Synchronizing Mind, Nature, and Neuroscience: Spacetime Experimentation with Georg Northoff

Join us in an intriguing exploration of the connections between the brain, body, and environment with esteemed neuroscientist and philosopher, Dr. Georg Northoff. Discover Dr. Northoff's ground-breaking research on spatiotemporal patterns in brain activity, which illuminates our understanding of consciousness and mental states such as depression and mania. Learn about the dynamic brain processes crucial for psychological well-being and the significance of personalized spatiotemporal patterns in mental health therapy. This episode weaves through Dr. Northoff's philosophical journey, influenced by nature, and thinkers like Kant and Whitehead, advocating a non-reductive neurophilosophy of human interconnectedness, inspired by Chinese philosophy. Expect a thought-provoking discussion that redefines traditional views on the mind and offers a fresh perspective on mental health and ecological ontology.

00:00 Introduction to the Brain-Environment Connection
00:42 Welcome to the Research Podcast
01:38 Introducing Dr. Georg Northoff
02:36 Exploring Spatiotemporal Patterns
14:43 The Brain's Dynamic Principles
19:17 Understanding Spatiotemporal Neuroscience
25:16 The Impact of Environmental Context
42:37 Personalized Therapy and Mental Disorders
46:36 Understanding Breathing Rates and Mental Health
47:22 Personalized Breathing Interventions
48:35 Synchrony and Psychological Well-being
51:23 Schizophrenia and Temporal Fragmentation
53:28 The River Metaphor for Schizophrenia
56:41 The Role of Spatiotemporal Patterns in Mental Health
01:00:55 Curiosity and the Pursuit of Knowledge
01:04:07 Philosophical Influences and Neuroecology
01:27:36 The Importance of Non-Reductive Neurophilosophy
01:30:39 Concluding Thoughts on Science and Philosophy

Royal Mind Brain Imaging and Neuroethics: https://www.theroyal.ca/research/biography/dr-georg-northoff

University of Ottawa, Faculty of Medicine: https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-medicine/dr-georg-northoff

Lab: https://www.georgnorthoff.com/researchers

Northoff was Andrea's supervisor for her Master thesis and she often atte

Transcript

Fractals within Fractals: Georg Northoff and Spatiotemporal Neuroscience

Georg Northoff: [00:00:00] Our brain is not in here. It's always between me, my body and the environment.

you don't come to the psychiatrist because you have an auditory hallucination.

You come to the psychiatrist because you cannot navigate the world.

the core of our psychological life is the synchrony.

Synchrony with yourself, synchrony with the body, synchrony with the other, synchrony with nature. It's amazing. 

 We are one fractal within the many fractals of nature.

in the natural world, you do not have dichotomies. You have continua, you have, uh, gradation, and that's key for nature. 

Andrea Hiott: Hello, everyone. Welcome back . This is a research podcast where we delve into all kinds of subjects relative to how we make our way in the world. We talk about what we love about life, about learning. About books, about the different paths we've been on about some [00:01:00] pretty deep subjects and ideas relative to the mind relationships. Challenges, inspirations, all these shared landscapes. And we try to do it beyond the traditional divisions that we're told we should keep in terms of what does or does not fit together. Or what should or should not be said in certain contexts? On that note. Today, this one is very neuroscience-based. About the brain. Not that you need to know everything about the brain to listen to it. But just a heads up. It's definitely one of the neuroscience ones. we're talking about space and time and the brain and some ways of thinking about brain activity and the relationship between the body and the world and the brain through spatiotemporal patterns. Even thinking of self almost as a spatiotemporal pattern. And as you can imagine, that can be a controversial idea but our guest today, Dr. Georg Northoff 

 has studied it from many angles. He's a philosopher. He's a [00:02:00] neuroscientist. He's a psychiatrist. He has degrees in all those disciplines. He's from Germany, but, Ottawa, the University of Ottawa recruited him to head the Mind Brain and Neuroethics Research Unit. At the Royals Institute of Mental Health Research. So he's working with patients every day relative to different mental health challenges. Which he also tries to understand from a neuroscientific experimental angle and which he also tries to understand as a philosopher. Coming out of the German tradition, phenomenology, but also as you're hear heavily steeped in Kant and Schopenhauer. His main research is between the different neuro and biochemical mechanisms, That might be related to these big ideas of consciousness and self. In this conversation, we talk about what it might mean for all of us to have some sort of unique spatiotemporal pattern. And how that might be expressed in the brain or the body or the world we [00:03:00] talk about how consciousness is like an iceberg Or I should say iceberg. I spared. It's a little too German. I guess iceberg with some of it's submerged under water, some of it above water and what this kind of example might tell us relative to the waves and the ocean has Northoff talks about. We talk about fractals and the fractals of nature and the fractals of all of these different measurements of trying to understand consciousness and mind and the body. We talk about subjectivity. And how important it is to try to look at all of this from an individual point of view. So it's kind of a heavy conversation. In some ways, but also gets to some really just everyday normal ways of trying to understand our life and and how we're effected. 

So hope you enjoy it. I'm really glad you're here. If you want to support love and philosophy, there's many ways to do that. I'll link to Northoff's lab and to his books. If you want to explore more about [00:04:00] spatiotemporal neuroscience, it's a work in progress. But the basic ideas. Focusing on spatial temporal patterns when we try to understand mind and consciousness, which I don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like a really fascinating idea. Something worth exploring and risking Being wrong to find how that might actually be right or apply to our life in ways that could help us with some of the issues that we face about mind and consciousness. All right. I hope you're doing well out there wherever you're making your way.​

Andrea Hiott: Hi, Georg. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. It's so nice to see you. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah. Hello. Nice to see you again. 

Andrea Hiott: So, I already know you and your work, but for those who don't, would you say you're a neuroscientist, philosopher, psychiatrist, all of the above?

Georg Northoff: Yeah, I think I would [00:05:00] all, do all three, and what I'm really, I'm, I'm a brain mind researcher, so I'm interested in exactly that interface, so if you want to basically have one label, it's, uh, Nautilus is a brain mind researcher. 

Andrea Hiott: Great. That's kind of why I asked, because actually what you're doing is sort of, transcending those dichotomies a bit. But I wonder how did you get interested in these subjects? Which one came first? If, if one came first? 

Georg Northoff: Yeah, good question. So I had a very good philosophy teacher in high school. And who really got me interested into philosophy. But then, uh, of course, then the question arises, what do you want to study?

So I wanted to study philosophy, obviously. But I didn't want to study philosophy just alone. I wanted to study it as a particular, with another more specific discipline. Of course, in a strong candidate, of course, mathematics, physics. Uh, another candidate, slightly different, is law, and the third candidate is of course neuroscience, and at the time, uh, strangely so, there were no neuroscience programs available in Germany, [00:06:00] and that was just 30 years ago, so it wasn't that long ago, um, and so then in order to get into, to the brain, you had to study medicine.

And yeah, and that's the way then I studied medicine. And of course, in doing the medicine, it's very clinical, it's not so much scientific. Then I also added the neuroscience to it. What was in 

Andrea Hiott: the early philosophy class before we get to the, the other part? What, do you remember what it is?

What sparked your interest? 

Georg Northoff: Understanding the world, I would say, and understanding what is behind the appearances. So that's of course already a very Kantian formulations, appearance reality, but , it's really what is behind, what is, what are the presuppositions, what happens behind.

That always drove me, yeah, uh, to look beyond the curtain or behind the curtain, if you want to say. 

Andrea Hiott: How did you realize there was a curtain there? 

Georg Northoff: Of course in the moment you get entangled and you can't find an exit, there's no exit. And and then you try to move [00:07:00] and there's something there and there's some discrepancies and for me philosophical question for me philosophy is.

See, I consider these three disciplines as different methods, as different methods. You have a conceptual logical method in philosophy, you have an empirical driven method in the sciences, in the neuroscience, in the clinical, you have more sort of a clinical, phenomenological subjective approach. And for me, these are different methods and that's why I'm saying I would consider myself a brain mind researcher who uses these three different methods.

And of course, now I also use computational stuff. From engineering and physics and artificial intelligence. Yeah. So for me, these are just methods focusing on one and the same problem question from different angles with different, uh, terms often, but then you have to translate. 

Andrea Hiott: So you got a PhD in philosophy, a PhD in neuroscience, your medical.

degree. Am I missing anything? There's [00:08:00] another one in there somewhere. 

Georg Northoff: Right. And then the psychiatry, I was a licensed psychiatrist. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: So, okay. I want to push you a little bit because, your work, you do try to move away from this mind brain dichotomy, but you just said you're researching brain and mind.

So do you really think of them as separate or are you using these words in the kind of traditional way that they're used? Or like, how do you really see them? 

Georg Northoff: Good question. Of course. I mean, I think it's really the, at least for my generation, it's really the question. I consider that every generation grows up with a certain question at the beginning of the 20th century.

Uh, the people grew up with the physics question, so probably I would have ended up as a physicist. Then in the middle of century, biology and genetics, resurfaced. Probably if I had grown up at that time, maybe I would have gone into that direction. But in my time, and it started with, uh, uh, Popper, Eccles, uh, the brain in itself, other books, uh, in that time.

And, Yeah, so I think I sort of [00:09:00] naturally got into that and so officially, of course, it's what you call the brain mind or mind brain problem.

But you can deal with problems in different ways. So first you can just provide an answer and okay, you tackle it. Did you take the question? Uh, at face value and take it seriously and say, okay, I want to provide an answer. And that's what I see in the current, uh, philosophy of mind that is formulated in the heart problem by David Chalmers and all the neuroscience, for instance, of consciousness.

However, then you can also have another approach. You can either say, you can resolve the problem, meaning there is no problem. You can just say, okay, swim it away. Yeah, naturalizes or just say eliminate it. And that's what I understood is a little bit done by, for instance, the Churchill and it's a neuro philosophy.

And I would call this sort of a reductive approach. And then you can say, okay, maybe You can [00:10:00] step literally behind the curtain and say, maybe I dissolve the problem and shift it to another question. So that's where I basically, of course, it's like you look for the previous positions hidden behind the question for the mind brain relationship.

And that's sort of a transcendental like methodology. Uh, if you want to say so, uh, going back to concept. And that's the approach I'm doing because I think you can say, okay, in order to raise the question for the relationship of brain and mind, both should be conceivable and plausible. And I'm thinking here of logical possibilities.

logical conceivability, not actual reality. So that's very important here. So it's a deliberate philosophical move here. And then I say, yes, there's a logical conceivability that there is a mind as [00:11:00] distinguished from the brain. And that's, then you can answer, then you can, based on that, you can raise the question, how are mind and brain related.

However, if you now say, okay, The assumption of the mind may be logically, uh, conceivable, but not empirically plausible. Then you might get into problems with your question, how are mind and brain related to each other? So in what I'm doing in my 2018 books, is spontaneous brain from the mind body to the world problem, basically saying, yes, uh, yes, the mind is logically, the assumption, uh, of the mind is logically conceivable.

It's a logical conceivability. So the mind body problem, the question for the mind body problem, is a very plausible and feasible question within the logic. Now I go back to the natural world and say, is the assumption of mind [00:12:00] empirically plausible or can it be Is there something else which is more plausible than the assumption of the mind?

And the answer to my, probably come later to that in the interview, is yes, maybe the world brain relationship can also explain mental features, and that's more empirically plausible. So I try to dissolve the problem. I don't try to answer the problem of mind brain. I don't try to resolve it or eliminate it.

But I tried to dissolve it and shift it to another. 

Andrea Hiott: This kind of gets to notions of space and time, because that, in all that you just said, you also developed this idea of spatio temporal Neuroscience. I always think of the way that you describe space and time similar to the way you just described it mind and body in a sense, but to just try to generalize it more, is it fair to say that you're thinking of mind and body and world, mind body world, are you thinking of them as different, um, [00:13:00] patterns, spatio temporal patterns or something like this, in a really general broad way, like, because these are the big questions.

How do we Find, like, how can we say these things are separate, mind, body, brain, or not separate? 

Georg Northoff: Let me give you two, you know, I more and more refer to basic features in nature.

So look at the seaside, you're in Netherlands, you go to the seaside to the North Sea and on a stormy day, you have big waves, you have small waves. And, uh, the smaller waves are integrated within the big waves, and the big waves are more slower, the, uh, smaller waves are faster. So here you see basically dynamic principles, yeah?

Basic dynamic principles of nature. And that's exactly also what happens in the brain. So in the brain I have plenty of waves. And big waves and small waves, and they're nested within each other. The smaller wave is nested, the smaller, faster wave nested within the bigger, uh, slower waves. And that's like the Russian dolls or the [00:14:00] Chinese crystal balls.

They're much more refined, many crystal balls, smaller, bigger. So you have basically the same shape, but different sizes. Yeah? So that's exactly what happens. You call it a scale free organization. Uh, holds across different time scales and space scales. Okay. And that's exactly in the brain. So that's one thing.

So that's basically, you have basic dynamic principles in the brain. Dynamics means the change over time. And when you look into nature, there are continuous changes. Everything changes. It's amazing. And our brain needs to adapt to that. So now that say, okay, the brain is dynamic. Yeah. And that's basically the lower part of the iceberg beneath the water.

Cognition is the upper part above the water, but as you know, the iceberg is only stable because of the lower part, yeah, unless the Titanic comes, yeah. Okay, and, um, [00:15:00] but now the second question, you said, yes. You characterize the brain as dynamic, meaning as continuous temporal changes, and that's of course part of spatial temporal neuroscience.

However, what you really want to show, how are these dynamic and spatial or topographic features related to mental features? like self and consciousness. So again, I give you another example, which I always like is what water we all know is the chemical formula of H2O. Yeah. So now imagine if you weren't knowing that water has the chemical formula of H2O.

So here in Canada, you would say there's three different substances. In winter, it's frozen, it's ice. Then in spring, it's a fluid. And in summer, when it's really hot, which is really the case here in Ottawa, it becomes vapor. So if you were doing that, all three are related to H2O, you would say. [00:16:00] These are completely three different substances.

So, and how is it possible that the same chemical formula transforms into such different states? Depending upon the context, whether it's hot, warm, cold, same here in the brain. So I would say the brain has certain dynamic configurations. They are neuronal. And when you have a proper context, when, for instance, the neuronal activity is aligned or synchronized with the environmental or the bodily activity, then in the case of proper relationship, it transforms into a mental state.

Last example for that. And that's why the alignment, the link. To the environment, the integration of yourself and your body as part of the wider environment is so important for me. Uh, another example of dancing. You dance to the rhythm of the music, you feel the groove of the [00:17:00] music, and the better you get the rhythm of the music, the better you feel the groove of the music.

That's a mentalist. 

Andrea Hiott: Are you a dancer? 

Georg Northoff: I'm not a dancer, but I'm a runner and a rollerblader and across countries where you have rhythm and I'm addicted to these rhythms. 

Andrea Hiott: To rollerblading too? Yeah. It does change your mental state, doesn't it? 

Georg Northoff: So you apparently do it too. 

Andrea Hiott: I did in the past, yeah, but also running and it's interesting, right?

Because it relates to that. , water, ice, steam, I mean, you do feel like you, you change your spatio temporal, uh, experience of the world when you,, you literally change your spatio temporal movement when you run or rollerblade, and it does end up feeling like it changes your mental state.

 But for people who don't know what spatiotemporal neuroscience is, which is something you're developing, you're looking at these, different states, let's call them, through space and time and [00:18:00] waves. So how does this relate? , are you actually saying different brain states are different speeds or, what is this spatiotemporal neuroscience

Georg Northoff: let me, give you two indications because it's really a process in development. So first cognition. So you have memory, you have working memory, short term memory, and then you recall, Oh, you just nodded your head. So I recall that. Or you said something. I recall that. That's typical working memory or longer term memory.

What you said at the beginning, your question, why it came into all this question, my high school stuff and so on. Okay. So, now imagine that my brain is. So that, and then we use usually for specific regions, and we look for a particular frequency, uh, in the, in the brain states mediating this kind of cognition, or if you pay attention, uh, attention is a big thing.

So now, that's basically a very cognitive approach to the brain, and you can do the same for different emotions. You look for specific regions or networks, and then you look for [00:19:00] specific time scales of frequencies. However, now imagine your brain has not only those functions. Cognitive attention, working memory, et cetera, and emotions, but it is also its own spontaneous activity.

And that spontaneous activity is continuously active and continuously changing, meaning it's continuously dynamic, dynamic, and it's also a certain spatial organization. So now imagine if your, working memory function occurs in the brain, which by itself is too slow. What will you have? You're always delayed.

And in your answers. Yeah. Or it occurs, or let's say your brain is literally too slow. Let's say it's like a seaside, which has almost no waves anymore. It's flat, meaning no change at all. It's extremely slow. So what happens, of course, you will always be delayed in [00:20:00] your working memory. That's, and you will always be delayed in your movement.

At the end, you might not even move at all anymore. You call this, we call this a psychotic psychomotor retardation. It's a typical symptom of depression. Now, the opposite. If your brain is too fast, your working memory and attention also becomes too fast, but that might not be beneficial because you're too fast.

You skip some of this. that happens in mania. So basically the brain provides a spatial temporal envelope around these different functions, cognition, emotion, uh, movement, action, perceptions, and that's, it's the lower part of the iceberg providing a spatial temporal envelope basically around the upper part, what we call cognition.

And now you say, yes, This is spatial, this is one aspect of spatial temporal neuroscience, [00:21:00] how it perceives cognitive emotion, perception, et cetera, in a spatial temporal. Now this key question is, where do mental features come? Because for me, the spatial temporal structuring, the way the brain spontaneous activity or task activity structures its own spatial temporal features, that's strongly related to consciousness, sense of self.

So that's the deeper layer. That's why we, for instance, now investigate time and space experiences. If your time and space experience are different, subjective, then you have corresponding time and space changes in the brain. So depressed patients experience an abnormal slowness. Nothing moves when you ask them.

And you, that's what leads them into depression. Imagine, nothing changes. There's a 

Andrea Hiott: feeling of being stuck or something too. I think, I mean, just in a very general way, we [00:22:00] can understand that there's a slow temporal spatial feeling or experience if anyone has ever felt depressed, almost as if you can't, you can't, manage to even get yourself to move or something.

 And when something like mania, it does feel. Even as the word suggests, as if everything is sped up or is moving very quickly or something like this. I just, I wonder though, are we talking about this in a metaphorical sort of way or Are you really saying that there are brain, there's measurable brain activity that's slow or fast associated with something like depression and, and mania?

Georg Northoff: Exactly. And I take it, I'm a German, so I take things very literally. Yeah. And I've read these studies, 

Andrea Hiott: but I think people who haven't, you're really saying it in a literal way that, And also we should describe about spontaneous brain activity. Almost like a resting state or something.

 Could we, could people think of it almost as like the habits that you're, it's not just your brain, but the activity of the brain, which is [00:23:00] part of the body, which is part of the world. It's developed certain, let's say, habits or patterns of activity, just to develop, to thrive, to survive, it's necessary.

Some of it comes just evolutionarily, some of it is through this alignment that you talk about. But at some point, you've got some patterns, you've got some biological habits, and that's in your brain too. And, Those aren't necessarily ever really changing. I mean, they're always dynamic and changing, but they're changing in a kind of continuous pattern not, based on what the body's external sensory envelope is experiencing.

Is that kind of what the spontaneous activity is? 

Georg Northoff: Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, the spontaneous activity is, of course, right at the interface between brain, body and environment. , first for the depression, I mean, you can really show that the perception is lagging behind. We showed this. Their movements are lagging behind.

Their thoughts are not changing and their emotions are not changed. So you [00:24:00] can really show, and all that is related to corresponding slowness in the neuronal activity. For instance, study, which we just submit is let's say your, your global brain, the whole brain activity here, your old surface cortex of the brain is related, of course, with your motor regions, the motor regions, which basically foster your movement and your action.

And what we see in depression, that this link from the rest of the brain to the motor regions of the brain are simply too slow. Yeah, there is a lag behind. They literally lag behind. It's like the kid in school saying the right answer, but five minutes late. Yeah, of course. And during the answer, nothing happens.

Okay. Failed. Yeah. So same as you can literally see that. And we use different measures from engineering and physics, uh, to really measure the speed of the brain. Literally. That's what I also described in this little [00:25:00] book for the broader audience, Neural Waves, which came out last year, where we really said that the waves are too slow.

So in depression, you have to imagine probably it's like a flat sea and occasionally there are some waves, but not much happen. When you look the first five minutes, it's a flat sea. you feel calm. Now imagine you look for one hour at the sea, you become crazy and depressed. That's exactly what happens, uh, in depression.

The other thing, what you said, the patterns, I think that's a very, very interesting point. Um, I think how do you develop these dynamic spatial temperate patterns in your brain? And that's where long term environmental influences come in, for instance. early childhood trauma. They can shape your spatial temporal structure and literally we and others could see that, that you have much more disorder measured by entropy, whatever it [00:26:00] is, uh, you have much more disorder.

There's less structure and order in your spatial temporal features in the brain spontaneous activity when you have a high degree of early childhood trauma. And you can see this 20 years later. And that, of course, may then cause the fetus to react with depression. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. So when you're saying they're slow or they're fast, what is it in comparison to?

Is it in comparison to other humans? Is it in comparison to the world that the brain is in? Is it in comparison to the body? Like how, what's too slow? Is it in comparison to another part of the brain? Um, what is, what's the slowness or the fastness? 

Georg Northoff: Yeah. Very good. Very good. So, of course. It's double. So first, your preferred individual speed and your speed will be different from mine.

How can you measure that? For instance, let people do finger tapping spontaneously in the frequencies they like to do. [00:27:00] And trust me, 20 people, different, 20 different speeds. It's unbelievable. Yeah. So that's basically your natural frequency. You can also do the breathing, for instance, the natural breathing frequency is slightly different between all of us.

Yeah. So that's one. So you have an internal reference or an internal default, which has developed over time. And there's a genetic predisposition and of course, the environmental. 

Andrea Hiott: So this could be like kind of the resting state for the subject in a way, or the spontaneous rest. Like what, what's kind of the normal state when you're not provoked or stimulated or having to deal with some kind of issue?

Yeah. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah, exactly. Spontaneous or resting state where we say the absence of any specific task. Right. Which is, it still means there's a lot of 

Andrea Hiott: brain activity. It's just that it's, the parameters are kind of similar and we kind of all have a signature that makes sense, right? We have a spatio temporal signature in a way that's always going to be different from everyone else, but there's a [00:28:00] lot of regularity probably usually, uh, with kind of a healthy, healthy brains or so

Georg Northoff: but they are, as you said, highly individualized or personalized. Yeah, and that's what we're also trying to use for therapy and mental disorder. And then there's, of course, the other side, you said, what is the reference for SLOFA? The other reference is your environmental context. So now imagine, so nowadays, Your reference in the environmental context is really spot.

You have these phones and they're constantly ring and here and there. And imagine, I often imagine a hundred years ago, how it must have been for people the first time when I had a telephone, you know, which is completely outdated for us. Yeah. You're the real telephone. Yeah. Not, not, not a cell phone. Yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Kind of do it with your finger, right? I've seen exactly exactly 

Georg Northoff: how it must have failed for the people for their space and time experience. Suddenly I have the voice here online and usually it took me. [00:29:00] five hours of horse riding. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it must have felt crazy. 

Georg Northoff: Talk about space and 

Andrea Hiott: time change. 

Georg Northoff: Exactly. It must have felt intrusive.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, almost like mysterious in a scary way. 

Georg Northoff: And suddenly the other person is much closer, both suddenly, and that means your environment changes. And your brain miraculously adapts. So we are doing a lot of now really new studies where we really saw how much the brain is sensitive to temporal or spatial changes in the environmental copy.

It's incredible. Our brain is so sensitive. So conceptually speaking. Our brain is not in here. It's always between me, my body and the environment. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: This is incredible. It's very exciting, but I think that that's confusing too, because of course, what we think of as the brain is always here, but what we think of as, uh, what we've come to associate with [00:30:00] the brain, which let's call it cognition is always this, but it's, you can't stop it at the brain.

And, it is a kind of bodily environmental interaction. Uh, I think that's what you're pointing out too. You're, you're, you are kind of saying that it's this ongoing process. I think Whitehead was one of your influences, right? Philosophically. So you're, you're coming out of a process ontology about this, you know, aren't you?

Yeah. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah. So definitely processes, of course, continues change dynamic and very interesting. Whitehead is not so much understood here in the Western world. It's a very small niche. But when you go to the Eastern world, in China or Taiwan or Japan, Whitehead is very popular. 

Andrea Hiott: How is that so? 

Georg Northoff: Because they have a much better sense for this continuous change.

So because here in the Western world, we say, okay, change is opposite to non change. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. 

Georg Northoff: So we have this all or nothing, a very [00:31:00] logical approach, all or nothing, either change, how, and the whole debate, uh, in philosophy about personal identity is how is it possible that it's something which is there over time, but my body continuously changes.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, right, right. Ship kind of thing. 

Georg Northoff: For them, it's absolutely not a problem for the user. That's why I feel often intellectually very home over at home over there. 

So it's, uh, the change and non change is, is an integral part. You cannot have changed not without non change and vice versa.

It's almost a dialectic Hegelian like thing. And it's really amazing. And that's exactly the brain work. So the question of personal identity, so what is, so there's continuous change. My brain is no longer the same in one year than today. And in 10 years, all the nerve cells probably have replaced each other in new cells, and the wiring is different, but I'm still feeling the same as Georg Nautov.

[00:32:00] So now, of course, you can say being a psychiatrist, you're Nautov, you have an illusion, you have the delusion that you're still Georg Nautov. But that's not true. So, because we share all that experience. So I would say it's a pattern of change, which is consistent. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Great. So 

Georg Northoff: that's where you have the non change.

It's a pattern of change. And that's basically a development of a Whitehead process ontology. And the other thing, which is an extension of Whitehead, is these patterns and these processes always relation. So they're in between the, uh, it's, it's not that I have a body and a world, but the concept of body and world are secondary abstractions.

from an underlying continuous relational process between them. And that process is spatial time. 

Andrea Hiott: Wonderful. So this is great. I'm glad we got to this place because now I want to look at what some of the things we were just talking about. For [00:33:00] example, something like depression where you have some sort of issue in terms of the alignment between the speed at which the body is operating and the speed or space required by what that body is encountering, so to speak.

So could we also think of that in this pattern way? Because I think that's what I was trying to bring up at the beginning too. It's not that you're trying to say here's a distinct measurement that is always the case, but it's more like we can find patterns. That, um, for a particular individual, if we look at their entire trajectory, are going to be unhealthy or, something like depression, something like mania, in comparison to, um, something like a healthy state for them, which might be completely different from someone else in terms of s specificity.

speed and time experience. So can we think of it like that, that what we're really trying to do is understand our own kind of unique patterns, basically a temporal pattern and how [00:34:00] we can adjust it such that what we're encountering, um, isn't so slow or fast, let's say, but you know, so overwhelming or so stimulating, let's say, you know, in something like depression or mania.

Georg Northoff: Yeah, I think the best one. I give you an example. Um, a patient of mine. Um, uh, she came and was a 16 year old girl. Uh, she was completely mute, didn't speak at all. And she came with her mother. Her mother was speaking normal speed. So normal speed. And later, and of course we were really concerned it would be some neurological, some bleeding or some tumor.

It wasn't. It was just pure depression. That's an extreme symptom. You call it mutism. People speak in depression. And then afterwards I asked her, why didn't you speak in the admission of the days? And she said, you know, my, I knew [00:35:00] that my mother was speaking normal speed, but it was too fast for me at the time.

I couldn't follow and that's why I shut up because I had the feeling I had nothing to say. Yeah. It was too fast for me. It was just all very blurry and I couldn't follow. And then I completely shut up. Yeah. And that, I think it's a nice description of how the speed shapes her behavior. So this is a key feature of what I call spatiotemporal psychopathology or spatiotemporal psychology or spatiotemporal neuroscience, that these temporal features or spatial features shape your behavior and your experiences and the way you behave relative within your environmental context.

That's, that's the key thing. 

Andrea Hiott: It's very interesting because like that story that you just told, she's aware of her own spatiotemporal process in a way. She's aware enough to know [00:36:00] that she's not moving at the speed that's required from her mother, but there's something in even just that, uh, dissonance of not being able to keep up and kind of knowing it can also be very paralyzing and can, uh, lead to more difficulty in these mental issues.

So have you found that just pointing something like that out to a patient like this that. That can be helpful in a way, that, that can even help them to find some kind of agency over readjusting or realigning spatiotemporally. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah. Yeah. Very, very good points. Um, the first thing I would describe this, this dissonance as it, let's say, imagine the upper part of the iceberg slash your cognition moves and shifts relative to the lower part.

So the socks partially decoupled, which is a feasible scenario. You can have that. Yeah. And that's exactly what happens here. And you, uh, mentioned a second point, which is a key point for many, because this look, uh, the [00:37:00] mental disorders. are disorders of the lower part of the iceberg beneath the water.

Meaning you have absolutely no conscious control over it. And the lower part It's more like that 

Andrea Hiott: spontaneous resting state pattern, stuff that's going on all the time that has nothing to do with whether or not you have a thought about it or something or anything like that. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah, what you consciously experience is only the upper five percent, it's the tip of the iceberg.

Very tip. So we 

Andrea Hiott: think it's everything, right? I think we have to pause there for a minute because, because that iceberg is all we, it's how we first even come to understand we have cognition. It feels like all of cognition or all of this process that you're describing, but it's really just the very growing tip of it.

And it comes often as you've expressed with this world relation. That it's through this interaction, for example, with your patient and her mother that she's starting to realize that her body, the iceberg and brain, isn't [00:38:00] responding in the way that is required by the mother. So there's this ongoing dynamical process, as you described, that's going on too, but the only thing we often really recognize is the very tip, and that's why we need something like a therapist, probably.

Georg Northoff: I don't know, well expressed. I mean, and now look at the lower part of the iceberg beneath the water. That is directly aligned to the water. That's what I call world brain relation, world body brain relation. And that's exactly where mental disorders happen. You see, all, you, you don't come to the psychiatrist because you have an auditory hallucination.

You come to the psychiatrist because you cannot navigate the world. Right. The auditory hallucination is just a consequence. So you feel estranged and depressed, as I already, she cannot speak anymore because she can't follow her mother. That's What I call temporal spatial alignment on the empirical side.

On the ontological side, I would call this philosophical side. I would call this [00:39:00] world brain relation, I think, and that's amazing. So now we do a lot of research on this link of the brain, the interface, the body and brain in its, uh, to environment. It, it's absolutely amazing how sensitive our brain. It's, uh, in tracking, let's say over one hour, it tracks the frequencies.

Let's say if you present 20 second blocks, 20 seconds, every 20 seconds for one hour, your brain tracks this 20 second interval. You see it in what is called the power spectrum of the brain, or you see it in the ways of the brain that they have a peak in exactly that time. It's amazing how sensitive our brain is.

Andrea Hiott: It makes a lot of sense just from what you've said, because the, to go back, we're not separating brain, body and environment. So you have to learn to align with the spatio temporal encounter that you're having. I mean, that is what you do as a baby. You learn how to walk, you learn how to talk, you learn emotions, [00:40:00] and everyone learns it differently

I developmentally and so all of us develop differently, good or bad, whatever you can say, but we're developing these kinds of patterns, of course, also coming with some preset, so to speak, patterns.

 But it's always ongoing, right? It's not linear. I think that's part of like a lot of the, uh, the measurements that you use are scale free or complex or fractal, so you're trying to look at how all this is happening in many different kind of scales and levels at once. Um, how does that translate to something like, uh, just a patient though?

Because it's not just, uh, it gets to this mental physical thing again, right? That, what we just described of the patient, having an awareness that she's not able to keep up with her mother is a mental, what we would say is a mental problem, but it could come from this physical development of the iceberg.

And so as, as a doctor, as a therapist, as a philosopher, how do you know which part of where in the scale to start to [00:41:00] focus to help someone? Or is it a matter of trying to figure out their pattern and that leads you to it? 

Georg Northoff: Um, I come back to that first. I think you said it very nicely. You learn and develop.

And I would add you learn and develop in an environmental context. So if you have five siblings, Oh, the very nice thing, very nice thing. Just recently, two days ago, a patient of mine told me, so she is a sibling and she has an identical twin. Uh, yeah. And now she told me she has a boyfriend who has also an identical twin.

Andrea Hiott: Oh wow. 

Georg Northoff: Wow. And we were both laughing. We were both laughing. It was so funny. Yeah. And then she said, you know, certain experience I can share with him. We don't even need to talk about it. We know. 

Andrea Hiott: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Because they've had that. They've developed the iceberg similarly. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah. And then that's the same [00:42:00] environment.

So that's why they understand. It's incredible. I really had to smile about this. And the way she described it, she said, this is, it feels so familiar. I'm so at home with him because. Yeah. And also, you know, this identical twin is very important for them. It's almost like a, like a substitute partner. Yeah.

Oh 

lifelong. I 

Andrea Hiott: think a lot of us can understand that too, though, just in a, to really kind of zoom out here and talk general, but that's why we find ourselves more easily attracted to certain things. You know, we talked about you being interested in philosophy. Who knows where that came from, but somehow it resonated with you on some level in your development up to that point.

And we all kind of find groups where we probably are resonating based on these experiences, right? That we don't even know that we're 

Georg Northoff: Of course, we just feel good. Yeah, it just feels right. Although sometimes, you 

Andrea Hiott: know, you want to, you become aware of that and you start to realize, Oh, maybe I'll try something different in order to [00:43:00] change my own spatiotemporal pattern.

Georg Northoff: Two things, but you said, how do you translate this? Mental disorder and mental therapy. So one thing which I often observe, when you're over this, we said earlier, that this lower part of the icebergs, the pure dynamic, how you relate to the world is completely unconscious. Meaning you have absolutely no sense of agency.

Now, imagine this alignment goes wrong, like in depression or in mania or in schizophrenia. You have even more a loss of agency, and this is a key thing. And just explaining the patient, how does this come about? And that it is real. It is not just an illusion what they experience.

So that helps them a lot. Just understanding. It's like, imagine there's another example, you know, when you have seizures. epilepsy, these seizures, people, a hundred years ago, we didn't know [00:44:00] that it's just some discharges, abnormal discharges in the brain. So people were thinking these are possessed by the devil and all kinds of things.

Now we know what happens in the brain. We know the mechanism as we say, as scientists. Uh, yeah. And it's much easier. You can deal with it and we find. forms of intervention. And that's what I also try to do. This is really a new thing, which hasn't come out so much, but we're really working on that, that we do personalized diagnostic and therapy of mental disorders.

So for instance, we developed a special form of personalized, individualized breathing therapy in anxiety disorders. And we're running larger studies and it's amazing how much it helps. And each one gets a different breathing frequency for the training at home. And that's really makes a difference. Yeah.

Because as we say, we had, you had it earlier. What is your reference? What is your default? What is your baseline? Your intern? [00:45:00] That's different. You feel better with maybe a faster breathing rate than me or vice versa. And so on So meaning If we are depressed, or if we are very anxious, we will benefit from different breathing rates.

So, but if you would, let's say, I give you the example. Let's say, I just say you have a breathing rate of 5, and usually you have a breathing rate of 10, let's say. Yeah. So now you're seriously depressed because also your breathing is too slow and depression can also happen. So now you would say intuitively, you would say, okay, Nottoff has a normal in the healthy state breathing rate of 10, now he's depressed by 5, so I give him 10.

You will see that I will not like this, because the 10 is too far away from the 5, from my actual state. So you would need to give me 6 to make my breathing slightly faster and pull me out of the [00:46:00] depression. And that's exactly the kind of stuff we are doing with Marcus. That's so 

Andrea Hiott: important that if we could find, I mean, with all this new technology and new ways of doing data, like I would hope, and I think that's what you're working on, in the lab is working on is trying to find ways to look at these patterns as, uh, individual.

Instead of just having this kind of cookie cutter generalized thing, like everyone should be at a 10 or something, and then trying to make everyone, be at that. That probably causes a lot of trouble too, just for someone who's experiencing a, a different time scale, a different spatial, spatiotemporal scale than their encounter.

If suddenly they're supposed to keep up with something that doesn't at all resonate to their own pattern, it's probably going to make you even sicker, right? And it happens probably a lot. 

Georg Northoff: That's why we have also, I mean, I see we have in the, in this breathing trial, we have patients who suffer from severe anxiety and have been to all kinds of medication and psychotherapy, really, really [00:47:00] difficult.

And, and, In many of them, the breathing gives them some relief. It's, it's amazing. It's really amazing. It's 

Andrea Hiott: great to come back just to that interface of the breath, because that is, like you said, you can tell a lot about your own pattern from that, and you can start to come into a kind of awareness of it, 

Georg Northoff: and the other thing which we, may again, completely amazing, we observe that the breathing pattern also adapts to the temple patterns in the environment. So let's say if you play a certain rhythm.

The 

only way for that to be possible is it goes through the brain, yeah? Because the brain is sensitive to this prism and then top down modulates the breathing. But it's amazing. So you, uh, so sometimes I explain this to my patients. And it's just that your brain wants to be in synchrony with the body, with yourself and with the environment, and then it's happy.

It's literally true. And actually we have one large scale study, which we just published in December, [00:48:00] a former postdoc of mine, Andrea Scalabrini from Italy, who is now a professor in Bergamo. And we investigated 1000 subjects online with visual analog scales for the experience of synchrony with your own self.

with your body, with the environment, the nature, and with others. And then we had various other, sense of freedom, thoughts, and various other psychological scales. But what the study really showed, the core, when we did a complex network analysis, the core of our psychological life is the synchrony.

Synchrony with yourself, synchrony with the body, synchrony with the other, synchrony with nature. It's amazing. And then we also observed that subjects who had a lower synchrony index of this, had a higher rate of anxiety and depression. So it's like synchrony 

Andrea Hiott: within all these fractal scales. It's not some linear kind of secret.

Exactly. Yeah. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah. [00:49:00] It's really amazing. So you really want to be in tune. You always want to be embedded. You want to be part of the wider environment.

This can be very 

Andrea Hiott: difficult for us to understand if, because we're all at different levels of awareness of our own patterns, I guess that's something that therapy can help you become aware, but it can also be very scary in the same way that breathing meditation can be for most of us, it's very beneficial, but for some, it can be.

Frightening, to suddenly become aware of yourself in a certain way if you're sensitized, at a different decibel, um, than those around you. Something like schizophrenia um, because often they're so identified with their illusion that you can't really get that kind of, uh, scale separation between the tip of the iceberg and the iceberg

Georg Northoff: yeah. So what we're trying to do in psychiatry, we're trying different kinds of spatial temporal disturbances for different disorders. [00:50:00] So you already heard that I consider depression and mania as speed disorders as to a slow fight. So what is schizophrenia? That of course is a difficult one.

So what we observe in schizophrenia, that they have a high degree of temple imprecision. in the millisecond bridge. So you observe, let's say, you have continuous waves, they fluctuate, and in schizophrenia, they fluctuate in a very disorderly way. So they have sudden shifts. So imagine, um, yeah, a very wild sea with a lot of storms.

Yeah, so suddenly you have a wave here, you have a wave here, you have a wave here, and the waves are no longer coordinate. And you can really observe this in the millisecond range in the brain, which is something we showed in the last two, three years, and another major paper just came out on this. And now how is that, this template, so let's say imagine, you perceive me.

In your visual regions in the [00:51:00] brain, the activity is slightly unstable and oscillating and, and fluctuating. And what you probably would say unstable and disordered chaotic patterns. Then you will perceive me also in a chaotic way. So meaning you have absolutely no idea why not of, let's say, imagine.

You see as I, I move a lot with my hands, . Yeah. And I know, yeah. Even when your computer's 

Andrea Hiott: moving around 

Georg Northoff: this. Yeah. And now imagine that you perceive not the timing of this movement because you are, you are. Right. You perceive my hand as something like this, or strange. So of course you have no idea what it means, and then you search for the meaning and you become insecure and then all the other stuff develop.

Yeah, and in your experience, so you have sudden shifts, yeah, you have sudden shifts in your ongoing neuronal activity, or the phase cycle, and how do you experience that? That's what they often experience as fragmentation, temporal fragmentation. So now I [00:52:00] like to use the example of a river.

So usually the river is flowing, flowing is nice and smooth. Uh, now imagine you throw some big rocks into the river. So suddenly the water is coming up, it becomes turbulent, and then it tries to find a way around it. That's the situation in Schizophrenia. A lot of rocks into the river. 

Andrea Hiott: I think that makes, uh, sense on a lot of levels, but, so does that mean that the, the, the state, the kind of pattern, let's say, in the way that we've been talking, the spatiotemporal pattern that one is living in, could suddenly shift to a completely different state?

Uh, level, decibel, setting, channel, so to speak, 

how would that stuff that you just described, like how would that, how do you see how that, that would explain? Is it just that the chaos can suddenly, you know, Click into a different level of space, temporal pattern, or

Georg Northoff: yeah, I mean, so first, just imagine you find you [00:53:00] have a river which is flowing steadily.

You feel calm, you feel good, you feel embedded. Now, imagine you have a river like this, which is a lot of rocks and very nervous. You also become nervous and yeah, so same thing you, you don't wanna look at that. turbulent river for a long time. You can't take it anymore. That's exactly what happens in the psychotic or schizophrenia people.

And then you try to find an explanation what is going on. You, you, you try to replace that. With some certainty. And then you come up with these delusions and hallucinations and so on and so forth, because you look for certainty. It is literally the word you have a paper where the word breaks down. Yeah.

Your alignment. is not only too slow or fast, it completely breaks down. You cannot make sense intuitively anymore. Here, let's say of this cup or why I now show this cup and how that is related to my speech. Because you perceive the cup as completely different from what I'm talking because you [00:54:00] cannot link the two because of your chaos and turbulence in your brain.

And then you say, yeah, why is not at all that probably he wants to kill me with a cup. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, but I, I think there's some kind of collapse too. And just to go to this metaphor that you've been using of the iceberg, and then you have the kind of, you know, the, the levels, the tip, the, the part that you can see somehow it feels like the, the person had no longer has a part.

They can see that they've just collapsed into that. whatever that, uh, defense mechanism story is or, or something. So it's interesting because this fractal stuff that you described, it almost feels like it sort of leaps into a different, um, state space or something, but it's solid. It's not that they're questioning it.

There's no questioning really happening in those episodes. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah, no, I mean, I think your brain has remarkable plasticity and flexibility. It, I like to speak of [00:55:00] reorganization. So you have a topographic or spatial and a dynamic or temporal reorganization of you, yeah? And that can be trained, for instance, in meditation.

You have a real proficient meditator, the brain of proficient meditators has a different spatial temporal pattern and structure than those of naive or non meditators, and in mental disorders too. You have a topographic and spatial reorganization of your brain and henceforth also your relation to body and environment.

So your whole spatial temporal perception in relation to the world changes. And that's, and all functions are affected. Your emotions, your cognitions, your motor behavior, your social cognition, and name it. 

Andrea Hiott: And your sense of self, there's a lot of, that we could talk about, about this continuity of spatio temporal patterns and how a self develops. And that would also kind of make sense [00:56:00] with all of these different disorders of, I guess the self could be all of, would you think it's the iceberg and the tip of the iceberg? Or is it just the tip of the iceberg? 

Georg Northoff: It's neither. It's how the iceberg is situated relative to the seaside. That's your point of view.

Yeah, the what it is like. That's your perspective in which you take onto the water. But you're embedded within the water. So you see, I have an explicitly relational or neuroecological concept of sense of self. Very important. 

Andrea Hiott: Higher 

Georg Northoff: order functions. Very basic. Yeah. Self is not 

Andrea Hiott: a higher order function.

Self is more or less the body's, alignment with the encounter. With the context. With 

Georg Northoff: the context, yeah. It's how the iceberg is positioned relative to the water, to the sea. So I'm now positioned here in sixth floor of the Institute at work. [00:57:00] Uh, that's now my state of self and I have a nice view here for the audience.

Oh, very nice. roof. Yeah. But now when I would step down, I would have a slightly different point of view and slightly changed. And my experience of myself would change. 

Andrea Hiott: Most people would understand that the space changes like you having that amazing view Does something for your mental health in these traditional ways?

But what you talk about in Neuro Waves is time and this is very interesting because we don't often think of how time spaces so to speak change our mentality, but It's too much for us to really unpack fully right now, but you if we start to think of these patterns as spatio temporal So it's not only the spaces that we are developing in and through and our brain activity But it's also time and the temporality.

I think it gets a little to what you were describing with the dancing,

Georg Northoff: yeah, but dance is a very good example. [00:58:00] So you align and synchronize your own inner space and your own inner time to the space of the music.

And when you ask musicians, my partner is a composer, so we have a lot of musicians. 

And when you ask pianists, They just, their piano playing is strongly dependent upon the hall, it's a space, yeah? And the way they situate themselves in that hall.

So the, the older pianists were extremely sensitive, yeah, uh, and to try to get used to the hall and get a feeling, conductors. Yeah, because for singers, they call it projection, how you project into the hall. Yeah. Uh, your voice sounds completely different. The same voice sounds different in a small room versus a large room.

Hugely important. This is what is called projection, how much it goes. So it's a key thing. And that tells you that, let's [00:59:00] see, here's a voice of the musician abilities, uh, always says, always a prior relationship to your environmental space and what is going on time wise. Because otherwise you wouldn't have that perception in projection.

Andrea Hiott: So like a musician, your partner, or even an actress or someone, it, when we talk about timing, it's somehow also a matter of like reading the room too. So it's all connected. I think I once heard you say that that your early interest in understanding the brain and all these things we've been talking about in terms of psychiatry and neuroscience and illness and health, was to understand what causes distortions of the brain or, and I wonder like where that came from.

 Have you had personal experience? Was there, is it just curiosity? What was that? Is that still motivating you? And was that like, why did that happen? What's that motivation, in your life? 

Georg Northoff: So we, we started initially with I'm a brain mind researcher, but I probably should have better said, I could [01:00:00] also say I'm a researcher of subjectivity.

So everything that is subjective is so fascinating for me. Uh, you don't see it, but I'm more than fascinated than ever, particularly now where I have the feeling I have a better grip on things. It took me 20, 30 years to develop all this, isn't it? Basically a long time, no idea, but now I have the feeling maybe I'm right.

And there's a lot of data and conceptual stuff. And now also other people take it over worldwide, which is very nice. And wow, this is a really different way of analyzing the same data and concealing things. makes sense and the data supports it. So it's now basically, I finally, uh, after so many years, I, I, I think I bought maybe the right puzzle and now I have to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

So it took me, I did 30 years of puzzle shopping. Yeah. Couldn't deny it. It's a lot of persistence. the usual puzzles. Now I finally have the puzzle and I say, wow, now I have a play tool. So, and now I put the pieces of the puzzle and [01:01:00] sometimes I've got, how stupid are you? And then it makes perfect sense. So it's really amazing.

So it's, it's probably the most exciting time in my life as a researcher. And it's really this, and if you ask me, is this curiosity, is it knowledge? Of course. in your life way. You have a lot of personal encounters and you see a lot. Uh, but it's really the curiosity. I mean, for me, when it comes down to what, for me, why I do this, I'm just curious.

And for me every day where I get some sort of new insight, some knowledge that makes me very happy. If I can understand something and just the process by itself. And now if I can also use it. To help some of these psychotic patients where the clinical situation is dire. I mean, it's a catastrophe. Uh, psychiatry is completely lagging behind the other medical disciplines.

So that's why we develop all these different personalized therapies now. Uh, that's for me, it's beautiful. And that's what motivates me. And if you have the feeling, [01:02:00] uh, sometimes I'm in very good moments, very rare moments, but sometimes maybe I'm really knocking on nature's door. And that's a feeling.

There's no publication at Top Toronto can ever top that. Such a nice feeling. It's, it's, it's beautiful. And maybe if I'm right, of course I might be wrong with all the special temple stuff, but if I'm right, the implications are huge. Yeah. And that's, it's just wonderful of understanding and how nature works.

So I become more and more an admirer of nature and that's why this climate change really hurts. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Well, I mean, 

Georg Northoff: do you 

Andrea Hiott: see your research, you, you talk about neuroecological and environment and these aren't separate from everyday urgencies, are they? I mean, Um, if we think of space and time as being so foundational in terms of our patterns, no matter if we think of them as measurements or we think of them, I mean, we didn't get into it.

I wanted to ask you [01:03:00] about how you really conceive of space and time. Is it absolute? Are we in a container? Is it a theater? But regardless of all that, what you're doing is prioritizing that everyone has a unique spatiotemporal pattern to put it very generally. And if that were really taken seriously and we took it seriously for all beings in the world, that'd be a big change ecologically.

Georg Northoff: Yeah, see, I have students from all over the world, and so I get all these different cultures to see where they come from. And I mean, for instance, people from the north, I mean, Canada is a northern country, let's face it, we have winters with minus 30, minus 40, long winters, five, six months. that shapes your mental states a completely different way than when you grow up in Italy.

Yeah. Um, it's, it's unbelievable. And you see similar differences in Northern and Southern China. So your climate, your geography has a strong impact on your mind. And how is that possible? Because your brain aligns to the spatial temporal pattern of its environmental ecological context. So I do think that [01:04:00] these kind of, uh, uh, climate changes we had here last year in, in, in May, June, it was horrendous, all these wildfires, and we had really doomsday scenarios, everything was yellow.

Andrea Hiott: Oh, God, yeah. 

Georg Northoff: That, of course, changes. If that occurs more often, then that changes your mental state. Absolutely. Yeah. And it tells you how adaptive our brain is. It's incredible. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it adapts, but to almost like a diseased state. I was driving to New York during that time, I remember, and I was visiting family and Yeah, it's very, clear sign that we are not separate from all the, that is going on around us and that maybe there's a way in which we can start to understand all these different patterns and how we're kind of co creating each other in a kind of, in a very serious way. So I have to just ask, I mean, this is called love and philosophy. So how do you see [01:05:00] that, that word like when you were talking, I was thinking about, um, this flow state that somebody like your partner probably feels when they're love.

I don't know what it is, but when you're at one with the music and the instrument and so on, I guess we kind of have that. You can have that in science too, , like what's motivated you to persist and 30 years build these , this part by part, uh, come up with your theory?

Is it something like, can't, can we talk about that word or is it 

Georg Northoff: only, yeah. It's, , it's, it's curiosity, uh, it's novelty seeking, it's trying to understand, as I said. So, and you know, so academic life can, can, can be very busy and you have a lot of demands becoming increasing and you have to do this, you have to sit here, you have to leadership and commission and, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And at some point in my life, uh, I really broke, broke down everything and I said, okay, what is really what motivates me? What do I really want to do? I want to understand. I want to do the research. And then since then I cut everything down and I just do this and I'm really a [01:06:00] very happy person. Yeah. And I think that the curiosity and the curiosity started for, for me with, with, uh, philosophy.

Yeah. And, and I'm still, I'm always amazed how much philosophical conceptual issues enter into even very tiny little empirical details or lab meetings. And you know, this go always back and forth like a pendulum between really empirical. tiny little detail and then suddenly a conceptual issue comes up.

And it's amazing. And yeah, I mean, we are, our brain is simply too limited just to have a conceptual or a scientific or empirical approach. You need both because we are too limited. I mean, this is really goes, of course, back to one of my favorite philosophers is Immanuel Kant. I mean, uh, is that, uh, let's say I paraphrase it a little bit.

Empirical research. without models and philosophy is, uh, blind and philosophy without science is empty. Yeah. And I think it's really, it speaks that we cannot [01:07:00] use just one method. We need a complementarity of methods targeted on the same question. So that's why I consider my different disciplines background as nothing special.

It's just different methods. Uh, and I use whatever method Which can help me to understand subjectivity, neuromental transitions, brain mind, mental disorders. So I think that's, that's really key. And yeah, that's this research. And there's a little bit also, let's say, call it a wide research because it doesn't always go the pre established, very assembly lines of research and the usual topic, which editors now try to basically predefine.

And what are the hot questions? Uh, it's a little bit. what you call outside the box, but even that is used as a category. So I wouldn't like to apply that either. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's very important. You just need to, it's like a little kid. So imagine a little kid playing on the street and trying out this, trying out that, [01:08:00] trying out here and all the, the ball flies there.

And when I kick the ball, it happens this. And then I do this. This is science. This is the original idea of science, especially Trying out. Yeah. And we forgot that. And I really became aware of that dimension of science in the case of when the COVID vaccines were developed. So suddenly we had no idea. So usually we think it's like a factory.

It produces assembly line and every minute a new knowledge is coming out like a car on the assembling line. No. Science is trying it out. It's playing around. We don't know. That's what science is. And when you see the development of the COVID vaccine, I went a lot into that because it was a typical example for me. And, and it's just, it's, uh, it's trying out. Okay. There's a problem. Okay. We need to try this one. We need to try this one. We need to try this one. Okay. Maybe this one works. Okay. Why doesn't either of these work? Or maybe we forgot something. Okay. Then you need to test for that one.

Okay. And it goes on like that. [01:09:00] That's science. 

Andrea Hiott: I'm so glad you said that because, that's a perspective that's so important and I think it does connect to this love of knowledge or this motivating. force that I was trying to touch on, um, that you did get back to this curiosity and you did ask yourself, because you do have a lot of energy and you are very motivated to study all this stuff and do all this research.

It takes a lot. Cause it's really serious stuff and it's a lot of different disciplines. It's not easy to master all of that. or even get to the point where you can discuss it coherently. but it's wonderful that you say it's about this. It's about trying things out because I feel like we need to remember that in science and philosophy that we don't have the answers in the, it's about trying it rather than trying to fit into all these other, already established, uh, possibilities for answers where we're not really in that spirit that you just described anymore.

I know you must come up with a lot to, of, up against a lot of resistance because [01:10:00] You're trying to do things, trying to do things differently than the way everyone's kind of stuck doing them can be really hard. Or do you just not look at that and you just kind of continue ahead? 

Georg Northoff: Oh, I had a lot of resistance.

It was, it hurt me very much because I didn't understand where the resistance coming from. So the good thing is I learned to understand the presuppositions, why they became resistant or why they're resistant. So for instance, you know, When your papers are rejected, and they say, okay, your spatial temporal approach, and you're so proud of it, and then it comes back and rejects it, it's completely trivial what you're doing, that hurts.

Andrea Hiott: Of course. 

Georg Northoff: But the way out of it is saying, okay, maybe, why do they say it's trivial? So now I understand my opponents very well. So it's easier for me. And now I'm, I'm, I'm, now I'm a little bit in a No, it's getting better. So I think that the time speaks for me. Also, I see a lot of young people coming to us.

I can see a lot of people taking this up, so I [01:11:00] think the time is speaking for me. Usually you wouldn't say this as a scientist in my age, but and I'm more than excited than ever. So I feel almost like a little kid who finally got his tool and can play around and say, now I can finally, now I can get up and walk around and can make a mess in this kitchen and find out how the kitchen works before I couldn't walk, let's say when I'm one and a half years old.

So sometimes I feel a little bit like that. So for me, it's. Uh, and you know, it, it's very easy to get bitter. It's very hard because it's really tough. I mean, it's really tough. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. You're really supposed to publish a certain quota and you're really supposed to fit into certain things and you get a lot of negative feedback just as part of the course.

Like that's part of built into the process, much less if you're doing something new, which scares people. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah. But, uh, still you see how I, my way, I have a certain tunnel vision. Of course I'm [01:12:00] still very open. Um, but now, particularly now, because I think maybe we really hit upon something, we knock on nature's door, and that, of course, is so fascinating.

And yeah, as I said, I'm also lucky I get a lot of clever students coming from all over the world, which is also very nice, and that's really motivating. Yeah. I think it 

Andrea Hiott: does. And you have a good atmosphere, um, that you let people explore what they're good at, but also, I mean, it is, you are keeping things, um, very scientific, you know?

So it's not just this kind of, uh, everyone just explore their ideas, but in a lab meeting, it's incredibly scientific. You could hardly understand half the stuff going on cause it's so mathematical and like, you know, it's wonderful, but there's all these new theories and ideas and, you know, tools that everyone understands.

All the students are really quite, um, uh, they, they have a lot of skills and skills, like very practical skills, whether it's coding, whether it's mathematical, whatever. But then it does, there is always a moment [01:13:00] where they're, it touches on these bigger issues, which I think is very important for all of us as students, as teachers, as whatever we are, because trying to forget that, that, Motivation is part of why we're doing it can result in perhaps some spatio temporal problems, right?

For us. In the way that we were 

Georg Northoff: discussing. So I have the association now of a dancer. I think it's a good, good example. So a dancer, they need to do a lot of physical stuff. I mean, you can't imagine how much they have to start early. So much training. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. 

Georg Northoff: A lot of training. But the real purpose is expressing the music.

So once they have the good physical training, then they really can start doing art. Before it's just a craftsmanship. But then they can do up. So same here. So just having some skills and applying them in a mechanical way doesn't mean that you're a scientist. You have the skills and then you can play around and then you can start doing science.

[01:14:00] And I think we often confuse it these days because it's so method driven. Okay, you have a method, now you apply the method and that's it, paper published, boom, PhD, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yeah, but that's not science starts then when you think you are finished. Then you need to think. How can you use this method?

What does this method might imply about the brain? And what does not? And maybe I need some other methods for my question. And maybe the method also gives me an idea of what kind of question I can ask. So suddenly I see a new question. This is the most exciting moments for me when some of my clever students bring in a new idea.

Wow. Bingo. Let's do that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's fantastic. So you see how method and target. question are intertwined, but they're not the 

Andrea Hiott: same. That's beautiful. It's almost like a craft to think of science almost like as a, you really have, even the way you described it, all these years of almost like apprenticeship where you're really [01:15:00] learning, but you're, you know, you're learning towards acts and action too.

And sometimes that action is, it is like a dance, right? I mean, in the best moments in science, they do feel like the best moments. uh, when you're dancing or when you're running or when you're, you know, there's a similar, there's something similar there. 

Georg Northoff: Yeah. Yeah. I do a lot of running. So that's why I have my flow feeling, but sometimes also, so when this feeling is No, I don't.

Running is my meditation. Running 

Andrea Hiott: is your meditation. That's my meditative 

Georg Northoff: like state. See, for me, meditation, sitting there and doing it, would not be the right sign of induction practice. 

Andrea Hiott: Exactly. That's your, your spatio temporal pattern wouldn't align well with that. 

Georg Northoff: No, no. But 

Andrea Hiott: running, it's almost like you get to the same space.

Yeah. 

Georg Northoff: Does that ground you in your 

Andrea Hiott: science? Like can you feel that? So the 

Georg Northoff: running is very, because here, so I run, of course, for the sake of running, but also for the sake of nature, because here in Ottawa, in Canada, the nature can be really beautiful and I enjoy this. And then I really [01:16:00] become part of the nature.

It's just unbelievable. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, you feel at one with it or something. Do you think of it as aligning spatio temporally? 

Georg Northoff: Yeah, yeah, exactly. 

Andrea Hiott: It feels like that, doesn't it? 

Georg Northoff: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no difference anymore between you and the nature of it. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, which is kind of what meditation is trying to do too.

You get to a place where you forget yourself, but you're completely aware of yourself. That's some strange thing. Yeah, 

Georg Northoff: they call this non dual awareness. Yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: there's many ways to that. You've also situated yourself in a place that has a lot of checks and balances regarding what we just talked about because you're doing the empirical work, studying, you're thinking about it philosophically, you have all these people around you doing both, but you're also literally still in touch with patients.

So I did want to add that too, that I think that must also help, help in all these ways that we've been talking about in terms of making new discoveries and also not taking the rejection too seriously because you're, you know, you're not sitting only on the sixth [01:17:00] floor thinking about all these things, you're really enacting them too.

Georg Northoff: Yeah, it's a nice thing. So, uh, somebody asked me where I get my ideas from. The, the main, two main sources are the philosophy and the patients, what they tell me. So my neuroscience can be understood from those two angles. And if you don't have that background, you will have a hard time understanding. Yeah.

Because a lot's coming from the subjective experience of the patients and from the philosophy background. And you see how my favorite philosophers were already, some of them are clear.

 Tell me about some of your favorite philosophers. 

Georg Northoff: Philosophy block, um, yeah, so obviously, uh, the expert of course is clear, uh, already knows Kant is for me indispensable.

It's, it's, so when I read, so I read the Critique of Pure Reason, everybody reads it different. as an attempt to bring together the logical and the natural world. He uses terms like synthesis, which is of course a term of [01:18:00] the natural world, and he uses concepts and categories, which are concepts of the logical world.

And the way he tries to do this, and to be honest, I think ultimately fails, uh, it's just amazing. I mean, this is, so for me, good philosophy is not the answer. is the questions you try to address. Because you find new questions which are lurking behind the curtain slash the phenomena. Yeah? And a little bit, I try to do the same with, I shift the question from the relationship of mind and body to the one of world and brain, because I think I can address the questions.

the former better with them. Yeah. So that I think the Kant is just unbelievable. Of course, the, uh, uh, Descartes is a fantastic philosopher. I think always bashing him as a, as a, as a dualist is unfair. Uh, many people say that I'm very close in my thinking to Spinoza, which is very interesting, but I don't have that much background by Spinoza.[01:19:00] 

Uh, Aristotle, Aristotle, of course, is always a strong philosopher, for me more than Plato. Obviously, that's clear. I'm too much of a natural world person than a logical person. Another philosopher from whom I did actually all my master's thesis and everything about was Husserl. Husserl, of course, was a phenomenology.

And what I admire in Husserl is his development. So he started with the logical investigations. Now I know a little bit for the experts, but and then he really developed all the concepts to the life. So he constantly asked new questions. So that I really admire that throughout life. He constantly put himself into new position and relativize things and searched further.

I love that. It's for me. I respect that a lot. A person whom I personally don't like, but his questions are good as Heidegger. It's clear why I'm saying that being in the world, I think, is true, but I think there's [01:20:00] also a lot of metaphorical things. Uh, I think there needs to be more philosophical substance, but it aligns really well with some of my ideas.

And then, uh, you may wonder, contemporary philosophers, it's Thomas Nagel, I think he's really read in the wrong way. He's much deeper and much more sophisticated than he's made in analytic philosophy. Sorry to say, I'm not really a big friend of analytic philosophy anymore, uh, because it's just too narrow and too sterile.

And even if they talk about empirical data, they do it in a logical sense. Philosopher completely from a different angle contemporary is MacDowell. I don't always agree with that. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. 

Georg Northoff: Uh, but the idea of a logical space, CELAS. logical space of nature, logical space of reason, and how McDowell tries to link them, but he comes of course from the logical end.

I would say no, no, no, you need a spatial temple space of nature. [01:21:00] Yeah, so that I think, but this gives good. And then, um, um, so I think Uh, Searle, Searle, not as much appreciated as Nadel, but I think also he raises some good questions. And then I was actually, because of my Taiwan and Chinese connection, I have very strong connections.

I also have a very good friend who is also a very good friend of mine. He introduced me to Chinese philosophy. Uh, Jiangzhi, the old Jiangzhi Daoist philosopher, uh, it's amazing, and he even wrote a paper which is only published in Chinese, but not in, uh, English, about the Copernican Revolution in, obviously, in philosophy, in Kant.

In Heidegger, in Whitehead, and in 

Andrea Hiott: Jung. 

Georg Northoff: It's only in Chinese available and I think that sheds a light on the state of philosophy in the [01:22:00] Western world.

Many know him. Zhang is an old Taoist philosopher, goes back to the, uh, about the ancient Greek time in China. And he has some beautiful, uh, yeah, they have always these metaphorical stories. Uh, the butterfly, the dream of the butterfly. Some people might know, 

Andrea Hiott: uh, the 

Georg Northoff: blue fish and yes, many for

so it's really amazing. And I think he really, and that's why it's for me. So amazing. He really understood how men is integrated, embedded. as part of nature. When you go to Beijing, there's a temple of heaven, and that's basically the connection to nature. And even the emperor bowed in front of this temple.

So this nature, and the Chinese, they never came up with the idea of a separate world, a purely logical world, because we were [01:23:00] embedded in part of the natural world. So that's for me really, uh, Um, so it's really ecological ontology, as some people describe my ontology, my special temple ontology. So it's amazing.

And that's why I say, and this is very important because they understand how to view humans or men from the viewpoint of the world and the nature. So a non anthropocentric view, because whereas the Western and the European centric people always view. world and nature from the perspective of humans. It's a very anthropocentric thing.

And that of course goes back, that's for me the quest for the Copernican revolution. So that's why I'm crazy about this. And in my 2018 book, Spontaneous Brain, I have a whole part on the Copernican revolution. And this paper where I compare this, uh, Kant, Whitehead, Heidegger, and Jung is exactly, uh, about the Copernican revolution.

Andrea Hiott: That's only in Chinese though? [01:24:00] 

Georg Northoff: Only in Chinese. Of course, I have an English version, but, I think it, it's, it reflects upon what's going on in Western philosophy that I cannot publish things like that. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: It reminds me of something else I put down for us to talk about, but we didn't quite get to is this point of view.

Um I feel like that's such an important concept and I think it's in spontaneous brain that you really unpack it, 

like how do we get, it's something I think about a lot too in my work, how do we get outside of this spatio temporal pattern in, and of course we do it through telescopes, through microscopes, through books, through movies, like that's what we're always trying to do is share these other scales of, of view.

Do you see that as fractal? Do you see that we're do you see the us as learning from each other and developing towards something new? I mean, maybe that's kind of part of what you're trying to do with your work too is take all these positions, look at all these positions, look from these positions.

I think it's very [01:25:00] interesting that you said her soul and, um, this phenomenological tradition is important to you because that's, that goes back to that subjectivity, right? Of really what you said motivated you is trying to understand. And you do, you're always trying to understand what is the self and how can we understand another self.

And I don't know, I'm saying a lot of things, but I wonder how you think of all this, because it can feel very linear and either or, and this is like about beyond dichotomies. So how do you see, is your work practicalizing some of that? I mean, I 

Georg Northoff: mean, first I would say just We are one fractal within the many fractals of nature.

And we are like just one little Russian doll among the many. One little Chinese crystal ball within among the many crystal balls. Yeah, I mean, this is, you see me smiling. So this is what we are, not more and not less. Yeah. Which is wonderful. 

Andrea Hiott: But, yeah. 

Georg Northoff: And that's what I try to bring out and see my work is really, if you want to characterize, I'm [01:26:00] against dichotomies because they're based, yes, they're logically justified.

dichotomies. Yes, if you have a purely logical point of view, yes, but in the natural world, you do not have dichotomies. You have continua, you have, uh, gradation, and that's key for nature. Yeah, otherwise, so the natural world, now speaking to philosophers, cannot be completely one to one equated with the logical, yeah, and with a purely, and that means that purely logical conceptual methodology will remain insufficient to grasp the natural world.

You need to combine it. That's what I mean by non reductive neurophilosophy, yeah? That's basically a method, a systematic method, how to link science and philosophy in a systematic way. That's basically what I'm doing. And what I'm doing with that is, from my point of view, nothing new. When you go back to the 19th century, Schopenhauer, I forgot [01:27:00] Schopenhauer, one of my Schopenhauer is crazy,

Schopenhauer, you read his papers, his books, I mean, he goes into biology, into chemistry, and wrote a whole thing about the earthquake in Lisbon. Leibniz, of course, goes without saying, mathematics, Descartes. That's where I see myself in that tradition. Yeah. So, but that has been lost in the 20th century because since philosophy thought it has itself distinguished from the science and then it completely went on the logical track slash analytic philosophy.

Yeah. And we're still suffering. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It's like we've taken language or this representations that we use to communicate about the world as the world itself in some weird way. Um, and then just gotten, I think I agree with you about analytic philosophy. Absolutely. It can be very good to study for critical thinking.

I think it can be even essential, like everyone should probably have to learn how to think [01:28:00] critically. And analytic philosophy does that. But just to get stuck in there and that becomes the kind of, the whole landscape in which problems need to be solved. It feels very, yeah, like, reductive and 

Georg Northoff: Yeah, I think, I think it's a confusion between method and problem, between method and question.

Yeah, if you take the question problem to be identical with the method, that's the way you end up. It's just one method to address a problem. 

Andrea Hiott: That kind of gets back to what I was trying to get at at the very beginning about the way that we think of all these terms like mind and brain and space and time, there's a way in which we can unstick from all that and see all of those things as something like language or like representations that we've been using. Like, of course, if you take any one point of view, you could probably find an opposite. from that kind of point of view, but we're trying to zoom out and understand, there's always these fractal, many, many, nested is a word you use a lot, points of view, and like, how can we start to understand that even though we use something like [01:29:00] dichotomy or dualism or analytic philosophy to help us think better and understand the world, it's not like the territory, it's the map.

Georg Northoff: Right, right, right, yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: Well, thanks so much for, for all of this is there, but is there anything else, like, before we go? No, I 

Georg Northoff: think we covered a lot of ground. Yeah, we did. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: All right. Well, thanks so much, Georg.