Are Bluetooth Headphones Safe? | Dr. Matt MacDougall & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I get asked a lot about the safety or lack thereof of Bluetooth headphones.

00:00:08.920 | You work on the brain.

00:00:09.920 | You're a brain surgeon.

00:00:11.480 | That's valuable real estate in there, and you understand about electromagnetic fields.

00:00:16.880 | Any discussion about EMFs immediately puts us in the category of, uh-oh, get their tinfoil

00:00:21.360 | hats.

00:00:22.360 | And yet, I've been researching EMFs for a future episode of the podcast, and EMFs are

00:00:29.000 | a real thing.

00:00:30.080 | That's not a valuable statement.

00:00:31.920 | Everything's a real thing at some level, even an idea.

00:00:34.700 | But there does seem to be some evidence that electromagnetic fields of sufficient strength

00:00:41.520 | can alter the function of, maybe the health of, but the function of neural tissue, given

00:00:46.040 | that neural tissue is electrically signaling among itself.

00:00:50.740 | So I'll just ask this in a very straightforward way.

00:00:53.160 | Do you use Bluetooth headphones or wired headphones?

00:00:55.200 | Yeah, Bluetooth.

00:00:56.200 | And you're not worried about any kind of EMF fields across the skull?

00:01:00.320 | No.

00:01:01.320 | I mean, I think the energy levels involved are so tiny that ionizing radiation aside,

00:01:09.040 | we're way out of the realm of ionizing radiation that people would worry about tumor-causing

00:01:15.560 | EMF fields.

00:01:19.380 | Even just the electromagnetic field itself, as is very well described in a Bluetooth frequency

00:01:27.400 | range, the power levels are tiny in these devices.

00:01:31.600 | And so we are awash in these signals, whether you use Bluetooth headphones or not.

00:01:36.880 | For that matter, you're getting bombarded with ionizing radiation in a very tiny amount,

00:01:41.440 | no matter where you live on Earth, unless you live under huge amounts of water.

00:01:48.560 | It's unavoidable.

00:01:50.480 | And so I think you just have to trust that your body has the DNA repair mechanisms that

00:01:56.400 | it needs to deal with the constant bath of ionizing radiation that you're in as a result

00:02:02.140 | of being in the universe and exposed to cosmic rays.

00:02:07.360 | In terms of electromagnetic fields, the energy levels are way, way out of the range where

00:02:16.100 | I would be worried about this.

00:02:18.000 | What about heat?

00:02:20.400 | I don't use the earbuds any longer for a couple of reasons.

00:02:24.920 | As you know, I take a lot of supplements and I reached into my left pocket once and swallowed

00:02:28.000 | a handful of supplements that included a Bluetooth, an AirPod Pro.

00:02:33.720 | I knew it.

00:02:34.720 | I swallowed it the moment after I gulped it down.

00:02:37.400 | By the way, folks, please don't do this.

00:02:39.200 | It was not a good idea.

00:02:40.480 | It wasn't an idea.

00:02:41.480 | It was a mistake.

00:02:42.480 | But I could see it on my phone as registering there.

00:02:44.760 | Never saw it again, so I'm assuming it's no longer in my body, but anyway, there's a bad

00:02:50.260 | joke there to be sure.

00:02:52.920 | But in any event, I tend to lose them or misplace them.

00:02:55.760 | So that's the main reason.

00:02:57.280 | But I did notice when I used them that there's some heat generated there.

00:03:02.760 | I also am not convinced that plugging your ears all day long is good.

00:03:06.120 | There's some ventilation through the sinus systems that include the ears.

00:03:10.060 | So it sounds to me like you're not concerned about the use of earbuds.

00:03:14.120 | But what about heat near the brain?

00:03:17.040 | I mean, there's the cochlea, the auditory mechanisms that sit pretty close to the surface

00:03:22.680 | there.

00:03:24.720 | Heat and neural tissue are not friends.

00:03:27.000 | I'd much rather get my brain cold than hot in terms of keeping the cells healthy and

00:03:33.160 | alive.

00:03:35.200 | Should we be thinking about the heat effects of some of these devices or other things?

00:03:39.640 | Is there anything we're overlooking?

00:03:40.920 | Well, think about it this way.

00:03:43.760 | I use cars as an analogy a lot and mostly internal combustion engine cars.

00:03:49.320 | So these analogies are going to start to be foreign and useless for another generation

00:03:54.520 | of people that grew up in the era of electric cars.

00:03:57.280 | But using cars as a platform to talk about fluid cooling systems, your body has a massive

00:04:06.160 | distributed fluid cooling system similar to a car's radiator.

00:04:11.160 | You're pumping blood all around your body all the time at a very strictly controlled

00:04:15.300 | temperature.

00:04:16.740 | That blood carries, it's mostly water.

00:04:19.400 | So it carries a huge amount of the heat away or cold away from any area of the body that's

00:04:26.920 | focused heating or focused cooling.

00:04:30.520 | So you could put an ice cube on your skin until it completely melts away and the blood

00:04:34.720 | is going to bring heat back to that area.

00:04:37.020 | You can stand in the sun under much more scary heating rays from the sun itself that contain

00:04:44.920 | UV radiation that's definitely damaging your DNA.

00:04:50.160 | If you're looking for things to be afraid of, the sun is a good one.

00:04:53.700 | You're talking to the guy that tells everybody to get sunlight in their eyes every morning.

00:04:56.920 | But I don't want people to get burned or give themselves skin cancer.

00:05:00.000 | I encourage people to protect their skin accordingly.

00:05:03.200 | And different individuals require different levels of protection from the sun.

00:05:06.600 | Some people do very well in a lot of sunshine, never get basal cell or anything like that.

00:05:11.880 | Some people, and it's not just people with very fair skin, a minimum of sun exposure

00:05:16.400 | can cause some issues.

00:05:18.200 | And here I'm talking about sun exposure to the skin.

00:05:21.040 | Of course, staring at the sun is a bad idea.

00:05:23.280 | I never recommend it.

00:05:24.280 | But thinking about the sun just as a heater for a moment to compare it with Bluetooth

00:05:29.600 | headphones, your body is very capable of carrying that heat away and dissipating it.

00:05:36.480 | You know, via sweat evaporation or temperature equalization.

00:05:42.080 | So any heat that's locally generated in the ear, one, there's a pretty large bony

00:05:47.080 | barrier there.

00:05:48.080 | But two, there's a ton of blood flow in the scalp and in the head in general and definitely

00:05:51.320 | in the brain that's going to regulate that temperature.

00:05:54.200 | So I think certainly there can be a tiny temperature variation, but I doubt very seriously that

00:06:01.080 | it's enough to cause a significant problem.

Are Bluetooth Headphones Safe? | Dr. Matt MacDougall & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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