The Science of Happiness with an expert Psychologist

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

I'm currently on tour.

I'm on tour.

I'm in Scotland right now.

I'm in a hotel room in Edinburgh.

Thankfully, not underneath the duvet

because there's heavy carpets and heavy curtains in this room.

So the sound isn't too bad, but it's slightly different to what you're used to.

But since you joined me for last week's podcast, I've been gigging

pretty much every single night and traveling in between.

So these are very few and precious moments that I have to set up my equipment and have a little chat with you.

I'm seven days, not eight days into this tour,

and I'm starting to experience

the beginnings of autistic burnout.

And I'm trying to explain what I mean by that.

So every single,

every single day of this tour

I've been highly social.

I've been speaking to...

I've been having small talk with multiple people every day consistently.

Because that's what's required to go on tour, to do a gig, to travel between gigs.

There's no way to do that without...

consistent communication with people, with all different people, especially strangers.

Now that's that's a struggle for me, that's difficult for me because

I have to put on my

I have to deliberately engage in the performance of being a neurotypical person, of being a normal person, masking.

That might sound fucking nuts to you.

For me, my entire life, just speaking to people,

strangers, speaking to strangers is

difficult and uncomfortable.

I've thought about ways of trying to explain this to neurotypical people.

Do you ever want to do a massive fart?

Do you ever have a huge fart, right?

And you think you're on your own and you're ready to do this giant fart.

And just as you prep yourself to do this giant fart, somebody walks in and tries to have a chat with you as as you've just gotten ready to fart and now the person's speaking to you and all you're focusing on is holding in this massive fart

it could be at work a colleague comes in to tell you the photocopier is broken all right the photocopier is broken so don't go near it because if you use it you might break the photocopier

But all you're focusing on is this giant fart that's hurting your belly and you're terrified of letting the fart fart out and now this what's supposed to be a regular conversation about a broken photocopier you're not listening to your colleague talking about the photocopier you have a cursory awareness someone's talking at me and a foot it's about a photocopier but i can't stop thinking about this fart and all you want is for the person I can't wait for this conversation to be over so you can leave and I can do my massive fart.

I really need to be be on my own so I can do this fart because it's actually hurting me and the longer you're talking to me it's hurting me and I can't wait for this conversation to be over because this fart needs to happen.

The person leaves, you do the fart, now you feel relaxed, you feel okay and you can't remember like you can't even remember what the conversation was about because you weren't having a conversation, you were focusing on holding in that fart.

That's what most conversation is like for me.

Except I'm not holding in a fart.

I'm thinking about my body language.

I'm looking at the other person's body language.

I'm thinking about my facial expressions.

I'm thinking about whether I should smile, whether I should not smile.

I'm thinking about when do I say hello, when do I say goodbye?

I'm thinking about eye contact.

Am I doing the right amount of looking into this person's eyes?

And I'm very afraid of

coming across as strange or weird or rude.

and that's why like 90% of the time I just keep to myself 90% of the time in my regular life I try and spend as much time with myself as possible so then I can be happy and be comfortable and feel okay with who I am but when I'm on tour especially seven days into it

I'm chatting to multiple people every single day chatting to lovely kind,

helpful, friendly, well-meaning people and each each time I do it for me, it's like I've got this giant fart, this huge, painful fart in my belly.

And

when the conversation's happening, I'm really focusing and not giving away that this giant fart is inside of me.

But really, it's like I'm not really taking in most of what you're saying to me.

I'm not taking in most of this conversation because I'm focused.

I'm really focused on my eye contact, my tone of voice, my body language, my posture.

That's what I'm worried about right here.

That's what I'm focusing on.

I can't actually listen to your words because there's other shit going on here.

And I'm really looking forward to when this conversation is over because this is

a tough one.

This is tough to do.

This is difficult for me to do because I've just done 16 of these already today.

And I sound like a bit of a prick.

My internal voice there sounds like a bit of a prick.

Like I don't have time to speak to people or I consider myself above people and don't want to chat to them.

And that's not the case at all.

It's I

have dyslexia.

It's like having dyslexia except instead of words on the page, it's

human conversation.

It's one-to-one human conversation with strangers.

The more it's not really with people I know, the more I get to know a person, then the less I need to mask, the more comfortable I feel being myself.

But when you first meet in another human being, when you first meet a person, you have to slip into your first time meeting a person persona, which contains all the learned rules of propriety and manners and appropriateness and all of this stuff that we simply pick up, we pick up from society and the culture that we're in.

For neurotypical people, this is instinct.

Just instinct.

There's a brand new person.

Time to put on my new person persona.

Boom, straight into it.

What's the crack?

How are you getting on?

Gone back to private persona for what from where i am on the autistic spectrum that's my area of difficulty that's my area of difficulty but i can do it i can pull it off i can pretend i'm able to actually do that and function in society smile eye contact how's your mother how's your father how's the weather but i can only do so much of it and i'm seven days into it now and I've been doing it multiple times a day.

I'm even having difficulty speaking now, to be honest.

I've been doing it multiple times a day non-stop.

And now a week into it I'm starting to experience the beginnings of autistic burnout.

And the first signs of it in me are

it becomes more and more difficult for me to speak to other human beings.

The other night before a gig I just noticed

I couldn't do eye contact anymore.

I had to speak to a sound technician, lighting,

tour manager,

people at the ticket desk, security, and then my guest, my guest on stage who I speak to before we go out on stage.

And these conversations range from something longer to just a simple hello.

But I noticed I could...

I could only do it if I wasn't looking anyone in the eye.

So now I'm trying to speak to people and be normal, but my eyes are darting all over the room.

Because that's the only way I'm able to speak to another person.

I have to have my eyes everywhere.

But then what happens is

in society, if someone isn't looking you in the eye, it means that that person is either lying or they have incredibly low self-esteem and they consider themselves to be so beneath you that they can't look you in the eye.

So lack of eye contact instantly makes the other person feel uncomfortable.

So, now I'm forcing myself to look someone into the eyes, but because it's forced, now I'm intensely gazing into a person's eyes, and that's intimidating them too.

And then I come away from small interactions, then

feeling terrible, feeling really bad, feeling intense shame, and then that,

then feeling

feelings of low self-esteem as a result of that.

And then, what happens is

my capacity to mask, my capacity to appear normal, which means maintain eye contact, keep an eye on my posture, not fidget,

stay on topic,

these things, they start to disappear.

And it becomes...

It becomes more difficult for me to pretend that I'm not autistic.

That's my life.

That's the life of most people who are autistic at the level that I'm at, which is level one, what used to be called Asperger's.

Your life in public is pretending to not be autistic.

That's what it is.

Pretending that you're not autistic so that you can just get on with life.

I mean, what do I want?

I don't want to make eye contact with people.

I want to...

If an interesting fact comes into my head, I want to say that in the moment.

And I want to fidget my hands because that's who I am.

And

that's who I can be around people that I know.

I have a small group of people, family, who I can be myself around.

Everyone else, I have to pretend I'm not autistic.

And that's not just me.

That's...

Most neurodivergent people listening, they can relate to some aspect of what I'm saying.

That's what life is like.

If you're neurotypical listening and you're thinking, fuck it, blind boy, fuck that.

Go out there into the world and fiddle your fingers and don't look people into the eyes and talk about the Norman invasion as much as you want.

No,

that's how you get bullied.

That doesn't work.

That doesn't work.

That works around a very small amount of people who know you well.

Autistic people mask and learn how to mask as a defense mechanism from bullying, shaming, being picked on, being pointed at, being laughed at, being ridiculed, not being taken seriously, being called out as different, weird, strange, eccentric, whatever the fuck, our entire lives since earliest fucking childhood.

And as soon as you find yourself in the playground and people go, why the fuck is he talking about volcanoes?

This is a seesaw.

We're focusing on up and down and that's it.

We don't need to hear about volcanoes.

So that's where I'm at.

That's where I'm at seven days into this tour.

And I have to, like, I'm familiar with this.

I've been dealing with this my whole life it's just the past three years I've had a fucking name for it what did I used to call this before I knew I was autistic I used to call it depression I used to call it anxiety like I'm in Edinburgh right now tonight I'm gigging Usher Hall

About 13 years ago I used to come to the the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

I did it three years in a row, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

And at the Edinburgh Fringe, I would gig 30 nights in a row and for all of those 30 nights I would be intensely social and speak to lots and lots of new people and I'd drink every single night I would drink because alcohol

after two points that little buzz after two pints

if you drink alcohol after two pints your inhibitions start to go and you stop caring as much about eye contact and the propriety of your body language.

So a lot of neurodivergent people without knowing it will use alcohol as a crutch.

And also the rules change, the social rules change when alcohol is involved.

When alcohol is involved people don't need to deploy their

proper

mannered I'm meeting someone for the first time personality.

When drink is present you get to be a little bit more flamboyant or silly or whatever you want.

When drink is there, all you got to worry about is being a decent person, being a nice person and not being mean.

That's not difficult.

I'm a kind person.

I'm a nice, kind person.

And when I meet new people,

I want to approach them with compassion and openness.

That has fuck all to do with autism.

The difficult bit is the appearing normal.

The expectation and pressure of appearing normal, it's it's not as present when drink is flowing and music is playing.

So I used to go to Edinburgh years ago, I'd do 30 fucking gigs and that would be in August, I'd come home in September and then experience

a type of depression until about January.

I'd come away from Edinburgh feeling hopeless, useless.

I'd be unbelievably forgetful.

I'd forget to pay bills.

I wasn't as diligent at responding to emails, doing my job.

And I'd just get into this

deep depression that would take six months to get out of.

And

I used to blame it on drink.

I used to say to myself, of course, you're like that.

You drank alcohol every single night for 30 days when you were in Edinburgh.

Of course, you're going to have depression for six months.

It was autistic burnout.

It was autistic burnout, and I didn't know.

That's what it was.

I'm speaking speaking about this because

I have a huge amount of neurodivergent listeners.

40% of the population is NeuroDivergent in some way.

That's what they reckon.

One in eight people in Ireland, I think, is autistic.

I think it's useful.

It's useful for me, for me to be able to come on this podcast and to say these things that I'm feeling almost like a journal.

That's really helpful for me.

And also, I'm hoping people who are fucking experiencing this are listening and then they feel a little bit more normal.

Like people have mailed me, people who are neurodivergent, and they'll hear me talking about burnout and they'll say, blind boy,

I'm so glad you put words onto that thing that I experience.

And then that makes me feel normal because I'm like, oh fuck, someone else is going through this too.

So what am I going to do to try and protect myself from burnout?

So neurodivergent people are different.

It's not a fucking disease.

It's not a disease.

It's brain pathways.

So I can be quite different to another person who's autistic or ADHD.

I can be quite different.

Another person might get...

What we're talking about here is overstimulation.

I am highly stimulated by social interaction.

I'm so stimulated by social interaction that it's quite overwhelming.

And I need to limit how much I do of it.

Some people are overstimulated by loud noises, by fabrics on their clothes, by bright lights.

Not me, because I'm actually sensory seeking.

I'm not sensory avoidant.

I'm sensory seeking.

I actually love bright lights and I love music and I love these type of things soothe me and these things they recharge my social battery.

I'm like an iPhone that hasn't been charged.

I'm an iPhone and I've been so busy for the past seven days that I haven't had time to charge myself and now I'm at the bottom fucking bit of my battery.

That's what's going on here.

So I have to find a plug socket.

I have to find a plug socket to plug myself into

and I know right now I'm in fucking Edinburgh and three minutes up the road from my hotel is the National Gallery of Scotland.

This is one of the best art museums in the fucking world.

So I'm gonna put my headphones on and I'm gonna put them on noise cancelling and I'm gonna go up to that gallery for about an hour.

And I know I get to stand and stare

at fucking Titian and Velasquez and the paintings of fucking Paul Cézanne is up there.

I get to stand inches away from paintings I've been looking at in books my whole life.

I'm gonna silently go up to that gallery and I'm not gonna talk to fucking anybody.

I'm not gonna look at anybody.

And I'm gonna walk around it for an hour.

Just me and the paintings and music.

And I'm gonna look at the paintings and go off into imagination land, where my stories come from and where my hot takes come from and where my writing comes from.

And that's my protection from burnout.

That's the exact opposite.

That's the exact opposite of having small talk with a stranger.

It's being by myself in my own world, listening to music, looking at paintings, imagining things, thinking about about things

and not speaking to other people and being around people.

The gallery is going to be full of people, no problem at all, but I won't have to speak to anybody.

And I'm going to have to pick those moments in my week coming up.

Like

I've got a six-hour drive to York on Monday and I'm just going to have to really politely ask.

my tour manager, I'm going to just have to ask and say, is it okay for this journey that I have my headphones in and I read Wikipedia?

Because I have to preserve my voice.

And that's the thing with

NeuroDivergence.

I'm not preserving my physical voice box.

I have to preserve the part of my brain where social interaction comes from.

That's what I have to preserve so that I can pick and choose the moments where I'm...

deploying it and engaging it.

I'm chatting about this just to

so that for me to understand

more what it means to be autistic.

Because I found out three fucking years ago, remember, even though I've been dealing with this my whole life,

I'm putting words on language and shit that I've been experiencing my whole life.

So I'm understanding myself better.

And then hopefully, if you're NeuroDivergent, this helps you to understand yourself better.

And then if you're a family member or a friend of someone who's NeuroDivergent, then you can understand them better.

Because I don't have friends.

Like, I don't, I've got plenty of people I can ring up and have a pint with, but I don't have any friends.

I'm, I'm not, I'm not in any WhatsApp groups.

So, when you're in your 20s, you've got friends groups.

That's actually a bit easier.

You've got groups of friends, and you can go along to a gathering and have little chats here and there, or you can go to the corner and say nothing.

You can sample conversations like they're tapas.

But then in your 30s, that changes, and friends groups disappear.

And if you want friends, then you have to really work at it, you have to stick at it, you have to put in effort.

I've got family,

but like, I don't have

the closest thing that I have to friendship are people who I work closely with, but I've no friends, I don't have a person that

I socialize with and hang out with for the sake of socializing.

And I don't think I've I've ever really had that.

Like just listening to people over the years.

Oh yeah, I called around to this person's house.

Why'd you do that?

Oh, just to hang out, you know?

What do you mean just to hang out?

Yeah, you know, just company.

I don't understand that.

I'm like, why would I possibly do that when I could be by myself reading Wikipedia?

And also,

you have to stay in contact with people to maintain friendships.

You have to to stay in contact with people and just talk for the sake of talking.

And none of that is, I don't like people, I don't want to be around people.

It's nothing like that.

It is nothing like that.

Also, what I want to point out is under neurotypical rules, to say something like, I don't have friends, that's usually like a type of a covertly narcissistic way to ask for attention.

It's a way to ask people to feel sorry for you.

No, like, I don't have close friendships because it doesn't particularly, it doesn't interest me.

And if someone said to me, will you meet me for coffee on Tuesday, I'm most likely going to cancel.

I'm most likely going to cancel that because as soon as I have to meet someone on Tuesday for the specific purpose of socializing, it becomes this massive task that I have to do next Tuesday and nothing gets done in between.

It would fuck up my concept of timekeeping.

It would massively get in the way of my routine and the things I want to do.

And it's not, it's not social anxiety.

I'm not afraid of going for a coffee.

It's

task paralysis.

It's related to that word I don't like, executive functioning skills.

And

it's a neurodivergent trait.

Autistic people and ADHD people.

Will you meet me next week for a a cup of coffee?

Meet another human being for a cup of coffee.

Now, if it's will you meet me next week to discuss a script for television, to discuss a new book that you might be writing, to edit some work, can you meet me next week for work, for creativity?

Not a fucking bother.

We can meet next week.

Can we meet next week for a cup of coffee?

Just to shoot the breeze, just to socialize, to catch up.

The emotional load of that

becomes like a blocking task.

It becomes this giant task in the week and then nothing else gets done because I've got this coffee that I have to have with a person where they want to catch up and shoot the breeze.

I'm going to end up cancelling that cup of coffee.

I'm going to end up cancelling that cup of coffee.

But my buddy James, who I write TV shows with, We got to meet next week.

We got to discuss this script.

We got to go through this.

Fucking done.

It's happening.

I'm there already.

I can't wait for that.

Creativity, ideas.

Fucking bring it on.

I'd love to not be this way.

It's a pain in the fucking hole.

Similarly, can you come to a gig tonight and speak to a stranger on stage in front of 2,000 other strangers?

Yeah, no bother.

I can do that.

If I had a friend, I'd be like, I might see you once a year.

Is that okay?

Maybe once a year.

And that's not how it works.

That's not the social contract.

You're expected to stay in contact with a person frequently.

Go for coffee.

Why?

To discuss your day.

The fuck could I do that for?

I need to read about the Cambrian extinction event.

So quite a lot of autistic people, they choose not to pursue friendships.

And I'm saying that because if you've got friends who are neurodivergent and you're neurotypical, don't take it personally if they don't show up to the party.

If you're having a fucking party, even if

it's an important birthday and it means the world to you, and your

NoraDivergent friend doesn't show up, it's not that they don't care about you.

They probably

don't fully understand the gravity, the social gravity of what it means to not show up to a birthday party that you're invited to.

Like I just stopped going to weddings, like 10 years ago.

I just stopped going to weddings, even if I was invited.

Because I couldn't do it.

A wedding is an enjoyable, fun thing for some people.

For me, it's it's like holding in 90 farts.

I'm trying to catch the autistic experience in the moment and journal it in the hopes that that might be useful here on this space as opposed to

fucking radio stations.

Blind boy, we tell it what's it like being autistic?

Blind boy, we can tell it blind boy's here to talk about being autistic.

What's it like, blind boy?

What's it like being autistic?

And the fucking corporate media want to bring you on as an autistic person to describe the experience in 90 seconds and then take your words out of context and put it as a headline of an article that's behind a paywall just to piss off a lot of Daz.

That's why you'll very rarely hear me.

Like I get fucking called, I'd say once every two weeks, by the radio stations in Ireland.

to come and talk about being autistic anytime it's in the fucking news.

No, no, I won't do that because the platform that you're providing isn't safe.

It's not safe and I don't think it helps autistic people.

I only notice this shit when I'm on tour.

When I'm on tour and I'm thrust into the

sea of people and the sea of conversations and social interactions, when that happens, then I'm like, oh fuck.

Yeah, I'm autistic.

Most of my life, I'm just happily going about my day by myself with my thoughts and my interests.

loving life, absolutely fucking loving life.

I really, really love being alive, and I'm very, I'm a very happy person.

And above all, I adore this job.

I fucking love this podcast.

So I wasn't actually expecting to talk there for 20 minutes.

I thought I was going to give a tiny little intro to this week's podcast because this week's podcast is

a chat I had a few days ago with Professor Bruce Hood, who is

a phenomenal individual, a wonderfully sound person, and a great crack with him.

He's a professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University.

And

usually with

academics, with professors, sometimes I'm

a little bit worried because sometimes academics who are in a very specific field, they tend not to deviate from that topic.

They stay on topic all the time.

But Professor Bruce Hood, Jesus Christ, I could bring up anything and he was quite happy to have a chat with me.

His work is fascinating because

he's a professor of psychology with a background in neuroscience and

he's written a book about the science of happiness.

He's really interested in magical thinking in adults, the psychology of magical thinking,

the psychology of what the self is, what the voice inside you that you consider to be you so me and check out his books check out professor bruce hood's books because they're really phenomenal and we had a banging conversation um

i had this chat i think it was last saturday and i've been editing the interview on my laptop while i've been traveling between gigs And if you're a new listener, if you just stumbled across this podcast because you like the topic of it or you want to hear from professor bruce hood just be aware that i don't interview guests i have conversations with guests i'm not into the interview format where i sit back and

just ask someone questions there's plenty of that i prefer to have unique conversations unique conversations where both me and my guest are chatting and figuring figuring things out so anyway here's the chat I had with Professor Bruce Hood in Bristol last few days ago.

You glorious cunts.

My guest is a philosopher and a psychologist called Professor Bruce Hood.

Come on out, Bruce.

How do you follow that?

Your work is absolutely fascinating.

The first thing I want to look at is,

so you're a professor of psychology, background in neuroscience as well.

And one area you're looking at is the science of happiness.

What is happiness?

What I love about the areas that you look at is

you also started off as a philosopher.

So it's like you're using psychology to answer the big philosophical questions about the human condition.

Indeed, indeed, because those are the questions which motivate me and get me out of bed in the morning or mean I can't get to sleep at night.

They're questions which were relevant 10,000 years ago, and hopefully they'll still be relevant in 10,000 years from now.

So

I'm motivated by the kind of the big questions.

Just a quick one about human beings.

Because you said 10,000 years ago.

How long back can you go where people were walking around with the same brains as me and you?

I would reckon at least probably about 100,000 years.

Fuck.

Yeah.

I mean, certainly the earliest records of the burials, and that's where we can get a measure of their kind of the artifacts that they left.

The first jewelry, for example, is around about 90,000 years ago.

So jewelry is a measure of aesthetics, if you like.

It was used for purposes.

I mean,

there were certainly humans doing hunting much earlier than that.

and they were working together and they're bringing down mammoths and stuff like that.

But the aesthetics, the first jewelry and body adornments, appear to be about 80,000, 90,000 years.

Is that when you start going, these are Homo sapiens?

What does jewelry say to you?

Is it these people have a sense of self?

These people have identity?

Well, the translation of Homo sapiens is thinking man.

Yeah.

But I think that, I mean, they clearly were thinking and that they were cooperating and they must have been communicating in order to sort of bring down a huge mammoth.

But in terms of jewelry and aesthetics and art, I think that represents a different level of thinking.

And that's the earliest that we can find.

And then when you hit about 50,000 years ago, this is where you get an explosion in the record of artifacts that they were buried with.

And you see symbolism, you see those booby dolls, you know, the Venus figurines with a large, which must have been something to do with fertility.

So they were obviously practicing ritual, they were practicing belief systems, and that to me is a kind of exponential level of understanding as opposed to just hunting together.

You know, chimpanzees can hunt together, but humans, by the time we get to about 60,000 years ago, are doing really complex things.

It's interesting too that we'd say, so jewellery and figurines, like that's art.

Art.

And

one thing, because when we spoke backstage, and this,

you said that one of the,

with all the work you were doing on happiness, that one of the things you found was that

Buddhism was one of the schools that kind of got it right, that you're finding with psychology that it agrees with that.

Yes.

And

just there with the art, one of my favourite stories from mythology is...

It's the one with Prometheus and Zeus and the creation of humanity.

And

I'm gonna fuck it up a little bit but this is how we tell stories in Ireland

um

Prometheus

and Zeus

were like bored

up in Mount Olympus right and they're like

why don't we make like a video game full of creatures like us for the crack?

Why don't we do that for the crack?

And Prometheus is like yeah let's do it And then Zeus is like, I want to do it, but I'm kind of scared.

What are you scared of, Zeus?

What if they get smarter than us?

What if we make this little world, this plaything of creatures that are like us, but they like get smarter than me and you and try to kill us?

So then they go and do it.

Prometheus gives them fire, and giving them fire was the thing that made them make art.

And when they made art, that's when Zeus freaks the fuck out.

And he's like, now we got to stop him.

When he sees sees the little civilization, the human beings, me and you, when he sees him making art, he's like, no, we gotta stop it there.

As soon as they make art, then they can kill us.

And then, what did Zeus do?

He gave a box to a woman called Pandora.

There was a little woman living amongst the society called Pandora.

And Zeus gave her a box, knowing that these little creatures, this artificial intelligence that they've made, were mad smart.

And he goes, there's a box in there, you can't open it.

And then she's like, well, well I'm a fucking human I have to open it so she does open it but when she opens it what comes out is like mental health problems

what comes out of it but that's it what comes out of Pandora's box is misery jealousy um

fucking pestilence everything about the human condition that gives us pain is what comes out of Pandora's box and that was like Zeus's code to limit these creatures from becoming powerful enough to kill him.

So like we're going to, like, because I'm just thinking one day, because I'm freaking out about AI,

someone's going to have to figure out how to give AI a panic attack.

Seriously, though, that's what we're going to be doing.

But the AI is going to get really smart, and we're going to be like, let's give it body issues.

Yeah,

low self-esteem.

It's true, though.

But, like,

different cultures.

Like, how do you know what happiness is?

How do you measure happiness?

Is one culture unhappier than the other?

Or who's the happiest and why?

Well, we actually do, well not I personally, but the World Happiness Report comes out every year and I think just about every country contributes to it and it's a very simple measure and what they ask people to do is to imagine a ladder with 10 steps on that ladder and the top of the ladder is a 10.

And that's the best possible life you could live.

And at the bottom is zero, which is the worst possible life you could live or imagine.

And so they ask them where you think you are on that ladder and every year the same five countries come out on top and it's the nordic countries it's finland uh

you know all of those those areas uh and they keep kind of switching for the top position norway's there occasionally but at the moment it's finland now

the question is what can you say is the best possible life For some, that might be happiness or the emotional content of it.

You see, it can mean different things to different people.

And that's, I suppose, one of the reasons that they use that wording, because happiness means different things to different people.

For some, indeed, the world, the word happiness and the way we research it is actually a broad spectrum of things.

It means your emotions, but it also means a feeling of contentment, a feeling of moving forward, a feeling of progress.

These are all captured in that.

I actually, I remember getting an infam, you know, one of these graphs with all the words which we use for happiness, and it was ridiculous.

It was something like 50 odd words, which all had this sort of positive valence, as it were.

But in general, it's the emotional component and a sort of what we call a cognitive component, which is a sense of everything being okay.

And that's what happiness is.

But the way you measure it, you can't stick an electrode in the brain, you can't take a biopsy, you can't measure it with anything.

It's basically to ask someone, how do you feel?

So, all happiness research is based on that sort of self-report.

And that's the problem.

Because the trouble with self-reports are they're incredibly biased.

That self-report you generate based on who you're comparing yourself to or where you think you should be.

And therein lies the problem.

Because if you have unrealistic expectations about where you should be or you're drawing the wrong comparisons, then you're going to feel inadequate.

And I think that, unfortunately, is part of the problem with the happiness research, that people are drawing the wrong comparisons, making the wrong sort of expectations.

And you were talking earlier on about the fear of failure.

I actually teach a whole lecture on that.

It's an incredibly important point.

A lot of my students avoid putting themselves in situations because of the fear of failure, and they don't learn.

They don't progress.

And a lot of that is driven by this sort of inadequate or inappropriate comparisons of where they think they should be.

So

it's a major issue.

I mean, I only really got into this research about six years ago because we were having a crisis at Bristol, and I changed changed my research.

I normally work on you know

deeper issues and child development and neuroscience kind of questions but I turned it around entirely just to focus on happiness because really trying to teach unhappy students is painful.

They don't learn.

It's a really really hard thing to do.

I'm trying to avoid the type of questions that

you'd get asked if you went on TV, right?

Because I know but there's one I do want to know about which is

when I was a kid, I didn't have social media, and I'm so glad that I didn't have social media because it's the comparison thing.

Like, obviously, I compared myself to my peers, but I didn't have a box that I could look into where I could see a few million peers from around the world.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

Remember it, like, there used to be this website called Bebo,

but

social media was like a year old, and I had a Bebo page.

And I started to notice what you had at the time was page views.

So if you had a lot of page views, and then your friend had more page views, they were a more popular person because it meant that more people were interested in their page views.

And suddenly, I found myself

thinking all the time about why do they have more page views than me?

What's this?

And comparing myself and becoming really, really miserable.

I'm old enough to remember not having that and then suddenly having it, and then all of a sudden having a comparison machine and being inescapably miserable because of it.

Like social media,

it's something that's designed by billionaires.

And they do want us to be, I don't want to say unhappy, but we do know that social media is about high arousal emotions, anger, fear, and that billions can be made from that because of this.

So we do have machines that are not there to make us unhappy, but I don't know whether they're doing

any good.

It's really, it's a complex issue, it's a contentious issue,

and I go backwards and forwards on it because I talk about the compare and despair phenomena that you're mentioning.

When you ask the kids, and the recent survey came out just from the Pew Center, which do these big surveys,

half of teenagers find social media actually helps their relationships, they think.

But half of them also think that it's toxic for others.

But only one in eight thinks it's difficult for themselves.

So it's kind of interesting.

They can see that everyone else or they're perpetuating this idea that it's really problematic, but they don't think that applies to them.

So

when you look at the big studies, the influence of social media is not as dramatic as everyone assumes.

So it has become a whipping boy.

I think what's going on is that when you're immersed in a story about the problems of social media mental health, people are just retelling that story again and again.

So I think the court is out, to be honest, and that might be against popular opinion because at the moment, we're hearing this big thing about social media creating an anxious generation.

That I don't think is proven to the extent that most scientists would accept.

That said,

we do know that teenagers are spending up to eight hours a day on this at least.

So, whatever they're doing on that, they're not doing normal interactions.

So, I think that that in itself is startling.

And that means that they're not having the normal things that we evolve to do, those communications, those kicking a ball around the playground.

So, I think that's really the problem with social media, not necessarily it's creating it.

It's what it's taking us away from.

It's what it's taking us away from, which is the social connection.

And for me, social connection is the secret to becoming a happier person.

You asked me earlier about that.

My own take on it is that we start off as very self-centered little children.

We have to become

cooperative.

We have to become socialized.

We have to learn the rules of engagement and how to communicate and theory of mind and all these abilities to become socialized.

And that's why we have one of the longest childhoods of any animal, if you think about proportionally, we spend, you know,

it's an enormous amount of time in childhood.

Why?

It's not education.

Education is recent in our evolution.

It must have been something else.

And I think it's about being socialized and becoming a member of the tribe.

And so we spend all that time doing that.

And when you take that away because you've introduced a device which is designed and is designed to capture your attention, then that really is the problem, in my opinion, because it's moving faster than our capacity to adapt it.

That said, I'm optimistic.

Humans are incredibly

flexible.

We're adaptive.

I think we'll get through it.

AI, on the other hand, that has me really worried.

What's freaking you?

Because I wanted to ask you about AI.

What is it that has you worried?

Well, I don't know if you've used it, but it isn't.

Oh, the fact that AI can become your friend really quickly.

Yeah, so

do you know the history of AI?

I don't know the history of it now.

Well, interesting, the first chat bought was a Rogerian therapist.

It was a guy, I can't remember.

Oh, yeah, Adam Curtis did that in his last documentary.

Right.

So back in 1967, he wrote a little program called ELISA,

which was a program which in Rigerian psychotherapy, all you do is just ask the question back.

You say, Sublime Boy, tell me why do you feel this?

And you just irreatively ask the question back to the client.

And that process of reiteration, they open up and they go deeper and deeper into what the basis of their problem is.

So it's really quite straightforward.

All he did was he wrote a simple program which just repeated your question back to you.

And they all knew it was a program, but the guy in Vedive came in one night to find that his secretary was on the chat box undergoing her own psychotherapy using the program.

So it was originally designed as a psychotherapist.

Now, of course, it is used as a psychotherapist.

You go into ChatGPT, you can actually have a kind of in-depth conversation with AI.

Have you seen so very recently, the past six months, they're caught in it ChatGPT-induced spiritual psychosis.

Have you heard of that?

No, but it seems alarming.

So

people

with a tendency towards psychosis are asking, so

they're not in the right frame of mind.

So they might ask a question such as,

I think the fella who was on the radio was talking about me specifically.

And then ChatGPT says, yeah, I think so too.

But

it's...

people who are experiencing psychosis and delusions, the chat GPT is there as a friend who's reinforcing it, and it's something that's emerged that no one predicted, and they're very worried about it.

It's pernicious.

I don't know how many of you have had this experience where you've been talking to someone and then you go on to your or you've been talking out loud and your Alexa has been listening in, and then you go on to do a search, and suddenly you find that what you were talking about has been thrown up

in your algorithms.

So they are,

it is being processed and sent back to you.

So that is not entirely psychosis.

It's actually quite accurate.

We are being monitored.

So I'm worried about that.

I'm worried about the kind of existential issue about what happens if you suddenly have a technology which takes away the need to learn because that's what's happening in higher education.

That's why I've so

I stopped using ChatGPT.

I used it a little bit at the start

because I could feel it taking over a very important part of my brain.

And what I mean by that is

when I'm writing a podcast,

what I'm always looking for is

connections.

I'm handy at seeing connections that don't exist.

And when I was passing research on the ChatGPT, asking it questions that I should, I'm asking ChatGPT questions that I should be asking my own myself.

It's just, it's like the link stops.

My creativity, where ideas come from, stop because I've offloaded it to ChatGPT and I went and get the fuck away from me.

But like I could tell in the way that

I can feel,

I don't know, is my memory as good as it was because I don't need it to be that good.

I forgot everything in my fucking phone.

I don't have to.

I used to be the person who

people used to ring me up on the phone wanting to know facts.

Seriously, before the fucking internet, I was that guy when I was a teenager.

Someone would be having a conversation about volcanoes.

And what are you going to do?

There's no fucking internet.

And they'd give me a shout, going, yeah,

really useful part to society.

And then the fucking internet comes in, and I'm not that guy anymore.

Well, I am, I suppose, I've got this podcast, but like

that, that was my I'm autistic, by the way.

Yeah, and

that was my actually, that's what I wanted to fucking ask you about.

I saw you mention, you mentioned it there, and you mentioned it before when I was looking at you on the internet about

when it comes to happiness, the importance of social connection, right?

And for me, as an autistic person,

that was the one where was wondering where do autistic people fit in there?

Because

me specifically,

if I speak to too many people, I get burnout.

Yeah, so like this tour, I'm going to be speaking to a new guest every night.

I'm going to be speaking to a bunch of people backstage.

When this tour is finished in 14 days, I'm going to have to really, really mind my mental health because if I don't, I lose executive functioning skills.

And that for me is my experience of autism.

Lots and lots of communication and socializing for me as an autistic person, it's kind of exhausting, it's strange.

Yeah, so I find meaning and happiness in isolation, but I do need it.

I definitely need people because COVID was no crack.

I can't go full hermit.

Yeah, I need a little bit of people.

Actually, this is a strange one.

So, this is my experience of

as an autistic person, person, and the social contract doesn't allow for this.

Do you know what I actually need?

I want to go to a party or a pub and to be around people, but not have to speak to anyone.

Yeah,

seriously, no, I fucking love it.

I go to the gym frequently, and I've been doing it since I'm 14.

And I'm like, what is it I love about this place?

Okay, I like the exercising.

What I love about the gym is it's socially acceptable to be in a room full of people, speak to nobody, and wear headphones all the time.

And it's actually weird if you talk to a stranger.

So, the gym is actually a brilliant space for autistic people.

It's that the rules are reversed.

And I went, Holy fuck, that's why I like the gym today.

In the art gallery, I fucking loved it.

I'm around art, I'm looking at art, headphones on, don't talk to people.

That's actually considered weird.

So, I find all these spaces where I get to be around people but not have to do the small talk, which scares the living shit out of me.

Yeah, you know what I mean?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I'm not that different by the way and actually you if you look at academics very often they're on what I used to call the spectrum.

They haven't gone necessary for a formal diagnosis but it's very common.

I for example and I know there's some colleagues in here because they they texted me earlier that they were coming along so this is a little awkward but I mean I am

public disclosure,

I am well recognized as someone who's pathologically awkward.

It's actually in my first book.

I describe my inability to do that.

I'm fine in front of a couple of thousand people, but you put me in front of a couple of...

Fucking hell, I'm the exact same.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, I find that.

So I don't have two T's necessarily because I can't stand the pregnant silence or the pause when nothing's being said.

So I always kept talking too much, and they never got to say anything.

And have you ever got to tell me their problems because I'm just talking all the time?

Have you ever pondered your possible spectrum this?

Yeah, I have.

Yeah.

Yeah, I have.

and yeah, I'm up there, but um,

and why haven't you gone for diagnosis?

You just don't think it's it's I don't think it's useful for me.

I and I'm somewhat

concerned about the over-diagnosis that's going on at the moment.

Um, I think that if it's something that's important to you and it provides comfort for you, and it that's fine, but there are, in my opinion, unforeseen consequences of the explosion in neurodiversity.

So, for me,

so here's the only reason for me that, like, I would have loved it in school because in Ireland, I don't have what's called a leave insert, and the leave-ins are like your A-levels or GCSE.

I was a smart kid who loved knowledge and didn't get to complete school, and that was fucking shit because then I couldn't go on to third level.

I had to wait till I was a mature student.

So, I would have loved it then.

Like, I'm trying to figure out how useful it was for me now to get the diagnosis.

I got the diagnosis so that people would be nicer to me.

Yeah.

It's literally that's it.

Because my job is in also to.

I was just like getting into my late 30s and people were going, what the fuck are you doing with a bag in your head, man?

And I needed it.

Do you know what I mean?

And it was like, great, I can justify.

Because the thing is with the bag, like I've been wearing this for years, but after getting the diet, it was actually a huge part of my diagnosis because when I went to the psychologist,

the psychologist was like, what's your job?

And I'm like, well, you know, I go up and do gigs and I'm on TV and shit like that, but I wear a plastic bag in my head so no one recognizes me in the street.

Sorry, what?

I'm sorry, what?

And that was a huge part of the diagnosis.

Not wanting...

any type of recognition or fame or going through that level of trouble to be like no literally I wear the fucking bag because I want to be on TV and write books and do things I like, but I definitely don't want anyone to speak to me the next day in the coffee shop.

So I wear the bag because of that.

And he goes, that's fairly autistic, sir.

So that was one of the things for my diagnosis.

But

the other thing that I find with my autism is eccentric behavior.

I am quite eccentric and I don't know when I am and I'm not being eccentric.

And it really causes a lot of shameful situations, public embarrassment, publicly embarrassing things.

Like I speak about it a lot on the podcast.

Like, fucking hell.

I was dying my hair.

So, I work in an

office, right?

Well, well,

I work in this giant fucking office building with accountants and solicitors and lawyers.

But, like, that's where I write my books and record my podcast.

But I don't tell them that.

I tell them I'm a fruit seller.

It gets more autistic as it goes on, doesn't it?

So, that's my life.

I don't wear a bag in my head.

I pretend to be a fruit exporter in a giant office, and that's where I write my podcast.

But I'm going grey, so I dye my hair right underneath the bag.

And one day

I dyed my hair right, but then got distracted by a very interesting article and then forgot that my hair was dyed.

But then I was thinking about the article so much that I started rubbing my face and rubbing my hands together and fucking accidentally walked into a full canteen like

blackface like

and this was only like a month ago.

Do you know what I mean?

And people were just like, What the fuck is this?

And then everyone's like, It's the fellow who sells the fruit, it's a fruit exporter.

But, like, I know it's funny, but like, that's my life.

I fucking

and I had to come out of that, like, oh my god, how embarrassed!

That was so embarrassing.

And the hair dye, it took about two days to get off my face.

I couldn't leave my gas.

I don't want to do shit like that, but like, the

like what had happened there was I'm dying my hair, that's fine.

Then the special interest kicked in.

The article was so interesting, so engaging that just 100% this is what I'm doing, and now I'm forgetting about everything and going back into normal life covered in black dye.

And

I want people to know I'm autistic because of that shit.

That's a little get out of jail.

If someone comes to me and goes, why did you walk into the canteen in fucking blackface?

I can go, I'm autistic, and here is exactly how it happened and

I'm really sorry about that something like that happens once a month fucking three weeks ago I got it I got a chest infection right and

they gave me this antibiotic and the antibiotic it was during a heat wave in Ireland and they the antibiotic was the one antibiotic where you could not go out in the Sun

So there's a heat wave, so I'm like, fuck, what am I going to do?

In Ireland, you don't have like flowing shirts like you have in fucking fucking Panama I'd never had to think of what do you do when it's too sunny and you have to go out so I had a kimono that I bought during the pandemic so I put on a fucking kimono

and these mad sunglasses and was then running between shadows in the middle of Limerick City

like a vampire in a kimono and then

people stare at me And then I go, oh yeah, that's what, yeah, this is mad.

This is fucking insane.

But that's the shit that I get into those situations with autism.

So that's why I come out and said it.

But

regarding the appropriateness of diagnosis, I know exactly what you're saying.

In that, here's the struggle I've had since getting diagnosed.

Now that I'm autistic, my fucking algorithm knows that I'm autistic.

So I can't go near Instagram or TikTok without getting all these autistic people.

And now I'm going, oh, should I do that?

Do you know what I mean?

So now instead of being the biggest challenge of my autism was that it changed my identity and my sense of self.

And trying to maintain who I am without going, now I'm autistic and going, should I be that way?

Should I be this?

Do I need to be more autistic?

And the thing is, is that it's a spectrum.

And I can meet an autistic person who is completely different to me.

And their expression of autism is completely different to mine.

And that's it.

And that's the point that we are all peculiar and we all have our oddities.

And I think the diagnosis is very helpful in your case and for many others, where it makes

it makes it provides, it's not just an excuse, it actually provides meaning.

It kind of explains things.

I've got no problem with that.

It's when it's used and exploited.

You know, if I go on Facebook, I'm getting sold all sorts of things to try and change my brain stimulation.

Yeah.

And I don't know why, and it's because I've been looking at things intensely.

So, yeah,

it's somewhat concerning.

The waiting list now is three years.

There's 200,000 people on the NHS trying to get a diagnosis.

So this sudden explosion has caused problems.

We went over our little interval time.

You people need a pint and a piss.

And we're going to be back out in about 10 minutes, all right?

God bless.

All right.

Okay, let's have a little

pause here.

Let's have an I really enjoyed that chat with Bruce.

Let's have an ocarina pause before we get to the second half of this chat.

I don't have an ocarina with me.

I didn't bring an ocarina with me on tour.

What I do have is uh this hotel,

this hotel pen that I'm gonna click.

I'm gonna click this pen, you're gonna hear an adverb for something, okay?

Terrible acoustics in this room, very poor.

Postman, postman,

postman.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to them current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

I can't believe they're having a gender reveal for their dog.

No, no, no, no.

This is a breed reveal.

Oh, so.

Yeah, they're finding out the breed of the puppy they're rescuing.

So they could just be spending all their money on like pet insurance instead.

We got lemonade for Roscoe and it covered vaccines, microchipping.

We saved 90% on vet bills.

Oh, here we go.

What do you think beige confetti means?

I don't know, that we'll never get this Saturday back?

Get a quote for any breed at lemonade.com/slash pet.

It's Stock Up September at Whole Foods Market.

Find sales on supplements to power up for busy weeks.

Plus, pack your pantry with pasta, sauce, and more everyday essentials.

Enjoy quick breakfast for less with 365 by Whole Foods Market seasonal coffee and oatmeal.

Grab ready-to-heat meals that are perfect for the office and save on versatile no antibiotics ever chicken breasts.

Stock up now at Whole Foods Market, in-store and online.

via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

If you like this podcast, if you listen to it every week, if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, whatever the fuck as you're listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly via the Patreon page.

This podcast is my full-time job.

It's how I earn a living, it's how I pay my rent, it's how I can go on tour, it's how I can go off on tour, it's how I can I can be a full-time artist, I can be a full-time artist as my full-time job the thing that I love the thing that I'm good at is my full-time job because

this podcast is directly supported by my listeners all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it and if you can't afford that don't worry about it you listen to the podcast for free you listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free everybody gets the exact same podcast.

I get to earn a living.

I don't have any tears on Patreon.

If you go onto the Patreon, you don't get any special treatment.

Everyone gets the exact same podcast.

It's a model based on kindness and soundness and it's been working for me for the past eight years.

So thank you to all my patrons.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

And try and if you're joining up, don't do it through the app on the Apple iphone because apple will take 30 do it on a browser please also

it just means i'm not beholden to advertisers advertisers come into podcasts and all of a sudden they want more listeners they want it to be viral they want it to be shareable they want the podcast to be controversial they want you to they want your podcast to end up in the newspaper they want you to platform guests just because the guest is famous fuck all that i want to make the podcast that I'm genuinely passionate about each week.

That's what I want to do.

That's the only thing I want to do.

That's because of that's because this podcast is listener-funded.

A listener-funded podcast can do whatever the fuck it wants.

It makes content for the listeners.

Any gigs?

I suppose tonight this is going out on Wednesday morning.

Tonight, I'm in London at the Troxy.

That's sold out.

But

this week I'm in

Beckshill on Friday and I'm in Norwich on Sunday and there might be a few tickets left for those.

Maybe.

They're almost sold out.

There might be maybe five or six tickets left for both of those gigs.

Chance it, fuck it.

And then I've no gigs until September.

I'm gonna be in Derry and I'm gonna be in Vicar Street and I get July and August to be a big autistic cunt by myself.

Just drop my pen on the floor there with the awful fucking acoustics.

Terrible acoustics.

Postman!

No listeners there, I'm not sporadically shouting the word postman into the ether.

The word postman is a word that I use to test the acoustics of microphones and rooms because it's got a P,

an S and a T

and it's got an O in there so you get your lungs behind the O.

Postman is just, a good word for testing microphones and the acoustics of a room.

It's better than one, two, one, two.

No, post man.

Much better.

So,

just so you know, that there's a reason I'm doing that.

All right, let's get back to the chat there with Professor Bruce Hood of Bristol University.

Another area that, aside from happiness, right, is

you look at magical thinking, especially in adults.

How do we define, like, what is magical thinking?

Okay, so

I used to believe

that you could bend things with your mind.

I watched Yuri Geller back in the 70s and 80s, and I wanted to go to university to learn how to use my mind to control other people and bend things and time travel.

I was a complete believer in all of that stuff.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, who wasn't then?

I mean, he was all over the place, and

you could see him doing it with keys, and I was incredible.

And I discovered it was all bullshit, which was unfortunate.

But then I discovered the power of the mind, and I got really interested in

consciousness and all the sorts of things we take for granted.

And that's why I became a psychologist.

What do you mean, like,

did you look at those CIA experiments they did with the STAR program, yeah?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Ministeric Goats was the other one that John.

Yeah.

That's right, they did.

They invested $20 million in teaching people to use their psychic powers.

To astral plane.

To astral plane, to kill people at a distance and all that sort of thing.

Did you ever do one of those meditations, the Hemi-Sync meditations, though?

No, what's that?

So, so

the CIA did this.

So they did this program where basically they'd heard the Russians were doing it.

So because they heard the Russians were doing it, the CIA were like, well, if we heard they're doing it, we have to try and do it at least.

Can you give us like $20 million to do it?

So they'd developed a type of meditation which can induce an outer body experience.

And then the person astral planes to Russia and then looks at nuclear bombs.

Ah.

Right?

Yeah.

But what was interesting about it, like that was all bullshit.

But what was interesting about it is that

the CIA had a team of scientists and their job was basically, can you do a report and tell us what reality is?

And that was really cool because it was about human consciousness and things like that.

But they did also develop a meditation called the Hemisync meditation, which you can do on YouTube.

And it uses certain sounds.

I'm like, ah, fuck it, I'll give it a go.

And I gave it a go, and then I got that feeling you get when you're on a roller coaster.

And it was literally like my body wanted to jump out of it.

And I went, fuck this.

So, whatever it does, it does.

I'm not saying something supernatural happened, but it freaked the fuck out of me.

And I got out of it and went back to my regular breathing meditation.

I did the Gansfeld state.

What's that?

Oh, the Gansfeld state is where you play white noise and you have diffuse light.

It's like altered, you remove all sensory input.

LSD for people who are scared to take an LSD.

That's right, yeah, yeah.

And that really does actually create altered states of consciousness.

They made a film about it, but yeah, that's called the Gansfeld state.

And you're not depriving oxygen there or anything?

No, no, it's just if you take the

interesting thing about the brain is it's always seeking out stimulation.

That's why we see patterns all the time and random noise.

If you listen to random noise, you'll soon hear voices and anything.

You think you hear ghosts and things, yeah.

Yeah, and that's actually an interesting phenomenon that people see faces and hear voices and all that.

When the sensory information is ambiguous or very distributed, you start to put patterns there.

So that's what's going on in the Gansfeld state.

But anyway, getting back to the consciousness thing, I kind of was really interested, but I'd never lost my fascination with why we want to believe in supernatural things.

So for me,

I was really, I knew there was no evidence for it anymore because it had been studied very thoroughly.

And there's still people who still study this stuff, but

the consensus of opinion from conventional sciences, unfortunately, there isn't anything there at the moment.

But that doesn't remove from me the fascination about why do we believe in all these things and why are they so universal?

And why is it?

So do you mean ghosts?

Yeah, so for me, it's...

What about aliens?

Because they could be real.

They could be real.

So I don't count them as supernatural.

I put them in the same category as conspiracy theories, which are plausible or possible, but

not unnatural.

But then it's like,

what if, because there's a lot of conspiracy theorists who are like, the world is actually run by interdimensional shape-shifting lizards.

Yeah, yeah.

We know who we're talking about there.

The ex-goalkeeper.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David, yeah.

Yeah.

But like,

that now is magical thinking, I would reckon.

Well,

you've actually made a really interesting point because what we consider supernatural now may not be in 10 years' time.

So, I was speaking to David Eagleman, who's another neuroscientist, and he's interested.

Not that one.

It just happens to be a neuroscientist, isn't it?

It sounds like David Eich.

It sure's not David Eckeck in a way.

No, it's David Eagleman.

I'll show you.

I don't know if my lawyer is listening.

But basically,

he, I mean, there is a field of research looking at brain-computer interface.

And it's entirely plausible that you could build sophisticated analysis systems which could read brain wave activity and they could be transmitted to you at a distance.

So, in a sense, telepathy could be possible.

But at the moment, without all that interfacing, if you think you have telepathy, that falls into the category supernatural.

But, like, yeah, if you showed an iPhone to an Anglo-Saxon, they'd get a heart attack.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.

Do you remember a cartoon called Inspector Gadget?

Yes, of course.

In Inspector Gadgets, the girl in it had a book with a screen and it had all the information in the world in it.

Yeah, yeah.

Wikipedia and a phone.

Yeah, yeah.

And I used to look at that as a kid, going, oh my god, and now it's real.

Yeah, well, Arthur C.

Clarke said that any

sophisticated technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And so that's the point that it could be possible.

Oh, sure.

Actually, yeah.

The Brits did that when they were colonizing Africa.

Seriously, do you know about the use of magicians for colonization?

No, tell me about it.

So when

I don't know, so so it was the Brits.

Again.

When Africa was being colonized, right?

It was like we're talking maybe 1860.

So they were going around into the middle of Africa and they only had so many soldiers.

And they were meeting tribes of people who were not as technologically advanced as the British.

But there was lots of them.

So the British were going, how do we conquer this village?

So they actually hired, I don't think it was Houdini, but they hired famous magicians to come down to Africa.

And one thing they would do would be

the British would come in, there's maybe 16 of them, they're the red coats, and they go into the village, there's a couple of thousand people, and they'd do the excalibur thing.

So they would get a stone, and in the stone is a sword.

First they'd go to the village, give me your strongest man and get him to pull this sword out.

And the strongest man from the village would come, and not a hope.

Then they'd get the weakest British soldier, he'd go up and just put it out.

But there was a magician there with a magnet.

So they would use literal magic tricks as a way to colonize.

And then the people who are in the village go, well, we're not fucking with these guys because they're space aliens.

They have magic.

What they've just done there is clearly magic, and we don't know what that is.

So we're terrified to resist.

And that's an example there of technology being perceived as magic if no one has seen it you know well indeed the conquistadors as well yeah that's another example that they brought of her the mayans used to think that a conquistador on a horse was one animal oh right they yeah if they because the horses didn't exist in south america so when they saw a human being on a horse which is fair enough you just went what the fuck is that entire thing Yeah, so they're like, I'm not touching that.

I don't know what the fuck that is.

Why would they assume it's a man on the back of a horse?

They just, they didn't ride the back of animals there.

They're llamas.

Go on.

What?

That's true.

I didn't pull that out of my arse.

That's in a book called Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

That's true.

Great book.

So, magical thinking.

Yeah.

It's not conspiracy theories because that's plausible.

So it's like ghosts or fairies.

Ghosts, spirits, energies, fairies.

I mean, energies is another hard one as well because obviously there are many parts of the universe we can't perceive directly.

But when you evoke an explanation which would require a new kind of energy, then that would be falling into, which is not recognized by conventional science.

That starts to get into the realms.

But I think premonitions is the one I like the most.

This is where you think your great auntie's going to, you know, going to die, and then you wake up the next morning and she has died.

So you say, well, I definitely had a premonition.

But premonitions, of course, are coincidences.

And we tend to, so I would not consider myself to be someone who's prone to magical thinking.

I tend to challenge it.

But around when my dad died,

then when I was experiencing grief, then I was having a little bit of magical thinking.

Like,

when his coffin went down, the sun shined.

Yeah.

And I'm just convinced that's my dad doing that.

And now I go, probably not.

It might have been a cloud.

Yeah.

But at the time, full-on, when I'm experiencing grief, I believed that and I wanted to believe it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, well, a personal anecdote here.

My father-in-law, my late father-in-law, was a brain surgeon.

And his wife died very early.

And he had many years of experience working on the brain and all sorts of states of mind.

And he swore that he would still see his dead wife months after she gone.

So, and that's actually a really, really common phenomenon.

The explanation is partly that you have such a strong representation or memory for someone that

the brain tricks itself into sort of recreating that experience.

So,

I don't mock anyone who has these things.

I think it's really important to recognize that these are just manifestations of an interesting kind of mind, as it were.

Because

that was, I was afraid of asking you these questions because,

like, even people who are into horoscopes, right?

That's not my bag.

But if someone's into that and it's working for them, I'm not going to be like, I'm not going to shit on their, you know what I mean?

Do you know what I mean?

And the other thing as well.

I speak loads about Irish mythology on my podcast.

And the reason I do it, and my interest in not only Irish mythology, but folklore and belief around fairies, because we have a lot of that in Ireland.

We call it pichos, but it means superstition about fairy mounds, about fairy trees, certain things you don't interfere with.

Like, I don't believe any of that, but I have a huge interest and respect for it because I think it's important for biodiversity.

Like, in Irish mythology, we have loads of

insects are sacred.

Like, up until the 1600s in Ireland, it was illegal to kill white butterflies because so many people believed that a white butterfly was the soul of a dead child.

Harsh shit,

but a scientist will turn around and say, pretty good idea not to fuck with butterflies, they're pollinators, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And I find that so many superstitious magical thinking within folklore and mythology is actually really useful when it comes to living in line with systems of biodiversity.

And with since the Enlightenment and with things like canonization, you lose that in favor of extractive capitalism.

That forest, that mountain means fucking nothing other than money.

Let's take it away.

And look where we are now.

Yeah.

We're fucked.

No, I totally agree.

And I think that society.

Good point.

We need sacred values.

If you reduce everything to a bottom line,

to a monetary value, then that undermines the cohesion of a group.

We're a social animal.

We need to have this convention, something that brings us together, and that requires faith.

Now, I'm not religious, but I totally understand why people feel faith and experience it.

And I can see it can play a very valuable role in coalescing people around a belief system.

So, belief systems are really important to us as a species, I think.

And that's why we shouldn't integrate them.

We just need to recognize when they get out of control and when they're trying to impose their belief systems.

So,

I can see why people are anti-religious.

I'm not anti-religious.

I just think it's really interesting that it's so common.

And I go back to William Golding's story, Lord of the Flies.

I mean, I think the thought experiment, because you'd never get the ethics for it, is to put a bunch of kids on an island without any culture.

And I bet my bottom dollar they would generate their own gods, their own belief systems, their own explanations.

You mean kids that haven't been raised like just bare humans?

Yeah, because

I think the...

Do you ever get excited around AI for that?

Because with AI, you might be able to do something like that.

Oh, well, I mean, there's some issues about how much energy and water it uses.

That's fucking terrible.

Yeah.

But I think for me, my concern, my worries, and by the way, it's not going away, so we've got to just recognize what it is.

But when it comes to the use of AI in higher education, I think we're facing a real kind of problem because we can't tell the difference between machine and human essays or assessments.

So that means that's going to become

really difficult.

But then it starts, if you've got a a virtual tutor who's even better than the person in real,

it starts to question.

And all of us in higher education are seriously worried about what's going to happen to our institutions.

Yeah.

I mean,

the people, we've got to start putting...

Billionaires are allowed to get away with an awful lot of shit.

And there needs to be some type of checks and balances.

And it's a strange thing.

When you hear these billionaires who own the AI companies, they're speaking about it as if it's this inevitable thing.

And it's a strange thing with humans and curiosity.

Like,

do you ever hear of long-term nuclear message warning?

No,

no.

Oh, you love this.

So, it's a whole field within semiotics, which is you've got all this nuclear waste, right?

Which we have, and if you bury this nuclear waste, it's still going to be dangerous in 100,000 years.

And we're putting it under the ground.

And there's people now going, fuck,

what if like someone digs it up in 30,000 years?

What if civilization has collapsed?

We can't predict what 30,000 years will be like, but we do know if someone digs this up, it's still going to be dangerous.

And they know that if it's human beings, they're going to still dig it up.

So they're trying to figure out how do you communicate 10, 20,000 years in the future.

And one thing they're looking at is superstition and folk belief.

Yeah,

now one mad, really fucking exceptionally eccentric solution was called Glow Cats.

They wanted to genetically engineer cats so that the cats glow in the presence of nuclear waste, but then create songs and folklore around glowing cats in the hope that, like religion, they would last 10,000 years in the future and people would understand that if a cat glows, don't dig underneath.

I'm serious.

Brilliant.

Because it ties in with

you like this, because I know you were saying backstage you like to fuck around with metal detectors.

I'm a detectorist, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So any other detectorists out there?

You know,

I knew there wouldn't be any.

I didn't say I was having the spectrum.

You'd be messing around with mounds and barrows, I'm guessing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So in Ireland, we've got mounds and barrows in Ireland as well.

But in Ireland, when we find a mound, we tend to refer to it as a fairy fort.

So in Ireland, you do not fuck with it.

It's a superstition that even it still exists in our culture.

Most people, even me, to be honest, and I consider myself to be a rational person, I'm not fucking with a fairy fort and I'm not fucking with a fairy tree.

I'm just not doing it.

And

so you have these mounds and it's just there in our culture.

Never ever interfere with these things.

Now, what the mounds were is pre-Christian Ireland, we didn't have towns or monasteries, we had a society that was based on pastoralism.

So there was a lot of cows, and people moved with cows, and cows were the most important currency.

And what these mounds actually were, they were a wooden fort, and most likely people kept cows inside there.

Okay,

but there's a theory.

A very, very common disease with cattle is anthrax.

Anthrax kills entire fucking

herd of cows and then it'll kill every human that's around the cow.

Anthrax is fucking deadly.

So a theory is, is that cattle would die of anthrax in one of these wooden mounds 2,000 years ago.

All the humans would die too.

Their bodies rot, they go down into the ground.

The wood rots away on the fort and you're left with a mound.

And you've loads of these all over Ireland.

A couple of hundred years later, some person goes, I'm going to dig that mound.

And they do.

But what you dig up is anthrax spores.

Wow, yeah, so there's a it's a plausible theory that some people actually died many, many years ago when digging up one of these mounds and killed their whole community with anthrax.

And then the fairy folk superstition, there are people under the earth, and they also believe too that when we see a mound and there's a white thorn tree there, that's one you especially don't fuck with because that's a fairy tree.

They reckon it's possible people put the fairy trees on the ones where the anthrax was.

So it's a theory.

2019, an archaeologist put it forward in 2019, and at the end of his paper, he basically says, Can someone please try and test this?

Can someone dig up a few of these mountains?

Because it's a lovely theory, isn't it?

Yeah, I like it, yeah.

And what it reminds me of is it's that nuclear waste thing.

We are burying something deadly in the ground.

It is going to be dangerous in 100,000 years.

How do you tell those people then?

Because humans, like when they found the pyramids, it's like, stay away from this place.

No,

I'm going to go to the, they used to eat the mummies.

Yeah, they used to get mummies and dip it in honey.

Or there's another one, they used to make the color brown out of mummies as well.

It's like, leave them the fuck alone, buddy.

Mamiria, yeah.

We've gone ferociously off topic, and I think you might also be autistic.

Because I'm like, I'm gonna bring the professor out tonight for some rigorous discussion in in his in your area and now we're talking about anthrax fairly forts and eating mummies and eating mummies um

so

yeah let's let's try again

do you

what I want to know is is is

the value that that magical thinking and superstition has to the human condition?

Yeah, so I think it at a very basic level, it provides a sense of meaning, but it also provides a sense of control.

And I think that's very obvious if you watch certain sportsmen, tennis players in particular, will have their little superstitious rituals.

And that's interesting because you might argue, well, that's ridiculous.

But actually, that provides them with a sense of control over this.

It becomes part of their habit, part of their pre-game routines.

And so if you try and take it away or thwart them, then they don't feel they play as well.

What do sports psychologists say about that?

I don't know.

I imagine associated learning would be the answer, which is basically you learn in association.

It becomes strengthened through repetition or the lack of counteraction.

And then that just becomes a kind of routine.

So,

you know, you'll see them.

I mean, I love what that's the only reason I watch Wimbledon.

I don't care about the tennis.

I'm looking out for all the superstitious routines.

They're bouncing the ball three times.

Yeah, yeah, just about everyone does it.

It's a very familiar kind of thing.

And do you think Tiger Woods would only ever wear a red cardigan when he was playing?

Do you think he's aware of that?

Do you think some of them are not aware of their little rituals?

No, I think they know about it.

Well, I don't know, actually, yeah.

Beckham, of course,

well, he has a bit of OCD as well, so that would explain it.

But yeah, it's about regaining control over the environment.

I do it.

I think everyone does it, don't they?

I mean, a little bit of little rituals.

Well, it's

it's when it comes to magical thinking, what I'm guessing is is there's healthy and then problematic.

Sure.

So is this this thing helping me in my life?

Or

fuck it, sure.

I was agoraphobic for a year.

I wouldn't have called that magical thinking, but no, it wasn't magical.

It was irrational and it wasn't helpful.

I was afraid of getting panic attacks in public.

No, that's that's that's irrational.

Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah, that's not supernatural.

I was, it was,

it's an interesting one because there was an element of mad.

So, magical thinking is the wrong word because there was nothing supernatural.

Yeah, no, but I did start to.

So, the way that agoraphobia was working for me was

I'd go to Tesco and then panic attack in Tesco.

So, now Tesco's, that's off the list.

And then it happens in a pub.

Pubs are off the list.

And I start creating a map of

where I'm the panic attack is an awful thing when you don't know what they are.

Because when no, when I got a panic attack before I'd heard a label for it, so I'm like, oh, sometimes I just feel like I'm literally dying, I'm in the act of dying.

Like, that's what a panic attack is.

If you get a good one, if you get a good one, like it's like, oh, I'm dying, I'm doing a death.

That's what this is.

I'm in the process of dying, dying is happening to me.

Like, that's a good panic attack, you know.

So, I was getting damn in Tesco for no reason.

So, I'm like, well, I'm not fucking going back to Tesco.

And then eventually, I couldn't leave my room because that's the only space where I couldn't get panic attacks.

So,

when I found CBT, we'll say

that was kind kind of referred to as magical thinking.

Even though it wasn't supernatural thinking, it's profoundly irrational.

And Tesco is not the reason for my panic attacks, you know?

And then I'd challenge it by going into Tesco like that.

Right.

Not literally, that's what I did.

Graded exposure.

A gradual exposure.

And one thing that really was a breakthrough for me, and it was the power of fucking art.

So I'd eventually gotten to the point where I'm going to nightclubs because I was like 19 and I wanted to do things that are normal.

So I was going to nightclubs, but it's like staying beside the emergency exit.

So I was comfortable with that much, but there's no fucking way I'm going into the crowd.

And

it was before

smartphones.

So I'm there in the nightclub, and then the DJ plays a song that I'd never heard before.

And it was the most fucking, I was like, oh my god, what is this?

Because it sounded like hip-hop music, but it was clearly the 70s.

So I'm like there's no shazam this is pre-internet so I have to find out what that fucking song is and if I do not find out what that song is I may never hear it again for the rest of my life so that I ran through the crowd I got through all of my fears didn't matter I had a purpose and I went to the fucking DJ and I said what's that song and it was the revolution will not be televised by Gil Scott Heron right and I rode it on my hand in Byro and then protected my hand and went home because there was no Shazam there was was this is what you had to do this is what you had to do but like

I came home from that and I got

because I said to you before I met you backstage like I don't I try not to use the word happiness I use the word meaning I pursue meaning I know that if I pursue happiness I'll end up disappointed happiness isn't a state I can reach but I can have a lot of meaning and that there

I had meaning that transcended my anxiety.

And the meaning was music, art.

I fucking love this so much.

I will run through this crowd just to find out that song and forgot that I was someone who had agoraphobia.

And it

was,

again, I don't want to say spiritual.

It was massively transformational.

It showed me, ah, art.

That's what gives me meaning.

If I can pursue the thing that gives me meaning, I can become a person who doesn't get panic attacks.

You know what I mean?

Indeed, yeah.

I mean, like, happiness isn't a state.

It's a kind of process.

I know it's a cliche to say it's a journey, but it is true that if you try and get it, it'll it'll evaporate.

It's elusive because you adapt to everything.

And in many ways, you have to be unhappy to know what happiness is.

So you can never be permanently happy all the time.

And

don't seek it in yourself necessarily.

I think that part of the problem, certainly amongst a lot of our students, and what I wrote about in the science of happiness, is that we've got to learn to stop focusing inward and being so self-critical and not reaching our expectations, and the fear of failure, and so on, and start to kind of reach out and become what I say, allocentric, which means other focused.

Now, I know that for an autistic person, it's hard, but you can still enjoy the experience of other people without necessarily having to have a very intimate.

And it comes to other people's happiness, like

something I find incredibly self-esteem-building is

like

I'm a human, so like I'm prone to jealousy, I'm prone to comparing myself to other people.

and when i find myself being jealous of another person especially of their achievements i catch myself in the moment and go actually let's try being happy for him yeah you know what i mean and it's really transformational i love doing it and that brings me

again what you're saying like i know that happiness isn't a state but there's great meaning in pain as well Like I spoke there about like my dad died when I was like 20 and it wasn't nice at all.

But at the same time, there's fucking huge meaning in that pain.

All that pain I experienced, I grew from it as a person.

So I

yeah,

I don't call that unhappy.

My dad's death, it's unhappy, true unhappiness for me is when I'm stuck in my head.

Yeah.

When I'm worried about the past

or trying to predict what the future is and I'm in this washing machine of worries, and I'm not in the present moment, that's the shit I don't like.

It's very hard to find meaning in that.

But if I'm in the present moment, even if I'm present with sadness,

that's kind of happy.

Yeah, I think the danger of being inside your head is it's not often a very pleasant place because if you're very self-critical and you're drawing comparisons, you can easily find flaws.

But if you can try and draw the energy and a ritualize of others around you, I mean, there are studies showing that the happiness you get by directing it towards others is more authentic and longer-lasting.

If you're trying to make yourself happy, if you're the instigator, purveyor, and recipient of the happiness, you know when it ceases to deliver.

And so it evaporates much more quickly because we naturally adapt.

But if you're kind of, you know, if I go out and buy you drinks, and everyone's thinking, oh, he's a great guy, you know, there's a kind of extension of

your efforts, as it were.

by virtue you you become more appreciated and I think that's part of it but you don't want to be be selfless, you don't want to kind of give everything over to everyone else and absorb all their miseries and be super empathic.

I think there's a danger of losing yourself, but it's striking the balance between the kind of self-care if you want and the care you direct towards others.

Abraham Maslow,

so he was the psychologist that his work he had the

what the fuck's it called?

His pyramid

actuation, the the self-actuation pyramid, right?

If you look at Maslow's work, he was a Canadian psychologist, and he had this pyramid of

the needs that human.

Basic needs at the bottom, yeah.

And then at the top, the self-actualization.

But if you actually look into the history of Maslow and what happened, Maslow had spent a huge amount of time with Indigenous people in Canada, the Blackfoot people.

And when he was with these people,

he found that these people had had high levels of self-actualization in their community.

I mean, self-actualization is a nice word for, again, I don't want to say happiness, but these people are content.

They have great meaning in life, purpose.

And he found that there's a huge amount of purpose in this community.

And what he also found that is these people...

Their value system wasn't based on how much you had, but how much you could give away your generosity.

But Maslow's pyramid, as we know it, this thing, that's not actually maslow's original work that got changed through the years in textbooks in order to align with individualistic capitalism are you did you kind of find that what i was trying to get at there is is because you also did a book about what was it called why we want things possessed possessed yeah why do we want why do we want more than we need why do we want more than we need yeah um To be generous and to give things away to the people around you within limits is a better way to be be happy than to be selfish and continually want.

True, because if you are, I mean, it's called the hedonic treadmill.

I mean, if you

say,

hedonism is joy, and if you're trying to chase joy, it's like on a treadmill, you never actually, you never get there.

King Midas.

Yeah, exactly.

So

the problem of pursuing riches and wealth and materialism, apart from the impact on the planet, is that you get used to your stuff.

You get used to your shit, you know, because it's like you buy the car and then suddenly you're comparing it.

Oh, I didn't get the best model, and then you're starting to compare yourself to someone else again.

And so, material things by their nature, you get used to them.

So, that's one of the reasons experiences tend to show less adaptation.

So, does external praise count as well?

Because, yep, yeah.

So, external praise, I mean, part of the mechanism, I mean, there are lots of reasons why people have possessions, and I think they're really fascinating.

Some of them to do with our sense of identity is what we can control, and so our possessions are an extension of self but also signaling theory from Darwin suggests that you know we buy things to show off our status yeah and there's a long history of research showing that as well so that's and that's quite clearly

designer goods luxury goods are all interpreted because of what they say about us as a person but ultimately i think that um it's it's a foolish task i make the point you can't take it when you go and uh if you consider all the effort you go into trying to accumulate these things, you never really feel fully, well, I would argue, really feel fully sustained, as it were.

So it's a folly.

And yeah, I think it's

something that we've got to, considering the impact on the planet, I think we've really got to try and curtail it.

I mean,

there's a point I just like to make that most parents would readily die for their children.

Most parents feel so strongly about it.

But when it comes to thinking about the consequences of our actions for our children's children we forget it and that's ludicrous when you think about it it just seems so silly

I want to hark back to when we were speaking about Buddhism yeah and you found that in in your research in happiness you found that Buddhism kind of got it right

yeah so

It relates to my interest in the self, which I think is a construct.

So, you know, we...

Oh, that's your other fucking book.

Yeah, be busy.

You're hitting all the big topics.

So, your other book is that the self-illusion.

The illusion that the sense of me, I, is like, fuck that, it doesn't exist.

Yeah, it's a completely, it's a story.

You're a story inside your head.

You prick.

Well, it's an interesting story.

It's a constantly changing story, but you never know because you are the narrator and the narrative.

You're one and the same.

You get a lot of pushback for that because that's

very challenging information.

But, like, I was joking there when I called you a break, I apologize, but what I mean there is, I didn't even hear it,

it's really challenging.

It's really like to say that

I don't want to hear that at all.

Yeah, no, people hate that.

They hate the idea they don't have free will, they hate the idea that they're not in control.

I mean, free will is we could argue about that, but the idea- What do you mean the eye doesn't exist?

Like, I talk to them all the time, yeah.

Well, that's that, that's the

voice you're hearing.

You're hearing, so for me, uh,

the mind is a series of complex unconscious unconscious processes, and then you have consciousness, which is the thing you can articulate and think about.

But there's a.

Is that the awakeness?

The I?

The awareness, yeah.

So, William James talked about the I and the me.

The I is the sense of in the present moment, conscious awareness.

The me is the autobiography of who blind boy is,

which is everything which feeds into the I.

So, whenever I ask you a question, if I say you, blind boy, which kind of ice cream do you prefer, vanilla or chocolate?

Vanilla.

Right, okay.

So, you had a a thing there for a while.

I did, but I had to go into the biography, yeah.

That's right.

You were checking the library, and if you'd go into the library, and I was like, there was that chocolate phase for a while, and then I went,

like, I was going there, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was kind of going to the point where I was, remember when you thought chocolate was better, and then you realized that it was actually the simplicity of vanilla that you liked.

And then there was, and then it was also a Madagascar, and there's a more interesting.

I'm not going to go in there.

So that'll be a crazy tangent.

Go on.

No, but so

hearing the question, formulating an answer is I.

But getting to the information, the database is the me.

That's the autobiography.

And I definitely had to go to a different place in the brain.

Like my eyes looked off there, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So you didn't create the autobiography.

That's all the experiences that have imposed themselves upon you.

So in a sense, in answering the question,

you're really constructing a coherent story on the basis of the data that you have stored away.

Now, you hear that as an internal voice,

but in many sense, that's after the fact.

I don't know if you ever have this experience, but sometimes I don't know what I'm going to say until I've said it.

Yes.

So

there's a whole lot of unconscious information bubbling up.

And we only ever really need to be aware of the things which are really important when we're making decisions.

A lot of it is done offline, you're on autopilot most of the time, because you haven't simply got the capacity or the bandwidth to process all the unconscious processes.

But that's what I mean by the self being a construct.

It's a story which makes sense of all of these unconscious things.

Because when you were arguing in your library about the chocolate, you weren't there having the library discussion.

It was coming out of the, and then it popped into your head, and that's why you said, oh, yeah.

Is that

useful?

What I mean there is

when we were speaking about happiness, right?

Right.

And one thing we were chatting about is

the removal of the self, the ego,

getting rid of that is a handy way to contentment.

I believe so.

And that's the bottom line in the science of happiness from my perspective.

It's the only thing I think I've contributed.

There are so many books on happiness, but the one thing I've said, which I don't think anyone else has really said, apart from the Buddha,

is that

go on.

We do actually start off as very egocentric children.

I mean, there's a whole lot of research, and that was my earlier career studying egocentrism in children.

And what I mean by that term egocentrism is that they literally see the world from their perspective.

They find it very difficult to understand what other people may be thinking.

Basically, children have to learn to become more integrated by understanding other people's perspectives.

They need to lose that egocentric view of the world.

And if you look at child development research and studies, it shows that children start off very egocentric and then they become less so.

Now, many adults, I think we're always egocentric because of the flow of consciousness, because we're always got that first person perspective.

But if you are so egocentric that you fail to take into consideration other people's situations, then that means that there's a danger that you're going to be so self-absorbed that you're blowing your own problems off, getting them out of proportion.

And also, by the way, everyone's thinking you're a prick because you're not actually caring about them.

You're being ostracized.

So I think that when you can start to integrate and direct your energies to flourishing, to helping other people, that's a much better balance to achieve.

But getting back to the self,

there is research, for example, psychedelics as shown to be very effective for people with profound depression.

And part of the common experience is

dissolution or delusion of

dissolving, a diffusion.

Ego death.

Ego death, yeah.

But you don't have to take psychedelics to get that experience.

You can get that on other situations which are also very positive.

So chance states, movement states, going into outer space.

Flow states.

Flow states.

Yeah.

Flow is really interesting because flow is where you're directing all your attention towards an activity.

And one of the common reports is the sense of time disappears and the sense of self disappears.

So if I was to rate my happiest experiences ever, it's when I can enter flow state.

Yeah.

Literally, that is...

It's what heaven feels like.

If I'm writing a story and I can go there for an hour, that's heaven.

Yeah, for me, writing.

Nothing compares to it.

right

writing for me yeah yeah uh and detecting so oh metal detecting too yeah you get flow when you're detecting yeah yeah yeah you can get into that and what is it about the metal detecting that interesting well because well because you're you're studying you you you're you're paying attention to the sensory signals so you you're listening for little signals all the time and so suddenly time is starting to disappear with you because you focused your attention externally when you focus your attention internally that's when you start to get into rumination which is why meditation works because meditation what you're doing is you're monitoring either your breathing or you're directing your attention externally or being mindful.

But if you go back into your inner space and just examine the content of your thoughts again, that's when you start to get sort of rumination.

Here's an interesting one for you, actually, around the magical thinking, and that point you're making.

One of the last, we'll say, socially acceptable pieces of magical thinking that we have in Ireland, you might have it here.

Does anyone pray at the St.

Anthony when you lose something?

So, like, that's in Ireland, that's a huge thing, right?

right?

If you lose a thing, your wallet, whatever, last resort, you pray to Saint Anthony.

I fucking do it.

The reason is, is it tends to work.

All right.

Like, how many people have prayed to St.

Anthony and they found the thing?

Yeah.

And this has rattled me for years going, come on, there's no fucking Saint Anthony helping me to find my iPhone.

Come on.

Do you know what I mean?

There's better things going on.

And then I thought about it.

And I reckon what it is, is

like if I lose my fucking, it's usually something important.

So it's a wallet or phone.

So that's a high fucking arousal emotion.

I'm really anxious.

And in that state, I'm not great at looking for my wallet.

I'm really not great.

Then, because I kind of believe in the Saint Anthony thing, because it's happened so many times before, I go, I'm going to pray to Saint Anthony and I'm going to find it because it's worked all those times before.

So I go, Saint Anthony, come on, you haven't heard from me in a while, but fuck it, I need that wallet.

Come on, and then there's the wallet.

And I go, Thank you, Saint Anthony.

But what's happened is I did a little mindfulness exercise.

Yeah, it's not Saint Anthony.

I got my

down to a state where I'm calm enough to actually see around me and go, oh, there it was.

And it was always right in front of me all along.

That's the thing.

It was there all along.

I couldn't see it because I was so anxious.

But the Saint Anthony thing brought me back.

And

I reckon I'm right with that.

I think you're totally right.

It happened to me two days ago.

I was trying to find my iPod.

I was doing a very important podcast, not yours, by the way.

And

I'm kidding.

I couldn't find my AirPods.

They said you have to have AirPods.

And my wife is sitting there.

She'll confirm this.

I ran around like a headless chicken.

And I was so stressed, I couldn't see anything.

And of course, after the show was over,

I was more relaxed.

And then I just remembered, oh, that's where you put them.

So my memory system, but because I was so stressed at at the time, I was unable to kind of reconstruct where they were last were.

So, yeah, I totally get that.

So, now the next time I'll call St.

Anthony.

And I don't pray to St.

Anthony anymore because I got an app called Tile.

Oh.

Yeah, so it's replaced Saint Anthony.

It's fucking brilliant, especially if you're nowhere divergent.

This isn't an advertisement, but basically, it's my wallet and my keys, anything that's fucking crazy important that I frequently lose.

There's a thing in it called a tile now, and I can never lose it because I just go to my phone.

So, if my wallet falls behind the couch, I just go, okay, and I ring it on tile, and it goes beep, beep, beep.

And then if I lose my phone, I can go to one of my keys and I can press a button, and then it finds my phone.

So, Saint Anthony can go fuck himself.

Sounds good.

But again, that's another example of

10 years ago.

That was magic.

That's magic, yeah.

Absolute magic.

It's like I can whistle for it if I want.

I won't because it'll make a noise.

My wallet will start beeping.

But I can whistle at it and I'll find it.

Ah, okay.

I've got to get that.

You're a Mr.

Losing Things.

Yeah.

Of course you are because you're a metal detector.

Hold on, we better take audience questions.

We've got 10 fucking minutes.

I could talk to you for hours, man.

Oh, that's good.

Thank you.

Let's bring up the house lights a little bit.

I get another photograph from my man.

2000s RB singer Usher has kindly come along tonight to hand out the microphone.

I've got it.

Go on, yeah.

My question is about critical thinking, and it's kind of a big, big question, but I thought it's a good opportunity.

I'd love to hear from either of you or both of you about it.

There's lots of different reasons I want to ask this question, but we were kind of, you guys were talking about AI and conspiracy theories came up as well.

And in a time of really dangerous political rhetoric, in a time of AI being like an information source, There's so many reasons for it, but I wonder what you think about ways to encourage critical thinking generally on a societal level.

It's one of the things that I think is most important right now.

That's a big problem right now.

Wow, that's a good question.

It's

without doubt.

It's what's going to be undermined by AI unless we pay attention to it.

I think that's at the heart of what I think you're asking is critical thinking is being eroded by the

rapid accessibility of narratives and stories.

And whoever is controlling those narratives or stories is removing the capacity for critical thinking.

So it's an existential question you've asked.

And I don't have a simple solution to it, but you're absolutely right that these systems of their

left unfettered are going to really cause problems.

One thing, I don't have a solution, right?

But one thing

so most of our like around this problem that we're all seeing,

one thing we need to look at, and I mentioned it before, a huge amount of our discourse is now on a platform owned by a billionaire where they have set the rules of that discourse, and the rules are all discourse has to be turn and response combat.

That's mad.

Imagine, right, social media didn't exist, and instead a billionaire came along and said,

both ye have an argument about racism except you're both on a on a tightrope and you have to hit yourselves into the head as well while you're doing it do you know what I mean it's it's

so much of our conversation is

in this forum that's designed by billionaires so you you can't you can't have critical thinking in in the Instagram comments or the Facebook comments Has anyone ever had a decent argument in the Facebook comments?

You can't.

It's impossible.

It's impossible.

But it's that thing where what I think about a lot is:

do you know when you're walking on the street and you almost bump into a person in physical space, you have this lovely little dance and a smile.

Yeah, yeah.

But then if you're in a car and you almost bump into someone, you fucking prick you!

Yeah.

The same thing has happened, but there's that thing, you might know the name of it.

What's it called when you're in a car and inhibition?

Disinhibition.

Disinhibition.

Yeah.

So, because I was speaking to a cyber psychologist about this,

the disinhibition happens when you're sitting in a car, because I've often sat in a car on the main street of my city and picked my nose, no problem at all, because I'm in a car and no one's looking.

They are, man.

I'm not going to walk down the road picking my fucking nose, but I'll do it in the car.

Yeah.

That's

the disinhibition of being in a car.

The same disinhibition happens in social media.

Yeah, you're not accountable.

We're not accountable.

So

your question is scary, but it becomes less scary when i think about it that way when i think about it yeah that's really scary there's a lack of critical thinking maybe we should stop uh conversing in the billionaire machine where they make money out of our arguments

i mean that's and that's the thing data is the new aisle

Like, where are these people getting their money from?

Our behavior.

That's the derming our behavior.

Like, oil.

That's how they're becoming fucking...

It's, ah, fuck me.

I think we're going to get booted out, right because uh

it's it's five minutes past ten and uh Edward Colston is like get the fuck out everybody

um no we are past curfew and I want to be nice to the people working here listen the reason we're past curfew is because you're such a fabulously interesting person and I could have spoken to you all night

Professor Bruce Hood everybody buy his books Thank you everybody for coming out, Bristol.

You were wonderful.

What a wonderful crowd.

This was the Blind Boy podcast.

god bless

thank you thank you thank you to professor bruce hood there thank you to professor bruce hood for that magnificent wonderful conversation he was a gentleman

I'll have him on again absolute cracking fella um

i'm i'm gonna fuck off now to the art gallery i'm gonna go to the art gallery in edinburgh to chill out and to look after my social battery and then tonight I'm gonna gig in Usher Hall in Edinburgh which

Never thought that was possible Usher Hall is I believe the gig is sold out.

It's massive

I Used to I used to flyer.

I used to stand outside Usher Hall and hand out flyers for my gigs that 70 people would show up to

So I never ever thought that I'd be headlining Usher Hall.

I don't want to say like in my wildest dreams, I never dreamt that far.

I never thought it was possible, never entertained it.

So, my absolute gratitude to the people of Edinburgh who are coming to this gig tonight, and for everybody on this tour who's coming to my shows.

Thank you so much.

I'm unbelievably grateful, and I remind myself of that every single day.

Every morning I wake up, I remind myself how fortunate and lucky I am to be able to do this as my job.

Rub a swan.

I always say rub a swan.

Don't rub a swan.

Genu fleck to a swan.

Wink at a mouse.

And

marvel, marvel at us.

It's probably raining back in Ireland.

I'm missing the rain back in Limerick.

I'm missing that Limerick rain.

It's probably raining back in Limerick.

Marvel at a little.

a big fat snail.

Marvel at a summer snail.

And the smell of rain.

Alright, dog bless.

I'll catch you next week.

Hopefully, with a hot take back in my studio.

Hopsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then-current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

What makes a great pair of glasses?

At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost.

Their designer quality frames start at $95,

including prescription lenses, plus scratch-resistant, smudge-resistant, and anti-reflective coatings, and UV protection, and free adjustments for life.

To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to WarbyParker.com.

That's WarbyParker.com.