How to Focus to Change Your Brain

00:00:00.000 | [upbeat music]

00:00:00.840 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.920 | My name is Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.740 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.900 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.860 | This podcast is separate

00:00:17.140 | from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:00:19.460 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:00:21.840 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:00:24.660 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:00:27.780 | In keeping with that theme,

00:00:29.380 | I want to thank the first sponsor of today's podcast.

00:00:32.420 | Our first sponsor is Inside Tracker.

00:00:34.920 | Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform

00:00:37.840 | that analyzes blood factors and DNA-related factors

00:00:41.780 | that helps you develop a personalized health plan.

00:00:45.200 | Many important factors related to our health and wellbeing

00:00:48.300 | can only be measured by a blood sample and by a DNA sample.

00:00:52.740 | I've been getting my blood work done for many years now,

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00:01:44.700 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Headspace.

00:01:47.660 | Headspace is a meditation app that makes meditating easy.

00:01:51.180 | I've been meditating on and off for about three decades now,

00:01:54.480 | and typically, it's been more off than on.

00:01:57.100 | I think like a lot of people,

00:01:58.220 | I find it hard to stick with a meditation practice.

00:02:01.260 | A few years ago, I started using the Headspace app,

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00:02:24.520 | the meditations are offered as an alternative

00:02:27.640 | to watching a TV or a movie.

00:02:29.680 | And I found that I would arrive feeling much more refreshed

00:02:31.880 | than had I just sort of zoned out on the TV the whole time,

00:02:34.380 | or even if I had slept.

00:02:36.380 | I now continue to use Headspace regularly

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00:03:04.240 | The third sponsor of today's podcast is Made For.

00:03:07.020 | Made For is a behavioral science company

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00:03:11.060 | in which you engage in specific activities

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00:03:18.840 | The company was founded by former Navy Seal Patrick Dossett,

00:03:22.040 | as well as Tom's founder, Blake Mycoskie.

00:03:25.600 | I'm the lead advisor

00:03:26.560 | of the Scientific Advisory Board at Made For,

00:03:28.660 | and some of the other members of the advisory board

00:03:30.440 | include the head of the Chronobiology Unit

00:03:32.400 | at the National Institutes of Health,

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00:03:51.360 | Today, we're talking about neuroplasticity,

00:03:54.800 | which is this incredible feature of our nervous systems

00:03:58.180 | that allows it to change in response to experience.

00:04:01.880 | Neuroplasticity is arguably

00:04:03.800 | one of the most important aspects of our biology.

00:04:07.120 | It holds the promise for each and all of us

00:04:09.680 | to think differently, to learn new things,

00:04:13.280 | to forget painful experiences,

00:04:15.800 | and to essentially adapt to anything that life brings us

00:04:19.480 | by becoming better.

00:04:20.700 | Neuroplasticity has a long and important history,

00:04:24.560 | and we're not going to review all of it in detail,

00:04:27.100 | but today, what we are going to do

00:04:29.040 | is discuss what is neuroplasticity,

00:04:32.360 | as well as the different forms of neuroplasticity.

00:04:35.480 | We're going to talk about how to access neuroplasticity

00:04:39.080 | depending on how old you are

00:04:40.580 | and depending on the specific types of changes

00:04:42.500 | that you're trying to create.

00:04:44.560 | This is a topic for which there are lots of tools,

00:04:47.860 | as well as lots of biological principles

00:04:50.280 | that we can discuss.

00:04:51.800 | So let's get started.

00:04:53.640 | Most people are familiar with the word neuroplasticity.

00:04:56.840 | It's sometimes also called neuroplasticity.

00:04:59.980 | Those are the same thing.

00:05:01.560 | So if I say neuroplasticity or neuroplasticity,

00:05:05.320 | I'm referring to the same process,

00:05:07.400 | which is the brain and nervous system's ability

00:05:09.920 | to change itself.

00:05:12.440 | There are a lot of reasons why the nervous system

00:05:15.080 | would do this.

00:05:16.720 | It could do it in response to some traumatic event.

00:05:20.860 | It could, for instance, create a sense of fear

00:05:23.680 | around a particular place

00:05:25.040 | or a fear of automobiles or planes.

00:05:27.600 | It could also occur when something positive happens,

00:05:30.640 | like the birth of our first child,

00:05:32.800 | or when our puppy does something amusing,

00:05:35.640 | or we see an incredible feat of performance in athleticism.

00:05:41.600 | The word neuroplasticity means so many things

00:05:44.480 | to so many different people

00:05:45.720 | that I thought it would be important

00:05:46.720 | to just first put a little bit of organizational logic

00:05:49.840 | around what it is and how it happens.

00:05:52.300 | Because nowadays, if you were to go online

00:05:54.420 | and Google the word neuroplasticity,

00:05:56.800 | you would find hundreds of thousands of references,

00:06:00.400 | scientific references, as well as a lot of falsehoods

00:06:03.240 | about what neuroplasticity is and how to access it.

00:06:06.440 | As I mentioned before,

00:06:07.280 | we're going to talk about the science of it,

00:06:08.840 | and we're going to talk about the tools

00:06:10.040 | that allow you to engage this incredible feature

00:06:12.680 | of your nervous system.

00:06:13.920 | And that's the first point,

00:06:15.040 | which is that all of us were born with a nervous system

00:06:18.220 | that isn't just capable of change,

00:06:20.440 | but was designed to change.

00:06:23.440 | When we enter the world,

00:06:24.980 | our nervous system is primed for learning.

00:06:30.600 | The brain and nervous system of a baby

00:06:33.720 | is wired very crudely.

00:06:36.120 | The connections are not precise,

00:06:38.400 | and we can see evidence of that in the fact that babies

00:06:41.800 | are kind of flopping there

00:06:42.980 | like a kind of a little potato bug with limbs.

00:06:45.180 | They can't really do much in terms of coordinated movement.

00:06:48.180 | They certainly can't speak,

00:06:50.240 | and they can't really do anything with precision.

00:06:53.480 | And that's because we come into this world over-connected.

00:06:57.960 | We have essentially wires.

00:06:59.400 | Those wires have names like axons and dendrites.

00:07:01.720 | Those are the different parts of the neurons

00:07:03.320 | discussed in episode one.

00:07:04.800 | But those little parts and those wires and connections

00:07:07.520 | are everywhere.

00:07:09.040 | Imagine a bunch of roads

00:07:11.040 | that are all connected to one another in kind of a mess,

00:07:14.120 | but there are no highways.

00:07:15.880 | They're all just small roads.

00:07:17.080 | That's essentially what the young nervous system is like.

00:07:19.760 | And then as we mature,

00:07:21.660 | as we go from day one of life to 10 years old,

00:07:26.660 | 20 years old, 30 years old,

00:07:28.880 | what happens is particular connections get reinforced

00:07:32.300 | and stronger and other connections are lost.

00:07:35.480 | So that's the first important principle that I want everyone

00:07:38.000 | to understand, which is that developmental plasticity,

00:07:41.960 | the neuroplasticity that occurs from the time we're born

00:07:44.760 | until about age 25 is mainly a process

00:07:49.000 | of removing connections that don't serve our goals well.

00:07:53.320 | Now, of course, certain events happen

00:07:55.140 | during that birth to 25 period

00:07:58.360 | in which positive events and negative events

00:08:01.400 | are really stamped down into our nervous system

00:08:03.820 | in a very dramatic fashion

00:08:05.480 | by what we call one trial learning.

00:08:07.400 | We experienced something once

00:08:08.840 | and then our nervous system is forever changed

00:08:12.240 | by that experience.

00:08:13.460 | Unless of course we go through some work

00:08:15.520 | to undo that experience.

00:08:17.280 | So I want you to imagine in your mind

00:08:20.500 | that when you were brought into this world,

00:08:22.520 | you were essentially a widely connected web of connections

00:08:27.500 | that was really poor at doing any one thing.

00:08:31.460 | And that through your experience,

00:08:33.020 | what you were exposed to by your parents or other caretakers

00:08:36.220 | through your social interactions, through your thoughts,

00:08:39.200 | through the languages that you learn,

00:08:40.940 | through the places you traveled or didn't travel,

00:08:43.160 | your nervous system became customized

00:08:45.460 | to your unique experience.

00:08:47.900 | Now, that's true for certain parts of your brain

00:08:51.500 | that are involved in what we call representations

00:08:53.880 | of the outside world.

00:08:55.280 | A lot of your brain is designed to represent the visual world

00:08:58.160 | or represent the auditory world

00:09:00.560 | or represent the gallery of smells

00:09:03.280 | that are possible in the world.

00:09:06.000 | However, there are aspects of your nervous system

00:09:08.440 | that were designed not to be plastic.

00:09:11.560 | They were wired so that plasticity

00:09:13.520 | or changes in those circuits is very unlikely.

00:09:17.160 | Those circuits include things like

00:09:19.200 | the ones that control your heartbeat,

00:09:21.140 | the ones that control your breathing,

00:09:23.000 | the ones that control your digestion.

00:09:24.760 | And thank goodness that those circuits were set up that way

00:09:27.640 | because you want those circuits to be extremely reliable.

00:09:30.460 | You never want to have to think about

00:09:31.940 | whether or not your heart will beat

00:09:33.300 | or whether or not you will continue breathing

00:09:34.920 | or whether or not you'll be able to digest your food.

00:09:37.680 | So many nervous system features like digestion

00:09:41.760 | and breathing and heart rate are hard to change.

00:09:44.620 | Other aspects of our nervous system

00:09:47.040 | are actually quite easy to change.

00:09:48.720 | And one of the great gifts of childhood,

00:09:50.700 | adolescence and young adulthood,

00:09:52.560 | is that we can learn through almost passive experience.

00:09:54.980 | We don't have to focus that hard

00:09:56.720 | in order to learn new things.

00:09:58.360 | In fact, children go from being able

00:10:00.840 | to speak no language whatsoever,

00:10:03.240 | to being able to speak many, many words

00:10:05.380 | and comprise sentences,

00:10:06.640 | including words they've never heard before,

00:10:08.720 | which is remarkable.

00:10:09.720 | It means that the portions of the brain

00:10:11.580 | involved in speech and language

00:10:13.180 | are actually primed to learn and create new combinations.

00:10:16.580 | What this tells us is that the young brain

00:10:20.840 | is a plasticity machine.

00:10:23.160 | But then right about age 25,

00:10:26.080 | plus or minus a year or two, everything changes.

00:10:29.240 | After age 25 or so,

00:10:32.320 | in order to get changes in our nervous system,

00:10:34.780 | we have to engage in a completely different set of processes

00:10:38.520 | in order to get those changes to occur

00:10:40.400 | and for them, more importantly, to stick around.

00:10:43.680 | And this is something that I think is vastly overlooked

00:10:46.120 | in the popular culture discussion about neuroplasticity.

00:10:49.560 | People always talk about fire together, wire together.

00:10:52.680 | Fire together, wire together is true.

00:10:55.320 | It is the statement of my colleague at Stanford,

00:10:57.280 | Carla Schatz, and it's an absolute truth

00:11:00.780 | about the way that the nervous system

00:11:02.200 | wires up early in development.

00:11:04.520 | But fire together, wire together

00:11:07.320 | doesn't apply in the same way after age 25.

00:11:11.360 | And so we have these little memes and these little quotes

00:11:15.040 | that circulate on the internet,

00:11:17.140 | like fire together, wire together,

00:11:18.780 | or there's a famous quote from the greatest neurobiologist

00:11:22.440 | of all time, Ramon y Cajal.

00:11:24.020 | I think it goes something like,

00:11:25.380 | should somebody wish to change their nervous system,

00:11:27.680 | they could be the sculptor of their nervous system

00:11:31.100 | in any way they want, something like that.

00:11:33.280 | And that sounds great.

00:11:34.260 | I mean, who wouldn't want to change their nervous system

00:11:36.220 | any way they want?

00:11:37.320 | But what's lost in those statements

00:11:39.780 | is how to actually accomplish that.

00:11:41.920 | And we're going to cover that today.

00:11:43.660 | But please understand that early in development,

00:11:46.280 | your nervous system is connected very broadly

00:11:49.340 | in ways that make it very hard to do anything well.

00:11:52.080 | From birth until about age 25,

00:11:53.920 | those connections get refined,

00:11:55.880 | mainly through the removal of connections

00:11:57.940 | that don't serve us.

00:11:59.240 | And the incredible strengthening of connections

00:12:02.020 | that relate to either powerful experiences

00:12:04.020 | or that allow us to do things like walk and talk

00:12:06.200 | and do math, et cetera.

00:12:08.480 | And then after age 25,

00:12:10.640 | if we want to change those connections,

00:12:12.480 | those super highways of connectivity,

00:12:14.600 | we have to engage in some very specific processes.

00:12:17.680 | And those processes as we'll soon learn are gated,

00:12:21.160 | meaning you can't just decide to change your brain.

00:12:23.280 | You actually have to go through a series of steps

00:12:25.300 | to change your internal state

00:12:27.400 | in ways that will allow you to change your brain.

00:12:30.280 | I just want to acknowledge that Costello is snoring

00:12:33.040 | particularly loud today.

00:12:34.480 | Some of you seem very keen at picking up on his snoring.

00:12:38.720 | Others of you can't hear his snoring.

00:12:40.960 | It's very low rumbling sound.

00:12:43.980 | And whether or not you can or you can't

00:12:45.640 | probably relates to the sensitivity of your hearing.

00:12:47.740 | We're actually going to talk about perfect pitch today

00:12:49.960 | and range of auditory detection.

00:12:52.240 | And so if you can hear Costello's snoring,

00:12:54.740 | enjoy, if you can't, enjoy.

00:12:57.180 | I want to talk about how the nervous system changes.

00:13:01.840 | What are these changes?

00:13:04.120 | Many of us have been captivated

00:13:06.920 | by the stories in the popular press

00:13:08.840 | about the addition of new neurons.

00:13:10.620 | This idea, oh, if you go running or you exercise,

00:13:13.000 | your brain actually makes new neurons.

00:13:15.420 | Well, I'm going to give you the bad news first,

00:13:17.280 | which is that after puberty,

00:13:19.440 | so after about age 14 or 15,

00:13:22.040 | the human brain and nervous system

00:13:23.960 | adds very few, if any, new neurons.

00:13:28.000 | The idea that new neurons could be added to the brain

00:13:31.220 | is one that has a rich history in experimental science.

00:13:34.480 | It's clear that in rodents and in some non-human primates,

00:13:39.360 | new neurons, a process called neurogenesis,

00:13:43.800 | can occur in areas of the brain,

00:13:46.080 | such as the olfactory bulb,

00:13:47.960 | which is of course involved in smell,

00:13:49.960 | as well as a region of our hippocampus,

00:13:51.840 | the center of the brain involved in memory,

00:13:53.200 | called the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus.

00:13:56.040 | And there is strong evidence that new neurons

00:13:58.620 | can be added to those structures throughout the lifespan.

00:14:01.960 | In humans, the evidence is a little bit more controversial.

00:14:05.380 | It's clear that we can add new neurons

00:14:07.440 | to our olfactory bulb.

00:14:09.320 | In fact, if any of you have ever had

00:14:11.320 | the unfortunate experience of being hit on the head too hard,

00:14:15.420 | the wires called axons from those olfactory neurons

00:14:19.120 | that live in your nose can get sheared off

00:14:21.540 | because they have to pass through a bony plate

00:14:23.180 | called the cribriform plate.

00:14:24.200 | And the cribriform plate can shear those axons

00:14:26.580 | and people can become what's called anosmic.

00:14:29.080 | They won't be able to smell.

00:14:30.920 | But over time, those neurons,

00:14:33.460 | unlike most all central nervous system neurons,

00:14:35.980 | can grow those connections back

00:14:38.400 | and even reestablish new neurons

00:14:41.820 | added to the olfactory bulb.

00:14:43.280 | They come from elsewhere deep in the brain

00:14:44.960 | and they migrate through a pathway

00:14:46.280 | called the rostral migratory stream.

00:14:47.880 | You can Google these words

00:14:49.040 | and look up some of the descriptions of this

00:14:51.040 | if you'd like to learn more.

00:14:52.480 | So indeed, there's some evidence

00:14:54.640 | that the neurons responsible for smell

00:14:56.760 | can be replaced throughout the lifespan,

00:14:58.660 | certainly in very young individuals

00:15:00.840 | from birth till about age 15 or so.

00:15:03.220 | Whether or not there are new neurons

00:15:05.920 | added to the hippocampus,

00:15:07.140 | the memory center of the human brain, isn't clear.

00:15:09.700 | Many years ago, Rusty Gage's lab at the Salk Institute

00:15:12.960 | did a really important study

00:15:14.500 | looking at terminally ill cancer patients

00:15:17.360 | and injecting them with a label, a dye,

00:15:20.900 | that is incorporated only into new neurons.

00:15:23.980 | And after these patients died,

00:15:25.920 | their brains were harvested, the brains were looked at,

00:15:28.600 | and there were new neurons there.

00:15:31.220 | There was evidence for new neurons.

00:15:33.480 | Those results, I think, stand over time.

00:15:36.520 | But what was not really discussed

00:15:39.480 | in the popular press discussion around those papers

00:15:42.220 | was that it was very few cells that were being added.

00:15:45.720 | And a number of papers have come along over the years,

00:15:48.760 | mainly from labs at UCSF,

00:15:50.480 | although from others as well,

00:15:52.440 | showing that if there are new neurons

00:15:54.540 | added to the adult brain,

00:15:56.380 | it's an infinitesimally small number of new neurons.

00:16:00.720 | So that's the depressing part.

00:16:01.720 | We don't get new neurons.

00:16:02.840 | After we're born, we pretty much have the neurons

00:16:05.120 | that we're going to use our entire life.

00:16:06.400 | And yes, as we get older

00:16:07.860 | and we start to lose certain functions in our brain,

00:16:10.440 | we lose neurons.

00:16:11.980 | But all is not lost, so to speak,

00:16:15.360 | because there are other ways in which neural circuits

00:16:18.860 | can create new connections and add new functions,

00:16:21.880 | including new memory, new abilities,

00:16:24.180 | and new cognitive functions.

00:16:26.320 | And those are mainly through the process

00:16:29.600 | of making certain connections,

00:16:31.720 | which of course are those things we call synapses,

00:16:34.500 | between neurons, making those connections stronger

00:16:37.280 | so they're more reliable, they're more likely to engage,

00:16:40.600 | as well as removing connections.

00:16:42.880 | And the removal of connections is vital

00:16:45.000 | to say moving through a grieving process

00:16:47.600 | or removing the emotional load of a traumatic experience.

00:16:52.180 | So even though we can't add new neurons

00:16:54.340 | throughout our lifespan,

00:16:56.040 | at least not in very great numbers,

00:16:59.160 | it's clear that we can change our nervous system,

00:17:01.580 | that the nervous system is available for change,

00:17:04.560 | that if we create the right set of circumstances

00:17:07.280 | in our brain, chemical circumstances,

00:17:09.800 | and if we create the right environmental circumstances

00:17:12.860 | around us, our nervous system will shift into a mode

00:17:15.960 | in which change isn't just possible, but it's probable.

00:17:20.080 | As I mentioned before,

00:17:21.720 | the hallmark of the child nervous system is change.

00:17:25.080 | It wants to change.

00:17:26.880 | The whole thing, everything from the chemicals

00:17:29.160 | that are sloshing around in there,

00:17:31.620 | to the fact that there's a lot of space between the neurons,

00:17:34.480 | a lot of people don't know this,

00:17:35.320 | but early in development,

00:17:36.160 | there's a lot of space between the neurons,

00:17:37.480 | and so the neurons can literally move around

00:17:39.240 | and sample different connections very easily,

00:17:41.300 | removing some and keeping others.

00:17:43.160 | As we get older, the so-called extracellular space

00:17:46.520 | is actually filled up by things called extracellular matrix

00:17:50.680 | and glial cells, glia means glue,

00:17:52.740 | those cells are involved in a bunch of different processes,

00:17:55.000 | but they start to fill in all the space,

00:17:57.160 | kind of like pouring concrete between rocks,

00:17:59.600 | and when that happens, it becomes much harder

00:18:02.540 | to change the connections that are there.

00:18:05.080 | One of the ways in which we can all get plasticity

00:18:08.560 | at any stage throughout the lifespan

00:18:10.840 | is through deficits and impairments

00:18:12.780 | in what we call our sensory apparatus,

00:18:14.960 | our eyes, our ears, our nose, our mouth,

00:18:17.520 | and there are some very dramatic

00:18:19.120 | and somewhat tragic examples of people, for instance,

00:18:22.300 | who have genetic mutations where they are born

00:18:24.380 | without a nose and without any olfactory structures

00:18:27.760 | in the brain, so they cannot smell.

00:18:30.300 | In that case, areas of the brain

00:18:31.900 | that normally would represent smell

00:18:33.960 | become overtaken by areas of the brain

00:18:37.260 | involved in other things like touch and hearing and sight.

00:18:41.200 | In individuals that are blind from birth,

00:18:43.600 | the so-called occipital cortex,

00:18:45.360 | the visual cortex in the back,

00:18:47.140 | becomes overtaken by hearing.

00:18:50.960 | The neurons there will start to respond to sounds

00:18:53.640 | as well as braille touch,

00:18:55.000 | and actually there's one particularly tragic incident

00:18:57.880 | where a woman who was blind since birth

00:19:01.120 | and because of neuroimaging studies,

00:19:03.660 | we knew her visual cortex was no longer visual,

00:19:06.480 | it was responsible for braille reading and for hearing,

00:19:09.840 | she had a stroke that actually took out

00:19:11.840 | most of the function of her visual cortex,

00:19:14.160 | so then she was blind, she couldn't braille read or hear,

00:19:17.180 | she did recover some aspect of function.

00:19:19.620 | Now, most people, they don't end up

00:19:20.860 | in that highly unfortunate situation,

00:19:22.960 | and what we know is that, for instance,

00:19:25.240 | blind people who use their visual cortex

00:19:28.760 | for braille reading and for hearing

00:19:30.840 | have much better auditory acuity and touch acuity,

00:19:35.320 | meaning they can sense things with their fingers

00:19:37.360 | and they can sense things with their hearing

00:19:39.140 | that typical sighted folks wouldn't be able to.

00:19:42.400 | In fact, you will find a much greater incidence

00:19:46.180 | of perfect pitch in people that are blind,

00:19:50.300 | and that tells us that the brain,

00:19:52.400 | and in particular this area we call the neocortex,

00:19:54.560 | which is the outer part, is really designed

00:19:56.920 | to be a map of our own individual experience.

00:20:00.020 | So these, what I call experiments of impairment or loss

00:20:04.080 | where somebody is blind from birth or deaf from birth,

00:20:06.920 | or maybe has a limb development impairment

00:20:11.920 | where they have a stump instead of an entire limb

00:20:14.480 | with a functioning hand,

00:20:16.360 | their brain will represent the body plan that they have,

00:20:21.060 | not some other body plan.

00:20:23.060 | But the beauty of the situation is that the real estate

00:20:26.020 | up in the skull, that neocortex,

00:20:29.000 | the essence of it is to be a customized map of experience.

00:20:33.280 | Now, it is true, however,

00:20:35.340 | that if, let's say I were to be blind when I'm 50,

00:20:40.200 | I'm 45 right now, I've always been sighted.

00:20:42.400 | If I was blind at 50, I'll probably have less opportunity

00:20:48.400 | to use my formerly visual cortex

00:20:51.580 | for things like braille reading and hearing,

00:20:53.700 | because my brain has changed,

00:20:55.120 | it's just not the same brain I had when I was a baby.

00:20:57.800 | So there's actually a principle of biology,

00:21:00.020 | not many people know this,

00:21:01.140 | it's actually a principle of neurology,

00:21:03.140 | which is called the Kennard principle,

00:21:05.140 | which says, if you're going to have a brain injury,

00:21:07.960 | you wanna have it early in life.

00:21:10.000 | And of course, better to not have a brain injury at all,

00:21:12.240 | but if you're going to have it,

00:21:13.320 | you wanna have it early in life.

00:21:14.880 | And this is based on a tremendous number of experiments

00:21:17.600 | examining the amount of recovery and the rate of recovery

00:21:21.520 | in humans that had lesions to their brain,

00:21:24.500 | either early in life or later in life.

00:21:26.320 | So the Kennard principle says,

00:21:27.520 | better to have injuries early in life.

00:21:29.800 | Now, that's reassuring for the young folks,

00:21:32.080 | it's not so reassuring for the older folks.

00:21:34.400 | But there are aspects of neuroplasticity

00:21:37.080 | that have nothing to do with impairments.

00:21:38.860 | I mean, earlier I said,

00:21:40.240 | we're all walking around with this map,

00:21:42.600 | this representation of the world around us,

00:21:44.760 | so we can see edges, we can see colors,

00:21:47.600 | except for folks that are colorblind, of course.

00:21:50.680 | And we also have a map of emotional experience,

00:21:53.600 | we have a map of whether or not

00:21:54.880 | certain people are trustworthy,

00:21:56.560 | certain people aren't trustworthy.

00:21:57.620 | A few years ago, I was at a course,

00:22:01.840 | and a woman came up to me and she said,

00:22:03.320 | "You know, I wasn't teaching the course, I was in the course."

00:22:07.120 | And she said, "I just have to tell you

00:22:08.440 | that every time you speak, it really stresses me out."

00:22:11.760 | And I said, "Well, I've heard that before,

00:22:14.000 | but do you want to be more specific?"

00:22:16.120 | And she said, "Yeah, your tone of voice reminds me

00:22:18.320 | of somebody that I had a really terrible experience with."

00:22:21.760 | I said, "Well, okay, well, I can't change my voice,

00:22:23.460 | but I really appreciate that you acknowledge that

00:22:25.800 | and it also will help explain why you seem to cringe

00:22:29.300 | every time I speak," which I hadn't noticed until then,

00:22:31.600 | but after that, I did notice she had a very immediate

00:22:34.520 | and kind of visceral response to my speech,

00:22:36.200 | perhaps some of you are having that right now.

00:22:38.360 | But in any event, over the period of this two-week course,

00:22:42.480 | she would come back every once in a while and say,

00:22:44.480 | "You know what, I think just by telling you

00:22:46.660 | that your voice was really difficult for me to listen to,

00:22:49.720 | it's actually becoming more tolerable to me."

00:22:51.640 | And by the end, we actually became pretty good friends

00:22:53.560 | and we're still in touch.

00:22:54.720 | And so what this says is that the recognition of something,

00:22:59.120 | whether or not that's an emotional thing

00:23:00.720 | or a desire to learn something else

00:23:02.840 | is actually the first step in neuroplasticity.

00:23:05.600 | And that's because our nervous system

00:23:07.680 | has two broad sets of functions.

00:23:10.000 | Some of those functions are reflexive,

00:23:12.400 | things like our breathing, our heart rate are obvious ones,

00:23:15.840 | but other aspects are reflexive like our ability to walk.

00:23:19.400 | If I get up out of this chair and walk out of the door,

00:23:21.560 | I don't think about each step that I'm taking

00:23:23.360 | and that's because I learned how to walk during development.

00:23:25.960 | But when we decide that we're going to shift

00:23:28.120 | some sort of behavior or some reaction

00:23:31.220 | or some new piece of information that we want to learn

00:23:34.620 | is something that we want to bring into our consciousness,

00:23:37.140 | that awareness is a remarkable thing

00:23:40.120 | because it cues the brain and the rest of the nervous system

00:23:44.480 | that when we engage in those reflexive actions going forward

00:23:48.080 | that those reflexive actions

00:23:49.600 | are no longer fated to be reflexive.

00:23:53.000 | Now, if this sounds a little bit abstract,

00:23:54.340 | we're going to talk about protocols for how to do this.

00:23:56.600 | But the first step in neuroplasticity

00:23:59.000 | is recognizing that you want to change something.

00:24:01.560 | And you should immediately say,

00:24:03.040 | well, kids don't go into school and say,

00:24:05.160 | oh, I want to learn language

00:24:06.620 | or I want to learn social interactions.

00:24:08.320 | And that's the beauty of childhood.

00:24:09.840 | The whole brain has this switch flipped

00:24:12.280 | that is making change possible.

00:24:14.040 | But after that, we have to be deliberate.

00:24:16.620 | We have to know what it is exactly that we want to change.

00:24:20.720 | Or if we don't know exactly what it is

00:24:23.260 | that we want to change,

00:24:24.440 | we at least have to know that we want to change something

00:24:26.760 | about some specific experience.

00:24:28.520 | In this case, I believe that she came and told me

00:24:31.080 | that my voice was really awful for her to listen to,

00:24:33.640 | not to make me feel bad or for any other reason,

00:24:36.720 | except that she wanted it to not be the case.

00:24:40.040 | And she knew I wasn't going to stop talking.

00:24:41.960 | So she decided to call it

00:24:43.720 | to her consciousness and mine as well.

00:24:45.940 | So that's important.

00:24:47.400 | If you want to learn something

00:24:48.640 | or you want to change your nervous system in any way,

00:24:51.360 | whether or not it's because of some impairment

00:24:53.460 | or because of something that you want to acquire,

00:24:56.480 | a cognitive skill, a motor skill, an emotional skill,

00:25:00.480 | the first thing is recognizing what that thing is.

00:25:03.760 | And that often can be the hardest thing to identify.

00:25:06.460 | But the brain has these self-recognition mechanisms.

00:25:09.420 | And those self-recognition mechanisms

00:25:11.640 | are not vague, spiritual, or mystical,

00:25:16.320 | or even psychological concepts.

00:25:18.540 | They are neurochemicals.

00:25:20.800 | We're going to talk next about the neurochemicals

00:25:23.320 | that stamp down particular behaviors

00:25:26.380 | and thoughts and emotional patterns

00:25:28.400 | and tell the rest of the nervous system,

00:25:30.500 | this is something to pay attention to

00:25:32.740 | because this is in the direction of the change

00:25:35.740 | that I want to make.

00:25:36.860 | So I'll repeat that.

00:25:37.700 | There are specific chemicals

00:25:39.580 | that when we are consciously aware

00:25:41.500 | of a change we want to make,

00:25:42.980 | or even just that we want to make some change,

00:25:45.900 | chemicals are released in the brain

00:25:48.080 | that allow us the opportunity to make those changes.

00:25:51.500 | Now there are specific protocols that science tells us

00:25:53.740 | we have to follow if we want those changes to occur.

00:25:56.800 | But that self-recognition is not a kind of murky concept.

00:26:01.800 | What it is is it's our forebrain,

00:26:04.420 | in particular our prefrontal cortex,

00:26:06.320 | signaling the rest of our nervous system

00:26:09.500 | that something that we're about to do here,

00:26:11.780 | feel or experience is worth paying attention to.

00:26:15.340 | So we'll pause there and then I'm going to move forward.

00:26:17.540 | One of the biggest lies in the universe

00:26:20.060 | that seems quite prominent right now

00:26:22.240 | is that every experience you have changes your brain.

00:26:26.140 | People love to say this.

00:26:27.300 | They love to say your brain is going to be different

00:26:29.500 | after this lecture or that your brain is going to be

00:26:31.220 | different after today's class than it was two days ago.

00:26:33.860 | And that's absolutely not true.

00:26:36.220 | The nervous system doesn't just change

00:26:38.440 | because you experienced something

00:26:39.620 | unless you're a very young child.

00:26:42.140 | The nervous system changes

00:26:44.860 | when certain neurochemicals are released

00:26:47.860 | and allow whatever neurons are active

00:26:50.620 | in the period in which those chemicals are swimming around

00:26:54.020 | to strengthen or weaken the connections of those neurons.

00:26:59.180 | Now, this is best illustrated

00:27:00.940 | through a little bit of scientific history.

00:27:03.720 | The whole basis of neuroplasticity

00:27:06.240 | is essentially ascribed to two individuals,

00:27:08.720 | although there were a lot more people

00:27:09.920 | that were involved in this work.

00:27:11.000 | Those two individuals go by the name

00:27:12.880 | David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel.

00:27:15.940 | David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel started off at Johns Hopkins,

00:27:18.800 | moved to Harvard Medical School.

00:27:20.820 | And in the '70s and '80s, they did a series of experiments

00:27:24.160 | recording electrical activity in the brain.

00:27:27.800 | They were in the visual cortex,

00:27:30.860 | meaning they put the electrodes in the visual cortex,

00:27:33.900 | and they were exploring how vision works

00:27:35.900 | and how the visual brain organizes all the features

00:27:38.540 | of the visual world to give us these incredible things

00:27:40.700 | we call visual perceptions.

00:27:42.500 | But Hubel was a physician,

00:27:46.580 | and he was very interested in what happens

00:27:50.020 | when, for instance, a child comes into the world

00:27:52.100 | and they have a cataract.

00:27:53.660 | The lens of their eye isn't clear, but it's opaque.

00:27:56.980 | Or when a kid has a lazy eye

00:27:59.420 | or the eyes have what's called strabismus,

00:28:01.260 | which is when the eyes either deviate outward or inward.

00:28:04.240 | These are very common things of childhood,

00:28:07.220 | especially in particular areas of the world.

00:28:09.460 | And what David and Torsten did

00:28:11.740 | is they figured out that there was a critical period

00:28:16.040 | in which if clear vision did not occur,

00:28:20.080 | the visual brain would completely rewire itself

00:28:24.520 | basically to represent whatever bit of visual information

00:28:27.660 | was coming in.

00:28:28.840 | So they did these experiments

00:28:30.580 | to kind of simulate a droopy eye or a deviating eye

00:28:34.380 | where they would close one eyelid.

00:28:35.700 | And then what they found is that the visual brain

00:28:37.700 | would respond entirely to the open eye.

00:28:39.740 | There was sort of a takeover of the visual brain

00:28:42.100 | representing the open eye.

00:28:44.180 | Many experiments in many different sensory systems

00:28:48.260 | followed up on this.

00:28:49.560 | There are beautiful experiments, for instance,

00:28:51.600 | from Greg Reckenzone's lab up at UC Davis

00:28:54.540 | and Mike Merzenich's labs at UCSF

00:28:57.020 | showing that, for instance,

00:28:58.420 | if two fingers were taped together early in development,

00:29:01.860 | so they weren't moving independently,

00:29:03.560 | the representation of those two fingers

00:29:05.180 | would become fused in the brain

00:29:06.700 | so that the person couldn't actually distinguish

00:29:09.660 | the movements and the sensations

00:29:11.020 | of the two fingers separately.

00:29:12.300 | Pretty remarkable.

00:29:14.200 | All of this is to say that David and Torsten's work,

00:29:18.540 | for which they won a Nobel Prize,

00:29:20.440 | they shared it with Roger Sperry,

00:29:22.100 | their work showed that the brain is in fact

00:29:26.540 | a customized map of the outside world.

00:29:28.440 | We said that already.

00:29:29.780 | But that what it's doing is it's measuring

00:29:32.220 | the amount of activity for a given part of our body,

00:29:35.800 | one eye or the other, or our fingers,

00:29:38.060 | this finger or that finger,

00:29:39.220 | and all of those inputs are competing

00:29:41.780 | for space in the brain.

00:29:43.860 | Now, this is fundamentally important

00:29:45.780 | because what it means is that

00:29:47.660 | if we are to change our nervous system in adulthood,

00:29:51.040 | we need to think about not just what we're trying to get,

00:29:54.780 | but what we're trying to give up.

00:29:56.060 | We can't actually add new connections

00:29:58.280 | without removing something else.

00:30:00.580 | And that might seem like kind of a stinger,

00:30:02.100 | but it actually turns out to be a great advantage.

00:30:04.540 | One of the key experiments that David and Torsten did

00:30:08.980 | was an experiment where they closed both eyes,

00:30:11.720 | where they essentially removed all visual input

00:30:14.820 | early in development.

00:30:16.060 | Now, this is slightly different than blindness

00:30:17.640 | because it was transient,

00:30:18.780 | it was only for a short period of time.

00:30:20.580 | But what they found is when they did that,

00:30:22.480 | there was no change.

00:30:23.740 | However, if they closed just one eye,

00:30:26.220 | there was a huge change.

00:30:28.020 | So when people tell you,

00:30:29.340 | "Oh, at the end of today's lecture,

00:30:31.260 | at the end of something,

00:30:32.580 | your brain is going to be completely different,"

00:30:34.700 | that's simply not true.

00:30:35.780 | If you're older than 25,

00:30:37.100 | your brain will not change

00:30:38.980 | unless there's a selective shift in your attention

00:30:42.580 | or a selective shift in your experience

00:30:45.340 | that tells the brain it's time to change.

00:30:49.100 | And those changes occur

00:30:50.820 | through the ways I talked about before,

00:30:52.140 | strengthening and weakening of particular connections.

00:30:54.420 | They have names like long-term potentiation,

00:30:56.180 | long-term depression,

00:30:57.040 | which has nothing to do with emotional depression,

00:30:58.740 | by the way, spike timing dependent plasticity.

00:31:00.940 | I threw out those names not to confuse you,

00:31:03.380 | but for those of you that would like

00:31:05.040 | more in-depth exploration of those,

00:31:07.320 | please, you can go Google those and look them up.

00:31:09.660 | There are great Wikipedia pages for them,

00:31:11.160 | and you can go down the paper trail.

00:31:12.520 | I might even touch on them in some subsequent episodes.

00:31:15.200 | But the important thing to understand

00:31:17.280 | is that if we want something to change,

00:31:19.580 | we really need to bring an immense amount of attention

00:31:22.900 | to whatever it is that we want to change.

00:31:25.100 | This is very much linked to the statement I made earlier

00:31:27.560 | about it all starts with an awareness.

00:31:30.580 | Now, why is that attention important?

00:31:33.120 | Well, David and Torrenston won their Nobel Prize,

00:31:36.340 | and they certainly deserved it.

00:31:37.180 | They probably deserved two

00:31:38.080 | because they also figured out how vision works.

00:31:39.700 | And I might be biased

00:31:40.860 | 'cause they're my scientific great-grandparents,

00:31:42.380 | but I think everybody in the field of neuroscience agrees

00:31:45.380 | that Hubel and Wiesel, as they're called,

00:31:49.260 | H and W for those in the game,

00:31:51.640 | absolutely deserved a Nobel Prize for their work

00:31:54.140 | because they really unveiled the mechanisms

00:31:56.680 | of brain change, of plasticity.

00:31:59.060 | David passed away a few years ago.

00:32:00.460 | Torrenston's still alive.

00:32:01.380 | He's in his late 90s.

00:32:02.580 | He's still at the Rockefeller University.

00:32:04.160 | He's sharp as a tack.

00:32:05.320 | He still jogs several miles a day.

00:32:07.440 | He's really into art and a number of other things.

00:32:09.840 | He's also a super nice guy.

00:32:11.060 | Hubel was a really nice guy as well.

00:32:12.520 | It's also, he was a great Frisbee player, I discovered,

00:32:14.740 | 'cause he beat me in a game of "Ultimate"

00:32:16.100 | when he was like 80,

00:32:17.740 | which still has me a little bit irked.

00:32:20.080 | But anyway, Hubel and Wiesel did an amazing thing

00:32:24.160 | for science that will forever change the way

00:32:26.620 | that we think about the brain.

00:32:28.300 | However, they were quite wrong

00:32:30.680 | about this critical period thing.

00:32:32.720 | The critical period was this idea

00:32:34.960 | that if you were to deprive the nervous system of an input,

00:32:38.400 | say closing one eye early in development

00:32:41.320 | and the rest of the visual cortex is taken over

00:32:43.720 | by the representation of the open eye,

00:32:45.760 | that you could never change that

00:32:47.920 | unless you intervened early.

00:32:49.960 | And this actually formed the basis

00:32:51.280 | for why a kid that has a lazy eye or a cataract,

00:32:55.160 | why even though there's some issues

00:32:56.860 | with anesthesia in young children,

00:32:59.080 | why now we know that you want to get in there early

00:33:02.000 | and fix the cataract or fix the strabismus.

00:33:05.400 | That's what ophthalmologists do.

00:33:07.640 | However, their idea that you had to do it early

00:33:10.980 | or else there was no opportunity

00:33:12.720 | to rescue the nervous system deficit later on,

00:33:16.600 | turned out wasn't entirely true.

00:33:19.120 | In the early '90s, a graduate student

00:33:22.700 | by the name of Greg Reckenzone was in the laboratory

00:33:25.080 | of a guy named Mike Merzenich at UCSF.

00:33:27.920 | And they set out to test this idea

00:33:30.560 | that if one wants to change their brain,

00:33:33.140 | they need to do it early in life

00:33:34.680 | because the adult brain simply isn't plastic.

00:33:37.100 | It's not available for these changes.

00:33:39.720 | And they did a series of absolutely beautiful experiments.

00:33:43.280 | By now, I think we can say proving

00:33:46.780 | that the adult brain can change

00:33:49.280 | provided certain conditions are met.

00:33:51.840 | Now, the experiments they did are tough.

00:33:55.200 | They were tough on the experimenter

00:33:56.480 | and they were tough on the subject.

00:33:57.920 | I'll just describe one.

00:33:59.200 | Let's say you were a subject in one of their experiments.

00:34:01.940 | You would come into the lab and you'd sit down at a table

00:34:05.060 | and they would record from or image your brain

00:34:09.440 | and look at the representation of your fingers,

00:34:11.600 | the digits as we call them.

00:34:13.720 | And there would be a spinning drum,

00:34:15.400 | literally like a stone drum in front of you

00:34:19.360 | or a metal drum that had little bumps.

00:34:21.480 | Some of the bumps were spaced close together.

00:34:23.480 | Some of them were spaced far apart.

00:34:25.440 | And they would do these experiments

00:34:27.100 | where they would expect their subjects

00:34:29.280 | to press a lever whenever, for instance,

00:34:32.560 | the bumps got closer together or further apart.

00:34:35.080 | And these were very subtle differences.

00:34:36.880 | So in order to do this,

00:34:37.720 | you really have to pay attention

00:34:39.740 | to the distance between the bumps.

00:34:41.680 | And these were not braille readers or anyone skilled

00:34:44.700 | in doing these kinds of experiments.

00:34:47.160 | What they found was that as people

00:34:48.880 | paid more and more attention

00:34:50.880 | to the distance between these bumps

00:34:52.840 | and they would signal when there was a change

00:34:54.320 | by pressing a lever.

00:34:56.240 | As they did that, there was very rapid changes,

00:34:58.920 | plasticity in the representation of the fingers.

00:35:02.200 | And it could go in either direction.

00:35:03.780 | You could get people very good

00:35:05.360 | at detecting the distance between bumps

00:35:07.840 | that the distance was getting smaller

00:35:09.340 | or the distance was getting greater.

00:35:11.720 | So people could get very good at these tasks

00:35:13.560 | that they're kind of hard to imagine

00:35:15.120 | how they would translate to the real world

00:35:16.600 | for a non braille reader.

00:35:17.840 | But what it told us is that these maps of touch

00:35:21.220 | were very much available for plasticity.

00:35:23.660 | And these were fully adult subjects.

00:35:26.100 | They're not taking any specific drugs.

00:35:28.120 | They don't have any impairments that we're aware of.

00:35:30.680 | And what it showed, what it proved

00:35:32.720 | is that the adult brain is very plastic.

00:35:34.840 | And they did some beautiful control experiments

00:35:36.980 | that are important for everyone to understand,

00:35:39.040 | which is that sometimes they would bring people in

00:35:40.680 | and they would have them touch these bumps

00:35:43.480 | on this spinning drum.

00:35:45.120 | But they would have the person pay attention

00:35:46.760 | to an auditory cue.

00:35:48.000 | Every time a tone would go off

00:35:49.440 | or there was a shift in the pitch of that tone,

00:35:51.960 | they would have to signal that.

00:35:53.240 | So the subject thought they were doing something

00:35:54.620 | related to touch and hearing.

00:35:55.800 | And all that showed was that it wasn't just the mere action

00:35:59.680 | of touching these bumps.

00:36:01.400 | They had to pay attention to the bumps themselves.

00:36:03.680 | If they were placing their attention

00:36:05.820 | on the auditory cue, on the tone,

00:36:08.880 | well then there was plasticity

00:36:10.420 | in the auditory portion of the brain,

00:36:12.320 | but not on the touch portion of the brain.

00:36:14.200 | And this really spits in the face of this thing

00:36:17.860 | that you hear so often, which is every experience

00:36:20.640 | that you have is going to change the way your brain works.

00:36:22.940 | Absolutely not.

00:36:24.220 | The experiences that you pay super careful attention to

00:36:29.660 | are what open up plasticity.

00:36:31.700 | And it opens up plasticity to that specific experience.

00:36:36.060 | So the question then is why?

00:36:38.640 | And Merzenich and his graduate students and postdocs

00:36:41.200 | went on to address this question of why.

00:36:43.560 | And it turns out the answer

00:36:45.440 | is a very straightforward neurochemical answer.

00:36:48.520 | And inside of that answer is the opportunity

00:36:51.120 | for any of us to change our brain at any point

00:36:53.980 | throughout our lifespan,

00:36:55.180 | essentially for anything that we want to learn.

00:36:57.520 | That could be subtracting an emotion

00:37:00.380 | from an experience we've had.

00:37:02.080 | It could be building a greater range of emotion.

00:37:05.120 | It could be learning new information

00:37:07.400 | like learning a new language.

00:37:08.980 | It could be learning new motor skill like dance or sport,

00:37:13.980 | or it could be some combination of cognitive motor.

00:37:17.780 | So for instance, an air traffic controller

00:37:19.900 | has to do a lot with their mind

00:37:21.120 | in addition to a lot with their hands.

00:37:22.820 | So it's not just cognitive,

00:37:24.380 | it's not just motor, but combined.

00:37:26.380 | So we're going to talk about what that chemical is,

00:37:28.700 | but to just give you an important hint,

00:37:31.960 | that chemical is the same chemical of stress.

00:37:35.700 | This is not a discussion about stress per se.

00:37:38.940 | In a future podcast episode,

00:37:40.420 | we'll talk all about stress and tools to deal with stress.

00:37:42.940 | It's something my lab works on quite extensively.

00:37:45.740 | And it's a topic that I enjoy discussing.

00:37:48.300 | But this is a topic about brain change.

00:37:50.740 | And what I just told you is that

00:37:52.060 | in order to change the brain,

00:37:53.260 | you have to pay careful attention.

00:37:55.140 | And the immediate question should be, well, why?

00:37:59.080 | Well, the answer is that when we pay careful attention,

00:38:02.640 | there are two neurochemicals,

00:38:04.380 | neuromodulators as they're called,

00:38:06.700 | that are released from multiple sites in our brain

00:38:10.000 | that highlight the neural circuits

00:38:13.260 | that stand a chance of changing.

00:38:16.420 | Now, it's not necessarily the case

00:38:18.680 | that they're going to change,

00:38:19.740 | but it's the first gate that has to open

00:38:21.820 | in order for change to occur.

00:38:23.300 | And the first neurochemical is epinephrine, also adrenaline.

00:38:26.720 | We call it adrenaline when it's released

00:38:29.240 | from the adrenal glands above our kidneys,

00:38:31.700 | that's in the body.

00:38:32.540 | We call epinephrine in the brain,

00:38:33.980 | but they are chemically identical substances.

00:38:36.760 | Epinephrine is released from a region in the brainstem

00:38:41.060 | called locus coeruleus.

00:38:42.960 | Fancy name, you don't need to know it unless you want to.

00:38:46.460 | Locus coeruleus sends out these little wires we call axons,

00:38:51.460 | such that it hoses the entire brain, essentially,

00:38:55.980 | in this neurochemical epinephrine.

00:38:58.340 | Now, it's not always hosing the brain with epinephrine.

00:39:00.700 | It's only when we are in high states of alertness

00:39:03.460 | that this epinephrine is released.

00:39:05.420 | But the way this circuit is designed,

00:39:06.980 | it's very nonspecific.

00:39:09.220 | It's essentially waking up the entire brain.

00:39:11.300 | And that's because the way that epinephrine works

00:39:13.400 | by binding particular receptors

00:39:14.980 | is to increase the likelihood that neurons will be active.

00:39:19.220 | So no alertness, no neuroplasticity.

00:39:23.180 | However, alertness alone is not sufficient,

00:39:26.580 | as we would say it's necessary,

00:39:28.020 | but not sufficient for neuroplasticity.

00:39:30.480 | We know this is true also from the work of Hubel and Wiesel,

00:39:34.180 | where they looked at brain plasticity

00:39:36.880 | in response to certain experiences

00:39:39.100 | in subjects that were either awake or asleep.

00:39:42.880 | And I hate to break it to you,

00:39:44.620 | but you cannot just simply listen to things in your sleep

00:39:47.900 | and learn those materials.

00:39:50.220 | Later, I'll talk about how you can do certain things

00:39:52.040 | in your sleep that you're unaware of

00:39:53.260 | that can enhance learning of things

00:39:54.980 | that you were aware of while you were awake,

00:39:57.780 | but that is not the same as just listening to some music

00:40:01.460 | or listening to a tape while you sleep

00:40:02.980 | and expecting it to sink in, so to speak.

00:40:06.560 | Epinephrine is released when we pay attention

00:40:10.140 | and when we are alert.

00:40:12.060 | But the most important thing for getting plasticity

00:40:14.540 | is that there be epinephrine, which equates to alertness,

00:40:17.900 | plus the release of this neuromodulator acetylcholine.

00:40:21.740 | Now, acetylcholine is released from two sites in the brain.

00:40:25.840 | One is also in the brainstem,

00:40:28.320 | and it's named different things in different animals,

00:40:30.260 | but in humans, the most rich site of acetylcholine neurons

00:40:34.480 | or neurons that make acetylcholine

00:40:36.260 | is the parabigeminal nucleus or the parabrachial region.

00:40:41.260 | There are a number of different names

00:40:42.340 | of these aggregates of neurons.

00:40:43.700 | You don't need to know the names.

00:40:44.900 | All you need to know is that you have an area

00:40:46.140 | in your brainstem, and that area sends wires,

00:40:50.080 | these axons, up into the area of the brain

00:40:52.860 | that filters sensory input.

00:40:55.180 | So we have this area of the brain called the thalamus,

00:40:57.240 | and it is getting bombarded

00:40:58.660 | with all sorts of sensory input all the time.

00:41:01.060 | Costello's snoring off to my right,

00:41:03.340 | the lights that are in the room,

00:41:05.460 | the presence of my computer to my left.

00:41:07.780 | All of that is coming in,

00:41:09.340 | but when I pay attention to something,

00:41:11.240 | like if I really hone in on Costello's snoring,

00:41:14.120 | I create a cone of attention,

00:41:15.720 | and what that cone of attention reflects

00:41:18.640 | is that acetylcholine is now amplifying the signal

00:41:22.980 | of sounds that Costello is making with his snoring

00:41:27.600 | and essentially making that signal greater

00:41:30.120 | than all the signal around it.

00:41:31.600 | What we call signal to noise goes up.

00:41:33.800 | So those of you with an engineering background

00:41:35.440 | will be familiar with signal to noise.

00:41:37.060 | Those of you who do not have an engineering background,

00:41:38.800 | don't worry about it.

00:41:39.620 | All it means is that one particular shout in the crowd

00:41:43.000 | comes through, Costello's snoring becomes more salient,

00:41:46.100 | more apparent relative to everything else going on.

00:41:49.340 | Acetylcholine acts as a spotlight,

00:41:52.720 | but epinephrine for alertness,

00:41:54.940 | acetylcholine spotlighting these inputs,

00:41:57.420 | those two things alone are not enough to get plasticity.

00:42:00.640 | There needs to be this third component,

00:42:02.240 | and the third component is acetylcholine released

00:42:04.700 | from an area of the forebrain called nucleus basalis.

00:42:08.180 | If you really want to get technical,

00:42:10.320 | it's called nucleus basalis of minort.

00:42:13.240 | For any of you that are budding physicians

00:42:15.740 | or going to medical school, you should know that.

00:42:19.040 | If you have acetylcholine released from the brainstem,

00:42:22.000 | acetylcholine released from nucleus basalis and epinephrine,

00:42:26.300 | you can change your brain.

00:42:27.540 | And I can say that with confidence

00:42:29.540 | because Mersennek and Recanzone,

00:42:31.740 | as well as other members of the Mersennek lab,

00:42:34.420 | Michael Kilgard and others, did these incredible experiments

00:42:38.240 | where they stimulated the release of acetylcholine

00:42:40.860 | from nucleus basalis, either with an electrode

00:42:43.620 | or with some other methods that we'll talk about.

00:42:46.020 | And what they found was when you stimulate

00:42:49.120 | these three brain regions, locus coeruleus,

00:42:52.200 | the brainstem source of acetylcholine,

00:42:54.660 | and then the basal forebrain source of acetylcholine,

00:42:57.360 | when you have those three things,

00:42:59.260 | whatever you happen to be listening to,

00:43:02.960 | doing or paying attention to, immediately in one trial

00:43:07.960 | takes over the representation

00:43:10.200 | of a particular area of the brain,

00:43:12.060 | you essentially get rapid, massive learning in one shot.

00:43:16.160 | And this has been shown again and again and again

00:43:19.520 | in a variety of papers,

00:43:20.780 | also by a guy named Norm Weinberger from UC Irvine.

00:43:23.600 | And it is now considered a fundamental principle

00:43:26.520 | of how the nervous system works.

00:43:27.740 | So while Hubel and Wiesel talked about critical periods

00:43:30.020 | in developmental plasticity,

00:43:31.940 | it's very clear from the work of Merzenich and Weinberg

00:43:34.300 | and others that if you get these three things,

00:43:37.260 | if you can access these three things

00:43:39.160 | of epinephrine, acetylcholine from these two sources,

00:43:43.040 | not only will the nervous system change, it has to change.

00:43:46.700 | It absolutely will change.

00:43:49.140 | And that is the most important thing

00:43:51.860 | for people to understand if they want to change their brain.

00:43:53.740 | You cannot just passively experience things.

00:43:56.540 | And repetition can be important,

00:43:59.420 | but the way to use repetition to change your brain

00:44:01.920 | is fundamentally different.

00:44:03.540 | So now let's talk about how we would translate

00:44:05.940 | all the scientific information and history

00:44:08.460 | into some protocols that you can actually apply,

00:44:10.860 | because I think that's what many of you are interested in.

00:44:12.700 | And I'm willing to bet that most of you are not interested

00:44:15.360 | in lowering electrodes into your nucleus basalis.

00:44:17.740 | And frankly, neither am I.

00:44:19.300 | In episode one of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:44:22.020 | I described the various ways that people can monitor

00:44:25.500 | and change their nervous system.

00:44:27.260 | Those ways include brain machine interface,

00:44:29.580 | pharmacology, behavioral practices.

00:44:32.460 | And those behavioral practices, of course,

00:44:34.440 | can include some dos, do this, and some don'ts,

00:44:36.960 | don't do that, et cetera.

00:44:39.440 | In thinking about neuroplasticity,

00:44:41.660 | I want to have a very frank conversation

00:44:43.240 | about what one can do,

00:44:44.760 | but also acknowledge this untapped capacity

00:44:47.880 | that I'm just not hearing about out there,

00:44:49.880 | which is one can also combine behavioral practices

00:44:53.340 | with pharmacology.

00:44:54.560 | One can combine behavioral practices

00:44:57.460 | with brain machine interface.

00:44:59.160 | And you don't have to do that.

00:45:00.140 | In fact, I'm not recommending you do anything in particular.

00:45:03.800 | As always, I'll say it again.

00:45:06.060 | I'm not a physician, so I don't prescribe anything.

00:45:09.280 | I'm a professor, so I profess a lot of things.

00:45:11.240 | What you do with your health and your medical care

00:45:12.960 | is up to you.

00:45:13.800 | You're responsible for your health and wellbeing.

00:45:15.660 | So I'm not going to tell you what to do or what to take.

00:45:18.480 | I'm going to describe what the literature tells us

00:45:21.320 | and suggests about ways to access plasticity.

00:45:24.020 | We know we need epinephrine.

00:45:25.360 | That means alertness.

00:45:26.640 | Most people accomplish this through a cup of coffee

00:45:29.000 | and a good night's sleep.

00:45:30.140 | So I will say you should master your sleep schedule

00:45:33.860 | and you should figure out how much sleep you need

00:45:36.220 | in order to achieve alertness when you sit down to learn.

00:45:39.100 | All the tools and more science

00:45:42.160 | than probably you ever wanted to hear about sleep

00:45:44.540 | and how to get better at sleeping

00:45:45.760 | and timing your sleep, et cetera, and naps,

00:45:47.880 | and all of that is in episodes two, three, four, and five

00:45:50.800 | of the Huberman Lab Podcast.

00:45:52.000 | So I encourage you to refer to those

00:45:53.720 | if your sleep is not where you would like it to be.

00:45:57.400 | Your ability to engage in deliberate focused alertness

00:46:00.460 | is in direct proportion to how well you are sleeping

00:46:03.260 | on a regular basis.

00:46:04.360 | I think that's kind of an obvious one.

00:46:06.240 | So get your sleep handled.

00:46:09.160 | But once that's in place,

00:46:11.560 | the question then is how do I access this alertness?

00:46:14.960 | Well, there are a number of ways.

00:46:16.400 | Some people use some pretty elaborate

00:46:18.920 | psychological gymnastics.

00:46:20.440 | They will tell people that they're going to do something

00:46:23.440 | and create some accountability.

00:46:25.120 | That could be really good.

00:46:26.320 | Or they'll post a picture of themselves online

00:46:28.460 | and they'll commit to learning a certain amount,

00:46:30.500 | losing, excuse me, a certain amount of weight

00:46:32.100 | or something like this.

00:46:33.260 | So they can use either shame-based practices

00:46:37.720 | to potentially embarrass themselves

00:46:39.280 | if they don't follow through.

00:46:40.300 | They'll write checks to organizations that they hate

00:46:42.400 | and insist that they'll cash them

00:46:43.760 | if they don't actually follow through.

00:46:46.480 | Or they'll do it out of love.

00:46:48.280 | They'll decide that they're going to run a marathon

00:46:51.920 | or learn a language or something

00:46:54.080 | because of somebody they love

00:46:55.360 | or they want to devote it to somebody.

00:46:57.520 | The truth is that from the standpoint of epinephrine

00:47:01.040 | and getting alert and activated, it doesn't really matter.

00:47:03.860 | Epinephrine is a chemical and your brain does not distinguish

00:47:06.560 | between doing things out of love or hate, anger or fear.

00:47:10.680 | It really doesn't.

00:47:11.500 | All of those promote autonomic arousal

00:47:14.480 | and the release of epinephrine.

00:47:15.720 | So I think for most people,

00:47:18.320 | if you're feeling not motivated to make these changes,

00:47:20.720 | the key thing is to identify not just one,

00:47:23.080 | but probably a kit of reasons.

00:47:25.200 | Several reasons as to why you would want

00:47:27.120 | to make this particular change.

00:47:28.800 | And being drawn toward a particular goal

00:47:31.640 | that you're excited about can be one.

00:47:33.200 | Also being motivated to not be completely afraid,

00:47:37.640 | ashamed or humiliated for not following through on a goal

00:47:39.840 | is another.

00:47:40.800 | Just want to briefly mention one little aside there

00:47:42.920 | because I've got a friend who's a physician.

00:47:44.800 | He's a cardiologist who has a really interesting theory.

00:47:47.400 | This is just theory,

00:47:48.220 | but I think it will resonate with a lot of people,

00:47:50.280 | which is that you've all heard of this molecule dopamine

00:47:53.120 | that gives us this sense of reward

00:47:55.720 | when we accomplish something.

00:47:57.100 | Well, we also want to be able to access dopamine

00:47:59.800 | while we're working towards things.

00:48:01.000 | Enjoy the process, as they say,

00:48:02.720 | 'cause it has all sorts of positive effects.

00:48:04.760 | It gives us energy, et cetera.

00:48:06.320 | With my friend, what he says is,

00:48:08.420 | there's many, many instances where someone will come to him

00:48:11.720 | and say, "You know what?

00:48:12.560 | I'm going to write a book."

00:48:13.800 | And he says, "Oh, that's great.

00:48:15.320 | I'm sure the book's going to be terrific

00:48:16.600 | and you really should write a book."

00:48:17.880 | And then they never go do it.

00:48:18.900 | And his theory is if you get so much dopamine

00:48:21.200 | from the reward of people saying,

00:48:22.880 | "Oh yeah, you're absolutely going to be able to do that,"

00:48:24.880 | you might not actually go after

00:48:26.260 | the reward of the accomplishment itself.

00:48:29.000 | So beware these positive reinforcements also.

00:48:32.440 | Not saying people should flagellate themselves

00:48:34.200 | to the point of victory in whatever they're pursuing,

00:48:36.840 | but motivation is a tricky one.

00:48:39.340 | So I suggest that everyone ask themselves,

00:48:42.360 | what is it that I want to accomplish?

00:48:44.480 | And what is it that's driving me to accomplish this?

00:48:47.620 | And come up with two or three things, fear-based perhaps,

00:48:51.240 | love-based perhaps, or perhaps several of those

00:48:54.200 | in order to ensure alertness, energy,

00:48:58.200 | and attention for the task.

00:48:59.840 | And that brings us to the attention part.

00:49:02.040 | Now it's one thing to have an electrode

00:49:03.400 | embedded into your brain

00:49:04.340 | and increase the amount of acetylcholine.

00:49:06.760 | It's another to exist in the real world

00:49:08.580 | outside the laboratory and have trouble focusing,

00:49:11.780 | having trouble bringing your attention

00:49:13.960 | to a particular location in space for a particular event.

00:49:17.560 | And there's a lot of discussion nowadays

00:49:19.600 | about smartphones and devices

00:49:22.160 | creating a sort of attention deficit

00:49:24.120 | almost at a clinical level for many people,

00:49:27.160 | including adults.

00:49:28.740 | I think that's largely true.

00:49:30.520 | And what it means, however,

00:49:32.240 | is that we all are responsible for learning

00:49:34.000 | how to create depth of focus.

00:49:36.860 | There are some important neuroscience principles

00:49:39.840 | to get depth of focus.

00:49:41.760 | I want to briefly talk about the pharmacology first

00:49:44.000 | because I always get asked about this.

00:49:45.360 | People say, what can I take

00:49:46.720 | to increase my levels of acetylcholine?

00:49:48.760 | Well, there are things you can take.

00:49:50.520 | Nicotine is called nicotine

00:49:53.160 | because acetylcholine binds to the nicotinic receptor.

00:49:56.660 | There are two kinds of acetylcholine receptors,

00:49:58.400 | muscarinic and nicotinic,

00:49:59.480 | but the nicotinic ones are involved

00:50:00.920 | in attention and alertness.

00:50:02.660 | I have colleagues.

00:50:05.080 | These are not my kind of like bro science buddies.

00:50:08.640 | I have those friends too.

00:50:10.160 | This is a Nobel prize winning colleague

00:50:13.020 | who choose Nicorette while he works.

00:50:15.360 | He used to be a smoker.

00:50:17.360 | He quit smoking because of fear of lung cancer.

00:50:19.760 | It's like a smart choice.

00:50:21.220 | But he missed the level of focus

00:50:23.880 | that he could bring to his work.

00:50:26.100 | This is somebody who's had a very long career.

00:50:28.060 | And if you ever meet with him,

00:50:29.880 | unfortunately I can't name him.

00:50:32.040 | If you ever meet with him,

00:50:32.880 | what you realize is he choose

00:50:33.720 | about five pieces of Nicorette an hour,

00:50:35.500 | which I am not suggesting people do.

00:50:37.800 | But when I asked him, why are you doing this?

00:50:39.100 | He said, well, increases my alertness and focus.

00:50:42.220 | And also his theory, and I want to really underscore

00:50:45.080 | that it's theory not scientifically supported yet

00:50:47.580 | is that it offsets Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

00:50:50.880 | It is true that nucleus basalis is the primary site

00:50:54.660 | of degeneration in the brain

00:50:56.880 | in people that have dementia and Parkinson's.

00:50:59.320 | And it's what leads to a lot of their inability

00:51:01.700 | to focus their attention, not just deficits in plasticity.

00:51:05.600 | So he might be onto something.

00:51:07.400 | Now I've tried chewing Nicorette.

00:51:08.600 | It makes me super jittery.

00:51:10.240 | I don't like it because I can't focus very well.

00:51:12.580 | It kind of takes me too far up

00:51:13.940 | the level of autonomic arousal.

00:51:15.740 | I've got friends that dip Nicorette all day,

00:51:18.020 | some of whom are scientists.

00:51:20.300 | Writers and artists and musicians

00:51:22.220 | are familiar with the effects of nicotine

00:51:24.320 | from the era where a lot of people smoked

00:51:26.120 | and fortunately fewer people smoke now.

00:51:28.640 | So if you're interested in the pharmacology,

00:51:30.640 | there are supplements and things

00:51:31.960 | that can increase cholinergic transmission in the brain.

00:51:34.720 | I'm not suggesting you do this,

00:51:36.920 | but if you're going to go down that route,

00:51:39.500 | you want to be very careful

00:51:40.940 | how much you rely on those all the time.

00:51:43.460 | Because the essence of plasticity

00:51:46.040 | is to create a window of attention and focus

00:51:48.360 | that's distinct from the rest of your day.

00:51:50.520 | That's what's going to create a mark in your brain

00:51:53.680 | and the potential for plasticity.

00:51:55.960 | Things that increase acetylcholine besides nicotine

00:51:59.860 | or Nicorette, the nicotine could come

00:52:01.880 | from a variety of sources,

00:52:03.880 | or things like alpha-GPC or choline.

00:52:07.400 | There are a number of these things.

00:52:08.420 | I would encourage you to go to examine.com, the website,

00:52:11.700 | and just put in acetylcholine

00:52:13.040 | and it will give you a list of supplements

00:52:15.000 | as well as some of the dangers of these supplements

00:52:17.060 | that are associated with cholinergic transmission.

00:52:19.260 | But I would be remiss and I would be lying

00:52:22.000 | if I didn't say that there are a lot of people out there

00:52:24.560 | who are using cholinergic drugs

00:52:28.160 | in order to increase their level of focus.

00:52:31.160 | And since we're coming up on the Olympics,

00:52:33.180 | I don't want to get anyone in trouble,

00:52:34.280 | but I'm well aware that the fact that the sprinters

00:52:37.880 | are really into cholinergic drugs

00:52:39.940 | because not only is acetylcholine important

00:52:42.280 | for the focus that allows them to hear the gun

00:52:44.200 | and be first out the blocks on the sprints,

00:52:46.360 | that's a lot of where the race is won.

00:52:49.040 | Hearing that gun and being quickest on reaction time,

00:52:51.680 | so they take cholinergic agents for that,

00:52:53.800 | as well as acetylcholine is the molecule

00:52:56.980 | that controls nerve to muscle contraction.

00:52:59.480 | So your speed of reflexes is actually controlled

00:53:01.760 | by this nicotinic transmission as well.

00:53:04.240 | So lots to think about in terms of acetylcholine

00:53:06.760 | in sport and mental acuity, not just plasticity.

00:53:10.980 | Now, for most of you,

00:53:12.460 | you probably don't want to chew Nicorette,

00:53:14.200 | definitely don't want to smoke cigarettes

00:53:15.440 | or take supplements for increasing acetylcholine.

00:53:18.360 | So what are some ways that you can increase acetylcholine?

00:53:21.900 | And there, it's going to sound

00:53:23.440 | like a bit of a circular argument,

00:53:24.640 | but you want to increase focus.

00:53:26.840 | How do you increase focus?

00:53:28.880 | People are so familiar with sitting down,

00:53:30.780 | reading a couple of pages of a book

00:53:32.100 | and realizing that none of it sunk in

00:53:33.880 | or talking to someone and seeing their mouth move,

00:53:36.580 | maybe even nodding your head subconsciously

00:53:38.560 | and coming, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, and none of it sinks in.

00:53:41.340 | This can be very damaging for school, work performance

00:53:44.020 | and relationships, as many of you know.

00:53:46.240 | Costello, incidentally, never seems to pay attention

00:53:50.940 | to anything I say while looking directly at me,

00:53:53.420 | which contradicts what I'm about to say,

00:53:55.100 | which is that the best way to get better at focusing

00:53:59.960 | is to use the mechanisms of focus that you were born with.

00:54:04.420 | And the key principle here is that mental focus

00:54:08.340 | follows visual focus.

00:54:10.280 | We are all familiar with the fact that our visual system

00:54:13.720 | can be unfocused, blurry, or jumping around,

00:54:17.420 | or we can be very laser focused on one location in space.

00:54:21.400 | What's interesting and vitally important to understanding

00:54:24.620 | how to access neuroplasticity

00:54:26.580 | is that you can use your visual focus

00:54:29.400 | and you can increase your visual focus

00:54:31.820 | as a way of increasing your mental focus abilities

00:54:35.540 | more broadly.

00:54:37.000 | So I'm gonna explain how to do that.

00:54:38.760 | Plasticity starts with alertness.

00:54:41.780 | And as I mentioned before, that alertness can come from

00:54:45.140 | a sense of love, a sense of joy, a sense of fear,

00:54:48.480 | doesn't matter.

00:54:49.380 | There are pharmacologic ways to access alertness too.

00:54:53.680 | The most common one is of course caffeine,

00:54:56.500 | which if you watch the sleep episodes,

00:54:58.340 | you know reduces this molecule that makes us sleepy

00:55:00.880 | called adenosine.

00:55:02.720 | I drink plenty of caffeine, I'm a heavy user of caffeine.

00:55:07.160 | I don't think abuser of caffeine.

00:55:09.020 | I think in reasonable amounts

00:55:10.100 | provided we can still fall asleep at night.

00:55:12.140 | Caffeine can be a relatively safe way

00:55:15.220 | to increase epinephrine.

00:55:16.640 | Now, many people are now also using Adderall.

00:55:21.960 | Adderall chemically looks a lot like amphetamine.

00:55:25.420 | And basically it is amphetamine.

00:55:27.900 | It will increase epinephrine release from locus coeruleus,

00:55:30.300 | it will wake up the brain.

00:55:31.820 | And that's why a lot of people rely on it.

00:55:33.620 | It does have a heavy basis for use

00:55:38.420 | in certain clinical syndromes prescribed

00:55:40.760 | such as attention deficit.

00:55:43.060 | However, it also has a high probability of abuse,

00:55:47.500 | especially in those who are not prescribed it.

00:55:50.020 | Adderall will not increase focus, it increases alertness.

00:55:53.620 | It does not touch the acetylcholine system.

00:55:56.460 | And if those of you that are taking Adderall say,

00:55:58.840 | well, it really increases my focus overall,

00:56:01.500 | that's probably because your autonomic nervous system

00:56:03.900 | is just veering towards what we call parasympathetic.

00:56:06.800 | You're really just very sleepy

00:56:08.340 | and so it's bringing your levels of alertness up.

00:56:11.100 | As I mentioned, Adderall is very problematic

00:56:13.580 | for a number of people.

00:56:14.920 | It can be habit forming.

00:56:16.660 | Learning on Adderall does not always

00:56:18.900 | translate to high performance,

00:56:21.400 | off or on Adderall at later times.

00:56:23.520 | And the Adderall discussion is a broader one

00:56:26.160 | that perhaps we should have

00:56:27.500 | with a psychiatrist in the room at some point

00:56:29.340 | because it is a very widely abused drug

00:56:32.220 | at this point in time.

00:56:33.460 | The acetylcholine system and the focus that it brings

00:56:38.160 | is available, as I mentioned, through pharmacology,

00:56:41.380 | but also through these behavioral practices.

00:56:43.660 | And the behavioral practices

00:56:45.700 | that are anchored in visual focus

00:56:47.660 | are going to be the ones that are going to allow you

00:56:49.740 | to develop great depth and duration of focus.

00:56:53.780 | So let's think about visual focus for a second.

00:56:56.540 | When we focus on something visually, we have two options.

00:57:01.200 | We can either look at a very small region of space

00:57:04.780 | with a lot of detail and a lot of precision,

00:57:07.620 | or we can dilate our gaze

00:57:09.100 | and we can see big pieces of visual space

00:57:11.140 | with very little detail.

00:57:12.260 | It's a trade-off.

00:57:13.100 | We can't look at everything at high resolution.

00:57:15.220 | This is why we have these,

00:57:16.460 | the pupil more or less relates to the fovea of the eye,

00:57:19.900 | which is the area in which we have the most receptors,

00:57:22.060 | the highest density of receptors that perceive light.

00:57:25.060 | And so our acuity is much better

00:57:26.680 | in the center of our visual field than in our periphery.

00:57:29.820 | It's a simple experiment you can do right now.

00:57:31.300 | If you're listening to this, you can still do it.

00:57:33.000 | You can hold your hands out in front of you,

00:57:34.860 | provided that you're sighted.

00:57:35.860 | You should be able to see how many fingers

00:57:37.180 | you have in front of you.

00:57:38.580 | For me, it's five, still got all five fingers.

00:57:41.100 | Amazingly enough, if I move my hand off to the side,

00:57:45.260 | and I can't see them with precision,

00:57:47.660 | but as I move them back into the center of my visual field,

00:57:50.020 | I can see them with precision.

00:57:51.460 | And that's because the density,

00:57:53.100 | the number of pixels in the center of my visual field

00:57:55.040 | is much higher than it is in the periphery.

00:57:57.340 | When we focus our eyes, we do a couple things.

00:58:00.260 | First of all, we tend to do that

00:58:02.260 | in the center of our visual field,

00:58:03.500 | and our two eyes tend to align

00:58:04.960 | in what's called a vergence eye movement

00:58:06.360 | towards a common point.

00:58:08.480 | The other thing that happens is the lens of our eye moves

00:58:10.800 | so that our brain now no longer sees

00:58:13.460 | the entire visual world,

00:58:14.620 | but is seeing a small cone of visual imagery.

00:58:18.380 | If it, that was the dog bumping into the wall, forgive me.

00:58:22.580 | That small cone of visual imagery or soda straw view

00:58:25.940 | of the world has much higher acuity, higher resolution

00:58:30.120 | than if I were to look at everything.

00:58:32.760 | Now you say, of course, this makes perfect sense,

00:58:34.860 | but that's about visual attention, not mental attention.

00:58:37.360 | Well, it turns out that focus in the brain

00:58:41.340 | is anchored to our visual system.

00:58:43.860 | I'll talk about blind people in a moment,

00:58:45.380 | but assuming that somebody is sighted,

00:58:48.040 | the key is to learn how to focus better visually

00:58:51.300 | if you want to bring about higher levels

00:58:54.140 | of cognitive or mental focus,

00:58:55.940 | even if you're engaged in a physical task.

00:58:58.500 | Now there's a remarkable phenomenon in animals

00:59:02.460 | where animals that have their eyes

00:59:04.120 | on the side of their head

00:59:05.740 | are scanning the entire visual environment all the time.

00:59:08.200 | They're not focused on anything.

00:59:09.300 | Think you're grazing animals, your cows, your sheep,

00:59:11.620 | your birds, et cetera.

00:59:13.080 | But think about a bird picking up seeds on the beach

00:59:16.380 | or on concrete.

00:59:18.100 | That bird's head is up here.

00:59:20.380 | It's up about a foot off the ground,

00:59:21.960 | or if it's a small bird, about six inches off the ground,

00:59:24.660 | and its eyes are on the side of its head,

00:59:26.380 | and yet it has this tiny beak

00:59:27.840 | that can quickly pick up these little seeds off the ground

00:59:30.220 | with immense precision.

00:59:32.420 | Now, if you try to do that

00:59:34.120 | by staring off to the sides of the room

00:59:36.280 | and picking up items in front of you with high precision

00:59:39.260 | at that tiny scale, little tiny objects,

00:59:41.220 | you will miss almost every time.

00:59:43.260 | They do it perfectly,

00:59:44.300 | and they don't smash their beak into the ground

00:59:46.020 | and damage it.

00:59:46.860 | With beautiful movement acuity also.

00:59:50.460 | So how do they do it?

00:59:51.880 | How do they create this focus

00:59:54.340 | or this awareness of what's in front of them?

00:59:56.140 | It turns out as they lower their head,

00:59:58.760 | their eyes very briefly move inward

01:00:02.180 | in what's called a virgin's eye movement.

01:00:04.260 | Now, their eyes can't actually translocate in their head.

01:00:07.900 | They're fixed in the skull, just like yours and mine are.

01:00:10.500 | But when we move our eyes slightly inward,

01:00:13.940 | maybe you can tell they're doing it like so,

01:00:17.140 | basically shortening or making the interpupillary distance,

01:00:21.120 | as it's called, smaller, two things happen.

01:00:24.020 | Not only do we develop a smaller visual window

01:00:27.260 | into the world, but we activate a set of neurons

01:00:31.100 | in our brainstem that trigger the release

01:00:33.980 | of both norepinephrine, epinephrine, and acetylcholine.

01:00:38.100 | Norepinephrine is kind of similar to epinephrine.

01:00:40.260 | So in other words, when our eyes are relaxed in our head,

01:00:43.560 | when we're just kind of looking

01:00:44.400 | at our entire visual environment, moving our head around,

01:00:46.560 | moving through space, we're in optic flow,

01:00:48.580 | things moving past us, or we're sitting still,

01:00:51.200 | we're looking broadly at our space, we're relaxed.

01:00:54.780 | When our eyes move slightly inward

01:00:57.200 | toward a particular visual target, our visual world shrinks,

01:01:00.940 | our level of visual focus goes up,

01:01:03.100 | and we know that this relates

01:01:05.080 | to the release of acetylcholine and epinephrine

01:01:07.760 | at the relevant sites in the brain for plasticity.

01:01:10.860 | Now, what this means is that if you have a hard time

01:01:13.660 | focusing your mind for sake of reading or for listening,

01:01:18.220 | you need to practice, and you can practice,

01:01:20.740 | focusing your visual system.

01:01:22.820 | Now, this works best if you practice focusing

01:01:25.800 | your visual system at the precise distance

01:01:28.480 | from the work that you intend to do for sake of plasticity.

01:01:31.660 | So how would this look in the real world?

01:01:33.860 | Let's say I am trying to concentrate

01:01:36.180 | on something related to, I don't know, science.

01:01:39.200 | I'm reading a science paper and I'm having a hard time,

01:01:41.000 | it's not absorbing.

01:01:42.840 | I might think that I'm only looking at the paper

01:01:45.140 | that I'm reading, I'm only looking at my screen,

01:01:46.980 | but actually my eyes are probably darting around a bit.

01:01:49.420 | Experiments have been done on this.

01:01:51.020 | Or I'm gathering information from too many sources

01:01:54.460 | in the visual environment.

01:01:55.860 | Now, presumably, 'cause it's me, I've already had my coffee,

01:01:58.900 | I'm hydrated, I'm well-rested, I slept well,

01:02:01.940 | and I still experience these challenges in focusing.

01:02:05.120 | Spending just 60 to 120 seconds focusing my visual attention

01:02:10.120 | on a small window of my screen,

01:02:12.920 | meaning just on my screen with nothing on it,

01:02:15.720 | but bringing my eyes to that particular location

01:02:19.080 | increases not just my visual acuity for that location,

01:02:22.320 | but it brings about an increase in activity

01:02:25.500 | in a bunch of other brain areas that are associated

01:02:28.840 | with gathering information from this location.

01:02:33.340 | So put simply, if you want to improve your ability to focus,

01:02:38.060 | practice visual focus.

01:02:40.080 | Now, if you wear contacts or you wear corrective lenses,

01:02:44.400 | that's fine, you of course would wanna use those.

01:02:46.480 | You don't wanna take those off and use a blurry image.

01:02:50.020 | The finer the visual image,

01:02:51.940 | and the more that you can hold your gaze

01:02:53.720 | to that visual image,

01:02:55.040 | the higher your levels of attention will be.

01:02:58.320 | Many times on Instagram, and here I've been teased

01:03:00.660 | for not blinking very often,

01:03:02.080 | that's actually a practiced thing.

01:03:03.980 | We blink more as we get tired,

01:03:06.220 | which as you hear it, you'll probably just say duh.

01:03:08.600 | As we get tired, the neurons in the brainstem

01:03:11.180 | that are responsible for alertness

01:03:12.760 | and that hold the eyelids open start to falter

01:03:15.520 | and our eyelids start to close.

01:03:16.820 | This is why it's hard, the words,

01:03:18.500 | I could barely keep my eyes open,

01:03:20.280 | which may be how you feel right now.

01:03:22.000 | But assuming that you're paying attention and you're alert,

01:03:25.000 | when you're very alert, your eyes are wide,

01:03:27.980 | your eyes are open.

01:03:29.480 | And as you get tired, your eyelids start to close.

01:03:32.200 | Blinks actually reset our perception of time and space.

01:03:36.520 | This was shown in a beautiful paper in Current Biology.

01:03:38.680 | I'll be sure to post the reference in the notes.

01:03:41.600 | And blinking, of course, is necessary to lubricate the eyes.

01:03:45.200 | People blink because their eyes might get dry.

01:03:47.440 | But if you can keep focus by blinking less

01:03:51.240 | and by focusing your eyes to a particular location

01:03:53.420 | that's probably pretty creepy for you to experience

01:03:55.260 | as I'm doing this.

01:03:56.400 | But the more that you can do this,

01:03:57.920 | the more that you can maintain a kind of a cone

01:04:00.720 | or a tunnel of mental focus.

01:04:02.920 | And so I'm sort of revealing my practice,

01:04:04.880 | which is that I've worked very hard through blinking contests

01:04:09.280 | with my 14 year old niece who still beats me every time

01:04:11.960 | and it really bothers me,

01:04:12.920 | but also just through my own self-practice

01:04:15.740 | of learning to blink less and focus my visual attention

01:04:19.560 | on a smaller region of space.

01:04:21.040 | Now, for me, that's important

01:04:22.760 | because I'm mainly learning things on a computer screen.

01:04:26.940 | If you're going to be doing sport,

01:04:28.560 | it's quite a bit different

01:04:29.480 | and we can discuss how you might translate that to sport.

01:04:31.620 | In fact, in the next episode,

01:04:33.300 | I'm going to talk all about how plasticity

01:04:35.960 | and the focus mechanisms relate

01:04:37.560 | to learning of movement practices and coordinated movements.

01:04:40.880 | It's an entire discussion unto itself,

01:04:42.880 | but the same principle holds.

01:04:44.020 | So we need alertness.

01:04:45.940 | You can get that through mental tricks of motivation,

01:04:50.240 | fear or love, whatever it is.

01:04:52.540 | Pharmacology, please do it healthfully.

01:04:55.680 | Caffeine, if that's in your practice.

01:04:57.720 | Certainly want to be well hydrated.

01:04:59.380 | That increases, it actually will increase alertness.

01:05:02.300 | Having a very full bladder will increase alertness,

01:05:04.140 | although you don't want your alertness to be so high,

01:05:07.000 | do that, all you can think about it

01:05:08.280 | is the fact that you have to go urinate

01:05:10.160 | 'cause that's very distracting.

01:05:11.560 | You don't want your alertness to go through the roof.

01:05:14.020 | You need focus and visual focus is the primary way

01:05:18.140 | in which we start to deploy these neurochemicals.

01:05:21.280 | Now, you may ask, well, what about the experiment

01:05:24.840 | where people were feeling this rotating drum

01:05:27.140 | or listening to the auditory cue?

01:05:28.440 | That doesn't involve vision at all.

01:05:29.800 | Ah, if you look at people who are learning things

01:05:32.760 | with their auditory system,

01:05:35.240 | they will often close their eyes

01:05:36.840 | and that's not a coincidence.

01:05:38.360 | If somebody is listening very hard,

01:05:41.100 | please don't ask them to look you directly in the eye

01:05:43.000 | while also asking that they listen to you.

01:05:45.000 | That's actually one of the worst ways

01:05:46.400 | to get somebody to listen to you.

01:05:47.320 | If you say, now listen to me and look me in the eye,

01:05:49.560 | the visual system will take over

01:05:50.760 | and they'll see your mouth move,

01:05:51.920 | but they're going to hear their thoughts

01:05:53.060 | more than they're going to hear what you're saying.

01:05:55.700 | Closing the eyes is one of the best ways

01:05:58.000 | to create a cone of auditory attention.

01:06:00.620 | And this is what low vision or no vision folks do.

01:06:03.200 | They have tremendous capacity to focus their attention

01:06:06.080 | in particular locations.

01:06:08.120 | Incidentally, does anyone know the two animals

01:06:10.340 | that have the best hearing in the world?

01:06:13.060 | The absolute best hearing,

01:06:14.560 | many orders of magnitude better than humans.

01:06:17.120 | Turns out it's the elephant that might not surprise you.

01:06:19.320 | They have huge ears and the moth,

01:06:22.000 | which probably will surprise you.

01:06:23.000 | I didn't even know that moths could hear,

01:06:25.260 | but now it explains why they're so hard to catch.

01:06:27.760 | If you are not sighted,

01:06:32.560 | you learn how to do this with your hearing.

01:06:34.940 | If you're somebody who braille reads,

01:06:36.200 | you learn how to do this with your fingers.

01:06:37.840 | If you look at great piano players like Glenn Gould,

01:06:42.840 | they oftentimes will turn their head to the side.

01:06:46.700 | You think about some of the great musicians

01:06:49.600 | that like Stevie Wonder, that were blind, right?

01:06:53.520 | He would look away

01:06:54.360 | because he had no reason to look at the keys,

01:06:56.480 | but oftentimes they'll orient an ear

01:06:58.760 | or one side of their head to the keys on the piano.

01:07:01.240 | As I mentioned before,

01:07:02.160 | people who are non-sighted have better pitch.

01:07:03.640 | So we have these cones of attention that we can devote.

01:07:06.680 | And for most people, vision is the primary way

01:07:09.320 | to train up this focus ability and these cones of attention.

01:07:12.000 | So you absolutely have to focus

01:07:13.600 | on the thing that you're trying to learn.

01:07:15.200 | And you will feel some agitation

01:07:17.480 | because of the epinephrine in your system.

01:07:19.120 | If you're feeling agitation and it's challenging to focus

01:07:23.200 | and you're feeling like you're not doing it right,

01:07:24.720 | chances are you're doing it right.

01:07:26.840 | And you can practice this ability to stare

01:07:29.700 | for long periods of time without blinking.

01:07:31.840 | I know it's a little eerie for people to watch,

01:07:34.040 | but if your goal is to learn how to control

01:07:36.080 | that visual window for sake of controlling your focus,

01:07:39.120 | it can be an immensely powerful portal

01:07:41.360 | into these mechanisms of plasticity

01:07:43.440 | because we know it engages things like nucleus basalis

01:07:46.800 | and these other brainstem mechanisms.

01:07:49.080 | I get a lot of questions about

01:07:50.480 | attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD,

01:07:53.720 | and attention deficit disorder.

01:07:56.040 | Some people actually have clinically diagnosed ADD and ADHD.

01:07:59.540 | And if you do, you should certainly work

01:08:01.900 | with a good psychiatrist to try and figure out

01:08:04.120 | the right pharmacology and/or behavioral practices for you.

01:08:08.160 | Many people, however, have given themselves

01:08:10.260 | a low-grade ADHD or ADD

01:08:13.800 | because of the way that they move through their world.

01:08:16.840 | They are looking at their phone a lot of the time.

01:08:19.400 | It's actually very easy to anchor your attention

01:08:21.220 | to your phone for the following reason.

01:08:22.780 | First of all, it's very restricted in size.

01:08:25.520 | So it's very easy to limit your visual attention

01:08:29.000 | to something about this big.

01:08:30.280 | It's one of the design features of the phone.

01:08:33.840 | The other is that just as you've probably heard,

01:08:36.800 | a picture is worth a thousand words.

01:08:39.000 | Well, a movie is worth 10,000 pictures.

01:08:42.760 | Anytime we're looking at things

01:08:44.400 | that have motion, visual motion,

01:08:46.780 | our attentional system will naturally gravitate

01:08:49.220 | towards those movies.

01:08:51.960 | It's actually much harder to read words on a page

01:08:55.080 | than it used to be for many people

01:08:57.400 | because we're used to seeing things spelled out for us

01:09:00.480 | in YouTube videos or videos where things move

01:09:04.200 | and are very dramatic.

01:09:05.920 | It is true that the more that we look

01:09:07.640 | at those motion stimuli,

01:09:09.980 | the more that we're seeing movies of things

01:09:11.500 | and things that are very dramatic and very intense,

01:09:14.680 | the worse we're getting at attending to things

01:09:17.080 | like text on a page

01:09:19.220 | or to listening to something like a podcast

01:09:22.120 | and extracting the information.

01:09:23.620 | So much so that I think many people have asked me,

01:09:27.160 | why aren't you providing intense visuals for us to look at?

01:09:30.120 | Well, frankly, it's because a lot of people

01:09:31.540 | are consuming this content through pure auditory,

01:09:34.160 | through just by listening,

01:09:35.500 | and I want them to be able to digest all the material.

01:09:38.400 | But in addition to that,

01:09:39.920 | if you think about the areas of life

01:09:42.580 | that dictate whether or not we become successful,

01:09:44.980 | independent, healthy individuals,

01:09:47.400 | most of those involve the kind of boring practices

01:09:52.700 | of digesting information on a page.

01:09:55.300 | Boring because it's not as exciting in the moment perhaps

01:09:58.480 | as watching a movie or something being spoonfed to us.

01:10:02.680 | But the more attention that we can put to something,

01:10:04.760 | even if it's fleeting

01:10:05.820 | and we feel like we're only getting little bits and pieces,

01:10:08.320 | shards of the information as opposed to the entire thing,

01:10:11.640 | that has a much more powerful effect

01:10:13.360 | in engaging this cholinergic system for plasticity

01:10:16.420 | than does, for instance, watching a movie.

01:10:19.300 | And that's because when we watch a movie,

01:10:22.460 | the entire thing can be great, it can be awesome,

01:10:24.520 | it can be this overriding experience.

01:10:26.240 | But I think for all those experiences,

01:10:28.180 | if you're somebody who's interested in building your brain

01:10:30.700 | and expanding your brain

01:10:32.580 | and getting better at various things,

01:10:34.640 | feeling better, doing better, et cetera,

01:10:37.320 | one has to ask how much of my neurochemical resources

01:10:40.860 | am I devoting to the passive experience

01:10:43.120 | of letting something just kind of overwhelm me and excite me

01:10:46.660 | versus something that I'm really trying

01:10:48.000 | to learn and take away.

01:10:49.520 | And now there's another,

01:10:50.360 | I enjoy movie content and TV content all the time.

01:10:53.480 | I scroll Instagram often.

01:10:55.720 | But we are limited in the extent

01:10:58.760 | to which we can grab ahold

01:11:00.360 | of these acetylcholine release mechanisms or epinephrine.

01:11:03.760 | And I think that we need to be careful

01:11:06.300 | that we don't devote all our acetylcholine and epinephrine,

01:11:10.400 | all our dopamine for that matter,

01:11:12.200 | to these passive experiences of things

01:11:14.220 | that are not going to enrich us and better us.

01:11:17.080 | So that's a little bit of an editorial on my part,

01:11:20.080 | but the phone is rich with movies,

01:11:23.800 | it's rich with information.

01:11:25.120 | The real question is, is the information rich for us

01:11:30.120 | in ways that grow us and cultivate smarter,

01:11:33.640 | more emotionally evolved people,

01:11:39.760 | or is it creating,

01:11:41.440 | what's it doing for our physical wellbeing for that matter?

01:11:44.440 | So I don't want to tell people what to do or not to do,

01:11:47.920 | but think carefully about how often you're focusing

01:11:50.960 | on something and how good you are or poor you are

01:11:53.680 | at focusing on something that's challenging.

01:11:56.760 | So once you get this epinephrine, this alertness,

01:11:58.800 | you get the acetylcholine released

01:12:00.880 | and you can focus your attention,

01:12:03.040 | then the question is for how long?

01:12:04.640 | And in an earlier podcast,

01:12:06.120 | I talked about these ultradian cycles

01:12:07.880 | that last about 90 minutes.

01:12:09.640 | The typical learning bout should be about 90 minutes.

01:12:12.680 | I think that learning bout will no doubt include

01:12:16.540 | five to 10 minutes of warmup period.

01:12:18.560 | I think everyone should give themselves permission

01:12:20.820 | to not be fully focused in the early part of that bout,

01:12:24.360 | but that in the middle of that bout,

01:12:26.240 | for the middle hour or so,

01:12:27.220 | you should be able to maintain focus

01:12:28.840 | for about an hour or so.

01:12:30.240 | So that for me means eliminating distractions.

01:12:32.880 | That means turning off the wifi.

01:12:34.720 | I put my phone in the other room.

01:12:36.340 | If I find myself reflexively getting up to get the phone,

01:12:39.540 | I will take the phone and lock it in the car outside.

01:12:41.680 | If I find myself going to get it anyway,

01:12:43.860 | I am guilty of giving away the phone for a period of time

01:12:48.520 | or even things more dramatic.

01:12:50.840 | I've thrown it up on my roof before,

01:12:52.700 | so I can't get to it till the end of the day.

01:12:54.720 | That thing is pretty compelling.

01:12:56.220 | And we come up with all sorts of reasons

01:12:57.600 | why we need it to be in contact with it.

01:12:59.520 | But I encourage you to try experiencing what it is

01:13:03.240 | to be completely immersed in an activity

01:13:05.400 | where you feel the agitation that your attention is drifting

01:13:07.920 | but you continually bring it back.

01:13:09.500 | And that's an important point,

01:13:10.680 | which is that attention drifts,

01:13:12.520 | but we have to re-anchor it.

01:13:13.800 | We have to keep grabbing it back.

01:13:15.280 | And the way to do that if you're sighted is with your eyes.

01:13:18.160 | That as your attention drifts and you look away,

01:13:19.960 | you want to try and literally maintain visual focus

01:13:23.220 | on the thing that you're trying to learn.

01:13:24.600 | Feel free to blink, of course,

01:13:26.180 | but you can greatly increase your powers of focus

01:13:28.720 | and the rates of learning,

01:13:30.640 | which is anchored in all the work of Merseneck,

01:13:32.320 | Hubel and Wiesel and others.

01:13:34.540 | Now that's the trigger for plasticity,

01:13:37.080 | but the real secret is that neural plasticity

01:13:41.720 | doesn't occur during wakefulness, it occurs during sleep.

01:13:46.520 | We now know that if you focus very hard on something

01:13:51.520 | for about 90 minutes or so,

01:13:54.020 | maybe you even do several bouts of that per day,

01:13:56.120 | if you can do that, some people can,

01:13:58.600 | some people can only do one focus bout of learning.

01:14:01.920 | That night and the following nights while you sleep,

01:14:04.760 | the neural circuits that were highlighted, if you will,

01:14:07.720 | with acetylcholine transmission will strengthen

01:14:10.600 | and other ones will be lost,

01:14:12.720 | which is wonderful because that's the essence of plasticity.

01:14:15.760 | And what it means is that when you eventually wake up

01:14:18.520 | a couple of days or a week later,

01:14:19.680 | you will have acquired the knowledge forever,

01:14:22.520 | unless you go through some process to actively unlearn it.

01:14:25.120 | And we will talk about unlearning in a later episode.

01:14:27.720 | So mastering sleep is key

01:14:30.840 | in order to reinforce the learning that occurs.

01:14:32.880 | But let's say you get a really poor night of sleep

01:14:35.200 | after a bout of learning.

01:14:36.960 | Chances are if you sleep the next night

01:14:39.400 | or the following night, that learning will occur.

01:14:42.480 | There's a stamp in the brain

01:14:43.960 | where this acetylcholine was released.

01:14:45.560 | It actually marks those synapses neurochemically

01:14:48.540 | and metabolically so that those synapses

01:14:51.240 | are more biased to change.

01:14:52.880 | Now, if you don't ever get that deep sleep,

01:14:55.120 | then you probably won't get those changes.

01:14:57.420 | There's also a way in which you can bypass the need

01:15:01.580 | for deep sleep, at least partially,

01:15:03.360 | by engaging in what I call non-sleep deep rest,

01:15:06.600 | these NSDR protocols.

01:15:08.420 | But I just want to discuss the science of this.

01:15:09.880 | There was a paper that was published

01:15:11.920 | in Cell Reports last year that shows that if people did,

01:15:16.120 | it was a spatial memory task,

01:15:17.440 | actually a quite difficult one where they had to remember

01:15:19.280 | the sequence of lights lighting up.

01:15:21.380 | And if there are just two or three lights

01:15:22.920 | in a particular sequence, it's easy.

01:15:24.140 | But as you get up to 15 or 16 lights

01:15:26.920 | and numbers in the sequence,

01:15:29.080 | it actually gets quite challenging.

01:15:30.880 | If immediately after, and it was immediately after

01:15:34.320 | the learning, the actual performance of this task,

01:15:37.040 | people took a 20-minute non-sleep deep rest protocol

01:15:41.040 | or took a shallow nap,

01:15:45.020 | so lying down, feet slightly elevated perhaps,

01:15:47.600 | just closing their eyes, no sensory input,

01:15:50.360 | the rates of learning were significantly higher

01:15:52.840 | for that information than to just had a good night's sleep

01:15:57.180 | the following night.

01:15:58.220 | So you can actually accelerate learning

01:15:59.840 | with these NSDR protocols or with brief naps,

01:16:02.440 | 90 minutes or less.

01:16:04.200 | So the key to plasticity in childhood is to be a child.

01:16:09.000 | The key to plasticity in adulthood is to engage alertness,

01:16:13.280 | engage focus, and then to engage non-sleep deep rest

01:16:18.160 | and deep sleep while you're in your typical bout of sleep.

01:16:22.760 | I always get asked,

01:16:23.960 | how many bouts of learning can I perform?

01:16:26.360 | Well, I know people that train up these visual focus

01:16:30.160 | mechanisms to the point where they can do

01:16:32.480 | several 90-minute bouts throughout the day,

01:16:35.140 | as many as three or four.

01:16:36.760 | And some of them are also inserting

01:16:38.080 | non-sleep deep rest as well.

01:16:40.160 | Now that can get pretty tricky.

01:16:41.520 | A lot of people find that they can recover best

01:16:45.040 | from these intense bouts of focused learning

01:16:48.840 | by doing some motor activity,

01:16:51.540 | where you get into self-generated optic flow.

01:16:53.920 | And that should make sense if you've ever heard me lecture

01:16:56.120 | about stress, which I've done a little bit

01:16:57.600 | in various podcasts.

01:16:59.060 | When we are in a mode of self-generated optic flow,

01:17:01.360 | like walking or running or cycling,

01:17:03.900 | and things are just floating past us on our retina,

01:17:06.680 | we're not really looking anywhere in particular.

01:17:08.260 | So this is the opposite of a tight window of focus.

01:17:11.000 | When we do that, there are areas of the brain

01:17:13.680 | like the amygdala, which are involved

01:17:15.640 | in releasing epinephrine and create alertness.

01:17:18.800 | At the extremes, it creates fear, but certainly alertness.

01:17:21.600 | Those all shut down.

01:17:22.840 | So it's its own form of non-sleep deep rest.

01:17:25.920 | So some people find it much more pleasurable and practical

01:17:29.600 | to engage in a focused bout of learning

01:17:33.320 | and then go do some activity that involves

01:17:36.880 | what we would essentially call wordlessness,

01:17:38.480 | where you're not really thinking about much of anything.

01:17:40.180 | And so for those of you that listen to audio books

01:17:41.920 | or podcasts while you run, you may want to consider

01:17:44.300 | whether or not that's how you want to spend your time.

01:17:47.200 | Now, I'd love it if you were listening to this podcast

01:17:49.240 | while you run or cycle, but I'm much more interested

01:17:52.340 | in you actually getting the benefits of neuroplasticity

01:17:55.280 | than just listening to me for sake of listening to me.

01:17:58.120 | So for many people, letting the mind drift

01:18:02.540 | where it's not organized in thought

01:18:04.720 | after a period of very deliberate focused effort

01:18:07.360 | is the best way to accelerate learning

01:18:09.200 | and depth of learning.

01:18:10.080 | And there are good scientific data

01:18:11.280 | to support these sorts of things,

01:18:12.500 | including the cell reports paper

01:18:14.160 | that I mentioned a few moments ago.

01:18:16.320 | I want to synthesize some of the information

01:18:18.200 | that we've covered up until now.

01:18:20.460 | This entire month is about neuroplasticity.

01:18:23.200 | Today's episode has covered a lot,

01:18:25.560 | but by no means has it covered all of the potential

01:18:29.240 | for neuroplasticity and protocols for plasticity.

01:18:32.460 | We will get into all of it.

01:18:34.240 | But today I want to make sure that these key elements

01:18:37.520 | that form the backbone of neuroplasticity

01:18:40.020 | are really embedded in people's minds.

01:18:42.540 | First of all, plasticity occurs throughout the lifespan.

01:18:45.480 | Early from birth until 25,

01:18:49.600 | mere exposure to a sensory event can create plasticity.

01:18:54.300 | That could be a good thing or a bad thing.

01:18:56.560 | We're going to talk about unlearning the bad stuff,

01:18:58.680 | traumas, et cetera, in a subsequent episode this month.

01:19:02.320 | If you want to learn as an adult, you have to be alert.

01:19:08.880 | It might seem so obvious,

01:19:10.120 | but I think a lot of people don't think about

01:19:12.640 | when in their 24 hour cycle they're most alert.

01:19:17.320 | There are four episodes devoted to that 24 hour cycle

01:19:21.320 | and the cycles of alertness and sleep.

01:19:22.960 | I encourage you to listen to those

01:19:24.100 | if you haven't had the opportunity to yet,

01:19:27.040 | or just ask yourself when during the day

01:19:29.080 | do you typically tend to be most alert?

01:19:31.180 | That will afford you an advantage

01:19:33.920 | in learning specific things during that period of time.

01:19:36.920 | So don't give up that period of time

01:19:38.680 | for things that are meaningless, useless,

01:19:41.240 | or not aligned with your goals.

01:19:43.000 | That'd be a terrible time to get into passive observance

01:19:47.200 | or just letting your time get soaked away by something.

01:19:51.220 | That is a valuable asset.

01:19:53.120 | That epinephrine released from your brainstem

01:19:56.100 | is going to occur more readily at particular phases

01:19:59.840 | of your 24 hour cycle than others,

01:20:02.560 | during the waking phase, of course.

01:20:05.360 | You should know when those are.

01:20:07.600 | And then you could start to think about

01:20:10.200 | the behavioral practices, maybe the pharmacologic practices

01:20:13.160 | like caffeine, hydration, et cetera,

01:20:15.000 | that will support heightened levels of alertness.

01:20:19.140 | Attention is something that can be learned.

01:20:20.880 | And attention is critical for creating that condition

01:20:25.260 | where whatever it is that you are engaging in

01:20:28.220 | will modify your brain in a way

01:20:31.400 | that you won't have to spend so much attention on it

01:20:34.300 | going forward.

01:20:35.140 | That's the essence of plasticity,

01:20:36.240 | that things will eventually become reflexive.

01:20:38.060 | The language that you're learning,

01:20:39.600 | the motor movement, the cognitive skill,

01:20:41.440 | the ability to suppress an emotional response

01:20:44.480 | or to engage in emotional response,

01:20:46.180 | depending on what your goals are

01:20:47.620 | and what's appropriate for you.

01:20:49.160 | Increasing acetylcholine can be accomplished

01:20:52.660 | pharmacologically through nicotine.

01:20:54.720 | However, there are certain dangers

01:20:57.000 | for many people to do that,

01:20:58.920 | as well as a cost, a financial cost.

01:21:01.860 | Learning how to engage the cholinergic system

01:21:05.580 | through the use of the visual system.

01:21:07.040 | Practicing how long can you maintain focus

01:21:10.000 | with blanks as you need them.

01:21:12.960 | But how long can you maintain visual focus on a target,

01:21:16.940 | just on a piece of paper set a few feet away in the room

01:21:20.240 | or at the level of your computer screen.

01:21:21.980 | These are actually things that people do in communities

01:21:24.440 | where high levels of visual focus are necessary.

01:21:27.560 | Now, the other way to get high levels of visual focus

01:21:29.480 | and alertness is to have a panic

01:21:31.240 | or to have a situation that's very, very bad.

01:21:33.900 | You will be immediately focused

01:21:35.200 | on everything related to that situation.

01:21:37.620 | But that's unfortunate.

01:21:39.620 | What we're really talking about here

01:21:40.840 | is trying to harness the mechanisms of attention

01:21:43.500 | and get better at paying attention.

01:21:45.560 | You may want to do that with your auditory system,

01:21:47.220 | not with your visual system,

01:21:48.900 | either because you're low vision or no vision,

01:21:51.280 | or because you're trying to learn something

01:21:52.640 | that relates more to sounds than to what you see.

01:21:54.600 | But for most people,

01:21:55.920 | they're trying to learn information, cognitive information,

01:21:58.160 | or they're trying to learn how to hear the nuance

01:22:00.760 | in their partner's explanations

01:22:02.940 | of their emotionally challenging events, et cetera.

01:22:05.820 | And just remember, by the way, what I said earlier,

01:22:08.040 | which is that if you really want somebody to listen to you

01:22:11.180 | and really hear what you're saying and what's underlying it,

01:22:14.480 | you should not and cannot expect them

01:22:16.720 | to look directly at you while you do that.

01:22:18.320 | That's actually going to limit their ability to focus.

01:22:20.600 | I'm trying to rescue a few folks out there

01:22:22.160 | who might be in this struggle.

01:22:24.320 | I, of course, have never been in this struggle.

01:22:26.520 | I think that was supposed to be a joke.

01:22:30.420 | I'm very familiar with that struggle.

01:22:32.940 | But I know that one can get better at listening,

01:22:35.440 | one can get better at learning,

01:22:37.180 | one can get better at all sorts of things

01:22:39.700 | by anchoring in these mechanisms.

01:22:42.080 | Now, of course, you can also combine protocols.

01:22:44.600 | You can decide to combine pharmacology

01:22:48.400 | with these learning practices.

01:22:50.680 | Many people in communities do that.

01:22:53.320 | Many people are doing that naturally

01:22:55.040 | by drinking their coffee right before they do their learning.

01:22:58.240 | But I would also encourage you to think about

01:23:00.620 | how long those learning bouts are.

01:23:02.160 | If you think you have ADD or ADHD,

01:23:06.780 | see a clinician, but you should also ask yourself,

01:23:09.240 | are you giving up the best period of focus

01:23:11.200 | that you have each day naturally

01:23:13.060 | to some other thing like social media

01:23:16.400 | or some other activity that doesn't serve you well?

01:23:19.080 | Or are you devoting that period to the opportunity to learn?

01:23:22.880 | You should also ask yourself

01:23:25.200 | whether or not you're trying to focus too much

01:23:27.640 | for too long during the day.

01:23:29.360 | I know some very high-performing individuals,

01:23:33.320 | very high-performing in a variety of contexts,

01:23:36.040 | and none of them are focused all day long.

01:23:37.940 | Many of them take walks down the hallway,

01:23:40.140 | sometimes mumbling to themselves

01:23:41.420 | or not paying attention to anything else.

01:23:42.920 | They go for bike rides, they take walks.

01:23:45.080 | They are not trying to engage their mind

01:23:47.380 | at maximum focus all the time.

01:23:49.840 | Very few people do that

01:23:51.960 | because we learn best in these 90-minute bouts

01:23:54.580 | inside of one of these ultradian cycles.

01:23:56.640 | And I should repeat again that within that 90-minute cycle,

01:23:59.760 | you should not expect yourself to focus

01:24:01.320 | for the entire period of one 90-minute cycle.

01:24:03.360 | The beginning and end are going to be

01:24:04.840 | a little bit flickering in and out of focus.

01:24:06.820 | How do you know when one of these 90-minute cycles

01:24:09.020 | is starting?

01:24:10.480 | Well, typically when you wake up

01:24:11.500 | is the beginning of the first 90-minute cycle,

01:24:13.080 | but it's not down to the minute.

01:24:14.800 | You'll be able to tap into your sense

01:24:17.100 | of these 90-minute cycles as you start to engage

01:24:19.360 | in these learning practices, should you choose.

01:24:22.400 | And then of course, getting some non-sleep deep rest

01:24:24.820 | or just deliberate disengagement,

01:24:27.040 | such as walking or running

01:24:30.040 | or just sitting, eyes closed or eyes open,

01:24:33.320 | kind of mindlessly, it might seem in a chair,

01:24:35.520 | just letting your thoughts move around

01:24:36.880 | after a learning bout will accelerate

01:24:39.540 | the rate of plasticity that's been shown

01:24:41.440 | in quality peer-reviewed studies.

01:24:43.460 | And then of course, deep sleep.

01:24:46.840 | And so what we can start to see is that

01:24:49.880 | plasticity is your natural right early in life,

01:24:54.880 | but after about age 25,

01:24:57.840 | you have to do some work in order to access it.

01:25:00.440 | But fortunately, these beautiful experiments

01:25:03.260 | of Hubel and Wiesel and Merzenich and Weinberger and others

01:25:06.340 | point in the direction of what allows us

01:25:08.980 | to achieve plasticity.

01:25:10.400 | It points to the neurochemicals and the circuits.

01:25:12.600 | And we now have behavioral protocols

01:25:14.800 | that allow us to do that.

01:25:16.040 | I also really want to emphasize

01:25:19.700 | that there's an entire other aspect of behavioral practices

01:25:23.740 | that will allow us to engage in plasticity,

01:25:26.220 | that don't involve intense focus and emotionality,

01:25:29.880 | but involve a lot of repetition.

01:25:32.600 | So there's another entire category of plasticity

01:25:35.900 | that involves doing what seemed like almost mundane things,

01:25:40.120 | but doing them over and over again, repeatedly,

01:25:44.120 | and incorporating the reward system that involves dopamine.

01:25:47.160 | So today I talked about the kind of plasticity

01:25:49.120 | that comes from extreme focus.

01:25:50.740 | You would get that extreme focus and alertness naturally

01:25:53.480 | through a hard or difficult event that you didn't want.

01:25:56.280 | That's the kind of stinger,

01:25:57.480 | but your brain is designed to keep you safe.

01:25:59.100 | So it wants to get one trial learning

01:26:01.180 | from things like touching a hot stove

01:26:03.000 | or engaging with a really horrible person.

01:26:05.360 | You can get incredible plasticity of positive experiences

01:26:12.400 | of things that you want by engaging this high focus regime

01:26:15.980 | and then rest, non-sleep deep rest and sleep.

01:26:18.420 | And there's another aspect of plasticity

01:26:21.540 | which we will explore next episode,

01:26:24.380 | as well as when we explore movement-based practices

01:26:27.980 | for enhancing plasticity and plasticity of movement itself.

01:26:32.520 | And those are not of the high attention,

01:26:35.860 | kind of high emotionality or in the intensity

01:26:40.160 | of the experiences that I described today.

01:26:42.360 | Those are more about repetition and reward and repeat.

01:26:45.940 | Repetition, reward, repeat.

01:26:47.760 | And they are used for a distinctly different category

01:26:51.380 | of behavioral change, more of which relate to habits

01:26:54.640 | as opposed to learning of particular types of information

01:26:58.720 | that allow us to perform physically, cognitively

01:27:03.720 | or adjust our emotional system.

01:27:06.560 | So I'm going to stop there.

01:27:07.400 | I'm sure there are a lot of questions.

01:27:09.680 | Please put your questions in the comment section below

01:27:11.920 | and please remember that this entire month

01:27:13.920 | we're going to be exploring neuroplasticity.

01:27:16.080 | So this discussion/lecture,

01:27:20.440 | I wish it was more of a back and forth,

01:27:21.920 | but this is what the format offers us.

01:27:24.640 | So please do put your questions in the comment section

01:27:27.340 | and I will address them in the other episodes coming soon

01:27:30.460 | on neuroplasticity.

01:27:32.440 | As I say that, I'm reminded that many of you

01:27:35.620 | are listening to this on Apple or Spotify

01:27:38.660 | and therefore there isn't an opportunity to leave comments

01:27:42.020 | aside from the rating section on Apple.

01:27:44.780 | So if you have specific topics related to neuroplasticity

01:27:48.320 | that you would like me to cover

01:27:49.660 | in the subsequent episodes this month,

01:27:51.800 | please go to the YouTube, subscribe,

01:27:54.660 | but as well, please put your question

01:27:57.080 | in the comment section for this episode

01:27:58.840 | and I'll be sure to read them and respond.

01:28:01.680 | Many of you have very graciously asked

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01:28:32.280 | who you think might benefit from the information.

01:28:34.960 | And as well, please check out our sponsors.

01:28:38.000 | That's a great way to help us.

01:28:40.040 | Today and in previous episodes,

01:28:42.120 | I've talked a number of times about supplements.

01:28:44.680 | I'm very pleased that we're partnering with Thorne,

01:28:47.200 | T-H-O-R-N-E supplements

01:28:49.840 | because Thorne has the very high levels of stringency

01:28:53.120 | in terms of product quality and precision

01:28:56.160 | about how much of given supplements are in the bottle,

01:28:59.880 | which is vital.

01:29:00.800 | And not all supplement companies

01:29:02.640 | have stood up to the test on that one.

01:29:05.320 | If you want to check out Thorne and go to Thorne,

01:29:08.560 | that's T-H-O-R-N-E.com/u/huberman.

01:29:13.560 | And if you do that,

01:29:14.960 | you'll get 20% off any supplements that you purchase.

01:29:18.440 | I've also listed there a gallery of supplements that I take,

01:29:21.640 | including magnesium glycinate.

01:29:23.320 | I know in previous episodes,

01:29:24.840 | I talked about magnesium threonate

01:29:27.000 | as a sleep aid that I take.

01:29:28.800 | Magnesium glycinate and magnesium threonate

01:29:31.560 | are essentially interchangeable.

01:29:33.840 | Thanks so much for your time and attention.

01:29:35.280 | And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

01:29:38.120 | [upbeat music]

01:29:40.700 | (upbeat music)

How to Focus to Change Your Brain

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