sense of Control, Free Will (01:43:14) Authoring Thoughts: Storytelling & Ideas, Free Will (01:52:11) Meditation & the Paradoxical Search for Self (02:06:44) Meditation & Concentration Practice (02:11:58) Mindfulness, “Skylike Mind” & Thoughts (02:15:11) States of Self & Context, Dualistic Experiences (02:32:39) Distraction & Identification of Thoughts, Meditation & “Flow” States (02:42:58) Eyes-Open Meditations, Sense of Self, Visual Cues & Social Interactions (02:54:59) Paths to Meditation, Mindfulness Meditation Step-Functions (03:05:58) Psychedelics, MDMA & Experiences in Consciousness, Religion (03:21:11) Meditation, Psychedelic Journeys & Inner Truths (03:29:48) Psilocybin, Ego-Dissolution & Thought Expansion (03:40:09) Process vs. Achievement of Goals, Fulfillment in Present (03:54:29) Leaving Twitter; Conflict, Life Interruption & Politics (04:06:14) Social Media, Attentional Disruption & Deep Work (04:15:39) Meditation & Sense of Self (04:19:02) Sam Harris & Waking Up App, Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Uberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
0:08.8	I'm Andrew Uberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and
0:12.6	Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Dr. Sam Harris.
0:17.6	Dr. Sam Harris did his undergraduate training in philosophy at Stanford University
0:22.4	and then went on to do his doctorate in neuroscience at the University of California at Los Angeles.
0:26.9	He is well known as an author who has written about everything from meditation to consciousness,
0:33.1	free will, and he holds many strong political views that he's voiced on social media
0:37.5	and in the content of various books as they relate to philosophy and neuroscience.
0:42.1	During today's episode, I mainly talk to Dr. Harris about his views and practices related to
0:47.4	meditation, consciousness, and free will. In fact, he made several important points about what a
0:53.5	proper meditation practice can accomplish. Prior to this episode, I thought that meditation was
0:58.8	about deliberately changing one's conscious experience in order to achieve things such as
1:03.7	deeper relaxation, a heightened sense of focus, or ability to focus generally, elevated memory,
1:09.6	and so on. What Sam taught me and what you'll soon learn as well is that while meditation does
1:14.8	indeed hold all of those valuable benefits, the main value of a meditation practice, or perhaps
1:20.4	the greater value of a meditation practice, is that it doesn't just allow one to change their
1:26.4	conscious experience, but it actually can allow a human being to view consciousness itself,
1:31.9	that is to understand what the process of consciousness is. And in doing so, to profoundly shift the
1:38.4	way that one engages with the world and with oneself in all practices, all environments, and at all
1:44.4	times, both in sleep and in waking states. And in that way, making meditation, perhaps the most
1:50.7	potent and important portal by which one can access novel ways of thinking and being and viewing
1:57.2	one's life experience. We also discussed the so-called mind-body problem and issues of duality and
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