Andrew Newberg Returns (on Sex, God, and the Brain)
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman, birthday girl Monica Padman. Oh, yay. We're going hard. We're going to go all the way through. Today we have for the second time, Andrew Newberg. He is a neuroscientist. He is a pioneer.

in the neurological study of religious and spiritual experiences known as neurotheology. That's what we talked a lot about the last time he was here. And he's got an incredible new book out right now called Sex, God, and the Brain, How Sexual Pleasure Gave Birth to Religion and a Whole Lot More. It was a juicy, fun one. I love any evolutionary topic. It was very interesting to hear how the brain works similarly with both of these opposing. Sure.

Please enjoy Andrew Newberg. Hey, how are you? Good to meet you in person. Good to meet you in person. Yeah, absolutely. We were on Zoom last time. Yeah, we were. It's better in person. Always better in person. Yeah.

It's funny because I like went listen to a little bit of it.

- And it's like, I forgot we did so much. - It was during the pandemic and we don't normally do that. - We did like two years of Zoom. - Yeah. They feel like lost episodes though, in my head, because there isn't that person to person. It all sort of blends. - This is where glasses become a problem. I'm in my glasses more and more and more. It's a great source of angst for me. - You never wore them before? - I never wore them and I have it in my mind that the more I wear them, the more I'll need to wear them. - Oh, yeah.

They say that. I don't know. I don't think your eyes actually do that because you're getting older. Well, yeah. I mean, that's what they're telling me. Let's see if we agree on some fundamental things. I mean, you're a certified internist. A couple different certifications. So obviously the pushback is going to be fierce. But

But I'm an integrative medicine doctor, so I'm very holistic. Okay, great, great, great, great. So you have lenses. Your muscles in your eyes bend those lenses as needed to focus near, distance, or far. Why wouldn't it hold that those muscles, like all other muscles, need to be worked out and kept at peak?

peak fitness so that it can perform the task of bending the lens. I don't know if there's any true way of exercising them because they're not the muscles that turn your eyes. They're like little interior muscles. Don't you think you could go through a series of focusing? I have heard that a solution to people who get fatigued looking at computer screens is to go look at a tree because there's so many different leaves at different focal lengths. It may work. I'll give you my wife's answer to you because she's 54 and she got

cataracts actually early on. She had cataract surgery and she says it's the greatest thing. Everybody should have it. I'm almost wanting to get diagnosed as having cataracts. She wants me to get them. But do you have it? You don't have cataracts. I don't know. Unfortunately. I've been wearing glasses since I've been in third grade.

Yeah, you've long accepted it. You've gone through the seven stages. And I have very tiny eyes, so putting contacts in my eyes. I will do that when I play hockey. I tried wearing glasses and they all fog up, you know? Yes. Well, this became a big issue too in the pandemic when you had to wear the face mask. Right. It was just like an exhaust system up to your glasses. Yeah, exactly. It's terrible. Okay, I'm going to try to reframe this as a much broader question, which is,

Wouldn't it be weird that the only thing in our body that doesn't benefit from exercise would be the eyeballs? It'd just be weird that we have one system that can't benefit from exercise. Everything else, the cardiovascular system. What's that? Olfactory system doesn't. Yeah, there's no muscles there, really. But there's probably...

systematic things. Yeah, I think it's a matter of how well you can get at that muscle. The good thing about your arms is that it's easy. You lift and they get bigger. Obviously, you could be a great weightlifter, but you could throw your back out. No matter how strong you get, there's like little tiny muscles in between your ribs. It's always a challenge. I've heard that the actual lens itself gets less flexible too, which is part of the issue. I think we've solved it.

I will also say that ophthalmology, it's like a whole different animal in medicine. It's a very different kind of training. Yeah. And where do we put Huberman in that? He's not an ophthalmologist, but his specialty is the eye. And I think it's interesting when they explain the eye, it's like a protrusion of your brain in a way. It's all part of your sensory systems. The eye is remarkable that it works as well as it does. And unique in our species. Most species don't spend that much energy on

eyes. Right. I mean, our vision is really critical to us. But I mean, every animal, I always think about the eagles who can soar three miles up and then they see a little mouse on the ground and... Yes. That's incredible. But also they say even with less information, our brain is so good that it digests the...

information we're receiving and builds a much more complicated model than even with lesser eyes. - Right, you're combining with your memory. I mean, like, as I look around this room, I know what a can of Diet Coke means and I know what the dinosaur is and everything has a meaning to me. - You might even smell popcorn when you see that T-Rex. It might take you back to Jurassic Park. - Right, to Jurassic Park, right.

Yeah, there's a lot going on. It is. Your visual cortex. In fact, one of the slides that I often show because of imaging, there's a big question, kind of a nerdy question, but what is the resting state of the brain? Is it with your eyes open? With your eyes closed?

If it's with your eyes open, is it your eyes open looking at like a blank screen versus a complex scene like this? And all of them change the way your brain is operating. And if I do a brain scan with your eyes closed and then I just do a brain scan with your eyes open, the whole back of your brain, which is your visual cortex, just like lights up. And then you bring in your memory and if you're reading, it brings in your language areas. Is there a rest?

there probably isn't one. One of the things that's happened now is that they've gotten into a lot of conversations about brain networks. And so there's something called the default mode network, which was first discussed about 15, 20 years ago, which is what is your brain doing when it's not doing anything?

because it's always on. Right. You know, like if I do a brain scan of you at any point in your life other than when you're dead, there will be blood flow and metabolism and all different kinds of things going on. Yeah. When you're trying to think of like us as a study subject and you'd want to get to baseline anything, it's kind of an erroneous pursuit because there is no baseline experience for us. Sometimes we're sleeping, sometimes we're hunting, sometimes we're mating. It's very Buddhist. It is. One of the

funny stories I tell students also is that whenever you do a brain scan of somebody, there's a certain degree to which you have to trust them, that they're doing whatever it is that you're asking them to do. One of my favorite little examples was one of my colleagues was doing a study on memory. He said, we're always looking for subjects. So I said, yeah, sure. So I'm in the MRI scanner and you're sort of like lying down and they're showing you a screen of different words and then you have to remember the words and say them back. I'm doing all this. And after about 45 minutes,

50 minutes. My back's starting to hurt. Kind of have to go to the bathroom. Ball cat. Now I'm like, I hope I'm not doing a bad job. So all this is going in my mind. But meanwhile, from his perspective, it's just ball cat. I'm just doing a memory test. Now the hope is that if you take 30 people and have them all do the ball cat, that will

overwhelm all of the random, this guy had to go to the bathroom and this guy's arm hurt and this guy's foot hurt and this guy's thinking about picking up his kids. If you lay me down for 45 minutes at any point, I will remember something I forgot to do. Right. Excuse me.

Oh, boy. Oh, I hate that. What's happening there? Have you fMRI'd anyone sneezing? Oh, no. The questions you must get asked. The problem is you never know when they're going to happen. You have like pepper on the scene and some feathers and whatnot, bright light. But that would be actually very overlappy, I feel like, for your focus because the sneeze and the bless you, it's murked up in what maybe we thought was happening. Exactly. Okay, so the last time you were here, we were talking about

religion's effect on the brain that is observable like in an fmri or through

through nuclear medicine imaging. But I'd first like to start because at this point now, to be honest, when I saw the topic of the book, I love it. I love talking about sex. I love talking about God. So your book is Sex, God, and the Brain. So right away, I'm very, very intrigued. But also then I'm looking at the last book. Then I get more curious about who you are and why you're steering your academic ship in this direction. Fair question. I don't think we covered this much last time, but you start in chemistry. That's true.

At a Quaker school. That's true too. Okay, so these feel relevant. So what was the initial goal? My very initial goal really goes back even to when I was a kid. I just was always wondering about why people held different beliefs. If we're all looking at the same world, why are there Democrats and Republicans?

I mean, shouldn't we all look at the world the same way? Why are there Jews and Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus? Why do we all sort of look at the world differently? My initial thought was I got to start with the brain. When I was in first grade, I would go to the elementary school library and they had a little book of all the systems of the body. And I would just take them out one at a time and then keep going. So I had the scientific ideas about, well, let's look at the brain. That's the part of ourselves that takes in our visual information and basically tells us what the world is like.

You're on the inside of the experience. You laid out really nicely in the book. Everything's coming your way. It's coming through your ears and your eyes and your nose and your tasting. Inside of this brain, you're trying to make sense of what's outside, which is kind of unknowable in a way. Well, it is. And that was kind of what I discovered as

And as I got into college and into this Quaker school of asking all these questions and then chemistry and understanding the science of the world, I realized that while I love science, there were some elements where it fell short. We're sort of trapped in our brain. And so it became more of a philosophical question. How do you really know what you know? So I started to read philosophy and I started to take philosophy courses and courses in logic. And then I said, well, there are these religious and spiritual ideas. There's Buddhism and thinking about consciousness and

We have consciousness, but somehow we can't find it, but we kind of know we have it. And how do I know you have consciousness and you're not just some AI zombie? I am, just to cut to the chase. I thought so. I wasn't sure. Hillbillies from a dirt road don't end up in this house. That's right. You know, it became that philosophical piece. I started to sort of merge the two. Yeah. In your chapter about myth, we talk about myth, and I think there's a colloquial use of

myth, and it generally means a not true story when we use it around town. But that's not how anthropologists look at it. And then you point out even science is a myth. It's a story that hopes to explain our reality through...

empirical data, things we can observe or experiments we can run. But we'd probably all agree there's a ton of stuff that's not observable, at least yet. Some of it is not observable. Some of it is not observable yet. And then this issue about sort of being trapped in our own consciousness. I don't know if we can ever get beyond that, at least in some kind of empirical way, because how do you study something that you're inside of?

I would even quickly think like, well, maybe that'll be some tool in AI and machines. But at the same time, the AI is educated on a large language model originated from humans. Part of what ultimately led me down a little bit of this path towards the mystical, it's in these mystical experiences that I first started reading about back in college and Buddhism, Hindu thought.

Because in my mind, I thought, well, the only way to answer this question is that somehow you have to get outside of your brain, outside of your consciousness, look at what's out there in the world, look at what you're thinking on the inside and see if they match. And if they do, you got it. And if they don't, well, you know, you have to correct. But there's no way to do that. Or is there? And so in a lot of these mystical traditions, they say things like,

I got outside of my mind. I got outside of my brain. I got outside of my consciousness. My ego self dissolved. Now, I'm not saying that that happens, but these are the only kinds of experiences that I know of where people actually say that. And so to me, I'm like, okay, well, so what's going on when that happens? And can we look at that in some way, biologically, spiritually, that might be able to get us to an answer to that question? And that's what led to this kind of work.

I imagine too, there's like a lot of different ways to look at it. You could be first looking at how does the brain react to this idol you show it or this word cat, right? You can hope to discover maybe the mechanisms inside what happens physiologically in your brain. That's

That's kind of one question. But then above that is what was it before it went through that mechanism? And one of the questions that I challenge a lot of my students about is ask the scientific question. All right, you've got trillions of neurons. You've got quadrillions of interconnections. You've got

all different kinds of neurotransmitters being released. You have all the electrical depolarizations and electrical activity and all these different neurons. So where in all of that is your thought? Where in all of that is your consciousness? Because we don't seem to find it in a neuron, unless again, if you're Buddhist and you say, well, everything has consciousness, then you could go down that road. But an individual neuron doesn't seem to have it. So there's

Does 20 have it? Does a million have it? Does 10 million have it? And it's not just the neurons, because if I have a person who died and I'm looking at their brain, as far as we know, they don't have consciousness unless consciousness is something that goes beyond the brain. Yes. Let alone a unique thought at that. It's not even just this fires, this fires, and you get this thought.

Everyone has unique thoughts all the time. Yeah. What causes that? We don't know. I mean, now there was like some very interesting research that was done a little while ago. And the joke was, it was like the Jennifer Aniston neuron. There were seizure patients and they actually put these very, very fine needles into individual cells. And they could find out that like this cell activated when you showed somebody a picture of

Jennifer Aniston, for example. Wow, oh my God. No, but that's not the experience of the picture of Jennifer Aniston. You know you're famous when every human's got a neurotransmitter dedicated to your face. Do you think people with seizures over-index in liking Jennifer Aniston? Because that would add up. Monica has epilepsy. And I love friends. Oh, okay. Well...

I do too, and my daughter does too. But interestingly, when we talk about this larger field of studies, sometimes referred to as neurotheology, this kind of intersection between science and religion, there are lots of pieces to it. And one of those pieces is actually people who have seizures because there's been this interesting link between people who have seizures and people who have unusual conditions.

religious experiences. So you start to think, why is that? What's going on? And where people have seizures, they have seizures and then they have the time in between the seizures. So are they having these experiences when they have the seizures? Are they having it in between? There's some very famous cases of people who have these seizures and become hyper-religious or have unusual mystical experiences. Now it's a very, very small population of people around it. I hope you get those.

Well, I'd rather not have another seizure, but... We had another expert talking on the history of medicine. Yeah, so epilepsy was almost always regarded as some kind of spirit possession. Oh, absolutely. The devil was in the person. And whatever form that culture thought of the devil. It's interesting how some of these things a couple thousand years ago, they thought there was a religious, maybe somebody like Moses or somebody who...

saw a light and heard a voice. You know, in the medieval days, it was demon possession. And then nowadays it's a medical disorder. So we'll see how it all goes. I like the Moses one. Enlightened. I actually talk about seizures at different times. And the carefulness we have to have is that sometimes people look at these kinds of results. People have seizures or people have schizophrenia who think that they're the Messiah or whatever.

But then we sometimes over-pathologize that. And what is interesting about even the famous people who've had religious experiences is that it's kind of a one and off. It's not like Moses kept seeing the burning bush. It's not a chronic condition. Yeah, which is what seizures are. Normally, if you have seizures, you continue to have the same kind of thing happening over and over again.

Maybe he got on Capra after he saw the bush. There's a lot of theories out there. Okay, but your own personal story has to be embroiled in this because I even think of Sapolsky, he's looking in a way at the same thing. And he has a very rigid explanation of that. You could, in theory, pinpoint what is critical mass for those neurons to create that thought, right? I worship him. But I was a little, there's something not very optimistic about it.

It goes right up against self-will and all these other things. It doesn't hold any space for something that we don't understand or isn't observable. You must have your own relationship with spirituality or minimally maybe meditation. Do you have some kind of practice that maybe makes you more open to considering all this? It was really in college where I was trying to go down the scientific path, felt that it

wasn't getting me all the way there, started to look at these other approaches. And I spent a lot of time just thinking about this problem. It became a kind of scientific, spiritual meditation. I started to take this...

which I felt was helpful. Because again, I'm still going back to the question of what's real. And I thought if there's something that I'm not sure about, it doesn't mean it's wrong, but I'll just say for the moment, I'm going to doubt it. I don't know if it's right. I don't know if it's wrong. And I'm just going to hold it off to the side as this, I call it doubt. And I started to go through this whole process of,

of doubting the ways I was thinking, of doubting different philosophies, of doubting science. And this was a very challenging thing to do in college when you're like studying for finals and in the middle of the theater, I'm doubting everything. It's like you're teetering on a psychotic break. It's very weird. I was in a similar place, by the way, when I was 20. I think a lot of us are. Yeah, yeah. We all go in our different directions. But after college was over, I managed to graduate and I was getting ready to go to medical school. And you have this little summertime where you just want to take off. And so I said, well, I'm just going to

really try to solve this problem because it was driving me crazy. Day after day, I'm just like, how do I solve this? I eventually had an experience that for lack of a better name, I describe it as infinite doubt that I got to this point where I was like, not only do I not know anything, I don't even know that I don't know anything, you know, and it just became this sort of infinite regression of not knowing. But it's a very interesting experience because first of all,

everything's part of it. Yeah, it's unifying in that none of it can be trusted. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so there was this sort of oneness. You know, I was doubting myself, obviously. So there was no Andy Newberg. Sometimes when I've told people this, they're like, well, this must have been like the worst experience you could have possibly had. Here you are trying to find an answer and you found that there's no way you can have an answer. And I said, but you know, it was the most blissful

calming experience. And from that moment, I realized a new way of looking at all of this where I can keep exploring the question, but the pressure was all off. I completely relate to this. I don't know that I had the period of elation or transcendence, but I definitely got mentally to a point where I thought,

It's all unknowable. And that is really liberating because it doesn't matter if you're wrong, because everyone's wrong. There's some kind of freedom. I think the anxiety, and even in a Buddhist way, it's like the tension is the craving for the answer. And the admission that there isn't an answer is the erosion of that tension or craving. You approach it with a sense of humor. Oh, yeah. When we look out on this universe, which is, let's just for argument's sake, basically

basically infinite. And what do we have access to? In the immediate moment, we have access to this room. You don't even know what's going on, but the guy's working on your house over there. No, it could have turned. Right. The whole house could have fallen down. There could be a mutiny happening. Let alone what's going on in China, in the galaxy next door. And then somehow we all feel like

We know exactly what's going on. We know what's right and wrong, political or religious. It's very arrogant. It is. There is a survival value to it. You have to be making decisions and your brain uses its problem-solving abilities to give you the story that we tell ourselves. But if we are worried about our story, our survival is at risk.

that is gonna blow our anxiety out of the water. So we want to feel like we understand the world. And that is part of why we've kind of gotten to where we are in the world through social media, because we wanna hear all the reasons why we're right and that guy's wrong. And also anyone that has the appearance of conviction is very settling.

Provided that it's a conviction- That you agree with. That you agree with. And then again, the problem is, is that if you don't agree with me, now I have one of two choices. Either I'm right and you're wrong, or you're right and I'm wrong. Well, which one is my brain going to select? Yeah. Well, I must be right and you must be wrong. But now if you're wrong-

And you keep speaking with such conviction to try to convince me you must be a kind of a bad person. Yeah, evil. Now we go into our other opposition paradox we love. And then you get into the us versus them. And that's part of the mythic element. It's part of the mating sexual piece, too, because we have the us versus them. It's our family. It's our group. It's whoever we are and whoever they are. They're a challenge to our survival.

I wonder if, do you feel like that has made you a little less fervent about the political energy? Completely. I look at both sides and I look at it the same way I'm looking at the universe. It's like-

everyone's damn certain they're right. Like, let's just start there. And I'm no different. I can't really be trusted to think that I'm any more right than anyone else. - Right, I mean, you kind of have to live on a practical level. You have to live in a house. - You gotta make decisions. - You have to get some food, you have to make decisions. You have to do the best that you can. But in the back of my mind, there's always like, well, that's what I'm doing the best that I can. And I could be wrong.

this may not be the best thing for me, or this may not be the right answer, or I think these are the right people to vote for, but... Or how about minimally, like, I'm aiming 60% good decisions would be a big victory. Exactly, that's probably true. I don't also have the illusion that I could possibly make all the right decisions. I always think about sports, and I mean, we always think that the great athletes never lose, but actually, they lose a lot. Probably they win 60% of the time. The best hitters...

30%. And they're legends. And 20s suck. What a margin. Yeah. What a delta between glory and... Right, exactly. Isn't that weird? And that is interesting too, because you get this whole sort of bell curve of all of us. And it is remarkable when you have some of these people who are just the LeBron Jameses. Simone Biles right now. What makes them at this other level...

that is just different than everybody else. But again, you can kind of extrapolate that to religion and spirituality too. There's only one Pope and there's only one Mother Teresa. There's a bell curve of all of this. Yeah, so the last book that we talked about was again about religions or God's effect on the brain. And so now we've incorporated sex. So I think the best place to start is

is how completely universal mating ritual is for all animals. So tell us a little bit. I mean, once you start giving examples, it's like, oh, of course, yeah, I've never seen a National Geographic show on animals where we didn't see the pageantry. It's really remarkable.

This goes back also in my own personal life to this mentor who I met in medical school. It was a guy named Dr. Eugene DeQuilly, and he was a psychiatrist, but he had a PhD in anthropology. And we used to go to these dinner parties where, you know, here I am, this little lowly nothing. And I'm sitting around literally people who have won Nobel Prizes and who have really

revolutionized the fields of psychology and medicine. And Gene's greatest thing was he loved rituals. In fact, his family was from Italy. He was actually nobility in Rome. And so he used to enjoy calling himself and his wife baron and baroness of the Holy Roman Empire. As they should. As you should. Well, it turns out he found out that as a baron of the Holy Roman Empire, that means that he was allowed to knight someone. Oh.

And so he found the whole ritual and how it all had to work and all the Latin. And they knighted one of the uncles or something. Oh, this is great. So as an anthropologist, he was looking at everywhere you see these rituals in animals. And he studied them and he wrote a book called The Spectrum of Ritual. And he talked about rituals.

take advantage of all the different senses that we have. So there might be movements that you see of a different animal or the big colorful feathers or the different sounds and the calls that they make or the smells that they emit. So all these different things, they stimulate the brain towards mating and bringing them together. But what he was also kind of getting at then was, well, what about human rituals? I mean, theoretically, human rituals would have to evolve from animal rituals. But in human beings, we...

certainly have our mating rituals and all the sights and the smells and, you know, we meet people at a dance and the movements and rhythms. But ultimately in human beings, we have incorporated rituals into every part of our lives. We just had a ritual expert on. Yeah, he was fascinating. Who was that? Michael Norton. He's weirdly a

Harvard Business School professor, but he's a psychologist. So his newest book is about ritual. And yeah, we went through all these different, like your morning ritual and how people, boy, what's the term they use in psychology? Yeah, they're disgusted when you tell someone, like, do you brush your teeth before the shower or after?

the shower or in the shower, right? Or do you receive before you put your lotion on? These are like really important things to people. If it doesn't match up with yours, you're like, something's wrong with you. Your other. Exactly. We have rituals throughout our lives and all different aspects of our life and across the lifespan. We have rituals for marriage and child, but of course, religions are loaded with rituals from the ceremonies that we do. Again, the life rituals, the prayers, meditation.

They're almost all rituals. They're all rituals. This is now 30 years ago, but Jean and I were talking about, well, if this is the case, we have all these incredible human rituals and specifically religious and spiritual ones. But if they evolve from animal rituals, all animal rituals are mating rituals. Yeah, what's the original ritual? So the original ritual is mating. I mean, all animal rituals essentially are mating rituals or social hierarchy rituals, but they're all part of the mating process. So sexuality...

ultimately has to be suffused throughout this whole thing. And so the basis of human rituals has to be the same as the mating rituals. So we kept saying, now there's got to be something that connects the sexual and the spiritual. And then we started to think about that in terms of the brain. And one of the ways that we got at that was through the rhythmic

elements of these rituals. Say more on that. And we should also do two seconds on the two forces behind evolution as a brush up, because I think it would funnel in nicely. Absolutely. Yeah. So with evolution, we talk about natural selection, which is what most people think of as evolution, which is survival of the fittest. Your neck was longer by mutation and you reached higher trees and then you're a more successful giraffe and you can pass on your long neck genes.

to the next generation. That's natural selection. And then there's sexual selection, which is part of the process because it's part of the mating process. But for whatever reason, a given species starts to like sex

some kind of ornament, we'll call it. So the classic examples are the big antlers of a moose or an elk. I'm living in Colorado right now. So, you know, they're all sporting these large antlers. They're a great cost to the animal and they have no benefit other than the mating ritual. Exactly. Oh, so it's always something superfluous? Often is, almost always, yeah. And the ritual itself is an opportunity for the female to determine the fitness of this mate.

So for peacocks, those are a great expense. They draw attention from predators. They're sending a lot of signals that this motherfucker's fit. He's like got a big sign saying, come get me. And he's still in front of me. And what's interesting about this too, is that's part of why these ornaments get real big.

And it's why male birds are generally prettier. Exactly. I mean, it's almost always the males who have that because it's the females that's sort of guiding that selection process. They got the selection across the board. Pretty much. Well, because they have the egg. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting because the male is selecting the female, but the female ultimately has that kind of final evolutionary push. And part of what has been proposed and goes along very well with what I talk about in Sex, God, and the Brain is the human brain, right?

may have evolved not just because of natural selection that we can solve problems and we can know how to plan our food so we can eat better, but maybe more so because of sexual selection, because what ultimately started to connect us with each other was

Poetry, music, stories, charm, sense of humor. Playfulness. Yeah. But the brains have to evolve together. Yeah. You point out if a male was really funny and the female couldn't understand any of the jokes, it would not result in mate selection. Exactly. Well, why does that happen all the time then? We've got a lot of variety in 8 billion people. It goes back to the bell curve concept. Which actually is important though, because take peacock feathers or the antlers on an elk. If

If all the antlers on elk could only be two feet long and had no variability, well, they can't be a choice for selection. So that you need something that actually can be larger, smaller, more or less, whatever it is. So some guys have a better sense of humor. Some guys tell a better story. Some guys have a better voice. And that's part of it too, which is the beauty of evolution is that there's not a right or a wrong. It's a course it's on. It's what is more adaptive. And so if you have a woman who really likes great music, then...

then the guy who tells a good story is going to be less interesting than the guy who's got a great voice. But then somebody else likes a great story. And so we're saying these things like sense of humor, they're the ornaments. The mental ornaments of who we are as human beings. And

And then that's what starts leading us, forgetting the religious explanation of religion for a moment. Look at religion. I mean, it's got the rituals, it's got the stories, it's got the social connection. It's got a lot of stuff that can really be very exciting for someone and ultimately kind of creates something

that cohesive group that ultimately everybody wants to be a part of. So it can work very well, both on a natural selection because it creates a cohesive society, but on a sexual selection basis that it kind of brings us together in ways you believe what I believe in. This is an important story and this tells me how the world is. I've now shown you if you have somebody who's got a lot of fervent belief in something, but it's consistent with yours, then you like that. You're attracted to that.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. It's interesting, though, they can converge or overlap, and maybe that's my complaint always about anything binary, is there's kind of overlap in those two mechanisms, which I think of the lion, right? Male and female lions have this huge sexual dimorphism. The male's so much bigger than the female, and that's going to continue to increase over

ad infinitum because the way the mating works in a pride of lions is one lion comes in that's bigger than the previous alpha, gets overthrown, and then that one reproduces. Every generation size is rewarded and the male keeps getting bigger when the female stays the same size.

That's just the course it's on. That seems like an overlap between mate selection and natural selection in a bizarre way. You could look at that either way. That's actually, to me, the power of religion if you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, which is that it really works on both mechanisms. Right. Because that's your fundamental question.

How would our capacity to believe in a religion or a God be adaptive in either one of these? From the perspective of sexual selection, it tells a story. It connects you to ideas about the world. It has music. It has social, you know, it has all these great things that bind people together. So that's the sexual selection part. But it seems to have a natural selection part as well because it does create cohesive societies. And in fact, one of the things I point out in the book is this idea that we have found antipathy.

ancient temples that were built in like 9,000, 10,000 BC, thousands of years before we had civilization. So religion seemed to occur long before we were actually able to create these kind of social groups that actually became very adaptive for us because it bound us all together. As far as I know, I don't think there's ever been a civilization that has developed de novo without religion. I mean, you look at ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. There's Moscow. Well, but...

But that's why I say de novo. And in fact, actually, because I took a course in Russian history in college, the religious elements of Russia were huge. Yeah, they were the second creed. And Russian Orthodox. Yeah, exactly. But back to the evolutionary thing, Yuval does a great job at demonstrating this in Sapiens, which is conventionally we're designed to live in a group of about 100 people. That's what humans traditionally lived in. And this common belief is,

and a shared deity allowed us to congregate in groups peacefully, like 1,000, 2,000, 3,000. And then now we're a member of a group that's 3,000. We can easily displace a group of 200 Neanderthals that might be physically superior to us, but have less numbers. So then it becomes part of natural selection. Exactly.

And I think it really does blend both. There's two forces that have kind of guided human history. One is the science technology, the wheel of fire to iPhones. And then the other is the religious and spiritual, which for all of the issues that religions have had over the years, here we are 2,000, 5,000 years after, and they have survived Greece, the Roman Empire, Soviet Union. Religions kind of keep going. Well, I think you could lose track of that a little bit in the US or in Europe, but Monica and I were in,

India this year and Hyderabad. Oh, yeah. Where we were staying was predominantly Muslim. And they were doing the call to prayer five times a day. And, you know, the entire city stops and does that. And it's very loud. That's what everyone's doing. For me, at least, I was like, oh, my God. Yeah, it's so loud.

alive and it's so integrated in all day, every day still. And even in places like Europe and in areas like the United States where there's been a move away from religions, there's still a great deal of spiritual elements to it. People are still looking for that connection. They're still looking for what connects them to the universe, connects them to something greater.

And it could even be just humanity. I mean, it could be being a humanist and saying, I've got to take care of humanity. That's what I want to do. I want to be altruistic. I want to be charitable. I want to help the downtrodden, whatever it is. But there's that thing that connects us to something greater. And that, to me, is what we ultimately are talking about.

It can be codified into a religion. And obviously those religions which are still around today have done that very successfully. The analogy to me is music. Millions of people are writing their own songs, but there's only one Beatles. And why was that? Well, there was something about their brains that allowed them to write songs that had a universal appeal. Whereas some guy sitting in his garage could be writing a fantastic song, but it just doesn't resonate with people. So I think that's part of it, at least in terms of the codified forms of religion.

That gets back to this discussion that we were just having. There's sort of an evolutionary aspect to religions, which is when Christianity was starting out, there were lots of individual sects of religion. And so which were the ones that really lasted? And they were the ones that, for a variety of reasons, kind of hit the largest majority and felt right and could bring all these people together. And that, I think, is true of all of the major traditions, that they just seem to be able to connect with a lot of people. I always argue that everybody...

because all of our brains are unique. I mean, no two people look at the world exactly the same way. Yeah. You said if there's 8 billion people, there's 8 billion religions, 8 billion religions, but there still can be a billion Christians or a billion Muslims. So I think that's part of the power of it. Okay. So let's get into a little bit. The,

the physiology of these things. So give us a brief course on the autonomic nervous system and what's happening. Oh, my favorite part of the brain. That was one of the things that my late mentor, Gene Quilley, and I talked about when we were talking about this connection with sexuality and rituals. How does this all kind of connect? And we looked at what's called the autonomic nervous system. So the autonomic nervous system connects the brain to the body. There's

two main arms. So one of them is called the sympathetic nervous system. That's the scientific term. I typically refer to that as the arousal system of the body. And then there is the parasympathetic, which is the calming or quiescent side. And they are very much balancing each other out throughout our whole lives. We almost sit within this balance of all of them. And so if we were sitting here and suddenly we heard an explosion outside, the arousal system would

kick in. Oh, do we need to pay attention to that? Do we need to run? Do we need to stand and fight against a predator or whatever it is? But it gets our heart rate going. It gets us aroused. It gets us getting ready for whatever it is that we need to do. And then you have this calming side, which is what turns on when it's getting late at night and it's time for us to get ready to go to sleep. So it calms us down. It makes us feel blissful. What's interesting about this system is that us and other colleagues have proposed that this is a key part of rejuvenation.

religious or spiritual experiences. Because when you talk to people about their experiences, and we've done surveys of thousands of these experiences, you get these two sides. You get, I was incredibly aroused, energy, electricity, all these different words that people use, but incredibly calm, you know, oceanic blissfulness kind of thing. And sometimes they happen together, which is interesting because the two systems, they normally kind of

inhibit each other a little bit. If you heard an explosion, that isn't the time to take a nap. That's the time to get out. And by the same token, we've all been in that place where we're trying to get a good night's sleep before we have a big test the next day or a big something at work and we can't sleep. Why? Because our arousal system keeps impinging on that calming side. But what's also interesting is that fundamental to sexuality and the rituals that we have, the rituals are

depending on the rhythms, drive the autonomic nervous system. So that's why if you're getting ready to play a football game, you want some heavy rock or rap that's got this big beat that's going and it drives your arousal system. It wakes you up and now you're ready to go out there and fight or do whatever it is that you need to do. And on the other hand, if you want to get this sort of sense of oceanic, blissful, overwhelming love of God kind of thing, then a Gregorian chant or a hymn that's very calming or some kind of

prayer where you just come along and it slows you down and it gets you to feeling this very, very calm feeling. So that's how the rituals start to affect that. But ultimately, why do we have these systems at all? It's because of sex.

These two systems are what enable sex to occur. They enable the rituals to start the process. You start to get that balance. There isn't a one way to do it. Some people like a lot of energy and arousing. Other people like to be calm and relaxed. But you find the person who resonates with you. But ultimately, in terms of, yeah,

the act of sex itself, both arms of that autonomic nervous system have to turn on in order for you to have an orgasm. Well, that's what makes it so pleasurable, right? Is that both sides are firing at max capacity, which is very unique. Right. As far as I know, the only two times that that happens or people talk about that happening is sexual ecstasy.

And spiritual ecstasy. Well, because I'm a junkie, I will also parallel with that's why the ultimate drug has always been the speedball. It's virtually that exact same thing in chemical form. It's an upper and a downer at once. And it's creating this cake and eat it to steak.

When I was talking earlier about this big puzzle of neurotheology, the whole aspect of using psychedelics and different drugs to induce spiritual states, you know, this is exactly what's going on. Those chemicals are changing in the brain. And many people talk about those psychedelic experiences as being profoundly spiritual and sometimes sexual. Yeah. MDMA. Yeah. Let's see, myths we kind of touched on. I just wanted to point out, because I like that you shined a light on it, but the

But the brain is just really great at creating opposites. We talked about it already in terms of even if you don't know your reality, you're best to think you know your reality because you do have to decide. And I think this is an outgrowth of that, right? Oh, absolutely. Our brain works best when we can clearly delineate things.

So we have what we used to refer to as a binary operator. We have parts of our brain that see the opposites. You think about how you grow up. You learn synonyms and antonyms and black and white. Our brain likes things that way because it also makes things clear. For anybody who's had a kid, what you did was right or wrong. It can't be, well, you can turn the juice cup over on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but not Mondays and Wednesdays. Or it's okay to do it if you really don't like it, but it has to be yes or no. That makes our lives easier. But we get into these issues of Republican and Democrat or something. It's

yes or no instead of the world itself is deeply gray. That's where our challenge comes in. And that's the basis of myth, which is that we sort of bring these opposites that we really can't reconcile easily. And in religious myth, the fundamental opposite is God versus us as human beings. How do we, as these very finite, limited, small, mortal beings have any kind of interaction with something which is arguably infinite and eternal and omniscient and so forth? So it

It's the mythic story that brings them together and helps us to resolve those opposites. And that's why you often see things like a profound sense of oneness or connectedness that's a part of that mythic story. Bridging the gap between these opposites you've laid out.

It's ironic that that's a pleasurable state at times. Well, it is because it resolves a problem for you. Because of that, it releases some of those feel-good molecules, the dopamine and so forth that makes you feel good, makes you feel like you understand something now. Talking about the Olympics right now. So wherever you grew up, you rooted for your high school basketball team

And you hated the high school down the road's basketball team. It's us versus them. But then we're all part of the same city. So we're all going to root for the Lakers. And we hate the Celtics. It keeps transferring. Right. And now we're in the Olympics. And so the guys who played on the Celtics and the guys who played on the Lakers, this is all the United States.

if aliens came down, then we'd be all playing, you know, so, which is an interesting piece of all of this because it gets into the us versus them concept. But where do you define those lines? And the us versus them is movable and sometimes in very good ways, but sometimes bad ways. That's the downside. Well, if we can remember that it's movable.

Exactly. That would be good. Okay, let's get into the history a little bit of how some of these religions have dealt with sex. Given they're so related, it is interesting and ironic that so many of the ones we're familiar with abhor sex, apparently, unless it's in pursuit of procreation.

So how on earth does it go from how it started to this weird division? And maybe we can start with what's sacred prostitution? Before I get to the sacred prostitution, because you asked a great question. I've been thinking about this. One of the things that we almost have to start with, what is arguably one of the most well-known sacred texts, the Bible. The moment that human beings are created by God, what does God do? God doesn't tell human beings to pray.

to create religion or even to believe in God, God says, be fruitful and multiply. It's interesting that even in the religion of many of these monotheistic traditions, which now have a lot of trepidation about sex, at least for the sake of having sex, the original admonition to us was to have sex. I mean, that was the first thing that we were told to do. And of course, if you go to the very first line of the Bible, it's God created the heavens and the earth. God gave birth to the universe. The whole act of creation and sexuality is kind of fundamental evidence

to the monotheistic traditions, and I think to all traditions, where I think the flip started to occur is there began to be this concern about the overlap. If sexuality and spirituality are using the same basic biological mechanisms, they can be viewed as competing with each other, in which case

you should only have sex for procreation and not for fun. But then there are lots of traditions, and you mentioned being in India and Hinduism and even some of the ancient Christian Jewish approaches, sexuality was a part of the process. And you mentioned prostitution. The idea was these women who were performing sexual acts

were doing so at the behest of God, helping people to connect with God in a very fundamental way. And back in the ancient times, they were regarded very highly in society. Yeah, unlike prostitution now, which diminishes status, this elevated status, in like Mesopotamian, Sumerian tradition. Exactly. Part of it has been this slow evolution of, well, where does sexuality fit in all of this? I mean, the original traditions were often about fertility goddesses and conglomerates

coming from Mother Earth, God the Father. And in fact, it is interesting because even in more modern times, I think one of the quotes that I have from Pope John Paul II talks about how sexuality, obviously within a marriage for the Catholic tradition, but it's talking about it's this devotedness, this complete giving over of yourself to another, this incredible oneness and connection, which in many ways parallels what we are supposed to be doing today.

It seems like they're caught in a bit of a trap, which is like they don't want you to be able to go out and experience this unique experience.

experience you get with God with someone else because it cheapens the God one. Yet no religion could be against procreation or it wouldn't have made it to now. Yet then there's also a great hack in there, which is if you can only have sex to procreate and we know how much you want to have sex, well, now we're ensuring you're going to have a ton of babies because we want to fuck. That's what's going to happen. Exactly.

So it's all very convoluted. To me, that was part of what was exciting about writing this book because it was really identifying the underlying biology of why this has become such a challenge because it looks like it really does ride on the same biological mechanisms, the autonomic nervous system, some of the other brain areas.

The fact that there's so much common elements to it, literally within us, it creates this problem and it creates this paradox that is challenging. And that's why some religions have found ways of utilizing sexuality as part of that process. And others have been

been more concerned about it. Will you tell me about the cult of Venus, just because I'm perverted and I want to know how it was before? A lot of this was based on the idea of the sexual energy as being the way that you could achieve spiritual enlightenment. And we see this in a number, you know, if you look at some of the ancient Hindu art forms and so forth, there's a lot of eroticism. And it was really about engaging in sexuality and sexual activity as a way of facilitating the spiritual. Well,

Well, even the notion you point out in the book, Yahweh's covenant with his people is going to be symbolized by cutting the penis. How about a high five or something? Yeah. They're asking you to basically alter the most important thing to you. Is that...

So that people will know you're a member, this in-group. Right. That's right. It's amazing that was the approach that was taken. It's so extreme. And it's so based on sexuality. You know, we just kind of inherited it as something that happens, but it's

It's so extreme. Not like cut your pinky off or give yourself a tattoo. Yeah. Or a nose ring or something. Yeah. Because ostensibly you're seeing the penis when you're having sex. So it is all connected. And it gets back to the stories and that sexual selection discussion. And so it's all connected.

Okay, so sexual ecstasy and spiritual ecstasy seem to have also, aside from the sympathetic and parasympathetic, we also have these subjective feelings that parallel. Intensity, clarity, unity, connectedness, and surrender.

When we did a survey of spiritual experiences and we looked at all the ways in which people describe them, we came up with the fact that there seemed to be these five basic elements that are part of those experiences. But again, they are all part of the sexual experience as well. So intensity. If you look at history, what else is

garnered human attention more than sex. Every poem, every song, every play, they're all about sexuality. So part of the other piece of all of this is even if you were to take a religious perspective and say, well, if God's up in heaven and here we are, and there needs to be some connection there, why wouldn't God utilize the things that are part of who we are? So if you want to

facilitate an intense experience, you would take the most primal experience that we have, which is having sex. If we don't enjoy it, we're not going to do it. It better be the best experience we can possibly have. And that's because of its intensity, the unity. I mean, that's another really fundamental piece of what sexuality is. When we talk about the rituals, the basis of animal rituals, as well as human rituals, is to create this rhythmic pattern that breaks down the barrier between ourself and another. Normally animals are

pretty separate in the world. They're certainly not going to start jumping on top of each other, but they do it for set. So there's something about that part that brings us together in an extremely intimate way that is also reflected then in spirituality, that sense of oneness, that incredibly intense and intimate encounter with God, if you're a Christian or the universe or universal consciousness, whatever it is. You mentioned the sense of surrender as you get into

sexuality, as you get into spirituality, you know, at the beginning, you're kind of making things happen and you're controlling what's going on. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that, whether it's meditation or sex. But at some point, you kind of lose control of the whole process. Ideally. Yeah. That sense of letting go and surrender is the transcendent part. Yeah.

And then with regard to human beings and sex, we talk about clarity and spirituality. That's, I get it. I understand the world. In the context of sexuality, it's, I get it. This is the person for me. This is who I now will connect with. And it has a transformational element. I mean, when you fall in love,

it feels forever and it feels like I'm a different person now. You complete me, you know, the old saying from Jerry Maguire or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's the feeling. And the same thing happens with spirituality. The person feels completed. They feel that they understand it. They feel transformed by the experience. And

And we can start looking at the different brain areas. So one of the ones that I talk about a lot, and I may have mentioned this the last time, is that we have our parietal lobe, which is located in the back part of our brain. And it takes our sensory information from all the rituals, from everything that we see, and gives us our sense of self, where we are and what we're doing and how we're interacting with the world.

What we have found in a lot of spiritual practices that when you get that sense of unity, that sense of connectedness, you lose the sense of self, that parietal lobe quiets down pretty dramatically. And that makes sense. It turns on to give you your sense of self when

When it goes away, you lose it. And you lose the boundary between yourself and other, between other objects in the world. So that's one of the big areas that we talk about. And then the sense of surrender is just one other example we think is very related to the frontal lobe. And so our frontal lobe, which is behind the forehead,

and enables us to focus our attention on meditation, prayer, sex, whatever it is that we're focusing on. - Model the future. - Yeah, that turns on our frontal lobe. But when we watch these practices where the person feels that sense of surrender, you mentioned going to India and looking at Muslim practices. We studied Muslim practices and the whole basis of Islam is surrender. Their frontal lobes actually shut down. It turns on to make us feel purposeful and to be in charge of whatever it is that you're doing. And when your frontal lobe goes down,

You surrender yourself. Sometimes people talk about the feeling of flow. Like you're just in it and it's just happening to you and you're just going with it. I think of the stereotypical, you hear this all the time, that very common stereotype

Submissives in these sub-dom relationships are people who actually have great, great control and power in their real life. It's so exaggerated in their daily life that to keep everything balanced, they almost need this submissive role. Fascinating. It is fascinating. And part of the basis of rituals and myths and all these things that we're talking about is that as...

As you turn the brain on in these different ways or off, the brain is a great analogy to a muscle because the more you use your brain in certain ways, the more the neurons connect to enable you to do it again. The cute phrase is that neurons that fire together wire together. Well, that's why rituals work so well. You mentioned they're called the prayerful.

five times a day, every day. So as you come back and you do that prayer, as you do the life ceremony or what you do at a wedding, you do it over and over and over and over again, those neural firings and all, they connect those neurons in a way that really supports your way of thinking about the world.

and connect you to that in a very fundamental way. And because of that autonomic nervous system, and this is kind of the final part of the rituals, is the rituals are connected to the myth, to the story. It's not that you just understand

what it means cognitively to be Jewish or Christian or whatever. You feel it in your body. That's what sexuality does. It's not just, oh, I love that person, but you're connected to that person in every way possible. It's a different kind of relationship than you have with your best friends. So it establishes a whole different kind of feeling. And that's why they're so powerful.

In the chemicals involved, you have a section called the biochemistry of God and sex. So what molecules are at play? One of the things that I often say is that there's not one part of our brain that makes us religious or spiritual. And similarly, there isn't just one molecule that's going to make us feel something. And I think for anybody who does have a spiritual feeling in their life, they realize that there are

different elements to it. There's things they think, there's things they feel, there's the emotions that they have. And we've done some brain imaging studies where we've looked at some of these different neurotransmitters. And so one of the ones that a lot of people probably have heard of is dopamine, and that is the feel-good molecule. And that gets released during practice

This is like meditation. It gets released during sexual arousal. So the dopamine becomes a very important part because it gives you that real euphoric kind of high. And that's part of why the drug cocaine is so powerful because it causes a release of dopamine. The serotonin system is another one. That's where the psychedelic drugs work. And serotonin gets released when we are engaged in these different rhythmic processes and these practices. And

We did a study where we looked at somebody who went through a long-term retreat program, and it showed that the brain was more sensitive to dopamine and serotonin. So each time now you have a new firing of it, it's like a little added effect, almost like a drug. It kind of keeps getting stronger and you may want it more and more because it keeps feeling better and better. One other one is a neurotransmitter many people may not have heard of this one called GABA,

which is an acronym for gamma-amino butyric acid. And what it is, is it's one of the main inhibitory neurotransmitters in the brain. It kind of calms the brain down. It's actually one of the sites where most of the big anti-anxiety medications. What GABA does is it helps to calm the brain down. So remember when we were talking about the frontal lobe quieting down, the parietal, well,

there needs to be neurotransmitters that help those areas do that. And that's what I think GABA does. And there's been evidence that there's a release of GABA in the brain when people are meditating or praying. And so we see all of this, but these are also all part of the sexual, you know, if you look at how sex actually happens and the arousal that you get with the dopamine, and then you get the serotonin and then some of these other neurotransmitters, it seems like it's a

very, very similar kind of mechanism, kind of utilizing that mechanism to have those same powerful feelings. Basically, you can observe that the spiritual experience and the sexual experiences are both very similar in their chemical composition and physically what areas of the brains are engaged. So then it really is just a question of which one was first. And it seems pretty obvious that it would have to be sexual. Right. If you take the evolutionary, the idea that there were all these animal rituals for people

millions and millions of years. And you go back in the brains and look at ancient animals and we find autonomic nervous systems and these neurotransmitters have been around for prehistoric crocodile. Is this why cults are so powerful? It's like the trifecta. They do rituals. There's some spiritual element to a lot of them. And

often a sexual element to a lot of them. Absolutely. Sexuality as well as spirituality can be incredibly positive and they can lead to compassion and understanding. But

but they can also be used for a lot of negativity. Even the idea of a cult is interesting because back in the day, 2000 years ago, Christianity was a cult. Is it not a cult now because there's a billion people who follow it? This to me is a really interesting part of neurotheology, which is the whole normal and not normal. And how do we define that?

we did a study of people speaking in tongues. We did the brain scans. These are panoptic- While they were speaking in tongues. While they were speaking in tongues. Incidentally, they feel that sense of surrender, so their frontal lobes shut down also. But what was interesting to me as I was looking it up, doing my due diligence of trying to understand what it was, for the people we had coming in,

it was connecting with God. But there are psychiatrists who will tell you this is a trained psychosis or hypnosis. And then there's other religious people who would say, that's not connecting with God, that's the devil. So you have the same thing that now everybody's looking at differently. But...

Getting back to your point, though, even within that concept of normal and not normal, you might say, well, somebody who likes to go to a church or mosque, they kind of have quote unquote normal religiousness. But what do you make of a nun or a monk who says, I'm not having a family?

I'm going to take a vow of celibacy. I'm not going to take any money. I'm just going to be very focused on only that. Is that normal? It's not a successful reproduction strategy. It's not a success, exactly. Minimally. Unless it's a way of sort of showing a target. We understand that not all of us are going to be able to do that. But if we all strive to be good people and we realize that there's this sort of ultimate goal of connecting with God, whether it's now or someday in the future or after death,

It helps to support the overall community. It's like, it's real. Look at her. Exactly. Can't be me. In Hunger Games, they're tributary. Yeah. They're like, I'll go. Right. Your question is great because...

This is part of what this whole research helps us to understand, which is sexuality is wonderful when it's two consenting people and they love each other and it's great, it's intimate, it feels terrific, but it can obviously go very wrong to the point where you have abuses and rape and addiction. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. ♪

Let's save dark side of sexuality and religion until the end. Tell us about the OM group and what opportunity they opened up for you, having had this curiosity for 30 years. For 30 years, I've been thinking about this relationship between sexuality and spirituality. But my late mentor, Gene DeQuilly, he died very suddenly after I've been working with him for about six, seven years. And he really had that anthropological background. I'm coming at it more from the neuroscience side. So as part of the team, I'm

I could kind of continue the neuroscience piece, but I had to leave a little bit of that anthropological piece behind because it wasn't my area. But I always felt like that was part of how we got here. And I kept wanting to find a way to do that. And a lot of times I get a call out of the blue from somebody who says, hey, we've got this practice that is really interesting and

would you be interested in studying it? And usually I'd say yes, because that's what I do. Monica, people have gone in the MRI and masturbated. Not with me. But I found that interesting because you point out like, look how strong this

wiring is that you can be in this machine making a lot of noise, knowing you're observed. You're probably assuming that it's not going to happen, but you show some pornographic images and people orgasm inside of an MRI. So one day I'm in my office and I get a call from this woman who I don't know anything about. And she says, we do this interesting practice called orgasmic meditation. I don't know. Okay. Sounds interesting. I like both those words. Tell me more. Tell me more. As she was describing it, I realized fairly quickly that one, this person

may be an interesting link between this whole discussion of sexuality and spirituality. It's a meditative approach that uses sexual stimulation as the focus of the meditation. My first thought was like, I'm sure many people, that seems a little odd, but when you actually take a step back and think about how many practices work, many practices use stimulation

our body's physiology as a focus. And probably the most common one is our breath. You meditate by closing your eyes and focus on your breath and the air feels cool and you feel all these things. There's a meditation called the body scan. There's walking meditation as well. So the idea of using some kind of stimulation that's part of your body, okay, that makes sense.

And then there was this added piece, which was the sexual stimulation, which to me, I'm like, this could be a little bit of this missing link because here I might be able to actually show what the sexual stimulation do in the brain when it's not specifically used for sexual stimulation, but as a kind of spiritual meditative focus. I think we need to talk about what's physically happening. So in this practice, a woman's meditating and a man generally, there's a stroker and a stroked.

And so a man is stroking the woman's clitoris as she meditates. Exactly. There were a couple of things that were interesting to me too, because it is a paired practice. And I do get a lot of questions about what's the difference when you're doing like a meditation practice, if you're just sitting there yourself versus if you're a large group at an ashram or something like that. But this is a meditation practice, which is done with two people. They were very adamant about the fact that

the person who is doing the stimulation is part of the practice. So the male, and it could be a female theoretically, but in our study, we did it as a male and female pair. The male who's doing the stimulation is very much meditating on what they're doing and what effect they're having.

For the female who is having the sexual stimulation, she's also involved in this meditation. And so she's focusing her mind on the feelings that she's having on the energy that is being generated as part of this process. And part of what also was kind of helpful for me as a researcher, sometimes when we've done a study like Buddhist meditation, when we scan people, we need to have some sense of timing.

because I can't put somebody in a scanner for hours and hours on end. And one of the ways that we do our scans is through what's called nuclear medicine, where we inject a little bit of a radioactive tracer. It's great for me to do that, but it captures that moment in time when I do the injection. So I need to know what they're doing at that moment. And when we did our Buddhist meditation study many years ago, they said, well, we meditate for an hour, hour and a half. You know, like, how do I know where you are in your practice? I mentioned the speaking and tongue study.

There was no timing on that,

You can hear him doing it. So the nice thing about this practice was that it's a very clearly timed practice. It's 15 minutes. The last half of that 15 minutes is the peak experience. So I can know when to inject. I can know when to do the study. All of that became very helpful for us from a research perspective because it made it easy to know what the whole very well-defined intentional process was. They were very clear that it's not having sex. And orgasms are happening sometimes and sometimes not. Occasionally, but that is not the goal.

they were very clear about that and as part of our study we ask everybody how it was because that's a whole other piece which is we want to make sure that anybody who's coming in for our study is doing the practice in a genuine way we asked them if they had actually a climax and in our group none of them did that's a little interesting to me i don't know how one gets their clitoris stimulated for 15 minutes while focusing on that are they actively trying not to have an orgasm i don't

think that they're purposely trying not to. I just don't think that's their goal. Not where their energy is focused. Their energy is not focused on it. It's more just connecting with the actual stimulation. Exactly.

Part of me was interested in seeing how the sexual-spiritual piece matched up, but then there was also the kind of social connection too, going back to our whole conversation about rituals and how do these two people connect with each other. And is he being observed as well? We actually were able to set it up in such a way where we actually scanned both of them. And did they have this great correlation of brain activity, the way when people sing together or do anything together? That was part of what we found.

We saw changes in their brains in general. We saw their frontal lobes decreasing. By the time they get into this process, it's sort of this natural thing that's just kind of happening to them. I should also be really clear that as with a lot of our studies, these were all people who are very experienced in this. We're not just taking somebody off the street and saying, here, you know, try it. Two students on campus, hey, give her to home. Yeah, right. Here, let's try this. And in fairness, I mean, when we've studied people speaking in tongues,

And these are all people who have been doing it for many, many years, which in and of itself is a whole other interesting question about who should you study and should you get people who are experts or novices? So these are all people who are very experienced with it. And that to me was part of it. So we saw the frontal lobes decreasing in both the males and the females. We saw the parietal lobes decreasing because there was this very intimate connection. They're sharing an identity in a way. Exactly. What we also found was that there were certain changes in their brains that

that correlated with how the other one was doing. It really showed that connection. And in some ways, that was, I think, maybe the best evidence of the whole sexual selection model, which is that your brains are really resonating with each other as you get into this kind of a practice. Yeah, because my knee jerk on the surface of learning of this practice was like, well, this is very lopsided. This is interesting. The guy just stimulates. But at the same time, no,

No, I've had those experiences and they're very wonderful for you too. I guess I'm relieved to hear their brain patterns were mirroring each other. And there were some distinctions as well. The other areas of the brain that also were different in them were something called the precuneus and the insula. And these are basically social areas of the brain. They are the areas of our brain that we use so that I can read what you're feeling and know how you're thinking and try to be empathic and compassionate to you.

So these areas were also significantly affected. Well, because you're overly aware of any cue being broadcast to you so that it will inform your actions. Exactly. Even that act of trying your hardest to observe what someone's doing is kind of a euphoric. It's like shrooms in that it forces you out of your own head enough that it's pleasant. You're really almost feeling what the other person is feeling, or at least that's your kind of goal. And it can be very powerful for obviously both individuals. And this is

part of where this kind of practice and meditative practices, talking about the real positive side of things, does this enable your brain to continue to be empathic towards

towards others even in a non-sexual way does it make you try to understand other people more try to reach out to them be intimate with them and I don't mean sexually intimate but understanding who you are and where you're coming from are those reps of intimacy and reps of empathy in this particular case we didn't specifically measure that although we do see longer term changes in these individuals in these areas but other studies have certainly looked at that with things like mindfulness and other types of practices this is just for your own amusement it's an antidote but we

interviewed people who had been in cults and we interviewed a guy who was in a cult that was a spin-off of this. There was a woman in New York that practiced this and then ended up with kind of a house everyone lived in and it was wild. I don't know if you crossed paths. I did not. I think there's a doc about him.

Okay, so let's now talk about the dark side of sexuality and religion. The most well-known atheists, the first thing they point out always is more people have been killed in the name of God than anything else. And there's a truth to that. So this to me is a real...

area where the field of neurotheology can help us with, because clearly there are people who turn to religion. Some of those wonderful human beings I've ever met were like in the pastoral care department at our hospital, and they're deeply religious. They have their own religious tradition, but they're open to everyone. They love everyone. They want everyone to

be well and healed. So they turn their religion outward and help everyone. And then of course, there's people who are willing to drop a bomb around their chest and kill people who don't believe the way they do. And this gets back to our earlier conversation a little bit about where is our line drawn in terms of the us versus them and how strongly do we feel about that? How dogmatic do we get about that? Even if you're one person, if you believe you're connected to all of humanity, then you're a loving, compassionate person to all of humanity. But if you think that it's your group

and your idea, and you're going to defend that idea, and anybody else who says anything differently, there's got to be something wrong with them, and they're evil. It turns that into very negative energy. One of the statements that my mentor and I used to talk about is that rituals are a morally neutral technology. They can be used for great good, bringing the whole country together, or bringing a whole group of people together and loving each other. Or Hitler.

Or Hitler. And he was terrific at using symbols and rituals. I mean, the rhythm and the songs, unfortunately. I also can imagine, again, I'm always infusing the addiction lens with all this, is that for sex addicts, it is a great way to regulate your internal state with this great distraction. And you can find freedom and peace from whatever is haunting you. You can enter this zone, and that is this freedom. Yeah.

Without sounding too judgmental, I have definitely met people who practice religion in a way that I would say is identical. The normal day-to-day life is so uncomfortable that this constant retreat into this world and thought process is being used at all times to regulate. Do you think there's any parallels between those two? Absolutely.

Part of what has been realized with the good versus the bad of religion and spirituality is that religion does get wrapped up sometimes in that negative aspect. Sometimes people think God is punishing them. Sometimes people turn to a religion that seems to be very dogmatic and very hate-filled, but ultimately resonates with them because of whatever issues they've been dealing with and does help to kind of quell what they're feeling. And so people have tried to turn to different psychotherapeutic approaches that incorporate religious content

to help bring people around to a different way of looking at it. And instead of looking at God as hateful, God is angry, God wants us to harm other people, God is loving, God is compassionate, God wants us to

be compassionate and loving to other people. But that to me is why it's a really interesting neurotheological question, which is what is the difference in a brain of somebody who has an addiction and turns towards religion or spirituality? You look at Alcoholics Anonymous and using a higher power. I mean, that's a fundamental part of the whole process. And it's very powerful for a lot of people. And obviously it's worked for lots of people, but it doesn't work for everybody. And then

And then there are people who really go in very negative directions. And what is the difference in the brain of somebody who takes that negative path? And I do suspect that in addition to just the overall biochemical changes, you're talking about some very core areas of the brain. There's a very central structure called the hypothalamus, which sits like at the very base of the brain. It's an amazing structure.

part of our being because it's maybe a half a centimeter, half an inch or whatever in size, but it regulates our autonomic nervous system. It regulates our hormones. And because it regulates these things, it's very involved in our aggression because we sometimes have to be able to fight or flight and quickly. But it also is where a lot of our pleasure centers are, and they're very close to each other.

To me, I'm always thinking, well, if it's just a millimeter to the left or a millimeter to the right, you get different neurons. Those are why people fight and then have sex. And I talk about that a lot in the book. I mean, that has a long thousand year history of aggression and violence and then followed by rape. Again, it all gets wrapped up because it's all part of that stimulatory piece, which can lead to violence.

very good things and it can be fun to have a sort of aggressiveness with your partner, but it can also, when that's not wanted, it can lead to horrific stuff. And it is interesting how both sexuality and religion or spirituality can both have that wonderful positive side and both have that really horrible negative side. Both prone to...

indulge in power and dominance. But that to me also is just why it keeps coming back to this common theme of they're using the same parts of our brain. Well, physiologically, if we're talking about, let's say, terrorists or something, if their frontal lobe has shut down because of ritual and spirituality and all these things that are used at first, can they even logic their way out of some of these things that are getting told to them? It's a great question, and it is extremely hard.

A lot of the people who get caught up in these things, they can undergo a conversion. They can go through a process where they come to some realization. Now, that to me is another really great neurotheological question. What is the data? What is the piece of information? What happens? What is that moment of resistance?

wrong that was in rabbit hole if you remember monica these people that started as occupy wall streeters that then evolved into q anoners but then some of the people that left q anon because it got really religious and then first whatever reason you keep going down in layers of identity and eventually one of these will bump up against an even more core identity marker which would be for this woman it was like i'm an atheist

As much as I believe in all this other stuff, the QAnon and the Occupy Wall Street, it got to this point where now we're quoting texts from 2000 years ago. I'm out. It can keep moving its way through your identity until it hits a roadblock where that one's so core to how you define yourself, you're now willing to be critical. How much information or what happens within us when we have a paradigm shift? This is not just for religion. This is for science. When I was going through medical school, if somebody had an ulcer in their stomach, it was because of acid.

One day, and I remember we were like reading these articles about how there was a bacteria that was doing this. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. It's definitely coffee. Yeah, it can't be that. That article that says it's a bacteria, that was poorly done. These people don't know what they're talking about. And today we give you an antibiotic. So they always joke that, you know, science proceeds one funeral at a time. As people change their way of thinking, how much data do you need? You know, the other story that I always think about is Albert Einstein and quantum mechanics. He

He couldn't get there. Yeah, smartest guy in the world could not get there. Exactly. And he would come up with ways to prove that it was wrong. And then they would do the experiment to show that it was right. And he still didn't like it. Like, what do you need to know that? I know it's this truth that we always try to pretend is not there. I even asked it to Sapolsky. I said, you have this enormous brain to bear on whatever your intuition is. And you can fool yourself, but we have this intuition. We have some weird base belief and then we can deploy our...

our huge brain to confirm it. And you can't know. You can't know. Okay, the one thing that I felt like is missing from all this conversation, and also I want to point out, you lay this book out beautifully for both people. So whether you're an atheist or whether you're religious, this book, I don't think, threatens either one of those. It's very inclusive of both those experiences. Thank you, I try to be. It's very meticulously done. I'm an atheist. So of course, I'm looking at this as being

basically this system has been co-opted by this human invention of religion. But the other explanation I've had for why we are so prone to and primed to accept a deity is that we're the ultimate social species. And so hierarchy is the most important force in our life. Our hierarchy is going to determine our mating access, our access to food, to shelter, to everything. It's number one. I agree.

And we are masterful at identifying hierarchy immediately. We pick up so many cues to figure out where we fall in the status ladder. So because we're so blueprinted to recognize and accept and then be deferential to status and to be subordinate to status, of course a God is easy for us. It's the ultimate alpha. It's just, of course, there's another thing above this alpha. And so I'm just curious, how do you see our...

predilection and obsession with status and hierarchy play out in sex and religion? Or is that even an aspect you think of much? And then maybe even what's happening in an fMRI when we are evaluating status and hierarchy? And is that perfectly paralleled to the sexual thing as well? First of all, I completely agree with you. In fact, that's part of the argument that I make. And the term I was using a little bit in the book was worship.

If you look at the social hierarchy of all animals, as you mentioned, there's the alpha male or a queen bee, and it is ultimately all about mating. So that whole process, it is deeply embedded within us to be able to establish those hierarchies and to have that alpha male. And to just pick up on one thing in particularly important that you mentioned, which is that when you have an alpha of any particular kind, I

I often thought, well, if somebody decides to fight the alpha and then they lose, why don't they just try again? But they don't. You are very deferential to anyone who is above you in that hierarchy. And so that clearly has been a part of what has been kind of embedded within us. I would see it on playgrounds all the time. You must have too. It's like these two kids hated each other's guts. They scheduled a fight in front of the school. They fought like crazy. They cried the blood. They get up. They're instantly at peace with each other. Yeah.

The immediate resolution of it reeked of something primitive in hundreds of thousands of years old. Even if you look at major wars, we had World War II where our hated enemies were Germany and Japan. And now, I don't know if we're best friends, but we're certainly good friends. Up there, yeah, yeah. England and us. Yeah, that is part of that process because it maintains that social hierarchy. So I completely agree and talk about that, that whole concept of worship and even the Ten Commandments is no other God. I mean, it's like...

alpha, no idols. I don't know the exact biology of it. I suspect that it does have something to do with the autonomic nervous system, because as you said, you get to this fight where your arousal system is as high as it's going to be. And then once that fight is done, that drops and your calming side comes in. But what's also interesting is the

We use our autonomic nervous system also to evaluate how that hierarchy runs. We did an interesting article, I thought, on the forgiveness process. And this is also an interesting piece of religion and spirituality and revenge versus forgiveness. And I sort of started with, well, how do you know that somebody has injured you in the first place? Because if you're my boss...

You're allowed to tell me I did a lousy job if I did a lousy job. You're not allowed to abuse me, but you're allowed to tell me I did a lousy job. If you're my friend, maybe you're not allowed to tell me that I did a lousy job at work. Yeah, just ignore that. You just stumbled into Monica and I's life. What about when it's your boss and your friend? That's very tricky. I never recommend that. Well, yeah. Too late. So revenge behavior, this is in the Bible too, about an eye for an eye. Ahamarabi. Right. So if you injure me...

I injure you back, an eye for an eye, and I have rebalanced.

that hierarchy, however that was. Even if I perceived you to be higher than me, I may not necessarily bring you down below me, but I've at least haven't let you get much higher than me. But interestingly, forgiveness also allows for a rebalancing depending on the cognitive and emotional processes that are part of that. So I might say, well, you know what? He hurt me or he insulted me, but he's a human being. Maybe he was having a bad day. I'm a human being. I've had bad days. I'm going to let this go. In

In my mind, I reestablish the hierarchy in a different way. And interestingly, as we have learned in history, while revenge, we see this all the time in the Middle East, but sometimes forgiveness is a more powerful approach because other people see what's going on and take your side as the one who is now forgiven. My concrete example is always in traffic. You're merging someone's pissed someone off.

Someone waves and they're basically saying, I'm sorry, versus you go to war and you argue and then you leave continuing to hate that person or you have misbehaved. I guess what I'm getting at is I have gotten a much deeper lesson out of having wronged people and they forgave me. And then I had the moment to reflect that my behavior was wrong. Yeah.

and felt shame and guilt about that versus if they just fight back and I get locked in the fight. I don't ever get into the evaluation. Autonomic nervous system. Yeah, it's so powerful for giving somebody. Yeah. It's almost deadly. It's like trying to hit nothing. I got into playing pickleball. If somebody smacks the ball at you hard, it's easy to punch that back. Somebody gives you a real softy, it's hard. It's like baseball, you know? Good luck getting there. It's like hitting a knuckleball. You can't do it. This also just shows how this intimate connection of sexuality and spirituality all

fit together. The whole social hierarchy of animals for mating that we see in all the other species on the planet that have social hierarchies, it became part of us too. Oh, it's so fascinating. Is there anything prescriptive? I don't know if it's prescriptive so much as I hope it gives people an ability to reflect on their own ways of thinking about things, on their sense of spirituality, their sense of sexuality, helps them to identify themselves.

the ways in which it works for them, appreciates when it doesn't. And I study these things. So to me, it's never, hey, do this practice or do that practice, but it's really about understanding ourselves. And I think that that helps us to know how to manage the different ways in which we are, even if it can just give us a little bit of pause and say, maybe that person, they're a human being too. Maybe I should be a little bit more open and understanding and compassionate to them.

I would like the three main ones to lighten their stranglehold up on sexuality. I think that was my original complaint where I was like, well, fuck this. This is what you're laying out for me. We're going to deny our sexuality. I'm out. This is crazy and untenable for me. And I think that's part of it, too, which is does it give us a better understanding of that relationship and maybe helps people to not feel the shame? But what I always emphasize is to find the ways that it's productive, to find the ways that it's good.

Sexuality is wonderful when you're with the right person and it connects you and all those wonderful feelings. And you can use that to be empathic and compassionate to others as well. And the same thing for spirituality. Have your belief, but go out and reach out to other people and engage them and try to learn about them. And I think it makes us all better people. And I guess that's what it's all about.

Oh, well, such an interesting book. Sex, God and the Brain. Andrew, your second visit. I hope there'll be a third. You keep writing very interesting stuff. Despite you acknowledging you'll never know anything, you keep trying anyways. And I appreciate it. If I ever figure it out, I promise I will tell you. Yeah, please publish. Resistance should be your next book. I might be. All right. Well, so fun having you in person. And I hope we see you again soon. Thank you so much. All right. Take care.

Hi there, this is Hermium Permium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check with Miss Monica. Hello, Armcherrys. This marks our last episode under the Spotify umbrella. And I just wanted to thank, we've worked with so many wonderful people over the last three years. And I just wanted to thank everyone. We had such a wonderful experience there. We really did. We were treated very, very well. Loved working.

with Spotify. - Yeah, we were treated abnormally well, I would say. And right out of the gate, Dawn Ostroff, who's the original exec to reach out to us and have interest in us and bring us over, she was always so wonderful, and then followed by Julie McNamara,

And then Jordan Newman, we love to death. Jess Morrison, who I even had the pleasure of partying with in Austin at Danny Ricardo's Live Music. I'm partying quotes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Asia and Giselle. An incredible team over there we got to work with. And we're very lucky and thankful. Thanks for having us. Truly. It was a wonderful three years. Yeah. We have another fun three years a coming. Yes, we do. Which is very fun. Reminder, ding, ding, ding, that starting next week, you can find us online.

You can find us anywhere. We're everywhere. Can't put too fine a point on this because I see it in the comments. Wherever you're listening right now, wherever you're at right now, you can stay right there. You don't have to do a damn thing. Don't worry. But if you want to, if you want to listen to us ad free. Oh, I would. You can go to Wondry Plus. Yeah. If you want to listen to us.

If you want to see us on video, you can go to YouTube and some other places. I'm not totally sure on there. But YouTube for sure. You can find us for the fact check and for experts. There's just way more fun options coming your way. That's right. We have recorded in the new video space. We have. And...

I like it. Yeah, let's give some behind the scenes about our feelings. Yeah, let's do it. I will say our very first guest, I did feel disoriented for about the first eight minutes. I don't know what your experience was, but I was like, oh man, yeah, it was lights, a lot of lights. I mean, the attic's generally a little...

It is. The lights don't work in here. Yeah, they actually don't work. In fact, we have been many times interviewing someone in the winter that started at like two or three and it's like getting dark and we're like, oh, fuck, I got to wrap this up. I can't see the person anymore. Yeah, we're riding by daylight. Yes. And I had like six minutes of worrying like where I put my coffee and is it distracting that I'm reaching over to get my coffee? Thought about my notes. You know, do I ever want anyone seeing me glance at my notes? Oh, wow.

Wow, yeah. One of their things. Yeah. But then that went away. Our first recording we did is an amazing guest who also knows this space very well, this video space very well. Yes, that's where they live. That was a very nice entree in. I don't know that they're all going to feel...

Yeah, you tell me your feelings. I think there's gonna be some growing pains. Yeah, sure. But by the way, think about, well, I'm reminded of like when we first got in here and started doing it in here. I know. There was some growing pains. No, but that's because I did my first video edit yesterday. Oh, you did? Yeah. And it was great. Yeah. But I was like- You gotta look at yourself a lot. Well, a few things. One, I was like-

I feel like we're starting all over. And that, I told myself to think of that positively, but there were minutes of that feeling soul crushing. Oh, really? Yeah. You got to learn a whole new thing. I can't believe we've been doing this for seven years and we're starting from scratch. And this is going to take

to get to the point where we were at as far as like ease. Right, right, right, right. Well, there's even workflow stuff. It's like there's a lot more to it. Yeah, yeah. Like the other stuff's dialed. I would say not the vibe of the show per se, but just the workflow of it, right? Yeah. And I was remembering, oh yeah, when I was first editing, it would take so long and now it's dialed. And then I was like, oh my God, it's taking...

So long. Oh, no. Oh, no. Sure. A little panic. There's a little bit of panic. Also, we're accelerated. So it's as hard as it'll be right now because we're playing catch up. Yes. Yes. Because again, if you have Wondery Plus, you can also get episodes a week ahead. Right. So virtually at the beginning, we have to kind of do two weeks in one week. Yeah. Six episodes in one week. Okay, great. Yes, six episodes in one week.

Yeah, it's a little bit of, it's an intense week. Yes. But it's great. I mean, it is a lot of looking at yourself on this video. And I already was like, oh no. Oh no, I'm nodding so much. Why am I nodding so much? Oh, I hate this.

And then today we recorded and I was like, oh my God, am I doing it? I forgot to think about it. And then halfway through, I remembered to think about it. Oh my God. Well, that's what I was feeling in the first eight minutes. Now, mind you, I have had a lot more time on camera to break my bad habits, right? I mean, I think I told you the most embarrassing thing I ever lived through was like playing the drums on camera in parenthood, having no clue what I look like when I played the drums and be like, whoa, that's what you look like.

It's different though than watching myself on a show. Because that's a character? Yeah, maybe because it's a character and also... It's not real? It's not real. It's not as long. I mean, it's like a whole episode of just... No, you're in a movie. ...watching us.

A movie, if you're in every shot. That's right. And it's a two-hour movie. Yeah. Yeah, you're doing three movies a week. That's not normal. And so, anyway, I was nodding a lot. So, I know people are probably going to comment on that. And I already know that I am nodding too much. So...

You don't need to say, I will try to dial it back. But I also don't want to be in my head because that's the whole point of the show. And you know, all these things start to- Well, I felt that, again, back to the very first one, I felt that for the first eight minutes. I found myself being a little self-conscious. Yeah. But then the next episode, which we recorded yesterday, and I immediately just flopped into like, oh, I'm just alive. I'm like talking, I'm alive, I'm not even thinking about it. So yesterday for me was really kind of-

for my own self-conscious state. I was like, oh yeah, there were many long stretches where I completely forgot. That was my hope or maybe slash my fear is like in here, there's long periods where I completely forget it's being recorded. It's like the sweet spot of this.

And so I was like, God, am I going to ever forget I'm being recorded when there's a camera at me? And yesterday, yeah, totally. I completely forgot so much of the time. It's going to be an evolution. But we should be clear. I would hate for people to think that the episodes are going to suffer because of that aspect. I don't think they're going to suffer. But part of this show is being really honest about our feelings on everything.

And that is something I also don't want to go away. I don't want the video to be like a movie. I don't want it to be presentational in that way. We're still us. And so, you know, if we are uncomfortable a little bit or for some reason, I don't know. But I think...

my optimism is like when we start doing fact checks down there. Yeah, I'm not worried about that. Because we know like I look at you, I hope, I won't speak for you. I look at you and I go, oh, I can do anything.

Yeah. I feel so safe. Like if you're sitting across from me. Yeah. I'm like, oh yeah, turn this thing on. I feel very anchored by you. Me too. In the way that I used to feel anchored by Peter Krause in acting scenes, you know? Like, oh, I'm good. Peter's here. Yeah. I feel that for the fact. I'm very excited to do fact checks on video actually. But it is funny though because I...

Again, like starting over a little bit, I'm a little bit back in my head a little about how much I'm talking, how much I'm not talking, because you can see it. You can see you thinking about that? No, you can see me. Oh, right. So it's a little bit. You're more reminded, you think? Yeah. So, you know.

I mean, it's funny. What I did get to is this is life. Life is pushing yourself and changing. And we got really comfortable, which is incredible. But, you know, you can't just stay stagnant forever and it's good to try new things. That's how I'm taking it. It's like, well, A, yeah, the Phil Stutz thing, right? Like, this is what life is. It's change and it's work and it's blah, blah, blah. And then...

Also, maybe I feel like I've earned this at 49. Like if you throw this at me, it'll just be another opportunity for me to figure something out. Yeah. And ultimately look back and be proud of myself. Like I'm kind of already down the road with it. No, it's a good challenge. And it's an excuse. I'm going to buy so many new outfits. Oh, sure. I did. Rob, I was kind of mad at you when I was editing it because I was like, my shirt is not.

right like you do have to tell me that well how would he know if it's right or wrong he can see them anyway we've got this always recording thing too so i'm juggling like just make sure all these are focused and framed and like hopefully audio's running too i imagine like whatever we're experiencing i'm imagining rob you're probably having three yikes that you have like so

so much more going on in the actual recording. Why? He's got to be looking at focus for five different cameras. Oh, it's not your change that you're pulling focus? I mean, I'm just framing everyone when they sit down and the bottom of the stand. Can you move it? It's not on robotics, is it? No. We don't have a remote head on any of these. That would be cool. Yeah. That'd be scary. They're fucking pushing in and shit. Yeah. Directing. I think I technically could with that setup, but...

Well, all to say, I'm not saying you have to fix it in the middle of the recording, but at the beginning, if my shirt is like not looking good on camera, I need last looks. If you're okay, if you're giving me the okay to tell you that during a recording, I will. Or could he yell avocado or something? Maybe we have like three or four different code words. But what if it's a really serious moment?

Because I need to look good for the serious moment. I can sneak behind that wall maybe and whisper to you. Okay.

Yeah, let's try it. What if we put a little light system on the coffee table? Yeah. We should have codes, right? Like your shirt is something and your face is fucked up is like another thing. That's code for your face is fucked up. Avocado. No, your face is fucked up is code for your face is fucked up. Your shirt is messed up. Anyway, new horizons. It's exciting. New outfits. It's going to be great.

Yeah, for you, like, this is your time to shine. You got so many, like, today's outfit is fantastic. We just left the space. Thank you. Your outfit's on fire. Thank you. It was my birthday. Yeah, but before we do that, I want to do two housekeeping things. Great. One is, we heard loud and clear from the misophoniacs. What do you call people with misophonia? Probably not misophoniacs, and they probably wouldn't like that, but...

Miso's? Miso's. So the misos were like, in general, the water pouring, delightful. Okay. They did not like the sound of me drinking. Yeah, that's where it broke apart. It's mouth sounds. It's not ASMR. I think we did. Yeah, when you open up the door for the misos to sound off, they're going to let you know. Yeah, you have to be careful with what you ask. I was thinking, there is...

It was very consistent that they hate water, that they started hating it when I was drinking. But then they would go on to list the things that really irked them the most. And this...

And there, there wasn't a tremendous amount of consistency. So it's like if you were dating a miso and you had previously dated a miso, you still got to figure out what their unique misos are. It's the same with sex. That's like all ailments. And just like you got to relearn everybody. Yeah, everyone's different. Everyone's different. And then next bit of housekeeping. Yes. Many people pointed out that the Jake Gyllenhaal glasses thing. Oh.

He commented on, and he took it from Paul Newman. Paul Newman wore his glasses that way in something. He commented on our post? No.

No, no, he didn't. Many of the listeners had either, many of them said he said it here, which I don't recall, but then others said they saw him on a talk show talking about it. But no matter what the origin source was, the story was still the same, that it's a nod to. Oh, JG. JG, you playful little girl. Obviously. You might have said that here. That sounds familiar now, but we hadn't seen the show yet. He did like Paul Newman. I do sort of remember that. Well, he was his godfather.

And he would come over. Not Godfather, but he would come over. And he had the dressing recipe or something. Oh, maybe he did. Are we making a lot up? Well, definitely the Paul Newman was at the house and he was around him a bunch. Yeah. Okay. JG. So that's all settled. Okay. That's great. One more housekeeping. Also, because next week, new stuff.

Go find Synced. Yes. On its own feed. Subscribe. Subscribe. Go there. That's where you'll find it to listen. Forward. Out on Thursdays. Just type that baby in. Synced. S-Y-N-C-E-D. It's very good you said that. Oh, that was another thing in the comments. Some people said you can spell it both ways.

Well, you can't spell the show both ways. No, not at all. But the word synced apparently. Oh, all right. Well. That was interesting. That's fine. But let's not confuse people more. No. It's spelled S-Y-N-C-E-D. And go check us out on Thursdays. If you miss having a Thursday episode. Yeah. We're still around. You can just run from Wednesday morning straight through the weekend. Yeah. We have the best questions on there.

Yeah. People really write in incredible questions. Everyone you bring to me, I'm like, that's a fucking great question. I know. And they're very honest in like what they're going through, which is sweet. It's very, very sweet and very vulnerable. Yeah, we have fun over there. So,

It's almost like a mini version. I don't want to say mini or anything diminutive, but it's related to Armchair Anonymous, but it's also different. Yeah, it has an element of that because we're hearing from real people who listen. Oh, I'm so glad that just came up. I had a very funny experience, which is I go to my daughter's new school's barbecue right after your birthday. Ding, ding, ding. Yeah. And I'm in line. I'm talking to a young girl.

Well, she's a girl. She's not a woman. She's like probably 15 or 16 or something. And she's doling out the burgers. I step up and I go like, okay, I'm going to hit you with a really annoying request. Like, you got an assembly line going here. I see it. Is it possible to just get the patty? Like, I don't want to waste a bun, basically. I had talked long enough that she was staring at me really kind of bizarrely. And she goes, hold on. Are you on Anonymous? And I go, what?

Wait, Armchair Anonymous? She goes, yeah, is that you? You're like, I recognize your voice. And I'm thinking, this is incredible. This is a teenager who doesn't know who I am. He doesn't know you as an actor. Yeah, or a human on planet Earth. But she is in high school and she listens to Armchair Anonymous. She doesn't listen to anything else.

And she's like, oh my God, yeah, I listen to Every Friday. I think it's so funny. I love it. And I was like, oh, what's your, you know, what are your favorite stories? And it was so funny. That is. I loved it. I hope she's sharing it with all her friends. Yeah, me too. I hope we have an upcoming Jen. Calvin got really into it on our road trip. Younger people like Anonymous. He couldn't remember the name of it. He kept saying, can we listen to Broadcast Studios? Oh, God.

We should change the name. He has such good... We listened to almost every single one on the road trip. No, did you listen to... Shitting Your Pants and Coming? No, I skipped that one. Okay. But he loved like the Grizzly Bear Attack. Oh, yeah.

The pooping ones he loves. Sure. We have one coming up that I told a bunch of people about. Which one? Blessing in Disguise. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There were a couple on that that were like- Blessing in Disguise was great. I admittedly was very wrong about that prompt. That's a very fun episode coming up. Anyway. Anyway. Okay, your birthday. Yeah, I had a birthday. It came and went. No. No.

Oh yeah. According to you, I have a lot of days left, which is exciting. Yeah. I haven't got on the chain yet, but I'll be there. On the connection chain, you've been saying happy birthday for the past few days. Yeah. And I'm going to continue to. And,

And it was really, really nice. So nice. At Cara. Yeah, we went to Cara. Well, I had a shopping day in the morning. Where did you go? I went to some stores. I won't say which. I went to some relatable stores. And then, and I got a haircut. I got a birthday haircut. That's a really fun thing to do. Where at? At a salon? No, Jenny came over. Oh, she did. Good birthday treat to yourself. Big treat. I needed it so bad. I was like,

don't feel like you need to comment on my hair on some of the beginning episodes of video. I hadn't had my hair cut and Rob forgot to tell me that it looked bad. So no need to comment. What's that one? That one's going to be a beehive. Stop.

Birthday haircut. Birthday haircut, which was a lovely start to the day. She knocked it out of the park. She's so good. But yeah, so yeah, then in shopping, then we went to Cara, had just kind of people come, stop by. Very casual. Very casual. It was so nice. My favorite kind. Yeah, you came. A lot of people came. Oh, there was 20 plus people there. Yeah, and then when you left, some other people came. Much more than I can. Who came after I left? Right.

Brian and Annie. Okay, good. They made it? Yeah, they made it. They had Evie's soccer game. Okay. We had some COVID people who couldn't come. Oh, who had COVID? Laura and Matt. Oh, I thought that was baby related, of course. You saw Callie. We had to leave earlier than I would have wanted to for the aforementioned barbecue. For the hamburger. Yeah, yeah, the school barbecue. Yeah, but it was really fun. I had...

Three martinis. Oh, nice. Over the course, though, of six hours. Yeah, six hours. That's not enough. One every two hours isn't enough, I don't think, on your birthday. I didn't know this phrase, but apparently it's a phrase. Martinis are like

Not to hurt anyone's feelings, okay? I don't... Because I don't... Everyone's body's perfect. Okay. But martinis are like boobs. One is not enough and three is too many. Oh, yeah. I recently heard that saying and it's a good one. It's good because it's accurate. One's not enough and three is too many. Yeah. Three...

pushes you over the edge a little bit. Even if you love boobs. I love boobs. Oh, I meant for part two. I mean, four is good though, right? You think so? Oh, well, I got you. Threesome. Okay. But yeah, I love boobs, but a third one, I don't know. It would... You'd probably still like it. Yeah, I guess. I like anything. I can get myself to any... Yeah. Yeah, I can buy in. It sounds perverted, but it's a good thing about you. Yeah, it's my superpower. You're open. Yeah.

I can find most things beautiful if I like the person. And I can think someone's very unattractive because I don't like them, even though they're objective. I mean, I think we all do that. Yeah. Well, actually, I don't know. I can't speak for everyone, but I definitely do that. Well, I knew a lot of dudes that like hooked up with people they didn't like.

Yeah, that's weird. It is. I mean, it's not for me. No. Yeah. I can't even talk to someone I don't like. Yeah. Well, you know this term, hate fuck, that's like a whole thing too. That's bad. Yeah. It is bad. It's really bad. If you hate fuck people, you're a baddie. Yeah, you're bad. Yeah. Tell me about your trauma. Oh, okay. So I didn't realize, I did realize, but I didn't put two and two together. Reels you can only do in a minute 30. That thing is 220. Yeah.

So I chopped the beginning, like just so that it's a little bit of that little song. And then I just am going to make it the trauma part. And then maybe we could do another one later in the week, but why don't I do it tomorrow and then collab. And what we're releasing? Well, I'll just. Oh, collaborate. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. That's easiest. Nice. How do you feel about collabs? If we could just talk about that for a second.

- I don't like when I see something I like and I look up and I wanna like follow the person who posted it or at least inquire into their other content. And there's two or three people up there, I'm like, I don't know who's responsible for this. And now I don't know who to go sniff around

Oh my God. What? I want to play something for you, but that's okay. It's just, now I'm thinking about Instagram. Oh, okay. Do you have any issue with that at all? Does that bother you? Okay. It's never been a hangup for me. Okay. Because it says all the people who are collab. I know, but you don't know who originated it. Oh, you want to know? Because it's like a funny piece of content. Yeah.

Well, why don't you just click on each person and then see? Exactly. Oh, wow. Okay. If I can click on three people and go through their whole page, try to figure out who the genius in this mix is. I think you can probably find out quickly. I guess for you and I, it doesn't matter, but. Yeah. Who are you trying to figure out? Oh, tons of times. It's all shit that gets recommended to me. And so there's like three names on it. And I don't know who's the genius behind this. If you're wondering on my collabs with Liz, it's Liz who's the genius behind it. Okay. That's very honest of you. Yeah. Okay.

Can I play one thing for you? Yeah. Okay, I gotta find out who I sent it to. Okay, I know I sent it to Kimmel because he loves Yacht Rock. Oh. This is great. What if Metallica was Yacht Rock? This is AI. Enter the Sandman.

This song fucking slaps, by the way. Oh my god. Oh. What? I love this song. Isn't it fucking cool?

Wow, that's good. Isn't that wild? I like that. I should give the dude who created it some props. How do you know? Has he collabed with a lot of people? Well, luckily it was just his name. But Mr. Professor 318, he does these, he makes AI make weird mashups, is what I can gather from his page. And so he just tells AI, uh-huh,

Do enter the Sandman as Yacht Rock in this fucking spin-off. Now, we have a lot of fear about AI. This, we gotta say, this is awesome. That's great, except I don't think we need to shout out Mr. Professor Blah Blah. Well, he's the one who had the idea to do this. Yeah, but he's not the robot. Wait. The robot is the one that did it. Oh, the AI robot. I thought you were talking about our robot, our in-house robot. Well, I am always talking about him, but no. Hey me, play AI.

Metallica entered the Sandman as Yacht Rock. I can't remember my tune. Oh, my God, Jax. I hate this. It's been too long. I want to hear some Metallica, but I'm in the mood for Yacht Rock this afternoon.

And then he just starts playing it, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I can only think so highly of Mr. Professor. But this is actually weirdly what's going to be the future of AI. I know. It's just a tool humans are going to use in a very creative way. Yeah. And so I certainly didn't think to tell AI to do that. I did. Oh. I just forgot. Let's hear your version. I forgot to do it. My version would be the same. It would be...

have AI make this song sound like this? Now, here's something really curious, and I don't know enough about AI to say it, but if this guy tells AI to do it, and then you tell AI to do it an hour later, does it come up with the same song or different? My hunch is different. And how is that? That's weird. Each person's AI has a personality. Oh!

That'll be really cool. I had spinning, but I'll be listening to this great song as I take over the world. Great.

Was there anything else? About your birthday. Did anyone throw a drink in anyone's face? Was there any fistfights? What happened when it became open to the pub? No problem? It was no problem. Yeah. Yeah, so it was private for a little bit, then it became open to the pub. Figuratively and literally. Yeah, and then I kind of was practicing doing some side eyes. Oh, okay. To deter. Let people know you're not welcome here. Yeah, but I forgot. Okay.

Also, a sweet arm cherry sent me a drink. By the way, they were serving Ted Seeger's there, which blew my mind. Yes. Oh, my God. Was that exciting? That is so cool. It is. Yeah. You got a little video. Yeah. You have to post that. I will. All right. I'm going to get into some facts. Now, it'll be my last non-video in it. Enjoy it.

Yeah. Maybe drink four or five Margie's. Oh, no, not Margie's. Martini's. Teenies. I could feel it. I could feel that third martini, even though it was six out. I don't think I drank enough water. You felt it the next day or you felt it in the moment? Did you feel a little sloshy? No, you didn't feel sloshy. I didn't. I felt.

In control. I felt sober. You rode a motorcycle home, right? Yeah, I did. I mean, I felt tipsy, but I did not feel drunk or anything. Did you say anything crazy? Probably. Actually, you know, there was one conversation that I was in the middle of talking and I was like, I think I'm done making like full sense. Because it was sort of a serious conversation. It required an explanation and I was making it and I was like,

I don't think I'm firing in the way that I'm really making this explanation correct. You didn't lay on that point. I didn't. And normally you could. But everyone nodded and. Yeah, people are pretty codependent, which is helpful. They were also, everyone else was drinking too. They're a little shit-faced too.

Well, that's getting stoned. I mean, that's the name of the game. Yeah, that's why I don't like it. Yeah, you're like midway through some point and you're like, I'm so lost in this fucking point and there's no way they don't all know and what do we do now? I know. But no, the next day I could feel it a bit. Birthday blues. Okay, cataract surgery. My dad got cataract surgery. Yeah. And

He was saying you can have your vision fixed while you're in there, but you have to pick nearsighted or farsighted. Sophie's choice. Yeah. He picked. Farsightedness. He picked fixing distance. Yeah. And he wears his little glasses. It makes the most sense because you can easily throw the glasses on. It's probably safer to be able to see far away. But I will say, I don't know if that's the right choice because I'm, at least my current life,

It's like a ton of reading and doing research. Yeah. And then journaling in the morning. I just feel like a big chunk of my life is nearsightedness. Right now, though. You're right. When I move into my boating phase, I want my farsightedness more. I don't need to see anything up close. And then your glasses might fall into the water. Blow off when I hit those north of 100 on my triple engine pontoon boat.

Okay, so you said Huberman's specialty is the eye, but he's not an ophthalmologist. Yeah, I wish I could remember what his... He is... He's a neurologist that specializes in the eyes, right? Yeah, he's associate professor of neurobiology and of ophthalmology. Oh. So...

So the Heuermann lab is focused on brain function development and repair with emphasis on regeneration to prevent and cure blindness. But he's not a medical doctor, which isn't an ophthalmologist a medical doctor? He must be. I don't think he is. Can you teach without? Yeah, he's a researcher. So he must have a PhD in medicine.

- And not an MD. - Right. Retinol and optic nerve damage and glaucoma and disorders of sensory limbic function such as depression and PTSD. Anyway, okay.

That song is so stuck in my head. Uh-oh. Oh, you know what's funny? When I was pulling up my fax, I just typed in his name in my email because I send my fax to myself. So I just typed in Andrew's number. To make it feel like you get mail. You like getting mail. I love getting email. I love it so much. I love it so much that I have 39,170 emails. I would throw that phone in the river.

Okay. If I look at my phone and it said that, I would scream out loud, I think. I know. It's white noise. I don't see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I typed his name in, pulled up the fact check, started looking up the facts, and I was like, what? I don't really remember that, but we've done a lot. It's from last time. It was from last year. Yeah, yeah. Well, I've had that problem, too, because I keep a file of all my research, and

And then so I have over time had to start putting the date. Well, then I looked at the email date and I was like, oh, shit. But when I did that, it was cool because I learned something. What'd you learn? What'd you relearn? I relearned dyschronometria.

Oh, that's colorblindness? Nope. Also called dyschronia is a condition of cerebular dysfunction in which an individual cannot accurately estimate the amount of time that has passed. Ew. Distorted time perception. Ooh. Yeah. Frontal lobe stuff?

Cerebral. Send the cerebellum. Oh, cerebellum. Yeah. Anyway, that's from last year. I'm still settling into the revelation that every brain part we've been talking about, there's two of. Like, I'm still digesting hippocampi. Same. I don't even know if I believe that. Okay. I'm turning into you. I like it, though.

We talked about sadism. I mean, no, we didn't. Oh, my God. Sub and dom. Oh, uh-huh. And there's a psychology today. This was in 2020.

And it talks about a study published in the Journal of Sex Research about understanding the personal origin stories of how practitioners became interested in masochism and submission, as well as their reasons or motives for continuing to practice masochism and submission. And it's interesting because it breaks down like intrinsic origins. It says the significant majority of participants, 78%, described having an intrinsic interest in masochism,

slash submission most of these participants describe sorry i can't read very well today because i woke up so early to go to the cardiologist update update i don't think my heart's gonna explode she didn't keep you that's a good she didn't admit me to the hospital yeah when anytime they say clear the rest of your day that's when you got yeah i am probably gonna go on a statin yeah which is fine

As I just said that, I didn't like it. Yeah, well, look, this is the story of getting older. I know. The medications just start racking up. That is how, it's like, oh my God, I'm 37, now I'm on a statin. Yeah, you're already on the Keppra and you're on the, well, not, I'm, I know. I'm trying to sympathize with you. It's like so many to take at night now. You should see the thing I take in the morning. You know, I have a pill fucking sorter, right? Yeah.

And there's so many that it's so laborious. I do two weeks at a time just because it's so much faster if I set up two weeks. Yeah. But I look like I'm 100. When you go in my bathroom, the biggest thing on my countertop is my pill selector. Yeah. I mean, most of mine are elective. Right. Which is nice.

If I travel and forget that, I'll be fine. Yeah. That's nice. And I wonder if going on the statin means I can go crazy. Well, that's, I think, how people fuck up the statin. Because I remember being with my uncle one time, and he was eating six, seven pounds of bacon. He's like, yeah, I'm on whatever it used to be called. Lipitor? No. Lipitor is one, yeah. Yeah, just like off to the races. Yeah. I'm not sure that that's how it's supposed to be used. That's kind of how I feel.

She said, which was reassuring, you know, it was weird. And this is I think I'm getting more context to why Dr. Isaacson was like, there's weird stuff here.

Because there is a gene that basically shows hereditary cholesterol stuff. And mine is not. I don't have it. But then there's this other piece called familial something. I forget the word. And she's like, you probably have that, but you probably only have one as opposed to two. She said some people who have two have like 900. Wow.

Wow. Yes. Do you think you could reframe it and get excited and start telling people like, I'm going to Staten Island? No. I'll try it. Okay. Sounds fun. Although I don't really want to go there. Well, I mean, no. I'm sure we have some listeners in Staten Island. No, I mean, I do want to go there. What if the medication was called Upper East Side? Oh, I would love it.

I would love it. Okay. Anyway, most of these participants described their interests in BDSM starting at a young age without necessarily having a sexualized component. For example, some participants described liking to be tied up or blindfolded during various make-believe games, such as cops and robbers. These participants often said they were, quote, born liking BDSM or that they were wired that way.

About 7% indicated that they had an aha moment later in life, realizing they had always been interested in BDSM practices. And there's extrinsic origins. 22% of participants described...

Extrinsic oranges. 11% reported it being connected to a history of childhood sexual abuse. I want to guess wrongly, obviously, that that was a bigger percentage. Oh, wow. 9% due to parental discipline. Example, spanking with an object. Another 9% introduced it through play as a child, cops and robbers, except that it was a friend who introduced the idea of restraints.

as opposed to them. And 9% reported being introduced to BDSM as an adult by a recent sexual partner. Interesting. As of yet, I can't relate to either side of the equation as being very appealing to me. I don't really want to be dominated and I also don't want to like dominate or be masochistic because I can relate to most of these sexual things. I'm like, yeah, I could see getting into that. Yeah, I definitely don't want to be

You might want to dominate. I don't know. Kind of a boss. Yeah, but I have that in life. Uh-huh. So I don't think I need to play that out there. You're the CEO. Yeah. You would go the other way, but you don't want to go the other way. I don't. I don't feel safe enough in that environment to be dominated. Right. Even though you set the rules, we should say that. Yeah. That is the interesting thing about it. You set your own rules. Yeah, but I think I don't.

You don't even know what your rules are. No, I don't trust people enough to follow the rules during sex. Sure, you get a little caught up in them all. Their hormones are all messed up. Blood's moving from the brain to other areas. I don't trust it. You know, as you said about chimps. I haven't watched yet and I do really want to. Watched the second episode last night. Yes.

He mentioned the cell that activates when to some people when you show them a picture of Jennifer Aniston And you know, I'd really like her to come on and I just want to say that out loud or put it in the universe Yeah, I want to put that in the universe. I love it too and another plea to Selena Gomez my We're doing a roll call Yeah

Still haven't heard back from them. Jay-Z, if you're listening, you know, of course I want. We have a whole list. Tay. Eminem. But so that's it. And. Happy birthday. Oh, thanks. Yeah. We're going to go till September 24th. Well, 23rd. Oh, that's going to be such a sad day. The 24th. The first day without a happy birthday. Yeah.

I mean, I'm inclined to go fine. I'll keep going. But no, then it's not. You would care less come next August. It's like when you tell everyone they're your favorite person. Yeah. It's just like that. Waters it all down. All right. Love you. Love you.