Peter Grossenbacher, PhD
TRT 51 minutes  
 
 
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Hello, and welcome to Mindful U at Naropa. A podcast presented by Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I’m your host, David Devine. And it’s a pleasure to welcome you. Joining the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions — Naropa is the birthplace of the modern mindfulness movement. 
 
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David Devine: 
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Mindful U Podcast. Today, we have a very special guest joining us in the studio, Peter Grossenbacher. Peter has been teaching at Naropa for quite some time now. He primarily teaches in Naropa psychology and counseling programs as well as undergrad classes. He also teaches meditation at Naropa and beyond in a secular context and also is Acting Director in the Conscious Lab at Naropa. He has a BA in Cognitive Science and Mathematics from the University of California Berkeley, a Master's in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oregon, and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oregon as well. Along with his in-depth studying in psychology, he does many other things such as meditating, research, and is a writer of multiple publications. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Thanks. I'm doing great.


David DeVine:
Awesome. Kind of already told you this, but when I came to Naropa, you were like a thing already. And so to have you on the podcast, it feels like a long time coming, so I really appreciate you showing up and just being here today.


Peter Grossenbacher:
I'm so glad to be here.


David DeVine:
So to get started, this is kind of like my little jump off question I always ask. For our listeners, can you discuss the discovery of psychology? Because you went from having a BA, a master's, and then now you have a PhD and now you teach psychology. So I'm really curious if you can let the listeners know how you found your journey in psychology, your interests, and what did that look like going through the educational process?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. So as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I did my senior honors thesis on people's experience with deja vu. So I wrote a computer program and I personally interviewed a hundred people. They sat in front of the terminal at that point in the computer lab and responded to my questions. And I learned that people experienced deja vu more in their late teens and early twenties and in the afternoon and outdoors. So as an undergraduate, I was already into research and learned some things about this very unique phenomenon of deja vu experience. I also worked with Eleanor Raj, who at that time was a longtime student of Naropa's founder, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, but she's also a very renowned psychologist in her own right. Her research showed how Aristotle was wrong in the way human minds categorized the world. So I was lucky to work with her and John Searle in the philosophy department and worked as a research assistant in a cognitive research facility there on campus and really got turned on to the field and to conducting research to make discoveries.


David DeVine:
Which makes sense because you studied psychology and mathematics, so there was a data component to your studies.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. The exciting part of math for me is topology, the branch of mathematics, which is about connection. So it's more qualitative than quantitative. We could get into that if there's interest.


David DeVine:
Okay. Like sacred geometry, would that have something to do with it?


Peter Grossenbacher:
No, I'd say that's more complimentary. Topology is just a branch of mathematics that's existed for 110 years, and it's about what things in space are already connected with each other or have the potential to connect with each other. So like the Mobius Strip has only one side, and that's an example of a topological concept.


David DeVine:
All right. So I know you've been teaching at Naropa for quite some time and it was 26 years. And what I'm curious is, how did you hear about Naropa? Because it sounded like you worked with somebody who knew Chogyam already. And how did you find Naropa? Did you go there and study a little bit or did you just go there to teach and just never left? How did your journey evolve?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah, I have not been a student at Naropa other than learning with and from my students and faculty colleagues over a couple of dozen years as I teach here. I took a course in 1981 that Eleanor Roche taught the psychology of Buddhism, and it was actually modeled on a Naropa course. And that's when I learned how to practice Shamatha, mindfulness meditation. I'd already been practicing another style of meditation, but this one felt really like coming home. And so I've been practicing it ever since, and it's part of who I am and how I engage this earthly existence. So I had already identified and taken refuge as a Buddhist before coming to Naropa. I had been a research scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, doing research on multisensory perception and synesthesia. And I realized that I wanted to really get into teaching and I had known about Naropa for many years, given my interest and involvement in meditation and Buddhist communities.
And this happened to be at a time when Naropa was incorporating more science and growing that side of psychology. So I applied and got the job and moved to Colorado in 2000 to take this position. And moving from the National Institutes of Health to Naropa University, I'll tell you, that was moving from an institution with a vast bureaucracy and no heart to a place that's the complete reverse of that.


David DeVine:
Also, what a complimentary addition to your already practicing meditation and your research to be able to come from bureaucracy to, I don't know what you'd call Naropa, like free flowing academia architect.


Peter Grossenbacher:
We live and breathe academic freedom here at Naropa, and there's never been pressure for me to work on particular topics or to publish at a particular rate. And that's really allowed me to follow my passion, which I've been fortunate enough to be able to do my whole life.


David DeVine:
That's lovely. Okay. So I'm actually curious, you have a PhD in experimental psychology, and you also teach different classes like abnormal psychology, and I've never heard those types of description in a psychology sense. And I'm curious, what does that actually mean? What is experimental psychology? Because in my mind, what I'm thinking is you try different modalities of psychology and you see which one works in the setting.


Peter Grossenbacher:
So from the outside, a lot of people think that psychology is all or mostly about therapy or counseling, and that couldn't be further from the truth. It turns out psychology is about understanding mind and experience and behavior of human people and other beings. So it's about understanding, which can involve research in the field or in the laboratory. And for my doctoral dissertation, I had noticed that occasionally I'm surprised by how a surface feels when I touch it compared to how it looks. So I ended up conducting a series of laboratory experiments to investigate how vision and touch come together and found evidence demonstrating a visual dominance for surface texture that was published and worthwhile contribution to the field, along with a number of other things. In fact, my focus on multisensory perception, which means vision, hearing and touch, for example, as well as multisensory attention, which is how the mind directs itself toward and away from aspects of the incoming sensory flow, the sensorium. And so I was focusing on all that because in meditation, especially mindfulness meditation, when there's an expanding field of awareness that includes but is not limited to the person's senses, I wanted to be conversant with and able to conduct research on people's perception and attention in the sensory fields. So even before coming to Naropa, I was preparing to conduct research on meditation, which then I have pursued at Naropa, both the transformative aspects of meditation, helping to increase engagement with awareness and shifting and transforming personal worldview, as well as looking into how on the teaching side, people provide guidance and instruction to help develop meditators along their contemplative path.


David DeVine:
To me, what it sounds like, it's more psychological than psychology because it's not so based upon somebody's trauma trying to fix something. It's more of looking at societal norms, patterns, how people perceive. You said something about filtering the sensory flow, things like that. So it has a scientifical lens upon the psychology of, because we all have psychological makeups, but it's like, how do we apply it in society?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. So I'm really hearing you start to see the inside of this field, which is a field of science. You could say it's a subfield of biology. So to understand how minds and brains and bodies actually do what they're doing, it's a very multifaceted, even multidisciplinary field.


David DeVine:
This is my jam. I like this stuff. I like looking at the science of stuff. And you were talking about dyslexia or synesthesia or what was it?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Deja vu.


David DeVine:
Deja vu. Has anybody ever told you that they've had deja vu? Because usually when you have deja vu, there's a moment where you're like, "I'm having deja vu," and then it goes away. But I've had a very small amount of times where I've had deja vu and I'm like, "I'm having it right now," and that was part of it.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah, exactly. So buddies and I, when we were undergrads at Berkeley, we had a little informal interest group in deja vu experience, and we were in our late teens and early 20s, so they happened with some frequency. Deja vu comes unbidden, it just starts, but it turns out you can kind of surf the experience. And if you don't react too far away from it at it as if you're a distant witness, but you're just kind of grooving along with it, you can actually extend the duration of the deja vu.


David DeVine:
I think I have done that too, where I'm just like, "Oh, here it is. Let's just see what's going on. " You're like an observer of the deja vu, but you are also part of it. It also feels like there's a third person view when that starts happening as well.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. And all of this, of course, is a microcosm of what can happen on a path of mindfulness meditation, where you're noticing your experience sometimes from a witness perspective, but sometimes without any separation from the experience as it unfolds moment by moment.


David DeVine:
So Naropa has a term, education from the inside out. And I'm curious, what does that mean to you in your teaching and how you conduct that in your classrooms. How does that like Naropa's contemplative pedagogy manifest in the psychology classroom when you're education from the inside out?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Good educators everywhere know that on occasion, events conspire to make a teachable moment. And sometimes that's only recognized after the fact, but because we are trained in mindful awareness, we are noticing those teachable moments, perhaps to a greater degree and taking full advantage of them. So regardless of what the syllabus says, regardless of a lesson plan or intention pre-planned regarding the next activity, when a topic emerges in a classroom discussion, when a student all of a sudden has an aha moment or an instructor has an uncertainty or an insight, then we take that and run with it, and it's those teachable moments, the invitation for and recognition of and taking advantage of and leveraging spontaneity that keeps the educational experience fully alive for everyone.


David DeVine:
And I could really see how meditating allows you to see those moments more often because a teachable moment, like you said, isn't in the syllabus. You're like, "Insert teachable moment in week three." That doesn't really happen. It's the collaboration with the students that spark an interest to pop up.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. And there's a movement in higher education and all levels of education to take full advantage of mindfulness on the part of teachers. And indeed, I've been part of teams going to different institutions and at conferences, providing workshops and training to faculty at other institutions to learn how to do that.


David DeVine:
Okay. With all the different types of classes you teach like cognitive neuroscience to contemplative learning seminars, what would you say is the technique of applying the contemplative model to each of these rigorous academic courses? Is there a way to do it without diluting the content, or there's like a skillful approach to how you do contemplative content in the classroom?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. So in abnormal psychology, for example, there's the classification system provided by the diagnostic and statistical manual or DSM that is sort of this reference that's used for diagnosis by medical and psychiatric and psychological professionals as well as insurance companies. And it's not able to fully capture the entirety of a human being. And so it is often viewed quite critically and appropriately in regards to its limitations. However, it was created by people whose intention has been to be helpful to people who are struggling, to people who are having either mental health crises or ongoing challenges to love and work and live happily and fully. So when introducing this system of categorizing people, which is putting them into boxes, I first had the students reflect on and then contemplate in silence the motivations and the caring of the people who are responsible for having created and maintaining this system.
And then we were able to go on and discuss in detail the various components of the DSM, including critical and creative thinking regarding its limitations and problematic aspects of its application, while at the same time not dissing the people who created it and recognizing the role that it plays in larger society.


David DeVine:
I sort of hear an ability to help someone get over issues while in a psychological setting. It sounds like you have to have the ability to diagnose someone in the, what is it, the DSM?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah, the DSM.


David DeVine:
The DSM. Within the DSM, then they find where the diagnosis fits and it's weird to think about insurance companies. So you said something about the DSM doesn't fully understand a human being because human beings are so complex. Can you just unpack that a little bit? I feel like there's something in there that you want to say.


Peter Grossenbacher:
So when you get to meet someone, you begin to at least scratch the surface of what they're bringing into that moment and likewise, reciprocally, they you. And this intersubjective encounter is full of mystery and depth and sometimes intimacy and even to various emotions from hatred to love. And the experience of encountering another human being reflects one's own interiority, the richness that lies within, the embodied feelings, the felt sense, the heartfelt aspirations and so on. So most of that is not in any way captured or addressed or reflected in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. So there's no attempt really to capture the fullness and in doing so by using labels like diagnosed with schizophrenia or anxiety or a major depressive disorder, there's a lumping and a reducing that is one of the reasons for decades now, the American Psychological Association has noted that people should not refer to a person as a schizophrenic or as someone labeled with their diagnosis, but rather say a person diagnosed with schizophrenia so that we're not objectifying people according to whatever label or box a diagnostic system may hold for them.


David DeVine:
That makes sense because you can get over it, you can work through it. So if you tell them that's who they are, it might be integrated into their personality a bit. So I could see why that's fruitful to not.


Peter Grossenbacher:
There's so many ways that people individually or especially through societal pressures, whether intended or otherwise, end up limiting the potential of who we are now and who we can become.


David DeVine:
Okay. So in our introduction, there was a mention of you being the director of Naropa's Consciousness Laboratories and I'm curious, like what do they do there? I've been there once. I didn't get to really dive into what they do, but I know they put the electrodes on your head and they measure the electricity going through your brain. But being the director, tell us what you're looking for, what you study, what type of work do you do there?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Right. Well, I have worked in two brain electrophysiology laboratories, one at Stanford University and one at the University of Oregon in Eugene. And I do have a colleague, Jordan Quaglia, who has been using EEG and event related potentials to investigate brain activity during mental life while processing certain tasks. And I'm very happy that he has that going on. That lab has a different name. So the Consciousness Lab is next door to that in the basement of Wilson Hall. And we've conducted research on people's experience with meditation, of teaching meditation, of synesthesia. And now we're embarking on an interview study of people who have experienced journeying with psychedelic medicines to find out what we can about that range of exploring consciousness.


David DeVine:
Are they meditating with the machine or the electrodes on their head or how do you do the study?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Right. So this is not while a person is journeying, but rather people who've already had such experience previously, we collect verbal data from them by asking a series of questions in a structured interview to discover patterns and structures in those experiences.


David DeVine:
What type of patterns have you discovered so far?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Well, as is already known in the field, psychedelics are particularly conducive for forming or revealing or strengthening experiences of connection, and that includes connections that are internal to a person, intrapersonal connectivity, also connections in and with nature and with divinity and with other beings, people and autonomous entities that they encounter on their journeys.


David DeVine:
And when it comes to the meditation, are they meditating while doing it or is that like the psychedelic avenue where they talk to you afterwards?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Right. So rather than jumbling together these different topics that I've conducted research on of attention, synesthesia, meditation, psychedelics, I really only design and conduct studies that focus on one of those at a time. So my current research does not involve meditation.


David DeVine:
Okay. I see. What's the most interesting thing you've found so far when it comes to your research in this lab?


Peter Grossenbacher:
That the widespread or even ubiquitous importance and commonplace experience and valuing of connection, be it human connection with other people or other forms of connection, that is so prevalent. It's almost the water we're swimming in and hard to identify. So indeed, if you look at the literature that's published about compassion or social justice or mindfulness, many of them take this common humanity or valuing or prioritizing experience of connection as a fundamental, but do not then open the lid, see what's in that category. So my research really tries to illuminate as many facets as possible of human connective experience.


David DeVine:
I would like to admit, that's usually what I feel is just how vastly amazingly connected everything is. The theme of network tends to come to mind, like how there's a neuroplasticity of networks in your brain, but that's how people feel and we feel to the earth and we feel to the animal kingdom and the different kingdoms that are involved, there's connection and it's like, how do we get there and how do we strengthen that connection? And it's usually through these different avenues that you're talking about.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Exactly.


David DeVine:
Alright. So I'm going to shift a little bit and talk about your personal practice as a meditator. And so I'm curious, you did sort of mention it, but I'm curious if you could talk about how you meditate, what you use to practice, or are there mantras, are there just like mindfulness thoughts that you keep? And I'm sure there's many different modalities that you do use and have been presented over this time, but I'm curious, how do you approach it? And especially how do you approach it as like a researcher and a teacher and using it as like mentoring other people? Because not only you just are a practitioner, you're a teacher and you also do research. So I'm wondering like how does the meditation practice inform your research?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Wow.


David DeVine:
That was a lot of questions. Maybe just like what ... Sorry. How do you meditate? Tell me about your meditation practice.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Right, right.


David DeVine:
We'll start there.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. So thank you to my teachers Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Eleanor Rosh, and many others, mostly in Buddhist traditions, including Vajrayana, Himalayan schools of Tibetan Buddhism. And having been on month long meditation retreats and numerous such practice programs, as well as then guiding and teaching in such programs, I have come to realize that the invitation to be present is always available, always fresh, and always amenable to practicing. So it's not the case that the meditation I know about and engage with helps you arrive at a destination different from where you are. Rather, this bodyfulness, heartfulness, mindfulness, path of practice is about tuning in and staying connected with each moment of experience as it unfolds and noticing when something different is happening and you're no longer present and being able to come back. And it turns out after, gosh, 45 years, that practice has not gotten old for me. So that's still my practice, this shamatha or calm abiding with experience as it is.


David DeVine:
I'm hearing the equation to figure out the teachable moments. Being more present probably equals more teachable moments because you're actually able to read the room with multiple people there. All right. So the second part of that question was, how does it influence you as a researcher and a teacher? Because being such a longtime practitioner, I'm sure it has influenced the way you teach, what you teach, how you teach, and also what you research.


Peter Grossenbacher:
With regard to people, I have come to respect the infinity inside each person, how each of us has a unique perspective and our own window into this multiverse that we share. And so teaching to me brings the opportunity for me to discover who's in the room with me, be it a Zoom room or a virtual classroom or in the residential program or hybrid intensives, the students who then come to Colorado to be able to to learn at least a little bit of their uniqueness. And so I'd say that that's been a big takeaway from my meditation practice is just recognizing the uniqueness of each moment, of each stream of consciousness and of each person. And indeed, in my research and publishing, I'm really doing my darnedest to recognize with humility my own limitations, the particular aspects of my own social location that many of which in my case grant me unearned privilege. And I'm trying to then leverage that privilege by spotlighting the experience of people who may not already have a seat at the table. So there are marginalized populations that have beautiful and amazing conscious experience such as synesthetes who experience synesthesia on a regular basis, as well as psychedelic psychonauts, people who are using psychedelic medicines to discover and learn and explore who they are and how mind works and that's a way that I've done what you're asking about.


David DeVine:
Okay. With all your research and knowledge and teachings, how do you envision contemplative psychology and neuroscience contributing to the future of mental health and education and humanity? Are you seeing advancements or do you envision advancements in the future? And also, does Nuropa have a role in that?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Naropa, as the flagship university in contemplative education has a central role in our students and their development and what they go on to do. So whether they go on to graduate study either at Naropa or elsewhere, I've had many students who've gone on to get their doctorates, their PhDs, and are now teachers and professors and researchers. So there are generational contributions that we make through people coming in for whatever time they engage with the Naropa journey. And our own research activity is actually resulting right now in a new theory. I call it the mediated intersubjective collaboration theory of consciousness because this reveals that consciousness itself may be collaborative and participatory inside the human mind and brain so that the ease and relevance and importance of connecting with other people where they have their own mind and awareness and there might be reciprocity between you and the being that you're encountering and spending time with, that I think is already happening inside your brain even before engaging with another. In fact, I think it's this intersubjective collaboration between functional brain network nodes that makes for this capacity for consciousness to be shared with others.


David DeVine:
Your research sits at the intersection of meditation, consciousness, and psychological science. What questions are alive for you right now? What are you excited about when it comes to your research?


Peter Grossenbacher:
I'm excited about the healing potential for psychedelic medicines. There's increasing research in both humans and other species that psychedelics open up or reopen a learning window that may have closed years before that makes it particularly beneficial to people who've gotten stuck in a major way, often through trauma or related problems, that the ability to flexibly reconfigure mind and consciousness and no longer beholden to the patterns that have kind of cemented themselves even for decades, that psychedelics can open up these new relearning or new learning opportunities. And of course, psychedelics come with risks, so there needs to be a lot of caution and careful research. So in our research, we're focusing on, in part, some of the healing potential that connective experience can mediate in psychedelic journeys.


David DeVine:
I actually really agree with that. And I do feel like a lot of healing potentials, but there is a warning label, I guess. You have to be very careful. So before we started this podcast and we were emailing each other, you shared with me a paper that you have, the Theory of Human Consciousness, and I skimmed through it a bit and found it very interesting and thought provoking. And I'm curious if you could let the listener know what it is a bit. And you sort of talked about it a little bit of synesthesia. Synesthesia is super interesting to me, being a musician and a very visual mind provoking person. So I'm curious if you can just tell us a little bit about that.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. So synesthesia is the conscious experience of systematically induced sensations that are not experienced by most people under comparable conditions. I've done a lot of research and published that research in variety of peer reviewed journals and books. And the idea, the theory that I've come up with recently is inspired by synesthetes themselves, their experience, and what's been discovered about brain activity.


David DeVine:
Synesthetes. People who experience synesthesia, I'm assuming.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yes, exactly.


David DeVine:
I've never heard that before.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. Sort of like aesthetes except instead of focusing on aesthetic considerations, it's the synesthesia specifically. So the mediated intersubjective collaboration theory of human consciousness is inspired by synesthetes as well as by psychedelic psychonauts, people who use psychedelic medicines to intentionally explore their mind and consciousness. And the idea has got a couple of parts to it. First, I'll just say that this paper has recently been submitted to Frontiers in Psychology, a peer reviewed journal, and is under review. So the idea is that there are all of these distributed functional networks in the brain. So what that means is you've got patches of tissue that sometimes know about rectangles, sometimes know about circles, sometimes know about triangles, and so on. Any and all shapes that are perceivable, there's a visual shape area of the brain that configures itself to represent any shapes that a person happens to be looking at. Often that goes outside of conscious awareness, but if one brings attention to the shapes in the visual field, you can notice rectangles and planar surfaces and pointy objects and so on. And it's this shape area that is doing that work for you and serving up that information to your conscious perusal.


David DeVine:
Your dictionary of shapes is localized in the brain, is what you're saying?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yeah. And that's not unique to shape. So any content of consciousness tends to have its affiliated circuitry. So be it the pitch of musical sounds or non-musical sounds, pitch is represented in a number of auditory cortical areas that are active during the experience of sound that has one or another pitch to it. So two with tambour, the different voices of musical instruments, so two with melody and key and so on. So whatever it is that you can be conscious of, rest assured in my reading of the literature and in my own research, it's convincing evidence that that conscious experience is supported by specialized activation in different parts of the cerebrum, of the human cortex. And it's not happening in isolation. I believe that consciousness is about this coming together of distinct functional brain network nodes. I refer to them as neurophenomenal constituents, neurophenomenal in the sense that it's both brain and conscious phenomena.
And indeed, neurophenomenology has an important history over the last few decades, really starting with Francisco Varella and his colleagues. And of course, Francisco was one of the first faculty at Naropa University. So science did have an early history, the science of consciousness at that time, and then it went through a hiatus, and then I and others now are rekindling those efforts.


David DeVine:
I really enjoy phenomenon, and I had this thought a long time ago where it's like, it should be illegal to patent anything that's a phenomenon. That should be allowed for any and everybody, whether it's science, manufacturing, industry, self-discovery. Another thing I wanted to get into was you talk about synesthesia a lot, and I know synesthesia is you experience ... So if I hear something, I could make that a number or a color. So say I see the color green and I say seven, that represents seven to me. Is that universal to ... How do you say that? synesthetes?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Synesthetes.


David DeVine:
Is that universal to them? Do they share the same number when they see colors or the same sound when they see color? You know what I mean?
Peter Grossenbacher:
I understand your question.


David DeVine:
Yeah. Is there similarity?


Peter Grossenbacher:
So I am a founding board member of the American Synesthesia Association. I was the only non-synesthete who got in the room and founded this, but as a researcher, I was already focusing on that in 1999. So the form of synesthesia in which musical sounds induce colors, for example, is shared by many people. In fact, some of the more common triggers or inducers are auditory and some of the more common concurrence, synaesthetic concurrence that are triggered by the inducer are colors, but even so, it's very idiosyncratic or peculiar to each person. So if you get a bunch of synesthetes in the room, which we've done, who share the same form, they'll disagree with each other and say, "Oh, you need to take vitamins. Your colors are all wrong." They say it in a playful way, of course.


David DeVine:
Okay. Have you heard of bineural beats?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Yes.


David DeVine:
Do binary beats do anything because you're having hard panned right and left single tone frequencies being put, side ways being put in each ear and the brain's making up one? Does synesthesia like to play with binaral beats?


Peter Grossenbacher:
No. And when science says no, often that means not that we know of. So science as a way of knowing on a good day is very humble. It's about recognizing things that have been demonstrated. And as the science structure of knowledge builds, what is happening actually is we're making greater surface area contact if you view it as bubbles with the surrounding mystery.


David DeVine:
Mhm


Peter Grossenbacher:
That's how science works.


David DeVine:
How do you define synesthesia?


Peter Grossenbacher:
The conscious experience of systematically induced sensations that are not experienced by most people under comparable conditions.


David DeVine:
Okay. That was really good. Wow. You were prepared for that. So you've never experienced that? Okay. For instance, it's not something you develop. It's something you're born with?


Peter Grossenbacher:
So we distinguish three etiologies or ways synesthesia can happen for a person. One is constitutional synesthesia, which has a developmental arc. It starts at least by early childhood and continues throughout one's adult life. And those people are referred to as synesthetes where it's an enduring trait of just part of who they are. There's also pharmacological synesthesia in which serotonergic psychedelic medicines induce during the drugged state experience of many different varieties of consciousness, including ones that are sensory in nature, often including but not limited to synesthesia. The third way is very, very, very rare, and it's called acquired synesthesia and happens, unfortunately, as a result of brain injury or disease, and the experience of it is qualitatively different than in the other two forms.


David DeVine:
Okay. So I just thought of an interesting question to ask you, because you're the perfect person for this. With your previous history with deja vu, do synesthetes experience deja vu more often or do they experience it? And if they do, do they experience it in a synesthete experiential way?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Oh, what a great question. Yeah, I could imagine learning things by scrutinizing the phenomenal content of experience during deja vu from people who have different baseline starting points, such as synesthetes or non-synesthetes. So far, I've never seen any publication addressing that question, nor have I done so in my research.


David DeVine:
Okay. I just thought it was interesting because it's like you tend to research phenomenal interests and they're very scientific and you have a very psychological background and it's very interesting to me. And I was like, "Ooh, I wonder if synesthetes have a different perspective on deja vu."


Peter Grossenbacher:
I'll say to you what I say so often to my students, I share your question.


David DeVine:
Okay. I read about 22 pages of your, what was it, like 60 pages or so of your paper and it really got me thinking, and I've always thought about this for a while of like consciousness and its location. And I was thinking about consciousness isn't necessarily located in the brain. Consciousness is a application that uses the brain. Sort of think about how my computer is using electricity. So I think of consciousness as electricity, and I think of my brain as the computer. So it's like the brain doesn't work unless it has the electricity. And what I'm curious about is like, how do you see it? Is consciousness localized? Is it not?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Great question. So this is called the hard problem, how the body has a mind, how brain activity may actually play a causal role in having conscious experience. And there are different philosophical positions ranging from panpsychism where consciousness simply permeates the universe, to mind brain dualism, where mind is one kind of stuff in this universe and body is another, to monism where mind and brain are the same sort of stuff, which often boils down to materialistic reductionism, that consciousness can just be dissected into smaller and smaller neurochemical reactions. And science on a good day is agnostic with regard to all these different philosophical positions. There is no set of data that clearly steer thinking toward or away from any one of those perspectives. And I'm a third generation scientist in my family, so I sort of grew up with science as a way of knowing, learning from my father that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, which really leaves so many things beautifully open to possibility. And so I have seen so many kinds of evidence that conscious experience so often has a lot to do with what's happening in the brain, that if part of the brain dies, such as through stroke or injury, that carves out a hole in the person's phenomenal field and they no longer have experience of color, say, or you can become cortically blind and no longer have visual experience when parts of your brain that handle visual processing are no longer alive and functioning and connected with other parts. And so too, when having conscious experience in the scanner, functional brain imaging studies using a variety of techniques demonstrate clear degrees of activity correlated with the conscious experience. So these are called neural correlates of consciousness, but that still doesn't solve the hard problem. In fact, it brings it to a point and says, "Well, gosh, there's this tight correlation, but how come one could imagine a system in which that brain activity happens without the conscious experience?" But it turns out there really is something that it is like to have that moment of experience. So that on the one hand is an ongoing mystery. On the other hand, the mediated intersubjective collaboration theory posits one possible solution to the hard problem by honing in on the information that is actually subjective information in the mind being processed by the circuits that constitute these functional brain network nodes. And in that role and capacity, I term them these neurophenomenal constituents, which constituents come together in a collaboration, sort of like a town hall meeting or a grassroots assembly, and it's in the meeting, it's in the joining, it's in the knowing about each other, which at a neural level could simply be phase lock oscillation of neural firing between the circuits that are indirectly connected with each other in that moment of experience.


David DeVine:
I actually really appreciate your way of describing it with the neural phenomenal function because neural is like what it's doing and the phenomenal is the subjectiveness to how it can be interpreted by the individual having that process happen. So like when you say that, I'm like, huh, I'm feeling that because it makes a lot of sense.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Mind is what brain does.


David DeVine:
Yeah. I also hear consciousness dictates brain functionality.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Well, the direction of causation is debatable. Is it only one way or is it both ways? And that's where decades and perhaps centuries of future research may shed further light.


David DeVine:
Yeah. It's kind of like, we don't know yet, but we will.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Maybe.


David DeVine:
Is there anything else you just want to say at the moment? Do you have any social media you'd like to share or any Naropa teacher news or classes your meditation, anything you'd like to share with the audience?


Peter Grossenbacher:
Nope.


David DeVine:
Alright.


Peter Grossenbacher:
Thank you so much. I've really appreciated this conversation.


David DeVine:
On behalf of the Naropa community, thank you for listening to Mindful You, the official podcast of Naropa University. Check us out at www.naropa.edu, or follow us on social media for more updates.