Can Science Measure Spiritual Experiences? Neuroscience, Meditation & Healing with Nicco Reggente

Nicco Reggente 

We’re working on some things right now to try and help people self-generate chills and it’s typically by cultivating a form of self-transcendence. So most often in some form of religious context where people are kind of meeting with Jesus and convening with the divinity, almost in some cases a non-dual experience where you’re merging with all that is.

Lorne Brown

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast. Coherence Code Podcast. Where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

So today on The Coherence Code, I’m joined by Dr. Nicco Reggente. Now he’s a cognitive neuroscientist, UCLA lecture, and a co-founder of the Institute of Advanced Consciousness Studies. Nicco’s work sits at the fascinating intersection of neuroscience, meditation, altered to non-ordinary states, interoception, hopefully he’ll define that for us, immersive technology and human flourishing, why a lot of you listen to this podcast. And what makes his work especially interesting to me is that he’s trying to bring rigorous science and measurement to experience as many people describe as healing, transformative, deeply meaningful, and some even will call it spiritual. We were introduced through Dr. Mitch Abrams, who was on the Coherence Code Podcast in the past and also a good friend of mine. He’s a radiologist and heartbrain coherence researcher based in Toronto and he thought this would be a very aligned conversation for a podcast, me and Nicco.

And I have to say I agree. So what I’m finding fascinating about your work, Nicco, is that you’re trying to bring rigorous science to experience as many people describe as healing, transformative, deeply meaningful, as I mentioned, and spiritual. And in my world, whether we’re talking about fertility, hormones, inflammation, burnout, emotional healing, or just wanting to feel like yourself again or reach that peak potential, I’ve seen over and over how the state someone is in changes how the body actually responds. And a lot of people have had moments through meditation, music, retreats, even psychedelics, grief, unfortunately, awe or deep stillness where something shifts. They may feel clearer, more connected, more peaceful, even more alive, but often they snap back like an elastic band to those old states. So today I want to explore a bigger question with you. Can science help us understand the kinds of states that reduce that internal noise, shift beliefs, support healing, and help people not just feel better, but actually thrive.

So no pressure, Nicco. I love it. Yeah. Listen to the podcast.

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, no, man, that’s fantastic. Yeah, we’re going to be able to have a great rich conversation on that because there’s some work we’re doing that’s right at the interface of somehow all of those facets. So very

Lorne Brown 

Excited. Well, we’ll dig in and we’ll dive in. And I kind of organize it in three ways if we can get through it all. So part of it is we’re going to discuss how these experiences, non-ordinary states actually help people feel better, heal and change. I was thinking of that. How do we make it real and practical so it gets integrated into this world so it’s not just this fascinating philosophical idea and then the science, like what’s happening in the brain body and can it be measured? So let’s get to know you a little bit. You came through neuroscience, not mysticism is my understanding. What pulled you into studying these experiences?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, it’s a great question. Yeah. I did a traditional academic route. I did my PhD at UCLA where I still lecture and always had this more entrepreneurial spirit and wanting to start an organization, nonprofit organization that could do the types of good, strong, rigorous science that’s done in academia, but without all the bureaucratic hurdles that serve academia in some fashions, but another in most regards tend to slow it down or prevent it from engaging with specific materials. I guess what got me into this is for a long time or arguably since forever, I’ve been an appreciator of the capacity for experience to engender belief updating and just more flourishing within a human. And that’s come from a whole host of what could be regarded as non-ordinary experiences, things from self-transcendent experiences at large concerts to psychedelic experiences to deep states of meditation.

I got really interested in the notion that even though many of these experiences are out there for the taking, there’s a whole host of social, cultural, pharmacological contraindications that kind of gate people from accessing those states. Even something like meditation where all you need to do is sit down and follow some instructions. It’s difficult for a lot of people, especially people with certain types of pain or certain breeds of depression and psychedelics are definitely not for everyone despite them being claimed as a panacea in some regards. They’re certainly not for everyone. So how can we A, lower the barrier of access to things like deep meditative states, things that are non-pharmacological routes to these non-ordinary states that are capable of promoting these belief updatings and effectively democratize access to non-ordinary states so that truly anyone could try and have these experiences by lowering the barrier of access to things like meditation and creating non-pharmacological psychedelic mimetic states of mind through things like experiential technology or engaging with aesthetic stimuli in ways to help cultivate these states to help promote flourishing.

And yeah, a lot more to say on that, especially around some of the caveats you gave around states and stages. But yeah, that was the general idea.

Lorne Brown

And I hope we get to dig into some of these non-pharmacological devices. In my clinic, they say I’m the boy with the best toys, the boy with the toys. And I think that’s why Mitch connected us. When I was with Mitch at the study in LA when they were doing the heart brain study, I brought my neuroVIZR there. I have all these toys. Go ahead. I’m sitting here. Did you ever get a chance to experience it or did I- 

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, I’ve tried out neuroVIZR

Nicco Reggente 

I’ve tried many different stroboscopic stimulation devices.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. So those immersive technologies just to see can they make a state change or a trait change? Because like you said, psychedelics, pharmacological for many reasons, are not for everybody. And sometimes you just need a five-minute experience and then you need to go back to work. And if you just took a hit, a megadose of a psychedelic or something else may not be the case, or you may not have an hour to get into that meditative state. I’m interested in some of the tech toys you have and I got to come back up to LA to see what you’re doing. Oh yeah,

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah. I might snag your title as boy with the best toys because we have a fun playground here.

Lorne Brown 

I know. Well, that’s why I’m just going to make sure I leave my credit card not when I come there because I find these toys. I’m like, I got to have this. I got to take this back with me.

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah. And it’s funny you bring up the stroboscopic entrainment devices. So things like NeuroVIZR, we worked with a company called Intu. We actually just finished another study on stroboscopic, which is effectively strobe, flashing lights at specific frequencies. And those frequencies are typically for in training, meaning entrainment is this phenomenon of as without, so within type of experience where if I’m showing light at a specific frequency, so it’s flashing a certain number of times per second, the brain will begin to respond in accord. So if you’re flashing at theta, your brain starts exhibiting more theta power, more theta waves are coming out as detectable by EEG. And so we’ve run a number of different studies on that. It’s quite a compelling technology. The one that we’ve leveraged here by Intu where we did the most of our work, we ran a study showing that comparing the stroboscopic experience to a, which is typically done with closed eyes.

So your eyes are closed and you’re sitting still and compared it to a breath-focused awareness meditation, one of the best anxiolytics out there, one of the best ways to reduce your stress and anxiety. And we kind of paired the two against each other at different lengths. And one of the main findings was that in terms of state anxiety and things like mood disturbances, in terms of state anxiety and mood disturbance, you saw great reduction in anxiety and amelioration of the mood disturbance in both groups. However, you see it within five and a half minutes of the stroboscopic and you see it at 22 minutes of the meditation showing that you can kind of get the same effects, the state effects of a 22-minute meditation in about five and a half minutes of the stroboscopic light exposure. And while I don’t think at all that you’ll be able to engender the same trait disposition changes that come about from keeping and maintaining a meditation practice, things like mindfulness, if you do need that quick five and a half minute or five minutes in to go back to baseline before a meeting, et cetera, a lot of these tech, especially the stroboscopic ones, are quite promising.

Yeah.

Lorne Brown

So you said about the entrainment. So something about the nervevisor, a couple things that you said about a state change and trait change, five minutes. So they have five-minute programs and 11-minute programs and you can double them up. So most people are doing 11 to 16 minutes, but once in a while there’s a five-minute one where I just need a little shift when I’m really tired. Garnet, the founder and advisor where he’s claiming he’s doing engagement, not entrainment. There’s entrainment inside of it, but really he’s taking you to the gym and he always finishes off with a cool down the nerve advisor. So the stretch, but there are times where I have felt uncomfortable, but because I’m aware it’s taking my brain to the gym, I’m like, oh, rather than freaking out, because it’s just I all of a sudden will feel not anymore, but the first many times I would feel anxious.

So these are neurables. Have you heard of the narrables?

Nicco Reggente

Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Lorne Brown

So first of all, because you do all these toys, to me it’s like, is this any good? Because how good can a device be under $1,000 doing EEG? But I have to say, because the neuroVIZR’s a wellness device with no research really on it, but he has researched why he created his programs. I decided to do 10 days in a row, it turned out that I measured myself before a neuroVIZR. So it showed my focus like 30, 40%. When you were listing off the different types of people, depressive and anxious for meditation, ADHD, trying to focus, that’s a hard person to meditate on. Then I would do the neuroVIZR and I did an 11-minute neuroVIZR session and then I would measure myself an hour later and see how high it is after or within an hour. And I’d go from 30 to 40% for 10 days in a row, 100% for all 11 minutes

Every day. It said I was dialed in. And I have to say, I’m having a full on ordinary experience. I do not feel dialed in, but my brain is dialed in and then afterwards I would stay at 70, 80%. So that’s not evidence, that’s just data, but that’s why I’m interested in these toys. Now there’s a two-part question here just about entrainment engagement if you have any information on this, but what he said when you talked about it’s not going to make a trait change, a state change, he would agree and I agree with that. So if you use it one-off, I have patients come in once a week, we give them a state change. A lot of them get their own system and he has these 21 days neurodosing without drugs with the light. And he says, if you do it regularly, you will get a trait change because you’re doing it daily versus a one-off.

So unpack that one for me.

Nicco Reggente 

So first I think that many of these stroboscopic device companies will orchestrate a specific journey, what we’ve been calling these neural trajectories is like you start at A and then B and then C, and you traverse this state space. And part of that typically includes what you could call a desirable difficulty, almost intentionally having this anxious moment of sorts to build up this potential energy that can be translated into a kinetic force as you get relieved from it, very similar to the come up of a psychedelic journey. It’s a big part of the experience and being able to relax and settle into that lets all of the other post-experiences wash over. So it’s actually very much so by design. Of course, the main tool is entrainment, but using that to encourage engagement is a clever way of doing things.

This is a very, very common thing and a very common thing to discuss is to what degree does repeatedly visiting specific states of consciousness naturally beget trait changes. So what Stan Groff and them called these states and stages. States are not stages. You can achieve high enlightened states of consciousness that are ephemeral and do not translate into stages of enlightenment. You kind of go back and not integrate appropriately and fall right back into the subtleties of life and the old patterns that you typically used to engage in. And the research is honestly quite sparse on this. So it’s hard to know if it is like going to the gym, as you say, where I don’t need to understand the biodynamics of what’s going on. I just need to lift the weights and my muscles will get bigger if I do it enough.

Lorne Brow

Whether you believe in it or know why it’s going to happen through the process of lifting weights.

Nicco Reggente 

Exactly. It’s going to happen. So we don’t know if it’s like that or if it’s like if you just tell me to play scales on piano

And I can then eventually play the scale very well and very quickly, but I haven’t related that to a larger scaffolding of understanding and music theory around how I’m permitting myself to express myself through music intonation. I might not then be able to use that scale to do a solo or express myself or make a song in some capacity, the real end stage of it. I may build proficiency in moving my fingers in a certain way, but it might not necessarily be songwriting. I may or may not come along for the ride with that. And if that’s the goal, then it seems important to have some form of scaffolding and framework around that much in the same way. And this is something that we’re actually looking to study in the lab now. A really good example of this is in meditation literature is like you can build what’s known, you can build through something like a vipassana practice.

A vipassana meditation practice typically consists of being able to build a sense of focused awareness and then bringing that focused awareness to discrete bodily loci and noticing the sensations at discrete bodily loci. And doing that practice in and of itself will cultivate the capacity for increased focused attention. It will increase the capacity for what’s known as interreceptive sensitivity. So interreception is the ability to be sensitive to endogenous from within the body, bodily sensations. So things that are arising within you, even things like being able to feel your heart, feel your lungs expand, feel your gastric muscles move. So just by practicing that, you’ll be able to increase the degree to which you have sensitivity, much in the same point of two-point discrimination tasks, like the interoceptive equivalent of that, you’re going to be able to bring more sensitivity to it. You’ll be able to detect changes more easily or with less evidence.

However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that will translate into what’s known as interreceptive sensibility, which is the ability to A, be sensitive and then to respond to that information in an adaptive way. So I may be very good at being able to tell when my heart is beating out of my chest. If I then can feel that beating and I go and panic and run off the stage, then that’s not necessarily a sensible way to deal with the information that’s coming in. There’s another path where I could be taking that information and recognizing that I may be a bit more anxious right now, my heart is beating faster and maybe I can take that as a moment to breathe and take pause and not rush. And this translation between interceptive sensitivity and sensibility doesn’t necessarily just come out of focusing on the body and focusing on different sensations in the body.

It typically has to be paired with some form of quantumist scaffolding of non-judgmental awareness where the teacher is not just telling you to pay attention to it, but saying these sensations are impermanent. Let them come, let them go. Look at them with non-judgmental awareness, just observe them as they are not with a reactive mindset. So without that type of framework and scaffolding, it’s hard to imagine how interceptive sensibility would just fall out of interceptive sensitivity. So I think that general concept and framework is really good for trying to understand why it’s not necessarily the case that frequent visitation of distinct states of consciousness will translate to stages of consciousness, more involved stages. Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

I like to unpack that a bit and see if I understand a little bit of what you’re saying. Some people run a program, but I’m not smart enough. I think the more our conversation goes on, I’m going to bring up that old program I think I cleaned up, but

Let’s see what I can unpack here. What I think I heard, you’re talking about the scaffolding and saying just because you’re doing something repetitively doesn’t mean you’re going to have a trait change. And so some people have had … So what I think I’m hearing is integration’s key, not so much the transformative experience. So you had a great psychedelic experience, you’re all one. It feels great. They had a peak experience. Oh, they went to a Joe Dispenza, I’ve gone to three, they did a week long and they popped, they saw the white light, you had a near death experience maybe. All these peak experiences without proper integration, it may not change your life. There’s the elastic band where you have the experience, but boom, you’re back to wherever you were and you’re having that experience where some people have that experience and it’s like plastic and it stays.

And so I was suggesting that if you do something repetitively, that elastic sometimes will stretch out a bit and it will hold a bit, but it’s not guaranteed. And so we can purposefully do integration around these toys like the neuroVIZR or your Vipassana. There’s got to be more than that. Doing these processes of Vipassana introspection, so the body scan where you’re going in and becoming aware of your body, getting practiced at that, to me that helps lower noise static in the system, which allows you to tap into your own intuition, I would say allows you to connect to your higher self. And so these practices, going to the gym regularly, doing these light strobes, vipassana, whatever we’re doing regularly, if it’s a precursor that you’re going to get, I would assume the most benefit from the integration because you need the noise to be low.

The noise, by the way, I call resistance needs to be low. So from what I shared, can you now help unpack it a bit more? Am I catching it correctly? No,

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, of course. Yeah, no, well summarized. I think you’re very right around this notion of decreasing noise. There’s a lot to be thought about there in the contemplative literature, especially as it interacts with the predictive processing literature, there’s a lot there and you’re very much so not wrong. And some of our work has actually shown that when you enter into deeper states of meditation, you start to see this, and this is also shown in the literature around when you begin to engage more internally versus externally, internally can with the right frameworks be less noise You begin to see this very interesting phenomenon kind of happen, which is that your heart, your heart is beating, let’s say for me right now, once every second. So every second my heart is beating and there’s a signal there of some capacity. And most often the brain is not necessarily responding to that signal.

Most people don’t think that the heart is exerting causal influence on neural activity. It’s helping to circulate oxygenated blood. So the brain can get its ATP, it can get its oxygenated hemoglobin. And that’s kind of this more mechanistic understanding. But what we’ve seen and what many others have seen is that as you enter into certain deep states of meditation or non-ordinary states, your heart actually does begin to exert more causal influence on neural activity. The heart beats and then the brain responds afterward. And the idea is that that could potentially always be there, but it’s just too noisy to see. So if you’ve settled and cooled the waters, then it becomes easier to … And I actually think a big part of that when you bring up tuning into your higher self, I think part of that is tuning into your own heart, listening to your heart.

And the degree to which you can do that is dependent upon how much out external noise there is and your capacity for developing focused attention to endogenous bodily sensations of which your heart is probably the strongest driver. So I think that there’s a lot there. It’s a really fun, fascinating, emerging field of research in the cognitive neurosciences.

Lorne Brown 

Can you give us a little science of what we’re measuring when people are in these non-ordinary states, what you’re seeing? Do you think we are developing technology that can be a catalyst to help us get into it so I don’t have to go for 40 years in the mountains to meditate?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Heartbrain coherence is a very interesting term. It’s been popularized by HeartMath, the HeartMath Institute. And it’s not really my main area of study, but my understanding is that the heart rate variability over time follows a 0.1 Hertz sine wave. And I think the extrapolation from there is saying that if heart rate variability, so how variable it is between each beat, so heart rate variability is like, well, if it’s boom, boom, boom, boom, that’s not very variable, but if it’s boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, that’s a bit more variable and you can track that variability over time. And if that variability starts to fall into this 0.1 Hertz sine wave, then I think that’s what they consider to be heart coherence or HRV coherence. And it is then thought that the neural activity has more capacity to sink or ride that wave more so than others.

I don’t really know too much about it other than there’s some relationship that might be fully accounted for by the respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is basically your heart rate variability will change as a function of whether you’re on the inhale or the exhale. And typically when you’re in more relaxed states, your exhale length over your inhale length, that ratio will increase. It’s typically indicative of an increased parasympathetic tone activation. So I think that’s the most that I know about it. I don’t actually know about too much research into HRV coherence and its relationship with whether or not it encourages more synchrony because you can take a time series of cardiac activity and just take an ECG and an EEG and correlate those time series and see the degree to which they’re moving as one cohesive unit. I don’t know the degree to which that’s related with HRV coherence.

Lorne Brown 

We’ll go to your focus. My curiosity, I can’t say I know this, but I would just imagine that it just creates potential for the integration that people want the healing reach their potential. I use the breath when I start all my conscious work sessions, like you just said, to engage the parasympathetic. I just feel if we want to change old programs, want to get into that operating system, if it’s in the alarm state feeling unsafe, it’s not going to want to do any adapting change, but if the noise is down, it could be open to that potential change.

Nicco Reggente 

Exactly. Yeah, you need to be in that receptive ready state. And I think being in a state of increased HRV and this more parasympathetic tone is exactly the type of place you want to be. That’s the set and setting for any type of experience that then goes on to totally moderate the type of experience you have. It’s mental mind. Mindset is the aspect there. Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

In your research at your facility, have you guys measured or have a better understanding of what is actually happening when people have these moments of awe insight or deep presence? I think when we talk about no noise, the resistance is drop is this deep presence, but have you measured it? Do you guys have a better understanding of what you think is happening?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, there’s a lot there. My philosophy is kind of twofold. One is I can tell you all of the different neural signatures of X, Y, and Z that determine or that help for you to classify a certain state of mind based on its underlying neural correlates. I could tell you that posterior beta is decreasing and frontal midline theta’s increasing once you reach these deep states of meditation or your heartbeat evoked potentials increase, et cetera. And part of my philosophy is like, okay, yeah, that’s cool and contributes to the scientific corpus. But to me, I almost don’t care that much. It can all be a black box to me and it ultimately is.

If we begin to think we understand the brain, we need to go back. But if we can use it and do things like have people have experiences, capture those experiences, model them, and then create tools with neurofeedback, et cetera, that help people get back into those same states, subjective states, that’s the real goal for me. And what actually goes into the black box, I like to nerd out and look in sometimes, but ultimately if you really press me, I don’t care that much. I care about the utility of it. Now that being said, I would like to go into it a little bit with you specifically in the direction of chills. So we’ve been studying aesthetic chills for some time and that when we refer to chills, we mean the goosebumps or shivers that you get in response to some form of aesthetic stimuli. Typically, the stimuli we’re using are speeches set to music that kind of confront your worldview and give some cathartic resolution to it.

So we’ve been studying chills for some time, which I’m sure we can talk about a bit more, but there’s a couple findings there that relate to the psychedelic literature, which is when it comes to distilling things into their neural correlates, some of the best things that you can look at are these increases in entropy or complexity in some cases. So really this idea of how reducible is your brain state? How compressible is a certain brain state at any given time? We were talking about heart rate variability and you mentioned something earlier: how repetitive or predictable is the brain state from one moment to the next? And if something’s highly predictable, it’s typically not that complex. You can think of it in the way that you could look at a LAR, let’s imagine a picture on a screen. And if that picture is not very complex, let’s just say it’s white on the top and black on the bottom, whatever the megabyte size of that picture is, if you were to go and compress it, literally do a dot zip on that, you could probably take it from, let’s just say a hundred megabytes to one megabyte or probably far less probably than kilowatts because there’s not a lot of rich information there. But if it was this really complex scene with all these different figures in it, like a Waldo type or a Bosch type of landscape, when you go, if it’s a hundred megabytes, you wouldn’t be able to get it down to one. You’d only be able to get it down to 95 or something. So the compressibility of something. So the brain can be modeled in such ways. And when it’s in these more peak non-ordinary states, it becomes far less compressible.

It’s just far more complex. There’s this whole entropic brain hypothesis that follows a similar concept. But what we see is that the amount with which that is expressed during a psychedelic trip or during a chills event, how much you express that goes on to account for all of the salutogenic outcomes of it. The amount of emotional breakthrough that you’ve had, the amount of psychological insight that you’ve had, the degree to which you feel connected to your community afterward, the amount of self-transcendence you had, the amount of ego dissolution, the increase in personal self, or sorry, decrease in personal self, increase in transpersonal self. All of these measures really relate to this concept of entropy and complexity, but it’s really this amount of compressibility, let’s say for now, which is actually a very good tool that’s also used for measuring how conscious someone is in general, whether or not you’re in a vegetative state or a minimally conscious state or a fully wakeful state.

So there’s a lot there with entropy and complexity. And also with the chills, we’ve seen this really interesting phenomenon where it’s hypersimilar to when people are lost in an environment, let’s say you have an EEG on them and they’re navigating about the environment either in a virtual environment or a real world environment and they feel lost like they don’t know where they are. The moment that they make a transition into getting it and being like, oh yeah, okay, wait, wait, I do know where I am. I got to go that way. There’s this way of finding of sorts that happens. There’s this big drop in theta power globally throughout the brain that happens at that moment. And what we’re seeing in the chills literature or in the work we’ve done on chills in the lab is that we also see this big theta sync, a big drop in theta at the time of getting chills.

And we think that that’s almost like wayfinding in an existential landscape. You’ve kind of had this insight and that insight is propagating its way throughout your entire body to update your belief system and that is like finding your way. So there’s these theta syncs that kind of happen, a big drop in theta.

Lorne Brown 

So with the chills, because in my experience somebody gives an inspirational speech or a beautiful piece of music and I get goosebumps and chills, that’s what I’m thinking of as chills. Is that what you’re describing here?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, yeah, that’s the thing

Lorne Brown 

So what do you think is happening when somebody hears that?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, so it’s multifaceted, but from our perspective, we’re thinking, and this is a lot of the work with my great collaborator, Felix Schuler, he’s kind of championed this idea that we have this innate knowledge instinct. We have a desire to make meaning out of the world, out of our experience and our place in it. And there comes certain times throughout life, there’s a rate of learning. Sometimes we’re learning a lot, sometimes we’re learning very little, but if you’re plotting that over time, there’s a way to think of this evolution of a learning rate. And we see this in other behaviors as well, other types of learning behaviors or reward-based behaviors where there’s an imperative phase, a consummatory phase, an association phase. What we think happens is that chills demarcate this moment in time where the learning rate reaches a null derivative, meaning it’s neither increasing or decreasing.

It’s kind of reached this maxima for a moment where it’s not accelerating, it’s not decelerating, but it’s reached this kind of moment of peak for its moment. And that indicates that you’ve now learned something either to its fullest extent or you are beginning to recognize that you don’t know anything and kind of like horror chills, which are on the more negative side. It’s like horror chills come about where you’re seeing something that you’re like, whoa, I didn’t even think about this potential concept ever before, or I’m seeing something that I’ve never seen before. I don’t have a world model for it. So I’m recognizing I haven’t learned because I didn’t even know there was something to learn. So the learning’s just beginning. So there’s two sides to it. The way we think about it is that chills effectively accompany these moments where your world model is being updated so extensively that that belief updating needs to … It starts in the mind, so it’s psychogenic, but that belief needs to be propagated through everywhere else that beliefs are held, which are in the peripheral and interoceptive nervous system as well, that propagation of beliefs is felt as a chill.

So it’s like- Is

Lorne Brown 

Is it almost like a sign of a software update in the body?

Nicco Reggente 

Oh man, that’s a great way to say that. Can I start using that? That’s good. Yeah, I think it kind of is

And it can be triggered through a number of different ways sometimes without words or insights or concepts. Sometimes just the right piece of music can be composed carefully in a way that engenders these chills because they’re violating your beliefs and expectancies and something’s happening that you totally didn’t see coming.

Lorne Brown

Is there anything then you’ve learned from this that we can purposely try to evoke chills for certain learning or upgrades? And I think of it as now we were talking about heart rate variability and we know that the exhale, elongated exhale is kind of engaging the parasympathetic. So we can hack our nervous system in a positive way and communicate you’re safe by just focusing on a long exhale. So same idea here. Can we do stuff by trying to make ourselves have chills to … The utility of the black box. We’re going to the utility black box. So this is cool. You’re measuring stuff. Is there a way to use this like we use the breath for healing peak potential or anything of the sort?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, that’s a really good question. We’re working on some things right now to try and help people self-generate chills. This is something that not a lot of people, but some people can do that many have reached out to us where they can guide themselves through specific exercises and they’ll end up with chills. And it’s typically by cultivating a form of self-transcendence. So most often in some form of religious context where people are meeting with Jesus and convening with the divinity and it’s like that notion of or that experience of almost in some cases, a non-dual experience where you’re merging with all that is, is one great way to regularly induce chills if you’re capable of that. And that part gets really deep because it’s in line with that chills framework I was talking about, but also taking into account this notion that Plato named anamnesis, meaning unforgetting.

So it’s almost like we’ve spent so much time forgetting the fact that in hippie language, we’re all one and there’s no separation. There’s no separation here.

Lorne Brown

You called it hippie language, but quantum physics is starting to say that that is actually the reality, no?

Nicco Reggente 

Sure. No, I mean, I totally agree, just for lack of a more sophisticated word, not that it needs one, it doesn’t mean it. We’re all one, it’s okay. But we spend so much time caught up in the egoic consciousness narrative that I am me, but really I am he, and you are me and we were all together, but we forget that and certain moments or certain practices can help with the unforgetting of that. And it’s almost that the unforgetting can cause the chills because it’s kind of revealing of the most primal of all world models, which is that there shouldn’t be one in the first.

Lorne Brown

You just made me think of the Yin Yang idea. Yin Yang, they’re interdependent, mutually exclusive, but yet they’re interdependent. When you said you’re unforgetting, therefore you’re remembering.

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah. Yeah,

Lorne Brown 

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Exactly. I had a LA Rec, who’s a self-realized psychotherapist and we were chatting and I was sharing my process of notice, except choose again. And I was saying, it’s a process of doing to get you into being. And then your next doing comes from that state of being. So notice, except, choose again, right action follows, right thinking. And he says, “It’s not a doing.” And I go, “What?” He goes, “It looks like a doing, but it’s really an undoing.” And that’s what you made me think of. People are like, “I need to remember the truth of who I am. I got to remember I’m whole.” They’re like, “Yes. And how we do this in the human body is by unforgetting.” Yeah, exactly. So it looks like I’m doing, but I’m really undoing. It looks like you’re remembering, but it sounds like we’re unforgetting.

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, many things are like that. One of my teachers, Andrew Holzhak, he says that people will be like, “Oh, try and expand, try and expand, try and expand your field of view.” He’s like, “Well, it’s really just stop contracting.”

So yeah, similar concept. But yeah, so some people do it that way. I think that one of the best ways though, aside from trying to self-generate these chills and do these more entheogenic style experiences, meaning finding God within or finding spirituality within experiences is to actually cultivate a specific mindset more regularly, which will predispose you to having chills more regularly. So things like cultivating an openness to experience just in general, engaging more with poetry, things that help cultivate what’s known as a kamomuto or this swelling of the heart, being open-minded, being able to connect more disparate areas or seemingly disparate areas of research or concepts and bringing that into your worldview and really just exposing yourself to more conscious media.

Lorne Brown 

So we’re meaning makers and the idea is we see the world through the lens of our subconscious program. So everything we’re perceiving is filtered through our lens, our brain, but it’s been imprinted on us. None of us chose it. So we’re meaning makers. And then you talked about this mindset to openness, curiosity, this mindset idea. Do you find though some people when they start to do this work, all of a sudden when you start to become present, there’s this awareness or knowingness of not knowing what’s next.You have to be comfortable with uncertainty and people will choose familiarity over uncertainty because even if familiarity is painful, we’ll choose it again. We’ll call this in the clinical hypnosis world self-sabotage, but it’s still an unconscious act because we’re choosing what’s familiar, but familiar doesn’t mean it’s really good for you. I use two terms. To do the work, you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable.

And one of the people I interviewed recently, I loved her term, “You have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Yeah, I love that. And over time, then it doesn’t become uncomfortable anymore. So I wanted you to go back into this. You were talking about mindset meaningmaker, but I wanted to hear what your research and your experiences is around how the nervous system seems to be wired to prefer familiarity over transformation even when familiarity is painful. Have you come across this in the work that you’ve been doing?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, no, I mean, it’s a great question. So I think you hinted on this concept of what are known as early maladaptive schemas, which are ways in which you begin to model and see the world based on early experiences and often they’re quite adaptive and may serve you in a specific setting. And then when you’re out of that setting, that belief is no longer adaptive and it becomes maladaptive. You may think everybody’s out to get you because maybe everyone was at one point in your life. It doesn’t mean the whole world is out to do that. There may be elements of shame and negativity that follow similar trajectories. What’s interesting is that many people will indeed cling to that for familiarity and because it’s comfortable and because it helps to reduce uncertainty, but you are diluting reality and putting it into your box because that makes you feel good and it makes sense and it decreases uncertainty.

So being able to be comfortable with uncertainty and deactivating some of those schemas and having a more open noting awareness where you can just call balls and strikes see things more as they are seems to be a real crux because that’s what is also captured by this great personality trait of openness to experience. To what degree are you open to trying new things or even if it’s something simple, do you order the same thing at the same restaurant every day or do you like to try and diversify even though it might come with the cost of being terrible sometimes or being really disappointing? And I think that translates into a bunch of different modalities. And I have a lot of conversations with friends around how I feel like so much of life and flourishing in life really comes down to courage, the degree to which you can manifest some form of courageousness to step outside of your comfort zone, which is where growth begins and whether or not you can cultivate that to be prepared to be disappointed and then really even going past that and absolving yourself of desire in the first place so that there’s nothing to be disappointed with in the first place.

But that takes a lot of training and energy to do. And that’s why I think things like engaging with aesthetics and being open-minded to that is one of the best things you can probably do because-

Lorne Brown 

Can you elaborate when you say aesthetics, what you’re talking about?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, art. Yeah. So engaging with art in all of its variety of forms, so architecturally to cinematography and film. And I say that because oftentimes people are carrying these beliefs or they’ve pinpointed where they are in this cultural manifold, where they exist in relation to their peers, in relation to their larger culture. And oftentimes it’s difficult to express exactly what that is and how that feels of being able to say who you are, where you’re from, why you are the way you are. It’s almost inherently ineffable at times, but the right piece of art, the right music, the right film can show you it’s like a cultural artifact of sorts that doesn’t need words, doesn’t need traditional means of expression, but can resonate with you much in the same way that a tuning fork, tune to one specific frequency will only vibrate other tuning forks at that frequency.

So that reverberation, that resonance that happens can be a way of recognizing where you are in the world. There’s others that have the parallel processing of life is happening through others and others share that same, share a journey with you and may have had additional insights or experiences that can then absolve you of the weight of the model that you’ve been carrying around. It’s like, “Hey, I see the way that you are seeing the world, but here’s a little bit more breadth. Here’s a little bit more expansion. It’s not just the way you see it. It’s that, but also more.” You’re missing part of the puzzle. So to circle back to your question, that’s probably the best thing you can do is be courageous and open to experience and then listen to those experiences. Did something give you chills? Investigate that. Why did that give you chills?

What’s important about what was said there or experience that resonates with you and your worldview? So yeah, just be open to experiencing courage.

Lorne Brown 

With the chills then, are you suggesting that it’s kind of like a signal to pay attention? And we talked earlier about integration is the key, not the … So it’s kind of like your autonomic nervous system thinks this is important and so consciously pay attention to it so you don’t have to keep learning it over and over again, repeating grade one. You have an opportunity. So stay curious, I’m hearing. And then when you have chills, this is an opportunity to maybe pause and pay attention, do some integration because a very wise part of you thinks it’s important.

Nicco Reggente 

Exactly. Yeah. And it’s typically a surprise and it’s the body’s way of saying, “Hey, we’re out here recruiting one of the most important systems in your body, the thermoregulatory system that if you didn’t have, you would die.” It’s getting recruited as this hyper potent orientation mechanism like, “Hey, this is important to you. Pay attention.” It’s an orientation. So yeah, very much so.

Lorne Brown 

And I get a sense you believe, and correct me, that we’re moving toward targeted emotional intervention. So like you said, the aesthetics and using music, video, immersive technology, neurofeedback. If that’s the case, you think we’re moving in that direction?

Nicco Reggente 

Oh

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. What are you finding in your lab then that’s helping people loosen those old patterns we talked about in non-pharmacological ways?

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, great segue. A lot of our work has been using chills for what we call schema surgery, which is effectively pairing you after we get to know you a bit and can suss out-

Lorne Brown 

Can you just spell it out? 

You got to define that for me please. I saw that in some of your writing. So for our audience, and remind me what you mean by that.

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, so we were talking before about maladaptive schemas. So schemas being kind of worldviews but often are maladaptive in some capacity, so these cognitive distortions of some sort. And something like self-acceptance or shame or negativity are different types of schemas that can vary. So we’ve been doing what we call schema surgery, which is this idea of identifying some of the schemas that you may be walking around with and then finding a piece of content based on all of our machine learning work that’s maximally likely to give you chills. And then going in with generative AI and making slight edits to that content so that now it feels like that piece of content is talking directly to you, your worldview, and then presenting you confronting that worldview and presenting you with a cathartic resolution that expands that worldview in such a way that it’s bespoke, it’s personalized.

And in these cases, a great majority of the people get chills, first of all. Second, people with depression, and we’ve done a bunch of trials on this, but people with depression will deactivate the maladaptive cognitions that are helping to promote their depression, like negativity schemas, thinking everything’s negative or some shame schemas carrying around a bunch of shame, that’s a huge one, or just being more generally negative and pessimistic. So it can actually help to deactivate those schemas and then go on to impact your depression in very clinically meaningful ways. We’ve run a bunch of trials and we just finished one where it’s like just giving someone one to three chills over the course of a week will two months later make them not have ever qualified for the study in the first place. They’re in full remission from major depressive disorder. And that type of stuff is really exciting.

I mean, that’s where you can have states that engender stages at rapid timescales.

Lorne Brown 

I need to unpack this with you a bit because I want to make sure I’m fully grasping this. So somebody that has experiences depression, depressive states, just giving them these experiences that elicit the chills, they all of a sudden come out of this depressive state. They can’t own the diagnosis that they’re depressed anymore. Exactly. Did I hear that part correctly? Yeah. I want to talk about the chills. It’s a little tangent, but it’s related to what we’re talking about here and it has that yin-yang component as in related chills from a very pleasurable experience, related to chills from a very not pleasurable experience. So there are some people, and I’ll lay them both out and then I’ll go deeper. There are people that can intentionally create a kind of pleasurable wave or tingling up their own spine. And I’m thinking that’s what we’re calling interception, right?

There’s autonomic control or is it something else where they can actually … And I’m capable of doing this. I can pause and do something and it feels like my spine is shaking and it feels really good and it’s mostly in the chest, but it moves up my spine and it’s like something to tickle my spine. If I was going to move my ear or shake myself, but you can’t see it shake on the outside, it’s an internal shake on the spine. Are you familiar with this? Are you aware of this? Can everybody do it? Yeah. This is the first time I bring it up. I’ve never asked anybody really about this so much, but as in a global, I know some people can do this, but now I’m asking you, is this just what everybody can do?

Nicco Reggente 

It’s certainly not what everybody can do in my experience. And I think it really is

Lorne Brown 

Is that the chill thing or is that a different phenomenon?

Nicco Reggente 

It depends. I think what you’re describing is a little bit more like what traditionally call the Kundalini, the feeling of Kundalini. And I think that they’re hyper related. I mean, the same thermoregulatory process of chills are used in many domains. It’s used to increase heat. It’s used … You can feel it even just through touching in the right parts of your body or ASMR when people are touching the mic. So that can engage it as well. So whether or not it’s related to the same world modeling system- But

Lorne Brown 

It is isolated to the spine. And the chills is global.

Nicco Reggente

It can be a bit more global. It’s typically the shiver is happening.

Lorne Brown 

As we get ready to wrap up here, what are you guys doing today? What’s exciting you today that’s coming down the pipeline that you’re allowed to share like research and also tie in a lot of the listeners that come and listen to the podcast, they want peace. So first part is they want peace. People are struggling. Some are going through infertility. A lot of the women we see perimenopause, that transition, people are looking for healings, people want to have peak potential. They want to have these non-ordinary states. At the end of the day, I think people just want to be happy. As we wrap up, if you can share any insights around what you’re seeing in your lab and your personal experience, because you’ve done Vipassana and it seems like you’re one of those individuals on the path as well for self-awakening or self-realizing any soundbites or resources or information to share with our listeners about these processes and things that you like for integration to help them do the unforgetting.

Nicco Reggente 

I mean, that’s a fantastic idea. I mean, I can only give what’s served me, which first is a vipassana practice. Cultivating capacity for increased sensitivity to endogenous body sensations is difficult to discount because given enough time of practicing and bringing non-judgmental awareness to the way your body feels begins to cultivate this familiarity with bodily sensations that eventually begets a pretty important insight, which is that we don’t react to events in the world. We react to the way those events make our body feel. And if you have increased familiarity with the landscape of the way your body can and does feel at any given time, that permits for you to then, as your body feels a certain way, not react mindlessly, but respond mindfully in accordance with the way that you wish to be in the world. So it begins to feel a bit more like navigating around your hometown. You can almost do it effortlessly as opposed to navigating in a new environment that you’ve never been to before.

The likelihood of you acting more erratically has increased. So I think that first and foremost, that’s kind of a nice butter for any-

Lorne Brown 

React versus respond. I have one last question before we end, but should be a short one, but I just want to let people know where they can find you again. So Rewire, does that have a website yet or that’s just-

Nicco Reggente

Yeah, so rewire.bio

Lorne Brown 

Say that again. I missed that

Nicco Reggente 

Rewire.bio

Lorne Brown 

Okay. Rewire.bio. Then we have advancedconsciousness.org. Any other places you want us?

Nicco Reggente 

Those are the main spots. Yeah, you can find Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies online, basically anywhere if you follow us on social media. 

Lorne Brown 

Great. Okay. Now I have a better understanding maybe why when I was reviewing your site, one of the first things I came across before I saw your chill research, I saw this music piece that I played and it gave me chills. Now I think that’s why it was on your website. But the question I had originally was who put this on there and why? But I think I get the why. It was a piece called Kol Nidre.

Nicco Reggente 

Nidre. Huh.

Wait, where did you see this?

Lorne Brown 

It was on your website. I think I was on your advanced consciousness. Do you have some videos or things to watch? I’ll have to go look for it

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah. Yeah. There is the ancient melody, modern sound on

Lorne Brown 

Kol Nidre, it’s K-O-L-N-I-D-R-E.

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah, you know what? I think that’s actually on one of the blogs as an example of something that can bring chills because we’re doing a study right now on contemplative … Yeah, okay, so I think I know where this came from. We’re doing a study on how chills can help to augment prayer. So in Jewish prayer, how-

Lorne Brown 

I think that was the song Neil Diamond sang in the Jazz Singer, maybe.

Nicco Reggente 

Yeah. But yeah, so we’re doing a lot of work on how giving people chills can increase the prayer quality and closeness to divinity that people feel during prayer. So maybe it came from that. Yeah.

Lorne Brown

Yeah. But I’m curious who put it up there, but I know it’s a very sacred religious prayer. There’s prayers, but it’s like a very special prayer, spiritual prayer. I was just curious, how did that end up on there? But I was just surprised when I just said, huh, I was just playing some of your videos and just playing with your stuff on your site and I was like, “Kolnidre.” And I clicked on it and I was just sitting there listening and then all of a sudden I hadn’t seen your chills stuff yet. I just gave me a bit of chills and I was just like, “Wow, this is powerful stuff.” And then months later, because we were connected months ago, and here we are having an interview now. When I was going through your research and there was chills in the research, I was like, “Oh, I wonder if that was there to evoke chills in some people”

Nicco Reggente

I am assuming that that was put up by one of our scholars, Mordecai Walder, who’s studying that stuff, who’s studying all of the potentiating effects of prayer on chills on prayer. So yeah, very much so designed to give chills and then interact with our website more.

Lorne Brown

And everybody’s different, so it’s not like that would give everybody chills. 

Nicco Reggente 

No, no, no, absolutely not. Yeah. And that’s the whole science of what we’re doing is getting to know you as a person then delivering the bespoke piece of content.

Lorne Brown 

So becoming individualized. Nicco, I really had a good time chatting with you.

Nicco Reggente

Likewise, man.
Lorne Brown

I do get to go up to LA once in a while, so I’m looking forward to coming in to play with all the toys you have there. We’ll have the toys. Yeah. I’m totally into that. I’m going to bring some of my toys and you can measure stuff on me because I have a bunch of tech here. All right. Thank you for your time.

Nicco Reggente 

All right. Thanks Lorne. Yeah, this was a pleasure, man. Thanks for putting it together. I really appreciate you. It was a fun conversation.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe or follow the show and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.