Anil Seth: When you perform an action onstage, like something even simple, picking up a mug of coffee, do you feel a sense of agency or free will or intentionality about it? Or is it more that you're observing your body do something?
Yara Shahidi: I've never really thought about it in those terms. I think I'm always striving to mimic that automated response that I have, as though I was just Yara on set, or pretending to be Yara on camera.
[Intersections]
[Anil Seth: Cognitive neuroscientist]
[Yara Shahidi: Actor, producer]
YS: And I'm grateful that they have paired us, because I feel like there is such an interesting overlap in acting and how I’ve viewed myself over time. And I thought, you know, your perspective on controlled hallucination just clarified so much for myself as a young person trying to figure out what am I doing every time I wake up and choose to go about the world?
AS: Can we start there? Because this is something that's absolutely fascinated me. So for years now, far too many years, I've been, as an academic, trying to understand not only how we experience the world around us but how we experience being a self within it. Being me, being you, being Yara. And we do all these experiments, we put people in brain-imaging scanners, we do all this stuff. But when I remember started talking to people who had experience of acting, it struck me that there’s something really underexamined here, which is people, especially someone like you, who's been acting since you were very young.
YS: Yeah.
AS: I've just been wondering how that affects your experience of being who you are.
YS: Well, it's something that I think has evolved over time because when I was acting at a young age, it was very much about saying certain lines, having fun. I don't think the idea of embodying a character came to me until much later. And then I think that presented new ideas because at the core of it, for me, like when I was Tinker Bell, as much as that was a small role and I really didn’t even speak in it, I was surrounded by a stage and setup a lot like this one, where it was grip stands and lights and cameras and nothing like the immersive sets people were on. And so my task was convincing myself every day that I was seeing what everybody else was seeing. And I think it made me create a base sense of having to, I don't know, undermine what I knew was in front of me, and say, "Oh, that thing in front of me is actually a huge tree." And there would literally be stick figures with my costar’s faces on them, plastered around me. And I'd have to believe that they were saying the words that the speaker behind me was playing. And I really can’t understand for myself what was exactly happening. But I’d have to say it was actually more engaging as an actor to have to be so solely sold on the world around me, that it was strangely easier than sometimes when I'm on sets that are, you know, super immersive.
AS: That's surprising. I was thinking about that, and I was thinking, you know, there's all kinds of contexts in which acting happens. You can be on a stage in front of people, on a TED stage in front of people, and in theaters as well, or on a set. Or I would have thought the hardest thing would be when you have to conjure everything and generate the surroundings that you're going to be in after the filming has been done, after the post-production. I'd have thought that would have been harder. How real did it seem to you? Is it something that as you did this more that the sense of, you know, the stick figures actually being people, sense of that wall being a forest, did that grow?
YS: Well, I think I started to learn what senses helped teleport me. And so for me, I've always been a more auditory person than a visual person. And so as I started to focus on their voices, I knew that that would help teleport me into that space more than looking at the image of their face. And I think in many ways it was the fact that I had nothing to hold on to that made me have to really double down and imagine that I was in this world. Whereas sometimes when I'm on a stage, you're flipping in and out of your own life and your character's life. I mean, I'm far from a method actor, but I'd say, like on a comedy set, you have people running in and out on stage. So as much as you're in this immersive house and you're in your character's clothing, they call cut, a ton of people rush in, you talk about all sorts of stuff between takes, and then they yell "action," and then you pretend you're the character again. Whereas there was something about having to stay in it and know that I didn't have this set around me. I didn’t have my costars around me. That created quite a new experience. I was even surprised because I came in quite nervous about the process, saying, this is the first time I've done anything like this where you're asking me to suspend what's in front of me to such an extent.
And then I think, even on the last project I had done, a lot of transforming into that character was about mapping my own experiences and emotions onto what this character was going through. And in that way, there were moments that felt very real. And, you know, that storyline was about me supporting a friend through a terminal illness. And there was something so interesting that happened to me for the first time as a young actor, where I felt like it was hard to snap out of in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. Because I was so emotionally there that I'd come home at the end of the day a little tired and fatigued. But can I ask, I feel like I can go on a tangent.
AS: We're going to come back to some of this stuff for sure.
YS: But I want to know just, this may sound so basic, but why consciousness? And what made you start examining the thing that I mean, you even said we can take for granted as just a part of our everyday experience.
AS: I think, to take something you talked about, curiosity. I think everybody, I might be wrong about this, but when I was a kid, I remember there was a time when I first questioned these things like, why am I me and not somebody else? Where was I before I was born? What will happen when I die? And those questions, you know, you think about them as a kid. You don't do anything with them. And I had no idea that I would end up as an academic, a researcher, still being interested in these questions. They matured a bit later on to this idea about consciousness, which is one of the oldest mysteries in the book, right? I mean, at one level, we're objects, very complicated objects. I don't want to undersell how amazing, rich and beautiful human beings and other animals are. But we’re made of stuff. And on the other hand, we have experiences. We open our eyes, and there's not just information processing happening in our brains, we have an experience. There's the redness of red, the sharpness of pain. And part of that is the experience of being a self within that, with all the emotions, all the the moods, the feeling of the body, the first-person perspective, the memories, the beliefs, the plans. And this for me was just the most fascinating thing, I think, because it combined something that was this big, big mystery that's still a big mystery, with something that’s so personal. And we all want to understand ourselves, know ourselves better.
And with something that's really practical. I think in the idea of studying consciousness has often been thought of as a philosophical indulgence. But actually, especially now, there are so many practical, important reasons to better understand it. We have epidemics of mental illness. We have really outdated views about ethics for non-human animals, for patients with brain injuries. We have new technologies like AI and neurotechnologies, which are really challenging the assumptions that we have about there being like, a separate disembodied soul that marches around with your body. And so for me, it was the confluence of all of these things that never really let me go.
YS: Can I ask, particularly since you mentioned AI, I know in your talk you had said that the relief of knowing just how consciousness is our body and mind working in tandem with the outside world, is that sentience is not easily replicated. How do you feel now? We're at our second conference, where we're surrounded by conversations on AI and how far we've gone, even in the last three years alone.
AS: No, that's right, it's really changed. I mean, my PhD was in artificial intelligence, like, 20 years ago, when it was not very monetizable. I stayed in academia.
YS: You were thinking long-term.
AS: I was too far ahead of the curve, I think. That's the way I like to think about it. But it has really taken off. And I think there’s a risk where we have these technologies, and we use them as mirrors for ourselves. And I think this can be quite denuding for the human spirit. And this is happening at the moment with these language models. So, you know, you've played around or used ChatGPT probably. And you know, these systems that you can talk to. And they are kind of magic. They talk back, and they certainly are much more capable than I would have expected them to be. But we overproject, I think, we anthropomorphize. We attribute properties to these systems they don't have.
In a sense, there's another parallel here. Whereas we can be tempted to feel that AI systems really understand us, they feel things, as well as just spouting interesting text, we’re overprojecting. And that can lead us astray because they aren't, in my view anyway. And there's a lot of disagreement about this, but I don't think AI is conscious, has experiences, but it can certainly persuade us that it does. And perhaps we should think about these systems as role-playing in a similar way to how you might play a role. They're not actually how they seem to be. There's something else going on under the hood. But yeah, I think we inhabit this, I mean, you must think about this all the time. About what do people project onto you when you're on stage or on a set. And how's that going to work? Because we just do this, I think, it's a natural psychological tendency. We project things.
YS: Most definitely. And I think about something that's always presented an interesting, I don’t know, maybe curveball in how I’ve perceived myself is at times less the acting but more so when I do advertisements as a public figure or a fashion ad. I’ll look at those, and it does not feel like looking in the mirror. It feels like, oh, that’s something I’ve participated in, while I’m looking at an image of myself. Because, I don’t know, when I see those images, I see the collaboration it took, I see this highly curated thing that we've created together. A lot of times, well before I ever see myself in the image. And so I find it interesting because when, you know, family or friends will see a picture of me they'll be like, oh my goodness, that’s Yara, in a way that it just doesn’t register the same.
And so I think that's why I found your talk so interesting, because I've often struggled with this feeling of my friends and I, less academically call it the “brain taxi,” of being like, oh, our bodies are just here to carry this brain. But otherwise, what is my body doing? How is it actually helping me exist in the world or helping me experience the world? And I found just how you broke down our different types of self to be really reaffirming too, to say, oh no, I'm obviously fully connected. I'm not just a brain taxi, because my body is helping me interact with the external world. But also, what you were saying on regulation in our internal world made so much sense to me in a way that hadn't made sense before.
AS: That's interesting. I mean, one of the things I've always tried to push back on is this idea that the self is this singular thing, this essence of you or me, that derives a little bit from ideas of the soul. Which I think there’s still a role for the soul in how we think about life, but not as this singular, separable, distillable, transportable, detachable, transubstantiable essence of you or essence of me. There are many different aspects to how the self manifests, you know. We have the body, and the body is this object in the world. This, as you say, this kind of brain taxi or meat robot that takes the brain around. But there’s the body from the inside, too. And the brain, the primary role of the brain is to keep the body alive. And that's all about regulating the interior of the body. Heart rate, blood pressure. Then there's the perspective. Like, we see the world from a point of view. And we take that for granted, too. But that's something the brain is always kind of figuring out, like, where it is in the world in relation to other things. Then there's free will and agency. Like, we feel to be the cause of actions. And only then these sort of aspects of self that I think many people think of when they think of self, which is personal identity. I'm Anil, I have these memories, these plans. And the social self. How we experience being who we are through the minds and memories of others.
And all of these aspects of self come together in a particular way for each of us. But they can come apart. And I was wondering, in acting, whether that you start to strain at the boundaries of these different components of self. Like one thing I’ve always wanted to ask somebody who's done a lot of acting like you is when you perform an action onstage, like something even simple, picking up a mug of coffee, do you feel a sense of agency or free will or intentionality about that? Or is it more that you're observing your body do something?
YS: That's a good question, I've never really thought about it in those terms. I think, you know, there’s one character I’ve played for ten years, and in many ways I feel like hopping into her is almost automated. And I don’t think about my actions in the same way I don't think about my actions while I'm Yara. And oftentimes the challenge is to think less about my agency, because otherwise I feel like an actor doing things like, oh, I was told to move towards this cup of coffee and pick it up at this time. And I think I’m always striving to mimic that automated response that I have, as though I was just Yara on set, or pretending to be Yara on camera.
But oftentimes I think I do feel a sense of agency, and a lot of it comes with buying, having to buy my surroundings. And I find that I’m most in my characters when I can believe the person across from me. And that's why I thought, you know, what you were clarifying on perception of this idea that as much as we're perceiving these objective things around us, we also have our own inputs, and we also have our own predictive abilities that are projecting how we intake what's around us, I think clarified what I think my own process is. Because as much as the person across from me is a friend that I've known for a handful of years off of set, as soon as they transform into character, suddenly they bring out something else in me that feels instinctual at its best. And then other times, I can begin to project different memories onto them. And that's kind of the task. So when I was working across from somebody recently that has been a friend, and I knew them in such a different context than the context of this film, so much of it was creating these different timelines of what our friendship must have been like in this other alternate universe, and having to buy it when I looked at her. And that was the project I was just talking about, where I think there were times in which we had done it so well that it was hard to then shift back at times, because we'd taken ourselves to such a place of either deep sorrow or deep friendship or had recreated things that just had not happened to us.
AS: But your body doesn't know that, right? So you have this, like, I guess, empathy-generation process that's necessary to do that.
YS: Most definitely. I mean, I think at the core of even acting and then going into my own, you know, bachelor degree studies came from just an interest in humans. Because I think to be an actor you have to just naturally be very curious about the people around you and want to know more about them. At least for me, I think even in my real life, so much of my life is determined by who's around me. I feel like they determine who I am when I walk into a room. That acting has always been about needing to be able to care deeply about whoever is across from you for whatever reason. And that's proven to me to be when I find my work to be the most intuitive, when I feel like, oh, that natural sense of care is easy. And then ...
AS: Has that ever got to a stage where it's almost concerning or worrying? I mean, I know there's been examples of actors who've required therapy or have really struggled, really suffered in playing a character that has required, you know, deep emotional challenges. I don't know if that's dependent on the way, is that something that comes out in method acting more than other kinds?
YS: Many times that is when you hear about the method actors in particular. And I mean, I think there's levels to it. I think as somebody that isn’t a method actor but oftentimes is projecting my own experiences or trying to mimic emotional responses to these fictionalized situations, there are times where I think it takes a while for me to transition out of it. Luckily, I think, you know, having my own very full world has always helped with that. I think oftentimes acting, and to be a good actor, it's thought that you have to be so fully immersed in your world, thus method acting, that you never snap out of it. Or that your whole world is oriented towards being an actor. And I think that is where it can feel a little unstable. But for me, I think it's always been helpful saying, OK, I'm fully immersing myself in this world, but when I go home, I have a full world as Yara, as a sister, as a daughter, as a friend, that I get to go back to, that re-anchors me.
And many times I'd actually say going into a different world is quite healing. I almost wish that everybody had the opportunity to be somebody that isn't them. It makes me so much clearer on who I am every time I play somebody that isn't me.
AS: Just dwell on that for a second. Why do you think that is? I was I was wondering about that.
Producer: We're almost out of time. We could listen to you guys talk all day.
AS: (Laughs)
Producer: We're kind of sad that we have to --
AS: We're just starting.
YS: Yeah. Can I at least ask -- Can I at least ask of you how this work has changed your sense of self? Because I can imagine, you know, as much as we all think about consciousness, you dwell in it in a way that I don't think many people do and has that for you, made, you know, the study of self, has that made how you relate to yourself change or evolve over time?
AS: I think it must have done. I think we both faced the challenges that we don't have, like, a control condition. We don't have an alternative Anil or an alternative Yara that wasn't acting or wasn't a neuroscientist. But I think it really has. And I think this manifests for me a little bit in, it opens a bit of distance between what it feels like to be me here now, and how I might reflect on that. So I can sort of understand emotions as being constructions of the brain. It doesn't mean they're not real, everything feels real and is real. But it might not be quite how it seems to be.
And I think the other thing, which is actually very complementary to ... centuries of thought in things like Buddhism, that everything is impermanent, everything is changing. And to become comfortable with the idea that the self is always changing, always evolving. There's a certain liberation in that too. It makes you think differently about the person that you were and the person that you might be in the future. Almost as distinct individuals, different people you can care about in a similar way to how I might care about friends and family. And that's an interesting shift.
YS: OK, we're truly out of time. Well, I guess we'll have to do part two. We'll continue this. This conversation could clearly go on for a long time, and I'm just so grateful to share space with you and begin what I’m sure is going to be a much longer dialogue. AS: I feel the same way. It’s been really eye-opening, and it's been a great pleasure talking to you about all this. I hope we get the chance to continue.
Thanks so much, Yara.
YS: Thank you.
