LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Los Angeles, CA

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Recently the Huberman Lab podcast

hosted a live event at The Wiltern theater in Los Angeles.

It was entitled The Brain Body Contract.

The first part of the evening was a lecture about science

and science-based tools for mental health, physical health,

and performance.

The second half was a question and answer period,

in which the audience asked me questions from the podcast,

or related to their own interests or things

that they've gleaned from social media, or just

general questions about mental health, physical health,

and performance.

And I answered those questions for them.

We wanted to make the recorded version of that question

and answer session available to everybody,

regardless of who could attend.

So what follows is the question and answer

period from The Wiltern theater Brain Body Contract

live Huberman Lab event.

I want to be sure to thank the sponsors from that event.

They were Eight Sleep, which makes

smart mattress covers with heating and cooling capacity.

I started sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress

cover about eight months ago, and it is completely

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And I wake up feeling far better than I ever have even

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In fact, I love my Eight Sleep so much that when I travel,

now I'm quite bothered that Airbnbs and hotels don't

have Eight Sleep mattress covers on them.

And I've even shipped my Eight Sleep mattress cover out

to meet me in the location that I arrived to so that I

get the best possible sleep.

If you want to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com/huberman

to save up to $400 off their Sleep Fit holiday bundle,

which includes their new Pod 3 Cover.

Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA,

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Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman.

I'd like to also thank our supplement partner, Momentous.

They make the very highest quality supplements.

They ship internationally, and they've formulated supplements

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If you're interested in any of those supplements,

please go to livemomentous.com/huberman.

And now without further ado, the question and answer period

from the Huberman Lab live event in Los Angeles.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

What occurs in the mind body when you have ADHD?

Are there ways to address it without medication?

Thank you for this question.

So attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

used to be called ADD.

The hyperactivity part is a little misleading.

And again I'm not a clinician here.

Here's what we know works for some people,

and yet there are always going to be

side effects of any kind of chemical manipulation, which

is that, we know that people, kids, and adults with ADHD

actually have a tremendous capacity to focus if they like

what they're focusing on.

You take a kid with ADHD who can't focus

and you give them their favorite video game

and they are a laser.

The threshold to access the dopamine system is higher.

And dopamine has this incredible ability

to focus the brain and other aspects of the nervous system.

Certainly, if people require medication,

I'm not going to tell you to stop taking that medication.

But the focus training exercises that have been explored mainly

in China, but they're starting to be explored over here

as well, do seem to be of benefit.

And these are as they sound.

They use them in schools in China now, which are literally

visual focus exercises.

Your mental focus, that is your ability

to focus on things cognitively, follows your visual focus.

And of course your stress will anchor your--

essentially put you in a soda straw view of the world.

So yes, there are non medication-based treatments.

By medication I'm assuming you mean prescription medication.

There are of course supplement-based medications

that will increase dopamine mainly L-tyrosine.

Again, this is something to think

carefully about before you start tampering

with your dopamine system.

But it is the--

L-tyrosine is the precursor to dopamine.

So it will raise your dopamine levels.

But I believe, and you'll hear me say this

as many times as necessary, that one should--

if you can rely on behavioral tools first,

then of course, sleep and nutritionists are prerequisite.

Again, for all mental health, physical health performance,

you simply can't neglect those.

And then and only then if all of that

isn't working to rely on supplement-based tools

or on prescription medication.

So it's clear that Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera

work for ADHD, but some people choose

to rely on more subtle forms of pharmacologic manipulation

like L-tyrosine.

And this focusing exercise essentially

consists of spending 1 to 3 minutes trying

to maintain visual focus.

And yes, you are allowed to blink.

I don't know why we tend to stare at something

we don't blink.

But don't let your eyes dry out.

And that can increase your ability to focus cognitively.

And it works.

And keep in mind that focusing always involves a refocusing.

We covered a beautiful data set, not collected by my lab

but by Wendy Suzuki's Lab at NYU, that at roughly 10-minute,

it's actually 13-minute a day meditation of the sort,

where you just focus on your breathing,

has been shown to improve focus significantly.

Why don't we hear about this more?

Well she's now Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU

and all the students are hearing about it.

Hopefully, they're doing it.

But it takes a little bit of discipline

for some reason 10-minute a day type meditation

is something that very few people follow consistently.

But if you're looking for non medication-based treatments

for ADHD, or you're somebody who just struggles with focus,

the focusing exercise or the meditation,

I just subscribed it can be very useful, so say the data.

Yeah, thanks for bringing up space-time bridging.

Are people familiar with what space-time bridging is?

I haven't talked a lot about it.

OK, this is-- thanks for bringing that up.

We actually have an episode on meditation coming

up soon where I cover it.

And I talked about it long ago and then

I kind of abandoned it because well, we wanted more data

and it's a pretty interesting technique.

If you think about the nervous system and vision

in particular, but if you're not a sighted person or you're low

vision, or no vision, you could do this with your hearing.

But I'm going to assume most people here are sighted.

If not just translate this to the auditory system.

You have this incredible ability to close your eyes

and focus, for instance, on-- people talk about the third eye

center, focusing right behind your forehead.

Do you know why people do that when they meditate?

The reason is that you actually have

no sensation in your brain.

It's the one place to focus your attention for which

you abandon sensation.

If I think about any portion of my body or my breathing,

either I'm going to sense what's happening.

I'm going to perceive my inner landscape,

so-called interior reception, or my outer.

If I look out into the world, it's external perception.

When you focus your attention with your eyes closed,

you do have to close your eyes just behind your forehead.

You are focusing on your thinking Sort of obvious,

but I don't-- at least to me it never been stated that clearly.

Again, one of the problems with some

of the more traditional practices but also the problem

with science, is that there's a shrouding of everything in very

complex language, which sucks.

Why is it suck?

Because it's a separator.

You eliminate the number of people

that can be brought to potentially useful practices.

And I don't like it when people, including myself,

overuse mechanism and descriptions of fancy phrases

to mask basic principles, so simplest language

I think it tends to unify people around the practices.

So when you focus on this so-called third eye center,

or a spot right behind your forehead or on your breath--

it's a little tricky with the breath,

but when you focus on your frontal cortex,

there's nothing to sense.

Because there's no sensory neurons there.

There's no touch.

There's no pain.

Nothing.

That's why in these gory movies, you can take the skull off

and-- while in neurosurgeries they're poking around in there,

and the person's playing a violin.

Like no anesthetic No anesthetic.

Doesn't require anesthetic.

There's no sensory neurons.

You can't sense anything there.

So space-time bridging involves--

it's essentially a meditation, but it's really

a perceptual exercise.

I think that's where we're going with this,

is it starts by closing your eyes

and focusing on that location for which there

is no sensation.

There's only thought.

And then opening your eyes and focusing on a location

maybe about the distance of your hand.

And you focus also on your breathing.

So you sort of imagine a kind of a tether between that.

You can split your attention to these two locations.

You're thinking about your body and you're

thinking about a location outside of you.

And then while continuing to think

about your body, so-called intersection,

focus on your breathing, you focus further out,

and then further out, and then further out.

And then ultimately, you know that little cartoon or meme

where they're like, we're just a little blue dot floating

in a big universe.

And like it's supposed to make all your problems go away.

It kind of works because what you've done

is you've expanded your perception,

and you go oh, yeah the stuff that's happening in here

is really important when I'm focused

on what's happening in here.

But when I'm focused on what's going on

and the vastness of all this, and we're just

a little pale blue dot and all that,

it changes your perception.

Not just your visual perception obviously.

Changing your visual perception changes

your cognitive perception, which changes

your emotional experience.

So the space-time bridging is a perceptual exercise

where you step from focusing internally

to focusing externally at a short distance, then

a further distance, further distance, further distance,

and then trying to imagine yourself

in this larger landscape.

It sounds very mystical but it's actually very neurobiological.

And it captures something really amazing.

Why is the T in there-- the time?

Space-time bridging, because this is space?

But time is in there because when you focus in close,

your slicing of time is finer.

You notice the subtle fluctuations

in your breathing and things that are happening up close.

Whereas when you focus further out, your perception of time

actually changes, which is why in panoramic vision

we are calm.

And when you think about, we're just

a pale blue dot and we mostly only live to about 85

or maybe 100 years old, and then what's happening right now,

my boss being a jerk, and all that doesn't really

matter because the Earth is spinning

and all that kind of stuff.

Which is all true.

And it's the stuff of philosophy and mindfulness.

And I think it's beautiful.

What you're really doing is you're

changing your time perception by changing your space perception.

So space-time bridging is very useful

because most people get locked at one step, one

of these stations, especially under conditions of stress.

And people who have trouble focusing-- and I'm

glad you brought this up in this context of ADHD,

people have a hard time focusing whether or not

they have ADHD or not, tend to skip back and forth

between different space-time domains,

as we call them in science.

So this is a simple exercise that you can do.

Focusing internally then stepping out externally,

and then stepping back in.

All the while paying attention to your inner landscape

just simply by focusing on your breathing.

It's a tool that we're still collecting data

on in terms of its utility, but people are already using it.

And I don't think of it as a meditation.

I think of it as a perceptual exercise.

Thanks for asking that.

As a teenager what are five things

you would recommend to physically feel my best?

I'm a 15-year-old surfer who attends high school

and plays soccer.

It sounds like you're doing a lot of things, right?

To physically feel your best.

So I'm going to grasp at some context here that I'm not--

that's not within reach.

I'm assuming if you are doing all these things you're

hopefully doing a bunch of other things too.

And they're going to be demands on you

that you probably some of them you don't want to do,

school and things like that, are going

to have varying levels of joy and delight and demand

of things you don't want to do.

I don't want to default always to the simplest of tools.

But I certainly think that even as a 15-year-old

if you're not already getting lots and lots of sleep,

that's going to be great.

Tell your parents that I said you should

get lots and lots of sleep.

provided you're not sleeping through classes,

I'm a professor after all.

I couldn't tell you otherwise.

I would say if I could travel back in time as a 15-year-old,

I would encourage you to cultivate some sort

of mindfulness practice.

I know this sounds a little cliche,

but having some awareness of your thinking

about your thinking is good.

But I'm actually not going to say

sit down and meditate for 10 minutes a day, or do NSDR.

I'm actually not going to tell you

that I think given how plastic your brain is,

how much it's changing at 15, I would encourage you--

and maybe you would set a timer for this, to actually develop

just a really keen awareness of what stresses you out,

what relaxes you, what delights, you et cetera.

And just to simply develop an awareness of that,

because those are your antennae.

And I certainly had a meditation practice as a youth,

mostly given to me, because I was a little haywire

and I needed it.

And it worked pretty well.

But I think in retrospect, what I

wish I had developed was more of a sense of how I navigated

stress or things and things I enjoyed

and things I didn't enjoy.

And I would just encourage you to have a general awareness.

Try and detect and learn about what

raises your adrenaline, what raises your dopamine, what

raises your serotonin, and then start thinking about tools.

But, again the awareness is going

to be very valuable and gosh, as a 15-year-old you are

in this amazing blessed period of heightened neuroplasticity,

should we all be so lucky.

So enjoy it.

Next question please.

Clarity on adrenaline regarding cold water.

Should we wait to feel the rise of adrenaline,

the "get me out of here" feeling and the fall of it

before bailing?

Yes, provided it doesn't kill you.

I don't want to say cold water.

It's hard to kill yourself with cold water, provide your head's

above and you're breathing.

But it's-- sorry, my podcast producer's always like,

"I can't help that."

Anyway, it's a great tool.

And different days it'll feel different.

So for instance, doing any kind of adrenaline and deliberate

cold exposure, or adrenaline increasing activity early

in the day, you might find that you are more "resilient"

than later.

In other words, the wall like, I really don't want to do this.

This is actually interesting for I think

it extends beyond cold water.

Let's say you really don't want to do something.

Pay attention to the fact that maybe it's

not the right thing to do.

But assuming it's something that you

know you should do but you don't want to do,

you are already in the first wall of adrenaline.

You don't experience it necessarily

as heightened levels of stress.

You might experience it as heightened levels of fatigue

or a hard time shifting on that kind of activation state

that's required to move through the thing.

But I do encourage you to take advantage of that.

And we have an episode coming out tomorrow actually that

answers questions like, should you train if you're sick

and what if you travelling.

And there's context always.

But I think that you do want to experience.

If you want to get the most out of the cold water exposure

and to be more specific the adrenaline, then you want

to get to that point of I really want to get out of here,

but I know I can stay in safely.

But I really want to get out of here.

And it's a little hard to explain,

but there's just so much learning in those short moments

about where your mind goes.

And this sounds very kind of again, subjective and maybe

a little wishy-washy.

But you can realize great things about yourself

in those moments.

You can find insight in those moments.

Also keep in mind that the degree of discomfort,

not just physical but mental discomfort,

is directly predictive of the pain to pleasure wave

that you'll experience afterwards.

The reason it feels so good when you get out of the ice bath

and you're showered off--

I always do the warm shower after.

I don't do this end on cold thing.

I don't know, It just seems a little too painful.

And then take a warm shower and then you feel great.

And that's the surge of dopamine that we

know based on a paper published in the European

Journal of physiology lasts many hours, and it's a 100% to 200%

increase in dopamine.

It's not a subtle effect.

And then people say, wait, is that dopamine

going to crash my dopamine system?

No, because it's a nice slow rise.

In fact, I am actually not aware of many things besides love

and delight that can create this long, slow arc

of dopamine lasting many hours.

Maybe you're aware of other things.

If you are, let me know.

But it turns out that long arc is a true anti depressant.

And my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Anna Lembke who's

the head of our Dual Diagnosis Addiction Clinic

has talked about in her amazing book Dopamine Nation

about patients of hers that have really helped themselves

along and out of the more depressive phases of working

through addiction and in just depression in general

through directed cold water therapy.

So I'm obviously a fanatic about it in the sense

that it's a powerful relatively safe, if done properly.

Safe, if done properly, way to modulate

your internal dopamine.

Hopefully, I answered your question.

Next question please.

Sorry, I caught it raised it went off the fall, as well.

Yes, I think you should get out once you've

accomplished something.

Don't get out when you panic unless it's dangerous, sorry.

How can you train your brain to feel more confident moments

where you tend to feel intimidated?

OK, these are hard question.

Because context is tricky here, because I don't know what

the context is.

And confidence on short time scales, and then

long time scales, so confidence in school,

confidence in career, those are long arc things.

Whereas confidence to be able to do something in the short term

is different.

But remember those action sequences

that trigger the release of dopamine.

I've mainly talked about the dark side of dopamine,

but I hopefully also talked about the sort of upward spiral

that dopamine can cause, mainly by thinking

about delight and things that you really enjoy.

That carries over.

And I would say that you want to micro slice

the demands of what's maybe got you back on your heels a bit.

Actually a good friend of mine who's here tonight,

I think also my friend Pat, he has

a great way of conceptualizing this, which

is for most all endeavors we either

feel back on our heels, flat footed, or forward

center of mass.

Like we can really do something, we're flat footed,

we're back on our heels.

And sometimes getting from back on our heels,

lets call that lack of confidence to just on two feet,

and confident enough to move forward or at least stay

in the game.

That's going to require you could lean on different tools.

I can't say which would be ideal for the circumstance you

have in mind.

But I do think that having a way to calm yourself

will give you access to more internal resources.

We know this.

This was something I meant to bring up

during the discussion about fear versus love,

et cetera, trying to access delight and love.

When we are in a state of fear or stress or anxiety,

the rule set, the options available to us, and indeed

our creativity, is greatly diminished.

And this has to do with the way that the prefrontal cortex

interacts with an area of the brain

called the insula, which relates to our internal landscape.

And there's this weird phenomenon,

which is that normally, our brain--

our thinking brain and our rule setting brain can--

it leads the brain parts that control and pay attention

to how we feel internally.

And that's why for instance, if you feel a little nervous

you can still do something.

At some point you get stressed enough.

And we know this from work by my colleague David Spiegel,

it reverses.

And these areas of the brain that

are paying attention like how flushed my face is,

or whether or not I'm sweating, or my breathing,

actually start to shut down creative decision making.

So I would say the way to have more confidence

is to learn to control that stress

and keep the part of your brain.

The prefrontal cortex is that part

that can come up with new rules that can

be funny that can be creative.

That keeps that brain part leading.

The way to think about this is, the prefrontal cortex

is sort of like the coach, and the rest of your brain

are sort of like the players.

And if you get too stressed, the players start to lead the game

and the coach follows, and kind of drags them along.

So I would encourage you to focus on real-time stress

modulation, and to raise your stress

threshold using the sorts of tools we talked about.

And to register your wins.

I didn't get into this in too much detail,

but one of the amazing things about the dopamine system

is that it's highly subject to your interpretation.

If you tell yourself that a fail was a win,

and you can see or conceptualize some way in which that's

actually true, you get to tap into the dopamine system.

You might think that's crazy.

You can cheat your own brain.

You can cheat your own neurochemistry.

And indeed you can.

You can change the time, space-time reference.

And we see this with examples like Nelson Mandela or Viktor

Frankl.

You read their stories trapped in little cells, confined,

imprisoned.

And they come up with new ways to access the dopamine system

by now not thinking about what they're not getting,

but thinking about what they can control

in their immediate experience.

Many examples of this throughout literature and history.

And the dopamine system is the life force system.

I don't say that in any loose way.

Dopamine is life force.

It's the wish and the desire to continue.

It's persistence.

And so if you can think about what might seem like a failure

and really spend some time thinking

about not the potential wins on the outside,

but how you can conceptualize that as a potential win

internally, you really do get to achieve

an internal chemical win.

And that chemical win sets you up for more real wins,

hopeful that make sense.

It's incredible how contextualize the dopamine

system is.

But if it weren't, why would it matter

if we're talking about money or mates or food or job or school?

You don't get 50 reward systems and motivation systems.

You get one, and that's the dopamine system.

Next question please.

What is the competing mechanism behind bilateral eye movement,

EMDR, that helps resolve psychological trauma?

The competing mechanism.

Well, let me try and answer as best I can.

I'm not sure I understand the full extent of the question.

But let me--

EMDR, moving your eyes from side to side, right?

And then recounting a trauma is a very common

and actually one of the four approved treatments that

are behavioral for trauma.

So it's taken seriously in the psychiatric and psychological

community for good reason.

It tends to work best for single event traumas as opposed

to entire childhoods.

No joke there.

Some people have their entire childhood that was traumatic.

Other people they experience a single event trauma

or repeated periods of the same or similar type of trauma.

Eye movements from side to side have

been shown in a number of studies

to very potently reduce the activity of a brain

structure called the amygdala, which most people are familiar

with, because of the character from the Star Wars movie,

Amygdala.

There's a neuroscientist somewhere on that team.

It is indeed a threat detection center

and when you move through space, not outer space,

but when you walk like this your eyes actually

generate these subtle side to side shifts,

unless you're focusing on a specific target.

And my lab and other laboratories

have found that leads to a very potent quieting of the threat

detection system.

And then EMDR is essentially a process

of pairing that calmer state with no threat detection

system activated with the recount of something that

normally would be quite triggering.

So you've heard of Pavlovian conditioning,

like a bell rings and the animal gets fed and animal

salivate eventually, just the bell will evoke the salivation.

You're doing the reverse of that.

It's called behavioral desensitization.

It has an underlying mechanism, et cetera.

But the idea is to pair a calm state

with recount of something.

It has been shown to be successful.

There are people who think that the side to side eye movements

and the recount of trauma may actually be

invoking some form of hypnosis.

My colleague David Spiegel's an expert in clinical hypnosis,

has appeared on my podcasts, Rituals podcasts

and a few other podcasts.

And talks about, this it is not stage hypnosis,

it's clinical hypnosis.

So there may be something going on there.

EMDR-- again, some people get great relief from it.

Other people don't.

What's kind of nice is that this eye movements

from side to side or simply taking a walk as long as you're

not looking at your phone and not allowing your eyes to move

from side to side, is a very good way

to shut down the fear and stress system.

So taking a walk I think is relaxing for obvious reasons.

And there are data showing that part

of the reason why animals scratch at the door

and want to go for a walk may not actually be the exercise.

There's kind of an anxiety and then an anxiety relief

that occurs.

Of course, they have to go to the bathroom too.

One of Costello's great joys in life

was just peeing on everything outdoors, thankfully.

So the psychological trauma rewiring, unfortunately there

haven't been a lot of brain imaging studies looking

at this long term of how well EMDR works.

What I think is going to happen in the next few years

by the way, is it is not going to be a discussion around,

should you do EMDR, should you do

transcranial magnetic stimulation,

should you do behavioral therapy?

It's going to be combination therapies.

Combination therapies, including pharmacologic manipulations

to essentially give a boost to the systems that

encourage neuroplasticity, like dopamine and serotonin and

adrenaline.

And then also then perform EMDR.

And if you want to talk about what's

happening in the landscape of clinical trials

on some of the psychedelics, I'm happy to talk about it.

They're still illegal, but they are

being used in clinical trials.

And very interesting stuff is happening there.

OK, next question please.

What new research or interventions

are you most excited about in the realm

of health and wellness?

So what I think is going to be very

interesting in the next few years really

reflects my memory obsession that you've

seen a little bit of tonight.

But the thing that I think is going to be most useful--

and I've seen this in science before

and I think we're going to see it in health and wellness.

It's that there are all these tools and all these people,

and he's saying this and she's saying that.

But what, we're going to start paying attention to

is, what are the common themes?

And a broader and more important theme

is going to be one of modulation versus mediation.

What do I mean?

Well, if someone were to pull a fire alarm right now,

and please don't, that will shift our attention

and make it hard to focus on what I'm saying.

And knowing me I'd probably just stay up here talking.

Do we think that fire alarms mediate attention?

No, they modulate it.

If it were very cold in this room

like it was when we first got here tonight, or arctic cold--

hopefully it's warmed up a bit.

It has and I'm so sorry.

So sorry.

Yeah, I attempted to-- yeah.

I almost thought maybe we all just do

a bunch of breathing to heat up like adrenaline release.

But these days getting groups of people

to all breathe on each other is not exactly a--

I can see that might go the wrong way in terms

of what people interpret.

So the idea here is that certain things directly

mediate something.

Like a physiological side directly

calms you down quickly.

It mediates the calming response.

Getting good sleep makes you less easily triggered.

It modulates stress.

But is sleeping directly mediating stress control?

No, and I think this is really important.

And this brings up the topic of the gut-brain axis.

The gut is rich with these little bugs,

bacteria trillions of them, which

is an eerie thought to me.

But also the surface of your skin, the surface of your eyes,

you have a skin microbiome, a nasal microbiome.

Every mucosal lining has a microbiome.

In fact, think about this.

This is a crazy but worthwhile tangent.

Have you ever bitten the inside of your mouth?

It sucks, right?

And you get cut and it hurts.

But guess what, the inside of your mouth

heals without a scar.

Think about that.

Weird, right?

You cut anywhere else on your body,

and depending on how well you heal,

and your age and your immune status, you get a scar.

Your mouth is filled with bacteria

and it's open to the world, but the gut microbiome,

provided it's healthy, provides an incredible ability

to heal quickly.

And I'm not somebody who's done a lot of acupuncture.

I went a few times.

And now there's interesting science

happening on acupuncture.

But what's the first thing they do when you walk in there?

Let me see your tongue.

And then they go oh, yeah.

And they have this cool intuition

that's not based on Western mechanistic science.

It's more of an intuition based on millions,

if not billions of data points that have

been put into these charts.

It's pretty cool.

And what they are looking at, I believe

and from what my colleagues who work on microbiome tell me is,

they can look at the pallor of your tongue,

in particular in the back and get a sense of

whether or not the microbiome there

is of the appropriate stuff.

But they don't go, oh, lactobacillus.

Remember this all end to illness, right?

But then, Oh you're just biotic.

Instead they get a sense.

Now, parents of small babies learn

to detect all sorts of things coming out

of essentially every orifice of the child

as a readout of health because the child doesn't

have language.

And a dog owners unfortunately you want to do this too,

for better or for worse.

Probably for better, right?

So we have this intuition about gut health.

But gut health would be another example, where

it's very clear now that fiber can be helpful

but it's mostly consuming these fermented foods

that have been used for ages.

But low sugar fermented foods of the natto, kimchi, sauerkraut,

kombucha, et cetera, all these things

depending on which culture you're in,

they come in different forms.

Certain yogurts, et cetera, that allow the gut to be healthy.

And it modulates a huge number of systems.

So I don't think that you're going

to cure depression by adjusting your gut microbiome.

But if your gut microbiota are not well, and you improve that,

it will indeed shift the neurotransmitter systems

of your brain and give you a elevated mood.

That shouldn't come as a surprise anymore.

But I think that the whole world thinks like, gosh it must

be the serotonin in the gut.

No, it's actually not serotonin gut.

It's that the gut microbiota create chemicals that actually

become serotonin in the brain, or become dopamine

in the brain.

And so I think that the gut microbiome,

I would put in the same category,

although not quite as important.

I would put it in the category of like sleep.

It modulates a huge number of other processes.

It doesn't mediate them. , So sunlight, sleep,

healthy gut microbiome, exercise, good nutrition,

social connection, these things all create this general milieu

or environment of health.

I would like to see more distinction between modulating

and mediating effects and tools out there,

because I also see a lot of unnecessary argument.

People are like, there's no example

that improving your gut microbiome cures depression.

Of course there's not.

But there are really good examples.

If your gut microbiome is off that improving

it can improve mood, which depending

on where you are on that spectrum of depression

can really relieve things.

So I think that the future of health,

we hear so much about personalized medicine

and matched to your genome.

But we don't even have the basic.

Most people don't even have the basics right.

And if you watch or listen to the podcast long enough,

hopefully certain themes start to repeat themselves.

But a key theme that you learn in science,

you teach your students, does it modulate or does it mediate it?

You need to be careful with your language there.

And there's great information, or as we say, interpretation

power there.

If you understand the difference then

I think we can go a long way by making that distinction

modulating versus mediating.

There are probably other things that modulate health

that I'm overlooking now just because

of the flow that I'm in.

The CoolMitt.

Yeah, the CoolMitt.

Palmer cooling.

OK, I promised to talk about Palmer cooling.

Well, I'll do it now.

Palmer cooling they changed the Q&A format.

What can I say, this is like teaching in the classroom.

All right, very briefly.

The Palmer cooling, which is essentially placing--

you can cool the core of the body most quickly

by placing cold objects on the hands, the bottoms of the feet,

or on the top of the face, because

of the arrangement of vasculature.

Normally, you've got this arteries, capillaries,

veins things, but at those locations in the body,

you skip the capillaries and you can basically--

you're not really passing cooling the body,

but you're cooling off the core of the body more quickly.

And, if you do that in between sets of exercise

or during a run or cycling you can dramatically

increase your ability to continue.

I actually use the CoolMitt for cognitive work.

But you don't need a CoolMitt.

Sorry, guys.

You can just get a thing of ice water or just very cold water.

And I know it sounds trivially easy,

but you're actually just cooling your core

by putting your hands or even one hand on a relatively

cold thing of water or ice.

But not so cold that it constricts the vasculature

there.

This is the incredible work of my colleague at Stanford Dr.

Craig Heller.

Why wouldn't more people do this if you can

double the amount of endurance?

Believe it or not.

Or double the number of sets of exercise

you can do or feel more alert and do more cognitive work.

Why wouldn't more people do it?

Because people just don't do it.

And it sounds crazy.

It really sounds crazy, but it's a real thing.

And I wish more people would do it.

The athletes at Stanford do it.

People in the military do it.

So people who know and they use it, enjoy it.

It's just it's almost like seems to off target from what

you're trying to accomplish.

I don't know, for some reason, people

are finally onboard breathing like in a specific way

as a useful tool.

A few years ago no one was into that.

I mean, just think of how far we've come.

It's incredible.

People are talking about psychedelics, meditation,

breathing.

I think the pandemic for all its pains

and, you know, what a challenging

period for all sorts of reasons, did wake people up to the idea

that you have to take control over your health,

because there's no magic fairy coming to do it for you.

And with all due respect there's no government agency that's

going to drop off the kit at your front door of like,

here's how you take good care of yourself.

So it just not going to happen.

And it wouldn't happen under any circumstances.

So it's a personal responsibility issue.

All right.

What lessons from skateboarding?

The failure part.

The failure, failure, or failure.

I mean, for me skateboarding-- never was a good skateboarder.

I still have close friends in that community

and our photographer and a guy who

does all the visuals and the other guys

do the visuals for our podcast, Mike Blabac, Chris, and Martin,

all of that community.

I think that for me that community was really--

as Mike will sometimes say, skateboarders hate everything,

meaning they have a very high threshold for what

they consider acceptable.

It's not just what you do.

It's how you do it.

Super important.

And I think in neuroscience, there

are a lot of-- there's a lot of stuff.

In science in general, there are so many papers

and there are so many experiments.

How do you navigate that landscape?

I think it helped me develop a sense of taste.

But the taste that I'm referring to

is not necessarily a taste of which

science is cool or not cool.

That too, but it came through a few times

tonight when I was talking about my mentors.

I picked back then skateboarding because I really

liked the people.

And also you didn't need your parents to go to a game.

And so that worked for me.

And you could kind of make your own schedule.

And I do think it's very important to the extent

that you can, in science and in everything,

to surround yourself with the kinds of people

that you just really enjoy being around.

And so to me, the podcast, running a lab,

feels a lot like skateboarding.

It's the same energy.

It's the same neurochemical systems firing, so that's--

yeah, that one.

Next?

Favorite Feynman.

Oh, I know that's inappropriate.

I do have a Feynman story, but it's inappropriate.

Darn it.

Damn.

Maybe some time.

This is why I don't drink.

Good decision making.

Well, I read all of Feynman's books.

So I had the pleasure I never met him.

He was dead before I was born.

But my dad did.

And he had good Feynman stories and they were inappropriate.

So the cool thing about Feynman was that he didn't really

care if people understood the specifics of what

he was talking about.

He just wanted people to get turned

on to how amazing physics was.

And he loved general principles.

And one of the things-- the example

that sometimes given out.

I don't know how many of you're familiar with the Feynman

books.

But surely, you're joking Mr Feynman

or what do you care what other people think, all of that

stuff it's wonderful.

He picked locks.

When he worked at Los Alamos Labs,

they were working on the bomb.

And he basically-- well, there and elsewhere.

And every morning the offices used to come in

and he would spread all the top secret papers out on the floor.

He would break into the safes at night.

And then they were perplexed who could do this.

And he liked safe cracking.

Literally like national security secrets just

for fun, prankster.

He also bongo drummed naked on the roof of Caltech.

And he did most of his writing of theorems in strip clubs,

in fact.

Learnt to draw late in life, was really

into flotation tanks, and very curious about

but never did psychedelics.

That's as I understand.

But one of the cool Feynman factoids

is that when he was a kid, he talks

about when he was a child that his dad used

to take him birdwatching.

And he'd say, oh, well that's a whatever scrub jay

and that's whatever thrush and that's the-- and his dad said,

no don't cloud your mind with naming and taxonomy.

That's not meaningful.

Because then what if it's different?

The pigmy thrush or the lesser or this or that.

The more important thing is to start

to identify principles of why certain birds behave

one way and certain birds behave another.

And to start finding the commonalities

and the regularities.

And that's a theme that I obviously tonight

have tried to impose.

And it's actually something that I can't do in podcasts,

necessarily because I can't thread across 40 episodes.

Or something like that in the same way

that I could in an evening like this.

So that's an appropriate Feynman story.

Also he just seemed like a delightful guy.

And he's kind of cool.

He's a little bit street, he had the thick accent.

He was from Far Rockaway, but he didn't really care much what

people thought, or he did and he pretended he didn't.

Care for when people tell you they

don't care what people think.

I think he did to the extent that it still allowed him

to get the message out there.

OK, next question please.

My horse.

Wow.

I love this.

I delight in all things animals, but especially horses,

because my high school girlfriend had a horse.

And they do that thing where people go, oh you know, horses

can detect how-- they know more about you than you know.

And then I get onto the horse, and the horse like this this

and this.

And it's like a litmus test.

Having a girlfriend with a horse was very intimidating for me

actually.

I felt like I had to compete with the horse.

She spent all this time with the horse, it's very large.

Anyway, eventually I broke the horse.

OK, my horse does the double inhale, long exhale often.

He's a bit of a stressed guy.

Warm blood?

Yeah, warm blood.

I used to work at the barn.

I used to shovel manure and work at the barn.

She brought her horse to college. .

I actually followed her off to college

I never would have gone to college

if she hadn't gone to college.

And the horses are interesting animals.

They do tell you a lot.

The horse does the double inhale, long exhale often.

He's a bit of a stress guy.

Do you suppose this physiological stress regulator

transcends species?

Absolutely.

In fact, I mentioned warm blood.

I have a colleague at Stanford and she's amazing.

Her name is Sue McConnell and she

is an expert in dog genetics, so you

can imagine I'm always asking her questions.

And we talk about dogs and we talk about horses because she

also--

I thinks she raises warm bloods.

And you hear about hot bloods and warm bloods.

And also, if you have any familiarity with dogs,

there are dogs like Costello, or like a nuclear bomb

could go off and Costello might open an eye.

That's the bulldog, economy of effort.

They're not going to get activated unless there's

a reason to do it.

They are very, as we call it, parasympathetic dominant.

That seesaw of autonomic arousal is just really relaxed.

Getting them into action is more of an effort.

There are other animals like the whippet

or the Italian greyhound.

Like they're always cold, that are very sympathetic dominant.

And then of course, within a breed or within a species

there's a range.

And humans also, are within a range.

I think anyone who's had children will tell you he

or she has been like this since birth.

Calm, easygoing, or like really easily stressed.

I think that seesaw, we didn't get into tonight too much.

But there's a concept with the autonomic regulation

of a hinge.

So don't think so much about being really stressed

out or really relaxed.

But certain animals, the hinge is

tighten so that the seesaw just kind of tilts

mellow like Costello.

A bulldog almost seems like a different animal

than a whippet.

They're so very different.

And within the category of horses--

and I'm not an expert in horse genetics,

but they are selected for not just

for their physical attributes, but for their psychological or

temperament attributes.

And you see this in dogs too.

In fact, the reason I picked Costello,

and Elvis can verify the stories, I read--

I wanted a dog for so many years.

And I went there and there were all these puppies.

And I was like I heard you need to take them in the other room

one by one.

And then if it barks for its siblings, you're like,

oh it's a healthy puppy.

So I walk in and all the dogs are running around like crazy.

It was right around Christmas time, right Elvis?

And they're running around and then there's one in the back.

And he's taking advantage of the fact

that all the other ones are running.

He's just eating out of all of their bowls.

And I was like, I want that one.

So I took that chubby little bastard in the next room

and I thought, OK, he's going to bark for his siblings.

And he lay down and he took a nap.

And I was like, this one.

I want this one.

Why did I want that one?

Well, this completes the principle

which is, I wanted a dog like that because I'm not like that.

And I was very interested in a dog I could take care of,

but also a dog that would help regulate my nervous system.

And so for me having a dog like that

as opposed to a whippet or something

that was going constantly around is a very calming effect.

And to this day memory of his snoring still puts me to sleep.

So I think that your horse probably has--

it kind of idles a little bit higher.

Think about the rpm.

You know, revs a little bit higher at a given speed--

more rpm at a given speed.

That's the way I think about the autonomic system.

How do you reset that?

Well, this is why a lot of exercise is good, right?

And certainly my girlfriend's horse was crazy.

It was gelded late.

And it was crazy.

I almost said nuts but that's like a bad pun

so it was not nuts but it was crazy.

It was gelded late.

Next question.

Is there any science behind staying motivated or developing

discipline?

Oh, so this represents the higher tier

of where I think things are going

to go in the next few years, where

we're going to start seeing this convergence of psychology

and biology, where we can get to these harder concepts.

I like to think that we can stay motivated

through a simple process that now will make sense to you.

Because the last thing I covered was toggling back and forth

between our ability to be gritty and linen,

kind of in friction, maybe even a little anger, fear,

competitiveness, et cetera.

That kind of grinding in.

But that the more sustaining fuel,

the sort of hybrid version, a hybrid fuel model

would be one in which you can access that.

But that's a depletable and not so renewable

resource without a lot of rest.

Meaning, working hard out of anger, determination, and kind

of grit will work, but when you are depleted

you have to stop for a long while.

Whereas if you can access this delight system,

which is really one of dopamine and serotonin, both.

In other words, and I want to think of a different way

to put this, but to try and think about what

sorts of things and tools allow you to be and feel most loving,

I know it sounds weak.

But it's anything but weak to be most

loving in the verb sense of the word toward what you're doing.

I actually used to use this trick in college when

I'd encounter a topic I hated.

I would tell myself I'm really--

I'm just going to fall in love with this

by trying to find the gems within it.

Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes it didn't.

But the wish to do it that way as opposed to OK,

I'm just going to grind this out,

at least for me at the time was a powerful tool.

So motivation and-- discipline is a tricky one.

That's sort of the just do it thing.

You need tools to modulate your stress and to get your sleep--

do all the basic things right.

Set the right context for you to be in your best

chance of being disciplined.

And that itself is its own form of discipline.

But in terms of continual motivation

you're not going to manage to go against the grain for very

long.

People have managed to go against challenge

for a very long time--

for a very long times.

In fact, I was reading recently about the psychology of people

who've been kidnapped.

And they have this odd trick that they used.

Have you heard about this is sort of like Stockholm

syndrome?

But they actually convinced themselves to fall in love

with their captors.

And then they come up with new ways to escape them,

which is kind of cool.

So there's something about mentally feeling

like you're trying to go from back on your heels

to flat footed.

That's very energetically costly.

So again, these systems are very susceptible to what we call

context or top down regulation.

Hopefully that helps.

I know it's a little bit abstract.

I wish I could give you a 1-minute exercise

or make you motivated.

But we do talk about tools to get adrenaline going and things

like that.

But spend some time thinking about what

would allow you to sustain effort

through positive feelings.

It's not a light concept at all.

Next question please.

What would be your biggest piece of advice

for achieving one's dreams?

Boy!

That's a tough one.

Again, this is going to be a little abstract.

I'm a believer in this idea kind of a seed message.

Robert Greene has talked a lot about this,

that we can all kind of think back to a event

or stage of our life.

Typically it's before puberty for other reasons

that are kind of interesting.

But where we delight in something.

So for me it was fish.

And obviously now I don't need to work on fish.

It wasn't about the fish.

I hope that came through.

I mean aquaria are really cool, but it's not about the fish.

It was something about the way they moved.

It was something about the way that it tickled my excitement.

I used to get dropped off at this little pet shop

in California Avenue called Monette's Pet Shop.

And my mom used it as childcare.

She would drop me off there and I had this book

and I would log all the tropical fish,

and which ones could be with which ones, and then I would--

I was obsessed.

But for me it was something about organizing

and being able to make reliable predictions.

It was about parsimony.

It was about principles as opposed to--

and the colors delighted me and all that kind of stuff.

The equipment delighted me, but then I hit puberty.

And then it was something else.

And then I went to college and it was something else.

And I got a girlfriend and it was something else.

So it changes over time.

But this is why I recommend to that young 15-year-old person

that they learn to tap into that sense of like Oh, this is cool.

Like this feels cool.

I know not everyone else thinks it's cool.

Maybe they do.

Like this feels good.

I actually have a somatic experience of this.

I'm not a very semantically oriented person.

I'm more up here.

But I actually know if I'm on to something,

if this left arm just kind of starts fidgeting,

it's like I want to move or like some people--

you can start to identify ways in which you suddenly

have this positive energy.

It's not a fear energy.

It's almost like a magnetism to things.

And just don't be confused or misdirected

in thinking that it's that thing.

It's that energy or that attraction to something

that feels right that is your--

I wish we had these divining rod to find water.

That's your tool.

It's like antennae, you want to grow your antennae.

So how do you follow your dreams?

Well, I never thought I'd do a podcast.

I never thought I'd become a neuroscientist.

You have to be willing of course, to take risks

and to iterate quickly, but not so quickly

that you fail out of the game, et cetera,

if you do get back in, et cetera.

But it's really about developing an awareness.

Now, the key thing is you're not going to find this

by going up a mountain and sitting there or waiting

for your passion to just kind of rock it in,

or piano fall onto your head.

It's not going to happen that way.

You have to interact with the sensory world

and different kinds of people.

And you have to be a little bit of a adventurer in a safe way,

of course.

An adventure and learn to recognize the signals.

And some people are very in tune with this.

There's an amazing podcast with Rick Rubin recently

on Joe Rogan's Podcast where he talks

about the creative processes.

Kind of this-- it seems like whatever's

going on in that beard of his just connects to the world.

And he can just like--

there, that's where you need to go and that's--

But that's part of the magic, is you don't really know.

And because it's all energetic--

it's all energetic.

And when I say energetic, I don't

mean in the mystical sense.

I mean you have to learn to sense

those fluctuations in energy.

Some people can sense them very easily

because they're very mellow.

And if something gets them really excited

they notice as a big delta, as we say in science, big change.

Other people they ride kind of high all the time.

And so everything is exciting to them,

and they miss a lot of the subtle fluctuations

in what's really special and right for them.

In fact, mania is characterized by hyper

elevated levels of dopamine and everything is a good idea.

And depression is the opposite.

Nothing is a good idea.

Nothing's going to work.

And those are the extremes.

And those are rough conditions obviously.

But for most people, it's about learning

to detect those subtle fluctuations.

And every time-- every single time you find somebody who is

exceptional at their craft and doing well in life--

there are a lot of people who are exceptional at their craft,

but not necessarily doing well on the whole.

Those people have a kind of intuition about

what feels good to them.

This year's Nobel Prize winner in chemistry

is my colleague, Carolyn Bertozzi.

And all I know of her, except the fact

that she's an amazing chemist, is they

did this interview with her.

And she said that when everyone would go out in college

she was finding excuses to stay home and read

organic chemistry.

Now, that to me sounds like a bad night.

But for her it was pure delight.

And she's wired for that.

And I think her work is going to be

vitally important and transformative for humanity.

I really do.

So how do you succeed in chasing your dreams?

You succeed in identifying what they are.

But you don't know at the outset.

You want to find the energy to find the right path

and continually course correct when you will undoubtedly

be off your path.

That's essentially what I've done.

I still look for the feeling of delighting

in Costello or the cuttlefish.

That's what I'm looking for.

It's not a template I have to match, but that's my like, oh,

yeah I know what that feels like.

It's like a texture.

It's like if you think about a bunch of different textures

of sandpaper, it's like this one that just feels really good.

And so you're comparing everything to that,

because the system that involves all these chemicals,

you'll find it if you learn to pay attention to it.

But you won't find it sitting, staring at your belly button

or going up a mountain.

You have to be in sensory experience in order to find it.

Reflection is good but you need to get into action.

Wow.

All right well.

OK, so psilocybin.

Opinion of the psychedelics.

Generally, we just had an episode with my colleague Nolan

Williams, who's a triple board certified neurologist

psychiatrist.

It's a fun thing about working at Stanford.

It's also very humbling because you're like,

whoa who are these people?

They have three board certifications.

The psilocybin-- first of all, not for everybody.

People with psychosis, it is still illegal

decriminalized in certain places.

So obviously the cautionary notes

people who have drug addiction issues or other kinds

of addiction issues need to be thoughtful about diving

into a neurochemical landscape like that.

But it does appear that the clinical trials

on one macro dose.

This is what's interesting to me.

A lot of people talk about micro-dosing psilocybin,

but the data at least according to Matthew Johnson, who is also

on the podcast, the data for micro-dosing

are not really there, frankly.

The data on single session macro dose, the sort of heroic doses

that have been talked about in the psychonaut community

for a depression and to some extent PTSD,

and for eating disorders and sort of end of life preparation

are quite encouraging.

In fact, the current data suggests that about 2/3

of people achieve lasting relief from one session.

Now, keep in mind those are guided sessions with physicians

in the room, et cetera.

I do think there's a potential hazard of all psychedelics,

which is they alter--

this includes MDMA or especially MDMA,

they alter the chemical landscape in you,

such that a lot of things can serve

as attractors in that state.

Meaning you can get really into the sound of music in an MDMA

session, feel connected to that, and waste

the opportunity for some more meaningful transformative

rewiring.

And I do think that's worth paying attention to.

So that's the usefulness of having a therapeutic guide,

as they can continually steer you back to what

at least for you is the more meaningful work.

But it's very encouraging.

And Nolan Williams, who I trust, is again

triple board certified M.D. Said that in the studies of lifetime

perceived individual and societal risk, of all

the compounds out there except for caffeine,

psilocybin is at the bottom of the list.

Whereas things like heroin, cocaine, alcohol,

methamphetamine sit at the top of the list.

Actually, alcohol quite high on that list at certain amounts

of consumption.

So I'm very excited about what's happening

in the landscape of psilocybin, but I'm not

so excited about the micro-dosing data.

Very excited about the single heroic dose data.

One interesting thing there perhaps,

what seems to be the unifying feature

of a successful psilocybo-- psilocybin, excuse me session,

is that at some point the person feels

as if it's like too much of a autonomic thing.

It kind of get to this point and then

they are encouraged to "let go."

And I'm fascinated by this concept

of letting go, because I'm a neuroscientist.

We don't know what that means, but it

seems like being able to ride the wave of autonomic arousal

from top to bottom.

Seems to be very powerful for trauma and depression

treatment.

And this is interesting.

A lot of people think that one of the major issues in humans

nowadays is we're stressed about a lot of things.

But we never actually get to go into the full stress response,

and then let it relax again.

And catharsis was big at one point.

Scream therapy, Steve Jobs is going to scream therapies.

That whether or not catharsis is healthy or not has been debated

but the data are kind of pointing to the fact

that it may be provided that the catharsis is not.

Obviously someone damaging themselves for somebody else.

So maybe we should all be screaming a lot more.

Why does my desire to eat disappear

after I use the sauna?

Oh, interesting.

I can go in hungry and get out with no desire to eat.

I can only speculate.

The sauna or any kind of deliberate heat exposure

that's uncomfortable releases this molecule dynorphin.

This is actually the same molecule

that's released under conditions of alcohol withdrawal.

It makes you feel agitated and not good.

And then there's this rebound.

The way it feels good is later, it

causes this upregulation in the so-called mu opioid receptors.

So the chemicals that you have, your so-called endogenous

opioids, not the opioids that are

related to the opioid crisis.

But the ones that you naturally make

are able to have a more robust effect after the sauna.

Dynorphin is an appetite suppressant

and for reasons related to kind of general discomfort

in the body.

So that's the only reason I can speculate.

There are a number of other things

that sauna does including massive increases in growth

hormone provided you don't sauna too much.

So if you do it once a week four 20-minute sessions spaced

five minutes apart, you get these enormous increases

in growth hormone.

If you start doing it more often you

get still significant, but smaller increases

in growth hormone.

And my team, this is how the podcast goes too.

At some point Rob just goes, it's enough.

So if you think the episodes are long now,

they'd be a lot longer.

Listen, I just want to-- before we part,

I know it's a Sunday night and people have to go,

I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight.

I know that at least for me I'm still sort of baffled,

but pleasantly so that people are interested in investing

time to come out and hear hours of a nerd like me

and talk about science and tools.

And I'm delighted that people are hopefully gleaning

some useful information.

Please do pass along the information.

I didn't invent this stuff as I mentioned before.

I was not consulted on the design phase.

I have no domain over it.

This is the stuff of mother nature.

And whatever other beliefs you have, they're here in us.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't finish by saying,

have a wonderful night and thank you

for your interest in science.

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