Data/transcripts/2Ds1m5gflCI_20241225194849.txt

- Welcome to The Huberman Lab Podcast,
where we discuss science
and science based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a Professor of
Neurobiology and Ophthalmology
at Stanford School of Medicine.
Recently, I had the pleasure
of hosting two live events:
one in Seattle, Washington
and one in Portland, Oregon,
both entitled, "The Brain Body Contract,"
where I discussed science
and science related tools
for mental health, physical
health, and performance.
My favorite part of each
evening, however, was the
question and answer period
that followed the lecture.
I love the question and answer period
because it gives me an opportunity
to hear directly from the audience
to what they want to know most,
and indeed to get into a bit of dialogue
so we really clarify
what are the underlying
mechanisms of particular tools,
how best to use the tools for
things like focus and sleep,
we also touched on some things related to
mental health and physical health.
It was a delight for me
and I like to think that
the audience learned a lot.
I know that many of you weren't
able to attend those events,
but we wanted to make the
information available to you.
So what follows this
is a recording of the
question and answer period,
from the lecture in Seattle, Washington.
I hope you'll find it
to be both interesting and informative.
I'd also like to thank our
sponsors of these live events.
The first is Momentous supplements,
which is our partner with
The Huberman Lab Podcast,
providing supplements that
are the very highest quality,
that ship international,
and that are arranged
in dosages and single
ingredient formulations
that make it possible for you
to develop the optimal
supplement strategy for you.
And I'd also like to
thank our other sponsor,
which is InsideTracker,
which provides blood tests and DNA tests
so you can monitor
your immediate and
long-term health progress.
I'd also like to announce
that there are two, new
live events scheduled.
The first one is going
to take place Sunday,
October 16th at The Wiltern
theater in Los Angeles.
The other live event will
take place Wednesday,
November 9th at the Beacon
Theatre in New York City.
Tickets to both of those
events are now available
online at hubermanlab.com/tour;
that's hubermanlab.com/tour.
I do hope that you learn from an enjoy
the recording of the
question and answer period
that follows this, and last,
but certainly not least,
thank you for your interest in science.
[upbeat music plays]
"What is your most used protocol?"
I'm assuming that you mean the
protocol that I use the most.
I genuinely do the
morning sunlight viewing.
And this evening I went
and looked at the sunset,
every single evening,
and I absolutely do 10 to 30 minutes
of some Non-Sleep Deep Rest
protocol, every single day,
every single day!
The reason I called it Non-Sleep Deep Rest
is because while I love
the classic traditions of,
and things like Yoga Nidra,
my fear was that if I
called things Yoga Nidra,
that people would get spooked.
But I also have to say
that I rather loathe
the fact that scientists
use so many fancy terms,
that it also vaults information
from the very people that fund the work.
So I have a kind of an ax to grind
with the scientific community too.
So Non-Sleep Deep Rest was my attempt
to kind of put my arms around
a number of different things
like Yoga Nidra, which I
have great reverence for,
and other tools like that.
I do that usually in the early afternoon,
or if I wake up first thing in the morning
and I haven't slept
enough, or not that well,
I'll do 30 minutes of Yoga Nidra
and I feel terrific after that.
I'll just mention a brief anecdote.
I learned about Yoga Nidra
while researching a book
that I never wrote, that may
or may not ever be published.
I went and spent a week
in a trauma center and addiction
treatment center in Florida
and saw some amazing work,
of some amazing people,
and some amazing transformations
and it was a big part
of their daily routine,
for these people to do Yoga
Nidra and Non-Sleep Deep Rest
and I thought they're
really onto something here.
So almost religiously for me,
every day, 10 to 30 minutes.
Not that it matters,
but the CEO of Google's really into NSDR.
I don't know him,
but he's written about
that a number of times.
"In Seattle, sunrise varies
from 4:30 AM to 9:00 AM,
depending on season,
are you recommending to vary
your wake-up/outside
time with the seasons?"
Somewhat.
You know, you don't need to
see the sun cross the horizon.
That would be great,
but not everyone can wake up with the sun.
You want to get so-called
low solar angle sunlight.
Why?
'Cause of that yellow-blue contrast
that we talked about before.
Many people wake up before the sun is out.
If that case, if you want to be awake,
turn on as many bright lights as you can.
Up here, I don't know, does anyone here,
you don't have to admit
this if you don't want to,
but maybe nod or raise your hand
if you're comfortable with doing that.
In the winter you feel less well,
or typically in the transition,
yeah, it's huge up here.
[audience laughing]
It's really, it's amazing.
And then when you're on campus
or that's where I've spent time
and you see Rainier and it's like,
the blossoms are out
and you feel almost high
because that's dopamine, you know,
animals that have white
pelage in the winter,
and then it turns dark in
the summer and spring months
that pathway, the melanin
pathway, is from tyrosine,
which is the precursor to dopamine
and also to melanin production in the fur.
So the whole system is linked.
It's not rigged, it's linked.
So what do I suggest?
I suggest in the winter months,
getting 30 minutes of sunlight viewing.
I know it's a lot,
but it's much better than
feeling lousy all day.
And then the real key in the winter
is to try and catch some
sunlight before it goes down.
If you're indoors and it goes down
and then you go outside and it's dark,
your brain and body
don't really know where they are in time.
And then you flip on "Ozark"
and you're watching "Ozark",
and then you really don't
know where you are in time.
I have one more episode.
Don't tell me what happened.
That show is, when I was a postdoc,
I used to recommend, "The
Wire," to my competitors.
[audience laughing]
True.
"I go to sleep fired up,
ready and excited to do whatever it takes.
When I wake up, that drive is depleted.
Why, and what can I do?"
Interesting.
Have not heard that one before,
but if I were to venture
a guess, you know,
we didn't spend much time tonight
talking about the
autonomic nervous system,
this kind of seesaw that
takes us from very alert,
potentially panicked, but
to very, very deep sleep;
even, you know, God
forbid we go into a coma.
It's 'cause the
parasympathetic nervous system
is overactive relative to the
sympathetic nervous system;
the seesaw of autonomic function.
You may be sleeping very, very deeply.
And when you are in deep, deep rest,
the last thing you want to do
is get into that forward center of mass
thinking, planning, predicting, right?
In, you know, again in Yoga Nidra again,
Non-Sleep Deep Rest,
there's this common theme in the script
of going from thinking
and doing and predicting
to being and feeling, they say.
And I'm not making fun of them
as the moment I hear that,
I go, "Oh, just I want to be and feel."
What are you doing?
You're actually just
moving into sensation,
but no planning, right?
There's nothing mysterious about it.
Sensation, but no planning.
Now in sleep,
a very deeply parasympathetic
sleep state, what's happening?
You actually, that visual aperture
is actually so big, you're
not in panoramic vision,
your eyes are actually closed.
Space and time are from
past, present, and future
are invited into your thinking.
You're in a deep, deep state of relaxation
and it may be, Dustin,
that when you're waking up,
you're having a hard time
transitioning out of that
because you're sleeping so deeply.
You may be waking up mid-sleep cycle.
Many people find it useful to set an alarm
so that they wake up
at the end of a 90 minute
so-called ultradian cycle.
There's some sleep apps
that do this on the phone.
I can't recall their names,
but so rather than sleeping seven hours,
you might be better off sleeping six
or seven and a half hours, right?
Waking up at the end of one
of these 90 minute cycles.
Try that.
That would be consistent
with what we know about the biology.
But I think it's common to,
if you sleep very deeply,
to wake up and not necessarily
want to spring out of bed.
I've heard of these people
that just want to spring out
of bed and attack the day;
Jocko Willink, 4:30 in the morning,
his Casio phone, and his watch.
I'm seeing his watch when,
and it's like eight for me.
I'm like, "Wow," like again,
these people are amazing.
I must be doing something wrong.
But these are, you know,
I don't wake up that way.
You know?
Like Tiger, I'm like, I
want water, I want sunlight,
90 minutes later I want caffeine.
Yeah.
"What are some of your favorite books
that have had the biggest impact on you?"
Kyle G, thank you, Kyle.
Gosh, so many!
You know, for non-fiction, well,
Oliver Sack's autobiography,
"On the Move,"
had a profound impact on me.
You know, people hated him?
The scientific community
tried to kick him out.
They said horrible things about him;
created all sorts of scandals.
It wasn't until "Awakenings"
became a blockbuster movie
that suddenly he got
appointments at NYU and Columbia.
Ha!
Then now they wanted him
back; the revered neurologist.
Like incredible, right?
But he was also a real seeker
in the cuttlefish thing.
And he had a lot of
internal struggles too,
some of which I relate
to, some of which I don't.
Actually, I've been in touch
with his former partner
because I actually moved to
Topanga Canyon for a short while
just 'cause Oliver lived there.
I thought, "If I go there, I'll
actually finish this book."
Guess what?
Just moving someplace doesn't
allow you to finish a book.
He lived in Topanga so I
was like, "That's the key."
It didn't work.
And people were wondering why
I was hanging around
their house all the time
'cause it was Oliver's former home.
So that's an amazing book,
and tells you my obsessive nature.
The other books that have had
a profound influence on me,
I would say in the non-fiction realm,
well I learned how to make a decent steak
and a few other simple recipes, not well,
from Tim Ferris's book,
"The Four Hour Chef,"
'cause I really needed help.
That was a fun one.
I like Robert Greene's book, "Mastery,"
because I've had amazing mentors
and that book is all about finding mentors
and assigning mentors to you,
even if you don't know them.
And as you can tell from
my stories about Oliver,
who I never met, and a few other folks,
that I've just decided
that they don't know it,
but I'm mentoring them,
that they're mentoring me, excuse me,
that book was really important for me.
And that mentor-mentee relationships
always involve a breakup,
either by death, or by
decision, or by consequence,
to your circumstance rather.
There's, something happens,
and they're supposed to break.
You're not supposed to
apprentice with somebody forever.
That was an interesting book for me.
I would say in the fiction realm,
[Andrew sighs]
I would say in the fiction
realm, it's all childhood books
'cause it's been a long time
since I've read fiction.
I read a lot of poetry. I'm
a big Wendell Berry fan.
I like poetry because poetry to me is,
is like the subconscious, it,
the structure is all messed up
and you think you understand
what they're talking about
but you don't really know.
And so it always feels
important and consequential,
even though, you know, it's
your own interpretation.
And then I love the
psychologists. I love Jung.
I love Erikson.
I love the psychologists
and could read endlessly
about the early days of attachment theory
and things like that
because I find that
stuff to be fascinating.
So those books have been a lot of fun
and I love picture books with animals.
[audience laughing]
And so if you can get a hold of
Joel Sartore's Instagram
account, the "Photo Ark,"
he decided to take pictures
of every animal on the planet,
especially the ones that are endangered.
He's a amazing photographer,
but his books are even better
so if you like animal books.
"What excites you most
about the future research
of mental health treatment,
particularly anxiety and depression?"
Oi! Michael, thank you, Michael.
Well there, I think that
we're in an exciting time.
I am, I'll just reveal my biases,
I'm quite pessimistic at the idea
that we're going to have
better medication soon for most things.
What I do think we are
starting to approach
is a time in which we understand
how broad categories of drugs
impact broad categories of chemicals,
which kind of shift our mind
in broad categories of directions.
What does all that mean?
I think we're starting to
realize that because there are
different receptors
for all these chemicals
all over the brain and body,
that that side effect-less drug
is unlikely to exist for mental health,
but that the combination of,
maybe some pharmacology,
but especially behavioral
tools, people actually learning
how to drive this thing that
we call our nervous system
is potentially helpful,
maybe very helpful.
Now in cases like schizophrenia, autism,
and I didn't put those next
to one another for any reason
by the way, OCD,
eating disorders,
and I'm very mindful of the fact that,
you know, anorexia is
the most lethal of all the
psychiatric disorders, right?
Amazing and sad fact.
I think for those conditions,
we are soon going to enter a time
in which it's going to be
combination behavioral,
drug therapy, and yes,
brain-machine interface.
I don't mean putting chips
down below the skull.
I think there's going to be,
and there are things happening now
of people using devices
like virtual reality,
as well as transcranial
magnetic stimulation,
placing a magnet on a
particular location on the head
combined with a particular,
maybe drugs, maybe psychedelics,
maybe not, to enhance plasticity.
I urge a vote for psychedelics
and I want to make a serious
point about psychedelics.
Five years ago, when
I, well, four years ago
when I started doing a bit
of public-facing stuff,
I was absolutely terrified
to say that word; terrified.
I thought I'd lose my job.
I really did. I thought,
"Don't say psychedelics."
And I'll be very honest, you know,
I, for me,
I think that the clinical data
on MDMA and on psilocybin
are very interesting, very interesting.
I don't think they are
the first and only pass
at rewiring the brain,
but it is clear that the brain
can enter a state of
heightened learning capacity,
but it needs to be
directed towards something.
The goal of opening plasticity,
just, it opens plasticity.
That's not the goal.
It's like running; the goal isn't running.
The goal is to run in
a particular direction.
So what I think is really needed
is to drive that plasticity
in particular directions.
And I would love to see more
directed use of those in,
of course, the safe clinical
setting where it's appropriate.
And a guest on the
podcast, Matthew Johnson,
who's at Johns Hopkins,
I asked him, "What's the
deal with the microdosing?"
And you know what his answer
was? I was very surprised.
He said, "Macrodose."
And I thought, okay, I'm
not a guy who, you know,
I'm not into, I'm not,
I'm not a pushing this.
I'm not a proponent. I said,
"You're kidding me. Why?
Why would you say this?"
This guy runs an NIH funded lab
at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
I thought, "Why?"
And he said,
"Because the one session
with a trained professional
that's triggering rewiring plasticity,
that's guided, is," as far
as they know from the data,
you can go back and listen
to, these are his words,
not mine, but he's the
expert in this area,
"are encouraging plasticity
in a particular direction."
And he thinks that that's far more useful
than just kind of nudging
the system a little bit
without any particular goal or outcome.
Very interesting, and very surprising.
And again, a trained academic
at one of the most elite
institutions in the world.
I think we're in very exciting
times, for those compounds.
And they're like,
there are studies at
Stanford and elsewhere
on ketamine and other
things, but it's early days.
Young people should be very cautious,
young, young people,
and adults should be cautious,
especially people with
preexisting psychiatric issues
and people who have a
propensity for addiction
although some of those compounds
are being used to treat addiction.
So I'd be an idiot and I would be lying,
if I didn't say
that it is a very exciting
time for psychedelic therapies.
[audience cheering and applauding]
"Where do you see the biggest area?"
and I've done only one clinical trial.
True. I was a part I took
part in one clinical trial.
So I don't speak from a
lot of experience there,
just a little bit.
I was a subject in that trial.
"Where do you see the biggest area
for performance enhancement
within the elite athletes and operators
that already hit marks of
proper sleep and nutrition?"
Meg Young, thanks for your question, Meg.
Yeah, I think that, well, first of all,
very few of them hit
marks for proper sleep.
But for those that do, so once
you have your sleep dialed in
and you got your nutrition dialed in,
and the motivational component is there,
I think where there's a lot
of work still to be done
and where people can really
get outsized effects,
is in this weird little
cavern of human existence
that we call creativity.
And I didn't have time to
talk about it tonight, but
there's a very unique brain
state that we call creativity,
which is taking preexisting neural maps
and starting to combine
them in unique ways
to create new ways of performance.
Performance can be basically
summarized in any domain
as essentially four stages.
You have unskilled, skilled, mastery,
which is when the brain
can generate movements
or cognitive computations that are,
create very predictable outcomes
and then there's this fourth
tier, this fourth layer,
which is virtuosity.
And virtuosity, by definition,
means inviting back in a
component of uncertainty.
What this looks like in terms of operators
or this looks like in terms of athletes,
or even we can say musicians,
or people who are in the cognitive fields,
or poets, or writers,
is what it means is introducing that
uncertainty about what's
going to happen next
and the way to do that is
to destabilize the system.
In other words, to create states of mind
in which there are literally
sensory disruptions.
It's like, like what I would
like to see is more training
in a kind of "funhouse of
mirrors" type environment.
That's when you start to see
incredible performances emerge.
And virtuosos invite in uncertainty,
they actually don't know what
they're going to do next.
And so this becomes a little
bit of a vague concept
and what I'm about to tell you next
might seem a little silly,
but one of the best ways
to access creative states
is to, no surprise, use your visual system
to view things that are
highly unstable and uncertain.
I don't just love fish tanks;
I love staring at videos
of aquariums in Tokyo,
and actually watching the fish
because it's completely unpredictable.
There's some evidence that
doing things like that
or people would say,
"Oh, I was in the shower,"
or, "I took a walk in nature
and then I had this idea."
I actually don't think it
was the walk or the shower,
it's that nature is
filled with unpredictable
visual stimuli, auditory stimuli.
When you can predict what's
going to happen next,
you have very little opportunity
to uplevel your game so to speak.
It's only by way of
unpredictable sensory input
that you can do that.
So if you're a coach,
or you're working with people
who are very high level performers,
do you want them to stand
on one leg and spin around
and then do what they're doing?
Not necessarily.
What you want to do
is try and get them into brain states
that are different than the
brain states that they're in
when they normally enter their practice.
The liminal state between
sleep and waking, excuse me,
the liminal state between sleep and waking
is a very powerful one
for accessing creativity.
Many people access ideas
as they're waking up in the morning,
they have great insights,
other people while strolling in nature.
I don't think it's the
strolling or the waking up.
I think it's the lack of,
as we call it top-down
regulation on rules.
You are able to access
combinations of neural maps
that are unusual.
So you can play with this a little bit.
A lot of people throughout history
have used compounds,
drugs, to do this, right?
Great writers would get
drunk and then try and write
or wake up and they would,
the amount of self-abuse
that people including
athletes and creatives
put themselves through to try and capture
these windows of cognitive
ability is pretty intense.
And I don't think that's a good idea.
I think one should be an explorer
and try and find these cognitive states
in ways that are non-destructive.
I'm starting to sound like
my mother, with all this.
[audience laughing]
Heel flips on lock. No kick flips.
Next question.
[audience laughing]
[scattered applause]
There's some skateboarders
in the audience;
my first non-biologic family.
There's some amazing
skateboarders in this audience
and I'm not going to be the one
doing a kick flip anytime soon,
but they're great to have.
One of the reasons we built the podcast
with the help of the great Mike Blabac
is because I learned a long time ago
that if you want things done right,
and you want to do them
outside the lane lines,
and you want to have control
over how things come across,
you do it with skateboarders,
'cause I didn't come from a
community where, you know,
I didn't have parents at my sports games
and things like that
so, thanks to the
skateboarders and the misfits
and the those folks.
"Do you have any tips on
how to improve memory?"
Yes, Ron Vered. Yes!
Okay.
This is a wild literature and I love it
and it's changing the
way that I do things.
I thought that to remember things
you're supposed to get
really, really excited,
really focused, and remember them.
Guess what? That's not how you do it.
There are data,
and there are stories going
back to medieval times
that they used to teach kids things
and then throw them in the river.
There's a beautiful Annual
Review of Neuroscience
written by the late James McGaugh,
a brilliant researcher who
taught me that, in this review.
And it turns out that if you
want to remember something
you want to spike adrenaline
after you acquired that
information, after!
That means the double
espresso and the ice bath
after you study for
math, immediately after.
And you think about this, you know,
that makes perfect sense, right?
Think about the one trial learning
that nobody wants to experience,
which is a car accident
or some traumatic thing.
You didn't get the spike
of adrenaline first.
You got the spike of adrenaline after.
So again, you know,
I discourage the use
of excessive stimulants
or you know, anything like that.
But if you're going to try
and remember information,
you need to get your brain and body
into a high autonomic arousal state.
Literally you need to deploy
adrenaline into your system
after you have made the attempt
to learn some information.
So much so that if you
give people a beta blocker
after learning emotional information,
they don't learn it as well.
Incredible, just incredible
data in animals and humans.
This is the beautiful work
of Larry Cahill at UC Irvine
and James McGaugh.
So that's how I would focus
on remembering things better.
And it's also true that
if you tell yourself
that something's really important to you,
you'll be able to learn it better.
If you meet people and
they tell you their name
and you forget it two seconds later, well,
you should probably be
thinking, and now I do this,
I meet people and I think,
"Okay, what terrible
thing did this person do?"
Just try and spike my adrenaline
or something like that.
It's a terrible trick, but
haven't figured out a better way,
but that's actually one
data-supported way to do that.
Easily a dozen or more studies
in humans on that very topic.
"How do you manage
social media addiction?"
Paul.
Oi, well we should be careful
with the use of the word addiction
because here, I think
it's entirely appropriate.
When you are engaging in
a behavior over, and over. and over again,
and you're thinking to yourself,
"This isn't even that interesting,"
you're officially addicted.
That's the litmus test for addiction.
Not, "This feels so good."
People talk about the
dopamine hits of social media.
Those only come at the beginning,
but then when you find yourself scrolling,
you're like, "What am I doing?"
Maybe it's that narrow visual aperture;
you're a hypnotized chicken,
but maybe also you are
seeking more dopamine hits
because guess what?
That dopamine wave pool is depleted,
at least for that activity.
It is true that dopamine,
you have a baseline and
then you have peaks on,
on that ride on that baseline.
I do think that we can have
dopamine for one behavior,
and not for another,
but it's a generalized phenomenon.
So how do you manage it?
You have to stop seeking
within social media.
And so I've taken on the
practice of turning off my phone
for a couple hours each day.
It's incredibly hard.
People get really upset too, by the way,
cause if you haven't noticed
these tethers that people expect.
We recorded a podcast
recently and it, so I,
I don't want to go into
too much depth now,
about attachment and grief.
And, you know, we all have a map now,
you know, you understand
what the maps are,
of space, time, and a dimension called
closeness to everyone that we know
space, where they are,
time, when they are,
dead, alive, when will I
see them again et cetera,
and closeness.
And the phone has allowed us to tap into
space, time, and this closeness map,
which define all our attachments,
on a very regular basis.
So you can understand why
it's so valuable to people.
You know, the plane lands
and everyone's texting.
The planes, take off, everyone's texting.
It's like, "Where are you?"
Well, the plane's in the air,
there's this thing called flight tracker.
No one cares about that anymore.
You want to hear from the person.
So I do think that,
I used to do an every odd hour of the day
my phone was off,
and like half the relationships
in my life disappeared.
They couldn't talk, they
couldn't tolerate it.
I loved it, but I loved them too.
So I would say take breaks.
And I would say at least an hour.
And if you find yourself excited
to get back on the phone,
that excitement, that
is the dopamine system.
So you can kind of learn
where it is for you.
But if you find yourself
scrolling mindlessly
and it's not doing anything for you,
you are driving that wave pool
down, down, down, down, down,
so hopefully that analogy will help.
It's weird to call myself Dr. Huberman.
In my business if you refer to
yourself in the third person,
it means you're officially a narcissist.
[audience laughing]
So I'm just going to start with,
"Were you nervous tonight and if so,
what did you do to prepare?"
Brianne, you saw my
nervousness, didn't you?
No, the, I asked myself that question.
I was excited, and I think
I'm good at lying to myself
and telling myself that autonomic arousal
that might be nervousness is excitement.
But in truth, I wasn't, I
was and am really excited
to tell you all these
stories and about biology.
I know this might sound
like a little bit of a line,
but I actually don't feel myself as a,
like a person when I do the
podcast or I do this stuff.
I took a walk before I got
here and I have to be careful.
There are only two
topics that make me cry.
One is talking about my bulldog.
The other is talking
about my graduate advisor.
So I have to be very careful,
but I took a walk and I
imagined that they were here
and, I know, and don't make me cry.
Lex Friedman made me cry on a podcast
and it was really unfair.
And he was like digging and digging and
there are a few people in the
audience that know Costello.
And it's like, you know,
and I just kept thinking to
myself before coming in here,
like, you know, I love
them and miss them and I,
Costello would be entirely
bored with this whole thing.
So I distracted myself a
bit and not so nervous.
I do get nervous about
things, sure, I'm human.
But when it comes to biology,
I think I still feel like that little kid
who just wants to tell you
all this stuff, you know, so,
you know, I can't help it.
"Is learning from failure
equal to learning from success?
Is one more efficient than the other?"
Rachel, thanks for your question.
Well, on a trial-by-trial basis,
we know that when you fail at an attempt,
on the next attempt,
your forebrain is in a
position to engage better.
And this makes total sense, right?
You feel that frustration [alarm buzzer]
and you want to get the next one, right?
Well, you're harboring,
or I should say funneling
more neural resources,
your focus, that aperture tightens.
Now you have to be mindful of that too,
because when you have a
failure and then you're like,
you're going to hit the bulls.
I'm thinking about a dart board,
'cause I'm terrible at darts, you know,
sober I'm terrible at darts.
I don't even drink.
So that next trial,
part of the problem is,
is that focus can narrow
so much that you can start
to lose access to information
that might help you.
If you were just to relax a little bit
and dilate that focus a
little bit, but in general,
on a trial-by-trial basis focus is the cue
that your nervous system
is going to be positioned
to learn better on the next trial.
Now in terms of life experiences, gosh,
I wish for everyone fewer
failures and more successes,
but you know, failures keep you humble.
And I've had a lot of 'em.
I mean, if people ever
wanted and they, you know,
I'd be happy to tell you about, I mean,
I've made a ton of mistakes
in life, a ton of mistakes.
Some of those were
mistakes of persistence,
like dumb decisions.
I kept like, "It's going to
change. It's going to change."
And it's clearly never going to change.
And then some were failures of misjudgment
about other people or situations.
And a lot of them were just plain failures
like the experiment didn't work,
or the, it just wasn't the right thing.
And you try and reframe those.
I do think that we owe it to ourselves
and to the people that we know
to try and generate
some wins here and there
and try and help other
people generate wins.
You know, in running a lab over the years
and I still do,
you realize that you want your
students to publish a paper
and feel that success pretty early
so that they can experience,
A, how much work it is
so they pick problems wisely,
but, B, so they can feel that,
like, "Oh, I can do this."
And I think that, you know,
this gets into the psychological as well.
I think that yes, failures
help, but successes help.
And there, I think, you know,
I function best in a team.
And I think that for those of you that are
feel like you're fighting
some challenge alone,
I do think that there are
great resources to be had
in trying to access other, you know,
other people as sources of support.
I think that that's a great tool.
There's this whole literature,
scientific literature,
around social connection
and how that can help us
reframe motivation and goals.
Anyway, maybe that's a topic
to expand on another time.
But failure is important
on a trial, trial by basis.
People who
don't experience enough wins
for a long period of time,
the brain is a prediction
machine after all
and they start to predict failure
so takes a bit more work to
wedge oneself out of that.
"When are you going to
start training jiu-jitsu?
Lex made me ask."
Ryan Flores.
Okay. Here's the story with that.
Lex said, "Do you want to try jiu-jitsu?"
I said, "Sure."
Lex said,
"Okay, it'll be great to
show people beginner's mind."
I said, "Sure."
We went and did a jiu-jitsu class.
He was very nice; nice,
nice, Russian, nice.
Like, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah."
Then he puts it on the internet
with me in a rear naked,
him putting me in a rear naked choke,
it was actually Lex Friedman
choking out Andrew Huberman,
There, I just talked about
myself in the third person,
dammit, edit that one.
I have not had the time for jiu-jitsu.
I like my ears the way they are, you know.
Have you ever seen these
people that do jiu-jitsu?
Their ears literally look like
stumps. No, I should do it.
It looks like a great sport.
And unlike the other sports
I've been involved in my life,
boxing, please don't do it.
It's not healthy.
Skateboarding and all this,
you don't really damage
your head doing jiu-jitsu.
So no.
I'm going to get you
back for that one Lex.
Okay.
"Can you go through,"
oh wow, John Edwards.
There's a joke that my
friends used to tell
about the supplements I take.
They used to say, someone would say,
"What supplements do you take?"
And they would just go, "All of them."
I don't take all of them, but
I have been very systematic.
For about 30 years,
I've been interested in
compounds that change the nervous system.
And I do think that the,
the events of the last few years
have changed the way that
people view supplements.
I think that more people
are starting to think about
how to take better care of their health.
And they, people are realizing that
obviously, great sleep, mindsets,
social connection, exercise,
nutrition and so forth
are very important.
But I, I actually don't know anybody,
granted, I run with a strange crowd,
but I don't know anybody
that doesn't take something nowadays.
You know, I could go
through the whole list,
but I would say the
most fundamental things
and there's no product pitch here,
the most fundamental things are
the things that are going to support
your kind of foundational health.
So for that's going to mean mainly
getting either by food
sources or supplements
is going to be getting
sufficient amounts of these
essential fatty acids.
So important.
For some people that's
taking liquid fish oil,
for some people it's a capsule,
for somebody that's eating fish.
I don't like the way fish
tastes unless I'm in Seattle,
by the way, the seafood here is amazing,
not so much in California.
So I think the essential fatty acids,
and then I'm big on the data,
dare I say, out of Stanford,
Justin Sonnenburg's lab
and Chris Gardner's lab
that these fermented foods
of which all these cultures
have interesting fermented foods,
kefir, and sauerkraut, and kimchi, and,
you know, pick your fermented food.
That those seem to really encourage
health of the gut microbiome.
So I started eating a lot of those
and taking no probiotics
except in, you know,
a few of the supplements
that I was already taking.
So I'm not trying to dodge the question,
but I think, by and large,
if you're eating well
and doing the other
foundational behaviors as well,
you can get it way with
a minimum of supplements.
D3, it seems to be a lot
of people deficient in D3,
but not everybody.
So I think that those are the main ones.
However, I do think that nutrition
should be the primary entry point.
Again, it should be behaviors
first, then nutrition,
then supplements, then prescription drugs,
only if you need them.
And then, you know, for some people,
their brain-machine interface
like TMS and things like
that are going to be useful,
but behaviors change your nervous system,
no supplement actually rewires you
or changes your nervous
system: behaviors do that.
I hope I didn't dodge
that question entirely.
I do take some of the things
that we talk about on the
podcast to do some focused work,
sometimes alpha-GPC,
but lately I've been
doing this whole thing
of cold water exposure
to spike my adrenaline,
'cause I hate it,
and it spikes my adrenaline after learning
based on the McGaugh and Cahill data.
"What would be your best
one or two pieces of advice
or recommended protocol for
improving learning and retention
for graduate students
in science and medicine?
We try to sleep sometimes."
Thank you, JD.
Oh great. You're at UW, JD.
So, you know,
I used to teach this course
at Cold Spring Harbor
on career development for scientists
and the there's a lot in there,
but the two things that
are most important are,
I, for sake of answering this
question, I would say, are,
find non-destructive ways
to reset your dopamine
and your energy levels
and do those at least every three days.
So for me, it was kind of a,
a tough thing to take a
long walk, or to spend,
I used to work really hard on Mondays,
really hard on Tuesdays,
and I would not go in until
the afternoon on Wednesdays
and sometimes not at all.
And then I go in Thursday, Friday,
and work really, really hard
and then not at all on Saturday
and then maybe do a little bit
of work from home on Sunday.
And I was very productive that way.
But those breaks are absolutely key
and it's not encouraged so
much in academic or tech
or maybe anything now.
I hear about so much stress and overwork.
I say, you just do it
and define the culture
and let the results and your focus
be the thing that defines you,
not how many hours you're in there.
But I realize there's
a huge cognitive load
and energetic load and for that,
I do think these Non-Sleep
Deep Rest protocols
are where it comes in really handy.
There are at least two
faculty I know at Stanford.
One whose a so-called
Howard Hughes investigator,
who is big, those are
big deal appointments.
They get tons of money,
et cetera, et cetera,
and they do amazing
science most of the time.
These individuals certainly do.
And they take two 20 minute
naps, per day, in their office.
When this guy came and visited me,
years ago when I was at
a different university,
he took the time that we were
supposed to meet in my office
and talk about data, he
asked if he could take a nap.
[audience laughs]
And he gave a great talk that afternoon.
So there you go.
I do think you have to take
control of your schedule
and do those things.
And I hope that helps.
And then of course,
for some people, exercise and
so on is the way they reset.
"What research or work are you doing
or that your colleagues are doing
that you're most excited about lately?"
Glen, yeah.
One project in particular,
I hope this paper gets accepted soon,
it's been out for review forever
and so if the reviewers
are in the audience,
please just tell us one
way or the other, you know?
We did a very large scale
study during the pandemic,
we meaning David Spiegel and I,
and an amazing PhD named Melis
she now has two last names, excuse me,
Balban, Yilmaz Balban.
And Melis
we essentially equipped people
with remote monitoring devices
and measured sleep and
heart rate variability
and a bunch of stress and
bunch of other things.
And we gave them
a very brief set of breathing protocols
and it turns out
that this thing that I'm talking
about a lot on the podcast,
these days of this double
inhale, long exhale,
the so-called, "physiological sigh,"
was the most effective breathing practice
for allowing people to control
their heart rate variability,
reduce overall heart
rate, access better sleep,
and these were extremely short protocols.
So I'm very excited about this.
I didn't discover physiological sighs.
I love the idea
that people can do a very
brief protocol, once a day,
maybe even just while
walking down the street
or in the moment
and actually learn to control
that autonomic seesaw better.
So I'm very excited about that.
And then we are gearing
up to do some studies
on people who have more
severe forms of anxiety
and panic attack, using
mainly respiration,
but also looking at some of these eye,
vision-related ways of
controlling the nervous system.
I love that stuff.
If I keep talking about it,
I'm going to give you a data presentation
so I'm going to turn around.
"How does dopamine
factor into neuroplasticity if at all?"
Colin, great question.
It's a very strong trigger of plasticity,
so much so in fact that
there's some work that shows
if you stimulate with an electrode,
the brain area that releases dopamine,
and you pair that with anything,
anything, even just like
an eight kilohertz tone,
[vocalizes a high tone]
the brain remaps and it's like,
"Oh, I love that eight kilohertz tone."
Remember dopamine is
dumb, and is just dumb.
And it is just, you
know, it's like Costello
when he sits this dog,
I could hang a rope from a tree.
This dog was so lazy he wouldn't
cross a room for a steak.
You had to give the steak to him,
[audience laughing]
but it would run across a field.
He would run and jump on
and hold onto that rope,
and he would sometimes
bite through his lip
with like blood dripping down.
And I was like, "Oh my gosh,"
it was like breaking my heart.
He loved every sit, that's
dopamine; turns us into idiots.
He was as smart about what
he needed to be smart about.
Dopamine.
So if you trigger dopamine
release with Ritalin, Adderall,
to a lesser extent L-Tyrosine,
and certainly please don't do this,
but cocaine, amphetamine,
whatever you're doing
seems super interesting.
It's true. And that's why
it's such a slippery slope.
It makes anything you're doing
seem interesting and important.
And actually I'll use this
as an opportunity to say
something about the
psychedelic thing earlier.
One of the issues with MDMA,
it's a very unusual brain
state: it's high dopamine,
high serotonin, completely
synthetic compound.
There are other things in
there that it does as well.
One of the problems with people I see
with the problem with
people just taking MDMA,
just at a basic level,
is that if you're not pushing that
towards some therapeutic
outcome, music sounds amazing.
Everything feels and sounds amazing,
but it's a very neurochemically,
you know, severe state.
So that's why I think
if people are going to
explore those things,
do it as part of
one of the university-supported
clinical trials.
One of the reas-
those drugs make everything
seem interesting,
even stuff that's not
terribly interesting.
Now they also have
the potential for trauma healing capacity.
These are the MAPS studies and so on.
So you have to be very careful
with what you pair with dopamine
and what you pair dopamine with.
And for those of you
that are high sensation
seeking, novelty seeking,
and everything's interesting to you,
and you want more, and
more, and more, experiences,
I, you basically have a
eight cylinder car in you
and you need to be very careful
how you drive that thing.
Like any high performance automobile,
it's going to spend more time in the shop,
[audience laughing]
so learn to drive appropriately.
"What advice can you
offer to future scientists
who want to make an impact like you have?"
Ryan O'Boyle, get tenure first.
No, I'm kidding.
So I have this weird history in science
and I'm not looking for sympathy here,
but my undergraduate
advisor, who I adored,
he's like a father to me,
my graduate advisor,
and my postdoc advisor,
who I also adored, all three of them died:
suicide, cancer, cancer, really young.
So the joke in my field is
you don't want me to work for you.
But in all seriousness,
all three of them had a
really morbid sense of humor,
all amazing people,
but it is this kind of
weird curse that I've had.
So what scientists, you
know, what advice, you know,
well, Ben Barres,
the late Ben Barres died
of pancreatic cancer,
an amazing individual.
They're actually making a
documentary about Ben's life.
He's transgendered. He
was a totally irreverent.
He said whatever he thought.
He offended everybody.
He was awesome. Brilliant too.
Ben and I had a conversation
as he was dying.
I recorded a lot of conversations with him
and I told him I was interested in doing
public-facing education.
And he said,
"Well, you're tenured now and,
people are going to be upset,
and they're not going to like it,
and your colleagues are
probably going to hate it
so whatever you do and
you better make it good."
And I was like, "Wow, that
doesn't really help much, Ben."
And he said,
"You know, you seem to
have a compulsion for it."
So, he was right.
I think that if you are
excited about science,
and sharing what you know, then do that.
And even if it seems super nerdy,
I mean, there are these ento-
I think they call
themselves entomologists,
the insect people,
they, I mean they make insects
seem really, really cool.
And if you are excited about
spindle kinetics or whatever,
you know, tell people
about it, I really mean it.
I think that the one caveat is that
I do think it's important
to get a formal, rigorous
training in it first.
I think that you'll go further
and faster in the long run.
And there's some amazing people out there.
There's a postdoc at Stanford.
I think his name is Ben Rein,
I think if you shorten it up on Instagram,
it's actually brain,
brein, 'cause he works out
he talks about brain science
so that's why it's weird:
B B R E I N.
He does a great job.
And he's a really good example of someone
who's still on the ascent with his career,
doing serious science, and
doing science communication.
But you have to be careful,
it's time consuming.
Look, you, people will
dislike you for whatever.
I made the mistake once of
saying that I eat butter.
Apparently that's a sin on the internet.
I like little bits of
actually like a lot of butter,
but try and eat little bits of butter.
But somehow it's like,
there's this idea that
I eat sticks of butter.
So you have to be careful.
[audience laughing]
Like, I mean, the things I've
heard, I heard I was dead.
That was cool.
So you have to be careful
and remember everything
is stamped into the,
the cloud now and the metaverse
or whatever it's called.
So I would say, here are
the rules that we have
at the podcast and on
here's the rules that
I created for myself.
I truly don't do it for me.
I do it 'cause I think
people want to hear about it,
but I've been telling myself
that since I was six years old.
The other thing is never, ever, ever do it
just for your own gratification.
You should really try and think,
"Is anyone going to get
anything useful out of this,
potentially?"
That's the goal.
If you're doing that,
it'll work out for you.
If you are thinking about
how to get followers
or something like that,
it ain't going to work out.
That's my advice.
"Is age 66 too old for neuroplasticity?"
No, no, I'll cut myself off,
"to begin learning again?"
Sandra Trazzare, no!
Did I pronounce that right?
Thank you, Sandra.
No, Richard Feynman, the
great Richard Feynman,
taught himself to draw later in life.
He was also really into flotation tanks.
Did you know that?
Yeah, he was also into bongo drumming
naked on the roof at Caltech.
Richard Feynman, you
know, did so many things
that would get most people fired nowadays.
He's just lucky he was alive when he was.
You can absolutely learn
at 66 and way beyond.
There's an amazing study
from Rusty Gage's lab at the
Salk Institute years ago,
showing that even people
who are very late in life,
terminally ill in fact,
are still producing new neurons
in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus.
These people that were gracious enough
to allow researchers to
inject them with dyes
that would label these neurons
for analysis postmortem, after they died.
Absolutely you can learn.
What's harder is focus.
Oftentimes what's harder is sleep as well,
but the same mechanisms apply.
There's no evidence whatsoever
that neuroplasticity
disappears at any stage
despite what Hubel and
Wiesel told the BBC.
"How do you tackle
reading research papers?
Do you have a specific strategy?"
Anne Hun, yes I do.
I do. I take notes on everything.
I try and so I there's four
questions that we teach students
and that I think that I use.
The first one is:
"What's the question they're asking,
major and more specific?"
Second is: "What did they do?
What are they, like
methods-wise, what did they do?"
You don't have to know all
the details in the methods
necessarily, but be
versed in those methods,
but you have to kind of understand like,
are they looking at mice?
Are they looking at humans?
Is this a, you know, did they have people
in two different conditions or just one?
You have to understand what did they do,
then you ask, "What did they find?"
And then the last question
is the most important one
and you should write down
the answer to this is:
"What did they conclude?"
And then you look back
at the first question
and you go,
"Did they actually answer that question,
or is it something unrelated?"
And those four questions
are essentially the way
that I parse each paper.
Learning to parse papers
is tricky for the podcast.
I use the telephone.
I call people and I badger
them and I ask them, you know,
"Like who's doing the really
good work in this area?"
And I spend a lot of hours doing it.
And then the best way to remember science
is to tell someone about it.
So before each podcast I'll
call someone and be like,
"Hey, did you know
that they used to throw
kids in the river?"
After, I do this, and my
sister, my poor sister,
and she's like, "Yeah."
My sister, by the way,
does not watch the podcast.
I, she's a therapist.
And she's like,
"Hey, I learned this amazing
breathing technique."
I was like,
"Oh yeah, really? Tell me about it."
And it's like, someone else is there.
I'm like, "You know, I have a podcast."
She's like, "I don't like your podcast."
You know, it's older
sister, it's older sister.
It's, she's not lying.
"What is your favorite
sauce, condiment, seasoning?
Sauce.
There's one in every audience.
I like the spicy stuff.
We've been fermenting
our own food at home.
It's kind of cool.
You put the cabbage and the stuff
in the little ceramic thing outside,
and then it, it goes
[popping]
It makes this amazing sound.
And then you can like
make your own sauerkraut and you know,
with peppers and like
fermenting that stuff,
it's really good.
Okay.
They're telling me one more
question so we'll do two.
"What's most important from your ADH, ah."
Gabriel, a lot of questions about ADHD,
for people on medication
or not on medication,
so I'll answer both.
For people on medication,
I think work with somebody really good
who's willing to work with you
to allow you to find that
minimal effective dose,
and also timing that dose.
One of the key things that we know now
is that from that waking
up point in your morning
until about eight or nine hours later,
we've sort of named that
phase one of the day
for lack of a better naming protocol.
The systems that release cortisol,
dopamine, and epinephrine,
are essentially more
effective at producing those
than they are in the
later periods of the day.
Which makes sense if you think about
the way that the autonomic
nervous system works, et cetera.
So there's an important question
that I can't answer for you,
but you can answer for you,
which is if you're using
Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse,
these things that enhance
dopaminergic transmission,
Modafinil, Armodafinil, by the way,
for the people in the audience like me,
who didn't go to college when
these things were all in use,
the numbers of people
that use these compounds,
on and off prescription, is astronomical.
It's incredible.
I didn't realize it.
I think something like
80% of college students
use these at some point.
Incredible, 'cause they put you
into a narrow aperture
tunnel of concentration.
So you want to, with a
physician's support of course,
to help, get permission or not,
to figure out what time of
day to take your medication.
Now for people who are not on medication,
I'll just go right back
to what I said earlier,
which is that you can train focus,
but it feels terrible to train it.
It is hard.
Again there are these large
scale studies in China
and elsewhere of people
literally teaching themselves,
and yes, they blink, although less often,
to focus their vision on a narrow aperture
and to really battle
through that agitation,
stress, and learn how to keep their focus.
Now focus will drift, right?
Focus is not a constant; focus will drift,
and you pop out of focused states
and then refocus, and
pop out, and refocus.
That's something that you can train up.
I've heard from many people
who have managed to train
themselves off medication
or to lower doses of medication,
and look, some people can't do that.
They absolutely have to maintain
their standard medication protocols.
This is a larger discussion, obviously,
as it relates to ADHD.
We're going to do another episode on ADHD
because the data are
coming out so so fast.
"What future episodes
are in the pipeline?"
David Nguyen. Okay, thank
you for that question.
We have one on grief.
We have an amazing episode with
a guy from the Rockefeller University
on the, this is,
am I allowed to say it's going
to be my favorite episode?
I love all the guests,
but this episode just blew me away.
It's on the relationship
between language,
speech, dance, and music.
And I have no musical talent
and I'm not a very good dancer.
So that's being generous.
Amazing interplay between those things,
exercise in the brain, OCD,
bulimia, binge-eating disorder,
Peter Attia's coming on.
He'll teach us about everything
medicine, and longevity.
And I'm kind of blanking at the moment.
David Anderson from Caltech
on aggression and emotional states.
Amazing.
And then there are a number of people,
Lisa Feldman Barrett, or Barrett Feldman.
I always get it backwards.
Sorry, Lisa, on emotions in the brain.
And really we do take suggestions
about who to bring on the
podcast very seriously.
What we're mostly looking for
are the people that no one else has heard,
that people haven't heard of,
who are not going on podcasts every week
and that people should
absolutely hear from.
And then I will tell you,
they're going to kill me for saying this,
but I'm going to do it anyway,
we have some short series coming up
with expert professionals.
I'm going to do a short series on trauma.
And my hope for this series
is that you'll actually get to
see an exquisitely
skilled trauma therapist,
take someone through, excuse me,
I seem so excited I'm spitting
on the audience, excuse me.
So it, to take someone
through actual trauma therapy.
This isn't staged.
This is somebody who's actually
in a point of near
suicidal grief and trauma,
taking them through it in
the course of the podcast,
as people can see what this
process actually entails.
That's a very meaningful project to me
for a number of reasons
so we're really excited about that.
And you know, to be
honest, I feel like there's
just such a treasure trove
of information out there
I just want to grab it all,
and tell you all about it,
until, I always say, "If nothing
else, I'll cure insomnia."
So, the, yeah.
[audience applauding vigorously]
Thank you. Appreciate it.
[applause continuing]
Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate everyone
coming out on a weekday
and I'd be remiss if I didn't say,
Thank you for your interest in science.
[audience cheering and applauding]
[upbeat music playing]