BW: The world is struggling and people are struggling, and at the same time it seems like this is really a critical time for change. What can we do in this critical time to make the best of it?
JS: I think we need to find what gets us in the zone and build our lives around it. Or at the very least take up a hobby that we can practice regularly; that gets us out of our heads. The key is anything that gets you out of your head. States of consciousness that put you in the zone or put you in the flow are characterized by selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness. So the key idea is that the self vanishes. Your sense of time distorts. The information that you get in these moments feels really rich and really meaningful. And it all feels effortless. And that’s an automatic process that happens when you get hurled into the now. So I think people need to figure out what hurls them into the now. It’s the best antidote to depression in my opinion.
BW: How do you deal with the difficulties in life?
JS: Struggle. I try to get enough sleep, try to get enough exercise, because those are ways of using the body to tame the mind so that the story stops spinning. You condition your body and you get rewarded with chemicals from exercise and good sleep. Sometimes existential despair is just a lack of sleep and low blood sugar. I’m aware of interventions I could use to hack my consciousness whenever possible. That’s pretty much my response to the whole thing. Hacking my consciousness. That’s why I’ve been calling myself an inspiration junkie. As long as I’m being catapulted into ecstasy by something magnificent, I’m not thinking about the inevitable.
BW: How would you explain the importance of this mind-body connection?
JS: The key idea to realize is that this (your brain) is wired to this (your gut). It’s all part of one spider’s web, one network. It’s all interconnected. Some of the latest science is saying that the bacteria that live in here, in our gut, can actually, without our awareness of it, influence how we feel. Sometimes your happiness or your sadness has more to do with the bacteria in your stomach than the events in your life. The fact that sometimes sadness is just a lack of sleep and low blood sugar should be a reminder of that: Don’t always listen to the running story here. You know, the cul-de-sacs and error messages. Sometimes the story is irrelevant. Sometimes it’s your neurochemistry that you have to hack.
BW: What is the relationship between science and art in your opinion?
JS: Marshall McLuhan used to say that it’s the artist who always realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it. So I think art is really the moment when science is interpreted from the perspective of our humanness. What does this mean to us? How does this change how we live? And to express that from a human point of view, from a particular perspective, is to be an artist. Artistry is the human response to the cut-and-dry aspect of science. It’s like the Hubble Space Telescope telling the brilliant engineers to build a machine. It floats in space, takes pictures of the universe, and uses algorithm and complex electronic components to communicate. It’s amazing. The artist looks at those images and it vindicates John Keats’ famous couplet: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” As artists, we use all this science to reveal the world to our senses, and then we interpret that world through the eyes of poetry and art.
BW: You’re a very successful communicator — what is the key to get people’s attention in your experience?
JS: Empathy. To connect to people, you have to know what you’re talking about. You have to
be compelling. But how do you know if you’re compelling? It’s because you have empathy. It’s because you’re effectively modeling the other person’s mind well enough to know if you’re reaching them or not. You can’t be aloof in your communication. You have to really relate with the people you’re talking to, to make sure you’re being understood. That’s quite taxing, by the way.
There’s a book called “Others in Mind” [by Philippe Rochat], which talks about how communication requires us to render ritual versions of other people’s interior worlds within our interior world. When you don’t connect with somebody, it means that you’re not effectively modeling their mind. Or you’re modeling their mind and you don’t like what you see. So much of communication is estimation, rendering, and assessment; modeling the environment. It’s kind of like the self-driving cars that show the graphics modeling the surrounding streets and the other cars. We’re running all those algorithms too, when we communicate with other people. I think the key to good communication is how rich those algorithms and your modeling of others are. If you know your audience well, you can connect with them, and you know what to say to them. Politicians do that well.
BW: You say, “we are gods” — can you elaborate more on this perspective?
JS: I think that life is wonderfully anti-entropic. Even though it is ultimately still subject to death and decay, life before it decays moves toward greater complexity and organization in a universe where everything else breaks down. Life gets more complex and more interesting. And out of life comes technology, which also grows more complex and more interesting. Kevin Kelly talks about this in his book, “What Technology Wants.” He talks about the technium, the seventh kingdom of life.
So, when I say we are as gods, it’s because we are the climax, perhaps, thus far, of the evolutionary process, which has gained sentience. When something has sentience it can self-modify through mindful will. It’s like we decommissioned natural selection and now it’s within our own agency and volition to modify ourselves. People say, “Oh, when artificial intelligence starts to build itself and modify itself, that’s a singularity.” I would say yes, but the first singularity was when we start doing it. Genetic engineering, gene sequencing, CRISPR technologies [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats — that is, genome-editing technology] — that’s the software of life. We are alphabetic. We are made of language and the capacity to make modifications to the source code of life is engendered godhood, in my opinion.
This article was originally published in Brain World Magazine’s Summer 2017 issue.
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