LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Sydney Opera House

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.240 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.720 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.920 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.120 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.160 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.280 | Recently, the Huberman Lab Podcast hosted a live event

00:00:18.140 | at the Sydney Opera House in Australia.

00:00:20.320 | The event was called the Brain-Body Contract

00:00:22.480 | and featured a lecture,

00:00:23.680 | followed by a question and answer session with the audience.

00:00:26.480 | We wanted to make the question and answer session

00:00:28.360 | available to everyone, regardless if you could attend.

00:00:31.440 | So what follows is the question and answer session

00:00:33.900 | from the Sydney Opera House in Australia.

00:00:36.240 | I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event.

00:00:38.680 | They are 8Sleep and AG1.

00:00:40.920 | 8Sleep makes smart mattress covers

00:00:42.640 | with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.

00:00:45.080 | And one of the key aspects to getting a great night's sleep

00:00:47.300 | is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment.

00:00:49.960 | And that's because in order to fall

00:00:51.440 | and stay deeply asleep,

00:00:52.840 | your body temperature actually has to drop

00:00:54.620 | by about one to three degrees.

00:00:56.240 | And in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed,

00:00:58.220 | your body temperature actually has to increase

00:01:00.360 | by about one to three degrees.

00:01:01.960 | 8Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature

00:01:04.320 | of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle,

00:01:06.880 | and throughout the night,

00:01:07.720 | and when you wake up in the morning.

00:01:09.280 | I've been sleeping on an 8Sleep mattress cover

00:01:11.120 | for nearly three years now,

00:01:12.640 | and it has dramatically improved my sleep.

00:01:15.000 | If you'd like to try 8Sleep,

00:01:16.240 | you can go to 8sleep.com/huberman

00:01:19.360 | to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover.

00:01:22.440 | 8Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK,

00:01:25.360 | select countries in the EU, and Australia.

00:01:27.700 | Again, that's 8sleep.com/huberman.

00:01:30.720 | The other live event sponsor, AG1,

00:01:33.200 | is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink

00:01:35.240 | that also contains adaptogens

00:01:36.880 | and other critical micronutrients.

00:01:38.860 | I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012,

00:01:41.720 | so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event.

00:01:44.640 | The reason I started taking it,

00:01:45.920 | and the reason I still take it every day,

00:01:47.680 | once or twice a day,

00:01:48.680 | is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas

00:01:51.040 | for vitamins and minerals,

00:01:52.840 | and it ensures that I get enough prebiotic and probiotic

00:01:55.680 | to support gut health.

00:01:56.760 | Now, of course, I strive to consume healthy whole foods

00:01:59.460 | for the majority of my nutritional intake every single day,

00:02:02.880 | but there are a number of things in AG1,

00:02:04.840 | including specific micronutrients

00:02:06.520 | that are hard to get from whole foods,

00:02:08.080 | or at least in sufficient quantities.

00:02:09.960 | So AG1 allows me to get the vitamins and minerals

00:02:12.400 | that I need, probiotics, prebiotics, the adaptogens,

00:02:15.160 | and critical micronutrients.

00:02:17.180 | To try AG1, go to drinkag1.com/huberman,

00:02:21.080 | and you'll get a year's supply of vitamin D3K2

00:02:24.220 | and five free travel packs of AG1.

00:02:26.320 | Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman.

00:02:30.120 | Thank you to the Sydney Opera House for hosting us

00:02:32.400 | and for making this event possible.

00:02:34.320 | [upbeat music]

00:02:36.900 | What are the latest findings on the physiological mechanisms

00:02:53.320 | behind stress's impact on the body and brain,

00:02:56.760 | and what are some practical tools or techniques

00:02:58.540 | for managing stress effectively?

00:02:59.700 | Well, thank you for that question.

00:03:01.320 | I'll deliberately not repeat what I said earlier

00:03:04.300 | about physiological size, panoramic vision, et cetera,

00:03:06.760 | and raising stress threshold,

00:03:08.120 | because we covered that already.

00:03:11.520 | But I think that one of the most interesting findings,

00:03:14.660 | two most interesting findings in the field of stress

00:03:17.520 | in the last five years, or even three years,

00:03:19.560 | I think the work from my colleague, Allie Crum at Stanford,

00:03:23.000 | she's been a guest on the podcast, she works on mindsets,

00:03:26.040 | is the following result.

00:03:28.280 | Students, Stanford students, that is,

00:03:30.960 | come into the laboratory, they view a,

00:03:33.640 | I think it's a five-minute movie

00:03:35.240 | about how awful stress is for the mind and body,

00:03:37.840 | all the things it does, like deplete your immune system,

00:03:40.760 | make you miserable, deplete certain aspects

00:03:44.880 | of the reproductive axis, and on and on,

00:03:47.420 | and then a separate group comes in

00:03:49.320 | and watches a video, also five minutes, also true,

00:03:52.940 | about all the things that stress can do

00:03:54.540 | to enhance performance, both cognitive or physical,

00:03:57.600 | like additional energy, additional cognitive power,

00:04:02.600 | access to certain memory sets,

00:04:04.920 | albeit narrow memory sets, et cetera,

00:04:07.080 | and what you find is that the results

00:04:09.040 | point directly to the fact

00:04:11.680 | that whatever you believe about stress,

00:04:14.200 | provided the information you have is true,

00:04:17.120 | is what happens.

00:04:19.400 | So if I tell you that stress improves

00:04:21.400 | your memory-focused attention, one observes that.

00:04:25.000 | If I tell you that stress depletes

00:04:27.440 | your immune system, et cetera, one observes that.

00:04:30.200 | So this is something that we don't quite yet understand

00:04:32.800 | as neuroscientists, and the psychology of it

00:04:35.560 | makes more sense, frankly, than the mechanisms,

00:04:38.000 | but it's becoming very clear that what we believe

00:04:42.920 | about a given phenomenon strongly impacts

00:04:46.120 | how it shapes our response to that.

00:04:49.360 | So I find that very interesting.

00:04:51.020 | Now, of course, you can't delete information

00:04:55.640 | about stress being bad for you,

00:04:57.320 | so what does that mean if you want stress

00:04:59.560 | to be enhancing, as it's called?

00:05:02.400 | There's literally now called

00:05:03.560 | the stress is enhancing mindset.

00:05:05.480 | The thing you can do is to learn more

00:05:06.840 | about how stress can be enhancing.

00:05:08.160 | We're not talking about lying,

00:05:09.480 | we're not talking about placebo effect,

00:05:11.520 | we're talking about real knowledge

00:05:13.240 | based in fact that one can absorb,

00:05:15.960 | and I find it amazing and wonderful

00:05:18.560 | that the mere learning of something

00:05:19.960 | can actually change how we respond

00:05:22.120 | to something at a core physiological level.

00:05:23.960 | The second, I think, very important set of findings

00:05:27.280 | on stress relate to a structure

00:05:28.760 | that I've talked about recently on the podcast,

00:05:30.720 | and I talked about with the one and only David Goggins.

00:05:34.080 | Most people presumably have heard,

00:05:35.280 | like, he's on his way, he's running here right now

00:05:37.440 | from Central America.

00:05:39.780 | Yeah, that guy, I'll tell you,

00:05:43.800 | that guy is every bit as intense as he comes across.

00:05:48.480 | I met him for the first time in 2016

00:05:51.160 | at a gathering, it was in Silicon Valley,

00:05:54.520 | we're just doing a little bit of work for this company.

00:05:57.400 | At the end of the day, he leaves Terminate

00:05:59.320 | and he changes into his shorts and his shirt.

00:06:03.720 | He's like, I'm going running, I gotta go to the airport.

00:06:06.360 | I'm thinking, I'm gonna go running,

00:06:07.720 | then I'm gonna go to the airport.

00:06:08.800 | He was running to the airport.

00:06:11.040 | Seriously, only like 14 miles from the airport,

00:06:15.320 | which I realize 14 miles for a marathon are no big deal,

00:06:17.640 | but he's got his bags, and I'm thinking to myself,

00:06:20.840 | this guy, he's nuts, and I love him.

00:06:24.080 | I mean, he's really that guy.

00:06:26.080 | It's actually very refreshing.

00:06:28.300 | I think one reason we love the Rick Rubens

00:06:31.960 | and the David Goggins is they truly are different,

00:06:36.600 | but from one basic standpoint,

00:06:38.520 | is they just don't give a shit.

00:06:40.560 | They just do what they're gonna do,

00:06:42.280 | and they trust that they're doing right for them

00:06:44.380 | and for the people around them, and it's awesome.

00:06:47.000 | It's really awesome.

00:06:47.880 | I think that it, again, brings about that word

00:06:52.680 | that doesn't come about very often for me,

00:06:55.500 | but it just kind of stuns you into like,

00:06:57.760 | behold, David Goggins, Rick Ruben,

00:07:01.480 | the cuttlefish, whatever, you know?

00:07:03.760 | (audience laughing)

00:07:06.280 | But I talked about this with David.

00:07:08.940 | There's this structure in our brain,

00:07:10.240 | and these are recent discoveries, not by my lab.

00:07:12.520 | I wish I had discovered these,

00:07:13.440 | but actually a colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvizzi,

00:07:15.440 | who's in the Department of Neurosurgery,

00:07:17.440 | has made these beautiful discoveries

00:07:20.360 | about the anterior mid-cingulate cortex.

00:07:22.360 | The anterior mid-cingulate cortex

00:07:24.640 | is a structure in the brain that has a lot of subdivisions,

00:07:27.600 | but when Joe put a little stimulating electrode

00:07:31.200 | into this area, because he had patients

00:07:33.240 | that needed neurosurgery, and they probe around,

00:07:35.720 | asking questions, what do you feel?

00:07:36.860 | How do you feel?

00:07:37.700 | What are you gonna do?

00:07:38.520 | And sometimes they hit an area.

00:07:39.360 | I've seen these experiments.

00:07:40.180 | They're unbelievable.

00:07:41.280 | Stimulated an area, and the person says,

00:07:44.500 | you know, I feel like I'm about to go into a rage.

00:07:46.760 | And you're like, okay, let's back off.

00:07:48.320 | Let's move over here.

00:07:49.320 | Anterior mid-cingulate cortex is stimulate,

00:07:51.840 | and the patient, the person says,

00:07:54.240 | I feel like I'm heading into a storm.

00:07:57.520 | You go, oh, that doesn't sound good.

00:07:59.920 | And they say, nope, but I'm ready.

00:08:01.720 | I'm leaning in.

00:08:03.200 | A different patient, you stimulate their

00:08:04.760 | anterior mid-cingulate cortex, and the person says,

00:08:06.960 | I feel like I'm gonna get up out of my chair

00:08:09.040 | and do something really, really difficult.

00:08:11.400 | Okay, so this is interesting.

00:08:12.560 | Across multiple people, you're seeing the same general

00:08:15.460 | kind of forward center of mass kind of response,

00:08:19.260 | kind of leaning into challenge, and challenge specifically.

00:08:21.940 | And then there's now scores of studies

00:08:23.980 | in just the last three to five years

00:08:26.300 | showing that, for instance, people who successfully

00:08:28.580 | overcome a challenge of any kind,

00:08:30.900 | fitness challenge, cognitive challenge,

00:08:33.300 | anterior mid-cingulate cortex expands,

00:08:35.340 | or at least increases its baseline levels of activity.

00:08:37.860 | You see people that fail to meet that challenge,

00:08:39.780 | less anterior mid-cingulate cortex activity.

00:08:41.820 | So there's a bidirectionality of the response.

00:08:43.780 | And on and on, and it seems that doing things

00:08:47.140 | that are difficult, that we don't enjoy,

00:08:49.580 | or that we have to push ourselves to do,

00:08:51.580 | grow and enhance the activity within

00:08:55.460 | this anterior mid-cingulate cortex.

00:08:56.900 | And the beauty of it is that it generalizes,

00:08:59.840 | that the anterior mid-cingulate cortex can be applied,

00:09:03.360 | or the growth of it can be directed

00:09:05.680 | towards lots of different things,

00:09:07.920 | which is, I think, a call for, of course,

00:09:11.220 | seeking pleasure, seeking comfort, seeking relaxation,

00:09:14.700 | seeking sleep every night, seeking sunlight

00:09:16.580 | in the morning, et cetera.

00:09:17.980 | But also, deliberately seeking out challenges,

00:09:21.220 | that is, challenges for us.

00:09:23.020 | The importance of doing hard things in a safe manner,

00:09:26.300 | psychologically and physically safe manner, of course,

00:09:29.460 | is truly beneficial toward our ability

00:09:32.020 | to manage ourselves in what would

00:09:34.740 | otherwise be called stress.

00:09:36.340 | So I think those, the work of Ali Crum

00:09:38.860 | and the work on the anterior mid-cingulate cortex

00:09:40.940 | by Parvizzi and a bunch of other labs,

00:09:42.980 | I think are the two areas where I feel like

00:09:46.340 | things are happening really quickly,

00:09:47.940 | we're making big strides as a field,

00:09:50.020 | and we're moving away from kind of conjecture

00:09:54.260 | about how to better ourselves in lots of different ways.

00:09:59.260 | Can you talk about time perception?

00:10:02.700 | Why is it that in some instances time moves very slowly,

00:10:06.440 | while in others it seems to move very fast?

00:10:08.780 | Thank you, tonight has been so fun.

00:10:10.260 | Thank you, I've had fun too.

00:10:13.360 | This is something I'm trying to do more of,

00:10:16.940 | not necessarily live, so that too,

00:10:18.500 | but someone recently, who I love and admire very much,

00:10:23.500 | said to me, "We're gonna have so much fun."

00:10:27.020 | And I thought, whoa, behold, no one's ever said that to me.

00:10:32.020 | No one's ever said that to me.

00:10:34.020 | All my years growing up, I mean, I love,

00:10:36.740 | with all due respect to my parents,

00:10:38.100 | I can't remember anyone ever turning to me and saying,

00:10:40.220 | "We're gonna have so much fun."

00:10:42.220 | So I'm trying, that to me just kind of blew me away.

00:10:45.780 | I'm thinking, yeah, like, you're allowed to have fun.

00:10:48.340 | So time perception is a topic that I am, you know,

00:10:52.460 | as obsessed by as I am many other topics,

00:10:55.040 | but one that is really near and dear to my heart

00:10:58.460 | because I've always been struck by this observation

00:11:03.460 | that is certainly not uniquely mine,

00:11:06.920 | that, you know, if you're sitting waiting

00:11:10.160 | for an appointment at the doctor's office,

00:11:12.200 | it feels like time goes by really slowly,

00:11:15.560 | like really slowly.

00:11:16.980 | Whereas if you have a really full day

00:11:21.620 | with lots and lots of activities,

00:11:23.880 | it seems like time went by really fast.

00:11:27.080 | Like, oh my God, I can't believe it.

00:11:28.280 | So much time has gone by.

00:11:29.900 | Sorry, so much has happened, excuse me,

00:11:33.200 | but not a lot of time has gone by,

00:11:35.400 | which means that our frame rate on life is highly dynamic.

00:11:38.760 | And in fact, it is.

00:11:39.880 | And in fact, it's set by, you guessed it,

00:11:42.620 | our visual system, at least for sighted folks,

00:11:44.980 | for people who are low vision or no vision.

00:11:46.940 | And by the way, I always reference that

00:11:49.000 | because my laboratory has worked on low vision,

00:11:50.520 | no vision issues for a number of years.

00:11:53.380 | It's through the auditory system.

00:11:55.960 | But for sake of generalizing now and for simplicity,

00:12:00.240 | we'll talk about the visual system.

00:12:01.360 | So it is a fact that when we focus on things up close,

00:12:06.360 | think a watchmaker, think about looking into your phone,

00:12:10.200 | our perception of time is more fine-grained.

00:12:12.960 | That is, our frame rate is higher.

00:12:15.680 | Okay, so more frames per second

00:12:17.820 | than when we view things at a distance.

00:12:20.000 | You might think, well, how could that possibly be?

00:12:22.320 | How could that possibly be?

00:12:23.620 | But it makes perfect sense.

00:12:24.720 | You know, when we think about

00:12:25.800 | the time-space coding in the brain,

00:12:29.340 | we need to anchor ourselves to something,

00:12:31.220 | the rising and setting of the sun, of course the,

00:12:33.480 | you know, I mean, unless you're a flat earther,

00:12:35.280 | you know, we're going around the sun.

00:12:37.080 | No, what's that?

00:12:39.320 | No, someone, we got no flat earthers?

00:12:41.120 | One flat earther in the audience.

00:12:42.840 | Okay, cool.

00:12:43.720 | I don't think that's what they were saying,

00:12:47.480 | but we need to anchor ourselves in time,

00:12:52.200 | and our visual system is the way

00:12:53.600 | that we anchor ourselves in time.

00:12:54.960 | We have facts about past, present, and future,

00:12:57.660 | so we have knowledge.

00:12:59.200 | But at an unconscious level,

00:13:02.220 | we need to anchor our frame rate, set our frame rate.

00:13:06.320 | And so this is why, if you go down to Bondi,

00:13:08.840 | and you lie back, and you look up at the clouds,

00:13:11.500 | and the clouds are kind of moving in an unpredictable way,

00:13:14.280 | whenever we're looking at a landscape

00:13:15.880 | which has some lack of predictable features,

00:13:20.120 | like waves, or rustling of trees,

00:13:23.160 | where you could predict that if the wind's blowing this way,

00:13:25.720 | that the tree's gonna go this way, and then back again,

00:13:28.400 | but you're not really in a mode

00:13:30.280 | of trying to anticipate just how far,

00:13:31.880 | in the same way that, for instance,

00:13:32.920 | if you call an Uber, or you're waiting on a text message,

00:13:35.480 | you know, if you're ever waiting on a text message,

00:13:36.960 | you notice you'll fine slice.

00:13:38.200 | Okay, dot, dot, dot, when's that thing coming,

00:13:39.880 | when's that thing, you're fine slicing time.

00:13:41.840 | As your level of autonomic arousal goes up,

00:13:44.280 | your frame rate goes up.

00:13:49.200 | As your level of autonomic arousal goes down,

00:13:52.120 | so you're sleepy, or if you're viewing things

00:13:55.200 | that have kind of an unpredictable aspect to them,

00:13:59.240 | then your frame rate expands, the passage of time changes,

00:14:04.240 | or your perception of the passage of time changes.

00:14:06.480 | This is why, one of the reasons why I love aquaria.

00:14:10.280 | You know, and one of my favorite things to do,

00:14:12.240 | since I don't have a fish tank at home right now,

00:14:14.460 | but that's gonna change soon, is I'll go on YouTube,

00:14:19.160 | and there's this beautiful live video

00:14:21.640 | of this aquarium in Japan, and I'll just zone out.

00:14:26.640 | It's like the most relaxing thing ever,

00:14:28.240 | and every once in a while, a whale shark,

00:14:30.800 | they have a whale shark in an aquarium.

00:14:32.600 | Every once in a while, a whale shark will go through,

00:14:34.480 | and you go like, whoa, and then it disappears,

00:14:37.920 | and then the little fish, and the kelp,

00:14:39.480 | and it's immensely relaxing.

00:14:41.160 | What it does is it slows your frame rate down,

00:14:45.440 | and then I find that resets me

00:14:47.280 | after just five or six minutes to go back

00:14:48.840 | to doing this high frame rate type stuff,

00:14:51.000 | which is what we're doing when we're texting,

00:14:52.420 | when we're typing, when we're social media.

00:14:54.280 | It, by the way, is tuned to a frame rate

00:14:56.260 | that's really interesting that keeps us engaged

00:14:59.040 | just up into the point where then we wanna swipe

00:15:00.880 | to the next thing.

00:15:02.000 | The algorithms are designed, and by the way,

00:15:05.600 | I have a somewhat benevolent, semi-benevolent view

00:15:08.400 | of social media.

00:15:09.240 | I think it'd be used for good.

00:15:10.060 | I think it'd be used for not good.

00:15:12.520 | I think limiting one's time on there is good,

00:15:15.500 | but there's some good content on there for sure.

00:15:17.760 | A lot of my life is spent on there indeed.

00:15:20.400 | So frame rate is set by where you're looking.

00:15:23.080 | The further out you're looking,

00:15:24.960 | the larger, the longer sort of time bins you're capturing,

00:15:29.560 | bigger time bins, okay, less resolution.

00:15:32.160 | Closer in, and the more you're trying to predict

00:15:34.880 | the next outcome, sort of fine-grained analysis,

00:15:37.680 | predicting what we call DPOs, duration, path, and outcome,

00:15:40.440 | what's gonna happen for how long,

00:15:42.440 | and what's gonna happen is something

00:15:44.760 | that you're thinking about and wondering about.

00:15:46.880 | Then frame rate goes up.

00:15:48.840 | And there's actually a wonderful movie, a Hitchcock movie,

00:15:52.320 | the name escapes me at the moment,

00:15:54.040 | in which Hitchcock understood this.

00:15:56.880 | And it's a movie that's only about 90 minutes long,

00:15:59.560 | but in the background, the sun rises and sets,

00:16:02.680 | and the way that people move through the scenes

00:16:05.520 | of this movie gives you the feeling by the end

00:16:08.200 | of this 90-minute movie that a full 24 hours passed.

00:16:12.720 | It's really interesting.

00:16:14.180 | You feel it in your body as if it was a much longer movie,

00:16:17.660 | even though if you look at your watch, that happens.

00:16:19.760 | And now the cannabis smokers, again, are thinking,

00:16:21.800 | like, yeah, like where you sit there,

00:16:23.000 | and you're like, whoa, that was a really long time

00:16:25.520 | you looked at, and it's like three minutes went by,

00:16:27.720 | and you're like, whoa, like, wow.

00:16:29.880 | Psychedelics will do this as well.

00:16:32.540 | They certainly do, they distort our time perception,

00:16:34.420 | mainly through the deployment of large amounts

00:16:37.160 | of the neuromodulator serotonin,

00:16:38.800 | which is intimately involved in our kind

00:16:41.080 | of clock perception mechanisms.

00:16:42.720 | There are a bunch of other things that can set

00:16:44.680 | sort of intrinsic rhythmicity of our auditory system

00:16:48.660 | that also adjust our frame rate.

00:16:50.180 | I think one of the reasons why 40 hertz tones

00:16:52.380 | can be valuable for doing cognitive work

00:16:54.180 | is that they tend to entrain certain circuits

00:16:57.860 | within the brain for doing the kinds of work

00:17:00.020 | that most people call work, okay,

00:17:02.060 | where you have to type things out, think logically,

00:17:03.860 | kind of if-then kind of analysis.

00:17:07.100 | Very different than, say, writing new sheet music

00:17:10.540 | or coming up with poetry where, you know,

00:17:12.740 | here again, we can think back to the, you know,

00:17:15.280 | the Rick Rubin thing or the, you know,

00:17:16.680 | being stationary, right, you know,

00:17:18.040 | like the wall or sitting with a movement

00:17:19.680 | in the brain going forward.

00:17:20.960 | There's something about adjusting frame rate

00:17:23.120 | for capturing new ideas versus implementing ideas.

00:17:27.720 | Implementation of ideas tends to be carried out

00:17:29.960 | on higher frame rate type time perception,

00:17:33.200 | and now you can understand why our visual perception

00:17:36.560 | set about the distance of a laptop or phone

00:17:38.360 | would be good for that or a conversation.

00:17:41.480 | You know, remember that whole thing of, like,

00:17:42.680 | looking at somebody's face and having a conversation

00:17:44.940 | as opposed to looking off into the distance,

00:17:46.820 | walking, and allowing one's gaze to go panoramic.

00:17:49.580 | So, hopefully, now you're starting to sense some themes.

00:17:51.980 | So, that's all I'll say about time perception now,

00:17:54.020 | but, of course, humans have throughout history

00:17:56.900 | and still now, frankly, also embarked

00:18:00.180 | on a lot of pharmacology, if we're honest,

00:18:02.180 | in order to try and adjust frame rate

00:18:03.780 | for sake of productivity, but, you know,

00:18:05.860 | caffeine will adjust frame rate

00:18:07.780 | in the predictable direction,

00:18:09.920 | but also things like alcohol and various drugs

00:18:12.580 | like, you know, cannabis in order to adjust frame rate.

00:18:15.660 | I'm certainly not suggesting you do those things.

00:18:17.380 | I'm not a cop, you do what you want,

00:18:18.940 | just know what you're doing.

00:18:20.700 | Can you please talk about the jet lag protocol

00:18:22.700 | you followed when arriving in Sydney?

00:18:24.900 | Oh, yeah, well, this one was a little bit easier for me

00:18:28.940 | because, obviously, it's not that far off,

00:18:32.500 | it's just you're a full day ahead

00:18:35.020 | from where I live back home in California,

00:18:38.420 | but, nonetheless, I suffer tremendously from jet lag

00:18:41.420 | and once, actually, in 2017, I went to Abu Dhabi,

00:18:44.180 | it's a 12-hour flip from where I was living

00:18:48.700 | at that time in the Bay Area, and I was a wreck.

00:18:51.180 | I could barely make it to the meeting, I was crying,

00:18:53.620 | I was, it really messes me up.

00:18:55.580 | I slept great the first night

00:18:57.340 | and then just didn't sleep for two days, I was a mess.

00:19:00.340 | So, jet lag is something that I really had to work hard on

00:19:04.060 | and there are a couple things worth noting.

00:19:06.580 | I mean, we've done a whole episode about this,

00:19:08.000 | so I'll kind of hit a few key bullet points

00:19:10.020 | and maybe it's relevant to you

00:19:12.940 | even if you're not traveling at any point soon

00:19:15.420 | because many people are jet lagged without traveling

00:19:17.500 | because of the way that they stay up late.

00:19:19.500 | In fact, most everybody in the world now

00:19:21.660 | qualifies as a shift worker, did you know that?

00:19:24.140 | And here, no disrespect, only reverence and gratitude

00:19:26.740 | to the actual shift workers that stay up all night

00:19:28.600 | doing emergency work and hospital work

00:19:30.740 | and caring for children and things like that

00:19:32.580 | throughout the night.

00:19:33.420 | So, I'm not trying to take anything away from them,

00:19:34.940 | but we are all shifted enough by virtue

00:19:37.140 | of artificial lighting and electronic devices

00:19:41.960 | that we are effectively shifted and shift working

00:19:46.960 | because we're staying up, engaging our cognitive systems

00:19:49.520 | in ways that, frankly, we didn't evolve to,

00:19:51.240 | which I'm not saying is bad, but it's just the reality.

00:19:53.520 | Okay, what to do for jet lag.

00:19:56.440 | The key thing is this, and actually,

00:19:58.440 | this is very valuable in general for sake of sleep.

00:20:00.640 | So, this is something I haven't talked enough about

00:20:03.080 | on the podcast, ask yourself what time you normally wake up

00:20:07.880 | without an alarm.

00:20:09.360 | I realize there's some variance day to day,

00:20:12.640 | but for me, it would be about, let's say 6 a.m.

00:20:16.920 | So, let's say for you, it's seven.

00:20:18.320 | Just pick your typical wake up time.

00:20:21.200 | If you subtract from that number, so for me, 4 a.m.,

00:20:26.060 | that almost with certainty is what's called

00:20:29.920 | your temperature minimum.

00:20:31.200 | Your temperature minimum, we could measure it.

00:20:34.320 | You could put a thermometer in your mouth,

00:20:36.320 | or if you come to the laboratory, unfortunately,

00:20:37.760 | they have to do it rectally.

00:20:39.360 | 4 a.m. would be my temperature minimum.

00:20:42.720 | Maybe for you, if you wake up at seven,

00:20:44.800 | typically, or around seven, it's gonna be 5 a.m., okay?

00:20:48.800 | So, we're not actually measuring your temperature

00:20:50.920 | in this kind of gedanken, this thought experiment.

00:20:53.200 | What we're doing is we're trying to find a time.

00:20:55.020 | So, here's what's interesting.

00:20:57.560 | If you expose your eyes, not your skin,

00:21:01.200 | but your eyes to bright light in the two hours or so,

00:21:06.200 | maybe three hours prior to that temperature minimum time,

00:21:11.600 | so if you wake up at 7 a.m.,

00:21:12.600 | 5 a.m. is your temperature minimum.

00:21:14.420 | So, in the two hours, maybe three hours prior to that,

00:21:17.320 | you're going to shift your wake up time

00:21:20.740 | and your to bed time, what's called a phase delay,

00:21:24.440 | a shift in your circadian rhythm, by about an hour.

00:21:28.720 | Interesting.

00:21:31.840 | Given that, if you view bright light

00:21:34.960 | in the two to three hours after your temperature minimum,

00:21:38.860 | you advance your clock, meaning you pull back your clock

00:21:43.300 | to wanna wake up a bit earlier

00:21:45.960 | and go to sleep a little bit earlier, by about an hour,

00:21:50.080 | for every time you do that.

00:21:52.120 | You think, well, okay, I wake up in the morning

00:21:54.400 | at seven, let's say I'm using you as an example,

00:21:56.760 | or me at six, and I usually try and get some sunlight

00:22:00.280 | in my eyes, especially on overcast days, et cetera, et cetera.

00:22:02.600 | You've heard me blab about this many times before

00:22:04.160 | on the podcast and elsewhere.

00:22:05.600 | So, how come I'm not going to bed earlier and earlier

00:22:09.480 | every night and waking up earlier and earlier every morning?

00:22:13.160 | And indeed, you would.

00:22:15.360 | You would keep phase advancing your clock if you did that,

00:22:18.800 | except that in the afternoon,

00:22:20.400 | if you got sunlight in your eyes,

00:22:21.840 | as presumably you did today,

00:22:22.800 | this beautiful sunny day on your way here,

00:22:25.120 | you phase delayed your clock a little bit,

00:22:28.080 | and as a consequence, you wake up and go to sleep

00:22:30.280 | at more or less the same time every day.

00:22:32.840 | It's an amazing mechanism, and guess what?

00:22:35.000 | Viewing sunlight in the middle of the day

00:22:36.880 | does not do the same thing.

00:22:38.200 | It doesn't shift your circadian clock.

00:22:39.700 | They don't tell you that in school, but they should.

00:22:42.320 | They're telling you all the other stuff.

00:22:44.860 | The reason it doesn't do it is that middle of the day period

00:22:49.160 | is what's called the circadian dead zone.

00:22:51.080 | Sounds very dramatic, very ominous.

00:22:53.760 | Getting sunlight in your eyes

00:22:54.920 | during the middle of the day is great for mood.

00:22:56.920 | It's evident that it's also important

00:22:58.800 | if it gets on your skin in healthy, not burning amounts,

00:23:02.200 | levels that would induce burn,

00:23:04.880 | then it can enhance testosterone, estrogen levels, et cetera,

00:23:07.720 | in healthy ways, healthy ratios.

00:23:09.960 | Nonetheless, that morning sunlight viewing

00:23:13.020 | after your temperature minimum advances your clock,

00:23:15.560 | makes you want to get up earlier, go to bed earlier.

00:23:18.320 | Viewed before delays your clock,

00:23:21.840 | makes you want to get up later, go to bed later.

00:23:23.780 | So this is very useful if you ever want to shift your clock

00:23:27.280 | at home before you travel to get onto a new schedule

00:23:29.920 | for work or school, or if you're traveling.

00:23:32.520 | What it means is that when you arrive in a new location,

00:23:35.640 | like I did in Melbourne the other day,

00:23:39.800 | believe me, I practiced that for like at least an hour,

00:23:43.020 | and with two Aussies,

00:23:45.000 | and they kept telling me I was doing it wrong

00:23:46.400 | until finally they're like, "No, I'm just joking with you.

00:23:48.480 | "You got it right like the fourth time."

00:23:50.640 | You guys have a wicked sense of humor down here.

00:23:53.040 | The, once again, I'm tougher than I look.

00:23:57.200 | The key thing is that if you land,

00:24:02.200 | you have to ask, let's say at 8 a.m. local,

00:24:06.760 | or noon local time, the key is to ask yourself,

00:24:10.400 | hmm, what does my body think,

00:24:14.920 | what is my temperature minimum from back home?

00:24:18.520 | So for instance, if you land at 5 p.m.,

00:24:22.480 | but it corresponds to time before your temperature minimum,

00:24:26.880 | and you go outside, and you're like,

00:24:28.240 | whoa, beautiful setting sun,

00:24:30.320 | I'm supposed to get sunlight in my eyes.

00:24:32.840 | Well, guess what?

00:24:33.680 | You might delay your clock.

00:24:34.660 | If you want to go to bed earlier,

00:24:35.720 | that's probably not a good idea.

00:24:37.200 | Whereas if you want to advance your clock,

00:24:41.040 | you would view sunlight at a time

00:24:42.880 | that is corresponding to the two hours

00:24:45.160 | after your temperature minimum.

00:24:46.400 | I realize it's a little bit tricky,

00:24:47.960 | but that's all you have to ask yourself

00:24:49.280 | for the first three days,

00:24:51.320 | first three days that you travel to some location,

00:24:54.040 | because then you can shift very fast.

00:24:55.660 | So what that requires is sometimes saying,

00:24:57.280 | oh, I don't want to shift myself,

00:24:59.000 | so I'm actually going to wear sunglasses and a brimmed hat

00:25:01.000 | to avoid shifting,

00:25:02.540 | because I'd like to be on the local schedule.

00:25:04.040 | Or in some cases, you think,

00:25:05.320 | oh, I really want to wake up here,

00:25:07.160 | and I'm in the perfect opportunity to wake up,

00:25:09.440 | because it's the middle of the afternoon in Sydney,

00:25:11.880 | and back home, I would have just hit my temperature minimum,

00:25:16.480 | and so I'm going to get sunlight in my eyes.

00:25:18.400 | Well, that's going to wake me up,

00:25:20.120 | and it's going to actually make me want to go to bed

00:25:21.760 | a little bit earlier so I can go to bed at local time,

00:25:23.640 | so I'm not going to be up until, you know, 3 a.m.

00:25:25.880 | So you might have to work this out a little bit on paper,

00:25:28.120 | but this is the way that military,

00:25:30.760 | and this is the way that shift workers

00:25:32.560 | who are educated in the mechanisms of this stuff,

00:25:35.680 | that's the way they do it.

00:25:36.680 | It also helps to eat on the local schedule,

00:25:38.480 | because food is another what we call zeitgeber,

00:25:41.360 | another one of the timekeepers for the circadian clock,

00:25:43.960 | so if you force yourself to eat on the local schedule,

00:25:46.000 | that can help you shift.

00:25:47.160 | Activity can help you shift,

00:25:49.360 | and social rhythms can help you shift as well.

00:25:51.840 | But that temperature minimum and the role of light

00:25:54.760 | before or after the temperature minimum,

00:25:56.600 | either delaying or advancing your clock,

00:25:59.760 | that's the heavy hammer in this whole process.

00:26:04.080 | So I did that, and these days,

00:26:05.800 | I do a lot of red light time in the evening

00:26:08.760 | when I want to go to sleep,

00:26:09.680 | and I don't mean red light panels,

00:26:12.480 | like the expensive stuff.

00:26:14.120 | That has a whole other set of uses.

00:26:15.600 | What I'm talking about is just getting a red light,

00:26:17.040 | like a party light.

00:26:18.080 | We turn off the lights and put in a red light,

00:26:20.680 | and that is known to reduce cortisol levels

00:26:22.840 | as opposed to other kinds of lighting.

00:26:24.840 | So it only takes about half hour

00:26:26.480 | before you go to sleep or so.

00:26:27.920 | You want to just mellow out.

00:26:28.920 | You just switch over to red light.

00:26:30.600 | It's actually very pleasant, right?

00:26:32.920 | As long as you can go about the activities

00:26:34.280 | you want to do safely,

00:26:35.640 | you just put a red light up.

00:26:38.440 | And by the way, Rick's house

00:26:39.560 | is like all red lights at night.

00:26:40.920 | No artificial lighting past sundown.

00:26:43.280 | It's like a plant.

00:26:44.720 | Can you elaborate on the science

00:26:45.920 | between psychedelic psilocybin and neuroplasticity?

00:26:49.320 | Yes.

00:26:50.160 | This is a topic that just a few years ago

00:26:53.040 | I was too frightened to talk about.

00:26:55.720 | I was afraid to lose my job, frankly.

00:26:57.580 | These are still scheduled drugs in the United States,

00:27:02.360 | although they are being explored for therapeutic reasons,

00:27:06.860 | mainly for the treatment of severe depression,

00:27:09.760 | but among other things,

00:27:11.600 | smoking cessation, eating disorders.

00:27:13.520 | By the way, anorexia nervosa still is the highest morbidity

00:27:17.920 | of any psychiatric challenge.

00:27:19.880 | It's just really tragic.

00:27:20.960 | So there's a real need for treatments that work.

00:27:24.440 | And psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD to some extent,

00:27:29.440 | MDMA, which technically is not a psychedelic,

00:27:33.700 | it's an empathogen,

00:27:34.880 | but we can talk about that, also called ecstasy.

00:27:37.740 | So these sorts of compounds have been explored

00:27:41.560 | quite extensively in the last few years.

00:27:43.060 | And I've completely revamped my stance on them

00:27:45.860 | for a couple of reasons.

00:27:47.300 | I'll just come clean.

00:27:48.620 | As a kid, too young, I explored these things.

00:27:52.860 | I do not recommend that.

00:27:54.560 | I had some pretty bad experiences on LSD

00:27:57.140 | as a young teenager, and I don't recommend it.

00:28:01.340 | I think the brain is highly plastic that time.

00:28:03.600 | In fact, being an adolescent, a kid or a teen

00:28:06.220 | is a psychedelic experience.

00:28:08.740 | You do not need psychedelics, and I don't recommend them

00:28:12.060 | unless some very qualified clinician

00:28:15.500 | can convince you otherwise.

00:28:17.380 | There, I would also seek a second opinion.

00:28:20.420 | But they clearly have their role.

00:28:22.340 | And I think a couple of things have changed my stance.

00:28:25.840 | First of all, there are a lot of federally funded studies

00:28:28.620 | taking place at Stanford and elsewhere on these compounds.

00:28:32.060 | Second, for whatever reason, and I don't quite understand

00:28:35.360 | the sociology of it, but for whatever reason,

00:28:38.080 | psychedelics are no longer associated

00:28:42.280 | with the kind of counterculture the way they used to be,

00:28:46.100 | and are, in fact, heavily associated

00:28:48.560 | with some of the veterans groups

00:28:49.800 | that are using these for PTSD with groups in the States,

00:28:52.240 | groups like Veterans Solutions,

00:28:53.460 | which are doing amazing work with different psychedelics,

00:28:56.280 | including Ibogaine, Eboga,

00:28:59.240 | which is a 22-hour-long psychedelic journey.

00:29:01.980 | I've never done it, truly, where you close your eyes

00:29:05.340 | and you get essentially real-life-like recollection

00:29:09.900 | of your experiences, but you have agency

00:29:11.740 | inside these experiences.

00:29:13.380 | There's some cardiac issues with Ibogaine

00:29:15.460 | that require constant monitoring of the heart,

00:29:17.500 | but they've got some really impressive outcomes.

00:29:19.940 | This is all work by my colleague,

00:29:21.100 | Nolan Williams at Stanford.

00:29:22.360 | So things like psilocybin,

00:29:24.740 | we view a little bit differently nowadays.

00:29:26.720 | What is psilocybin?

00:29:29.080 | Psilocybin, if you look at it chemically,

00:29:32.360 | looks a lot like serotonin, a lot like serotonin,

00:29:37.020 | and it tickles, that is, it binds nearly selectively

00:29:41.700 | to a specific serotonin receptor,

00:29:43.540 | and it seems to create more

00:29:45.360 | what we call resting-state lateral connectivity,

00:29:47.540 | which means more brain areas connected to other brain areas

00:29:50.220 | or at least talking to those brain areas

00:29:52.540 | after the psilocybin journey, as it's called,

00:29:55.540 | as opposed to before.

00:29:57.340 | Now, these journeys, and I have done them as an adult,

00:30:02.200 | I did this as part of a clinical trial,

00:30:03.960 | I participated in a psilocybin trial,

00:30:06.320 | and I participated in an MDMA trial.

00:30:08.620 | They can be terrifying while they're happening,

00:30:13.600 | but often there's great insight from those experiences,

00:30:16.880 | provided the right support is provided,

00:30:18.880 | and they always say set and setting.

00:30:21.160 | So I'm not providing all these caveats

00:30:22.880 | about safety for no reason or to protect me.

00:30:26.000 | I'm saying to protect you.

00:30:26.960 | I mean, it can be, and it was for me, absolutely terrifying,

00:30:30.840 | and then you do it again as part of these trials.

00:30:33.200 | The second time, I'm like, okay,

00:30:34.280 | this time when it's gonna be good,

00:30:35.360 | it gone, boom, terrifying.

00:30:37.720 | It was horrible, but I learned a lot,

00:30:40.240 | and there does seem to be an antidepressant effect.

00:30:42.640 | I wasn't clinically diagnosed with depression,

00:30:44.520 | but prior to that, or after, thank goodness,

00:30:47.800 | but I think what we're seeing with these compounds,

00:30:52.640 | and from my own experience, if I may,

00:30:55.520 | is that they allow us to see relationships

00:31:00.240 | between events of past and present,

00:31:04.800 | and hopefully anticipate certain actions

00:31:07.580 | and changes into the future,

00:31:09.680 | while experiencing the fullness of the emotionality

00:31:12.920 | of those experiences in real time.

00:31:15.480 | So as somebody who's done an immense amount of therapy,

00:31:18.280 | I can tell you that I find great value in talk therapy.

00:31:21.320 | I do, especially of the, I think,

00:31:25.040 | what's called insight-oriented psychoanalysis,

00:31:28.240 | or psychotherapy, doesn't have to be classic psychoanalysis.

00:31:31.520 | Not just support, you need that,

00:31:33.320 | not just rapport, you need that,

00:31:34.800 | but insight as well is the goal, those three things.

00:31:38.920 | But one of the issues is,

00:31:40.680 | unless you get on the phone with your therapist,

00:31:42.520 | or you talk to them in person,

00:31:43.620 | in a moment where something is really acute,

00:31:45.500 | like it's really getting you right at that moment,

00:31:47.740 | sad, or happy, or whatever it may be,

00:31:51.120 | it's hard to experience the fullness of that issue

00:31:55.680 | in that moment, while also parsing it cognitively.

00:31:58.480 | And it does seem that the psychedelics,

00:32:00.940 | and to some extent MDMA,

00:32:02.360 | allow people to get into the full amplitude,

00:32:05.500 | maybe even enhanced amplitude,

00:32:08.320 | emotionality of an experience.

00:32:10.360 | And at the same time, allow people to reflect,

00:32:12.800 | and with the help of a so-called guide, or the therapist,

00:32:17.440 | take notes in a way that leads

00:32:18.800 | to specific actionable outcomes.

00:32:22.560 | And I think that's the real value,

00:32:24.200 | you can get real-time experience with insight,

00:32:27.360 | and of course you need support as well,

00:32:28.860 | and of course set, and setting, and safety

00:32:30.600 | are absolutely key.

00:32:32.120 | So psilocybin seems to do that in one manner,

00:32:34.320 | MDMA does it in a different way.

00:32:37.000 | MDMA, by the way, we know,

00:32:38.960 | dramatically increases serotonin and dopamine,

00:32:42.220 | but it seems to be the serotonergic effect

00:32:44.400 | that is responsible for most of its therapeutic effect.

00:32:47.680 | By the way, MDMA is methylenedioxymethamphetamine,

00:32:51.880 | which isn't necessarily saying that it's bad,

00:32:54.240 | what's actually interesting is that MDMA,

00:32:57.440 | ecstasy, provided that it's pure,

00:32:59.600 | and in the appropriate dosage range,

00:33:01.620 | does not seem to be neurotoxic,

00:33:03.960 | as it once was thought to be.

00:33:05.240 | The paper claiming that was retracted,

00:33:07.480 | they accidentally were giving the subjects in that study

00:33:12.400 | methamphetamine, not MDMA, and, right, yes, right,

00:33:17.200 | and they retracted the paper,

00:33:18.480 | but nobody talks about that paper,

00:33:19.640 | but do you know, it's kind of interesting,

00:33:21.060 | do you know where most of the data

00:33:23.160 | on the lack of toxicity of MDMA comes from?

00:33:26.520 | There's a beautiful set of studies

00:33:28.960 | that were carried out on subjects

00:33:32.180 | who were exclusively from the Church of Latter-day Saints,

00:33:36.040 | sometimes referred to as Mormons, right?

00:33:38.280 | Mormons are an excellent test population

00:33:41.200 | for a study like that, because they don't do other drugs.

00:33:44.400 | But MDMA is not on the no-fly list.

00:33:50.420 | So apparently, according to these papers,

00:33:53.220 | and by the way, I have a lot of friends who are LDS,

00:33:54.960 | and they're wonderful people,

00:33:57.120 | according to these papers, which I believe,

00:34:00.320 | 'cause they're published and peer-reviewed,

00:34:01.540 | and they still are in the literature,

00:34:03.720 | you can find subjects in that community,

00:34:05.640 | not all LDS folks are taking ecstasy, I don't think,

00:34:10.200 | but presumably no, but people who have taken

00:34:13.320 | anywhere from one to two to 50 to over 100 doses of MDMA

00:34:18.320 | in a short period of time,

00:34:19.480 | and aside from a mild deficit in attention

00:34:22.360 | in the people who have taken the large doses,

00:34:24.880 | or frequent doses, that is,

00:34:26.960 | there do not seem to be many cognitive deficits

00:34:30.240 | that are detectable, and certainly no apparent neurotoxicity,

00:34:33.880 | which is not to say go do MDMA as much as you like.

00:34:36.600 | I think there is the potential for neurotoxicity

00:34:38.880 | if it's taken too often, and things of that sort.

00:34:41.600 | So a lot to still figure out.

00:34:43.440 | But MDMA seems to have a slightly different trajectory

00:34:48.440 | than psilocybin, it tends to be less scary,

00:34:54.040 | although it is very sympathetic arousing, that is,

00:34:57.480 | so people can get afraid,

00:34:58.920 | or if they're elevated heart rate, et cetera.

00:35:01.320 | But the empathogenic component is really interesting,

00:35:04.560 | because ultimately, with PTSD,

00:35:07.460 | it's really about developing empathy for one's self.

00:35:11.320 | It's really about developing empathy for one's self,

00:35:13.880 | and resolving one of the core issues of trauma,

00:35:16.160 | which is often not discussed,

00:35:17.600 | which is that at an unconscious level,

00:35:20.120 | at an unconscious level,

00:35:22.120 | trauma seems to be a confusion to the nervous system

00:35:24.760 | about who's responsible.

00:35:26.680 | So that even if somebody knows and understands,

00:35:29.000 | hey, that was them, they're the perpetrator,

00:35:31.160 | I'm the victim, somehow the nervous system gets confused

00:35:36.320 | about responsibility in a way that leads to triggering

00:35:40.260 | of some of the negative feelings around that event,

00:35:43.760 | or events, as the case may be.

00:35:45.900 | And MDMA seems to be able to intervene in that confusion,

00:35:49.980 | and short-circuit that confusion through this self-empathy.

00:35:53.100 | Self-empathy is something that I think

00:35:55.040 | deserves more exploration in the years to come.

00:35:57.300 | So a lot's happening there in the United States.

00:35:59.060 | MDMA is now being registered with the FDA

00:36:02.140 | for additional, perhaps for legalization.

00:36:06.320 | Right now, it is still illegal.

00:36:08.400 | So if you take any of what I said tonight and go buy MDMA,

00:36:11.120 | I'm not at fault, okay?

00:36:13.480 | Getting in the sauna about two hours before going to sleep

00:36:15.440 | really improves my quality of sleep.

00:36:16.640 | What's going on here?

00:36:17.600 | Ah, love this.

00:36:19.360 | This one can be pretty simple.

00:36:20.640 | The relationship between temperature and sleep

00:36:23.720 | is a well-established one.

00:36:26.440 | To fall asleep, you need to cool down by one to three degrees.

00:36:30.200 | You've probably heard me say that before.

00:36:31.440 | To wake up, you need to heat up by about one to three degrees.

00:36:36.440 | And when you get into a sauna, or you take a hot bath,

00:36:40.880 | or even to a lesser degree, you wash your face

00:36:44.500 | with warm water in the evening, hands with warm water

00:36:47.920 | because of the way that the body thermoregulates,

00:36:51.640 | you actually end up cooling yourself off.

00:36:54.160 | You think, no, I got in the sauna.

00:36:55.560 | Actually, I've been going to the sauna

00:36:56.920 | at this place here, Recovery.

00:36:59.120 | They have a wonderful sauna, cold plunge.

00:37:00.600 | And then they have this bed where you float on the thing.

00:37:02.760 | Have you tried this thing?

00:37:03.920 | This thing is so cool.

00:37:05.040 | It's like a water bed, but it floats you.

00:37:07.360 | They're amazing, amazing.

00:37:08.720 | By the way, they don't pay me to say that.

00:37:10.000 | I'm just grateful that they let me sit in this bed.

00:37:12.280 | I've been sleeping in there as much as possible,

00:37:14.120 | but they shut down at night eventually,

00:37:15.520 | and then I gotta go home.

00:37:16.640 | So the sauna's a great tool before sleep,

00:37:19.840 | or a warm shower, or a hot bath, or a warm bath,

00:37:24.000 | for the following reason.

00:37:25.640 | The brain area that controls thermoregulation

00:37:28.680 | is the medial preoptic area,

00:37:30.400 | which operates like a thermostat.

00:37:32.000 | So if you warm the external portion of the body,

00:37:34.680 | the brain has to then, what?

00:37:37.400 | Cool down your core body temperature.

00:37:39.200 | It doesn't happen right away,

00:37:40.440 | but it happens as you get out of the sauna,

00:37:42.720 | and maybe you take a warm, a shower, a cool shower.

00:37:45.320 | So what ends up happening is that you warmed up,

00:37:48.200 | which allows you to cool down internally,

00:37:50.440 | and then you're able to fall asleep

00:37:51.680 | and stay more deeply asleep.

00:37:53.840 | That's probably what's improving your sleep.

00:37:55.120 | In fact, a kind of mantra that I learned

00:37:57.480 | from the great Matt Walker,

00:37:58.600 | who wrote the great book "Why We Sleep,"

00:38:00.400 | and by the way, we have a sleep series

00:38:01.800 | with the mighty Matt Walker coming out later this year.

00:38:05.000 | We record six episodes,

00:38:06.440 | every aspect of sleep you can imagine.

00:38:08.360 | He says, and I hope I'm getting this right,

00:38:13.120 | he says, "You need to warm up to cool down to go to sleep,

00:38:18.120 | "or to fall, warm up to cool down to fall asleep.

00:38:21.480 | "Stay cool to stay asleep, warm up to wake up."

00:38:25.720 | There you go.

00:38:26.600 | That's a straight bite out of Matt Walker's mouth,

00:38:30.800 | so he deserves that citation, not me.

00:38:34.000 | So that's what's happening when you get in the sauna.

00:38:35.720 | Now, when you get into the cold plunge, you're cold,

00:38:38.760 | but guess what?

00:38:39.600 | Same thing, the surface of your body is cooler,

00:38:42.880 | those thermoreceptors transmit information

00:38:45.640 | to the medial preoptic area of your body,

00:38:47.480 | and your core body temperature eventually goes up,

00:38:50.800 | provided you don't stay in there

00:38:51.920 | and get hypothermic, of course, okay?

00:38:54.240 | People are always asking me,

00:38:55.320 | I have a good friend who just so happens to be straight edge.

00:39:00.320 | He's like, never even has a sip of caffeine.

00:39:03.040 | I don't know, it's a good thing because he's extreme,

00:39:05.320 | and he got a cold plunge, and he went in for a minute,

00:39:07.960 | and then the next day, he's like, "I did three minutes."

00:39:09.560 | And then pretty soon, he's like, "Hey, I got sick."

00:39:12.720 | And I was like, "What'd you do?"

00:39:13.560 | And he's like, "I got naked in the cold plunge

00:39:14.720 | "for 45 minutes."

00:39:16.360 | I was like, "Well, listen, first of all,

00:39:18.280 | "thank goodness you don't do drugs,

00:39:19.560 | "and second of all, easy does it, easy does it."

00:39:23.520 | The cold is a very powerful stimulus, as is heat.

00:39:26.640 | So minimal effective dose, have some fun with it,

00:39:30.480 | but don't go wild.

00:39:31.720 | I still don't know why you got in there naked,

00:39:33.240 | but who knows?

00:39:34.480 | If we expose ourselves to the same stress

00:39:36.720 | over and over again,

00:39:38.680 | do we release the same amount of adrenaline

00:39:40.560 | and it's positive negative impact

00:39:41.920 | and just becomes less receptive?

00:39:43.040 | Do we release less adrenaline, and hence, it's less harmful?

00:39:46.080 | It's a great question.

00:39:47.200 | Depends on the context.

00:39:48.360 | Typically, you'd release less and less adrenaline.

00:39:50.720 | And actually, this relates to a really important fact

00:39:53.000 | about the ever-famous structure, the amygdala,

00:39:55.640 | which means almond.

00:39:56.800 | I don't know why I told you that.

00:40:00.200 | The, happens to be shaped like an almond.

00:40:02.880 | The amygdala, people associate

00:40:05.120 | with threat detection and danger,

00:40:07.200 | but it's actually a novelty detector, essentially.

00:40:10.960 | And it's involved with a bunch of other brain circuits

00:40:13.280 | that anytime we experience something novel,

00:40:16.080 | we have an elevated level of autonomic arousal.

00:40:21.440 | Like earlier tonight, before the show,

00:40:23.120 | there was a kind of a repeating dong, dong, dong.

00:40:25.840 | And the first time it happened, I'm like,

00:40:27.440 | "Fire alarm?

00:40:28.280 | "Like, what's going on?"

00:40:29.120 | By the time it happened five times,

00:40:31.040 | I was kind of like, "Meh."

00:40:32.200 | So that sort of, if we had,

00:40:33.440 | I'd be willing to bet both amygdalas

00:40:35.640 | that had recorded from my amygdalas,

00:40:38.440 | it's got one on each side of the brain,

00:40:39.560 | you would find that the first time

00:40:42.120 | there's a big increase in activity,

00:40:43.360 | lesser, second, third, fourth, fifth,

00:40:45.280 | and you attenuate, you habituate.

00:40:47.720 | So if the stressor is one in which you don't care,

00:40:51.360 | it doesn't have much relevance to you, like that alarm,

00:40:54.720 | probably less and less adrenaline, I'd be willing to bet.

00:40:58.840 | However, if with each subsequent exposure,

00:41:02.360 | like somebody you really can't stand or something like that,

00:41:04.880 | it's decreasing your life satisfaction

00:41:07.640 | and increasing your level of cognitive

00:41:09.800 | or psychological stress,

00:41:10.960 | then it would go in the opposite direction.

00:41:12.520 | I think that's fair to say.

00:41:15.240 | Hey, hey, Andrew.

00:41:16.680 | I like that.

00:41:18.360 | I like that.

00:41:19.200 | Hey, that's cool.

00:41:20.920 | Yeah.

00:41:21.760 | The other day, it was really interesting.

00:41:22.720 | Every once in a while, someone will walk up and be like,

00:41:24.200 | "Hey, listen to the podcast, it's always nice.

00:41:25.880 | "It's always nice to meet people."

00:41:27.120 | And this kid walks up to me,

00:41:28.880 | this was in Melbourne, in the gym,

00:41:30.640 | like this has never happened to me before.

00:41:32.640 | It was really cool.

00:41:33.480 | He just walks up, he goes, "Hey, Andrew."

00:41:35.800 | I'm like, "Cool."

00:41:36.640 | He just said, "That's it."

00:41:37.480 | And he just walked away.

00:41:38.320 | I was like, "All right, cool."

00:41:40.960 | And I was like, "That kid is so mellow."

00:41:43.440 | It was really cool.

00:41:44.280 | Like, I was like, we would have been friends.

00:41:45.920 | Actually, I would have been friends

00:41:46.760 | with all the wild ones,

00:41:47.680 | but it was a really interesting phenotype.

00:41:49.560 | Again, human phenotypes fascinate me.

00:41:51.440 | So if we run into each other on the street

00:41:53.000 | and I ask your name and we talk,

00:41:54.480 | I'm genuinely interested.

00:41:55.640 | I'm not studying you, I'm not taking notes or data,

00:41:57.960 | but people are so different.

00:41:59.400 | But hey, Andrew.

00:42:00.240 | Okay, so maybe it's him.

00:42:01.240 | (audience laughing)

00:42:02.680 | Hey, Andrew.

00:42:03.560 | Hey, Adi.

00:42:05.160 | I've found that I'm able to focus far better

00:42:08.020 | when I bounce my legs up and down

00:42:09.420 | while sitting on the balls of my feet.

00:42:10.600 | What's going on here?

00:42:11.440 | You got a lot of energy.

00:42:12.900 | That's what's going on.

00:42:13.740 | No, I think, you know,

00:42:17.500 | there isn't a ton of science on this,

00:42:19.780 | but it's very clear, as I mentioned earlier,

00:42:23.040 | that people have different spontaneous movement rates.

00:42:26.700 | And some people, you know,

00:42:28.240 | some people are a little bit more jittery.

00:42:30.240 | If you look, if you go into a classroom,

00:42:33.960 | young children, see them sitting around,

00:42:36.760 | boys and girls, let's say somewhere between four and six,

00:42:41.140 | oftentimes you'll notice that some of the kids

00:42:44.180 | can sit extremely still.

00:42:46.020 | And then some of the kids are like really like.

00:42:48.260 | And there is a chromosomal difference there.

00:42:52.980 | The boy, it's known that boys have a slower development

00:42:57.980 | of the so-called top-down inhibition from the forebrain.

00:43:01.100 | The prefrontal cortex, which frankly we hear about

00:43:03.140 | over and over again, many podcasts,

00:43:04.700 | a lot of description of the prefrontal cortex,

00:43:06.940 | its main job, the best description

00:43:08.880 | I've ever heard of it anyway,

00:43:10.080 | is from a friend who's a neurosurgeon at Neuralink

00:43:12.940 | who came up through my lab, Matt McDougall.

00:43:14.820 | He's been on the podcast.

00:43:15.780 | He says the job of the prefrontal cortex

00:43:18.380 | is to send connections to the rest of the brain

00:43:22.340 | and say, "Shh," basically, to the appropriate circuit.

00:43:27.340 | So that's why people with damage to the prefrontal cortex

00:43:30.720 | for any reason or degeneration of the prefrontal cortex

00:43:33.140 | find themselves doing things,

00:43:35.200 | or we find them doing things

00:43:36.340 | that are a little bit context inappropriate.

00:43:38.620 | And in some cases, dramatically inappropriate,

00:43:40.940 | but in most cases, just kind of context inappropriate.

00:43:42.860 | They don't suppress behavior very well.

00:43:45.820 | So it may be that a certain level of autonomic arousal

00:43:50.700 | brings us into that optimal,

00:43:52.580 | some people call it a flow state.

00:43:53.980 | A flow state is a little bit of a nebulous thing.

00:43:56.140 | I mean, I have great respect for Stephen Kotler

00:43:57.820 | and those that have talked about and written about flow,

00:43:59.660 | but what I really can just say about flow

00:44:02.820 | as it relates to neuroscience

00:44:04.120 | is that like backwards, it spells wolf.

00:44:06.420 | Like we don't really know that much more

00:44:08.400 | about like the neural basis of a flow state.

00:44:10.460 | But for each of us, we have these kind of tunnels

00:44:12.860 | that we like to be in where we find

00:44:16.820 | that our level of focus and action is just right.

00:44:19.180 | And so I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here,

00:44:23.060 | Hadi, by saying that if you find that you focus best

00:44:25.740 | when you can dispel a little bit of that energy

00:44:28.800 | by moving your body, that you're able to do your best work,

00:44:31.980 | that makes sense to me.

00:44:33.560 | I don't do them so much anymore,

00:44:34.840 | but for years I would do surgeries,

00:44:36.560 | lots and lots of surgeries down the microscope,

00:44:38.460 | dissecting retinas, dissecting retinas.

00:44:40.180 | Like if you got an eyeball, I can dissect it,

00:44:41.900 | I'm good at it, I can do them in my sleep.

00:44:44.740 | And I would find that if I had a little bit too much energy

00:44:48.480 | that the forceps would jiggle a little bit

00:44:51.660 | and it wasn't a caffeine thing.

00:44:53.100 | And a friend of mine who's a world-class neurosurgeon,

00:44:56.140 | Eddie Chang, he's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF,

00:44:58.300 | he's been on the podcast, and he said,

00:45:00.020 | ah, there's a solution to that

00:45:01.220 | that we learn in neurosurgery.

00:45:02.980 | They're like the astronauts of medicine.

00:45:05.500 | He said, you know, you tap your foot.

00:45:07.820 | I thought, oh, that's kind of cool, why would that work?

00:45:10.340 | He said, well, basically,

00:45:11.660 | you've got some sort of anticipatory activity

00:45:13.740 | in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia,

00:45:15.580 | which is involved in these go, no-go type actions.

00:45:18.420 | Like all of our actions are yes-go and no-go,

00:45:21.540 | don't do something else.

00:45:22.660 | So flexor extensor, there's all kind of stuff,

00:45:24.620 | very complicated, but it's seamless for most people.

00:45:28.180 | And when you have a bit too much anticipatory activity,

00:45:31.780 | you're getting ready to go like a sprinter out the blocks,

00:45:34.900 | and you're doing something that's very important,

00:45:37.060 | like a brain surgery, in his case,

00:45:39.500 | or a microsurgery, in my case, for research purposes,

00:45:42.880 | that if your activation state is too high,

00:45:45.100 | that you can dispel some of that energy

00:45:46.660 | by just simply tapping your foot

00:45:48.660 | or doing some sort of rhythmic activity

00:45:50.180 | with another part of your body,

00:45:51.660 | appropriate to that context, of course.

00:45:53.580 | Last question, I don't know.

00:45:57.820 | Hey, Andrew, yeah, oh, oh, they skipped that one.

00:46:04.620 | I guess that's the new thing.

00:46:05.820 | I'll never forget when I got my lab for the first time.

00:46:08.020 | I came up in an era when it was still pretty formal.

00:46:10.780 | Neuroscience, you'd say, "Hey, Professor so-and-so,"

00:46:13.100 | and then they'd say, "You can call me Barbara,"

00:46:14.820 | and I'd be like, "Hey, Barbara."

00:46:15.980 | But before that, no one, you don't need the hey or that,

00:46:18.540 | and I'll never forget that in my lab,

00:46:20.060 | my first graduate student, who's now a professor,

00:46:21.860 | he's a very, very talented scientist

00:46:23.520 | at the University of Utah,

00:46:25.220 | and I got a text from him, and it just said,

00:46:27.420 | she called me Andy, she said,

00:46:29.960 | "Hey, Andy, when are you gonna buy us an espresso maker?"

00:46:33.060 | It was like the second day, and I was like, whoa.

00:46:35.220 | Times have changed, so I think it's good.

00:46:36.900 | I think the lack of formality is actually good.

00:46:38.780 | At first, I was like, wait a second,

00:46:40.020 | I waited my whole life to become a professor,

00:46:41.660 | and now it's, hey, Andy?

00:46:43.100 | But I think, you know, with the years,

00:46:46.580 | I've realized that it's actually kind of nice.

00:46:48.860 | I'm 17 years old.

00:46:50.680 | Congratulations, man, I wish I,

00:46:52.940 | you didn't wanna know me when I was a nice kid,

00:46:55.100 | but I was just, I had a lot of confusion.

00:46:57.020 | I'm 17 years old,

00:46:58.500 | so you're in a psychedelic experience of youth.

00:47:01.020 | What is your biggest advice on finding your passion?

00:47:03.420 | Oh, well, goodness gracious, I think you know,

00:47:08.420 | if I'm honest, I think,

00:47:11.020 | we talked about it a little bit earlier,

00:47:12.180 | I think your passion is rooted in a feeling state

00:47:17.020 | that you've already accessed, hopefully many times,

00:47:21.060 | but at least one time earlier in your life,

00:47:23.840 | when, for whatever reason or circumstances,

00:47:27.260 | you weren't thinking about what your parents

00:47:30.300 | wanted you to do, what was cool or not cool

00:47:32.980 | in school, you were in a pure feeling state of yum.

00:47:37.420 | That's really cool, behold.

00:47:45.620 | And so I can't answer the question for you,

00:47:51.060 | but I'll tell you, yes, continue to forage.

00:47:54.260 | I do believe that learning is among the most wonderful

00:47:58.260 | things that we can do for ourselves,

00:48:00.380 | but that if you spend some time in your memory banks,

00:48:05.380 | that you'll be able to remember a feeling,

00:48:08.780 | and maybe the feeling was about a board game you played

00:48:11.480 | or something you observed,

00:48:13.660 | or maybe it just came about through some other activity

00:48:17.920 | and the feeling is unrelated to the activity.

00:48:20.020 | That's where it gets a little tricky.

00:48:22.380 | And we're answering this question for a 17-year-old,

00:48:24.280 | but it's true for all of us.

00:48:25.900 | This is where it gets a little tricky,

00:48:26.980 | is that sometimes we think it's the activity,

00:48:29.680 | but it's not the activity.

00:48:31.220 | Lord knows, I stay out of the Aquaria stores these days.

00:48:34.640 | Because if I go near one, it's all over.

00:48:38.060 | No, it's the delight in something that is very personal,

00:48:43.060 | in fact, I think is very unique to you,

00:48:46.420 | to the extent that, and I do believe this,

00:48:48.880 | that it's not capable of being created by anybody else,

00:48:53.820 | and that feedback from other people about what we should do

00:48:56.980 | or what we're good at, while it can be useful,

00:48:59.320 | it's merely a calibration point for saying,

00:49:05.260 | like someone says, "Maybe you should do this,"

00:49:07.060 | and you go, "Eh," or like, "Meh," or like, "Yuck."

00:49:11.000 | Those are all just calibration points on this compass

00:49:14.200 | to take you back to that feeling state.

00:49:16.580 | So I apologize for not having

00:49:18.220 | a more concrete mechanistic works-the-first-time-works-every-time

00:49:21.800 | kind of instant tool, like a physiological sigh.

00:49:26.000 | Rather, this is going to have to be some self-exploration,

00:49:28.940 | but the good news is, you're 17, your brain's still plastic.

00:49:31.780 | The good news is, all of us are capable of neuroplasticity

00:49:35.140 | throughout the lifespan, and the good news is,

00:49:37.420 | all of us are capable of introspection

00:49:39.500 | throughout the lifespan.

00:49:40.940 | So even if you can't remember, you can sense,

00:49:44.420 | and if you can sense, what you're doing is you're feeling.

00:49:47.140 | What is this?

00:49:47.960 | I don't want to turn this into a neuroscience lesson,

00:49:50.020 | but I'd be remiss if I didn't say that you're perceiving

00:49:54.860 | and feeling on the basis of converting

00:49:58.100 | physical information in your environment,

00:50:00.240 | sound waves, photons, mechanical pressure,

00:50:04.180 | chemicals going in through your nose and mouth.

00:50:06.860 | You're converting that into electrical and chemical signals.

00:50:09.620 | That's what being and perceiving really is.

00:50:14.620 | It can't be anything else.

00:50:16.820 | So there's something about the way that you're wired, Oscar,

00:50:21.920 | that is different and leads you to say yum.

00:50:26.920 | Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that, that.

00:50:32.480 | And for me, I've always associated

00:50:33.920 | with a certain physical sensation in this arm.

00:50:36.360 | Don't ask me why.

00:50:37.680 | I don't even know.

00:50:39.120 | And if you can sense into what it is

00:50:43.220 | that gets you going in that direction,

00:50:45.380 | if any and all of us do that,

00:50:47.620 | then I really believe you can sense into your unique gifts.

00:50:52.100 | Or maybe you just need to sit back

00:50:53.260 | and think in deliberate, complete sentences for an hour

00:50:56.020 | like Rick or one of those other geniuses.

00:50:57.780 | I don't have a better answer.

00:50:59.020 | That's the best I can do.

00:51:00.240 | Thanks so much, yeah.

00:51:01.960 | (audience applauding)

00:51:05.120 | Thank you, thank you so much.

00:51:08.500 | Thank you, thanks so much.

00:51:13.800 | Thank you, thank you, thank you.

00:51:17.300 | Thank you so much.

00:51:18.300 | So just as a final note this evening,

00:51:23.540 | I just want to thank everyone for coming out.

00:51:25.660 | As Rob mentioned, you know, come out.

00:51:28.420 | As far as I know, there's no alcohol here.

00:51:29.980 | People are here, amazing.

00:51:31.460 | An event with no alcohol on a Saturday night

00:51:34.960 | in this beautiful Sydney summer where we talk science.

00:51:39.960 | Thanks for letting me tell some stories, learn some stories.

00:51:42.260 | My real wish, my deep wish,

00:51:44.100 | is that everyone do some level of introspection,

00:51:47.700 | if not tonight, going forward.

00:51:50.160 | And I so appreciate that people are interested

00:51:53.180 | in the concepts around science and health.

00:51:55.340 | And the really big, big wish for me,

00:51:58.040 | maybe I'll even just call it an ask,

00:51:59.780 | is that I truly don't develop the protocols.

00:52:03.780 | I mine them.

00:52:05.280 | Occasionally I develop them,

00:52:06.460 | but I mine them from the rich sources of information

00:52:11.020 | in papers and elsewhere and put them into a format

00:52:14.860 | that I'm deeply appreciative people enjoy digesting

00:52:18.180 | and hopefully apply, but hopefully share.

00:52:20.220 | And I certainly don't need attribution.

00:52:22.080 | None of them are named after me intentionally

00:52:24.060 | because that's not gonna give them any information

00:52:26.440 | about what they do or how they work.

00:52:28.500 | And last but certainly not least,

00:52:30.820 | thank you for your interest in science.

00:52:32.740 | (audience applauding)

00:52:40.020 | - Thank you to the Sydney Opera House Trust

00:52:41.660 | for their hospitality and for making this event possible.

00:52:44.820 | And last but certainly not least,

00:52:46.820 | thank you for your interest in science.

00:52:48.820 | (upbeat music)

00:52:51.400 | you

LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Sydney Opera House

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