A recorded YouTube interview between Dr. Jud Brewer and Josh Trent about habit change, consciousness, and embodied awareness. Dr. Brewer highlights interoceptive awareness and the insula’s role, explains predictive/generative brain models (top-down predictions, limited sensory bandwidth, prediction-error attention), and connects these ideas to pragmatic practices—curiosity, somatic experiencing, and noticing mismatch signals—to weaken habitual responses and see past expectancy bias.
Chapters
You can't solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it. And the idea there is you can't think your way out of a, of a problem. You can't think your way. Well, let's, let's be clear. A logical problem. Yes, that's what thinking is for, and it's very helpful. But for habits, we can't think our way out of a habit because that's not how they form. We have to feel our way out in that. Feeling comes from awareness, from curiosity.
And that feeling resides where is it the neural tree? Is it the vagus nerve? Is it connected to the amygdala? I mean, there is some hardware here. Yes, the, the feeling body, as you mentioned.
So there are certainly brain regions and networks involved in what's called interoceptive awareness. And I think this is where somatic experiencing can be really helpful because it kind of helps to strengthen those pathways, one of the key brain regions. And these are always overly rejectionist. But just in case people have heard of this one, it's called the insula, you know, literally the island. And there the insula has been shown to be activated when people are sensing their embodied experience, you know, whether it's their heartbeat, whether it's other things. And that's also where we feel emotion. Right. Is in our body. We don't feel it in our brain. Our brain doesn't even have sensory neurons. That's why you can do brain surgery without anesthesia once you cut the skull open. Fun fact.
I did not know that. That makes sense. How could you operate on a brain if it could feel you operating on it? That makes perfect sense. Wow. So these receptors don't live in the brain. So the brain is literally wired to give and receive information.
Yep.
Is that its core function?
Well, it's. It's got a lot of functions. That's one of them. And if we want to get into some really interesting stuff, I mean, it's all interesting, but there's. I love it. There's some newer work around what's called generative models. And this comes from this interesting anatomical anomaly, which is. And I actually learned in medical school that, you know, our brain processes information that comes up from the sensory, you know, the peripheral nervous system, you know, and so it's okay, it's bottom up, but it turns out when they were able to look at the anatomy, the connections are actually, there are 10 times more connections going down than up. So fundamentally, people started asking, you know, wondering, and started starting to question whether it was simply about incoming Sensory information. And then I don't remember where this came from, but the, you know, some people, people started asking, well wait a minute, can we actually process all the sensory information that's available in any one moment with the apparatus that we have? And the answer is no way. Too much information available at any one time. Our brain would crash. So what our brain does, and it's evolved to do this is it actually makes up stories. It hallucinates in a literal sense where we are, we, you and I, everyone, we're all hallucinating our world. We're generating our world. We're creating a story of the world every moment that is based on our past experience. And that store what our sensory information helps with is basically we're expecting certain things to look and behave the way that our story says that they should. So for example, this microphone in front of me, I, I expect that it's not going to move unless I move it. It's. I expect it to be an inanimate object because in the past that's how microphones have worked and that's how I understand physics. So if this microphone suddenly, you know, jumped on the top of my head, I would pay attention. I would pay real attention because my brain says there's a mismatch. This is called a, you know, error signal. Right. So the, the error is I was expecting that thing to be the way it is. And with the expectation I can basically only take in very minimal sensory information. Like if it's, it's, if it's behaving the way I expect it to, I'm basically ignoring it. That's a microphone, but I don't, I see it in my stories Mind's Eye. It looks very rich in detail, but it's. My brain can't actually process sensory information in as rich D in 4K, for example. It makes that up. What my brain is seeing is edges, colors, shadows, shapes. Right? That's about it. And to give an example of that, you know, there so that these top down sense, these, these top down neurons are making up the story and the sensory information is coming in from the bottom, giving it like is this you giving it error mismatch signals? And so it's basically not firing unless there's an error that says, hey, pay attention. And that's how we function. Because it's very efficient. It's an efficient way to go about the world. There are caveats there because it's not a perfect system. One caveat is that we're going to expect things to be a certain way. So we're going to actually see them and feel them and hear them, and we're going to bias them to be the way we expect them to be. It's in psychology they call this expectancy bias. And it makes it harder for us to see the world accurately because we're not really seeing the world carefully. We can't. So if something goes way off, we're going to pay attention because our sensory systems forces us to pay attention, because it's this moment a matter of survival. It's like, what's going wrong here? Is my world literally turning upside down, or figuratively. So there it helps us really say, okay, what's going on here? We pay attention, and then we stop paying attention as soon as we've told ourselves a story that's consistent enough with our previous story to say, okay, I get it. You know, the world's not falling apart. My world is not falling apart, because everybody has their own world they're living in. Literally living in their own world. So I know that was a lot, but I'll pause there. Does that make sense?
It's. It's beautiful. You know what I was. I had a picture in my mind, a story, as you were describing that. And what I remembered was when Christopher Columbus arrived at the shore, the indigenous, literally so is written, could not see the ship because they had that bias of which you speak. They couldn't see it as real because it matched no story that they'd ever seen before. And that's a beautiful way to describe the science that you're describing. But, you know, what else came through was you said top down, bottom up. So we have. Obviously, you're very steeped in this. The enteric nervous system, the gut brain axis, and how that feeds up to the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous. There's all these beautiful systems. There's.
There's.
The body is such a. Do you ever just wonder, like, wow, who created this body? This is such a magical thing, the body in the brain. Yeah. Does that come through for you still in your work?
Oh, still. Every time I think about, you know, the. The bones in the skull, they're so intricate. It's like, how did this ever happen? If you look at the eye or just look at the whole thing? Yeah, it's. Every time I'm amazed.
It's a miracle. Yeah, it's a miracle. So. So my second question was if we have this feeling body, to use that term, and it could be an amalgamation of the enteric nervous system or other things, you could describe, but that bottom up seems to be where most people are disconnected because we live in a very top down society. How do you make sense of this for people that might be hearing this for the first time?
Well, there are some really pragmatic aspects to that. And it also reminds me there was this James Joyce short story from over a hundred years ago, just highlighting how this is relevant. This has always been relevant and we're just pointing it out more now. And so there was a short story about a guy named Mr. Duffy and the line went, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body, right? We're walking around these disembodied beings, right? How often are we just divorcing ourselves from our feeling body? So this relates to this, the story. Because if we one, if we don't know that we are living a story that we're telling ourselves, right? Again, it's not that there's something wrong with that. We just need to know that that's how our brain works. So if we don't know that, we're just going to assume the world is the way that we think it is. And then when somebody says no, it's not that way, we're going to say, you're wrong because this is the way I see it and I can literally see it. But the thing is, we can't literally see anything. You know, as an example, when somebody takes a psychedelic, they often will see these, you know, geometric patterns and things like that. One of the hypotheses is that that's actually shutting down the story system and preferencing the bottom up sensory information. And we're actually seeing more clearly even though it looks less clear. But the more clear aspect is that that's the level of pixelation that our eyes can detect. That's, that's accurate. We're just not used to seeing, literally seeing accurately. Pragmatically, it's really helpful to know, hey, this is my story. So that we can even step back a little bit and ask, hey, wait a minute, this doesn't fit with something that's happening or this doesn't fit with somebody else's story. So let's open up our sense gates, let's open up, let's be curious and see where our story might be wrong. You know, instead of just double down and say nope, this is the way it is. That's problematic.
