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Data/transcripts/0Dtt95_xabw_20241225194252.txt

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+So it's very clear that smoking,
+vaping, dipping or snuffing
+is bad for skin appearance and health.
+Bad, bad, bad.
+Every dermatologist said this.
+Why?
+Well, with smoking, you
+can imagine why, okay?
+A lot of carcinogens
+and toxic end products
+generated from smoking,
+even from vaping.
+Yes, even from vaping,
+it will make your skin
+age faster, that's clear.
+But it's also the substance itself.
+Why all of those things,
+in addition to increasing inflammation,
+nicotine itself is a vasoconstrictor,
+so you're doing the exact
+opposite of what you want
+when it comes to skin
+health and appearance.
+And that's why people
+take things like BPC-157,
+that's why people take nicotinamide,
+that's why people are trying to improve
+the hydration status of their skin.
+So if you're somebody
+that's vaping nicotine,
+or even taking nicotine
+in some other form,
+pouch or smoking nicotine,
+and you're interested in
+having youthful-appearing skin,
+you are really shooting yourself
+in the, I don't know, face?

Data/transcripts/1SXDXdngX2M_20241225194316.txt

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+A lot of people think that
+the key to feeling better
+is to vent your emotions.
+There's research on this.
+Venting is good for strengthening
+bonds between people.
+It's good to know that, you
+know, we're buddies now.
+I could call you up if I'm struggling.
+You're going to listen to
+me and empathize with me.
+That's great for our relationship,
+but if all you do is just
+validate what I'm going through
+and you don't take the next step
+to additionally help me
+look at that bigger picture
+and problem solve, I
+leave the conversation
+feeling really good about
+my relationship with you,
+but the problem is still there.
+So just venting ends up leading
+to what we call co-rumination,
+which can be pretty harmful.
+The people on my Chatter Advisory Board,
+they know to first
+validate, empathize with me,
+learn about what I'm going through.
+They've got my back.
+They communicate that powerfully,
+but then once they do that,
+they start working with me
+to broaden the perspective,
+to try to think through that problem,
+which I'm having
+difficulty doing sometimes
+when the chatter is really, really loud
+and you know, typically
+when I get to that stage,
+I'm in pretty good shape.

Data/transcripts/2Ds1m5gflCI_20241225194849.txt

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+- 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]

Data/transcripts/3_auLYOilb8_20241225194826.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,1854 @@
+- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
+where we discuss science
+and science based-tools for everyday life.
+[light music]
+I'm Andrew Huberman,
+and I'm a Professor of
+Neurobiology in 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 as 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.
+Therefore, what follows
+this is a recording
+of the question and answer period
+from the lecture in Portland, Oregon.
+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
+of 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 and 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.
+[light music]
+"What are the current best
+practices for post TBIs,"
+traumatic brain injuries for those of you
+that aren't familiar with TBIs,
+"Especially long term,
+multiple," ooh, "et cetera."
+"Thoughts on hyperbaric O?"
+I'm so glad you asked
+this, Danny Morledge,
+"As treatment for TBIs?"
+Okay, TBI...
+Now, one thing about TBI and concussion,
+everyone thinks football.
+Guess what?
+Most of the TBI is not football.
+There aren't that many football players,
+they're just large so they stand out.
+There might be a few here this evening.
+[audience laughing]
+Of course, football players are a concern
+when it comes to TBI.
+Most head injuries are going
+to be construction workers.
+Have you ever seen the
+hard hats they wear?
+Those, I don't even know if
+they are just there for show.
+It doesn't make sense.
+And that we actually
+have a lab at Stanford
+that's focused very hard on
+trying to solve this problem.
+So, construction workers, car
+accidents, bicycle accidents.
+Portland, amazing city to cycle;
+I'm frankly afraid to cycle.
+You're a small moving object
+around these big objects
+and people are staring
+into their little aperture
+on their phone while driving.
+I mean, whatever happened
+to that by the way,
+of not texting while driving?
+Somehow that just disappeared.
+It's like, it really has just disappeared.
+There was all this science
+showing that it's worse
+than drunk driving.
+TBI.
+Well, the basic rules
+of the "don'ts" apply.
+If you get a head injury,
+don't get a second head injury.
+But that often isn't feasible
+for people that need to work,
+continue working in construction,
+or that are struggling.
+What do we know?
+Well, this is a great
+opportunity for me to distinguish
+modulatory foundational tools
+from things that directly
+change your brain
+and nervous system the
+way that you want to.
+What do I mean by modulatory?
+We hear so much and
+there's so many studies
+showing that great
+sleep, quality nutrition,
+good social interactions,
+avoiding chronic stress,
+and on and on and on are
+important for everything;
+they're related to Alzheimer's,
+they're related to ADHD.
+I mean, we could do
+thousands of podcast episodes
+just returning to the same 10 things:
+Sleep, don't stress too much or too long,
+good social connection, avoid
+toxic people, eat good food,
+not too much processed food;
+We could have an argument all night
+and I don't want to have one about whether
+or not it's mainly plants or this.
+I mean, this is obviously
+eating high quality food
+is something that we should all be doing,
+which foods you select is a
+topic that is very barbed wire,
+and I can give only my opinions.
+All of that modulates your brain function,
+but it doesn't mediate or
+change anything directly.
+It's setting a foundation
+of what's possible.
+So we should all be doing those things,
+and especially people who have TBI.
+Now, this question relates
+to hyperbaric chamber.
+Hyperbaric chamber, there's
+some very interesting data.
+It's essentially a
+hyperoxygenation of the brain
+for very brief periods of time.
+I think the data on
+hyperbaric chamber and TBI
+are very encouraging.
+The problem is, much in the
+way that a few years ago,
+cryo was only available in a few places.
+And now people are doing ice baths
+and cold showers on their own.
+It's hard to find a hyperbaric chamber.
+They aren't just laying around,
+and they don't have
+them at spas typically,
+and they are quite expensive.
+So, yes, there are
+interesting and important data
+I think on hyperbaric chamber.
+You definitely want to
+work with a physician
+or somebody who is very skilled,
+a practitioner who's very
+skilled in hyperbaric chamber.
+They do seem to improve brain
+function by hyperoxygenating
+the brain for brief periods of time.
+It seems to improve a number
+of things, but above all,
+it seems to improve the
+quality and duration of sleep,
+which indirectly allows
+the brain to repair itself,
+because as I mentioned earlier,
+brain change largely occurs in sleep.
+So if you don't have access
+to a hyperbaric chamber,
+but you do have TBI, what
+are some of the other data?
+What do those point to?
+Well, I'd go on and on,
+and you don't have to get
+this from supplements,
+you can get it from food,
+but this threshold level of
+these EPA essential fatty acids.
+There are now so many data,
+so much data on the valuable role
+of these essential EPA fatty acids.
+Thresholds being somewhere
+between one and two grams
+per day of the EPA.
+So much so, actually, that
+there are now prescription forms
+of EPA that doctors are
+starting to prescribe
+for people with TBI.
+Although for most people
+you can get this through...
+You can look up and we've
+done podcast episodes
+about different ways to access this.
+Also functions as an antidepressant;
+equally good, believe it or not,
+in clinical trials to SSRIs
+once one gets over the one or
+basically two grams per day
+of the EPA.
+The resident expert on
+the internet about this
+is pretty extreme about the dosages,
+and that's Dr. Rhonda
+Patrick, who by the way,
+deserves a nod of
+acknowledgement and support
+because it turns out that
+before me or David Sinclair
+or Matt Walker or any of these guys
+were blabbing to the world about
+stuff that they had learned
+in the archives of science
+and in their laboratories,
+the first person in was this
+woman named Rhonda Patrick.
+As far as I know, the first
+public facing formerly trained
+scientist to start going
+on all these podcasts
+and risk her reputation
+and this kind of stuff
+that you deal with when
+you put your neck out
+there like that.
+And Rhonda's, I think, terrific.
+We don't agree on everything
+and it would be weird if we did,
+but I think she's really
+been the proponent
+of these higher doses of EPAs for TBI
+and for cognitive function into all ages.
+"We often hear about ways
+to increase dopamine.
+However, are there effective
+ways to decrease dopamine
+when you get too much of
+it for certain behaviors
+or habits we want to break?"
+Katie Hamm, I think is the last name.
+Thank you, Katie, for your question.
+Yeah, dopamine is a slippery slope.
+And Dr. Anna Lembke is the expert in this,
+and we've had a lot of conversations.
+She's one of my closer
+friends on the faculty.
+Unfortunately for her,
+our coffee discussions
+often last four hours or more.
+Her poor patients and family.
+Here's the thing,
+when dopamine is higher
+in your brain and body,
+when you've deployed it through excitement
+or pharmacology or otherwise,
+it tends to narrow your focus
+and make you seek more of it
+in that general theme that
+you happen to be focused on.
+It could be anything.
+That's the scary thing about dopamine.
+What can you do to control
+it and to reduce it?
+Well, for those of you
+that are engaging in habits
+that are healthy,
+maybe that doesn't
+require reducing dopamine.
+How do you define
+healthy versus unhealthy?
+Well, I think the simplest
+way to define addiction,
+at least by my mind,
+is that addiction is a
+progressive narrowing
+of the things that bring you pleasure.
+And a good life is a progressive expansion
+of the things that bring you pleasure.
+A rather simple definition,
+and yet when we think about
+the biology of dopamine,
+dopamine is not unique to one pursuit.
+It's not unique to the pursuit of sex
+or the pursuit of warmth when you're cold
+or cool environments when you're too warm
+or food or social media,
+it's just a dumb molecule that puts you
+into this forward state of
+mass, small visual aperture,
+and a kind of obsessive-like nature.
+What can you do to counter that?
+Well, the best thing to do
+is to not get into that state too long,
+but if you do, the best
+thing you can do is to try
+and switch off that system,
+not through pharmacology,
+but by not pursuing more dopamine.
+The day after a big event,
+the so-called postpartum depression,
+named of course because of true postpartum
+after the delivery of a child.
+It's quite common for people
+to get very, very depressed.
+There's a lot of neurochemical
+and hormonal adjustments
+that are occurring,
+but different types of
+postpartum depression occur;
+after a big party, the Monday
+blues, the Sunday blues,
+the post-whatever blues.
+The four month mark in a
+relationship is typically
+when dopamine starts to drop.
+I always tell people, just wait.
+I'm telling somebody very
+close to me right now,
+just wait four months,
+four months, four months,
+and also spend as much time
+with that person as possible.
+I don't know what this deal is
+about not spending as
+much time with people.
+I think people are afraid
+that the dopamine wave pool
+is just going to pull them both under.
+I think they've called that
+the escalator model of relationship,
+where you just sort of find
+yourself in the relationship
+because you went through
+the stages without
+actually deciding on them.
+In any event, four months
+seems to be the stage in which
+the dopamine crescendo
+starts to relax a little bit,
+not in a long distance
+relationship, however.
+We know this, right?
+Anticipation is dopamine,
+that positive anticipation,
+and there's a whole
+beautiful science of this,
+and I should say psychology of this.
+There's a wonderful book actually.
+The name of the book
+is embarrassing always,
+I don't know why, for me to say.
+It's by a psychologist
+called "Can Love Last?",
+which is a psychoanalytic book
+about this dopamine-serotonin system
+and the kind of seesawing back and forth.
+And the fact that in relationships,
+people often just slam on
+the dopamine side of things
+and then they hit a wall
+and want to break up.
+Or they go into this like warm,
+cozy, fuzzy feeling thing,
+and they go, "Well, I guess
+the exciting part is over."
+And this idea that one could actually,
+or two people or however
+many people were in Portland
+could oscillate this seesaw.
+[audience laughing]
+I don't think that you
+want to use pharmacology
+to turn off the dopamine system,
+but for people that have
+a hard time sleeping
+and that are really in
+a state of agitation
+and constantly obsessing,
+the psychiatrists...
+One of the oldest and
+most effective treatments
+is that the psychiatrists,
+and this does have to be prescribed,
+we use a very, very low dose
+of a dopamine receptor blocker,
+like Haloperidol, which is
+used to treat schizophrenia.
+A very low dose to shut down
+the obsession component.
+The smart, well-educated psychiatrists
+know this as a useful tool,
+but this is a one time
+thing with a very low dose
+because having your
+dopamine blocked sucks.
+It does not feel good,.
+But not being able to sleep
+and being in an obsessive mode also sucks.
+So it's actually a very
+potent clinical tool.
+So pharmacology is one tool,
+but really at the far end of things.
+I believe that one should try and modulate
+their own dopamine by
+not rewarding one's self
+on a regular basis, but only randomly.
+Random intermittent reward
+is truly the best schedule
+of reward, hence slot machines and so on.
+And you should engage
+random intermittent reward.
+And I think this is also the
+way that we should train kids.
+I call it training kids.
+You can tell I don't have kids.
+[audience laughing]
+You don't reward them every time.
+I don't believe everyone
+should get a trophy every time,
+nor should you always
+just reward the winners
+because those winners often,
+we see cases of this, high
+profile cases of this,
+they often crash and burn.
+I mean the number of high performers
+that crash and burn publicly
+and Lord knows how many do
+it privately is remarkable.
+It's 'cause their dopamine
+system is all messed up.
+So random intermittent reward
+is the schedule of reward
+that we should impart on ourselves.
+"If you had 10 minutes a day to improve
+your brain plasticity, what would you do?
+And when would you do it?"
+Richard Conlin, thank you.
+Well, I'm going to say again,
+I would absolutely anchor my physiology
+with morning sunlight viewing.
+I can't help it.
+Do you know what's interesting?
+And I'll tell you very briefly,
+you know what's special
+about morning sunlight?
+This low solar angle sunlight.
+I don't think I've talked
+about this much on social media
+or on the podcast.
+There's a group at the
+University of Washington,
+a couple, Jay and Maureen Neitz.
+They run a lab together.
+That sounds like a horrible thing,
+but they do it and they
+get along very well.
+And they've discovered
+that the cells in your eye,
+the neurons that set your circadian clock
+make you alert during the day
+and make you sleepy at night,
+and so on.
+Those cells respond best
+to yellow-blue contrast
+and orange tones.
+Now, this is important
+because when you go out
+in the morning, even
+if it's not at sunrise,
+but it's close to sunrise
+or you look at the sun in the evening,
+what you'll see is yellow-blue
+contrast or orange;
+yellow, blue, orange,
+that old thing from
+kindergarten or first grade.
+That's not the color of light
+that you're going to see
+when the sun is overhead.
+Now, this also is really interesting
+because artificial lights,
+at least to my understanding,
+even the daylight simulators
+have not picked up on this.
+It's just about bright light.
+Someone ought to design
+something that can mimic this,
+but nature has done
+this beautifully for us.
+And so viewing low solar
+angle sunlight in the morning
+and in the evening is most effective
+because of those yellow-blue contrasts.
+Now here's the really wild thing.
+Those circuits that set your
+levels of alertness and sleep,
+yes, they respond best
+to yellow-blue contrast,
+but what that tells us is crazy.
+What that means is that color vision
+was probably not related
+to color perception first
+because all of that is
+completely subconscious.
+The pathways that do this
+are present in people
+who are pattern vision blind.
+So, what do I mean?
+I mean that color vision likely evolved
+from a need to synchronize
+your internal state
+with the external world.
+And the best stimulus in the outside world
+to do that is yellow-blue contrast.
+In other words, our
+ability to detect color
+was first and foremost, and
+we understand this based on
+evolutionary genomics and so forth,
+to extract time of day information,
+not color of fruit or color
+of skin or anything like that.
+That's all secondary,
+which is wild and crazy.
+And this is yet another example of the way
+we think things work is
+not the way they work.
+It's completely 180 degrees opposite.
+I'm just going to give
+you a little teaser.
+I had a guest on the podcast,
+we haven't aired the episode yet.
+His name is Erich Jarvis,
+he works on speech and language.
+He also was admitted into
+Alvin Ailey Dance Company.
+Again, who are these people?
+He's a professor at the Rockefeller.
+Anyway, I learned from Erich,
+and you'll learn when
+that episode comes out,
+that you only find elaborate
+speech and language
+in species that also
+engage in dance and song.
+And the genomics point to the
+fact that song and singing
+came first and language came second.
+And that led me during that
+episode of the podcast,
+I wrote down in my notes,
+I was listening to him talk and
+I wrote down in my notebook,
+it's just scrawled in big letters.
+It says, "I am so happy right now."
+I was just blown away.
+And it makes so much
+sense when you hear it,
+that the colors in the
+sky were what our system
+is trying to extract,
+not a perception of
+those colors in the sky,
+'cause they're informing us about time
+and orienting us in time.
+That song and the communication
+of emotional states
+would be simpler and more foundational
+than communication about
+specific patterns of language.
+When you hear it, suddenly it makes sense.
+But of course we're human beings,
+and unless you're Erich Jarvis
+or Alia Crum or Anna Lembke,
+you think about all this
+stuff backwards, as I do.
+"How can I navigate my way
+through taking supplements
+to optimize my health
+when my career demands,
+Army infantry, prevent me
+from being able to establish
+consistent routines?"
+Andrew Yagen, well thank
+you for doing what you do.
+Andrew, so the consistent
+routine thing is tough.
+Here's what I can say
+without going into a long
+two and a half hour episode
+about jet lag and shift work,
+which we've done.
+The most powerful way to anchor
+your brain and body in time
+is indeed viewing sunlight
+at consistent times of day.
+That's not something I made up.
+We know this based on a
+lot of work that dates back
+to the 1930s.
+The second most powerful
+stimulus is going to be movement
+and changes in body temperature.
+In particular, increases
+in body temperature
+tend to make us alert,
+and decreases in body temperature
+tend to make us sleepy.
+Body temperature drops
+one to three degrees
+to get us into sleep.
+Why does a cold shower wake you up?
+Adrenaline is released
+and believe it or not,
+your body is heating up
+internally to combat that cold,
+unless you make yourself hypothermic.
+So, sauna, hot baths to get sleepy,
+cold showers, ice baths,
+et cetera to wake up.
+Sort of obvious when you hear it,
+but it's counterintuitive
+because you think,
+oh, heating up the body to wake up
+and cooling down the body to go to sleep.
+So getting into cold
+ought to cool me down,
+but your body compensates
+just like if you threw a
+cold towel on a thermostat,
+you'd crank up the temperature in the room
+and vice versa for heat.
+Okay, so what do you do?
+You want to try and use
+as many of these things,
+light, temperature, exercise, food.
+When you eat is typically
+associated with waking.
+Very few of us are capable
+of eating in our sleep.
+And then the other one is
+social activity and rhythms.
+Now the discombobulated person
+is going to be the person
+that has not aligned these
+things in a consistent way.
+So while schedules vary,
+and Andrew, I don't know
+your exact schedule,
+what I can say is if you
+suddenly go from daytime behavior
+and sleeping at night to
+the so-called vampire shift,
+as it's called in the military,
+and suddenly you're up in
+the middle of the night
+and you're sleeping during the day,
+then when you come off that shift,
+what you want to do is try
+and combine as many of those
+same things at one time.
+So it would be get your sunlight,
+so go jogging without your sunglasses,
+drink your coffee, engage with
+other people and communicate,
+eat a meal afterwards or
+as the case may be before.
+Try and bring as many
+of those things together
+at the same time of day for a few days
+and pretty soon your system
+will map around that.
+So the reason I encourage for those of us
+that are not doing shift work
+to try and be fairly consistent
+about sunlight viewing
+is it sets in motion
+everything else that's correct,
+in terms of timing of
+eating, appetite will follow,
+when your alert will follow.
+You'll start to learn your own rhythms.
+When you can't control your schedule,
+try and combine as many of those cues;
+again, light, temperature, exercise, food,
+social engagement into one period of time
+and try and lock that into a more or less
+a one or two hour period or
+plus or minus one or two hours
+at a particular time of day
+for at least two or three days.
+And your schedule, meaning
+your internal clocks
+will lock to that.
+"How is social media changing our brains?"
+Thomas Adcock.
+Well, you hear all the terrible ways
+in which it's changing our brains.
+And I think that again,
+we go back to this thing,
+is it the aperture that we're looking at?
+So is it the format that
+we're engaging in things?
+Or is it the content?
+Well, the way I like to
+think about the phone
+is the way that we've been
+engaging with the phone
+and the laptop for that matter,
+in staring into the small
+visual aperture each day
+is sort of like walking like
+this all day long, right?
+We have this amazing
+ability to shuffle our feet
+and take small steps
+or to take big strides,
+to run, to move...
+I think that's the sagittal
+plane for movement.
+I know it for the brain,
+but I always mess it.
+The PTs are vicious
+people online, by the way.
+The PTs and nutrition people,
+I've learned to just not
+say anything about that.
+I'm not a PT and I'm not
+a physical therapist.
+And they do incredible
+work, but they're like,
+it's a very spirited crowd.
+[audience laughing]
+And the nutrition thing is really weird.
+I mean, it's just incredible.
+People are either throwing liver at you
+or they're throwing celery at you
+or they're fasting or they're not fasting.
+It's nuts.
+In any case, the social media
+and staring at a small visual aperture
+is changing our brains.
+Here's one way I know in
+which it's changing our brains
+and then I'll tell you how to fix it.
+If you stare or look at
+something within two feet of you
+for a certain number of hours each day,
+your eyeball actually gets longer.
+And the visual image then is focused
+in front of your neural retina,
+not onto your neural retina,
+and you are becoming myopic; nearsighted.
+And if you look at things
+in the distance enough,
+guess what?
+Your eyeball changes shape
+and your lens will focus
+appropriately the image onto your retina.
+It takes some work.
+Kids that look at things
+up close too much,
+and adults that look at
+things up close too much
+become nearsighted.
+And there's a beautiful
+set of clinical trials now
+where mainly in kids,
+if kids get outside for two hours a day,
+getting a lot of this UVB and blue light
+that we're told is so terrible for us,
+but they get it from sunlight,
+they actually can reverse myopia,
+or reduce the incidence of
+myopia, maybe even glaucoma.
+Although that's a big maybe.
+So, how much staring into
+a small visual aperture
+is too much?
+I don't know.
+But what we do know is that we
+are literally becoming myopic
+in terms of our vision
+and we're becoming myopic
+in terms of our cognition.
+And then there's the whole business
+of what's actually
+contained in those Tweets
+and those social media feeds
+and those news stories.
+Which frankly, I feel
+like you lose either way,
+whether or not you're
+in one political camp
+or another political camp,
+you're upset about half of
+the information out there.
+So I feel like, and I'm
+not someone who knows
+how to talk about politics
+without stumbling,
+I didn't do well in social
+studies in this sort of thing.
+It just never made sense to me.
+It just felt like the
+prize goes to the person
+who can shout the loudest
+and the most coherently
+for a moment.
+But I encourage, of course,
+people to be politically active.
+And I vote.
+[audience laughing]
+But the content is tricky to navigate.
+And I can't really speak to that,
+except that it seems to
+be bothering everybody
+on one side or the other or in the middle.
+And the format is something
+that we really understand.
+And again, I don't know of
+many people that are talking
+about this narrow visual
+window format thing.
+It came up more during the
+lockdowns when we were all inside
+a lot and not looking out at a distance.
+The data say really to try
+and get at least 10 minutes
+of long distance viewing,
+so longer than 10 feet away from us,
+for every 30 minutes of closeup viewing.
+And not a lot of us are doing that.
+If you're walking to your
+car looking at your phone,
+you're definitely losing an opportunity.
+"What new piece of neurological research
+are you most excited about?
+Mateo Minato.
+Ooh.
+I think the piece of
+neurological research that I...
+All right, the weird stuff.
+I've got this colleague at Stanford,
+Tony Wyss-Coray, and they're
+really into literally taking
+proteins from young blood
+and young spinal cord
+cerebral spinal fluid
+and putting it into
+older people and animals,
+and they get younger.
+That stuff's pretty wild.
+The fecal transplant stuff is pretty wild.
+You take the microbiome from
+one person and as it sounds,
+you transplant it to somebody else
+and they take on the physical
+characteristics of the donor.
+It's crazy.
+Until I talk to my [chuckling]...
+There's some shouts for fecal transplant.
+Nice.
+[audience laughing]
+I have never read the method
+sections of those papers.
+I'm actually afraid to
+read the method sections.
+I would say this is not neurological,
+but the work from Chris
+Gardner and Justin Sonnenburg,
+also at Stanford,
+it makes it sound like I just like,
+"Stanford, Stanford, Stanford."
+But these are the people I'm
+closest to and surrounded by.
+There are excellent places
+everywhere, of course,
+including OHSU and I'm not just
+saying that 'cause I'm here.
+I actually close colleagues
+here and friends here at OHSU.
+Also an amazing, although
+that tram thing freaks me out,
+it's like I always just
+have all these ideas
+about what's going to
+happen if that thing breaks.
+But the microbiome data
+are really interesting.
+I never understood why
+getting your gut microbiome
+was important.
+And it turns out it's because
+your gut actually makes
+many of the neurotransmitter precursors
+that your brain uses.
+So that's pretty cool.
+And I always thought it
+would be a complicated thing
+to get your gut microbiome right,
+but it turns out that it's fermented foods
+that seem to have the biggest effect.
+There was all this argument
+about fiber and yes,
+fiber is important and
+here I'm getting nervous
+talking about nutrition,
+'cause the people are going
+to come at me with fiber.
+But it's very clear from
+Justin and Chris's data
+that people who are
+getting four servings a day
+of fermented foods,
+whether or not it's kimchi
+or sauerkraut or kombucha,
+that stuff actually seems to encourage
+a healthy gut microbiome
+and people feel better,
+and their immune system works better.
+And I like this because it actually,
+it resolves an issue which
+is that high dose probiotics,
+these very expensive need
+to be refrigerated things,
+those actually can create brain
+fog and other issues there
+for real severe cases of dysbiosis.
+So I always like an instance
+where one can look to foods
+which are good, 'cause I like to eat,
+in order to resolve these issues.
+In terms of other neurologic issues,
+frankly, I think the stuff on dopamine
+is fundamentally important.
+So much addiction, that's a severe case,
+but also so much waxing
+and waning of motivation.
+And once you understand the
+dopamine system and you say,
+"What activities am I engaging in
+or pharmacology am I engaging in?
+What am I doing to spike dopamine?"
+You start to go, "Oh, I get it.
+The waves in this wave pool are too high
+and that's why I can't
+do this consistently."
+And then you do the counterintuitive thing
+of approaching things with
+a little less excitement,
+but then you're able to
+do them more consistently.
+It's like, "Ah!"
+And maybe with some luck, I'll
+end up finishing this book
+that I've been working on
+for four and a half years
+as a consequence 'cause I can't seem to.
+"Thinking about the Wim Hof Method.
+Do you believe it?
+How is it really working?
+What process is happening in his brain?"
+Oh, boy.
+Madison Cameron and everyone
+here probably familiar
+with Wim Hof.
+Whose occupation on Wikipedia
+used to be "Daredevil."
+That was cool.
+It's like Evel Knievel
+had it and Wim had it.
+I got a story about Wim.
+Actually in 2016, I heard
+about this guy, Wim Hof,
+and I got a hold of him,
+actually his children.
+And I had one vacation that
+year and I flew to Spain
+and I spent some time
+mountaineering with Wim,
+which was absolutely terrifying.
+I almost lost a leg legitimately.
+I tied in wrong on a bridge sling.
+He told me it was good for me.
+He told me to, "Stare
+into the lizard's eyes."
+And I stared into the lizard's eyes.
+I jumped backwards off this
+homemade bridge sling thing.
+And I had the rope wrapped through my leg
+and I came back with basically the tendon
+on the back of my knee exposed.
+And sitting next to me on the plane
+was our Vice Dean of Research at Stanford.
+And I had to explain to him
+what I was doing and why.
+It was very embarrassing.
+What did we do on that trip?
+Well, a couple of things that will help me
+answer your question.
+First of all, when I arrived,
+I suffered terribly from jet lag,
+but the moment I got there,
+Wim did not say hello.
+He literally told me to
+get into the ice bath.
+And I did 10 minutes in the
+ice bath not because I'm tough,
+but because he held me
+down in the ice bath.
+He is indeed one of the
+strongest human beings.
+He reminds me of the bus
+driver on "The Simpsons"
+or the janitor, excuse me.
+No, Otto is the bus driver, right?
+The janitor on "The Simpsons,"
+like [grunts] that guy.
+That's Wim.
+Incredibly physically strong guy.
+What do I think's going
+on with Wim Hof stuff?
+Well, Wim Hof, whether or
+not he understands it or not,
+I always think he's sort of
+the Bob Dylan of breathwork.
+Like everything he says seems
+to have some intuitive sense,
+but you don't really
+understand what in the world
+he's saying.
+[audience laughing]
+He's going to come after me now.
+We've had a good but
+complicated relationship,
+I'll just confess.
+Maybe someday we'll resolve that.
+No big scandal or story there,
+just we communicate very differently.
+Wim has a couple methods.
+One is to deliberately hyperventilate.
+This is also called Tummo breathing.
+My lab actually studies this.
+We have a paper that I'm happy
+to share with you the results
+although they're not published yet,
+where people do deliberate
+cyclic hyperventilation.
+Which as the name suggests,
+you just breathe really deeply in
+and really deeply out 25 times.
+Or if you're Wim, you'd say, "In and out.
+In and out."
+I just tell people, here's how it works.
+You go [deeply breathing].
+You do that 25 times and you heat up
+and you feel really agitated,
+and that's because of adrenaline.
+If you throw yourself into an ice bath
+or a cold shower, adrenaline.
+If somebody upsets you
+or you get a triggering text, adrenaline.
+Adrenaline sounds like a terrible thing,
+except when you deliberately induce it.
+As my colleague, David Spiegel says,
+"There's a big difference
+between going into a state
+and you controlling your
+entry into a state."
+So it's not just about
+the state you're in,
+it's about how you got
+there and whether or not
+you had anything to do with it.
+States of high adrenaline
+are very powerful.
+When you self induce
+adrenaline by cold shower,
+cyclic hyperventilation,
+AKA Wim Hof breathing
+or Tummo breathing,
+you then have an opportunity to create
+a very distinct mind-body relationship.
+We all hear that interoception
+and the mind-body relationship.
+Interoception just your ability
+to sense your heartbeats
+and what's going on in your body.
+Powerful, right?
+Terrible if how you feel sucks.
+So interoception is wonderful,
+but when you're anxious it
+actually is more adaptive
+to be able to maintain your thinking
+and get yourself out
+of that anxious state.
+So if you're trembling and
+your body's freaking out
+and your cheeks are flushing
+and your brain is following
+your bodily state,
+well, that's not good.
+And if you're somebody and sadly,
+this happens a lot where you've
+experienced a lot of trauma
+or typically this is people
+that have been bombarded
+with extreme criticism or physical abuse
+or other kinds of abuse
+during development.
+They actually can seem very calm,
+but internally they're
+freaking out in their head.
+And they're just thinking,
+just get me through this.
+And they just go into a state
+where no one knows they're upset.
+I've known people like
+this and it's eerie to me
+because I've never had
+that response to stress,
+but it's very common.
+And so we should learn and
+be careful about deciding
+that people are in one state or another
+based on their bodily or
+their mental response.
+Vim Hof breathing, cold
+showers, et cetera,
+are a great practice in my opinion,
+because they allow you
+to spike your adrenaline.
+And you can do that, for instance,
+by making the water colder
+if you want more adrenaline,
+staying in longer if you
+want more adrenaline,
+moving your limbs around in the water
+will give you more adrenaline
+'cause it breaks up that thermal layer.
+It makes it a lot colder.
+Or doing 50 deep inhales and exhales.
+That is very useful because
+then you have the opportunity
+to use that prefrontal cortex and to stop
+and sense all that adrenaline in your body
+and yet maintain clarity of mind.
+And that's an absolutely powerful tool.
+I would even call it a power tool.
+And Wim figured this out.
+I don't know if you know this,
+but the way that Wim discovered all this
+was he was in deep grief about
+the tragic death of his wife.
+She committed suicide, jumped
+off an eight story building.
+Just truly tragic death.
+And he was in situation, he
+had four children at the time.
+Now, he has five.
+And he was in a state of depression
+and he ended up going into
+the canal in Amsterdam
+and it was very cold and
+it shocked his system.
+And in that shock to his system,
+which is caused by adrenaline,
+he somehow was able to anchor his thinking
+and in kind of genius
+of sorts, Wim thought,
+"Wow, I can intervene in my physiology
+with this strange activity."
+And then he realized that
+breathing would do it as well.
+You didn't have to get into cold water.
+And then, years later, we discovered,
+not we meaning my lab, but other labs,
+that when you get into cold water,
+even just 60 degree water,
+that there's a very long
+lasting increase in dopamine.
+That is 2.5x above baseline,
+which is on par with
+some prescription drugs
+for increasing dopamine.
+So when people laugh at me and go,
+"Oh this cold water thing,"
+I get teased a lot on the internet.
+I've heard on the internet
+that I eat sticks of butter,
+which I never said.
+I said, "I like butter."
+[audience laughing]
+I've been told all sorts of things.
+I've been told I eat sticks of butter.
+I don't know why.
+I've been told that I'm dead.
+That was an interesting one.
+That was one of the cooler ones.
+But when I was going out
+there as a serious scientist
+and saying, "Using
+deliberate cold exposure."
+You can use all sorts of things.
+Or if you come to my lab,
+I'd be happy to put you in VR
+and expose you to all
+sorts of scary stuff.
+Or we can inject you with adrenaline
+or you can inject yourself with adrenaline
+and titrate that, adjust
+the levels of that.
+So it's a very powerful tool.
+And I think that Wim and
+others deserve credit
+for really tapping into that.
+And as a last point,
+there's a beautiful study
+in the Proceedings of the
+National Academy of Sciences
+years ago using this deliberate
+cyclic hyperventilation
+thing; 25 breath [deeply breathing].
+And then another group meditates.
+And then they inject
+them both with E. coli.
+And the people injected
+with E. coli who meditate
+get nauseous, vomit, diarrhea,
+and they get a fever.
+And the people who
+[deeply breathing] first,
+far fewer symptoms, if any.
+Why?
+Because adrenaline actually
+suppresses a lot of these
+innate immune responses
+in a way that's healthy
+in the short term.
+This is why you can work,
+work, work, work, work,
+where you can study for finals,
+or you can take care of a loved one
+and then you finally stop
+and rest and go on vacation,
+and then you get sick.
+Stress activates your nervous
+system and in doing so,
+it activates your immune system.
+Makes perfect sense
+when you think about it.
+How would we ever go through famine
+if you're just getting flus
+whenever you're stressed?
+We can deal with a lot.
+My suggestion is if you're coming off
+a period of high stress,
+to do some sort of
+adrenaline spiking behavior
+as you taper out of that stressful period,
+not going strictly to massage, vacation,
+and yoga nidra all day long,
+as I would reflexively do.
+"Can red light therapy help
+treat exercise intolerance
+and fatigue in mitochondrial disease?"
+Allison, I'm glad you brought this up.
+This is another case where I thought,
+"Oh no, this red light stuff is crazy."
+And then I went into the
+literature and it turns out
+that in 1908, the Nobel
+Prize was actually given
+for phototherapy.
+So, there we go again.
+And I have this slide,
+I chose not to use slides tonight,
+but I have this slide that shows Ken Kesey
+and the magic bus and
+stuff from the 1930s,
+and psychedelics and people
+getting into cold water.
+And then here we are, 2019,
+2020, you've got Wim Hof,
+and Matt Johnson giving people
+macro doses of psilocybin.
+We're right back where we were.
+And one of my major goals is to really try
+and create some scientific
+discussion around these things.
+This stuff is crazy on the face of it,
+but there are mechanisms that
+are real that underlie it.
+Red light, because it's
+long wavelength light,
+longer literally as opposed
+to a short wavelength light,
+can penetrate through things like skin
+and can indeed change mitochondria.
+One of the more impressive
+results on red light
+comes from my good
+friend, Glen Jeffery's Lab
+at the University College London.
+I've known Glen for years,
+and a few years, he was
+a basic vision scientist.
+And a few years ago he
+started using red light.
+He'd have people look at red light
+at a distance of about
+two feet in the morning.
+So is long wavelength light.
+And sometimes even just take a flashlight,
+a torch as they call it in England,
+and cover it with a red film.
+And they would look at this stuff
+for a few minutes each morning,
+and it can reverse some forms
+of age-related vision loss
+and macular degeneration.
+How we now know it can
+prove mitochondrial function
+in photoreceptors by
+reducing what are called
+reactive oxygen species.
+Here's what's interesting,
+it only seems to work
+in people older than 40,
+and it seems to only
+work if you do it within
+the first three hours of waking.
+And the incredible
+thing is you can do this
+for one or two minutes a week,
+and some of the positive effects last
+as long as three weeks.
+And it's affecting a very specific form
+of visual improvement, which is acuity,
+kind of fine detail stuff
+in a particular wavelength.
+So, particular colors
+and objects and things.
+Pretty impressive.
+So, yes, red light can
+improve mitochondrial function
+to the photo receptors.
+If you are going to try and do this stuff,
+don't put it too close.
+I don't have any affiliation
+to any red light panel company.
+So I can't say anything there.
+They are rather expensive.
+Nowadays, people are putting
+red light everywhere,
+and I do mean everywhere.
+People are putting red
+light on their stomach
+for improving ovarian function,
+whether or not it can
+penetrate isn't clear to me
+all the way down there.
+People are trying to do this.
+I have a friend, I won't name him.
+Recently, he told me he is really into
+the red light therapy.
+He's putting it on his testicles
+to try and increase testosterone.
+But he told me that after
+he handed me the red light.
+[audience laughing]
+True story.
+My team knows who this is.
+It's no one on my team.
+Thank goodness.
+I was like, "Oh, that's
+super interesting."
+I actually don't think you
+want to contact the red lights
+directly to your skin.
+So red light is powerful.
+I don't think we have, aside
+from the vision protocol,
+I don't think that it's clear
+which protocols are best.
+I will say if you're into
+red light infrared sauna.
+Typically those don't get hot enough.
+Typically if you want to
+get the benefits of sauna,
+you want to get between 80
+and 100 degrees Celsius,
+which is 176 to 210 or 208 Fahrenheit.
+And I don't actually do
+the conversion in my head.
+I memorize it.
+"You mentioned the consequences
+of blasting your brain
+with too much dopamine.
+Is it possible to overdo
+ice baths while following
+the same line of thinking?
+Will you experience an
+extreme low in dopamine
+with too many ice baths?"
+Lucas Ancke, thank you for the question.
+Any behavior that spikes adrenaline,
+you will eventually get
+better at tolerating it.
+You will become cold adapted
+and you'll become comfortable
+at high adrenaline states.
+And you just have to ask yourself this,
+it's just like lifting
+weights in the gym or running.
+You need to leave some
+space for improvement.
+So if you run, as people do,
+and you do your 5k, then you're 10k,
+then you're half marathon,
+maybe a 10k is a half marathon.
+I don't know.
+But anyway, then you're
+doing your marathon.
+Then you're doing ultras that
+are 50 miles and 100 miles.
+I mean, eventually you're going
+to start doing damage, right?
+And eventually you look
+at every ultra runner
+and typically these are
+people who are very much
+on the dopamine pursuit system.
+I mean, I don't think that he would mind;
+my good friend and a podcaster
+who I have tremendous
+respect for is Rich Roll,
+amazing human being,
+and also has an amazing
+story about addiction.
+He was an alcoholic.
+And I'm not sharing anything
+that he hasn't already shared
+in his amazing book, "Finding Ultra."
+He got really into running,
+running, running all the time
+and there's a dopamine
+history there for him.
+Some of us can use ice
+baths so consistently
+and making it so cold and
+doing them longer and longer
+that indeed you're playing
+with the dopamine system.
+Is it bad?
+Well, it depends on what
+you're trading that in for,
+at the expense of what?
+Is it giving up cocaine?
+Yeah, great, stick with the ice bath.
+But you know, can only make it so cold
+and you can only stay in there so long
+before you become Wim Hof, right?
+And it worked out for Wim,
+but there's really only one Wim Hof.
+And in general, that
+speaks to a larger theme,
+which is I love the idea
+of people using tools
+and understanding mechanism.
+I mean, of course I love that.
+It's what I talk about and
+think about so much in my life.
+But for most of us,
+we don't make a living doing those things.
+And so I do think that the ideal situation
+is to have behaviors and
+tools that you intersperse
+throughout your day and
+throughout the week.
+For instance, I think
+three times a week is fine
+for the ice bath.
+No one said you had to do it every day,
+but you should see sunlight
+every morning if you can.
+Just because if you miss a
+day, your system will be fine,
+just spend twice as long
+outside the next day.
+Seriously, 'cause it's a
+slow integrating system.
+But for most of these
+high intensity things,
+the less often you do them,
+the more powerful they are.
+In fact, if you get into a very hot sauna
+for four 30 minute sessions on one day.
+So you go 30 minutes,
+get out for five minutes.
+30 minutes, get out for five minutes.
+30 minutes, get out for five.
+Two hours a day in the
+sauna, that's a lot of sauna,
+but the growth hormone release
+from that type of protocol
+is a 16x increase in growth hormone.
+This has been measured in humans.
+Whereas if you do it every day
+or three or four times a week,
+you get diminishing returns on that.
+So I actually am a big fan
+of doing really intense stuff
+only every once in a while.
+This is also why I only
+take one long run per week
+or one long hike.
+First of all, I don't have time for it.
+I'm not an ultra runner.
+I got other things to do.
+And second of all, it's a strong stimulus.
+I'm sore until Tuesday,
+or I don't want to run
+until Tuesday anyway.
+I actually think that's fine.
+And I actually encourage
+kind of more healthy,
+rational schedules of
+these kinds of behaviors.
+There's no rule that says
+you have to do something
+every day, even if you're trying
+to engage neuroplasticity.
+You can learn French or an
+instrument by practicing
+three times a week.
+As long as your practice
+is very focused, right?
+Daily perhaps would be better,
+but very few of us have the opportunity
+to do things every day consistently.
+And I really want to encourage
+a more balanced approach.
+"Before working for
+Thrasher, what's the best..."
+Oh, goodness gracious.
+The skateboarders are always in the house.
+My first non-biological family
+was a skateboarding community.
+When I have great relationship
+with my parents now,
+but because there was a
+time when there was no one
+to go to soccer games
+or do any of that stuff,
+the skateboard community took me in
+'cause there were no parents involved.
+It was great.
+There were no referees or coaches
+'cause I didn't like
+authority and it was awesome.
+And there was no nutritional plan.
+You drank your slurpy
+and you sat on the curb,
+and it was fantastic.
+I don't do that anymore.
+But the skateboarding community's
+one that I've remained close with.
+I did write for Thrasher
+under a different name
+while I was a postdoc
+to make some extra cash.
+You won't find those
+articles anywhere, I hope.
+They're not very good.
+And the best skate trick?
+Well, I was involved in it
+enough that this will only
+makes sense like three
+people in the audience,
+but I had decent heel flip.
+I could nollie better than I could ollie.
+And I was never very good.
+Oh, there's more
+skateboarders in the audience.
+What I will say though,
+is you have to be very
+careful with skateboarders,
+'cause I don't want to
+claim that I was any good.
+Any success that I had was
+out of sympathy of others
+for letting me hang around.
+It's a great community.
+And it gave me great
+appreciation for indeed
+communities of kids that
+don't have structure
+and sports leagues and teams
+and all that kind of stuff.
+Nowadays, it's actually a
+much different landscape.
+And I have to also say that
+it's really amazing to see
+all the incredible girls and
+women skateboarders also.
+There were none.
+It's an Olympic sport
+now for women and girls,
+and it's an Olympic sport
+for boys of men too.
+So, it's awesome to see that community.
+Okay, "What are your favorite brain hacks
+for doing hard things?
+Ranging from cold exposure to
+getting through selection?"
+Hoby Darling, thanks for the question.
+Yeah, hard things.
+Well, I'll be honest.
+I learned how to hack
+into my adrenaline system
+a long time ago through the
+worst possible mechanism,
+which is that I would set
+up battles in my mind.
+I would get into competition
+with people, imagined or real,
+or I would get into states of
+fearing shame and screwing up.
+So, this is what a lot
+of people do I think,
+you end up scaring
+yourself into trying to do
+the hard thing, and it works.
+The problem is it feels
+rather like a downward spiral
+because those negative states of mind
+work to liberate adrenaline and
+get you through hard things.
+So being a kind of rebellious
+kid, resistance was...
+If someone told me I couldn't
+do something, I was like,
+"Yeah, try me" and this kind of thing.
+And as I mentioned before, I
+wasn't crazy about authority.
+And so, that was the
+method for a long time.
+And then, I started reading
+Oliver Sacks's books
+and I started learning
+from people who seemed
+to access things through
+this whole love thing.
+And I tried that love and
+kindness meditation thing,
+and that didn't work.
+And what I started doing was I actually,
+I'll just tell you before
+I came out here tonight
+and before I do anything challenging,
+I just actually like to imagine the people
+that have supported me.
+It's a weird tool.
+I don't think I've ever shared.
+I'm actually slightly
+embarrassed to share this out.
+'Cause there are only two
+things that make me cry,
+and that's talking about my bulldog
+and talking about my graduate advisor.
+And if I talk it about any
+longer, I'll probably cry.
+But I think about them a lot
+because they were kind of similar.
+They were kind of ornery
+and they were hard on me,
+and I adored them both.
+And so these days I try
+and think about people
+that really, that I love.
+And so I have been trying
+to do this whole, like,
+doing things from a place of love thing.
+And so, for me, that's animals
+and people that I love.
+And okay, now, I better move on.
+Ah, thank you.
+[audience applauding]
+Okay, they're telling
+me one more question.
+So I'm going to answer one more.
+"What do I fear?
+How do you manage your fear?"
+KB, oh, gosh.
+This is going to turn into a
+no one's going to be satisfied
+until I cry.
+I get it, I get it.
+[audience laughing]
+I do cry, but again about the
+things I mentioned before.
+I realized something, by the way.
+We just recorded an episode on grief.
+It hasn't come out yet.
+Fascinating topic.
+I realized at one point, by the way,
+I'll just give this away,
+that I thought I was really
+sad about losing them.
+I thought I would tear up really easily
+because I was sad about them.
+But then I realized that this,
+gosh, I can't believe
+I'm going to do this.
+But I realized that
+feeling that I was feeling
+is the exact same feeling of love
+that I had when they were alive.
+So, grief is love.
+And when you look at the literature,
+it's basically that, but
+your brain is freaking out
+because that map of knowing
+where people are in space
+and time, grief is basically
+a remapping of the space:
+Where are they?
+Time: When are they?
+And then, this kind of
+abstract map representation
+that we call closeness.
+And grief is this process of
+ripping ourselves off of that.
+So, in any event, what do I fear?
+Talking about things like this.
+What do I fear?
+Quite honestly, my biggest fear,
+the thing that would just
+make me feel just horrible
+is I fear letting down my friends.
+I have an amazing...
+I love my family and they're wonderful,
+but I have this incredible
+relationship to friendship,
+and I adore my friends
+and I would sooner give up
+all my limbs and die before I would
+deliberately let them down.
+So, there you go, that's what I fear most.
+[audience applauding]
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+I also fear I've gone long.
+And so my team has shut this down.
+I just want to just briefly, two things.
+First of all, I of course
+want to thank everyone
+for coming here tonight.
+I realize it's the middle of the week
+and to commit some hours of your life
+to thinking about these brain mechanisms,
+we got pretty nerdy there for a minute,
+and hopefully the tools redeemed those
+who were only interested
+or mostly interested
+in practical tools,
+but hopefully some of the
+insights about how you work
+were useful as well.
+I do want to just make brief
+mention of the sponsors
+that made this possible, 'cause
+they did make this possible.
+And we made every effort to
+try and keep the ticket prices
+manageable for people.
+And thanks to InsideTracker and Momentous
+for making this possible.
+And then, of course I
+would be completely remiss
+if I didn't say thank you
+for your interest in science.
+[audience applauding]
+[audience cheering]
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+Oh, wow, thank you.
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+[light music]
+Thanks so much.
+Everyone be sure to get
+home safely tonight.

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+ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome
+to Huberman Lab Essentials,
+where we revisit past
+episodes for the most
+potent and actionable
+science-based tools
+for mental health, physical
+health, and performance.
+[MUSIC PLAYING]
+My name is Andrew
+Huberman, and I'm
+a professor of neurobiology
+and ophthalmology
+at Stanford School of Medicine.
+Today we're talking
+about neuroplasticity,
+which is this incredible feature
+of our nervous system's that
+allows it to change in
+response to experience.
+Neuroplasticity is arguably one
+of the most important aspects
+of our biology.
+It holds the promise
+for each and all of us
+to think differently,
+to learn new things,
+to forget painful experiences,
+and to essentially
+adapt to anything that life
+brings us by becoming better.
+So let's get started.
+Most people are familiar with
+the word "neuroplasticity,"
+which is the brain and nervous
+system's ability to change
+itself.
+All of us were born
+with a nervous system
+that isn't just
+capable of change
+but was designed to change.
+When we enter the world,
+our nervous system
+is primed for learning.
+The brain and nervous system of
+a baby is wired very crudely.
+The connections are
+not precise, and we
+can see evidence
+of that in the fact
+that babies are kind of flopping
+there, like a little potato
+bug with limbs.
+They can't really do much in
+terms of coordinated movement.
+They certainly can't speak,
+and they can't really
+do anything with precision.
+So I want you to
+imagine in your mind
+that when you were
+brought into this world,
+you were essentially a widely
+connected web of connections
+that was really poor
+at doing any one thing,
+and that through your
+experience, what you were
+exposed to by your parents
+or other caretakers,
+through your social
+interactions,
+through your thoughts, through
+the languages that you learned,
+through the places you
+traveled or didn't travel,
+your nervous system
+became customized
+to your unique experience.
+Now, that's true for
+certain parts of your brain
+that are involved in what
+we call representations
+of the outside world.
+A lot of your brain is designed
+to represent the visual world,
+or represent the auditory
+world, or represent
+the gallery of smells that
+are possible in the world.
+However, there are aspects
+of your nervous system
+that were designed
+not to be plastic.
+They were wired so that
+plasticity or changes
+in those circuits
+is very unlikely.
+Those circuits include
+things like the ones
+that control your heartbeat.
+The ones that control
+your breathing.
+The ones that control
+your digestion.
+And thank goodness that
+those circuits were set up
+that way, because you want
+those circuits to be extremely
+reliable.
+So many nervous system features,
+like digestion and breathing
+and heart rate,
+are hard to change.
+Other aspects of
+our nervous system
+are actually quite
+easy to change.
+And one of the great gifts
+of childhood, adolescence,
+and young adulthood is that
+we can learn through almost
+passive experience.
+We don't have to focus that hard
+in order to learn new things.
+And then after
+age 25, if we want
+to change those connections,
+those superhighways
+of connectivity, we have to
+engage in some very specific
+processes.
+And those processes,
+as we'll soon learn,
+are gated, meaning
+you can't just
+decide to change your brain.
+You actually have to go
+through a series of steps
+to change your internal
+state in ways that will
+allow you to change your brain.
+Many of us have been
+captivated by the stories
+in the popular press about
+the addition of new neurons,
+this idea, oh, if you go
+running or you exercise,
+your brain actually
+makes new neurons.
+Well, I'm going to give
+you the bad news, which
+is that after puberty, the
+human brain and nervous system
+adds very few, if
+any, new neurons.
+So even though we can't add new
+neurons throughout our lifespan,
+at least not in
+very great numbers,
+it's clear that we can
+change our nervous system,
+that the nervous system
+is available for change,
+that if we create the
+right set of circumstances
+in our brain, chemical
+circumstances,
+and if we create the right
+environmental circumstances
+around us, our
+nervous system will
+shift into a mode in which
+change isn't just possible,
+but it's probable.
+As I mentioned
+before, the hallmark
+of the child nervous
+system is change.
+It wants to change.
+One of the ways in which
+we can all get plasticity
+at any stage
+throughout the lifespan
+is through deficits
+and impairments
+in what we call our sensory
+apparati-- our eyes, our ears,
+our nose, our mouth.
+In individuals that
+are blind from birth,
+the so-called occipital cortex,
+the visual cortex in the back,
+becomes overtaken by hearing.
+The neurons there will start
+to respond to sounds as well
+as Braille touch.
+And actually, there is one
+particularly tragic incident
+where a woman who
+was blind since birth
+and, because of
+neuroimaging studies,
+we knew her visual cortex
+was no longer visual.
+It was responsible for Braille
+reading and for hearing.
+She had a stroke that
+actually took out
+most of the function
+of her visual cortex.
+So then she was blind, she
+couldn't Braille read, or hear.
+She did recover some
+aspect of function.
+Now, most people, they don't end
+up in that highly unfortunate
+situation.
+And what we know is that, for
+instance, blind people who
+use their visual cortex for
+Braille reading and for hearing
+have much better
+auditory acuity and touch
+acuity, meaning they can sense
+things with their fingers
+and they can sense
+things with their hearing
+that typical sighted
+folks wouldn't be able to.
+In fact, you will find
+a much greater incidence
+of perfect pitch in
+people that are blind.
+And that tells us that the brain
+and, in particular, this area
+we call the neocortex,
+which is the outer part,
+is really designed to be a
+map of our own individual
+experience.
+So these, what I
+call experiments
+of impairment or
+loss, where somebody
+is blind from birth
+or deaf from birth
+or maybe has a limb development
+impairment where they have
+a stump instead of an entire
+limb with a functioning hand,
+their brain will represent the
+body plan that they have, not
+some other body plan.
+But the beauty of the situation
+is that the real estate
+up in the skull, that
+neocortex, the essence of it
+is to be a customized
+map of experience.
+A few years ago,
+I was at a course,
+and a woman came up to me
+and she said, you know, I--
+I wasn't teaching the course.
+I was in the course.
+And she said, I just
+have to tell you
+that every time you speak,
+it really stresses me out.
+And I said, well, I've
+heard that before.
+But do you want to
+be more specific?
+And she said, yeah,
+your tone of voice
+reminds me of somebody that I
+had a really terrible experience
+with.
+I said, well, OK, well,
+I can't change my voice,
+but I really appreciate
+that you acknowledge that.
+And it also will
+help explain why
+you seem to cringe
+every time I speak,
+which I hadn't
+noticed until then.
+But after that, I
+did notice she had
+a very immediate and kind of
+visceral response to my speech.
+But in any event, over the
+period of this two-week course,
+she would come back every
+once in a while and say,
+you know what?
+I think just by telling you that
+your voice was really difficult
+for me to listen
+to, it's actually
+becoming more tolerable to me.
+And by the end, we actually
+became pretty good friends,
+and we're still in touch.
+And so what this says is that
+the recognition of something,
+whether or not that's an
+emotional thing or a desire
+to learn something else,
+is actually the first step
+in neuroplasticity.
+If I get up out of this chair
+and walk out of the door,
+I don't think about each
+step that I'm taking.
+And that's because I learned
+how to walk during development.
+But when we decide
+that we're going
+to shift some sort of
+behavior or some reaction
+or some new piece of information
+that we want to learn
+is something that we want to
+bring into our consciousness,
+that awareness is
+a remarkable thing
+because it cues the brain and
+the rest of the nervous system
+that when we engage in those
+reflexive actions going forward,
+that those reflexive actions are
+no longer fated to be reflexive.
+Now, if this sounds a
+little bit abstract,
+we're going to talk about
+protocols for how to do this.
+But the first step
+in neuroplasticity
+is recognizing that you
+want to change something.
+We have to know what it is
+exactly that we want to change.
+Or if we don't know exactly what
+it is that we want to change,
+we at least have to know that
+we want to change something
+about some specific experience.
+Now, there are
+specific protocols
+that science tells us
+we have to follow if we
+want those changes to occur.
+What it is, is
+it's our forebrain,
+in particular our
+prefrontal cortex,
+signaling the rest
+of our nervous system
+that something that we're about
+to do, hear, feel, or experience
+is worth paying attention to.
+So we'll pause there, and then
+I'm going to move forward.
+One of the biggest lies
+in the universe that
+seems quite prominent right now
+is that every experience you
+have changes your brain.
+People love to say this.
+They love to say,
+your brain is going
+to be different
+after this lecture,
+or your brain is going to be
+different after today's class
+than it was two days ago.
+And that's absolutely not true.
+The nervous system
+doesn't just change
+because you experience
+something unless you're
+a very young child.
+The nervous system changes
+when certain neurochemicals
+are released and
+allow whatever neurons
+are active in the period in
+which those chemicals are
+swimming around to
+strengthen or weaken
+the connections
+of those neurons.
+So when people tell you, oh,
+at the end of today's lecture,
+at the end of
+something, your brain
+is going to be completely
+different, that's simply not
+true.
+If you're older
+than 25, your brain
+will not change unless
+there's a selective shift
+in your attention or a selective
+shift in your experience
+that tells the brain
+it's time to change.
+And those changes occur through
+strengthening and weakening
+of particular connections.
+But the important
+thing to understand
+is that if we want
+something to change,
+we really need to bring an
+immense amount of attention
+to whatever it is that
+we want to change.
+This is very much
+linked to the statement
+I made earlier about it all
+starts with an awareness.
+Now, why is that
+attention important?
+In the early '90s, a graduate
+student by the name of Gregg
+Recanzone was in the laboratory
+of a guy named Mike Merzenich
+at UCSF.
+And they set out
+to test this idea
+that if one wants to
+change their brain,
+they need to do it early in life
+because the adult brain simply
+isn't plastic.
+It's not available
+for these changes.
+And they did a series
+of absolutely beautiful
+experiments, by
+now, I think we can
+say proving that the
+adult brain can change,
+provided certain
+conditions are met.
+Now, the experiments
+they did are tough.
+They were tough on
+the experimenter,
+and they were tough
+on the subject.
+I'll just describe one.
+Let's say you were a subject
+in one of their experiments.
+You would come into the lab,
+and you'd sit down at a table,
+and they would record
+from or image your brain
+and look at the representation
+of your fingers, the digits,
+as we call them.
+And there would be a spinning
+drum, literally like a stone
+drum in front of you, or metal
+drum, that had little bumps.
+Some of the bumps were spaced
+close together, some of them
+were spaced far apart.
+And they would do
+these experiments
+where they would
+expect their subjects
+to press a lever whenever, for
+instance, the bumps got closer
+together or further apart.
+And these were very
+subtle differences.
+So in order to do
+this, you really
+have to pay attention to the
+distance between the bumps.
+And these were not
+Braille readers or anyone
+skilled in doing these
+kinds of experiments.
+What they found
+was that as people
+paid more and more
+attention to the distance
+between these bumps--
+and they would
+signal when there was
+a change by pressing a lever.
+As they did that, there
+was very rapid changes,
+plasticity in the
+representation of the fingers.
+And it could go in
+either direction.
+You could get people
+very good at detecting
+the distance between bumps that
+the distance was getting smaller
+or the distance was
+getting greater.
+So people could get very
+good at these tasks that
+are kind of hard
+to imagine how they
+would translate to the real
+world for a non-Braille reader.
+But what it told us is
+that these maps of touch
+were very much available
+for plasticity,
+and these were fully
+adult subjects.
+What it proved is that the
+adult brain is very plastic.
+And they did some beautiful
+control experiments
+that are important for
+everyone to understand,
+which is that sometimes
+they would bring people in
+and they would have
+them touch these bumps
+on this spinning drum, but
+they would have the person pay
+attention to an auditory cue.
+Every time a tone
+would go off or there
+was a shift in the
+pitch of that tone,
+they would have to signal that.
+So the subject thought
+they were doing something
+related to touch and hearing.
+And all that showed
+was that it wasn't just
+the mere action of
+touching these bumps;
+they had to pay attention
+to the bumps themselves.
+If they were placing their
+attention on the auditory cue,
+on the tone, well,
+then there was
+plasticity in the auditory
+portion of the brain,
+but not on the touch
+portion of the brain.
+And this really spits in
+the face of this thing
+that you hear so often,
+which is, every experience
+that you have is going to
+change the way your brain works.
+Absolutely not.
+The experiences that you pay
+super careful attention to
+are what open up plasticity,
+and it opens up plasticity
+to that specific experience.
+So the question then is, why?
+And Merzenich and his
+graduate students and postdocs
+went on to address
+this question of why.
+And it turns out, the answer
+is a very straightforward
+neurochemical answer.
+And the first neurochemical is
+epinephrine, also adrenaline.
+We call it adrenaline when it's
+released from the adrenal glands
+above our kidneys.
+That's in the body.
+We call it epinephrine
+in the brain,
+but they are chemically
+identical substances.
+Epinephrine is released from a
+region in the brainstem called
+locus ceruleus.
+Epinephrine is released
+when we pay attention
+and when we are alert.
+But the most important
+thing for getting plasticity
+is that there be
+epinephrine, which
+equates to alertness, plus the
+release of this neuromodulator
+acetylcholine.
+Now, acetylcholine is released
+from two sites in the brain.
+One is also in the brainstem,
+and it's named different things
+in different animals.
+But in humans, the most rich
+site of acetylcholine neurons,
+or neurons that
+make acetylcholine,
+is the parabigeminal nucleus
+or the parabrachial region.
+All you need to know is that you
+have an area in your brainstem,
+and that area sends wires,
+these axons, up into the area
+of the brain that
+filters sensory input.
+So we have this area of the
+brain called the thalamus,
+and it is getting bombarded
+with all sorts of sensory input
+all the time.
+But when I pay
+attention to something,
+I create a cone of attention,
+and what we call signal to noise
+goes up.
+So those of you with an
+engineering background
+will be familiar
+with signal to noise.
+Those of you who do not have
+an engineering background,
+don't worry about it.
+All it means is that one
+particular shout in the crowd
+comes through.
+Acetylcholine acts
+as a spotlight.
+But epinephrine for alertness,
+acetylcholine spotlighting
+these inputs, those
+two things alone
+are not enough to
+get plasticity.
+There needs to be
+this third component,
+and the third component
+is acetylcholine
+released from an area
+of the forebrain called
+nucleus basalis.
+If you really want
+to get technical,
+it's called nucleus
+basalis of Meynert.
+For any of you that are
+budding physicians or going
+to medical school,
+you should know that.
+If you have acetylcholine
+released from the brainstem,
+acetylcholine released
+from nucleus basalis,
+and epinephrine, you
+can change your brain.
+And this has been shown
+again and again and again
+in a variety of
+papers, and it is now
+considered a fundamental
+principle of how
+the nervous system works.
+If you can access these
+three things of epinephrine,
+acetylcholine from
+these two sources,
+not only will the nervous
+system change, it has to change.
+It absolutely will change.
+And that is the
+most important thing
+for people to understand if
+they want to change their brain.
+So now let's talk about
+how we would translate
+all this scientific
+information into some protocols
+that you can actually apply
+because I think that's what
+many of you are interested in.
+What you do with your health and
+your medical care is up to you.
+You're responsible for
+your health and well-being.
+So I'm not going to tell you
+what to do or what to take,
+I'm going to describe what the
+literature tells us and suggests
+about ways to access plasticity.
+We know we need epinephrine.
+That means alertness.
+Most people accomplish this
+through a cup of coffee
+and a good night's sleep.
+So I will say you should
+master your sleep schedule,
+and you should figure out how
+much sleep you need in order
+to achieve alertness when
+you sit down to learn.
+But once that's in
+place, the question
+then is, how do I
+access this alertness?
+Well, there are
+a number of ways.
+Some people use some pretty
+elaborate psychological
+gymnastics.
+They will tell
+people that they're
+going to do something and
+create some accountability.
+That could be really good.
+Or they'll post a picture
+of themselves online,
+and they'll commit to
+learning a certain amount--
+losing, excuse me, a certain
+amount of weight or something
+like this.
+So they can use either
+shame-based practices
+to potentially
+embarrass themselves
+if they don't follow through.
+They'll write checks
+to organizations
+that they hate and
+insist that they'll
+cash them if they don't
+actually follow through.
+Or they'll do it out of love.
+They'll decide that they're
+going to run a marathon
+or learn a language or something
+because of somebody they love,
+or they want to
+devote it to somebody.
+The truth is that from the
+standpoint of epinephrine
+and getting alert and activated,
+it doesn't really matter.
+Epinephrine is a
+chemical, and your brain
+does not distinguish
+between doing things out
+of love or hate, anger, or fear.
+It really doesn't.
+All of those promote
+autonomic arousal
+and the release of epinephrine.
+So I think for most
+people, if you're
+feeling not motivated to make
+these changes, the key thing is
+to identify not just one, but
+probably a kit of reasons,
+several reasons as
+to why you would want
+to make this particular change.
+And being drawn toward
+a particular goal
+that you're excited
+about can be one.
+Also being motivated to not
+be completely afraid, ashamed,
+or humiliated for not following
+through on a goal is another.
+Come up with two
+or three things,
+fear-based, perhaps, love-based,
+perhaps, or perhaps several
+of those in order to ensure
+alertness, energy, and attention
+for the task.
+And that brings us to
+the attention part.
+Now, it's one thing to
+have an electrode embedded
+into your brain and increase
+the amount of acetylcholine.
+It's another to exist
+in the real world
+outside the laboratory and have
+trouble focusing, having trouble
+bringing your attention to a
+particular location in space
+for a particular event.
+And there's a lot of discussion
+nowadays about smartphones
+and devices creating a
+sort of attention deficit,
+almost at a clinical level for
+many people, including adults.
+I think that's largely true.
+And what it means,
+however, is that we all
+are responsible for learning
+how to create depth of focus.
+There are some important
+neuroscience principles
+to get depth of focus.
+I want to briefly talk
+about the pharmacology first
+because I always get
+asked about this.
+People say, what can
+I take to increase
+my levels of acetylcholine?
+Well, there are
+things you can take.
+Nicotine is called nicotine
+because acetylcholine binds
+to the nicotinic receptor.
+There are two kinds of
+acetylcholine receptors,
+muscarinic and nicotinic.
+But the nicotinic
+ones are involved
+in attention and alertness.
+I have colleagues-- these are
+not my kind of like bro science
+buddies.
+I have those friends, too.
+This is a Nobel
+Prize-winning colleague who
+chews Nicorette while he works.
+But when I asked him,
+why are you doing this,
+he said, well, it increases
+my alertness and focus.
+Now, I've tried
+chewing Nicorette.
+It makes me super jittery.
+I don't like it because
+I can't focus very well.
+It kind of takes me too far up
+the level of autonomic arousal.
+I've got friends that
+dip Nicorette all day.
+If you're going to
+go down that route,
+you want to be very
+careful how much you rely
+on those all the time because
+the essence of plasticity
+is to create a window
+of attention and focus
+that's distinct from
+the rest of your day.
+So what are some ways that you
+can increase acetylcholine?
+How do you increase focus?
+The best way to get
+better at focusing
+is to use the mechanisms of
+focus that you were born with.
+And the key principle
+here is that mental focus
+follows visual focus.
+We are all familiar
+with the fact
+that our visual system can be
+unfocused, blurry, or jumping
+around, or we can be
+very laser-focused
+on one location in space.
+What's interesting and vitally
+important to understanding
+how to access
+neuroplasticity is that you
+can use your visual
+focus, and you
+can increase your
+visual focus as a way
+of increasing your mental
+focus abilities more broadly.
+So I'm going to
+explain how to do that.
+Plasticity starts
+with alertness.
+That alertness can come from a
+sense of love, a sense of joy,
+a sense of fear.
+Doesn't matter.
+There are pharmacologic ways
+to access alertness, too.
+The most common one is,
+of course, caffeine.
+Many people are now
+also using Adderall.
+Adderall will not
+increase focus.
+It increases alertness.
+It does not touch the
+acetylcholine system.
+The acetylcholine system
+and the focus that it brings
+is available, as I mentioned,
+through pharmacology, but also
+through these
+behavioral practices.
+And the behavioral
+practices that
+are anchored in
+visual focus are going
+to be the ones that are going to
+allow you to develop great depth
+and duration of focus.
+So let's think about
+visual focus for a second.
+When we focus on something
+visually, we have two options.
+We can either look at a
+very small region of space
+with a lot of detail
+and a lot of precision,
+or we can dilate
+our gaze and we can
+see big pieces of visual
+space with very little detail.
+It's a trade-off.
+We can't look at everything
+at high resolution.
+This is why we have these.
+The pupil more or less
+relates to the fovea
+of the eye, which is the area
+in which we have the most
+receptors, the highest
+density of receptors
+that perceive light.
+And so our acuity is
+much better in the center
+of our visual field
+than in our periphery.
+When we focus our eyes,
+we do a couple of things.
+First of all, we tend
+to do that in the center
+of our visual field,
+and our two eyes
+tend to align in what's
+called a vergence eye movement
+towards a common point.
+The other thing that happens
+is the lens of our eye moves,
+so that our brain,
+now, no longer sees
+the entire visual
+world, but is seeing
+a small cone of visual imagery.
+That small cone
+of visual imagery,
+or soda straw view of the world,
+has much higher acuity, higher
+resolution, than if I were
+to look at everything.
+Now you say, of course,
+this makes perfect sense.
+But that's about visual
+attention, not mental attention.
+Well, it turns out
+that focus in the brain
+is anchored to
+our visual system.
+I'll talk about blind
+people in a moment.
+But assuming that
+somebody is sighted,
+the key is to learn how to
+focus better visually if you
+want to bring about higher
+levels of cognitive or mental
+focus.
+When we move our eyes
+slightly inward--
+maybe you can tell that I'm
+doing this-- like so, basically
+shortening or making the
+interpupillary distance,
+as it's called, smaller,
+two things happen.
+Not only do we develop a smaller
+visual window into the world,
+but we activate a set
+of neurons in our brain
+stem that trigger the release
+of both norepinephrine,
+epinephrine, and acetylcholine.
+Norepinephrine is kind of
+similar to epinephrine.
+So in other words,
+when our eyes are
+relaxed in our head,
+when we're just
+kind of looking at our
+entire visual environment,
+moving our head around,
+moving through space,
+we're in optic flow,
+things moving past us,
+we're sitting still, we're
+looking broadly at our space,
+we're relaxed.
+When our eyes move
+slightly inward
+toward a particular
+visual target,
+our visual world shrinks, our
+level of visual focus goes up,
+and we know that this relates
+to the release of acetylcholine
+and epinephrine at
+the relevant sites
+in the brain for plasticity.
+Now, what this means is that if
+you have a hard time focusing
+your mind for sake of
+reading or for listening,
+you need to practice--
+and you can practice--
+focusing your visual system.
+Now, this works
+best if you practice
+focusing your visual system
+at the precise distance
+from the work that you intend
+to do for sake of plasticity.
+So how would this look
+in the real world?
+Let's say I am trying to
+concentrate on something related
+to, I don't know, science.
+I'm reading a science paper
+and I'm having a hard time.
+It's not absorbing.
+Spending just 60 to 120 seconds
+focusing my visual attention
+on a small window of my screen,
+meaning just on my screen
+with nothing on it,
+but bringing my eyes
+to that particular
+location increases not just
+my visual acuity
+for that location,
+but it brings about an
+increase in activity
+in a bunch of other
+brain areas that
+are associated with gathering
+information from this location.
+So, put simply, if you want to
+improve your ability to focus,
+practice visual focus.
+Now, you may ask, well,
+what about the experiment
+where people were feeling
+this rotating drum
+or listening to
+the auditory cue?
+That does involve vision at all.
+Ah.
+If you look at people
+who are learning things
+with their auditory system, they
+will often close their eyes.
+And that's not a coincidence.
+If somebody is
+listening very hard,
+please don't ask them to
+look you directly in the eye
+while also asking that
+they listen to you.
+That's actually one
+of the worst ways
+to get somebody
+to listen to you.
+If you say, now listen to
+me and look me in the eye,
+the visual system will take over
+and they'll see your mouth move,
+but they're going to hear their
+thoughts more than they're going
+to hear what you're saying.
+Closing the eyes is
+one of the best ways
+to create a cone of
+auditory attention.
+And this is what low-vision
+or no-vision folks do.
+They have tremendous capacity
+to focus their attention
+in particular locations.
+And for most people,
+vision is the primary way
+to train up this focus ability
+and these cones of attention.
+So you absolutely have
+to focus on the thing
+that you're trying
+to learn, and you
+will feel some agitation
+because of the epinephrine
+in your system.
+If you're feeling agitation
+and it's challenging to focus
+and you're feeling like
+you're not doing it right,
+chances are you're
+doing it right.
+So once you get this
+epinephrine, this alertness,
+you get the acetylcholine
+released and you
+can focus your attention, then
+the question is, for how long?
+And in an earlier
+podcast, I talked
+about these ultradian cycles
+that last about 90 minutes.
+The typical learning bout
+should be about 90 minutes.
+I think that learning bout will
+no doubt include 5 to 10 minutes
+of a warm-up period.
+I think everyone
+should give themselves
+permission to not
+be fully focused
+in the early part of that
+bout, but that in the middle
+of that bout for the
+middle hour or so,
+you should be able to maintain
+focus for about an hour or so.
+So that, for me, means
+eliminating distractions.
+That means turning
+off the Wi-Fi.
+I put my phone in
+the other room.
+I encourage you to
+try experiencing
+what it is to be completely
+immersed in an activity
+where you feel the agitation
+that your attention is drifting,
+but you continually
+bring it back.
+And that's an important point,
+which is that attention drifts,
+but we have to re-anchor it.
+We have to keep
+grabbing it back.
+And the way to do that,
+if you're sighted,
+is with your eyes, that as your
+attention drifts and you look
+away, you want to
+try and literally
+maintain visual
+focus on the thing
+that you're trying to learn.
+That's the trigger
+for plasticity.
+But the real secret is
+that neuroplasticity
+doesn't occur
+during wakefulness,
+it occurs during sleep.
+We now know that if you
+focus very hard on something
+for about 90 minutes
+or so, maybe you even
+do several bouts
+of that per day,
+if you can do that--
+some people can.
+Some people can only do one
+focus bout of learning--
+that night and the following
+nights while you sleep,
+the neural circuits that were
+highlighted, if you will,
+with acetylcholine
+transmission, will strengthen.
+And other ones
+will be lost, which
+is wonderful because that's
+the essence of plasticity.
+And what it means is
+that when you eventually
+wake up a couple of
+days or a week later,
+you will have acquired
+the knowledge forever,
+unless you go through some
+process to actively unlearn it.
+So mastering sleep
+is key in order
+to reinforce the
+learning that occurs.
+But let's say you get a
+really poor night of sleep
+after a bout of learning.
+Chances are, if you sleep the
+next night or the following
+night, that learning will occur.
+There's a stamp in the brain
+where this acetylcholine was
+released.
+It actually marks those
+synapses neurochemically and
+metabolically so that
+those synapses are more
+biased to change.
+Now, if you don't ever
+get that deep sleep,
+then you probably won't
+get those changes.
+There is also a way
+in which you can
+bypass the need for
+deep sleep, at least
+partially, by engaging in what
+I call non-sleep deep rest,
+these NSDR protocols.
+But I just want to discuss
+the science of this.
+There was a paper
+that was published
+in Cell Reports last year that
+shows that if people did--
+it was a spatial memory task,
+actually quite difficult one,
+where they had to remember the
+sequence of lights lighting up.
+And if there were just
+two or three lights
+in a particular
+sequence, it's easy.
+But as you get up to 15
+or 16 lights and numbers
+in the sequence, it actually
+gets quite challenging.
+If immediately after-- and
+it was immediately after
+the learning, the actual
+performance of this task,
+people took a 20-minute
+non-sleep deep-rest protocol
+or took a shallow nap, so lying
+down, feet slightly elevated,
+perhaps, just closing their
+eyes, no sensory input,
+the rates of learning were
+significantly higher for that
+information than were they to
+just had a good night's sleep
+the following night.
+So you can actually
+accelerate learning
+with these NSDR protocols or
+with brief naps, 90 minutes
+or less.
+For many people,
+letting the mind drift,
+where it's not
+organized in thought,
+after a period of very
+deliberate, focused effort,
+is the best way to accelerate
+learning and depth of learning.
+I want to synthesize
+some of the information
+that we've covered up until now.
+Today, I want to make sure
+that these key elements that
+form the backbone
+of neuroplasticity
+are really embedded
+in people's minds.
+First of all, plasticity
+occurs throughout the lifespan.
+If you want to learn as an
+adult, you have to be alert.
+It might seem so obvious,
+but I think a lot of people
+don't think about when in their
+24-hour cycle they're most
+alert.
+Just ask yourself
+when during the day
+do you typically tend
+to be most alert?
+That will afford
+you an advantage
+in learning specific things
+during that period of time.
+So don't give up
+that period of time
+for things that are meaningless,
+useless, or not aligned
+with your goals.
+That epinephrine released
+from your brain stem is going
+to occur more readily
+at particular phases
+of your 24-hour
+cycle than others--
+during the waking
+phase, of course.
+You should know when those are.
+Increasing acetylcholine can be
+accomplished pharmacologically
+through nicotine.
+However, there are certain
+dangers for many people
+to do that, as well as a cost.
+financial cost.
+Learning how to engage
+the cholinergic system
+through the use of
+the visual system.
+Practicing; how long
+can you maintain focus
+with blinks as you need them.
+But how long can you maintain
+visual focus on a target,
+just on a piece of paper set
+a few feet away in the room,
+or at the level of
+your computer screen.
+These are actually
+things that people
+do in communities where
+high levels of visual focus
+are necessary.
+What we're really
+talking about here
+is trying to harness the
+mechanisms of attention
+and get better at
+paying attention.
+You may want to do that with
+your auditory system, not
+with your visual system,
+either because you're
+low-vision or no-vision,
+or because you're
+trying to learn something
+that relates more to sounds.
+You should also ask
+yourself whether or not
+you're trying to focus too much
+for too long during the day.
+I know some very
+high-performing individuals,
+very high-performing in
+a variety of contexts,
+and none of them are
+focused all day long.
+Many of them take
+walks down the hallway,
+sometimes mumbling to themselves
+or not paying attention
+to anything else.
+They go for bike
+rides, they take walks.
+They are not trying to engage
+their mind at maximum focus
+all the time.
+Very few people do that because
+we learn best in these 90-minute
+bouts inside of one of
+these ultradian cycles.
+And I should repeat again that
+within that 90-minute cycle,
+you should not expect yourself
+to focus for the entire period
+of one 90-minute cycle.
+The beginning and end are
+going to be a little bit
+flickering in and out of focus.
+How do you know when one of
+these 90-minute cycles is
+starting?
+Well, typically when you wake
+up is the beginning of the first
+90-minute cycle, but it's
+not down to the minute.
+You'll be able to tap into your
+sense of these 90-minute cycles
+as you start to engage in
+these learning practices,
+should you choose.
+And then, of course, getting
+some non-sleep deep rest
+or just deliberate
+disengagement,
+such as walking or
+running or just sitting,
+eyes closed or eyes open, kind
+of mindlessly, it might seem,
+in a chair.
+Just letting your
+thoughts move around
+after a learning
+bout will accelerate
+the rate of plasticity.
+And then, of course, deep sleep.
+Many of you have
+very graciously asked
+how you can help support
+the Huberman Lab podcast.
+The best way to do that is
+to subscribe on YouTube.
+You might want to also hit
+the Notification button
+so that you don't miss
+any upcoming episodes.
+Leave a comment as well.
+If you go to Apple, you can
+give us a five-star rating,
+and there's a place there where
+also you can leave a comment.
+And if you prefer to
+listen on Spotify,
+subscribe and
+download on Spotify.
+In addition, it's always helpful
+if you recommend the podcast
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+and others who you think
+might benefit from
+the information.
+And as well, please
+check out our sponsors.
+That's a great way to help us.
+Thanks so much for your time
+and attention, and as always,
+thank you for your
+interest in science.
+[MUSIC PLAYING]

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+Step number one is suffering.
+Okay.
+We all have that.
+You may have never felt
+good in your life, listener,
+but you have suffered.
+That's for sure.
+That's the first noble truth of Buddhism.
+There is suffering in this life.
+Pay attention to your
+suffering without fighting it.
+Allow it to be there.
+I did this meditation.
+If something's physically
+painful or emotionally painful,
+I used to say, let go, let go to myself.
+Didn't work.
+So one day I said, all
+right, you can stay.
+Let it stay.
+And so I do a let stay meditation.
+If there's pain, let it stay.
+If there's sorrow, let it stay.
+And as soon as I let it
+stay, it begins to change.
+So, first step is suffering,
+second step is compassionate
+attention to one's suffering
+with no resistance.
+And the third step is
+to follow the compassion
+that is naturally being
+directed toward that suffering
+until you find yourself centered in it.
+And that is a huge relief.
+And I've done this in
+massive physical pain.

Data/transcripts/6RZbGrq9BxE_20241225194306.txt

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+When it comes to reducing BPA exposure
+and some of these forever
+chemicals that you mentioned,
+seems like reducing fluid intake
+from plastic vessels
+is going to be number one.
+The primary source of BPA
+is in the lining of cans.
+So any drink, or soup, or
+anything that comes in a can.
+Any can, all cans?
+Any can, unless it's a high-end,
+you know, elite company
+that's made the change from
+BPA to an alternative lining,
+and they'll say that.
+So, and by the way,
+BPA has some bad relatives
+such as BPS and BPF.
+And maybe you'd be
+interested in this story.
+So when it came out
+that BPA was estrogenic,
+which is what it is.
+And by the way,
+it's kind of the evil twin of
+phthalates because phthalates
+are anti-androgenic and BPA is estrogenic,
+and phthalates make plastic
+soft and BPA makes plastic hard.
+You don't want either, okay.
+So when this came out
+that this was a bad thing,
+the manufacturer started selling
+things that say BPA-free.
+I'm sure you've seen that.
+The trick is that instead
+of BPA, they use BPS.
+Sneaky rats.
+And BPF.
+That's so sneaky.
+And these are chemicals,
+these are lookalikes,
+they're analogs, and
+they're just as harmful.

Data/transcripts/6YLdlK2hYnw_20241225194328.txt

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+I don't want to use the word happy.
+I want to see you joyful.
+Joy.
+Joy is more important than happiness.
+Joy is a state of mind.
+Happiness is okay,
+yeah, I said a list of
+things I want to have,
+and I have them, and I smile a lot.
+Joyfulness is this sense
+of being in yourself,
+and I would like that.
+I would personally like
+to see you enjoying today
+and this weekend, and that's it,
+and everything else is
+going to come to you.