LIT: Resensitizing Our Aliveness

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session. 

Tami Simon: Hello, friends, my name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening. Special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. 

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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dr. Jeff Karp. He’s a bioinspirationalist—I have to say, 800 podcasts into Insights at the Edge, I’ve never spoken to someone who’s a bioinspirationalist, we’re going to hear more about that—an entrepreneur and a futurist. He works at the forefront of taking inspiration from the most successful researchers of all time: nature, and evolution. He is a tremendously creative person, a fascinating person to talk with. Taking our inspiration from nature and evolution and finding ways to solve problems that we face. His Karp Lab technologies have led to the formation of 13 companies. He’s an acclaimed biomedical engineering professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT. He’s a distinguished chair at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and he’s the author of a new book, it’s called LIT. L-I-T, which stands for Life Ignition Tools: Use Nature’s Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action. Jeff, welcome.

Jeff Karp: Hi there. So great to be here.

TS: Excited to talk with you here. I’ve introduced you, talked about your many accomplishments, and you are quite an accomplished person. And yet your journey to become a bioinspirationalist and a professor and to start Karp Labs—it’s been a really interesting, and dare I say, even challenging journey for you. You write about it in LIT, about your early life. Tell us a little bit about this path that you’ve walked to become the director of Karp Labs?

JK: For sure. No, thank you so much for that. And you’re exactly right. When I was younger, I struggled a lot with undiagnosed ADHD and learning differences. I didn’t know it, my parents didn’t know it. My teachers certainly didn’t know it. And in the second grade is really when it started to present itself. I would sit at the back of the class and nothing was sinking in. My mom tried flashcards, she tried phonics, nothing worked. And I felt really demoralized. I wasn’t connecting socially with anybody. And at the end of the year, the teacher, Mr. Steadwell, he held a conference with my parents and said that he would like to hold me back to repeat the second grade. And my parents negotiated that if I spent the summer with tutors catching up, that I could move on to the third grade. And so all my classmates went on vacation and here I am in summer school.

And what actually happened was transformational. Because there was one day in particular that really stands out to me. And I can remember certain aspects of it, because on that day I went in and the tutor read me a passage. Usually that’s what happened, and asked me questions. But on this particular day, the tutor, after asking me questions and me giving answers as I typically did, she asked me a question no one had ever asked me before, which was, “How did you think about that?” And that led to this new-found awareness, almost like this canvas appeared in my mind to think about thinking. I had never—this impulsive kid a fairly extreme on the neurodiversity scale.

And I started to bring this awareness to all aspects of my life. I started to observe my own thinking and how that led to impulsiveness and actions. I started to observe my classmates and why, when they said certain things, why did they say it in certain situations? I just started trying to piece things together. And early on, as I look back, it was almost like I knew I had this hardware comparing myself to a computer, but I didn’t have software that worked for me. And so I spent a lot of my life really just seeing everything as algorithms and noticing behaviors in other people and then trying them on myself to see if they worked for me and just iterating that over time as really a survival tool. And then eventually I started to develop a bunch of tools and things that allowed me to move from survival to thriving.

TS: What would say about the way your mind works, maybe even the way your brain works, that has enabled you to be so gifted at innovation?

JK: I think one of the aspects of my mind is that, well, I mean there may be a few things. One is like, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Terminator, but the first movie, there’s a scene in Terminator where this screen appears and there’s like four or five, six different options of things to say, and then you have to pick one thing as a response. And so I really connected with that, because that’s how I felt, like anytime I was asked a question I always saw multiple possibilities in my mind and I never knew the right answer to give, like which is the answer the teacher wanted me to give?

And so that’s a lot of the struggle for me is trying to figure out, my mind doesn’t really think linearly. I’ll think of something and then I’ll see all these branches coming off of it. And so it’s difficult for me to hone in in linear thinking. And so that’s why the work that I do in my laboratory, I do it as a team. There’s so many people that I’m working with and I have certain skills that I bring to the table, so does everybody else. And so I think that’s how I’ve been able to really navigate things is knowing what my weaknesses are, knowing what my strengths are. And the ability to quickly see different frames of reference. And I’ll just say one other thing is that as I was a bit kind of elucidating here, is seeing things as algorithms and almost, some people may call it habits or patterns. I kind of feel like it’s just very algorithmic, and I feel in my life I constantly need to try new things. I’m constantly trying new algorithms and then disrupting them. And so I’m very experimental. My life is a living laboratory.

TS: And then being a bioinspirationalist, how did that happen for you and what does it mean? You’re a problem solver, you’re solving medical problems, nature’s inspiring you. I think what I’m getting at here is, for all of us who want to be inspired by nature to solve our problems also, what can we learn?

JK: Yeah. Well, my work in bioinspiration actually began when I became a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. And I saw a journal article on a colleague’s desk that had a picture of the action figure Spider-Man stuck to the ceiling. And it was in one of the most prestigious journals, which is Nature. And so I went back to my desk and I looked up the article and the group that was doing this research, they had discovered how geckos are able to hang from a single toe on a wall in all their entire body weight, and they’re not suction cups, there’s no glue. It’s this hierarchical amazing, beautiful design. It’s like these hairs and then if you look at high magnification, they’re made up of even smaller hairs and then even smaller hairs, so they maximize the surface area of contact. There’s this, what the researchers had done is through elucidating how geckos can attach to surfaces they could create a dry adhesive tape that could work for maybe industrial applications.

And so, bioinspiration as I see it, is there’s hundreds of millions of years of research and development that have happened all around us. And every creature that’s alive today, every plant is here because it is solved insurmountable challenges. And so I think I look at these mechanisms that nature has evolved as solutions as ideas for solving problems. When we experience a problem in the laboratory of sort of advancing on a project and hitting a wall and it’s like we don’t know what to do next, we’ll say, “Can we find examples in nature where some elements of this problem may have been encountered? And how did creatures overcome those challenges?” And then those become ideas that we can bring into the lab. And essentially we use bioinspiration to disrupt our thinking. Because I think what happens is that when we’re children, we’re constantly, we’re in this fairytale land and we look at a bird we don’t know yet, it’s called a bird. And it’s just such a beautiful magical creature. And we’re constantly engaging in all these new activities. Every year of school is like a whole new different world unfolding and learning to ride a bike and walking and talking.

And then I think as we get older, our lives become very algorithmic. And so we wake up at the same time, we have breakfast at the same time, we go to work and we scroll and we have lunch and we have our coffee. And it just becomes… And I think that that really, I think my ADHD sometimes takes over, so my mind’s like, woo. But what we do is turning to nature for inspiration is a tool to intercept the algorithms, the thinking that we typically do. Because our thinking ends up being very narrow as we go on in life. And so when we turn to nature for inspiration, it’s a way to look at problems from a completely different angle, a way to disrupt our thinking and lead to fresh energy and new ideas.

TS: I love it and I love the woo. So you just follow that, Jeff and keep sharing with us. Now, I think it would be interesting to get some examples from the lab of problems that you solved inspired by nature and how that led to some of these patents and companies that have been successful now?

JK: Yeah, I’d love to share. In 2009, the chief of cardiac surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital reached out to us because he was doing surgery on these children who had septal defects. These are holes in between the chambers of the heart. And one in 200 to 300 children that are born have a congenital heart defect and a percentage of them require surgery. And he said that sometimes he goes in to do the surgery and the tissue is so fragile it just tears. And there’s devices that work for adults, but you can’t downsize them into a child, because they’re permanent devices and the child’s heart, as it grows, it will outgrow the device. And so you’d have to do open heart surgery to replace these devices, which is unacceptable, to have to keep going back and doing that.

And so we decided what we would do is develop a patch that you can put inside a beating heart attached to the surrounding tissue around a hole. It would immediately seal the hole and then cells from the surrounding tissue could migrate over top, form new tissue. The material would degrade and the patient would be left with their own tissue sealing the hole, which could then naturally grow with the patient. That was the concept. It was a little bit pie in the wall actually. It was quite pie in the sky. But we needed, you have to start somewhere. And so we started to advance on the project and made a little progress, but then we hit a wall and hit a wall and just some people on the team were like, “Maybe we should stop.” That happens actually pretty much every project, where we get to a point where we really don’t feel like we’re going to be making any more progress on it.

Instead of stopping, we said, “Okay, can we find examples in nature where nature has achieved adhesion under wet, dynamic conditions?” And so we looked all around the Earth, land and sea, and there’s these sandcastle worms that sit on rocks in the sea and the waves are hitting them constantly, but they’re remaining put, so they’re strongly attached. So how did they attach in these wet, dynamic environments? And then sometimes you might see a snail sitting on a leaf and it’s raining and the snail’s not moving, it’s not being washed off, and so what’s happening there? And so we realized that these creatures, there’s many creatures that exist in these wet conditions where there’s movement of water and they have achieved a solution by having these secretions that have very special properties, they can repel the water away from the surface of what they’re attached to, and they have certain mechanisms like that.

And so what we did is by discovering that, we brought that into our project and we started to mimic some of the properties of the secretions that the creatures in nature use to attach to rocks or leaves or other things. And that allowed us to make significant advances and actually develop a patch that could literally, we showed, could seal a hole inside a beating heart. There was a patch with a glue on it. We took the glue through regulatory, through clinical trials, got it approved in Europe for vascular reconstruction, so to seal blood vessels. And now it’s being explored in two clinical trials, one for nerve reconstruction and one for hernia repair.

TS: Your new book is called LIT: Life Ignition Tools. And towards the beginning you write, “Discovering that you could engage the LIT state at will changed your relationship to obstacles of all kinds.” I want to know, what is the LIT state? And then we’ll talk about how to engage it at will?

JK: Absolutely. So to me the LIT state is, it’s recognizing and embracing that there are many possibilities to any situation that we’re in. I think as I was mentioning a bit before, I think as we go on in our lives, we start to believe there’s a narrow range of possibilities. And so, the LIT state is one where we believe that there’s limitless possibilities to any situation. And that when we start to look at life that way we can engage curiosity and creativity and deeper connections with everything around us. We can flip the switch on having a dull day or a dull moment to firing up our curiosity, to really bringing in fresh energy in almost any scenario. It’s really these on-ramps, LIT is all about these on-ramps to deepening our everyday experiences and elevating our baseline of wellness and fulfillment in life.

TS: Do you ever find yourself just dull and tired and unlit, and isn’t that perhaps natural, like part of the cycle?

JK: Absolutely. Absolutely. I look at everything actually as a pendulum. And so, there are moments where it’s dull and things are exactly as you described, and there’s moments when things are totally lit up. And I think that by recognizing where I am in that pendulum swing, it can provide these LIT moments, because if I’m in a dull state, then I can start to ask myself questions. I can start to consider potential tools that I might embrace or engage to explore a possibility that might help me get out of that state and start moving the pendulum. Or if the pendulum’s over here and I’m really in a great state, I might think, “Okay, what can I do to keep this going?” Or I may just recognize that I’m not necessarily going to stay in that state and I really want to embrace it in the moment and enjoy it the most I can.

TS: How has learning about the LIT state, knowing you can engage it at will changed how you approach a challenge or a problem in your life?

JK: There are so many things. I’ll give you an example. It is like a shift. It’s a shift in thinking, which leads to the shift in actions and then the shift leads to shifts in energy. Sometimes when I send emails to people and I don’t hear back right away, I start saying to myself, “Okay, maybe I said too much. Maybe I said something wrong. Maybe I offended them. Maybe they don’t like me.” You know we start thinking about it like that.

TS: Sure, of course.

JK: What I do is to transform that into a LIT moment is I pause and I ask myself, “Okay, why am I thinking of these things?” And what that question does is it prompts me to realize that the reason I’m thinking about these things is because I care, because I want to be connected to the person that I’m emailing. And when I make that shift to caring, when I really deeply align with that, that is the true reason of why I feel this way. I want to connect, I want to experience, I want to have energy exchange. Then I start to feel better, because caring is something that is a quality that’s important to me. And so I just made the shift from potentially shaming myself or from negativity to positivity. And there’s so many ways that we can embrace that in our day. I can give you more examples too if you want.

TS: One of the things that I found really intriguing that I want to hear you explain more, because I wasn’t sure I fully understood it, had to do with different parts of the brain lighting up and how that’s an aspect of being LIT. That there’s a literal, oh, there’s the word again, quality to it, that there’s actual inner lights that can be seen as we engage with this possibility mind, if you will. And if you can explain that, I think that would be helpful.

JK: Absolutely. I think I really believe that there’s this life force within everything. And it runs through all of nature, the entire universe, and of course us as well. And I think there are aspects of that life force, like our curiosity that is, it’s always there. And when we tap into it, it literally lights up our brains. They glow orange on an MRI, many different regions of our brains light up like the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, and there’s all sorts of regions that start to light up and we start to get the flow of neurotransmitters like the dopamine and the oxytocin, and there’s all kinds of great ones that make us feel great. And we can engage that as well by doing new things, by practicing new skills, by, for example, our lives sort of become where maybe we drive to work and we take the same route every single time, and it gets to the point where we stop noticing trees and houses and buildings and we may get to our destination and even forget the route that we took or even seeing anything along the path.

And so, if we start to change up that route, even if we walking our dogs, it’s important in my opinion to change up that route, because our brains get assimilated. They’re in this high energy brain state, but they quickly gravitate to a lower energy brain state. And if we stay there we get into ruts, and when we change things up, it lights up our brains. It causes the release of all these positive neurotransmitters. And I’ve brought that to my laboratory by working in all these different areas, like we’re constantly getting into new areas, we’re constantly developing new types of technologies that we haven’t developed previously. And this is one of the ways that we’re just able to bring in this fresh energy all the time. And I’m also doing this in my personal life too, I’m constantly changing things up.

TS: Okay, so I have some questions about this. You introduced this term, LEB?

JK: Yes.

TS: Can you explain that?

JK: Absolutely. To explain it, I like to think about what are we up against as humans. And to me, there’s two major aspects that need to be considered in order to really develop a strategy for life where we can lead our best lives and do our best work. One of the things that we’re up against is there’s $900 billion with a B, spent on marketing and advertising every year to hijack our attention and to serve us someone else’s definition of importance. And that’s like whoever controls the algorithms can potentially control us and actually is controlling a lot of us. And then the other thing that we’re up against is 10 to 15,000 years ago and way before that we were all hunters and gatherers. And we were outside working hard to survive. And when we weren’t, our brains gravitated to this low-energy brain state, and our bodies gravitated to this low-energy body state as well. Because it wouldn’t make sense to exercise, because we need to conserve our energy in case we depleted resources and we needed to move or something was running after us or we needed to go hunting.

And so by design, our brains and our bodies are wired to gravitate to this low energy state. Where our brains anticipate what comes next. And that can serve us in certain regards. But the problem is that if you combine that with the first thing I said, that we’re up against this $900 billion of marketing and advertising there to hijack our attention, we become very susceptible to just living the algorithms that the powers to be want us to live. We’re buying the products that others are deeming important for us, we’re upgrading our phones and doing all these things. And we’re essentially just pawns in somebody else’s game. And so to me, we’re at this snapshot and evolution right now where we still have this primitive wiring that we have this also this incredible level of consciousness.

We have our prefrontal cortex, which is where we do all of our problem solving, our emotional regulation, our planning, and we have this amazing evolutionary inheritance as well of neuroplasticity. Where our brains are constantly rewiring themselves, and regardless of whether you’re doing something intentional or not. And so we can use our consciousness to be intentional in our thoughts and our actions to intentionally rewire our brains, so we create patterns that serve us and serve our communities.

TS: Okay. I want to talk a little bit more about low-energy brain. I understand how if you’re being bombarded by all of this marketing information all the time, you’re just in front of a television or a computer and you’re just becoming like, I’ll use a nature image, a slug. Something like that. I don’t know if it’s really what a slug is like. You probably know a lot more about that than I do. But my point here is, if we take the marketing messaging out, low-energy brain, I want to conserve energy. I love resting. I love the joy of actually having relatively simple patterns in my life that I can count on. I know what I’m going to eat for breakfast. What’s the problem? Don’t I like low-energy brain? I want to conserve my energy.

JK: Absolutely. Yeah. No, there definitely is a purpose and a function, and there’s intentionality around being in a state where we’re regenerating our cognitive capacity, where our bodies are regenerating from the activity that we’ve gone through. I think the challenge is that we are in this, our current culture has brought us to this sedentary lifestyle where we have all of these conveniences. In fact, one of the things that really jumped out to me is the number of times I’ve been… My children love Disney World. And there’s this exhibit called the Carousel of Progress. And this was in the World Fair in New York is when Disney brought it there, and it was this highly innovative studio that he had created. It’s like the stage moves around and the audience sits still. And what’s interesting is if you look at what that story is all about, and it always kind of bothered me every time I went in, and because I’ve been there multiple times, it takes you through from the early 1900s up until today and gives you snapshots into what life looked like.

And as you go from scene to scene 20, 30 years and you’re jumping forward, realize that the major focus of innovation in our society has been on convenience. And convenience, what that has done is it’s created the sedentary lifestyle. Because the very last scene is the kids are there, the family’s there, and they’re basically texting. They’re sitting in the same room texting each other, and they’re not moving. They’re not out and about and exploring. And I think what’s happened is that the low energy brain state is… And then combined with these, the innovation in this world is focused on convenience has got us into this state where we’re no longer leading experiential lives. We’re not getting outdoors and sort of experiencing life as we did 10 to 15,000 years ago when we were hunters and gatherers. And so to me, that’s the challenge.

Yes, we need time to, and that’s actually one of the tools in LIT is press pause. And it’s a very, very important tool because we need time to process information and experiences. We need to take time in between meetings to do lateral thinking and connect dots. We need times for our bodies to rest. But if our bodies, if we’re not constantly moving throughout our day, then we’re not getting the positive neurotransmitters. We’re not, the low energy brain state is working against us.

TS: So, is it fair to say in your description here that when we’re in the LIT state, we’re in some kind of high energy brain state? Is that fair to say, or am I missing something?

JK: Yeah, no, to me the LIT state is really an intentional state. So, the high-energy brain state to me is it can be a state where we’re intentionally pressing pause to try to connect the dots to give ourselves regenerative time. It’s really more associated with intention. When we go into this lower energy brain state, to me there might be an intention to be there, but at the same time we become susceptible to all of these poles of modern society. And so to me it’s more of a definition of how to navigate the current world that we live in.

TS: And tell me more about how you think of intention, and how you work with intention in your life?

JK: There’s a lot of ways that I use intention in my life. And I experiment all the time. Part of it is to me it’s in … I use it in relationships, I use it in my work, and then I also use it for self-development and my own mental health. One way, I’ll just give you an example for the mental health. This just happened not that long ago. I looked out the window and in our backyard there’s these incredible trees and bushes and shrubs and things, and they were kind of moving in the wind and it almost looked like they were waving at me, and I paused and I thought, “Okay, I can think about this two different ways.” I’m sure there’s more ways too, but in that moment, that’s what came to me. I could think, “Well, the wind’s just blowing against these trees and they’re just moving like that, or these trees and the bushes are actually waving at me.”

And I thought to myself, “Okay, if I believe that they’re waving at me, that actually makes me feel good. I feel connected. There’s this deeper, I’m looking more closely, I’m examining, I’m thinking about it in a very positive way. If I just think about it as the wind is moving through the trees, that’s not giving me a little burst of positive energy.” And so I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m going to believe that the trees are waving at me, that I’m interacting with them.” And so that to me in that moment is intentional. Because I feel better. I’ve elevated my ground state by changing how I think about how I’m experiencing the world.

Another thing that I do is, we have two dogs, when I’m walking the dogs in the neighborhood now, I used to be the person not that long ago kind of pre-COVID where I would be walking with my phone watching an episode on Netflix of something and walking the dogs around the neighborhood, and I would validate it to myself that I’m getting exercise, they’re getting exercise and I’m watching a full episode of something.

But I realized through practicing these LIT tools that there was a higher … There was something I was missing that this wasn’t serving me. I recognize this wasn’t serving me. It kind of hit me. And so I made the intention that I am going to connect with my dogs on the walk. That is my intention. And so what I did is if I make the intention that I’m not going to look at my phone, that’s really difficult because it’s kind of like a hollow intention to me. I wasn’t born to have the intention of not looking at my phone, but I was born to have the intention to connect with everything around me. And so the phone now stays in my pocket because my intention is very pure to connect with the dogs.

And as I’m walking with them around the neighborhood, I notice one of the dogs, Ginger, every minute or two looks back and makes eye contact with me. And when we make eye contact, I feel that little burst of positivity. And then Ryder, the other dog will look back every four or five minutes when we make eye contact. He is a burst of energy and he starts galloping for just a few steps forward. And to me, that makes me feel wonderful in that moment. To me, that’s one of the ways that I practice intention in all sorts of ways in my life. I mean, another is when I’m having a conversation with my family, I notice there’s an energy of the conversation. I notice, let’s say if my teenage kids are speaking and I have an impulse to interrupt or take out my phone and show them something or say something, I take the energy away from them and I put it on me, and often they will stop speaking.

And so to be intentional in the conversation, I realized that even though this impulse comes to me and I have to hold myself back, that if I can do that, my thoughts and emotions associated with it will slowly dissipate. And I will be, I say in my mind, “Okay, good, that’s a win.” I’ve checked a little box and so I feel really good about that. I’ve created all these things in my day where I’m checking these little boxes saying like, “Okay, that’s another win. That’s another win.” And it elevates my baseline feeling of wellness and fulfillment in life.

TS: One of the things about intention that I’m specifically curious about has to do if you see the kind of intention you’re describing in other aspects of nature. Or if this feels more like a human thing? We can clearly see that in all aspects of nature there’s a drive for survival and a drive to reproduce and be fed. But do you see intention in the way you’re describing out there in the natural world?

JK: I see everything as energy transfer. And I went to Panama. I’ve been to Panama actually a few times during the past six months or so. And I’ve had some transformational experiences there. Just being in the jungle within this really interconnected, one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. And really experiencing and having guides around me to explain what I’m seeing and from different frames of reference, that when I think of the trees and I look at the trees, I mean the trees are reaching for the sun, right? They’re reaching for a core energy source for planet Earth, and the sun is powering photosynthesis, and then photosynthesis is what powers the animals. And then during the animal’s lifetime they’re constantly exchanging energy. As I, for example, when I’m walking the dogs, as I mentioned, when I make eye contact, there’s this magical transfer of energy that’s occurring. And so to me in life, I think the intention in nature is all around energy transfer. It’s about gaining energy and passing energy on to to everything that exists.

TS: Energy transfer for what, evolutionary drive or impulse?

JK: Well, I think of it as just part of the life force, like the evolutionary process that I don’t think there are any end goals that nature has in mind. I think it’s just all about perturbations. There could be a volcano eruption or a lightning strike or a fire or a drought. And then that leads to adaptation and experimentation and new insights and experiences that are gained. And to me one of the thoughts that I had just a few weeks ago is that nature got itself to the moon, and I started thinking deeply about that. And that maybe nature is using … Humans are a vessel, a vehicle that nature uses to explore itself, to explore the cosmos. And really that concept, I’ve been mulling it over and still thinking about it from different angles. But to me it was a bit of a breakthrough in my mind to think of life that way. Because we have conversation where we’ll say, “Okay, well we’re part of nature,” but to me that didn’t click.

But thinking like we are, everything is a vessel of nature. Everything, we’re, all of us are contributing to evolution and through our experiences. And as we talk about our experiences with others and others observe us experiencing the world in different ways, we’re actually all contributing to this evolution. And to me, intentionality fits into this, especially for humans. Because I think non-human typically are wired to contribute to evolution in positive ways. I think humans, if we don’t use our consciousness, we can contribute to evolution in negative ways. In terms of the issues that we’re seeing right now on the planet and the extinction of many species that are humans caused.

TS: Okay. Jeff, I’m going to take a moment, if you will, and do a little recap and clarification, if that’s okay?

JK: Sure.

TS: What’s very obvious to me is what a creative thinker you are. And dare I say, to use your term, this quality of being LIT up, which I would say to me just in everyday language, this inspiration sense of possibility in you. And how terrific you’re able to function in your lab to find creative solutions to difficult to solve medical problems. I totally get that. Then when I try to understand, what does this Life Ignition Tools mean for me in my life, and this notion that I could fall into low energy brain patterns, I just want my comfort, which I do. And my status quo habit patterns, which seem to serve me, and I don’t want too much shaking up and all that. I’m still not 100% sure how I’m going to take your message in LIT and apply it in my life in a useful way. I wonder if you could help me with that and maybe share just what the most important principles are that the listeners and I can work on?

JK: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think the challenge with the low energy brain state, the state that our brains and bodies gravitate towards is we become susceptible to the marketing and the advertising and the algorithms that if we’re on our devices, it’s just a massive force that’s hard to deal with. I think without that the low-energy brain state serves us very well. If we can disconnect from our technology completely, it serves us well because it puts us in this regenerative state. But at the same time we’re surviving. We’re focusing on surviving. And I think that’s the challenge is that with where we are right now in today’s society a certain percentage of people on the planet don’t have to fight for survival on a daily basis. And that actually means that we’re missing out on a lot of positive cues and neurotransmitters that we typically would get from working hard and being outside and experiencing nature.

I think that to me there are … LIT is all about sensitizing our aliveness. It’s all about our senses, is how we sense the world, how we experience the world. And I’ll just give you one example of something that anybody can practice today from LIT that will move people into the LIT state. And that is one thing that I do, and this actually is not in the book, but it evolved from the book as I’m constantly experimenting and trying things. But one of the things that I do is I’ll walk around my neighborhood and I cycle through my senses. I’ll say, “Sight.” And I’ll look at the trees and I’ll look at the bark on the trees and the texture, and I’ll look at the tops of the trees and the patterns and the trunks, and I’ll look at the clouds. And then I’ll say, “Hearing.” And I’ll listen for the birds and I’ll hear the wind rustling in the leaves. And then I’ll say, “Touch.” And I’ll feel the clothes against my skin. I’ll feel my heel hit the ground and I’ll feel the wind against my face.

And as I’ve practiced this on going for walks with the dogs, I’ve actually deepened each of my senses. As I’m walking by a tree now, I feel this digital world we’re in, when I walk outside, usually my eyes are going all over the place, just looking around. I’m not really focusing on anything for a long … For just these little tiny nanoseconds, or my head is down and I’m ruminating. If I put my head up, I can generally slow down or stop the rumination, but if I cycle through my senses, I can actually re-sensitize each one of those senses, because I think our society, it flattens our senses, it flattens how we experience the world.

Something else that I do is when I’m eating my meals, I will close my eyes for a few bites, and it completely changes the experience just to experience the flavors. I start to realize that as I breathe out, the flavors get more amplified. And so, we can start to get in touch with our powerful biology, these ways that we sense the world. And to me there’s so many things that we can do, and that’s what LIT is really all about. It’s exploring all of these possibilities that can elevate our experiences in the world.

TS: Re-sensitizing our aliveness. That really clarifies it for me and helps me understand your work. Thank you so much for that phrase. That makes a lot of sense to me.

JK: Yeah, I can give you one other, actually example is last summer I was at a friend’s house, and because I’m open to it, I’m constantly looking around me and observing what other people do. And I was at my friend Bridge’s house for dinner, and amazingly he has a chalkboard in his dining room for what he’s trying to be intentional about. He writes it on the chalkboard, what an amazing idea. He writes there that he’s practicing gratitude. There’s just four or five of us at dinner. And he says, “Okay, we’re going to,” he tells us he’s engaging in this new practice. And gratitude is always something like, I’ve heard people talk about it, but I haven’t figured out how to access it, so I’m very curious.

And so he says, “Okay, we’re going to put our hands over our food and we’re going to think about the flavor of each ingredient before we eat.” You look at your food and you start to think about it, and I’ve gotten better at it. I’m quicker at it because I’ve been practicing it every meal since. And then he said, “We’re going to think of the power of the sun and the power of photosynthesis, and we’re going to think of the microbes in the soil and the farmer’s hands. And we’re going to think of the transporters and the people who prepared this and everything that had to happen for this food to get in front of us.” And then he said, “And now this food will become us. It’s going to power all of our thoughts and all of our actions.”

And I’ve been practicing this and it’s evolving for me. I’ve been doing it every meal. And I try to look outside or sit outside when I can when I eat, and I start to think about the interconnectedness of all of life, I start to think about the submicron creatures in the ocean, the submillimeter creatures, the phytoplankton that are providing over half of the oxygen that we breathe. I’m looking at nature and I’m appreciating things more.

I used to, for example, we have this gate at my house when I walk the dogs and the gate’s kind of broken, so I used to slam it shut. And now with this new gratitude practice, I see everything around us has come from the crust of the Earth. Everything is sacred. And so now I lift it up and I close it gently, and just the gate that’s changed how … And when I do that I feel good about it as I’m being intentional. And so there are these little practices and rituals that I think can really help us to lead more conscious lives that allow us to tap into the LIT state.

TS: Do you think that even just having the intention to re-sensitize our own aliveness, to be as alive and as sensitively alive as we could be, that’s the overarching intention of how I operate. So, get outside and feel the breeze, I’ve been inside for God knows how long, or whatever it might be, I’m here to re-sensitize my aliveness. What do you think that as a guiding intention?

JK: I think it’s a wonderful intention. I think there’s more to it than setting the intention, because I think what we need to do, we need to create space to let our minds flow around that intention. Where we’re not on our devices, we’re not actively in conversation with somebody else. We’re actually creating space for our minds. And I’ll give you an example. What I noticed is I used to book my meetings back to back to back to back, and I would feel pretty good because I could meet with a lot of people in the day and things would be moving all over the place. But I started to realize that I was missing out on even higher value opportunities. And so as I started experimenting, I started to create space in between some of my meetings to do nothing really, to go for a walk or just sit there and not answering emails or doing text messages or searching online is not creating space that you’re still doing something.

And so what I noticed is when I created space, even 10 or 15 minutes, I start connecting things that the person just told me with things that people said last week or last month or last year. And all of a sudden I’m like, “Wait a moment, I should connect this person to this person I met four months ago and we should get together because this could lead to something completely new and different and impactful.” And I wouldn’t have those thoughts had I not created space for my mind to just drift around and start to create dotted lines between the dots, the information, and then maybe that could form something interesting.

To me, having the intention was a first step, but then we need to create space where we’re not ruminating, but rather we’re just sort of in an environment where that intention we can just be like, “Okay, maybe what could be a little step we might take?” Or maybe I’m going to observe somebody else and their patterns and maybe I’m going to look for something to try, something to change in my life and see where that leads, see what insights I can gain.

TS: As you’re speaking, it reminds me of something you write about in LIT, which is lowering the activation energy. Which I interpreted as just not having as many speed bumps between us and this sensitized state. And I wonder if you can give some examples of that lowering the activation energy?

JK: Sure. Last summer, my friend Michael Gale called me while he was riding his bike and he called to say that being on his bike was his happy place. And I immediately resonated with that. Because I’ve always, when I’ve been on my bike, I feel free as a bird. It just so liberating. It puts me in such a good mood just being on my bike. And so I was like, “But wait a moment. Why am I not biking? I have two bikes at home. I’m not biking.” What I did is I said, “Okay, I need to reduce the activation energy here.” And activation energy is something that I learned when I was in school, and it defines the amount of energy you need to put into a system for a reaction to occur. If you have a beaker of water and two molecules and you add a little bit of heat and they move around, nothing’s happening and you add more heat and now they’re really moving, you add more heat and then they collide and a chemical reaction occurs. The amount of energy you put into the system is the activation energy required for that reaction to occur.

That when I heard that, it immediately resonated with me and I was like, “I could use this to help me in everything that I do in my life.” And so for the bike example, what I did is I said, “Okay, what I’m going to do is I’m going to find steps I can take that will lower the activation energy for me to get to the reaction of getting on the bike.” I said, “Okay, I’m going to, one day I’m just going to put air in the tires. I’m not going to allow myself to do anything else, just air in the tires.” I put air in the tires, and then the next day I said, “Okay, I’m going to clean the bike.” And the next day I’m like, “I’m going to hang the helmet on the bike and move it in a place where I’m going to bump into it every day. I’m just going to see it every day.”

And so now I’ve lowered the activation energy to the point where all I need to do is find 10 minutes or 15 minutes to get on the bike and go for a couple of loops around the neighborhood. And so the activation energy now is low. It started off being high, I chipped away at it to make it low. And last summer I did over 1,000 miles on my bike. And this summer I’m training to do a 50-mile bike ride. I’ve been doing a bunch of 30-mile bike rides and I just love it. And I’m here in Los Angeles. I rode a bike earlier today. I rented one, I rode one yesterday. And I’ll tell you one other thing that I do to activate the LIT state, it is so simple is I say hello to people when I’m on my bike. I say hello to people as I’m passing. I just say, “Good morning or hello.”

And not everybody responds and not everybody responds with it like the reaction that I would hope, but enough people they’ll smile, they’ll look over, they’ll sort of, and to me that’s exchanging energy with people. And it’s like I feel great. It gives me that little burst of positivity, just saying hello and having a connection occur with another human. And to me that’s what I want to be filling my day with.

TS: It sounds to me, because you gave the example of connecting with your dogs and now saying hello to people when you ride your bike that there’s something about connection that you associate with “the LIT state.” I think I’m still trying to understand the LIT state. Is it a state where you feel exquisitely alive? Is that a way to put it?

JK: Yeah, I think it’s a state where we’re doing intentional actions or having intentional thoughts that are aligning us with our core values. That are taking us in the direction that we truly want to go, that we’re not just operating based on someone else’s algorithm, we’re not on autopilot, but we’re actually, whether we’re a restful state or whether we’re out engaging or trying to connect with other people, whatever it is that we need in that moment that we’re taking a step towards that. To me that’s the LIT state. And it can also define us when we’re in a really challenging time and we’re experiencing negative emotions and things.

To me, I feel like, for example, I’ve experienced a lot of failure in my life, a lot of setbacks, not just struggling with my ADHD and learning differences, but I applied to three medical schools. I failed to get into all three of them when I was in my undergrad. When I started my laboratory, my first two and a half years, I submitted over 100 grants. Almost 100% of them were rejected during the first two and a half years. I gave a talk on the TEDMED stage at the Kennedy Center in DC, five livestream cameras being live streamed throughout the world. I stopped in the middle of it for 20 seconds and said absolutely nothing when I was on stage. I’ve encountered all these challenges that to me, for example, in moments of failure or challenges like that, what I realized is that to me the LIT state is recognizing the patterns that happen.

When I encounter something negative, I feel the negative emotions and I can’t get myself out of that state. It’s very visceral. I feel like when I got a grant rejection, it felt like I was being punched in the face. It really hurt, because I was so excited about the project. But what I realized is that after a night or two of sleep, good night’s sleep, that it’s almost like this after the rain moment where now my mind is open to receive new insights. And that’s when the greatest things happen. That’s where the best ideas come from, where we get our patents that we can move technologies forward. It’s after we’ve encountered a challenge when our minds are now more open than they were to even at the beginning of the projects.

And so to me, the LIT state and all of that are accessing LIT is recognizing the patterns and how these moments of challenge that feel so visceral and so negative can turn into positivity. I don’t know, I think just so many of us, we look back on our lives at the challenges we’ve encountered, there’s been something positive that has come out of it that has changed us in very useful and productive and impactful ways.

TS: Just a few more questions here, Jeff. Now when something goes south and it looks like a failure and you still have those experiences inside of anguish, but you do something different, you go to sleep and know that it’s going to pass. What else?

JK: Well, I think part of it is knowing, and it’s hard, I’m not saying that this is an easy thing for me. But what it does is, is that by recognizing that … So let’s say when things are going well, I recognize they’re not always going to go well, but I’m like, “Okay, but I’m just going to focus here. I know there probably something around the corner that’s going to surprise me, and I know that I’m going to be able to get over it. I know I’m going to be able to be resourceful and connect with other people and find a way forward. That there’s going to be a path. There’s going to be insights that I’m going to gain that I can’t gain unless I encounter that challenge. That there’s going to be some incredibly valuable experience or lesson or insight that’s going to be gained.” And so to me, that’s a big part of it. The other thing I’ll say is what I noticed, just kind of a parallel is I used to do a lot of travel, now I’m doing a little bit more.

I mean, I’m doing more travel because the book came out and there’s a lot of really interesting opportunities. I’m trying to figure out, “Wow, all these things.” And so what I noticed though when I travel overseas that I can … You see, sleep is really tough. So what happens is I notice I get really tired, really, really tired, but if I just can hold on for a couple of hours, I’ll enter a cycle where I’m super awake. And so I realized there’s these cycles of super tired to super awake. And then if I have meetings and things I need to go to, I just have to power through those two or three hours of deep sleepiness and then I’ll be back awake and I don’t even need coffee for that. It’ll happen. It’s just these cycles. And so to me there’s recognizing the patterns of life. We hear trust in the process is something we constantly hear.

And to me that’s recognizing the patterns, that’s looking back and seeing how things tend to ebb and flow. And that negativity turns into positivity if we can … If we’ve been intentional and we are able to sit in those difficult times and let our minds catch up and process.

TS: Okay, this show is called Insights at the Edge, and now I’m going to get a little edgy by going out on the edge myself here for these final couple questions. And one of them has to do with this word LIT. When I first heard that that was the title of your book, I was really drawn to it. Because, and I want to know if this is an experience you share or if you have any insight into it from your experience. I feel that the inner body, if you will, the inner space of the body is lit up for me a lot of the time. It feels like an animated bright space, and I’m wondering how you relate to that notion?

JK: I feel that as well. And I think that to me, I don’t feel that unless I have rituals and practices that allow me to bring myself to experience that and then continually experience it more often and more deeply. I found if I don’t have these rituals that I’ve been telling you about, then I am not able to tap into that. Now, for example, I cut my finger several weeks ago, actually two months ago, and within a month … It was pretty bad, actually, and I just put a bandaid on it and probably could have got stitches, it was that bad. But it fully regenerated. And we have this powerful biology that we, in my sort of opinion, the more we can see what we have, these capabilities, the more appreciation we have for all of life and for each other. And the more we appreciate neurodiversity and how we actually need people to think differently and experience differently in order to power evolution and maximize our chance of survival and thriving.

TS: And that brings me to the last question I wanted to ask you, because there’s a part of LIT where you write about mining your neurodiversity. And I’ve had a bunch of questions about the use of this term. Is it helpful? What does it mean exactly? There are some people quite close to me who I asked recently, “Do you think I’m neurodiverse?” And they were like, “Heck yeah, Tami, glad you finally brought it up so we could talk about it.” And I’m in my own process of understanding that, and you are very upfront about what that means for you. And it seems like you have a view of what that also means in evolution and at this time. And that’s what I’d love to hear more about?

JK: To me neurodiversity, it’s such a curious term, and I think that important that we are defining it and thinking about it and considering it in today’s society. I think it’s really sort of context dependent for our society. Again, if we go back to when we were hunters and gatherers, I mean, my sense is that people who are neurodiverse, who are on the extremes of how they interpret the world, how they see patterns, how they process information, that they had special powers in nature to see things that others couldn’t see. And that would actually have survival benefits, that that would be very useful for a village to have people be able to see interactions and notice patterns and be able to hyperfocus on things that others couldn’t. When I think back then maybe there wouldn’t have been a need to define neurodiversity. It would have been actually more defined as all the different powers that everybody has in the community and how they use those powers to support the community and to survive and thrive.

I think that the education system that we have, there’s a lot of incredible things about it that it also is like a factory and it caters to the average student. And so the people who are one standard deviation away from the average, they fall through the cracks. Because they don’t think the way in the linear ways that the education system has been defined. And so that’s why in the seventh grade my mom, my school didn’t want to get me anything. They didn’t want to help me at all. My mom went up against the school board. She was a warrior, but she had written down every negative thing teachers had said about me. Lazy, lost cause, wouldn’t amount to anything, troublemaker. I mean, the list goes on and on. She’d written it all down, all the reports and everything. She went up against the school board and got me identified as having a learning difference.

And that led to me getting extra time on tests and some space as well. And my grades went from C’s and D’s to A’s. And what’s happening in today’s society is that a lot of the people who are neurodiverse are not getting the support they need. And a lot of them become addicts and they fall through the cracks. And they have all this incredible potential to change the world and to impact the world and their communities in such positive ways. But because they think differently, because they’re not linear thinkers, because they don’t see things the same way that the average sees. That they’re not supported and they end up thinking there’s something wrong with them. And so to me neurodiversity is really about the superpowers that people have. And everybody’s on a spectrum. Everybody has different experiences, different wiring, different genetics. Everybody experiences the world in different ways.

And to me neurodiversity powers the world. If everyone was the same, we likely would not survive. We wouldn’t find life interesting, we wouldn’t be curious about others. And we use that in my lab. My lab, there’s minimal overlap of expertise. I’ve designed my lab specifically for this purpose to maximize diversity in every possible way. We’ve had people from 30 different countries, people have different education systems, and so they think differently from different origins. And we have minimal overlap of expertise. We have biologists, chemists, material scientists. We’ve had a gastrointestinal surgeon, a cardiac surgeon. We’ve had a dentist in the lab constantly changing. And so people can bring fresh, everyone has their own unique knowledge and skills and access to resources that they can bring. And that maximizes our potential to solve many different problems and maximize our number of shots on goal.

And so I think in our personal lives we also need to engage people who think differently and who experience the world differently. Because then we can contrast that to how we experience and it can open up possibilities in things we might want to experiment with even just our thinking or interactions.

TS: I’m going to ask you one final question, Jeff, because I can’t help myself. Which is I think that many of us are concerned about the evolutionary moment that we’re in right now as a human species. And I’m wondering from your vantage point when you see this time and you wrote this book, LIT: Life Ignition Tools, there was a motivation for you to put this out now, what you see as this moment in time from your perspective as a bioinspirationalist?

JK: I think there’s a real sense of urgency, Tami, for people to bring to their lives, for everybody to bring to their lives in a very personal way. I think that there’s so many positive things going on. And what I’ve realized is that despite all of the challenges that we face right now, there are many, many groups of people who are doing incredible things and that are creating these ripple effects. And my sense is that we need to, on an individual basis we need to take more steps towards intentionality and being more deliberate in our lives. And creating space to connect with our intuition and the cues that we’re constantly receiving from this core wisdom that we all have. And we need to talk about it more with other people. We need to share with other people what we’re working on and our self-evolution, because that magnifies the ripple effects.

And I feel, I don’t know, I personally feel it’s like a moral obligation that we have to amplify that positivity. And I think when we do that, I think that we move closer to consciousness. As I was mentioning before, I think we’re at this snapshot in evolution where we have this wiring towards the low-energy brain and body state, this impulsiveness, this animalistic kind of instincts. But we also have this incredible consciousness. And I think as we take steps towards utilizing that consciousness and the incredible biology that we have, that we start to evolve in a way that creates this positive force that’s unstoppable.

TS: What a generous conversationalist you are. Thank you so much. I’ve been speaking with Dr. Jeff Karp. He’s the author of the new book LIT: Life Ignition Tools: Use Nature’s Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action. Thank you so much.

JK: Thank you.

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