Speaker 1: Today. It's great to chat with Andrew Huberman on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Andrew is Associate professor of neurobiology and of optimology at Stanford.
Speaker 1: His lab is focused on brain function development and repair,
Speaker 1: with emphasis on regeneration to prevent and cure blindness. They
Speaker 1: also study the neuro circuits that control visual fear and
Speaker 1: are developing tools to remap them and to treat anxiety disorders. Additionally,
Speaker 1: Uberman is host of the popular podcast called Huberman Lab. Andrew,
Speaker 1: it's so great to chat with you today. Great to
Speaker 1: be here. I've been looking forward to this. Thank you
Speaker 1: for having me on. Thanks, I've been really looking forward
Speaker 1: to this as well. Congrats on the awesome success of
Speaker 1: your podcast. What compelled you to do a podcast? Ah? Well,
Speaker 1: the short answer is I have the great Lex Friedman
Speaker 1: to blame for that one. Lex Friedman, as some of
Speaker 1: your listeners may know, is a researcher at MIT computer
Speaker 1: scientist Physics, a guy who has a podcast where he
Speaker 1: interviews scientists and now he's branched out to talk to
Speaker 1: people in cryptocurrency and martial arts, all his interests. And
Speaker 1: I was a guest on there, and Lex and I
Speaker 1: got to be friends and we had a little discussion.
Speaker 1: You know, this was an end of twenty twenty. I'd
Speaker 1: been teaching neuroscience on Instagram for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: I started that in twenty nineteen, and I was a
Speaker 1: guest on various podcasts. And then after we finished recording,
Speaker 1: Lex said, you know, have you ever thought about starting
Speaker 1: a podcast? I said, no, absolutely not. But then, you know,
Speaker 1: he impressed upon me that you know that there's a
Speaker 1: lot of interest in science learning, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I love the field of neuroscience so much,
Speaker 1: and I love a lot work that's done by other labs,
Speaker 1: not just mine, of course, and there's so much out
Speaker 1: there that I feel people could know about and should
Speaker 1: know about, and could benefit from learning that. I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm going to do a podcast that's more
Speaker 1: or less the equivalent of a university lecture. For the
Speaker 1: first twenty minute, it's going to introduce a topic, a
Speaker 1: little bit of mechanism, and then talk about some tools
Speaker 1: that stem from that mechanism. And it's a different sort
Speaker 1: of podcast for a couple of reasons. One is that
Speaker 1: we don't jump from topic to topic. We do an
Speaker 1: entire month focused, for instance, on sleep and how to
Speaker 1: get better at sleeping or neuroplasticity and how to get
Speaker 1: better at changing your brain and what the science has
Speaker 1: to say about that. And so in some ways it's
Speaker 1: a little bit more like a university curriculum merged with
Speaker 1: a podcast. But that's the reason, and I've had a
Speaker 1: lot of fun doing it. I'm still learning. There's a
Speaker 1: learning curve of course for me, but thus far it's
Speaker 1: been very gratifying and we're always seeking to be better.
Speaker 1: And I realize as I'm saying the Scott that we've
Speaker 1: got to get you on as a guest at some point,
Speaker 1: because we are soon going to have guests. Right now,
Speaker 1: it's just been me blabbing at the microphone, but starting soon,
Speaker 1: I've got some colleagues from Stanford and elsewhere who are
Speaker 1: going to come on. So maybe we can turn the
Speaker 1: tables on you a little bit and have you on
Speaker 1: as a guest. That'll be pleasured. I mean, no pressure
Speaker 1: or anything, but it'd be great if you would well,
Speaker 1: I would love that. I humbly accept that invitation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'd like to talk a little about your background
Speaker 1: a little bit. I'll go back a little bit and
Speaker 1: can you kind of tell our audience, what you got
Speaker 1: your degree in your advanced degrees, and what maybe even
Speaker 1: your dissertation topic was about, and how that led to
Speaker 1: the work you're doing today. Sure, I got interested in
Speaker 1: neuroscience when I was a sophomore in college. I was
Speaker 1: studying psychology actually, and I took a course in a
Speaker 1: normal psychology. And this was the early nineties, and the
Speaker 1: drug Prozac had just been released, essentially, the book Listening
Speaker 1: to Prozac had come out, and I was fascinated by
Speaker 1: some of the more biological aspects of abnormal psychology. I
Speaker 1: don't know if they still call it abnormal psychology, but
Speaker 1: you know, in an abnormal psychology class and then nineties
Speaker 1: you'd hear about schizophrenia, depression, UCD, etc. Which I guess
Speaker 1: given the prevalence of those conditions, I guess now we
Speaker 1: should probably call normal psychology. And there's so many people
Speaker 1: challenge with it, so probably the course should be renamed now.
Speaker 1: But in any case, I started realizing that my interest
Speaker 1: was moving toward neurotransmitters and things of that sort, but
Speaker 1: I didn't know anything about it. So I took a
Speaker 1: class in what they at that time was called biopsychology.
Speaker 1: The field of neuroscience did not exist. There was no
Speaker 1: named field of neuroscience, nor was there any neuroscience program
Speaker 1: or department in the world at that time. It's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting how young a field neuroscience is. There was neurobiology, neurophysiology, psychobiology,
Speaker 1: which is a wild name, biopsychology. But what happened was
Speaker 1: I started looking for courses. I started taking classes in physiology,
Speaker 1: in cell biology, and psychology, and in the end I
Speaker 1: got my degree in a combination of biology and psychology.
Speaker 1: And I worked in a lab did a senior thesis
Speaker 1: looking at thermal regulation of all things under conditions of
Speaker 1: MDMA exposure. So these are animals that we would give
Speaker 1: ecstasy MDMA and we looked at how they would change
Speaker 1: their perception of temperature. That was my senior thesis. We
Speaker 1: published that. I loved working in the lab. I found
Speaker 1: that working with my hands was something I really enjoyed.
Speaker 1: I never really liked working with animals much. I'm an
Speaker 1: animal lover, and also I didn't really enjoy it that much.
Speaker 1: But I did do that, and my lab still does
Speaker 1: that to some extent for the twenty five plus years
Speaker 1: following then, what happened was I went off and did
Speaker 1: my masters at UC Berkeley. It was intended to be
Speaker 1: a PhD, but it had a master's Along the way,
Speaker 1: and I was studying the effects of two things. One
Speaker 1: was the effects of early androgen exposure testosterone and its
Speaker 1: derivatives on differentiation of the brain in humans. If she
Speaker 1: was part of a study by a guy named led
Speaker 1: by a guy named Mark Breedlove that explored how the
Speaker 1: digit ratios the length of our fingers actually correlates with
Speaker 1: two things that are interesting. One how much testosterone we
Speaker 1: were exposed to in utero while we were still in
Speaker 1: our mother's room and how that impacts, believe it or not,
Speaker 1: sexual orientation in adulthood. It's a very robust literature that
Speaker 1: has now been replicated six times. We don't have time
Speaker 1: to delve into it. But I was fascinated by hormones
Speaker 1: and behavior. And I was also studying a system on
Speaker 1: called the circadian timing system, how light orients our sense
Speaker 1: of time and when we sleep in when we are alert.
Speaker 1: Along the way, I took a class from the great
Speaker 1: Carla Shatz, who is the person who coined the phrase
Speaker 1: fire together, wire together. Carla is a absolutely world class
Speaker 1: researcher in the field of brain development and plasticity. The
Speaker 1: phrase fire together, wire together is often ascribed to Donald Hebb,
Speaker 1: but that is incorrect. It was Carla who coined that phrase.
Speaker 1: Have said something else which was unrelated, actually, but for
Speaker 1: some reason it falls to Hebb, But it's Carla's. And
Speaker 1: I started hanging around people in her lab and learning
Speaker 1: how to do the sorts of experiments they were doing,
Speaker 1: which was looking at how electrical activity in the brain
Speaker 1: shapes the brain, and how neuroplasticity occurs, how we can
Speaker 1: change our brains in response to experience. So I had
Speaker 1: the challenging but turned out to be fortunate circumstance of
Speaker 1: going to Carla and saying, hey, you know, I really
Speaker 1: want to do what you do more than I want
Speaker 1: to do the stuff that I'm currently doing. And she said, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm moving my lab to Harvard, but there's
Speaker 1: a lab up the road at Davis. You see Davis
Speaker 1: that's working on some similar things, and there's a new
Speaker 1: PI there. I think you'd enjoy working with her. So much,
Speaker 1: to the dismay of people that were close to me,
Speaker 1: I took my Masters from Berkeley, did not take my PhD.
Speaker 1: I left by choice. I was doing fine in the program,
Speaker 1: moved up to Davis and started working in a lab
Speaker 1: working on these questions that I was really drawn to,
Speaker 1: And I ended up doing my PhD in the lab
Speaker 1: at Davis of a woman named Barbara Chapman, and my
Speaker 1: thesis was on the role of neural activity and molecular
Speaker 1: guidance cues chemicals that shape the developing brain. And I
Speaker 1: have to say, you know, Davis was a great place.
Speaker 1: I loved it. It's still a great place. I think,
Speaker 1: just as a little bit of a message to any
Speaker 1: of the listeners who might be pursuing degrees in science.
Speaker 1: I've always focused on particular scientific questions and asked where
Speaker 1: could I be most productive around those questions. For the
Speaker 1: next five or six years. Walking away from Berkeley was hard.
Speaker 1: I loved Berkeley. Davis was this little cowtown I thought
Speaker 1: on the way to Tahoe. It was not didn't have
Speaker 1: the prestige that Berkeley had, And yet my time at
Speaker 1: Davis was one of the most productive phases of my career.
Speaker 1: Barbara and I published a lot of papers together. We
Speaker 1: had a lot of fun doing it. And then when
Speaker 1: I finished, I did a post stock at Stanford with
Speaker 1: the late Ben Barris. Ben worked on neuron gliol interactions.
Speaker 1: And Ben is actually quite famous for not just his science,
Speaker 1: but he was a big advocate for women in science
Speaker 1: because he used before he was Ben, he was Barbara,
Speaker 1: so he did the control experiment. He had the experience
Speaker 1: of being a woman in science and a man in science.
Speaker 1: And I absolutely loved working with Ben. We were very,
Speaker 1: very close, and I didn't work on anything related to
Speaker 1: what Ben worked on. He let me come to the
Speaker 1: lab and work on finding genetic markers for neurons in
Speaker 1: the eye that degenerate in blinding diseases, so I skipped
Speaker 1: to that. I had a ton of fun doing it,
Speaker 1: and sadly Ben passed away in twenty seventeen, but that
Speaker 1: was great fun. And then I was a assistant professor
Speaker 1: at UC San Diego, where I continued to work on
Speaker 1: neural regeneration and repair in the eye, and we started
Speaker 1: to work a bit on how internal states like stress
Speaker 1: et cetera impact behavior, in particular fear behavior. And then
Speaker 1: I was recruited back to Stanford, where I'm now the
Speaker 1: associate tenured professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology and my lab
Speaker 1: works on neural repair and brain states such as fear,
Speaker 1: your performance, et cetera. So it's a lot. That was
Speaker 1: a long answer, but that the common thread through all
Speaker 1: of it is I'm absolutely obsessed with biology and neuroscience,
Speaker 1: and I end physiology and psychology, and I've basically let
Speaker 1: my interests guide my choices. I've never married myself to
Speaker 1: one particular line of work, and it served me well.
Speaker 1: It does help to have tenure if you're going to
Speaker 1: switch fields. But I've had great fun, and you know
Speaker 1: my I've made the decision that my life as a
Speaker 1: scientist will be pursuing the thing that interests me most,
Speaker 1: and I will never ever allow myself to wish I
Speaker 1: was working on something else more. I'll always work on
Speaker 1: the thing that I love the very most without negotiation.
Speaker 1: I love that. I love your commitment to science and
Speaker 1: also your love for the biological basis of human behavior.
Speaker 1: You know, in some circles that's just even starf that
Speaker 1: is just is controversial. Like even if you just say
Speaker 1: I study like like it, it should be the most
Speaker 1: uncontroversial thing in the world to say that there's a
Speaker 1: biological basis to human behavior. Have you faced any sort
Speaker 1: of pushback by any of your colleagues or anyone. Well,
Speaker 1: let's see, Stanford's been very supportive. You know, when I
Speaker 1: started podcasting, I worried a little bit that you know,
Speaker 1: anytime an academic starts putting their neck out there more publicly,
Speaker 1: you always worry a little bit. But they've been very
Speaker 1: supportive of that in terms of you know, like my
Speaker 1: podcast and some of the work I do in my
Speaker 1: lab now is so human oriented. It's about tools that
Speaker 1: humans can use. It's about we have a human lab.
Speaker 1: We went from studying mice just and we still study
Speaker 1: mice because there's some questions you can only address in mice,
Speaker 1: to a lab that does virtual reality and studies fear
Speaker 1: and humans. We study sleep in humans by we measure
Speaker 1: people's sleep while they're out there in the world. We're
Speaker 1: doing that right now, they're breathing, while they're at home,
Speaker 1: We're measuring that. I think it's fair to say that
Speaker 1: some of my colleagues, probably and not just at Stanford
Speaker 1: but in the in the scientific community at large, probably wondered,
Speaker 1: you know, what is Huberman doing. You know, he's been
Speaker 1: working on mice and ferrets, and you know, this kind
Speaker 1: of thing was he doing working on humans? But there's
Speaker 1: one solution to that problem, which is to publish really
Speaker 1: good papers. And I'm quite happy with the fact that
Speaker 1: we've published some papers in humans now and we've got
Speaker 1: more on the way. And the solution to any critique
Speaker 1: or potential critique is always going to be productivity. And
Speaker 1: I felt that it was just crucial to move to
Speaker 1: work on humans. And I suppose occasionally people will say, well,
Speaker 1: what about you know the psychology of this particular behavior
Speaker 1: like stress, or what about you know spiritual aspects to this?
Speaker 1: And I my response is always the same, which is
Speaker 1: I have a choice to look at things through any
Speaker 1: number of different lenses. But the lens I know how
Speaker 1: to look at things through is the lens of science
Speaker 1: and neuroscience and biology. So when I hold up a
Speaker 1: lens to something like depression or stress, I'm in no way,
Speaker 1: shape or form saying that spirituality or that psychology or
Speaker 1: sociology don't play a role. I'm just saying I'm looking
Speaker 1: through this particular lens. And so I think something that
Speaker 1: the general public, end the scientific community, frankly ought to
Speaker 1: learn more or consider more seriously, is that something can
Speaker 1: be highly accurate without being exhaustive. Right, you can be
Speaker 1: absolutely right, but you're not right about every aspect of something.
Speaker 1: And so my goal and what I know how to
Speaker 1: do is look at particular problems, including human behavior and
Speaker 1: human brain states, through the lens of neuroscience. But I
Speaker 1: certainly don't claim that those are the only lens that
Speaker 1: we can look at things through. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: fun to consider what a view of something like stress
Speaker 1: might look like through a different lens, but I'm just
Speaker 1: not trained to do that. So I also tend to
Speaker 1: stay in my lane as much as possible, although I
Speaker 1: define that lane pretty broadly as a biology, so no
Speaker 1: real pushback. One thing, and I'm sure you've experienced this
Speaker 1: to Scott as a trained academic, is that occasionally where
Speaker 1: I should say, often people will say what about the
Speaker 1: work of so and so? What do you think about
Speaker 1: the work of so and so? And they're usually asking
Speaker 1: about some online self help person that I might have
Speaker 1: a background in neuroscience, but they're not a professional neuroscientist,
Speaker 1: so will I never comment on other people's work unless
Speaker 1: it's published in scientific papers, or I can comment on
Speaker 1: their ability as a communicator. But there are a lot
Speaker 1: of theories out there that probably are worthwhile, even though
Speaker 1: there's no peer reviewed study to support it. But I
Speaker 1: can't comment on that because I can't see the data.
Speaker 1: So when people I won't name names here, but you
Speaker 1: can fill in your favorite online guru, people say, oh,
Speaker 1: that sounds a lot like the work I heard about
Speaker 1: and so and so. But if it's not something I
Speaker 1: can look at in a manuscript or a textbook, I
Speaker 1: can't really work with that. But I still think there's
Speaker 1: a lot of great stuff out there outside of biology.
Speaker 1: Of course there is, of course, Yeah, thanks, thanks, thanks
Speaker 1: for that. Well, this topsy study are so relevant to
Speaker 1: the experience of humans, and I thought we could just
Speaker 1: go through some of the broadest topics of things that
Speaker 1: people we can really apply for their own lives to
Speaker 1: make their lives easier. The first topic I'd like to
Speaker 1: bring up is a topic of emotions. It's a big topic.
Speaker 1: I thought an interesting way to kind of get in
Speaker 1: get into that topic is to ask you whether we
Speaker 1: can predict our emotions before they occur or before they
Speaker 1: kind of spiral out of control. Yeah, great question, and
Speaker 1: certainly that's a challenging one. You know, emotions as you
Speaker 1: know better than I are difficult to define. You know,
Speaker 1: the field of neuroscience doesn't even really know how to
Speaker 1: define emotions. People throw around things like fear and all
Speaker 1: this kind of thing, but in neuroscience, really you can
Speaker 1: only measure behavior, especially in animal studies, because we don't
Speaker 1: know how. You can ask a mouse all day what
Speaker 1: it's feeling, but all you can do is measure its behavior.
Speaker 1: And people are not that good at understanding their own
Speaker 1: emotions or describing them. The language of emotions is both
Speaker 1: vast and non specific, right. I mean, if I say
Speaker 1: I'm feeling mellow and happy, that's informative, but I have
Speaker 1: no idea whether or not that's the same as you're
Speaker 1: mellow and happy. I just don't know. So one of
Speaker 1: the things that we've done as a laboratory is to
Speaker 1: try and address this question through the lens of the
Speaker 1: autonomic nervous system. So the autonomic nervous system has all
Speaker 1: these fancy names associated with it, like sympathetic, compair, sympathetic,
Speaker 1: but the simplest way to think about it is that
Speaker 1: it's just a seesaw inside of all of us that
Speaker 1: adjusts our level of alertness or calmness so when I
Speaker 1: say calmness, I mean parasympathetic nervous system alertness sympathetic, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of a push pull between the two, and
Speaker 1: the autonomic nervous system is constantly adjusting our level of
Speaker 1: alertness and calmness. Alertness and calmness, for me, is a
Speaker 1: useful way to look at the question of emotions, because
Speaker 1: if you ask how alert or calm are you relative
Speaker 1: to the demands that are being placed on you, oftentimes
Speaker 1: you get an answer that relates to what we know
Speaker 1: is the valance of emotion, whether or not an emotion
Speaker 1: is good or bad, positive or negative. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: if I'm sleepy and it's time to fall asleep, great,
Speaker 1: that's a great place to be. If I'm wide awake
Speaker 1: and I need to fall asleep, that's stressful. Okay. If
Speaker 1: I'm wide awake and I have a lot of work
Speaker 1: to do, that's generally a good place to be. But
Speaker 1: if I'm wide awake and i have a lot of
Speaker 1: alert work to do and I'm so alie that I'm
Speaker 1: panicking and I can't control my behavior, that's not a
Speaker 1: great place to be. Now, this is very coarse language
Speaker 1: to get at emotions, but it's the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that we can measure in the laboratory, and now, using
Speaker 1: various technology, we can even measure this sort of thing
Speaker 1: while people are out of the laboratory. So we take
Speaker 1: a very crude and yet a very tractable and measurable
Speaker 1: approach to looking at emotions. Now we also get people's
Speaker 1: subjective reports of whether or not they feel good or bad,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But that's the lens that we look at
Speaker 1: this through, and it's not perfect, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: Lisa Feldman, Barrett and other psychologists would say, you know,
Speaker 1: I think quite correctly that emotion has all this context. Right,
Speaker 1: Being devastatingly sad at the loss of a loved one
Speaker 1: is appropriate. Being devastatingly sad because you wake up and
Speaker 1: you can't attach that to any particular life event is
Speaker 1: called depression. So there's this very interesting issue as to
Speaker 1: whether or not our internal state, which includes alertness and calmness,
Speaker 1: matches our external pressures or environment, and that equation plus
Speaker 1: our kind of goals in life, short term and long
Speaker 1: term goals generally, at least to my mind, spells out
Speaker 1: to whether or not you're you're happy or sad. Right, So,
Speaker 1: or works out to whether or not you're anxious or mellow,
Speaker 1: or appropriately alert or appropriately sleepy. And so I don't
Speaker 1: want to, you know, just shed a ton of parameters
Speaker 1: on this, but I would say the tool that emerges
Speaker 1: from this is that if people can start to afford
Speaker 1: a little bit of control over their internal state, what
Speaker 1: we've found is that then they can adjust their emotions
Speaker 1: emotions in air quotes for those of you listening. They
Speaker 1: can adjust their emotions by simply changing their relationship between
Speaker 1: their internal world what we call interroception, your perception of
Speaker 1: your internal state relative to the external world. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: if I am very alert and it's time to sleep,
Speaker 1: and I can actively calm myself by using particular approaches
Speaker 1: which one can and we could talk about, then I
Speaker 1: can suddenly go from being stressed to feeling great because
Speaker 1: I'm falling asleep and I'm sleepy, or I'm asleep or
Speaker 1: I slept. Well, if one can adjust their level of
Speaker 1: alertness up in response to a demand, well then we
Speaker 1: start to feel some control, some will over the world
Speaker 1: and in the world. And then people generally start to
Speaker 1: feel more quote unquote empowered or as if they have
Speaker 1: more self control and so there are tools to do this,
Speaker 1: and so we look at emotions through the lens of
Speaker 1: this autonomic nervous system. And that brings us to the
Speaker 1: word states. I'm a big fan of the word states,
Speaker 1: and what I'm wishing for, maybe some of the audience
Speaker 1: will tell us is would be language that more accurately
Speaker 1: describes the human condition because it focuses on states. States
Speaker 1: of mind have a persistence, they could be short or
Speaker 1: long lasting. They have a vaillance, they can we can
Speaker 1: say they're great, or they're terrible or just neutral. States
Speaker 1: are something that are I think more tractable than the
Speaker 1: word emotions, and states definitely are supported or have a
Speaker 1: I should say a foundation of alertness or calmness is
Speaker 1: kind of tilting back and forth of a CEESEF. So
Speaker 1: that's a long answer, but that's the way that we
Speaker 1: approach it. And I would say if anyone wants to
Speaker 1: have better control over their emotions, they should focus on
Speaker 1: learning to control this so called autonomic nervous system, because
Speaker 1: that is going to be, at least by our data,
Speaker 1: more powerful than simply telling oneself, oh I should be
Speaker 1: happy or oh I should you know. Focus on the good,
Speaker 1: not the bad. That's all powerful too, but we focus
Speaker 1: on the physiology. Cool. No, that's very cool. What do
Speaker 1: you what do you think of William Fleeson's model of
Speaker 1: traite density distributions, as all traits are distributions of states
Speaker 1: that we can, you know, kind of change our traits
Speaker 1: by changing our pattern of states. I mean, it just
Speaker 1: seems to dovetail what you're talking about a little bit. Uh. Well,
Speaker 1: I have to contrast, I'm not an expert in it,
Speaker 1: so I and I should certainly read up on it.
Speaker 1: So maybe afterwards you can send me the great psychology references.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned, you know, we look at things from
Speaker 1: a terribly narrow lens of physiology, but I'd love to
Speaker 1: learn more. But from the way you just described it,
Speaker 1: it sounds marvelous. I love that idea, and I love
Speaker 1: it because what I want to see is the field
Speaker 1: of neuroscience and psychology, which you are now one and
Speaker 1: the same. I mean, that's one of the wonderful things
Speaker 1: about neuroscience in the last ten years is the doors
Speaker 1: have just swung open to everybody, from AI to you know,
Speaker 1: to psychology. But what I would like to see is
Speaker 1: some real progress in terms of concrete answers and first principles,
Speaker 1: so that in ten years there's a common language for
Speaker 1: people to talk about emotions. But I love the idea
Speaker 1: that traits are assembled from an array of states. I
Speaker 1: think that's a marvelous idea. But then again, it's very
Speaker 1: much in line with the kinds of things my lab does.
Speaker 1: So I want to admit a complete bias in my response.
Speaker 1: I'll send you those papers. Yeah, just while we're still
Speaker 1: in this topic of emotion, I'd love to hear more
Speaker 1: about the work you're doing with your lab to alter
Speaker 1: the neural circuits that control visual fear, fear that control
Speaker 1: visual fear, and how to remap them and treat anxiety disorders. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the two main ways to adjust one's internal state
Speaker 1: are respiration, breathing, and the visual system. And we can
Speaker 1: talk about the visual system first. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: the visual system and sight is the dominant way by
Speaker 1: which we navigate the world and survive and make sense
Speaker 1: of the world. For blind people it will be hearing
Speaker 1: and touch, but for most people who are cited, it's
Speaker 1: going to be vision. There are two pieces of things
Speaker 1: in the front of your face called your eyes are
Speaker 1: actually parts of your nervous system, your central nervous system.
Speaker 1: Your retinas are part of your brain, and they are
Speaker 1: the only part of your brain outside the cranial vault,
Speaker 1: outside the skull, and they were put there for a reason,
Speaker 1: which is to adjust your level of alertness or sleepiness
Speaker 1: depending on time of day. That's why they were there.
Speaker 1: We know this because there are a set of neurons
Speaker 1: in there whose primary job is to set your level
Speaker 1: of sleepiness or alertness according to the time of day.
Speaker 1: And the other neurons that are in there that see
Speaker 1: colors and motion and allow you to comprehend what the
Speaker 1: difference between a face and a car those evault later.
Speaker 1: So vision is by far the most powerful way in
Speaker 1: which our brain focuses, in which its emotional states shift around,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And a lot of this is happening subconsciously. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, when we are stressed or simply more alert
Speaker 1: or excited positively alert, our pupils get larger and they dilate.
Speaker 1: Our eyes actually widen, This is a non trivial thing,
Speaker 1: but our eyelids actually open a bit more. When we're sleepy,
Speaker 1: our eyes start to shut. That's sort of a duh,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people don't know. The reason for
Speaker 1: that is that the circuitry in our brain stem that
Speaker 1: controls our alertness, things like locus ceruleus, reticular activating system,
Speaker 1: all those fancy names, they connect very directly to the eyes,
Speaker 1: and when we are excited, we actually narrow, we contract
Speaker 1: our field of view. And in addition that, because we
Speaker 1: contract our field of view, we get a more kind
Speaker 1: of so to straw our tunnel view of the world.
Speaker 1: We also start to analyze time differently. And the simplest
Speaker 1: way to explain this is that if you're ever in
Speaker 1: a rush, or you're stressed, or you're excitedly waiting for something,
Speaker 1: it will seem as if the outside world is moving
Speaker 1: much more slowly. The person in line in front of
Speaker 1: you at the grocery store, while you've got your mask
Speaker 1: on and you're having a hard time breathing and they're
Speaker 1: returning something like oh my god, it's going to seem
Speaker 1: like they're moving very slowly. They're not moving slowly. You're
Speaker 1: just slicing time more. Finally, this is also why people
Speaker 1: who get into accidents or experience trauma, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: things happening in slow motion. The opposite is true when
Speaker 1: we are relaxed, our eyes start to close. Our pupils constrict.
Speaker 1: They constrict for other reasons too, but they sort of constrict,
Speaker 1: and things outside us will seem like they're moving very fast.
Speaker 1: If you're ever sleepy and you wake up and you've
Speaker 1: had a rough week and you look at you email
Speaker 1: and there's all this stuff coming at you, like, oh
Speaker 1: my goodness, there's all this stuff. It seems like the
Speaker 1: world is moving fast and you're not caught up. You're
Speaker 1: not caught up. You're just it's just that you're sleepy,
Speaker 1: and so the world out you're slicing time and broader
Speaker 1: time bins. So it turns out that the visual system
Speaker 1: also can impact our level of alertness, just like a
Speaker 1: level of alertness can impact our visual system. So what
Speaker 1: my lab has been focusing on is how if people,
Speaker 1: for instance, just take a panoramic view of their environment.
Speaker 1: So this is not moving your head around or moving
Speaker 1: your eyes around. But let's say I'm looking at you
Speaker 1: on a screen right now, because we're doing this by skide,
Speaker 1: But if I were to dilate my gaze, so I
Speaker 1: still see you, Scott, but I also see the walls
Speaker 1: behind me and the ceiling and the floor, and now
Speaker 1: I see myself in the environment that I'm in. That
Speaker 1: disengages a circuit in the brain stem and actually leads
Speaker 1: to a more active calming of internal state. Conversely, if
Speaker 1: I deliberately bring my eyes what's called a vergence point,
Speaker 1: where I bring my eyes together at a common site
Speaker 1: and I start to look at that particular place, that
Speaker 1: engages a circuit in the brain stem, leads to increases
Speaker 1: in alertness and actually leads to increases in cognitive focus.
Speaker 1: So cognitive focus follows mental focus, and excuse me, visual focus,
Speaker 1: and so to repeat that, cognitive focus follows visual focus,
Speaker 1: and visual dilation will also lead to kind of cognitive dilation.
Speaker 1: And so what we've been studying is how tightening or
Speaker 1: broadening our literal field of view using our eyes can
Speaker 1: allow people to calm themselves or increase their levels of alertness.
Speaker 1: And there's a third way in which the visual system
Speaker 1: can impact things like fear. Some people will recognize this
Speaker 1: as the main thrust behind EMDR I movement to sensitization reprocessing.
Speaker 1: For years, people would ask me about EMDR. They'd say,
Speaker 1: what do you think of the and EMDRS where you
Speaker 1: move your eyes from side to side while recounting a trauma,
Speaker 1: typically to a trained trauma therapist. I'm to be honest, Scott,
Speaker 1: I thought this stuff was complete whoe. I was like,
Speaker 1: this is ridiculous, how can that possibly be. I'm a
Speaker 1: vision scientist, I work on stress. This doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: And then I ate my words because starting in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, and twenty twenty, there were five papers published
Speaker 1: in really good journals, including Nature, one of the Apex
Speaker 1: science journals, showing that lateralized eye movements from side to side,
Speaker 1: so just sweeping one's eyes from side to side, not
Speaker 1: up or down and yes, eyes have to be open,
Speaker 1: leads to a suppression in the activity of a brain
Speaker 1: center that many people might be familiar with called the amygdalah,
Speaker 1: which is a threat detection center in the brain. And
Speaker 1: I thought that is crazy. But the data were so solid,
Speaker 1: and the groups that were publishing this were not psychologists,
Speaker 1: they were neurobiologists studying eye movements, so it was really
Speaker 1: an absence of bias there. And it turns out that
Speaker 1: the reason that these lateralized eye movements suppress activity of
Speaker 1: the amigda, at least the reason we think they do
Speaker 1: is that when we are in forward ambulation, when we walk, forward,
Speaker 1: cycle forward, anytime we're in self generated movement, we are
Speaker 1: generating what's called self generated optic flow. Things move past us. Now,
Speaker 1: unlike your phone, where if you take a picture on
Speaker 1: your phone and you move your phone, it's blurry. As
Speaker 1: you move through space and you move your head and
Speaker 1: your eyes, you don't experience the world as blurry. And
Speaker 1: that's because you are constantly generating what are called slip
Speaker 1: compensating eye movements. When you move your head from side
Speaker 1: to side, your your eyes are moving so as to
Speaker 1: not generate blurry images. And moving your eyes from side
Speaker 1: to side, even if just you're sitting in a chair
Speaker 1: or something like that simulates forward movement. And we believe
Speaker 1: that forward ambulation, and this could be cycling, biking, walking, running,
Speaker 1: et cetera, provided you're not looking at your phone or
Speaker 1: some little narrow box of visual space suppresses the activity
Speaker 1: of the fear centers. And this is we're assuming is
Speaker 1: part of the primordial circuitry by which animals, including humans,
Speaker 1: advanced towards things that were uncertain, and so it is
Speaker 1: the great insight of the late psychologist Francine Shapiro, who
Speaker 1: is I believe in pal Aalto maybe had an affiliation
Speaker 1: to Stanford. I don't recall she figured out she created
Speaker 1: EMDR while taking a walk in the woods. That's how
Speaker 1: the story goes anyway on Wikipedia, that she was walking
Speaker 1: in the woods, was recalling something troubling and realized that
Speaker 1: she was much calmer about it than when she recalled
Speaker 1: the same thing just sitting in a chair. She exported
Speaker 1: the eye movement component to her clinic. And just to
Speaker 1: be clear, a number of people have said to me, well,
Speaker 1: EMDR has mixed results for treating trauma and reducing fear,
Speaker 1: and I've talked to my colleagues about this. With my
Speaker 1: colleagues in psychiatry, it turns out that EMDR is most
Speaker 1: successful in dealing with very specific traumas, specific events that
Speaker 1: can be recalled in detail as someone does this, And
Speaker 1: I would encourage people, of course to do this with
Speaker 1: a trained professional. This isn't the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: you do at home alone, although there is a place
Speaker 1: for these eye movements, but it's not so good, for instance,
Speaker 1: at dealing with an entire childhood, or an entire divorce,
Speaker 1: or all of twenty twenty, it seems to map very
Speaker 1: well toward recall of a particular challenging incident, while moving
Speaker 1: one's eyes in this way is essentially uncoupling the feeling
Speaker 1: of fear from the recall of the event. Now, the
Speaker 1: movement of the eyes from side to side can be
Speaker 1: used more conventionally outside the context of trauma if one
Speaker 1: is feeling kind of nervous about public speaking or feeling
Speaker 1: too much internal arousal for whatever reason. I don't see
Speaker 1: any reason why trying it couldn't hurt in that circumstance.
Speaker 1: But in terms of treating trauma, it's there's decent success
Speaker 1: and there's a there's a great book I'm gonna look
Speaker 1: over because I have it to my right, which is
Speaker 1: I move into sensitization and reprocessing therapy. There are three
Speaker 1: editions of this now written, and this is one of
Speaker 1: only three behavior approved I would say APA American UH
Speaker 1: Psychological Association approved behavioral therapies. I think it's exposure therapy
Speaker 1: E M, d R. And now with there's one other
Speaker 1: sort of exposure type therapy that's been approved, so it
Speaker 1: has some merit. And again this is just vision, right,
Speaker 1: this is using the visual system to adjust the internal
Speaker 1: level of stress, and in certain circumstances that can be
Speaker 1: very beneficial. I really want to try it right now.
Speaker 1: I want to, like just sign up with a new
Speaker 1: therapist and try it. Yeah, a number of people have
Speaker 1: reported good results, so that not everyone. You know, there
Speaker 1: are gonna be some things, just like. Hypnosis is another
Speaker 1: area my college. Gavid Spiegel at Department of Psychiatry at
Speaker 1: Stanford is actively involved in, you know, work on hypnosis
Speaker 1: and how it changes default networks in the brain and
Speaker 1: dealing with it. Hypnosis has a very high, greater than
Speaker 1: chance success rate with many things, but some people will
Speaker 1: not benefit from it as much as others. I think
Speaker 1: that's been shown too. That's the beauty of individual differences.
Speaker 1: Some people have greater susceptibility, visibility, openness to experience, personality
Speaker 1: trait predicts that. Yeah. Actually, there's a fun little twist
Speaker 1: there relates to the visual system. So Spiegel develops something
Speaker 1: called the Spiegel eye roll test. I can do it
Speaker 1: on you right now, and people can try it. Don't
Speaker 1: do this if your driving. So because of the relationship
Speaker 1: between the brain stem and the eyes and eye movements,
Speaker 1: there's a particular aspect of eye movements that predict on
Speaker 1: a one to four scale, how hypnotizable somebody will be
Speaker 1: Let me see if we can do this by skype.
Speaker 1: So if you look up towards the ceiling, Scott, if
Speaker 1: you look up and now just slowly close your eyes
Speaker 1: while maintaining your gaze upward, Okay, okay, I'm not okay,
Speaker 1: and then stop, yeah, okay, stop. So I would say
Speaker 1: maybe you're like a two so speakable scale, So what
Speaker 1: you're looking for? Yeah, so on a scale one to four,
Speaker 1: so you're I would say you're mildly hypnotizable. But again
Speaker 1: I'm not an expert in this. Spiegel taught me this,
Speaker 1: so and he's the expert. It's actually called Spiegel iroll test.
Speaker 1: But what happens is, as you look up, it turns
Speaker 1: out upward directed gazes are associated with alertness. Who would
Speaker 1: have known, but it makes total sense, and downward gaze
Speaker 1: and closing of the eyelids are associated with sleepiness. Exactly
Speaker 1: and every and when you hear it, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is so obvious. But this is again ancient circuitry.
Speaker 1: So this looking up while trying to close the eyes
Speaker 1: is something that Spiegel discovered is a it's a kind
Speaker 1: of contradiction of goals right of looking up, but actually
Speaker 1: closing the eyes, it's hard to do. Actually, the eyes
Speaker 1: tend to flutter, and depending on how much the eyes
Speaker 1: roll back and you see the whites of the eyes,
Speaker 1: it dictates whether or not you're one to two or
Speaker 1: three or four. Now yours rolled back a little bit,
Speaker 1: not a ton. And this is all correlative. But what
Speaker 1: they found is that this predicts hypnotize ability. So some
Speaker 1: people also find it very hard to close their eyelids
Speaker 1: while looking up, and a really good trained clinical hypnotist
Speaker 1: will have you look up and then close your eyes.
Speaker 1: Stage hypnosis is a completely different business, and I don't
Speaker 1: even want to talk about it because it's kind of
Speaker 1: a disgrace to clinical hypnosis. But anyway, I'm not a
Speaker 1: trained clinical hypnotist, but I do if people want to
Speaker 1: sample with clinical hypnotism. By the way, there's a terrific
Speaker 1: free app that Spiegel and colleagues released called Reverie r
Speaker 1: E V E r E. They have a one minute hypnosis,
Speaker 1: a five minute hypnosis for anxiety, sleep, et cetera. It's
Speaker 1: available on Apple and Android and it's a it's a
Speaker 1: free tool, but it has backing in numerous clinical and
Speaker 1: peer reviewed publish studies from Stanford. So I just want
Speaker 1: to put this isn't just some random app. This is
Speaker 1: developed by people who do this for a living, where
Speaker 1: you know, board certified mds and things of that sort. Well,
Speaker 1: that is super cool. I think I used to be
Speaker 1: more susceptible to hypnotizability, and then I started to wise up.
Speaker 1: I'd become more cynical. I became more cynical with people's intentions.
Speaker 1: I thought, you're missing I so enjoy your Twitter feed
Speaker 1: because your Twitter feed makes less cynical. It makes me
Speaker 1: more positive, less cynical. Well, can you imagine just how
Speaker 1: innocin I was before? Because I still am. I still
Speaker 1: am a bit, you know. I. I have a lot
Speaker 1: of positive faith in humanity. I really do. But I
Speaker 1: used to. I used to be very, very like susceptible
Speaker 1: to like like people like global to the extent of
Speaker 1: just global. You know, Well, I think that Jack Feldman,
Speaker 1: who's a wonderful colleague who works on the science of
Speaker 1: respiration breathing from UCLA. He likes to say, and he's
Speaker 1: a New Yorker, and he likes to say, be skeptical,
Speaker 1: not cynical, And I think it's a wonderful phrase, you know.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great stance for scientists. I think
Speaker 1: it's a great stance for anybody. You want to be skeptical.
Speaker 1: But I think cynicism is tricky. And and I should
Speaker 1: say that Jack, just since we threw out his name,
Speaker 1: has really been a pioneer, has been decades ahead in
Speaker 1: terms of understanding how the other feature of our brain
Speaker 1: body relationship, the respiration centers, can shape our states of mind.
Speaker 1: And so much of what we're doing now our human
Speaker 1: lab on breathing and respiration to allow people to adjust
Speaker 1: their states and access sleep, et cetera, much of that
Speaker 1: is built on the fundamental discoveries of Jack Feldman. And
Speaker 1: he's done his work in mice. We're working in humans.
Speaker 1: But we talk all the time, and I just want
Speaker 1: to tip my hat to him. You know, these physiologists
Speaker 1: like Jack, Francine Shapiro and the e MDR. Stuff that
Speaker 1: was clinical discovery first. But the more that scientists communicate
Speaker 1: across fields, the better life gets. Yeah, for sure, And
Speaker 1: I really like your giving credit to these other individuals.
Speaker 1: There's other scientists well, I have you here, since you
Speaker 1: are a neuroscientist, I'd like to double click or zoom
Speaker 1: in on the amigula because I think it's a very
Speaker 1: misunderstood brain area. And you know, you mentioned you kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, associated like with how a lot of people
Speaker 1: associated with it as kind of the fear response. But
Speaker 1: it's been my understanding that the more nuanced understanding of
Speaker 1: the migdala shows that it's it really has to do
Speaker 1: just emotional significance more generally. And I was wondering what
Speaker 1: your thoughts are on that more recent research. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you nailed it. I think so the amygdala, we
Speaker 1: think of this, you know, fear center. It it means almond.
Speaker 1: It's these two little lawmands on the side of our
Speaker 1: brain that are there just to make our life difficult.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, we used to be hunted by
Speaker 1: lions and now we're stuck with this amygdala and that's
Speaker 1: all wrong, right. It's first of all, it's it's a
Speaker 1: big structure. It's a whole cluster of structures. It's part
Speaker 1: of a network. It does not house fear. No one
Speaker 1: brain area houses anything except maybe our pituitary, which houses
Speaker 1: a lot of releasing hormones are or circadian clock or
Speaker 1: something like that. But it's part of a network, a
Speaker 1: neural circuit, as we say, that is involved in vigilance
Speaker 1: and assignment of internal state to external Q. You know,
Speaker 1: our entire I think there's a there is not opportunity
Speaker 1: here for a brief little neuroscience lesson, which is every
Speaker 1: neuron or brain area basically does any one to three things.
Speaker 1: It's either a sensory thing it senses stuff inside us
Speaker 1: and outside us. It's controlled in generating movement motor or
Speaker 1: it's modulatory it's trying to adjust when to move to
Speaker 1: what kind of thing, or when to be afraid of what.
Speaker 1: And our entire experience can basically be distilled down to
Speaker 1: two things. Interception our perception of our internal real estate,
Speaker 1: an exteroception our perception of everything outside the confines of
Speaker 1: our body. And the best way I can think of
Speaker 1: to conceptualize interception exter reception from a neuroscience perspective is
Speaker 1: that our experience of life from the time we're born
Speaker 1: until the time we die, even in sleep, is like
Speaker 1: a imagine a glass bar bill with one sphere at
Speaker 1: one end and another sphere at another and they're connected
Speaker 1: by a handle, call it the tether. One sphere represents
Speaker 1: interception and the other represents exteroception, and of course they're tethered,
Speaker 1: and we can split our attention between what we're feeling
Speaker 1: inside and outside. So we can do this right now.
Speaker 1: If somebody wants to close their eyes, or if they
Speaker 1: can't close their eyes, just try and focus as much
Speaker 1: of your attention on the sensation of your skin in
Speaker 1: contact with whatever surfaces it happens to be in. You
Speaker 1: do that for a second, you just made the bar,
Speaker 1: the globe, or the sphere at the side of the
Speaker 1: interception a little bit bigger, and as you did that,
Speaker 1: the exter reception got a little bit smaller. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: if you open your eyes and you focus your attention
Speaker 1: intensely on something outside of you, like a point on
Speaker 1: the wall across the room, chances are you can grow
Speaker 1: that sphere of exter reception and you will forget about
Speaker 1: your internal state just momentarily, or maybe your focus on
Speaker 1: your internal state will shrink. So you can try that
Speaker 1: for a second, So just try and focus x externally.
Speaker 1: Often this is best by focusing your eyes on a
Speaker 1: particular point. Okay, Now, typically we jump back and forth
Speaker 1: interception exter reception all the time, and they're connected by
Speaker 1: the tether. So what the amygdala does is the amygdala
Speaker 1: addresses what is my internal state and in my environment,
Speaker 1: is there anything that's novel or in particular threatening or exciting,
Speaker 1: And if there is, it starts to increase the robustness
Speaker 1: of that tether. It starts to link what I'm feeling
Speaker 1: internally to the actions of something external, and that is
Speaker 1: generally a threat, but it could be something positive. So
Speaker 1: if you look at humans who have who lack an amygdala,
Speaker 1: like people Clover Bucy syndrome, this classic syndrome where people,
Speaker 1: you know, the animals start it would like lick inanimate
Speaker 1: objects who or try and have sex with inanimate objects.
Speaker 1: What you've really disrupted is the relatelationship between internal state
Speaker 1: and external events, and it becomes rather random. So the
Speaker 1: amygdala is not a fear center. The amygdala is a
Speaker 1: tether that tends to bias us towards behaving or not
Speaker 1: depending on what's being tethered. So for instance, if if
Speaker 1: I suddenly see a dark object walk past my window
Speaker 1: at night, and then I'll pause if it comes closer
Speaker 1: and my stress level goes up. Then I now am
Speaker 1: in this high state of vigilance aka fear. Now, if
Speaker 1: that thing disappears, it walks away, I'll start to feel relaxed. Okay,
Speaker 1: the amygdala will then Essentially it's not responsible for the relaxation,
Speaker 1: it's responsible for me changing my behavior in response to
Speaker 1: that relaxation. So the amygdala is kind of like a
Speaker 1: security guard that can't actually do anything. You know, those
Speaker 1: those security guards that can't actually do anything, that can
Speaker 1: just use their radio you use sometimes see those at
Speaker 1: malls and you know, something happens and they'll just they
Speaker 1: can only call for the police. They can't actually do anything.
Speaker 1: So that's a one way to conceptualize the amygdala. And
Speaker 1: this interception extra aceptive relationship doesn't have a name in neuroscience.
Speaker 1: Maybe it has one in psychology. But it's a fascinating
Speaker 1: aspect to our experience because it's very dynamic, and I
Speaker 1: should just mention in sleep, what's incredible is that the
Speaker 1: tether is completely dismantled. Our experience is all internal. We
Speaker 1: are one hundred percent interceptive, but in dreaming, where you know,
Speaker 1: thinking about things and things are happening more or less
Speaker 1: it ran, space and time are untethered. This barbell becomes
Speaker 1: like two spheres that are linked by a piece of
Speaker 1: dental floss, loading around in space and swirling. So space
Speaker 1: and time becomes very fluid. When we are in fear
Speaker 1: states or alert or focused states, bam, the tether becomes locked,
Speaker 1: and now our internal state is very much driven by
Speaker 1: whether or not the email in front of us says
Speaker 1: what we want it to, or whether or not we
Speaker 1: you know, a comment made to us on Twitter. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden, we are locked. We are tethered to
Speaker 1: that comment, and we're like, wait, how could you possibly
Speaker 1: say that? I consider that a directive front? Or oh
Speaker 1: I love that that makes me feel so wonderful. So
Speaker 1: that your space and time is governed by the rigidity
Speaker 1: of this tether, or we could also say our space
Speaker 1: time relationship is also governed by how loose and fluid
Speaker 1: this tether is. So in relaxed states, we tend to
Speaker 1: be very open to new contingencies, mostly because our internal
Speaker 1: state is in locked to events around us. When we
Speaker 1: are in very high stress or very excited positively excited states,
Speaker 1: our entire inter interroceptive world becomes linked to the external world,
Speaker 1: and the amygdala is crucial as a linker between the
Speaker 1: external and the internal. That's the simplest way I can
Speaker 1: think of to describe it. Yeah, And if we think
Speaker 1: about what brain alterations you see in those who are psychopaths,
Speaker 1: I think that it's really interesting because psychopaths have a
Speaker 1: very low start all respons It's hard to startle psychopaths,
Speaker 1: and I think that's related to a lot of what
Speaker 1: you're saying. You know, it's not necessarily just threats that
Speaker 1: they don't get startled by, but they don't tend to,
Speaker 1: you know, get terribly moved by a beautiful flower either, right,
Speaker 1: they tend to, you know, some I have a couple
Speaker 1: of friends who come from a background in military special
Speaker 1: operations and have the great privilege of working with some
Speaker 1: people in those communities for for for sake of working
Speaker 1: on human performance things and also some of the rehabilitative things.
Speaker 1: And it's an amazing community because they are extremely good
Speaker 1: at what they do. They are selected through the most
Speaker 1: stringent protocols you could ever imagine, much more stringent than
Speaker 1: even the stuff we see about, you know, carrying logs
Speaker 1: in cold water all that, but much more. And yet
Speaker 1: there so their their main function is to be able
Speaker 1: to act effectively on their environment, and yet they are
Speaker 1: unique and distinct from sort of sociopathy because they also
Speaker 1: have an incredible ability to integrate the goals and desires
Speaker 1: of other people in a way that's beneficial. It's a
Speaker 1: really incredible thing. I think also very charismatic people politicians.
Speaker 1: You know, when people say, you know, in the presence
Speaker 1: of whoever this person was, you just feel good. Some
Speaker 1: people are just very good at dynamically interacting with people
Speaker 1: in a way that makes them feel brought in and seen.
Speaker 1: You know that. There's a story. Actually a friend told
Speaker 1: me that he met Oprah and he said, I've never
Speaker 1: met over, but he said that the way that she
Speaker 1: moved through the room was was stunning because she's always
Speaker 1: getting approached, right, everyone wants talk to her and you know,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And she would just acknowledge people one by
Speaker 1: one in a way that made people feel truly seen.
Speaker 1: And I said, what was it? Was it like her
Speaker 1: gaze right, And he said, I have no idea. But
Speaker 1: when she arrived at him and just said hi, so
Speaker 1: nice to be moved on, he felt like, he said,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just who she was. It was the way
Speaker 1: that she was able to engage at almost kind of
Speaker 1: a trivial level, felt like the glass had been poured
Speaker 1: completely full for the first time, and I thought, Wow,
Speaker 1: And this is a person who's not easily shifted around
Speaker 1: by that kind of thing. He doesn't have any he
Speaker 1: doesn't fan out, he's not really obsessed with celebrity or
Speaker 1: anything like that. So I think some people are just,
Speaker 1: I think, naturally or through training or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: are just very good at engaging other humans in a
Speaker 1: way that makes them feel good. And I think sociopaths
Speaker 1: use that to the worst possible ends. And people who
Speaker 1: and other people like you know Oprah, who seems like
Speaker 1: a nice person. I've never met her, but certainly sopath.
Speaker 1: I am absolutely not calling Oprah associate, but I think
Speaker 1: quite the opposite. I think she has it. My senses
Speaker 1: is that she has a deep empathy. And I think
Speaker 1: that when people feel truly seen by somebody, it's the
Speaker 1: opposite of manipulation, right, And unfortunately we hear stories about
Speaker 1: sociopaths manipulating people, and of course they're out there. I'm
Speaker 1: sure my lab is never focused on studying them. I
Speaker 1: kind of don't want to because I don't really want
Speaker 1: them coming to my lab. That's the last thing I
Speaker 1: want is a bunch of those gip athks going to
Speaker 1: my lab. But the link between the internal and the
Speaker 1: external and goal directed behavior, I think is again it's
Speaker 1: one of these tractable areas of neuroscience and psychology that
Speaker 1: I think we're just right now at the infancy of
Speaker 1: understanding and what's missing as a language, Right we have
Speaker 1: language for so many other things. We don't have a
Speaker 1: language to describe what I just talked about. It doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: Great point, I'd like to move on to another topic,
Speaker 1: and that's motivation. What can people do if they feel
Speaker 1: very unmotivated in their lives? Like I just feel like
Speaker 1: that's just a common thing right now with COVID people
Speaker 1: are like not languishing well. People just don't feel like
Speaker 1: they're necessarily flourishing, you know, during this time, right, So
Speaker 1: what can people do to kind of get that motivation back? Well,
Speaker 1: from a very core physiological perspective, motivation is the combination
Speaker 1: of two neurochemicals what we call neuromodulators, and those two
Speaker 1: are epinephrine. It goes by another name called adrenaline. We
Speaker 1: need energy, we need to move, and we often think
Speaker 1: that energy comes from food, and it doesn't. Energy comes
Speaker 1: from neurotransmission and from particular neuromodulators. We need to eat,
Speaker 1: of course to sustain ourselves, but goal directed behavior requires
Speaker 1: a fuel, and that fuel is epinefforn, and there are
Speaker 1: ways to increase epineffort and talk about in a moment.
Speaker 1: The other is dopamine. You know, the neumodulator. Dopamine many things.
Speaker 1: It's involved in reward and feel good, but its main
Speaker 1: job is craving and motivation. I have a colleague at Stanford,
Speaker 1: Anna Lemke spelled l E m b k E, who's
Speaker 1: a psychiatrist. She actually has an amazing book coming out
Speaker 1: in August called Dopamine Nation is all about dopamine an addiction.
Speaker 1: I think you guys would really enjoy a chance. She's
Speaker 1: I'll put you guys in touch. She's an incredible person
Speaker 1: and clinician, and she talks about dopamine as the molecule
Speaker 1: of craving. There's also another book called The Molecule of More,
Speaker 1: which is very good about this. Dopamine isn't about reward,
Speaker 1: it's about craving and motivation and dopamine at the same
Speaker 1: time is something that we that we get more of
Speaker 1: when we reach milestones, So epinephrine and dopamine are close
Speaker 1: cousins in motivation. There is a way to increase epinephrine
Speaker 1: just pure physiology, and a lot of people are already
Speaker 1: doing this, and my lab is looked at this a bit.
Speaker 1: But there are ways to breathe that will increase epinephrin.
Speaker 1: And there's another way to do it which essentially costs
Speaker 1: nothing as well, which is you can throw yourself into
Speaker 1: cold water or get into a cold shower. Now, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of reasons to do cold exposure as
Speaker 1: long as it's done safely. But one of the things
Speaker 1: that isn't often understood is that when you get into
Speaker 1: a cold shower and you decide to deliberately stay there
Speaker 1: for one to three minutes or maybe even longer, you
Speaker 1: are releasing adrenaline from your adrenals, and you're releasing the
Speaker 1: same molecule from your brain, which is epinephrine. It's called
Speaker 1: epinefortn in the brain. It's adrenaline from the adrenals in
Speaker 1: the body. Getting into a nice bath will do the
Speaker 1: same thing that will increase your energy level. It is
Speaker 1: a mild form of stress, but it is energy level.
Speaker 1: Exercise will do it too, but a real quick way
Speaker 1: to do it is to get into a cold shower
Speaker 1: or an ice bat. Not everyone wants to do that,
Speaker 1: so with respiration you can do this. In My lab
Speaker 1: has studied this protocol. It involves taking twenty five deep
Speaker 1: inhales and exhales, so it looks something like this, So
Speaker 1: in through the nose, out through the mouth, twenty five
Speaker 1: of those and you will be alert. You will actually
Speaker 1: feel a little agitated, and for people that have panic
Speaker 1: attacks or prone to anxiety, you might not like it. However,
Speaker 1: if you finish twenty five or thirty of those breats,
Speaker 1: and you exhale all your air and hold your breath
Speaker 1: for about fifteen to thirty seconds, and then repeat and
Speaker 1: do that two or three times, so twenty five thirty
Speaker 1: breasts in through the nose, out through the mouth, and
Speaker 1: through the nose out through the mouth and exhale and hold, repeat,
Speaker 1: exhale and hold. What you'll find is that during the
Speaker 1: exhale hold period you can achieve a state of calm
Speaker 1: with very high levels of alertness. This simple I don't
Speaker 1: like calling it a hack because this is actually what
Speaker 1: the biology was designed to do. A hack kind of
Speaker 1: implies you're cheating the system. And I don't like the
Speaker 1: word hack. Is always sounds like something's getting carved up,
Speaker 1: and you know, so I hate the phrase biohacking. I
Speaker 1: lose it here. What we're talking about here is actionable
Speaker 1: biology or applied biology. So you're increasing epineffort. Now what
Speaker 1: you do with that energy is up to you. But
Speaker 1: many people actually find that just by doing this pattern
Speaker 1: of breathing, they suddenly feel like they could or want
Speaker 1: to exercise, or they could or want to work, They
Speaker 1: could or want to get up out of their chair.
Speaker 1: So that's one thing that can be beneficial. The cold
Speaker 1: shower thing, you know, and wim Hoff is famous for,
Speaker 1: you know, the iceman and for doing this breathing that's
Speaker 1: very similar to the type of breathing I described. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a way of generating adrenaline in the body at
Speaker 1: low levels, but that allow people to get into action. Now,
Speaker 1: the dopamine component involves reaching some sort of a milestone
Speaker 1: or craving something. Dopamine is best served not just by
Speaker 1: reaching a goal, but by craving a goal and Anna,
Speaker 1: I should say doctor Lemke in fairness, she's a friend
Speaker 1: and a colleague, so I call her Anna, but doctor
Speaker 1: Lemke because she is a board fight psychiatrist has talked
Speaker 1: about this as let's say you eat a piece of chocolate.
Speaker 1: We think that the dopamine release that you get from
Speaker 1: that is actually about the satisfaction from the chocolate. But
Speaker 1: the next time you eat something delicious, pay careful attention.
Speaker 1: The good feeling that you're feeling is actually the craving
Speaker 1: for more. It is not an absolute joy in what
Speaker 1: you're doing. And this is fascinating, and it's at the
Speaker 1: heart of addiction, right the cocaine user or even the
Speaker 1: pot user, and I realize nowadays a lot more people,
Speaker 1: you know, use pot legal and stuff, so it's complicated.
Speaker 1: But that craving for something, or or for sex, or
Speaker 1: for whatever it is. That excitement, excitement is craving. It's
Speaker 1: not reward. And that's because dopamine and pleasure and pain
Speaker 1: have a very unique combo. I'll leave it to doctor
Speaker 1: Lemke to complete that discussion because she can describe it
Speaker 1: so much more eloquently and accurately than I can. But
Speaker 1: the way to get dopamine is once you are in action,
Speaker 1: set a milestone. Okay, today I'm just going to go
Speaker 1: out for a walk, or today I'm just going to
Speaker 1: send ten emails related to some business related goal or
Speaker 1: whatever it happens to be. That can help dramatically. But
Speaker 1: without epinephrine, without the bias toward action, it is very
Speaker 1: hard to get out of complacent inactive states. And remember,
Speaker 1: stress and excitement at a neurochemical level are just epinephrine
Speaker 1: released in the brain, but dopamine is the reset. It's
Speaker 1: kind of the reup of epinephrine that allows you to
Speaker 1: repeat that over and over and over. And from a
Speaker 1: purely biochemical perspective, most people don't this, but epinephrine adrenaline
Speaker 1: is made from dopamine. The biochemistry of dopamine and the
Speaker 1: bio chemistry of epinephrine are such that they are linked.
Speaker 1: You cannot have epinephrine without dopamine synthesis. So if someone
Speaker 1: has a real clinical depression and they're low in dopamine, well,
Speaker 1: then talk to a psychiatrist. There are drugs out there
Speaker 1: like grouperniroon, wellbutrin and things like that that they work
Speaker 1: by increasing dopamine and epinephrine very distinct from other antidepressants
Speaker 1: that like prozac, which increase serotonin. Serotonin is the molecule
Speaker 1: that basically makes us feel pretty good with what we've
Speaker 1: got in the present. It does not tend to drive motivation,
Speaker 1: tends to come from eating, from having had, you know,
Speaker 1: a satiating experience or meal. It's not involved in craving
Speaker 1: as much. And of course I'm talking about these chemicals
Speaker 1: in very coarse terms. They have subtlety to them as well.
Speaker 1: Of course. Yeah, my colleague Colin de Young has a
Speaker 1: really wonderful paper linking dopamine to the personality system and
Speaker 1: just to tie this to psychology, and he you know,
Speaker 1: he calls it the neuromodulator of exploration. That's that's, that's
Speaker 1: the word he uses, exploration because you know, extroverts, extroverts
Speaker 1: score very very high. They have a lot of doping production,
Speaker 1: particularly in this stratum and uh and uh lower subcortical
Speaker 1: structures you know, that motivate them to explore the social world.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like all about you know, oh, I
Speaker 1: want to like never enough, it's never enough for that,
Speaker 1: you know, like they always need someone new, you know,
Speaker 1: else they get bored. Yeah, and you know, and you
Speaker 1: know this lies at the at the kind of deepest
Speaker 1: levels of our evolutionary biology. You know, the anticipation of
Speaker 1: sex and which of course underlies reproduction, which underlies the
Speaker 1: progression of our species. Of course, there are other reasons
Speaker 1: people have sex, but the dopamine is produced in pursuit
Speaker 1: of enduring sex. But just to be concrete about it,
Speaker 1: after orgasm, dopamine levels plummet, and another and a hormone
Speaker 1: called prolactin is increased. Prolactin sets a quiescence. It's actually
Speaker 1: also what's released in new and expecting parents that calms
Speaker 1: them down and makes them very focused on the needs
Speaker 1: of another. Right, you can't be running around like crazy,
Speaker 1: certainly not looking for new mates shortly after a child
Speaker 1: is delivered into a relationship or even a single parent.
Speaker 1: And when prolactin goes up, it tends to make us
Speaker 1: more quiescent, not want to seek novelty. It makes us
Speaker 1: content with what we have and put us into caregiving
Speaker 1: roles in both men and women and every variation thereof,
Speaker 1: and in animals and in humans it tends to throw
Speaker 1: down body weight to in theory, to make us want
Speaker 1: able to tolerate long nights of no sleep to raise young.
Speaker 1: So it's dopamine is involved in the pursuit of food,
Speaker 1: the pursuit of sex, the pursuit of money, the pursuit
Speaker 1: but the moment that we reach those goals, there's a
Speaker 1: huge plummet in dopamine and then it resets our over time,
Speaker 1: it resets for the pursuit of more. And I think
Speaker 1: the book The Molecule of More describes this really, really nicely.
Speaker 1: I think it's Daniel Lieberman. It's definitely Lieberman. I think
Speaker 1: I have the first name correct. He's a psychiatrist at
Speaker 1: gw at George Washington or Georgetown, forgive me that I
Speaker 1: don't know his affiliation. That's a great book about this too.
Speaker 1: But I think that we can take advantage of the
Speaker 1: biology of epinephrine and realize that when we have increased
Speaker 1: levels of epinephrine, we need to move. And sometimes that
Speaker 1: can be keys on a keyboard and focus. Sometimes that
Speaker 1: can be actual physical movement around exercise, et cetera. One
Speaker 1: of the most challenging things is high levels of epinephrine
Speaker 1: in our system and to be sitting still that's called stress.
Speaker 1: And twenty twenty was a forced situation of limited movement
Speaker 1: from our usual routines and a lot of incoming information
Speaker 1: that was very triggering to a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: I realize we're still somewhat in this thing now. It's
Speaker 1: not like New Year's hit and we're out of it.
Speaker 1: But whether or not it's for work purposes or fear
Speaker 1: of COVID, et cetera, it's clear that bodily movement is
Speaker 1: a very very good thing, and that the more we
Speaker 1: physically move, the more that these circuits in the brain
Speaker 1: and body that underlie motivation get carried out. Because the
Speaker 1: reason we have a nervous system. I mean, I wasn't
Speaker 1: consulted in the design phase, but logically speaking, evolutionarily speaking,
Speaker 1: the reason we have a nervous system is to move.
Speaker 1: The only way we can affect anything besides ourselves, other people,
Speaker 1: other events, et cetera. They are only two ways. One
Speaker 1: is movement and the other is sweating. Right, our sweat
Speaker 1: can in fact people not very in major ways in
Speaker 1: most cases. But movement is how we speak, Movement is
Speaker 1: how we eat, Movement is how we reproduce. Movement is everything,
Speaker 1: and so epinephrine is like an engine beneath movement. Dopamine
Speaker 1: is like a rudder that steers us toward particular things
Speaker 1: as we move. That makes a lot of sense. Like
Speaker 1: I mentioned Colin de Young, but I just want to
Speaker 1: bring up another part of his theory, and that's that
Speaker 1: there's this nerdy dopamine pathway that people are starting to
Speaker 1: understand where you can really get energized at the potential
Speaker 1: reward value of information. So that's for all us nerds
Speaker 1: out there. You know, there are dopinge projections to the
Speaker 1: dorsal ot or prefailp the cortex. You know, it's not
Speaker 1: all just sex, drogs and rock and roll with dopamine.
Speaker 1: So that's another kind of misconception. I wanted to kind
Speaker 1: of I've been trying to dispel that misconception. Oh, I
Speaker 1: totally agree. I mean, doctor lemke Ana would talk about
Speaker 1: and does talk about Internet addiction. She was actually featured
Speaker 1: in the Social Dilemma. She doesn't have a big presence
Speaker 1: on social media as a consequence, although she I think
Speaker 1: she has a somewhat of her presence there. But she
Speaker 1: you know, I talked about this with her. You know,
Speaker 1: she accused me of being a work at it, and
Speaker 1: she's probably right. I love learning. It feels good. It
Speaker 1: feels like a drug to meal, it feels like a
Speaker 1: healthy drug. And so I love information. So I guess
Speaker 1: I have the nerdy dopamine type. And I love YouTube.
Speaker 1: I think YouTube is amazing. I think YouTube is an endless,
Speaker 1: you know, library of amazing stuff. There's also a lot
Speaker 1: of garbage. But so you I'm glad you pointed that out,
Speaker 1: because we can forage with our minds just just as
Speaker 1: much as we can forage with our bodies. Except now
Speaker 1: foraging with our minds is made much more accessible than foraging.
Speaker 1: It's actually come to replace forging with our bodies, and
Speaker 1: so we forage with our minds. And I think I
Speaker 1: love that concept. Who's the gentleman that you use? Colin
Speaker 1: de Young? I'll send you the paper. I'll send you
Speaker 1: the paper. Colin de Young. Yeah, fantastic. He's a personality neuroscientist.
Speaker 1: He actually is leading the field of personality neuroscience. And
Speaker 1: I'd love to see what sort of connections can be
Speaker 1: made between the kind of work you're you're doing, the
Speaker 1: kind of work he's doing, and that I'm doing with
Speaker 1: him and stuff. But great, that sounds amazing. When I
Speaker 1: was at Berkeley, Bob Levinson was setting up his physiology
Speaker 1: lab downstairs, and I remember thinking, Wow, I didn't know
Speaker 1: that psychologist did physiology, because back then it was pretty rare.
Speaker 1: Now there are all these wonderful mergers of fields. So
Speaker 1: it's Daker, Keltner and those guys doing that. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: great stuff, really great stuff. Just want to end this
Speaker 1: interview by getting a little bit of an understanding of
Speaker 1: your your chronotype management. You know, how do you manage
Speaker 1: your unique chrototype. Do you have any suggestions? I want
Speaker 1: to know your daily routine, but can you also kind
Speaker 1: of just tell us about science about you know, when
Speaker 1: you should sort of be doing certain things during the
Speaker 1: day in general for optimal brain development. Sure, okay, So
Speaker 1: there are four things that act as very powerful levers
Speaker 1: on when you will be awake and when you will
Speaker 1: want to be asleep, when you will be able to
Speaker 1: do your best work, when you'll be able to do
Speaker 1: your creative work. And those are your exposure to light,
Speaker 1: in particular sunlight. So light is one and is the
Speaker 1: most dominant one. The second is temperature. It's vitally important
Speaker 1: environmental temperature and your temperature movement aka exercise. But activity
Speaker 1: of various kinds. And then when you eat, and to
Speaker 1: some extent, how much you eat, that's easily handled. If
Speaker 1: you eat a large volume of any any substance, it
Speaker 1: will bring more food to your gut, so it will
Speaker 1: make you sleepier. If you eat a moderate to just
Speaker 1: quote unquote healthy level of any substance, it will tend
Speaker 1: to not overwhelm your system and you'll be alert. But
Speaker 1: there are certain things that you can eat to be
Speaker 1: more alert, and certain things you need to be sleepier.
Speaker 1: So I just want to be clear. So let's think
Speaker 1: about light first and then I'll reveal my schedule according
Speaker 1: to chronotype. So regardless of chronotype, if you're a night hour,
Speaker 1: a morning person, et cetera, you want to get bright light,
Speaker 1: sunlight in your eyes within the first hour of waken
Speaker 1: if you wake up before the sun comes out, you
Speaker 1: want to turn on artificial lights as much as possible
Speaker 1: if your goal is to be awake. So put simply,
Speaker 1: if your goal is to be alert and to wake up,
Speaker 1: turn on a lot of lights, especially overhead lights. Because
Speaker 1: of the position of these neurons in the eye that
Speaker 1: reset our circadian clocks. Overhead light triggers alertness in the
Speaker 1: brain more so than does light right in front of
Speaker 1: you or light down low. So early in the day,
Speaker 1: try and get outside, even if it's overcast. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of photons coming through about ten thousand times more
Speaker 1: photons coming through a densely clouded sky than a really
Speaker 1: bright internal artificial light. So get right light and through
Speaker 1: a window is fifty times less effective. So I've talked
Speaker 1: to now thousands of people who tell me just making
Speaker 1: this one simple change can really help because it triggers
Speaker 1: a circuitry in the brain and body that activates alertness
Speaker 1: and focus throughout the day through the cortisol system, healthy
Speaker 1: cortisol levels, et cetera. And it also triggers a timer
Speaker 1: so that the hormone melatonin is secreted about twelve to
Speaker 1: sixteen hours later, which makes you fall asleep. Okay, So
Speaker 1: the simple rule is get a lot of bright light
Speaker 1: early in the day and throughout the day. So for
Speaker 1: those of you wearing blue blockers throughout the day, it's
Speaker 1: a huge mistake. Huge mistake, is like, don't I know
Speaker 1: sol who does that? I know solone who does that.
Speaker 1: It's just limiting your alertness. I think people like the
Speaker 1: way they look or how they feel when they wear them.
Speaker 1: But blue blockers in the evening can be very good
Speaker 1: because you want to limit or start to taper the
Speaker 1: amount of light that you get in the evening hours,
Speaker 1: and you want to avoid bright light exposure between ten
Speaker 1: pm and four am, unless your job is to be
Speaker 1: awake at those times. And the reason is it can
Speaker 1: suppress melatonin, which is a sleepiness hormone, and it can
Speaker 1: suppress dopamine. There are two studies showing that, and dopamine
Speaker 1: is important. It can suppress learning, it can cause depression
Speaker 1: at low levels. It can exacerbate depression for other reasons.
Speaker 1: That's caused by other reasons. So a lot of light
Speaker 1: during the day and morning, especially in the morning, try
Speaker 1: and get it from sunlight. Try and not get it
Speaker 1: through a window. It's okay to wear contact lenses or
Speaker 1: eyeglasses when getting this exposure, but if you can safely
Speaker 1: do it without wearing sunglasses, better to do it without
Speaker 1: wearing sunglasses. But please don't drive off a cliff or
Speaker 1: injure your eyes or something. Never look at any light
Speaker 1: that's so bright it's it's painful to look at. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I'll reveal my schedule I wake up. First thing
Speaker 1: I do, so I try and get outside, get five
Speaker 1: to ten minutes outside, walk my dog, and maybe even
Speaker 1: to read. It's going to be indirect. You don't have
Speaker 1: to stare directly at the sun. If it's still dark out,
Speaker 1: I'll turn on a bunch of lights in my home.
Speaker 1: If the goal is to wake up, then as you
Speaker 1: move into the day, most people, because temperature starts to
Speaker 1: increase after you wake up, most people are going to
Speaker 1: be most alert and feel most able to do various
Speaker 1: kinds of mental and physical work somewhere between three hours,
Speaker 1: so I would say at about three hours after waking
Speaker 1: and eleven hours after waking. There are these two little
Speaker 1: peaks in our circadian timing mechanisms. You have to figure
Speaker 1: out when you do your most focused work. But for
Speaker 1: most people they can do their highly focused work about
Speaker 1: ninety minutes to two hours after waking. This is mid
Speaker 1: morning for most people. And that's going to be time
Speaker 1: where linear work, meaning the kinds of work that requires
Speaker 1: a lot of focus and you more or less know
Speaker 1: what you need to do, but you have to You
Speaker 1: know the strategy, but you need to implement the strategy
Speaker 1: or you need to figure out the strategy, so very
Speaker 1: focused kind of analytic work. And that's a terrible time
Speaker 1: to do email or be involved in meetings because it's
Speaker 1: going to suck away your ability to do really what
Speaker 1: cal Newport would call deep work. Right. Fasting and low
Speaker 1: carbohydrate intake favor alertness because it leads to a state
Speaker 1: of increase adrenaline. So I typically don't eat until about
Speaker 1: eleven or noon. I sometimes have some almonds or something
Speaker 1: like that, or fat. Sometimes, if I'm very hungry, I'll
Speaker 1: have some eggs or something like that. But I generally
Speaker 1: fast until about noon, and then at noon I eat
Speaker 1: a meal, which is generally some sort of meat or
Speaker 1: fish or chicken or something, and a salad. I like
Speaker 1: cold food, and I don't eat much carbohydrate. Now there
Speaker 1: are exceptions to this. Occasionally, if I did like a
Speaker 1: hard workout early in the morning, which I rarely do
Speaker 1: iatiually work out later these days, then I might eat
Speaker 1: some more carbohydrates. But typically if you eat starches like
Speaker 1: pastas or rice, etc. We always hear that gives us energy. No, No,
Speaker 1: your energy comes from your glycogen stores, which are on
Speaker 1: your liver and your muscles, and your adrenaline in your brain.
Speaker 1: You have to restock that stuff. But if you want
Speaker 1: to be alert, fasting water, caffeine, make sure you're getting
Speaker 1: enough electrolytes. So salt is important. If you're fasting or
Speaker 1: not drinking a lot of water, you can deplete electrolytes.
Speaker 1: A lot of people will get kind of dizzy because
Speaker 1: they're not eating enough salt. Unless you have hypertension, it's
Speaker 1: generally safe to consume some salt. And so the daytime
Speaker 1: is when you want to be alert and working. And
Speaker 1: then after lunch, everybody experiences a little bit of a dip,
Speaker 1: but the lower carbohydrate intake during the day can prevent
Speaker 1: some of that dip. In the afternoon, I continue with
Speaker 1: the same, but I do a second work walk in
Speaker 1: the afternoon, which I always do a what's called a
Speaker 1: non sleep deep rest protocol once per day. I take
Speaker 1: twenty or thirty minutes, sometimes ten minutes, and I do
Speaker 1: either yoga nidra, which is where you just lie down
Speaker 1: and listen to a script. I've put one out there
Speaker 1: totally cost free, where you can just put on YouTube NSDR.
Speaker 1: It was hosted by a company called made for of
Speaker 1: It's totally free of cost that takes you through a
Speaker 1: deep relaxation. This non sleep deepress has been shown to
Speaker 1: bring the brain and body into states that favor neuroplasticity.
Speaker 1: That was published several times Inclan last year. Replenished dopamine
Speaker 1: in the Striatum that was published by a group in Scandinavia.
Speaker 1: And or I'll do the Reverie app. I'll do the
Speaker 1: hypnosis for kind of deep relaxation. I come out of that,
Speaker 1: I usually drink a little bit of caffeine. I do
Speaker 1: drink coffee and caffeine, and then I'll do some sort
Speaker 1: of work for about ninety minutes or so. That's more
Speaker 1: kind of creative work, like writing or something where the
Speaker 1: strategy isn't quite clear. It's a little bit more challenging.
Speaker 1: And I do this because in the afterno noon or
Speaker 1: when we're sleepy, a little bit more relaxed, I should say,
Speaker 1: not sleepy, we are able to create new contingencies. Creativity
Speaker 1: is taking existing things and organizing them in new ways
Speaker 1: in space and time, and that kind of space time
Speaker 1: rearrangement is favored by states where we are deeply relaxed
Speaker 1: necessarily sleepy. So I trying to do a ninety minute
Speaker 1: block of focused work early in the day and a
Speaker 1: ninety minute block in the afternoon. And during that time
Speaker 1: I turn on a program called Freedom, a free program
Speaker 1: on my computer that locks me out of the Internet,
Speaker 1: and I turn off my phone and I lock it
Speaker 1: in a safe because I'm not very disciplined with the
Speaker 1: phone otherwise. And then evening is when your temperature starts
Speaker 1: to drop. Some people exercise in the evening. That just fine.
Speaker 1: If you are going to do I should say, if
Speaker 1: you're going to do cold water exposure, you want to
Speaker 1: do that early in the day because it's going to
Speaker 1: favor alertness. You know, ice baz, cold showers. If you're
Speaker 1: going to do things like sauna, hot baths and things,
Speaker 1: those should be done in the evening preparation for sleep.
Speaker 1: There are exceptions to this, some people like to do
Speaker 1: it early in the day, but if temperature is a
Speaker 1: powerful determinant of these internal states. And then my evening
Speaker 1: meals generally consist of more carbohydrate pasta, vegetables. I might
Speaker 1: eat some fish or eggs or something like that, but
Speaker 1: generally they're more carbohydrate lated, which makes sleep fantastic. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you carbohydrates really favors sleep. We all heard oh,
Speaker 1: never eat after six pm. Carbohydrates are bad for you.
Speaker 1: They lay down body fat if you eat them late
Speaker 1: in the day. Nothing to be further from the truth,
Speaker 1: there's zero evidence for it. They facilitate the release of
Speaker 1: things like serotonin, which lend themselves well to sleep. So
Speaker 1: I cut out the caffeine in the app in the
Speaker 1: late afternoon and evening, I end up eating some starches
Speaker 1: after I do my exercise, and that helps you taper
Speaker 1: to And I limit my light exposure, especially overhead light exposure.
Speaker 1: You want it. If you're gonna have lights on in
Speaker 1: the evening, set them low. That would be the time
Speaker 1: to wear blue blockers if you want. But I should
Speaker 1: say that any light, if it's bright enough, will trigger
Speaker 1: activation of the alertness system, even if you're wearing blue
Speaker 1: black blockers. So dim screens and kind of bad things out.
Speaker 1: And then I do use supplements to support sleep. I'm
Speaker 1: not a fan of melatonin because as effects on other
Speaker 1: hormones in the body. But for some people, and again
Speaker 1: I'm not a physician, so I'm not telling people what
Speaker 1: to do. Always check with your doctor. Things like magnesium
Speaker 1: three in eight spelled thh r e O n AT
Speaker 1: or biglycinate can help create a state of kind of sleepiness.
Speaker 1: They trigger your activation of the Gabba circuitry, which kind
Speaker 1: of turns off thinking, et cetera. Thianine th h E
Speaker 1: A I N E and something called apagen and a
Speaker 1: p I G E n I n apagenin which comes
Speaker 1: from Camra mail. Many people benefit from taking those to
Speaker 1: allow them to relax, but of course check with your doctor.
Speaker 1: I would say the two single most important protocols that
Speaker 1: I've adopted over the years and for which there's great
Speaker 1: scientific data are mourning. Bright light exposure to the eyes. Again,
Speaker 1: never so bright that you're going to damage your eyes.
Speaker 1: You'll know because you'll blink if it's really bright. Definitely
Speaker 1: blink if you need to. And these non sleep deep
Speaker 1: breasts are doing a twenty or thirty minute deep relaxation
Speaker 1: protocol once per day because they help you get better
Speaker 1: at falling asleep. Right, that's what these non sleep deep
Speaker 1: breast protocols do. They help you get better at relaxing.
Speaker 1: Humans have no trouble activating their stress circuitry, but they
Speaker 1: somehow nature evolution made it such that we have to
Speaker 1: learn how to calm ourselves. So that's what I do,
Speaker 1: and I do a bunch of other things too, but
Speaker 1: those are kind that's kind of the general framework. And
Speaker 1: I should say that if you are a night owl,
Speaker 1: you should still try and do the same things, but
Speaker 1: instead of trying to avoid light from ten pm to
Speaker 1: four am, maybe you avoid light from like two am
Speaker 1: to eight am. I don't know. Everyone's schedule differs. If
Speaker 1: you're an early morning person, my advice would be, do
Speaker 1: not push past your desired bedtime too far, because what
Speaker 1: happens is that many people wake up at three thirty
Speaker 1: or four in the morning to use the bathroom. That's
Speaker 1: totally normal. Go back to sleep. Waking up once during
Speaker 1: the midle the nights to go to the bathroom, no
Speaker 1: big deal. You don't want to drink too many fluids
Speaker 1: late at nine for that reason. But if you're somebody
Speaker 1: who's waking up at three am and you cannot fall
Speaker 1: back asleep, chances are you are supposed to go to
Speaker 1: bed at eight thirty or nine pm unless there's an
Speaker 1: underlying anxiety, and what's happened is your melotonin is run
Speaker 1: out and you're awake. The problem is it's very easy
Speaker 1: for people to push their bedtime out it's much harder
Speaker 1: for people to go to bed early. We've experienced this
Speaker 1: when you travel. You can always stay at the party,
Speaker 1: but it's very hard to say, okay, click, snap your
Speaker 1: fingers and fall asleep. So if you're somebody who wakes
Speaker 1: up at three or four am and you're having a
Speaker 1: hard time falling back asleep, try and go to bed
Speaker 1: earlier and then wake up at three or four am,
Speaker 1: and you're one of those lucky people that can get
Speaker 1: much more done in life than the rest of us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's the suggestion. And then most people will have
Speaker 1: a kind of typical chronotype. You'll want to wake up
Speaker 1: around six thirty or seven thirty am, depending on age
Speaker 1: and lifestyle factors, and you want to go to bed
Speaker 1: around ten thirty eleven, sometimes twelve pm. It's not that's
Speaker 1: the typical pattern. So those are the main things, and
Speaker 1: as you can see, they relate to light, temperature, food
Speaker 1: and exercise. And if you're going to exercise late in
Speaker 1: the day, well have a protocol to bring yourself down
Speaker 1: afterwards and avoid too much caffeine. If you're going to
Speaker 1: exercise very early in the day, understand that you're shifting
Speaker 1: your clock of it. Anytime you do something regularly that
Speaker 1: involves a lot of activity, you're creating a system in
Speaker 1: your body of anticipation of that activity. So if you
Speaker 1: want to wake up earlier, wake up a few days,
Speaker 1: set your alarm, force yourself to do an exercise at
Speaker 1: five am. Pretty soon you'll start waking up at five am.
Speaker 1: That's just the way these circuits work. I love it.
Speaker 1: We know we did. There's so many different topics we
Speaker 1: could have nerded out today, and maybe we'll table some
Speaker 1: for when I'm on your podcast. We can keep up
Speaker 1: and continue the cut or even just hanging out here
Speaker 1: on the beach so we can continue our conversations. But
Speaker 1: one big topic is flow. You know, something that a
Speaker 1: topic we're both super interested in. I know we both
Speaker 1: have a mutual friend Kytler Stephen Coler. You know, how
Speaker 1: does how does this go no go? Sweet spot that
Speaker 1: you talk about relate to the flow state? And then
Speaker 1: maybe we can end there. Sure, so you know, flow
Speaker 1: still remains a little bit unclear as a neurobiological state.
Speaker 1: But I talked to Stephen about this and what I
Speaker 1: what I really appreciate about Steven is he's intensely curious
Speaker 1: about all the things that it could be, not just
Speaker 1: saying this is what it is. And I think that's
Speaker 1: something that There are many things that make Steven a
Speaker 1: unique and special character and serious thinker, but that's one
Speaker 1: of them. But so flow to me is when our
Speaker 1: inter reception and our exter reception that barbell model that
Speaker 1: I described earlier, kind of glass barbell, when that suits
Speaker 1: our goals almost perfectly. So if I, you know, if
Speaker 1: I were to I could even say, like during this podcast, right,
Speaker 1: I was very focused on what's going on here and
Speaker 1: you and I are were tethered in and we're in flow, right.
Speaker 1: I mean I wasn't thinking about the fires outside the
Speaker 1: or my dog over to my left, or you know,
Speaker 1: my attention might have diverted here and there for a moment,
Speaker 1: but we were in this space time thing that worked well.
Speaker 1: I like to think for the conversation we're having, sure,
Speaker 1: that to me is flow. Now what's challenging is understanding
Speaker 1: how we transition in and out of flow, and I
Speaker 1: think that's where at some point it can be operationally defined.
Speaker 1: I could not describe the set of neurobiological events that
Speaker 1: allow that to happen, but what we know is that
Speaker 1: the brain and nervous system, which of course links the
Speaker 1: brain and body and body to brain, It somehow figures
Speaker 1: out very quickly what are the contingencies, what are the
Speaker 1: relevant things that need to be handled here? What are
Speaker 1: we going to do? And it starts peeling away all
Speaker 1: the irrelevant stuff, and so that my internal state is
Speaker 1: going to be matched to what's going on and back
Speaker 1: and forth. And I think that it certainly involves activation
Speaker 1: of these frontal circuits that harness our focus and our
Speaker 1: decision making, and the way I like to think about flow.
Speaker 1: It is speaks to a little bit of how I
Speaker 1: like to think about the nervous system generally, which is
Speaker 1: that it's like a bookshelf. But it's almost like a
Speaker 1: bookshelf in a Harry Potter novel or something. It's very dynamic.
Speaker 1: So we sit down and I say, okay, here's Scott.
Speaker 1: We've met once before in person. I read your tweet,
Speaker 1: so I have a context. It's like a bunch of
Speaker 1: books on the shelf. And then as you start to
Speaker 1: engage in the conversation, things pop up. So it's doctor
Speaker 1: Lemke and you know, Liberman, like all these things, and
Speaker 1: we start creating a context. So this bookshelf is very dynamic,
Speaker 1: and so what's brought to the front of your attention
Speaker 1: starts becoming more and more narrowly constrained. Right, But as
Speaker 1: we end podcast and we get up and we go
Speaker 1: about something else, the brain doesn't just shut down our
Speaker 1: view of that bookshelf. It's still chattering in the background.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of what I think the research
Speaker 1: around flow, if I may, should be centered on, is
Speaker 1: how to access those states more quickly and more deeply,
Speaker 1: because I think that we experience this whenever we pick
Speaker 1: up our phone and we start scrolling Instagram or Twitter.
Speaker 1: What they've done so beautifully and almost sometimes start detriment
Speaker 1: but beautifully with social media is that there's a ton
Speaker 1: of libraries of different types of information packed into a
Speaker 1: very narrow context, and so we're basically library flipping. If
Speaker 1: I look at your tweet and then I look at
Speaker 1: another tweet, they have no relevance to one another. So
Speaker 1: it's almost like being in one section of the library
Speaker 1: looking at anthropology, and then all of a sudden, I'm
Speaker 1: in geography, Then all of a sudden, I'm in neuroscience,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, I'm in the murder mysteries, and
Speaker 1: the brain sort of will try and lock to each
Speaker 1: one of those. And so it's anti flow in one sense,
Speaker 1: but it's the flow is all within the context of
Speaker 1: the application. When Schottler talks about flow like on his
Speaker 1: mountain bike or while skiing, or it's so tangible because
Speaker 1: in physical pursuits, we don't have the option to you know,
Speaker 1: mountain bike and ski at the same time. I mean,
Speaker 1: you could come up with some silly hybrid of that,
Speaker 1: but we don't have the option to cycle and swim
Speaker 1: at the same time. But with our mind, we have
Speaker 1: the option to leap back and forth all the time.
Speaker 1: So to me, flow is going to be best understood
Speaker 1: first in these very well defined physical pursuits. But I'm
Speaker 1: throughout the day, I'm always thinking about what is my
Speaker 1: what is my tether locking? What is it? You know?
Speaker 1: And this is why I both loathe and love this device,
Speaker 1: the phone, because I find that it it can allow
Speaker 1: for billions of context to enter my brain. But that's
Speaker 1: part of the problem, right, And so going down, going down,
Speaker 1: drilling down into a question like like we had this
Speaker 1: unfortunate incident we were talking about before we log started
Speaker 1: recording that there was an arsen recently in the area.
Speaker 1: They caught the guy. Fortunately, we were asking them, like,
Speaker 1: what leads somebody to want to do this went down
Speaker 1: the rabbit hole of arsen for a little bit. That's
Speaker 1: actually an exploration of a single topic, which from a
Speaker 1: perspective of brain function, is very normal and very healthy.
Speaker 1: To think about a topic in sequence and go more
Speaker 1: and more deeply into its actually kind of feels good.
Speaker 1: What is what is diabolically bad for diabolical and is
Speaker 1: actually bad for us is when we are our brain
Speaker 1: is constantly switching between context and a feed. And that's
Speaker 1: what I think is the problem. If I had my way,
Speaker 1: I'd be able to filter my Twitter feed by psychology
Speaker 1: and neuroscience and then I'd switch to like the other
Speaker 1: things I really enjoy, Like I'm a total animal, you know.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if that's a very good answer,
Speaker 1: but I think that flow deserves more work, and it
Speaker 1: has to do something with our brain's ability to set
Speaker 1: context very narrowly. And we know that focus and narrow
Speaker 1: context setting is absolutely the place in which we experience
Speaker 1: deeper satisfaction, the place we experience great learning and great growth,
Speaker 1: and where we access, neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change.
Speaker 1: I've never been changed by simply scrolling through an Instagram feed.
Speaker 1: I've been changed by reading a chapter in a book.
Speaker 1: I've been changed. I've changed the way that I think
Speaker 1: in general or very specifically about stories that I've read
Speaker 1: or interactions that I've had. And it's not to say
Speaker 1: that social media is evil. I teach neuroscience on social media.
Speaker 1: You have accessed many, many more people, I would say,
Speaker 1: right then you would be able to access you were
Speaker 1: just locked away in some university office. But I think
Speaker 1: we should think about how many contexts our brain is
Speaker 1: locking to each day. And I think we should embrace,
Speaker 1: potentially embrace a concept not just a flow, but of
Speaker 1: anti flow. And anti flow is what we're doing a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, and anti flow is the enemy
Speaker 1: of neuroplasticity, and anti flow is the enemy of the
Speaker 1: ability to achieve flow. I do think that flow is
Speaker 1: a skill, and I think Coler would probably agree, Although
Speaker 1: don't want to put words in his mouth. I'd love
Speaker 1: to know what you think about this, because I'm just
Speaker 1: kind of riffing at this point. Yeah, again, I think
Speaker 1: this is a two be continued conversation for us, because
Speaker 1: I'm eternally fascinated or perpetually fascinated by this topic and
Speaker 1: really interested in my work on the coupling of the
Speaker 1: executive attention network and the default mode network in just
Speaker 1: such a way that you get the optimal state of
Speaker 1: flow where the intentional executive attention is lowered just enough
Speaker 1: that you're directly accessing the rich internal fantasies and associations,
Speaker 1: and so it gives you that feeling of like you're
Speaker 1: just jamming, you know. So that's the topic of creative flow,
Speaker 1: you know, and there's I think there's different types of flow,
Speaker 1: you know, that we're having social flow right now, which
Speaker 1: I think might be activating different brain networks than if
Speaker 1: I'm doing jazz improvisation or if I'm just doing creative
Speaker 1: writing writing a poem. So I think we need to
Speaker 1: talk about the demean specificity of flow in addition to
Speaker 1: how we you know, call or test talks like general
Speaker 1: sort of like let's have one theory to explain everything,
Speaker 1: and it's like that it's not possible, you know. Does
Speaker 1: that make sense? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, And I think that
Speaker 1: you know, words like it. So just as a reflection
Speaker 1: you know. I'm in such deep admiration of the sleep scientists,
Speaker 1: you know that have defined different stages of sleep rem sleep,
Speaker 1: slow wave sleep, stage one stage Tuesday suit Ta is
Speaker 1: four alternating cycles. We sleep in repeating ninety minute cycles.
Speaker 1: All this kind of stuff right. Early night dreaming is
Speaker 1: more about recovery of the body and motor learning. Later
Speaker 1: night dreaming is rem dominant, more about emotional uncoupling from
Speaker 1: prior experiences. It's kind of a therapy of sorts. We
Speaker 1: have basically zero taxonomy to describe waking states, and we
Speaker 1: have basically zero understanding of the neurobiology underlying those states,
Speaker 1: whereas with sleep we understand a lot thanks to the
Speaker 1: great efforts of that community. So I think the next
Speaker 1: ten years of neuroscience and psychology we are tasked with
Speaker 1: figuring out what is a really good taxonomy of states,
Speaker 1: and flow is what I would put under the category
Speaker 1: of highly desirable states. It sounds wonderful. Everybody wants it.
Speaker 1: It's like the thing you want. The reason my lab
Speaker 1: has focused on states that are far more mundane, like
Speaker 1: stress or calm or alertness or focus. We are interested
Speaker 1: in creativity, etc. Is because I'm a big believer that
Speaker 1: we can build up our understanding to these more complex
Speaker 1: and highly desirable states through a basic understanding of the
Speaker 1: ingredients that go into feeling sleepy or alert. And it
Speaker 1: also probably reflects the fact that I love to think
Speaker 1: about high level concepts. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: the question, you know that every PhDe advised or asks
Speaker 1: their highly ambitious student or postoc is like, Okay, what's
Speaker 1: the experiment? You know, I think every academic has had
Speaker 1: the experience of having this brilliant person come to them
Speaker 1: highly enthusiastic, and the student says, I want to study
Speaker 1: plank plank playing, and you say, okay, great, design an experiment.
Speaker 1: And so I think with flow we need to start
Speaker 1: designing experiments. And I'd love to be involved in that
Speaker 1: effort if ever there were the opportunity, And I'm sure
Speaker 1: there are experiments out there, But right now I think
Speaker 1: is the time to start thinking about what are these
Speaker 1: states of waking? Like, like, what state are we in
Speaker 1: right now? Scott? I don't know, I feel alert, focused,
Speaker 1: but like, what what does that? Does it have a name?
Speaker 1: Does it even need a name? Clearly, as you said,
Speaker 1: it's different than the kind of flow I would experience
Speaker 1: snowboarding or downhill skiing or something. So more more language
Speaker 1: to describe the nuance, but in a tractable way. Right
Speaker 1: language can either confuse or it can clarify. And what
Speaker 1: I like so much about the way that you place
Speaker 1: things is that I can you know, because of your
Speaker 1: background as a as a you know, as a researcher,
Speaker 1: and because of your background and current ground as a
Speaker 1: as an academic, you know that ultimately there's got to
Speaker 1: be an experiment with which we can measure this, and
Speaker 1: I think that's we need more of that, And so
Speaker 1: I just this is also a reflection on how much
Speaker 1: I appreciate your knowledge, because I think that in the
Speaker 1: social sphere of internet psychology, most or a lot of
Speaker 1: what's out there is just naming stuff that sounds cool
Speaker 1: and sounds clickbaity. But that's not the same as understanding
Speaker 1: something at all. Definitely not. And I think both of
Speaker 1: us we want to understand the mechanism behind these things,
Speaker 1: and there's there's different mechanisms that play with different states
Speaker 1: of flow. And you know, I'm just gonna end here
Speaker 1: and say to be continued, like I know I keep
Speaker 1: saying that, but I just I really appreciate you coming
Speaker 1: to my podcast. I really appreciate what you're doing doing
Speaker 1: in this world, Andrew, and the passion for science as
Speaker 1: well as the rigor to science that you bring. You
Speaker 1: bring both those things and that's a wonderful combination. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much for being on my podcast today. Oh, thanks
Speaker 1: so much for having me on. It's been a real
Speaker 1: pleasure and I look forward to many more conversations. And
Speaker 1: it'd be fun to grab another workout on the beach.
Speaker 1: That was fun. It'd be a lot of fun. And
Speaker 1: stay safe, stay safe from the fire. The fires behind you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you might be able to hear some of the planes
Speaker 1: and helicopters, you know, Hats off to the firefighters that
Speaker 1: are that are doing this incredible work, and well, hats
Speaker 1: on for now. They should keep their hats on, but
Speaker 1: that you know. But but definitely they deserve a nod.
Speaker 1: They do such hard and dangerous and important work. And
Speaker 1: it's only when we have a fire that you like
Speaker 1: stop to think, woll they are these people whose profession
Speaker 1: is to basically save our lives and our property. So
Speaker 1: and the police who caught the guy, So yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: stay safe, stay safe, so we can hang out again soon.
Speaker 1: All right, thanks so much, Thank you, thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to react in some way to something you heard, I
Speaker 1: encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also,
Speaker 1: if you'd prefer a completely ad free experience, you can
Speaker 1: join us at Patreon dot com slash psych Podcast. Thanks
Speaker 1: for being such a great supporter of the show, and
Speaker 1: tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity.