The Science of Consciousness: What’s Beyond the Brain? | Mark Gober
In this long‑form interview on Dave Asprey’s Human Upgrade podcast, biohacker Dave Asprey talks with author and consciousness researcher Mark Gober about the limits of the dominant materialist view that consciousness is produced by the brain. Gober recounts his personal awakening in 2016, sparked by exposure to alternative podcasts, float‑tank meditation, and stories of near‑death experiences and psychic phenomena. He describes how sensory‑deprivation tanks act as a “mini‑filter removal” that lets consciousness glimpse a broader reality, and how psychedelics, meditation, and biohacking practices can further dissolve the brain’s filtering function. The conversation surveys a range of fringe‑but‑peer‑reviewed research—from the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies and the Institute of Noetic Sciences to the former PEAR lab and declassified government psychic‑spying programs—suggesting that consciousness may survive bodily death and continue in other forms. Gober challenges the brain‑as‑generator model, proposing instead that the brain is a filter or antenna for a non‑local consciousness, citing near‑death experiences where consciousness appears heightened despite absent brain activity. Throughout, both hosts blend personal anecdotes, scientific references, and philosophical speculation, urging listeners to question entrenched paradigms and explore practices that expand awareness.
Chapters
The model that consciousness revolves around our brain, it's not a proven model. Your consciousness is just riding around in the body with very limited connection to reality, because the body, its whole job is to filter out almost all of reality. Because why would you pay attention to the spinning of the planets and gurgling of things? Too much data.
Consciousness survives bodily death. When a person's body dies, their consciousness simply transitions into a new form. Doesn't die. It's still accessible in the stream and it could reconfigure into a new whirlpool that is reincarnation Wouldn't be paranoid normal.
What evidence do you really have that consciousness isn't in your brain? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is a show that I am so excited to share with you because you might have noticed that I'm into biohacking. If you've been listening for a long time, you know where biohacking came from. What happens is you might start out saying, look, I care about human performance or I want to lose weight, or I want my brain to work. And I've been in each of these situations. So I want my body to stop hurting or I don't want to get sick anymore, right? So there's a consciousness component. And I believe that if you start on the path of biohacking, you will end up inevitably saying, I'm going to join Dave in living to at least 180 and dying at a time. And by a method of my choice. You're also, if you decide to do that, like, well, my brain works, I have tons of energy. I don't want to be miserable and suffer anymore. So I'm going to have to. Well, the technical term would be wake the fuck up, but the more enlightened term would be, I'm going to become more conscious. And you've heard me say over and over, if you work on your mitochondria, you are wired in your bones to be kind to other people. It is a fundamental aspect of life in order to do that. But it's just really hard to shift your energy into that versus staying in fear. So that means we're ultimately studying consciousness. And this is why you'll see guys like Joe Dispenza on stage at my biohacking conference, shameless plug biohackingconference.com May 28 Austin. 4,000 people. It's going to be amazing. But you see, Joe and one of my shamanic teachers, Alberto Viota, will be there this year. And it's why, for 20 years I've studied in monasteries and gone to the Andes and Himalayas and all this stuff that you might not really hear about front and center. And what that comes down to is my model of reality and consciousness has shifted quite a lot because I've seen and eventually learned how to do things that I was raised to believe are entirely impossible. And I've seen them reliably and repeatedly and they just basically smack me in the face enough times that I'm like, oh, my picture of reality is not very accurate. Right. So I've been studying all these different perspectives, some old lineages and some of the more modern things. And our guest today is a guy named Mark Gober. Mark is an author of was this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 books, the most famous of which is called An End to Upside Down Thinking. And he's an award winning author and we'll call it consciousness researcher, who like me, used to hang out in places like Silicon Valley. But he was even worse than being a nerd. He was an investment banker. He had to take three showers before he came into the studio just to get the banker stench off of him. Okay, not really. I think he has good hygiene, but he comes from that world, which I'm very familiar with as well, and has learned to kind of reject a lot of materialist science. So he's a mental force. He does a lot of thinking, a lot of research, and has gone way down the path of saying, oh my God, like there is science behind consciousness, behind things that you wouldn't think are real. So I think we can all learn a lot. And you find someone who has one belief set and then just keeps seeing things and starts questioning their belief set. This is what you've done to become a biohacker. Things just happen to me, I don't know why to I'm in control by choosing my environment inside and outside my body. He's doing the same thing about choosing how to frame reality with no other ado. Mark. Welcome to the studios here in Austin, Dave.
Thanks for having me.
You and I got to have dinner last night in a room of about 25 or so leading AI researchers, consciousness researchers, top entrepreneurs, Jeffersonian style dialogue. Really, really fun. We had great minds in biology and computer science and there wasn't really a consensus on almost anything. But more people in the room than not thought that our consciousness paradigm maybe wasn't very accurate, that there's a lot of spirituality, a lot of belief systems that were not rigorously Western science. How did you go from being kind of atheistic banker dude into spiritual guru dude who doesn't wear a beaded necklace under your sport code, but probably wants to.
Yeah, unexpectedly. That's the short answer. Never would have predicted it if you talked to my friends and family like, what happened to Mark? Because this was not on my radar. I was on a mainstream track. I was very interested in the normal things you're supposed to achieve in so school, getting good grades. I was a competitive athlete, went to Princeton. I was one of the captains of the tennis team there. Then like many of my classmates, went into investment banking. I was there in 2008 during the financial crisis. That's when I graduated and didn't really have a sense of meaning or purpose when I was doing other than this is what you're supposed to do, this is what's going to bring happiness or something. And then I ended up working in Silicon Valley advising tech companies and sort of had an awakening in 2016 in Silicon Valley where I hit a wall in my life in many ways because I was on this treadmill of trying to succeed, either succeeding or not, and then not feeling like I was getting anywhere in the process. I was sprinting really fast but not moving.
And so you weren't moving towards happiness, towards financial success, towards relationships? What were you not moving to?
I would say all the above. Of what, what's really going to make life awesome. And the things we're told often don't bring the lasting satisfaction that, that we expect.
What were the three things that you thought were going to bring happiness? Like the most important three, I would.
Have said material success and that, that's two categories. One is respect in an industry. So that means progressing but then also doing well financially. So the numbers, I would have said those are two really important things.
And.
Beyond that I'm actually not sure. Probably relationship, having the right marriage and the right kids and all that.
Okay, there you go. How old are you now?
39.
39. And you're. It's fantastic. I was on a very similar thing, like, okay, I've top career in Silicon Valley and like, okay, if I just have enough money then I'll be happy. And I make 6 million pre Biden dollars when that was real money. And, and I just looked at a friend, I'm like, I'll be happy when I have 10. I, I literally said that, like, what a douchebag. And then like, oh, a relationship, I better get married. And that was not a way to be happy. And same same thing to me it's.
Because there wasn't a deeper sense of purpose underlying it. And that's what my awakening in 2016 has led me toward, which is, who are we fundamentally and why are we here? And then having answers to those questions moving forward from that point. And what I would have told you, Dave, if you asked me pre2016, I would have said we live in a fundamentally random and meaningless universe.
Yeah, I would have said that too.
And meaningless I would have said to you as well, we can create meaning in our mind, but we're rationalizing the inevitability of we're going to die. And when our brain shuts off, that's the end of our consciousness. There was a big bang 13.8 billion years ago. It was all random interactions of molecules and atoms that led us here, and we just have to deal with it.
Are you pissed off at yourself for believing that for so long?
Yes and no. Yes, in that what I now know makes my old worldview look very foolish. But at the same time, I don't think I could have escaped it, given where I was and the orientation I had. It would have been very difficult up until that point in 2016 for me, really, to have a shift.
You say you had an Awakening in 2016. What does it even mean? What happened?
Yeah, because for many people, it can be different. Some people have a near death experience or a psychedelic trip. For me, it was more of a feeling of being a zombie in life combined with learning about science that challenged my worldview. Starting with podcasts, because in 2016, podcasts became more popular. A friend of mine sent me a Tim Ferriss episode with Marc Andreessen. I was like, this is cool. You can listen to venture capitalist talk. And then some of my friends were putting butter and coffee and they're like, listen to Dave Asprey. So I was listening to Dave Asprey.
Sweet.
And lots of alternate, more, you know, kind of Joe Rogan, things like that. And then came across a show called Extreme Health Radio. And they were helping. They were talking about people curing themselves of things, using all kinds of alternative treatments, both mentally and physically. Because I was interested in the mental, too, of how can I make. Where can I find joy?
That's where it's at. I mean, even if you have a tumor or something, at least if your brain works and you're happy, yeah, you'll probably heal the tumor.
Exactly. So I was. These were all foreign ideas and it was just an. It was a way, an outlet for me because I was so focused on my job and my client work in Silicon Valley to Hear these other ideas. So I started doing sensory deprivation. Float tanks.
Whoa. In 2016.
Yes.
Tell me about your first float ever.
So if your audience is not familiar, they probably are. But if they're not, it is water with so much salt that you float on your back, you stay afloat. There's that much salt in it, it's not even that high. And where I went in San Francisco, it was a pod. So you could close the pod. I would like to do no lights, no sound, and it's like meditation on steroids. That's how I see it now. And I would come out of there very relaxed. I would do an hour, actually. Sometimes I would book back to back to back. Or I'd do like three hours just to see what it was like. Because I didn't feel at the time I wasn't ready to do the psychedelic realm. I just wasn't as comfortable. But I heard, I think it was on Tim Ferriss podcast. They're like, you don't have to do these substances. You can just meditate a lot. I'm like, all right, let me try that. So I definitely felt peaceful. But also emotions would start to come up, like memories that I hadn't thought about. I'm like, whoa. That memory had been suppressed. And it actually had a big impact on my life. So I would have a lot of emotions. And in hindsight, probably those meditations in. Or if you want to call them meditations in the tanks, they might have somehow steered me toward where I ended up in terms of learning about the science. I was on this path without knowing it.
Float tanks are. They're so interesting. I tried one in 2014, kind of before it became a trend. It'd been on my list forever. You know, I saw the movie Altered States years ago. You probably saw that. I just couldn't find one. So I'm in Las Vegas and I googled around. I was at a conference of some sorts. I found a place. It was the craziest thing ever. I call them and they're like, yeah, yeah, come over. You know, you don't have to take a taxi. We'll send our son over. And I'm waiting. The guy's like 45 minutes late to pick me up. And he pulls up in some beat up old car. This is pretty much like Jesse from Breaking Bad in the early part of, like. And he gets lost on the way to his own house. I'm like, oh, my God, this guy is so loaded on meth. Like, this is probably not a good idea. And I Get to the place where the float tank is, and it's a homemade float tank with like plywood and plexiglass and stuff on it. And there's these two kind of tweaker parents and, you know, they're selling $25 bottles of Epsom salt with a piece of lavender in them. And like, this is the sketchiest thing I've ever done. I'll do it. So I lay down in the thing and fortunately nobody killed me. Yeah, it felt same thing. You know, there's no sensory input, so I'm just alone with myself. Right. And it was, it was very similar to some of the psychedelic experiences I'd had. So there, there is value in that for sure.
And I was seeing things too. Colors, almost like kaleidoscopes in a way.
Yeah. What do you think that is? Like, what are those?
I don't know. I. So this is getting into where my work is headed, actually about what the brain is and how its relationship to consciousness actually is in the world. And I think that when we meditate, perhaps we're getting things from our brain out of the way that normally filter out a broader reality. So the float tank and meditation could be like miniature ways of doing that. Whereas a psychedelic trip or a near death experience, those might be more dramatic. So it's like maybe little bits getting into my awareness while my mind was calm. And I was not a person who could sit still or meditate. So that was a big deal for me to sit in those tanks. And really the first time I had to be with myself like that, I.
I ended up getting one of the pods, probably similar to the one you had. For my first upgrade, Labs is in my barn in Canada. I'm like, I know the magazines are going to come here. So I made a special room for it and I had a big like stencil made for it that said human cloning tank.
Nice.
It's so sci fi. You open it up and there's, you know, guy dripping with water and coming out and. Yeah, it freaked a few people out.
But sort of like Minority Report, that movie where they like come out of. That's what it looks like. It really is, but it's. You're just sitting in salt water. The place I went to an SF was really nice. It was like a spa in the marina.
So that's how it should be. My experience was pre, like commercialization of this. So I'm glad it's a little bit more normal. Did you find it just shredded your hair? Like, like the. So weird Just, like, messed up. I didn't do my nearly as much as I thought I would when I was at my house.
Yeah, well, the shampoos and soaps that they gave were apparently designed to counteract that.
Okay.
So it was really. It was a great place.
Sweet. And I. And I'm not suggesting, if you're listening to the show, that you shouldn't go do a try afloat if you never have. I went to a place in Victoria with my son when he was 5, and he was kind of afraid, right. You know, so I held his hand and, you know, he finally let go and was just floating and maybe for five minutes. And I said, congratulations, you did your first float ever. And he looks at me, he goes, that wasn't my first float. What do you mean? And just real peacefully, he goes, when I was inside mommy, I was floating. It was like he remembered being in the womb, and this was the same feeling. And it triggered. I was like, whoa, profound.
Well, that's actually one of the things that drew me to it versus regular meditation, is that you are. Your muscles are totally relaxed. And it's supposed to mimic the womb. It's part of the selling that they were doing.
Oh, absolutely.
Felt that way.
The. The pods I use at 40 years of Zen are also designed to mimic the womb, even though they're for neurofeedback. Because it's not something that we're going to think about. It's just that when we're in a womb like environment, we naturally, in our bones, feel safer with no cognitive involvement whatsoever. Right. It's this feeling of connectedness. And connectedness is one of the things that is a hallmark of your work. We're all connected.
Exactly. Right.
So your awakening was a float tank.
Maybe we could say that was the first domino, or we could say some of these earlier podcasts. But if I had to point to one moment, it was listening to a woman on Extreme Health Radio named Laura Powers, who I actually ended up having on my podcast, Where's My Mind? But she talked about, this is a health podcast, okay? And I had heard many episodes on curing cancer and things like that. And this woman is speaking about using psychic abilities and energies to work with clients and interdimensional beings. And the hosts were taking her seriously. So I'm like, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? Because I'm not familiar with this. This sounds like sci fi. She doesn't sound like she's lying. Is she delusional? How could this be?
And.
And it didn't. My Life didn't change in that moment. But at the end of the episode, Laura said, well, I have my own podcast, it's called Healing Powers, and I've interviewed a lot of other people. So I said, let me check out this new podcast. And it was person after person after person, different backgrounds coming to this view of reality that was contradicting what I had grown up with. And I'm like, wait a second. I don't know anyone in my network that believes these things. And then I heard a man on her show named Paul Davids, who I interviewed on my podcast also. Eventually he went to Princeton also. He was a psychology major like me, and he was a Hollywood producer. So the Transformer. So incredible guy. And this came after I'd heard a lot of other anecdotes and he's like, I'm working on the Life After Death project because my colleague passed away and he was an atheist. And he said, I don't believe in an afterlife, but if I die before you, and there is one, I'm going to drop you a line. Paul proceeds to describe example after example of things that rocked his world. And the one that really stood out to me, when his colleague died, he said he was home alone in New Mexico working on papers, and left the room, came back and there was a wet inkblot covering words that related to the death of his former colleague. He didn't put the ink blot there. No one else was there. And he spent three years sending that ink blot to chemistry labs, analyze the composition. And there were strange properties. This was one out of several hundred examples of weird things. So I remember I couldn't even move in my chair because I had heard enough before to say, hm, maybe there's some reality. This is a really smart guy.
Whoa.
And I started looking around the room. Are there things that I can't see? How could people not know about this? And my curiosity has just grown since then.
The idea that there are things you can't see, it actually pisses some people off. And for me, I grew up in New Mexico, and when I was 14 and a half at the time, you could get a license back then. I did total the car within three months. So maybe you shouldn't get a license at that, you know? But I bought a radar detector. Not a lot of people had them back then. And soon I realized as I'm driving around, I'm driving through all these invisible fields like they're there provably. I can't feel or sense any of these. And I think it really changed my mind to go, I'm constantly surrounded by things I can't sense, and that's just a normal part of reality. Could help that I had Asperger's syndrome. So I'm like a pattern matched guy. I'm like, why is it here? Why is it there? What's going on? I'm like constructing a map of bubbles of energy around me because I'm driving through them and I can sense them. And I'm like, oh, that's that flavor of energy. And that flavor of energy becoming really comfortable with the fact that you can't see cell phone, you know, emanations, radio frequencies and all, but that they're there. Why couldn't there be other things that maybe we don't have technology to say?
Exactly. So even by mainstream standards, scientists will tell you that we can only see a tiny fraction of the full electromagnetic spectrum. So those sorts of concepts I started to integrate and I knew a little bit about quantum mechanics with these spooky action at a distance where things are connected that are far away and they're moving at the same time. I'm simplifying this, but whoa, that violates the notion that the speed of light is the fastest you can travel if there's this instantaneous connection. So I started, you know, kind of doing the math in my mind of maybe the reason we have this 96% of the universe that's dark matter and dark energy that scientists don't understand, but they have to plug it in to rationalize the whole universe. Maybe that's because they're missing something fundamental. So it started to make sense intellectually, but I still couldn't grasp that so many smart people I knew had no idea about this and even would reject it.
God, I want to go in two directions. I have a story about death and a story about science. You want the death story? Sure, because it's kind of all right. My grandfather, PhD, physical chemist, spent his entire life in the nuclear industry, won awards for his work in it. Right before he died, he knew he was coming to the end. He called my dad and said, you know, I. I've been an atheist my whole life, and now that I get it really close to the end, I've really been thinking about it. And my dad's going, he's going to convert. Oh, my God. And he goes, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced it's all right. So he's like, I'm still an atheist. And he was trolling my dad, but then he Said, I'm also a scientist. He said, I've never died before. No. I would argue that he probably has because I know about past lives and whatever, but he goes, I never died before. So it's really just an experiment. So after I cross over, if I can leave you a sign, I will. I mean, very much like your story. That's what made me think about this. Right. You totally reminded me. And so about a week after he died, this huge billboard goes up in town and it said, where's Larry? Which was his name. There was no phone number, no QR code, no. No one knows what it was for. And the whole family's like, was that it? And we don't know. We'll never know, right? Yeah, it was. It was super weird. And since then, like, I don't know, I've done shamanic training and all. I've invited the spirit of my ancestors to come and hang with me. Dude, I can tell when he's there. Right. I'm not that good at talking with things like that. That's not my superpower. But when you work with people who are really adept at these sorts of things, I. I'm very skeptical about death really being that real. It's just a change of state. Are you there too?
That's where I am, yeah. So it comes from the idea that our consciousness, which is the part of us that's experiencing right now, our subjective inner awareness, difficult thing to talk about because we can't point to it. So language is always going to have to approximate, but we all have consciousness right now. The idea here that flipped my world, which is why my first book's called An End to Upside Down Thinking. I used to think consciousness comes out of our brain through chemical and electrical activity because there's so much neuroscience showing affect this part of the brain, it affects your consciousness change. This part of the brain that is responsible for vision, now your eyesight changes close correlations between brain activity, conscious experience. The problem is that correlation is not necessarily causation. If you see firefighters at the scene of the fire, I could say to you, Dave, hey, look, those firefighters, they cause the fire.
Oh, yeah. You could even see beans in a place where people live unusually long periods of time and think it's caused by the beans. Just saying.
We could say that because they're co. They're co occurring.
Yeah. It's not the beans.
We have to really think, well, what's the cause of relationship? So I started looking at this other possibility because I heard so much, so many anecdotes and then started to see peer reviewed science from the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which I'm now on the board of. But this is 50 plus years of peer reviewed research founded by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut. Princeton University had a lab, the PEAR Lab, for almost 30 years run by the former Dean of engineering, studying these phenomena, the US Government doing psychic spying programs with declassified documents saying it's real. So all of these things made me say, hmm, first of all, I'd never heard of these things before. So if your audience is new to this, it's mind blowing when you get into it. But secondly, maybe we have the relationship between the brain and consciousness wrong. And consciousness somehow beyond the body and we're tapping into it. And if that's true to your question, maybe when our body dies and our brain shuts off, it's actually kind of a liberation of consciousness and it goes into some other form, but it doesn't actually die.
You know, I'm sorry, but we're gonna have to cancel you. I mean, there's this guy named Galileo and he stood up and said, what if our model of reality isn't very accurate and the sun doesn't revolve around the earth and it's the other way around. And of course, how dare you. And now it's commonly accepted, the model that consciousness revolves around our brain. It's not a proven model, it's just a useful model, like Newtonian physics. It's useful, it's just wrong, right?
Yeah, it's a good approximation. And there are these correlations to. Neuroscience is great, but I find that many scientists, like I used to be that mindset, they want to get rid of anything that could sound spiritual. So let's just stick in the materialist paradigm. It's all stuck in the brain, versus this other possibility of what if the brain's like a filter? So like the near death experience. One of my favorite quotes from my podcast series, I interviewed Dr. Bruce Grayson from the University of Virginia Medical Doctor, very credible smart guy who's been studying near death experiences. So these are people, let's say they're in cardiac arrest, clinically dead, they have an elaborate experience. He said, mark, we're left with this paradox that at a time when the brain isn't functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever.
How does that work?
Well, if our brain is maybe like a blindfold or getting in the way of our consciousness, it's filtering it in a particular way, like an antenna, then maybe when you get the brain fully out of the way, we can experience this broader reality. Maybe that's what psychedelics are doing. Maybe that's what certain meditation experiences are revealing. And so that changes for.
