Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I am your host, Trevor.
You guys, I'm doing it. I'm taking my first honest
to god vacation in my adult life. Nothing too crazy,
one full day. I'm taking one full day off, two nights,
one full day off to lay in a pool with
my kids and my wife at an airbnb an hour
from home. Some people go to Italy for three weeks.
I go up the road for thirty six hours. But hey,
you know what, no complaints. I think the goal is
to make your working life your average day kind of
like a vacation in the sense that you're choosing to
do the things you do. That's the dream, right, That's
the goal, and I'm closer than most to that, I think.
I mean, you know, money would be nice, but you know,
don't have any of that. That's fine, but I do
have a lot of flexibility and freedom. Now there is
always that looming fear that that other shoe could drop
and it would all be over, lose my job, have
to start auditing health records for some evil insurance company
or something to pay the bills. But for the moment,
doing okay. I hope you're doing okay. I hope you're
not stuck under some the boot of some bureaucracy, some
corporate overlord. I hope you're free, or as free as
you can be, all things considered. Anyway, I was listening
to the old podcast app and I came across a
great episode with our friend. His name's Thomas Campbell, my
big toe author former. They really hype up the former
NASA scientist thing. But hey, I mean, so would I
if I was a NASA scientist, I'd probably I'd go
get coffee and say, hey, my name's Trevor, former NASA scientist.
Can I have an Americana please? So I get it.
He's an older guy. He was doing cool research early
early days. I knew he was a big like information
theory guy, kind of had some ideas like John Wheeler.
John Wheeler came first, but very cool, very interesting guy.
What I didn't know is that he was a big
part of the early Monroe Institute stuff before before Monroe
is it Bob Monroe actually became the Monroe Institute guy.
He was doing research with Thomas Campbell and someone else
on astral projection EEG. While being exposed to various electrical
currents and just like the early days of this kind
of weird. I don't know what you would call it.
Would you call it parapsychology, He's I don't think I
ever called it that. He kind of saw himself as
a mainstream physicist, and then he went on to write
this cool book. So it reminded me of an episode
I did on a different show a long time ago
that I did with my good friend Alfredo. I think
that show might be over. Podcasting isn't for everybody, you know,
it takes a special kind of masochism to want to
do work for free and just record your thoughts. You know,
you've got to be a special kind of messed up
to want to do that. So hopefully, hopefully we get
that going again. I don't know. It's it's tough, especially
too if you don't have time to prepare for the shows.
You're just kind of winging it. It's difficult. It's difficult,
but hey, I enjoy it so anyway, So I'm here
and I thought I might kind of redo that and
play some bineural beats for you guys. Talk about some
of the more mainstream aspects to it, some of the
more fringe aspects to it and then really just explore
Thomas Campbell's theories because they're actually pretty similar to I mean,
I wrote this book and I just sort of bootstrapped
these ideas. You know, I had no formal anything. I
had some formal training in neuroscience, but that's not really
what the book was about. And so I didn't mention Thomas.
But my interpretation of him was that he was kind
of considered like very fringe, and so I didn't want
to contaminate things. You know, come to find out, his
beliefs basically perfectly mirror mine. So what as I say
about my beliefs. I guess he comes to very different
conclusions about the nature of reality and stuff. But anyway,
so I should probably read his book, but I've watched
a lot of his interviews. I have a pretty good
sense for what he's all about. So let's start with
the buy by is it binural b neural? How do
you say this binural? Binural beats? Maybe before we get
to binural beats, let's talk about brain wave entrainment. So
you can throw some electrodes on the scalp and measure
sort of the accumulative electrical oscillations of your brain. Now,
each neuron is capable of generating many different electrical signals
called graded potentials and action potentials. You can have sub
threshold potentials you get once threshold has crossed in certain
parts of the cell membrane, you can have action potentials.
These are these big reversals and membrane potentials. So first
let me just what is membrane potential. So we have
these cells called neurons, and many other cells do this too,
I think nearly whole cells actually. But we have these
cells called neurons and they have a semi permeable cell membrane.
Water can move through it, but larger polar molecules can't,
and charged particles cannot, like ions like sodium ions, potassium ions,
calcium ions, and so there are channels. There are channels
transmembrane proteins that are like little tunnels through this lipid
wall that forms the wall of the cell the neuron.
In this case, there's little tunnels that these ions can
move through, and ions move down their concentration gradient. Now
there are also pumps. For example, there's a sodium potassium pump.
It pumps sodium out and it pumps potassium in. Because
this pump is always operating in because there are so
many of these pumps in any given neuron. The inside
of the neuron has ten times more potassium than the outside,
and the outside of the neuron has ten times more
sodium than the inside. So the outside there's tons of sodium,
the inside there's tons of potassium. So while this is
all being actively pumped, it builds the steep concentration gradients.
So ask yourself, where does the potassium want to go?
You know, it's like being at a party. It's just packed.
You can't move. What are your instincts? Tell your instincts
tell you to get out of here. Find the nearest exit, right,
And so the same thing is happening to potassium. There's
tons of potassium and it is trying to get out
of the cell. Well, good news, there are these tunnels
just for potassium. The only potassium can go through. And
so it leaves. It's continuously leaving, It's continuously leaving, and
is continuously pumped back in, continuously pumped back in. But
this process of potassium leaving, it drags along all these
negatively charged proteins and anions and things right up to
the inner wall of the membrane, and there's a ton
of potassium now outside because it's constantly drifting out right.
So what happens is the inside of the neuron, not
the whole neuron, but just the layer, just the interface
between the inside of the neuron and the outside, becomes
positively charged. So at rest in a neuron, it's did
I say positive, I'm sorry, it's negative on the inside
positive on the outside. The resting memborane potentials about maybe
negative seventy negative ninety varies. And so if you were
to open some channels that allowed sodium in, remember there's
tons of sodium outside the cell, sodium would russian and
this big sodium cascade would trigger a series of events
which would actually transmit this electrical signal all the way
down the axon. We would go all the way down
the axon, a neurotransmitter would be released, and same thing
might happen in the next surn. Anyway, it gets complicated,
but this is a general idea. You're Neurons are these
little electrically active, electrochemically active switches that can be switched
on and off by stimulus. And you know, a neuron
could do ten twenty forty one hundred action potentials per
second that can oscillate at various frequencies. And then collectively,
if we zoom way out and look at the billions
and billions and billions of electrically active cells in your brain,
we can measure that sort of some electrical signal and
it oscillates. And these oscillations are called brain waves. And
there's data waves and delta waves and gamma waves, right,
and these are just all different frequencies. And you know,
one part of your brain might be giving off waves
in one frequency band and a different part in a
different band. And there's all sorts of studies to study this.
You know, does exercise change it? Does laughter change? It?
Does chocolate change?
Speaker 2: It?
Speaker 1: Does? I've helped with some of these studies collecting data.
I've never been a co author on any of these.
There is a guy at my graduate school who's really
into this. Anyway. I don't know a ton about it,
to be honest, but I know a bit. And so
you can measure these EEGs. Well, a study came out,
or a series of studies came out that showed that
if you expose let's go even farther back. What we
figured out is that your brain waves will entrain with
external stimuli. So if there's a light bulb flickering ten
times per second, your brain, particularly your eccipital lobe where
all that sensory input comes in, also mirror that frequency.
You'll get increased power in that frequency range. So this
is true for auditory stimulus. I kind of have this
idea that it could even be true for vibratory stimulus.
Like they have these vibration plates you can stand on,
and the part of the brain that gets activated kind
of correlates to the stimulus. You know, if it's a sound,
like if it's a ten hurtz sound, it's your temporal lobes,
if it's a ten hertz visual stimulus, it's your eccipital lobe.
I would think vibration could affect your pridal lobes. I
don't know what would have affect your frontal lobes. But anyway,
so your brain and trains, it matches, it synchronizes with
the rhythm of the stimulus that it's exposed to a
bit you know, not entirely, but it's very clear. No
one denies this. It's widely accepted. This is not like
a French thing. Well, some folks, a bunch of different
groups actually some mit some of some other places to
studies showing that forty hertz auditory and visual stimuli cleared
different Alzheimer's disease proteins. I don't remember if it was
amoid or tower both and stimulated the type of immune
cell called microglia that's only in your brain, and it
did some others and improved, and then in adults have
done studies it improves cognition. It's pretty much accepted that
a forty hrtz visual stimulus or or visual and auditory
stimulus is good for your brain for Alzheimer's disease in particular.
So there's some work going into this. It's not curative,
it's you know, it's just statistically significant. But it's not like,
it's not crazy. I think it'd be cool to make
light bulbs forty hertz in like senior living facilities, but
I don't know. Forty hertz is right on that range
where you can tell it's blinking sort of, you know,
and so I don't know if you'd really want that,
but phones, it would be cool to set the forty hertz.
Do you know, do a sudoku at forty hertz visual stimulus.
It's got to be good for you. This kind of
maybe that would get the fernal lobe, you know, because
it's a cognitive load plus a stimulus. Anyway, so this
is pretty cool. Now you can do that by just
playing a forty hertz sound and I'll play what that
sounds like. Now, Oh, I don't actually have just a
raw forty hertz. Sorry. You can do that by playing
forty hertz, or you can do that by playing some
bass frequency, say one hundred hertz, and then also simultaneously
playing out of a different channel, so out of your
right speaker instead of your left speaker a one hundred
and forty hertz sound, So you have a one hundred
herts and one hundred and forty hertz playing out of
different channels of your laptop or your headphones. Headphones are better,
and you're your brain picks up on the differential because
on one side of your head you have forty HRTs
coming or one hundred hurts. On the other side you
have one hundred and forty herts, and you end up
hearing a forty hertz sound even though you're not technically
listening to a forty herts sound you're listening to a
one hundred and one hundred and forty, but the convergence
of the waves in your mind registers as forty herts.
So I'll play that now. This is what that sounds like.
Do you feel it? Are you driving and you just
lost control?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: My voice sounds weird? Meditate a little bit, close your eyes.
What do you think was that cool?
Speaker 2: I don't know?
Speaker 1: Sounding cool on my headphones. If I wonder if you're
in a in a car, how it would sound. I mean,
you still have a left channel and a right channel,
so it should still work, or if your phone's on speaker,
it's just still work. But headphones are cooler anyway. So
that's forty hertz. Well, this is all kind of modern.
This binaural beats idea is much older and was really
kind of popularized in like the fringe science spirituality New
agey world as like doing something to your brain that
maybe opens you up to certain things like deep meditation
or astral projection whatever that means. You know, it's this
is now we're in the woo woo spooky spooky stuff.
But you know this Tom Campbell guy, he was into
that and he worked with Monroe and they had this idea.
This was after his time, Thomas Campbell's time. Monroe went
on to develop this HEMI sync I date idea. There's
a CIA paper about it. It wasn't actually the CIA
who investigated it. Those I think the Army sent people
to this institute and did it, and they wrote up
this really bizarre paper that is insane. These CIA papers
are ridiculous. Sometimes I wonder like is this serious. I
can't tell, Like do they mean it? Is this a joke?
But it is nuts. And they start talking about like
refractory waves coming from the bifurcation of the aorda into
the common iliac arteries, and this is a real thing.
I mean, they start talking about your heart rate and
you can get this resonant frequency with the bineral wave
and your whole body can sort of go into this
like four hertz oscillation. They did four herts, not forty
forty's for Alzheimer's. They did four herts, And it's a
little bizarre. It's a little bizarre. So years ago I
had downloaded a one hundred hertz clip off YouTube in
a one hundred and four hertz clip off YouTube, and
then I set the one hundred hurts to left channel
and the one hundred and four hurts to right channel
in audacity, and I played that on a show years ago,
a different show, and it was just kind of fun
because because like you almost don't believe it's two different
sound waves, but it sounds like it's just one thing.
So doing it step by step like that, I thought
was really cool. Unfortunately I can't find those clips. I
did find one hundred herts on YouTube, so this is
one hundred hertz. So now if I play that same
thing with a one hundred and four hurt sound on
top of it, it sounds like this. So this is
the one. If you uh were into is a Macromay
nineteen seventies, the arn plant holder stuff. You're into macrima
and beads and maybe did mushrooms. Every once in a
while you could drive up to a place called the
Monroe Institute and they would teach you how to meditate
while listening to this, and you would transcend space and
time and encounter the entities. Now I'm not mocking it.
I'm mocking it a little for my own credibility in
case somewhat important ever listens to this I'm leaving. I'm
being very skeptical, and in reality, I've listened to a
lot of interviews of people who've gone to this place,
and I don't know, I'm not sure, but you can.
You can kind of feel it, right, you can kind
of just like close your eyes. If you're driving, maybe
stop first, but close your eyes. If you're doing dishes,
just put put the dishes down, put the fork down.
If you're walking, don't trip and just listen. Listen to this.
And I don't really know what meditate means, but this
almost makes me feel like I could do it. Here
we go ten seconds. Did you encounter any entities? Yeah,
so I don't know. To me, it just sounds like
a cool sound, you know. But apparently the claim is
that with practice and maybe certain proclivity, like if you
have a predilection for this, you might be able to
do something I guess become pure consciousness, maybe inhibit your
frontal lobe. Maybe that's what's going on, have like an
ego dissolution. Who knows. Anyway, it's kind of fun. So
I thought we'd listen to a little bit of Thomas Campbell.
Speaker 2: Does this this get all hung up over that?
Speaker 1: Sorry? I should mention I'm an hour and twenty minutes
in the biner O beat. Stuff has already passed, and
so we're kind of switching subjects to his take on physics.
He is a physicist, and so this is his take
on physics.
Speaker 2: How does the probability distribution collapse into a particle? Yes, well,
probability is mathematics. It doesn't collapse into part So that's ridiculous.
But that's a good metaphor for what they see happening.
Speaker 1: I love this because I've never I've never really liked
the idea that a lot of physicists have that, you know,
the probability wave is collapsing, because I don't. I don't
really know what that means. And because probability is a map, right,
It's a It's an explanation of how reality works, like
what are the odds of reality looking in a certain way.
To me, I've never really understood how probability could collapse.
So I have never really liked the metaphor, and I've
really never liked the fact that they don't treat it
like a metaphor. They treat it like this is actually
what's happening. And so right off the bat. I kind
of enjoyed, enjoyed that, so let's keep going.
Speaker 2: But it isn't a real thing. What's actually happening? And
this is a probability calculation. It's not a bottoms up
you know, make the little particles that make your particles
that you know, it's not that kind of thing. That's
the way physicists imagine it, because that's how they would
make a model. You know, I start from the bottom
and work up. It's a deterministic model. This is a
probabilistic model. It's much more efficient. Wasn't this a thesis
of your your twenty seventeen paper, Well, you compare coping
interpretation in many worlds and then there's the was it
the Norman Wigner? Yeah, but it is twenty seventeen. Yeah,
it's based on this es the conscious is fundamental. Yes,
this is all about information and yes, indeed, so what's
actually happened and the way the system finds out what
happens next? See, in the deterministic model, you know what
happens next, It happens because of all these other things
that happened before it. Right, in a probabilistic model, how
do you know what happens next. You don't have that determined,
so that what happens is you you take a random
draw from a probability distribution of the possibilities. Now that's
not a random draw from the possibilities that would jump
all over. It's a random draw from a probability distribution
of the possibilities, which means the things that are more
probable or more likely to be drawn. Things that are
less probable. They can still be drawn because it's a
random draw. But there's one chance in a million you'll
draw that one, and on one chance, maybe you know
in two that you'll draw this one. So that's how
it determines what happens next. I think proved that it Well,
that solves all the big paradoxes. Yes, you know you can.
Ser Cat was a little bit of a paradox. It
was kind of a tongue in cheek thing of him
showing how bizarre the whole thing was, and the you know,
the the physicists don't understand where these particles that are
just probability distributions, and why does it come here instead
of there? You know, they all have probabilities, but it's
a random draw from the probability distribution of the possibilities,
so anything's possible. And one of the ways I try
to explain this to people is, let's say you have
a telescope and it can look further. So nobody's ever
seen what's there before, so it's new. It's something new,
something unknown. Or you turn on the scope and there
could be say ten thousand things out there in outer
space who knows, you know, red dwarfs, sure, supernos and
anything could be there. So there's a probability distribution. Some
things are more probable than others. And when that telescope
gets turned on, that random draw is taken from that
probability distribution of the possibilities, and that's what he sees.
So it's not like there's something out there that is
this way or not this way. What's out there gets
decided on that random draw. That's how reality is created.
It's information. Now, after he sees that and he takes
his picture and he publishes his paper, anybody else looks
at that same spot, they'll see that same thing because
once it comes into the reality, it stays here, and
now somebody's going to look next to it. But now
the probabilities, the possibilities are different because we know what
it's in here, and that will affect the probabilities of
what's next to it. You say, so, then that.
Speaker 1: There's a sorers muted. There's a physicist I forget his
first name, and his last name is Wigner, and he
had a lot of different theories, and he was kind
of into the mind body problem, and he sort of
had a lot of thought experiments. In theoretical physics, there's
a lot of experiments too, but there's a lot of
thought experiments, like a lot of it's almost like philosophy,
you know. And anyway, he had this idea like, okay,
say you have a quantum system of unknown outcome. Let's
let's say someone is going to click a button that
measures the spin of a photon, and so it's either
in an upspin or a downspin. And let's say he
pushes that button and it's in an upspin. But now
a mad that outside of that lab is another box, right,
and there's another observer about to open the window and
see the outcome of the quantum experiment. The question is
why wouldn't that second observer occasionally get a different solution
to the outcome of the quantum system than that first observer.
I think, I don't know. I read these things and
I'm always pretty confused. I think that's what it is,
and it's reasonable, right, because if we're sampling a probability distribution,
this random draw, it's not actually random, right, it's not
a random draw it so it's a probabilistic draw. We're
just using the word random as shorthand you know there there,
Let's say, you know, there is a certain probability of
either outcome. Now, in the case of a photon is
fifty to fifty, But any quantum system could have a
particular outcome. They might be a continuous outcome, you know,
it could be an integer between zero and infinity, right,
or it could be like a binary outcome, like an
up or a down. But anyway, you get the point.
There's some outcome and it's probabilistic, and you click a button,
you take the measurement, and you have a certain probability
of getting either measurement. Well, why wouldn't that apply to
the second observer. He's outside the lab, he's about to
measure the photon again, but he maybe he does, so
I forget the exact how it works. But he measures
it again. Why couldn't he get a different answer. It
seems to violate the principle because he will never get
a different answer. He will always get that same answer.
So it kind of seems to violate the idea that
the outcome of quantum events is probabilistic and each time
you measure it, you know you could potentially get a
different outcome. And the thing is the issue is or
the answer I guess is that once you measure the thing,
its state becomes definite, not probabilistic. And so the thought
experiment is called Wigner's Friend, Like, will Wigner's friend outside
the lab always get the same measurement as Wigner who's
in the lab taking the measurement, And I think the
answer is yes. And so it goes some way to
explaining the stability of the world around us, because once
something is observed, when something is pulled into definite existence
in space and time, it's sort of locked there. Now.
I guess the question is if everyone leaves and it's
no longer being measured, it could sort of resume this
undefined state, like an electron or something. It's all very
difficult to make sense of. But it's kind of a
cool idea because to me, what it implies is that
there is a certain There is a certain the belief
seems to play a role. Now, I don't like the
words they use. They use words like intention. He uses
very new age words manifestation. I don't think that's what
it is, because I don't think it's about intent. You know,
no matter how badly I want something to happen. Well,
people might disagree with this, but no matter how badly
I want something to happen, I'm not going to make
it happen. But what if I, like, genuinely believe something.
I think maybe I could influence probabilistic outcomes that are
able to be influenced, Right, Like if ten people are
looking at a car and I really believe that the
car's white, I can't make it white because it's definite,
it's in space and time, it's observed.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But I do wonder, like going back to stuff we
talked about recently, like these random event generators, like if
there is a true outcome, that the outcome is unknown
to anyone or anything, I influenced that. And I mean
it does seem like I could, right, based on some
of the evidence. But so it's pretty cool. It's pretty
interesting stuff. Let's listen to a few more minutes, and
then I got to pack up and get out of here.
Speaker 2: This picture is taken and it has to be consistent
with what you already know. So there's a certain you
know that changes the distribution. Now, one of the very
most interesting things about this idea is that this probable
this you know, what do we call it?
Speaker 1: Oh? My podcast app just froze? Did I forget to
pay my internet bill? Well, the decision might be made
for us. We might might be done with Thos Cannibal. Huh.
Well that's too bad, because if I remember correctly, it
was about to get interesting. Well, we can pick this
up another time. That's fine, we'll wrap up. I hope
you guys are doing good. I've received zero emails about
microtubule questions, So come on, guys, come on, surely sure?
Oh I think I was supposed to talk about that
more of this episode. Oh my bad. We'll do that
next time. But we need more. We need questions. We
need questions about microtubules, Questions about microtubules as the physical
structure that mediates conscious experience. It is the thing that
provides us with this incredible first person perspective that our
brains seem so intent on providing us with. M What
do you think? What are some experiments we might do?
What are some questions we might ask? Please email me
at God's I view book at gmail dot com. As
we wind this down, let's get a nice little background music.
Here you go. I want you guys to all have
a good week out there. This is funny. I want
you guys to have a good week. I want you
to be kind to your fellow man. If your boss
is a jerk, just ignore them, Just ignore them, just
live life the way you want to live it. You
do need some ultimate source of authority, though you know
you can't just rely on your own will. I do
think you need to submit to something and then just
live your life according to that standard. Your boss says, hey,
we need to do this shady thing. I think you
just say no, I'm not gonna do it, and then
when you're fired, living homeless in the street, I will
deny that I ever said that. When the lawsuits inevitably
come to recoup your lost earnings, I will wholeheartedly deny
saying that. And actually you'll have evidence because this is recorded,
So I'm gonna fully disclaim now that I'm just joking.
Everything in the show is a joke. My views do
not represent the views of my employer. They don't even
necessarily represent my own views. It's very mysterious. Why don't
you guys just stay safe out there, try to have
a good week. Oh, we do have an update. We
have some genius listeners out there and one of them
is working on a photonic quantum random event generator for us.
So the dog bacon experiment is still on the table.
If you don't remember what I'm talking about. Our vision
was to take a creature with an underdeveloped frontal lobe
compared to a human, like a dog, and see if
they have the ability to influence the outcome of a
random event generator. Hypothetically they would, because the study that
we talked about showed that if you inhibited certain regions
of the frontal lobe, people could influence the outcome of
a random event generator. And so there's no need to
do that in a dog, right because it's already underdeveloped.
That's the hypothesis. So how could we test the ability
of a dog to influence random outcomes? This is so ridiculous.
I hope no one listens to this episode. We would
take a string on a spool. We would translate the
outcome the one hundred bits per second outcome of the
random event generator to that spool. If there are more ones,
it would lower, it would elongate. If there are more zeros,
it would shorten. We would suspend the bacon from the
center of a room and let in five dogs. Could
their collective desire lower the bacon. I'm gonna turn this off. Sorry,
here's the problem. I think the issue is the dog
has to believe the bacon would be lowered, and I
don't know if they have that cognitive capacity. So maybe
we'll try it on humans first. I guess we don't
need the bacon. We'll just do We'll play pong, we'll
hook we'll hook two random event generators up to two
pong paddles, and then we just yeah, we do need
to fry our frontal lobe somehow. Maybe we'll do hemi sync.
Is hemi sync is a binural beats inhibit frontal lobe
question mark, google, no oh. Depending on the frequency, though
they can modulate either increase or decrease activity and connectivity
in the front regions. For example, forty hertz. Here's a reminder.
This would stimulate your frontal lobe. Do you feel it?
Are you present? Are you fully self aware, drawn to
the present moment, and confident in your agency?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: So that's forty herds that would enhance focus. Makes sense.
That kind of woke me up. If you want to
inhibit the frontal lobe, you might try four hurts to
hate hurts, so you can entrain the brain to slow
down and may temporarily suppress higher rousal activity in the
frontal lobe. A lot of maze and maybes. So here's
the frontal lobe inhibitor. Ready, let's see if we if
we have ego dissolution. Yeah, I feel it. I don't know.
I'm just having fun. Guys. I suspect there probably is
something important to all of this. I'm not I'm not
belittling it. I think it's it's cool. It's just it.
It just seems to escape the scientific method, you know,
So we gotta be careful. We need to move forward
with caution because lots of people have believed all sorts
of crazy things that end up just being ridiculous. Right,
So it's tempting as it is to dive right in.
I am skeptical, but also I don't know. I wouldn't
be surprised if if there is something important here, So
maybe we'll explore this further. Let me know email Gods
I viewbook at gmail dot com. Until next time, stay
safe out there, have fun, God bless