LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at Plenary in Melbourne
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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, the Huberman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the Plenary Theatre in Melbourne, Australia.
The event was called The Brain-Body Contract and featured a lecture, followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience.
We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend.
So what follows is the question and answer session from the Plenary Theatre in Melbourne, Australia.
I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are 8Sleep and AG1.
8Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
Now one of the key aspects to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment.
And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees.
And in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.
Eight Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and throughout the night and when you wake up in the morning.
I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly three years now, and it has dramatically improved my sleep.
If you'd like to try 8sleep,
you can go to 8sleep.com slash Huberman
to save $150 off their pod three cover.
8sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK,
select countries in the EU and Australia.
Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman.
The other live event sponsor, AG1,
is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink
that also contains adaptogens
and other critical micronutrients.
I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012,
so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event.
reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it every day, once or twice a day,
is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas for vitamins and minerals. And it ensures that
I get enough prebiotic and probiotic to support gut health. Now, of course, I strive to consume
healthy whole foods for the majority of my nutritional intake every single day. But there
are a number of things in AG1, including specific micronutrients that are hard to get from whole
foods or at least in sufficient quantities. So AG1 allows me to get the vitamins and minerals that I
need probiotics, prebiotics, the adaptogens, and critical micronutrients. To try AG1, go to
drinkag1.com slash Huberman, and you'll get a year's supply of vitamin D3, K2, and five free travel
packs of AG1. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman. And now for the question and answer
session from Melbourne, Australia.
Hey, Dr. Huberman.
Some of your listeners are in or approaching our 50s.
Okay.
Same.
And are thinking of doing all we can to prevent dementia.
Same.
Do you have any additional thoughts or protocols or research we could focus on?
Yes.
So for the next two and a half hours.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm not known for being succinct.
I didn't go over too much earlier.
So, okay, so ground truths.
So let's start with ground truths, and then let's move to emerging.
Let's maybe get to a little bit of speculation.
Let's avoid conjecture.
Ground truths.
Blood circulation is good for the brain, perhaps most important for the brain.
So anything that is good for cardiovascular health is going to be good for brain health.
It's not the only thing, but that's true.
We know this.
So you hear these days a lot about zone two cardio.
I don't know who gets credit for that.
Peter Attia talks a lot about it.
I talk a lot about it.
None of us invented the notion.
But, you know, 150, probably more like 180 to 200 minutes of so-called zone two cardio per week is good numbers to shoot for.
Some of us get more.
Some of us less.
What is zone two cardio?
Zone two cardio is cardiovascular exercise.
Could be running.
Could be swimming.
Could be walking, depending on your level of fitness, which you can just barely maintain
a conversation.
Were you to push any harder or faster, you wouldn't be able to complete your sentences
with much ease.
Okay?
So is this zone two cardio for me?
No.
But if I were to jog and try and have a conversation, at some point I would have a little bit of
a hard time. That's zone two cardio. So we know that's true. Why? Well, it seems to do a number
of things at the level of release of growth factors, brain-derived neurotrophic factor,
at the level of different, let's call them, I realize the immunologists are going to roll their
eyes, but anti-inflammatory cytokines and things of that sort. You also have inflammatory cytokines
sort. It does seem that increasing blood flow in and through the brain is important for brain health,
which is not all that surprising. There are species of animals that spend part of their
life swimming about, and then when they stop and stick to a rock or something, a good portion of
the nervous system actually degenerates. But neurodegeneration and dementia are not necessarily
the same thing, and this is something that we don't often hear about. The age-related decline
in memory capacity, in particular working memory, can be related to reductions in dopamine
transmission in the brain, so things that increase the catecholamines that we talked about earlier.
This could be pharmacology, of course, but it doesn't have to be pharmacology. It could be
anything that increases the catecholamines, and we talk about this on the podcast. We have
zero-cost protocols that you don't have to sign up for. You can just go to our website and go to
dopamine regulation, and it will list out ways to increase the catecholamines through zero-cost
and very low-cost ways. They are known to improve working memory. Working memory, of course,
the capacity to maintain a string of numbers or information for sake of kind of immediate goals,
but not information that's passed to the longer-term memory. So that's different than
neurodegeneration, that's simply reductions in the amount of neuromodulators like dopamine
being deployed as we get older. So modulating dopamine through healthy, ideally, means,
but I do think we are going to see an increase in the use of selective pharmacology for this
purpose, and here I'm not recommending anyone do drugs or take drugs, prescription or otherwise,
but it does seem that certain compounds like nicotine believe it or not even though it
increases vasoconstriction and blood pressure can offset some of the age-related reductions
in dopaminergic and cholinergic acetylcholine cholinergic transmission and you know you don't
want to smoke vape dip or snuff I'm not even recommending people take Zyn patches but I think
there is some use cases for nicotine, provided you're doing it with the, you know, your physician
knows and you're not getting into blood pressure, dangerous blood pressure range, or supplementation
with choline donors and things of that sort to increase acetylcholine and dopamine. Some people
are starting to take things like modafinil and Adderall in older age. But keep in mind, these are
not modafinil, but Adderall, Vyvanse, et cetera. These are amphetamines. They're amphetamines. So
I'm not recommending this. But I think that's where we're headed. I think you're going to see a number of
different cognitive enhancers that are used to offset some age-related cognitive decline,
aka dementia. Now, in terms of, so we're going zone two cardio to like prescription drugs,
we're kind of bracketing here, and then behavioral protocols that can increase
neuromodulators, such as the catecholamines. Now, in terms of other things that can perhaps
decrease the likelihood of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia as it relates to neurodegeneration.
Currently, there are a lot of do nots. Don't hit your head too hard. If you hit it really hard,
don't hit it again hard. The so-called two-hit model, literally. And we think of football or,
I guess, rugby. That's a sport you guys play down here where they use the head as a battering ram.
I've seen this right
big necks on those kids and then
just boom and they
but the problem is not
necessarily just rugby
or American football
I was told that
someone told me I had to shout out an Australian football
team and I know it's a setup
so I'm not going to do it
when you're in Melbourne tomorrow you got to say that
your favorite team is blank and I'm like
this feels really dangerous
so I'm not going to do it
going to do it. But what's that? Do it. I can't remember the name of the team.
But I watched the document. But I still don't understand the rugby thing. Do they use the
guy's head or gal's head as a battering ram? Because they used to play at UCSD outside my
lab. We had this big field and my bulldog loved watching. He was like, this sport makes sense.
were just like, run. And then I never understood it. But anyway, what's that?
Got it. I need a translator. Sorry.
So I need a translator. But I love the enthusiasm.
Yeah. So we think about head injuries and brain injuries, mostly in the context of sport,
Most of them occur construction workers, car accidents, TBI, things of that sort.
There's some interesting data on hyperbaric chambers.
This is getting really into the high-level stuff here, meaning most people don't have access to them.
I look forward to learning more.
These are playing with different concentrations of oxygen in a little microenvironment for traumatic brain injury and neurodegeneration.
Do I think in five years that everyone's going to be sitting in hyperbaric chambers in order to offset neuron loss?
Probably not.
I think it's not cost effective.
But I will say that most of the things that are good for the body are good for the brain.
Keeping kind of anything that plaques the arteries, capillaries, and veins of the brain
because it's so heavily vascularized, minimal.
And minding those neuromodulators.
Obviously, drugs of abuse like methamphetamine can deplete dopamine neurons.
The data on MDMA, by the way, I don't know, there's drug enforcement in the room.
The data, you know where they have most of the safety data or lack of safety data in some cases on MDMA?
Keep in mind, MDMA ecstasy is methylene-dioxymethamphetamine.
Methamphetamine, we know, causes neurodegeneration.
No question.
It also causes bad teeth.
Do you know how?
Do you know how?
It turns people into mouth breathers.
Dry mouth and the teeth degenerate.
Yeah, we have an episode on oral health coming out.
This is real.
That's actually why the teeth degenerate.
It's from excessive dry, and it limits saliva production.
Saliva is very important for a remineralization of the teeth.
Shout out to the dentist in the house.
So the thing about MDMA is interesting because it turns out that MDMA,
because it also increases dopamine just as methamphetamine does,
remember MDMA, methylene-dioxymethamphetamine,
but also huge increases in serotonin seem to be most of the effect of MDMA,
the kind of empathogenic effect.
There was a study done of people from the LDS, Latter-day Saints,
sometimes referred to as Mormons.
Why was a study on MDMA done with people from the LDS community?
And I don't want to imply that everyone from the LDS community does MDMA, but why?
They're a very interesting test population because they don't do other drugs.
But for some reason, MDMA is not on the no-fly list.
So it's a beautiful paper in which they took people who had only done as any drug, not even taking caffeine, right,
either once or semi-frequent or very frequent use of MDMA, and they did a bunch of cognitive testing.
And there were some attention issues when people had taken over what was a couple hundred doses of MDMA at the 80 milligram dose or more.
but it doesn't seem to be much neurodegeneration, which is not to say that it's all safe. There is
an abuse and addictive potential there. The biggest issue seems to be contamination of
batches. We have a fentanyl issue in the U.S. I don't know if it's happening down here as well.
Very concerning. Okay, so the point here is that I think very soon you're going to hear about
drugs, prescription drugs and supplements to augment the release of neuromodulators,
not for sake of empathogenic states or psychedelic states, but to try and keep those dopaminergic
neurons online to offset dementia, because that's what the question's about.
In fact, there's a Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist at Columbia University, whose name I won't
tell you, or maybe I will, who, when I went to visit his office, chewed no fewer than
five pieces of Nicorette in the course of a half an hour.
And I'm like, what's going on?
He's got a Nobel Prize, but this looks kind of pathologic.
And I said, why?
And he said, well, the nicotine is to offset age-related loss of dopaminergic and cholinergic neurons.
I thought, really?
He's like, yeah, when I quit smoking because I didn't want lung cancer.
But this is him.
This is anecdata.
I'm not suggesting you do this.
§02Transcript — part 2
I think there are a number of things that we can do.
But protect those neuromodulators.
Keep perfusion, that is, blood flow to the brain strong.
There's a case for cardiovascular exercise.
And it does seem, it really does seem that exercise that engages the neuromuscular connections more than cardiovascular exercise, so not just resistance training, but anything that involves coordinated bodily training, learning new physical skills, dance, etc., really does seem to offset some of the loss of cognitive functioning in adults.
So it's kind of interesting that physical exercise is great for cognition, and probably cognition may or may not help physical ability.
But one probably can imagine why there's a bidirectional relationship there.
Your nervous system doesn't really distinguish between physical and cognitive.
It's all working as a bunch of functional units.
I could go on and on about this, but hopefully that at least gets your gears turning around,
some things that perhaps you've heard about and some things that you haven't.
We'll do an episode on dementia and offsetting dementia in order to get into some of the fine details.
Okay.
Can we increase our willpower just like training a muscle group with your research into the AMCC?
Ooh, I'm so glad that you mentioned the AMCC.
I think of all the new areas of neuroscience research that are out there,
I think the anterior mid-cingulate cortex is one of the most interesting structures and areas of research nowadays.
you know I think I if I have my way then not only will most people have heard of dopamine and the
amygdala I guess you need a Star Wars character named after your brain part um isn't there one
right I only saw the first three I'm of that generation but isn't there an amygdala or
something yeah right don't leave me hanging here is there or not if I'm wrong just say no okay
Anyway, the amygdala is a brain structure that is involved in threat detection and novelty detection, not just threats.
The anterior mid-cingulate cortex is an area of the brain that we know is activated.
Well, let me tell you the best experiment.
The best experiment was done, in my opinion, by a neurosurgeon at Stanford, Joe Parvizi.
He's probing around in people's brains.
skull missing. He's stimulating in the brain. He's asking them questions. How do you feel?
What's going on? How do you feel? What's going on? And he's got this electrode in the anterior
mid-cingulate cortex. And the patient says, I feel like something really bad's going to happen.
Like a storm's coming. It's like, okay, well, we can stop stimulating. He's like, no,
I'm going into the storm. Oh, that's interesting. Stimulate a little bit further back just by a
millimeter or so, completely different subjective experience for the patient. That's interesting.
Get a different patient in there, map to the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, stimulate,
and the person says, I feel like I'm going to get out of my chair and I'm going to do something hard.
Wild, right? This is prior to any knowledge of what the anterior mid-cingulate cortex is doing.
Make a long story short, people who successfully overcome a physical challenge, a cognitive
challenge, that learn a new skill, that successful dieters, I don't really like that term,
their anterior mid-cingulate cortex grows or becomes more active under conditions that
challenge the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. So this brain region seems to be the brain region
that puts us in a forward center of mass, physically and sort of cognitively and emotionally.
I often like to think that the nervous system, as sophisticated as it is, and psychology as
as it is, excuse me, can be binned into kind of three categories. Things that we like to eat or
don't like to eat or can kind of be binned into yum, yuck, or meh. That's kind of what the nervous
system has to do because ultimately you have to decide, do I want to go toward it? So-called
appetitive behavior. Do I want to get away from it? I don't want to do nothing. People were either
like yum, or in some cases yum, yuck, or in some cases like, or like meh, right? Yum, yuck, meh.
Yum, yum, meh. This is the sort of three tributaries that we have the option of moving
down, not moving down, or moving away from. So the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, because it has
inputs from so many different areas and outputs to so many different areas, it can access
circuits related to dopamine, norepinephrine, it can access circuits related to memory and context.
It's a hub.
It's a hub that, by all views, through all lenses of the existing research, suggests
that any time we do something truly challenging, in particular things that we do not enjoy,
this is key, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex undergoes some sort of plasticity.
everything's in the research data now point to the idea that the anterior mid-cingulate cortex is
the seat of so-called willpower which is linked to concepts like tenacity or grit and etc and what
i love about this research is that it comes from a bunch of different areas human brain imaging
brain stimulation etc here's what i don't like about the reality but that we all need to accept
which is that the anterior mid-cingulate cortex is modifiable by experience,
by leaning into challenges at any stage of life.
That's great. We talked about that earlier, plasticity.
But lest we forget, plasticity goes in the other direction too.
It seems that when we don't engage in challenges,
that the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, it doesn't atrophy,
but it undergoes sort of a downshift in activation.
Now, here's what's really, really interesting
and relates to the previous question.
The anterior mid-cingulate cortex
seems to be especially active at baseline
and available for plasticity
in what are called super-agers.
Super-agers, you know, we've all heard of blue zones.
The super-agers are these people
who don't just exist in blue zones.
They're spread around the world.
people that seem, at least by cognitive measures
and other physiological measures of the body,
seem to age extremely slowly.
So they shouldn't really be called super-agers, right?
They should be called super-non-agers.
Anyway, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex
seems to be hyperactive in these super-agers,
as they're called.
And so it seems that not only do they maintain
cognitive function later in life,
to their regular engagement in challenging things. So remember for so many years we heard, okay, like
nuns don't get dementia, and then there's all sorts of things you can imagine could be related to that.
And then we're thinking, oh, maybe it's crossword puzzles. Maybe it's crossword puzzles. Maybe it's
hanging out with other people. And then you know that person down the street and she's cycling on
the weekends like crazy and she's 90 and she looks like she's 50 and she's sharp as a tack.
it's probably leaning into challenge on a regular basis.
Leaning into challenge on a regular basis
as opposed to one specific cognitive or physical thing
which means that if you love cycling
or you love the cold plunge
or you love a certain form of exercise
it's probably not doing that much
for your anterior mid-cingulate cortex.
But these super-agers also live longer.
And so there is this notion
that because the anterior mid-cingulate cortex
has connectivity to a lot of areas of the brain and body
linked to the will to live. And this is being examined now in so-called terminal cancer patients,
so-called, you know, terminal cases. I don't like the language because there are these amazing
instances and physicians and oncologists have known this for a long time that when people decide
they're going to fight cancer, they don't always win that fight, unfortunately. But oftentimes,
Sometimes it's the people who insist on fighting it psychologically that they won't give in, that end up still living more months, more years, and in some cases putting the cancer into remission with, of course, other tools, right?
I'm not saying you shouldn't use other tools to combat cancer.
It's a very interesting structure.
It relates to the question on dementia.
Hopefully that was informative.
Julian, thank you.
How would you recommend shift workers minimize the effects of disruption to their circadian rhythm?
Oh, this is so important. You know why?
Because right now, 9.40 p.m., we're kind of doing shift work right now.
Most people are on a shift work schedule now in the world.
This is true.
We think of shift workers as only the people who are up in the middle of the night and sleeping during the day,
but most people are doing shift work.
The criteria for shift work is at least a two-hour variance, at least in the U.S.,
A two-hour variance in the sleep-wake cycle, more than three nights a week.
Anyone here go to sleep every night, same time, wake up every morning, same time, never
stay up later than that, more than two nights a week?
Okay.
Most people are doing shift work nowadays.
They're just on their phone or they're on their computer.
And I'm not going to argue that's, you know, you shouldn't.
Many times that's me as well.
So here's what we do know.
And I could, we did a whole episode on shift work, but I'll try and summarize some of the
key points.
you want to have your cortisol elevated early in the day and then subside across the day.
That's the ideal pattern of cortisol release. Cortisol is a great thing when it's high and
then tapers off from early day into the later day. It's a bad thing if that cortisol peak is
shifted late. That cortisol peak is coming every 24 hours. You don't have a choice.
Question is, is it going to be early day or is it going to be late day? Late day cortisol
peaks are associated with depression and anxiety.
This was done by my colleague David Spiegel
and the great Robert Sapolsky at Stanford.
I study about that.
Robert, another great beard.
Amazing.
And I always thought it was to blend in with the species that he studies
because he was like the baboon guy.
You know, I haven't quite figured out how to master that one.
You know, like the cuttlefish look.
But I'm working on it, working on it.
Maybe I just have to sit down.
Never mind.
There's a story about, you remember the earlier story?
The main, anyway, the cuttlefish, anyway, never mind.
Again, this is why I don't like to speak too late in the day.
I get myself into trouble.
But the point here is that having that cortisol peak early in the day sets you up for mood
focus and alertness immune system function in a really great way. Shift workers have a serious
problem, which is that late peaks in cortisol are kind of paramount in all forms of shift work.
And so what you need to do is to put yourself ideally in lighting conditions that limit the
amount of blue light coming in at night or when you're doing that shift work. Now, you have to do
your work. And I think in the next two years, if I have my way, one idea that I'd like to embed in
people's minds is, you know, we hear a lot now about how hyper-processed foods and highly processed
foods are bad for us, sort of empty calories. What are empty calories? It's foods that are very
calorie-dense but micronutrient-poor, right? That's what it really is. It's also the quality
of food issues, and people get, you know, like, let's please not have the seed oil debate. It's
like people get really into this and it's unclear to me still. And okay. But we sort of think of
empty calories like alcohol, sugar, et cetera. Calorie dense, micronutrient poor. Light can be
viewed in much the same way. These days we live in a very blue light rich world. A lot of blue
light. So shortwave length light, blue light, UV light. And by the way, in sunlight, especially
down here. It's very UV rich blue, which is great during the day, especially when it's offset or,
or sorry, when it includes long wave length light, full spectrum light, by the way, for everyone
that's obsessed with red light and I love red light and red light therapies. Remember the best
source of red light is the sun. It's full spectrum light. It includes red. It's just, there's a bunch
of other stuff in there too. So it doesn't look like a red light panel. Um, that said, if you are
things you can do that's been shown to reduce cortisol levels at night while you're doing that
shift work is to filter out some of the blue. So that is a use case for blue blockers or even for
glasses that put you into more reddish conditions, provided you can still do the work you need to do
safely. You will see a dramatic reduction in cortisol under those conditions. This blue and
UV pathway picked up by a certain set of neurons in the eye, the intrinsically photosensitive
melanopsin cells, et cetera, is a real thing, and it's designed to activate you. This is why
so-called seasonal affective disorder lamps, SAD lamps, are basically bright blue-white-ish light.
So when you're doing that shift work, if you can get into red or orange or amber light conditions,
that's great. You can do this very inexpensively, by the way, by just getting some party lights.
red light. This is not talking about red light panels. The other thing, of course, is when you
get back to your non-work environment, you need to do some work to think about when is best to sleep,
when is not best to sleep. You know, is it best to sleep all day and be up all night or get that
sunlight in the morning? And I talk about that in the shift work episode. And I'm tempted to go down
that rabbit hole now, but I would just encourage you to take a look at that episode. And I'll just
cue you all to a resource. The HubermanLab.com website allows you, thanks to our wonderful
engineers, to put in multiple topics. So you could say shift work red light or shift work
dopamine or shift work sunlight, and it will take you to the exact timestamps across all the episodes
where those specific topics occur. It's all zero cost, as opposed to having to go and peruse all
these different episodes. A lot of people have said, why not shorter episodes? It's like, well,
idea was to create a library of information that now AI is and better engineering of websites can
allow you to just pull the relevant information just like you would a book. Well, I used to go
with a library. For those of you like me, old enough to remember, you actually took this thing
called a book off a shelf. You Xerox copied it. In any event, it was very archaic and very expensive
and you'd always get the margin of the book in the middle, like the spine. It sucked. Now you can go
to the website and just get that information. And then we also just launched an ai.hubermanlab.com
website. Again, it's all zero cost. You can just say, hey, what should I do for shift work?
But I wanted to come here tonight, so I didn't tell you that until you got here. No, I'm just
kidding. I'm just kidding. Okay. And there are a few other tools about adjusting eating schedules
§03Transcript — part 3
and whatnot for shift work, but hopefully that gets you going, Julia. Thank you.
What's the difference between NSDR and meditation?
Thank you for this question.
I am a huge, huge, huge believer and proponent and practitioner of NSDR,
non-sleep deep rest.
What is non-sleep deep rest?
Well, to be fair, yoga nidra, which translates to yoga sleep,
is a thousand-year-old practice,
thousands of years old practice in which you lie completely still,
keep the mind awake.
You're not thinking in a structured way.
It's more of a body scan, directed relaxation, et cetera.
I discovered this in 2015 when I was doing some research for a book that I still can't
manage to seem to finish on trauma and addiction.
And I have a friend, very talented trauma therapist, who's managed to help people with
all sorts of addictions.
He'll be on the podcast in the not too distant future.
And I went down to this clinic in Florida and everyone there spent the first hour of
the day doing yoga nidra.
This is pretty wacky. I was still in my pure science, quote unquote, pure scientist, naive scientist lens.
And I thought, what is this about? And he said, well, you know, so much of addiction is about an
inability to regulate impulses, to deal with agitation, especially in the early days of trying
to get sober or being sober. And it just helps people learn to self-direct their nervous system
in terms of self-directed relaxation. It also seems to help with their sleep. It also has these
components about time and sort of, because he said, you know, it's kind of interesting. If you
take a step back, you know, if you can tolerate craving for a second, you just did it, so why
couldn't you do it for another second? If I can do it for another second, another second,
it's not as if it necessarily increases linearly or over time. So, you know, what's going on? And
so, again, sort of our ability to realize and regulate our states across time and to realize
there's this funny thing where when we feel terrible,
we think it's going to go on forever.
And when we're happy, we're like certain it's going to stop.
There's like kind of asymmetry in our nervous system
that we don't understand.
We showed, he started talking about yoga nidra
really seems to help addicts recover and stay sober.
They do it regularly.
I thought, well, this is cool.
What is it?
I'm a neuroscientist.
We started studying it in my laboratory.
We discovered that the brain goes into these states
during yoga nidra that are similar to sleep.
Body still, mind alert.
And that seems to be very beneficial,
maybe even accelerates neuroplasticity and learning,
and indeed there's evidence for that,
and there's evidence that yoga nidra,
from a laboratory out of Scandinavia,
not my laboratory showing that it can increase dopamine levels
in the striatum, basal ganglia, by up to 60%
using human positron emission tomography imaging.
So we're talking about how to increase dopamine
through non-pharmacologic means.
something about body still, brain active, very powerful way to do that. I made up this term,
this acronym, non-sleep deep rest, because I have tremendous respect for yoga nidra and the yoga
traditions, but I was concerned for a lot of people, unfortunately, when they hear yoga nidra,
it sounds esoteric and they're not going to approach that practice. Also, yoga nidra includes
intentions and some things that are a little bit on the mystical side. And I knew I was going to
and I feel badly about it, but that bad feeling is offset by, I think when you call something
non-sleep deep rest, it tells you what it is, and then more people are likely to come to the
practice, and I felt like it was worth, you know, kind of putting myself, you know, jumping on the
grenade for that one. So, non-sleep deep rest is very effective at restoring cognitive and physical
vigor and can indeed offset some degree of sleep loss. It also gets you better at falling and
staying asleep, and it's very simple and very easy to do, and it's zero cost. And if you want to try
it, you can go onto YouTube and put NSDR in my last name. There's a woman named Kelly Boys, B-O-Y-S,
who has a much more pleasant voice than mine, who does them as well. These are all zero cost
protocols. She's also in the Waking Up app. And there are many of them. Kamini Desai is another
wonderful yoga nidra scripts so you can find these things and they're really about 10 minutes to 20
minutes sometimes 30 minutes long you can do it for an hour but most people won't do that
consistently you don't have to do them every day and they're very very effective at restoring
mental and physical vigor when you're feeling depleted and getting you to be a better sleeper
so i figure that's a zero cost tool that is grounded in good mechanistic science and makes
sense logically, so why not? Meditation, typically, and there are many different forms of meditation,
but if you're, let's just say kind of standard, if there were such a thing, third eye meditation,
closing your eyes, focusing your concentration on a point just sort of at your forehead,
concentrating on your breathing, redirecting your attention to your breathing if your attention
drifts. We know based on work from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at New York University and some work
out of the University of Wisconsin, can improve memory, can improve focus, and does seem to have
some stress offsetting effects. But it's more of a focus exercise as opposed to an energy
replenishing exercise. Now, some people meditate and feel better afterwards. They have more energy,
but then it's sort of like, well, compared to what? I don't think that's the major effect of
meditation. And while we're on these topics, I should just say that self-directed hypnosis of
the sort that my colleague David Spiegel studies is more about solving a particular problem.
So hypnosis is more about engaging neuroplasticity. Remember earlier we said that neuroplasticity in
adulthood can be activated by focus followed by rest. It seems that in the self-directed hypnotic
states, the brain enters kind of pattern of activity in which neuroplasticity can be accessed
because the brain is both focused and relaxed in a particular way, merging that focus and rest state.
And of course, the hypnotic script is not about getting you to do crazy things on stage.
That's stage hypnosis.
But self-directed hypnosis is, for instance, smoking cessation.
By the way, the success with smoking cessation from hypnosis is far greater than the cessation with smoking
from pretty much any other protocol.
But unfortunately, it has the name hypnosis, which makes people think about stuff that people do on stage
wacky. So we need a new name for it. Because unfortunately, names are a problem. Names can
be differentiators as opposed to integrators. When people say, I'm going to hypnotize you,
or you should try hypnosis, people are like, eh. Like, yum, yuck, meh. They're like, yuck.
So by the way, does everyone here remember how you know if you're highly hypnotizable?
Do you know that the Spiegel eye roll test, it's not what teenagers do. David Spiegel and his father,
psychiatrist discovered the clinical application of hypnosis. It's a clinically approved tool.
There's brainstem neurons that cause elevations and alertness and focus, and they're associated
with moving the eyes up. They're brainstem neurons that close the eyelids and essentially
drive the eyes down that are associated with parasympathetic states, which is why you go like
this when you're tired, you're out there, I'm sure. If you are capable of keeping your gaze
upward and closing your eyelids, you score on a particular end of the so-called Spiegel eye roll test,
which makes you highly hypnotizable. Because that state of hypnosis is one in which you're what?
Alert, but very, very relaxed. So if you go to Spiegel's laboratory, they're going to look at
you and they say, look up at the ceiling and then close your eyelids. And if you can still see the
whites of, if they still see the whites of your eyes as your eyelids close, well, then you're in
the highly hypnotizable realm. Kind of interesting, right? There's all nervous system related. And you
can see this stuff is, this is like real clinical tools. Okay. How do we stop ourselves from
mindlessly scrolling on our phones? Hard questions. I didn't look at my watch because I'm bored. I'm
just thinking, how much time do you have? Well, on the way here to Australia, my Rob, who you met
earlier, my friend and podcast producer, he said, okay, guys, everyone's deleting social media from
your phones for the whole trip, the whole trip. And I'm like, I don't know if I can go on this
trip, Rob. No, I'm kidding. We got what we have one guy who's kept it on his phone so that we can
post things. And we continue to. Honestly, I think that's what it takes. If it's social media that
delete and reinstall.
If I'm honest,
a delete and reinstall every day.
Because I think,
and then you have to limit the amount of time.
And one of the members of my podcast team
experienced this.
He said, I just picked up my phone a minute ago
and I went to like hit the Instagram tab
and it wasn't there.
And I know it's not there.
And that's where I say,
yeah, at some point it becomes more compulsive
than addiction.
These are just reflexive behaviors.
It's like walking to the refrigerator.
I could do it every day of my life, all day.
I walk into people's homes and just look in the refrigerator.
I don't even know.
I get into people's cars, I look in the glove box.
I just do this.
I'm kind of like looking around.
I'm not going to steal anything.
But it's like the teenage boy in me.
You know, I just kind of like walk in, I'm going to open your refrigerator.
So I think it gets to the point of reflexive and it's compulsive
and it might be addictive.
but it can't be good when it's like that.
But I think social media can be really useful.
So I think you can set timers.
You can try graying out the screen,
getting rid of the color thing.
There's all this stuff,
but I think if there are particular apps
that you're struggling with,
I would just delete them from your phone
and do a reinstall
because that's enough of a behavioral barrier.
There are enough steps involved,
enough sequencing to put the thing back on there
each day and each time, maybe twice a day, that you're going to vastly reduce your use. To be honest, I think
that's probably the best way to do it. And there are probably people in this audience that are
thinking, this seems crazy. Like, just don't turn it on. Just don't open it. And look, if I was 65
years old, I'd say that too. But it doesn't work that way for certainly the younger generation.
It doesn't. And I know this because I gave a talk at Santa Clara University a few years ago,
and I was talking about limiting social media use and phones.
And this kid came up to me afterwards.
He said, you don't get it.
It's like, you're like, back then I was like 43.
He said, you don't get it.
He said, for you, the phone was a thing
that you like integrated into your like post 90s high school life.
Like you watched The Breakfast Club
or something, I don't know how he knew that movie.
I was like, you're right.
I did watch The Breakfast Club a bunch of times.
and he said but for us it's like life I was like I rolled my eyes and I thought wait no listen I'm
gonna listen because no one knows what it's like to be 16 years old or 24 years old in 2024 unless
you're 16 or 24 like okay here we go listen he said when my phone he said when my phone powers
down, I feel the energy drain out of me. And when it comes back up, I feel life energy come back
into my body. And I thought, oh my goodness, like we are hosed. But that's the reality. And I'm of
the mind, you know, I was a camp counselor. I worked with at-risk kids. I was a wild kid. And
you learn something, especially when you work with kids like me. When I was a teenager, I was a hellion.
is be a channel, not a dam.
You cannot block this system that's emerged.
This is here and it's here to stay.
So I think things like deleting the app
is putting it back on there is the only way to go.
And we have to listen.
I think we have to listen and understand that,
you know, we, after all,
adults created these technologies
and these kids are using them.
And I don't think we're going to see a reversal.
I don't.
So we have to really,
I think that what he said to me,
as scary as it was to me,
the reality. It's part of their life energy. It's part of their connectivity. And we're going to
have to come up with better tools. And I doubt those tools are going to be to the effect of
eliminating it. You could say, unfortunately, you know, all the adult, last I checked, I'm an adult.
People in my life have argued differently. But I think we're going to have to learn to be a channel,
not a dam with this. I do. If resources and ethics were not an issue, what would your dream
§04Transcript — part 4
clinical trial to run? Oh my goodness. This is a hard question.
Okay. Dream clinical trial. What's that?
Oh gosh, the accent is killing me. More cuttlefish. Yeah, more cuttlefish. Like cuttlefish?
I like the idea of more cuddling. Physical contact, so key. I think we're all still
recovering from the years. We had a few years of just like no physical, like physical contact,
so minimal. I mean, there's the classic Harlow experiments, right? The wire monkey versus the
cloth monkey. I mean, primates go to the cloth monkey even if they don't get food there. I mean,
I think this is a
you know what
I'm going to do something I've never done before
I'm going to turn the question around
seriously I'm not trying to avoid answering this
but we've worked on
I've worked on cuttlefish, we've worked on respiration
practices, we've worked on
vision, we've worked on neural regeneration
I've enjoyed
working on a great number
of different things
I'm sort of curious what people
what do you think we need more of
know. I don't know how we're going to do this in any kind of non-chaotic format, but what the hell.
It's late enough in the evening, we just do it. Like, really, I mean, so now there's trials on
psychedelics. Maybe we do this by kind of, like, I'll throw out some options, and then we'll do it.
So right now, it seems that psychedelics are a big thing. Do they increase plasticity? Yeah,
I'm excited about it. I'm a convert, but I do think that one has to be careful, and there are
certain people in populations, like people who suffer from certain types of manic bipolar or
schizophrenia that really need to avoid these things. Kids, I mean, being a kid is basically
being in a psychedelic state. You know, lateral connectivity of the brain is extensive,
and, you know, I don't encourage it. I mean, the trials with MDMA and PTSD are incredible. What's
happening with MAPS is incredible. You know, 60 plus percent remission rates done with licensed
physicians, of course. I don't get cavalier with this. So, okay, so I'll just ask. So, I mean,
it's going to be hard to draw out the dissenters, but more work on psychedelics,
psilocybin, et cetera, as ways to ameliorate depression. Are people like more like yum,
yuck, or meh? Is it like yum? Okay. Or like yuck? Don't be afraid to say yuck. I like a good
argument. Is anyone like yuck on psychedelics? Sorcery. It's sorcery. I heard that.
meh okay all right interesting okay so psychedelics get a strong push I think we have enough evidence
that changing patterns of respiration changes brain states but I think that that's an interesting area
I don't know you can you just shout it out just shout it out one okay first over here yes
oh god the accent you guys are so good I love the accent listen I listen I don't drink I don't
just say the Australian accent never fails in the U.S. Yeah. Time chambers. Time chambers.
Oh, hyperbaric chambers. Yeah, hyperbaric. That's an interesting one. Yeah. I mean,
when I think of ways to modify physiology, you think temperature, light, neuromodulators,
right you think by the way anytime you want to think about changing something in the body or
brain you think mechanical and chemical so this is kind of this is changing the chemistry of the
brain and body through hyperbaric chambers thank you appreciate it i think i reckon did we run into
each other at the gym the other day no anyway um i think i recognize you um the
Okay, I'll get to you in one second.
Yeah.
Yeah, love that.
Okay, so protocols for childhood trauma.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think we're finally at the place where we, as a world, where like this word trauma actually is meaningful.
Like, because we knew it before.
But I think before people thought if like if you hadn't lived in a war zone, which obviously is trauma.
Now I think people appreciate that trauma is inherent to a lot of life.
shirt. I own that shirt. It's like, yeah, it's a Lonsdale shirt. It was against racism. Hey,
I love that shirt. You know the history of that shirt, right? It's like Lonsdale was co-opted by
some neo-Nazi groups as a brand. So Lonsdale came out with an against racism and hate shirt,
which is like the best like to that, which is like, yeah. So anyway, a little side note there,
not sponsored by Lonsdale, but rad shirt. Yeah, I think childhood trauma, you know,
Trauma can be best defined as an adverse event that changes the nervous system in a way that causes maladaptive functioning going forward.
It's not every bad thing, right?
But it certainly happens, and I think we need to learn to rewire the nervous system.
Let's face it, whether or not it's psychedelics or it's talk therapy or it's hyperbaric chambers or it's cold plunges, what we're talking about is neuroplasticity.
We're trying to rewire the nervous system.
So I love that one.
We need some very structured tools.
stuff about psoas release for trauma. And, you know, there's little bits, like little silos of
things that are all very interesting, breath work, you know, release work. But so far, there isn't
like a structured framework for treating trauma. Different groups doing different things, EMDR,
et cetera. I think they all have merit. Okay. There was the shouting out consciousness,
the big C. Yeah. In my house, Costello was the big C. He would always remind me of that. But
But consciousness, I think that, and now with AI, we have to ask ourselves, like, what is consciousness?
And I think we need a clear definition of what that is.
Do you guys know this story of, like, they were going to solve consciousness a few years ago, and they didn't do it?
There was this bet in neuroscience that it was going to be solved by 2015 or something like that.
So I think we need, and it's not, obviously.
So we need better definition of what that means.
But I think it's a very important problem, indeed.
So thank you.
Maybe a free will.
Yeah, that's a tough one.
That's one I usually avoid.
Robert slammed me on that one on the podcast.
What was it in the back?
I heard it as an adaptive technique, but.
Oh, yeah.
You know, we hear.
Yeah, we hear so much.
I'm agreeing with you.
We hear so much about ADHD these days without an understanding, like what it really reflects.
except in the extreme clinical cases. So I think a better understanding, I did two episodes of the
podcast, by the way, on attention and ADHD. One focused mainly on behavioral and nutritional
tools. It was positively received by about half of people. And then the other half were like,
this is garbage. What about all the drugs that are useful? Then I did one about all the drugs
that can be useful. And people said, this is garbage. You're putting kids on meth. And I'm
like, wait a second, hold on, we try and cover it all, so, because I favor balance, I heard
excellent things, there was, we're all male voices, we kind of got a sampling bias here,
unless I've got a high frequency cutoff, thank you, something negotiation, sorry,
of negotiation. Yeah. So people being able to resolve differences better. Lord, please. Yes.
Oh my goodness. I mean, this is, yes. Thank you. Um, if ever there was a call to action,
it's like, um, you know, this is a big question, right? I'm a neuroscientist, not a historian,
or a politician, but thank goodness.
Can you imagine what a terrible job I would do?
I like being outdoors.
I hate meetings.
I like dressing like this, and I don't like the news.
It'd be the worst.
But, yeah, if ever there was a need and a question,
it's, you know, are we just going to continue
in these, like, iterative cycles of, like,
when the economy is good, things seem mostly good,
and then a lot of people are still suffering,
and then, like, these cycles of,
Or are we going to finally just sit back and go, okay, what are we good at as a species?
What are we really bad at?
What are we kind of good at?
And start coming up with some tools to try and function better on the whole.
With the understanding that there are bad actors out there that are constantly trying to exploit and manipulate.
But there are also a lot of good actors, too.
And by good actors, I don't mean actors in the stage acting sense.
I mean, I think that, look, we're a smart species.
We can think in past, present, and future terms.
We can look at mechanism.
We can communicate better with each other, better than any species, except maybe the cuttlefish.
And so I think the question is, are we, you know, is there going to be some sort of sitting back and finally just saying, like, enough?
Like, let's just figure out a way to dialogue.
And I love that.
you know
it's a
science way that there are problems and there are hard
problems
and honestly
I think it's going to come about if it comes about
it's going to come about through groups
not through individuals I don't think we're going to get
like the world leader or world
leaders of 12 people like let's
get it done let's get it done
right this time I think it's going to be
a more collective
consciousness you know I'd like to see
fewer individual leaders and more groups and panels leading things. But anyway, that's my bias.
You know, genetics.
Genetics. Genetics. Love it. Yeah. Okay. Well, there's, okay. I'll say two things and then I
think my team's gonna make me close out wait um rad okay awesome now it's turning into like a like
a science punk rock show so um the um genetics well i think the big things in genetics are
we're soon going to be in the place where we can do genetic well right now you can take human
embryos and screen them for mutations by whole genome sequencing. It's very inexpensive compared
to a few years ago. It's still expensive. And you can do selection. You can select out based on lack
of mutations, maybe even based on over-representation of certain genes. That's interesting.
Has some ethical considerations. But soon you can do CRISPR. You could. In theory, you could modify
the genome of adults and certainly babies. And so that's where we're headed. It's already being
done in certain countries. It was done in China. It was not looked upon kindly by the international
ethics committees, but it was done, a mutation in the HIV receptor. So those babies exist.
So it's happening. It's going to be interesting times. The microbiome, I think, is really exciting.
action is that there's a microbiome in the gut, but there's also microbiome on the skin and the
nose and the mouth and the genitals, like these, all these little niches and well, I guess it
depends a little or not so little niches. Depends. I was thinking about the nostrils.
The night's getting long. There I go again. They are all important and there's a lot more to
understand. I think the gut microbiome is just one of the microbiomes. So, and female hormones,
certainly important topic. It's received far less, sadly, far less attention than male hormone
therapy or understanding. And things are starting to change there. It's been slow. Yeah. Yeah.
There's been, it's been, can you believe it? It was like four, only like eight years ago that the
National Institutes of Health in the United States was like, Hey, maybe you should start studying
female mice too. It's like, I mean, we're, modern science is very far behind.
We're very far behind.
And I think it's a resource issue.
It's also, you know, there's a bunch of sociological considerations in science.
Anyway, I'm trying to change the story there, but I'm but one person.
And, you know, I hope to live a very long time.
But, you know, should I get hit by a bullet, a bus or cancer tomorrow,
I want you to know that it's going to be, or a long time from now, natural causes. Sorry,
I have a morbid sense of humor. I worked with the physicians. They all talk like that.
I hope to live a very long time. But it's a collective effort. So I just want to,
before we wrap, I want to say a couple of things we can get on with the rest of the night.
First of all, it is a collective effort. As I've mentioned several times this evening,
I look no differently on the massage therapy versus chiropractic versus whole genome sequencing.
It's just all different lenses to look at the same sort of set of goals through.
And yes, there's a range of quality and rigor and communication styles and personalities.
But if you can maintain some level of curiosity and discernment about what works for you or doesn't work for you or where you think there's merit, that's great.
But it's going to be a wonderful thing when we can all start to dialogue and see where the points of convergence are, where you're basically talking about two different groups talking about the exact same thing through a different language.
I think that's where things really can move forward.
The discourse of public science and health communication obviously is something I'm very passionate about.
I would love to see more podcasts, believe it or not, not just my podcast, but there are more podcasts.
If you have something to say to the world, please say it.
Please put it out there on social media.
that there's value there.
So I'm encouraging every person,
not just usually they go the young people,
but like every people to get information out there
and to support the efforts.
And I also want to say thank you so much
for coming out on a Saturday night here in Melbourne
and for listening to the podcast.
And for, yeah, it really means a lot to me.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
§05Transcript — part 5
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it that the podcast is indeed a labor of love.
I feel oh so blessed to do it.
And my hope is that the tools, protocols, and information will radiate out as far and wide as possible.
I don't need or want credit.
I just want people to have the information.
I really mean that.
And to share it where you think it can be useful to people.
And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.