How to Expand Your Consciousness | Dr. Christof Koch

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I am Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford. Today I am joined by Dr. Christof Koch, pioneering neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. His work spans perception, states of mind, and consciousness. We dive into what consciousness is in mechanistic brain terms, how to expand it, reshape your perception box through neuroplasticity, what flow, psychedelics, meditation, sleep, and dreams reveal about the mind, and even collective human consciousness. We also somehow get to dogs, cats, Jennifer Aniston, and the meaning of life. This one will change how you think about your life, hopefully with more optimism.

To set the stage: when you say consciousness, what exactly are we talking about—biologically, psychologically, philosophically? Is it just being aware, or something more? And am I right to assume a rock is not conscious?

I mean the felt experience itself—hearing, seeing, loving, hating, imagining, dreaming, dreading. Without that light inside, you do not exist for yourself. In deep non-REM sleep or under anesthesia, you are gone for yourself; in REM dreaming, you are present again. That is consciousness. Historically, the struggle is that we can only access our own; yours is private to you, mine to me. Science prefers third-person measurements, and that makes consciousness unusual. People also confound consciousness with self-consciousness. You can lose the sense of self—during flow, meditation, or psychedelics—yet remain vividly conscious of the world. So consciousness is broader than the narrating self.

What about liminal states and Yoga Nidra? I practice a non-sleep deep rest where I stay awake while the body drops into deep relaxation and intense interoception. Past and future fall away, I become hyper-present, almost falling inward, yet I am still fully there. Does that give us a window into consciousness?

Yes. It shows consciousness is a state of being, not just doing. We speak and act a lot, so we conflate behavior with consciousness and intelligence. But behavior is neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness. Computers can do without being. Consciousness is the felt being.

How stable is the self? We see memory loss with lesions, but total loss of self seems rare. Are there states where self drops out?

The self is our core operating kernel and evolution keeps it robust, but it can glitch. In derealization you feel the world is not real and try to wake up from it. A dramatic case was a pilot who, after psychedelics and grief, tried to shut down engines believing he needed to crash to wake up. We all live in the gravitational field of planet ego, yet in flow or on psychedelics the critic can vanish—you become selfless while remaining exquisitely conscious.

I had a VR experience that put me in a black avatar for ten minutes. It rewired how I perceive subtle social signals and burdens others carry. It stuck. How modifiable is the self and perception at this level?

I call that a transformative experience. We all move through the world inside a perception box—our Bayesian priors about self and world. The dress illusion shows how priors drive perception; so do events like September eleven or October seven, where priors shape radically different interpretations. Your VR expanded your priors and thus your perception box. That is powerful, rare, and valuable.

It was emotional, and there was an integration period where I felt my priors updating. Direct experience beat a thousand lectures.

Exactly. Integration is the explicit work of updating priors, likely via prefrontal top-down signals into social and theory-of-mind networks. You can learn slowly through books and films, but direct acquaintance changes you quickest—mystical experiences do this too.

Oliver Sacks used to imagine being a bat or an octopus to get closer to non-human consciousness. Any thoughts or stories about him and whether we can approximate other minds?

Oliver was a dear friend with extraordinary empathy. He met patients where they lived—often in bespoke realities created by brain lesions. Actors strive for this through method acting. With animals it is harder—different sensors, motor systems—but we can approximate. Nagel said we can never truly know what it is like to be a bat; I think we can get closer through disciplined imagination and empathy.

Can we deliberately update consciousness in therapy—say, keep the memory but remove its emotional load—through CBT, MDMA-assisted therapy, or better REM sleep? Is that truly possible?

Yes. Minds are malleable if you believe change is possible and do the work—talk therapy, psychedelic-assisted therapy, other modalities. The Alcoholics Anonymous insight applies: acknowledge the problem and accept you cannot do it entirely alone. Community matters. Willingness opens the space for change.

As neuroscientists, can we point to specific circuits or dynamics that are the origin and signature of consciousness?

Enabling conditions like heart and brainstem arousal must be intact, but the content of experience in us arises from thalamo-cortical circuits. We can probe this with TMS and high-density EEG and compute a perturbational complexity index. Above approximately 0.31, the brain shows complex, distributed echoes associated with consciousness; below that, in deep non-REM, anesthesia, or brain death, complexity collapses. Clinically, about twenty-five percent of behaviorally unresponsive patients show covert consciousness—either high complexity or command-following in motor cortex despite no outward behavior. This helps families and guides treatment and prognosis.

Can you situate the famous long-term case and whether people ever come back from these states?

In that well-known case the brain was globally atrophied, likely truly unconscious. But yes, some patients recover. They often lack explicit memory for the period, just as we forget most dreams, but they can regain meaningful life. Recognizing covert consciousness has shifted medicine over the last decade.

This also makes me rethink end-of-life directives and my own bias against living with severe disability. Many locked-in patients still want to live.

There is a disability bias. Beforehand you might say never; after injury, many choose life unless they have uncontrolled pain. Priors change when reality changes.

I see the human will to live in athletes who rebuilt meaning after devastating injury. I am fascinated by the anterior mid-cingulate cortex in will and persistence.

Lesions there can cause akinetic mutism—no will to act or speak. Posterior cingulate relates to the sense of self; stimulation or seizures can produce dissociative out-of-body-like states. Meditation and psilocybin reduce activity there. Every experience has a neural footprint, even if it is not reducible to neurons.

Given how perception boxes drive our politics, can we find meta-priors to de-escalate? Could AI help us arbitrate where humans fail?

We need meta-priors—shared commitments like no political violence—to override reflexive screaming. We have lost common narratives, and AI will accelerate change while people disagree on what to optimize. Historically, violence per capita has dropped, but risks remain. We probably need a collective realization, AA-style, that we cannot continue as we are.

Could we swap priors experimentally to build empathy at scale? Social media’s visceral videos are already reshaping priors in real time.

If we knew the neural substrate of your priors, in principle we could perturb them, but scaling that to billions is another matter. And yes, high-fidelity video massively amplifies emotional impact. We are in an accelerando.

You tried five-MeO-DMT. What happened, and what did it teach you about mind and death?

Within three breaths my visual field fractured, terror surged, and Christof died. No body, no voice, no space, no time—only an icy, blinding point of sheer ecstasy. Then I returned quickly, wept, and could speak within an hour. It taught me mind does not require space, time, or self. The fear of death vanished. Later, on a Brazilian beach, I experienced unity with the universe and shifted toward idealism: space, time, matter may be emergent from mind. Foundational quantum questions about observers nudge in that direction. You cannot cancel consciousness; what can vanish are self, space, and time.

I treat meditation as perceptual training. I built a simple practice I call space-time bridging—cycling attention from interoception to near, far, and cosmic scales, then back—so I can escape brain attractor trenches. I wish a trusted AI twin could warn me as I slide into unhelpful states.

No sentient creature steps wholly outside its perception box, but practices like yours expand it. Today’s AI mostly reflects you back and can reinforce harmful tendencies. Meanwhile adolescent mental health has worsened for decades—loss of autonomous play, social media filters, the pandemic, and shrinking families likely contribute. Many teens lack interoceptive grounding; body-based therapies and mindful interoception can help.

Dogs teach me about autonomic set points. Breeds have distinct behavioral baselines—some idle hot, some cool. People and cultures show parallel differences. I think it is both biology and learning, and you can see it in how much we move even at rest.

Does longevity really track resting heart rate? In humans we hear the two billion heartbeats idea. Small animals run fast and die sooner; big animals the opposite. How does that play out across dog breeds?

It does. In dogs, lifespan inversely scales with size; IGF-1 largely sets body size. And I buy Twyla Tharp’s take: aging accelerates when we stop spontaneous movement. Keep moving and the brain keeps those circuits alive. We learn a lot from animals here.

With age I see less cognitive flexibility, less curiosity and motivation—more, I have done this a hundred times, I do not need the hundred and first.

Cynicism is deadly. The worst outcome from anything we face is deciding we will never get out. We still need belief—especially in the young—but really in all of us.

Placebo shows belief matters. Boris Heifets ran a ketamine study in depressed surgical patients under full anesthesia. Both arms improved; what predicted the drop was believing you got ketamine. Cynicism undermines that therapeutic pathway.

The hero vacuum feeds cynicism. We fixate on flaws, rename buildings, and erase complicated people. Brains are plastic—wire cynicism early and you live as a scrooge.

We judge the past by today’s standards and refuse to talk to those who do not match our moral bar. The future will judge us, too. That stance is corrosive.

So I put it as curiosity versus cynicism. Curiosity keeps plasticity and expands consciousness.

Cynicism shuts the perception box. If you believe nothing works, change and therapy will not help. Losing faith in the human spirit is the worst.

Deaths of despair now claim many under forty. At an NIH hearing it hit me: they are very ill without being physically ill. We have to cut cynicism and grow curiosity and compassion.

Despite material abundance, anxiety and loneliness are up, people drink less, have less sex, and stay home longer. History always had crises; what feels new is the hopelessness.

I will not tell everyone to take psychedelics—there are real risks—but I will plant a flag for curiosity over cynicism. This show is to give tools and remind people they can choose and work at it. Young folks are not lazy; they need direction. Two quick ones: Jennifer Aniston neurons, and the meaning of life.

At UCLA we recorded single neurons from epilepsy patients in medial temporal lobe. Some cells fired selectively for a specific person across different photos and even their written or spoken name—the Jennifer Aniston cell, a Bill Clinton cell. Humans know thousands of individuals, so it makes sense to wire concept neurons. Deep nets show analogs. Dismissing so-called grandmother cells was premature.

Hearing this, our own Jennifer Aniston cells are probably firing. Seeing someone like Donald Trump in person after only on screens, I felt the real and virtual collide; the stadium split cleanly into boos and cheers—an emergent readout of priors. Thank you—Jennifer Aniston cells.

Book recommendations—one or two you give people?

Marcus Aurelius’ Confessions. It teaches that I can control only my response. I give it to my kids, friends, everyone.

We will link your books, including the new one on mystical experiences. Last one: meaning of life. How do you approach yours, and any advice?

I find myself in a universe strangely conducive to life and consciousness. I think reality is fundamentally mental, with its own laws. I am part of it and will return to it. Teilhard de Chardin imagined a noosphere and a Point Omega of maximal consciousness—I am not sure about that, but I will keep questioning without expecting final answers. Stay curious, strive to understand, and leave the world better than you found it.