Hi, I'm Dr Hackie Reitmann, welcome to another episode of exploring different brains, we
have with us today Gabriel Axel Montez and he's going to introduce himself because what
he's doing is very very interesting stuff with neural axis and all the other things
he's doing. Welcome Gabriel, thanks for coming, why don't you introduce yourself to our
different brains audience properly.
Thank you hackie it's a pleasure to be here, thanks for the warm introduction. So, yep
my name is Gabriel Axel Montes and I'm a neuroscientist and educator, and I work with people helping
them to understand their brains and how they function and how that influences their life
in various ways and how it can effectuate change in various ways; so right now I'm
completing my PhD which is based at the University of Newcastle in Australia and before that
I did a masters degree in neurobiology. Before I did that I did my bachelor degree in Neurobiology
and Anthropology, and along the way I became interested in the mind, not only from the
perspective of the third person objective, meaning like what can you figure out about
the brain in the laboratory. I also became interested in the brain from the perspective
of introspection and the first person perspective; the eye, the experience of consciousness as
the ocean of experience. So I decided to go into that for basically the purposes of exploration,
well-being, Health etcetera, and I turned my experience into a lab, an experiment and
that's how… I am where I am today which is weaving the first person experience of
the brain and the third person experience of the brain.
Now is that we're calling the fusion of Neuroscience and self-cultivation practices?
Correct, yes. I refer to the general spectrum of mind/body practices that involve going
inward and working with your mind and your body in a certain way, I refer to those generally
speaking as self-cultivation practices, because you're cultivating like a gardener, the
self.
Tell us about Neural Axis.
Sure. So Neural Axis is basically the the umbrella term for everything that I I do;
from research to education, to working with people to consulting on various things including
how to incorporate neuroscience and neuro-scientific inspired thinking into a workflow, a process,
a company's kind of culture Etc. to consulting an artificial intelligence based projects
and how that can evolve with a fusion of self-cultivation and neuroscience. Neural Axis was named that
way because basically it's a reference to the neural axis, the spinal axis of the body
that connects the organs and the brain etcetera, so it's kind of a catch-all term for everything
I'm involved in it's an evolving beast.
(chuckles) it's a little overwhelming to someone like myself even though I have an
MD, I'm completely ignorant of this stuff. I like to think I'm not stupid but I'm pretty
ignorant of… because it actually, conceptually, can actually get into the fusion if you will,
or the merger of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and what's going on in our
brain.
Yeah, absolutely. it's… I view my body and self cultivation practices as the sort
of internally generated technology if you will it's like an ancient or perennial technology
is better said. Were constantly editing our experience, that said there have been people
that have formally gone through systematic processes of editing and facilitating, enhancing
their experience manipulating it in various ways. So I view that as sort of a perennial
technology, that it goes back as long as humans have been around at least. And then I see
things like virtual reality, AI as external technology in the way that we typically think
of technology today. So, there's different ways of actually going in there and Shifting
the way we think whether it's introspectively through first person experience, or through
the technological means; by going in there either having a girl in her face and her neural
implants whatever that actually edits the brain or experience, or having virtual reality
which basically Works through manipulating the… some corium of experience such that
the mind is affected in this very synchronized way, it's like having a puppeteer pulling
the different puppet strings: smell, sight, taste, etcetera virtual realities mostly starting
now with Sight but eventually things will get more and more advanced where we have…
close to full immersion and in something where feels like you're really there. and the Brain
as a tricky way of doing that to you can an amplify one or two senses just enough to really
convince your whole brain that you're actually somewhere, even if you really think about
one sense in particular you can tell that you're not, so the brain has very tricky multi-sensory
mechanisms and by the way it integrates some that make things that virtual reality possible
today even though the technology is quite franklin. Still in it's infancy.
If our viewers in our different brains audience or people like myself say, "boy, this is
great stuff. I want to become his client." Who are your clients and what do they sign
up for, and how do they know to contact you?
sure so one of the things that I do is I work with people individually. Depending on the
nature and the need and the…. I wouldn't say the urgency but you know the nature of
the problem in general or concern so I- because of the self-cultivation work I've done, I've
become quiet perceptive of kind of subtle flows of the mind and there are certain ways
to work with people that can catch some ways of thinking earlier before they become full-blown
problems. Or sometimes if there is a full-blown issue in the person's life, that they can
work backwards to kind of like the common denominators at the root of their emotional
brain, that can be shifted and they can therefore sort of change the way a person thinks. a
lot of this work can be done just from a very secular point of view, just thinking about
emotions, psychology, cognition, drives subconscious messages that we've received and we interact
with. the radius of that sort of approach to also something that many people would consider
more spiritual, it just depends on the languaging that a person likes to use. It's not entirely
necessary talking so-called spiritual terms, it's just about what works for a person.
So, to answer your question I work with a lot of clients individually, the easiest way
to contact me is through my website the contact form, and I also work with larger clients
so one example is a recent one that I've been working with called singularitynet and that
which is a- basically a blockchain artificial intelligence platform, so this was part of
the wave of the whole cryptocurrency boom and I work with them to develop the… integration
of how non what I call non-ordinary consciousness interfaces with artificial intelligence and
Neuroscience kind forecasting the future of artificial general intelligence and start
creating some road maps to how to possibly get to building a better artificial intelligence
based upon insights into the human mind which are based in scientific literature of Psychology
and Neuroscience and also things that are ahead of data so to speak which is basically…
ways of- ways of the mind Works that have not necessarily received a whole lot of scientific
funding in the pipe in the in the academic institutional pipelines to basically know
we know this for sure we don't know this for sure but something more in the realm of observations
based upon practice that I've had with myself with client to students over the years that
give me some insight as to how the mind works that I feel fairly confident in making recommendation
and suggestion while also being fully aware that this is ahead of the data, meaning the
science hasn't really caught up with it yet. But from what I've seen both we have
seen this looks like a likely way to go so I work with smaller clients, bigger clients,
coaching whether it's Executive coaching life coaching, to kind of more organizational flows
that align with how the brain works, so part of my thesis…
Can you talk about some of the anatomical correlates that you've become aware of in
the studies that have been going on? If there are any.
First of all I want to say that there is a-some interesting philosophical implications that
I've been brought forth by scientists and philosophers about the location ISM in the
brain so the way we view brain is very highly conditioned upon the technology we use to
investigate it and probe it. So we've already kind of in more in the frothy leading edge
of the discipline of Neuroscience, we've already kind of seen that yes there are certain areas
of the brain that we want to say do this and this area does that but we've already seen
over the past decade or two that there are neuro-circuitries that transcend, if you will,
the discrete brain regions on a three-dimensional you know volumetric level, and it's a lot
more complex and yet we still like to talk about brain regions, and then there's- because
it's useful you know and then there's also the ways that different brain regions connect
and how they influence each other so functional connectivity and there's different ways of
describing that, the way they give feedback to each other, and the the kind bi-directional
street, and then or where they take a detour through another part of the brain before going
there and what that part of the brain does to that signal, Etc. So I only give you this
as a precondition because a lot of these brain region localizationalist views, what they
mostly serve to do is to to verify "oh, there is something going on with that phenomenon
that that's why we study it." It also gives us a sense that we can grasp some thing that
is that is actually meteorically far more complex than we can even imagine as the brain
is as a complex system is often compared to the level of complexity of the physical universe.
So it's almost like having a microcosm in the brain of the macrocosm that we are apart
of. So I always like to say that in general because the studies are shifting all the time.
someone says "the amygdala's responsible for fear" and then we know that I'm- we
learned that we could still say that even today, but we've also learned there are
different parts of the amygdala, that respond to negative emotional stimuli in one way or
maybe it's not always about fear, but it's also about just… emotional valence the kind
of emotional profile we give to something before it becomes out right fear so things
like that are- so for example one of the things that mindfulness meditation it was just the
most common study because it's been able to be systematized in the form of MBSR mindfulness-based
stress reduction. So it's been very clinically studied and we can see that my voice meditation
changes the structure of a meditator. first we saw that meditators and non-meditators
had the different brain structural differences we saw that people going over course of mindfulness-based
stress reduction program over the course of 8 weeks could actually change their brain
and then- now we've seen that or short bit of meditation or talking just like hours to
even- 4- 48 hours a few different studies here can change your brain through meditation
so a lot of these studies are our have been done Sarah Lazar at Harbor University is one
of the most popular- Britain wholesale who is also who is part of her lab as well now
living in Europe, also a famous researcher in this area; so we have structural changes
in the brain. Now, what kind of structural changes? Different societies various have
shown that the amygdala the way it responds to emotional stimuli changes as a result of
these awareness techniques like a mindfulness-based stress reduction Etc. There's also different
forms of meditation affect different parts of the brain differently. For example. you
have non-dual meditation, so non-dual contemplation is considered one of the simplest and most
challenging forms of- of… cultivation you can say or attainment, achievement, states,
it's not really a state, its just awareness of reality, the non dual nature of reality,
so it's a practice in different traditions in tibetan tradition is called dzogchen and
this particular tradition affects an area of the brain called precuneus, so different
types of meditation affect different parts of the brain. Also the coda putamen areas
of the which are functionally part of the limbic system are also linked to intuitive
perception abilities. so if you like talking about simple mindfulness, non dual meditation,
intuitive capabilities, and then you have things like Mantra meditation where you're
repeating a sound over and over like 'Om', and letting that resonate in your body and
your mind and your emotional systems. All these things have varied effects. No one has
even begun to study the body and physiology. Now… different types of meditations, different
types of brain regions, different types of brain circuits, then you have the process
of basically meditating, so when you start doing a practice such as meditation or whatever
where you have to focus- there's initial attempt to focus noticing what's going on, the attempt
to focus focusing, getting distracted and then realizing your distracted and then shifting
back into awareness. That has it's own little sort of roulette wheel of of brain signals
that brain regions that are activated so normally deciding to focus involves your prefrontal
regions and your maintenance of focus involves prefrontal activation. excuse me activation
of focus then maintaining it brings online not mutually exclusively but brings Online
the striatum which is apart of the limbic system which helps to sustain the attention
on what is what you've the state you've gotten into. and then at some point you'll get
distracted, and then you'll use your prefrontal cortex again to pull you back into where you
want to go. So for example meditation for the breath is off off and use of pointer Focus
you can also use a visual aid or certain sounds as points of focus and the effects will all
be very slightly different so I'll pause there that there's there's much much more to talk
about and explicate with regards to examples of how the brain is affected but the brain
regions are important to anchor people's understanding in neuroscience and from there you have to
go into "Okay so what are we going to do about it" and that gets more into psychology.
And people's intuition and emotions etc. so..
That was a fantastic journey you just took us on, that was wonderful!
I hope it was a specific enough
No it was, it was fabulous. What is the website that our audience can go to, what is your
website to learn more because I'm sure everyone's going to want to know more about what you're
doing here.
Yeah sure, no problem. so my website is gabrielaxel.com, I also have another domain which is currently
linked to that one neuralaxis.org but gabrielaxel.com is fine. and yeah, the website is something
that's a work-in-progress I've been mostly focused on finishing my doctorate for the
past few years so what you'll see most maintained on my website is my academic page which describes
my academic interests directions, goals, grants, Publications Etc. that's kind of the most
up to date stuff and part of what I'm going to do with my PhD work is deliver this framework
that I mentioned earlier kind of explicate that in the form of something formal like
a course, and an online course. I also teach other things in the realm of purely self cultivation,
neurophysiological integration processes that deal with people subjected experience but
that have effects on their neurophysiology and neuroendocrine systems for basically to
use a metaphor, rewiring the nervous system in a way that more expensive states of being
and makes a lot of aspects of life and further self cultivation much more easy much easier
more integrative and fruitful. So that's based on a few different systems at the syncretic
system what is a general neurophysiological integration process so that's kind of what
I do on the one hand and then there's my PhD work on the other hand that's the framework
I had mentioned earlier, so I have these two things that I feel are the- the first tools
that empower… people the most I have found. I really like to see people get off to a start
in their life that makes sense for where they are for their Walk of Life and something that's
quite broad enough or it can apply to different people. So you can go to my website, you can
contact me, you can refer to self cultivation, or the neuroscience framework and ask me a
question, and that's that's how we can begin and from there, I basically maintain contact
with people until the course is ready to come out. So I expect to see that in the near future,
the very near future.
Talk for a bit about strong social relationships and the lack thereof.
Yes. The way I see it a lot of the mental illness crisis that are present in our modern
world are in part caused by the separation of people into various real property allotments.
humans involved in Village settings with a relatively small number of people, you growing
up as a kid, exposed to similar faces all the time and you form deeper relationships,
people help each other, with people it doesn't work in the same way our current Society Works
in terms of exchange economically. I'm not saying we should go back to village at all.
What I'm saying is the human mind evolved in that context to a far larger degree, than
it evolved in the fast-changing context that we have today. So the separation of people
leaves people feeling alone and isolated there is a big overlap between the neural pathways
are responsible for social connection and interaction and the pathways for introspective
faculties such as meditation reflecting upon ourselves is very much related to the way
we can reflect about other people so if we are missing social interaction a large scale,
what is that doing to our ability to understand ourselves? and then it's like a loop it
keeps going and spiraling. social connections to Me… I want to say something personal
is social connections to me I always enjoyed social connection but I leaned much more into
being introverted at some point I realized that part of my personal fulfillment in this
life is about relating to other people, helping other people and feeling connected that's
just part of how the brain works it's not even like a yes of course for me there's something
about it that feels like a- like a- just a fuzzy or a feeling that I just have to do
it you know? Not logical, but if you want to look at it logically the human brain is
wired for social connection we are social animals and that is a part of healthy brain
function. If don't have enough that, you are risking something happening to you I've seen
a lot of loneliness coinciding with dementia and alzheimer's sorry I don't know the
statistics, I think it's something to watch out for and I think we need to be careful
that we don't spend too much time within four walls whatever that is at work or at home
and either with the same people over and over small number of people just our spouse. Some
of us may have enough where with all that to just be fine with that because we're healthy
and another levels and emotionally, but in such a- in the world where we are bombarded
constantly with experiments of information, chemicals, media, etcetera, we have so many
variants, variables, that you want to maximize your chances of success, you know? Valued
social interaction is a pillar of your life that's mine my response in-
what is the biggest single thing you can tell our audience of advice to get from you what's
the biggest single thing you can tell our audience?
You have the power to direct your experience. With the proper tools, you can direct your
life in the way that aligns with your deeper desires. It will involve some reflection and
awareness of what is adjacently possible to you, but with the right set of tools and the
right intention and belief in yourself, you can accomplish things that you would never
dream are possible of accomplishing.
Very well said, Axel Montes from all the way in Australia it's been such an honor and a
pleasure to have you here at different brains.org on another episode of exploring different
brains! Thank you so much!
Thank you Hackie, and thank you to everyone who who listened and I'm happy to be in touch
as needed thank you so much.
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