0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Huberman. Andrew is a neuroscientist. He's a Neurobiology Professor at Stanford Medical School and McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and the founder of Huberman Lab, where he's involved in all kinds of really amazing breakthrough research on brain function, brain plasticity and brain regeneration. His work has been published in top journals like Nature. He's been featured in publications like Time, Scientific America and the BBC. And he's here today to discuss the brain, to discuss growth mindset, how to focus, how to navigate the stressful times and many other subjects. It's an incredible conversation. I think you guys are gonna enjoy it.
0:45 I appreciate you watching make sure to hit that subscribe button and without further ado, this is me and Dr. Andrew Huberman. First of all, thanks for doing this. I appreciate you coming out. Yeah, my pleasure. Long time coming. I'm glad we're doing it in person- Likewise. And not remotely. And I think what I wanna do is start with your origin story, because you're a very, it's your path is very unlikely, your path to becoming a scientist. And I think it actually also kind of contextualizes some of the things that I wanna talk about with you today. So maybe start there. Sure, so on the one hand, you know, maybe I was faded to become a scientist.
1:33 I guess the two things that are relevant there are I always loved animals and I've always been obsessed with animal behavior. Like just could watch Cousteau shows growing up, you know underwater life or animals hunting, animals doing anything. It's just so fascinating to me because I'm, I think even at a really young age, I've always just been intrigued in sort of what drives different animals to behave in the way they do and how body form matches to, I didn't know what it was, but brains and how that all works. So I've always been obsessed with animals. And then my dad's a scientist, so he's a physicist. It was really early in chaos theory. And so growing up in our home, you know, we had scientists over for dinner and graduate students would come over
2:20 for barbecues and things like that. Is he a Stanford professor? Yeah, he was at Stanford. He was mostly at Xerox Park, which is kind of famous if you read the Steve Jobs book is for the, yeah. The development of the gooey interface the graphical user interface and sort of early days of the computer. So he had a lab there and he had a lab in applied physics at Stanford and something called symbolic systems which is a Stanford degree in kind of ecology and computation, that kind of thing. So I grew up in this family where science was very prominent and we had lots of discussions in our home that I would overhear and I didn't understand about physics and we'd spend summers at the Aspen Center for Physics, which was like- Good times. Yeah, so, you know, and we were, and to be clear, you know, you hear the word Aspen, you know, we were a middle-class family but they have this Aspen Center for Physics. So the Feynman, you know, Richard Feynman was there,
3:07 Murray Gell-mann, like all these luminaries of physics, Peter Carruthers. And my dad was really good at telling me the stories about these guys and then I'd always wanna meet them. And it was mostly guys back then, there weren't many women in physics. So I, you know, I was kind of immersed in science from a young age, but right about age 13, my parents split up. And he moved overseas, he moved to Denmark and my mom was really struggling with the breakup and I wasn't in contact with him anymore. So I had this really unusual childhood where, you know, we didn't talk about sports, we talked about science, and I had this close relationship with science and the people around science but then all of a sudden the structure around family like instead of dinners together every night, it was just like me and my mom and I was an adolescent, I was hitting puberty.
3:54 So, you know, there was bound to be some shifts in my world landscape and internal landscape anyway. But basically what happened was, I stopped really paying attention to school. And I got really heavily into skateboarding and the kind of punk rock music. And I found my pack or my community through like packing community of kids that also just were kind of parentless. So this was like late 80s, early 90s. And so at a pretty young age, I started taking the, I grew up in Palo Alto. I was actually born at Stanford Hospital. I started taking the seven F bus up to San Francisco and hanging around in Embarcadero. For the skateboarders out there, the Lizards, this is the the now famous EMB crowd. So this was the birth of a huge movement of skateboarders that became professionals.
4:40 Like, so you'd see the young Danny Way would come through town and you had Rob Dyrdek. I remember when he came through. So all these names that eventually became popular during the kind of X games era and the, but at that time it was really underground. And so it was this pack of maybe a hundred guys and it was run like a little city and it was chaos. It was like there was fights, and there was drinking and there was lawlessness, there was also a lot of amazing skateboarding and there were a lot of amazing people. And there were some older guys, like one in particular, a very famous skateboarder, is this kid, Mike Carroll, his older brother was kind of like the older brother to everybody, kind of kept us all in check. So it had its own unique organization. And it's actually interesting 'cause the same thing was happening at that time
5:25 in Washington Square Park in New York, and at Love Park in Philadelphia, there were all these like communities of kids that were basically parentless. And so in that time I saw some interesting things. First of all, I learned what it was to be parentless. Growing up in Palo Alto, it was like soccer games and AYSO and you know, swim club and all of a sudden I realized, you know, I don't have to be home at any particular time, or, you know, none of these kids are going to school. And so we all, it was kind of a big group of truants. And it was interesting because it gave me a perspective that I had never had in Palo Alto. And I was drifting further and further away from any kind of academic rigor. I think I would go to school every once in a while. What's mom doing? Does she have any idea that you're going up to the city every day?
6:11 So she was totally checked out. You know, I think she was just devastated by a bunch of things that were happening and she lapsed into a pretty serious depression. And then in that community, what was interesting is, I started seeing that, you know, some guys were clearly faded to becoming professional skateboarders. They were really good at it. I just wanna say for full disclosure, I was not particularly good. I kept getting injured. I just, I was not faded to be, you know, exceptional or very good at it, but I love the comradery and I love the community, but I also noticed that, you know, some people were drinking all day and other people got into hard drugs and people started to, you know, some of the dysfunction really started to show up. Yeah, the fracture. Yeah, the fracture. Begins. Exactly, and so,
6:56 and I started seeing that, lot, a lot more violence. You know, people start getting their girlfriends pregnant. They didn't have money to support those kids. You know, it started becoming apparent to me that there was a lot of dysfunction as well as a lot of incredible people in that community. And so about that time, I got a girlfriend, and the other thing was I got removed from high school. So I went to kind of the famed/infamous high school in Palo Alto, Gunn High School. Oh, you went to Gunn. I went to Gunn, which is famous because it's the, one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country, maybe the planet, people moved to the area just to send their kids there. But it also has this very complicated reputations of the highest suicide rate of any school in the country. The New York Times has written about this. So, you know, I would come to school every once in a while
7:43 but I could tell you far more about the curbs in the front of the Gunn High School parking lot than I could about anything that I learned at Gunn. So when they say they, you were removed, I mean, you got, you were expelled. No, I basically, they just said, you need to either start coming to school or, you know- You're done. Or you're done. So I got shifted to another high school and that was same story. It was just was, it was a mess, it just fell apart. And so at one point I was brought in, I have a kind of vague recollection of this, but I was brought in to have a discussion with a school counselor. And I don't think I've ever told this story before. And there was someone sitting in the corner, this guy was sitting in the corner and he didn't introduce himself. And pretty soon I realized when I was like, I think they're gonna take me away. Like I started realized, 'cause they realized my mom wasn't really able to control me.
8:29 Wasn't really in a place to support me at that time. And that's what they did. They took me away. They took me into a place up the peninsula, which was not a jail and it wasn't a hospital. It was just sort of a place where they put kids that were- Like some kind of GV warehousing situation? Yeah, a lot of psychologists, lot of locks on doors, lot of, lot of kids that, there were 12 of us in there at any one time, it was locked down. And the first night there, I remember I had a roommate who was like really into cutting on himself, that kind of thing. And he told me, he was like, "Look, if you just do what they say here, you'll be outta here in like a month. And if you don't, you're gonna be here a very long time." And I remember being pretty frightened for the first time.
9:18 And at that point I was like, oh my goodness, like, this is bad. You know, like, this is bad. I'm a long way. It's so hard for me to imagine. I know, I know. This given you know, who you are and what you do now. I know and you know, and it was literally like the kind of one phone call a day kind of thing. So actually I called I was skateboarding for a company in San Francisco. I think they put me on out of sympathy and I called this guy up and I said, "Look, I've, you know, they locked me up, I don't know what to do. Can you help me?" And he get, and I'll never forget, I wanna say his name because you're the most normal guy I know. Well, he's like- The least likely of that crowd. Exactly. For that to happen. So, in any event, I was permitted to go back to school eventually, provided that I went to therapy. And so I started going to weekly therapy
10:04 which in the early 90s was kind of a weird thing. You would, wouldn't admit it to your friends but tweets skateboard around Stanford campus. I was doing my thing and then twice a week I would go in and see this therapist. He's a remarkable guy because A, he had deep training in the mind, right? And we started talking about what was going on. And he really picked up on the fact that there was essentially no structure, no home life for me, but that I had a strong drive, and I was really interested in learning. I mean, I was, I was enthusiastic and motivated enough to, you know, skateboard as hard as I could, even though I wasn't gonna go anywhere with it. So at that point, and the fact that I had a girlfriend, I started looking for something that I could do. And I started at one point I thought I'd join the fire service,
10:49 'cause it seemed like the comradery was good. At that point, I started strengthening my body a bit because I didn't wanna keep getting hurt. So I started running, I started lifting weights, a football coach at Gunn actually turned me on to fitness. It's actually an interesting guy. He wrote the script for that movie "Mr. Mom," Oh my God. Yeah, because his wife bet him that he couldn't do what she could do, which was stay home with the kids. And he was this big strong football coach. And so he made her a bet and he lost. And so he wrote that script Michael Keaton played the, yeah. So he taught me, he was like, look, you know you can't even do a pull up. You need to start doing your pull-ups and you start running you know, and he said, the fire service might be good for you. So, I was spinning out, but there were people that were willing to kind of, you know, point me in the right direction. So what ended up happening was my high school girlfriend
11:34 went off to college and I didn't, you know, I didn't know what I was gonna do. So I actually went and I lived in the parking lot outside her dormitory. I just wanted to be near her. She was my family at that point. A college locally or? She was at UC Santa Barbara. So you just drove down and- I just drove down and I just camped out in the parking lot and people, and I was starting to get into some martial arts and Thai boxing then. So I think I was teaching some Thai boxing, self-defense stuff on campus and doing this kind of thing. And by the end of that year, I realized that I should probably apply to college. So I applied to UCSP and somehow I got in, Lord knows how I got in. I did, 'cause I did eventually graduate high school, barely. Got in, and then after a year I just completely flailed it.
12:20 You know, I wasn't going to class. I was getting into fights, a lot of that kind of mischief and kind of wildness was still in me. And what ended up happening was, I got into a physical altercation on July 4th, 1994 with like a bunch of guys. And at the end of that, I walked back to the place I was staying, and of course I wasn't paying rent because I had learned in those years, like you can just squat in an empty house. So, you know, it's Isla Vista California, you know? So I was really running wild and went back and just I realized I was like, this picture is really bad. You know, at some point, this isn't gonna be like a kid who had some problems, this is gonna be, truly. It's not cute anymore. It's not cute anymore And no one, no one's gonna make excuses about your upbringing
13:05 or the lack of parenting. It just becomes, you just, you're gonna end up being a ward of the state. I mean, you were, it sounds like you were, you were almost a feral animal. Totally feral. Actually, and I have some close friends that's how they they referred to me, that feral. And it's funny even to this day, I mean, I'll get to where this eventually took me. But even to this day, when I go into a home where it's clearly like a loving home where there's kids are happy and there's good food and it's warm and cozy I always feel this thing like, wow, like amazing. Like I sort of wanna be adopted by them immediately, but you know, I'm 45 years old so that's not appropriate at this age. What's so interesting, I keep thinking about David Epstein's book "Range." Did you read this book? Which is basically this thesis
13:52 that some of the most successful people are not, you know, we suspect that, you know, the great talents of the world across all disciplines are the people who discover their passion at an early age and practice it voraciously for many, many, many years. But in fact, it's people more like yourself, who've dabbled in all different kinds of things who end up being ultimately, you know, the most proficient at their selected skillset. And when I look at your experience, I see trauma, I see adventure, I see, you know, all these obstacles that you've had to face and overcome and manage on your own essentially, right? And all of those really informed perfectly the things that you're interested in and what you explore today in your lab.
14:38 Yeah, it really did. You know, I think that I'm so grateful for those years. I wouldn't wish them on any kid, because I think having a secure, loving environment at home is so key. And, you know, I should say about a third of the kids that I grew up with in that environment, that whole skateboarding, punk rock culture, about a third have gone on to found companies or professional skateboarders, about a third just kind of drifted off and about a third are dead or incarcerated. You know, a huge number. And so there's real value in having a support system, that's clear, but it exposed me to all these things like addictions, schizophrenia, rage, like all these incredible elements. Like I was never really into drinking and drugs. I could drink or not drink. It just wasn't, I wasn't drawn to it, but other people they took one sip and it was like, that was their thing. It was like the magic elixir for them. And so, you know, I was observing what was happening.
15:26 And then after that, you know, that July 4th '94 incident was, I realized this is it, you know, it's now or never. It really was one of those moments. You know, you hear about those moments but it was me realizing I'm living in this squat where I've got a pet ferret. My girlfriend's gone, she broke up with me. She was smart enough to break up with me, you know, I'm getting in fights, I'm working at a bagel shop. I'm barely making ends meet. And at that point I just made the decision. I just said, okay, look, I'm not gonna be a professional athlete. I think I'm pretty good at memorizing things. I think I have an interest in people, I'm going to just decide, I just decided to do school. I decided that was the, that was the track. And so like, some people pick the military because it's like, if you know what to expect at least in terms of the, you know,
16:13 the passages that you're gonna go through. And for me that was school. And so I had decided, get back in school. I moved into a studio apartment by myself. I quit partying completely, I didn't go to parties. I got really serious about fitness. So I just started running and lifting weights and I studied. You went like Henry Rollins style. I did. Yeah. I did. It's a lot of self-awareness you know, I mean, people go into the military because on some level, I mean, some people do because they're, there's some yearning for having that structure imposed upon their lives. But you constructed that kind of structure for yourself. Yeah, I think I was really afraid. I think I was like, you know, and I and these days, you know, 'cause of my lab studies fear and I get into this whole thing around mindsets
16:59 and people always ask me like, is it better to do something from a place of love or fear? Like depends. And at that point, fear was the best motivator for me. And I just basically worked like crazy. And it's interesting because I didn't have a mentor or someone to bring me to that. But once I started doing that, you know, there was one professor in particular who took note, he was like, "Oh, you know, you seem really interested in this stuff." And I was like, yeah, 'cause he was teaching me about depression, schizophrenia, neuro-chemicals. I thought, I was totally turned on by the world of neuroscience. It didn't, it wasn't even called neuroscience back then. But this one guy, Harry Carlisle he was teaching me about thermal regulation and how the brain works and how receptors in the skin relate to perceptions in the mind. And he also had a deep sensitivity to mental disease.
17:45 And I'd seen a lot of that, you know, I'd seen a lot of depression and anxiety in my own family. I had had a friend commit suicide. Another friend becomes schizophrenic. I think he's still walking the mission district of San Francisco now. Seeing some friends become addicts. And so here was someone explaining that there's actually an underlying basis for this. And I just poured myself into it. Is that the same guy who, you know, would smoke underneath the vacuum hood and stuff like that? Like a bit of an (indistinct). Yeah, he was amazing. So he was a favorite teacher of many students, but if you could get into his lab then you were kind of one of the chosen ones I guess. He's like the perfect mentor at the perfect time for you. Yeah, so he used to drink coffee in lab which you're not supposed to do.
18:31 He's just smoke cigarettes in lab in the fume hood. And they used to come and yell at him and he would do it anyway. And I thought, you know, this guy he doesn't even know what it is, but you know, he's a punk rocker and he doesn't even know. And so, you know, he gave me an opportunity to work in his lab. And at some point he told me, if you go to graduate school they'll actually pay you to do science. And what ended up happening at that point was I hit a brick wall because I was, I had a lot of resentment toward my dad. I felt, you know, here's my dad. He was a scientist, he had, you know, left us all this kind of thing. And I realized if I didn't do this, if I didn't take this opportunity, it was going to be the most foolish thing ever. You know, what am I gonna do to spite my, you know, my parents, you know, I was 20 years old at that point. So I just made the decision. I'm gonna get a PhD and become a professor.
19:16 I'm going to get tenure and be like this guy, you know this guy who has looked like he had a pretty good life to me, and so that's pretty much how I spent the, you know the last 25 years of my life is doing experiments. It worked out. It worked out, is it, a lot of work, I mean, I didn't have the power of concentration. I hadn't read all the good books that Gunn High School students read growing up. I had to learn how to speak properly. I learned how to, learn how to think properly and really learn how to commit to something that was very linear and at times was very painful. And I went to some pretty extreme things. I, you know, I actually used to set a timer and I wouldn't allow myself to get out of the chair until I was, the timer went off. So, and I would experience extreme agitation but over time I got pretty good.
20:02 And now I can do long stints of work without any breaks. And yeah, it worked out. It developed that neuroplasticity in your favor, ultimately. You're always a reader though, right? I loved books. So I would, you know, I would hide in the tower books section in the evenings and I would read everything about fitness, psychology, anything I could, I've always devoured information. My favorite book when I was a kid was the "Encyclopedia," or the "Guinness Book of World Records." So I was like, when I was a little kid, I'd walk around the Aspen Center for Physics. And I would tell anyone, I didn't even ask them, if they want to hear about like the, what's the world's smallest ethereum mammal. You know, I would like, it could tell you all these facts that were kind of meaningless at the time, but I've always been fascinated by the inventory of different animals on the planet
20:48 and their different behaviors. And so yeah, voracious reader and still now. I love, I love information. Well, as a neuroscientist, I mean, you're your own patient. I mean, the fact that you were able to, you know, turn your life around in such a dramatic fashion and do it essentially through sheer will and you know setting up practices that would feel you, you in that right direction, and then being available when those mentors showed up from the, from the, you know, the early therapist, sounds like that guy almost saved your life, right? He absolutely saved my life. He gave me the book, "Wherever You Go, There You Are" the Jon Kabat-Zinn book. And he said, no pressure, but if you can develop a mindfulness practice where you can sit still for like 10 minutes a day, it'll serve you very well.
21:34 So I started doing that. Like he could've, he could've told me to hang out of a window by my ankles, I would have done it. I think there was a, there was a self preservation thing was kicking in for me. So I got very interested in mindfulness meditation. He also, it was, I think, quite smart in saying, look there's a whole world of psychedelic drugs that are powerful in influencing the mind. He said, "If you're going to explore those, wait until your brain has already developed," which I think is a controversial statement in and of itself. He, so he actively discouraged me to go down that path, which I think was the right thing, given I was a minor, you know, and nowadays there's all this discussion now about psychedelics and their power. And I think they are very interesting compounds but he really steered me towards behavioral practices.
22:20 Like what could I do each day from waking up to going to sleep that would serve my mental health and my productivity well. I owe him a tremendous amount. And especially because he wasn't just in the psychoanalytic theory, he also was like cognitive behavioral. He understood the power of practices not just discussing issues. Yeah, to begin a meditation practice at that age in the mid 90s, that's pretty radical. Yeah, I felt it was funny 'cause I thought if I didn't sit in the lotus position like I wasn't doing it properly, you know, back then there was all this stuff around, it was very mystical and in my family 'cause my dad's very conservative and my mom was a little bit more of a free spirit. I was taught that anything that related to hippie culture was doomed to fail and cause problems.
23:05 And then anything that was related to like conservative culture was faded to advance the progress of humanity. It turned out neither one was true, of course. So I, but I needed people to push me in those directions, lift weights, run, meditate, do your schoolwork, do your homework. And so I think I, you know, now I have a good relationship with my parents, but I think I had to go out into the world and find those, you know, sort of paternal and maternal figures because they weren't in my home. I needed to find those. Do you look back on your upbringing with gratitude? Like how do you reflect on that experience and how it informs how you think about what you do now? I'm immensely grateful for it because you know, where I'm at today is, you know, my lab works on a number
23:52 of issues related, you know, sort of hardcore neurobiology of regenerating the brain, you know, trying to fix, basically cure blindness and repair visual systems, but also things related to, you know, fear, courage, mindset, stress, anxiety, trauma, et cetera. And the early seed of seeing how science is done, definitely gave me an advantage. I won't lie, you know, I seeing how scientists interact and behave and understanding that they are just people. 'Cause a lot of what was discussed in my home was about the people, not just the science they do, that really gave me an advantage. And then seeing all that dysfunction and realizing that the human animal is amazing at making plans, at modifying its brain if it wants to, but the human brain and the human animal are also dreadfully bad
24:40 at doing what's best for us. Because of this, what I think it comes down to is the fact that our reward systems are not designed for things that are just good for us. They're designed for things that optimize the progression of our species, but they're also, they will grab on to and ratchet into any behavior that makes us feel good. And so the human brain is really not optimized for making best choices. And so, those years of seeing all that. I could testify to that. Yeah, it's and it's, I wouldn't trade those years for anything. And I still have great friends in that community. I mean, I think, you know, any, had I joined a different community, I would have found the right people as well, but to be with a, you know, a huge pack
25:26 of feral kids at that age and to see the function and dysfunction and also it was wild, it was a lot of fun. I can imagine. It was a lot of fun. That's a whole set of stories for another time. Did you see that movie, "Mid 90s?" "Mid 90s" and the movie "Kids", the Larry Clark movie. When I saw that movie, first of all, I had a lot of friends that were in that movie 'cause he used actual skateboarders. In "Kids?" Yeah, I actually knew a couple of those kids and you know, it's a movie, but there are a lot of things about that movie they're very accurate. And when I saw that movie I was like, yeah, that's like right. Pretty much a day in the life in Washington Square Park. And you know, I mean it was a little extreme on some end but you didn't know where you're gonna end up each night. And that was a unique experience, you know? So yeah, and "Mid 90s" was really good.
26:13 I think it captured the essence of what it is to be a kid that's just looking for some group of people to join. And skateboard is a unique sport because you get young kids and grown men and now women and girls do it as well. It didn't happen so much then, but now there are a lot of great, awesome skateboarders that are female but they're all hanging out together. You wouldn't find that in soccer. You're not gonna get little kids playing with grown men. So you get exposed to a lot 'cause everyone's at develop, different developmental stages. But yeah, it was an amazing thing. I wouldn't change it for anything. Cool, well, let's segue into talking about the brain and maybe we could start with, you know, how you think about the brain specifically? Like, what is the brain, what does it do? What does it not do? You know, it helps us survive. It's our portal into trying to make sense of the world.
27:02 Like what's the starting point in the discussion around the brain? Yeah, so the brain and nervous system, which so it's like brain spinal cord connections with the body and back in. I don't distinguish between brain and mind. I think that's like an 80s discussion or earlier. And I think it would take us down the wrong track. So brain or mind to me is interchangeable. Mind, body, is kind of interchangeable because the brain is connected to the body and the body is connected to the brain, right? If I, you know, pinprick my hand and it hurts my brain registers it where it happens it's kind of an irrelevant discussion. I think we really need to just appreciate that the nervous system is designed to orchestrate all the processes in the body not just thinking and not just behavior and really can be divided into five things.
27:47 So there's sensation and sensation is really bound or restricted by the receptors in the body. So receptors in the eye that perceive photons, light energy per se, receptors in the skin that perceive pressure you know, touch receptors, smell, taste, hearing, et cetera. And the interesting thing about sensation and the fact that the nervous system needs to pay attention to sensation is it's non-negotiable. The nervous system of humans is designed to extract physical phenomenon from the universe that are non-negotiable, photons of light. I can't see in the infrared with my eyes and I can't see ultraviolet light with my eyes. And I can't perceive that because I don't have the receptors for it. So, you know, other animals can perceive some of those things but that leads us to the next thing, which is perception
28:34 which is which sensations are you paying attention to. So all the time you're sensing things like right now your feet are sensing the contact with your shoes, but you're not thinking about it until I say that. And then you shift your perception. So perception is like the spotlight. So the brain wants to constantly bring in sensation. It's non-negotiable what's coming in. It's just dependent on your environment Perception is negotiable, you can control that. 'Cause I just said shoes and you thought about your feet and there you are. Then there are feelings which can be a little bit nebulous but feelings are a link between our emotion and generally invokes the body, sensations in the body and concepts in the mind and what those sensations are about. That's really what emotions are. Animals definitely experience them. I'm kind of appalled to think that 10 years ago people like, do animals have emotions?
29:20 Of course they have emotions, right? Because those are bodily sensations merged with some perceptions, so of course they do. And then there's thoughts and thoughts are interesting because thoughts happen spontaneously. Think about like a web browser that's constantly giving you pop-ups but thoughts can also be deliberate. So you and I can decide right now that we're gonna think about a plan for something or we're gonna think about what's going on in the world. So thoughts happen spontaneously and they can be deliberate. And then the final thing is behaviors and actions. So the nervous system is responsible for sensation, perception, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. And what's interesting, we start to think about that as you're like, okay that's a lot, but what is the nervous system really trying to accomplish? Like on any given day or at any moment, what's it trying to accomplish? And it's really trying to accomplish one thing
30:07 which is to take perceptions of the outside world and merge those with perceptions of the inside world what we call interoception and to link those in a way that's operating on an environment in the appropriate way. So what do I mean by that? So if I'm feeling anxious, and I'm in a very calm environment, I'm gonna perceive that rapid heart rate and kind of feeling of agitation in my body as inappropriate for the moment, right? And my goal then as an organism is to adjust my level of what they call autonomic arousal or alertness down. If I'm in a great party or I'm at a wedding or it's a celebration or I'm at a protest or, you know, then I might feel that my level of alertness is appropriate for my environment. So the nervous system is in this constant,
30:53 dynamic interaction with the outside world and trying to figure that out. One way and this can be kind of conceptualized is there's an emerging idea that's kind of interesting about impatience. So we've all had the feeling of being impatient. Some people are far more patient than others, but if you've ever been in line at the store and you feel like something's going very slowly, you know, the person in front of you is taking a long time, they're doing some returns, you're getting kind of impatient, maybe you're breathing in a mask, and you're like, ah, like you're, you know, what's the ideas that if you're getting a certain frequency of pulses from your body, and if those pulses are coming in quickly, like you're perceiving yourself that interoception quickly, it's like pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse. You're gonna be more geared towards your internal representation.
31:38 And then you're seeing what's going on in the outside world. And it seems like it's going very slowly, but there are other times when you're in line at the store, someone's getting some returns and you're texting on your phone or you've had a great day, you've had a great run, your family's in great shape, and you're fine, why? Well, that frequency of those pulses, that interoception, is matched pretty well to your outside environment. And so impatience is really when your internal sort of metronome, tick, tick, tick, tick, is not matched well to the external environment. There are other times when you're feeling like your internal metronome is tick, tick, tick, and you've got a million things coming at you through email or texts, you've got a bunch of things and you're feeling overwhelmed and tired. Well, in either case there's nothing right or wrong
32:24 it's just your body and your brain are trying to say what's going on in the outside world, and how well matched am I to it? Right. So if you think about some of the, sort of core practices of mindfulness and self-regulation of like focusing on breathing or focusing on, you know, state of mind, a lot of that is trying to bring more awareness to your internal state, but what our brain is normally doing when our eyes are open and we're interacting in the world is we're constantly trying to update our internal state to match external demands of the world. And this hearkens back to a, you know, like a really early design of all nervous systems which is how do you take an organism that needs certain things, food, water, mates, reproduction, shelter.
33:10 How do you move that organism? How do you create a system that will do that in best relation to the environment? And so what mother nature has done is designed a system a series of systems. Let's just take agitation and stress for one, if an animal or a human is very thirsty you feel kind of agitated might get up and get a drink of water. If you're very thirsty, it can put you into a state of panic. If you're extremely thirsty and water is a limited resource you might even result the violence to get it or negotiation of some sort that you wouldn't if you were calmer. So the stress and agitation were designed to actually mobilize the body to take us into the direction of something that's adaptive. So you can start to see these kind of core elements of what the brain and nervous system do.
33:55 Sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and action and this constant challenge of trying to match our internal state to the external real estate, the outside world. And you start to see that the sensations that we call stress or impatience or calm are really the result of those attempts that the nervous system is trying to perform. That's a lot to take in and super interesting. And it, you know, it's prompting in me this, you know, attempt to try to wrap my head around what within the brain is mutable, which is kind of, you know what your work is all about versus what is immutable like you were talking about thoughts like pop up windows on a browser.
34:40 You know, some, sometimes our brains are just doing what they do and that there are things that we can do like mindfulness and breath work and the practices that you're talking about, hypnosis which is another thing that you're involved in to help, you know, help us like take better, manage better that process to kind of take the reins and be more in charge rather than be prey or victim to these kinds of things that just occur without our conscious awareness. Well, I think that, you know, in terms of value of understanding the nervous system and where it can be steered, it's absolutely clear that the nervous system can change in response to experience. So this thing we call neuroplasticity is really that, it's the brain's ability to modify itself in response to experience.
35:25 And I think it's important to understand that from birth till about age 25, the brain is extremely malleable, in a kind of almost passive way where kids are exposed to things and the brain is just wiring up. I mean, the brain is designed to adjust itself, in order to be in concert with its surroundings and to optimize that just the way we described it a minute ago. Like a way that a child can learn a language very quickly- Or three languages. Play a guitar or something like that. Yeah, without an accent, you know, three languages without an accent, it's remarkable and try and do that after age 25, it's very challenging. And so the brain is basically designed to be customized in the early part of life, and then to implement those algorithms in that circuitry for the rest of your, of its life. And so the brain can change in adulthood
36:10 and it can change provided that there's an emphasis on some perceptual event. So in other words, if you wanna change your brain as an adult, let's say you wanna be less anxious, you wanna learn a new language, you wanna be more functional in some way, presumably, the key thing is to bring focus to some particular perception of something that's happening during the learning process. And the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical system involving acetylcholine. And it comes from these two little nuclei down in the base of the brain called the nucleus basalis. All day long you're doing things in a reflexive way, but when you do something and you think about it very intensely, acetylcholine is released from basalis at the precise neurons that were involved in that behavior
36:58 and it marks those for change during sleep or during deep rest later. So for people that wanna change their brain, the power of focus is really the entry point and the ability to access deep rest and sleep. Because most people don't realize this but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense focus, but neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest. And we can talk about how to optimize those different brain functions. One of the things that's really important also to think about how the brain works in terms of plasticity and all this stuff is what the brain really wants to do is also pass as much of what it does off to reflexive behavior as possible. So, when we're talking about focus I think it can get a little bit vague, but it might be useful to think about like what exactly is focus and what triggers plasticity?
37:45 So the brain loves to be able to just do things, pick up coffee cups and drink and walk and talk and do things and not put much energy into it. When we decide to focus what the brain really does is it switches on a set of circuits then all the frontal cortex and nucleus basalis and some others and it's trying to understand duration, how long something's gonna last, path, what's gonna happen, and outcome, what ultimately is gonna happen. So duration, path and outcome. You know, the events of early 2020 are a good example of this. One of the reasons why it's so exhausting to be alive in 2020, is because we are now having to pay attention to duration, path and outcome. How long is this thing gonna last? When are, you know, when are they gonna open up all businesses? Did I touch that door handle? Does it matter? You know, who are the experts?
38:32 Are there any experts? You know, there are a lot of questions whereas normally, we can just move through life without having to do all that analysis. So if it's a simple example like trying to learn a new language or a new motor skill, or a new way of conceptualizing something, maybe somebody who's in a therapeutic process and they're trying to work through a trauma or something like that, duration, path and outcome is built into the networks of the brain. We can do that very easily, but it takes work. And it almost has a feeling of underlying agitation and frustration. And that's because of the circuits that turn on before acetylcholine are of the stress system. So when you or I decide we're gonna learn something and really dig in, norepinephrine which is adrenaline is secreted in the brainstem and in the body. And it brings about a state of alertness.
39:18 Then our attention which is mostly a diffuse light is brought to a particular duration, path and outcome analysis. This would be thinking about what somebody is saying, what are they really trying to say? A hard passage of reading, a hard, you know, set of math problems, you know, a challenging physical workout. When you do that, these two systems have to work very hard and the adult brain doesn't really wanna change the algorithms they learned in childhood. But if you do those two things, you have alertness and focus, the acetylcholine and the norepinephrine converge to mark those synopsis for change. And so, so the way to think about neuroplasticity if one wants to change their brain is bring about the most intense concentration you can to something. And then later bring about the least amount of concentration to that thing.
40:06 So I'll talk about that in a second, but there were some studies that were done at Stanford by a guy named Eric Knudsen that showed that plasticity in the adult brain any age, can be as robust as it is in childhood, as fast and as dramatic, provided the focus is there and it's all contingent on this acetylcholine molecule coming from nucleus basalis. So you say, well, how do you do that? How do you get it, you know? Well, I've got friends that you nicorette thinking that's gonna get them there because nicorette is a nicotinic acetylcholine agonist but that's gonna globally increase acetylcholine. So I always tell them that's not the right approach. The right approach is to bring as much focus to a behavior or to a thought or to an action pattern and there has to be a sense of urgency.
40:52 So what Knudsen lab showed and another lab at UCF Mike Merzenich's lab showed is that if there's a serious contingency, like in order to get your ration of food each day, you have to learn this thing. The degree of plasticity is remarkable. But if there isn't an incentive, it just isn't gonna happen. So the circuits in the brain that mother nature set up, are designed to be anchored to a real need. And people always say to me, well, should I do something out of love and a real desire to learn, or should it be out of fear, but either one works. The sense of urgency is just acetylcholine. It's norepinephrine, that's all it is. It doesn't, the brain doesn't have a recognition of whether or not something is pleasureful or not until later. Once you start accomplishing your goal, the reward systems like dopamine start kicking in.
41:39 But I think if people are interested in modifying their brain for the better, at least some, you know, top contour understanding of how urgency and focus must converge for that to happen can be useful. Because I think there's a lot of attention paid to whether or not something feels like flow or whether or not it's see what I call highly desirable states or whether or not you can, you can eat a plant out of the ground that will magically put your brain into a state of plasticity. And the answer is yes, such plants exist, but what's missing is the focus component. If that work is not done with a particular end goal in mind, you'll get plasticity, but you'll get plasticity in a kind of across the board, it's like learning nine lang, learning a little bit of nine languages all at once, is not gonna make you
42:24 speak coherently in any one of them. So focus is the key. Right, I mean, this idea of flow is so much in the vernacular now. And you know, my sense is that people are trying to measure their level of engagement against some sort of theoretical idea of what it's like to be in that flow state. And if they're not experiencing it, they feel like they're doing it wrong or they're, they feel guilty or they beat themselves up. And for me, it's, a lot of it is just hard work. Like right now, I'm trying to finish this book and I should have been working on this book for like the last nine months, right? And I just couldn't, couldn't get it together. Like it's a collaborative project. So there's a lot of different people
43:10 that are involved in this, and they've been working diligently sort of daily, you know putting this thing together. And I've just been focusing on the podcast and been unable to immerse myself in this project because I know from past book projects, when I go in, I go all in, like the addict in me kicks in and it's like, it just becomes my universe. And I've been completely paralyzed from taking that on. And so I've dithered away most of the quarantine without being productive on this project. And then about 10 days ago, we had a meeting, and we established this deadline at, you know, July 10th to turn this thing in. And it was like a switch got flicked. And I went all in and it's all I can think about now. And in fact, everything else feels like extraneous
43:56 and a distraction. I just wanna get back so I can focus on this thing. And 10 days ago, I couldn't get myself into that position. And it's made me think about like, what is going on in my brain that, you know, it's such a drastic state change. And what did I do to switch that while a deadline was imposed upon me and whatever happened neuro-chemically with that set in motion like a chain reaction of events that got me into the chair. And once I began the project for me, it's all about like momentum, right? It's like, to start getting to the starting line and beginning is so hard. Like, I will just go forever without doing it. And then I'm in, and then I'm all in 110%. And I'm like, why can't I just,
44:42 why can't I be that person who just worked on it, you know an hour and a half every day for the last three months? Well, I can offer some potential explanations. I can relate. And none of it involves a flow state. It's all hard. Yeah, and you know, I'm friends with Steven Kotler I think flow and I think the chicks in Mohali who originated this thing of flow is really interesting. But I say right now, the most we can say about flow mechanistically is backwards it spells wolf. We don't really understand flow. Now people have come up with these theories. It's like, you know, hypo hyper frontality. I haven't seen the data and I'm not picking on anybody. I'm putting that out there as a prompt for people to discover this. I think that, and to work on it. I think it's a really interesting, highly desirable state but I think we need to get comfortable as a culture
45:28 in trying to understand our species and how we work, that the early stages of hard work and focus are gonna feel like agitation, stress and confusion, because that's the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in. None of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift, or, you know, a performer go do something without warming up. The brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are gonna be active. And it's unreasonable for us to think, "Oh I've got an hour, I'm gonna plop down and write beautifully for an hour my best work." We need to accept that there's a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated states. Now, in terms of the reward that accompanies the feeling that we're funneling into that groove
46:15 of being productive in one regime like for you writing this book, the dopamine system is really important to understand. So we've talked about norepinephrine kind of gets you going, acetylcholine is the spotlight of attention. The dopamine system is mother nature's hardwired, ancient system in all animals including humans to put us on the right path. Now it's, a lot of people talk about dopamine as this thing that you get when you publish the book or when you get the book deal or when something wonderful happens like your child's born. And that's true, but dopamine's main role is to be released anytime you achieve a milestone, or you think you're on the right path. And when the dopamine system is tethered to a particular pattern of focus, remember duration, path and outcome.
47:01 So it's like, okay, you sit down, maybe you don't get much text out but then the next day you get 800 words of really solid text and you feel good, like I'm into this. What does that dopamine system do? The dopamine system takes the norepinephrine which is normally rate limiting. Like at some point there's so much norepinephrine that you quit and we can talk about that. It's actually the substrate for quitting, dopamine can push that noradrenaline back down, that adrenaline back down and give you more room, more space to do duration, path and outcome work, highly focused work. And I'm making duration path outcomes synonymous with highly focused work. Why would this happen? So let's think about an animal. Let's think about a deer that wakes up and is thirsty and it's wandering out looking for water. That animal needs water. It doesn't know that it needs water.
47:47 It experiences agitation the same way that a baby feels agitation when it wants food but it doesn't know it needs food. It just feels agitation and cries and a caretaker comes, hopefully. That deer is now foraging for something that it needs. And let's say it smells water, 'cause a deer can actually do that and arrives at a stream and takes a sip of water, there's dopamine released then, that puts it on a path to maybe a larger lake or something of that sort, or to be able to go cheap food. So when we are on the right path, and we hit a milestone, dopamine is released and it tends to tighten our focus more for that activity. So the dopamine, this is why drugs of abuse and why alcoholism and some process addictions,
48:32 which are behavioral addictions are so dangerous because they, a lot of those drugs of abuse are dopamine. So it becomes this cyclical loop where there's no other behavior that can evoke the same level of release. In fact, I sort of define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And I say that because it really is the way that the dopamine system works. Normally the dopamine system is designed to be generic. It's designed to get me to do lots of things, social quality, social interactions you know, work, exercise, all those things, just like the stress system is designed to get me out of bed in the morning, cortisol pulse is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It's also what leads me to, or led me to pursue a career in science out of fear, initially, and eventually pleasure. So the dopamine system is tethered to those states of focus
49:22 and it's what mother nature designed so that the neuroplasticity would occur and you would want to continue those behaviors again in the future. That deer needs to know and remember and create a memory, not just aware that stream is, but the process of, oh, when I feel that agitation I'm gonna get up and go down this particular path. And so people think of the dopamine system as this kind of like catch all for reward, oh, you get likes on Instagram and it makes you feel good. That's not really how it works. And the important thing to understand is when you start getting a convergence of norepinephrine so that level of agitation duration, path, outcome, acetylcholine, and dopamine, now you're starting to wire in the behaviors that make people really good at certain things. Now in a functional view of this, so not addiction,
50:10 what this means is that for any of us, success in any endeavor is very closely related to how much focus we can bring to that endeavor. And the reward system you start to realize is entirely internal, no one's coming along and cramming dopamine in your ear or dripping it in your brain, it's all internal. And this starts to bring us into the kind of like discussion around mindsets. Because, so my colleague Carol Dweck, who popularized this thing, growth mindset, it's and again, a very misunderstood concept. It's the idea that we can change. So that's built into that, but the discovery of growth mindset was of these kids that actually really enjoyed doing problem sets that they knew they couldn't get, right? But for them, they would get this like dopamine release from just focusing on the problem. They liked doing puzzles they couldn't get right.
50:57 It sounds crazy, but inevitably, those kids are very good at puzzles and very good at math and on these kinds of things. So growth mindset is I believe, if a certain neuroscience lens on growth mindset would be that the agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something and when you're trying to lean into it and you can't focus is just a recognized gate. You have to pass that through that gate to get to the focus component. And then if you can reward the effort process you really start to feel joy and low levels of excitement in the effort process. That's that buffering of adrenaline. That's that feeling like, yes, I've got a lot of adrenaline in my system but I'm on the right path. It feels good to walk up this hill, so to speak. And when you start to bring those neural circuits together
51:44 you really start to create a whole set of circuits that are designed to be exported to any behavior you want. So if it's writing a book, great, if it's podcasting great, if it's building a business great. If it's, you know, building a terrific relationship, great then the circuits that mother nature is designer incredibly generic so that we could adapt to whatever it is that we need to do. And I think the misunderstanding around how these circuits work, has led to this idea that there's some secret entry point maybe marked flow on the door and there's a trampoline up to that door and you just open that door and you're gonna be in it. And nothing could be further from the truth. And anyone who's done well in any career or athletic pursuit knows this, but unfortunately there's a kind of obsession
52:29 with the idea that it's all supposed to feel good and it does feel good but there's a whole staircase in which it feels kind of lousy. Yeah, I mean, the feel good aspect of that experience is very subtle. And I think, you know, in a kind of global way, what you're talking about is falling in love with the process. Like you have to push this gate open, which might require you know, more effort than you're comfortable with. But once you push through, it is about, you know, that daily the daily rigor and the tiny wins that you get from that, rather than, you know, it's easy to, you know, you set a goal, but that goal becomes very abstract, right? And it's those tiny little things that you're getting done every day that bring you that internal satisfaction that are like calibrating that plasticity.
53:15 Is that what you're saying? Yeah absolutely. And what's incredible is the extent to which the mind and thoughts, remember earlier we were talking about how thoughts are spontaneous. You can't control them, negative thoughts, traumatic thoughts, bad thoughts, trying to suppress those is futile. If there's one message I can send people it's just don't even work at that, but work at the process of introducing thoughts as almost like you would introduce actions, because we can introduce thoughts. And, you know, Carol Dweck has talked about this, that positive self-talk is not the same thing as growth mindset, because positive self-talk is almost always linked to the ultimate outcome. If I'm losing badly in something, and I tell myself, I'm doing great, I know that I'm lying. There's no dopamine release from that. And you know, a lot of the self-help wellness culture
54:01 of the 80s and 90s was like, it's impossible to be in a bad mood if you're smiling. We won't have any depression on the planet if that's true. There's probably some feedback from the face to the brain, but it's not that simple. But the idea that you can self reward the effort process is extremely powerful, because what it means is that if you can recognize agitation, stress, and confusion as an entry point to where you eventually wanna go, I do think that just that even just mental recognition can allow people to pass through it more easily. They think they're doing something wrong and then rewarding yourself when you achieve any milestone, like, you know, running to a particular location if you're trying to run a long distance and then registering that as a partial win, what we know is that the dopamine that's released in response to that suppresses the total amount
54:47 of adrenaline and gives you more room, more time, more energy to run in the running example. And this is anchored in a real scientific result. So last year there was a paper published that essentially was asking why any human or animal quits at any behavior. Now, certain behaviors like I can't lift a car, unless it's a very small car. I can't lift a car, but if we're talking about running or we're talking about long bouts of work, the question is, why do we quit? Like, what is that? And it turns out that every time we exert effort, a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released, and there's a sort of a counter in the brainstem. And at some point enough noradrenaline is released and it shuts down cognitive control, deliberate control
55:32 over the motor circuitry, and we quit, that's it. But the thing that can restore those levels or it can sort of reset those levels lower and give us more gas, more mileage, is dopamine. And it makes perfect sense because our species had to move against very challenging things in nature and in certain, so in culture at every stage of our evolution including now, 2020 is a good example of this. And when a good example would be, if you're really slogging it out and things are miserable, just think like the worst family vacation, everything's a disaster or a very hard physical event, and someone cracks a joke, you're almost immediately feel a sense of relief. You see this in the team that wins the Super Bowl. Both teams slogged it out. You have to believe they were both at max effort
56:19 the entire game. Look at the team that wins, they have extra energy, they're jumping all over the place. So it can't be physical energy. It can't be glycogen related. It's not ketone related. It's nothing in the body in that sense. It's dopamine's ability to take that level of norepinephrine and smack it back down. And so we can learn this, right? I mean, I think this is where there's real power like in your story, or the story that I'm familiar with from your book. Like the ability to push through those pain points is something that we really can export to other aspects of life because it's the same neuro-chemicals that are involved. So when you get to a particular location or maybe your, recall, you know, a portion where you're just you're feeling lousy, you know, you're injured, or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally
57:07 and think I'm actually still on the ladder. I'm still holding onto a wrong. I know that at least that much, I'm still breathing. I know that much. And the lift that we get is not some psychological pump-up, it's a neurochemical thing. It's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine, and saying you're on the right path, you can keep going. It's a permission to keep going.
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