How to Think Clearly in an Age of Distraction | Sam Harris

**Sam Harris** (0:00)
Mindfulness is, to talk about the style of meditation I tend to recommend, is just an ability to step back and notice thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in the mind. Perhaps only for brief moments in the beginning, to break the connection between the anxious thought and the physiology of anxiety.

**Andy Galpin** (0:23)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life.
Welcome to Perform.
I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a Professor and Scientist and the Executive Director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Sam Harris. Sam has a PhD in Neuroscience, an extensive background in philosophy, and has spent over 20 years as a public intellect. In today's show, we talk a lot about critical thinking, logic, and reason. We also get into Sam's current position on artificial intelligence and how that is impacting us in the short term, as well as in the long term. We also spend a lot of time talking about mindfulness and other tools and practices that you can use to have more control over both your emotions and logic. I know I personally picked up many things from our conversation that are going to help me in my thinking processes to be more decisive, to be more clear, to be more articulate, and to overall feel like I'm communicating more effectively as both someone speaking to the world as well as someone who wants to listen and be more effective at those tools. So with that in mind, please enjoy today's conversation with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr. Sam Harris, it's great to have you in here.

**Sam Harris** (1:34)
It's great to meet you. Yeah, thank you.

**Andy Galpin** (1:36)
I'm really interested in taking this conversation in a particular direction that I haven't seen you get the opportunity to spend as much time in recently, and that is thinking. I know you cover a ton of topics, but given the fact that you've got terminal degrees in neuroscience, at least a graduate degree in philosophy.

**Sam Harris** (1:55)
Undergraduate.

**Andy Galpin** (1:55)
Undergraduate in philosophy. And you've spent, at the same time, much of your career helping people directly via your app or your teachings on meditation and whatnot. So you have this triangle of academic knowledge and kind of this intersection between the brain and the mind, as well as putting this into practice. How do we actually help people?
And it's my opinion that, right now, the world needs some help in thinking. And I think you're the perfect person to ask these kind of set of questions with. So, I want to actually start with what I hope is a simple question, and you can lay some groundwork, and then we can dive in as far as possible.

**Sam Harris** (2:30)
Sure.

**Andy Galpin** (2:30)
What's the difference between being smart and being intelligent?

**Sam Harris** (2:35)
Well, I think we tend to use those more or less interchangeably. Intelligence is really just a capacity to solve problems and meet various goals, and general intelligence manages to do that across a functionally unlimited range of environments. Where learning in one space doesn't degrade your learning in another. So obviously, now we're talking a lot about the search for artificial general intelligence, which many of us are worried about. There's the possibility even certainty that if we build it, we will have built something that is more powerful than we are ultimately, because it can solve the same sorts of goals faster, and can solve problems that we can't solve on our own. So if the thing is not aligned with our interests in the end, many of us get very worried about that picture, or that relationship really.
Analogous to meeting, you know, aliens from outer space that come and demonstrate by their mere arrival that they're smarter than we are. I think smartness might, in the way we use it commonly, might imply at least a dose of common sense or wisdom, right? So there are many very intelligent people who are just, who are obviously not wise. I mean, they haven't figured out how to live good lives. They suffer in all kinds of unnecessary ways, and they produce lots of suffering that we hope they regret, and we certainly are not fans of. So there's no direct link between sheer brain power with respect to solving problems and meeting goals and the wisdom that allows you to pick the right problems to solve and the right goals to orient towards. So, yeah, if that's what you're after, I think that you could fold into the concept of being smart, some kind of common sense or wisdom.

**Andy Galpin** (4:40)
The reason I wanted to start there was I got to imagine anyone listening, if we said, would you like to be smarter or more intelligent, every hand would go up, right? Much like if I asked the same thing of if you want to be stronger or more fit, I mean, who doesn't want that? But it's difficult for us to provide tools and strategies and tactics for that when we actually struggle to understand what that means. I feel like most people have a better sense of saying, if I helped you gain more muscle, you know what that means. But what's it mean to be smarter?