LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Sydney Opera House
全文文稿 · 按对话顺序保留完整内容，深入理解上下文。
§01Transcript — part 1
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Recently, the Huberman Lab Podcast hosted a live event at the Sydney Opera House in Australia.
The event was called The Brain-Body Contract and featured a lecture, followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience.
We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend.
So what follows is the question and answer session from the Sydney Opera House in Australia.
I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event.
They are 8Sleep and AG1.
8Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
And one of the key aspects to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment.
And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees.
And in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed,
your body temperature actually has to increase
by about one to three degrees.
Eight Sleep makes it extremely easy
to control the temperature of your sleeping environment
at the beginning, middle, and throughout the night,
and when you wake up in the morning.
I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover
for nearly three years now,
and it has dramatically improved my sleep.
If you'd like to try Eight Sleep,
you can go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman
to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover.
Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK,
select countries in the EU and Australia.
Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman.
The other live event sponsor, AG1,
is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink
that also contains adaptogens
and other critical micronutrients.
I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012,
so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event.
The reason I started taking it
and the reason I still take it every day,
once or twice a day,
is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas
for vitamins and minerals.
And it ensures that I get enough prebiotic
and probiotic to support gut health. Now, of course, I strive to consume healthy whole foods
for the majority of my nutritional intake every single day, but there are a number of things in
AG1, including specific micronutrients that are hard to get from whole foods, or at least in
sufficient quantities. So AG1 allows me to get the vitamins and minerals that I need, probiotics,
prebiotics, the adaptogens, and critical micronutrients. To try AG1, go to drinkag1.com
slash Huberman, and you'll get a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2 and five free travel packs of AG1.
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman. Thank you to the Sydney Opera House for hosting us
and for making this event possible.
What are the latest findings on the physiological mechanisms behind stress's impact on the body and brain,
and what are some practical tools or techniques for managing stress effectively?
Well, thank you for that question.
I'll deliberately not repeat what I said earlier about physiological sighs, panoramic vision, etc.,
and raising stress threshold, because we covered that already.
But I think that one of the most interesting findings,
two most interesting findings in the field of stress in the last five years or even three years,
I think the work from my colleague, Alia Crum at Stanford, she's been a guest on the podcast, she works on mindsets, is the following result.
Students, Stanford students, that is, come into the laboratory.
They view a, I think it's a five-minute movie about how awful stress is for the mind and body, all the things it does, like deplete your immune system, make you miserable, deplete certain aspects of the reproductive axis, and on and on.
and then a separate group comes in and watches a video, also five minutes, also true, about all the
things that stress can do to enhance performance, both cognitive or physical, like additional
energy, additional cognitive power, access to certain memory sets, albeit narrow memory sets,
etc. And what you find is that the results point directly to the fact that whatever you believe
about stress, provided the information you have is true, is what happens. So if I tell you that
stress improves your memory focus attention, one observes that. If I tell you that stress depletes
your immune system, etc., one observes that. So this is something that we don't quite yet understand
as neuroscientists, and the psychology of it makes more sense, frankly, than the mechanisms,
but it's becoming very clear that what we believe about a given phenomenon strongly impacts how it shapes our response to that.
So I find that very interesting.
Now, of course, you can't delete information about stress being bad for you,
so what does that mean if you want stress to be enhancing, as it's called?
There's literally now called the stress is enhancing mindset.
that the thing you can do is to learn more about how stress can be enhancing.
We're not talking about lying.
We're not talking about placebo effect.
We're talking about real knowledge based in fact that one can absorb.
And I find it amazing and wonderful that the mere learning of something
can actually change how we respond to something at a core physiological level.
The second, I think, very important set of findings on stress
relate to a structure that I've talked about recently on the podcast
and I talked about with the one and only David Goggins.
Most people presumably have heard, like, he's on his way. He's running here right now from Central America.
Yeah, that guy, I'll tell you, that guy is every bit as intense as he comes across.
I met him for the first time in 2016 at a gathering in, it was in Silicon Valley, which is doing a little bit of work for this company.
at the end of the day he leaves for a minute and he changes into his shorts and his shirt he's like
I'm going running I gotta go to the airport I'm thinking I'm gonna go running then I'm gonna go
to the airport he was running to the airport seriously we're like 14 miles from the airport
which I realized 14 miles for a marathon or no big deal but he's got his bags and I'm thinking
myself, this guy, he's nuts, and I love him. I mean, he's really that guy. It's actually very
refreshing. You know, I think one reason we love the Rick Rubins and the David Goggins is they
truly are different, but from one basic standpoint is they just don't give a shit. They just do what
they're going to do, and they trust that they're doing right for them and for the people around
them. And it's awesome. It's really awesome. I think that it, again, brings about that, you know,
that word that, you know, doesn't come about very often for me, but you just kind of stuns you into
like, behold, David Goggins, Rick Rubin, the cuttlefish, whatever, you know. So, but I talked
about this with David. There's a structure in our brain, and these are recent discoveries, not by my
lab, I wish I had discovered these, but actually a colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvizi,
who's in the Department of Neurosurgery, has made these beautiful discoveries about the
anterior mid-cingulate cortex. The anterior mid-cingulate cortex is a structure in the brain
that has a lot of subdivisions, but when Joe put a little stimulating electrode into this area,
because he had patients that needed neurosurgery, and they probe around asking questions, what do
you feel, how do you feel, what are you going to do, and sometimes they hit an area. I've seen these
experiments. They're unbelievable. Stimulate an area, and the person says, you know, I feel like
I'm about to go into a rage. You're like, okay, let's back off. Let's move over here. Anterior
mid-cingulate cortex, they stimulate, and the patient, the person says, I feel like I'm heading
into a storm. You know, oh, that doesn't sound good. And they say, nope, but I'm ready. I'm
leaning in. A different patient, you stimulate their anterior mid-cingulate cortex, and the
person says, I feel like I'm going to get up out of my chair and do something really, really difficult.
Okay, so this is interesting. Across multiple people, you're seeing the same general kind of
forward center of mass kind of response, leaning into challenge and challenge specifically. And
then there's now scores of studies in just the last three to five years showing that, for instance,
people who successfully overcome a challenge of any kind, fitness challenge, cognitive challenge,
anterior mid-cingulate cortex expands or at least increases its baseline levels of activity. You see
people that fail to meet that challenge, less anterior mid-cingulate cortex activities. There's
a bi-directionality of the response and on and on. And it seems that doing things that are difficult
that we don't enjoy or that we have to push ourselves to do, grow and enhance the activity
within this anterior mid-cingulate cortex. And the beauty of it is that it generalizes,
that the anterior mid-cingulate cortex can be applied or the growth of it can be directed towards lots of different things,
which is, I think, a call for, of course, seeking pleasure, seeking comfort, seeking relaxation,
seeking sleep every night, seeking sunlight in the morning, etc.,
but also deliberately seeking out challenges, that is, challenges for us.
The importance of doing hard things in a safe manner, psychologically and physically safe manner, of course.
is truly beneficial toward our ability to manage ourselves in what would otherwise be called stress.
So I think the work of Alia Crum and the work on the anterior mid-cingulate cortex by Parvizi and a bunch of other labs,
I think are the two areas where I feel like things are happening really quickly.
We're making big strides as a field, and we're moving away from conjecture about how to better ourselves in lots of different ways.
Can you talk about time perception? Why is it that in some instances time moves very slowly, while in others it seems to move very fast? Thank you. Tonight has been so fun. Thank you. I've had fun too.
this is something I'm trying to do more of not necessarily live, that too but someone recently
who I love and admire very much said to me we're gonna have so much fun and I thought whoa like
behold no one's ever said that to me no one's ever said that to me all my years growing up I mean I
love with all due respect to my parents I can't remember anyone ever turning to me and saying
we're going to have so much fun. So I'm trying, that to me just kind of blew me away. I'm thinking,
yeah, like you're allowed to have fun. So time perception is a topic that I am, you know,
as obsessed by as I am many other topics. But one that is really near and dear to my heart, because
I've always been struck by this observation that is certainly not uniquely mine, that, you know,
if you're sitting waiting for an appointment at the doctor's office, it feels like time goes by
really slowly, like really slowly. Whereas if you have a really full day with lots and lots of
activities, it seems like time went by really fast. Like, oh my God, I can't believe that so
much time has gone by. Sorry, so much has happened, excuse me, but not a lot of time has gone by,
which means that our frame rate on life is highly dynamic.
And in fact, it is.
And in fact, it's set by, you guessed it, our visual system,
at least for sighted folks,
for people who are low vision or no vision.
And by the way, I always reference that
because my laboratory has worked on low vision, no vision issues
for a number of years.
It's through the auditory system.
But for sake of generalizing now and simplicity,
we'll talk about the visual system.
So it is a fact that when we focus on things up close, think a watchmaker, think about looking into your phone, our perception of time is more fine-grained.
That is, our frame rate is higher, okay?
So more frames per second than when we view things at a distance.
You might think, well, how could that possibly be?
How could that possibly be?
But it makes perfect sense.
When we think about the time-space coding in the brain, we need to anchor ourselves to something, the rising and setting of the sun.
Of course, unless you're a flat earther, we're going around the sun.
What's that? No flat earthers? One flat earther in the audience. Okay, cool.
I don't think that's what they were saying.
But we need to anchor ourselves in time, and our visual system is the way that we anchor ourselves in time.
We have facts about past, present, and future, so we have knowledge.
But at an unconscious level, we need to anchor our frame rate, set our frame rate.
And so this is why if you go down to Bondi and you lie back and you look up at the clouds,
and the clouds are kind of moving in an unpredictable way,
whenever we're looking at a landscape which has some lack of predictable features like waves
or rustling of trees where you could predict that if the wind's blowing this way that the tree's
going to go this way and then back again but you're not really in a mode of trying to anticipate just
how far in the same way that for instance if you call an uber you're waiting on a text message
you know if you're ever waiting on a text message you notice you'll find slice okay dot dot dot when's
that thing coming when's that thing you're fine slicing time as your level of autonomic arousal
goes up, your frame rate goes up. As your level of autonomic arousal goes down, so you're sleepy,
or if you're viewing things that have kind of an unpredictable aspect to them, then your frame
rate expands. The passage of time changes, or your perception of the passage of time changes. This is
why, one of the reasons why I love Aquaria. You know, and one of my favorite things to do, since I
don't have a fish tank at home right now, but that's going to change soon, is I'll go on YouTube
and there's this beautiful live video of this aquarium in Japan. And I'll just
zone out. It's like the most relaxing thing ever. And every once in a while,
a whale, they have a whale shark in an aquarium. Every once in a while, a whale shark will go
through and you're like, whoa. And then it disappears. And then the little fish and the
kelp and things like that. And it's immensely relaxing. What it does is it slows your frame
rate down. And then I find that resets me after just five or six minutes to go back to doing this,
you know, high frame rate type stuff, which is what we're doing when we're texting, when we're
typing, when we're social media, it, by the way, is tuned to a frame rate. It's really interesting
that keeps us engaged just up into the point where then we want to swipe to the next thing.
It's the algorithms are designed. And by the way, I have a somewhat benevolent,
semi-benevolent view of social media. I think you'd be used for good. I think you'd be used for
not good. I think limiting one's time on there is good, but there's some good content on there
for sure. A lot of my life is spent on there, indeed. So frame rate is set by where you're
looking. The further out you're looking, the larger, the longer sort of time bins you're
capturing, bigger time bins, okay, less resolution. Closer in, and the more you're trying to predict
the next outcome, sort of fine grain analysis, predicting what we call DPOs, duration, path,
and outcome, what's going to happen for how long, and what's going to happen is something that
you're thinking about and wondering about, then frame rate goes up. And there's actually a
wonderful movie, a Hitchcock movie, the name escapes me at the moment, in which Hitchcock
understood this. And it's a movie that's only about 90 minutes long, but in the background,
the sun rises and sets and the way that people move through the scenes of this movie gives you
the feeling by the end of this 90-minute movie that a full 24 hours passed. It's really interesting.
You feel it in your body as if it was a much longer movie even though if you look at your watch
that happens and now the cannabis smokers again are thinking like yeah like where you sit there
and you're like whoa that was a really long time you look at it's like three minutes went by and
you're like, whoa, like, wow. Psychedelics will do this as well. They certainly do. They distort
§02Transcript — part 2
our time perception, mainly through the deployment of large amounts of the neuromodulator serotonin,
which is intimately involved in our kind of clock perception mechanisms. There are a bunch of other
things that can set sort of intrinsic rhythmicity of our auditory system that also adjust our frame
rate. I think one of the reasons why 40 hertz tones can be valuable for doing cognitive work
is that they tend to entrain certain circuits within the brain
for doing the kinds of work that most people call work,
where you have to type things out, think logically,
kind of if-then, kind of analysis.
Very different than, say, writing new sheet music
or coming up with poetry,
where here again we can think back to the Rick Rubin thing
or being stationary, right?
Like the wall or sitting with a movement in the brain going forward.
There's something about adjusting frame rate
for capturing new ideas versus implementing ideas.
Implementation of ideas tends to be carried out
on higher frame rate type time perception.
And now you can understand why our visual perception
set about the distance of a laptop or phone
would be good for that or a conversation.
You know, remember that whole thing
of like looking at somebody's face
and having a conversation
as opposed to looking off into the distance,
walking and allowing one's gaze to go panoramic.
So hopefully now you're starting to sense some themes.
So that's all I'll say about time perception now, but of course humans have throughout history and still now, frankly, also embarked on a lot of pharmacology, if we're honest, in order to try and adjust frame rate for sake of productivity.
But caffeine will adjust frame rate in the predictable direction, but also things like alcohol and various drugs like cannabis in order to adjust frame rate.
I'm certainly not suggesting you do those things.
I'm not a cop.
You do what you want.
Just know what you're doing.
Can you please talk about the jet lag protocol you followed when arriving in Sydney?
Oh, yeah.
Well, this one was a little bit easier for me because obviously it's not that far off.
It's just you're a full day ahead from where I live back home in California.
But nonetheless, I suffer tremendously from jet lag.
And once actually in 2017, I went to Abu Dhabi, a 12-hour flip from where I was living at that time in the Bay Area.
And I was a wreck.
I could barely make it to the meeting.
I was crying.
It really messes me up.
I slept great the first night and then just didn't sleep for two days.
I was a mess.
So jet lag is something that I really had to work hard on.
And there are a couple things worth noting.
I mean, we've done a whole episode about this, but I'll kind of hit a few key bullet points.
and maybe it's relevant to you even if you're not traveling at any point soon because many people
are jet lagged without traveling because of the way that they stay up late in fact most everybody
in the world now qualifies as a shift worker did you know that and here no disrespect only reverence
and gratitude to the actual shift workers that stay up all night doing emergency work and hospital
work and caring for children and things like that throughout the night so i'm not trying to take
anything away from them but we are all shifted enough by virtue of artificial lighting and and
electronic devices that we are effectively shifted and shift working because we're staying up
engaging our cognitive systems in ways that frankly we didn't evolve to, which I'm not
saying is bad, but it's just the reality. Okay, what to do for jet lag. The key thing is this,
and actually this is very valuable in general for sake of sleep. So this is something I haven't
talked enough about on the podcast. Ask yourself what time you normally wake up without an alarm.
I realize there's some variance day to day, but for me it would be about, let's say 6 a.m.
So let's say for you at 7, just pick your typical wake-up time.
If you subtract from that number, so for me 4 a.m., that almost with certainty is what's called your temperature minimum.
Your temperature minimum, we could measure it.
You could put a thermometer in your mouth, or if you come to the laboratory, unfortunately they have to do it rectally.
4 a.m. would be my temperature minimum. Maybe for you if you wake up at 7, typically, or around 7,
it's going to be 5 a.m. Okay, so we're not actually measuring your temperature in this kind of
Gedanken in this thought experiment. What we're doing is we're trying to find a time. So here's
what's interesting. If you expose your eyes, not your skin, but your eyes to bright light
But in the two hours or so, maybe three hours prior to that temperature minimum time,
so if you wake up at 7 a.m., 5 a.m. is your temperature minimum,
so in the two hours, maybe three hours prior to that,
you're going to shift your wake-up time and your to-bed time,
what's called a phase delay, a shift in your circadian rhythm, by about an hour.
interesting given that if you view bright light in the two to three hours after your temperature
minimum you advance your clock meaning you pull back your clock to want to wake up a bit earlier
and go to sleep a little bit earlier by about an hour for every time you do that you think well
okay i wake up in the morning at seven and let's say i'm using you as an example or me at six
and I usually try and get some sunlight in my eyes,
especially on overcast days, et cetera, et cetera.
You've heard me blab about this many times before
on the podcast and elsewhere.
So how come I'm not going to bed earlier and earlier
every night and waking up earlier and earlier every morning?
And indeed you would.
You would keep phase advancing your clock if you did that,
except that in the afternoon,
if you got sunlight in your eyes,
as presumably you did today,
it was a beautiful sunny day on your way here,
you phase delayed your clock a little bit and as a consequence you wake up and go to sleep at more
or less the same time every day it's an amazing mechanism and guess what viewing sunlight in the
middle of the day does not do the same thing it doesn't shift your circadian clock they don't
tell you that in school but they should they're telling you like all the other stuff
the reason it doesn't do it is that middle of the day period is what's called the circadian
dead zone. Sounds very dramatic, very ominous. Getting sunlight in your eyes during the middle
of the day is great for mood. It's evident that it's also important if it gets on your skin and
healthy, not burning amounts, levels that would induce burn, then it can enhance testosterone,
estrogen levels, et cetera, in healthy ways, healthy ratios. Nonetheless, that morning sunlight
viewing after your temperature minimum advances your clock, makes you want to get up earlier,
go to bed earlier, viewed before, delays your clock. Makes you want to get up later, go to bed
later. So this is very useful if you ever want to shift your clock at home before you travel to get
onto a new schedule for work or school, or if you're traveling. What it means is that when you
arrive in a new location, like I did in Melbourne the other day, believe me, I practiced that for
like at least an hour, you know, and with two Aussies. And they kept telling me I was doing it
wrong until finally they're like, no, I'm just joking with you. You got it right like the fourth
time. You guys have a wicked sense of humor down here. The key thing is that if you land,
you have to ask, let's say at 8 a.m. local or noon local time, the key is to ask yourself,
hmm, what does my body think? What is my temperature minimum from back home?
So for instance, if you land at 5 p.m., but it corresponds to a time before your temperature
minimum, and you go outside, and you're like, whoa, beautiful setting sun. I'm supposed to get
sunlight in my eyes. Well, guess what? You might delay your clock. If you want to go to bed earlier,
that's probably not a good idea. Whereas if you want to advance your clock, you would view sunlight
at a time that is corresponding to the two hours after temperature minimum. I realize it's a little
bit tricky, but that's all you have to ask yourself for the first three days. First three days that
you travel to some location, because then you can shift very fast. So what that requires is sometimes
saying, oh, I don't want to shift myself, so I'm actually going to wear sunglasses and a brimmed
hat to avoid shifting, because I'd like to be on the local schedule. Or in some cases, you think,
oh, I really want to wake up here, and I'm in the perfect opportunity to wake up because it's the
middle of the afternoon in Sydney, and back home, I would have just hit my temperature minimum,
and so I'm going to get sunlight in my eyes. Well, that's going to wake me up, and it's going to
actually make me want to go to bed a little bit earlier so I can go to bed at local time,
so I'm not going to be up until, you know, 3 a.m. So you might have to work this out a little bit
on paper, but this is the way that military, and this is the way that shift workers who are educated
in the mechanisms of this stuff, that's the way they do it.
It also helps to eat on the local schedule
because food is another what we call zeitgeber,
another one of the timekeepers for the circadian clock.
So if you force yourself to eat on the local schedule,
that can help you shift.
Activity can help you shift,
and social rhythms can help you shift as well.
But that temperature minimum and the role of light
before or after the temperature minimum,
either delaying or advancing your clock,
that's the heavy hammer in this whole process so I did that and these days I do a lot of red light
time in the evening when I want to go to sleep and I don't mean red light panels like the expensive
stuff that has a whole other set of uses what I'm talking about is just getting a red light like a
party light we turn off the lights and put in a red light and that is known to reduce cortisol
levels as opposed to other kinds of lighting so it only takes about half hour before you go to
sleep or so, you want to just mellow out, you just switch over to red lights. It's actually very
pleasant, right? As long as you can go about the activities you want to do safely, you just, you
know, get in, you put up red light up. And by the way, Rick's house is like all red lights at night,
no artificial lighting past sundown. It's like a plant. Can you elaborate on the science between
psychedelic psilocybin and neuroplasticity? Yes. You know, this is a topic that just a few years
ago, I was like too frightened to talk about. I was afraid to lose my job, frankly. You know,
these are still scheduled drugs in the United States, although they are being explored for
therapeutic reasons, mainly for the treatment of severe depression. But among other things,
smoking cessation, eating disorders, by the way, anorexia nervosa still is the highest morbidity
of any psychiatric challenge. It's just really tragic. So, you know, like there's a real need
for treatments that work. And psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD to some extent, MDMA,
which technically is not a psychedelic, it's an empathogen, but we could talk about that also
called ecstasy. So these sorts of compounds have been explored quite extensively in the last few
years. And I've completely revamped my stance on them for a couple of reasons. I'll just come clean,
And, you know, as a kid, too young, I explored these things.
I do not recommend that.
I had some pretty bad experiences on LSD as a young teenager.
And I don't recommend it.
I think the brain is highly plastic that time.
In fact, being an adolescent, a kid or a teen, is a psychedelic experience.
You do not need psychedelics, and I don't recommend them
unless some very qualified clinician, you know, can convince you otherwise.
I, you know, and there I would also, you know, seek a second opinion. But they clearly have their
role. And I think a couple of things have changed my stance. First of all, there are a lot of
federally funded studies taking place at Stanford and elsewhere on these compounds. Second, for
whatever reason, and I don't quite understand the sociology of it, but for whatever reason,
psychedelics are no longer associated with the kind of counterculture the way they used to be.
and are, in fact, heavily associated with some of the veterans groups that are using these for PTSD
with groups in the States, groups like Veterans Solutions, which are doing amazing work with
different psychedelics, including Ibogaine, Iboga, which is a 22-hour long psychedelic journey.
I've never done it, truly, where you close your eyes and you get essentially real-life-like
recollection of your experiences, but you have agency inside these experiences.
There's some cardiac issues with Ibogaine that require constant monitoring of the heart,
but they've got some really impressive outcomes.
This is all work by my colleague Nolan Williams at Stanford.
So things like psilocybin, we view a little bit differently nowadays.
What is psilocybin?
Psilocybin, if you look at it chemically, looks a lot like serotonin.
A lot like serotonin.
And it tickles, that is, it binds nearly selectively to a specific serotonin receptor,
and it seems to create more what we call resting state lateral connectivity, which means more
brain areas connected to other brain areas, or at least talking to those brain areas after
the psilocybin journey, as it's called, as opposed to before.
Now, these journeys, and I have done them as an adult, I did this as part of a clinical
trial. I participated in a psilocybin trial, and I participated in MDMA trial.
They can be terrifying while they're happening, but often there's great insight from those
experiences, provided the right support is provided, and they always say set and setting.
So I'm not providing all these caveats about safety for no reason or to protect me. I'm saying
to protect you. I mean, it can be, and it was for me, absolutely terrifying. And then you do it again
as part of these trials. The second time I'm like, okay, this time moment's going to be good. It'd
gone, boom, terrifying. It was horrible. But I learned a lot. And there does seem to be an
antidepressant effect. I wasn't clinically diagnosed with depression, but prior to that,
or after, thank goodness. But I think what we're seeing with these compounds, and from my own
experience, if I may, is that they allow us to see relationships between events of past
and present and hopefully anticipate certain actions and changes into the future
while experiencing the fullness of the emotionality of those experiences in real time.
So as somebody who's done an immense amount of therapy, I can tell you that I find great value
in talk therapy. I do. Especially of the, I think what's called insight-oriented psychoanalysis or
or psychotherapy doesn't have to be classic psychoanalysis.
Not just support, you need that.
Not just rapport, you need that.
But insight as well is the goal, those three things.
§03Transcript — part 3
But one of the issues is,
unless you get on the phone with your therapist
or you talk to them in person,
in a moment where something is really acute,
like it's really getting you right at that moment,
sad or happy or whatever it may be,
it's hard to experience the fullness of that issue
in that moment while also parsing it cognitively. And it does seem that the psychedelics and to some
extent MDMA allow people to get into the full amplitude, maybe even enhanced amplitude,
emotionality of an experience. And at the same time, allow people to reflect and with the help
of a so-called guide or the therapist, take notes in a way that lead to specific actionable
outcomes. And I think that's the real value. You can get real-time experience with insight. And
of course, you need support as well. And of course, set and setting and safety are absolutely key.
So psilocybin seems to do that in one manner. MDMA does it in a different way. MDMA, by the way,
we know dramatically increases serotonin and dopamine, but it seems to be the serotonergic
effect that is responsible for most of its therapeutic effect. By the way, MDMA is methylene
dioxymethamphetamine, which isn't necessarily saying that it's bad. What's actually interesting
is that MDMA ecstasy, provided that it's pure and in the appropriate dosage range, does not seem to
be neurotoxic as it once was thought to be. The paper claiming that was retracted, they accidentally
were giving the subjects in that study methamphetamine, not MDMA. And right, yes, right.
And they retracted the paper, but nobody talks about that paper.
But do you know, it's kind of interesting, do you know where most of the data on the lack of toxicity of MDMA comes from?
There's a beautiful set of studies that were carried out on subjects who were exclusively from the Church of Latter-day Saints, sometimes referred to as Mormons.
Mormons are an excellent test population for a study like that because they don't do other drugs.
but MDMA is not on the no-fly list so apparently according to these papers and by the way I have a
lot of friends who are LDS and they're they're wonderful people the according to the these
papers which I believe because they're published and peer-reviewed and they still are in the
literature you can find subjects in that community not all LDS folks are taking
actually, I don't think, but presumably no. But people who have taken anywhere from one to two
to 50 to over 100 doses of MDMA in a short period of time, and aside from a mild deficit in
attention in the people who have taken the large doses or frequent doses, that is,
there do not seem to be many cognitive deficits that are detectable and certainly no apparent
neurotoxicity, which is not to say go do MDMA as much as you like. I think there is the potential
for neurotoxicity if it's taken too often and things of that sort. So a lot to still figure out.
But MDMA seems to have a slightly different trajectory than psilocybin. It tends to be less
scary, although it is very sympathetic arousing, that is, so people can get afraid or if they're
elevated heart rate, etc. But the empathogenic component is really interesting because ultimately
with PTSD, it's really about developing empathy for one's self. It's really about developing
empathy for one's self and resolving one of the core issues of trauma, which is often not discussed,
which is that at an unconscious level, at an unconscious level, trauma seems to be a confusion
to the nervous system about who's responsible. So that even if somebody knows and understands,
hey, that was them, they're the perpetrator, I'm the victim, somehow the nervous system
gets confused about responsibility in a way that leads to triggering of some of the negative feelings
around that event or events, as the case may be.
And MDMA seems to be able to intervene in that confusion
and short-circuit that confusion through this self-empathy.
Self-empathy is something that I think deserves more exploration in the years to come.
So lots happening there in the United States.
MDMA is now being registered with the FDA for additional, perhaps for legalization.
Right now, it is still illegal.
So if you take any of what I said tonight and go buy MDMA, I'm not at fault.
Getting in the sauna about two hours before going to sleep really improves my quality of sleep.
What's going on here?
Ah, love this.
This one can be pretty simple.
The relationship between temperature and sleep is a well-established one.
to fall asleep, you need to cool down by one to three degrees. You've probably heard me say that
before. To wake up, you need to heat up by about one to three degrees. And when you get into a sauna
or you take a hot bath, or even to a lesser degree, you wash your face with warm water in the evening,
hands with warm water because of the way that the body thermoregulates, you actually end up cooling
yourself off. You think, no, I got in the sauna. Actually, I've been going to the sauna at this
place here, Recovery. They have a wonderful sauna, cold plunge. And then they have this bed where you
float on the thing. Have you tried this thing? This thing is so cool. It's like a water bed,
but it floats you. They're amazing, amazing. By the way, they don't pay me to say that. I'm just
grateful that they let me sit in this bed. I've been sleeping in there as much as possible, but
they shut down at night eventually, and I got to go home. So the sauna is a great tool before sleep
or warm shower or hot bath or warm bath for the following reason.
The brain area that controls thermoregulation is the medial preoptic area,
which operates like a thermostat.
So if you warm the external portion of the body,
the brain has to then what?
Cool down your core body temperature.
It doesn't happen right away, but it happens as you get out of the sauna
and maybe you take a warmish shower or a cool shower.
So what ends up happening is that you warmed up,
which allows you to cool down internally
and then you're able to fall asleep
and stay more deeply asleep.
That's probably what's improving your sleep.
In fact, a kind of mantra that I learned
from the great Matt Walker
who wrote the great book, Why We Sleep.
And by the way, we have a sleep series
with the mighty Matt Walker coming out later this year.
We recorded six episodes,
every aspect of sleep you can imagine.
He says, and I hope I'm getting this right.
He says, you need to warm up to cool down
to go to sleep.
warm up to cool down to fall asleep. Stay cool to stay asleep. Warm up to wake up. There you go.
That's a straight bite out of Matt Walker's mouth, so he deserves that citation, not me.
So that's what's happening when you get in the sauna. Now, when you get into the cold plunge,
you're cold, but guess what? Same thing. The surface of your body is cooler. Those thermoreceptors
transmit information to the medial pre-optic area of your body and your core body temperature
eventually goes up. Provided you don't stay in there, get hypothermic, of course. Okay. People
are always asking me, I have a good friend, um, who, uh, just so happens to be straight edge. He's
like, never, never even has a sip of caffeine. I don't know. It's a good thing because he's extreme
and I, he got a cold plunge and he went in for a minute. And then the next day he's like, I did
three minutes. And then pretty soon he's like, Hey, I got a, I got a sick. And I was like, what
you do? He's like, I got naked in the cold plunge for 45 minutes. I was like, well, listen, you know,
I'm like, first of all, thank goodness you don't do drugs. And second of all, like easy does it,
easy does it. The cold, cold is a very powerful stimulus as is heat. So, you know, you know,
minimal effective dose, you know, you could have some fun with it, but don't go wild. I still don't
know why you've got in there naked, but who knows. If we expose ourselves to the same stress over and
over again, do we release the same amount of adrenaline and it's positive negative impact and
just becomes less receptive, we release less adrenaline, and hence it's less harmful? It's a
great question. Depends on the context. Typically, you'd release less and less adrenaline. And
actually, this relates to a really important fact about the ever-famous structure, the amygdala,
which means almond. I don't know why I told you that. It happens to be shaped like an almond.
The amygdala, people associate with threat detection and danger, but it's actually a novelty
detector, essentially.
And it's involved with a bunch of other brain circuits
that anytime we experience
something novel,
we have
an elevated level of autonomic arousal.
Like earlier tonight, before the show,
there was a kind of a repeating
and the first time it happened, I'm like,
fire alarm, what's going on?
By the time it happened five times,
I was kind of like, eh.
I'd be willing to bet both
amygdalas that, had we recorded from
my amygdalas, it's got one on each side of the brain, you would find that the first time
there's a big increase in activity, lesser, second, third, fourth, fifth, and you attenuate,
you habituate. So if the stressor is one in which you don't care, it doesn't have much relevance to
you, like that alarm, probably less and less adrenaline, I'd be willing to bet. However,
if with each subsequent exposure, like somebody you really can't stand or something like that,
it's decreasing your life satisfaction and increasing your level of cognitive or psychological
stress, then it would go in the opposite direction. I think that's fair to say.
Hey, Andrew. I like that. I like that. Hey, that's cool. Yeah. The other day, it was really
interesting. Every once in a while, someone will walk up and be like, hey, listen to the podcast.
It was always nice. It's always nice to meet people. And this kid walks up to me. This was
in Melbourne in the gym. This has never happened to me before. It was really cool. He just walks
up. He goes, hey, Andrew. I'm like, cool. He said, that's it. And he just walked away. I was like,
all right. I was like, cool. And I was like, that kid is so mellow. It was really cool. I was like,
we would have been friends. Actually, I would have been friends with all the wild ones. But
it was a really interesting phenotype. Again, human phenotypes fascinate me. So if we run into
each other on the street and I ask your name and we talk, I'm genuinely interested. I'm not studying
you. I'm not taking notes or data. But people are so different. But hey, Andrew. Okay, so maybe it's
him. Hey, Andrew. Hey, Adi. I found that I'm able to focus far better when I bounce my legs up and
down while sitting on the balls of my feet. What's going on here? You got a lot of energy.
That's what's going on. No, I think, you know, there isn't a ton of science on this,
but it's very clear, as I mentioned earlier, that people have different spontaneous movement rates.
And some people, you know, some people are a little bit more jittery.
If you look, if you go into a classroom, young children, see them sitting around, boys and girls, let's say somewhere between four and six.
Oftentimes, you'll notice that some of the kids can sit extremely still.
And then some of the kids are like really like.
And there is a chromosomal difference there.
The boy, it's known that boys have a slower development of the so-called top-down inhibition
from the forebrain. The prefrontal cortex, which frankly we hear about over and over again,
many podcasts, a lot of description of prefrontal cortex, its main job, the best description I've
ever heard of it anyway, is my friend who's a neurosurgeon at Neuralink who came up through
my lab, Matt MacDougall. He's been on the podcast. He said the job of the prefrontal cortex is to
send connections to the rest of the brain and say, shh, basically, to the appropriate circuit.
So that's why people with damage to the prefrontal cortex for any reason or degeneration of the
prefrontal cortex find themselves doing things, or we find them doing things that are a little bit
context-inappropriate. And in some cases, dramatically inappropriate, but in most cases,
just kind of context-inappropriate. They don't suppress behavior very well. So it may be that
a certain level of autonomic arousal brings us into that optimal, you know, some people call it
a flow state. Flow state is a little bit of a nebulous thing. I mean, I have great respect for
Stephen Kotler and those that have talked about and written about flow. But what I really can just
say about flow as it relates to neuroscience is that like backwards, it spells wolf. Like we don't
really know that much more about like the neural basis of a flow state. But for each of us, we have
these kind of tunnels that we like to be in where we find that our level of focus and action is just
right. And so I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here, Hadi, by saying that if you find
that you focus best when you can dispel a little bit of that energy by moving your body, that you're
able to do your best work. That makes sense to me. I don't do them so much anymore, but for years I
would do, you know, surgeries, lots and lots of surgeries down the microscope, dissecting retinas,
dissecting retina. I was like, if you got an eyeball, I can dissect it. I'm good at it.
I can do it in my sleep. And I would find that if I had a little bit too much energy,
that the forceps would jiggle a little bit. And it wasn't a caffeine thing. And a friend of mine
who's a world-class neurosurgeon, Eddie Chang, who's chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. He's been
on the podcast. And he said, ah, there's a solution to that that we learn in neurosurgery.
They're like the astronauts of medicine. He said, you know, you tap your foot. I thought,
that's kind of cool. Why would that work? He said, well, basically, you've got some sort of
anticipatory activity in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, which is involved in
these go, no-go type actions. Like all of our actions are yes, go and no-go, don't do something
else. So flexor, extensor, those all kinds of stuff, very complicated, but it's seamless for
most people. And when you have a bit too much anticipatory activity, you're getting ready to go
like a sprinter out the blocks and you're, you know, you're doing something that's very important,
like a brain surgery in his case, or a microsurgery in my case for research purposes,
that if your activation state is too high, that you can dispel some of that energy by just simply
tapping your foot or doing some sort of rhythmic activity with another part of your body,
appropriate to that context, of course. Okay. Last question.
I don't know. Hey, Andrew. Yeah. Oh, they skipped that one. I guess that's the new thing. I'll never
forget when I got my lab for the first time, you know, I came up in an era when it was still pretty
formal. Neuroscience, you know, like you'd say, hey, Professor so-and-so, and then they'd say,
you can call me Barbara, and I'd be like, hey, Barbara, but before that, no one, you know,
hey, or that, and I'll never forget that in my lab, one of my first graduate students, who's now
a professor, who's a very, very talented scientist at the University of Utah, and I got a text from
her, and it just said, she called me Andy, she said, hey, Andy, when are you going to buy us an
espresso maker? It was like the second day, and I was like, whoa, times have changed,
So I think it's good.
I think the lack of formality is actually good.
At first, I was like, wait a second.
I waited my whole life to become a professor, and now it's, hey, Andy.
But I think, you know, with the years, I've realized it's actually kind of nice.
I'm 17 years old.
§04Transcript — part 4
Congratulations.
Man, I wish I would.
You didn't want to know me when I was a nice kid, but I was just, I had a lot of confusion.
I'm 17 years old.
So you're in a psychedelic experience of youth.
What is your biggest advice on finding your passion?
Oh, well, goodness gracious.
I think you know, if I'm honest, I think we talked about it a little bit earlier.
I think your passion is rooted in a feeling state that you've already accessed, hopefully many times, but at least one time earlier in your life.
when, for whatever reason or circumstances,
you weren't thinking about what your parents wanted you to do,
what was cool or not cool in school.
You were in a pure feeling state of,
yum, that's really cool.
Behold.
And so I can't answer the question for you,
but I'll tell you, yes, continue to forage. I do believe that learning is among the most wonderful
things that we can do for ourselves, but that if you spend some time in your memory banks,
that you'll be able to remember a feeling, and maybe the feeling was about a board game you
played or something you observed, or maybe it just came about through some other activity,
and the feeling is unrelated to the activity.
That's where it gets a little tricky.
And we're answering this question for a 17-year-old,
but it's true for all of us.
This is where it gets a little tricky,
is that sometimes we think it's the activity,
but it's not the activity.
Lord knows I stay out of the Aquaria stores these days,
you know, because if I go near one, it's all over.
No, it's the delight in something that is very personal.
In fact, I think is very unique to you,
to the extent that, and I do believe this, that it's not capable of being created by anybody else,
and that feedback from other people about what we should do or what we're good at,
while it can be useful, it's merely a calibration point for saying, like someone says,
maybe you should do this, and you go, or like, meh, or like, yuck. Those are all just calibration
points on this like compass to take you back to that feeling state. So I apologize for not having
a more concrete mechanistic works the first time works every time kind of, you know, instant tool
like a physiological sigh. Rather, this is going to have to be some self-exploration. But the good
news is you're 17, your brain's still plastic. The good news is all of us are capable of
neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan. And the good news is all of us are capable of
introspection throughout the lifespan. So even if you can't remember, you can sense. And if you can
sense, what you're doing is you're feeling. What is this? I don't want to turn this into a
neuroscience lesson, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say that you're perceiving and feeling on the
basis of converting physical information in your environment, sound waves, photons,
mechanical pressure, chemicals going in through your nose and mouth. You're converting that into
electrical and chemical signals. That's what being and perceiving really is. It can't be anything
else. So there's something about the way that you're wired, Oscar, that is different and leads
you to say, yum, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that, that. And for me, I've always associated
with a certain physical sensation in this arm.
Don't ask me why.
I don't even know.
And if you can sense into what it is
that gets you going in that direction,
if any and all of us do that,
then I really believe you can sense into your unique gifts.
Or maybe you just need to sit back
and think in deliberate, complete sentences for an hour
like Rick or one of those other geniuses.
I don't have a better answer.
That's the best I can do.
Thanks so much.
Yeah.
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you so much
so just as a final
note this evening I just want to
thank everyone for coming out as Rob
mentioned you know come out
as far as I know there's no alcohol here people are
here. Amazing. Um, an event with no alcohol on a Saturday night in this beautiful Sydney summer
where we talk science. Um, thanks for letting me tell some stories, learn some stories. My,
my real wish, my deep wish is that everyone do some level of introspection and if not tonight
and going forward. And, um, I so appreciate that people are interested in the concepts around
science and health and, and the, the really big, big wish for me, maybe I'll even just call it an
ask is that I truly don't develop the protocols. I mine them. Occasionally I develop them, but I
mine them from the rich sources of, you know, information in papers and elsewhere and put
them into a format that I'm deeply appreciative people enjoy digesting and hopefully apply,
but hopefully share. And I certainly don't need attribution. None of them are named after me
intentionally because that's not going to give them any information about what they do or how
they work. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
Thank you.
Thank you to the Sydney Opera House Trust for their hospitality and for making this event possible.
And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.