LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at Meridian Hall in Toronto
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.
Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event at the Meridian Theater in Toronto, Ontario.
The event consisted of a lecture entitled The Brain-Body Contract, followed by a question-and-answer session.
We wanted to make sure that the question-and-answer session was available to everybody, regardless of who could attend in person.
I also want to make sure to thank the sponsors of that event, which were AG1 and 8sleep.
8sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature
of your sleeping environment is correct.
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 feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually
has to increase by about one to three degrees.
With Eight Sleep, you can program the temperature
of your sleeping environment in the beginning,
middle, and end of your night.
It has a number of other features
like tracking the amount of rapid eye movement
and slow wave sleep that you get,
things that are essential to really dialing in
the perfect night's sleep for you.
I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover
for well over two years now,
and it has greatly improved my sleep.
I fall asleep far more quickly,
I wake up far less often in the middle of the night,
and I wake up feeling far more refreshed
than I ever did prior to using an Eight Sleep mattress cover.
If you'd like to try Eight Sleep,
you can go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman
to save $150 off their pod three cover.
Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK,
select countries in the EU and Australia.
Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman.
AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink.
I've been taking AG1 since 2012,
so I'm delighted that they sponsored the live event.
The reason I started taking AG1
and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day
is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs.
That is, it provides insurance
that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins,
minerals, probiotics, and fiber
to ensure optimal mental health,
physical health, and performance.
If you'd like to try AG1,
you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman
to claim a special offer.
They're giving away five free travel packs
plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2.
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman
to claim that special offer.
And now, without further ado, the question and answer session from our live event at the Meridian Theatre in Toronto, Ontario.
Okay, what motivated me to do the guest series with Paul Conti?
Okay, so first of all, for those of you that don't know, Paul Conti is a psychiatrist,
he's a Stanford and Harvard trained psychiatrist, and I wanted to do the series with Paul for
several reasons and we initiated that series. First of all, he's incredibly talented as a clinician
and yet despite having written an excellent book about trauma, I felt that two things were true
for sure. One is that most people won't get the opportunity to work with Paul, sadly. He's time
limited. And second, that his expertise is incredibly vast, not just restricted to trauma.
traumas if understood can be transmuted into you know deep sources of knowledge that other people
can benefit from and indeed what I found in Paul as I got to know him is that he has just profound
insight into the unconscious mind and people had long asked me you know around in and around the
podcast what about the subconscious what about the unconscious and I was of the mind that the
supercomputer of the human brain is the forebrain the thinking planning context setting piece right
right behind our forehead, so it's the reason that we're not the house cats.
The house cats are the house cats, and it's the reason we're the curators of the planet.
But Paul said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The unconscious mind is the supercomputer of the mind.
I'm like, well, that sounds great, but how do we understand the unconscious mind?
And he has a really biological and psychological and psychiatric understanding of the unconscious.
And in that series, he talks about these so-called cupboards that we can look into
in order to better understand our unconscious mind, in order to allow our unconscious mind to
teach us things about ourselves that are useful. And there are three main places where our unconscious
teaches us useful things that allow us to be more conscious of the way that our brain is working in
useful ways. The first is in these liminal states between waking and sleep. It really does seem to
be the case that when surprise surprise we're completely still and we're emerging from or
we're dropping into states of reduced autonomic arousal but our level of thought if you will
is still active enough that we are aware maybe even lucid dreams and also in dreams our unconscious
mind uses as i think jung and freud pretty well understood symbols to teach us things but
But everything's flipped in there.
Gender's flipped.
Like just because you're having a conflict with somebody in your life who's a man
doesn't mean that that person shows up as a man.
They could show up as an animal.
So species are flipped.
The symbols become mishmashed.
But Paul made it very clear that all this can be parsed
if you do a certain kind of introspective work.
And I thought that would mean a lot of talk therapy that people would,
how are we going to get people to learn how to do talk therapy by themselves?
we want to keep things as much independent of cost and things like that. And the practices he
started talking about were incredibly simple. Things like mirror work. Some of the psychologists
in the room will be familiar with this. I thought, mirror work? What is that? And he said, literally,
people trying to activate their unconscious, or excuse me, access their unconscious in sleep by
a practice of staring into the mirror for some period of time while awake and reflecting on
self and aspirations and the idea of the body as a container. All this stuff, even for a kid from
Northern California, sounds really woo new agey. But here it's scripted by Paul into a formal
structure that one can use to parse your own mental health and enhance mental health. So that
was the reason for doing the series. And especially the episode on relationships, not just romantic
relationships I found hasn't come out yet incredibly interesting because he talked about
how in his clinical experience, virtually all the stuff that people pay attention to
in relational stuff is, are they a narcissist? Are they obsessive? Is this person a musician
versus whether or not I'm an accountant? Are we compatible? That none of that stuff predicts
anything as well as the balance of these three drives, the aggressive drive, the pleasure drive,
and the so-called generative drive.
And I found it to be fascinating,
and I'm excited for that episode and the other episodes to come out,
but basically because Paul's brilliant,
and he makes what I consider pretty obscure and opaque
very clear and concrete, and they're a bunch of worksheets,
again, all available at zero cost,
and none of them requiring that you do therapy with anybody
if you choose not to.
This is all the kind of work one could do on oneself.
And the last thing I'll say about this is,
and I should have said this first,
is that the primary motivation was we did a series of Dr. Andy Galpin on physical fitness.
Why isn't there a series on mental fitness?
What is that?
Why do we talk so much about mental health when we're, and it's usually a conversation
about mental illness, what people should have tools and practices that are zero cost, I
believe, to be able to introspect in a structured way and enhance their mental health independent
of their level of income.
And I think Paul was the guy to do it.
And we'll do more of that with other people as well,
because no single episode about any topic or series can exhaustively cover any topic,
although the Lord knows we will try.
Okay, next question.
What are the recommended protocols and best practices to enhance emotional resilience
and develop effective responses during highly triggering situations?
You're asking the wrong guy.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't snap.
I don't snap I was a wild teenager but I don't snap I'm not the aggressor but I do have a snap
button and it's been pushed before and I have to say when that happens it's really kind of a scary
thing not to me right um and it's been many years but I think anyone who's who's hit that threshold
where you just you try not to say something you say it anyway you know that's usually how it shows
up for people. I think we hear the statements like be responsive, not reactive. Okay, that's
why I became a biologist because stuff like that makes no sense to me. In that moment,
how are you responsive, not reactive? So to me, I was like, what are the tools? Clearly,
as you go up that continuum of autonomic arousal, it becomes much harder to do whatever that means,
right so that hence the the tools for reducing stress in real time i think the one that we
haven't emphasized so much on the podcast um and by the way thanks to some great therapy and that
was not voluntary i i was uh able to you know i was a wild kid a wild wild kid hung around wild
kids and um things were pretty different then and we we worked it out you know but i think nowadays
it's wonderful because I think people are more conscious of the need to
understand their nervous system, their own psychology. That wasn't as common back
then. In fact I hid the fact that I had to do therapy for a long time thinking
wow like everyone's gonna think I'm crazy. They did call me crazy. You know I
think things have really changed. I think the last 20 years have brought about a
profound shift in the way that we think about our own species and what what are
useful tools and practices. And I think that one of the things that is abundantly
clear is that that threshold for a stress response really is different for different people,
different in different situations, but that it is something that can be practiced and elevated.
And in terms of not getting near that trigger point through the types of practices I talked
about earlier, getting more comfortable with adrenaline circulating in your system is what
it's really about, frankly. But of course, it all starts with a good night's sleep, right? It's
going to make you far less reactive. But of course, when you're stressed, that's often when you're not
getting good sleep. So I think that ultimately that our ability to, as you know, more emotional
resilience and effective responses during triggering situations is really the consequence
of practices of taking good care outside of those situations. And then of course, inevitably,
there will be situations where people get triggered. And it's actually interesting to see
the way that people behave online and the fact that you know many people in fact in science as
well have literally lost their jobs for having you know not being able to control their thumbs
it's kind of we're in an odd time where there's the the distancing of doing things online as
opposed to in person where people somehow engage in saying things and doing things that they wouldn't
in person but i think that ultimately it's the consequence of good self-care and this gets
actually back to some of the things that are covered in the Conti series. You know, we hear
about self-care as we think that means massages, which are great, by the way, and we think that
that is about exercise, and that's wonderful. But much of self-care is about really making sure that
our nervous system is in the state that we need it to be in in order to go about our day. And I
think this is why morning routines and practices are so vital. I think that those set the stage for
the emotional resilience. They'll set the stage for avoiding getting triggered, so to speak. I don't
think there's a lot that one can do in real time except perhaps physiological sighs. So sorry to
give you a sort of empty answer. I'm not a pessimist on this front, but it's, I think that
ultimately it's like saying, well, what if you have to scale the side of a building to get in,
you locked yourself out, you know, what can you do to prepare for that? Well, you can buy a ladder,
but if you don't have a ladder, you know, what, because what you probably should do is be physically
fit enough to you know climb up a railing or something like that and know how to pick a lock
or something like that. So I think ultimately that it's the consequence of stuff that's done
away from those triggering situations. Next question please. How would you describe the
brain activity of somebody when they're suddenly inspired and hadn't fostered inspiration in
your life? Well I talked a little bit about this but I will say that the best way to foster
inspiration is in the words of the great Joe Strummer. They actually call it Strummer's Law,
no joke. No input, no output. I think one of the things that I've observed over and over again is
that as much as we need to dedicate ourselves to our craft, to our families, to our friends,
that ultimately our best ideas come from disparate experiences when we're not seeking
a particular kind of input to get ideas. Now maybe this practice of being completely still
while being alert fosters a lot of, I think the way I understand it is more of a geysering up
of stored information in the unconscious. That's how I think Rick would talk about it or Paul
Conti would talk about it as geysering up from the unconscious because when we are focused on
the outside world we're taking in sensory information, exteroception as
opposed to interoception. And of course that external info, sensory information
that no input no output is that those are the raw materials that our nervous
system uses to construct ideas about anything. So my belief, and this is a
practice I do every week, is I make sure that at least once a week I either walk
or hike or run without any earphones and I'm trying to get into states of wordlessness states
where I'm not digesting a podcast where I'm not reading a book where I'm not listening to a lecture
where I'm not in conversation and essentially trying to turn off that the linguistic narrative
we are a storytelling species we tend to take all all of our internal and external experience
§02Transcript — part 2
and construct things around language, but spoken language is not the language of the nervous system.
The language of the nervous system still remains to be identified. It's something else. For people
that think and feel, it will certainly incorporate that. Spoken language, of course, is important,
and we have some core structures to spoken language. We covered this in the podcast episode
with my friend Eddie Chang. But ultimately the the way to come up with new ideas of inspiration is
going to be to collect the raw materials of experience and then give ourselves these periods,
maybe even just five, ten minutes, you have to lay around half the day doing nothing still wide
awake and give that those raw materials the opportunity to to marinate and combine in whatever
ways that are unique to you and then to geyser up. What inspiration looks like in the brain,
we don't really know. There's awe. There's some studies about awe, but that's different.
The word that better comes to mind is delight. Awe, in my mind, is something that we witness
that sort of overwhelms our attention. Like, wow. Delight is when it somehow links up with
our own internal narrative. Like, I have something to do with what's happening. I'm not just here to
witness it. You know, a firework show, a really impressive firework show, is like, aw. But there's
nothing to do about it. It doesn't relate to anything about you, really. You're purely a
spectator. Whereas delight is when you see something and it somehow links to something in
your emotional or personal history or how you're wired, that now there's something to do about it.
That's inspiration.
And we don't understand where that exists in the brain or what that looks like.
But I think we all recognize that feeling when it happens, and it's oh so wonderful.
Okay, next question, please.
How can Canadians fight the seasonal depression winters are too long here?
Okay.
Okay, well, this gives me an opportunity to share with you what I think is one of the coolest things about our species.
Notice I say that about many things.
So we've talked about circadian rhythms, right?
Sunrises, sunsets.
And we get that information transmitted into our nervous system by looking at the sunrise.
By the way, you don't have to watch the sun cross the horizon.
It just needs to be low solar angle, low in the sky.
Once it's overhead, it's a different signal.
So low solar angle, that's what it's about.
It's not necessarily about seeing the sun cross the horizon.
it. By the way, someone the other day on my team said, wait, won't you get cataracts if you look
at the sun? Low solar angle sunlight is very unlikely to cause cataracts, especially if you're
just doing it 10 to 30 minutes. That solar, you know, the sun overhead is when it's quite bright.
Yes, indeed, some people are going to be at risk for cataracts. So ophthalmologists in the audience
can attack me for that one. But it was our chair of ophthalmology at Stanford that said it, so I'm
to trust him. Okay. That's circadian 24-hour rhythms, but there's also these circannual rhythms.
So if you're at a fairly northern location on the planet, nights get very long, days get short in
winter. What happens then? Well, melatonin, the hormone of darkness, right, is essentially
obliterated by light, by sunlight. So what's happening when days are, you know, 12 hours long,
you have very little melatonin, the duration of the melatonin signal is very short.
Then as you proceed into the fall, days are getting shorter, nights are getting longer,
the duration of the melatonin signal is getting longer and longer.
Then, of course, in winter, there's a lot more darkness.
Melatonin signals are very long.
Daylight signals are very short because the days are short.
So you could say, okay, well, that's obvious, thank goodness.
but what that means is incredible. What that means is that you have a hormone, melatonin,
that's secreted from your pineal gland, which Descartes called the seat of the soul
because there's only one of them in the brain. I don't know how he came up with that one, but
the pineal secretes melatonin and you suppress melatonin secretion with sunlight viewing.
There's a couple of synapses in between the eye and the pineal, but it gets there,
up through the neck, basically, a cervical ganglia. What's wild, therefore, is that the location of the
earth around the sun and the tilt of the earth is translated into a neural and then a hormonal
signal in your brain, which to me is amazing. That literally means that the position of the earth
around the sun and its tilt are translated into a physiological signal that's working
unconsciously to tell your brain and body what time of year it is, but it doesn't care what time
of year it is. It cares about where you are in this orbit about the sun. So if you think about
when days are, say, eight hours long in the fall versus eight hours long in the spring, what's
different? What's different is how long the signal was the day before. So the seasonal depression we
now know is the consequence of the melatonin signal getting longer, not an absolute duration
of the melatonin signal. In other words, in the spring when a day is eight hours long,
but yesterday the day was seven hours and 48 minutes long, your brain has a memory of how
much melatonin was released the day before, much more, than that particular day. So it's a slow
integrating clock. So this is a very roundabout way for me to teach you about the melatonin
seasonal rhythm cycle and answer the question directly by saying, if you want to offset seasonal
depression, what you want to do is extend the amount of bright light that you're getting in
the morning slightly as days get shorter. But it's the extension of the bright light exposure.
And if you can't do that with sunlight, because there's no sunlight because you live in Toronto,
not Toronto, what you want to do is find some artificial source that you can look at in the
morning before you leave your home. And I haven't talked much about this on the podcast because our
listeners are extended around the globe and not just in northern locations. But what this
essentially means is getting maybe two to three minutes of bright light exposure as you're heading
from fall into winter. Bright light from an artificial source. You do not need to purchase
a so-called sad lamp one of these very expensive seasonal affect depression lamps you can what I
did was I purchased because I'm very sensitive to seasonal changes in light even though I don't live
very far north is you can get a 900 lux drawing tablet these are quite inexpensive they're not
zero cost but quite inexpensive and just put that on your desk or on your wherever you make your
coffee in the morning 90 minutes after you wake up this sort of thing and just get five or so
minutes before you leave the house. And then as you extend into the winter, you don't have to be
neurotic about increasing the duration every day. You could actually, the way these slow integrating
clocks work, you could actually even just hold it a little bit closer each day. Don't burn your
eyeballs out a little bit closer each day. But essentially, if you just dose yourself with a
little bit more bright light early in the day as you extend into winter, that will essentially trick
the melatonin system into thinking that you're going from eight hours into 10 hours of light,
as opposed to eight hours into six hours of light. Okay. Very simple. And if you can't get
one of these 900 lux tablets or something off a website, then you could do this with any bright
incandescent bulb should work. Again, just be careful not to put it directly against your eyeball.
okay next question please how do you increase neuroplasticity well this this is an opportunity
to talk about something i should have said earlier which is that ultimately whether or not you are
triggering neuroplasticity through elevated focus or whether or not you're taking high dose psilocybin
your business not mine um and we could talk about psychedelics if you want um just decriminalized in
california or soon to be decriminalized cool people are enthusiastic yeah the one thing i've
I've been pretty vocal about my belief that the data are really interesting, to say the
least, about not microdosing.
By the way, there's not a lot of evidence that microdosing is useful.
I'm not saying it's not, but there are not a lot of clinical trials showing that.
But the two macrodose with effective therapeutic support trials are very encouraging, not just
for major depression, but also for various eating disorders, alcohol use disorder, which
which is by the way that the term that people are starting to shift to as opposed to alcoholism
or alcoholic alcohol use disorder, which is not to be politically correct, but just so
you understand what they're talking about when they're talking about alcohol use disorder.
Whether or not psilocybin, whether or not it's MDMA, whether or not it's frustration
brought about by your inability to play an instrument and you know your determination
to do so, it's in the end it's all about deployment of these neuromodulators.
neuromodulators being some combination of dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, or epinephrine,
again, usually in combination. What's very clear is that the neuroplastic effects of MDMA,
the neuroplastic effects of psilocybin are brought about by huge increases in serotonin.
This also can help us understand why for some years, and to some extent still now, it was thought
that the SSRIs, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, would be good treatments for depression.
I think some people, by the way, have experienced tremendous relief from the SSRIs.
We don't want to demonize them.
At the same time, it's very clear that depression is not simply low levels of serotonin.
That's also not true.
Hence why there's effective, in some people, antidepressants like bupropion
that increase dopamine and epinephrine and not serotonin.
The point here is that these neuromodulators, as they're called, allow for what?
They allow for modulation of synapses, which effectively allows for neuroplasticity.
I mean, ultimately, whether or not it's through talk therapy, kundalini breathing,
high-dose psilocybin, MDMA, or the combination, which I think is called a hippie flip.
Never done them together.
I confess, never done them together, but have done them.
With a clinician, by the way, in legal circumstances, and not a lot, not often, that is,
it's very clear that it's opening windows for plasticity.
Now, what's intriguing, if we're going to just talk about psychedelics for a second,
is why a drug like MDMA, which increases dopamine, which, by the way, MDMA is methylene-dioxymethamphetamine.
don't let anybody tell you it's something there it's meth it's meth but it's meth with a lot of
serotonin thrown in there too but it's meth and it's clear that for the treatment of ptsd it holds
promise it's not absolutely safe especially for people with cardiac conditions and you if you're
going to go down that path you want and need a skilled guide and this is where i think the laws
are really going to have to pay careful attention to what who and what is a skilled guide okay
And when it comes to psilocybin, the serotonin increase is what effectively causes broader
connectivity in the brain.
And what's interesting is that both of those drugs increase plasticity mainly through increases
in serotonin, but working on very different receptors.
So they have different types and outputs of plasticity.
What's interesting to me is that because I'm a strong believer that children should not
be doing psychedelics, nor should we be giving children psychedelics, is that the increases
in connectivity in the brain that are the consequence of playing a musical instrument
or ideally an instrument with others as a child mimic a lot of the broader scale connectivity
sort of called so-called resting network connectivity that occurs when people take
psychedelics as adults in other words and i can't emphasize this enough and again i failed at music
miserably i'll tell you a story about that in a second but so getting kids to play an instrument
is it's very clear improves their ability to learn all sorts of things for their entire life.
It's just so, so important. I don't really know what to do about this or who to shout at or talk
to about keeping the arts active in schools and physical education, but the idea that we would
just train kids in math is just frightening because if you want them to be truly good at
math and science, you'd also have them play instruments. By the way, when I was a kid,
I played the violin. My parents made me. It was not the instrumental I wanted to play.
And we have only one picture. And they taught me the Suzuki method.
You're supposed to learn by ear. And there's one picture.
And all the other kids have their bows up. And my bow is down.
And I'm standing here on the stage. And my fly is down.
And that and literally the neighbor's dog howled. And I quit after that concert.
So I was traumatized by it. They showed me the picture. My sister teased me relentlessly.
So neuroplasticity, figure out your choice way to increase a neuromodulator like serotonin or epinephrine, acetylcholine or dopamine.
I honestly would not encourage pharmacologic or psychedelic approaches as your primary entry point.
I really don't.
I think that there's a place for that in certain circumstances, but that would not be the primary entry point.
Next question, please.
what type of movement protocol do you recommend for somebody who's working from home sitting
behind the computer from 8 a.m to 5 p.m oh um okay well a couple things i mean i can make all sorts
of recommendations like get up early and you know move and if you can take breaks and walk this sort
of thing but let's let's assume that all of that is is kind of understood that there are certain
forms of exercise that we should all be doing three i think now it's very clear based on the
beautiful work of Peter Attia, whose brother is in the audience, by the way, tonight. Yeah, yeah.
He's got a younger brother. He's got a younger brother. Can you imagine if Peter Attia was your
older brother? Can you imagine? That'd be pretty cool. I sort of adopt people as siblings because
they don't know it, but I do. But I just assume Peter was my older brother, but turns out he has
a younger brother already. And Peter's essentially hammered home the truth, which is that we should
all be getting somewhere between 150 to 200 minutes of so-called zone 2 cardio where we're
walking a lot and we're moving about where we can just barely hold a conversation. I notice people
in Toronto seem to walk a lot so that's great. And then three days a week or so resistance training
and there are a bunch of other mobility things that we should all do so that we don't fall and
break our hips because that's where another bone because that's another way that people really
limit their healthspan and lifespan and so on and so forth. But two things that can make
being at a desk, which I loathe, even though I like to learn, I hate sitting still.
You can do the standing desk thing. I do that by stacking boxes. The other thing that was
interesting, did anyone see this study out of the University of Texas? I think it was in Houston
this last year about the soleus push-up. Did anyone see this? This is pretty interesting.
So the soleus, this wider flat muscle below the gastrocnemius of the calf, is a really unique
muscle in the human body. It's 1% of the total human musculature, but it has an ability
what will soon be for obvious reasons to dramatically shift fuel utilization in the
body what they did in this study was they had people who were sitting for you know three or
four hours a day just simply raise their heel seems almost silly right they call it a soleus
push-up when I called it that online I literally got attacked by the gym bros telling me that's a
seated calf raise. Okay. You know, I mean, like, okay. No wonder they, you know, this whole
broscience thing gets kind of, you know, people get really aggressive. They lift their heel and
they put, they're pushing their toe down. And some people think of it as bouncing the knee,
but it's really about pushing the toe down and lifting the heel. So they just simply had these
sedentary people do this heel raise. And what they saw was that there was a dramatic,
highly statistically significant increase in blood glucose utilization and reduction in both
insulin levels during that activity and around the clock. Really interesting. What they were
doing was mimicking some aspect of walking. Now, is it as good as walking? No. But if you are stuck
behind a, you know, working from home, sitting behind the computer from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.,
what they found was that people getting into this unconscious pattern of lifting their heel over and
over and shifting back and forth mimics a lot of the effects of walking it's not a replacement for
exercise but the shifts in glucose and insulin output and utilization excuse me utilization and
§03Transcript — part 3
output respectively were very impressive and this group down at the University of Houston
University of Texas in Houston is starting to incorporate this into people who have limited
mobility and it doesn't seem like other limb movements can do this there's something special
about the soleus it was designed in air quotes to be a muscle that's used repeatedly over you know
extended hours of time and that has this unique pathway of fuel utilization so is it going to cure
obesity no but if you're stuck behind a desk that would be something useful I have this little fidget
thing I was too lazy to build one but I found one online for a couple bucks where you just when you
stand at your desk and just you kind of kick it back and forth everyone seen these these are kind
cool then you just kind of kick them back and forth and some people will treadmill at the desk
i can't do that i can't do that many things but i also i'm still like working on this one
i can't quite do that uh next question please my morning meditation consists of okay and then i
think we're about out of time but the um yeah so my morning meditation is not really a meditation
it's a perceptual exercise and um that perceptual exercise is has a weird name because i gave it a
weird name. And I didn't intend to sound mystical and I don't want credit for it, but I call it
space-time bridging, but it's not that. What it really is, is that the, to me, one of the most
interesting things about the nervous system is our ability to orient in different time domains.
This gets a little bit abstract, but we know from states of high stress that we start fine slicing
time. We know this, right? The world becomes like a slow motion video because frame rate has
increased. As a vision neuroscientist, I can tell you that in my laboratory, we were doing studies
with virtual reality where we can crank up people's level of stress by giving them certain
visual stimuli. And then their ability to parse information is clearly increasing in the time
domain. They're fine slicing much in the same way that when you look at a slow motion video,
somebody dunking a basketball or something of that sort is because the frame rate went up,
right? So when we are in high alertness states, our frame rate increases. When we're very relaxed,
our frame rate decreases. So if you're Rick Rubin and you're lying there looking at the sky,
your frame rate is probably slower than if you're hyper-focused on, oh my goodness, you know,
like you said, like imagine a dreadful situation where somebody sends you a text message. Well,
let's make it positive. Somebody's having a child in your family and you're like,
you know, is it a healthy, yeah, are mom and baby okay? I mean, seconds feel like minutes,
minutes feel like hours because you're fine slicing time okay and then mom and baby you're
fine okay great happy story ending great so when we're very relaxed we tend to bin time more broadly
now it's also true that your visual system and your perception of time are inextricably linked
such that if you close your eyes and you focused on your internal state
you are fine slicing time and the second hand if you will is more or less the metronome
rather is your breathing and your heart rate combined. When you open your eyes and
you look at something in your immediate environment, when you move from so-called interoception to
exteroception, you start your perception of time shifts fairly dramatically and you now perceive
time according to believe or not the speed of images moving in your environment relative to you
and then as you look out further on to say the horizon you extend the time domain even more
If you then imagine yourself kind of in the whole globe, you extend your time domain even more.
So my morning meditation, if you will, it's more of a perceptual exercise, is to step through these different time domains to close my eyes and focus on my internal state.
Open my eyes and focus on something close by.
Look a little bit further, look a bit further.
Think about myself on the globe, the whole world moving.
so you're really extending your space domain and then the time domain expands with it. You know,
and this comes up when you see these little memes of, you know, anytime you're worried,
just remember you're a little dot on a little blue dot spinning in the universe, you know,
this kind of thing. But you don't think that way when you're stressed. You're thinking,
I'm the blue dot. You're the problem, whatever, you know, I want that. You know, you're not
thinking. So this perceptual exercise is a way of training the nervous system,
my nervous system to shift deliberately between these different time domains. And for me,
it's been very useful for improving task switching, something that as you probably have noticed,
I'm not very good at. I go into the trench, I don't leave the trench very easily. So that's
been very useful. And if you are interested in this in more detail, there's a wonderful book
called The Secret Pulse of Time. And there's a Hitchcock movie that's discussed in that book,
which the movie is about 75 minutes long and during the course of that movie the background
actually includes rising and setting of the sun and a bunch of different speeds of movement and
interplay between the characters and your perception at the end of the movie is that a much
much longer period of time occurred because of unconsciously your brain was paying attention to
these circadian signals and these other signals and absolutely fascinating and hitchcock not a
huge Hitchcock fan but now I after seeing that I was like wow that's genius he captured this space
time thing what you see out the window is in one time domain in the room is a different time domain
I won't tell you who killed who but it's very very interesting and so the point being that when your
visual system is up close focusing on things up close or internally you're you're fine slicing
when you focus on things further away you're more broadly focusing and so on and so forth so that's
morning meditation i do it only perceptual exercise only takes about a minute or so
and the other thing is that on the monitors they're flashing now that was your last question so i i
want to just say a couple of things before we go first of all thanks to all of you who um stood
out the night for the long duration i realize this stuff is like nerdy detailed and there are a lot
of other things you could be doing with your evening and your time and so i'm very grateful
that came together tonight for this, what I like to think was a discussion.
And I also just want to thank everyone for your interest in the podcast.
You know, it is a labor of love.
I'm highly dependent on my team for doing all of it.
I don't do it alone by any stretch.
But as much as it might seem like it's me talking to all of you,
it really is about all of you.
That's the reason I do it.
And I'm ever so grateful.
And I'd certainly be remiss if I didn't say thank you for your interest in science.
Thank you.
Thank you.