LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at The Wiltern in Los Angeles
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 Podcast hosted a live event
at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles.
It was entitled The Brain Body Contract.
The first part of the evening was a lecture
about science and science-based tools
for mental health, physical health, and performance.
The second half was a question and answer period
in which the audience asked me questions
from the podcast or related to their own interests
or things that they've gleaned from social media
or just general questions about mental health,
physical health, and performance.
And I answered those questions for them.
We wanted to make the recorded version
of that question and answer session available to everybody,
regardless of who could attend.
So what follows is the question and answer period
from the Wiltern Theater Brain Body Contract
Live Huberman Lab event.
I want to be sure to thank the sponsors from that event.
They were Eight Sleep,
which makes smart mattress covers
with heating and cooling capacity.
I started sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover
about eight months ago,
and it has completely transformed my sleep.
I sleep so much deeper.
I wake up far less during the middle of the night, if at all,
and I wake up feeling far better than I ever have,
even after the same amount of sleep.
In fact, I love my eight sleep so much
that when I travel, I'm quite bothered
that Airbnbs and hotels
don't have eight sleep mattress covers on them.
And I've even shipped my eight sleep mattress cover
out to meet me in the location that I arrived to
so that I get the best possible sleep.
If you want to try Eight Sleep,
you can go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman
to save up to $400 off their SleepFit Holiday Bundle,
which includes their new Pod 3 cover.
Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada,
United Kingdom, select countries in the EU and Australia.
Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman.
I'd like to also thank our supplement partner, Momentus.
They make the very highest quality supplements.
They ship internationally.
and they've formulated supplements
as single ingredient formulations
that match what is discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast.
If you're interested in any of those supplements,
please go to livemomentous.com slash Huberman.
And now without further ado,
the question and answer period
from the Huberman Lab live event in Los Angeles.
What occurs in the mind-body when you have ADHD? Are there ways to address it without medication?
Thank you for this question. So attention deficit hyperactivity disorder used to be called ADD.
The hyperactivity part is a little misleading. And again, I'm not a clinician here.
Here's what we know works for some people, and yet there are always going to be side effects of any kind of chemical manipulation,
which is that we know that people, kids and adults with ADHD, actually have a tremendous capacity to focus if they like what they're focusing on.
You take a kid with ADHD who can't focus, and you give them their favorite video game, and they are a laser.
the threshold to access the dopamine system is higher and dopamine has this incredible ability
to focus the brain and other aspects of the nervous system you know certainly if people
require medication i'm not going to tell you to stop taking that medication but the focus training
exercises that have been explored mainly in china but they're starting to be explored and
over here as well, do seem to be of benefit. And these are, as they sound, they use them in schools
in China now, which are literally visual focus exercises. Your mental focus, that is your ability
to focus on things cognitively, follows your visual focus. And of course, your stress will
anchor your, essentially put you in a soda straw view of the world. So yes, there are non-medication
based treatments. By medication, I'm assuming you mean prescription medication. There are, of course,
supplement-based medications that will increase dopamine, mainly L-tyrosine. Again, this is
something to think carefully about before you start tampering with your dopamine system, but
L-tyrosine is the precursor to dopamine, so it will raise your dopamine levels. But I believe,
and you'll hear me say this as many times as necessary, that one should, if you can, rely on
Behavioral tools first, then of course, sleep and nutrition are prerequisite again for all
mental health, physical health performance.
You simply can't neglect those.
And then, and only then, if those, all of that isn't working to rely on supplement-based
tools or on prescription medication.
So it's clear that Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera, work for ADHD, but some people
choose to rely on more subtle forms of pharmacologic manipulation like L-tyrosine.
And this focusing exercise essentially consists of spending one to three minutes trying to
maintain visual focus.
And yes, you are allowed to blink.
I don't know why we tend to stare at something we don't blink, but don't let your eyes dry
out.
And that can increase your ability to focus cognitively.
And it works.
And keep in mind that focusing always involves refocusing.
We covered a beautiful data set, not collected by my lab, by Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU, that
at roughly 10 minute, it's actually 13 minute a day meditation of the sort where you just
focus on your breathing, has been shown to improve focus significantly.
Why don't we hear about this more?
Well, she's now Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU and all the students are hearing about
it.
Hopefully they're doing it, but it takes a little bit of discipline.
For some reason, 10 minute a day type meditation is something that very few people follow
consistently.
But if you're looking for non-medication-based treatments for ADHD, or you're somebody who just struggles with focus, the focusing exercise or the meditation I just described can be very useful.
So say the data.
Yeah, thanks for bringing up space-time bridging.
Are people familiar with what space-time bridging is?
I haven't talked a lot about it.
Okay, thanks for bringing that up.
We actually have an episode on meditation coming up soon where I cover it.
And I talked about it long ago, and then I kind of abandoned it because, well, we wanted more data.
And it's a pretty interesting technique.
You know, if you think about the nervous system and vision in particular, but if you're not a sighted person, you're low vision or no vision, you could do this with your hearing.
But I'm going to assume most people here are sighted.
If not, just translate this to the auditory system.
You have this incredible ability to close your eyes and focus, for instance, on people talk about the third eye center, you know, focusing right behind your forehead.
Do you know why people do that when they meditate?
The reason is that you actually have no sensation in your brain.
It's the one place to focus your attention for which you abandon sensation.
Right. If I think about any portion of my body or my breathing, I'm either I'm going to sense what's happening.
I'm going to perceive my inner landscape, so-called interoception, or my outer, if I look out into the world, it's exteroception.
When you focus your attention with your eyes closed, you do have to close your eyes just behind your forehead, you are focusing on your thinking.
Sort of obvious, but at least to me, it's never been stated that clearly.
Again, one of the problems with some of the more traditional practices, but also the problem with science, is that there's a shrouding of everything in very complex language, which sucks.
Why does it suck? Because it's a separator. You eliminate the number of people that could be brought to potentially useful practices.
And I don't like it when people, including myself, overuse mechanism and descriptions of, you know, fancy phrases to mask basic principles.
So simplest language, I think, is a, it tends to unify people around the practices.
So when you focus on this so-called third eye center, right, or a spot right behind your forehead or on your breath, it's a little tricky with the breath.
but when you focus on your frontal cortex,
there's nothing to sense
because there's no sensory neurons there.
There's no touch, there's no pain, nothing.
That's why in these gory movies,
you can take the skull off
or in neurosurgeries,
they're poking around in there
and the person's playing a violin.
Like no anesthetic, no anesthetic.
Doesn't require anesthetic.
There's no sensory neurons.
Can't sense anything there.
So space-time bridging involves,
it's essentially a meditation,
but it's really a perceptual exercise. I think that's where we're going with this, is it starts
by closing your eyes and focusing on that location for which there's no sensation, there's only
thought, and then opening your eyes and focusing on a location maybe about the distance of your hand,
and you focus also on your breathing. So you sort of imagine a kind of a tether between that. You
can split your attention to these two locations. You're thinking about your body and you're thinking
about a location outside of you. And then you, while continuing to think about your body, so-called
interoception, focus on your breathing, you focus further out and then further out and then further
out. And then ultimately, you know, that little cartoon or meme where they're like, we're just a
little blue dot floating in a big universe. And like, it's supposed to make all your problems go
away. Like it kind of works because what you've done is you've expanded your perception and you
go, oh yeah, like the stuff that's happening in here is really important when I'm focused on
what's happening in here. But when I'm focused on what's going on and the kind of the vastness of
all this, and we're just a little, you know, pale blue dot and all that, it changes your perception,
not just your visual perception, obviously. Changing your visual perception changes your
cognitive perception, which changes your emotional experience. So the space-time bridging is a
perceptual exercise where you step from focusing internally to focusing externally at a short
distance, then a further distance, further distance, further distance, and then trying to imagine
yourself in this larger landscape. It sounds very mystical, but it's actually very neurobiological,
and it captures something really amazing. Why is the T in there, the time, space-time bridging?
Because this is space, but time is in there because when you focus in close,
your slicing of time is finer you notice the subtle fluctuations in your breathing and things
that are happening up close whereas when you focus further out your perception of time actually
changes which is why in panoramic vision we are calm and when you think about we're just a pale
blue dot and we mostly only live to about 85 or maybe 100 years old and then like what's happening
right now my boss being a jerk and all that doesn't really matter because you know like the
earth is spinning and all that kind of stuff, which is all true and is the stuff of philosophy
and mindfulness and I think is beautiful. What you're really doing is you're changing your time
perception by changing your space perception. So space-time bridging is very useful because
most people get locked at one step, one of these stations, especially under conditions of stress.
And people who have trouble focusing, I'm glad you brought this up in this context of ADHD,
People who have a hard time focusing whether or not they have ADHD or not tend to skip back and forth between different space-time domains, as we call them in science.
So this is a simple exercise that you can do, focusing internally, then stepping out externally, and then stepping back in, all the while paying attention to your inner landscape just simply by focusing on your breathing.
It's a tool that we're still collecting data on in terms of its utility, but people are already using it.
And I don't think of it as a meditation.
I think of it as a perceptual exercise.
Thanks for asking that.
Okay, as a teenager, what are five things you would recommend to physically feel my best?
I'm a 15-year-old surfer who attends high school and plays soccer.
It sounds like you're doing a lot of things right.
To physically feel your best.
Okay, so I'm going to grasp at some context here that's not within reach.
I'm assuming if you are doing all these things, you're hopefully doing a bunch of other things too,
and there are going to be demands on you that you, probably some of them you don't want to do,
school and things like that, are going to have varying levels of joy and delight and demand
of things you don't want to do. I don't want to default always to the simplest of tools,
but I certainly think that even as a 15-year-old, if you're not already getting lots and lots of
sleep. That's going to be great. Tell your parents that I said you should get lots and lots of sleep.
Probably you're not sleeping through classes. I am a professor after all. I couldn't tell you
otherwise. You know, I would say if I could travel back in time as a 15-year-old, I would
encourage you to cultivate some sort of mindfulness practice. I know this sounds a little cliche,
but having some awareness of your thinking about your thinking is good.
But I'm actually not going to say, sit down and meditate for 10 minutes a day or do NSDR.
I'm actually not going to tell you that.
I think given how plastic your brain is, how much it's changing at 15, I would encourage
you, and maybe you would set a timer for this to actually develop just a really keen awareness
of what stresses you out, what relaxes you, what delights you, etc.
And just to simply develop an awareness of that, because those are your antennae.
And I certainly had a meditation practice as a youth,
mostly given to me because I was a little haywire and I needed it.
§02Transcript — part 2
And it worked pretty well.
But I think in retrospect, what I wish I had developed was more of a sense of how I navigated stress or things I enjoyed and things I didn't enjoy.
And I would just encourage you to have a general awareness.
Try and detect and learn about what raises your adrenaline, what raises your dopamine, what raises your serotonin.
And then start thinking about tools.
But again, the awareness is going to be very valuable.
And gosh, as a 15-year-old, you are in this amazing, blessed period of heightened neuroplasticity.
Should we all be so lucky?
So enjoy it.
Next question, please.
Clarity on adrenaline regarding cold water.
Should we wait to feel the rise of adrenaline, the get-me-out-of-here feeling, end the fall of it before bailing?
Yes.
Provided it doesn't kill you.
You know, I don't want to say cold water.
It's hard to kill yourself with cold water.
provided your head's above and you're breathing, but the, it's, sorry, my podcast producers always,
I can't help that, the, anyway, it's, it's a great tool, and different days it'll feel different,
so for instance, doing cold, any kind of adrenaline and deliberate cold exposure or
adrenaline increasing activity early in the day, you might find that you are more quote-unquote
resilient than later. In other words, the wall, like I really don't want to do this. This is
actually interesting for, I think it extends beyond cold water. Let's say you really don't
want to do something. Pay attention to the fact that maybe it's not the right thing to do,
but assuming it's something that you know you should do, but you don't want to do,
you are already in the first wall of adrenaline. You don't experience it necessarily as heightened
levels of stress. You might experience it as heightened levels of fatigue or a hard time
shifting on that kind of activation state that's required to move through the thing.
But I do encourage you to take advantage of that.
Of course, and we have an episode coming out tomorrow, actually, that answers questions
like, should you train if you're sick?
And, you know, what if you travel?
And, you know, there's context always.
But I think that you do want to experience, if you want to get the most out of the cold
water exposure, and to be more specific, the adrenaline, then you want to get to that point
of, I really want to get out of here, but I know I can stay in safely, but I really want to get out
of here. And it's a little hard to explain, but there's just so much learning in those short
moments about where your mind goes. And this sounds very kind of, again, subjective and maybe
a little wishy-washy, but you can realize great things about yourself in those moments. You can
find insight in those moments. Also keep in mind that the degree of discomfort, not just physical,
but mental discomfort is directly predictive of the pain to pleasure wave that you'll experience
afterwards. The reason it feels so good when you get out of the ice bath and you're showered off,
I always do the warm shower after. I don't do this end on cold thing. I don't know. It just
seems a little too painful. And then take a warm shower and then you feel great. And that's the
surge of dopamine that we know based on a paper published in the European Journal of Physiology
lasts many hours and it's a 100 to 200% increase in dopamine. It is not a subtle effect. And then
people say, well, wait, is that dopamine going to crash my dopamine system? No, because it's a nice
slow rise. In fact, I'm actually not aware of many things besides love and delight that can create
this long, slow arc of dopamine lasting many hours. Maybe you're aware of other things. If you
are, let me know. But it turns out that long arc is a true antidepressant. And my colleague at
Stanford, Dr. Anna Lembke, who's the head of our dual diagnosis addiction clinic, has talked about
in her amazing book, Dopamine Nation, about patients of hers that have really helped themselves
along and out of the more depressive phases of, you know, working through addiction and just
depression in general through directed cold water therapy. So I, you know, I'm obviously a fanatic
about it in the sense that it's a powerful, relatively safe, if done properly, safe, if done
properly, way to modulate your internal dopamine. Hopefully I answered your question. Next question,
please. Sorry, I caught it, Ray, as it went off. The fall as well. Yes, I think you should get out
once you've accomplished something. Don't get out when you panic, unless it's dangerous.
Sorry. How can you train your brain to feel more confident in moments where you tend to feel intimidated?
Ah, okay. These are a hard question. Because context is tricky here because I don't know
what the context is. And, you know, confidence on short time scales and then long time scales. So
confidence in school, confidence in career, those are, you know, those are long, long arc things.
whereas confidence to be able to do something in the short term is different. But remember those
action sequences that trigger the release of dopamine. I've mainly talked about the dark side
of dopamine, but I hopefully also talked about the sort of upward spiral that dopamine can cause,
mainly by thinking about delight and things that you really enjoy. That carries over.
And I would say that you want to, you want to micro slice the demands of what's maybe got you back on your heels a bit.
Actually, a good friend of mine who's here tonight, I think also my friend Pat, you know, he has a great way of, you know, conceptualizing this, which is, you know, for most all endeavors, we either feel back on our heels, flat footed or forward center of mass.
Like we can really do something.
We're flat footed.
We're back on our heels.
And sometimes getting from back on our heels, let's call that lack of confidence to just, you know, on two feet and confident enough to move forward or at least stay in the game.
That's going to require, you could lean on different tools.
I can't say which would be ideal for the circumstance you have in mind.
But I do think that having a way to calm yourself will give you access to more resources, internal resources.
We know this.
This was something I meant to bring up during the discussion about fear versus love, et cetera, trying to access delight and love.
When we are in a state of fear or stress or anxiety, the rule set, the options available to us, and indeed our creativity is greatly diminished.
And this has to do with the way that the prefrontal cortex interacts with an area of the brain called the insula, which relates to our internal landscape.
And there's this weird phenomenon, which is that normally our brain, our thinking brain, and our rule-setting brain, it leads the brain parts that control and pay attention to how we feel internally.
And that's why, for instance, if you feel a little nervous, you can still do something.
At some point, you get stressed enough.
And we know this from work by my colleague David Spiegel.
It reverses.
and these areas of the brain that are paying attention, like how flushed my face is or whether
or not I'm sweating or my breathing actually start to shut down creative decision-making.
So I would say the way to have more confidence is to learn to control that stress and keep the
part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex is that part that can come up with new rules that can be
funny, that can be creative, that keeps that brain part leading. The way to think about this is that
the prefrontal cortex is sort of like the coach and the rest of your brain are sort of like the
players. And if you get too stressed, the players start to lead the game and the coach follows
and kind of drags them along. So I would encourage you to focus on real-time stress modulation and
to raise your stress threshold using the sorts of tools we talked about and to register your wins.
I didn't get into this in too much detail, but one of the amazing things about the dopamine system is that it's highly subject to your interpretation.
If you tell yourself that a fail was a win and you can see or conceptualize some way in which that's actually true, you get to tap into the dopamine system.
You might think that's crazy.
You can cheat your own brain.
You can cheat your own neurochemistry.
And indeed, you can.
You can change the time, space, time referencing.
We see this with examples like Nelson Mandela or Viktor Frankl.
You know, you read their stories, right?
Trapped in little cells, right?
Confined, imprisoned.
And they come up with new ways to access the dopamine system by now not thinking about what they're not getting, but thinking about what they can control in their immediate experience.
Many, many examples of this throughout literature and history.
And the dopamine system is the life force system.
I don't say that in any loose way. Dopamine is life force. It's the wish and the desire to continue. It's persistence. And so if you can think about what might seem like a failure and really spend some time thinking about not the potential wins on the outside, but how you can conceptualize that as a potential win internally, you really do get to achieve an internal chemical win.
And that chemical win sets you up for more real wins. Would that make sense? It's incredible
how contextualized the dopamine system is, but if it weren't, why would it matter if we're talking
about money or mates or food or job or school? You don't get 50 reward systems and motivation
systems. You get one and that's the dopamine system. Next question, please. What is the
competing mechanism behind bilateral eye movement, EMDR, that helps resolve psychological trauma?
The competing mechanism. Well, let me try and answer as best I can. I'm not sure I understand
the full extent of the question, but let me, EMDR, moving your eyes from side to side,
right? And then recounting a trauma is a very common and actually one of the four
approved treatments that are behavioral for trauma. So it's taken seriously in the psychiatric
and psychological community for good reason. It tends to work best for single event traumas as
opposed to like entire childhoods. No joke there, like, you know, some people have their entire
childhood was traumatic. Other people, they experience a trauma, single event trauma or
repeated periods of the same or similar type of trauma.
Eye movements from side to side have been shown in a number of studies to very potently reduce
the activity of a brain structure called the amygdala, which most people are familiar with
because of the character from the Star Wars movie, amygdala.
There's a neuroscientist somewhere on that team.
It is indeed a threat detection center.
And when you move through space, not outer space, but when you walk like this, your eyes actually generate these subtle side-to-side shifts unless you're focusing on a specific target.
And my lab and other laboratories have found that that leads to a very potent quieting of the threat detection system.
and then EMDR is essentially a process of pairing that calmer state with no threat detection system
activated with the recount of something that normally would be quite triggering. So it's,
you've heard of Pavlovian conditioning, like a bell rings and the animal gets fed and
animal salivates. Eventually just the bell will evoke the salivation. You're doing the reverse
of that. It's called behavioral desensitization. It has an underlying mechanism, et cetera.
but the idea is to pair a calm state with recount of something. It has been shown to be successful.
There are people who think that the side to side eye movements and the recount of trauma may
actually be invoking some form of hypnosis. My colleague, David Spiegel, expert in clinical
hypnosis, he's appeared on my podcast, Rich Roll's podcast, and a few other podcasts and talks about
this. This is not stage hypnosis, it's clinical hypnosis. So there may be something going on there.
EMDR, again, some people get great relief from it. Other people don't. What's kind of nice is that
this eye movements from side to side or simply taking a walk, as long as you're not looking at
your phone and not allowing your eyes to move from side to side, is a very good way to shut
down the fear and stress system. So taking a walk, I think, is relaxing for obvious reasons.
And there are data showing that part of the reason why animals scratch at the door and want
to go for a walk may not actually be the exercise. There's kind of an anxiety and then an anxiety
relief that occurs. Of course, they probably have to go to the bathroom too. One of Costello's
great joys in life was just peeing on everything. Outdoors, thankfully. So the psychological trauma
rewiring, unfortunately, there haven't been a lot of brain imaging studies looking at this long
term of how well EMDR works. What I think is going to happen in the next few years, by the way,
is it is not going to be a discussion around, should you do EMDR? Should you do transcranial
magnetic stimulation should you do behavioral therapy? It's going to be combination therapies,
combination therapies, including pharmacologic manipulations to essentially give a boost to the
systems that encourage neuroplasticity like dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline, and then
also then perform EMDR. And if you want to talk about what's happening in the landscape of clinical
trials on some of the psychedelics, I'm happy to talk about it. They're still illegal, but they are
being used in clinical trials and very interesting stuff is happening there. Okay, next question,
please. What new research or interventions are you most excited about in the realm of
wellness? So what I think is going to be very interesting in the next few years
really reflects my obsession that you've seen a little bit of tonight, but the thing that I think
is going to be most useful, and I've seen this in science before, and I think we're going to see it
in health and wellness is that there are all these tools and all these people and he's saying
this and she's saying that. And what we're going to start paying attention to is what are the common
themes, right? And a broader and more important theme is going to be one of modulation versus
mediation. What do I mean? Well, if someone were to pull a fire alarm right now, and please don't,
that will shift our attention and make it hard to focus on what I'm saying. And knowing me,
I'd probably just stay up here talking. Do we think that fire alarms mediate attention? No,
they modulate it, right? If it were very, very cold in this room, like it was when we first got
here tonight, we were Arctic cold. Hopefully it's warmed up a bit. It hasn't. I'm so sorry.
so sorry um yeah i attempted to yeah i almost thought maybe we all just do a bunch of breathing
to heat up like adrenaline release but i don't know these days getting groups of people all
breathe on each other is not exactly a you know i can see that might go the wrong way in terms of
what people interpret so the the idea here is that certain things directly mediate something
Like a physiological sigh directly calms you down quickly.
It mediates the calming response.
Getting good sleep makes you less easily triggered.
It modulates stress.
But is sleeping directly mediating stress control?
No.
And I think this is really important.
And this brings up the topic of the gut-brain axis.
The gut is rich with these little bugs, bacteria, trillions of them, which is an eerie thought
to me.
but also the surface of your skin, the surface of your eyes. You have a skin microbiome,
a nasal microbiome. Every mucosal lining has a microbiome. In fact, think about this.
This is a crazy but worthwhile tangent. Have you ever bitten the inside of your mouth?
It sucks, right? And you get a cut and it hurts. But guess what? The inside of your mouth
heals without a scar. Think about that. Weird, right? You cut anywhere else on your body and
depending on how well you heal and your age and your immune status, you get a scar.
Your mouth is filled with bacteria and it's open to the world. But the gut microbiome,
provided it's healthy, provides an incredible ability to heal quickly. And, you know, I'm not
somebody who's done a lot of acupuncture. I've went a few times and now there's interesting
science happening on acupuncture, but what's the first thing they do when you walk in there?
and then they go, oh yeah. And they have this cool intuition that's not based on Western
mechanistic science. It's more of an intuition based on millions, if not billions of data points
that have been put into these charts. It's pretty cool, right? And what they are looking at, I
believe, and from what my colleagues who work on microbiome tell me is they can look at the
pallor of your tongue in particular in the back and get a sense of whether or not the microbiome
there is of the appropriate stuff, but they don't go, oh, lactobacillus and then bacillus,
they all end '-illus', right? Oh, you're dysbiotic. Instead, they get a sense. Now,
parents of small babies learn to detect all sorts of things coming out of essentially every orifice
of the child as a readout of health because the child doesn't have language. And the dog owners,
unfortunately, you learn to do this too, for better or for worse, probably for better, right?
§03Transcript — part 3
So we have this intuition about gut health, but gut health would be another example where it's very clear now that fiber can be helpful, but it's mostly consuming these fermented foods that have been used for ages, but low sugar fermented foods of the natto, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, etc.
All these things, depending on which culture you're in, they come in different forms, certain yogurts, et cetera, that allow the gut to be healthy, and it modulates a huge number of systems.
So I don't think that you're going to cure depression by adjusting your gut microbiome, but if your gut microbiota are not well and you improve that, it will indeed shift the neurotransmitter systems of your brain and give you an elevated mood.
that shouldn't come as a surprise anymore.
But I think that the whole world thinks like,
gosh, it must be the serotonin in the gut.
No, it's actually not serotonin in the gut.
It's that the gut microbiota create chemicals
that actually become serotonin in the brain
or become dopamine in the brain.
And so I think that the gut microbiome,
I would put in the same category,
although not quite as important.
I would put it in the category of like sleep.
It modulates a huge number of other processes.
It doesn't mediate them.
So sunlight, sleep, healthy gut microbiome, exercise, good nutrition, social connection,
these things all create this general milieu or environment of health. I would like to see more
distinction between modulating and mediating effects and tools out there because I also see
a lot of unnecessary argument. People are like, there's no example that improving your gut
microbiome cures depressions? Of course there's not, but there are really good examples. If your
gut microbiome is off, that improving it can improve mood, which depending on where you are
on that spectrum of depression can really relieve things. So I think that the future of health,
we hear so much about personalized medicine and matched to your genome, but
we don't even have the basic, most people don't even have the basics right.
And if you watch or listen to the podcast long enough, hopefully certain themes start to kind
repeat themselves. But a key theme that you learn in science, you teach your students, you know,
does it modulate or does it mediate it? You need to be careful with your language there.
And there's great information or as we say, interpretational power there.
If you understand the difference, then I think we can go a long way by making that distinction,
modulating versus mediating. There are probably other things that modulate health that I'm
overlooking now just because of the flow that I'm in. The cool mitt. Yeah. The cool mitt. Palmar
cooling. Okay. I promised to talk about Palmar cooling. Well, I'll do it now. Palmar cooling,
they changed the Q and A format. What can I say? This is like teaching in the classroom.
All right. Very briefly, the Palmar cooling, which is essentially placing, you can cool the
core of the body most quickly by placing cold objects on the hands, the bottoms of the feet,
or on the top of the face because of the arrangement of vasculature. Normally you've got
this arteries, capillaries, veins, things, but at those locations in the body, you skip the
capillaries and you can basically, you're not really passing cool into the body, but you're
cooling off the core of the body more quickly. And if you do that in between sets of exercise
or during a run or cycling, you can dramatically increase your ability to continue. I actually use
the cool mitt for cognitive work, but you don't need a cool mitt. Sorry, cool mitt guys. Um,
you can just get a, a, a thing of ice water or just very cold water. And you, I know it sounds
trivially easy, but you're actually just cooling your core by putting your hands or even one hand
on a relatively cold thing of water or ice,
but not so cold that it constricts the vasculature there.
This is the incredible work of my colleague at Stanford,
Dr. Craig Heller.
Why wouldn't more people do this
if you can double the amount of endurance,
believe it or not,
or double the number of sets of exercise you can do
or feel more alert and do more cognitive work?
Why wouldn't more people do it?
Because people just don't do it.
And it sounds crazy.
It really sounds crazy, but it's a real thing.
And I wish more people would do it.
The athletes at Stanford do it.
People in the military do it.
So people who know, know, and they use it and enjoy it.
It's almost like it seems too off target from what you're trying to accomplish.
I don't know.
For some reason, people are finally on board breathing in a specific way as a useful tool.
A few years ago, no one was into that.
And just think of how far we've come.
It's incredible.
People are talking about psychedelics, meditation, breathing.
I think the pandemic, for all its pains and, you know, what a challenging period for all sorts of reasons, did wake people up to the idea that you have to take control over your health because there's no magic fairy coming to do it for you.
And with all due respect, there's no government agency that's going to, like, drop off the kit at your front door of, like, here's how you take good care of yourself.
So it's just not going to happen.
And it wouldn't happen under any circumstances.
So it's a personal responsibility issue.
No, no. All right. What lessons from skateboarding? The failure part, you know, the failure, failure, failure.
I mean, for me, you know, skateboard never was a good skateboarder.
Still have close friends in that community and our photographer and a guy who does all the visuals and the other guys that do the visuals for our podcast.
Mike Blabac and Chris and Martin are all of that community.
You know, I think that for me, that community was really, as Mike will sometimes say, skateboarders hate everything.
meaning they have a very high threshold for what they consider acceptable. It's not just what you
do, it's how you do it. Super important. And I think in neuroscience, there's a lot of stuff.
In science in general, there's so many papers and there's so many experiments. How do you
navigate that landscape? I think it helped me develop a sense of taste. But the taste that
I'm referring to is not necessarily a taste of which science is cool or not cool, that too.
but it came through a few times tonight when I was talking about my mentors you know I picked back
then skateboarding because I really liked the people and also you didn't need your parents to
go to a game and so that worked for me um and you could kind of make your own schedule and I do think
it's very important to the extent that you can in science and in everything to surround yourself
with the kinds of people that you just really enjoy being around and so to me the podcast
running a lab feels a lot like skateboarding. It's the same energy. It's the same neurochemical
systems firing. So that's, yeah, that one. Next, favorite, oh, oh wait, no, that's inappropriate.
I do have a Feynman story, but it's inappropriate. Darn it. Damn. Maybe sometime. This is why I
don't drink. Um, good decision-making. Um, well, I read all of Feynman's books, so I had the pleasure.
I never met him. Uh, he was dead before I was born. Um, but my, my dad did, and he had good
Feynman stories and they were inappropriate. Um, so the cool thing about Feynman, right,
was that he didn't really care if people understood the specifics of what he was talking about.
He just wanted people to get turned on to how amazing physics was. And he loved general principles.
And one of the things, you know, the example that's sometimes given, I don't know how many of you are
familiar with the Feynman books, but surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, or what do you care what other
people think? All of that stuff. It's wonderful. He picked locks. You know, we worked at Los Alamos
labs. They were working on the bomb and he basically, well, there and elsewhere. And every
morning the offices used to come in and he would spread all the top secret papers out on the floor.
He would break into the safes at night and then they were perplexed. Who could do this? And he
like safe cracking, literally like national security secrets, just for fun. Prankster.
He also bongo drum naked on the roof of Caltech. And he did most of his writing of theorems in
strip clubs. Fact. Learned to draw late in life, was really into flotation tanks,
and very curious about, but never did psychedelics. That's as I understand. But one of the cool
Feynman factoids is that when he was a kid, he talked about when he was a child that his dad
used to take him bird watching, and he'd say, oh, that's a whatever, scrub jay, and that's a
whatever whatever thrush and that's the and his dad said no don't cloud your mind with naming and
taxonomy that's not meaningful because then what if it's the different you know the pygmy thrush or
the the lesser this or that the more important thing is to start to identify principles of
why certain birds behave one way and certain birds behave another and to start finding the
the commonalities and the regularities. And that's a theme that I obviously tonight have
tried to impose. And it's actually something that I can't do in podcasts necessarily because I can't
thread across 40 episodes or something like that in the same way that I could in an evening like
this. So that's an appropriate Feynman story. Also, it just seemed like a delightful guy.
And he's kind of cool. He's a little bit street, right? He had that thick accent. He was from far
Rockaway, but he didn't really care much what people thought or he did and he pretended he
didn't. Careful when people tell you they don't care what people think. I think he did to the
extent that it's still to allow him to get the message out there. Okay. Next question, please.
My horse. Wow. I love this. I delight in all things animals, but especially horses because
my high school girlfriend had a horse and um i you know they do that thing where people oh you know
horses can detect how they know more about you than you know and then i get into the horse and
the horse is like you know this and like it's like a litmus test having a girlfriend with a horse was
very intimidating for me actually i felt like i had to compete with the horse she spent all this
time with the horse it was very large very like you know um anyway
Eventually, I broke the horse.
Okay, my horse does the double inhale, long exhale often.
He's a bit of a stressy guy.
Warm blood, yeah, warm blood.
I used to work at the barn.
I used to shovel manure and work at the barn.
She brought her horse to college.
I actually followed her off to college.
I never would have gone to college if she hadn't gone to college.
And the horses are interesting animals.
They do tell you a lot.
The horse does the double inhale, long exhale often.
He's a bit of a stressy guy.
Do you suppose this physiological stress regulator transcends?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
In fact, I mentioned warm bloods.
I have a colleague at Stanford.
She's amazing.
Her name is Sue McConnell, and she is an expert in dog genetics.
So you can imagine I'm always asking her questions.
And we talk about dogs, and we talk about horses,
because she also, I think she raises warm bloods.
And you hear about hot bloods and warm bloods.
And you also, if you have any familiarity with dogs,
there are dogs like Costello
where like a nuclear bomb could go off
and Costello might open an eye.
That's the bulldog, economy of effort.
They're not going to get activated
unless there's a reason to do it.
They are very, as we call parasympathetic dominant.
That seesaw of autonomic arousal
is just really, really relaxed. Getting them into action is more of an effort.
There are other animals, like the whippet, right? Or the Italian greyhound, like they're always cold,
that are very sympathetic dominant. And then, of course, within a breed or within a species,
there's a range. And humans also come out within a range. I think anyone who's had children will
tell you, you know, he or she has been like this since birth, calm, easygoing, or like really easily
stressed. I think that seesaw, we didn't get into tonight too much, but there's a concept with the
autonomic regulation of a hinge. So don't think so much about being really stressed out or really
relaxed, but certain animals, the hinge is tightened so that the seesaw just kind of tilts
mellow like Costello. A bulldog is almost seems like a different animal than a whippet. They're
so very different. And within the category of horses, and I'm not an expert in horse genetics,
but they are selected for not just for their physical attributes, but for their psychological
or temperament attributes. And you see this in dogs too. In fact, the reason I picked Costello
and Elvis can verify their stories. I read, I wanted a dog for so many years and I went there
and there were all these puppies and I was like, I heard you need to take them in the other room
one by one. And then if it barks for its siblings and you're like, oh, it's a healthy puppy. So I
walk in and all the dogs are running around like crazy. It was right around Christmas time, right
Elvis? And they're running around and then there's one in the back and he's taking advantage of the
fact that all the other ones are waiting. He's just eating out of all of their bowls. And I was
like, I want that one. So I took that chubby little bastard in the next room and I thought,
okay, he's going to bark for his siblings. And he laid down and he took a nap. And I was like,
this one, I want this one. Why did I want that one? Well, this completes the principle, which is
I wanted a dog like that because I'm not like that. And I was very interested in a dog I could
take care of, but also a dog that would help regulate my nervous system. And so for me,
having a dog like that, as opposed to a Whippet or something that was going to, you know, like
constantly looking around is a very calming effect. And to this day, memory of his snoring
still puts me to sleep. So I think that your horse probably has, it kind of idles a little
bit higher. Think about the RPM, you know, revs a little bit higher at a given speed, higher,
more RPM at a given speed. That's the way I think about the autonomic system. How do you reset that?
well this is why a lot of exercise is good right and sadly my girlfriend's horse was crazy it was
gelded late and it was crazy i almost said nuts but that's like a bad pun so all right it was not
nuts but it was crazy it was gelded late um next question
is there any science behind staying motivated or developing discipline oh so this represents kind
of the higher tier of where i think things are going to go in the next few years where we're
going to start seeing this convergence of psychology and biology where we can get to
these harder concepts you know i like to think that we can stay motivated through
a simple process that now will make sense to you because the last thing i covered was
toggling back and forth between our ability to be gritty and lean in, kind of in friction,
maybe even a little anger, fear, competitiveness, et cetera, that kind of grinding in, but that the
more sustaining fuel, the sort of hybrid version, right? Hybrid fuel model would be one in which you
can access that, but that's a depletable and not so renewable resource without a lot of rest,
Meaning working hard out of anger, determination, and kind of grit will work.
§04Transcript — part 4
But when you are depleted, you have to stop for a long while.
Whereas if you can access this delight system, which is really one of dopamine and serotonin, both.
In other words, and I want to think of a not of a different way to put this,
but to try and think about what sorts of things and tools allow you to be and feel most loving.
I know it sounds weak, but it's anything but weak.
To be most loving in the verb sense of the word toward what you're doing.
I actually used to use this trick in college when I'd encounter a topic I hated.
I would tell myself, I'm just going to fall in love with this by trying to find the gems within it.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
But the wish to do it that way, as opposed to, okay, I'm just going to grind this out,
at least for me at the time, was a powerful tool.
So motivation and discipline is a tricky one.
That's sort of the just do it thing.
You need tools to modulate your stress and to do all the basic things right,
set the right context for you to be in your best chance of being disciplined.
and that itself is its own form of discipline.
But in terms of continual motivation,
you're not going to manage to go against the grain for very long.
People have managed to go against challenge for very long times.
In fact, I was reading recently about the psychology of people being kidnapped
and they have this odd trick that they used.
Have you heard about this?
It's sort of like Stockholm Syndrome,
but they actually convince themselves to fall in love with their captors.
And then they come up with new ways to escape them, which is kind of cool.
So there's something about mentally feeling like you're trying to go from back on your heels to flat-footed
that's very energetically costly.
So again, these systems are very susceptible to what we call context or top-down regulation.
Hopefully that helps.
I know it's a little bit abstract.
I wish I could give you a one-minute exercise that would make you motivated. But we do talk
about tools to get adrenaline going and things like that. But spend some time thinking about
what would allow you to sustain effort through positive feelings. It's not a light concept
at all. Okay, next question, please. What would be your biggest piece of advice for
achieving one's dreams. Oy, that's a tough one. Again, this is going to be a little abstract.
You know, I'm a believer in this idea of a kind of a seed message. Robert Greene has talked a lot
about this, that we can all kind of think back to a event or stage of our life. Typically it's
before puberty for other reasons that are kind of interesting, but where we, we delight in
something, right? So for me it was fish. And obviously now I don't need to work on fish
is it wasn't about the fish. I hope that came through. I mean, Aquaria are really cool,
but it's not about the fish. It was something about the way they moved. It was something about
the way that it tickled my excitement. I used to get dropped off at this little pet shop in
California Avenue in Palo Alto called Monet's Pet Shop. My mom used it as childcare. And she would
drop me off there and I had this book and I would log all the tropical fish and which ones could be
with which ones. And then I would, I was obsessed, right? But for me, it was something about organizing
and being able to make reliable predictions. It was about parsimony. It was about principles
as opposed to, and the colors delighted me and all that kind of stuff. The equipment delighted me.
but then I hit puberty and then like it was something else. And, um, and then I went to
college and it was something else and I got a girlfriend and it was something else. So
it changes over time, but this is why I recommended to that young 15 year old person
that they learn to tap into that sense of like, Ooh, like this is cool. Like this feels cool. I
know not everyone else thinks it's cool. Maybe they do like this feels good. I actually have a
somatic experience of this. I'm not a very somatically oriented person. I'm more up here,
but I actually kind of know if I'm onto something, if this left arm just kind of starts fidgeting,
like it's like, I want to move or like some people, you can start to identify ways in which you
suddenly have this positive energy. It's not a fear energy. It's almost like a magnetism to things.
And just don't be confused in or misdirected in thinking that it's that thing. It's that
again, energy or that attraction to something that feels right. That is your, you know, I wish
we had these divining rod to find water. That's your tool. It's like antennae. You want to grow
your antennae. So how do you follow your dreams? Well, I never thought I'd do a podcast. I never
thought I'd become a neuroscientist. You have to be willing, of course, to take risks and
and to iterate quickly, but not so quickly that you, you know, you fail out of the game,
et cetera. If you do get back in, et cetera. But it's really about developing an awareness.
Now, the key thing is you're not going to find this by going up a mountain and sitting there
or waiting for your passion to just kind of rocket, you know, does this sort of piano fall
onto your head? It's not going to happen that way. You have to interact with the sensory world
and different kinds of people. And you have to be a little bit of a
adventure in a safe way, of course, an adventure and learn to recognize the signals.
And some people are very in tune with this. You know, there's an amazing podcast with Rick Rubin
recently on Joe Rogan's podcast, where he talks about the creative processes, kind of this,
like, it seems like whatever's going on in that beard of his is just connects to the world. And
he can just like, there, like, that's where you need to go. And that's, you know, but that's part
of the magic is you don't really know. And because it's, it's all energetic. It's all energetic.
And when I say energetic, I don't mean in the mystical sense. I mean, you have to learn to
sense those fluctuations in energy. Some people can sense them very easily because they're very
mellow. And if something gets them really excited, they notice as a big Delta, as we say in science,
big change. Other people, they ride kind of high all the time. And so everything's exciting to them
and they miss a lot of the subtle fluctuations in what's really special and right for them. In fact,
mania is characterized by hyper-elevated levels of dopamine, and everything's a good idea.
Right? And depression is the opposite. Nothing's a good idea. Nothing's going to work. Right? And
those are the extremes, and those are rough conditions, obviously. But for most people,
it's about learning to detect those subtle fluctuations. And every time, every single
time, you find somebody who is exceptional at their craft and doing well in life. Okay. There
are a lot of people who are exceptional at their craft, but not necessarily doing well on the whole.
Those people have a kind of intuition about what feels good to them. This year's Nobel Prize
winner in chemistry is my colleague, Carolyn Bertozzi. And all I know of her, except the fact
that she's an amazing chemist, is they did this interview with her. And she said that when
everyone would go out in college, she was finding excuses to stay home and read organic chemistry.
Now that to me sounds like a bad night. But for her, it was pure delight. And she's wired for that.
And I think her work is going to be vitally important and transformative for humanity. I
really do. So how do you succeed in chasing your dreams? You succeed in identifying what they are,
but you don't know at the outset. You want to find the energy to find the right path and
continually course correct when you will undoubtedly be off your path. That's essentially
what I've done. I'd still look for the feeling of delighting in Costello or the cuttlefish. That's
what I'm looking for. It's not a template I have to match, but that's my like, oh yeah, I know what
that feels like. It's like a texture. It's like, if you think about a bunch of different textures
of sandpaper, it's like this one that just feels really good. And so you're comparing everything
to that because the system that involves all these chemicals, you'll find it if you learn to
pay attention to it, but you won't find it sitting, staring at your belly button or going up a mountain.
You have to be in sensory experience in order to find it. Reflection is good, but you need to get
into action. Okay. Wow. All right. Well, okay. So psilocybin, opinion of the psychedelics.
Generally, we just had an episode with my colleague, Nolan Williams, who's a triple
board certified neurologist, psychiatrist. This is a fun thing about working at Stanford. It's
also very humbling because you're like, whoa, who are these people? I got three board certifications.
You know, the psilocybin, first of all, not for everybody, people with psychosis,
It is still illegal, decriminalized certain places.
So obviously, cautionary notes, people who have drug addiction issues or other kinds
of addiction issues need to be thoughtful about diving into a neurochemical landscape
like that.
But it does appear that the clinical trials on one macro dose, this is what's interesting
to me.
A lot of people talk about microdosing psilocybin.
But the data, at least according to Matthew Johnson, who was also on the podcast,
The data for microdosing are not really there, frankly.
The data on single session macro dose, the sort of heroic doses that have been talked
about in the psychonaut community for depression and to some extent PTSD and for eating disorders
and sort of end of life preparation are quite encouraging.
In fact, the current data suggests that about two thirds of people achieve lasting relief
from one session.
Now, keep in mind, those are guided sessions with physicians in the room, et cetera.
I do think there's a potential hazard of all psychedelics, which is they alter, this includes
MDMA or especially MDMA, they alter the chemical landscape in you such that a lot of things
can serve as attractors in that state.
Meaning you can get really into the sound of music in an MDMA session, feel connected
to that and waste the opportunity for some more meaningful transformative rewiring.
And I do think that that's worth paying attention to. So that's the usefulness of having a
therapeutic guide there is they can continually steer you back to what, at least for you,
is the more meaningful work. But it's very encouraging. And Nolan Williams, who I trust,
again triple board certified MD
said that in the studies of
lifetime perceived
individual and societal risk
of all the compounds out there
except for caffeine
psilocybin is at the bottom of the list
whereas things like you know heroin
cocaine, alcohol
methamphetamine sit at the top of the list
actually alcohol quite high on that list
at certain amounts of consumption
so I'm very excited
about what's happening
in the landscape of psilocybin, but I'm not so excited about the microdosing data. Very excited
about the single heroic dose data. One interesting thing there, perhaps what seems to be the unifying
feature of a successful psilocybin session is that at some point the person feels as if it's
like too much of an autonomic thing. They kind of get to this point and then they are encouraged to
let go. And I'm fascinated by this concept of letting go because I'm a neuroscientist. We don't
know what that means, but it seems like being able to ride the wave of autonomic arousal from top to
bottom seems to be very powerful for trauma and depression treatment. And this is interesting.
A lot of people think that one of the major issues in humans nowadays is we're stressed
about a lot of things, but we never actually get to go into the full stress response and then let
it relax again. And catharsis was big at one point, you know, scream therapy, Steve Jobs is
really into scream therapies that whether or not catharsis is healthy or not has been debated, but
the data are kind of pointing to the fact that it may be provided that the catharsis is not
obviously someone damaging themselves or somebody else. So maybe we should all be screaming a lot
more. Why does my desire to eat disappear after I use the sauna? Oh, interesting. I can go in hungry
and get out with no desire to eat. I can only speculate. You know, the sauna or any kind of
deliberate heat exposure that's uncomfortable releases this molecule dynorphin. This is
actually the same molecule that's released under conditions of alcohol withdrawal. Makes you feel
agitated and not good. And then there's this rebound. The way it feels good is later,
it causes this upregulation in the so-called mu opioid receptors. So the chemicals that you have,
your so-called endogenous opioids, not the opioids that are related to the opioid crisis,
but the ones that you naturally make are able to have a more robust effect after the sauna.
Dynorphin is an appetite suppressant.
And for reasons related to kind of general discomfort in the body.
So that's the only reason I can speculate.
There are a number of other things that sauna does, including massive increases in growth hormone, provided you don't sauna too much.
So if you do it once a week for four 20-minute sessions spaced five minutes apart, you get these enormous increases in growth hormone.
If you start doing it more often, you get still significant but smaller increases in growth hormone.
And my team, this is how the podcast goes too.
At some point, Rob just goes, it's enough.
So if you think that the episodes are long now, they'd be a lot longer.
Listen, I just want to, before we part, I know it's Sunday night and people have to go.
I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight.
I know that, at least for me, I'm still sort of baffled, but pleasantly so, that people are interested in investing time to come out and hear hours of a nerd like me talk about science and tools.
And I'm delighted that people are hopefully gleaning some useful information.
Please do pass along the information.
I didn't invent this stuff.
As I mentioned before, I was not consulted at the design phase.
I have no domain over it.
This is the stuff of Mother Nature and whatever other beliefs you have.
They're here in us.
And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't finish by saying have a wonderful night
and thank you for your interest in science.