Evolution and Your Attention Are Constantly Evolving

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What we're talking about is how you are doing something very analogous to evolution. What's constantly happening is there are processes within you that are opening up variation and also processes that are putting selection on it. I can give you two clear examples of that: your autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic. The sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of reality as threat or opportunity. There's this dynamic coupling of opponent processing between them that is constantly evolving your arousal. Similarly, your attention, you have the default mode network, task network. The default mode network is putting pressure on you right now to mind wander,. Then the task focus network is selecting out of those

John Vervaeke is a psychologist and cognitive scientist at University of Toronto. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Books mentioned:
Flow: https://amzn.to/3cQDby9
On Bullshit: https://amzn.to/3PZDvYW
The Denial of Death: https://amzn.to/3KsIctp

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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:03) – Meaning
(27:17) – Consciousness
(36:17) – Relevance realization
(47:40) – Wisdom
(54:54) – Truth
(59:38) – Reality
(1:11:59) – Meaning crisis
(1:35:27) – Religion
(1:43:17) – Nontheism
(1:58:26) – Distributed cognition
(2:16:37) – Flow
(2:36:35) – Psychedelics
(2:45:03) – Marxism and Nazism
(2:57:08) – Evil
(3:01:19) – Powerful ideas
(3:08:10) – Advice for young people