Complexity Fatigue & the Third Entity with Beck, Shay and Penijean

Participatory sense-making is a term coined by Hanne De Jaegher & Ezequiel Di Paolo. Both these philosophers will be featured in upcoming episdoes.

Andrea Hiott hosts Rebecca Todd, Shay Welch, and Penijean Gracefire explore intricate themes of participatory sensemaking, the concept of the 'third entity,' and the impact of trauma and love on interpersonal relationships. The discussion delves into how the body acts as a data-gathering device, how sensory inputs shape our understanding of the world, and the importance of mutual sense-making in a highly complex and often overwhelming environment. Each speaker shares their unique perspectives and experiences, from cognitive neuroscience to ethical interactions, ultimately highlighting the significance of staying connected both with others and oneself. This conversation is intellectually stimulating and emotionally enriching, drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, and mental health to offer fresh insights into navigating the complexities of human interaction.

00:00 Introduction to the Body as a Data Gathering Device
00:57 The Futility of Communication and Social Media
02:35 Welcome to Love and Philosophy
02:52 Participatory Sense Making and Social Cognition
04:46 Meet the Three: Beck Todd, Shay Welch, and Penijean Gracefire
05:46 Rebecca Todd: Cognitive Neuroscience and Life Experience
08:13 Penijean Gracefire: Neurotechnology and Human Function
12:21 Shay Welch: Philosophy, Public Art, and Participatory Sensemaking
15:50 Exploring the Concept of the Body
23:09 The Role of EEG in Understanding the Brain
52:36 The Impact of Trauma on Sensemaking
53:25 Introduction to Anchors and Interactions
54:14 Effortful Sense Making Shaped by Love
55:16 Individual Differences in Sensory Systems
56:24 Neuromodulation and Sense Making
59:24 Visualization and Communication Challenges
01:03:07 Complexity Fatigue and Bandwidth
01:14:11 Neuromodulation Device Experiment
01:20:35 Participatory Sense Making with the More-than-Human World
01:29:34 Challenges of Virtual Interaction
01:36:48 The Futility and Hope of Communication

L&P Newsletter

PSM Paper

A Multiplicity of Worlds

What is Participatory Sense-making and Why Should We Care?

Transcript

Complexity Fatigue and The Third Entity

Penijean: [00:00:00] Conceptually the body is a data gathering device. So sensory inputs come in and then we are trying to make sense out of those inputs. We're trying to construct some sort of understanding about the world. 

Rebecca Todd: the body is an ecosystem that includes the brain, but is not restricted to the brain.

And that the, the mind is the, that ecosystem in the world. 

Shay: You would think that between people who can't make sense, they're the ones who are making sense the most, even if it's bad sense, 

Rebecca Todd: You argue all the time. It's nonstop, right?

But, but there is you also feel that third entity and the third entity is so shaped by love. And that's what I noticed. 

Penijean: is it if I don't like what's happening, if I don't like what's happening in my body, if I don't like what's happening within my relationships, if I don't like what the world is doing to me, is it mutable?

Is it changeable? 

I arrived at the [00:01:00] profound relief of the realization and acceptance of the futility of communication.

And by that I mean that I had thought it was my responsibility for almost my entire life. It was my responsibility to manage. My communication with other people in such a way that they would understand what I was saying and see my perspective and replicate my perspective, 

Shay: I am sort of in a place where I feel people's social media needs to be taken away from them, and then they need to be forced into a room with other people and made to sit there and hash it out, or whatever.

Penijean: The number one thing I think that's helpful for anybody is learning how to recognize when you're, when you're hitting the end of the ramp, because the responses to being overwhelmed or overstimulated or, you know, complexity, fatigue, the responses [00:02:00] to things being too complex is either to shut down or to go full suplex, right?

Shay: People are so shaped by trauma because there is so much sensemaking going on because there's such a desperate need to make sense of what's happening   

Rebecca Todd: and the third entity is whether when, when the dance is not any one person, making choices and making decisions, but the agency is sort of in this third entity that is greater than the sum of the dancers. 

Penijean: if we don't care enough to wanna connect with each other, we do not persist in the conversation. 

Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy, complexity, fatigue. that term probably speaks for itself regardless how you're coming to the idea of complexity. but I think I wanna let this conversation be what it is stand for itself. It's, an experiment or an example of participatory sense making social cognition.

This idea of the third [00:03:00] entity, which we talk about a lot here. So if you and I come together and have a conversation, there's something that is the third entity, which is us in interaction. It's our relationship as one thing while we're connecting and communicating, and we have these all day, all the time in many different ways.

We create meaning together in this way. At some level, we could even think of the entire world and every relationship, even the ones that we have as our bodies through something like this lens of interaction. Everything is interaction, everything is relation. I'll link to a lot of papers about that in terms of the more detailed and academic senses of all these words, but I just encourage everyone to think about.

Participatory sense making in whatever way that hits you right now. And what sort of sense are we making together? What meaning are we making together? As a world right now in our conversations [00:04:00] in what we prioritize and what we seem to agree is important or is successful, And the ways we do that is through making sense together towards different options than perhaps the ones that are making us rather tired or rather overwhelmed at the moment. I want us to have hope to really believe in the power of love. I don't care if it sounds cheesy. The fact that it sounds cheesy is part of the problem right now.

Perhaps because I. Making sense together. Making meaning together, making life together, making love together. This is why we're here and this is how we find new worlds that we wanna live in. This is how we make new ways, and this conversation is an example of all of these things that I'm talking about with three remarkable women, Rebecca, Todd, Shea Welch, and Penny Jean Grace Fire.

[00:05:00] They will all introduce themselves, so I won't. Give a long introduction here, but their neuroscientists, philosophers, mental health counselors, working with brainwaves, working with philosophical texts and words, but very concerned with the idea of participatory sense making. And this is a very rich conversation, a very real conversation.

It's not always optimistic, but it's authentic. And with a lot of heart, and I hope you enjoy it. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support and wherever you are today, I hope you make some sense of the world with others in a way that uplifts you. I.

Rebecca Todd: So, my name is be Todd and, for work, I am a professor at the University of British Columbia in the psychology department and at the Center for Brain Health. And, um, my research is in the [00:06:00] general area of cognitive neuroscience, how patterns of brain activity sort of map onto to what we, understand as, as cognitive processes, like attention learning and memory.

and I've really been interested throughout my work in how our, how our life experience, um, shapes us so that we see certain things in the world and don't see others, and as a result of seeing them or hearing them, but that we perceive some things and not others of all the things that are in the world.

And by perceiving those things, also think about them. Remember them. Learn about them in certain ways. And so I think that's something that's interesting in on a lot of different levels. And lately I've been very interested in studying something that in adults has not been very well studied, which is how the dynamics of our interactions with other people actually shape what matters [00:07:00] to us and therefore what we actually perceive of the world.

And I think that is the area where, in different ways I overlap with both Penny, Jean and with Shay. 

Andrea Hiott: And you also have written some really beautiful articles which talk about, about that work and about their work, which I'll definitely link to. 

Rebecca Todd: So I do, I write a Substack newsletter where I kind of think out loud about the things that really interest me and have the privilege of interviewing interesting people, like the people here today.

Andrea Hiott: It's actually very good writing too. I think you must be a journalist in your other life. But 

Rebecca Todd: I was a journalist in this life actually. Oh, in this life, okay. Even closer myself. Is that, this is my second career before I came back, went back to school actually in my forties, I mean, no, sorry, thirties.

I turned 40 in grad school. So my late thirties I went back to school, but before that I was working as a, as a choreographer, a contemporary dance choreographer, and a journalist writing about the arts. 

[00:08:00] So that's, we share that life. 

Andrea Hiott: We share that. We both went back to school in our thirties at least, so Yeah. She, or penijean or whoever wants to go. Penny that was 

Shay: right into you. 

Penijean: Well, all right then. 

Shay: Yeah. 

Penijean: My name is Penny Jean Grace Fire, and I am a licensed mental health clinician who specializes in neurotechnology. And part of the reason I went that direction is that, um, anyone who has sat on a couch across from a person on another couch and attempted to exchange information can probably recognize the inherent limitations in that informational exchange with another person.

And so my, my core interest has been how do I data gather about how people work and how they construct their kind of unique individual experiences of their environments in their world, and then communicate that to other people. And what are, what are the actual, possible, tangible, measurable, [00:09:00] observable.

Data points about human function can we actually gather to try to match the narrative that people develop for themselves and talk about. And so for me that that ended up being neurotechnology. can we measure brain activity and what it's doing to give us insight into how people construct that lived experience that they then try to communicate to each other.

Andrea Hiott: Wonderful. 

Shay: penny, did you not want to say what your company is or the name of your fancy,   

I also founded Brain Star Innovations, which is a research and design and consulting company specifically around helping to bring newer, maybe more, let's just say we're trying to take advantage of the actual advances in technology that we have to bring products to a wider accessibility and affordability level so that anybody can just do, anybody can look at their brain and actually look at the information and do something with it.

Penijean: For example, [00:10:00] I follow a tattoo artist that I, I follow this guy for like seven years on Instagram, and a couple of days ago I was scrolling. Turns out he got one of those little more accessible, affordable little EEG headsets and he is measuring somebody's e, EG and then turning it into, you know, images and line art that he can then.

Tattoo onto them so he can, look at their brain states and then make tattoos out of visualizations of that data. And the humorous element is that when I followed him seven years ago, I thought, you know, I'm really into EEG. This guy's line work looks like it's perfect for doing like a unique EEG tattoo of me on myself of my own brainwaves.

One day when I want to do that, I'm gonna put this guy first to the line and reach out to him. Seven years later, he's out here. Naturally being, being drawn towards sort of the artistic capability of taking bio data about ourselves, visualizing, and then turning it into art. [00:11:00] And I was like, yeah, we're all drawn towards this idea of understanding ourselves and expressing that through art.

And as the technology becomes more affordable and usable, more people are like, yeah, I would love to find out what is going on with myself and express it. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And just for, if there's anyone who doesn't know what EEG is, maybe you could just really quick 

Penijean: Sure. Yeah. So EEG stands for electroencephalogram in electrical and stuff is Brain Go is picture Instagram.

So it's a picture of the electrical activity in your brain. Most people have seen the little squiggles maybe on TV or like a, a medical drama show or even potentially in real life. We're, we're essentially measuring what the brain is doing at any given point in time and over the last 20 to 30 years, the an analytical programs, we have to turn those little data points into significant meaning that's [00:12:00] representing like human function experience has really just rocketed.

So we're at a pretty fascinating point in like human capability and development where we can understand things and have insight about things that wasn't possible even 20 years ago. 

Andrea Hiott: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Penijean: Okay, 

Andrea Hiott: Shay. 

Shay: Okay. Um, I am the glue that holds us all together, or at least that stuck, got us stuck together.

I am Shay Welch. I am an associate professor of philosophy at Spelman College. I do all kinds of. Weird things, that range all the way from like feminist ethics to public art to, to the cognitive science aspect of it. And so there are two, two sides of my research right now.

So like, one side of it is related to the participatory sensemaking, which I assume that [00:13:00] we'll talk about, about the way that bodies can communicate between each other purposefully through the use of public art in public spaces. And then, and that's where Penny, Jean, and Beck got involved with me because Penny Jean was running EEGs on people while.

They were watching the artist perform, and then Beck came in and helped me do some experiments and some ethnography work. And then we were talking about the, the neuroscience of it all in terms of the participatory sense making. and then my work also relates to both of them in another direction, which is that they're both interested in the ways in which the brain figures out what matters to themselves in interaction with other people.

So like how interactions with other people determine the way that people see the world in [00:14:00] terms of what is valuable to them for shaping their own lives. And so I use that information to also talk about the reciprocal nature of how that works, about how. People are subject to the treatment of others and then see the world in a certain kind of way, and then that boomerangs back.

Mm-hmm. And they start to enact the world in a certain way that, especially in trauma cases, which Penny Jean is also related to that can cause disruptions in the ability to have a symmetrical comprehension of the dynamic. And so then you have people who can't make sense of each other because one person's worldview has been shaped in terms of what matters or is significant through a traumatic lens.

And then so it just kind of boomerangs back and forth where there's just disruptive attempts to make sense between each other and is typically [00:15:00] constantly resulting in failures of communication and abilities to make sense. So I guess I take more of like the ethical, interpersonal aspect of what Beck and, and Penny Jean do.

So it sort of starts with Beck being very science, neuroscience brain, and then Penny Jean gets more interpersonal. And then I am literally at the applied ethical interaction stage. So we make a, a nice line between each other in terms of a direction.

Andrea Hiott: So all of you together can solve everything. The three of you have everything. Yes. Naturally. With enough wine, we'll all be waiting. no, but it's, it's very fascinating that it's so many different sides of, of are we trying to understand? what, what's going on? We all have different sensitivities.

We all have. Different, perceptions. maybe we can start with the body. What is the body for you? And by the way, feel free to ask each other questions or whatever you want. everybody can do whatever they want here, but I wanna think about the body and how you think of it. Is it a [00:16:00] interface for all this stuff that you all just described?

Is it 

Shay: beck, I'm calling on you because I know y'all are just gonna sit back and like, wait so. 

Rebecca Todd: Yeah. that, that's a really good question. I mean, to me, as somebody who has for my academic career, studied mostly the brain as a part of the body, I think that the body is an ecosystem that includes the brain, but is not restricted to the brain.

And that the, the mind is the, the, that ecosystem in the world. So I think of the body of being a certain level of ecosystem that is, that contains maybe smaller micro ecosystems of which we can look at. We can think about the brain as one of those, but again, not as an isolated one. Um, and then that ecosystem, of course, that is the body is embedded in larger ecosystems of.

Culture and family [00:17:00] and, and na the, the more than human world. Um, it's embedded in all of these. so I see it as being sort of one scale of ecosystem within ne nested ecosystems at different scales.

Andrea Hiott: Is it kind of the ultimate ecosystem, or not ultimate, but if you're thinking about sense making and participation on the most kind of normal level, even dance. you know, because we separate the body into all these different senses and we kind of It's all categorized into million Many different ways, but in just an everyday interaction, is the body is it our way of being in that situation or, The word interface comes up a lot. But I wonder what that really, 

Penijean: you know, it's a wild 'cause I'm literally sitting here going, I'm trying to find another word besides interface.

Yeah, I hate 

Andrea Hiott: that word. That's why I was hoping someone would say no. Yeah. But it does kind of, because it's this, it's this place as, as Beck just was saying, like we could look at any sort of membrane, right. As an interface and all these different nested levels but I guess I'm trying to get into, someone mentioned, I think Shay you talked about how you were [00:18:00] looking at the EEG recordings while someone was watching a dance performance.

I think you and Beck are also doing something like that of thinking about a performance and what was happening there. So are you thinking of it as you're trying to understand this body in relation to this external world? Are you trying to understand the inside and the outside or how, how can people understand what, what's really going on here?

Shay: Um. So the whole time that y'all are talking and y'all are saying things like ecosystem and interfaces, I'm just thinking like a wet sponge that just goes out into the world and it's just kind of like leaking affect and then it like absorbing affect and then you can squeeze it and then it just leaks more affect, you know what I mean?

It's slightly so like in my mind there's this wonderful little like cartoon shaped body that's like swirling in colors and I'm just like, you know, in my mind it's like, oh, affect is just pumping out and affect is sopping in and then the [00:19:00] emotions are all coloring all over the body. And so, so Beck's like ecosystem and I'm thinking, oh, I am very unsophisticated in my conception of the body.

because I just being like the ethicist. Aspect of it, you know, thinking of the body as nowhere in sense maker an actor. Right? It doesn't seem, the body doesn't seem to me to be a place, or a space or a thing or a, I feel like the body as person, right? The body as person, frolics about the world and just has this permeable interchange with everything that's going around it between the sun and the sound of the ice cream man, and like all of these responses to it and sending it out and, you know, it's, it's a.

Dogs are barking when you're walking by and the wind is blowing into your eyes. And like, [00:20:00] and I'm just thinking of like the, you know, the person in the body and like everything is making sense on the body and through the body and then coming out of the body. And so for me it's just this big whirlwind that's going around having these whirling interactions with other bodies and, and that's, 

Andrea Hiott: that's good.

That's messy. And that's good you brought that up. 'cause there's not these little nice, neat loops like the ones we draw in pictures of all these kind of things happening. It is very messy. But, but we're not stuck in our bodies. We're not stuck in our heads, we're not in the world or 

Shay: I think it's everywhere.

I mean, we're in the world and I mean, we have a head, the head is in the world and the, the world is, but the world is also on our head. Right. So it's, it's, for me, it's always thinking about the fact that we are. We are not enacting the world, without the world enacting itself on us. And so whatever push there is, there's a [00:21:00] push back from whatever it is.

Right. and, and always trying to think about the body is in interaction, like it's in interaction all the time. and so because it's always making sense of the world and it's always having a response to the world, even if it's dialed down, I know if I am. On the phone, but I'm walking to the park or whatever, you know, I'm paying attention to my phone call, but I'm also paying attention to the way that the earth feels beneath my feet.

And I'm also paying attention to the ways in which the wind is blowing. And I'm also, you know, I'm paying attention to all of these things and all of those things are talking to me at the same time. I have so many different interactions going on with my body. I think sometimes our body is so enacting in relation with the world in so many different ways that it's, it's almost incalculable in Cal.

Mm-hmm. 

Andrea Hiott: Can't 

Shay: [00:22:00] calculate the extent to which we're literally in interaction in our spaces. Right. So, I guess, and I don't think that it's messy. I think that it's ginormous and exciting, right?

So I think of it in this really bubbly, kind of exciting, dynamic way instead of like, concerns for all the leakage.

Andrea Hiott: But when pen, and you're pen, I have this like French way of saying your name, sorry, pen. Pen. but when you're, you can actually sort of, you know, you, you can, you can measure, is that the right word? Sure. These. Frequencies, these, brainwaves of, of a person. So how do you see that? That's because there's some modulation, right?

There's something the way that I'm gonna be in the world and, and what you're gonna measure, that's happening to me when I watch Shay dance or something. When I [00:23:00] watch Shay, the aerial dancer is gonna be different than Beck. So what's that? Or is that, is that right? Is that what you see in your work? 

Penijean: I am going to appropriate Shay Beck's phrase, participatory sensemaking and redeploy it in the way that I would potentially use it myself.

So if we're gonna break down the concept of making sense, then, then sensory inputs come in. Conceptually the body is a data gathering device. So sensory inputs come in and then we are trying to make sense out of those inputs. We're trying to construct some sort of understanding about the world. and I think for a lot of us, it's quite true that we don't do purposeful intentional evaluation or data gathering behaviors to actively, intentionally [00:24:00] participate in the ways that we make sense of the world.

And so I think for many of us, there's, there's a lot of understandable bandwidth, difficulty, so many things are happening. There are so many data points. We can take in a lot of sensory input simultaneously, but at some point we have to then select or choose what to prioritize or what to pay attention to and what to engage with when we shift from, I'm taking stuff in to now I am responding and I am.

Attempting to make senses sense back to you. I'm participating in the sense making and now you are gonna have a sense of me. And then you were gonna try to make sense of that, and then you're gonna try to express something back and then we participate together in making a third. You know, so as we are constructing our own experience, constructing experience for other people, constructing experience together and trying to communicate about it, as I, as I break down those concepts, the thing that always stands [00:25:00] out for me is how much we intentionally inquire, do data gathering, ask questions, and then attempt to purposefully construct how we make sense out of things and what that means.

And so when we're taking something like EEG and trying to understand, make, make sense out of how to brains work. What is your brain capable of doing? What insights does looking at electrical brain activity give us? everything I'm doing is very inquiry driven because I, as an individual am an incessant question asker who has just attempted to leverage being an annoying kid into a career.

And so when I listened to Beck and Shay talk about this very corporeal physical, you know, invested, interactive experience they have with the world, I reflect a little bit on how I, um, one of the things that's very helpful in a therapeutic [00:26:00] rapport building approach is to genuinely ask somebody sort of towards the beginning of trying to interact with them and understand what's happening, mental or physical health wise is ask them, if I were to ask you.

To physically point at the place where you exist, like you are conceptually there is a you that you conceptualize physically point where you exist. I have had a such a wide range of answers. 

Andrea Hiott: Hmm. Can you share one or two 

Penijean: now? I'm definitely gonna share before, if we were to do that now, if y'all were to physically identify where your sense of yourself exists, where would you point?

Andrea Hiott: I don't think I can point. It feels like, because I've been doing this every single one. You feel your whole body thing, 

Penijean: every single one of you had an initial immediate reflex response to that idea that she was in inhibited and didn't share, and are now thinking [00:27:00] about. If you were to just go back to that first initial impulse you had, what, what was it?

Your whole body, you said. 

Andrea Hiott: For me it was my whole body because I've been trying to do this meditation where I feel myself as my body, so that's lingering in me. You know, where you actually feel your body as it's living. You can almost feel the energy in all of your body if you put your attention on it.

The attention awareness thing is what changes that, I think. But what about Beck? 

Rebecca Todd: Yeah, almost the same, my whole body, but also a little bit of electrical field around it. 

Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. 

Shay: And then I guess mine is like this zoom, zoom through like my fingers and my hands, but so it's like where do I exist? But it also probably makes sense with my like nerve issues because I have.

Nerve sensations that just like go through my fingers up and down, my [00:28:00] legs into my toe. Like, so, and it's kind of, you know, Becca was like the electrical field, whereas like my, even like right now, I just feel electricity like circulating through my body. So I think that like, I don't have a spot. I am, I am electricity.

Uh, so yeah, so my mine's just like racing around, which is cool. It's like a little race track in my body of like electricity. So 

Andrea Hiott: That's good. What about you by the one who asked the question? Did you, do you have, does it, does it always the same answer for you, Benji? So, 

Penijean: so it is interestingly, 

Andrea Hiott: okay 

Penijean: for me, I exist up here.

It's probably about two feet to the left of what I would consider my head to be. Wow. Like this is, I actually, I didn't expect 

Andrea Hiott: that answer. That's fascinating. 

Penijean: Here's what's interesting, and here's part of why I ask these types of questions, right? Is [00:29:00] because, um, the way that we consider an orientation response, a lot of what we do, like cognitively and sub sub cordically and subc cognitively to try to interact with the world is, um, parts of our brain are trying to track what's happening around us to do that data gathering and also to prioritize what's important for like, attention or survival or, you know, social interaction, whatever.

And so all of us have a very visceral, kind, lower brain orientation response that that can be impacted by brain injury or trauma or a lot of other things. So the idea of like where, like that proprioceptive conceptualization, where am I in space? Where are you in space? What does that mean? I'll ask people, people, some, a lot of people put their hands on their belly and say, I'm here.

Some people will say chest. I've had throat, I've had full body, I've had, I don't exist in my body. The description of I'm a field around my body, like [00:30:00] people will say really different things. They usually come in, you know, some, some relational language because I'll say, but you'll notice that I phrased it point at a location in space.

I didn't say point in your body. I didn't say I, I leave it very general and then people interpret that in different ways. So the way they even interpret the question, 'cause I said point and you said, I can't point 

Andrea Hiott: right. It's 

Penijean: right. And so some people have like a, like a pinpoint location that they believe sort of.

And so the, the point of the exercise is even just that early inquiry data gathering stage of going, how am I even supposed to have this conversation with somebody about what they think all body is or who they think they are in relationship or where. How do I have these spatialization conversations without doing a little mapping first?

And we're all doing a certain amount of cartography emotionally or situationally in any given point. And [00:31:00] so the brain mapping, which is what we call it, is us literally doing some data gathering and then trying to lay that information out in kind of these analytical frameworks to then make sense out of what we're looking at.

Right. and I think that the whole reason I went on this arc, it was the participation, the participatory element of the sense making is that I don't think all of us are maybe, maybe the level of map makers that we have the capability of being, and we're not always considering that we've got options and choices.

For how we intentionally drive our interactions with the world. And so really I think everything behind whatever I'm trying to do is can we ask questions that help people better conceptualize or even just be more curious about, is it if I don't like what's happening, if I don't like what's happening in my body, if I don't like what's happening within my relationships, if I don't [00:32:00] like what the world is doing to me, is it mutable?

Is it changeable? Like can I do a different thing? What am I capable of so far as changing my own participatory sense, making procedures? Mm-hmm. Maybe make different sense. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And in a way that's what a lot of the work that you all described at the beginning is oriented towards, helping people.

And as you were asking these questions and we were all answering, I was thinking of two things. One, I. you said your feeling of yourself was to the, to the right. That's very interesting. And I thought, yeah, I kind of understand because sometimes when I'm outside and I see a bird fly or something, I, I kind of have this feeling like I'm the bird for a minute.

There's a sense in which you can kind of fill yourself as other movement. But the other thing was I wonder as a kid, if we are just so immersed in the participation that we don't think of, if you ask a kid, where are you?

Have you ever asked a kid where, where are you? Or point to where you are? I wonder if it's different you said something about awareness or that words come up a few times [00:33:00] too, and. I guess what I'm getting at is a lot of us we notice that we're feeling the world or feeling our bodies differently from others around us at some point, and that's when a lot of these troubles come, that then we're all here trying to heal.

what does that bring up? All that rambling for any of you?

Penijean: The, um, conversation that I had with Beck that turned into part of the recent article she wrote about a multiplicity of worlds. Um, we, in that conversation, we discussed the idea of at what point during your sort of growth, your maturation experience, you start realizing that you are different than other people.

And then how does that affect, your conceptualization and you're trying to interact with the world. And I think Beck probably has some thoughts and insight on that. 

Rebecca Todd: I was thinking actually of what you said. You, you had a very, um, a very clear way of, of, of describing how there was a certain point when you were a kid, where you realized that the way that you were perceiving the world and what you [00:34:00] enjoyed from the world was not what other people perceived and enjoyed.

And, and I think you said very in a, in, in a way that was both articulate and very, very funny in a way that like you, you found that, you were talking about how we tend to be attracted to people who share the sort of same pleasures and dislikes in the world, and that you really didn't feel pulled to interact with the people around you because you didn't take pleasure.

In the same things. So that was, that was one thing that, that really struck me and stayed with me about what you said, penny, Jean. Um, the other thing, and, and, and I think a lot of us probably have very similar experiences. Um, if it wasn't one moment in development, it was just sort of getting that impression over time, you kind of feel different or weird.

But it was interesting. It really struck me, penny, Jean, what you said about that you experience yourself, you know, up into the left [00:35:00] or that's my right, but up, up into your left. because I wonder if how we experience ourselves doesn't change over development in interesting ways. Because I have a memory of when I was about four years old, like right now, after, you know, so many years of doing dance and yoga and feeling my body as like, you know, within, its, its electrical field as a whole.

but when I was about four, I went through a period where I perceived myself sort of from the direction that you described, I, I get probably upper right and I, from the perspective of this very judgy mother and child, I. That would look down on me and comment on me. And later, when I grew up and studied developmental psychology, I realized that that is about the age where you're developing this sort of very, very explicit theory of mind, right?

Where you know that other people have a perspective on you that is not your perspective, and that's when [00:36:00] a lot of shame develops and stuff like that. So I, for me, it was this very literal, and the, and the mother and daughter came from, I think my mother had this book called Mothercraft. And in it there was this photo of this judgey looking mother daughter.

And that was what I somehow was viewing myself from their perspective. And, you know, that was, that was a brief period I, I think, I don't know about before then. I don't have a lot of memory before then. After then, I, I did seem to find myself located much more in my. You know, first person body, but there was a developmental phase and I, I, I, I wonder how common it is that as we learn that other people have perspectives on us that aren't, that are very separate from our own first person experience, that we sort of have these weird shifts of, of how we locate ourselves.

Andrea Hiott: That's wonderful. But you're, you don't have that feeling pin jean. You're not seeing yourself as if you were a critic, a critic or something. When you see yourself to [00:37:00] the left, feel yourself to the left, whatever it is. 

Penijean: So I'm going to try to keep this as brief as possible because I could absolutely talk about this indefinitely.

one of the reasons I think I have a little trouble relating sometimes and have spent so much of my both young and adult, I. Mental energy on the idea of how can I relate more effectively to other people does come from a very early theory of mind conceptualization as a kid, um, but also is born out of.

Um, I have recognized at some point that my experience of life is more of a cumulative historical record than it is a shifting ongoing sort of more, uh, central nowness that many people seem to interact with the world. And a lot of people are very episodic. Like as they change in develop over life, they don't necessarily retain and reference all the way [00:38:00] back to the beginning of historical record in a cumulative way, not consciously.

And I think the fact that I do that, that I remember things from when I was six months. Old, 1-year-old. I have distinct sense memories from very early on that I haven't lost over time and everything accumulates for me. There are two things that come out of that that I think are in some ways useful in other ways, uh, does make it more challenging for me to kind of relate to people in, in helpful ways.

And those two things are that if you think about everything that has ever happened all of the time, at the same time, the amount of bandwidth that that regularly requires from you to sort of engage ongoingly with a, a constant present stream of database, shapes, kind of like what you have available, but also in a way as an exercise, some, I think may have expanded the range [00:39:00] of what I consider to be normal to be thinking about simultaneously all the time.

Hmm. It took me a little bit of effort to understand that that's not like everyone's not working with this big historical matrix regularly as just like a background hub. The second reason that I think this is, um, has kind of shaped everything is because as I realized people don't typically do this, that they're, they sort of move through their lives.

They change, they develop, and it's, it's sort of, they have episodes or errors as the kids say, I'm now entering my era of, um, because I don't sort of live in a, in a period of errors, there's this wrong geological record. That also means that I'm having trouble sometimes sharing experience with other people.

And so if I try to talk about things and, and I see words that make no relational sense to how other people experience the world, I. Then communication is not achieved. So that means that I am regularly operating from a [00:40:00] theory of mind perspective, but I have to constantly think about how other people see me at the same time that I try to think about what's a me?

You're a you, I'm a me. Where a, you know, as I'm, I have to constantly keep all those construction simultaneously, and it's very rare for me to just say things in any sort of unfiltered way without trying to consider how you might be experiencing the thing I'm saying. Mm-hmm. So I genuinely can't live in my body if I wish to interact with other bodies because my, my natural interaction style would be unintelligible to most other people.

Rebecca Todd: Can I jump in with a question? Mm-hmm. Benny, that, that's like really fascinating. Do you, do you know the research that, um, at uc, Irvine, Jim Mcgon, Larry Cahill did on these super, super autobiographical memory people, uh, Joe Price and 

Andrea Hiott: stuff. 

Rebecca Todd: Yeah, yeah. There are [00:41:00] these people who, uh, who, who, like, it sounds a lot like you described.

They can, like any day, you know, you, you name a date, they can tell you what they ate, what they wore, what happened, and, and that they don't, you know, the idea that the idea in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience before these people, you know, before researchers became aware of these people is that we, we've, we need to forget.

We forget for a reason because we don't have the bandwidth to retain it all. But now it appears there are people like you who do retain it all. Are you, are you that extreme and that you can remember? If I could say, you know, um, July 17th, you know, 1983 that you could remember it, or is, are you just, just like very high bandwidth?

Penijean: So it isn't that extreme. In fact, it's not numerical, right? Like a lot of people do. Like when you ask most people like. Tell me what was happening to you in seventh grade. Like people will block their eras out into [00:42:00] grades or when I had which kid, or you know, where I was in my schooling. And so like we, where we lived geographically, if we moved around, most people have ways of blocking out those eras in their life history, right?

Um, I don't really have a good blocking mechanism 'cause it's all just sort of the same thing. And then I use an inquiry mechanism to go in and attempt to like just emerge whatever. I think a salient data bit that I wanna go back and retrieve is, so for me it's almost always conceptual and very rarely that static.

I ate this color apple on this day. Right? Mm-hmm. It's every apple I've ever eaten Mars into concepts of apples into infinity. Now, I say that I think this is part of the reason that my friendship with Shay has lasted as long as it has, and has been as helpful and interesting as it has been is [00:43:00] because, um, I'm a very visual memory person and, and I'm like, I'm like a strong visualizer.

And she and I recently through trying to kind of work on visual aids for educational purposes together, have learned that the way I visualize and the way she visualizes are very different. And I really like every two months, every two weeks, I'm constantly discovering things I didn't realize about people in my immediate vicinity, and then having to update.

The mechanism for information processing. And so even just a recent conversation with Shay, where she was going, explain this brain map to me. And I was like, yes, it's so simple. Just look at the map. And she's like, quit telling me to look at the picture. Just tell it to me in words. I'm like, well, but the picture has the data.

And she's like, tell it to me in words. And I'm like, okay, but I can't separate the words from the picture. And she's like, I'm pretty sure you can quit pointing me at the picture. But it was just that process of like, [00:44:00] for her, the pictorial information was not very useful. And for me, the pictorial information was everything.

Mm-hmm. And us trying to meet in the middle about what was the genuine like concept in between those two conceptual, that was like actually tremendously useful for me. And I'm having experiences with people around me who are really very intelligent and expressive and analytical, but they're not processing and holding content in the same way I do.

So that attempt to exchange content and experience is. I mean, I don't know if anything is participatory sense making except for like exactly what I'm talking about, which is why I'm actually deeply interested in what Shay and or Beck mean when they say like, from a cognitive neuroscience or from a Phil, like an analytical philosophical perspective.

When they say participatory sense making, what did they actually mean? 

Rebecca Todd: Yeah. Well, so yeah. Yeah. 'cause I mean, a lot of things, uh, a couple of thoughts that just came to mind. First of all, the, the, the example you [00:45:00] described, do you think that's partly training? Because you and I are trained to read brain maps, and you showed me your brain maps and I immediately saw what you see.

But Shay is trained in philosophy. She's trained in a very verbal, I, I just, the training is a different way of thinking. So, so, so it's just like you and I have the same like years of. Looking at brain maps and talking to other people that look at brain maps, that when we look at brain maps, we see certain things that are not gonna be apparent to somebody who has spent years training in a whole different other way of thinking.

But the other thing I wanted to say about participatory sense making and to kind of add to what you've been talking about Penny, is um, so first of all, the, the term gets credited to Hana Deger and Ezekiel di de Paolo, uh, they really coined the term. They published a 2007 paper. So I just want to give, uh, to give proper credit to the concept.

Um, and um, and the other thing that [00:46:00] is. I guess a key component to the idea of participatory sense making to me is the fact that beyond the individuals who are constantly trying to make sense of and be, be made sense of, there is the interaction, there's a dynamic of the interaction, it itself, and that takes on a, it's this sort of emergent property, it takes on a life of its own so that we, we participate in it and it participates in us.

And the sense we make is, is, is sort of different with that, uh, with that sort of interactive dynamic, uh, than it would be. Without it. And um, and one reason I'd like to use dance as a way of looking at this is if you look at dancers who practice a form of improvisation called contact improvisation, they talk about something called the third entity.

And the third entity is whether when, when the dance is not any one person, [00:47:00] you know, making choices and making decisions, but the agency is sort of in this third entity that is greater than the sum of the dancers. And I think that's kind of a wonderful way of thinking of it. And when you talk about sort of, when you think about that in ions to say an audience and a performer, you can think about.

Uh, and, and it can be, it can be on a, a highly conceptual level, but also a very embattled bodied kind of pre reflective level, which is where I tend to focus on looking at it. so that you could, for example, measure coordination between, between brainwaves, between heart rates, between movement patterns, between that person in the audience and the performer and, and see the degree to see the frequencies on which they resonate and don't resonate.

I'm interested in, um, in looking at how these different patterns of falling it in, out of coordination, you know, maybe shape, shape our attention. and. They shaped what matters and by shaping what matters [00:48:00] shape our attention. And that's something that's been pretty well studied in, in infancy with between dynamics, between infants and caregivers and how it shapes what they attended and care about, but not so much in adults.

So that's just sort of a, a layer I wanted to add on to what you described. And again, you look at it a very, like, it sounds like your experience is, is very, very conscious and very explicit. You, you have access to what's going on at all of these levels. Whereas I would say, just taking myself as an example, I have ter, I have very, you know, like a DHD, poor attentional resources.

I don't have the bandwidth to do that. So like I, I, I, I feel like a lot of my engagement in those levels is much more pre reflective just because I don't have the bandwidth for it to be reflective. 

Shay: I, I think I was gonna add onto that. Um, the thing about the brain map is like, that's just an example. It's not about training.

Um, you can't show me a [00:49:00] visual cue. Like when people use PowerPoints during presentations, I have to close my eyes or turn away from it. Like, if you give me anything visual, it causes me like literal distress. So Penny and I were having quite a traumatic exchange. It was a very long inter exchange, and I was getting very like, distressed.

And Penny was like, look at the picture. And I was like, penny, please stop telling me to look at the picture. I can't, I can't look at the picture. I was like, traumatized. I was like, stop show. And she would like send to me more pictures and I'm like, penny, stop. Why are you being so mean to me? And it, it's like this weird thing because Penny and I.

They're very similar people and we have very similar histories. And, and if you can tell our communicative styles and our affective styles are polar opposites. So you have like Penny and me in the kitchen and I'm all over the place and I'm hyped up and I'm all arms [00:50:00] swinging around everywhere. And then Penny Jean is just sitting on her stool and she's gathering data from the things that I'm talking about.

And she, you know, I throw things in the air and she. She plucks them out, she sorts them. And it's so, it's like this weird thing where I'm throwing things at her and she's trying to organize them, and I'm like, stop it. Stop it, penny. You know? And and she's like, Shay, it's okay. We're gonna make sense out of this.

It's gonna be, and I'm like, but we can't make sense out of it if you just keep moving it around. And so that's just, she, and I'll just sit there for hours and it's like, that's how we interact. And it's like chaos. It's Becca, I think you saw this with Anne Marie and me, I tend to, and Petty Jean saw this the way that I, I partner up with people who are more organizational.

And so we have these sort of really chaotic interactions that are [00:51:00] fruitful and like sense, fully. Thriving in terms of making sense. And anyone from the outside would be looking at it and being like, y'all are not making sense in any sort of way. So this third entity aspect is really interesting because it really does exist as like, um, like an envelope in a certain sort of way of like the, the whirls of, interaction that's happening that's, that's enveloping both participators or more or whatever.

And when you have people, I tend to think people who have different styles probably make sense together more successfully because there's so much intentional effort that has to go into the communication and it has to be based on a desire. To sustain the [00:52:00] interaction. Right. And so if you're just with somebody who's your own vibe, a lot of things are just flying loose, right?

Just escaping. Mm-hmm. these sort of like loose and chill, vibing and like, I can, I can talk about Penny and May's interactions more specifically in ways that like my friend Carlton will come over and we both just like chill and he like scrolls through Instagram and I color or something and like we just vaguely chat at each other and it's kind of a, a super chill.

But I couldn't tell you anything about any of our interactions, like what's going on. and so I do think, and this is the interesting thing about trauma, is I think that I. People are so shaped by trauma because there is so much sensemaking going on because there's such a desperate need to make sense of what's happening and that the person or environment that would be enacting the traumatic context has [00:53:00] such a need to ignore the sense making interactions.

Right? So it's, it's this weird thing where there's so much investment in the dynamic that you would think that between people who can't make sense, they're the ones who are making sense the most, even if it's bad sense, 

Rebecca Todd: And then in a sense of good sense, like, uh, so you, you use the example, so I've only seen you and Penny Jean interact virtually, but, uh, but I have seen you and Anne-Marie, who is an engineer, a friend of a friend and collaborator of Shay's, who's an engineer, very rational, very organized, um, interact.

They both 

Shay: calm me down. They're both my, an like penny, jean, and, and Annemarie are my anchors. They're the ones who keep me. They step in when I start to spiral and they just like yank me down. Very. So I [00:54:00] 

Rebecca Todd: observed, but I've observed your interactions with Annemarie and you argue all the time. It's nonstop, right?

But, but there is like, you also feel that third entity like, and the third entity is so shaped by love. And that's what I noticed. You know, you've been talking about, you know, sort of the, the situations where, where the capacity for. Sense making is shaped by trauma. But this, this seems to be almost, uh, uh, a, a counter example in, in an interaction where there is more effortful sense making going on, but it's totally shaped by love.

'cause that's what I get from your interactions, uh, that I've observed with, with both Penny, Jean and within Marie. Marie.

Andrea Hiott: Thanks for bringing that up. The, all, everything you just said reminded me also of the writing from both articles, uh, where you're asking kind of how, how do people be in the same place and experience it differently. Um, and also I think it's Bryce maybe who has this, he can't visualize When [00:55:00] Shay was saying, well, but you know, we, we, we persist and that actually makes more sense. But that does kind of, is a kind of love, right? That you have to. Be participating in too or to, to go through that because like these aren't easy things.

Are they, eh, 

Rebecca Todd: Right. I mean, what, what, what both Penny and Shaa have talked about in, in my discussions with them is like the, the different levels at which we live in different worlds from people. So Penny, penny, Jean has also talked quite a bit about how our sensory systems at, at a, at a very sort of basic level are organized differently.

We have individual differences in that, and then there's all the individual differences in experience that cause different things to matter to us. And so we perceive them, you know, we perceive different aspects of the environment. And so you have these sort of layers upon layers of these sort of gulfs between, between us where we, where we live in different worlds and, and you know, so one thing that, um, that, [00:56:00] um.

Penny Jean has talked about is, is like one of her goal, her idea that part of our inability to understand each other. And I think the world right now is an amazingly horrible example of that. Just playing itself out in every way has to do with a lack of bandwidth. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and um, and then I think there's a few things.

So Penny, Jean, you've talked about using neuromodulation to see if you can kick people's brains into a state where they actually are more flexible, can, can hold more things in mind at once. And then, and then also, but then also, um, uh, and you know, but there's also the idea of like, at, at the level of interacting with people.

I think the idea that there does have to be a strong will to make sense together. And if, if there isn't, you know. One, one person is, you know, easily left outta the sensemaking, for example. And Shay, [00:57:00] you've talked about that a lot. People, people who are not, uh, allowed to participate or not listened to because they sense make differently.

You've talked about different, you know, in response to trauma, having just different rhythms, different ways of, of pre reflectively as well as reflectively engaging with others in the world. And that by way of that, rather than others trying to somehow sense make with you to meet you halfway, you end up having to do all of the meeting or you're, you're not listened to.

So I guess those are all sort of things that, that come up for me, that have come out of those conversations that I've had with the two of you. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. There's something you, one of you say in one of those conversations about complexity, fatigue, which stuck with me. and also I think is quite a good I thing to think about right now in the world.

Also with Penny Jean. It was saying, it sounds like what, what you were talking about with your, with your memory and sort of everything coming. Almost like the whole [00:58:00] line of all associations coming at once reminds me of how I felt as a kid in a different way with just being sensory overload. Just, you know, a lot of people have had this where you just, you can't believe how much you're feeling and then you, you, you think everyone else feels that way too.

And then sort of like Bryson in Beck's article, at some point someone shares something with you and you realize, oh, actually everybody's not feeling that way. We all kind of have these, where you just realize maybe you're not seeing the world the way everyone else is.

And I feel like a lot of your work, I think you might've even said this, penny Jean is trying to increase that bandwidth. That's a word that's come up a lot or find ways to help people do that. Yeah. But do you, do you feel like you've been able to change that sensory interface of the body in a way for yourself?

Because when you were describing all that, I was thinking, wow, you've come a long way. if, if as a kid you felt like you couldn't express yourself and you were too overwhelmed by everything, you are now such a wonderful communicator. has it been because of [00:59:00] these tools that we're talking about? 

Penijean: I think actually the answer is both of the themes that we've been discussing this whole time, which is, first of all, you have to care enough to want to keep trying to figure out what is going on with yourself or somebody else, or the third entity, mutual experience you're having and co-creating.

So the reason I kind of harken back to Shay and, and use the visualization differentiation as an example was because this just happened like in the last month or two, and. What it illuminated for me was my sort of ongoing over reliance on visualization and visual data, like my PowerPoint addiction, right?

Like I, if I'm gonna communicate things to people, I'm gonna show them pictures. And pictures are worth a thousand words, right? Everybody likes a good picture. And, and so I had been really kind of relying on this as a way to communicate [01:00:00] complex data. I thought I will simplify complex data so it'll be easier for people to absorb it.

'cause if I just put a bunch of words on a slide or I just say a bunch of words, like, that's gonna be harder. And then here comes Shay with a completely different pro, you know, hierarchy of processing needs. Mm-hmm. And, and you know, capabilities where. The thing I was assuming was gonna make it easier and reduce complexity, fatigue, absolutely stressed her out.

And so the reason I say that, first of all, the, the, the caring and the curiosity has to be there first before anything else works is because if we don't care enough to wanna connect with each other, we do not persist in the conversation. But even if we care, we still have to have some capability, right?

And so Shay and I did actually have like, what was like a three and a half hour conversation where I'm trying to tell [01:01:00] her stuff. She's trying to tell me stuff. I'm like, why isn't it working? She's like, why are you doing this to me? And so like at some point during the conversation, I went to myself, this isn't working.

She's telling you it's not working. You need to listen to her. Understand what you need to do differently. And I had to really confront, because I think of myself as a pretty flexible, adaptable, updating as an ongoing mechanism. You know, think about everybody else, like hold all the possible futures, reference all the possible past, and at some point come up with a thing that's gonna achieve communication and connection.

Like this is the whole vibe, right? And she's like, you are not doing this on a fundamental level with me. And I had to stop and go, okay, this thing that I think I just do, like as easy as breathing, actually I can't seem to do. And what I think is a really simple way with her what is happening. And that [01:02:00] just even my willingness, her willingness to keep reiterating and my willingness to, at finally ninth time she says it go, okay, what's happening?

That sent me on almost like a three and a half week little s. I wouldn't like, I was an existential update because I thought retroactively, how many people have come to my educational sessions or interacted with me or have I tried to explain a brain map to, in the last 20 years who didn't have like an ease of visual processing capability or bandwidth and all I did was overwhelm them with the exact thing I thought would make it easier.

So I had to have a little retroactive crisis and then I had to update and think about, and that required me to expand even more possibilities to hold for how people do or don't receive the information. What does make something [01:03:00] easier, harder? What creates complexity fatigue in more complex ways? And so like just ha like.

I say bandwidth, obviously bandwidth can be a function of how many data bits you're trying to hold simultaneously or can be a function of how much time you have over an arc of processing. Some weeks, some months, some years, right? We can, we can expand out bandwidth in different ways and I had really been focused in some ways, align this idea of doing a lot of things at the same time, which is what a visualization heavy brain thinks about.

Like, put it all up on the, on the vision board and then, you know, pull off the stuff you want. And I really hadn't been considering as much the, the power of sequential processing because to me, sequential processing seemed slower. Right? But there is a real, I, I think a real structural strength. Sequencing as processing as opposed to just [01:04:00] simultaneously.

So even the way I'm considering building bandwidth, right? I was thinking of bandwidth as widen the highway, right? Um, and, and now I'm trying to think about like, okay, let, let's say we've got a, a, can we just get all the cars to move faster on like one lane? Is that an option? Like, could we turn them on to motorcycles or could we pack everybody into a bus?

Like, you know, we've got these transportation options. Like could we just, and so even just that attempt, Shay's willingness to be persistent, my willingness to try to update and expand, like this is a microcosm of what I mean when I say the, the desire to modulate your brain. I am trying to use technology to help introduce possibility or maybe people can't do this volitionally.

But I think that the desire to do something differently is in and of itself what actually [01:05:00] drives ultimately your persistence so that the bandwidth, however that means, can be expanded. I don't think I can do that with my tech, like against someone's will necessarily. Right. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that's just beautiful.

That's what we need right now it also remind me, you said something about the weirdness, right?

Realizing that the weirdness is fascinating or even what you just expressed, which is kind of. Uh, taking that, like realizing that these differences, we do share so much in common, but the differences point us to transformations, openings in the way in those habits. Uh, you, you just came up with a, a different way of, of understanding your work, which is actually so beneficial.

I think so, yeah. There's something about embracing the weirdness and, and call it, and the difference and those points of that are difficulty. That can be, yeah. I mean in, in a way that leads [01:06:00] to, to where we're trying to get to, to in our work. I, in a sense, but Shay, I wonder what all that brings up for you that she was saying, 

Shay: well, I'm interested in the idea of complexity fatigue, because this, I think this goes again to the way that I was describing, depending in my interactions, it's that like.

I'm curious to see what Beck thinks about the differences in What I'm saying is I, I am complexity fatigue like I am. I am the source of complexity fatigue for many of my interactors because my brain works in such a way that I need a whole lot. Like the, the more information about the thing, the more you [01:07:00] can just take around it into like the layers and the layers, like the more simplified it gets for me.

Right. Like the more you can, like, if you just give me like a concept or like Penny, penny is very good about like, putting things in a bus. And if you gimme the bus, I'm like, I don't know what's in the fucking bus. Like, what are you telling me about this bus? Open the doors, let the people out. Can I see the people?

What kind of people are on the bus? What are they wearing? Where are they going? And like, so for me to make any sense of the world, I need the complexity. And Penny has seen me complex myself right into complexity death. So like, I don't hit complexity, fatigue. I just complex and complex and complex about the one thing until I have just destroyed myself.

I, she's seen me do this, like researching something like personal, like, um, but it, it, again, it goes with like, you know, I'm throwing in or like, when people tell me stories, but [01:08:00] they include like, like anciliary, like information. I get really mad. Because I'm like, what is this fluff on the outside the periphery of this conversation?

Like, I need to know like what's, what is happening in very detail. Like what's ha like what kind of facial expressions are they making? Like how strong was their cologne at the time? Was that bothering you and did that make it more, you know? And you know, and I'm just like, build it up, make it complex.

Give it to me so that I understand it so I know it. That's how you simplify it is you make it deep and penny's like, shut up. You're throwing all of these things at me. I'm plucking out as few things as necessary. I'm weeding out and I'm putting 'em on, like I'm putting the bus on the highway and I'm gonna put the highway somewhere.

And, and so it, and I can see like both mine and Penny's ways of interacting the way that our brains work are [01:09:00] nonsensical to probably other people's, even conception of bandwidth. Because I was told, I am told that I give too much detail when I think that that detail is necessary to understand that thing.

And then Penny does a thing where she doesn't give enough detail because she thinks that she's giving you the most simplified form. And then that is its most comprehensive state. And then other people talk to both of us and they're like, I don't understand you. And we're both like, why doesn't anybody understand me?

I don't understand it. I'm so clear about what I'm feeling and what I want. 

Andrea Hiott: So you, you don't have a bandwidth problem then Shay, you, you always have enough bandwidth. Do you think 

Shay: I will bandwidth myself into the ground is the problem. There's no, there's no 

Andrea Hiott: stopping the bandwidth. 

Shay: There's not. And right now I'm going through a situation where my bandwidth is being involuntarily taken from me and it's making it very hard for me to, I.[01:10:00] 

To be an existential being in the world. Um, but I'm interested in Beck, like what are, what are your thoughts about the difference between complex and simplified sensemaking for, for bandwidth and brains? 

Rebecca Todd: Yeah. So, huh, tough question. Um, I, I'm gonna tell you something, uh, though, I wanna add to something you said your description about how you need all of, all of the detail.

Um, and, and that is that, you know, I heard you give the talk a couple of weeks ago at, at Emory Uni University, and, um, what you did with a lot, a lot of information is you told a really clear and coherent narrative. So that at some level you're taking all of that complexity and your way of simplifying it into something that is digestible to others who haven't been immersed in all of the things you've been immersed in is to tell [01:11:00] a story with it and you told a story that was very clear.

Whereas Penny Jean, when she, when she shows me her slides, when she shows me her slide deck of all of her brain data that she collected on you and explains like. For her. I actually, so, so I see it as actually not more simple, because in order to really understand what she is presenting, I need to look at all of her slides and all of the detail.

And to me, they're very detailed and, and every finding is very nuanced, you know, uh, you know, and, and, and requires all of the, and she has lots of qualifications and framing for what you're looking at, what frequency band, you know, what, you know. So, so for, so for me, what, what she does is also very detailed, but it's detailed.

Um, it's detailed in a, in a very sort of neurosciencey analytic way, you know, within, within what I think of as a conventions of neuroscience that we were trained in. Whereas you. So this [01:12:00] incredibly synthetic thinker, Shay, who is able to, to, you know, weave great complexity into these very compelling narratives that just make sense, that bring things together, that like most of us would just see and think, oh my God, it's too complicated.

I can't do anything with it. But, but, but it does, you made, you, you brought like, you brought information from so many different fields together to explain a phenomenon that you were experiencing in a way that made total sense. So to me, when I look at both of you, you both have a lot of bandwidth and tolerance for complexity.

It's just different. Like you, you handle it differently and you have different styles and you have different ways of distilling and simplifying it, but you both have immense amounts of bandwidth. And in talking about the brain, this is something that again, penny, Jean has described. I think a lot of that comes down to the flexibility of your sort of brains, say their large [01:13:00] scale networks, right?

These sort of networks of groups of brain regions that tend to sort of just dance together, in particular configurations. But like any dance, they hook and unhook, right? Like different, different systems will like doey dough and dance with one system and then dance with another system. I think that the more flexibility these systems have in sort of reconfiguring themselves, then probably the more bandwidth you can handle.

So if I were to like do a deep case study of the two of your brain networks in different situations, you would probably both show a lot of flex flexibility and capacity to reconfigure. And to what I understand some of the stuff that Penny Jean says she would like to do with neuromodulation. Um, that, that, that it would be to, to enhance that capacity in, in, in people in general.

And, and you know, Shay, when you say you're having that capacity involuntarily taken away from you, that's probably reflected in, in a lack of your usual flexibility in [01:14:00] brain networks to sort of, to, to, to, to dance with each other. Um, I don't know if that answered the question or not, but. But that kind of struck me.

There's one thing, I don't know if we're gonna get a chance to talk about it, but when I visited Shay in Atlanta, we played Penny Jean with one of your neuromodulation devices. It was a little thing we put on her ear lobes and zapped each other. And, and Shay uh, Shay was feeling a lot of physical pain at the time and she was putting it on and loving it.

And I put it on and felt really, really nauseous. But I wonder if you can describe like, what, what, what was that neuromodulation device? What was it doing and, you know, why did we respond so differently? 

Penijean: Sure. So the one you guys were experimenting with was a prototype. A colleague of mine is developing essentially a, an electrical stimulation device that is designed to simulate the physical sensation of [01:15:00] rocking.

And, and the theory is that, um, there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of different ways we're talking through how to basically describe this to people, to do some research, to do some investigation, like what people are experiencing as a result of some electrical stimulation, somewhat lower in the brain.

You put something in the ear LOEs and the, the electrical circuit kinda connects through that lower brain, right? And so the purpose that he's trying to achieve. Is the idea that there's all this research about how, like a, a sense of rocking, like that physical movement, proprioceptive sense of kind of rocking back and forth.

A lot of people do that to self-soothe. They will do it to relax. They will do it to try to reset when they're under distress. You'll watch people like rock almost to, to sometimes when they hit certain thresholds of stress or distress, um, that it's a very reflexive thing. And so this idea of I'm out in a boat or I'm in a hammock, or what are things we do that simulate the movement in the womb?

Like what are the natural physical [01:16:00] movements we can generate that, you know, help us to reset perceptual and emotional states? So he, his little device is meant to kind of stimulate the same proprioceptive sense of almost like rocking back and forth without you having to necessarily physically do it with your body.

However, what's interesting about that. Some people put it on and try it and they were like, I immediately feel more relaxed. Or they go, I feel seasick. Like, I almost feel like nauseated. Like I'm not like I'm on a boat. Like I don't love it. Like, I mean, people have a variety of responses somewhat based on how do they physiologically, you know, perceive that stimulation like in their body and their sense of proprioceptive movement.

So, um, it's still kind of in testing and development, shake out the prototype to be sort of an early alpha tester. And I also was actually really a little impress and surprised by how rapidly she reacted in a positive way to that [01:17:00] stimulation. Because I, like the majority of people I've tried it on have had maybe within like the first 10 to 15 minutes, like some noticeable relaxation response, but she was almost instantaneous.

And, and that again, sort of changed the way I thought about how her brain processes information because her presentation to the world while being very sort of, you know, um, inquisitive and interactive also is a little bit resistant. Like she, because of which I can relate to, because of like past experiences where the world has come in a little too much too often when we didn't love it, we've developed some appropriate differentiation and defensive, you know, uh, ways of trying to prevent things from being, from encroaching too much.

And so I perceive Shay as being a little more reflexly resistant to things. And so for her to. You know, accept this electrical stimulation and relax so quickly. I was like, oh, [01:18:00] actually you're just a sensitive little buddy, aren't you? So Shay was like, stop selling me out and telling people I'm a marshmallow.

It's bad for my bread. But like watching people interact with these different types of like, sensory experiences in technology, it literally gives us these insights and to like, 'cause we're all trying to present certain ways to the world and, and we can't always verbalize or don't even always realize that what that information says about us other people and how they interpret.

So, watching how we receive or don't receive types of neurostimulation, um, or interactions with, with neural behavior that we can always verbalize or explain is I think is an untapped wealth of information and insight into each other. That I am kind of fire hosing myself with right now on every front.[01:19:00] 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It's like what are those routines and how beck, I like what you said about there not being one kind of bandwidth or, or, or, I'm not sure how you said it, but there's different bandwidths that we're, we all have and we can sort of open each other to a whole other kind of bandwidth in a way. And it reminds me of, I think it's something in, in your writing or in one of all of your dialogues where you say there's no right way to perceive the world.

You know? And also that speaks to what Penny Jean has been bringing out about that. You know, we can help each other find different ways of noticing how we are different and opening, like those differences becoming sort of. Portals or something. But Beck, I mean, we've talked about Penny, Jean, and Shay a bit, but I, I feel like you hold the space very well for all of this, at least in your writing.

And I wonder if that was a, a journey for you to be so open to so many different kinds of perception. It doesn't ever seem to, you, don't, [01:20:00] you seem to be okay to open the space further and further. Maybe I'm projecting, but 

Rebecca Todd: So that's a, that's a really interesting, uh, question about being sort of, um, holding space for other ways of being.

I think it's been a long and gradual journey for me, but I do think it probably has its roots in my hippie childhood. Um, you know, as, as, as Andrea knows, my dad is an ecologist and is very, very interested in listening to the, the more than human world, I think. And, and, um, and that's something that actually, um, I, my, the next substack piece I want to write is participatory sense making with the more than human world.

And, um, and I'm talking to people who interact with, uh, with landscapes, with, with, with plants and non-human animals, um, as a form of participatory sense making, extending that idea. So I think a lot of that goes back to [01:21:00] that. And then just, you know, through my own life experience of being in a family where there's a lot of neurodivergence in, uh, you know, but growing up in a time where that wasn't a thing, um, right.

You were just weird. And, um, and so just the way the whole dialogue culturally has grown along that has been, you know, for me and my family members were like, oh, oh,

over the years, you know, talking to people, the more, and the more you start talking about these experiences, um, the more people start talking to them. So, you know, talking to Bryce Hubner who has no visual imagery, or I had this, uh, research assistant when I was a postdoc at University of Toronto, and she was an undergraduate at the time.

And, um, she had a form of synesthesia that's very rare called object personality synesthesia. So she lives in a completely anate world and it's, it, it, it is [01:22:00] what she directly perceives. Like she, after she graduated, she went to the UK and she was working in London for a while. And you know, we had spent a lot of time working together.

so, so, you know, I was pretty familiar with, with her way of experience in the world just because we had, had gone, you know, out of town to do research together. Stayed, you know, stayed in the same hotel, spent a lot of time just talking. So she ca she called me, she's like, I don't have a lot of people, I can tell about this, but I feel so bad.

I just, I, I came in after work and, my feet were sore and I yelled at my shoes and I feel so bad. I hurt their feelings and I didn't mean to, and she was in tears. She felt so bad because her shoes are, are, are beings. and she's not crazy and she's not making it up.

You know, she's been studied by psychologists. She's very consistent. And that's the one she looked at. That's 

Andrea Hiott: the friend you write about. I think in one of the things, yeah, I think I read that study of everything is alive, lit. I mean, it's really true. Yeah. 

Rebecca Todd: Yeah. So, so I've been blessed in my [01:23:00] life with, um, and I've always been attracted to people, you know, probably.

Probably because, you know, because that's who I feel most comfortable with. But I've always been attracted to people who, who perceive the world in a different way. And I think, I think what both, you know, in cognitive science and in our culture at large, or at least there was a window in our culture at large, maybe closing at the moment where we were talking more and more about this, that that was sort of, was permission to really become much more aware of it.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, let's, I mean, if anyone has anything to say, feel free. But also before we go, I wanna come to that, that, that idea of where we are right now. Because again, someone in, in all of your conversations that I've looked at and read, talks about this binary mindset and how if you don't, if you're not thinking of more than three points at once, I think you say, it's usually just because you're, you're overwhelmed.

That's where that complexity fatigue comes in and this, and I think you kind of talk about, you're just trying to help people be able to deal with whatever's coming [01:24:00] in enough to open up to these perspectives. Because like you said, Beck, I think that's where the real life is and that's where we all. All of us have felt weird in some way at some time and trying to open that up in that space of love that we were talking about with Shay and pen Jean finding that I just, wonder what your thoughts are right now in terms of where we are in the world, how, how you've been able to do that to yourself.

give yourself that kind of love to let yourself see yourself, in some of the ways that we're talking about here. But also just if you have any thoughts about how we can do this in our, our daily lives, wherever we are on all these, uh, sides right now. I would love to hear that from all of you. 

Penijean: The number one thing, forget like fancy neurotech and all of the cool stuff we can do with all of the things we developed and innovated as a, an intelligent species.

The number one thing I think that's helpful for anybody is learning [01:25:00] how to recognize when you're hitting. you, when you're, when you're hitting the end of the ramp, because the responses to being overwhelmed or overstimulated or, you know, complexity, fatigue, the responses to things being too complex is either to shut down or to go full suplex, right?

Um, for people who aren't familiar with wrestling as the world of entertainment, suplex is a move where you basically pick somebody up and slam them into the ground, right? And so the majority of the time that when people feel overstimulated or overwhelmed, we either shut down and with withdraw to avoid being harmed, or we expressively act out or lash out and we potentially harm.

Now obviously people have very different thresholds and, and ideas about what it means to harm and be harmed, right? 

So, so the idea would be. Even though I know we've got different concepts of what harm is, some people [01:26:00] feel quite harmed if you yell at them. Some people feel quite harmed if you ignore them and give them, you know, the cold shoulder treatment.

Some people are like, yeah, what's yelling that? We just did that in my family as normal dinnertime conversation. Like, I'm not gonna be mad at you till you stab me. And some people are gonna be like, you know, like the occasional stabbing, little light stabbing among friends. What's the big deal? Like we've got different thresholds for what it means to harm other, and so.

The idea of being able to go, I am starting to tap out. I'm starting to get too overstimulated and too stressed out. Why can't I, like, why? Is there any way to expand my own capacity to manage myself almost for everyone? It's gonna be, you know, checking to see how you've managed your resourcing. Did I sleep?

Did I drink water? Have I had food? Was it real food? Or was it like stuff shaped as food that just made me more stressed out and worse? Right. Just being able to manage, like I have a limited amount of energy and an effort to give, [01:27:00] and this is something we all knew or theoretically we know about children.

If you don't feed them, if you don't water them, if you don't nap them, we expect them to behave poorly, to get overwhelmed and to have meltdowns. And then we think because we got older. That doesn't apply anymore, except we're still the exact same organisms, just bigger. And now our meltdown send us to jail or end us up in divorce court.

Right. Or get us fired. And so it's still that same principle of we're, we're a little biological organisms and we've gotta be fed and watered and, and rested and repaired, or we really can't interact with people on even sort of a bare minimum level. So our own purposeful. Either teaching the kids or teaching ourselves to recognize when we're starting to reach capacity and to then pause and be like, what can I do to either withdraw before I harm, right, or withdraw before I am [01:28:00] harmed?

Or we reach a level of damage, and then what can I do to resource or repair and then maybe return. To attempt again. And I think just being able to recognize where we are on the ramp and make appropriate decisions is like a basic life skill. We all sort of maybe talk about in reference, but we don't always consider in practical physiological ways and I don't think we're teaching kids.

That you know how to do this. Like, are you upset because your brother's being too loud? Which is a real thing for a lot of us. Let's be honest. Are you upset because your brother's being too loud? Or are you upset because you need to pee and you've been holding it and now it's physically uncomfortable?

That is taking up 97% of yourself soothing bandwidth, and your brother clinking his toys together, isn't gonna make you homicidal if you just go pee and come back. Like these are sort of basic things, right? But. We don't really consider that as like a [01:29:00] practical strategy every day for interacting with the world, and I think anybody can learn that as a bandwidth expander behavior.

I. Without all the fancy stuff that I do to try to also neuromodulate to expand 

Andrea Hiott: capacity. Yeah, that's a good point. it's also that awareness of thinking in these ways that you're presenting a.

Just knowing we can think like this and that we all are experiencing the world differently. Beck or Shay, do you have any comments to add to that or advice for how to deal with complexity, fatigue, or how to love yourself and others?

Shay: I don't know. I'm in a very pessimistic place right now on successful interaction between people. So, um. I am, I am sort of in a place where I feel people's social media needs to be taken away from them, and then they need to be forced into a room with other people and made to sit there and, and hash it out, or whatever.[01:30:00] 

Because I think, I think the inability or the. The move away from Interal. Sensemaking has led to the devolution of our ability to, to make sense, right? So I feel like in the world right now, it is equal parts acting out in equal parts shutting down, and I don't think that people are engaging in any sort of.

In between, and I feel like nobody thinks that they should be expected to do anything in between, and that I feel like that perspective that there has been a fully endorsed abandonment of participatory sensemaking as a society. I feel like things [01:31:00] are not going to get better because we continue to get further and for further apart from an embodied perspec like situation.

And we are embodied organisms and we are living through the world virtually and. It is separating us from, from the things that make us our own organism. Like we lose a sense of ourself because we're always reacting to something that's not there. So I'm in a weird place. People are very. It'll get better. Or if we just engage in this sort of like resistant behavior and I'm like, your resistant behavior is to completely avoid the things that need to be resisted.

This just a fully full throttle segregation of bodies from each other that only interact through a virtual space [01:32:00] and then is on the extremes of shut down or act out. So that, that's, I'm thinking about that a lot. so that's where I am. 

Rebecca Todd: Yeah, so I, I, I actually really agree with you about all of that.

Shay, I think I, I have a couple of thoughts. I think in terms of the ongoing attempt to sense make with people, given all of their huge diversity of experience in worlds we live in, I actually, I think on the one hand that's our only hope, like all of the voices that are outside the sort of endorsed, mainstream, normative voices are absolutely the voices we have to listen to now, but will we.

Probably not, but that's the goal. that's, that's where our salvation, all of the creativity for dealing with, with a sort of world situation, a societal situation that seems unmanageable, has got to come from all these different ways of thinking. but and I think that there are ways of, I think interal sense making is crucial and within that context.

There are ways of training yourself to listen. People [01:33:00] do it differently. They may have meditation practices. There are like dance improvisation practices where they really teach you to tune to each others into dynamics. There are people who do it, you know, working, you know, with the na in the natural world, listening to nature.

There's many, many ways of tuning yourself to listen and they're, they're out there. They're, they know artistic training of any kind. You know, trains you to listen. But I I think as Shay says, the inter corporeal component is really crucial because when you're virtual, the stakes don't seem high.

It's so easy to, to disengage or to, to go fo what, what's the wrestling term? It's slam people on the floor. Um, whereas the stakes are higher when your body's in a room together, sort of exchanging pheromones and electrical fields and gestural rhythms and all of that stuff. But, but then when I think this is what we need to do, I also agree.

I I also like, she, I'm quite pessimistic right now because of the, all lure of the sort of technological isolation is so strong and so dominant right now. But, but honestly, [01:34:00] there's only a certain amount of time, like there was a headline the other day that, that, the power, uh, the power requirements of just all of the servers serving, um, all, all the.

Tech AI needs was gonna quadruple by 2030. And we, we can't sustain that. We're so, so ultimately our virtual worlds are going to collapse. And, you know, and, and, and you know, I think that that. You know, we, we are, we are crashing into authoritarianism. I think that there's gonna be a lot of damage and a lot of death.

and that probably we won't rediscover inter corporeal sensemaking, you know, most of us, um, until, you know, a lot of trauma has been unleashed upon the world. That's kind of where I'm at now, is it's also quite, I'm, I'm not feeling great about the state of things. 

Andrea Hiott: It's both of you sort of did what Penny Jean said, when you realize, when you've come up to the, the wall or I'm not sure how you put it, but, and just, and admitted.

And stated and so thanks for doing that and I. [01:35:00] I, I have to disagree a little bit because that's, I, I feel all of that too, but I also feel like what you all have demonstrated in your conversations to me and in the work I've read that all of you do, which is extraordinary in very different ways.

Everyone can just go look at it. But I think that, if we look at this big. We started with these big nested things. I think Becky were saying there's all these different levels of what these systems are, and Shay said it's a big sponge and all of that. But on these big levels, this all feels overwhelming.

But we can also look on the really daily levels. Like that conversation that Shay and Pen had. That inspires me. I think I can go out in everyday life or even just who I'm dealing with in my family and find some things like that, right? Ways to refocus what I wanna have my bandwidth be and beyond.

And even if all the technology does collapse, those things are still there, aren't they? Or am I being too optimistic? 

Rebecca Todd: It's not the technology collapse that I'm worried about. I think those things are very much there. There, it's. It's what? Well, yeah, it's the other stuff. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. [01:36:00] And that is this inner participatory sense making.

I mean, there's a responsibility to it too, isn't there? That I don't see a lot of that actually happening in the, in the world right now because, you know, we don't have time to go into it now, but there's a kind of autonomy that needs to be there and there's a kind of respect and so on to really have participatory sense making even just doing the work that you're doing in participatory sense making and bringing that into awareness, could we need a trend towards real participatory sense making, not this mediated optics only strange world we're in right now. Well, amen to that. 

Penijean: You know? Yeah. That same conversation that I had with Shay and I sort of joked a little bit about having an existential crisis and update for the month or two afterward.

The idea of sort of trying to balance futility and hope as just like existential states we exist in. I definitely went through the whole cycle just on that microcosm, but the reason I'm bringing this up is because I arrived at the profound relief of the realization and acceptance [01:37:00] of the futility of communication.

And by that I mean that I had thought it was my responsibility for almost my entire life. It was my responsibility to manage. My communication with other people in such a way that they would understand what I was saying and see my perspective and replicate my perspective, and if they didn't understand it, how I understood it and applied it in the way I said then communication had not been achieved.

Education had not been achieved, and I had therefore failed as a communicator and a co connector. And I realized just recently, it seems so crazy. I'm almost 45 and I just figured this out. I realized that in, in reality, all I can do was say stuff, show stuff, put it out there. I. And then if I'm like, I'm not responsible, for your experience of me, you are gonna take whatever you want out of this exchange.

You're gonna [01:38:00] make meaning out of it. Apply it to your life in ways that make sense and work for you. And if I am trying to control how you do that, I will inevitably, constantly fail. The interaction. But if I just show up and do the best I can to say stuff that I think is interesting, and then you take any bits you want, reformulate them in any way that makes sense to you and go out and do something useful with it, then success has been achieved because the interaction's not about me, replicating my experience onto you is about you getting to have your own experience of whatever you think my experience was and then just.

Ally circling out into the world and into other people. And so if I think that I'm responsible for communicating and fixing and, and making other people experience things differently in a way I think is better, then I am always overwhelmed and always feeling a sense of futility and impossibility and fatigue.

And if I go, the only thing I'm responsible to do in this [01:39:00] interaction is show up and do. Whatever makes sense to me in a way that I think is helpful and minimally harmful, and then you can do whatever you want with that. That has, I think, really actually shifted what I feel has been the breaking, like the spirit breaking burden of having to kind of achieve a particular response.

Like I've, I think I've moved more from persuasive. They just exploratory or experimental, which seems so irresponsible based on years and years of being like, you're supposed to do it the right way, and if you don't, you're not helping anyone. So moving from persuasive to just exploratory right? Um, to, from persuasive to permissive, however you wanna frame it.

That has been a huge shift just in the last month or two that has made me feel less responsible to fix the world. Which has opened up a little bit of relief, which has, I think, made me feel less futile and hopeless. ' cause I'm like, now the new mantra is, did I break it? Well, if I didn't break [01:40:00] it, it's not my responsibility to fix it.

However, I can't show up. Do what I can in this situation. Look, maybe we're all gonna go up in a ball of fire. Like the, the plan might explode next week. I don't know. The uncertainty itself. Is its own fatigue component. Trying to hold all the possible futures and all the ways we might can do the thing.

And should, should I buy gold because the economy's collapsing? Should I buy, you know, dried eggs? 'cause we're never gonna have them again. Like, the, the constant cer, uncertainty and all the futures and our inability to tear it. Card ourselves into the right s you know, you know, self preservation answers.

We're all feeling that weight. And I think that is what is sucking up the bandwidth, the physical exhaustion and, and illness and fatigue and the We can't, we, nobody can handle all of this. So the idea of what can I immediately do physically myself, my body, my voice, my [01:41:00] offering. And, and staying there.

Like, it's not a big, so like, I mean, I overthink everything too. It's not a magical solution, but just the idea that that's a possible thing we could try to do was new for me. And it, it created a little bit of breathing space. 

Rebecca Todd: So to me, what I'm hearing you saying, and maybe, maybe I'm getting it wrong, but, but you're actually now trusting in the third entity, part of the participatory sensemaking.

You're engaging with it and you're listening to it, but you're trusting that the third entity. will, will carry the sensemaking or that's, that's what, how what you said sounded to me. 

Penijean: I have gone from, I've got an agenda and a script and a checklist for the third entity to the third entity is its own entity and it's just gonna do what it wants anyways, no matter what I show up wanting it to do.

Maybe I should just stop trying to make it do what I want, because that's exhausting and stressing me out. Just like, oh, you can't make a fruit fly. Do what you want. Like, why do I think I can make other people do what I want? Right? And so like [01:42:00] that it's, it's not a solution to the world's problems, but it is a shift of perspective or paradigm for me on a small scale for how I'm.

What I'm sinking my energy and time into and how quickly I burn through it, hit the end of the ramp and then feel hopeless and futile. So I think it's just better resource management maybe. 'cause I'm stop, I'm, I'm not flushing it down the toilet anymore for no return. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It feels like relaxing into what is And, but also it makes me think of having your team too, or having people that you know, you can be yourself with and communicate with and, because it's not, you don't have to do it alone either, I guess is what I'm saying, is, you know, you can practice this with others too.

Do you, you practice the love with yourself and with others at the same time, Instead of trying to control. We definitely can't control all of this, but I do think these little things change what's possible and the more other [01:43:00] people, you know, people will hear you say this and it opens up ways that they can do that and it's weird, and how quick, quickly, those kind of things can spread.

So does anyone have any final comments or ideas or anything they wanna say? I know it's been two hours now, so.   

Good. 

Andrea Hiott: Shay, I hope you've, it sounds like you've given people a lot on this conversation, so just remember that with all you're dealing with right now and whatever it may be, 

Shay: thank you.

Andrea Hiott: It's a little. 

Penijean: Being among the friends. 

Andrea Hiott: I'll be in touch. I hope y'all have a good day there.

Bye y'all. Yeah, bye.