Ezra Hewing

James (00:05.07)
Welcome to Big Bad Beautiful Brains. I’m James. Since I was diagnosed at the age of 45 with autism and ADHD, I’ve been on a journey not only to discover how my brain works and how to look after myself, but also about other people’s brains and how they look after theirs.

I’ll be speaking to people from all different backgrounds, all different ages and all different experiences to understand how they think and how their big bad beautiful brains work.

James (00:36.046)
Hello again everyone, welcome to another episode of Big Bad Beautiful Brains. This week I’m talking to Ezra Hewing.

James (00:48.288)
Ezra is head of mental health education at Suffolk Mind and a human givens therapist. He holds an MSc in the psychology and neuroscience of mental health at King’s College London, where his research explored REM sleep and its links to mental health with a focus on schizophrenia.

James (01:07.096)
Really good chat with Ezra, it’s really good to catch up with him. Conversations are always varied and deep and very interesting and you’ll see us going down a few rabbit holes on this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Let’s have a listen.

James (01:25.942)
Ezra, hi, how are you?

I’m okay, James, and flattered and happy that you’ve invited me to come onto the podcast and the questions that you have lined up for your guests I think are wonderful, so.

Thank very much. Okay, let’s go. What’s a song or sound that’s been stuck in your head recently?

This is, this was a difficult question to think about because, because the thing is, is that once upon a time I was really saturated in music and I would never not have music on the go, you know, whether it was in headphones or around me. And then, and then, you know, other things became more important to me and it’s rare for me to have music on. I think as a result of

having been saturated in music at a young age, songs will kind of like play in the background in my head, but they tend to be things that I was listening to when I was much younger. And I suppose like one that recently has popped up from time to time is Nautilus by Bob James. But then the thing about that is that it will be connected with other songs that have sampled Nautilus. So I’ll have like, know, Eric B and Rakim sort of that immediately follows that because

Ezra (02:38.508)
You know, there’s a segment of Nautilus. So things kind of run on a sample based loop.

Do you use music as a place to go back to for comfort and familiarity or is it more at an entertainment level purpose and then an emotional attachment is secondary?

you know, it’s going to sound terrible, but I rarely do that. I’m very comfortable with kind of peace and quiet and just leaves and birdsong. From time to time, I might get together with old friends around Christmas or whatever from that time where, you know, I was listening to music all of the time and, you know, we’ll play old records from maybe old old records or maybe the sorts of things that we were

listening to as they were being released in the late 80s and early 90s so it’s more of a nostalgia trip a couple of times a year than anything I do.

What’s something you’ve been curious about lately?

Ezra (03:40.726)
I think at the moment, you know, if your newsfeed or your social media feed is bombarding you with global events, however you might feel about those on whatever side of whichever divide or even if you’re able to do so, if you sit on the fence over certain things or are able to kind of tolerate different views on issues, it can feel very much like, you know, many parts of the world.

already, were already dictatorships and others are kind of heading in that direction and there’s ever more control being exercised by powerful influences and people perhaps feel they have less autonomy in their lives or maybe they only have attention to give to, you know, putting food on the table, paying the rent and so on and so forth. Or it can feel like

things are entering into, or there is an active World War Three going on, and that there’s more tribalism, black and white thinking, more hatred and so on and so forth. you know, civilizations are entering a kind of a state of collapse. Maybe that reflects my news feed than perhaps any of your listeners. So if you’re not seeing that, then that’s great. And I don’t want to change that for you. But for me, like that…

in that sense, it’s really easy to assume that this is, you know, the end state of affairs. actually, people in the past and in the recent present who’ve written about these sorts of times, you know, at end of the Roman Empire or the Persian Empire or whenever it might be, something always comes after that.

And I’m curious about looking out for green shoots, the signs of what comes next, which can be hard to see. think, you know, if you were the Etruscans and you thought, you know, what’s going on? know, our civilization is collapsing. You had no idea that the Roman Empire was about to be built in the place where you live. That’s where it started. And, you know, there’s no evidence that they could see that that was coming.

Ezra (06:00.962)
So I’m curious about what comes next.

Yeah, I think it can be very hard to look for the green shoots sometimes, particularly, know, bad news travels faster than good. live in a world where social media is a distraction at best. It’s probably the nicest thing to call it that I could think of calling it. Doom scrolling is habitualized.

as a, as a, as a means of comfort to some people as well. know I can fall foul of it myself and the, algorithm isn’t really working in your favor. It’s kind of cognitive bias driven. and it does create wedges into people, but also you sit into that space and you think you’re seeing everything the world has to offer. And you, you can get into an algorithm where it is. Everything’s bad. Everything’s failing. Everything’s wrong.

and not be able to see those green shoots. So sometimes it’s kind of.

finding the space to step out of where it’s comfortable and to look somewhere else to find something which is meaningful.

Ezra (07:16.022)
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

If you had to describe how your brain works in three words, what would they be and why?

Okay, another great question, massive question. So the three words would be information, knowledge and experience. And the reason why is a bit of a long-winded answer, I’m afraid. So it’s my view that our attention is shaped by

Far away. Far away.

Ezra (07:49.71)
or takes a different form depending on whether it’s shaped by information, knowledge or experience and in any given moment information, knowledge and experience are always present but if the kind of attention we give to things becomes unbalanced and is too shaped by information or knowledge or experience then there are consequences to the

to the loss of balance. So, and I also think that this has a lot to do with the way that we learn. if I start there, if I start with the way that we learn and this, you know, this is not necessarily my idea, but my kind of reflections on the ideas about the people. So, in the 19th century, Holtz and Poincaré to

continental philosophers who are, know, polymaths in every regard. They formulated the idea that all learning involves a period of saturation where you’re concentrating on new information. Like if they’re trying to solve a problem in science or develop a theory or try or understand something in chemistry or, you know, electrics or biology or whatever it might be.

It’s a period where you have to give concentrated, focused, narrow attention on new information and you need to do that until you can get to a point where you can now switch to a different kind of attention, where rather than giving concentrated, narrow attention, you can contemplate all of the new bits of information that you’ve taken on board and observe the relationships between those bits of information and

You do that for a period of time and then you need to forget about it. And then what happens, the next stage that they described is illumination. And that’s where you have those penny drop moments where you’re, you know, having a soak in the bath or out walking in the park. You’ve taken your attention completely away from the problem you were trying to solve. Maybe you were trying to write a piece of music. Maybe you were trying to formulate

Ezra (10:10.186)
what you wanted to write about or the sequence, know, how am going to approach writing about a particular topic for a blog post or whatever it might be or, know, a new business idea, you know, what do I need to do? It’s when you’re not thinking about it, that your brain has had enough time to absorb and contemplate units of information and then you have the penny drop moment and, that’s the illumination. And then Poincaré added another stage, which is verification where you go and test it out against what’s already known and

and the new insight that you’ve had. Since then, Graham Wallace, who was one of the founders of the London School of Economics, wrote about this in his book, The Art of Thought, that was in 1925. And then there’s a huge gap until Murray Gellman, a Nobel winning quantum physicist, writes about this in a book, The Jaguar and the Quark. he

posits the idea that this is actually what constitutes a living system. Any living organism, what makes it different from a machine is it can give concentrated attention and choose when to take it away, contemplating, forget about it for a while. I’ll have a penny drop moment where it experiences the meaning, the meaning of the new learning and then it goes and tests it out. And I think that those, what they’re describing is the influence, the information.

in the outside world, the knowledge that we already have within us and our experience of the meaning when we bring knowledge to bear on information has. Now look, that’s quite an abstract idea, but if we think about the world around us, at the moment we’re saturated with data and information. We’re bombarded with fragments of information all of the time through social media feeds. We have companies who are solely dedicated to

harvesting data from us and from everything that’s going on in the world. And they’ve been doing so for decades. Many of them believe that data tells the story and they don’t believe that there’s anything unique or special about human knowledge and experience. And this is what drives the development of AI. The reaction in the mental health world and the kind of advocacy for lived experience is a reaction to all of that.

Ezra (12:28.942)
And again, people like Goethe were talking about the importance of, and not pretending that you can exclude human experience from scientific experiments and that everything can be reduced down to kind of data variables, and that we needed to get better at examining our experiences and, know, to use a very old fashioned term, develop knowledge of self. I think that these, we’re living in a world where

Everything’s imbalanced and leans towards information and in reaction, we chase novel experiences to get away from it all. And what’s neglected is developing internal autonomous knowledge that can see patterns in the data, experience the meaning and see connections and relationships between things.

The illumination element from that as well. Yeah. Yeah. And it ties back to a couple of things, suppose, from, from my experiences. One thing is being bound to the desk until I’ve solved the problem. Yeah. It’s something I used to do, but it’s, you know, it’s tried and tested. It’s step away, take a pause, take a moment, go for a walk, get some fresh air. It will land. Yeah. And maybe not straight away.

Yeah, hopefully.

Ezra (13:34.967)
city.

James (13:42.338)
But you have to have those pauses there to create the space. And I think on the machine learning and the looming threat of AI, a group of students recently is the two, the one thing that data will never have is curiosity. It’s a one way conversation in terms of data. It won’t query why.

So.

Ezra (14:03.532)
Yeah, absolutely.

James (14:10.336)
No, it has to have human thought of that and AI cannot do that either. AI does not have curiosity. It synthesizes curiosity, but it’s based on human experience.

I think that’s absolutely right. If you think about what curiosity is for a moment, curiosity exists where we don’t know what the meaning of something is. And AI doesn’t experience meaning. You would only be curious about something if you’ve had the experience of penny drop moments where you saw the meaning of something and you understood something for the first time. And that generates more curiosity about what things mean. What you said a moment ago about, you know, learning that we need to step away from things some of the time is,

is interesting too because a lot of the time when people talk about attention and learning or if you go through the school system as it’s designed at the moment, it’s largely designed around the unconscious assumption that the ideal is to give concentrated focused attention indefinitely and that is how learning and problem solving takes place rather than

seeing that attention takes different forms and that it’s dynamic and that those different forms of attention are in a relationship with one another. Now what’s also interesting about this to me is that recently we’ve had people like Dr. and McGill Chris writing about the two hemispheres of the brain and the different kinds of attention that they give and how the left hemisphere gives concentrated narrow focused attention and he, as I understand it, sees many of the issues of the the world.

arising from an imbalance between the left hemispheres, know, an over-reliance on concentrated focused attention at the expense of neglecting the right hemisphere’s broader context and its perception of relationships and meaning. But even the idea of attention, I was talking about it now, that’s a fairly recent cultural development. There’s a documentary, a mainstream documentary produced by David Attenborough in 1970 where he

Ezra (16:17.134)
worked with the writer and thinker Idris Shah to produce a series. It was an episode of a series called, I think it was called Dream Walkers or something like that. And in that documentary, it introduced the idea that we need attention, we need a certain amount and that the quality of attention that we give to things shapes what we see. Now that’s quite, until recently, that was quite an intangible idea. But going back to

tech and AI and data harvesting. It’s not until we’re up against mobile phones and scrolling, harvesting our data, that all of a sudden we come and become a little bit more aware and more sensitive to it. It’s almost like we need, there’s a kind of a paradox where you need a little bit of kind of resistance and challenge and discomfort to become aware that we’ve all got a need and a capacity for attention and we’ve only got a certain amount to give.

and it has different qualities. And I think that that might be the thing which helps us to see that we need to go beyond narrow focused attention, that it takes different forms depending upon whether we’re talking about information, knowledge and experience and that we can develop more autonomy over how we give attention and what kind of attention we give to things.

Yeah. And I think that that lends itself to it’s a signal versus noise problem. Yeah. And it’s something with the work that I do away from chatting to people is working out where the signal is and not where the noise is. And that can apply to day-to-day life. can be applied to getting stuck in a social media kind of doom scrolling situation. And it can apply to data.

as well, to a certain extent, kind of data is a lot of it’s noise and without an insight and without a signal in there, it’s too broad to be able to attach thought, curiosity, experience or knowledge to. And it is trying to find those times of stepping away from the desk and creating that space to let your brain do that important level of thinking.

Ezra (18:31.082)
Yeah, that’s a really important point, if you’ve got too much time on your hands like me and you gather kind of different scientists and different data analysts definitions of data and information and knowledge as well, more often than not they will describe information as they well they’ll say well okay the root of it is to be

in formation, so in other words it’s in some kind of pattern. Data hasn’t yet arrived at that point, data is meaningless until it’s organized into a pattern and then the next question is what is it that forms information into a pattern and that has to be knowledge and at that point it changes, it changes from quantities where you can measure quantities of data in bits to qualities because knowledge allows

allows us to see shades of gray, nuance and color and gives rise to an experience that can never be reduced down to numbers of data and numerical data. I think that’s another area where many people struggle to develop the sensitivity or don’t make that distinction. And we’re also living in a world where

Now, when people are faced with uncertainty and they believe that you can find a degree of certainty and you can exercise control over systems by accumulating more data, the nature of data makes us think in numerical terms, in terms of quantities rather than qualities. And that kind of mindset that’s dominated by data and information sees solutions in creating policies and in regulation.

to regulate everything that they think they’re seeing in the data. And I think one of the unintended consequences of that is that we end up being our way of seeing the world, the kind of attention we give to things and the kinds of solutions that we see is actually without us being aware of it, shaped by the very nature of data.

James (20:51.074)
Yeah. that can go into, again, it’s the noise problem and the traditional marketing tactics of taking data and making it work for you and what your narrative is, not necessarily presenting it in its truest form, but you know, eight out of 10 cats prefer whiskers. it’s great marketing message, but you know, you could interrogate that data. Which cats? No, what age were they? Are they healthy?

Tabby’s or Tongue-Gas.

You can, you can, if you scratch the surface of the marketing messages, they tend to be paper thin and, but data across all boards and not necessarily marketing into all forms of kind of human interaction can do that. And it’s either through a need of clarity or a need for someone to be convinced in a certain way to do something.

Is this so much of that is hard to stop and kind of go, yep, hold on.

There’s too much noise going on for you for people to be able to take that pause and step away. I’m not saying necessarily that you want to interrogate a cat food marketing brand, but it can be you’re being bludgeoned continuously with that noise of data.

Ezra (22:09.898)
I think that’s right. I think there’s another danger there as well and that’s a perfectly natural response to feeling that, as you put it, being bludgeoned with data. If you feel overwhelmed and that it’s meaningless and that your concerns are being dismissed because they don’t match what the data, what people believe the data is telling them, then we shouldn’t be surprised when we see people react.

because they feel that they’re not being heard and they’ll pursue, they will act in ways where they will chase some kind of an experience that changes the way that they feel and gives them a sense that they’re acting, they’re taking some control back for themselves. I think many of the sectors of society that become involved with protesting either online or in person

sometimes rioting. Now we see that in August, I think that has something to do with poor quality sleep in July, but that’s a slight tangent. People find a way out of being drowned in data by attaching themselves to causes that shift their experience of the world.

them feel like they’re being hurt.

make them feel like they’re being heard. And the thing about that is, is that it’s an easy way out or seemingly easier way out because you don’t actually have to develop knowledge. That’s a bit that’s lost in the middle between information and experience, which is why when you asked me which three, I was like, looked at that, I was like, well, I’ve been thinking a lot about information, knowledge and experience and the relationship between them. And it seems to me that, I mean, there are some people that are very good at that act.

Ezra (23:53.578)
very good at acting on their body’s knowledge and satisfying their appetites. think that Donald Trump doesn’t really care very much about information and data, doesn’t really care too much for experiences outside of his own, outside of what makes him feel comfortable, whatever that might be. And he’s very good at acting on instinctive knowledge. If he was a member of the animal kingdom, and I’m not giving

Not using pigs as an example, because it’s disparaging, not at all. What I mean is, that pigs are, they are, they’re ungulates. So they’ve got great stomachs for digesting lots of different food. And they’re also quite flexible in that they can eat a lot of different things and they can move very quickly and kind of.

Attach that to Animal Farm to an extent and where that fits in.

I do. I don’t want to borrow George Orwell’s metaphys of the bat. think the thing about information, knowledge and experience is that humans are kind of flexible enough to kind of work with all of those and take on board new information, develop knowledge and pursue a rich range of experiences. I think other animals, other mammals in particular are specialised for each of them. think rodents, you know, if you read the work of

a German biologist Wolfgang Schgadd, he said, if rodents were humans, you would diagnose them with anxiety disorders. Their sensory system is so finely developed, so finely attuned, it’s even mirrored in their teeth, where their incisors are almost like extensions of their sensory system. they would, just kind of, any kind of uncertainty in the environment, they kind of react and start having anxiety attacks. If you watch squirrels, like

Ezra (25:40.286)
constantly twitching their tail in their eyes. I think people who are, of us, overwhelmed by data and information behave a bit like squirrels. And some of us pursue experience like carnivores with their kind of finely tuned hearts and respiratory systems. And then some of us behave like ungulates where we just graze and move through territory. And you know, if anybody gets picked off at the edge of the herd, so be it. And I think that

there, you know, we’re, we’re in a situation where lots of us are imbalanced and behaving. That’s a whole podcast in it.

We’ll come back to that one another time. Yeah. So you’ve got your three words, think well figured out and kind of well interrogated. What’s something you’re still figuring out?

I’m still trying to, I was thinking about this question, my first kind of answer.

first thing that came to mind was how to develop an autonomous conscience in the context of a world that is very where there’s a lot of heightened emotion, lots of fear, lots of tribalism and a moral conscience that isn’t influenced and shaped by fear or desire for reward or social ties or shaped by kind of black and white rules

Ezra (27:08.3)
And that allows you to make, allows you, it gives you a kind of an internal compass so you can make decisions about what’s right and wrong in any given moment. But there’s, there’s, there’s kind of another side to this, which kind of goes back to a little bit of where, you know, I kind of veered off on the moment ago. And one thing I’m trying to figure out is in a world where people are looking for certainty, they’re very often kind of

look for leaders and gurus to tell them what to do. That’s true in, I work in the mental health field. you know, if you’re foolish enough to spend too much time on LinkedIn or wherever it is, or just the algorithm sending you adverts, I get bombarded with adverts for, you know, events run by trauma gurus or people running retreats or the latest expert selling the latest technique. And

or, you know, charging lots of money for conferences or whatever it is. And I need to, I’ve been having a conversation with myself whereby I need to learn to recognise that people, people are, in some way people get their needs met through that. I might think that the people organising those events are exploiting vulnerable people.

But it might also be true that people need to go through that a few times before they learn that there really isn’t anything new on offer there and that it still, we need support and help some of the time, but that help should be geared towards enabling us to act independently and think for ourselves and make decisions about how we meet our needs in healthy ways and not have somebody telling us what to do. know, thinking back to the life of Brian in 1979 where

You know, he tells the audience, know, you don’t need a leader. And they all reply, you don’t need a leader. We’re still, we’re still, we’re still absorbing that cultural lesson. You know, when you think that that was like a blockbuster film on a low budget, but it was like, you know, one of the most watched films of that year. And it’s a cult classic now. We’re not, we’re not there yet. Like 46 years later.

Ezra (29:28.064)
We’re still looking for parent figures to help us resolve problems. And I need to let go of being on a soapbox about that. That’s what I’m trying to still trying to figure out.

I mean, that really ties back to, I was talking at a local school this morning and about one of the questions on the kind of things that I had to talk about on the thing was who helped you?

And I think I came up with who I thought would help me didn’t help me. And I had to look elsewhere. And I think it is part of that kind of cultivating curiosity that comes back to all the answers are not necessarily where you expect them to be. And they don’t, it’s not a one size fits all solution. You can’t, you know, it’s difficult to productize mental health.

Because everyone has different experiences, everyone has different learnings, everyone has been through different things, whether that’s neurotypes or lived experiences or trauma. It’s very difficult to of pigeonhole that into a, this course will fix you mentality. And there’s a lot of them out there. And as you say, some people just have to go through that to understand that the answer is not necessarily there. but sometimes the answers can be in

the strangest of places that can resonate and it can be a lyric, can be something aligned from a children’s book, lyric from a song or something completely kind of incidental, crossing the road. Something like that. A lesson can come from that that you need to be more open to. But again, it goes back to the kind of, you have a finite amount of attention that you can give to things. And if you’re stuck in a loop of

James (31:15.598)
Steam scrolling on a device or overthinking or over intellectualizing, which I fall foul of a lot. You don’t have that space for new experiences to come in and perhaps guide you in the right direction.

That’s so true. I mean, the thing about strong emotions is that they, you know, we’re…

We’re often, sensitivity to the ordinary, the everyday, the kind of the things that are kind of there, that are happening is often obscured by, you know, strong emotions like anxiety or even the desire for excitement. You know, if it’s not exciting and dramatic and it, you know, it doesn’t come with, you know, with a figurehead and, you know, a colorful robe and a mantra, then there’s probably, there’s, you know, it’s not going to give me what I need. And as you say, it can be in very quiet everyday.

everyday events that are just like kind of slip below the radar. And as you say, it comes back to the quality and amount of attention that we’re able to give to things and developing a sensitivity to be able to see ranges of meaning in life beyond the course and the dramatic.

Yeah. And, you know, as is the way with things like social media, things are delivered to you in digestible, divisive mechanisms. Very simple to understand, very easy to have a negative reaction to. Overwhelmingly, bad news travels faster than good. Social media has amplified and accelerated that considerably. It’s very easy to kind of get lost in.

James (32:55.264)
outrage and not take a step back.

Yeah, it’s a strong emotion. will, it will, yeah. It will lock your attention for sure.

Okay, so we’re changing tack a little bit now for the next question.

What’s something about everyday life that you find easy and others find hard or the other way around?

Another great question and both sides really, they’re two sides of the same coin for me. So if somebody was diagnosing me, they would probably, I’d fit into what in psychology jargon would be called hyperassociativity. So I think I can see connections between many things.

Ezra (33:45.42)
that other people might not agree upon. They might think that there’s no connection between one thing or another. I think that this is a problem that kind of dogged me throughout childhood and throughout my teenage years as well. And I had to learn how to discipline that and how to sit with the connections that I thought I could see and let them form and develop into patterns over time.

So while I might make a jump between one piece of information and another piece of information and the connection to other people might seem nonsense, ridiculous. I needed time to allow that kind of pattern to form and to investigate it further, allow it to kind of recede and approach, give it the right quality of attention and nurture it before.

before I was and learn how to articulate those patterns clearly in a way that could be useful. So examples of that from my professional life include things like many years ago I drafted the beginning of an article for my professional body’s journal on the effects of cannabis and its relationship with REM sleep and I remember the initial draft that I submitted.

editor who I now know very well, she emailed me back and said we don’t publish pseudoscience and she is somebody you have to take very seriously because she’s a former lead editor for Psychology Today and she’s edited probably hundreds of books and has written hundreds of articles for other people that couldn’t write and has been doing that for many decades.

But we worked, somebody intervened on my behalf and we worked together and it took us maybe two or three years to refine that. And then as a result, I was able to do more work with her. So I was able to write about, investigate and over a period of about five or six years, develop and write about the connection that I saw between human hands, which unlike the four limbs of other mammals,

Ezra (36:01.294)
Other mammals’ forelimbs are specialized. So in fish, they’re clearly for guiding you through water. For horses, they’re for running on hard ground. And in birds, they’re for flying. In humans, there isn’t a single adaptive purpose for hands. They have no fixed purpose. They’re far more autonomous and flexible and that has consequences for the organization of the human brain.

hand dominance, an increase in connections, the expansion of the front of the left hemisphere to begin with over time and our ability to internalize and learn lots of patterns through interacting with the world through our hands. That shapes our identity and our ability to exercise control over ourselves in ways that are not really available to other species or even to our close relatives in the primate world.

but that wasn’t an obvious connection. It needed like time to think through and then, and then, you know, if anybody’s familiar with the approach that we use at Suffolk Mind, they’ll know that, we talk lots about the relationship between REM sleep and mental health and, we see mental health as a continuum. So it’s, it’s a range of interconnected ideas and that stress isn’t random, stress is nature’s way of telling you that a need is not being met. And so the, this is the thing that I find easy.

is seeing the connections between things. harder part is explaining them in ways which will be acceptable to a world that values things being reduced down to simplistic explanations and reducing the data down to, you know, a single kind of reductionist viewpoint.

that, yeah, that there are plenty of other examples I’m sure I could think of, that’s, that’s, that’s both my challenge in terms of like, what’s like, is, but it’s, it’s a challenge in that I can do this thing, but it doesn’t necessarily work in the world that we’re living in. I have a kind of a zigzag brain. The other thing about being hyper associative and seeing connections between things is that you’ll tend to think in terms of analogy and metaphor and story and pattern rather than like,

Ezra (38:21.767)
know, rules and logic and reason, which is what, you know, much of the world around us demands.

Yeah. And I think it is, it is a, it’s a double edged sword of kind of being hyper associative and it can be very powerful in either uncovering new knowledge or associating things that perhaps haven’t been associated in the past, but it can also, you can run away with it. Yes, you can. Or it can run away with you. And you can start to associate, or my brain in particular can.

date.

James (38:56.75)
try and latch onto things that don’t need association, that don’t need consideration at any point in time or need the pattern recognition. It’s a good tool to have that you have to choose when you’re going to bring it out. And sometimes with overactive imaginations or overthinking or catastrophization in particular, that tool can kind of turn on you.

Yeah. So everything in the world is like this, right? You can use a knife to commit murder or to save somebody’s life with surgery. There’s nothing in the world that’s purely good or bad. It depends on how it’s used in the context in which it’s used. And you’re right. That’s true of associative thinking. And I guess that for me, you know, it’s taken me a long time to develop the patience to be able to review ideas and test them out, to verify them in the way that going back to

information, knowledge and experience to verify them in the way that Hemholtz and Juan Carre described us needing to do when we think we’ve seen a connection between one thing and another.

Have you found any approaches that make the world better for you either with a hyper associative mindset or anything else that you use to either kind of physical tools or anything in your mental toolkit that helps you get through a day or week, an experience?

Yes, it’s a very old fashioned idea. I was very lucky when I was a child to be left alone with and to be given and left alone with large collections of folklore and mythology and to be exposed to storytelling at a young age. And it’s my experience, not just my experience, there are other people who

Ezra (40:52.494)
who for whom I know this is true, who have a shared interest in storytelling, who their view is that storytelling is the mind’s kind of default mode. It’s sort of seen as something that’s just for children in our part of the world and you kind of, you’re meant to grow out of it and learn to apply rules.

That applies to curiosity as well, think, as well as another thing of kind of stop asking questions.

I think that’s true too, yeah.

I’ve been gifted and spent time around other people who were far more advanced than I am with this, but I’ve been gifted with a kind of a storehouse, if you like, of stories that enable me to see meaning in events. And sometimes the same story might reveal different levels of meaning over time. So there are stories that I’ve known for, you know, 20, 30 years that meant either confused me at the beginning or meant one thing and then

that the meaning of it has shifted and changed over time, or I’ve seen new layers in it that weren’t immediately obvious before. And they enable me to navigate my way through life and to withhold from reacting in situations where I might have just reacted in a black and white or emotional manner before.

Ezra (42:14.892)
I don’t know what life would be like without that. I feel bad for other people that haven’t been gifted that or that have been robbed of… I mean, people absorb stories all of the time through Hollywood or whatever film industry or through watching series and they love it. People read retellings of stories. If you’re watching Game of Thrones then…

you’re watching somebody’s retelling of Tolkien and Tolkien is retelling Anglo-Saxon legends and myths from our past and they’re retelling Celtic legends and Persian stories and so on and so forth back into the mists of time. I really believe, and I’m not alone in this I know, even though it might seem a bit odd to listeners, that there’s a body of knowledge

which is captured in the world storytelling traditions, which is waiting there to be absorbed and to help us navigate our way through a world that, that other world that we were talking about where everything is reduced into kind of bits and policy documents and regulations.

Yeah, or consumption. I think you look at kind of modern Hollywood and that sort of thing. A lot of the retellings, the Seven Samurais become the Dirty Dozen has become any other film or the kind of the story arcs of all of the characters and the journeys that they go on. mean, Brother, Where Art Thou? being Home is Odyssey and all of that sort of thing. It’s just retellings.

I think if you go back far enough, you can take away all of the additional stuff that has been applied to these stories, whether it’s commercialization or product placement or embellishment to just change the story a little bit. You take away, and I’m quite interested in mythology and a lot of the kind of storytelling that comes from that Norse mythology in particular.

James (44:24.31)
you see appear in lots of other places and you can go into a kind of a very deep dive around, whether it’s religion or whether it’s folklore. there is a crossover between that and to a large extent as well, where a lot of the simple stories are still there and that’s kind of waiting to be uncovered to a certain extent. there’s a lot of learning that you can have without all of the consumption on top of it.

Well, in fact, they even insist upon it. So if you’re thinking about Norse mythology, as a child, you know, I’m sure psychiatrists would have a field day with this. I was obsessed with Odin hanging from the tree at Yggdrasil for nine nights and also him giving up an eye for the witches who guard the cauldron at the bottom of one of the roots of Yggdrasil.

Um, Odin dies on the tree as I’m sure you know, and, um, and you see the same, the same idea, you know, in the, in a, you know, the Christian idea of, of, of Christ dying on the cross. In the Middle East, it’s ca- the same idea is captured in a, in, in the, proverb or the advice, die before you die. So you, in order to gain knowledge, you have to sacrifice something. It doesn’t come freely. It’s not something you consume. You have to give something up.

And also you have to lower your expectations. So traveling a short distance from Scandinavia to Ireland, Finn McCool is the captain of the High Fianna. And I’m part Irish, so in my family, there’s this speculation that we’re descended from Finn McCool, which is nonsense. But let’s just leave that idea out there. But there’s a story of when Finn McCool is young and he goes to study with

He goes to serve a magician and he’s given the task of capturing the salmon of knowledge from a pool where the salmon of knowledge lives. And Finn McCool catches the salmon of knowledge and the magician instructs him to cook the salmon of knowledge. And when the magic user returns, he’ll eat the salmon of knowledge and gain on knowledge. And while Finn McCool is cooking the salmon of knowledge, he burns his finger.

Ezra (46:43.678)
on the Salmon of Knowledge’s thumb and then licks his thumb to lick the fat off. The magician returns to eat the Salmon of Knowledge, but when he does so, he doesn’t notice any change in himself. And he says, you know, did something happen? Did you eat any of the salmon? And Finn McCool says, no. He said, talk me through exactly what happened. And Finn McCool explains how he cooked the Salmon of Knowledge and that he’d burnt his finger. And he said, well, what did you do next? Well, I sucked my thumb to cool it.

And the magician says, the knowledge is passed to you.

If you’re going back to this business about concentrating on information, contemplating knowledge and then forgetting about it for a while until you have the penny drop moments, Finn McCool has no expectation about getting knowledge from the salmon of knowledge. It’s only the magician that does that. But sometimes when you have expectations of things, they become a barrier to you gaining the knowledge and you have to let go of your expectations, reduce your greed and your desires. Going back to your point about consumption.

in order to be able to absorb knowledge from the salmon of knowledge or wherever else it’s metaphorically captured. So all of these ideas and insights that could guide us with the challenges we face in the modern world, I believe are contained in stories and folklore from the past.

Everywhere for ages, my kind of, I have trouble reading long form. can’t, you know, words jump about a bit or I get distracted, but what there was one fantastic book that always, still got probably a couple of copies around here, which is the Haka Kuri. so the Japanese samurai, Japanese samurai code. Some amazing stuff in there, which is, which doesn’t apply to being a traveling warrior in any way, or form. It’s about.

Ezra (48:29.646)
Absolutely.

James (48:37.186)
good life practice and it is kind of uncovering those little gems of knowledge. Someone recommended me a book on, it’s a fairly short book, but it’s about, it’s called Cunning Folk and it’s about 15th century witchcraft. And they were called Cunning Folk rather than kind of being dunked in rivers and checked if they were drowning or not. if they’re, then you burn them at the stake. There were people that existed between this.

that would work with the church. They’d be wise people. but they, would appear to be magic, but it was pragmatic thought that made people go to them and use them for different things. And there’s a lot of learning from that as well of kind of being open-minded about stuff, going into things with zero expectation. And, and I personally suffer with is rehearsing expectation in my head.

Yeah.

Ezra (49:30.082)
Yeah, yeah.

James (49:35.234)
And then the outcome being different and me feeling weird about it after. And trying to learn to go with the flow.

And in a sense, mean, rehearsing, using our imagination to rehearse the future isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do. That’s, you know, that’s a, there’s some evidence that other animals can make predictions about the future, but our ability to take it, to rehearse the future, what you have to do is take your attention away from what’s immediately in front of you, right? So you actually have to dissociate. You have to do that. And that’s the superpower. It means that you can imagine what’s not immediately there.

And as you say, rehearse for the future. But again, as you say, that needs to be tempered by having a realistic attitude about expectations and being open to what might happen. exactly. Absolutely. Although there might be a number of different possible outcomes that we need to rehearse for. We might need, you know, a number of, and sometimes we might just need to improvise around a framework.

Yeah. And it is the, I use the Dr. Strange moment in one of the recent Marvel films. kind of goes through 1,420,003 potential outcomes of how this kind of universe ending experience is going to be. that, it can feel like that sometimes where you are trying to, it’s a defense mechanism to a certain extent of trying to kind of set expectations of what you have. But I think it, again, it is one of those things to your point about

the knife is whether you’re using it for the benefit of yourself and people around you or whether you’re letting it run away with you and it becomes a distraction from everything else that’s going on around you.

Ezra (51:20.492)
Such an important point, isn’t it? You’ve got to have an awareness of what other people’s needs are and to be acting in service and consideration of those for sure.

What’s a small thing that always makes you smile?

really fortunate to have like people around me who I’m very close to, know, my kind of people I live with basically, my partner and you know, a family member who are incredibly kind and considerate of other people’s needs and that sort of creates a culture where that’s the norm. So you might kind of, you know, arrive home to an unexpected meal or

you know, know that they’ve had like a long day and you know, take pleasure in preparing something for them or you know, bringing flowers home or whatever it might be and then just seeing their reaction to an unexpected meal or flowers or you know, gifts that is connected with their interests like you know, a watercolour set or a calligraphy set or something of that nature and just seeing their reaction that makes me smile

If you had a free day with no plans, how would you spend it?

Ezra (52:34.19)
Depends. I’m really fond of like travel to places that probably wouldn’t appeal to most people. I like traveling in parts of the world that are not organized in the same way that the West is. And they give me free license to sit and watch the world go by, drink tea and coffee, read stories, contemplate them, turn them over in my mind. Or just wander through cities which are new to me and just let my feet.

my feet carry me. I’m fond of Central Asia and the Caucasus and the Caucasus region and parts of Turkey too and parts of Northern Morocco as well, like Fez and Assyl-A.

Bukhara and Samarkand and Uzbekistan are my favourite cities that I’ve visited and yeah, just sitting watching the world go by and turning things over in my mind and trying to make sense of things. Again, going back to, know, when you kind of take attention away from immediate concerns or scrolling or whatever it is, what I find is that often things that you’d long forgotten about come back to your mind, ideas you’d had.

insight solutions to problems they sort of come rushing back into the void and say hello here I am

Yeah. And again, it’s back to that space, creating that space and finding ways that through travel or through going nowhere, sometimes that can actually just create that space to solve a problem or come up with an idea or,

Ezra (54:23.822)
That’s what I do with a day where there’s nothing planned. Sometimes I plan days with nothing planned for that same reason.

And for the space. I mean, for years, I think I was very reluctant to travel places, but it’s the traveling to the destination that always throws me. A classic moment I had when I had to go to Sweden for a few days, which I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed when I was there. Stockholm’s a really nice city. Met lots of interesting people.

is a

James (55:01.984)
enjoyed watching the world go by when I got there. The idea of traveling there was absolutely terrifying to me though, because people, airports, crowds, changes. My flight was at 5 PM. I got to the airport at 5 AM because I couldn’t contemplate getting across London while it was busy. So I spent 12 hours in an airport. But once I was there, it was part of my people watching and just kind of watching.

The people are horrific.

Ezra (55:24.705)
us.

James (55:31.15)
It’d probably be a very interesting time lapse video of me just sat there with my headphones on as the day happened. But that was part of the, that was part of the travel and the part of the way that I felt comfortable with traveling. And I think one of the things I now want to do is get places in a way that I feel comfortable getting to, but enjoy them and, and, and look at other perspectives and how other people’s days go by. I find very, very interesting.

Yeah.

Ezra (56:00.014)
Yeah, I have a friend who, he’s a travel writer who lives in Morocco. He’s obsessed with that. Like people watching and looking out because what he describes is if you sit somewhere long enough, you start to see patterns that are not, you can’t see with just five or 10 minutes. And you, you, you notice that, you know, if you spend a whole week like watching the same place, you’d

You’d start to see the routines of the kind of, you know, the same person who arrives at a certain time, traveling to work or whatever it is, or, you know, people selling things or, you know, and, yeah, you’ve to really slow down in order to do that. And that’s a luxury to be done often have in a busy, demanding work.

Yeah. And I think you can fall into the trap of the convenience of travel of a package holiday or a destination holiday, which isn’t, that’s not the bit I’m interested in. It’s the, the, the, sitting down and watching people go by or the exploring off the beaten track that aren’t the tourist attractions is where you find the really interesting cultural differences and similarities as well.

No.

James (57:16.384)
Okay. What’s something that makes you lose track of time?

Walking around a city, think again, earlier this year I was in Baku and my partner was kind of working remotely. So I kind of left her to get on with it. And then I just wandered around Baku and that’s for listeners, Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan and the rest of Azerbaijan is on the edge of the Caspian sea. It’s quite Azerbaijan, the rural part I think is quite traditional, whereas Baku is many layers.

There’s a hyper modern layer that looks like a European city like Vienna, but with kind of sandstone and with, you know, wide roads that can host Formula One races. Then there’s an old Medina with minarets and underground caverns and restaurants. And then there are parks and

Azerbaijani and Georgian and Armenian restaurants and the legacy of when Armenians lived there. There’s a conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia now. And then there are other places as well. In the outskirts of the city, there’s a temple, a Teshgar, which is a Zoroastrian city, a fire-worshipping city. And when you visit, you’ll see like, Parsees from India who’ve traveled there.

to carry out a pilgrimage, is quite some distance for them. And then about an hour and a half or so south, there’s an ancient kind of settlement, there are cave rock cave paintings where there was a settlement overlooking, it’s kind of overlooking a plateau and then

Ezra (59:16.578)
The Caspian Sea is visible from there, as is the prison where Joseph Stalin was held for his crimes as a Georgian gangster before he rose to rule the Soviet empire. So there are all of these different historical layers and time just kind of, know, flips by while you’re wandering around it trying to absorb the environment.

Amazing, Last four questions. Sure. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been

given. I’m afraid I’ve got three. Is that allowed? That’s allowed. Okay. So when I failed my GCSEs, I didn’t want to go home and tell my mum. So I went to my friend Kevin’s house. Kevin’s 15 years older than me and Kevin now he’s American. He’s now back in the US and he grew up as a black American, an African American in East St. Louis during the race riots. So

That was like the worst place to be and had, and then joined the army to get the hell out of there. And, and, you know, I had had a lot of very difficult experiences. So I had gone to his and he passed me something to roll up for myself to calm my nerves. And there I was like, you know, in a state and he said, I’m not going to try and mimic his accent, but he just said, you’re not going to die dog. And like,

And that put everything into context and ever since then, know, when I think going back to expectations, when I think something has gone wrong, like it’s like, you’re not going to die, you know, unless you actually are, but like that’s fairly rare to be put in a situation where that is like a likely outcome. And then a second piece of advice. I remember being on a workshop. It was on the use of a metaphor and storytelling in psychotherapy and Pat Williams, who was, who’s a

Ezra (01:01:14.646)
I mean, she’s very elderly now, but she’s like a world-class in her time. She was a world-class therapist and one of the founders of the Royal College of Storytellers. And she was asking us what stories had shaped us when we were young. And I had many, lots which were difficult to pick from. And I said, well, one of them was the Emperor’s New Clothes, but I had to learn another story so that I could keep my mouth shut when it wasn’t the right time.

to call out naked emperors. And she said, what was that? And I said, time and pomegranates. The story of time and pomegranates is about a student who goes to learn from a doctor when doctors used to have stools in marketplaces and bazaars and wants to learn the doctor’s method and says, can I take part one day in you prescribing so I can learn through experience? And this guy comes along and the doctor says, this person coming now, can…

through intuition, I can tell you that they need pomegranates. And the patient arrives and the student kind of leaps to the solution and says, I’m going to give you pomegranates. And the patient says, we haven’t listened to any of my symptoms first, you must be some kind of quack and turns and walks away. And the student doesn’t really understand what they’ve done wrong. And the doctor says, we’ll have to wait for another opportunity for me to demonstrate. And sometime later, as another patient coming along, the doctor says to the student, watch. And he listens to the patient.

and asked questions and says, I think you need something which is like fluid that contains certain sugars and nutrients in a sac form. I think the right thing for you would probably be pomegranates. And the patient says, that’s great. I’ll go and get pomegranates straight away. And the student says, what was the difference between the way I acted and the way that you did? And the doctor said, the patients needed time on pomegranates. And at that point, Pat Williams said, and those stories were your teachers.

And then the third piece of advice is not advice that was given to me but advice that was given to another one of my tutors where they were wondering about, know, they were speaking with somebody who’d achieved a huge amount in their life and they, you know, they were trying to get their head around it. The advice they were given was, so long as it’s not illegal or immoral, any opportunity you are offered, do your best to take up on it and to make the use of that opportunity. Say yes.

Ezra (01:03:37.687)
Don’t over promise or over commit to things that you can’t do because that would be immoral but if you can then do it.

I don’t know three because they’re three fantastic pieces of advice. What’s something you’re excited to learn or try in the future?

I don’t know whether I’m excited, but at the beginning of the year I had the opportunity to join a group of electrical engineers and AI developers who were developing, who I’d been asked to join because they wanted to develop protocols to protect human users of not AI specifically, but agentic AI. And there’s still a lot to learn about that. I’m enrolled on a course.

Am I excited about that? I don’t know. There’s a new territory and it might be that I’m able to do something useful. I’m sure that I’ve got a better example somewhere, but that’s the kind of the one, the thing on the horizon that springs to mind that I need to learn more about.

think that’s, an interesting point of the, the interface between humans and machine learning. Um, and both making it useful and safe. Machine learning is not going anywhere. Perhaps the companies that led the revolution may fall away, may change, may fail, may succeed over time. But I don’t think machine learning is ever going to go anywhere.

James (01:05:04.834)
think the important next step is to create a, not just a useful space to interact with machine learning, but also a safe space as well. And to have some guardrails in place for people interacting with it.

Yeah, I think that’s right. mean, and then, you know, I work in mental health, so there’s a degree of responsibility for, for us to be doing that. And already people are kind of running away with, you know, proposals and new, new products that use AI as kind of therapists or to, or people are just seeking support from unregulated platforms or platforms with minimal kind of guardrails. And there aren’t a huge number of people.

responding to that in a meaningful manner. There are a few to be fair but not a lot.

What’s one thing you’d like listeners to take away from this conversation?

It’s going to be personal to any listener so whatever they need to take away from this conversation for them is what they should take away from it.

James (01:06:11.736)
what’s next for you.

I’m trying to write a book about the relationship between REM sleep and our mental health, which is accessible and practical for absolutely anybody. That’s the thing, the next thing that needs to be done.

Yeah. And I think there’s a massive connection between healthy rest, good sleep.

Yeah.

Ezra (01:06:37.678)
Different kinds of sleep.

Yeah, and really kind of understanding why you might not be getting good sleep and being curious and interrogating what might the cause of that be. And think sometimes you can, through overwhelm and that sort of thing, you can try and pinpoint the thing you’re experiencing at that moment can be the thing that you think might be causing you overwhelm. It could be something completely unrelated and it could be a longer tail thing which is affecting your sleep, how you dream.

Absolutely.

James (01:07:08.12)
how you process the information in that time and what your dreams mean and that sort of thing. I think that, yeah, and you know, there’s eight hours of your day should be spent getting the best from that. it’s, you know, the rest part of life, whether it’s sleep or downtime or creating those pauses are just as important as when you’re doing stuff.

War your dreams.

That’s basically what the book is about.

Ezra (01:07:33.964)
Absolutely and what you’re doing shapes your sleep very often as well, there’s that too. So yeah, that’s what’s next.

Fantastic. Thanks, Ezra.

James, thank you very much.

James (01:07:49.678)
Okay, that’s it for another episode of Big Bad Beautiful Brains. Thank you for listening. Huge thanks to Ezra for coming in and having such a great chat. And I hope to see you back again another week for another episode of Big Bad Beautiful Brains. Until then, toodle pip.