July 19, 2017

Neurohacker Insights – Mind Wellness & Emergence

Dr. Charles Parker sits down with Daniel Schmachtenberger to discuss mind wellness and emergence in this episode of the Core Brain Journal podcast.

Neurohacker Insights Translate Brain Systems Into Helpful Action

Complex and whole systems science, combined with exponentially increasing computational power, is about to pour light over our previously resigned expectations of just feeling “OK.” The silver bullet mentality is a broken mentality in every area.
– Daniel Schmachtenberger

Beyond Reductionistic Thinking – Into Systems Complexity

This interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger, my friends, of more than 80 Episodes now, is directly targeted, in critical concordance, with our overall philosophy and mission objectives here at CBJ. If you’re new here, you’ll love it. If you’re an old timer [!] with us since launching last April, you will love it. If you remain perplexed about the interface between neuroscience and street utility, be prepared for inclusive, actionable thinking. Daniel is amazing, with articulate insights on the evolution of mind science. neurohacker insights, daniel schmachtenberger, qualia

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a consummate polymath with a background in systems science and human behavior and is the founder of the Emergence Project. He is the anchor of the scientific team at Neurohacker and provides sustained vision and informed for the larger Neurohacking movement.

Complexity, Reality & Neurohacker Insights

After accumulating comprehensive inventories on behavioral influence, coupled with an already widespread literacy of complex systems and whole systems science, he then founded The Emergence Project to begin working with a host of luminaries to tackle global-scale problems with global-scale solutions. Concurrently, he researched the epistemological frontier of neuroscience, delving deeply into integrative medicine as well as emergent neurotech tools and psychological techniques to optimize solutions on both sides of the mind/brain interface.

Mind science evolution provides a metaphor for the evolution of humankind.

Neurohacking is Timely – Daniel’s Overview:

“In many ways, our contemporary technical prowess works against us. Yes, we have access to a level of information that would have seemed like pure magic to folks even a few centuries ago. But this doesn’t come for free – our always-on, connected-info lifestyle immerses us in a barrage of demands on our attention and processing power. Even at their best, our poor hominid brains are overwhelmed by the pings and buzzes of social media.

And we are not positioning ourselves to be at our best. Consider, for example, real nutrition. For hundreds of thousands of years, our tool using hunter-gatherer ancestors had access to food that provided a vast diversity of nutrients from topsoil that was robust and healthy and part of a whole, complex biologic system, without actually any toxicity in the environment. These days most of our food is produced, processed and transported in a complex soup of chemistry that we don’t come close to fully understanding.

Neurohacker Insights Beyond Nutrition

And even if we eat the healthiest food, which most of us don’t even come close to, even the very healthiest food grows in minerally-depleted soil that leaves our needs unmet.

Or consider pollution and our toxic environment. We spend much of our time indoors, not getting enough vitamin D and breathing in a host of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from all of our modern building materials. The average mother has 136 petrochemicals in her breastmilk in the United States. Those chemicals are carcinogens and neurotoxins, and we see these kinds of things continue to proliferate.

So we’ve got a situation where we need more capability than we’ve ever had, and we have more going against us physiologically than we’ve ever had.

We need help. We need Neurohacking – both in metaphor and strategic thinking.

The Global Picture

To understand our perspective on this, we have to take a look at a bigger picture. For all of our evolutionary history until very recently, we lived in relatively small geographic areas with a relatively limited number of people, and our technological/industrial capability could only affect a relatively small amount of our world.

We evolved to be able to process those kinds of things. For example, there is something called “The Dunbar Number” that reflects what appears to be the fact that our primate brain is only able to process unique relationships is in the vicinity of 150 people. We evolved to live in bands and small tribes – and when we must deal with more people than that, we are out of our element.

Empathic Limits

What this means is that we broadly seem to confine ourselves to having empathy for people that we see and taking responsibility for things where we can see the effects. But where the consequences of our actions are distant – like where we can make purchases and then throw stuff out, or we don’t see the open pit mine where the stuff came from, or the landfill that it goes to, then we struggle to connect the dots.

So in our modern world where many issues have profound complexity between many different financial interests and nation-states and cultures, to even be able to sort out what satisfactory solutions look like requires that we level-up our capacity. It requires the ability to be able to care about more than we ever did and to be able to increase our problem-solving and cognitive capability, also to increase our emotional resilience that we remain undaunted by a constant flow of news coming in showing the enormous challenges we face all around the world.

Complex Yet Connected

The world is more complex, and yet more interconnected. The problems are bigger, but also more challenging. That means the people doing the problem-solving must have capabilities commensurate with the scope and profound magnitude of the multiple problems.”

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