Just listened to this 8 hour Neuralink episode. It might not be fun for all of you, so it's not a general recommendation, but to me it was fascinating. First about how the technology including robotic surgery works, but mainly about the weirdness of controlling something with your brain.

I have spent hundreds, maybe more than a thousand hours on some sort of EEG brain computer interface, so I got plenty of training. The resolution of these is not perfect, but you can do many things even with an EEG device. What is interesting is that I am controlling things that have no analog in the motor cortex, I am changing my state of mind and focus, which is very different to moving (or attempting to move, or imagining to move - three different things as per the podcast) a finger.

The brain does not have direct receptors about its internal state. The brain does not hurt. The EEG feedback adds this information and it's possible to train doing completely new things with the brain. The interesting fact is that even when I learn it to some extent, I can't really tell how it works - or what exactly I do. I call it surfing on the wave all the way down, but it's something that you would not be able to replicate without figuring it out yourself. We can only have shared vocabulary after you experienced it .

This I believe is precisely why it's hard to explain psychedelic experience to someone who has never experienced it. You might describe the visual part (which is not shared - I don't do the visual part at all actually, even when I dream, it's never visual. I know the concepts, the structures, but I don't see it), but that's only because that's the common ground ("I have seen beautiful fractals") and probably the least interesting part of the experience.

Why I'm describing this? It's very hard to explain that there are things you can learn to do with your brain that we don't even have good words for. I believe brain computer interfaces with technologies like neurofeedback will make learning it much easier than for example meditation. Combining the dedication of meditation practice with the boost of neurofeedback is the best I believe. But most of you don't even understand what I'm talking about, because you never experienced it. It's out there.