Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman on How He Changed His Mind about Past Lives, the Importance of Creative Intelligence, Different Types of Narcissism & How to Overcome the Victim Mindset
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These prodigies, if you trace someone in their family long enough, someone had that skill. That is a form of past life memory. When a child comes out and they're able to do something with no preparation. Like they become a pianist and you're saying somewhere in the family you think there's a pianist. Case by case and you start to find, oh, the great grandfather in Russia had this amazing talent. Isn't that a form of past life memory? It's an intergenerational transmission. You're saying that there is something coded in your DNA. That was transmitted to them. It's a memory.

And the question is, if we believe in a collective consciousness, if it's not encoded in your DNA, can you pull someone else's life memory from the collective consciousness? - When you really look at some of this incredible phenomenon, the more that I can rule out all of these confounds, the more excited I get that there's something mysterious that is even in further need. We should keep our minds open. - Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. - I'm Jonathan Cohen. - And welcome to our breakdown.

We're going to talk about human potential today. This was a hard episode to summarize in terms of what we're actually going to talk about, but... Because we talk about so many things, many of which do relate to potential. Let's explain what we mean by potential. Here's what I mean by it, and now we can also have your explanation because...

What we learn in this episode is that truth is somewhat subjective and we need explanations on how each of us see reality. For me, potential means what are we capable of? What are our core skills, meaning what are our attributes and our abilities? Many people think we have five senses.

that our ideas, consciousness is localized in the brain. I do not believe that. Science is exploring these ideas fundamental to the nature of our consciousness, how we perceive our reality. Physicists understand it one way. Philosophers understand it one way. Scientists are skeptical, would you say?

Yeah, and today we're going to be talking to a cognitive psychologist who is willing to talk about human potential in ways that many scientists will not talk about it. We're going to talk kind of all across the spectrum of potential. We're going to talk about personal potential. He has a book, Ungifted.

intelligence redefined, about kind of misunderstood potential of the individual. And we're also going to talk about things that limit us from achieving our full potential, including having access to or even understanding things outside of the realm of the material world. In terms of intellectual potential, we explore and kind of turn on its head the

accepted idea of what makes someone intelligent or not. There are different types of intelligence. He explores the idea of creative intelligence and that there are a lot of children who do not fit into the school system who may be actually the ones who can help push humanity, civilization, society forward because of their creative ability to problem solve and think outside the box.

He also talks about cognitive distortions, ways in which that we're thinking that could be limiting our potential. There may be ways that you're thinking that you don't even realize are keeping you stuck in all sorts of ruts with personal relationships, in work, and even in your relationship to something bigger than yourself. We...

touch on catastrophizing, black and white thinking, shouldisms. The list goes on and we explore them, but they are so prevalent in our thinking that we may not even realize we are doing it. We think that's just the way the world is. And when we learn to start shifting them, identifying and shifting them, we can access so many more opportunities and see creative solutions to our problems that we never realized were there.

We're also going to talk to Scott about some of the incredible guests that he's had on his podcast, talking about things like, is there a genetic basis for cancer?

identifications of reincarnation. Is there any sort of way that we can explain and understand a collective consciousness? I love that he really is bringing what a truly open, skeptical, scientific mind is to these problems that many of us are interested in and really want to believe can be discussed in a legitimate way. At one point, he says, I now believe in past lives. And when we talk to him about it further, what he describes is

are children who have inherited memory with savant ability, meaning somewhere in their family lineage was someone that had an extra amazing ability, for example, to play the piano or to

decipher math problems. And many generations later, this trait resurfaced in this child with no training showing unbelievable gifted ability. And Scott's going to talk about his theory as to how sort of...

creative memory can in many cases be called reincarnation or past life understanding. And I just love how he frames it again in the scientific lens and makes it really accessible to all of us. Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive psychologist. He's the host of the Psychology Podcast. He's also a professor of psychology at Columbia University. His writing appears in Atlantic, Scientific American, Psychology Today, all sorts of places. He's the author of 11 previous books.

Rise Above is the one we're going to talk about today, but also highly recommend Ungifted. And we're going to get into so many interesting arenas of his research, his work, and also his personal experience in exploring things outside of traditional scientific models of measurement. Let's welcome to The Breakdown, in person, Scott Barry Kaufman. Break it down.

- Scott Barry Kaufman, welcome to The Breakdown. - Oh, it's so good to be here. I'm so glad to be here. - You and I have connected through a mutual friend, Sam Harris, and we've had several conversations, but I've been listening to your podcast, The Psychology Podcast, and in particular have been really taken with

I don't know, the ability that you have to straddle the worlds of kind of science and wonder. Thank you. And I wonder if we can sort of start... I love that you put it that way. Well, that's kind of what it feels like. I feel so seen.

I feel so seen. I wonder if we could start a little bit. I'm just a little kid inside. Well, I think I'd like for you to sort of take us through a little bit of your story. I really enjoyed, I mean, obviously Rise Above is fantastic, but I also really enjoyed Ungifted. That's my baby, right? It will always be my baby. Ungifted, intelligence redefined, the truth about talent, practice, creativity, and the many paths to greatness.

I put everything I got into that book and then I realized I was still alive. And I was like, what the hell am I going to do now the rest of my life? You ever finish a big project where you just like, you're like, I put it all in. What else do I got? Well, tell us your story a little bit. You know, kind of what's most kind of captivating is you had a path that in many ways was

would have led people to disregard you, not value your intelligence, for you not even to acknowledge your own abilities. Tell us a little bit about your story. Sure. I was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder when I was very, very young. It appeared as though I was, let's say, ungifted. That's a term I kind of made up, but that's how I was treated.

The opposite, whatever the opposite of gifted is, you know, it took me an extra couple milliseconds to process things in real time. So people thought I was really slow. And I was put in special ed. And then in fifth grade, I went to a special school for kids with a learning disability. And my parents couldn't afford it for more than a year. So then I was put back into I was kept in special education all the way till ninth grade.

Now I look back at the IEP reports and things. It says things like, for instance, when they tested me in fifth grade, they said he no longer has the auditory processing disability. And I could sense that and feel that. I was like, why am I still here? I don't feel I have a problem. But it says in the report we need to keep him in because now he has a lot of anxiety. And I'm like, you –

mother of beepers. What do you think? Well, how do you think I have the anxiety? You're telling me I'm stupid every day. So it's this, I realized this, it's a cycle. It's the self-perpetuating cycle. Um, so I was kept there until ninth grade. Um, and I remember I was taken out of, um, uh, the history classroom. I was, I was ready for regular, like I wanted to so desperately to show that I was intelligent. Um, but they, they forced me to, to, to be removed from the history class. And,

take an untimed test in the special education room. And I wasn't having it. I was just like, I was like, I remember saying something like, well, I have the rest of my life to take this test. What's the rush? You know? And there was a teacher there that day who had never seen me before. Sometimes it takes a fresh eye. She was a special ed teacher. She said, I'd like to talk to you after class. And she like tilted her head and she's like, what are you still doing here? And I repeated the question in my head and it really went to like, what am I doing?

what am I still doing? Because I really desperately wanted someone in a position of power to question that, you know, for me. It's like I needed it. Like something surged through me and I immediately ran to the pay phone and I called my mom. I said, I'm not reporting. I'm breaking out of special ed. And my mom's screaming. She's an overprotective Jewish mother. And she's like, what?

What are they doing to you over there? But I said, no. And so I became the first person in my school district history for the kid himself to break out of special ed. There was this moment, like I also had this profound realization which the threads are in Rise Above, which is,

no one's coming to save me. Like I actually, I'm the one that needs to make this decision. You know, like I have well-meaning parents, everyone means well, but no one knew my inner experience, which was that I felt I was capable. Jonathan has a, not the same experience, but. Oh, what's your story like? I was diagnosed in the second grade with a generalized learning disability. I struggled to learn to read. I had

a fantastic auditory i still have that the generalized thing yeah yeah i had a fantastic auditory memory i processed everything through auditory but when it came to writing couldn't spell oh wow couldn't really sound things out had enormous anxiety about reading and

catching up and also being removed from regular classes. I was in regular classes, but then would get extra help or had to miss gym class. And the social anxiety, where are you going? Why are you leaving class and not in gym class? Which is like the best thing about school in general. - It's my favorite. - And then leaving early, I would go to a tutor to get special help.

And I would leave at 2 o'clock some days. And everyone was like, why are you... And anything that makes me feel different, I'm like, of course, terrified of. And so I fought against...

the label and I refused help because I didn't want to be seen as different. And yet I wasn't keeping up with reading. I wasn't getting through any of the books. I would make up books instead of having to read them. And, you know, my mom would help me a lot. That should be an indicator of something. He's a writer.

Come on. And I also went to a specialized school in the fifth grade, actually. They found a school. Regular school just was fraught with just all the, what do they want from me? How am I going to do this? Can I do this? Am I smart enough? Should I be in the special ed class? But the special ed class had a really wide range.

range of students. Some of them with very intense developmental delays that you're like, I'm not that. - Right, right. You didn't feel a sense of belonging there. - Or in the regular-- - Nowhere. - Exactly, so I really felt displaced. And then I went to a school designed for kids with learning disabilities in the fifth grade. - Were we in the same school? - I was in Toronto, Canada, so maybe not. And I got in a very small environment with kids who were all dealing with their own challenges.

And I just had an amazing teacher who was like, I'm going to teach you what you need to know. I'm going to fill in the gaps. And it was really the first time where there wasn't a stigma of not knowing something. Like you didn't have to pretend that, oh, you knew everything and everything was fine.

You knew how to do the homework. It's like, come in and let's work together. And I thankfully was there between fifth and eighth grade. Okay. And then went back into the mainstream public school system. And that did not go well at all. Yeah. It coincided for me with a lot of a big family tragedy event. So I was emotionally pulled out. But I think there is a huge emotional component there.

to being regulated as a student. And if you're not regulated and you are anxious or you're uncertain in any way, that has a huge implication to how well you're gonna be able to process information, be able to feel confident and be able to learn and grow and really fit in. - Yeah, well said. Did you have any English teachers who recognized your gift? - I did in like the eighth grade.

And, you know, I was learning Hebrew, English, and French in the first grade. Oh, my gosh. So I think it was overwhelming. In Hebrew, which was a very phonetic language, I got much more easily. But I think it was an overload, and I was, like, fighting back. I remember the first moment of rebellion for me was standing up in French class in the second group. And did you say, no? Well, I used some expletives, and I stormed out of the class because I just –

And I can think back to the level of frustration that that kid was feeling. And I'm like, that isn't the type of pressure that a second grader should have felt. Yeah. Agreed. I actually ran away that night from my house because I was so terrified that the school was going to call the house and how much trouble I was going to get in. So imagine that kid feeling like the only way to escape that level of pressure was to run away. Miami Alex Breakdown is supported by the official Big Bang Theory podcast.

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What is it about the way our society is structured to see intelligence and what we desire as a society in humans that can be challenging for people who are different? Oh, boy. Well, you know, a lot of it has the roots in the IQ test, to be honest. There's this idea that quickness of processing is the measure of intelligence as opposed to depth.

of processing or even dare I say creativity of processing. And these are two things I've tried to

add on to the intelligence sort of conceptualization along with unconscious intelligence as well, which we nerded out about. So we'll get to that. Yeah. Cool. Cool. There's just there is this idea. There really is the idea that, you know, the extent to which you're kind of there's this computer processing numbers and outputting things quickly, you know, is the extent to which you're intelligent. Right.

And that really does leave out way too many kids as far as I'm concerned. I mean, one is way too many in my opinion, but...

it does leave out, I mean, I actually estimate, I put a number to it in my book, Twice Exceptional. I did a book for educators. And the idea is that if you look at twice exceptional kids, kids who have a learning disability, but also have a high IQ. So they're both, people estimate about 300,000 kids, but I argue, hold on, we need to go beyond just the IQ as the indicator of intelligence. What if you have a learning disability and you have

amazing writing ability. So I say if we expand it to that and I crunch the numbers because I'm a nerd, millions of kids are falling between the cracks who are twice exceptional because we have this dichotomous system that you're either gifted. Actually, it's actually a three-part system. You're either learning disabled, gifted, or we don't pay any attention to you. You're in mainstream education and it's not good for anyone.

Eric Weinstein talks about how we're basically sectioning off the people who will make the biggest leaps forward in human civilization and progress. I agree with Eric, yeah. Because the people who are going to think outside of the box and think creatively and don't fit in to the status quo and assembly line of modern education are really the ones who are going to break the paradigm and come up with the net new ideas. Yeah.

Yeah, I think he nails it when he says that, and I would completely agree with that. And the whole idea of some people are neurodivergent, and then we have the typical people. I'm actually starting to come around there's no such thing as a typical person. In the abstract, there is statistically, but have you ever met an individual who's typical? Yeah.

And I don't even know what that really means. And I've had some really great discussions with, I want to give props as well to El Todd Rose, who we had a great two-part discussion in my podcast about this because he wrote a whole book about why do we design around the typical when no one is really typical. Everyone has, if you look enough at enough traits and you start adding up the traits, personality traits, talents, abilities, no one's at the midline on everything. Someone's going to have an extreme trait somewhere.

And to me, that's all neurodivergency is, is like, what's your extreme trait? You know, and how are you like everyone? Like we should ask everyone that, you know, all kids. What's it? What is it? What is what the hell does that mean? Well, above two standard deviations above the meat. I mean, I have a precise statistical definition. You can find any trait. Let's say agreeableness. OK, maybe someone's two standard deviations. Maybe that's their thing. You know, they're they jump in all the time. How can I help?

How can I help? Okay, that's your neurodivergency. We don't think of that as neurodivergency, but why not? Why are only certain things neurodivergency, other things aren't? Well, that's a good question. Thank you. Introversion, I've argued that should be 100% part of the neurodivergency spectrum, introversion. It's actually correlated with autism, 0.80. People don't know that. Yeah.

I sleep with my hands folded in. I didn't know that's a sign of neurodivergency. The internet told me so. I have to sleep like this. So I saw on Instagram and I actually asked Fred, apparently, like my whole life I've slept like that.

I didn't know. And I didn't know until this Instagram post where this girl was like trying not to sleep and do the hand thing. And I'm like, why wouldn't you do the hand thing? Or why is my hand thing on Instagram? Apparently it's a measure. Like it's a thing that a lot of special people do.

Can you talk a little bit, you know, if every trait in theory, two standard deviations out, could be neurodivergency, are we all neurodivergent? What are we talking about when we're talking about neurodivergence? I'm starting to actually come around to the fact that we should be identifying everyone's

special sauce, whatever it is. Why only some people have special sauce, others don't? Let's only isolate the ones that do and give them all the resources. I'm coming around to this idea that there are so many different personalities, there's so many traits, traits, psychological traits, and physical traits. They contribute to sports ability on offer in the human genome.

there's enough to go around for, for every, if you go enough, you'll find an extreme trait in anyone. You really will tip. But I will say traditionally, uh, neurodivergency has been, uh, confined to things like autism, uh, dyslexia, ADHD, developmental disorder disorders. Um, and I would actually challenge, uh, some of these labels. I've, uh, I wrote an article recently about ADHD that we should actually view it as an extreme trait and, and that's it. You

you know, not as a, like get rid of that, you know, the D stands for disorder at the end of ADHD, but I think it's a misnomer. Well, let's talk about that for a minute. If we got rid of it as a disorder, would we then either celebrate it, accept it? You know, I, for example, think that I've always been probably on the very ADHD spectrum somewhere. And as a mime thinks I will

Go ahead. What does Mayim think? That face, that face. I don't think there should be any question in anyone's mind. Okay, yeah.

Earlier on in my life, I had a much harder time assigning focus when needed. Yeah. But also, that came with a hyper focus on things that I was super interested in, and I found that could be 100% my superpower. Cool. Without that, I don't know that I would have been able to accomplish a lot of what I've accomplished. But in a classroom setting. Horrible. Bingo. Bingo. Horrible. So that's what I argue. Yeah.

Like, how dare I try to add nuance to this discussion? But I hear people describe ADHD as a superpower. I hear people describe ADHD as a disorder. Look, it's neither. It can be a disorder and it can be a superpower. Like, why do people have trouble with yes and thinking? You know, it depends on the context.

ADHD is just, if you just look at what it is, it is a label. There is no thing that exists that is ADHD. It is a label that we humans have created for problematic children that are not behaving.

And they can't sit still. They can't sit still. And it also tends to correlate with, to be fair to adulthood, problematic behaviors that are tough for the individual experiencing it because it is frustrating having trouble concentrating. - Well, and also I just wanna say that when I was in school,

a million years ago, but not that many years ago. - I think we're like the same age. - There was always like one or two kids who I think by my current thinking, I'd be like, oh, that was a kid that was clearly on the extreme spectrum and had a lot of difficulty. But what I hear from my kids who are in school is that most kids are on some medication for ADHD. It's like a medicated classroom from junior high. - The rates have skyrocketed.

In that case, while I want to say like, oh, it's a trait, there's something going on because a teacher can't teach a group of kids where the majority of them are having those problems. Is it a broken system or a broken person? Yeah.

What a great question. Am I allowed to say both? And I would never describe it as broken person, but I would say there are some parts of this. Let's go down both avenues. Let's start with the system. I mean-

Just full transparency, I think the system is horribly broken. Yes, I agree. I would use the word broken for system, I just wouldn't for individual. Yeah. No, I totally agree. Yeah, yeah. So with the system, what's interesting is a lot of people don't realize the extent to which environmental toxins can actually be causally related to ADHD, lead in the environment. So obesity can lead to ADHD-appearing symptoms.

Also copious amounts of sugar. I was a massive sugar addict. Absolutely sugar. There's something about fat, about lipids in the bloodstream. I mean, people are starting to study this in a really a way that I like the way they're studying this because we're realizing the more research comes out suggests it's less and less the mother's fault.

It's not that the mother just didn't hold you enough, which is the, that's the predominant narrative in our society right now that I see everywhere on Instagram. I look, it's like ADHD, it's because of your trauma from your parents and usually it's the mother that's blamed. And I think that's, I can't tell you how many emails I get from the kindest mothers in the world who are like,

I've done everything right for my child and they still have ADHD. What am I doing wrong? And I think that it is part of it. We need to think of it in a system way. - In a system that also predicts what pregnancy and labor should look like, does not necessarily support breastfeeding, encourages a ton of interventions that in many cases separate the mother from the child or don't allow hormones to be released to the child. So like in terms of like what a lot of us think, and also we're told to feed our kids food that is also contributing all these things. - This is so important.

Even the best mother that we're trying to be is in many cases shaped by a system that's not supportive. Exactly. That's why we really need to think about this. I'm kind of fed up with people who feel like they have the easy answer. It is trauma, this nebulous term that just catch all for everything. Actually, some recent research, and when I really looked into it, I was like, there really is something here. Iron deficiency.

Kids, get your kids tested for iron deficiency. Like this is, meta-analyses are showing this to be a really big factor in development of ADHD symptoms. So we just need to look beyond, you know, the environment as just parenting, you know. And this is why people report

dietary changes actually can make a shift, which we're learning more and more about gut permeability and its connection to cognition and behavior. So you may be looking at a kid that is having something nutritional going on, something immune going on, and our solution is to medicate it. Medicate, medicate, shut them up.

But also the whole shutting them up thing, like you're also shutting down a lot of creativity. And so I do want to acknowledge what you said earlier about like it can be the superpower part because it can be a superpower. So let's talk about the individual. We talked about the system. Talk about the individual. It can be. I've done a lot of research on the link between mental illness and creativity.

And ADHD is part of it. Also being prone to schizophrenia. If you have schizophrenia light, L-I-T-E. So let's say your family member might have full blown schizophrenia, but you got the watered down genes. That makes you like 10 times more likely to think in a creative way.

and to have a rich imagination without the downside. We don't need to put you in the mental institution. God forbid you think of bizarre associations that might end up being world-changing. Ah, like nonlinear thinking in certain situations is very not helpful if you're trying to have a conversation in a therapist's office. Yeah, that's true. Or on a podcast. But nonlinear thinking in a

creative mode or if you're in a creative role, you can make connections other people don't. Yeah, absolutely. Can I tell you a little bit about the neuroscience of ADHD, if this is interesting at all to you? I think it is. So there's one brain network that educators have tended to obsessively focus on, and that's the executive attention network. To the extent to which a kid is having trouble with their executive attention network is the extent to which we need to medicate them, shut them up, because they're not focusing on you. It's like, how dare them not focus on our boring lecture, you know?

-Medicate them. -It's very boring. Yeah. The Executive Attention Network is for paying attention to boring things. Let's just say that's what it's for. It's because you got to inhibit and suppress and hold things in working memory. You make it sound like it's a bad thing. I love my executive functioning. Yeah, well, yeah, that's true too. Like there are many benefits to being able to have a meditation practice. That's a whole different topic.

that helps you. But there's also another brain network that I think we ignore completely. I call it the imagination brain network. Nerdy scientists call it the default mode brain network, but I've renamed it the imagination network because it really has to do with our

our at default state our mind tends to think about the future and tends to prospect you know about about our own personal self as well as uh positive constructive daydreaming is my my um one of my advisors in grad school called it well and in depression the default mode network it's it's telling a whole different set of messages different thing the default mode network is connected to the is connected to other areas that we don't want it connected to right

The anxious areas. The perseverative, yeah. Yeah. It's all about what are these networks, how are they connected? It's not about any one of them is good or bad. Right. But people with ADHD have an overactive default mode. Even I call it by the nerdy name, an overactive imagination network, which leads me to believe, as I wrote in a Scientific American article, shouldn't we just say that they have, it's overactive imagination disorder? Isn't that really what it is? I mean-

If you can use that as a way to generate ideas and then have either help or be able to transition the creative and imagination into execution, then that's a fantastic capability, not a disorder. I think so. Yeah. Well, this goes to my concern about medication. Yeah. Sorry. It just also goes to my concern. Sorry. I have a different concern. What's your concern? So one of the concerns that I have, and this is something that, you know, it's kind of like,

you can talk to you about everything because it all connects. So one of the things, one of the things that, you know, that, that we've noted and noticed is a lot more adults identifying as neurodivergent or a lot of people receiving adult and teenagers on Tik TOK and teenagers and Tik TOK, but it's the adults also watching on Tik TOK. But in addition to,

you know, when people have a new awareness of ADHD, it can often be, and I'm just saying from a work environment standpoint, it can be kind of cumbersome in certain cases if someone sort of declares, I need a tremendous amount of help in moving things forward because it's

In a work environment, in many traditional work environments here in a Western culture, we do. We value independence. We value efficiency. And I wonder where some of this also starts dipping into some of the narcissism that we talk about because so much of what people report about independence

here's my diagnosis and here's this, and I want everyone to like be accepting and we want to be accepting. But when I think about it in terms of how we, he's so mad right now. I have so many things to say about this point. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit because one of my favorite examples of you talking about this is the link between sensory processing sensitivity and vulnerable narcissism.

Sorry. Point eight zero correlation. Right. The link between sensory processing sensitivity and vulnerable narcissism. So I also wonder if with all of these diagnoses in particular for savvy, intelligent adults, if it then becomes this sort of rallying point that can spin its own

web of everyone needs to accommodate to me. How do we work with that? I think we need to button ADHD and then jump to this. Because you wanted to talk about medication, right? Well, I think... I'll hold both things in my mind at the same time. I love that. On the ADHD front, what...

A lot of the proponents of medication are like, they have to fit into the school system. They have to be able to go to school, right? Yeah. They have to be able to get through the system that exists. We don't have an alternative for most people. So I understand that. But we still want them to learn all the things that are going to be helpful to them when they go out into the world. It's not just like fit into the system. It's like, I want you to be able to- We want to educate people. And my point is that the system of education that we have

is doesn't accommodate for different kinds of intelligence and different like needs that a student would have where one student is able to sit down, listen to the lecture, be generally happy in eight hours of class. Someone else may need to not be at their desk, moving around a room, independent, checking in with a teacher more like in a Montessori style where that's either self-guided or sort of group guided in small areas and they're never going to succeed being at their desk sort of

Not chained to the desk, but that version of it. And the other proponent of medication is that, which I can't really speak to, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, is that we're helping them develop executive functioning through the stimulants and that that's going to help shape their brain, especially as they're growing so that they have better executive functioning as an adult.

I didn't have that experience because I never tried medication until my early 20s. Okay. When I did try medication, I was like, this is the most intense drug that I think exists. Adderall? What's Adderall? It was Ritalin. I tried Ritalin for a little while and tried Adderall. Okay. I'm like, I can sit down for eight hours and write. But when I go to sleep at night, it's go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep. Like, it just brought my-

It brought my system to that level where I'm like, this is not a natural or healthy intervention. And also what I wonder is if I had been given that as a younger person, what would have happened to that creative imagination that I think is some of my best skillset? Now, this ties into what you were saying about how do people manage both sides? Because

I agree totally that we can't have everyone saying this is my diagnosis and the world should accommodate me. However, when you're building teams,

And you have some people who are amazing at systems and system execution. Right, right, right. But they maybe struggle at seeing things that don't yet exist. And someone else who is into creative imagination and someone else who's extremely analytical who can take that creative imagination and say, here's four problems that we may foresee that we should solve for and then pass it. Like you can build...

a team of people who have complementary skill sets and like that's ultimately the best business if you're starting to hire and build an organization.

Well, I mean, no disagreements, no lies detected. I think the question goes back to mimes and then also, you know, buttoning up the, what is the trade-off? You know, is it that people should look to ADHD medication because there's longer term benefit in the developing structure of the brain and that trade-off doesn't sacrifice creativity? I think that's part one. And then part two would be more to the, um,

Accommodation part? Or the diagnosis in later adult life and how do people sort of accept who they are without asking for a blanket accommodation that the world bend to them. There's a lot there. There's a multi-part question. I want to just talk about the accommodation thing for an instant because when I talk in the book about, you know, you

You shouldn't expect everywhere you go people to accommodate you. That's different than leading with your strengths and hoping that if you're on a team, it's a different instance than the instance you brought up. Being on a team in a workplace, I mean, I just recently wrote a forward to a wonderful book like The Brain-Friendly Workplace, which is all about people with neurodiversity. We should absolutely be very friendly in the workplace to people with different kinds of minds.

and what their greatest strengths are. Specifically, the narcissism thing that comes in is a different beast. It's like something different. You're not leading with your strengths. You're not leading with what can you contribute. The focus is entirely on me and everyone around should tiptoe around me and treat me like even if I'm an asshole, for instance, people should forgive me immediately because I'm a highly sensitive person.

And, you know, I went berserk when I saw an interview once with Kanye West where he said, people, I'm so misunderstood. I'm really just a highly sensitive introvert.

And I wrote an article for Scientific American, was very cheeky, title was like, "21 Signs You're Secretly a Narcissist Masquerading as a Highly Sensitive Introvert." And the article was about vulnerable narcissism and how you can be highly sensitive in different ways. Being highly sensitive to criticism and your ego, like you can still be an asshole. Like you can be a highly sensitive asshole.

Do you know what I mean? Totally. Can we put that on a t-shirt? I'm a highly sensitive asshole. It would be a funny t-shirt actually just to like, you know.

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Before you keep going, why don't we describe what is a vulnerable narcissist?

So it's a spectrum people who score high in vulnerable narcissism like a journal article over here In our study we found that people who score high in vulnerable narcissism tend to score higher in Self instability they really are uncertain who they are and it makes them very insecure I'm a lot of them there is a correlation with early childhood abuse so, you know

These things are complicated, right? I'm not a big fan of shaming and blaming and saying this like, oh, let's laugh at the vulnerable narcissist. In general, I think that people who develop vulnerable narcissistic traits, it's a compensatory defense mechanism for real pain that they've experienced in their lives. What does it look like? Yeah, it looks like...

constantly having hostility and resentment for people who are more successful than you, feeling as though you're entitled to special privileges because you've suffered. Not because you're better than others, that's grandiose narcissism. See, there's two different types of narcissism with two different forms of entitlement associated with them. Grandiose narcissists are entitled to special privileges because they feel like they were born better than everyone else.

Vulnerable narcissists have quite a low self-esteem on average and tend to have an, it's really an uncertain self-esteem. There's actually no such thing as a low self-esteem. We find in our studies, no one reports a zero on self-esteem surveys. It's either the middle or high, suggesting it's really a low, that what we've been calling low is really just the participant who doesn't know how they should view themselves.

And so that's really what a low self-esteem is. And people who score high in vulnerable narcissism, it's a really defining characteristic because they're very, and they're very sensitive to rejection. There's actually quite a high correlation with borderline personality disorder, which is interesting, but this is a general personality trait. With vulnerable narcissism, you know, it's interesting. You do get a lot of the splitting, like people are either angels or devils, but like,

I mean, I want to have some compassion. There's a lot of... Let's pull a little Sharon Salzberg for a second, like loving kindness meditation on these people, because they have a lot of splitting they do with themselves, which is causing them so much unnecessary inhibition of their self-actualization. That's why I wrote Rise Above, to show how we have these characteristics of...

in all of us that is really bringing us down, you know, from our higher nature and who we could be to constantly be questioning who you are and just be flipping back and forth between, oh, I'm at the root of me. I'm a lot of these people, they feel at the root of them. They're broken. That's how they feel. But it takes a lot of therapy to get there. These aren't people who walk around being like, oh, I'm so hurt. This is people who are usually kind of

Very externalizing and very, you know, the things that get revealed are typically not what you're encountering on the daily. Well, that's a very good point. Vulnerable narcissism is correlated with introversion, non-netics, and more internalizing than externalizing, whereas grandiose narcissism is related to more externalizing. And virtually no internalizing, by the way. We cannot...

seem to find anyone who scores extremely high in grandiose narcissism that ever puts the blame on themselves. They're really good at externalizing everything. Sorry, I'm thinking of a pathological liar like that guy at the bar.

That's that kind of narcissist I think of. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about, you know, in Rise Above, which the, you know, overcome a victim mindset, empower yourself and realize your full potential. There's so much in here that is really helpful in terms of there are many things that.

I didn't realize are leaning into victimhood that I do. Right. And so that was, yeah, that was really helpful. Explain what cognitive distortions are and how they kind of play into a victim mindset. And then maybe give an example of a couple. Sure. You know, when you have cognitive distortions, you're not seeing reality clearly. You really are exaggerating things to a degree that is not helpful, productive, and often not accurate. Like

- And we all do this. - We all do this, we all can fall prey when something bad happens to us, we think, oh, I'm a loser. Just these thoughts that are so extreme and distorted. The totality of their being is a loser. And then cognitive behavioral therapy developed and developed a whole bunch such as, well, exaggerating, seeing things in black and white terms, like people are either all good or all bad,

Or if I don't get this job, then I will never get a job the rest of my life. Maybe overgeneralizing would be. And even if you know that's not true, thinking that thought starts a distortion that basically creates a groove in your brain. It totally creates a groove in your brain. And the one that's the number one, if we had the gong, you know, what's the number one thing associated with a victim mindset? It is. You ready for it?

Um, it is seeing, uh, a malevolent intent, uh, in neutral stimuli. Oh, wow. That's a big one. That's the number one that we have found associated. Um, and, uh, what does that look like? So, um, you're, uh,

in, in a comical example, I like to think, uh, all comedians are vulnerable narcissists because when they're up there, uh, like if an audience member is just, has a neutral expression, they interpret that as they hate me, you know? So that's the most, I, I, I jokingly talk about Rodney Dangerfield, uh, yo, I got no respect, you know? Um, but in the everyday individual and every, in most people, um, it is, um, you know, you smile at someone on the street, um,

They don't smile back you take it personally and you're like Michael Jordan every go that was personal So um so you just when the reality of the matter like, you know is that person is not I mean that doesn't know you the person not thinking about you that person is thinking about the million things they have to do their day, you know and

And then just more egregious and more controversially, I admit it, seeing malevolent intent through the lens of only one thing, like everyone's racist. So therefore, if you have a belief, your prism of the world is all white people are racist.

then every white person who has a neutral response to you, like, why don't they like me? They must be racist, you know? So, and I understand it's a sensitive topic and I want to be sensitive to it. No, but it's a good example. It's a very good example. One of my favorite cognitive distortions that I like is jumping to conclusions. A big one. Can you talk about... You like, that's your favorite? I do, it's my favorite one. You have a favorite cognitive distortion. I do. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how that looks sort of and how that can be so...

Damaging. Isn't that, I think that's quite related to the ones we're just, we're just talking about, um, where you think you have understood and concluded what's really going on here when it's the, when there's a lot more complexity to what's really going on there or what's really going on there is not personal. Um, so a lot of people will jump to the conclusion that everything is personal, you know, um, you know, you're at the Starbucks, um,

You're in line and there's a big line. It's not moving fast enough. The world's conspiring against you. Like you've jumped to that conclusion. And even if it's not that specific thought, that burning feeling you feel that is the opposite of patience, the opposite of loving kindness, the opposite of all those things. We sometimes when I learned about cognitive distortions, I don't know how you feel about cognitive distortions.

I didn't realize I was doing them. Yeah, I wonder if he has a favorite one. Yeah, I didn't realize I was doing them. I just spend a lot of time, the way that I think of it, I spend a lot of time in my head and I spend a lot of time in your head. Like,

Like whoever you are, meaning I'm always reading into what are they thinking? What can I do to change them? Did I upset them? Are they happy? So if I'm spending all of that time, what it actually means is that the entire world is then filtered through this lens. That's not really true. Do you have a favorite one? Do you want to look at the list? I have a few. I have a few that I like. I do like that actually.

The saying though, like the Starbucks example is like that reminds me of the saying of you're in traffic and you're like, oh, this traffic is getting in my way, not realizing you are the traffic. So true. And the black and white thinking was an interesting one for me. I used to see just two things and I'd be like, well, I can either do this or that.

and understanding that most things have some sort of middle, which is interesting for me because I love a creative problem. - You're also a catastrophizer though. I can either take this job or I'm living under the bridge on the freeway because I didn't take the job. Like he's very, like that's how black and white, and catastrophizing. - I definitely worked on my catastrophization. That for me totally came from, I can see the roots. Both my dad is an amazing risk analyzer.

We used to consider him. It's his job. He was the managing director of an accounting firm analyzing risk. Oh.

- But that is his lens. - That's his lens. - That's his lens, yeah. - He's like, what are all the things that could possibly go wrong? Let's mitigate against that and make our decision. We used to call him head of catastrophe prevention. - Oh my gosh, can I just say this? You see this all the time in academia, where if you only have a hammer, you see a nail everywhere. Everyone at these meetings, these fact, everyone is seeing the world through their own sort of scholarly research thing. So if you're the critical gender theory person,

You literally, you're the person at the meeting where every single comment you interpret as, well, that was sexist. Well, that way, you know, you need to, you need to, let me educate you on the literature you need to read. But that's how we operate in the world. Yeah. What do you mean? Tell me what you mean. Like we're all, we all have specializations.

And we will see the world through the lens of our specialization, whether it's trauma, racism, homophobia. - I agree. I don't mean to just pick on the gender critical theorist. That's not, that's the example that was most prominent in my head at that moment. But you can go down the line. So I was also gonna make joke, like if you're the history person who your specialization is 17th century Buddhist oppression, you will see in the meeting. So I don't mean to pick on anyone

No, but that makes sense. But we do. And to be able to be mindful of that is just world-changing because it helps you increase your connections to others in such a profound way. Well, said the other way, it really divides us when we only view things through our own lens. Learning what the cognitive distortion might be and not to remove it because I still believe that understanding and analyzing risk is

extremely beneficial to not end up with in a bad situation. That's right. That's right. It can be very helpful. But not to only rely on it, to be able to pull back. And I think, you know, all the experts that we've spoken to is they say that it's not necessarily not utilizing any of these, but being have having the flexibility to move out out of them and apply other ways of thinking as well. Totally. So for from a creative standpoint, when people give me

two different options, I usually want a merger. I usually want some sort of hybrid. I'm like, let's take this and that and like, let's build a new version. And so in one area, I feel like I'm able to do it a lot. And so trying to learn that, what were some of the others?

Let's see, okay, well we talked about black and white thinking, we talked about catastrophizing, minimizing, personalizing, false sense of hopelessness. I like that one too. Shooting, shooting. - Yes. - Entitlement, jumping to conclusion, over general, mind reading, I like that one. - Let's pause on shooting for a second. - Yeah. - Because a lot of,

Big one. It's a big one because it perpetuates others. Albert Ellis, you know Albert Ellis, rational mode of therapy? He said, stop sugar baiting all over yourself. Yeah. That's his expression he used. He thought he was being clever. But that has such a deep string when you start to pull on it because you're like, I should be at this meeting on time and yet I'm stuck in traffic. But if you accept that I've done everything possible to be on time, maybe things are okay even if I –

absolutely believe I'm going to lose this job because I'm not at this interview on time. That could be catastrophic, but unless you can look back and be like, Oh, I really know you're shaking your head. No, I think now I'm mind reading. No, I think for, for shooting, I think of it more of like, I should have had more success by this time in my life. I should have accomplished this or he should have gotten sober or she should have this. It's a lot more. It's, it's,

I don't know. I think of it as general to both end, both end. And I also think we live in an interesting time where we get so mad. Like we're kind of signaling to others, you should think just like me. And that's I'm adding a third, the third thing here. And it's really tearing our country apart, you know, because it's like, you know, you should have my political belief, you know, and if you don't.

Go fuck off. You know, like, and so we're shooting each other, you know, like we're shaming and shooting each other in addition to shooting ourselves, which is inhibiting our self-actualization. There's so much shooting going around. I'll give an example of something that I think works on a micro level, but maybe not as much on a macro level. It was having a positive, assuming a positive intent for someone. Oh yeah. I love that. And I,

I think I've told this story before, but I had a boss who... I was an apartment manager and I had a boss who came in and he just had a positive intent of every single one of the tenants. You're like, this tenant trashed their apartment. Well, maybe it was... And at that time, I was under a lot of stress and my immediate assumption was really like, no, this person has bad intent or they're taking advantage. You said bad intent. And I saw how stressful that was on me and I saw how his gracious intent was...

often led to more information that I didn't have at the time. And seeing that him apply that, I was like really profoundly changed by it. On a macro level, I think it's harder because you're like, oh, this person is, you know, or I'm in a business deal and they're offering something well below what I want. Like it's hard to have that type of same positive intent instead of setting a boundary. Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about the cognitive distortion of outsourcing happiness? Can you describe what that is? Are you a philosopher? I don't know. I don't think so. I feel like I'm getting a little bit of like a philosophy vibe from him. Do you know what I mean? We think it's generational. I think there's something in his lineage, but...

It's the many men with long beards in my family. I don't know what it is, but anyway. Can you talk about outsourcing happiness? What does that look like practically? I'll be happy when? Exactly. Or this relationship will make me happy and therefore I'm miserable without it. Gosh, we do that so often. I mean, I do that all the time, you know, like a...

Until I get moved to New York and there's perfect tranquility and I'm settled in my job and I find my wife, then I'll be happy. We don't allow ourselves happiness right here, right now. And the sad thing that's heartbreaking is that we actually can't allow ourselves happiness right here, right now.

We don't need that cognitive distortion. We can throw that in the rubbish bin, you know, but we hold on to it so much in this false sense that, you know, that we're going to outsource our happiness to external factors. Or external people. Or external people, yes. One of the really incredible things about sort of your body of work and your research is you're able to sort of, you know,

You're able to sort of tackle all of these things and be open to thinking about what superpowers can look like outside of the realms of kind of the materialist world. We were actually good. We're going to go there. Yeah, we were connected through a mutual friend, Sam Harris, because I wanted to talk to Sam about the telepathy tapes and he didn't want to talk to me about it, which is his prerogative. But he said, you should talk to Scott Barry Kaufman.

And so we were connected and I started listening to your podcast and we started having some conversations. One of our...

One of our interests in the telepathy tapes and in various conversations we've had over the many, many episodes, hundreds of episodes that we've done is we believe that there is something true about things that previously have been dismissed as something for hippies or mystics or, you know, and we we wonder if you can sort of speak to what about.

understanding intelligence and understanding those who are twice gifted. What insight does that give you into understanding people who might have special needs that we can't yet explain? Yeah, I don't go to the supernatural level as my default, but I keep an open mind. You know, I'm an open skeptic. Where my mind goes is just to how incredible the human genome is and how much we don't know about it.

epigenetics and how much we don't know about genetic transmission. Just what is encoded, you know, what are these proteins code for, you know, like and

And I – before I got into – and now I'm obsessed with this mind reading stuff. But before that, I was obsessed with, well, how are these people, these kids able – like prodigies able to kind of sit down at piano and just kind of get the rule structure of piano? But the rule structure of piano has been operated on enough during the course of human evolution that it is –

reasonable that it would be somewhere in our genes, some of these things. We don't ask, we don't say, "Oh, it must be supernatural that I learned all these words that I learned from the ages of two to five," which we did automatically. We do so many things that if we really... We're like the fish in water. We're like, because we're swimming in the water, we don't realize that there's water. But there's so many miraculous things that we have evolved learning systems

and i'm really interested in the interaction between generalized learning systems like implicit learning systems and evolutionarily evolved implicit domain learning systems so basically what i mean by that is mouthful but saying our genes really prepared us through the course of evolution to attune our attention to certain regularities in the environment that were very regular across the course of human history now some of these individuals

most exceptional, there's always a great disability concomitant with it. Either it's acquired, so they get hit on the head and then all of a sudden they can

It'd be Mozart or it is developmental. But there's no case where there's not a concomitant severe disability. Or trauma. Great point. Great point. And it's usually the trauma or the disability is usually a verbal one. And the ability is usually a nonverbal one.

So you don't see prodigies in creative writing, really, really. You know, you don't see in verbal sort of creative domains. You see it most prominently in art, music. Now we can add telepathy to the list. I was going to say, well, spirituality. We're adding the spiritually gifted child. We can really try to figure that out. But that's still, I think, a nonverbal thing.

thing, whatever's going on there. It's just something non-verbal. It's a picking up. It's a receiving of something at the very least. So my investigation, which started in Ungifted with prodigies and savants, Daud Trefort's work is incredible. He spent his whole career studying these savants. There's something about the non-verbal that gets unleashed

When it's not dominated by language as much so you said two things that I want to better understand Language is a part of this. I just want to yeah one of them was that I

It potentially is coded in our genes. Well, everything's encoded in genes. Well, what is coded is an attention to certain regularities that most of us are not programmed to be attuned to. But some people are, I think, right out of the get-go programmed to be attuned to the pattern, the statistical pattern structure of X. Does that make sense? Yes, it's an attunement. But the other sort of word that I'm sort of caught on that you were talking about was that they receive something.

So the... Statistical probabilities, maybe. So it's statistical probabilities, but where are they, I think is the question. Where are the... Oh, right, right. Right? So if... With music, clear feedback, with art, I mean, with those things, obvious, there's clear feedback you're getting, you know, when you sit down and you can figure out the probabilities if your system's attuned to it. But you're talking about telepathy. Do you want to double check telepathy? Well, I'm talking about telepathy, but I'm also talking about even creative imaginations.

you know people who like when we were talking about creative imagination I'm like well where is that it's not localized it is the imagination brain network however is it internal or is it non-local and the system of the brain is actually accessing information all around us recently in our episode with Deepak Chopra he's

you know, talking about how the universe is creative of these ones and zeros that we are simply making sense of and pulling external information. So by attunement and by the ability to form statistical probability in music, well, then you could say maybe that's somewhat internal, but are they accessing something outside? But when you talk about creative imagination and we're talking about intuitive abilities or the ability to have

precognitive experience. Yeah, I hear you, man. And there's something really profound here. There's something to the demonic, the Greeks, you know, this guiding force that that we have seen all throughout the human history, that creative people, really creative people

often say it does not feel like it's coming from me. And so we need to take that seriously. And I have taken that very seriously in my whole career, even linking it to mental illness. I think there's an interesting link there when the brain is altered in an altered state of consciousness where you don't feel like you're having agency over the ideas. There's something really profound there as well. So I think I'm taking what you're saying very seriously because there is

You know, Anika Harris, you know, studies the form of consciousness. She believes that it's universal, right? And so there are scientific approaches emerging that give some sort of mechanistic account to perhaps there is, we have been thinking about consciousness wrong, you know, and perhaps there is a universal consciousness that, you know, Carl Jung talked a lot about that, right? Yeah.

Let's give him a little bit of credit, you know, that we're just kind of having antenna, you know, that's tapping into it. It could be. I mean, it could be that plants are tapping into it, that everything is tapping into it that has any sort of life, you know, associated with it. I'm open to that idea. Yeah.

Some people aren't. I'm not going to mention names, but there are some friends of mine who are very prominent consciousness researchers at NYU who they will just dismiss it just –

Don't even let's not even talk about it, you know But I think there's there's enough accumulating evidence to suggest that we should keep our minds open To that is the way this is working Now does it mean as it's depicted in the telepathy tapes that these these autistic savants are accessing a plane? You know, they're going to some that to me is a little far-fetched. I

To be honest, that's a little far-fetched. The only way that one could frame that there is a place called the hill, for example, as the telepathy tapes talks about, that all these kids are going to the same place. The only way that we could kind of understand a scientific framework around that is if there were...

a collective consciousness that in some way we cannot yet measure. We cannot yet isolate. And for those of us who want to measure and isolate things, that's a limitation. But the idea would be that there's a certain group of people who have an ability to drop in because it's almost always like a meditative state, a trance state, some sort of theta state or a nonverbal state. And they are able to access a metaphysical location

in which their consciousness is entangled and they are linked. You do have to set aside a lot of the problems of facilitated communication. I wanted to bring that up. Yeah, you have to set aside. And I don't think we, you and I, feel comfortable just setting those aside and being like, it doesn't matter. There are just so many confounds that have not been ruled out properly yet. Correct. And that's the problem. I had this conversation with someone the other day. They said, Scott, you're never going to prove

that this realm exists because, oh, it was Michael Shermer yesterday. Michael Shermer, he's head of Skeptic Magazine. So he's on brand. He's on brand. We got into a whole discussion about this on his podcast yesterday. He's like, Scott, you're never going, if there does exist this realm of that's not open to evidence, well, you're never going to discover it. And I said, well, you know,

Well, here's the way I think about it because I'm such a curious person. Even if that may very well be true, the more that I can rule out all of these confounds, the more excited I get that there's something mysterious that is even in further need. See, that's the way I think. Do you know what I mean? It's like I'm not trying to prove –

I'm trying to see what could be most probable. And if we so like Simon Baron Cohen and I had a conversation about designing studies on this. Like, let's try this confound. This is the it's never been done where they've had the complete separation. So let's do that. Let's if we can do put six of these things in and the child is still saying five, seven, nine. I'll be like, OK, that's pretty darn cool. That's pretty cool.

Well, here's there's two issues that I think are outstanding in any conversation about this. And one of the things that is outstanding is the general acknowledgement that observation of something changes it. And that's that's a beautiful limitation. And it's it is incredible.

It is going to make analysis difficult. So for me, that's the first challenge. Observation is difficult. And if we are dealing with not just a subset, we're dealing with a subset of a subset of a subset of individuals. And what proof likes, what science likes is regularity. Yes. We like to live right in the middle of that bell curve.

And that is what our scientific measurement is calibrated to. So that is not to say that you cannot study this subset of the subset of the subset. However, the techniques that we have that we currently have and the conscious awareness of how to even approach things is limited because we are not used to thinking in that realm. And that's why people like Sam Harris or any of these people are like, we won't even talk about it because the,

only methods of analysis are designed for regularity, reproducibility, separating the individuals from the people that they claim to be telepathic with, which is exactly the only way that in many cases they are telepathic because there is an emotional connection. So we're trying to kind of apply like an ice cream scoop to a piece of bacon. It doesn't go together. I think

I think that I'm even more optimistic though, that if it's supernatural exists, that we can capture it scientifically. This is why I love the conversations that you have on your podcast. This is why I love- Did you listen to my past lives one by any chance? Yeah, of course I did. Because that one was so cool. That one was insane. I'm a believer now. Right. But the reason that it's compelling is there are scientists and I'm not a practicing scientist, but there are people like me and like you who are actual scientists practicing who

You're an actual scientist. No, but there are people who are willing to say, we may not be able to design an experiment where we have 50 people and we isolate them from the person and see if they can read minds. That's not what this experiment is going to look like. But if you look at it, I'm picturing like a pom-pom.

If the truth is in the middle of the pom-pom, you've got all this other stuff that you have to get through to try and get to it. So if we can start shaving off parts of this outside so that we can say, okay, it's not this, or this is a confounding factor, or if we really want to test it, we've got to do this, or I'm going to be actually an open skeptic and say, how do I shave off the parts so that I can even get an indication?

of getting closer to the middle. That's what a scientific approach to this needs to look like. Absolutely. And I think that even if there's certain metaphysical things exist, like even if our consciousness is

If it turns out that our consciousness is not confined to our brains, that's what we're talking about here. If that's true, I think that there's some interesting things we'd pick up on. So I think that if there are two people who both are thinking of the same thing, we know that certain brain areas are more likely to be active when we're thinking of language or not. But they're both thinking of this. Let's say there's two people that the claim is they're both thinking.

tapping into the same universal consciousness. Well, I would expect both of them at the same time without communicating would show a very similar area of activation while they are both imagining the very same thing. Limbic resonance. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, limbic resonance is a thing. Deepak Chopra talked about it. In a description of mirror neurons, in a description of limbic system, if I feel for you. That's true.

and you know that I feel for you, then we are in some sort of resonance. I'm giving that to Deepak. He is correct about that. I've just heard some things he said that I'm like, let me do some more testing on that. That's all. He does claim to be the first person to prove telepathy that he says...

I see him in the background of the Tilapia Tape videos. No, there's a video he published years ago where he had one of these kids who was mind reading and he said it was absolutely unbelievable. And they put them in separate rooms and his mother was reading and the child was saying what the mother was reading. Separate rooms? Separate rooms. Why can't we scientifically replicate that though? Correct.

I mean... I'm skeptical. Scientifically... Well, I think... Sure, of course. And it could be that this person had a great ability. The question would be not why we can't scientifically replicate this with other people, but going back to that same... Same...

Mother and son. Yeah for sure and I also just getting into magic and getting into mentalism which I have I realized the extent to which people recreate a story in their head of what happened because it's what they want to believe that is not actually what happens when you play the tape back and

because I've, I've really gotten into mentalism. A big part of it is, you know, I think, well, what experience do I want to leave this person? When they tell their friend, this is what happened. He pulled, you know, for instance, I, um, one of these podcasts, I went to their party and, uh, I did this thing. And then, um, on the podcast, they were raving about what I did. And they're like, you're not going to believe what Skyper Kaufman did. Okay. Literally there was a person there and he, he just asked someone, he said, what is your, what is your favorite movie? And the guy said his favorite movie. And he literally just took his wallet out and he pulled out a movie ticket for the movie.

Okay, just right then and there. Like, there's no explanation for that. And that's a recounting. It's a recounting. That's not what happened, though. Well, it is exactly what I wanted to...

Him to tell that story in his own head in how he reconstructs it Okay, that's exactly like that's that was my aim was for that That's how I wanted him to perceive it. Will you tell us how you do that? Of course not but I I wanted him to perceive it that way I want to get to something that you said which is you now believe in past lives So there's something that I've been banging so I back to Mike to my credits. I

Ever since I started studying prodigies, I've been banging the drum. There's something here where these prodigies are, I really believe... If you trace someone in their family long enough, someone had that skill, right? So I always thought there was something... That's a form of past life memory. That is a form of past life memory. When a child comes out and they're able to do something with no preparation or practice... Like they become a pianist and you're saying somewhere in the family you think there's a pianist. So there is...

I looked into this and you start to go one case by case and you start to find oh the great-grandfather in Russia had this amazing talent You know and and so then let's just generalize from that principle Okay, so isn't that a form of past life memory? Like what else is it if it's if that's not a well what you're saying? You could say it's a it's an intergenerational Transmit, but you're you're saying that there is something coded in your DNA that was transmitted to them, right? It's a memory

And I know how controversial that sounds. And in this case, it's a creative memory. It's a creative memory. And it's like it's a certain set of genes as well that makes you more likely to be able to soak up knowledge and things. But I do think the memory thing, we can't rule it out, you know, the extent to which maybe certain memories are encoded in our genes. And again, this could get into...

Someone might make things so woo-woo. Right. But I don't think it is that woo-woo when you really look at some of this incredible phenomenon, you know? You had Jim Tucker on your podcast, and we hope to have him on one day. But the conversation that you had was regarding children who have very, very elaborate— Vivid memories.

Vivid and not just sort of factual memories, but emotional memories, and in many cases, kind of somatic memories of being someone else. In many cases, they're pulling out facts. The very famous case was the kid who had all these details about a pilot. I think it was a World War II pilot. And he described his own death, which was accurate to the way this pilot died. And it wasn't general information. It was very, very astonishingly specific information.

that to our knowledge was not available on the internet. Well, I mean, I read the journal articles and I want to say this to all my scientist friends out there. If you're a good scientist...

And you read those journal articles. You have to agree. There is something that is not fishy going. There's something real going on. You have to. If you if you if you've scientific integrity, that's my challenge. If you have scientific integrity, you can't come away reading how how meticulously documented this stuff and how rigorous he was about it. He's like this using the scientific method. You can't just.

just fluff it off. And so that does bother me when people, when scientists fluff off things without even reading the journal article. Like read the journal article and then can we talk about it? Well, and so what Jim Tucker talks about is he believes that there is something and the conversation you had was regarding is there something encoded in DNA that's being passed on? And the question is if we believe in a collective consciousness,

If it's not encoded in your DNA, can you pull someone else's life memory from the collective consciousness into your own? I literally sit up and I try to think of different hypotheses for what could be going on. You know, how can there be certain accident, accidental co-mingling? Yeah.

of things that wasn't supposed to happen. You know, most of us, it doesn't happen, right? These are a minority of cases, but I like to think of, of all the weird quirks of things that can happen. You know, there are also so many weird special abilities. And by the way, there could be a whole like doc Netflix series on just all the weird, like,

The person with three eyes. Three eyes? Yeah, they exist. Where's the third one? That's me. No. I don't know where it is. But some people's developmental, just the way they development, all sorts of things can go awry from the plan, you know? And things can get commingled. The genes can, you know, I mean, I've seen things, women with three breasts, right? I mean, these things. I mean, I haven't seen it.

I dated a woman once. No, but I've heard of these cases. They exist. Scott, before our time runs out with you, you said there's more and more evidence of consciousness being non-local. What other evidence have you come across that makes you more curious than skeptical? You know, it's funny. I heard myself say evidence. And I would say there are more... Let me frame it a little bit differently. There are more like...

not crazy people who are coming up with theories of how it's possible. And I think that's the closest I can get to this.

Fair. There are some, and some of them are philosophers, you know, who are writing about this. Physicists have no problem with this. Physicists, quantum mechanics people, they're like, yeah, we totally, of course, this is exactly what like Planck described. This is what like Heisenberg knew. Like, so physicists have no problem. Philosophers are dipping into it. Philosophers are dipping into it. And some cognitive scientists just arguing, you know, that there is this pan-

psychism, you know, that doesn't need to be explained by the supernatural level, but actually is linked to physics. You know, some of them are linking it to physics principles and the improbability of us, of consciousness existing in the first place, you know, and trying to kind of use logic and philosophical tools versus scientific tools to explain some of this. Philip Goff is a big one, by the way. Genius.

G-O-F-F. Philip Goff. Philip Goff. He just wrote The Meaning of Existence. He might be a fun person to talk to because he has a scientific case for God. Oh, yes. Yeah. And he was on my podcast, so you can listen to that if you want. So one of the most simple examples that Rick Rubin talks about is the idea that ideas have their moment and that most artists are actually just using antennae to capture data from this collective consciousness and that...

The example he gives is like ideas springing up in different parts of the world before there was a... Thomas Kuhn said the same thing about scientific...

Breakthroughs. They're going to happen. It's just who's the person that's literally going to seize on it or receive it. And I don't have the list of the ideas that circulated in different parts of the world simultaneously, but there is that list where it feels like evolution or human consciousness or human progress is evolving at a certain rate and these breakthroughs are going to happen and you sort of are not necessarily local to an individual to bring them to the world instead of...

capturing them in some way. There's also, if there's something, an idea in the air, someone's going to find it, and there'll be multiples. Dean Simonton has found that to be the case through scientific revolutions. Usually there's about five or six people who simultaneously seize upon it because it's in the air. Doesn't that push us into this notion? Yeah, if there's a really important scientific discovery to be made, yeah.

People from very different perspectives tend to seize upon it. Something happened yesterday before we let you go. Oh, yeah. So, you know, sometimes you'll be like thinking of someone and then they text you. Yeah. Like whatever happens. That happens. It happened three times to me yesterday. Three. That's a lot in one day. And I had had a very rough night's sleep. I actually wasn't feeling good. And I was kind of wondering like, so it happened once and I was like, oh, that's kind of thing. And then a couple hours later it happened again. And I was like,

And I'm like, how many times in one day am I going to type, I was just thinking about you and then you texted, right? And one of them was my son who wasn't feeling well. And I was kind of thinking like, how far out on this...

on this like spectrum of thinking do I want to go right I just it was like three in one day and I'm thinking am I supposed to do something else like try and meditate in a different way is there other information in the air that I'm supposed to gather today so maybe we should we should just start here not end here on this statement but I think the universe has a purpose I agree with Philip Goff on this

The universe has a purpose. And I think that, unfortunately, as much as I hope we discover that in my lifetime, it's probably going to take many more lifetimes before... But there will become a day. This is my prediction. If you're...

listening back on this a thousand years from now. Someday, I think humans will figure out that a lot of things did have a lot more meaning. I get in a lot of fights with Sam Harris about whether or not we have free will or not. And please don't tell him I said this, but I'm starting to come around to

his perspective. I mean, we've had some heated on my pockets. We had a two-part series. We had a heated debate about this. But I'm starting to come around to the idea that there are... There's so much predetermined that we don't realize. Right when we were born, there was so much predetermined there. And we're watching this beautiful thing unfolding, thinking that we are the one creating it. And a lot of the things...

And this is relating to what you said, because there are a lot of things that if you just view it in a Buddhist way and you start to realize that things do come at you that were meant for you, things go away that weren't meant to you. You can try to hold onto them as much as you can, but they just weren't meant. Like you have friends that come and go that are seasonal friends.

And then you have friends that like my friend Elliot will always be my friend. You know, there's no doubt. And I don't think all that is just chance. You know, whatever configuration of things like things are attracting and are like connecting as they were meant to be. And we can fight it because we say, oh, well, I'm jealous of this podcast or why can't I be like this podcaster? Or you can accept your fate, which I think is a much more healthier way of living your life.

When you think about your own personal story to kind of wrap that up and you think about all the challenges you had and, you know, being placed in special ed when that clearly wasn't the place for you. And it may be helpful for some other kids. When you think about your own personal journey, how do you kind of tie that into we're here, like everything's supposed to happen. Well, I have always felt it was my fate to do these books to talk about creativity, demonic. When I was writing Transcend, I don't remember who wrote that book. Like I don't.

I mean, I sat down and I wrote that book, but I don't remember thinking about what I was going to write. I mean, I can't explain it. I mean, when I sat down, I wrote that, like, today I'm going to write chapter connection. You know, by the end of a couple of weeks, the connection chapter was written. I don't remember thinking, oh, let me plan out how I'm going to write that. I would sit down and write the need for connection, but...

So, I don't know. I've always felt that my life story, it's all part of this thread that's unfolding. It's still unfolding, but now it's unfolded enough where I can kind of start to see the pattern because enough years have gone by. I'm an old man now. I'm an old man now. Rise Above was the inevitable. I almost had no other choice, but for everything, every choice to lead up to Rise Above because Rise Above is the natural progression. Once you get out of

the way intelligence, creativity, then you start to have, then you have the aha moment. Oh, actually it's really about, you know, realizing no one's coming to save you. Yeah. You need, you need, yeah. Do you know, am I making sense? Yeah, no, it makes total sense. Everything was in the inevitable result that you only see at the end of your life. We really, I mean, we appreciate that so much. And I think it's such a great,

It's such a great tie in to also say the universe has a purpose for me. And if I get stuck in a place where I don't believe that, like these are the kinds of tools that I need to come out of it. I mean, that's what I got out of the book. So thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to have you here. Oh, great. Thank you so much. We're so glad. Both of you are so smart. Thank you. Thank you.

One thing we didn't get to talk to Scott about is we'll link to his website below, which has a ton of interesting information. It links to his podcast. Also, he writes for The Atlantic, Psychology Today, Scientific American. He does a ton for them. So he has some really interesting articles about personality, about being a late bloomer, about how to maximize your potential. But he also has a series of tests, which you and I actually took.

We took the self actualization test. There are many different ones on the, on the website we took the characteristics of self actualization scale test. It looks at.

appreciation, acceptance, authenticity, equanimity, purpose, truth-seeking, humanitarianism, peak experiences, moral intuition, and creative spirit. And what this test produces is it shows you your three kind of strengths, and it shows you the strengths that you have based on the questions that you answer. So I thought it would be fun for us to go over them. Let's do it. So...

I offered to take the test for Jonathan because I think I understand Jonathan better than Jonathan understands Jonathan, but that's not fair. You love to answer questions for other people. But I did help you in that when you got stuck, I knew that was a neutral. Yeah, there was a couple of questions. There was a couple where I was like, no, I get what they're asking and I'm going to help you. But no, it was definitely, we each took it. So what I thought was interesting, we got totally different strengths. It gives you your top three strengths. It also gives you the other rankings of your others. But

My top three results for my characteristics of self-actualization. Let's hear them. Authenticity. Oh, you're so authentic. Well, I want to be authentic. It doesn't mean that I am. It means that it's an important value to me. Purpose. Oh, yeah. Like wanting to have a sense of purpose. And humanitarianism. What people don't know about you is that you actually love people.

purpose, meaning not only just like a larger macro purpose, but when you show up at someone's house, you're like, let me organize your cupboards. I like to be of. Can I file your papers for you? I like to feel that I have purpose. Yes. And in some cases it might be insecurity, but.

It's not that I want praise. No, no. It's that wanting to feel a purpose is important. You want to feel useful. And humanitarianism, that makes sense to me because I do have a very strong sense of wanting to do good. It doesn't mean that you are these things. It means these are the values and the characteristics that are important to you. Let's talk about me. Let's talk about Jonathan. Equanimity.

I had to look up what that was and what that actually meant. What did you find? Tell the class. I don't remember, actually. I have to look up. Tell us what equanimity is. Mental calmness, composure, evenness of temper, especially in difficult situations. I don't like an emergency unless it's an emergency. And even then, I don't like it. So it's funny because some of these questions were interesting to me because you answered...

in the way that you'd like to handle things. But I find that sometimes even little things can make you very upset, like sometimes disproportionately. And I mean, like sometimes you feel nervous or anxious about something that feels maybe, to use the language of Scott, like maybe you're generalizing or catastrophizing, but it's not a goal of yours, which is why equanimity is one of your highest. It's something you're aspiring to, if I don't believe you're there yet in all ways. I'll say this. I was dealing with

our internet provider. And that was very frustrating to me. But in general, even when things like get thrown off the rail, I don't think I am...

A very reactive person, but maybe that's just my experience of myself. Well, equanimity is important to you. That is true. Creative spirit, that feels right on. And these were, I think, all equally the same level. So for my authenticity, purpose, and humanitarianism, equanimity, creative spirit, that really tracks. And truth-seeking, that came up high for you. I don't like any BS.

And I think it's more about like, what is a generalized truth? Meaning, where are we getting information? Because sometimes with specific truths, it can be a little fuzzy. Specific truth has a lot of context. I think one of the questions was like, I try and stay close to your reality. You're like, what is reality? Yeah.

That is true. Reality is very subjective. Every guest we talk about explains that we make up a lot of how we see the world, and that's why it needs context.

Because you have to explain how you're coming to said reality, which is also about truth. If truth is presented in one fashion, some people will be like, this is what it is. It's like those internet memes. It's Yanni or Clancy or Lancey, where people hear things totally differently. Yanni, I'm like the...

It's the internet meme where a sound plays and people hear it totally differently. Yeah, it's like the blue and black, white and gold dress issue.

Truth is subjective. That's why we have to find it. The other tests that you can take, there's a human potential index, a light versus dark side of the force test, which I thought was really cool. Yeah, there's a selfishness and altruism scale. So anyway, head over to scottberrykoffman.com for sure. And we'll link to that below. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or

And now she's gonna break down, so break down. She's gonna break it down.