Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now, for my discussion with Doctor. Sam Harris. Doctor. Sam Harris, what is this thing that we call a self? You know, as far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our awareness of self. The problem is we we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And and there's there's one sense of that term, which, is the target of meditation, and and you'll hear it from me that this self is an illusion, right, and and that there's a there's a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion. And some people don't like that framing. Some people would would insist that it's not so much an illusion, but it's a it's a construct, and it's not what it seems. The thing that doesn't exist, certainly doesn't exist as it seems, and I would I would wanna argue that it actually is just a proper illusion, is this the sense that there is a subject interior to experience in addition to experience. So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world, and they're having their an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention. It's almost like they're you're a passenger inside your body. Most people don't feel identical to their experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side. You're kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there. Your body is is, in some sense, an object in the world, which you you know, it's different from the world. You know, the boundary of your skin is still meaningful. You can sort of loosely control your body. I mean, you can't control it. You can control your gross and subtle, you know, voluntary motor movements, but you're not controlling everything your body is doing. You're not controlling your heartbeat and your hormonal secretions and all of that, and so there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you. Then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, okay, well, let's examine all of this from the first person's side. Let's look for this thing you're calling eye. They're gonna close their eyes, very likely, and and now they're gonna pay attention to something. They're gonna pay attention to the breath or to sounds, and it's from the point of view of being a locus of …