ASM124 Protests, Autopilot, and Looking Outside of Time

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

protests autopilot and looking outside of time all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic [Applause] [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life without being a scientist or a pastor although i am living so surely that qualifies me to answer questions about life right well we'll see i'll show my work and you'll tell me if the answers are good or not by sending in more questions whatever let's get it started so last week there was no ass science mic what what come on science mike this is your job take it seriously i do uh but i take it so seriously i went to see the total solar eclipse so i uh i flew to portland oregon saw my friends from cascade church and several of us loaded into a minivan and a truck full of survival supplies in case food gas and water ran out and we drove into central oregon to watch the eclipse in its totality and it turns out uh when you go into central oregon with a lot of people uh dramatically more people than are generally there the internet gets bad so i couldn't upload the show and then i decided i wanted to take another run at some of the answers i'd recorded last week so i'm actually redoing episode 124 now with this little thing about the eclipse and i really want to tell you about the eclipse i'm sure most of you watched it in some form but i got to see it in the totality that 70 mile wide path that the eclipse's umbra or the darkest part of the eclipse shadow took across the continental united states and wow you know i love astronomy i love looking at the sky uh and this was by far the most dramatic event i've ever seen in the sky with celestial objects and how crazy that it was the moon and the sun very near neighbors of ours that provided this incredible experience so i was standing up on a hill in a high desert plateau so we could see hundreds of miles in every direction well i mean hundreds is in more than 100 it wasn't fully 200 still a long way and as totality approached we turned our backs to the sun to watch the shadow approach and oh my gosh it was a dramatic sight it got very dark very quickly it got very cold very quickly and we saw birds kind of flying out of the air and toward trees in great numbers and then it was dark like dark like the middle of the night but with this odd quirk in that 360 degrees around us on the horizon looked like sunset so imagine a dark starry night there were stars out only sunset is on every horizon every direction you look you can see sunset and then you look up and you see the totality now luckily in the totality for those couple of minutes we didn't have to wear protective glasses so i looked up and saw this obsidian orb that we call the moon it looked incredibly dark but it didn't look as flat as i expected at least from where i was with very clear skies there seemed to be an almost spherical projection in the sky and it was surrounded by this gorgeous halo of light that in some cases extended quite far you know four or five times the diameter of the the moon or the apparent diameter of the moon in the sky of course that was the sun's corona which we never see because the rest of the sun is so bright but i stood there i couldn't record this show earlier this week because i lost my voice for several days and but people were yelling and crying and shouting and weeping and uh i was doing all of the above at the same time it was totally gorgeous and then of course the light came back and it took us an hour to get from portland a little over an hour to get from portland to madras or madras or however you say it you know me folks i'm not good at pronouncing things especially cities my apologies to my friends in edinburgh as i've been corrected so many times uh but edinburgh edinburgh it took almost eight hours to get back from central oregon to portland because you know tens of thousands of people were participating in this mass post-eclipse exodus but was it worth it absolutely it was worth it it was one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen and i actually think i might try to do either a science mic event or a liturgist event in 2024 we'll have another total eclipse that won't go across the entire country but will come up through texas and then uh swing east and um that could be a lot of fun to see this with folks like you let me know if that's something you're interested in and if so i'll figure out about finding a venue and what it'll cost and that'll probably be something you have to buy a ticket to super super early uh because it'll be hard to hold on to hotel rooms uh as 2024 gets closer but how crazy is it i'm talking about 2024 the reason i am is that eclipse was so beautiful and we're gonna have a little period here where we have uh total solar eclipses more frequently than is statistically the norm in north america although 2017 was unique in its distribution this totality going coast to coast but the eclipse was really really amazing if you saw it in totality you know what i'm talking about if you don't seriously this is a bucket list thing don't miss out the next time there's a total solar eclipse uh okay a couple of things one really soon got a new event announced uh i'm going to be at theology live with broderick greer in memphis tennessee on september the 7th uh broderick is just this incredibly thoughtful wise person he is a minister in the episcopal tradition one of the most influential people and how i understand scripture and the gospel so he is a real visionary and i'm honored to be with him in memphis on september the 7th so if you're in that area you can learn more by going to ask sciencemike.com and clicking on the events tab of course september the 15th and 16th we'll be having the liturgist gathering in los angeles october 6th and 7th the liturgist gathering in boston october 27th the liturgist gathering in seattle we sold so many tickets in seattle we had to expand the venue in order to accommodate everybody if you're thinking about going to any of these events grab your ticket especially los angeles in seattle where tickets are selling quite quickly now we're getting closer to the event and so people actually start buying tickets and i would hate for you to miss it the largest gathering is it's incredible we have some amazing things planned we have surprise guests planned for you in each city so you don't want to miss the liturgist gathering of course october i'll also be doing a tour through the united kingdom for at science mike live and stopping by the republic of ireland for the rubicon conference in dublin ireland so you can learn more at we are rubicon.com for that dublin stop uh or go to my website ask sciencemike.com to learn about ask science mike live in london and birmingham and in edinburgh i would love to see you at some of those and then november the 15th i will be at the ripple effect conference in lawrence massachusetts so lots of chances to see me this fall i'd love to catch up learn more grab your tickets by going to asksciencemike.com or the liturgistsgathering.com [Music] hey science mike love your work uh you've really helped me in my own deconstruction reconstruction phase um i've got a question about uh a god or an observer outside of space and time and what humanity or the universe would look like um to that observer given that they would exist outside of time so therefore or my assumption or understanding limited as it is would be that everything that has and is and ever will be exists all at the same time so if say you were a person who would fly around the world um you would be leaving strings of yourself um and then if you were stationary you would be just this one sort of more gelatinous blob um some more so than others but um yeah just wondering what your thoughts would be on what it would look like for creation to exist in one space and time or if that's even the correct application of the science um no idea but love to hear your thoughts on the matter thanks bye this is absolutely one of my favorite questions to think about uh and one i have pondered a great deal that i've bugged physicists with [Laughter] and um and that i i did my best to cover in my first book finding god in the waves which comes out in paperback october the 3rd by the way if you're looking for a cheap way to grab that book and hear what i had to say on this in more detail just go to findinggodintheways.com or go to any place books are sold and ask about finding god in the ways gosh but it's such a good question and it's so hard to answer you know what would all of creation look like to an observer beyond time that's a valid question it's got verbs it's got nouns it's got a subject it's got an object it seems like it should compute from a linguistic standpoint but it doesn't here's why uh here's another sentence that is as valid semantically and grammatically but that doesn't actually pose an answerable question okay wait wait for it do rocks like salsa okay you've got a subject a noun rocks uh you've got an interrative statement with do you've got a verb like you've got salsa another noun uh an object here but what's the problem with the question rocks can't like things rocks don't have the implied conscious experience that allows the verb like to function we could certainly buy a lot of salsa and get a spoon and put salsa on as many rocks as we wanted to and we could ask these rocks you know polling data did you like the salsa and the rocks won't be able to communicate a preference regarding salsa i hope i'm not overstating the point here here's another one do photons experience time that's a really common question and we typically even science educators even real physicists will often say no photons don't experience time because of time dilation and how as you approach the speed of light time slows down except the passage of time it doesn't really apply to photons they don't have a reference frame a photon is not an observer so the question of experience doesn't apply to a photon and can't apply to a photon and any observer has mass and therefore can't experience what a photon experiences so on the surface it seems like a profound question but when you actually start to do the physics it becomes a nonsense question right even if you use einsteinian relativity some of the assumptions of relativity are what they're based on the speed of light being something a reference frame is compared to and not a reference frame itself and this is incredibly relevant to your question about what would creation look like to a timeless creator or an observer beyond time you see our intuition our cognition and therefore our language strongly relates to three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension and i can i can demonstrate to you how closely these things are tied if you've got a smartphone go to the app store and download an app called 4d toys that's four dimensional toys and it will allow you to manipulate four dimensional objects which is a perfectly valid thing to do mathematically but our brains don't understand it we can't get it it's never intuitive you can take what looks like a cube and put it on what looks like a square hole and the cube won't pass through the hole because there is an obstruction in the fourth dimension which we can only sweep through in this app okay and if that is is hard to understand without a visual don't worry it's hard to understand with a visual because our language is strongly related to three dimen spatial dimensions that unfold across one temporal dimension so observer implies a reference frame the verb to look implies a temporal awareness the very act of looking is to engage in physical dimensions and temporal dimensions this is why i am a mystic if we speak of a god that has any validity in what we understand of the fundamental nature of the universe in physics this god is not like us words like consciousness look observe cause effect would not apply well to a god who exists in singularity state to a god who um if as as our faith claims is everywhere if this god is uh also at light speed then the assumptions we project about our experience onto that god simply are not valid which is why i'm also a christian the incarnation of god in christ gives us a god much more relatable the stories in the bible of a god participating in reality in a way that can be understood by humans is much more relatable our faith gives us a framework within to contemplate and to ponder and to discover things about god but if we ask physics-themed questions we find very quickly that our intuition and our language are insufficient to describe truly universal and truly fundamental aspects of reality our next question came in via email and it reads hi science mike what is going on in my brain when i am doing something on autopilot like when i get home from work without remembering the drive home is it a hypnotic state or some kind of energy conservation mode any activity that becomes habitual tends to slip right out of my awareness from time to time which seems sort of scary when it involves things like driving do i simply not remember or was i not aware in the moment thanks a ton it's a fantastic question and it makes sense if you understand the evolution and structure of our brains most beings with brains have a brain that is divided from between a hind brain and a in the case of human evolution the forebrain has grown dramatically i mean really really dramatically our brains as they've developed newer structures appear on top of older structures this is why you might hear a neuroscientist talk about your lizard brain or your monkey brain or your mammal brain versus your human brain these different levels of sophistication are kind of stacked on top of each other like a brain burrito okay so they kind of wrap around each other as well the most sophisticated part of your brain is the neocortex it's a thin layer of neurons around the very outside of the brain where a majority of your neurons are found and your neocortex does really amazing things like language and advanced sensory processing and analytical reasoning all this really really great stuff but it's pretty slow and it takes a lot of energy and our brain prefers to use those older more time-tested circuits as much as possible so when we rehearse activities at first we have to really concentrate to pull them off whether that's riding a bicycle driving a car juggling whatever it is at first it takes a lot of attention and focus to do it but as we forge uh pathways and networks in our brain related to those movements the more ancient parts of our brain basically automate this task they no longer require conscious effort to execute think about how easily you move your hands you don't think about the movements required to pick something up off your desk but if you watch a very small infant do the same thing you'll see them trying to turn arm movement into something automatic so we have a couple of competing networks in the brain we have basically a narrating network that we would think of as engaged most of the time that's when we're concentrating on something when we're basically creating a story of our consciousness and then we have a direct experiencing network that is more associated with the older parts of the brain and that's something that's been uncovered as researchers have uh done brain imaging scans related to mindfulness meditation that the feeling of being in the now of being present being aware that's that's associated with the direct experience network sense of detachment is associated with the narrative network one structure in particular the basal ganglia which among other things mediates activity between our frontal cortices and other parts of the brain is quite ancient but appears in research to be strongly associated with what you would describe as your brain's autopilot so you've learned to drive you've driven many times to the point that if you want you can make a phone call or daydream or do other things and your basic ganglia will do a pretty good job of keeping the car on the road will do a pretty good job of turning the brakes on as long as there's no sudden stops running the accelerator and uh so you can daydream or do it else or as is the example when you come home and don't remember how you got there you just completely check out you clock out your your higher functions are kind of just disengaged you're not napping but it's close and that's this is actually dangerous some studies have shown even something as simple as washing the dishes you have an elevated risk of injury when you're doing it on autopilot so how do you how do you mitigate that mindfulness and an emphasis on direct experience can keep you engaged so if you if you study mindfulness meditation you can you can be mindful while you drive you can notice the weight of your body against the seat and how the seat feels how the steering wheel feels where the light is coming from you can choose to pay attention to many details which will bring you present and into the moment and help you avoid autopilot but again that takes conscious effort and i say this is someone who autopilot drives all the time and as a result is an absolutely terrible driver i drive very well on unfamiliar roads in unfamiliar areas because i i don't go into autopilot but as soon as i get into a good routine i have no idea how i got from point a to point b except for those moments when i slam on brakes and become aware that oh my gosh i'm driving a car so that's what's happening in your brain autopilot mode is related to the basal ganglia and a couple of competing networks in the brain which by the way uh one study has shown that we're on autopilot almost half the time in our day so this is not a rare thing this is incredibly common and related to the structure of human brains more details on the show notes for this episode on ask sciencemike.com hey science mike this is sabrina from tacoma washington my question has to do with the fact that my church is being protested by an individual who used to go to our church but no longer goes to our church and i was curious about the science of um when someone is protesting what happens in their brain and is there a reinforcing factor that helps them to continue to protest or is it just a behavior thanks science mike love what you do it's actually pretty tough to um talk about what happens in the brain while protesting for several reasons one it's difficult to image someone's brain while they are in a protest all of the brain imaging technologies we have involve you sitting in a controlled environment and then you know doing activities yes but only activities allow you to remain relatively motionless while your brain is imaged and if you if you picture a proper protest that doesn't involve sitting in an fmri scanner it's out on the street there's things going on and i'm not sure we can reproduce a lot of the activity associated with protesting especially the social activity associated with protesting in those environments so i wasn't really able to find any brain imaging studies related to protests but the other thing that makes it tough to talk about what happens in the brain while protesting is there's like so many different kinds of protests you know is it a picket line is it a march in the streets is it a sit-in you know this this is incredibly relevant because it is dangerous at the very least careless to over generalize the findings of brain imaging studies which is a huge problem in popular science and discussions of neuroscience today i i can tell you a few things about protests that are safe and related to the brain one is that protesters tend to be younger college age or younger and that's largely due to brain development teenagers and college students share something in common they have fully formed emotional capacity in the brain they can feel feelings as strongly as any adult and yet they don't have a fully formed orbitofrontal cortex so it is more difficult for them to see the consequences of a given action to imagine career consequences or whatever social pressures these kinds of things and it makes them more likely to protest in terms of their brain structure and the statistics on who participates in protest validate that theory two protests are more likely to be self-sustaining as numbers grow because people feel social identity and an increased level of neurological arousal it's very stimulating when there's a lot of people protesting with you no matter what kind of protest that it is and of course things are going to affect how the brain responds how much opposition is there what is the opposition doing how loud is it what is the form of protest you could imagine if you could image the brain of someone at a sit-in in a corporate lobby where there isn't a lot of opposition and there's no police presence is going to be very different than someone marching shouting while you know tear gas is being thrown at them by a line of police and riot gear these are going to be radically different brain states because of the radically different circumstances around the protest now when i talk about your question in particular there's some fascinating aspects from at least what i hear in the question one is you're talking about a solo protest or someone protesting alone and that does present some pretty serious emotional headwinds so i'd have to imagine there's like a really intense emotional impetus behind this protest a solo protester is really worried about a loss of social standing so one thing that could motivate someone to protest alone would be if they've already had a perceived loss of social standing and feel they can regain it through protest maybe they felt an intense feeling of betrayal maybe they've had a very traumatic experience that has gotten tied up with their day-to-day life and experiences that's not saying i'm not casting judgment on whether your church was engaged and that people can have dramatic experiences um that aren't necessarily directly related to the actions or appropriate or inappropriate actions of another party uh especially if they're related to further actions in the past or earlier experiences what we would call triggering but there's no there's no magical brain formula here for why this person is protesting or how to deal with them other than in general kindness solidarity and listening tend to be much more effective in disbanding protests than active opposition or uh antagonizing people you'd be surprised how well solidarity works i've been to a couple of corporate protests in the past and you know companies tend to bring water they tend to bring snacks they tend to bring corporate representatives to listen to what the protesters are saying who write it down who promise follow-up and offer contact information and uh you'll notice that it seems in america today corporations are a little bit better at responding to protests than governments in general largely because they have different economic incentives and structures right corporations don't want bad pr government is often very concerned with maintaining social order and government authority so i don't know what's happening in the brain of your protester i don't know enough about the experience but in general i would say a solo protester that's a pretty hard thing to sustain compared to even if just a few people show up and certainly it's very easy to sustain a protest once you get dozens or more people involved our last question comes in via email and it reads regarding the split brain patients and the left versus right brain thing i like your i like your opener there i was listening to your interview on the bible for normal people and you touched briefly on the topic of split brain patients and how scientists have been able to isolate responses from each hemisphere as they studied people who underwent surgery to sever the corpus callosum you related one of their responses back to your spiritual journey saying that you found it encouraging that literally one half of the brain can be an atheist while the other half is a theist my question is how pertinent is this to the realm of mental health is it possible that only one half of my brain for instance has an anxiety disorder while the other half knows that it is capable of so much more than the exam anxiety allows me to achieve i ask because the other night i was talking okay crying to my husband again about this illness and as he reassured me that i am intelligent and capable i kept thinking to myself but i know that and yet there's this other self saying over and over again that i don't and that i'm not can neuroscience explain why we can believe both positive and negative things about ourselves simultaneously is it because one hemisphere literally disagrees with the other looking forward to your next book jenna m well jenna you know the split brain phenomenon and those patients make for a fascinating case study precisely because their brains are so atypical only when the corpus callosum is severed that the two halves of the brain have the opportunity to diverge so significantly and to facilitate us communicating with a single hemisphere of the brain without the influence of the other hemisphere so in your case if your corpus callosum is intact you're not going to have the same cognitive decoherence between the two hemispheres of your brain they're they're communicating state information much more frequently or in this case at all but that doesn't mean your brain agrees on everything all the time when you talk about an anxiety disorder what you're you're talking about is that anxiety primarily resides in the brain's emotional centers and in the limbic system and the part of your brain that is saying but i know i'm intelligent and capable i know that i can do more is happening in the higher levels of the brain but the thing about our conscious brain our analytical brain is research is telling us that it's not quite this present of the brain it's not quite the ceo yes sometimes we have executive function originating there but some research is telling us that as much as anything that part of our brain is the narrator and provides a linguistic and rational justification for our actions and in the case of people who have some neurological impairment or disability or brain damage where we see them taking actions they don't remember making and then responding to the outcome of those actions they will tell you a reason why they did something that is a total made-up justification and they don't know it it's their narrator trying to make sense of what their senses are telling them and uh that really challenges our our conception of self so in your case i'd like you just to imagine your brain for a moment as a zoo like there's a zoo in your brain and there's a crocodile in this zoo that is very aggressive and very fearful there is a really playful labrador in your brain that is friendly and affectionate and warm but also can be aggressive and there is a chimpanzee in your brain that is very concerned with social order and social standing and quite intelligent and then in here with these four animals is also you a person and the trick about this zoo is all four of you have to come to decisions together to eat or to go visit people to do anything and just imagine how hard it would be to reason with the crocodile you know you could probably without language get to some degree of consensus and communication certainly with the dog very likely with the chimpanzee but the crocodile doesn't know what language is the crocodile doesn't have empathy or or understand about your emotional states and that is actually pretty seriously uh applicable to the way we live our lives the lower parts of your brain where anxiety is generated they don't have access to your narrative linguistic model of reality they rely on far more ancient and primitive means of discerning what is safe and what is not my family recently moved to los angeles and myself my wife and my daughters have all reported kind of a generalized anxiety and of course we do there's no way for the very most primitive parts of our brain to understand that we've left our home in florida and we've moved here and this is permanent that part of the brain can't understand that it only sees that things are different and it'll just take a long time to get used to the new environment to accept it as normal and safe and so as i deal with uh you know my own emotional hang-ups and issues i sometimes find it helpful to visualize the different networks in my brain literally as animals and to think of ways to comfort them if i'm very nervous for example i might i might scratch the back of my head the same way i would scratch a dog and just imagine myself becoming more calm and that kind of visualization can be helpful in the same way that sometimes we need repetition to tell us things that we already know if i'm afraid that you know i'm working on a book and it's not going to be any good sometimes i need friends to tell me that i can write well even though i know i can write well the social part of my brain might need that validation and that's okay so it's okay to receive your husband saying that you are intelligent and capable because although you already know that maybe just maybe the crocodile in your brain doesn't know it yet [Music] you've done it you've listened to another episode about science mike and i'm so glad you're here by the way don't forget to send in your hashtag ask bible pete questions pete ends is going to come host this program and answer your questions about the bible but you've got to tweet me with hashtag ask bible pete or send me an email or a voicemail on asksciencemike.com and reference ask bible beat in order to have your question considered for that program as always i would like to thank andrew golucky for helping with pre-production on our science mike greg nord dean for producing the show and my friend jeff bodaford for the amazing ass science mic theme song thanks for listening everyone and i will talk to you next week [Music]