André Duqum

The User Illusion is this book talking about where I think I've heard you mentioned like the 11 million bits or so of information that are around us and the very narrow actual, like we're looking through life through the straw hole.

It's like we're getting a very small amount of sensory input based on what's necessary for us to survive and navigate our experience.

Um, but it's actually not useful for life to show us objective reality, just like it's not useful for a laptop to show you all the electrical switches that are happening on the motherboard or different parts of the computer.

It gives you a user interface that's workable, you know, and a desktop screen that you can actually do stuff on.

And that's similarly like how our life is kind of constructed and neurologically speaking.

Now,

When you mentioned you back, like this one example that you gave and through your journey with your PhDs, starting to rewire what you start to perceive and what you expect, the default mode network and the neural correlates of our structure and sense of self, I think is important to examine here because that is largely where, and I'd love for you to continue to elaborate and speak to, where our sense of self, self is constructed, stored, and...

The show is called Know Thyself, you know, and so we like to examine this previously held notion of a solid, separate, individualistic self and all the things that are attached to it.

So what is the DMN and what are some like fun facts that you'd love to explore in regards to all that?

I feel like that's the gift and the curse of the scientific endeavor, right?

It's like you learn so much by dissecting the world into its parts and you can understand what it's made up of.

But the more you reduce something to its form, the more you're like disconnected from its essence.

And so I'm, you know, I try to strive in this balance with my show and the conversations I have.

And similarly, I feel like with you in your work, when you explore spirituality and the themes of,

And then also the scientific understanding and try to merge the two.

It can be tricky terrain to not reduce all.

emotional and spiritual components to the neural correlates and to brain activity and to go into this deterministic route.

And then likewise, it can be, you can conflate, you can go too far on the spiritual front without understanding and really just having a grounded and integrated approach to understand both sides of it.

So I love that you try to walk that line and try to honor both without, you know, bastardizing the other.

Yeah.