LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Moore Theatre in Seattle
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§01Transcript — part 1
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
where we discuss science and science-based tools
for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
at Stanford School of Medicine.
Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting two live events,
one in Seattle, Washington, and one in Portland, Oregon,
both entitled The Brain-Body Contract,
where I discussed science and science-related tools
for mental health, physical health, and performance.
My favorite part of each evening, however,
was the question and answer period that followed the lecture.
I love the question and answer period
because it gives me an opportunity
to hear directly from the audience
as to what they want to know most,
and indeed to get into a bit of dialogue
so we really clarify
what are the underlying mechanisms of particular tools,
how best to use the tools for things like focus and sleep.
We also touched on some things
related to mental health and physical health.
It was a delight for me,
and I like to think that the audience learned a lot.
I know that many of you weren't able to attend those events,
but we wanted to make the information available to you.
So what follows this is a recording
of the question and answer period
from the lecture in Seattle, Washington.
I hope you'll find it to be both interesting and informative.
I'd also like to thank our sponsors of these live events.
The first is Momentous Supplements,
which is our partner with the Huberman Lab podcast,
providing supplements that are of the very highest quality
that ship international and that are arranged in dosages
and single ingredient formulations that make it possible
for you to develop the optimal supplement strategy for you.
And I'd also like to thank our other sponsor,
which is Inside Tracker,
which provides blood tests and DNA tests
so you can monitor your immediate
and long-term health progress.
I'd also like to announce
that there are two new live events scheduled.
The first one is going to take place Sunday, October 16th
at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles.
The other live event will take place Wednesday, November 9th
at the Beacon Theater in New York City.
Tickets to both of those events are now available online
at hubermanlab.com slash tour.
That's hubermanlab.com slash tour.
I do hope that you learn from and enjoy the recording
of the question and answer period that follows this.
And last, but certainly not least,
thank you for your interest in science.
What is your most used protocol?
I'm assuming that you mean the protocol that I use the most.
I genuinely do the morning sunlight viewing this evening.
I went and looked at the sunset every single evening,
and I absolutely do 10 to 30 minutes of some non-sleep deep rest protocol every single day.
Every single day.
The reason I called it non-sleep deep rest is because while I love the classic traditions of things like yoga nidra,
My fear was that if I called things yoga nidra, that people would get spooked.
But I also have to say that I rather loathe the fact that scientists use so many fancy terms
that it also vaults information from the very people that fund the work.
So I have a kind of an axe to grind with the scientific community, too.
So non-sleep deep rest was my attempt to put my arms around a number of different things like yoga nidra,
which I have great reverence for.
and other tools like that. I do that usually in the early afternoon, or if I wake up first thing
in the morning and I haven't slept enough or not that well, I'll do 30 minutes of yoga nidra, and I
feel terrific after that. I'll just mention a brief anecdote. I learned about yoga nidra while
researching a book that I never wrote that may or may not ever be published. I went and spent a week
in a trauma center and addiction treatment center in Florida and saw some amazing work of some
amazing people and some amazing transformations. And it was a big part of their daily routine
for these people to do yoga nidra and non-sleep deep rest. And I thought they're really onto
something here. So almost religiously for me, every day, 10 to 30 minutes. Not that it matters,
but the CEO of Google is really into NSDR. I don't know him, but he's written about that a number of
times. In Seattle, sunrise varies from 4 30 a.m. to 9 a.m. depending on season. Are you recommending
to vary your wake up outside time with the seasons? Somewhat. You know, you don't need to see the sun
cross the horizon. That would be great, but not everyone can wake up with the sun.
You want to get so-called low solar angle sunlight. Why? Because of that yellow-blue
contrast that we talked about before. Many people wake up before the sun is out. If that case,
if you want to be awake, turn on as many bright lights as you can. Up here, I don't know, does
anyone here, you don't have to admit this if you don't want to, but maybe nod or raise your hand if
you're comfortable with meaning that in the winter you feel less well, or typically in the transition,
yeah, it's huge up here. It's really, it's amazing. And then when you're on campus, or that's where
I've spent time, and you see Rainier, and it's like the blossoms are out, and you feel almost high,
because that's dopamine. You know, animals that have white pelage in the winter, and then it turns
dark in the summer and spring months, that pathway, the melanin pathway is from tyrosine,
which is the precursor to dopamine and also to melanin production in the fur. So the whole system
is linked. It's not rigged. It's linked. So what do I suggest? I suggest in the winter months,
getting 30 minutes of sunlight viewing. I know it's a lot, but it's much better than feeling
lousy all day. And then the real key in the winter is to try and catch some sunlight before it goes
down. If you're indoors and it goes down and then you go outside and it's dark, your brain and body
don't really know where they are in time. And then you flip on Ozark and you're watching Ozark
and then you really don't know where you are in time. I have one more episode, don't tell me what
happened, that shows. When I was at postdoc, I used to recommend The Wire to my competitors.
True. I go to sleep fired up, ready and excited to do whatever it takes. When I wake up,
that drive is depleted. Why and what can I do? Interesting. Have not heard that one before, but
if I were to venture a guess, you know, we didn't spend much time tonight talking about the
autonomic nervous system, this kind of seesaw that takes us from very alert, potentially panicked,
but to very, very deep sleep. Even, you know, God forbid we go into a coma, it's because the
parasympathetic nervous system is overactive relative to the sympathetic nervous system,
seesaw of autonomic function. You may be sleeping very, very deeply. And when you are in deep,
deep rest, the last thing you want to do is get into that forward center of mass,
thinking, planning, predicting, right? In, you know, again, in yoga nidra, again,
non-sleep, deep rest, there's this common theme in the script of going from thinking and doing
and predicting to being and feeling, they say.
And I'm not making fun of them.
As the moment I hear that, I go, oh, just going to be and feel.
What are you doing?
You're actually just moving into sensation but no planning, right?
There's nothing mysterious about it.
Sensation but no planning.
Now in sleep, a very deeply parasympathetic sleep state, what's happening?
You actually, that visual aperture is actually so big, right?
You're not in panoramic vision.
your eyes are actually closed. Space and time are from past, present, and future are invited
into your thinking. You're in a deep, deep state of relaxation. And it may be, Dustin, that when
you're waking up, you're having a hard time transitioning out of that because you're sleeping
so deeply. You may be waking up mid-sleep cycle. Many people find it useful to set an alarm so
that they wake up at the end of a 90-minute so-called ultradian cycle. There are some sleep
apps that do this on the phone. I can't recall their names, but so rather than sleeping seven
hours, you might be better off sleeping six or seven and a half hours, right? Waking up at the
end of one of these 90 minute cycles. Try that. That would be consistent with what we know about
the biology. But I think it's common to, if you sleep very deeply, to wake up and not necessarily
want to spring out of bed. I've heard of these people that just want to spring out of bed and
attack the day. Jocko Willink, 4.30 in the morning, his Casio phone. I'm seeing his watch
when it's like 8 for me. I'm like, wow, again, these people are amazing. I must be doing something
wrong. But I don't wake up that way, like Tigger. I'm like, I want water. I want sunlight. 90 minutes
later, I want caffeine. What are some of your favorite books that have had the biggest impact
on you, Kyle G. Thank you, Kyle. Gosh, so many. You know, for nonfiction, well, Oliver
Sacks's autobiography, On the Move, had a profound impact on me. You know, people hated him.
The scientific community tried to kick him out. They said horrible things about him,
created all sorts of scandals. It wasn't until Awakenings became a blockbuster movie that
suddenly he got appointments at NYU and Columbia. Then now they wanted him back. And the revered
neurologist, like incredible, right? But he was also a real seeker and the cuttlefish thing. And
he had a lot of internal struggles too. Some of which I relate to, some of which I don't.
Actually, I've been in touch with his former partner because it actually moved to Topanga
Canyon for a short while just because Oliver lived there. I thought if I go there, I'll actually
finish this book. Guess what? Just moving someplace doesn't allow you to finish a book.
He lived in Topanga, so I was like, that's the key. It didn't work. And people were wondering why I was
hanging around their house all the time, because it was Oliver's former home. So that's an amazing
book and tells you my obsessive nature. The other books that have had a profound influence on me,
I would say in the non-fiction realm, well, I learned how to make a decent steak and a few other
simple recipes not well from Tim Ferriss' book, The Four-Hour Chef, because I really needed help.
That was a fun one. I like Robert Greene's book, Mastery, because I've had amazing mentors,
and that book is all about finding mentors and assigning mentors to you, even if you don't know
them. And as you can tell from my stories about Oliver, who I never met, and a few other folks
that I've just decided that they don't know it, but I'm mentoring them. They're mentoring me,
excuse me. That book was really important for me. And that mentor-mentee relationships always
involve a breakup, either by death or by decision or by consequence, your circumstance rather.
There's something happens and they're supposed to break. You're not supposed to apprentice with
somebody forever. That was an interesting book for me. I would say in the fiction realm,
I would say in the fiction realm, it's all childhood books because it's been a long time
since I've read fiction. I read a lot of poetry. I'm a big Wendell Berry fan. I like poetry because
poetry to me is like the subconscious. The structure is all messed up and you think you
understand what they're talking about, but you don't really know. And so it always feels
important and consequential, even though, you know, it's your own interpretation. And then I
love the psychologist. I love Jung. I love Erickson. I love, um, I love the psychologist
and could read endlessly about the early days of attachment theory and things like that,
because I find that stuff to be fascinating. So those books have been a lot of fun. And I love
picture books with animals. And so if you can get a hold of Joel Sartore's Instagram account,
The Photo Ark, he decided to take pictures of every animal on the planet, especially the ones
that are endangered. He's an amazing photographer, but his books are even better. So if you like
animal books, what excites you most about the future research of mental health treatment,
and particularly anxiety and depression.
Oy.
Michael, thank you, Michael.
Well, there I think that we're in an exciting time.
I am, I'll just reveal my biases.
I'm quite pessimistic at the idea
that we're going to have better medication soon
for most things.
What I do think we are starting to approach
is a time in which we understand
how broad categories of drugs impact broad categories of chemicals, which kind of shift
our mind in broad categories of directions. What does all that mean? I think we're starting to
realize that because there are different receptors for all these chemicals all over the brain and
body, that that side effectless drug is unlikely to exist for mental health, but that the combination
of maybe some pharmacology, but especially behavioral tools, people actually learning
how to drive this thing that we call our nervous system is potentially helpful, maybe very helpful.
Now, in cases like schizophrenia, autism, and I didn't put those next to one another for any
reason, by the way. OCD, eating disorders, and I'm very mindful of the fact that, you know,
anorexia is the most lethal of all the psychiatric disorders, right? Amazing and sad fact.
I think for those conditions, we are soon going to enter a time in which it's going to be
combination behavioral, drug therapy, and yes, brain machine interface. I don't mean putting
chips down below the skull. I think there's going to be, and there are things happening now of people
using devices like virtual reality, as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation, placing a
magnet on a particular location in the head, combined with a particular, maybe drug, maybe
psychedelics, maybe not, to enhance plasticity. I hear a vote for psychedelics, and I want to make
a serious point about psychedelics. Five years ago, when I, well, four years ago, when I started
doing a bit of public facing stuff, I was absolutely terrified to say that word.
Terrified. I thought I'd lose my job. I really did. I thought, don't say psychedelics.
And I'll be very honest. You know, I, for me, I think that the clinical data on MDMA and on
psilocybin are very interesting, very interesting. I don't think they are the first and only pass
at rewiring the brain, but it is clear that the brain can enter a state of heightened learning
capacity, but it needs to be directed towards something. The goal of opening plasticity,
just it opens plasticity. That's not the goal. It's like running. The goal isn't running. The
§02Transcript — part 2
goal is to run in a particular direction. So what I think is really needed is to drive that
plasticity in particular directions. And I would love to see more directed use of those in, of
course, the safe clinical setting where it's appropriate. And a guest on the podcast, Matthew
Johnson, who's at Johns Hopkins, I asked him, what's the deal with the micro dosing? And you
know what his answer was? I was very surprised. He said, macro dose. And I thought, okay, I'm not a
guy who, you know, I'm not into, I'm not, I'm not a pushing this. I'm not a proponent. I said,
you're kidding me. Why? Why? Why would you say this guy runs an NIH funded lab at Johns Hopkins
School of Medicine? I thought, why? And he said, because the one session with a trained professional
that's triggering rewiring plasticity that's guided as far as they know from the data.
You can go back and listen to it.
These are his words, not mine, but he's the expert in this area.
Are encouraging plasticity in a particular direction,
and he thinks that that's far more useful than just kind of nudging the system a little bit
without any particular goal or outcome.
Very interesting and very surprising.
And again, a trained academic at one of the most elite institutions in the world.
I think we're in very exciting times for those compounds.
And there are studies at Stanford and elsewhere on ketamine and other things, but it's early days.
Young people should be very cautious, young, young people.
And adults should be cautious, especially people with preexisting psychiatric issues.
and people who have the propensity for addiction,
although some of those compounds are being used to treat addiction.
So I'd be an idiot, and I would be lying
if I didn't say that it is very exciting times for psychedelic therapies.
Thank you.
Where do you see the biggest area?
And I've done only one clinical trial.
True.
I took part in one clinical trial,
I don't speak from a lot of experience there, just a little bit.
I was a subject in that trial.
Where do you see the biggest area for performance enhancement within the elite athletes and operators that already hit marks of proper sleep and nutrition?
Meg Young, thanks for your question, Meg.
Yeah, I think that, well, first of all, very few of them hit marks for proper sleep.
but for those that do, so once you have your sleep dialed in and you've got your nutrition
dialed in and the motivational component is there, I think where there's a lot of work still to be
done and where people can really get outsized effects is in this weird little cavern of human
existence that we call creativity. And I didn't have time to talk about it tonight,
but there's a very unique brain state that we call creativity, which is taking pre-existing
neural maps and starting to combine them in unique ways to create new ways of performance.
Performance can be basically summarized in any domain as essentially four stages. You have
unskilled, skilled, mastery, which is when the brain can generate movements or cognitive
computations that create very predictable outcomes. And then there's this fourth tier,
this fourth layer which is virtuosity and virtuosity by definition means inviting back
in a component of uncertainty what this looks like in terms of operators or this looks like in terms
of athletes or even we can say musicians or people who are in the cognitive fields or poets
or writers is what it means is introducing that uncertainty about what's going to happen next and
And the way to do that is to destabilize the system.
In other words, to create states of mind in which there are literally sensory disruptions.
It's like what I would like to see is more training in a kind of fun house of mirrors
type environment.
That's when you start to see incredible performances emerge.
And virtuosos invite in uncertainty.
They actually don't know what they're going to do next.
And so this becomes a little bit of a vague concept.
And what I'm about to tell you next might seem a little silly, but one of the best ways to access creative states is to, no surprise, use your visual system to view things that are highly unstable and uncertain.
I don't just love fish tanks.
I love staring at videos of aquariums in Tokyo and actually watching the fish because it's completely unpredictable.
There's some evidence that doing things like that,
or people will say, oh, I was in the shower,
I took a walk in nature and then I had this idea.
I actually don't think it was the walk or the shower.
It's that nature is filled with unpredictable visual stimuli,
auditory stimuli.
When you can predict what's going to happen next,
you have very little opportunity to up-level your game, so to speak.
It's only by way of unpredictable sensory input that you can do that.
So if you're a coach or you're working with people who are very high-level performers, do you want them to stand on one leg and spin around and then do what they're doing?
Not necessarily.
What you want to do is try and get them into brain states that are different than the brain states that they're in when they normally enter their practice.
The liminal state between sleep and waking is a very powerful one for accessing creativity.
Many people access ideas as they're waking up in the morning.
They have great insights. Other people, while strolling in nature, I don't think it's the strolling or the waking up. I think it's the lack of, as we call it, top-down regulation on rules. You are able to access combinations of neural maps that are unusual.
So you can play with this a little bit. A lot of people throughout history have used compounds, drugs, to do this. Great writers would get drunk and then try and write or wake up.
The amount of self-abuse that people, including athletes and creatives, put themselves through to try and capture these windows of cognitive ability is pretty intense. And I don't think that's a good idea. I think one should be an explorer and try and find these cognitive states in ways that are non-destructive.
I'm starting to sound like my mother with all this.
Heel flips on lock, no kickflips.
Next question.
There's some skateboarders in the audience.
My first non-biological family.
There's some amazing skateboarders in this audience,
and I'm not going to be the one doing a kickflip anytime soon.
But they're great to have.
One of the reasons we built the podcast with the help of the great Mike Blabac
is because I learned a long time ago that if you want things done right and you want to do them
outside the lane lines and you want to have control over how things come across, you do it
with skateboarders because I didn't come from a community where, you know, I didn't have parents
at my sports games and things like that. So thanks to the skateboarders and the misfits and those
folks. Do you have any tips on how to improve memory? Yes, Ron Verred. Yes. Okay, this is a
wild literature, and I love it, and it's changing the way that I do things. I thought that to
remember things, you're supposed to get really, really excited, really focused, and remember them.
And guess what? That's not how you do it. There are data, and there are stories going back to
medieval times, that they used to teach kids things and then throw them in the river.
There's a beautiful annual review of neuroscience written by the late James McGaugh,
a brilliant researcher who taught me that in this review.
And it turns out that if you want to remember something,
you want to spike adrenaline after you acquired that information.
After.
That means the double espresso and the ice bath after you study for math.
Immediately after.
And you think about this, you know, that makes perfect sense, right?
Think about the one trial learning that nobody wants to experience, which is a car accident or some traumatic thing.
You didn't get the spike of adrenaline first.
You got the spike of adrenaline after.
So, again, you know, I discourage the use of excessive stimulants or, you know, anything like that.
But if you're going to try and remember information, you need to get your brain and body into a high autonomic arousal state.
Literally, you need to deploy adrenaline into your system after you have made the attempt to learn some information.
So much so that if you give people a beta blocker after learning emotional information, they don't learn it as well.
Incredible.
Just incredible data in animals and humans.
This is the beautiful work of Larry Cahill at UC Irvine and James McGaugh.
So that's how I would focus on remembering things better.
And it's also true that if you tell yourself that something's really important to you, you'll be able to learn it better.
If you meet people and they tell you their name and you forget two seconds later, well, you should probably be thinking, and now I do this, I meet people and I think, okay, what terrible thing did this person do?
Just trying to spike my adrenaline or something like that.
It's a terrible trick, but I haven't figured out a better way.
But that's actually one data-supported way to do that.
Easily a dozen or more studies in humans on that very topic.
How do you manage social media addiction, Paul?
Oy.
Well, we should be careful with the use of the word addiction because here I think it's entirely appropriate.
When you're engaging in a behavior over and over and over again and you're thinking to yourself, this isn't even that interesting.
You're officially addicted.
That's the litmus test for addiction, not this feels so good.
People talk about the dopamine hits of social media.
Those only come at the beginning.
But then when you find yourself scrolling, like, what am I doing?
Maybe it's that narrow visual aperture.
You're a hypnotized chicken.
But maybe also you are seeking more dopamine hits because guess what?
That dopamine wave pool is depleted, at least for that activity.
It is true that dopamine, you have a baseline, and then you have peaks that ride on that baseline.
I do think that we can have dopamine for one behavior and not for another, but it's a generalized phenomenon.
So how do you manage it?
You have to stop seeking within social media.
And so I've taken on the practice of turning off my phone for a couple hours each day.
It's incredibly hard.
People get really upset, too, by the way.
In case you haven't noticed, these tethers that people expect.
We recorded a podcast recently, so I don't want to go into too much depth now, about attachment and grief.
And, you know, we all have a map.
Now, you know, you understand what the maps are.
Of space, time, and a dimension called closeness to everyone that we know.
Space, where they are.
Time, when they are.
Dead, alive, when will I see them again, et cetera.
And closeness.
and the phone has allowed us to tap into space-time in this closeness map which
define all our attachments on a very regular basis. So you can understand why
it's so valuable to people, you know, the plane lands and everyone's texting. The
plane's taking off, everyone's texting. It's like, where are you? Well the plane's in
the air, there's this thing called flight tracker, no one cares about that anymore.
You want to hear from the person. So I do think that I used to do in every odd
hour of the day my phone was off and like half the relationships in my life
disappeared. They couldn't tolerate it. I loved it, but I loved them too. So I would say take
breaks, and I would say at least an hour. And if you find yourself excited to get back on the phone,
that excitement, that is the dopamine system. So you can kind of learn where it is for you.
But if you find yourself scrolling mindlessly, and it's not doing anything for you, you're
driving that wave pool down, down, down, down, down. So hopefully that analogy will help.
It's weird to call myself Dr. Huberman. In my business, if you refer to yourself in the third
person, it means you're officially a narcissist. So I'm just going to start with, were you nervous
tonight? If so, what did you do to prepare, Brianne? You saw my nervousness, didn't you?
No, I asked myself that question. I was excited, and I think I'm good at lying to myself and
telling myself that autonomic arousal, that might be nervousness, is excitement. But in truth,
I wasn't. I was and am really excited to tell you all these stories and about biology.
I know this might sound like a little bit of a line, but I actually don't feel myself
as a person when I do the podcast or I do this stuff. I took a walk before I got here, and I
have to be careful. There are only two topics that make me cry. One is talking about my bulldog.
the others talking about my graduate advisor, so I have to be very careful. But I took a walk,
and I imagined that they were here, and I know, and don't make me cry. Lex Fridman made me cry
on a podcast, and it was really unfair, and he was like digging and digging, and there are a few
people in the audience that know Costello, and it's like, you know, and I just kept thinking to
myself before coming in here, like, you know, I love them and miss them, and I, Costello would be
entirely bored with this whole thing. So I distracted myself a bit and not so nervous.
I do get nervous about things. Sure, I'm human. But when it comes to biology, I think I still feel
like that little kid who just wants to tell you all the stuff, you know, so, you know, can't help
it. Is learning from failure equal to learning from success? Is one more efficient than the other?
Rachel, thanks for your question. Well, on a trial by trial basis, we know that when you fail
at an attempt, on the next attempt, your forebrain is in a position to engage better. And this makes
total sense, right? You feel that frustration, and you want to get the next one right? Well, you're
harboring, or I should say funneling more neural resources. Your focus, that aperture tightens.
Now, you have to be mindful of that, too, because when you have a failure, and then you're like,
you're going to hit the bullseye. I'm thinking about a dartboard because I'm terrible at darts.
you know sober I'm terrible at darts I don't even drink so that next trial part of the problem is
is that focus can narrow so much that you can start to lose access to information that might
help you if you were just to relax a little bit and dilate that focus a little bit but in general
on a trial by trial basis focus is the cue that your nervous system is going to be positioned to
learn better on the next trial now in terms of life experiences gosh I wish for everyone fewer
failures and more successes, but you know failures keep you humble and I've had a
lot of them. I mean if people ever wanted and they you know I'd be happy to tell
you about I mean I've made a ton of mistakes in life, a ton of mistakes. Some
of those were mistakes of persistence like dumb decisions I kept like it's
gonna change it's gonna change and it's clearly never gonna change and then some
were failures of misjudgment about other people or situations and a lot of them
were just plain failures like the experiment didn't work or that it just wasn't the right thing.
And you try and reframe those. I do think that we owe it to ourselves and to the people that we
know to try and generate some wins here and there and try and help other people generate wins.
You know, in running a lab over the years, and I still do, you realize that you want your students
to publish a paper and feel that success pretty early so that they can experience, A, how much
work it is, so they pick problems wisely, but B, so they can feel that, like, oh, I can do this.
§03Transcript — part 3
And I think that, you know, this gets into the psychological as well. I think that, yes,
failures help, but successes help. And there I think, you know, I function best in a team,
and I think that for those of you that feel like you're fighting some challenge alone,
I do think that there are great resources to be had in trying to access other people as sources of support.
I think that that's a great tool.
There's this whole scientific literature around social connection
and how that can help us reframe motivation and goals.
Anyway, maybe that's a topic to expand on another time,
But failure is important on a trial-trial basis.
People who don't experience enough wins for a long period of time,
the brain is a prediction machine after all,
and they start to predict failure.
So it takes a bit more work to wedge oneself out of that.
When are you going to start training jiu-jitsu?
Lex made me ask.
Ryan Flores.
Okay, here's the story with that.
Lex said, do you want to try jiu-jitsu?
I said, sure.
Lex said, okay.
It'll be great to show people a beginner's mind.
I said, sure.
We went and did a jiu-jitsu class.
He was very nice.
Nice, nice.
Russian, nice.
Like, oh, yeah, yeah.
Then he puts it on the internet with me in a rear naked, him putting me in a rear naked choke.
It was actually Lex Fridman choking out Andrew Huberman.
There, I just talked about myself in the third person, damn it.
Edit that one.
I have not had the time for jiu-jitsu.
I like my ears the way they are, you know?
Have you ever seen these people that do jujitsu?
Their ears literally look like stumps.
No, I should do it.
It looks like a great sport.
And unlike the other sports I've been involved in in my life,
boxing, please don't do it.
It's not healthy.
Skateboarding, all this, you don't really damage your head doing jujitsu.
So no.
I'm going to get you back for that one, Lex.
Okay.
Can you go through, oh, wow, John Edwards.
There's a joke that my friends used to tell about the supplements I take.
They used to say, someone would say, what supplements do you take?
And they would just go, all of them.
I don't take all of them.
But I have been very systematic.
For about 30 years, I've been interested in compounds that change the nervous system.
And I do think that the events of the last few years have changed the way that people view supplements.
I think that more people are starting to think about how to take better care of their health.
health, and people are realizing that, obviously, great sleep, mindsets, social connection,
exercise, nutrition, and so forth are very important, but I actually don't know anybody.
Granted, I run with a strange crowd, but I don't know anybody that doesn't take something nowadays.
You know, I could go through the whole list, but I would say the most fundamental things,
and there's no product pitch here.
The most fundamental things are the things
that are going to support your kind of foundational health.
So that's going to mean mainly getting,
either by food sources or supplements,
is going to be getting sufficient amounts
of these essential fatty acids.
So important.
For some people, that's taking liquid fish oil.
For some people, it's capsules.
For some people, it's eating fish.
I don't like the way fish tastes, unless I'm in Seattle.
By the way, the seafood here is amazing.
Not so much in California.
you. So I think the essential fatty acids, and then I'm big on the data, dare I say, out of
Stanford, Justin Sonnenburg's lab and Chris Gardner's lab, that these fermented foods, of which
all these cultures have interesting fermented foods, kefir and sauerkraut and kimchi, and you
know, pick your fermented food, that those seem to really encourage health of the gut microbiome.
So I started eating a lot of those and taking no probiotics except in a few of the supplements that I was already taking.
So I'm not trying to dodge the question, but I think by and large, if you're eating well and doing the other foundational behaviors well,
you can get away with a minimum of supplements.
D3 seems to be a lot of people deficient in D3, but not everybody.
So I think those are the main ones, however.
I do think that nutrition should be the primary entry point.
Again, it should be behaviors first, then nutrition, then supplements, then prescription drugs, only if you need them.
And then, you know, for some people, their brain-machine interface like TMS and things like that are going to be useful.
But behaviors change your nervous system.
No supplement actually rewires you or changes your nervous system.
Behaviors do that.
I hope I didn't dodge that question entirely.
I do take some of the things that we talk about on the podcast to do some focused work sometimes, alpha GPC.
But lately, I've been doing this whole thing of cold water exposure to spike my adrenaline because I hate it.
And it spikes my adrenaline after learning based on the McGaugh and Cahill data.
What would be your best one or two pieces of advice to recommend or protocols for improving learning and retention for graduate students in science and medicine?
We try to sleep sometimes.
Thank you, JD.
Oh, great.
You're UW, JD.
So, you know, I used to teach this course at Cold Spring Harbor on career development for scientists.
And there's a lot in there.
But the two things that are most important are, for sake of answering this question, I would say are find non-destructive ways to reset your dopamine and your energy levels and do those at least every three days.
So for me, it was kind of a tough thing to take a long walk or to spend.
I used to work really hard on Mondays, really hard on Tuesdays,
and I would not go in until the afternoon on Wednesdays, and sometimes not at all.
And then I'd go in Thursday, Friday, and work really, really hard,
and then not at all on Saturday, and then maybe do a little bit of work from home on Sunday.
And I was very productive that way.
Those breaks are absolutely key, and it's not encouraged so much in academic or tech.
or maybe anything now.
I hear about so much stress and overwork.
I say you just do it and define the culture
and let the results and your focus be the thing that defines you,
not how many hours you're in there.
But I realize there's a huge cognitive load and energetic load,
and for that, I do think these non-sleep deep rest protocols
are where it comes in really handy.
There are at least two faculty I know at Stanford,
one who's a so-called Howard Hughes investigator,
who those are big-deal appointments.
They get tons of money, et cetera, et cetera.
And they do amazing science most of the time.
These individuals certainly do.
And they take two 20-minute naps per day in their office.
When this guy came and visited me years ago
when I was at a different university,
he took the time that we were supposed to meet in my office
and talk about data.
He asked if he could take a nap.
And he gave a great talk that afternoon.
So there you go.
I do think you have to take control of your schedule
and do those things.
And I hope that helps.
And then, of course, for some people, exercise and so on is the way they reset.
What research or work are you doing or that your colleagues are doing that you're most excited about lately?
Glenn, yeah.
One project in particular, I hope this paper gets accepted soon.
It's been out for review forever.
If the reviewers are in the audience, please just tell us one way or the other, you know.
We did a very large-scale study during the pandemic.
we meaning David Spiegel and I, and an amazing PhD named Melis, she now has two last names,
excuse me, Balban, Yilmaz Balban. And Melis, we essentially equipped people with remote
monitoring devices and measured sleep and heart rate variability and a bunch of stress and a
bunch of other things. And we gave them a very brief set of breathing protocols. And it turns
out that this thing that I'm talking about a lot on the podcast these days of this double
inhale, long exhale, the so-called physiological sigh, was the most effective breathing practice
for allowing people to control their heart rate variability, reduce overall heart rate,
access better sleep. And these were extremely short protocols. So I'm very excited about this.
I didn't discover physiological sighs. I love the idea that people can do a very brief protocol
once a day, maybe even just while walking down the street or in a moment, and actually learn to
control that autonomic seesaw better. So I'm very excited about that. And then we are gearing up to
do some studies on people who have more severe forms of anxiety and panic attack using mainly
respiration, but also looking at some of these eye vision related ways of controlling the nervous
system. I love that stuff. If I keep talking about it, I'm going to give you a data presentation.
So I'm going to turn around. How does dopamine factor into neuroplasticity, if at all?
Colin, great question. It's a very strong trigger of plasticity, so much so, in fact, that there's some work that shows if you stimulate with an electrode the brain area that releases dopamine and you pair that with anything, anything, even just like an 8 kilohertz tone, the brain remaps and it's like, oh, I love that 8 kilohertz tone.
Remember, dopamine is dumb, and it's just dumb, and it's just, you know, it's like Costello when he said,
this dog, I could hang a rope from a tree.
This dog was so lazy it wouldn't cross a room for a steak.
You had to give the steak to him.
But it would run across a field.
He would run and jump on and hold on to that rope, and he would sometimes bite through his lip with, like, blood dripping down.
I was like, oh, my God, it's, like, breaking my heart.
He loved every set.
That's dopamine.
It turns us into idiots.
he was he was a smart about what he needed to be smart about dopamine so if you trigger dopamine
release with ritalin adderall to a lesser extent l-tyrosine and certainly please don't do this but
cocaine amphetamine whatever you're doing seems super interesting it's true and that's why it's
such a slippery slope it makes anything you're doing seem interesting and important and actually
I'll use this as an opportunity to say something about the psychedelic thing earlier. One of the
issues with MDMA, it's a very unusual brain state. It's high dopamine, high serotonin,
completely synthetic compound. There are other things in there that it does as well. One of the
problems with people I see with the problem with people taking MDMA just at a basic level is that
if you're not pushing that towards some therapeutic outcome, music sounds amazing.
Everything feels and sounds amazing, but it's a very neurochemically severe state. So that's why
I think if people are going to explore those things, do it as part of one of the university
supported clinical trials. Those drugs make everything seem interesting, even stuff that's
not terribly interesting. Now, they also have the potential for trauma healing capacity. These are
the MAPS studies and so on. So you have to be very careful with what you pair with dopamine and what
you pair dopamine with. And for those of you that are high sensation seeking, novelty seeking,
and everything's interesting to you and you want more and more and more experiences,
you basically have a eight cylinder car in you and you need to be very careful how you drive
that thing. Like any high-performance automobile, it's going to spend more time in the shop.
So, learn to drive appropriately. What advice can you offer to future scientists who want to
make an impact like you have? Ryan O'Boyle, get tenure first. No, I'm kidding.
So, I have this weird history in science, and I'm not looking for sympathy here, but
my undergraduate advisor who I adored, it's like a father to me, my graduate advisor and my postdoc
advisor who I also adored, all three of them died. Suicide, cancer, cancer. Really young. So the joke
in my field is you don't want me to work for you. But in all seriousness, all three of them had a
really morbid sense of humor. All amazing people. But it is this kind of weird curse that I've had.
So what scientists, you know, what advice, you know?
Well, Ben Barres, the late Ben Barres,
died of pancreatic cancer, an amazing individual.
They're actually making a documentary about Ben's life.
He was transgendered.
He was totally irreverent.
He said whatever he thought.
He offended everybody.
He was awesome.
Brilliant, too.
Ben and I had a conversation as he was dying.
I recorded a lot of conversations with him.
§04Transcript — part 4
and I told him I was interested in doing public-facing education, and he said, well,
you're tenured now, and people are going to be upset, and they're not going to like it,
and your colleagues are probably going to hate it, so whatever you do, you better make it good,
and I was like, wow, that doesn't really help much, Ben, and he said, you know, you seem to
have a compulsion for it, so he was right. I think that if you are excited about science
and sharing what you know, then do that.
And even if it seems super nerdy,
I mean, there are these,
I think they call themselves entomologists,
the insect people.
I mean, they make insects seem really, really cool.
And if you are excited about spindle kinetics or whatever,
you know, tell people about it.
I really mean it.
I think that the one caveat is that
I do think it's important to get a formal,
rigorous training in it first, I think that you will go further and faster in the long run.
And there's some amazing people out there. There's a postdoc at Stanford. I think his name is Ben
Rein. I think if you shorten it up on Instagram, it's actually Brain, because he talks about brain
science. So that's why it's weird. B-R-E-I-N. He does a great job, and he's a really good example
of someone who's still on the ascent with his career doing serious science and doing science
communication. But you have to be careful. It's time consuming. Look, people will dislike you
for whatever. I made the mistake once of saying that I eat butter. Apparently that's a sin on the
internet. I like little bits of butter. I actually like a lot of butter, but I try and eat little
bits of butter. But somehow it's like there's this idea that I eat sticks of butter. So you
have to be careful. I mean, the things I've heard, I heard I was dead. That was cool.
So you have to be careful.
And remember, everything is stamped into the cloud now and the metaverse or whatever it's called.
So I would say here are the rules that we have at the podcast.
Here's the rules that I created for myself.
I truly don't do it for me.
I do it because I think people want to hear about it.
But I've been telling myself that since I was six years old.
The other thing is never, ever, ever do it just for your own gratification.
You should really try and think, is anyone going to get anything useful out of this potentially?
That's the goal.
If you're doing that, it'll work out for you.
If you are thinking about how to get followers or something like that, it ain't going to work out.
That's my advice.
Is age 66 too old for neuroplasticity?
No.
No, I'll cut myself off to begin learning.
Sandra Trezari.
No.
Did I pronounce that right?
Thank you, Sandra.
No, Richard Feynman, the great Richard Feynman,
taught himself to draw later in life.
He was also really into flotation tanks.
Did you know that?
Yeah, he was also into bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech.
Richard Feynman did so many things that would get most people fired nowadays.
He's just lucky he was alive when he was.
You can absolutely learn at 66 and way beyond.
There's an amazing study from Rusty Gage's lab at the Salk Institute years ago showing that even people who are very late in life, terminally ill in fact, are still producing new neurons in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus.
These people were gracious enough to allow researchers to inject them with dyes that would label these neurons for analysis post-mortem after they died.
Absolutely you can learn.
What's harder is focus.
Oftentimes what's harder is sleep as well.
but the same mechanisms apply. There's no evidence whatsoever that neuroplasticity disappears at any
stage, despite what Hubel and Wiesel told the BBC. How do you tackle reading research papers? Do you
have a specific strategy? Yes, I do. I take notes on everything. There's four questions that we
teach students and that I use. The first one is, what's the question they're asking, major and
more specific. Second is what did they do? What are the, like methods wise, what did they do?
You don't have to know all the details of the methods necessarily, but be versed in those
methods. But you have to kind of understand, like, are they looking at mice? Are they looking at
humans? Is this a, you know, did they have people in two different conditions or just one? You have
to understand what did they do? Then you ask, what did they find? And then the last question is the
most important one. And you should write down the answer to this is what did they conclude? And then
you look back at the first question and you go, did they actually answer that question
or is it something unrelated? And those four questions are essentially the way that I parse
each paper. Learning to parse papers is tricky. For the podcast, I use the telephone. I call
people and I badger them and I ask them, like, who's doing the really good work in this area?
And I spend a lot of hours doing it. And then the best way to remember science
is to tell someone about it. So before each podcast, I'll call someone and be like, hey,
did you know that they used to throw kids in the river?
I do this, and my sister, my poor sister,
and she's like, yeah.
My sister, by the way, does not watch the podcast.
She's a therapist, and she's like,
hey, I learned this amazing breathing technique.
I was like, oh, yeah, really?
Tell me about it.
And it's like someone else is there.
I'm like, you know I have a podcast.
She's like, I don't like your podcast.
Yeah, it's older sister, older sister.
She's not lying.
What is your favorite sauce condiment seasoning sauce?
there's one in every audience um i like the spicy stuff we've been fermenting our own food at home
um it's kind of cool you put the the cabbage in the stuff in the little ceramic thing outside and
then it goes pop pop it makes this amazing sound and then you can like eat make your own sauerkraut
and you know with peppers and like fermenting that stuff it's really good okay they're telling
me one more question so we'll do two what's most important from your adh ah gabriel
A lot of questions about ADHD. For people on medication or not on medication? So I'll answer
both. For people on medication, I think work with somebody really good who's willing to
work with you to allow you to find that minimal effective dose and also timing that dose.
One of the key things that we know now is that from that waking up point in your morning until about eight or nine hours later, we've sort of named that phase one of the day, for lack of a better naming protocol, the systems that release cortisol, dopamine, and epinephrine are essentially more effective at producing those than they are in the later periods of the day, which makes sense if you think about the way that the autonomic nervous system works, et cetera.
So there's an important question that I can't answer for you, but you can answer for you, which is if you're using Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, these things that enhance dopaminergic transmission, modafinil, armodafinil.
By the way, for the people in the audience like me who didn't go to college when these things were all in use, the numbers of people that use these compounds on and off prescription is astronomical.
It's incredible.
I didn't realize that I think something like 80% of college students use these at some point.
Incredible.
Because they put you into a narrow aperture tunnel of concentration.
So you want to, with a physician's support, of course, to help get permission or not,
to figure out what time of day to take your medication.
Now, for people who are not on medication, I'll just go right back to what I said earlier,
which is that you can train focus, but it feels terrible to train it. It is hard. Again, there are
these large-scale studies in China and elsewhere of people literally teaching themselves, and yes,
they blink, although less often, to focus their vision on a narrow aperture and to really battle
through that agitation, stress, and learn how to keep their focus. Now, focus will drift, right?
focus is not a constant. Focus will drift and you pop out of focus states and then refocus and pop
out and refocus. That's something that you can train up. I've heard from many people who have
managed to train themselves off medication or to lower doses of medication. And look, some people
can't do that. They absolutely have to maintain their standard medication protocols. This is a
larger discussion, obviously, as it relates to ADHD. We're going to do another episode on ADHD
because the data are coming out so, so fast.
What future episodes are in the pipeline, David Nguyen?
Okay, thank you for that question.
We have one on grief.
We have an amazing episode with a guy from the Rockefeller University on the,
this is, am I allowed to say it's going to be my favorite episode?
I love all the guests, but this episode just blew me away
on the relationship between language, speech, dance, and music.
And I have no musical talent, and I'm not a very good dancer.
So that's being generous.
Amazing interplay between those things.
Exercise in the brain, OCD, bulimia, binge eating disorder.
Peter Attia is coming on.
He'll teach us about everything, medicine and longevity.
And I'm kind of blanking at the moment.
David Anderson from Caltech on aggression and emotional states.
Amazing.
and then there are a number of people, Lisa Feldman Barrett or Barrett Feldman, I always
get it backwards, sorry Lisa, on emotions in the brain and really we do take suggestions about who
to bring on the podcast very seriously. What we're mostly looking for, what we're mostly looking for
are the people that no one else has heard, that people haven't heard of who are not going on
podcasts every week and that people should absolutely hear from and then I will tell you,
They're going to kill me for saying this, but I'm going to do it anyway.
We have some short series coming up with expert professionals.
I'm going to do a short series on trauma.
And my hope for this series is that you'll actually get to see an exquisitely skilled trauma therapist take someone through.
Excuse me.
I seem so excited.
I'm spitting on the audience.
Excuse me.
So to take someone through actual trauma therapy.
This isn't staged.
This is somebody who's actually in a point of near suicidal grief and trauma,
taking them through it in the course of the podcast so people can see what this process actually entails.
That's a very meaningful project to me for a number of reasons.
So we're really excited about that.
And, you know, to be honest, I feel like there's just such a treasure trove of information out there.
I just want to grab it all and tell you all about it until I always say, if nothing else, I'll cure insomnia.
So, yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate everyone coming out on the weekday, and I'd be remiss if I didn't
say thank you for your interest in science.