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Change Your Brain: Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman | Rich Roll Podcast — Transcript

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0:00Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast.
0:02My guest today is Dr. Andrew Huberman.
0:05Andrew is a neuroscientist.
0:07He's a Neurobiology Professor at Stanford Medical School
0:11and McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow
0:15and the founder of Huberman Lab, where he's involved
0:17in all kinds of really amazing breakthrough research
0:19on brain function, brain plasticity and brain regeneration.
0:24His work has been published in top journals like Nature.
0:27He's been featured in publications
0:29like Time, Scientific America and the BBC.
0:31And he's here today to discuss the brain,
0:34to discuss growth mindset, how to focus,
0:37how to navigate the stressful times and many other subjects.
0:42It's an incredible conversation.
0:43I think you guys are gonna enjoy it.
0:45I appreciate you watching
0:47make sure to hit that subscribe button
0:48and without further ado, this is me
0:51and Dr. Andrew Huberman.
1:00First of all, thanks for doing this.
1:01I appreciate you coming out.
1:03Yeah, my pleasure. Long time coming.
1:04I'm glad we're doing it in person-
1:05Likewise. And not remotely.
1:07And I think what I wanna do is start with your origin story,
1:14because you're a very,
1:15it's your path is very unlikely,
1:16your path to becoming a scientist.
1:19And I think it actually also kind of contextualizes
1:22some of the things that I wanna talk about with you today.
1:25So maybe start there.
1:26Sure, so on the one hand, you know,
1:30maybe I was faded to become a scientist.
1:33I guess the two things that are relevant there
1:36are I always loved animals
1:38and I've always been obsessed with animal behavior.
1:41Like just could watch Cousteau shows growing up, you know
1:45underwater life or animals hunting, animals doing anything.
1:50It's just so fascinating to me because I'm, I think even
1:53at a really young age, I've always just been intrigued
1:54in sort of what drives different animals to behave
1:57in the way they do and how body form matches to,
2:00I didn't know what it was,
2:01but brains and how that all works.
2:03So I've always been obsessed with animals.
2:07And then my dad's a scientist, so he's a physicist.
2:11It was really early in chaos theory.
2:13And so growing up in our home, you know, we had scientists
2:17over for dinner and graduate students would come over
2:20for barbecues and things like that.
2:21Is he a Stanford professor?
2:22Yeah, he was at Stanford.
2:24He was mostly at Xerox Park, which is kind of famous
2:27if you read the Steve Jobs book is for the, yeah.
2:29The development of the gooey interface
2:30the graphical user interface
2:32and sort of early days of the computer.
2:33So he had a lab there and he had a lab in applied physics
2:35at Stanford and something called symbolic systems
2:38which is a Stanford degree
2:39in kind of ecology and computation, that kind of thing.
2:42So I grew up in this family where science was very prominent
2:46and we had lots of discussions
2:49in our home that I would overhear
2:50and I didn't understand about physics and we'd spend summers
2:54at the Aspen Center for Physics, which was like-
2:56Good times. Yeah, so, you know,
2:58and we were, and to be clear, you know,
3:00you hear the word Aspen, you know,
3:01we were a middle-class family
3:03but they have this Aspen Center for Physics.
3:04So the Feynman, you know, Richard Feynman was there,
3:07Murray Gell-mann,
3:08like all these luminaries of physics, Peter Carruthers.
3:11And my dad was really good at telling me the stories
3:13about these guys and then I'd always wanna meet them.
3:16And it was mostly guys back then,
3:16there weren't many women in physics.
3:18So I, you know, I was kind of immersed in science
3:21from a young age, but right about age 13,
3:26my parents split up.
3:27And he moved overseas, he moved to Denmark
3:30and my mom was really struggling with the breakup
3:34and I wasn't in contact with him anymore.
3:36So I had this really unusual childhood where, you know,
3:40we didn't talk about sports, we talked about science,
3:42and I had this close relationship with science
3:43and the people around science
3:45but then all of a sudden the structure around family
3:48like instead of dinners together every night,
3:50it was just like me and my mom
3:52and I was an adolescent, I was hitting puberty.
3:54So, you know, there was bound to be some shifts
3:57in my world landscape and internal landscape anyway.
4:01But basically what happened was, I stopped
4:03really paying attention to school.
4:05And I got really heavily into skateboarding
4:07and the kind of punk rock music.
4:08And I found my pack or my community
4:12through like packing community of kids
4:14that also just were kind of parentless.
4:16So this was like late 80s, early 90s.
4:19And so at a pretty young age, I started taking the,
4:21I grew up in Palo Alto.
4:22I was actually born at Stanford Hospital.
4:25I started taking the seven F bus up to San Francisco
4:27and hanging around in Embarcadero.
4:29For the skateboarders out there, the Lizards,
4:31this is the the now famous EMB crowd.
4:35So this was the birth of a huge movement
4:38of skateboarders that became professionals.
4:40Like, so you'd see the young Danny Way
4:42would come through town and you had Rob Dyrdek.
4:45I remember when he came through.
4:47So all these names that eventually became popular
4:50during the kind of X games era and the,
4:53but at that time it was really underground.
4:54And so it was this pack of maybe a hundred guys
4:58and it was run like a little city and it was chaos.
5:01It was like there was fights,
5:03and there was drinking and there was lawlessness,
5:06there was also a lot of amazing skateboarding
5:08and there were a lot of amazing people.
5:09And there were some older guys,
5:12like one in particular, a very famous skateboarder,
5:15is this kid, Mike Carroll,
5:16his older brother was kind of like the older brother
5:18to everybody, kind of kept us all in check.
5:20So it had its own unique organization.
5:22And it's actually interesting
5:24'cause the same thing was happening at that time
5:25in Washington Square Park in New York,
5:27and at Love Park in Philadelphia, there were all these
5:30like communities of kids that were basically parentless.
5:33And so in that time I saw some interesting things.
5:35First of all, I learned what it was to be parentless.
5:37Growing up in Palo Alto,
5:39it was like soccer games and AYSO and you know,
5:42swim club and all of a sudden I realized, you know,
5:45I don't have to be home at any particular time,
5:47or, you know, none of these kids are going to school.
5:51And so we all, it was kind of a big group of truants.
5:54And it was interesting because it gave me a perspective
5:58that I had never had in Palo Alto.
6:00And I was drifting further and further away
6:02from any kind of academic rigor.
6:05I think I would go to school every once in a while.
6:08What's mom doing?
6:09Does she have any idea
6:10that you're going up to the city every day?
6:11So she was totally checked out.
6:13You know, I think she was just devastated
6:15by a bunch of things that were happening
6:17and she lapsed into a pretty serious depression.
6:20And then in that community, what was interesting is,
6:24I started seeing that, you know, some guys were clearly
6:26faded to becoming professional skateboarders.
6:28They were really good at it.
6:30I just wanna say for full disclosure,
6:31I was not particularly good.
6:32I kept getting injured.
6:34I just, I was not faded to be, you know, exceptional
6:38or very good at it, but I love the comradery
6:40and I love the community, but I also noticed that, you know,
6:43some people were drinking all day and other people got
6:46into hard drugs and people started to, you know,
6:49some of the dysfunction really started to show up.
6:51Yeah, the fracture.
6:52Yeah, the fracture. Begins.
6:54Exactly, and so,
6:56and I started seeing that, lot, a lot more violence.
7:00You know, people start getting their girlfriends pregnant.
7:02They didn't have money to support those kids.
7:03You know, it started becoming apparent to me
7:05that there was a lot of dysfunction
7:07as well as a lot of incredible people in that community.
7:10And so about that time, I got a girlfriend,
7:13and the other thing was I got removed from high school.
7:16So I went to kind of the famed/infamous high school
7:19in Palo Alto, Gunn High School.
7:20Oh, you went to Gunn.
7:21I went to Gunn, which is famous because it's the,
7:24one of the most academically rigorous schools
7:27in the country, maybe the planet,
7:29people moved to the area just to send their kids there.
7:32But it also has this very complicated reputations
7:35of the highest suicide rate of any school in the country.
7:38The New York Times has written about this.
7:40So, you know, I would come to school every once in a while
7:43but I could tell you far more about the curbs
7:44in the front of the Gunn High School parking lot
7:46than I could about anything that I learned at Gunn.
7:49So when they say they, you were removed,
7:51I mean, you got, you were expelled.
7:53No, I basically, they just said,
7:54you need to either start coming to school or, you know-
7:57You're done. Or you're done.
7:58So I got shifted to another high school
8:00and that was same story.
8:02It was just was, it was a mess, it just fell apart.
8:04And so at one point I was brought in, I have a kind
8:09of vague recollection of this, but I was brought in
8:10to have a discussion with a school counselor.
8:13And I don't think I've ever told this story before.
8:15And there was someone sitting in the corner,
8:18this guy was sitting in the corner
8:19and he didn't introduce himself.
8:21And pretty soon I realized when I was like,
8:23I think they're gonna take me away.
8:25Like I started realized, 'cause they realized my mom
8:27wasn't really able to control me.
8:29Wasn't really in a place to support me at that time.
8:34And that's what they did.
8:36They took me away.
8:37They took me into a place up the peninsula,
8:38which was not a jail and it wasn't a hospital.
8:42It was just sort of a place where they put kids
8:44that were- Like some kind of
8:45GV warehousing situation?
8:47Yeah, a lot of psychologists,
8:50lot of locks on doors, lot of,
8:52lot of kids that, there were 12 of us in there
8:55at any one time, it was locked down.
8:59And the first night there,
9:01I remember I had a roommate who was like really
9:03into cutting on himself, that kind of thing.
9:06And he told me, he was like, "Look, if you just
9:08do what they say here, you'll be outta here in like a month.
9:11And if you don't, you're gonna be here a very long time."
9:13And I remember being pretty frightened for the first time.
9:18And at that point I was like,
9:20oh my goodness, like, this is bad.
9:22You know, like, this is bad.
9:24I'm a long way. It's so hard for me
9:25to imagine. I know, I know.
9:27This given you know, who you are and what you do now.
9:30I know and you know, and it was literally like the kind
9:32of one phone call a day kind of thing.
9:34So actually I called I was skateboarding for a company
9:36in San Francisco.
9:37I think they put me on out of sympathy
9:39and I called this guy up and I said, "Look, I've, you know,
9:43they locked me up, I don't know what to do.
9:44Can you help me?"
9:45And he get, and I'll never forget,
9:47I wanna say his name because you're the most normal guy
9:49I know.
9:51Well, he's like-
9:52The least likely of that crowd.
9:54Exactly. For that to happen.
9:55So, in any event, I was permitted to go back to school
9:58eventually, provided that I went to therapy.
10:01And so I started going to weekly therapy
10:04which in the early 90s was kind of a weird thing.
10:07You would, wouldn't admit it to your friends
10:08but tweets skateboard around Stanford campus.
10:11I was doing my thing and then twice a week
10:13I would go in and see this therapist.
10:15He's a remarkable guy because A,
10:18he had deep training in the mind, right?
10:20And we started talking about what was going on.
10:22And he really picked up on the fact
10:24that there was essentially no structure,
10:25no home life for me, but that I had a strong drive,
10:29and I was really interested in learning.
10:31I mean, I was, I was enthusiastic and motivated enough to,
10:34you know, skateboard as hard as I could,
10:36even though I wasn't gonna go anywhere with it.
10:38So at that point, and the fact that I had a girlfriend,
10:41I started looking for something that I could do.
10:45And I started at one point
10:48I thought I'd join the fire service,
10:49'cause it seemed like the comradery was good.
10:51At that point, I started strengthening my body a bit
10:53because I didn't wanna keep getting hurt.
10:55So I started running, I started lifting weights,
10:57a football coach at Gunn actually turned me on to fitness.
11:01It's actually an interesting guy.
11:02He wrote the script for that movie "Mr. Mom,"
11:05Oh my God.
11:06Yeah, because his wife bet him
11:08that he couldn't do what she could do,
11:10which was stay home with the kids.
11:11And he was this big strong football coach.
11:13And so he made her a bet and he lost.
11:15And so he wrote that script Michael Keaton played the, yeah.
11:18So he taught me, he was like, look, you know
11:20you can't even do a pull up.
11:21You need to start doing your pull-ups and you start running
11:23you know, and he said, the fire service
11:25might be good for you.
11:26So, I was spinning out, but there were people
11:28that were willing to kind of, you know,
11:30point me in the right direction.
11:32So what ended up happening was my high school girlfriend
11:34went off to college and I didn't, you know,
11:38I didn't know what I was gonna do.
11:39So I actually went and I lived in the parking lot
11:41outside her dormitory. I just wanted to be near her.
11:44She was my family at that point.
11:46A college locally or?
11:47She was at UC Santa Barbara.
11:48So you just drove down and-
11:50I just drove down and I just camped out in the parking lot
11:52and people, and I was starting to get into some martial arts
11:56and Thai boxing then.
11:57So I think I was teaching some Thai boxing,
11:59self-defense stuff on campus and doing this kind of thing.
12:03And by the end of that year, I realized
12:05that I should probably apply to college.
12:07So I applied to UCSP and somehow I got in,
12:11Lord knows how I got in.
12:12I did, 'cause I did eventually graduate high school, barely.
12:16Got in, and then after a year I just completely flailed it.
12:20You know, I wasn't going to class.
12:21I was getting into fights, a lot of that kind of mischief
12:25and kind of wildness was still in me.
12:28And what ended up happening was,
12:31I got into a physical altercation on July 4th, 1994
12:35with like a bunch of guys.
12:37And at the end of that, I walked back to the place
12:40I was staying, and of course I wasn't paying rent
12:43because I had learned in those years,
12:44like you can just squat in an empty house.
12:46So, you know, it's Isla Vista California, you know?
12:47So I was really running wild and went back
12:51and just I realized I was like, this picture is really bad.
12:55You know, at some point,
12:56this isn't gonna be like a kid who had some problems,
12:58this is gonna be,
13:00truly. It's not cute anymore.
13:01It's not cute anymore And no one,
13:02no one's gonna make excuses about your upbringing
13:05or the lack of parenting.
13:07It just becomes, you just, you're gonna end up
13:10being a ward of the state.
13:11I mean, you were, it sounds like you were,
13:12you were almost a feral animal.
13:14Totally feral.
13:15Actually, and I have some close friends
13:19that's how they they referred to me, that feral.
13:21And it's funny even to this day, I mean,
13:24I'll get to where this eventually took me.
13:25But even to this day, when I go into a home
13:28where it's clearly like a loving home
13:30where there's kids are happy
13:32and there's good food and it's warm and cozy
13:34I always feel this thing like, wow, like amazing.
13:37Like I sort of wanna be adopted by them immediately,
13:40but you know, I'm 45 years old
13:42so that's not appropriate at this age.
13:43What's so interesting,
13:44I keep thinking about David Epstein's book "Range."
13:48Did you read this book?
13:49Which is basically this thesis
13:52that some of the most successful people are not,
13:56you know, we suspect that, you know,
13:58the great talents of the world across all disciplines
14:02are the people who discover their passion at an early age
14:05and practice it voraciously for many, many, many years.
14:08But in fact, it's people more like yourself,
14:11who've dabbled in all different kinds of things
14:14who end up being ultimately, you know,
14:16the most proficient at their selected skillset.
14:19And when I look at your experience,
14:22I see trauma, I see adventure,
14:25I see, you know, all these obstacles that you've had to face
14:28and overcome and manage on your own essentially, right?
14:31And all of those really informed perfectly
14:34the things that you're interested in
14:35and what you explore today in your lab.
14:38Yeah, it really did.
14:39You know, I think that I'm so grateful for those years.
14:42I wouldn't wish them on any kid,
14:44because I think having a secure, loving environment
14:46at home is so key.
14:47And, you know, I should say about a third of the kids
14:49that I grew up with in that environment,
14:51that whole skateboarding, punk rock culture,
14:52about a third have gone on to found companies
14:54or professional skateboarders,
14:56about a third just kind of drifted off
14:59and about a third are dead or incarcerated.
15:01You know, a huge number.
15:02And so there's real value in having a support system,
15:06that's clear, but it exposed me
15:08to all these things like addictions, schizophrenia, rage,
15:11like all these incredible elements.
15:13Like I was never really into drinking and drugs.
15:14I could drink or not drink.
15:16It just wasn't, I wasn't drawn to it, but other people
15:18they took one sip and it was like, that was their thing.
15:20It was like the magic elixir for them.
15:22And so, you know, I was observing what was happening.
15:26And then after that, you know, that July 4th '94 incident
15:29was, I realized this is it, you know, it's now or never.
15:33It really was one of those moments.
15:35You know, you hear about those moments
15:36but it was me realizing I'm living in this squat
15:39where I've got a pet ferret.
15:40My girlfriend's gone, she broke up with me.
15:42She was smart enough to break up with me, you know,
15:44I'm getting in fights, I'm working at a bagel shop.
15:47I'm barely making ends meet.
15:49And at that point I just made the decision.
15:50I just said, okay, look,
15:52I'm not gonna be a professional athlete.
15:55I think I'm pretty good at memorizing things.
15:58I think I have an interest in people,
16:01I'm going to just decide, I just decided to do school.
16:06I decided that was the, that was the track.
16:07And so like, some people pick the military
16:09because it's like, if you know what to expect
16:11at least in terms of the, you know,
16:13the passages that you're gonna go through.
16:16And for me that was school.
16:17And so I had decided, get back in school.
16:20I moved into a studio apartment by myself.
16:23I quit partying completely, I didn't go to parties.
16:25I got really serious about fitness.
16:28So I just started running and lifting weights and I studied.
16:32You went like Henry Rollins style.
16:34I did.
16:35Yeah.
16:37I did. It's a lot of self-awareness
16:38you know, I mean, people go into the military
16:39because on some level, I mean,
16:40some people do because they're, there's some yearning
16:42for having that structure imposed upon their lives.
16:45But you constructed that kind of structure for yourself.
16:51Yeah, I think I was really afraid.
16:53I think I was like, you know, and I and these days,
16:55you know, 'cause of my lab studies fear
16:57and I get into this whole thing around mindsets
16:59and people always ask me like,
17:00is it better to do something from a place of love or fear?
17:02Like depends.
17:03And at that point, fear was the best motivator for me.
17:06And I just basically worked like crazy.
17:10And it's interesting because I didn't have a mentor
17:14or someone to bring me to that.
17:15But once I started doing that, you know,
17:18there was one professor in particular who took note,
17:21he was like, "Oh, you know,
17:21you seem really interested in this stuff."
17:22And I was like, yeah, 'cause he was teaching me
17:24about depression, schizophrenia, neuro-chemicals.
17:27I thought, I was totally turned on
17:28by the world of neuroscience.
17:30It didn't, it wasn't even called neuroscience back then.
17:32But this one guy, Harry Carlisle
17:34he was teaching me about thermal regulation
17:36and how the brain works and how receptors
17:38in the skin relate to perceptions in the mind.
17:41And he also had a deep sensitivity to mental disease.
17:45And I'd seen a lot of that, you know,
17:47I'd seen a lot of depression and anxiety in my own family.
17:51I had had a friend commit suicide.
17:54Another friend becomes schizophrenic.
17:55I think he's still walking the mission district
17:57of San Francisco now.
17:59Seeing some friends become addicts.
18:00And so here was someone explaining that there's actually
18:04an underlying basis for this.
18:06And I just poured myself into it.
18:08Is that the same guy who, you know,
18:11would smoke underneath the vacuum hood and stuff like that?
18:14Like a bit of an (indistinct).
18:16Yeah, he was amazing.
18:17So he was a favorite teacher of many students,
18:20but if you could get into his lab
18:22then you were kind of one of the chosen ones I guess.
18:25He's like the perfect mentor at the perfect time for you.
18:28Yeah, so he used to drink coffee in lab
18:29which you're not supposed to do.
18:31He's just smoke cigarettes in lab in the fume hood.
18:34And they used to come and yell at him
18:35and he would do it anyway.
18:36And I thought, you know, this guy
18:38he doesn't even know what it is, but you know,
18:39he's a punk rocker and he doesn't even know.
18:41And so, you know,
18:43he gave me an opportunity to work in his lab.
18:44And at some point he told me, if you go to graduate school
18:47they'll actually pay you to do science.
18:49And what ended up happening at that point
18:51was I hit a brick wall because I was,
18:53I had a lot of resentment toward my dad.
18:55I felt, you know, here's my dad.
18:57He was a scientist, he had, you know,
18:58left us all this kind of thing.
19:00And I realized if I didn't do this,
19:02if I didn't take this opportunity,
19:04it was going to be the most foolish thing ever.
19:05You know, what am I gonna do to spite my, you know,
19:08my parents, you know, I was 20 years old at that point.
19:12So I just made the decision.
19:13I'm gonna get a PhD and become a professor.
19:16I'm going to get tenure and be like this guy, you know
19:19this guy who has looked like he had a pretty good life
19:21to me, and so that's pretty much how I spent the, you know
19:24the last 25 years of my life is doing experiments.
19:27It worked out.
19:28It worked out, is it, a lot of work,
19:30I mean, I didn't have the power of concentration.
19:32I hadn't read all the good books that Gunn High School
19:34students read growing up.
19:35I had to learn how to speak properly.
19:38I learned how to, learn how to think properly
19:41and really learn how to commit to something
19:44that was very linear and at times was very painful.
19:47And I went to some pretty extreme things.
19:49I, you know, I actually used to set a timer
19:53and I wouldn't allow myself to get out of the chair
19:55until I was, the timer went off.
19:57So, and I would experience extreme agitation
20:00but over time I got pretty good.
20:02And now I can do long stints of work without any breaks.
20:05And yeah, it worked out.
20:08It developed that neuroplasticity
20:10in your favor, ultimately.
20:12You're always a reader though, right?
20:14I loved books.
20:14So I would, you know, I would hide
20:17in the tower books section in the evenings
20:21and I would read everything about fitness, psychology,
20:25anything I could, I've always devoured information.
20:27My favorite book when I was a kid was the "Encyclopedia,"
20:29or the "Guinness Book of World Records."
20:31So I was like, when I was a little kid,
20:32I'd walk around the Aspen Center for Physics.
20:34And I would tell anyone, I didn't even ask them,
20:36if they want to hear about like the,
20:37what's the world's smallest ethereum mammal.
20:40You know, I would like, it could tell you all these facts
20:41that were kind of meaningless at the time,
20:43but I've always been fascinated
20:45by the inventory of different animals on the planet
20:48and their different behaviors.
20:49And so yeah, voracious reader and still now.
20:53I love, I love information.
20:55Well, as a neuroscientist, I mean,
20:58you're your own patient.
20:59I mean, the fact that you were able to, you know,
21:02turn your life around in such a dramatic fashion
21:05and do it essentially through sheer will and you know
21:08setting up practices that would feel you,
21:11you in that right direction,
21:12and then being available when those mentors
21:14showed up from the, from the, you know,
21:16the early therapist, sounds like that guy
21:19almost saved your life, right?
21:20He absolutely saved my life.
21:21He gave me the book, "Wherever You Go, There You Are"
21:24the Jon Kabat-Zinn book.
21:25And he said, no pressure, but if you can develop
21:28a mindfulness practice where you can sit still
21:31for like 10 minutes a day, it'll serve you very well.
21:34So I started doing that.
21:35Like he could've, he could've told me to hang out
21:37of a window by my ankles, I would have done it.
21:38I think there was a, there was a self preservation thing
21:41was kicking in for me.
21:43So I got very interested in mindfulness meditation.
21:45He also, it was, I think, quite smart in saying,
21:49look there's a whole world of psychedelic drugs
21:52that are powerful in influencing the mind.
21:55He said, "If you're going to explore those,
21:58wait until your brain has already developed,"
22:00which I think is a controversial statement in and of itself.
22:03He, so he actively discouraged me to go down that path,
22:09which I think was the right thing,
22:10given I was a minor, you know,
22:12and nowadays there's all this discussion now
22:14about psychedelics and their power.
22:15And I think they are very interesting compounds
22:17but he really steered me towards behavioral practices.
22:20Like what could I do each day from waking up
22:22to going to sleep that would serve my mental health
22:25and my productivity well.
22:27I owe him a tremendous amount.
22:29And especially because he wasn't just
22:31in the psychoanalytic theory,
22:33he also was like cognitive behavioral.
22:35He understood the power of practices
22:36not just discussing issues.
22:38Yeah, to begin a meditation practice at that age
22:41in the mid 90s, that's pretty radical.
22:45Yeah, I felt it was funny 'cause I thought
22:48if I didn't sit in the lotus position
22:50like I wasn't doing it properly, you know,
22:51back then there was all this stuff around,
22:53it was very mystical and in my family
22:55'cause my dad's very conservative
22:57and my mom was a little bit more of a free spirit.
23:00I was taught that anything that related to hippie culture
23:03was doomed to fail and cause problems.
23:05And then anything that was related
23:07to like conservative culture was faded
23:09to advance the progress of humanity.
23:11It turned out neither one was true, of course.
23:14So I, but I needed people to push me in those directions,
23:18lift weights, run, meditate,
23:21do your schoolwork, do your homework.
23:23And so I think I, you know, now I have a good relationship
23:26with my parents, but I think I had to go out
23:28into the world and find those, you know, sort of paternal
23:32and maternal figures because they weren't in my home.
23:35I needed to find those.
23:36Do you look back on your upbringing with gratitude?
23:40Like how do you reflect on that experience
23:42and how it informs how you think about what you do now?
23:46I'm immensely grateful for it because you know,
23:50where I'm at today is, you know, my lab works on a number
23:52of issues related, you know, sort of hardcore neurobiology
23:55of regenerating the brain, you know, trying to fix,
23:58basically cure blindness and repair visual systems,
24:01but also things related to, you know, fear, courage,
24:03mindset, stress, anxiety, trauma, et cetera.
24:06And the early seed of seeing how science is done,
24:10definitely gave me an advantage.
24:11I won't lie, you know, I seeing how scientists interact
24:15and behave and understanding that they are just people.
24:18'Cause a lot of what was discussed in my home was
24:20about the people, not just the science they do,
24:23that really gave me an advantage.
24:26And then seeing all that dysfunction and realizing
24:29that the human animal is amazing at making plans,
24:33at modifying its brain if it wants to, but the human brain
24:37and the human animal are also dreadfully bad
24:40at doing what's best for us.
24:43Because of this, what I think it comes down to is the fact
24:46that our reward systems are not designed
24:49for things that are just good for us.
24:51They're designed for things that optimize the progression
24:53of our species, but they're also, they will grab on to
24:57and ratchet into any behavior that makes us feel good.
25:01And so the human brain is really not optimized
25:05for making best choices.
25:07And so, those years of seeing all that.
25:09I could testify to that.
25:10Yeah, it's and it's, I wouldn't trade those years
25:14for anything.
25:15And I still have great friends in that community.
25:17I mean, I think, you know, any, had I joined
25:21a different community, I would have found the right people
25:23as well, but to be with a, you know, a huge pack
25:26of feral kids at that age
25:28and to see the function and dysfunction
25:31and also it was wild, it was a lot of fun.
25:33I can imagine. It was a lot of fun.
25:36That's a whole set of stories
25:37for another time. Did you see that movie,
25:38"Mid 90s?"
25:39"Mid 90s" and the movie "Kids", the Larry Clark movie.
25:42When I saw that movie, first of all, I had a lot
25:45of friends that were in that movie
25:45'cause he used actual skateboarders.
25:47In "Kids?"
25:48Yeah, I actually knew a couple of those kids
25:51and you know, it's a movie, but there are a lot of things
25:55about that movie they're very accurate.
25:57And when I saw that movie
25:58I was like, yeah, that's like right.
26:00Pretty much a day in the life in Washington Square Park.
26:02And you know, I mean it was a little extreme on some end
26:06but you didn't know where you're gonna end up each night.
26:08And that was a unique experience, you know?
26:10So yeah, and "Mid 90s" was really good.
26:13I think it captured the essence of what it is to be a kid
26:15that's just looking for some group of people to join.
26:20And skateboard is a unique sport because you get young kids
26:23and grown men and now women and girls do it as well.
26:26It didn't happen so much then, but now there are a lot
26:28of great, awesome skateboarders that are female
26:31but they're all hanging out together.
26:33You wouldn't find that in soccer.
26:34You're not gonna get little kids playing with grown men.
26:36So you get exposed to a lot 'cause everyone's
26:39at develop, different developmental stages.
26:41But yeah, it was an amazing thing.
26:43I wouldn't change it for anything.
26:44Cool, well, let's segue into talking about the brain
26:49and maybe we could start with, you know,
26:51how you think about the brain specifically?
26:53Like, what is the brain, what does it do?
26:55What does it not do?
26:56You know, it helps us survive.
26:58It's our portal into trying to make sense of the world.
27:02Like what's the starting point
27:04in the discussion around the brain?
27:06Yeah, so the brain and nervous system, which
27:10so it's like brain spinal cord connections
27:12with the body and back in.
27:13I don't distinguish between brain and mind.
27:15I think that's like an 80s discussion or earlier.
27:18And I think it would take us down the wrong track.
27:21So brain or mind to me is interchangeable.
27:24Mind, body, is kind of interchangeable
27:26because the brain is connected to the body
27:29and the body is connected to the brain, right?
27:30If I, you know, pinprick my hand and it hurts
27:33my brain registers it where it happens
27:35it's kind of an irrelevant discussion.
27:37I think we really need to just appreciate
27:38that the nervous system is designed
27:41to orchestrate all the processes in the body
27:43not just thinking and not just behavior
27:45and really can be divided into five things.
27:47So there's sensation and sensation is really bound
27:52or restricted by the receptors in the body.
27:54So receptors in the eye that perceive photons, light energy
27:58per se, receptors in the skin that perceive pressure
28:02you know, touch receptors, smell, taste, hearing, et cetera.
28:06And the interesting thing about sensation and the fact
28:08that the nervous system needs to pay attention
28:10to sensation is it's non-negotiable.
28:13The nervous system of humans is designed
28:14to extract physical phenomenon from the universe
28:17that are non-negotiable, photons of light.
28:19I can't see in the infrared with my eyes
28:22and I can't see ultraviolet light with my eyes.
28:24And I can't perceive that
28:26because I don't have the receptors for it.
28:28So, you know, other animals can perceive
28:31some of those things
28:32but that leads us to the next thing, which is perception
28:34which is which sensations are you paying attention to.
28:36So all the time you're sensing things like right now
28:39your feet are sensing the contact with your shoes,
28:41but you're not thinking about it until I say that.
28:43And then you shift your perception.
28:45So perception is like the spotlight.
28:47So the brain wants to constantly bring in sensation.
28:50It's non-negotiable what's coming in.
28:51It's just dependent on your environment
28:53Perception is negotiable, you can control that.
28:55'Cause I just said shoes
28:56and you thought about your feet and there you are.
29:00Then there are feelings which can be a little bit nebulous
29:03but feelings are a link between our emotion
29:06and generally invokes the body,
29:08sensations in the body and concepts in the mind
29:11and what those sensations are about.
29:12That's really what emotions are.
29:14Animals definitely experience them.
29:16I'm kind of appalled to think that 10 years ago
29:18people like, do animals have emotions?
29:20Of course they have emotions, right?
29:22Because those are bodily sensations merged
29:24with some perceptions, so of course they do.
29:27And then there's thoughts and thoughts are interesting
29:29because thoughts happen spontaneously.
29:31Think about like a web browser
29:32that's constantly giving you pop-ups
29:35but thoughts can also be deliberate.
29:36So you and I can decide right now that we're gonna think
29:39about a plan for something or we're gonna think
29:41about what's going on in the world.
29:43So thoughts happen spontaneously and they can be deliberate.
29:46And then the final thing is behaviors and actions.
29:49So the nervous system is responsible for sensation,
29:51perception, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
29:55And what's interesting,
29:56we start to think about that as you're like, okay
29:58that's a lot, but what is the nervous system
30:00really trying to accomplish?
30:02Like on any given day or at any moment,
30:04what's it trying to accomplish?
30:05And it's really trying to accomplish one thing
30:07which is to take perceptions of the outside world
30:11and merge those with perceptions of the inside world
30:14what we call interoception and to link those in a way
30:18that's operating on an environment in the appropriate way.
30:21So what do I mean by that?
30:22So if I'm feeling anxious,
30:24and I'm in a very calm environment, I'm gonna perceive
30:27that rapid heart rate and kind of feeling of agitation
30:29in my body as inappropriate for the moment, right?
30:33And my goal then as an organism is to adjust
30:36my level of what they call autonomic arousal
30:39or alertness down.
30:40If I'm in a great party or I'm at a wedding
30:43or it's a celebration or I'm at a protest or, you know,
30:47then I might feel that my level of alertness
30:50is appropriate for my environment.
30:51So the nervous system is in this constant,
30:53dynamic interaction with the outside world
30:56and trying to figure that out.
30:58One way and this can be kind of conceptualized
31:00is there's an emerging idea that's kind of interesting
31:03about impatience.
31:04So we've all had the feeling of being impatient.
31:07Some people are far more patient than others,
31:09but if you've ever been in line at the store
31:12and you feel like something's going very slowly, you know,
31:14the person in front of you is taking a long time,
31:16they're doing some returns, you're getting kind
31:17of impatient, maybe you're breathing in a mask,
31:19and you're like, ah, like you're, you know,
31:22what's the ideas that if you're getting a certain frequency
31:26of pulses from your body,
31:28and if those pulses are coming in quickly,
31:30like you're perceiving yourself that interoception quickly,
31:33it's like pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse.
31:35You're gonna be more geared
31:36towards your internal representation.
31:38And then you're seeing what's going on in the outside world.
31:41And it seems like it's going very slowly,
31:43but there are other times when you're in line at the store,
31:45someone's getting some returns and you're texting
31:47on your phone or you've had a great day,
31:48you've had a great run, your family's in great shape,
31:50and you're fine, why?
31:52Well, that frequency of those pulses, that interoception,
31:55is matched pretty well to your outside environment.
31:59And so impatience is really when your internal
32:03sort of metronome, tick, tick, tick, tick,
32:05is not matched well to the external environment.
32:09There are other times when you're feeling
32:11like your internal metronome is tick, tick, tick,
32:14and you've got a million things coming at you through email
32:17or texts, you've got a bunch of things and you're feeling
32:19overwhelmed and tired.
32:20Well, in either case there's nothing right or wrong
32:24it's just your body and your brain are trying to say
32:27what's going on in the outside world,
32:28and how well matched am I to it?
32:30Right.
32:31So if you think about some of the, sort of core practices
32:36of mindfulness and self-regulation of like focusing
32:39on breathing or focusing on, you know, state of mind,
32:43a lot of that is trying to bring more awareness
32:45to your internal state,
32:47but what our brain is normally doing when our eyes are open
32:51and we're interacting in the world
32:52is we're constantly trying to update our internal state
32:54to match external demands of the world.
32:57And this hearkens back to a, you know,
32:59like a really early design of all nervous systems
33:03which is how do you take an organism that needs
33:05certain things, food, water, mates, reproduction, shelter.
33:10How do you move that organism?
33:12How do you create a system that will do that
33:14in best relation to the environment?
33:16And so what mother nature has done is designed a system
33:20a series of systems.
33:22Let's just take agitation and stress for one,
33:24if an animal or a human is very thirsty
33:27you feel kind of agitated might get up
33:28and get a drink of water.
33:30If you're very thirsty,
33:31it can put you into a state of panic.
33:33If you're extremely thirsty and water is a limited resource
33:36you might even result the violence to get it
33:38or negotiation of some sort that you wouldn't
33:40if you were calmer.
33:41So the stress and agitation were designed
33:44to actually mobilize the body
33:46to take us into the direction of something that's adaptive.
33:49So you can start to see these kind of core elements
33:52of what the brain and nervous system do.
33:55Sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and action
33:57and this constant challenge
34:00of trying to match our internal state
34:02to the external real estate, the outside world.
34:04And you start to see that the sensations that we call stress
34:07or impatience or calm are really the result
34:11of those attempts that the nervous system
34:13is trying to perform.
34:16That's a lot to take in and super interesting.
34:20And it, you know, it's prompting in me this,
34:26you know, attempt to try to wrap my head around
34:29what within the brain is mutable, which is kind of, you know
34:33what your work is all about versus what is immutable
34:36like you were talking about thoughts
34:37like pop up windows on a browser.
34:40You know, some, sometimes our brains are just doing
34:43what they do and that there are things that we can do
34:45like mindfulness and breath work
34:47and the practices that you're talking about,
34:48hypnosis which is another thing that you're involved in
34:53to help, you know, help us like take better,
34:55manage better that process to kind of take the reins
35:00and be more in charge rather than be prey or victim
35:04to these kinds of things that just occur
35:07without our conscious awareness.
35:09Well, I think that, you know,
35:12in terms of value of understanding the nervous system
35:14and where it can be steered,
35:16it's absolutely clear that the nervous system can change
35:18in response to experience.
35:20So this thing we call neuroplasticity is really that,
35:23it's the brain's ability to modify itself
35:24in response to experience.
35:25And I think it's important to understand that from birth
35:28till about age 25, the brain is extremely malleable,
35:31in a kind of almost passive way where kids are exposed
35:34to things and the brain is just wiring up.
35:36I mean, the brain is designed to adjust itself,
35:39in order to be in concert with its surroundings
35:43and to optimize that just the way we described it
35:45a minute ago.
35:46Like a way that a child can learn a language
35:47very quickly- Or three languages.
35:48Play a guitar or something like that.
35:49Yeah, without an accent, you know,
35:51three languages without an accent, it's remarkable
35:53and try and do that after age 25, it's very challenging.
35:57And so the brain is basically designed to be customized
36:01in the early part of life,
36:03and then to implement those algorithms
36:05in that circuitry for the rest of your, of its life.
36:07And so the brain can change in adulthood
36:10and it can change provided that there's an emphasis
36:14on some perceptual event.
36:16So in other words, if you wanna change your brain
36:19as an adult, let's say you wanna be less anxious,
36:22you wanna learn a new language,
36:23you wanna be more functional in some way, presumably,
36:27the key thing is to bring focus
36:30to some particular perception
36:32of something that's happening during the learning process.
36:35And the reason for that is that
36:37there's a neurochemical system involving acetylcholine.
36:40And it comes from these two little nuclei
36:42down in the base of the brain called the nucleus basalis.
36:46All day long you're doing things in a reflexive way,
36:49but when you do something and you think about it
36:51very intensely, acetylcholine is released from basalis
36:55at the precise neurons that were involved in that behavior
36:58and it marks those for change
37:00during sleep or during deep rest later.
37:03So for people that wanna change their brain,
37:05the power of focus is really the entry point
37:08and the ability to access deep rest and sleep.
37:11Because most people don't realize this
37:13but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense focus,
37:16but neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest.
37:19And we can talk about how to optimize
37:21those different brain functions.
37:23One of the things that's really important
37:24also to think about how the brain works
37:25in terms of plasticity and all this stuff
37:27is what the brain really wants to do is also pass as much
37:31of what it does off to reflexive behavior as possible.
37:35So, when we're talking about focus
37:37I think it can get a little bit vague,
37:39but it might be useful to think about like
37:41what exactly is focus and what triggers plasticity?
37:45So the brain loves to be able to just do things,
37:47pick up coffee cups and drink and walk
37:50and talk and do things and not put much energy into it.
37:53When we decide to focus what the brain really does
37:56is it switches on a set of circuits
37:57then all the frontal cortex
37:59and nucleus basalis and some others
38:00and it's trying to understand duration,
38:03how long something's gonna last, path, what's gonna happen,
38:07and outcome, what ultimately is gonna happen.
38:09So duration, path and outcome.
38:11You know, the events of early 2020
38:14are a good example of this.
38:15One of the reasons why it's so exhausting to be alive
38:18in 2020, is because we are now having to pay attention
38:21to duration, path and outcome.
38:22How long is this thing gonna last?
38:24When are, you know, when are they gonna open up
38:26all businesses?
38:27Did I touch that door handle?
38:29Does it matter?
38:30You know, who are the experts?
38:32Are there any experts?
38:33You know, there are a lot of questions
38:34whereas normally, we can just move through life
38:37without having to do all that analysis.
38:39So if it's a simple example
38:41like trying to learn a new language or a new motor skill,
38:45or a new way of conceptualizing something,
38:47maybe somebody who's in a therapeutic process
38:49and they're trying to work through a trauma
38:50or something like that,
38:51duration, path and outcome is built
38:55into the networks of the brain.
38:56We can do that very easily, but it takes work.
38:58And it almost has a feeling
38:59of underlying agitation and frustration.
39:02And that's because of the circuits that turn on
39:05before acetylcholine are of the stress system.
39:08So when you or I decide we're gonna learn something
39:10and really dig in, norepinephrine which is adrenaline
39:14is secreted in the brainstem and in the body.
39:16And it brings about a state of alertness.
39:18Then our attention which is mostly a diffuse light
39:22is brought to a particular duration,
39:25path and outcome analysis.
39:26This would be thinking about what somebody is saying,
39:28what are they really trying to say?
39:29A hard passage of reading, a hard, you know,
39:32set of math problems, you know,
39:34a challenging physical workout.
39:36When you do that, these two systems have to work very hard
39:39and the adult brain doesn't really wanna change
39:42the algorithms they learned in childhood.
39:44But if you do those two things,
39:45you have alertness and focus, the acetylcholine
39:49and the norepinephrine converge
39:50to mark those synopsis for change.
39:53And so, so the way to think about neuroplasticity
39:56if one wants to change their brain is bring
39:58about the most intense concentration you can to something.
40:02And then later bring
40:03about the least amount of concentration to that thing.
40:06So I'll talk about that in a second,
40:07but there were some studies that were done at Stanford
40:10by a guy named Eric Knudsen that showed that plasticity
40:14in the adult brain any age, can be as robust
40:18as it is in childhood, as fast and as dramatic,
40:22provided the focus is there and it's all contingent
40:25on this acetylcholine molecule coming from nucleus basalis.
40:28So you say, well, how do you do that?
40:29How do you get it, you know?
40:31Well, I've got friends that you nicorette thinking
40:33that's gonna get them there
40:34because nicorette is a nicotinic acetylcholine agonist
40:38but that's gonna globally increase acetylcholine.
40:41So I always tell them that's not the right approach.
40:43The right approach is to bring as much focus
40:45to a behavior or to a thought or to an action pattern
40:49and there has to be a sense of urgency.
40:52So what Knudsen lab showed and another lab at UCF
40:55Mike Merzenich's lab showed is that
40:57if there's a serious contingency, like in order
41:00to get your ration of food each day,
41:02you have to learn this thing.
41:04The degree of plasticity is remarkable.
41:07But if there isn't an incentive,
41:09it just isn't gonna happen.
41:11So the circuits in the brain that mother nature set up,
41:14are designed to be anchored to a real need.
41:16And people always say to me, well, should I do something
41:19out of love and a real desire to learn,
41:21or should it be out of fear, but either one works.
41:24The sense of urgency is just acetylcholine.
41:26It's norepinephrine, that's all it is.
41:28It doesn't, the brain doesn't have a recognition
41:31of whether or not something is pleasureful or not
41:33until later.
41:34Once you start accomplishing your goal,
41:36the reward systems like dopamine start kicking in.
41:39But I think if people are interested
41:41in modifying their brain for the better, at least some,
41:45you know, top contour understanding of how urgency
41:47and focus must converge for that to happen can be useful.
41:51Because I think there's a lot of attention paid
41:54to whether or not something feels like flow
41:56or whether or not it's see what I call
41:57highly desirable states or whether or not you can,
42:00you can eat a plant out of the ground
42:02that will magically put your brain
42:04into a state of plasticity.
42:05And the answer is yes, such plants exist,
42:08but what's missing is the focus component.
42:10If that work is not done with a particular end goal in mind,
42:14you'll get plasticity, but you'll get plasticity
42:17in a kind of across the board,
42:19it's like learning nine lang, learning a little bit
42:21of nine languages all at once, is not gonna make you
42:24speak coherently in any one of them.
42:26So focus is the key.
42:28Right, I mean, this idea of flow
42:30is so much in the vernacular now.
42:32And you know, my sense is that people
42:36are trying to measure their level of engagement
42:39against some sort of theoretical idea
42:42of what it's like to be in that flow state.
42:45And if they're not experiencing it,
42:47they feel like they're doing it wrong
42:49or they're, they feel guilty or they beat themselves up.
42:53And for me, it's, a lot of it is just hard work.
42:56Like right now, I'm trying to finish this book
43:01and I should have been working
43:02on this book for like the last nine months, right?
43:05And I just couldn't, couldn't get it together.
43:07Like it's a collaborative project.
43:08So there's a lot of different people
43:10that are involved in this,
43:11and they've been working diligently sort of daily, you know
43:14putting this thing together.
43:16And I've just been focusing on the podcast
43:19and been unable to immerse myself in this project
43:22because I know from past book projects, when I go in,
43:25I go all in, like the addict in me kicks in
43:28and it's like, it just becomes my universe.
43:30And I've been completely paralyzed from taking that on.
43:35And so I've dithered away most of the quarantine
43:38without being productive on this project.
43:40And then about 10 days ago, we had a meeting,
43:43and we established this deadline at, you know,
43:46July 10th to turn this thing in.
43:48And it was like a switch got flicked.
43:50And I went all in and it's all I can think about now.
43:52And in fact, everything else feels like extraneous
43:56and a distraction.
43:57I just wanna get back so I can focus on this thing.
44:00And 10 days ago, I couldn't get myself into that position.
44:04And it's made me think about like,
44:06what is going on in my brain that, you know,
44:09it's such a drastic state change.
44:12And what did I do to switch that
44:14while a deadline was imposed upon me and whatever happened
44:17neuro-chemically with that set in motion
44:20like a chain reaction of events that got me into the chair.
44:24And once I began the project for me,
44:27it's all about like momentum, right?
44:29It's like, to start getting to the starting line
44:32and beginning is so hard.
44:34Like, I will just go forever without doing it.
44:37And then I'm in, and then I'm all in 110%.
44:40And I'm like, why can't I just,
44:42why can't I be that person who just worked on it, you know
44:44an hour and a half every day for the last three months?
44:48Well, I can offer some potential explanations.
44:51I can relate.
44:52And none of it involves a flow state.
44:54It's all hard.
44:55Yeah, and you know, I'm friends with Steven Kotler
44:57I think flow and I think the chicks in Mohali
44:59who originated this thing of flow is really interesting.
45:01But I say right now, the most we can say about flow
45:05mechanistically is backwards it spells wolf.
45:08We don't really understand flow.
45:10Now people have come up with these theories.
45:11It's like, you know, hypo hyper frontality.
45:14I haven't seen the data and I'm not picking on anybody.
45:17I'm putting that out there
45:18as a prompt for people to discover this.
45:20I think that, and to work on it.
45:21I think it's a really interesting, highly desirable state
45:24but I think we need to get comfortable as a culture
45:28in trying to understand our species and how we work,
45:31that the early stages of hard work
45:34and focus are gonna feel like agitation,
45:36stress and confusion, because that's the norepinephrine
45:40and adrenaline system kicking in.
45:42None of us would expect to walk into the gym
45:45and do our PR lift, or, you know,
45:48a performer go do something without warming up.
45:51The brain also needs to warm up
45:52and start to hone in which circuits are gonna be active.
45:55And it's unreasonable for us to think,
45:57"Oh I've got an hour, I'm gonna plop down
45:59and write beautifully for an hour my best work."
46:02We need to accept that there's a period
46:03of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping
46:06into these highly concentrated states.
46:09Now, in terms of the reward that accompanies the feeling
46:13that we're funneling into that groove
46:15of being productive in one regime
46:18like for you writing this book,
46:20the dopamine system is really important to understand.
46:22So we've talked about norepinephrine kind of
46:24gets you going, acetylcholine is the spotlight of attention.
46:27The dopamine system is mother nature's hardwired,
46:30ancient system in all animals
46:32including humans to put us on the right path.
46:36Now it's, a lot of people talk about dopamine
46:39as this thing that you get when you publish the book
46:42or when you get the book deal
46:43or when something wonderful happens like your child's born.
46:46And that's true, but dopamine's main role is to be released
46:51anytime you achieve a milestone,
46:53or you think you're on the right path.
46:55And when the dopamine system is tethered
46:58to a particular pattern of focus,
46:59remember duration, path and outcome.
47:01So it's like, okay, you sit down,
47:02maybe you don't get much text out
47:04but then the next day you get 800 words
47:05of really solid text and you feel good, like I'm into this.
47:09What does that dopamine system do?
47:10The dopamine system takes the norepinephrine
47:13which is normally rate limiting.
47:15Like at some point there's so much norepinephrine
47:18that you quit and we can talk about that.
47:20It's actually the substrate for quitting,
47:22dopamine can push that noradrenaline back down,
47:26that adrenaline back down and give you more room,
47:29more space to do duration, path and outcome work,
47:31highly focused work.
47:33And I'm making duration path outcomes
47:34synonymous with highly focused work.
47:36Why would this happen?
47:37So let's think about an animal.
47:38Let's think about a deer that wakes up and is thirsty
47:43and it's wandering out looking for water.
47:44That animal needs water.
47:45It doesn't know that it needs water.
47:47It experiences agitation the same way that a baby
47:50feels agitation when it wants food
47:52but it doesn't know it needs food.
47:54It just feels agitation and cries
47:56and a caretaker comes, hopefully.
47:58That deer is now foraging for something that it needs.
48:02And let's say it smells water,
48:04'cause a deer can actually do that and arrives at a stream
48:07and takes a sip of water, there's dopamine released then,
48:10that puts it on a path to maybe a larger lake
48:13or something of that sort, or to be able to go cheap food.
48:15So when we are on the right path,
48:18and we hit a milestone, dopamine is released
48:21and it tends to tighten our focus more for that activity.
48:25So the dopamine, this is why drugs of abuse
48:28and why alcoholism and some process addictions,
48:32which are behavioral addictions are so dangerous
48:35because they, a lot of those drugs of abuse are dopamine.
48:39So it becomes this cyclical loop where there's
48:41no other behavior that can evoke the same level of release.
48:45In fact, I sort of define addiction
48:48as a progressive narrowing of the things
48:50that bring you pleasure.
48:51And I say that
48:52because it really is the way that the dopamine system works.
48:55Normally the dopamine system is designed to be generic.
48:58It's designed to get me to do lots of things,
49:00social quality, social interactions
49:02you know, work, exercise, all those things,
49:06just like the stress system is designed to get me
49:08out of bed in the morning,
49:08cortisol pulse is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
49:11It's also what leads me to, or led me to pursue a career
49:14in science out of fear, initially, and eventually pleasure.
49:17So the dopamine system is tethered to those states of focus
49:22and it's what mother nature designed
49:24so that the neuroplasticity would occur
49:26and you would want to continue those behaviors again
49:29in the future.
49:30That deer needs to know and remember
49:32and create a memory, not just aware that stream is,
49:35but the process of, oh, when I feel that agitation
49:38I'm gonna get up and go down this particular path.
49:41And so people think of the dopamine system
49:44as this kind of like catch all for reward,
49:46oh, you get likes on Instagram and it makes you feel good.
49:49That's not really how it works.
49:51And the important thing to understand
49:53is when you start getting a convergence of norepinephrine
49:56so that level of agitation
49:58duration, path, outcome, acetylcholine, and dopamine,
50:01now you're starting to wire in the behaviors
50:03that make people really good at certain things.
50:07Now in a functional view of this, so not addiction,
50:10what this means is that for any of us,
50:13success in any endeavor is very closely related
50:16to how much focus we can bring to that endeavor.
50:19And the reward system you start to realize
50:21is entirely internal, no one's coming along
50:24and cramming dopamine in your ear
50:26or dripping it in your brain, it's all internal.
50:29And this starts to bring us
50:30into the kind of like discussion around mindsets.
50:32Because, so my colleague Carol Dweck,
50:34who popularized this thing, growth mindset,
50:37it's and again, a very misunderstood concept.
50:39It's the idea that we can change.
50:41So that's built into that, but the discovery
50:44of growth mindset was of these kids that actually
50:46really enjoyed doing problem sets
50:49that they knew they couldn't get, right?
50:51But for them, they would get this like dopamine release
50:53from just focusing on the problem.
50:55They liked doing puzzles they couldn't get right.
50:57It sounds crazy, but inevitably,
50:59those kids are very good at puzzles
51:00and very good at math and on these kinds of things.
51:02So growth mindset is I believe,
51:05if a certain neuroscience lens on growth mindset
51:08would be that the agitation and stress that you feel
51:11at the beginning of something
51:13and when you're trying to lean into it
51:13and you can't focus is just a recognized gate.
51:16You have to pass that through that gate
51:18to get to the focus component.
51:20And then if you can reward the effort process
51:23you really start to feel joy
51:25and low levels of excitement in the effort process.
51:29That's that buffering of adrenaline.
51:31That's that feeling like, yes,
51:33I've got a lot of adrenaline in my system
51:34but I'm on the right path.
51:36It feels good to walk up this hill, so to speak.
51:40And when you start to bring those neural circuits together
51:44you really start to create a whole set of circuits
51:46that are designed to be exported to any behavior you want.
51:50So if it's writing a book, great, if it's podcasting great,
51:54if it's building a business great.
51:56If it's, you know, building a terrific relationship, great
51:59then the circuits that mother nature is designer
52:01incredibly generic so that we could adapt
52:04to whatever it is that we need to do.
52:06And I think the misunderstanding
52:07around how these circuits work,
52:09has led to this idea that there's some secret entry point
52:12maybe marked flow on the door
52:14and there's a trampoline up to that door
52:16and you just open that door and you're gonna be in it.
52:18And nothing could be further from the truth.
52:21And anyone who's done well in any career or athletic pursuit
52:25knows this, but unfortunately there's a kind of obsession
52:29with the idea that it's all supposed to feel good
52:31and it does feel good but there's a whole staircase
52:33in which it feels kind of lousy.
52:35Yeah, I mean, the feel good aspect
52:39of that experience is very subtle.
52:41And I think, you know, in a kind of global way,
52:44what you're talking about is falling in love
52:46with the process.
52:47Like you have to push this gate open, which might require
52:50you know, more effort than you're comfortable with.
52:52But once you push through, it is about, you know, that daily
52:56the daily rigor and the tiny wins that you get from that,
53:01rather than, you know, it's easy to, you know,
53:04you set a goal, but that goal becomes very abstract, right?
53:07And it's those tiny little things that you're getting done
53:10every day that bring you that internal satisfaction
53:13that are like calibrating that plasticity.
53:15Is that what you're saying?
53:16Yeah, absolutely.
53:17And what's incredible is the extent to which the mind
53:20and thoughts, remember earlier we were talking about
53:22how thoughts are spontaneous.
53:23You can't control them,
53:24negative thoughts, traumatic thoughts, bad thoughts,
53:27trying to suppress those is futile.
53:29If there's one message I can send people
53:30it's just don't even work at that,
53:33but work at the process of introducing thoughts
53:37as almost like you would introduce actions,
53:39because we can introduce thoughts.
53:41And, you know, Carol Dweck has talked about this,
53:43that positive self-talk is not the same thing
53:45as growth mindset, because positive self-talk
53:47is almost always linked to the ultimate outcome.
53:50If I'm losing badly in something,
53:52and I tell myself, I'm doing great,
53:54I know that I'm lying.
53:55There's no dopamine release from that.
53:58And you know, a lot of the self-help wellness culture
54:01of the 80s and 90s was like, it's impossible
54:02to be in a bad mood if you're smiling.
54:04We won't have any depression on the planet if that's true.
54:07There's probably some feedback
54:08from the face to the brain, but it's not that simple.
54:11But the idea that you can self reward
54:14the effort process is extremely powerful,
54:17because what it means is
54:18that if you can recognize agitation, stress, and confusion
54:21as an entry point to where you eventually wanna go,
54:24I do think that just that even just mental recognition
54:27can allow people to pass through it more easily.
54:29They think they're doing something wrong
54:31and then rewarding yourself when you achieve any milestone,
54:33like, you know, running to a particular location
54:36if you're trying to run a long distance
54:38and then registering that as a partial win,
54:42what we know is that the dopamine that's released
54:44in response to that suppresses the total amount
54:47of adrenaline and gives you more room, more time,
54:51more energy to run in the running example.
54:54And this is anchored in a real scientific result.
54:57So last year there was a paper published
55:00that essentially was asking why any human
55:02or animal quits at any behavior.
55:05Now, certain behaviors like I can't lift a car,
55:07unless it's a very small car.
55:08I can't lift a car, but if we're talking about running
55:11or we're talking about long bouts of work, the question is,
55:15why do we quit?
55:16Like, what is that?
55:17And it turns out that every time we exert effort,
55:20a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released,
55:23and there's a sort of a counter in the brainstem.
55:26And at some point enough noradrenaline is released
55:29and it shuts down cognitive control, deliberate control
55:32over the motor circuitry, and we quit, that's it.
55:35But the thing that can restore those levels
55:38or it can sort of reset those levels lower
55:40and give us more gas, more mileage, is dopamine.
55:42And it makes perfect sense because our species had to move
55:46against very challenging things in nature
55:49and in certain, so in culture at every stage
55:53of our evolution including now,
55:542020 is a good example of this.
55:56And when a good example would be,
55:59if you're really slogging it out and things are miserable,
56:02just think like the worst family vacation,
56:04everything's a disaster or a very hard physical event,
56:09and someone cracks a joke,
56:11you're almost immediately feel a sense of relief.
56:14You see this in the team that wins the Super Bowl.
56:16Both teams slogged it out.
56:17You have to believe they were both at max effort
56:19the entire game.
56:20Look at the team that wins,
56:22they have extra energy,
56:23they're jumping all over the place.
56:24So it can't be physical energy.
56:26It can't be glycogen related.
56:28It's not ketone related.
56:29It's nothing in the body in that sense.
56:32It's dopamine's ability to take that level
56:34of norepinephrine and smack it back down.
56:36And so we can learn this, right?
56:39I mean, I think this is where there's real power
56:41like in your story,
56:43or the story that I'm familiar with from your book.
56:45Like the ability to push through those pain points
56:49is something that we really can export
56:51to other aspects of life
56:53because it's the same neuro-chemicals that are involved.
56:55So when you get to a particular location
56:57or maybe your, recall, you know, a portion where you're just
57:01you're feeling lousy, you know, you're injured,
57:03or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally
57:07and think I'm actually still on the ladder.
57:09I'm still holding onto a wrong.
57:11I know that at least that much, I'm still breathing.
57:13I know that much.
57:13And the lift that we get is not some psychological pump-up,
57:17it's a neurochemical thing.
57:19It's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine, and saying
57:22you're on the right path, you can keep going.
57:25It's a permission to keep going.
57:27And we grant that permission to ourselves,
57:29no one grants that permission to us.
57:31I think one of the other kind of misconceptions
57:34that we wanna dissolve is this idea
57:36that external rewards can actually propel us
57:39down long paths of success and high performance.
57:44They can't.
57:44It's internal rewards. No, that's a sustainable
57:46fuel source.
57:47Yeah. Yeah.
57:48I have a friend from the SEAL team
57:49and somebody asked us recently, we were giving a talk
57:52and somebody said,
57:53"How can I make sure that I continue to self reward,
57:56and I'm not driven by these extra rewards?
57:59How can I continue to have that drive?"
58:02And his answer was very good.
58:04He said, "Give away all the external rewards."
58:06You know, now not everyone can afford to do that.
58:09It's just about you and you.
58:10It's just you and you.
58:11And the more attach there's a famous Stanford study done
58:14at being nursery school, probably not far where
58:17from where you were in the dormitory,
58:18there was a little nursery school in Escondido village.
58:20And they did a study where they looked at kids
58:22that like to playing during their recess,
58:25it's all recess in nursery school, but they're drawing.
58:28And they took the kids that really liked to draw.
58:31And they started giving them little gold stars
58:34on their drawings.
58:35And then they liked the gold stars
58:37for a kid that's an extrinsic reward.
58:39And then they stopped doing that and the kids stop drawing.
58:42They just, they associated the good feeling of doing it
58:45with the external rewards.
58:47We have to be very cautious about how much
58:49of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards,
58:53if we wanna continue to grow
58:55and pursue and focus and work hard.
58:57If you just wanna get to someplace and cash in, then fine.
59:01But most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place
59:04because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards,
59:07they need more and more of that.
59:08Well, the why has to be deeper than that.
59:11I mean, the thing that I kind of always default to
59:14when I hit that breaking point or, you know
59:16I'm training or I'm racing or whatever,
59:18and I'm at that stage where it's just like,
59:20I can't go any further,
59:22the first thing I do is I reflect inward
59:24on why I'm doing this to begin with, like, what is the,
59:28you know what is the value system
59:30that I'm trying to tap into?
59:31What is it that I'm trying to express?
59:33Like what got me to this point?
59:34So it's a reminder, and then I just set,
59:38like I just say, well, I'm just gonna get
59:39to the next lamppost or I'm gonna, you know,
59:42get to the next intersection or whatever it is.
59:45I break it down into the tiny, I'll quit after that.
59:47Like the more I can just root myself in the present moment
59:51and distill it down into the tiniest of digestible chunks,
59:57that's the only way I can, you know,
59:59continue to move forward.
1:00:01And I've learned over time that the more I do that, then
1:00:04you know, suddenly I'll find myself
1:00:06in a different mental, like it will shift, right?
1:00:09Just because I feel that way in that moment
1:00:12is not determinative
1:00:13of how I'm gonna feel 10 minutes later.
1:00:16Absolutely, there's an interesting process that occurs
1:00:20when people start to realize that rewards are all internal
1:00:24and what they start to do is they start linking
1:00:26this duration, path, outcome thing,
1:00:28to their internal rewards.
1:00:30And so to put this simply one of the most powerful things
1:00:33that any person can do is to learn to control
1:00:37this idea of duration, path, and outcome
1:00:39and attach an internal sense of reward
1:00:42just that you're doing well to reward yourself mentally
1:00:44just say, "I'm doing well, I'm actually on the right path."
1:00:47To do that inside of the demands
1:00:51that come from the external world.
1:00:53The more often that we can self reward
1:00:56some aspect of the process provided
1:00:57it's in the right direction of what we're trying to achieve,
1:01:01the more energy we're gonna have for that,
1:01:03the more focus we're gonna have for that.
1:01:04And remember that the reason I say energy,
1:01:06I don't throw that around loosely is that limiting amount
1:01:10of noradrenaline is constantly being kept at bay.
1:01:13You literally keep buffering the quit response.
1:01:16And so when people start realizing
1:01:18that if they set the goals inside of the larger goal
1:01:22and self reward each one of those
1:01:24they essentially have an infinite amount of energy
1:01:26to pursue those goals.
1:01:28They have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those goals.
1:01:31You see this most in the special operations community
1:01:36and people that are selected essentially for this process.
1:01:39It's one of the things that's been intriguing to me.
1:01:40I have some friends from the SEAL teams
1:01:42and I don't begin to really understand the real work
1:01:45that they do deployed
1:01:46'cause I've never done that kind of work
1:01:47but I've always been intrigued
1:01:48by the selection process,
1:01:50the so-called BUD/S process, right?
1:01:51Because carrying logs and getting in cold water
1:01:54and all that, that's not really how the work is.
1:01:58That's really not what the work is about.
1:01:59So the selection process is interesting
1:02:01because everyone shows up fit, motivated,
1:02:04and convinced that they're not gonna quit.
1:02:06I mean, I think like there might be a couple of days
1:02:08you'll just show up to show up,
1:02:09but everybody is absolutely convinced.
1:02:11And then a very small subset of them make it through.
1:02:15And I'd be willing to bet
1:02:17that the ones that make it through,
1:02:19of course they're gritty and resilient
1:02:20but they all are essentially, right?
1:02:22So that's necessary, but not sufficient, obviously,
1:02:25otherwise they, everyone would make it through.
1:02:27The people that make it through somehow
1:02:29are able to tap into a process.
1:02:31Maybe it's a reward process.
1:02:33Maybe it's through self punishment,
1:02:35maybe it's through self reward in the positive sense,
1:02:38but they're able to control something
1:02:40inside an environment that is not controlled by them.
1:02:43It's controlled by the instructors.
1:02:45And I've always been struck by the fact that in order to
1:02:49to not in order to get through, you just have to not quit.
1:02:53Remember people aren't being deselected.
1:02:55They're not saying, get out of here,
1:02:56you're not good enough, you're not,
1:02:57people are deciding that for themselves.
1:02:59And so it's interesting because it brings
1:03:02about a real-world experiment of people who are quitting.
1:03:05And I believe they're quitting because they can't manage
1:03:08these neurotransmitters.
1:03:09And the people, when I say manage,
1:03:11I think that the people that get through
1:03:13knowing some of these people quite well,
1:03:15had an internal process
1:03:17by which they could reward themselves
1:03:19for doing something that might've just look trivial
1:03:21to everybody else, but it gave them more gas, more energy.
1:03:26And what's interesting is the process,
1:03:27the kind of unconscious genius of the BUD/S process
1:03:30is that they've picked two sensory events
1:03:34that are across the board, challenging for everybody.
1:03:38One is cold water, which is great, because it
1:03:41most of the time it can't kill you, right?
1:03:43It's not like heat, which can kill you.
1:03:45It's cold water and sleep deprivation.
1:03:49And so the ability to do these, like what I'm calling DPOs
1:03:52this duration, path and outcome steps and procedures
1:03:56is great on when you're rested, you know,
1:03:59you know, when you have, when you're well fed, well slept,
1:04:02you can do anything.
1:04:03You can be in any hard conversation
1:04:04you can work through anything.
1:04:05So what they do is they start taking
1:04:06the autonomic nervous system, which is these deep reserves
1:04:10of the nervous system
1:04:12that when our autonomic nervous system is off,
1:04:15it starts making us pay more attention
1:04:17to how we feel than the demands of the world around us.
1:04:20Remember that basic challenge in the nervous system.
1:04:23And so sleep deprivation is the best way
1:04:26that you can pull somebody down from their ability
1:04:29to analyze duration, path and outcome and reward themselves.
1:04:33Sleep deprivation is the way
1:04:35in which you essentially pull apart the nervous system
1:04:38and the way that it wants to function
1:04:39because it's very easy, again, rested to do all this.
1:04:43But so what they do is they're sleep deprived people
1:04:45they put them in cold water,
1:04:46they're trying to get them more in touch
1:04:48with the way that they feel inside than what they need to do
1:04:51in response to the external demands.
1:04:54Everyone I know that's made it through that process,
1:04:56did it slightly differently
1:04:58but I'll tell you how they didn't do it.
1:05:00They didn't do it through sheer grit and determination.
1:05:03They did it through attaching a sense of meaning.
1:05:05They did it by micro slicing the day, or slicing the day
1:05:10into a series of meals that they just needed to get to
1:05:13and then rewarding themselves
1:05:15for getting to that next milestone.
1:05:17So they don't know, I mean, most of them,
1:05:19you know, probably had very low concept
1:05:21of dopamine and norepinephrine, but that's the process.
1:05:23That's also the process
1:05:24I think that allows someone to finish an ultra.
1:05:26I've never run an ultra, but I think that process
1:05:29of self reward is grit and resilience,
1:05:32in a kind of neurochemical definition.
1:05:35And I think it's the thing that anybody can tap into.
1:05:38And I think it's, therefore, I think it's so key
1:05:41because I think people think that it's just so key
1:05:44that people understand, excuse me,
1:05:45that these circuits are not unique
1:05:48to people who run ultras or people that make it through
1:05:52you know, stringent filter, special operations command.
1:05:56These, it's the same thing
1:05:57that anyone can do. It is interesting.
1:05:59Yeah, the ultimate determinant
1:06:01isn't your physical conditioning.
1:06:03And yet that's what everybody focuses on.
1:06:05It's what's going on in, you know,
1:06:08internally, mentally, neuro-chemically
1:06:10that's making the difference
1:06:11and the people that are able to best calibrate that
1:06:14and find these, you know, strategies for managing
1:06:17are the ones that get through whether it is an ultra
1:06:20or BUD/S and BUD/S is like this perfect,
1:06:22it's almost like its own lab, right?
1:06:24For studying human resilience in a certain respect
1:06:27but you have actually taken some of these people
1:06:30and tested them in your lab, including David Goggins, right?
1:06:34So, what do you do when you, when these people visit you
1:06:38and you're like, I'm gonna deconstruct you here,
1:06:40figure out what makes you tick.
1:06:42Yeah, so I had the good fortune of meeting David
1:06:46at a consulting event a few years ago.
1:06:48And I guess I should just say, David,
1:06:52you probably know this already, but he is,
1:06:54every bit is intense as he comes across.
1:06:56Yeah, I mean,
1:06:57what you see online. His private persona is-
1:06:58Yeah it's exactly the same.
1:06:59What you see is what you get.
1:07:01Really wonderful and obviously extremely impressive
1:07:04human being.
1:07:07David anecdote, so the night before we had this event,
1:07:11he came out to the lab.
1:07:12My lab, we do, we study fear.
1:07:14We study courage, we say resilience.
1:07:15And we say the underlying neurochemical substrates
1:07:18for those.
1:07:19So we had a bunch of guys there,
1:07:20a couple of team guys, some other folks, and we bring them
1:07:25in this little room and we do virtual reality there.
1:07:27And one of the things that we used to scare people
1:07:30or to generate a sense of autonomic arousal
1:07:32is this experience of diving with great white sharks.
1:07:35Which of course, you're not in water,
1:07:37you're in the laboratory, but it's very immersive.
1:07:39And for people that are afraid of sharks,
1:07:40it can be quite scary, not always,
1:07:44but we also have heights, we have claustrophobia,
1:07:46we got something where you can feel spiders
1:07:48crawling all over your body, if you're an arachnophobe.
1:07:51You know, if you have a pain point, we find it.
1:07:53Do you spend time trying to figure out
1:07:54what that pain point is?
1:07:56We do and we do it through some very covert methodology
1:08:00that involves AI and some fun tools.
1:08:03A bunch of weird questions that, right, all right.
1:08:06Let's just say this, from the moment you step
1:08:08into our laboratory, we're studying you.
1:08:10so the-
1:08:12Now I know. And yeah, exactly.
1:08:14So what was fun was, you know,
1:08:15so I sort of explained what the platform was
1:08:17and what we were gonna do.
1:08:18And David said, he goes, "I don't like sharks."
1:08:23And I was like, all right, well, and so then, you know,
1:08:27this was not a typical experimental day in the lab.
1:08:29So I just kind of, at one point I finished describing
1:08:31what the tech is and how we're going to wire people in.
1:08:33And then I said, "So who wants to go first?"
1:08:36And he's like, I'll go.
1:08:37Right, of course.
1:08:38And what was funny to me at that moment
1:08:39I realized this is interesting because he,
1:08:42he was very explicit about the fact he didn't like sharks.
1:08:43He was very explicit about the fact
1:08:45that he was going to be first, you know, first man in.
1:08:48I mean, it would be inappropriate
1:08:50for me to describe his data, right?
1:08:51And we didn't do a full-blown experiment
1:08:53but what I can say is he's, whatever it is
1:08:55that David has figured out how to do,
1:08:57it clearly involves taking whatever adrenaline pulse
1:09:01he feels and understanding something fundamental to biology
1:09:04which is that adrenaline response was designed
1:09:06to move us not to keep us stationary.
1:09:09He uses behavior as the way to shift sensation,
1:09:14perception, feelings, and thoughts.
1:09:16He understands how to run that program
1:09:18in the right direction.
1:09:19Whereas most people, when they don't like what they feel,
1:09:21they start negotiating sensation, which will never work.
1:09:24They start trying to control their perception
1:09:26which is hard, right?
1:09:27They're like, I'm not gonna think about that
1:09:29or I'll think about it differently.
1:09:30Very hard to control the mind with the mind.
1:09:32He knows that's a tough one.
1:09:34Yeah.
1:09:35Feelings, Lord knows what those are
1:09:38and how to control them.
1:09:38I mean, we'll eventually figure that out as a field,
1:09:41but thoughts are complicated.
1:09:43So he just goes immediately into action.
1:09:45He goes forward towards it.
1:09:46So when he says, just for clarity, when he says,
1:09:50"I don't like sharks", he's basically saying
1:09:52put me in the shark tank, like, he's cuing you to say
1:09:54this is the thing I'm afraid of
1:09:56and I'm gonna be the first one to volunteer
1:09:58and I know you're gonna put me in the shark tank
1:09:59if I tell you that, right?
1:10:00Exactly, and I think, and I obviously can't speak for him,
1:10:04but one of the things I think is very clear
1:10:07is that he's tapped into this neuroplasticity process
1:10:11through the door through the portal of agitation and stress,
1:10:15he's figured out the, and this is really the holy grail
1:10:18of neuroscience is how can I modify my brain?
1:10:22Well, you modify it by placing yourself into discomfort
1:10:25and using that as a propeller to move you into action.
1:10:29And, you know, a couple of years later
1:10:30when David was working on his book
1:10:32and I heard the book was coming out,
1:10:33I think I saw a pre-release announcement,
1:10:35I texted him and I just said, look
1:10:36"I'm really excited to see your book."
1:10:39And he said, "Oh great, thank you.
1:10:41You know, be great if you'd write something
1:10:45like an endorsement."
1:10:46I said, "Oh, I'd be honored to, I'm happy to."
1:10:47And he said, "But I need it tonight."
1:10:50And this was Saturday.
1:10:51I think it was like 10:30 at night when I texted him.
1:10:53So it's a great, well, I'd be happy to, I won't do it now.
1:10:57He said, "I need it by midnight."
1:10:58So I sit down and I start writing this thing
1:11:00and these are short blurbs, but I kind of realized
1:11:01that you know, you wanna get it right.
1:11:03It's David and you know, my name's next to it.
1:11:04And I wanna do do it justice.
1:11:07So I'm sitting down, I'm working on the saying
1:11:08and I texted him, "Look, I'm gonna be a few minutes late.
1:11:10No problem, no problem."
1:11:11Finally, I sent him the thing at like 12:30 at night
1:11:13and he's like, "Aw, bro, thank you, thank you, thank you.
1:11:15I promise I'll send you a copy of this and that."
1:11:17And I was like, grateful, you know, thank you.
1:11:18And then I realized that that time he was living in New York
1:11:23and I said, "Wait a second, where are you?"
1:11:25He said, "New York."
1:11:26And I said, "It's 3:30 in the morning."
1:11:30And he goes, "Yeah, I'm going running."
1:11:32And I realized at that point, I was like, okay
1:11:34you know, there's, it's undisputable.
1:11:36You know this guy lives the persona
1:11:38that he projects into the world.
1:11:40And even that day, that consulting gig, you know,
1:11:43there was a four o'clock lag
1:11:44and he was like, no, let's keep going.
1:11:46So he's figured something out.
1:11:48And I think that his enormous popularity is it's earned,
1:11:53because he's figured out that it really doesn't matter
1:11:58if you come at something from a place of joy and love.
1:12:00And that would be wonderful, but there's a whole other set
1:12:04of ways to approach this, that involve slogging
1:12:07through the discomfort, the doubts, the wish for things
1:12:12to be different and starting with behavior.
1:12:15And it's incredible 'cause if you think about sensation
1:12:18perception, feeling, thought and behavior,
1:12:20actually the way to control our nervous system
1:12:23and feel the way we wanna feel is to run that backwards.
1:12:27Behavior, thoughts.
1:12:28So if you change your behavior, then generally
1:12:30your thoughts, your feelings and your perceptions change.
1:12:33And everyone tries to come at it from the other end,
1:12:36but he's figured out through whatever process led him there
1:12:39and incredible life circumstances, how to run it
1:12:42in this direction of behavior first.
1:12:44And I really think that if neuroscience has anything
1:12:47to offer, it's some understanding of what the underlying
1:12:51chemicals and neuro-circuits are, but the sooner
1:12:54that the human animal, the human species can start
1:12:57to understand that our feelings and our thoughts
1:13:00and our memories and our all that is very complicated,
1:13:03but that when behaviors are very concrete
1:13:06and they are the control panel for the rest of it.
1:13:11I don't wanna relegate feelings,
1:13:12feelings are extremely important.
1:13:14I don't wanna relegate perception,
1:13:15they're extremely important, but when it comes to wanting
1:13:18to shift the way that you function, to get better
1:13:21or to perform better, or to show up better,
1:13:24or to move away from things like addictive behaviors,
1:13:27it's absolutely foolish for any of us, me included,
1:13:31to think that we can do that by changing our thoughts first,
1:13:34it's behavior first, thoughts, feelings
1:13:37and perceptions follow.
1:13:39Mood follows action.
1:13:40Mood follows action.
1:13:41This is like been my mantra forever.
1:13:43And, you know, I swear by it.
1:13:45And David's example illustrates that that act first
1:13:49he's developed so much neuroplasticity that it's reflexive
1:13:54for him to just move towards the hard thing
1:13:56or the challenge or the discomfort, right?
1:14:00And now the science establishes
1:14:02that this is indeed the case.
1:14:04And yet our programming, our default hard wiring is to,
1:14:10you know, put us in this place where we want to ruminate
1:14:12on all this stuff.
1:14:13And wait until we feel like doing something before we do it
1:14:16or check our motivations for it.
1:14:18But anytime I'm in a funk or I wanna change my state,
1:14:22I have to move forward.
1:14:23I have to do something with my physical body in order
1:14:26to shake things up and, you know,
1:14:28rearrange whatever's going on mentally.
1:14:31So, and it, and it works every time.
1:14:35It works every time because the brain circuits
1:14:37meaning sets of connections and chemicals
1:14:39they're there from birth, they're there your whole life,
1:14:41and they were designed for that.
1:14:43So in 2018, a graduate student in my lab published a paper
1:14:46in Nature, showing that in the face of a physical threat,
1:14:50there are three options.
1:14:51You can obviously freeze,
1:14:53you can retreat, or you can move forward.
1:14:56And the moving forward response actually triggers activation
1:15:00of a connection in the brain to the dopamine circuitry
1:15:02of the brain and makes it more likely
1:15:05that you're gonna be able to move forward in the future.
1:15:08Now, what was interesting to us was that,
1:15:10not only is forward action rewarded at a neurochemical level
1:15:15which then sets you up for more forward action
1:15:17but the highest level of agitation and stress was associated
1:15:21with moving forward, we always think, well,
1:15:23if I just call myself enough, I'll be able to move forward.
1:15:26But it's the exact opposite, you know?
1:15:29And so people who are paralyzed in fear
1:15:32or that have a hard time initiating, sometimes the key
1:15:35is to raise the level of stress and agitation.
1:15:37This is why deadlines are so effective.
1:15:39This is why fear is so effective.
1:15:41This is why that deer gets up out of its, you know,
1:15:44nice little den and starts to move
1:15:46because it feels a certain level of agitation.
1:15:49If that agitation isn't high enough,
1:15:50we will not move forward.
1:15:51And so, especially in the U.S you know, we have a culture
1:15:54in which stress has been created, you know, these ideas
1:15:57around stress is that it's terrible for us.
1:16:00When in fact stress is designed to move us forward
1:16:03towards these action steps that are rewarded
1:16:05which then move us forward and so on.
1:16:08So what is the process of combating that, you know
1:16:12monkey mind that is, you know,
1:16:14running whatever narrative that's keeping you stuck.
1:16:17Like, it's easy to say, like, just move
1:16:18you gotta take the action.
1:16:20But a lot of people still, despite understanding that,
1:16:24intellectualizing that, are unable to, you know,
1:16:28basically act as if.
1:16:31Yeah, I think we're dealing with two general categories
1:16:34of people who have problems with motivation and focus.
1:16:37And I think we've failed to decide, excuse me,
1:16:42I think we failed to describe the fact
1:16:44that there are two groups and not one we think,
1:16:47well I need to calm myself enough to move forward.
1:16:49I think, and then other people say, well, no
1:16:52you need to kind of ramp yourself up to move forward.
1:16:54Here's the way I conceptualize it
1:16:56based on the data that I'm aware of.
1:16:58Some people are just hypo aroused.
1:17:02They're just not motivated enough.
1:17:04And those people would benefit greatly
1:17:06from cultivating practices, like super oxygenated breathing.
1:17:10So this is something along the lines
1:17:11of like tummo type breathing, so rapid.
1:17:14And we look at this and allow
1:17:15we're actually running a human study on this now.
1:17:17So 25 or 30 deep breaths through the nose and out
1:17:20through the mouth, then exhaling the breath and holding,
1:17:23learning to how to self generate adrenaline.
1:17:26That's what you're doing when you're doing that.
1:17:27Some version of the Wim Hof technique.
1:17:30That's what that is.
1:17:31Brian McKenzie talks about.
1:17:33Right, an ice bath is doing the exact same thing,
1:17:35stimulating adrenaline response.
1:17:37It actually improves the immune system.
1:17:39There's a published paper on this, releases adrenaline
1:17:41which buffers the immune system against infection
1:17:45but getting good at taking yourself from low,
1:17:48low energy to higher energy
1:17:51and then learning how to compress your focus.
1:17:53And I'll talk about the focus thing in a minute.
1:17:54Some people are so agitated, the monkey mind
1:17:57they got too many things going on and they're thinking, okay
1:17:59they're trying to sit down and write.
1:18:00I suffer from this, and I'm feeling like, wait
1:18:03I've also got this person I need to connect with.
1:18:05And I'm kind of being drawn off course
1:18:07by not being able to put the blinders on.
1:18:09For people that have that issue,
1:18:11I think learning how to calm the nervous system
1:18:14is very powerful.
1:18:15And the best way that I know how to do that is based
1:18:17on two studies, one published in Nature, one published
1:18:19in Cell Reports recently showing that physiological size
1:18:23there's actually a thing in the literature
1:18:25called physiological size, are one of the fastest ways
1:18:28to bring our overall level of sub autonomic arousal down.
1:18:32And a physiological sigh is a two inhales,
1:18:35followed by an extended exhale.
1:18:37So it's like, it's not just a deep breath.
1:18:41It's two inhales followed by an exhale, okay?
1:18:45And what that, what that does.
1:18:46And this has been shown several times now in humans
1:18:50and other species, as well is it dilates
1:18:52the little sacks of the lungs and that second inhale
1:18:55dilates them a little bit more,
1:18:57and it pulls a little bit of carbon dioxide
1:18:59out of the bloodstream so that when we exhale,
1:19:01we offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide
1:19:03and it perfectly adjust the ratio of carbon dioxide
1:19:06and oxygen in the bloodstream and lungs.
1:19:08And sometimes it only takes one of these double
1:19:10inhale exhale.
1:19:11Sometimes somebody needs to do two or three,
1:19:14but that's the fastest way
1:19:15to bring the autonomic nervous system down.
1:19:19A lot of people need such a tool because I think
1:19:22we talk a lot about meditation and tools for calm
1:19:25and, you know I can go to Esalen for a weekend
1:19:27and get a massage, I'm gonna feel very good,
1:19:29but then when I'm thrown back in real life
1:19:30I need something that's gonna work in real time.
1:19:33What I call a real time tool.
1:19:35And most people don't know how to control
1:19:36their autonomic nervous system because it's complicated.
1:19:39I can't control my liver function.
1:19:41I can eat that will calm me,
1:19:42but that has complicated, you know, issues with it too
1:19:46if I'm just eating to calm myself.
1:19:48So the diaphragm is the one skeletal muscle organ
1:19:53that was internally, right?
1:19:55We've got obviously skeletal muscles
1:19:56designed to move things.
1:19:57It's a skeletal muscle organ, unlike the spleen, the liver,
1:20:00the heart, et cetera
1:20:01it was designed to be moved voluntarily.
1:20:04And these physiological size are actually
1:20:06occurring fairly regularly during sleep,
1:20:09to adjust our levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen.
1:20:13And there's a recent study showing that in claustrophobia
1:20:16this is the breathing pattern that people default to,
1:20:19to try and offload that carbon dioxide.
1:20:22So, whereas there are a lot
1:20:23of really interesting breathing techniques,
1:20:25Wim Hof, Brian McKenzie does great work.
1:20:27Patrick McHugh, you know, the Laird and Gabby, there're tons
1:20:30of people doing really interesting things out there.
1:20:33My lab has been focused on what are the neural circuits
1:20:36that are designed to achieve particular states
1:20:38that happen to impinge on and capture diaphragm function.
1:20:42And so the reason I think breathing is so powerful
1:20:45is that everyone has a diaphragm
1:20:48and it's the immediate link to the body.
1:20:50A lot's been made at the vagus nerve.
1:20:51You know, oh, the vagus is the path
1:20:53between the body and mind, but the vagus is very slow.
1:20:56The vagus nerve calming is what you experience
1:20:59when you eat a really rich carbohydrate-rich meal
1:21:02or you've had a long day and you put your feet up
1:21:05and you're finally relaxing.
1:21:06It takes minutes to hours to kick in.
1:21:09Whereas the diaphragm is real-time control
1:21:12over your brain state.
1:21:13So the brain knows what the body is doing
1:21:16by how fast the diaphragm is moving.
1:21:18It knows its overall activation state.
1:21:20So when you breathe quickly
1:21:21those 25 or 30 breaths, the brain says, oh, I must be alert.
1:21:24I'm gonna start secreting some noradrenaline.
1:21:26And when you breath slowly,
1:21:28that level of noradrenaline drops down.
1:21:30So it sounds so simple, but I think it's only in the last
1:21:34two or three years that my lab and Mark Krasnow's lab
1:21:37at Stanford and other labs elsewhere in the world
1:21:39have started to identify the neurons
1:21:41in the brain that are linked to breathing
1:21:43and how those two things relate to one another.
1:21:45And I think everybody should have a kit of tools
1:21:49that they can use to bring themselves down
1:21:51and ramp themselves up.
1:21:53I'll just say one other thing about focus.
1:21:55So when we're in a high alert state,
1:21:57something very powerful happens
1:21:59that I think partially explains your your ability now
1:22:02to drop into this book writing.
1:22:04When there's a certain amount of adrenaline in our system,
1:22:06our pupils dilate,
1:22:08remember the eyes are not connected to the brain.
1:22:10Our eyes are actually two pieces of central nervous system.
1:22:13They are two pieces of brain outside the skull
1:22:16that were designed to control our overall arousal state.
1:22:20And so we can talk about this as it relates to sleep
1:22:22and sleep quality, but when I bring up the level
1:22:25of adrenaline in my body through breathing, or let's say
1:22:28I see a troubling text, or let's just say,
1:22:30I just use a very Goggins-type-approach
1:22:33and just figure out the most painful, inspiring for me
1:22:37reason to do it, you know, it sounds vague,
1:22:39'cause obviously David
1:22:40I don't know what goes on in your head
1:22:42but a tremendous respect for your ability to do this.
1:22:44But he just ratchets himself out of that ditch
1:22:46and puts himself in motion, the pupils dilate,
1:22:50and when that happens,
1:22:51our visual system actually enters something
1:22:54that's a little bit more like portrait mode on our phone.
1:22:56There's a process called accommodation
1:22:58and your ability to focus on one thing visually
1:23:02actually becomes better
1:23:04and your ability to see everything else blurs away.
1:23:07And that's the ability to just see that screen of text
1:23:11or that if you were work on, you know, pad and paper
1:23:13to just see that pad and paper.
1:23:15And then as you start writing, what people don't realize is
1:23:18that mental focus follows visual focus.
1:23:22Now in blind people, it's slightly different,
1:23:23it follows auditory focus, but in most people,
1:23:28your visual focus as you bring that
1:23:30into really sharp relief, that image of your book
1:23:33and you stare at you're gonna feel some agitation
1:23:35and your mind's gonna be jumping all over the place.
1:23:37But if you wait just a couple minutes,
1:23:39the rest of the world will disappear.
1:23:41I think this is sort of like the flow state
1:23:43people are looking for.
1:23:44But remember the gate of entry is one of which
1:23:46you have to wade through some sewage
1:23:48before you can swim in clear water.
1:23:50That's the way I always think about it.
1:23:52But the visual focus is what brings the rest of the brain
1:23:56into cognitive focus
1:23:58and people in the martial arts understand this.
1:24:01You've probably experienced this running when
1:24:03you're feeling exhausted and you can just concentrate
1:24:06on one milestone and get there.
1:24:09You can almost bring that into like you
1:24:12what you're doing is you're linking that
1:24:13to the dopamine circuitry.
1:24:14You're saying that thing is the milestone
1:24:17not winning the race, not some other thing outside this,
1:24:21this immediate environment, that thing.
1:24:22And when you're able to start capturing
1:24:24these peripheral circuits, meaning the body, the diaphragm,
1:24:27the visual system, then you start getting past
1:24:31this whole idea of mindsets
1:24:32and it really becomes about the body setting the mind.
1:24:35And this is where I think when you say action
1:24:37leads the rest, right?
1:24:40It's that's what you're saying is grounded
1:24:43in real neuro biological data.
1:24:47There's also a shift in your perception of time
1:24:50when you're in that state, you know,
1:24:51suddenly your relationship with time
1:24:54becomes completely different.
1:24:56So, I'm really glad you-
1:24:58And I'm not like, you know,
1:25:00it's easy to say it slows down or it speeds up,
1:25:02to me it's neither.
1:25:04You're in this weird liminal state
1:25:06where it's almost like it doesn't exist.
1:25:08It's not, it's not a relevant like vector in your,
1:25:12in your emotional experience.
1:25:15I'm really glad you brought this up
1:25:16because one of my obsessions is time perception.
1:25:19And, you know, having spent the last 20 years
1:25:21or so studying the visual system
1:25:22what you start to realize is that space,
1:25:25meaning physical space, not outer space, but physical space
1:25:28around you and your time perception are absolutely linked.
1:25:33And when our focus is very narrow,
1:25:36time starts to feel thin sliced.
1:25:40So, you're right.
1:25:41It's not that it's going fast or slow,
1:25:44it's that you're perceiving more events per unit time.
1:25:48So it's like a metronome that's going faster.
1:25:51When our gaze is dilated,
1:25:53so when we're relaxed, there's actually a,
1:25:56what happens is the pupil kind of relaxes a bit.
1:25:59It doesn't always get bigger or smaller
1:26:00but what happens is when we're relaxed,
1:26:02so if you view a horizon for instance,
1:26:04or you go into what's called panoramic vision,
1:26:06so even though I'm looking at you right now,
1:26:08I can dilate my gaze without moving my head or eyes.
1:26:10So I can see the corners of the room and the ceiling.
1:26:12I can see myself in the environment, when we do that,
1:26:15our perception of time broadens.
1:26:18And we feel like we have more time.
1:26:20And what we're doing when we do that focus
1:26:23versus de-focus as I call it,
1:26:24or focal vision versus panoramic vision is you're toggling
1:26:28on and off the autonomic nervous system for alertness,
1:26:31you're turning on and off that norepinephrine circuit.
1:26:35And so it's conscious control over a brainstem circuit.
1:26:38And this is why I don't like the phrase autonomic,
1:26:40'cause that means automatic, it's a misnomer.
1:26:42All the breathing I can control my autonomic nervous system.
1:26:45I can breathe, I can control my autonomic nervous system,
1:26:48I can eat a big meal.
1:26:49I can control my autonomic nervous system,
1:26:51I can focus or de-focus.
1:26:53And if you really look at the realm of high-performance
1:26:56what you start to realize is people who are very good
1:26:59at their respective sport or career
1:27:04or in the special operations community what they do,
1:27:06are exceptionally good at turning it on and off
1:27:09these systems.
1:27:10So they're highly functional at achieving their milestones
1:27:13but they're not spending out extra energy.
1:27:16Because when you go into panoramic vision,
1:27:18you start to uncouple the space time thing
1:27:21and you get some rest and relaxation.
1:27:24The way to think about this
1:27:25as we go back to duration, path and outcome,
1:27:27that's the most stringent high focus regime for the brain.
1:27:30The way to get better
1:27:32at duration, path, and outcome is to engage
1:27:35in activities that are low duration, path, and outcome
1:27:39where your brain is not in modes
1:27:40of analyzing duration, path, and outcome.
1:27:43What's the one phase of our life when we're not thinking
1:27:47about duration, path, and outcome at all?
1:27:49Sleep, and so the reason why
1:27:54you can pull somebody's mind apart,
1:27:56their ability to think rationally and analyze duration,
1:27:59path and outcome by sleep depriving them, is because sleep
1:28:03despite all its neurochemical complexity is really when
1:28:07we restore our ability to analyze duration,
1:28:10path and outcome. Now you think about BUD/S and you go
1:28:12no wonder they're sleep deprived.
1:28:14They're trying to figure out who has the ability to control
1:28:17these mechanisms and who doesn't, most people fail.
1:28:20So when I think about how to recover,
1:28:23I've I actually don't think about recovery as its own thing.
1:28:27I think about recovery as giving buoyancy
1:28:30or improving my ability to focus.
1:28:33So sleep is the turning off of these brain circuits
1:28:38that are thinking about what's happening next.
1:28:40So some people experience challenges in falling asleep,
1:28:43they need to learn how to turn off thinking.
1:28:45And there's actually a way to do this.
1:28:46We're doing a study on this now, it relates to hypnosis.
1:28:49That will be fun to talk about.
1:28:51And we can, if you like, the other thing is that
1:28:54just merely going into panoramic vision,
1:28:57say between a meeting instead of looking at your phone,
1:28:59more focal vision we're hard on your book.
1:29:02Maybe you walk to the kitchen, just two seconds of,
1:29:04what I call deliberate decompression, where you just kind of
1:29:06let your mind go broader, will allow you to reset your focus
1:29:11much more intensely when you return to that book
1:29:13as opposed to if you'd looked at your phone
1:29:15or engaged even in some other kind of deep duration,
1:29:18path, outcome type function of the brain.
1:29:22So when you start thinking about meditation,
1:29:25it's also valuable because a lot of meditation
1:29:27involves focusing on your breath.
1:29:29I actually think a lot of people
1:29:31are spending out this ability.
1:29:33They're working too hard in the activities
1:29:38that are designed to reset them.
1:29:40So the two ways to reset yourself in wakefulness.
1:29:43Being just very adamant about my meditation practice.
1:29:46That's right.
1:29:47Because it's an, it's a letting go.
1:29:48It's not it's, you know, it's we're so programmed
1:29:51to like force ourselves to do things
1:29:53or to like dive in with intentionality.
1:29:56But so much of this is more elusive than that.
1:30:01I think that we can all do ourselves a great service
1:30:04and perform much better in what we're doing
1:30:08by taking little micro recoveries in the form of dilating
1:30:11our gaze in between meetings, just for a second,
1:30:14viewing a horizon is the best way to do it
1:30:16because it naturally brings the eyes into de-focus.
1:30:18We're doing this in VR because we can control
1:30:20the visual environment completely.
1:30:22When you go into this de-focus mode, you turn off
1:30:25that brainstem circuit, you're conserving norepinephrine
1:30:28for your next bout of focus in activity.
1:30:30Otherwise you're spending it and the brain doesn't care
1:30:33how you spend it.
1:30:34Doesn't care if it's on Instagram, doesn't care
1:30:36if it's watching the news, but learning how to de-focus
1:30:40and then refocus very quickly can get you through a race
1:30:43that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to get through.
1:30:46It saves you energy and it builds energy.
1:30:50The other thing is we talk a lot about sleep
1:30:53and sleep is extremely important, but there are other modes
1:30:56of, and brain states that can allow you to recover.
1:30:58One of the ones that I'm a huge proponent of
1:31:00and that my lab has been studying and other labs
1:31:03are studying is what many people call yoga nidra,
1:31:06where you-
1:31:07I've done yoga nidra a lot.
1:31:08It's a wonderful practice, you know, just lying down
1:31:11and focusing enough of your attention
1:31:13so that you don't fall asleep and enough of your attentions
1:31:17on and moving it around
1:31:18so that you're not really concentrating on any one thing.
1:31:21I fall asleep every time.
1:31:22I do too, yeah, I do too.
1:31:25But what we know,
1:31:26so I fundamentally disagree with respectfully though,
1:31:29with the idea that we can't recover sleep that we've lost.
1:31:32Because what are we really talking about there?
1:31:34For me it's the ability to perform these duration,
1:31:37path, outcome analysis.
1:31:38So in my lab, we have people do a cognitive task
1:31:40and then we place them into these very deep states
1:31:43of relaxation through things
1:31:44that are kind of like yoga nidra
1:31:46and people can find yoga nidra scripts out there.
1:31:47They're everywhere on YouTube, elsewhere,
1:31:50or we have them do a hypnosis script.
1:31:52Hypnosis is very similar, deep relaxation,
1:31:55wandering sort of attention, fairly narrow context,
1:32:00but it brings the brain into these unique states
1:32:03where you're neither asleep nor awake.
1:32:05And for people that have trouble falling asleep,
1:32:08or trouble relaxing themselves, these kinds of practices
1:32:11are extremely useful,
1:32:13because they're really teaching you how to turn off
1:32:16those modes of focus.
1:32:17So, you know, we live in a stress society.
1:32:19Some people are stressed 'cause they're overwhelmed
1:32:21but other people are stressed because they just don't know
1:32:23how to turn off their brain and fall asleep.
1:32:25And so if you wanna learn how to turn off your brain
1:32:28and fall asleep, these practices are immensely useful.
1:32:31How do you practice hypnosis by yourself though?
1:32:34So there's some scripts.
1:32:35I would recommend people go to one of the scripts
1:32:37on YouTube or there's some good ones I've never met him.
1:32:40I don't have any relationship to him, but Michael Sealey,
1:32:43S-E-A-L-E-Y, an Australian guy
1:32:47has some really good hypnosis scripts.
1:32:50And they're just audio programs?
1:32:51Yeah, you just listen to them and these-
1:32:53And he's not gonna make you walk off a cliff or anything.
1:32:56No, so stage hypnosis is very different.
1:32:58So I have a very close collaboration
1:33:00with a guy named David Spiegel,
1:33:01who's in our psychiatry department at Stanford.
1:33:03We're now looking at how daily breathing exercises
1:33:08can impact people's sleep and levels of stress.
1:33:10He's done a lot of work on addiction and trauma
1:33:12and pain management through hypnosis
1:33:14and most all of hypnosis that's clinical
1:33:17involves bringing one's state
1:33:19into one of deeper relaxation, not full sleep.
1:33:23And then thinking about some behavioral change
1:33:25that one wants to make.
1:33:26These are ancient practices, really.
1:33:29And I think that they were developed
1:33:30by people that understood that rewiring
1:33:33of the brain requires focus and deep rest.
1:33:37What's interesting about hypnosis is it brings
1:33:39those two things together at the same moment.
1:33:42So normally you'll work really hard
1:33:43on something work really hard, then you'll sleep
1:33:45and that's when the plasticity occurs.
1:33:47But hypnosis likely accelerates that whole process
1:33:50by having people enter a state of deep relaxation
1:33:54and focus at the same time
1:33:56and allows those circuits to reshape themselves.
1:33:58And there's some published data
1:33:59from David's lab to support that.
1:34:01That's fascinating.
1:34:02So I think these practices are really useful.
1:34:04And I think that if you wanna get better at performing
1:34:07everyone now knows thanks to Matt Walker's book
1:34:09and others like "Sleep More, Sleep Better,"
1:34:11but what if you have trouble sleeping,
1:34:13well or falling asleep?
1:34:14Well, we want to define what that is.
1:34:16Some people have a hard time turning off their thoughts.
1:34:19It's really hard, remember you can't do it.
1:34:21What you can do is to learn to control
1:34:24that perceptual window and distribute it so that your sense
1:34:27of time starts to kind of drift off
1:34:29and you end up in sleep more easily.
1:34:30And it's a practice that most people find if they do it
1:34:32for 10 minutes a day or so, they start sleeping
1:34:35much better within a week or more.
1:34:38And sometimes more, they sometimes people need
1:34:40some other help, like not drinking caffeine
1:34:42late in the day et cetera.
1:34:43But that brain state of no duration,
1:34:47path and outcome analysis is gonna be the most restorative
1:34:50and you can get it in wakefulness too.
1:34:51So taking a walk where you're just letting your mind go
1:34:55is very powerful.
1:34:56And the other thing that's powerful is optic flow.
1:34:59So self-generated optic flow by walking, running,
1:35:03or cycling shifts the brain into a state of relaxation
1:35:08that's not seen when you're stationary.
1:35:11This is well-described in the neuroscience literature
1:35:13for some reasons not well-described
1:35:15in the wellness literature, but it's a real thing.
1:35:20When you move through space, you're active,
1:35:23you're, there's a natural calming of the brain circuits
1:35:25involved in threat and threat detection.
1:35:27This is the basis for EMDR,
1:35:29eye movement desensitization reprocessing,
1:35:32the lateralized eye movements they have people do
1:35:33in the clinic that on a goofy-looking thing
1:35:35while they do counter trauma. I've heard you talk
1:35:36about that, to overcome fear and trauma.
1:35:39That lowers stress and the rationale is that
1:35:43by coupling a low stress state, to the recall of the trauma
1:35:48it's gonna allow people to reshape the relationship
1:35:50to the trauma, to tolerate that discomfort.
1:35:54And it, EMDR my clinical colleagues tell me
1:35:57works best for fairly well-defined traumas.
1:36:01It's not gonna be like my childhood or, you know
1:36:04a whole series of events, but for single event traumas
1:36:06or trauma that's repeated, but of the same sort,
1:36:10it seems to work best.
1:36:12It's not gonna work best to completely reshape
1:36:14all relationships to all traumas,
1:36:16but it does seem to be powerful
1:36:18for a certain group of people.
1:36:19So, basically an example would be if you got
1:36:21into a car accident, and then you're afraid to get in a car
1:36:23or something like that, right?
1:36:24So you take this person and you submit them
1:36:28to this therapy where they move their eyes
1:36:31back and forth laterally, which seems absurd.
1:36:33Seems goofy, right.
1:36:35So this is supposed to help them
1:36:37get over their fear or their blockage?
1:36:39Yeah, so, okay.
1:36:41So my lab studies vision and we study stress
1:36:45and states of mind, and people used to talk
1:36:47to me about EMDR and asked me about EMDR.
1:36:49And I was like, this is crazy.
1:36:50This sounds like a music genre.
1:36:52This is absurd, right?
1:36:53Or a drug.
1:36:54Makes no sense, why would moving the eyes
1:36:55from side to side, have any impact on states of mind?
1:36:58That's ridiculous.
1:37:00But then what happened was in 2018, 2019 and 2020,
1:37:03five quality manuscripts came out in very good journals,
1:37:07from groups that were studying eye movements,
1:37:10not studying stress or trauma that found
1:37:12that these lateralized eye movements not up and down,
1:37:14but lateralized eye movements,
1:37:16quiet the activity of the amygdala,
1:37:18the limbic structure in the brain
1:37:20that's primarily responsible for threat detection
1:37:23and stress.
1:37:25And I was like, oh my goodness
1:37:27this thing might actually be real.
1:37:29Then I started to dig into the backstory of this.
1:37:31And there was a woman named Francine Shapiro
1:37:34who came up with this idea, actually walking behind Stanford
1:37:38in the Stanford Hills, she was a therapist.
1:37:40And she figured she had this idea based on the fact that she
1:37:43didn't feel as upset about certain things
1:37:45when she was walking, that this might be useful.
1:37:48And she was smart enough to know
1:37:50that these lateralized eye movements
1:37:51are what reflexively occur anytime we're in optic flow.
1:37:54We don't realize it 'cause they're subconsciously generated
1:37:56and they're very subtle,
1:37:58but she realized she couldn't really take people walking
1:38:00on their therapy sessions, I suppose she could,
1:38:02but it's not really practical, it's raining, et cetera.
1:38:05So what she decided to do
1:38:06was to bring the eye movement component to the clinic
1:38:09and have them move their eyes from side to side
1:38:11while they would recount these traumas,
1:38:13and people experienced tremendous benefit.
1:38:16And in fact, now there's a lot of evidence to show
1:38:19that these lateralized eye movements
1:38:20really do quiet the stress of the nervous system
1:38:23and allow people to continue to move forward.
1:38:25This is probably all anchored.
1:38:28I go back to that story of that deer that needs something.
1:38:31And as it's feeling that agitation and gets up
1:38:34and starts moving, the movement feeds back
1:38:37onto the brain to quiet that stress and anxiety.
1:38:39So it can be observant of its environment.
1:38:42And that panoramic mode is what we are in
1:38:46when we are in a position to be very situationally aware.
1:38:51When we're stressed, we are gonna have, you know,
1:38:53soda straw view of the world, right?
1:38:56This relates directly to addiction
1:38:58because I've spent some time at addition treatment clinics
1:39:00and talking to people in that community.
1:39:02And it's very clear that of course there are a huge number
1:39:04of factors that play into why people become addicted
1:39:07and relapse, et cetera.
1:39:09But if you can get at people's ability
1:39:11to control their anxiety,
1:39:13and their feelings of peak states and happiness,
1:39:16you don't guarantee, but you help reinforce the possibility
1:39:22that they're gonna get sober and stay sober.
1:39:25As an addict gets more tethered
1:39:27to the idea that some substances, the thing they need,
1:39:30the progressive narrowing
1:39:31of the things that bring them pleasure
1:39:33and everything else kind of falls away
1:39:34like portrait mode on the phone,
1:39:37they're essentially in a state of high stress
1:39:39trying to meet that dopamine need all the time
1:39:42and they don't see other possibilities.
1:39:45The reason I mentioned not just stress
1:39:47and treating stress to get at addiction
1:39:50but also pleasure is that we've also seen this.
1:39:52When do people relapse?
1:39:53When they're feeling really good.
1:39:55When they're feeling really lousy and stressed
1:39:57and when they're feeling really good.
1:39:58They've been sober for five years.
1:40:00We hear about this in the news,
1:40:01usually from celebrity examples,
1:40:03people have been doing great,
1:40:04all of a sudden they're back in treatment.
1:40:06And you're like, what happened?
1:40:07What happened was the dopamine circuit from other things
1:40:10maybe a great life event or things are going well
1:40:13or stress, the loss of a job, everything crashing,
1:40:17puts our visual system
1:40:18and the rest of our brain into a myopia.
1:40:21We become near, we literally become near-sighted
1:40:23and the dopamine system says
1:40:26that's the only thing that's gonna get me
1:40:28out of the mode that I'm in.
1:40:29They literally don't see the other possibilities.
1:40:31So some of the work that I'm starting
1:40:33to get involved in now is to try
1:40:35and inform the addiction treatment community,
1:40:37the trauma community, that there are ways to use action
1:40:41in the body to move people out of states of myopia,
1:40:44near-sightedness.
1:40:45And this is kind of a cognitive near-sightedness,
1:40:48and allow them to start pursing
1:40:51their time perception differently.
1:40:53It hard, you know, it goes right back to time perception.
1:40:56When an addict needs something,
1:40:58their sense of time is fixed to the retrieval of that thing
1:41:02or the, you know, reaching that thing.
1:41:04And then when they can dilate their sense of time,
1:41:06they realize they have time for other options,
1:41:10but until you can dilate that,
1:41:11there's really no chance, frankly.
1:41:13You can't find a way in.
1:41:14You can't find a way.
1:41:15You can tell somebody you're gonna lose your kids,
1:41:17and they'll do it anyway.
1:41:18And that just tells us we need another route to it.
1:41:21And so one of the things I think is powerful is to think
1:41:23about how can we leverage the visual system?
1:41:26How can we leverage the diaphragm system?
1:41:29In the same way that you would tell a, you know,
1:41:32somebody who's in, you know, has cancer
1:41:34or needs a surgery of a certain sort,
1:41:35like we need to leverage certain technologies.
1:41:38Well, we need to leverage certain inborn technologies
1:41:42of respiration and vision to be able to access states
1:41:45of mind that will allow us to make better choices.
1:41:47For the addict in that really near-sighted view fixated,
1:41:51there is no other choice.
1:41:52And I think those early years of skateboarding and being
1:41:57you know, feral, it showed me that these, the people I knew
1:42:00that became addicts and frankly, I know some adults
1:42:02who have become addicts, even who have very quote-unquote
1:42:05functional lives, it wasn't just them,
1:42:08those people, you know, we like to think
1:42:11they're making a bad choice and they had,
1:42:14they're making a bad decision.
1:42:16It's unclear to me whether or not they have a choice
1:42:19in those highly myopic states of mind.
1:42:22And so what we need to do is we need to dilate
1:42:24their perception of the world around them.
1:42:26We need to dilate their perception of time.
1:42:28We need to learn.
1:42:29They need to learn how to relax themselves
1:42:31so they can actually see other options.
1:42:34And it all relates to how the visual system
1:42:37and the breathing system relate to autonomic function.
1:42:39Addiction is the perfect sort of laboratory
1:42:43to do this, and it's so important, I think,
1:42:45because if it were simply the case that people just
1:42:48needed family support and which they do, and they needed
1:42:53you know, encouragement and they need discouragement
1:42:56about making the wrong behaviors, then this,
1:42:58we wouldn't even
1:42:59be having this discussion. It's so much
1:42:59more complicated than that.
1:43:00It's so much more complicated.
1:43:01I mean, the thing, I think all of those are,
1:43:05you know, really powerful tools and important things
1:43:07to look at with respect to the addict mentality
1:43:11or that disposition.
1:43:13There has to be a level of self-awareness in that addict
1:43:16that the decision to pick up the drink or to use the drug
1:43:20begins so far in advance of the actual behavior.
1:43:25By the time they actually pick up that drink,
1:43:27there's no getting in the way of that.
1:43:29Like that decision has so much momentum
1:43:32behind it that it's almost impossible to reverse.
1:43:34So a breathing technique or any technique
1:43:37at that juncture is unlikely to be successful.
1:43:40So it's about recognizing, you know,
1:43:43when that state is starting to shift in that direction
1:43:46whether it's days or hours or weeks
1:43:48before the behavior choice to intervene at a place in time
1:43:53when you can actually have an impact.
1:43:56I agree.
1:43:57I think that it's always an uphill battle with addiction
1:44:00at least at first, but even just given
1:44:02that the numbers on relapse, you know, I think every
1:44:05what was it that someone wants told me?
1:44:07I don't know if this is actually true,
1:44:09but for most people, but he said,
1:44:11a recovered addict told me, you know, he
1:44:13that everyday he tells himself, no matter how far I drive,
1:44:16I'm always the same distance from the ditch, you know?
1:44:19I mean, the addiction community has-
1:44:20There's so many awesome.
1:44:21There's so many great takeaways, yeah.
1:44:23What's interesting is there's a, some verbiage
1:44:29around the yoga community that is very valuable.
1:44:32I can't recall it off the top of my head,
1:44:35but they talk about the great support that one can get
1:44:40from learning to access brain states of timelessness, sleep
1:44:46being very restorative, wakeful, deliberate disengagement
1:44:49being very restorative, maybe meditation,
1:44:52maybe through yoga nidra, maybe through simple,
1:44:54quick breathing techniques, but being able to dilate
1:44:57and contract one sense of time and not being locked
1:45:00to one kind of space-time regime, the ability to recognize
1:45:06that I'm not seeing clearly
1:45:08or I see what I see, but I don't know what I don't see,
1:45:12the ability to introduce that understanding
1:45:15for somebody can be very powerful.
1:45:16And I think we need to give them tools
1:45:18that they can look to very quickly.
1:45:20I don't think we're ever gonna have a treatment
1:45:22for addiction that's in the form of a pharmaceutical,
1:45:24like one pill,
1:45:25because if you start tapping
1:45:26into the dopamine system itself,
1:45:28you start degrading other aspects of life.
1:45:30So I think one of the reasons why addiction treatment
1:45:32is so complicated is that you need many elements,
1:45:35but the elements that come from the person themselves
1:45:38are ultimately the most important ones, of course.
1:45:41And I think physiology and neuroscience does have some tools
1:45:44that can lend support to that.
1:45:45Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
1:45:47I mean, I think that every couple of years
1:45:51you see new science emerge on addiction
1:45:53and there's some new protocol and, you know
1:45:5712 steps constantly getting thrown under the bus
1:45:59and, you know, 12 steps, what got me sober,
1:46:02and I'm very rooted in that community.
1:46:06I remain open to other, you know, modalities and protocols
1:46:09and super interested in seeing where all of this is going,
1:46:14but I think it is important to appreciate how complex it is.
1:46:17Like there's a trauma element to it.
1:46:19There's a, you know, behavioral modification element to it.
1:46:23There's an emotional, like how do you,
1:46:25how do you find a way to anchor this person to a path
1:46:28a life path that has meaning and purpose
1:46:30and all of these things inform this complex, you know,
1:46:34soup that's going on in their head, that's dictating
1:46:37whether they're gonna pick up a drink or not?
1:46:39Yeah, and you know and I love the neuroscience community
1:46:42with, you know, it's been my family
1:46:43and home for many years now.
1:46:45And the people working on addiction are, you know,
1:46:49motivated from the right place.
1:46:50And they are, you know, working exceedingly hard.
1:46:53There are a lot of data now that show,
1:46:55you know, for instance, there are complete genetic changes
1:46:58in the cells that can, you know,
1:46:59and the pathways that control dopamine and reward.
1:47:01And that's all wonderful to understand.
1:47:03But meanwhile, I think there are enough tools out there
1:47:06that they need to be aggregated in a way that's structured
1:47:09and that addiction treatment communities can leverage.
1:47:13One of the things that would be of great use
1:47:14is the idea of a biomarker.
1:47:16So you described that, you know,
1:47:18and it's really a beautiful example of how when some,
1:47:20early on you might be able to intervene,
1:47:22but later it gets much harder.
1:47:24We need biomarkers that are gonna tell us
1:47:27for some people or their family, that somebody is at risk.
1:47:30Some of you have biomarkers-
1:47:31Some kind of whooped device, right?
1:47:33Well, I think it's gonna come from once you know
1:47:36how well somebody is regulating
1:47:38their own autonomic nervous system,
1:47:39you can predict pretty well whether or not
1:47:43they're going to succeed or fail in making good decisions.
1:47:47And so I do think a whoop type device
1:47:49or other sensor device could be tremendously beneficial
1:47:52in detecting and telling people
1:47:56whether or not they are veering off course.
1:47:58Right.
1:47:59And I think-
1:48:00It's getting very minority report though.
1:48:01It is, I mean, I think machines are gonna help us
1:48:04make a lot of decisions
1:48:05that we're actually pretty poor at making.
1:48:07But the simplest of those that we might see
1:48:10in the next two or three years is saying, look,
1:48:12you've been working extremely hard on your book.
1:48:14You're doing very well, but you're gonna need an extra hour
1:48:18of sleep, I mean,
1:48:18that's essentially what it's doing for you, or-
1:48:21In 12 hours you're gonna make a bad decision.
1:48:23In 12 hours you're gonna make a bad decision.
1:48:25or even cuing it, or insert might in there, right?
1:48:29You might make a bad decision so that you're more aware
1:48:31and you're gonna devote a little more mental energy
1:48:33to the kinds of decisions you're making.
1:48:35I think that as I pull a lot of all nighters and I still do
1:48:39unfortunately in my career writing grants and so forth.
1:48:42And I have this rule that I learned,
1:48:44my gosh about 15 years ago which is I don't trust
1:48:47any of my thinking that occurs between 3:00 AM and 7:00 AM
1:48:51if I've been up all night, I just don't trust it,
1:48:52because I start to think the world's falling apart.
1:48:55I start thinking the word the is misspelled.
1:48:58I mean, I really know I'm sleep deprived when words
1:49:00like the look misspelled
1:49:02and then I'm like, what's going on?
1:49:04That's that duration, path, outcomes circuitry
1:49:07starting to try and starting to fall apart.
1:49:09So I think that that's an extreme example
1:49:11but I think that short of having people buffer their lives
1:49:14with tons of activities
1:49:15and perfect nutrition and perfect social interactions,
1:49:18people learning to control their autonomic nervous system,
1:49:20I think is really the next step in our species evolution.
1:49:25I really believe that what we are seeing now in the world
1:49:30is a call to arms, if you will, or a request
1:49:35from mother nature to have everybody learn
1:49:38how to control their autonomic nervous system
1:49:40a little bit better or ideally a lot better.
1:49:43Yeah, it's absolutely critical, I think.
1:49:45I mean, right now, you know, irrespective of what's going on
1:49:49with the pandemic and the political climate,
1:49:52and the protests and all the upheaval that we're seeing,
1:49:55as a culture, we're experiencing an extraordinary poverty
1:49:59of attention and focus.
1:50:01We're so distracted by our devices.
1:50:04We're more anxious and stressed
1:50:05and depressed than we ever have been before.
1:50:08This is not going in a good direction.
1:50:11And to the extent that we can commandeer
1:50:14a little bit more control over these things and understand
1:50:17that we have some level of agency
1:50:19and we can reverse this sort of automatic pattern
1:50:25that we're on of just scrolling endlessly and, you know,
1:50:29doing what we're doing that we know is not leading us
1:50:31in a good direction is critical
1:50:33if we're gonna find our way forward.
1:50:34And to speak a little bit to what's going on right now,
1:50:38I think, you know, and it's related,
1:50:40and I'm interested in your thoughts on, you know,
1:50:43the neuroscience that is, you know,
1:50:47I think relevant to this is that we've lost the ability
1:50:52to have civil discourse.
1:50:54There's a real breakdown in communication right now,
1:50:56culturally and socially, and it's fractured our society
1:51:01and it's not good, right?
1:51:04So what is going on neurologically
1:51:07with human beings that are attaching themselves
1:51:11and it's so self identifying with certain narratives
1:51:14that it's polarizing our population and preventing us
1:51:18from being able to just be together or united
1:51:23or agree upon what is true and what is not true
1:51:26and share a value system so that we can see our way
1:51:30through the challenges that we're facing right now,
1:51:33which many of which are an existential threat
1:51:36to the future of humanity and the planet.
1:51:39It's a huge problem, you articulated it beautifully.
1:51:44And I think neuroscience can offer a couple of insights
1:51:47into why it's happening
1:51:49and perhaps what we might do about it.
1:51:51So, one of the scientific results that I'm very intrigued by
1:51:56is in the 1960s, a guy named Robert Heath recorded
1:51:58from the human brain, there are people
1:52:00you can't do this experiment nowadays,
1:52:02but skull popped off, my neurosurgery friends tell me
1:52:05that's no big deal, electrodes lower deep into the brain,
1:52:10all over the brain and people can stimulate
1:52:11wherever they want
1:52:12and they just report what they're feeling.
1:52:14So press one lever, they feel drunk.
1:52:16They press another lever, they feel happy.
1:52:18They press another lever, they feel sexually aroused.
1:52:20And they're reporting all of this, right?
1:52:22When was this done?
1:52:23In the 1960s, the early 1960s.
1:52:26Several times actually, and published twice
1:52:29essentially the same data, different populations
1:52:30in the journal science which is sort of our Super Bowl
1:52:33science and nature cell, those are the big ones,
1:52:35journals rep that is,
1:52:37so the number one brain area that people want to stimulate.
1:52:42They finally hit this lever where they go, oh, I like that.
1:52:46And they just keep hitting that thing and hitting that thing
1:52:48and hitting that thing, frustration and mild anger.
1:52:53And I saw that result. That's the choice.
1:52:55I could be drunk, I could be happy.
1:52:57I could be, I'm gonna choose frustration and anger.
1:53:00Exactly, it's, what that told us is it's clearly tapped
1:53:03into the dopamine reward system.
1:53:05It feels like a hit of dopamine to them,
1:53:08more than anything else.
1:53:09So, we need to put that on the shelf and keep it visible
1:53:13as we kind of march into this sort of answer
1:53:17to your question.
1:53:19The other thing is an understanding that,
1:53:21and there's some recent data on this
1:53:22that are really impressive, not from my lab
1:53:24but from another lab, which is that beliefs
1:53:27and information that supports our prior beliefs,
1:53:31also increases the activity of these reward systems.
1:53:34So the more I see stuff that verifies what I already think
1:53:37or feel that they are bad and they are good
1:53:39or that we are good and they are bad,
1:53:42the more dopamine and adrenaline is released into my system.
1:53:46Which we now know from our discussion a few minutes ago,
1:53:49changes the way I view the world.
1:53:51It actually changes the way I view the world.
1:53:53It means that I'm gonna see certain things
1:53:54and not see others.
1:53:55And this also relates to the auditory system.
1:53:57I'm gonna hear certain things and not hear others.
1:53:59The things that verify my beliefs
1:54:01are I'm gonna feel rewarded for,
1:54:03the things that are counter to my beliefs,
1:54:06I'm not gonna be it's rewarded for.
1:54:08So we have all these barricades
1:54:10to empathy and to really listening
1:54:13and to really hearing what the other side is trying to say.
1:54:16And we have all these support networks
1:54:18in our body and our brain
1:54:20which are building a bigger and bigger divide.
1:54:23Now that's all very depressing.
1:54:25So the question is, what's the boat
1:54:26that's gonna get us across that divide.
1:54:29And I believe, and I am not just defaulting to this
1:54:33'cause it's what my lab works on,
1:54:34but I fundamentally believe
1:54:36that the boat that's gonna get us to the other side
1:54:39is our ability to control our internal state,
1:54:43to be able to ratchet down our level of autonomic arousal,
1:54:47just enough so that I can dilate not just my vision,
1:54:50of what's happening in my immediate environment,
1:54:52but I can dilate my cognition, my thinking,
1:54:55to the possibility that there may be a kernel of value
1:54:58in what somebody else is saying, even if it's about me,
1:55:00and I don't like what I'm hearing.
1:55:02Now, as somebody who spent time
1:55:04in the addiction treatment community, you probably know,
1:55:06this is a lot of what you get good at as you learn to move
1:55:09through something that to you feels very good and you know
1:55:15all the reasons why it would probably be good to change it,
1:55:18but you know what you don't want to,
1:55:20because it feels so good.
1:55:22So we're talking about an addiction to entrenched thinking.
1:55:25We're talking about an addiction and neurochemical systems
1:55:28that support, lack of change my refusal to change,
1:55:31and stubbornness.
1:55:33And I actually think just like in, for the treatment
1:55:35of addiction and trauma, the key is to get people to learn
1:55:38to tolerate progressively higher levels of stress,
1:55:42and maintain dilation of sensory experience,
1:55:46of thought experience.
1:55:47We've got to create some small little portals
1:55:52through which information can come in.
1:55:54A lot's been made of mirror neurons.
1:55:56I hate to break it to the crowd, but the data in support
1:55:59of mirror neurons in humans is not that impressive.
1:56:02And now the mirror neuron people are gonna come after me,
1:56:04but fine.
1:56:05There are circuits in the brain
1:56:08that control emotional contagion.
1:56:10And those are what's powerful.
1:56:12My ability to recruit you into stress is much more powerful,
1:56:17than my ability to recruit you into empathy
1:56:20for something good.
1:56:21That's a well-established neuro-biological fact.
1:56:23Or empathy for someone's perspective
1:56:27that you know, that I'm fundamentally
1:56:31going to disagree with.
1:56:32Right, so I think there are three gates to getting there.
1:56:35And by there, I think we're, you know,
1:56:37I'm referring vaguely to the idea
1:56:39that we need to increase our level of understanding
1:56:42at least our level of discourse
1:56:44so that we can hear other really hear other people's ideas,
1:56:47even though we don't like the way it feels,
1:56:49and we love the way that we feel.
1:56:50This is one of the results, so we love the way we feel.
1:56:53We don't like the way other people feel.
1:56:54The first thing is to bring the level of urgency
1:56:59that we feel internally down.
1:57:00We need to learn to calm ourselves
1:57:02in order to really have the information start to come in.
1:57:05Now, the system right now, and people out there
1:57:08everyone's in a frenzy and you can see it, our collect
1:57:11the collective consciousness is kind of losing its mind.
1:57:14It's kind of out of its mind.
1:57:15We need to learn how to turn off those amygdala circuits.
1:57:17So are we all gonna get together and do EMDR?
1:57:19Probably not.
1:57:20Are we all gonna get together and do breathing exercises?
1:57:23Probably not, not at scale.
1:57:25What we need to do is start to figure out how we can,
1:57:29I think, especially for the next generation of kids,
1:57:31how to teach them to regulate their nervous system,
1:57:34so that they recognize that pulse of adrenaline
1:57:37as placing them in a compromised position.
1:57:40Like we have to leverage the idea that being able to hear
1:57:43and listen, hinges on the ability to be calm.
1:57:46So therefore the ability to be calm is crucial to hearing
1:57:49and listening and hearing and listening is crucial
1:57:52to our advancement as individuals and as groups.
1:57:55The problem is everyone's been trying to do this backwards.
1:57:58They've said we all have to get along.
1:57:59We have to cancel, cancel culture.
1:58:01We all have to, you know, listen to one another.
1:58:04And I think, again, we have to start from the inside.
1:58:06We have to teach it physiologically.
1:58:09Now I don't have a master plan on how to do that,
1:58:11but one of the reasons I'm here
1:58:12and one of the reasons I'm teaching neuroscience
1:58:15on Instagram and not just in my laboratory is,
1:58:17until we can learn to regulate the self,
1:58:20I don't think we're gonna get where we wanna go
1:58:23as a culture.
1:58:24I think it really does start
1:58:26with our own individual ability to do that.
1:58:29And so, you know,
1:58:30David's a really good example for instance,
1:58:33of somebody who learn how to deal with his own internal mess
1:58:37and build something beautiful out of that.
1:58:38And he continues to do that.
1:58:40And everyone's got to find that process for themselves
1:58:43and whether or not you have a perfect family,
1:58:45or whether or not you consider yourself the most inclusive
1:58:47and accepting person in the world or not,
1:58:50everyone needs to learn how to do that for themselves.
1:58:52And everyone thinks we do it pretty well,
1:58:54but I think it's clear that none of us do it well enough.
1:58:58So, autonomic arousal, autonomic arousal, autonomic control.
1:59:01I think those are the entry points for addiction,
1:59:04for trauma, and for really impact that hearing
1:59:07and listening, and until we do that
1:59:10I think our species is gonna continue to go
1:59:12around this merry-go-round where every 50
1:59:14or a hundred years we crash
1:59:15right up against the same general set of issues,
1:59:18only now social media has made it slightly more,
1:59:21or a lot more complicated.
1:59:22It's a little bit similar to what you were talking about
1:59:26in terms of the seeking external validation,
1:59:30versus finding it within yourself.
1:59:31Like essentially the protocol,
1:59:34the prescription that you just gave has a strain of Buddhism
1:59:38in it, in the sense that the world's gonna change
1:59:41when we change ourselves.
1:59:42Like the best, most impactful way
1:59:44that you can make a difference for the world,
1:59:47is to focus on being the best version of yourself.
1:59:49How can you comport yourself in a way
1:59:53that allows you to be more receptive,
1:59:56and objective and empathetic and able to listen and hear?
2:00:00And I think that's true, it's a hundred percent true.
2:00:04And then I think about the person losing their shit
2:00:07and, you know, target or whatever
2:00:09over the masks or whatever, you know,
2:00:12insane video clip of the day,
2:00:13I happened to see on social media.
2:00:15And I think we're doomed, like,
2:00:17is this person gonna do that?
2:00:18No, I can't control that, I can only control myself.
2:00:22And I worry that when the onus is on the individual
2:00:26to solve the problem, that,
2:00:30that we're not gonna find our way through it, right?
2:00:32Like we obviously need organizational, institutional,
2:00:35and systemic changes.
2:00:36We need to change the way these social media platforms work,
2:00:39the way in which we're delivered information
2:00:41and the way in which we're siloed,
2:00:44but I don't have any control over any of those things.
2:00:47The only thing I have control over
2:00:49is my own internal mechanism.
2:00:53So what other choice do we have?
2:00:54Well, I think we need people in positions of power
2:00:56and leadership who are very good at internal control.
2:00:59You know, I think emotions are great.
2:01:02I experienced them often intensely, but-
2:01:06Congratulations.
2:01:07Thank you.
2:01:09They're not always wonderful to experience,
2:01:11but I think it's clear that the level of autonomic arousal
2:01:15that's associated with emotion's either very high
2:01:18or very low, very happy or very sad, very anxious
2:01:21or very angry, clouds our judgment.
2:01:26It's very clear and I think the sooner-
2:01:28We give them too much credence too,
2:01:30they're just feelings, man.
2:01:31Like we don't have to allow them to overtake us
2:01:34and monopolize everything that we do.
2:01:37They were designed to push us
2:01:38along certain behavioral paths,
2:01:41but they've grown in importance in the last few years.
2:01:46And, you know, we could get into a discussion about how,
2:01:49you know, social media marketing are designed to capture
2:01:52these very deep limbic aspects of ourselves,
2:01:55and they are, but what's amazing is and important is
2:01:58that everybody has a forebrain.
2:02:01Some people, it seems it's more developed than others,
2:02:03but everybody has one.
2:02:05And we have this capacity for what we call top down control
2:02:08which is the ability to intervene in our own feeling states
2:02:12and our own action states and to set some rigor
2:02:15and some real clear marks that we're out to achieve.
2:02:20And I think it's gonna start with the generation
2:02:23that's very plastic right now.
2:02:25You know, most parents are afraid of stressing their kids
2:02:29because they don't wanna, you know, again, I went
2:02:31to a high school where kids literally at Gunn High School
2:02:34in the last 10 years, kids have, you know,
2:02:36there've been over a dozen, you know, train track suicides.
2:02:39So those are kids that are committing suicide
2:02:42for different reasons, but a lot of them
2:02:43is 'cause they just feel too much pressure.
2:02:46So obviously we can't, you know, we can't pressure kids
2:02:49beyond their capacity to regulate.
2:02:52But the idea that all of our internal state
2:02:56should be driven by external things,
2:02:58that's a foolish misstep also.
2:03:00So, I think we need to operationalize
2:03:03what we're gonna teach the next generation.
2:03:05You know, maybe our generation isn't really rescueable,
2:03:09but maybe the next generation is.
2:03:10And if they understand that there's some concepts
2:03:13that sound a little mushy, like gratitude,
2:03:17or mindfulness or these kinds of things, but as long
2:03:21as they understand that, for instance, gratitude,
2:03:23which we didn't really touch on,
2:03:25involves a whole other neurotransmitter reward system
2:03:27in the brain, the serotonin system, which buffers us
2:03:30against injury, it can improve wound repair,
2:03:33it can allow us to lean back
2:03:34into these high stress regimes, learning
2:03:37and kids learning how to toggle their nervous system
2:03:40back and forth between highly, you know,
2:03:43duration, path, outcome focus states of trying to improve
2:03:46and learn and then learning how to really relax
2:03:49and chill out and enjoy and be socially connected,
2:03:52because it will allow them to ratchet back in,
2:03:54and focus with extreme depth.
2:03:56I think in doing that,
2:03:57we might not get every child to learn how to do that,
2:04:00but if we can distribute that information widely enough
2:04:04and there's so many brilliant examples
2:04:05and beautiful example, yours, David's, many others
2:04:08of people that have been able
2:04:09to tap into those systems intuitively,
2:04:11if we can get that information out there,
2:04:14I really believe that at least a subset of those kids
2:04:17will grow up to be the leaders that our species really needs
2:04:21in order to get through this next filter.
2:04:24And right now we're feeling the stringency of that filter.
2:04:27And I think our level
2:04:28of autonomic dysregulation as a species,
2:04:31the fact that we're there, we're here right now says,
2:04:35okay, here's the task.
2:04:37Are you guys gonna figure yourselves out?
2:04:39You got this forebrain, my dog doesn't have
2:04:40the forebrain I've got, he can't figure it out,
2:04:42but we can work this out.
2:04:44And it'll involve technologies,
2:04:45like devices to measure how we're doing,
2:04:48maybe some machines to guide that,
2:04:50that's a different discussion,
2:04:51but I think it's entirely possible.
2:04:54And I think that's the evolutionary pressure
2:04:55that we're in right now.
2:04:57And I think that the next generation,
2:05:00if they can hear about it and learn about it,
2:05:02is gonna meet that demand.
2:05:03Our species has done it for every other demand.
2:05:06I toggle back and forth between extreme optimism
2:05:09and, you know, dystopian despair.
2:05:12Because on the one hand, you know,
2:05:14you described the experience of going to therapy
2:05:18and you know, how that was kind of, you know,
2:05:20novel at that time, but we're not in that place anymore.
2:05:23And everybody's got a smartphone and there's, you know,
2:05:26head space and calm and waking up
2:05:28and all these incredible apps
2:05:29and mindfulness is part of the mainstream modern vernacular.
2:05:33Like these kids are growing up,
2:05:35not only aware of these practices, but amenable
2:05:41and you know, they're, it's being done in the households
2:05:43in which they're being raised,
2:05:45which I find to be, you know, that's an amazing thing.
2:05:48I think there is a consciousness that is emerging
2:05:52out of these young people that hopefully, you know,
2:05:55we can rely on to solve some of these problems.
2:05:57And then, you know, I just think about the endless scrolling
2:06:00and the associated, you know, I'm just like,
2:06:01oh yes, we're fucked.
2:06:03Well, I think it's clear that most people, young or old,
2:06:06are content to be passive consumers
2:06:09and spend out their dopamine doing
2:06:11essentially meaningless activities,
2:06:13and consuming food and consuming air
2:06:16and light that is basically damaging to themselves.
2:06:18And they, I don't think they care.
2:06:20I think there are species let's be fair, our species is-
2:06:25Non-essential.
2:06:26Well, no, no, I didn't say that.
2:06:28our species, although sometimes I think it'd be interesting
2:06:30if some other species ran the earth
2:06:32but we're the curators of the planet.
2:06:33So I think that our species is probably divided
2:06:37into those that are really going to try
2:06:39and maximize on this gift of neuroplasticity, right?
2:06:42We're the only species that has neuro-plasticity
2:06:44throughout the lifespan and that neuroplasticity
2:06:48in childhood lasts as long as it does as a function
2:06:50of our total lifespan, it's incredible.
2:06:52So we were gifted this and I think some people leverage it
2:06:55and take advantage of it and other people don't.
2:06:58And I think we need to accept
2:06:59that we're not gonna get everybody,
2:07:01but what we need to do is attach the reward systems
2:07:05of society, financial, socio-economic, et cetera
2:07:08to the kinds of behaviors that are
2:07:10is gonna give rise to people that can lead us
2:07:13into the next hundred years, 200 years.
2:07:15Now that is not saying, oh do away with monetary systems,
2:07:18actually the opposite.
2:07:20I think that once people start to realize
2:07:21that you're high performing military elite, military
2:07:26your high performing athlete,
2:07:27your high performing academics,
2:07:28you're high-performing business people,
2:07:30they actually have practices that they use
2:07:32to regulate themselves to in order to
2:07:35not just perform better, but sleep better
2:07:37and not just to sleep better, but to listen better,
2:07:40not just listen better but incorporate ideas that allow them
2:07:43into states of creativity and states of mind
2:07:46that really lead to new and exciting ways
2:07:49that humans can interact.
2:07:51And the many people will just be consumers of everything
2:07:53they produce.
2:07:54Well, all of the, what's what's great about new media
2:07:58is that we've democratized access to this information.
2:08:02And we're able to realize that these people
2:08:06are not just freaks of nature
2:08:07but that they have a methodology,
2:08:09and they've created this canon, this tool kit
2:08:11and these practices are available to everybody.
2:08:15And you have people like David who are explaining this
2:08:18in very plain terms, that it is within your power
2:08:22to take advantage of these things,
2:08:23to take better control of your life.
2:08:25And we've never seen anything like that before,
2:08:27in the history of humanity.
2:08:29And I think that, that, you know,
2:08:31that bodes well for the empowerment of the next generation
2:08:35as well.
2:08:35I do too, I, as you can probably tell,
2:08:37I'm optimistic, I have to be,
2:08:40because otherwise I can't justify the work that we're doing
2:08:43but I think that there's so much interest now
2:08:47in psychology and the brain and the self
2:08:49in physical fitness, which, you know,
2:08:52I think it's fair to say is inextricably linked
2:08:55to mental fitness.
2:08:57And the fact that people are so curious
2:09:00about what other people are doing
2:09:01and what are the paths to success and you know,
2:09:04what are the resources for trauma and addiction?
2:09:06I think there's been a kind of swarm of information.
2:09:09It's been hard to sort through,
2:09:11but I think 2020 is our, you know, is our sort of call
2:09:16I keep calling it a call to arms,
2:09:17and I, 'cause I guess I do feel that way.
2:09:19It's very serious, this is serious business
2:09:22and this is the time for us and the next generation
2:09:26to step up and, you know, and to lead people
2:09:29toward a place where we can function better
2:09:32and where the next generation
2:09:33will reflexively function better.
2:09:35That's that beauty of early childhood is that
2:09:37if some of this stuff is taught and passed off,
2:09:39it's not gonna be perfect, but there'll be a generation
2:09:41of people coming up, that will naturally understand
2:09:45stress and agitation is taking them off their game
2:09:48and leading to bad decisions
2:09:49and will make the appropriate adjustments.
2:09:51And there are people that will that read David's book
2:09:54and your book, and we'll see the possibility
2:09:56of doing something differently with a terrible childhood
2:10:00or a brutal addiction.
2:10:02And, you know, I think we need more stories of success.
2:10:07I think it's easy to look out there
2:10:08and see all the things that are going wrong
2:10:10and we need to keep paying attention to those,
2:10:11but we need these beacons that draw people forward.
2:10:15And I say that from a place of experience, I mean,
2:10:17I used to have to find it in books in the bookshelf.
2:10:19I, there was no online back then or in mentors and you know,
2:10:22you have to forage, you know, I think kids,
2:10:24they have to have that foraging capacity.
2:10:26They can't just sit there and wait for it to rain on them
2:10:29or for a parent to dump it on them.
2:10:31But I trust that they're out there
2:10:32and that they're gonna figure it out.
2:10:34Just like you're doing on Instagram.
2:10:35You're dropping these videos basically every day, right?
2:10:38Like more or less little lessons on neuroscience.
2:10:42I'm trying, I'm trying to show people
2:10:44that I have a kind of no acronym rule.
2:10:47So I don't like embedding things
2:10:48in a lot of complex language.
2:10:49Sometimes I have to use an acronym, but yeah,
2:10:51teach people a little bit about how their brain works
2:10:53how it interfaces with psychology.
2:10:54Everyone's got different goals and purposes in the world
2:10:57but you know, that scientists are normal people
2:11:00and that hopefully science has something,
2:11:02I think really science has something to offer,
2:11:05but it's not gonna happen if I'm vaulted in my lab
2:11:08where my papers are read by the 12 people that care enough
2:11:10to read the papers start to finish.
2:11:12So I'm doing it, there are others out there.
2:11:15Of course, David St Clair is doing it,
2:11:17(indistinct) doing it.
2:11:18I'm trying to recruit more people
2:11:20from the scientific community to do this.
2:11:21I think it's our responsibility.
2:11:23You paid for it, it's your tax dollars.
2:11:26You know, there's a tremendous cost to doing science
2:11:29that is not often discussed
2:11:30but I don't really consider it an option.
2:11:32I consider it my obligation and I'm gonna keep going.
2:11:35Well, keep doing it, man.
2:11:37I appreciate the work that you're doing.
2:11:39I think it's really important work.
2:11:40We need it now more than ever.
2:11:42And it's cool that you're getting out there
2:11:46and sharing your wisdom with everybody.
2:11:48It's super empowering, so thanks man.
2:11:50Appreciate it. Thank you.
2:11:51Really appreciate the chance to be here.
2:11:52If you're digging on Andrew
2:11:55best way to find him is-
2:11:59Huberman Lab. Instagram.
2:12:00Yeah, Huberman Lab. Huberman Lab, cool.
2:12:02All right, man.
2:12:03Coming back, I made all these notes
2:12:04all this stuff I wanted to talk to you about.
2:12:06We got through like 10% of it, so
2:12:08come by and talk to me again. My apologies.
2:12:10I realize you're pretty verbose.
2:12:11Yeah, I just was getting out of the way man,
2:12:13to, you know, listen to what you have to say.
2:12:16I appreciate it, thanks man.
2:12:17Thank you.
2:12:18Peace.

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