Andrew Huberman
Уровень B2· 1137 слов
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, [music] where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based [music] tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now, for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris.
what is this thing that we call a self? You know, as far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our awareness of self.
>> The problem is we we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And and there's there's one sense of that term, which um is the charge of meditation, and you'll hear it from me, that this self is an illusion, right? And and that there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of
discovering it to be an illusion. And some people don't like that framing, some people would would insist that it's not so much an an illusion, but it's a construct, and it's not what it seems. The thing that doesn't exist, uh it certainly doesn't exist as it seems, and I would I would want to argue that
it actually is just a proper illusion, is this the sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience. So, most people feel like they're having an experience of the world, and they're having their an experience of their bodies in the world.
And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and intention. It's almost like they're you're a passenger inside your body. Most people don't feel identical to their experience. They feel like
they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side. You you're kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there, your body is is in some sense an object in the world, uh which you you know, you it's different from the world, you know, the the boundary of your skin is still
meaningful. You can sort of you loosely control your body. I mean, you can't control you can control your gross and subtle, you know, voluntary motor movements, but you're not controlling everything your body is doing. You're not controlling your heartbeat and your hormonal secretions and all of that. And
so there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you. Then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, "Okay, well, let's let's examine all of this from the first-person side. Let's look for this thing you're calling I." They're going to close their eyes, very likely. And
now they're going to pay attention to something. They're going to pay attention to the breath or to sounds.
And it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath that there's this dualism that is set up. And the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, there really two levels at which you could be interested in in meditation.
