You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast.

Hi, Katie.

Hi, Bob.

How you doing?

I'm doing well. How are you? I can't complain. Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the Non-Zero newsletter. This is the Non-Zero podcast. You're Catherine Devaney, a wearer of many hats. Some of them are, like you're a neuroscientist, and you studied the effects of meditation on the brain.

In fact, you're doing an interesting study now that we talked about last time,

where you're studying these kind of levels of meditative attainment or whatever called Janhas

in the effect on the brain.

You're conversant in the effect of psychedelics on the brain.

You have some, possibly some first-hand experience with that at some point in your life, as I recall.

But you're also on the applied end of things, right?

You co-founded this place in Berkeley called the Olympic, where meditation is taught and people's

spiritual growth is guided and so on. So like when somebody asked you like at a party or something,

just what do you do and you just feel you have to be super concise? Or like if you had a business

card, if people still had business cards, like what would it what what's the uh what's the what's a one

line takeaway here yeah it's a bit challenging to someone once told me that i was impossible to pigeonhole

and that is true so a lot of what i say depends on the situation i'm in when i was in college

if i met people at a party and they asked what I was studying and I wanted to

keep talking to them, I would say psychology. And if I wanted to stop talking to them, I would say

neuroscience and they would just walk away. And that hasn't changed over the years. I thought

neuroscience had gotten cooler, no? I think it has gotten cooler now. So for now, what I usually say is something around the cluster of neuroscience, meditation,

and psychedelics.

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