The Science of Emotions & Relationships

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

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

00:00:04.920 | for everyday life.

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

00:00:10.840 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.920 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.940 | This podcast is separate from my teaching

00:00:17.760 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:00:19.560 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:00:21.700 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:00:23.800 | about science and science-related tools

00:00:26.280 | to the general public.

00:00:27.840 | In keeping with that theme,

00:00:29.360 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:00:32.280 | Our first sponsor is Inside Tracker.

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00:01:15.460 | In addition, they can often be very confusing

00:01:17.220 | what all the factors are and what they really mean.

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00:02:08.320 | to get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans

00:02:11.160 | and use the code Huberman at checkout.

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00:03:41.200 | The final sponsor of today's podcast is Magic Spoon.

00:03:44.400 | Magic Spoon is a zero sugar,

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00:03:48.840 | As I've mentioned before on the podcast,

00:03:50.940 | I'm neither ketogenic, nor am I all meat, nor am I vegan.

00:03:55.200 | The way I eat is that early in the day I fast.

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00:05:09.720 | This month, we're talking all about the science of emotions

00:05:12.740 | and tools related to the science of emotions.

00:05:15.600 | We've talked about the science of stress and resiliency,

00:05:18.520 | tools to access more calm,

00:05:20.600 | tools to raise your stress threshold

00:05:22.600 | to become more resilient.

00:05:24.080 | We've talked about motivation

00:05:25.380 | and the role of the dopamine system.

00:05:27.560 | I'd like to make a couple of announcements

00:05:29.240 | about some new resources.

00:05:31.120 | The first one is that we have now captioned

00:05:33.800 | all the Huberman Lab episodes in English and in Spanish.

00:05:37.760 | We were able to do that thanks to your support

00:05:39.760 | of our sponsors and on Patreon.

00:05:42.360 | So now all of the podcasts have a captioning feature

00:05:45.680 | on YouTube and those were done by experts.

00:05:49.120 | So while there might be the occasional error

00:05:51.600 | for the most part, they're very precise.

00:05:54.200 | We've done that so that people that prefer

00:05:56.080 | to consume the content in Spanish

00:05:58.280 | or that like to read the content

00:06:00.000 | from the English subtitles can do so.

00:06:02.320 | And we're going to continue to expand the number of languages

00:06:04.880 | that are captioned for the Huberman Lab podcast.

00:06:07.240 | So we want to thank you for that resource.

00:06:09.100 | It's now available for all episodes.

00:06:11.860 | In addition, in previous episodes,

00:06:14.140 | I've talked about NSDR or non-sleep deep rest.

00:06:18.340 | NSDRs come in a variety of different forms.

00:06:21.380 | There's self hypnosis.

00:06:23.640 | I've pointed you to some resources for that previously.

00:06:26.480 | There's yoga nidra.

00:06:28.120 | NSDR is really about achieving calm quickly

00:06:31.940 | and doing that in a self-directed way for many reasons.

00:06:35.240 | In order to access sleep more readily,

00:06:37.260 | in order to de-stress very deeply,

00:06:39.660 | in order to replace sleep that you've lost.

00:06:42.760 | It also seems to aid neuroplasticity.

00:06:45.280 | It can enhance the rearrangements of connections

00:06:48.260 | in the brain that occur during learning.

00:06:50.020 | There's scientific support for that.

00:06:52.220 | There's a link in today's episode caption to a new site.

00:06:56.940 | This is a YouTube video that was brought free of cost

00:07:00.800 | by the folks over at Made For,

00:07:02.400 | a company that's been a sponsor of the podcast previously.

00:07:05.260 | So this is an NSDR script that doesn't contain

00:07:09.240 | any of the intentions

00:07:11.460 | or some of the more typical language of yoga nidra.

00:07:14.020 | Instead, it's focused purely on the breathing protocols

00:07:17.940 | as well as includes a sort of body scan

00:07:19.980 | where you direct your attention

00:07:21.020 | to different locations around your body.

00:07:23.320 | It has all the core elements of non-sleep deep rest

00:07:26.500 | but is distinct from yoga nidra.

00:07:29.540 | I just offer this to you as a resource

00:07:31.240 | if you'd like to use it.

00:07:32.340 | It's about 30 minutes long and should be very effective

00:07:35.080 | in bringing you into deep states of relaxation

00:07:37.320 | for all the reasons I mentioned before.

00:07:40.060 | So let's talk about emotions.

00:07:41.860 | Emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect

00:07:44.540 | of our life experience.

00:07:46.380 | It's fair to say that emotions make up

00:07:48.340 | most of what we think of as our experience of life.

00:07:51.940 | Even the things we do, our behaviors and the places we go

00:07:55.260 | and the people we end up encountering in our life,

00:07:57.800 | all of that really funnels into our emotional perception

00:08:02.420 | of what those things mean,

00:08:04.120 | whether or not they made us happy or sad or depressed

00:08:06.980 | or lonely or we're awe-inspiring.

00:08:10.640 | Now, one thing that is absolutely true

00:08:12.600 | is that everyone's perception of emotion

00:08:14.780 | is slightly different.

00:08:16.320 | Meaning your idea of happy is very likely different

00:08:20.240 | than my idea of what a state of happiness is.

00:08:23.980 | And we know this also for color vision, for instance.

00:08:27.700 | Even though the cells in your eye and my eye

00:08:30.540 | that perceive the color red are identical

00:08:33.600 | right down to the genes that they express,

00:08:36.340 | we can be certain based on experimental evidence

00:08:39.420 | and what are called psychophysical studies

00:08:42.020 | that your idea of the most intense red

00:08:45.500 | is going to be very different than my idea

00:08:47.620 | of the most intense red.

00:08:48.780 | If we were given a selection of 10 different reds

00:08:51.020 | and asked which one is most intense,

00:08:52.660 | which one looks most red.

00:08:54.940 | And that seems crazy.

00:08:56.460 | You would think that something as simple as color

00:08:58.740 | would be universal and yet it's not.

00:09:01.380 | And so we need to agree at the outset

00:09:03.720 | that emotions are complicated.

00:09:05.580 | And yet they are tractable.

00:09:07.420 | They can be understood.

00:09:08.620 | And today we're going to talk about a lot of tools

00:09:11.440 | to understand what emotions are

00:09:13.860 | for you to understand what your emotional states mean

00:09:16.700 | and what they don't mean.

00:09:18.220 | And in doing that, that will allow you to place a value

00:09:20.580 | on whether or not you should hold an emotional state

00:09:23.640 | as true or not true.

00:09:25.740 | Whether or not it has meaning or it doesn't.

00:09:28.140 | As well as whether or not the emotions of others

00:09:30.000 | are important to you in a given context.

00:09:32.500 | We're going to talk a lot about development.

00:09:35.340 | In fact, we're going to center a lot of our discussion today

00:09:37.660 | around infancy and puberty.

00:09:40.160 | We're also going to talk about tools

00:09:41.820 | for enhancing one's emotional range

00:09:44.640 | and for navigating difficult emotional situations.

00:09:48.460 | I am not a clinical psychologist.

00:09:50.020 | I'm not a therapist,

00:09:51.480 | but I do have some background in psychology.

00:09:53.980 | And today I'm going to be drawing

00:09:56.060 | from the psychology greats.

00:09:57.620 | Not me, but from the greats of psychology

00:10:00.080 | who studied emotion, who studied emotional development

00:10:03.180 | and linking that to the neuroscience of emotion.

00:10:06.000 | Because nowadays we understand a lot about the chemicals

00:10:08.680 | and the hormones and the neural circuits

00:10:10.620 | in the brain and body that underlie emotion.

00:10:13.220 | So while there's no one single universally true

00:10:16.140 | theory of emotion,

00:10:17.720 | at the intersection of many of the existing theories,

00:10:20.620 | there are really some ground truths.

00:10:21.940 | So today we're going to visit those ground truths.

00:10:24.220 | We're going to talk about the tools that emerge from them.

00:10:26.420 | And we're going to talk about some absolutely wild

00:10:28.580 | and wacky experiments that people are doing

00:10:30.440 | out there right now

00:10:31.480 | that I don't necessarily recommend you do

00:10:33.600 | of inhaling different types of hormones

00:10:35.420 | and trying to get attached more quickly.

00:10:37.380 | You're actually going to do some experiential stuff today

00:10:39.620 | if you like.

00:10:40.460 | There's some things that you can do in real time

00:10:42.680 | while listening to the podcast

00:10:44.480 | in order to tap into some of the mechanisms

00:10:47.120 | that I'll be referring to.

00:10:48.140 | So today's going to be very interactive

00:10:49.740 | in a way that previous podcasts episodes have not.

00:10:52.700 | If we want to understand emotions,

00:10:54.960 | we have to look at where emotions first develop.

00:10:57.680 | In fact, this is a critical central theme

00:11:00.140 | if you want to understand brain science and psychology.

00:11:03.480 | There's a rule in neuroanatomy.

00:11:06.240 | Because if you look at 50 different brains of humans

00:11:09.160 | or you compare the brains of dogs and humans,

00:11:12.080 | there are a lot of differences.

00:11:13.500 | Certain things are the same,

00:11:14.400 | but certain things are different.

00:11:15.820 | And the rule that every good neuroanatomist knows

00:11:18.800 | is that if you want to understand

00:11:20.400 | what a part of the brain does,

00:11:22.420 | you have to address two questions.

00:11:23.860 | First, you have to know what connections

00:11:26.280 | does that brain area make?

00:11:28.380 | What is it connected to?

00:11:29.600 | Where does it get inputs from?

00:11:31.440 | And where does it send inputs?

00:11:33.600 | So for instance, if there's an area of the brain

00:11:35.800 | that gets direct input from the neurons in the nose,

00:11:39.720 | you can be pretty certain that it has some role

00:11:42.580 | in analyzing smell, in measuring something about odors

00:11:46.500 | or analyzing something about odors.

00:11:48.500 | Now, if it also gets input from the eye,

00:11:50.760 | you can also conclude that it gets input

00:11:52.680 | from the visual system,

00:11:53.900 | that it cares about light and photons.

00:11:57.040 | This is sort of obvious.

00:11:58.360 | And yet you need to know that connectivity

00:12:00.520 | and you need to know what's called

00:12:03.280 | the developmental origin of that structure.

00:12:05.600 | You need to know where it was early in development

00:12:08.680 | because things move around a lot as the brain develops.

00:12:11.600 | The brain of course is this more or less squishy thing

00:12:14.680 | floating around in some liquid

00:12:15.960 | that's stuffed inside your skull.

00:12:17.760 | And as a consequence, things move around a lot.

00:12:20.080 | They are not always in the same place

00:12:21.640 | in two different species

00:12:24.040 | or two individuals of the same species.

00:12:26.680 | So you have to know where they started out

00:12:28.480 | because where they started out

00:12:29.760 | informs what they do as well.

00:12:31.920 | And when we're talking about emotions,

00:12:33.520 | we cannot point to one area of the brain.

00:12:36.020 | We can't say that's the area of the brain

00:12:38.020 | that's responsible for emotions.

00:12:39.980 | There is this so-called limbic system

00:12:42.360 | that has been linked to emotions in various ways.

00:12:45.600 | We're going to talk about that today.

00:12:47.520 | But the limbic system is just one component

00:12:50.300 | of the inputs to create emotions.

00:12:52.400 | It's not the place for emotions.

00:12:55.040 | You can't go in and lesion one location in the brain

00:12:58.000 | and eliminate emotions entirely.

00:13:00.080 | It just doesn't work that way.

00:13:02.380 | So first of all, we have to ask,

00:13:05.400 | what are the circuits for emotion?

00:13:07.160 | What are the brain areas for emotion?

00:13:08.760 | And nowadays there's a lot of debate about this.

00:13:11.040 | For years, it was thought that there might be circuits,

00:13:14.280 | meaning connections in the brain

00:13:15.520 | that generate the feeling of being happy

00:13:17.240 | or circuits that generate the feeling of being sad, et cetera.

00:13:20.400 | That's been challenged.

00:13:22.320 | In fact, Lisa Feldman Barrett has been the person

00:13:25.480 | who's really challenged this head on

00:13:27.360 | and has very good evidence for the fact

00:13:29.080 | that such circuits probably don't exist.

00:13:31.740 | And yet I think there's good evidence

00:13:33.840 | for circuits in the brain,

00:13:35.320 | such as limbic circuits and other circuits

00:13:37.960 | that shift our overall states

00:13:40.740 | or our overall level of alertness or calmness,

00:13:43.320 | or whether or not they bias us

00:13:44.920 | toward viewing the outside world

00:13:46.700 | or paying more attention to what's going on

00:13:48.760 | inside our bodies.

00:13:50.460 | If none of this makes sense right now,

00:13:51.800 | I promise it will make sense soon.

00:13:53.680 | But the important thing to understand

00:13:54.980 | is that emotions do arise in the brain and body.

00:13:59.360 | They arise because there are specific connections

00:14:01.500 | between specific areas in the brain and body.

00:14:04.200 | And if we want to understand how emotions work,

00:14:07.640 | we have to look how emotions are built.

00:14:10.680 | And they are built during infancy, adolescence, and puberty.

00:14:15.680 | And then it continues into adulthood,

00:14:18.480 | but the groundwork is laid down early in development

00:14:21.400 | when we are small children.

00:14:23.300 | So let's think about what happens

00:14:24.600 | to a baby that comes into the world.

00:14:27.040 | A baby comes into the world,

00:14:28.400 | you were born into this world

00:14:30.060 | without really any understanding of the things around you.

00:14:34.320 | Now, there are two ways that you can interact

00:14:36.040 | with the world and you're always doing them more or less

00:14:38.800 | to some degree at the same time.

00:14:41.040 | Those are interoception,

00:14:43.760 | paying attention to what's going on inside you,

00:14:46.320 | what you feel internally,

00:14:47.680 | and exteroception, paying attention

00:14:49.580 | to what's going on outside you.

00:14:51.400 | Hold that in mind, please,

00:14:52.720 | because the fact that you're both interocepting

00:14:55.840 | and exterocepting is true for your entire life

00:14:58.900 | and it sets the foundation for understanding emotions.

00:15:02.200 | It's absolutely critical.

00:15:03.580 | As an infant, you didn't have any knowledge

00:15:08.120 | of what you needed.

00:15:09.240 | You didn't understand hunger,

00:15:10.720 | you didn't understand toys

00:15:12.140 | when you first came into the world,

00:15:13.240 | you didn't understand cold or heat or any of that.

00:15:16.540 | When you needed something,

00:15:18.260 | you experienced that as anxiety.

00:15:21.160 | You would feel an increase in alertness

00:15:23.120 | if you had to use the bathroom,

00:15:25.400 | you would feel an increase in alertness if you were hungry,

00:15:28.680 | and you would vocalize, you would cry out,

00:15:31.480 | you would act agitated, you might coo,

00:15:34.300 | you might do a number of different things,

00:15:35.860 | but all you knew was what you were feeling internally,

00:15:39.840 | and then your caregiver, whoever that might've been,

00:15:42.420 | would respond to that.

00:15:43.560 | So you would feel some agitation,

00:15:45.280 | a caregiver would come and make a decision.

00:15:47.220 | Oh, you need food and give you milk or change your diaper

00:15:52.040 | or wrap you in a blanket if you were cold,

00:15:54.980 | but they didn't know if you were cold,

00:15:56.580 | they could just assume that you were cold.

00:15:58.660 | So this is actually really important to understand

00:16:00.740 | that a baby, when you were a baby and when I was a baby,

00:16:04.000 | we didn't have any sense of the outside world

00:16:06.560 | except that it responded to our acts of anxiety essentially.

00:16:11.560 | Now, this isn't Freudian theory, right?

00:16:14.000 | There are components of it

00:16:15.000 | that are embedded in Freudian theory,

00:16:16.480 | but all developmental psychologists agree

00:16:19.080 | that babies lack the ability

00:16:21.120 | to make cognitive sense of the outside world.

00:16:23.740 | But in this feeling of anxiety

00:16:26.200 | and registering one's own internal state

00:16:28.300 | and then crying out to the outside world,

00:16:30.340 | either through crying or subtle vocalizations,

00:16:33.760 | or even just cooing, making some noise,

00:16:36.240 | we start to develop a relationship with the outside world

00:16:39.320 | in which our internal states, our shifts in anxiety,

00:16:42.920 | start to drive requests

00:16:45.020 | and people come and respond to those requests, hopefully.

00:16:48.840 | And the reason I say hopefully

00:16:50.680 | is that we've all heard presumably

00:16:52.860 | about these cases of neglect.

00:16:54.720 | There are a lot of cases where if you neglect a baby,

00:16:57.320 | you neglect an adolescent or a teenager,

00:16:59.880 | development doesn't go well.

00:17:01.600 | And we'll touch on some of those,

00:17:02.940 | but those are really extreme cases.

00:17:04.520 | They're sort of like the parallel to experiments

00:17:07.120 | that are often done in the laboratory with animals

00:17:09.320 | where you've probably heard of these enriched environments

00:17:11.400 | where they'll give mice a bunch of toys

00:17:13.600 | and they'll give them some different foods

00:17:16.240 | every once in a while

00:17:17.080 | and they'll house them together with other mice.

00:17:18.780 | And then what you find is that the animals,

00:17:21.060 | they will say, oh, their brain is thicker

00:17:23.320 | and their neurons have more branches to them and all that.

00:17:26.440 | But that's really comparing deprivation with normalcy.

00:17:30.540 | What we want to center on today instead

00:17:33.040 | is what happens when things go well

00:17:36.060 | and why things might not go well in certain circumstances

00:17:39.920 | is interesting, but to me, not as interesting

00:17:41.980 | as what healthy emotional development looks like.

00:17:44.200 | And if you haven't achieved healthy emotional development,

00:17:46.420 | what can be done as an intervention at later times

00:17:49.600 | in order to rescue that?

00:17:51.280 | So the baby, you as a baby,

00:17:54.280 | you're flopping around there in your crib,

00:17:56.740 | you're getting care where you need it

00:17:59.000 | and when you need it, presumably.

00:18:01.120 | And this gets to the basis of what emotions are about,

00:18:06.120 | which emotions are really about forming bonds

00:18:10.260 | and being able to predict things in the world.

00:18:13.260 | That's really what emotions are about.

00:18:15.620 | Whether or not the baby feels angry or happy or sad,

00:18:18.140 | we don't know.

00:18:19.200 | We can guess, but we don't know.

00:18:20.560 | In fact, most of the time, we don't even know how we feel,

00:18:22.660 | let alone how other people feel.

00:18:24.000 | And that's true for adults.

00:18:25.480 | So if I ask you how you feel right now,

00:18:28.200 | I don't know that you could tell me

00:18:29.600 | in any kind of rich language that I would say,

00:18:32.420 | oh, I really understand.

00:18:34.120 | If you said you were very, very depressed

00:18:36.020 | or very, very happy,

00:18:37.000 | I'd have some sense because of how extreme that is,

00:18:39.680 | but I don't know that I would really know.

00:18:41.160 | And I don't think you know how I feel right now either.

00:18:43.200 | I could be furious right now or I could be very happy.

00:18:45.820 | You don't have any idea.

00:18:47.160 | Now, of course, we have these things called expressions.

00:18:49.520 | Our pupils dilate.

00:18:50.520 | There are various cues of how people feel.

00:18:52.640 | We're going to talk about those cues,

00:18:54.040 | but you really don't know.

00:18:55.440 | And at this point, I actually just want to pause

00:18:57.600 | and mention a really interesting tool

00:19:00.600 | that is trying to address this question

00:19:02.640 | of what are emotions and what do they consist of

00:19:05.320 | that you can use if you like.

00:19:06.860 | This is an app.

00:19:07.700 | I didn't develop it.

00:19:08.520 | I don't have any relationship to them,

00:19:10.080 | but the app was developed by people at Yale,

00:19:12.880 | by groups at Yale who do research and it's called Mood Meter.

00:19:17.960 | And it's actually quite interesting.

00:19:19.440 | I think it's either free or it's 99 cents.

00:19:22.280 | Again, no business relationship to them,

00:19:24.160 | but what they're trying to do is put more nuance,

00:19:28.120 | more subtlety on our words and our language for emotions

00:19:32.960 | and be able to allow you to predict

00:19:35.400 | how you're going to feel in the future.

00:19:37.120 | And it's actually quite interesting.

00:19:38.520 | I'm on the app right now, and I know you can't see this,

00:19:40.560 | but it's called Mood Meter.

00:19:42.900 | And you can find it on Apple or Android.

00:19:45.620 | And you go into it and it asks you,

00:19:47.640 | it says to me, "Hi, Andrew, how are you right now?"

00:19:50.340 | And I click the little tab that says, I feel,

00:19:53.360 | and I can either pick high energy and unpleasant,

00:19:57.520 | high energy and pleasant,

00:19:59.720 | low energy, unpleasant, or low energy, pleasant.

00:20:02.840 | And I would say right now, I feel high energy, pleasant.

00:20:05.760 | So I just revealed to you how I feel.

00:20:07.320 | So I click on that and then it gives you a gallery of colors

00:20:11.500 | and you just move your finger to the location

00:20:13.920 | where you think it matches most.

00:20:15.820 | And as you do that, little words pop up.

00:20:17.960 | I know some people are looking at this on,

00:20:19.560 | or listening to this on audio only.

00:20:20.920 | So say motivated, cheerful, inspired.

00:20:22.960 | I would say, I'm feeling right now, cheerful.

00:20:25.040 | So you click that and then you just go to the next window

00:20:27.760 | and it just says, what are you doing?

00:20:28.920 | And this feels like play to me,

00:20:30.880 | but I'm going to call it work.

00:20:32.120 | And then that's it.

00:20:33.480 | And then what it does is it basically starts

00:20:36.720 | to collect data on you.

00:20:38.280 | You're giving it information and it starts to link that

00:20:40.720 | to other features that you allow it access to if you like.

00:20:43.680 | And it starts helping you be able to protect

00:20:46.080 | how you're going to feel at different times of day.

00:20:48.280 | It's actually quite accurate in certain ways,

00:20:50.820 | quite interesting.

00:20:52.060 | And it points to a couple of really interesting features,

00:20:55.600 | which is that we don't really have enough language

00:20:58.240 | to describe all the emotional states.

00:21:00.680 | And yet there's some core truths to what makes up an emotion.

00:21:05.040 | And I want to review that twice during today's podcast,

00:21:08.780 | because this can really help people, kids and adults,

00:21:12.500 | understand better what they're feeling and why,

00:21:16.040 | and when best to engage in certain activities.

00:21:18.920 | And thankfully when best to avoid certain activities too.

00:21:22.340 | So the way this works is the following.

00:21:24.340 | You need to ask yourself at any point,

00:21:28.340 | you could do this right now if you like,

00:21:29.840 | what's your level of autonomic arousal?

00:21:32.360 | Autonomic arousal is just the continuum,

00:21:35.180 | the range of alert to calm.

00:21:38.840 | So if you're in a panic right now,

00:21:40.840 | you are like 10 out of 10 on the arousal scale.

00:21:45.260 | If you're asleep,

00:21:46.780 | you're probably not comprehending what I'm saying,

00:21:49.760 | although maybe a little bit,

00:21:51.020 | but let's say you're very drowsy.

00:21:52.480 | You might be at a one or a two.

00:21:55.060 | So you always have to ask,

00:21:57.160 | where are you on the arousal scale?

00:21:59.400 | And then there's this other axis, this other question,

00:22:04.400 | which is what we call valence.

00:22:06.260 | Now, valence is a value.

00:22:07.740 | Do you feel good or bad?

00:22:09.320 | I would say I feel pretty good right now

00:22:10.620 | on a scale of one to 10.

00:22:11.920 | I'm like, I don't know, I feel like a seven.

00:22:14.360 | Got a good night's sleep last night.

00:22:16.680 | Had a good walk with Costello this morning,

00:22:18.720 | I'm fed, I'm hydrated, I feel good.

00:22:20.800 | So I'm like a seven.

00:22:21.880 | So I'm alert and I feel pretty good.

00:22:24.280 | And then there's a third thing,

00:22:26.480 | which is how much we are interocepting

00:22:30.040 | and how much we are exterocepting, all right?

00:22:32.520 | So how much our attention is focused internally

00:22:35.860 | on what we're feeling and how much it's focused externally.

00:22:39.520 | And this is always going to be in a dynamic balance.

00:22:42.820 | So for instance, if you're really, really stressed,

00:22:46.000 | oftentimes that puts you in a position

00:22:48.040 | to be really in touch with what's going on in your body.

00:22:50.240 | If you start having a lot of somatic,

00:22:52.060 | a lot of bodily sensations,

00:22:53.440 | like your heart is beating so fast that you can't ignore it,

00:22:56.500 | then you're really strongly interoceptive.

00:22:59.440 | But also sometimes you're really stressed

00:23:01.000 | because someone's stressing you out

00:23:02.280 | or somebody sends you a text message

00:23:03.820 | or makes a comment about a YouTube thing you posted

00:23:07.000 | or something and you're really triggered by it.

00:23:09.020 | That never happens to me,

00:23:10.000 | but if it does happen to you, then you're exterocepting.

00:23:14.360 | So there are these three things,

00:23:15.400 | how alert or sleepy you are, that's one.

00:23:18.180 | How good or bad you feel, that's two.

00:23:20.520 | And then whether or not most of your attention

00:23:22.240 | is directed outward or whether or not it's directed inward.

00:23:25.680 | And much of what we call emotions

00:23:27.720 | are made up by those three things.

00:23:30.280 | And so let's return now to development,

00:23:33.120 | but tuck that away and just kind of think about it,

00:23:35.120 | alert versus asleep, good versus bad,

00:23:39.040 | and focused internally or focused externally.

00:23:41.380 | Because when I looked at the whole of all the theories

00:23:45.800 | of emotion that were out there,

00:23:47.040 | there were a lot of different components to them,

00:23:49.140 | but they all seem to center back

00:23:50.360 | to these same three features in some way

00:23:53.280 | or to some degree or another.

00:23:54.520 | And it can be very powerful to understand

00:23:56.600 | and look at your emotions through that lens.

00:24:00.020 | So let's return to the infant.

00:24:02.600 | There's the baby in the crib.

00:24:04.500 | It's mostly interocepting.

00:24:06.760 | As caregivers bring it what it needs, you hope,

00:24:10.240 | milk, diaper changes, et cetera,

00:24:13.040 | a warm blanket if it's cold,

00:24:15.160 | pull off the blanket when the baby's fussing

00:24:17.240 | and it's too warm 'cause babies get too warm also.

00:24:20.240 | It starts to exterocept, excuse me, I misspoke.

00:24:24.640 | I want to be very clear.

00:24:25.480 | It starts to exterocept.

00:24:27.760 | The baby starts to look into the outside world

00:24:30.340 | and start making predictions.

00:24:32.380 | It starts wondering how much it needs to cry

00:24:36.240 | or predicting, well, if I cry like a little bit,

00:24:40.160 | then mom comes over and I get my milk.

00:24:43.960 | Or if I cry a lot, mom doesn't come over and give me milk.

00:24:48.160 | So I need to really scream at the top of my head, okay?

00:24:51.360 | So babies are starting to evaluate and do all this,

00:24:55.460 | but they're not doing it consciously.

00:24:57.140 | They're doing this strategically

00:24:59.320 | in order to relieve anxiety.

00:25:01.440 | And I won't propose that that's what we do into adulthood.

00:25:05.280 | But a lot of what we do in adulthood

00:25:07.520 | is when we feel something, we start exterocepting.

00:25:09.960 | Some people are much better at just sitting as a container

00:25:12.160 | and just interocepting and paying attention

00:25:14.240 | to what they're feeling internally.

00:25:15.840 | But most people do a little bit of a balance of both.

00:25:18.640 | We don't feel good, so we look for an item of food

00:25:21.220 | that might make us feel better.

00:25:22.360 | We're feeling anxious, heading into the dentist

00:25:25.040 | or something like that, so we text somebody.

00:25:26.660 | We do this almost reflexively.

00:25:28.420 | It's not always conscious.

00:25:30.320 | So infants do this and we continue to do this.

00:25:33.880 | We start to now balance our interoceptive

00:25:36.360 | and exteroceptive focus,

00:25:38.800 | our looking inward and looking outward.

00:25:42.120 | And as we do that, we're starting to figure out

00:25:44.300 | what gets our needs met.

00:25:45.740 | Remember, emotions are really there to form bonds

00:25:49.480 | and to make predictions.

00:25:50.840 | And so our needs are going to be met to some degree or not.

00:25:53.840 | Sometimes, sadly, there is neglect.

00:25:55.920 | Sometimes people don't show up for us

00:25:57.440 | the way that we would like.

00:25:58.780 | And in general, our responses to that

00:26:03.200 | have to do with whether or not we predict

00:26:05.060 | whether or not they would or not.

00:26:07.120 | When we expect something and it doesn't happen,

00:26:09.400 | it's a big letdown.

00:26:10.360 | That was the discussion about dopamine last episode.

00:26:12.920 | So the many theories of emotion, the triune brain theory

00:26:16.580 | that you have a primitive and evolved brain,

00:26:18.440 | something that's a little bit on shaky ground these days,

00:26:20.860 | the idea that Darwin proposed

00:26:22.340 | that there are these universal expressions of emotions,

00:26:25.080 | the work of Helen Fisher on love

00:26:27.780 | that you have circuits in the brain for lust,

00:26:30.180 | circuits in the brain for love

00:26:31.900 | and circuits in the brain for long-term bonds,

00:26:35.160 | as well as the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett

00:26:37.260 | saying that emotions are contextual,

00:26:39.380 | that they have a social component.

00:26:41.380 | And I'll be talking more about this,

00:26:43.760 | but the work of Alan Shore,

00:26:45.340 | a clinical psychologist and researcher at UCLA

00:26:49.380 | about right brain, left brain

00:26:51.780 | and its role in emotional development.

00:26:53.380 | All of them have strong elements of this idea

00:26:56.820 | of paying attention to what's going on inward and outward.

00:27:00.680 | As a young creature, an infant and young toddler,

00:27:05.020 | you were mainly focused inward

00:27:06.600 | and you started to understand what was going on outward

00:27:09.000 | as a way of predicting what would bring you relief,

00:27:12.460 | what would remove your anxiety.

00:27:14.160 | And that's where the fundamental rules of your experience,

00:27:17.280 | your emotional experience were laid down.

00:27:19.540 | Now I realize that's a lot of information

00:27:22.080 | and it's somewhat of an academic talk,

00:27:24.380 | but there were two tools in there

00:27:26.060 | that I just want to highlight.

00:27:27.060 | One is the Mood Meter app.

00:27:28.360 | If you're interested in it can give you some insight

00:27:30.460 | into the different kinds of nuance within emotions

00:27:32.820 | and allow you to actually predict emotional states.

00:27:35.880 | If you want to try that and you might find that interesting.

00:27:39.060 | The other one is this idea

00:27:40.300 | that there are three axes to emotion,

00:27:42.620 | three continuum that interact,

00:27:44.980 | the level of alertness and calmness,

00:27:47.140 | how good or bad you feel

00:27:48.540 | and whether or not you're mainly focused inward or outward

00:27:50.700 | because those are going to form a useful toolkit

00:27:53.820 | for the information going forward.

00:27:55.740 | So now let's talk about what kind of baby you were

00:27:59.500 | because that actually informs your emotionality now.

00:28:03.620 | These are classic, they're actually famous experiments

00:28:06.460 | done by Bowlby and Ainsworth.

00:28:08.260 | Anyone that studied psychology

00:28:09.600 | or has taken a psychology class

00:28:10.860 | might've learned about this.

00:28:12.260 | This is this classic experiment

00:28:15.520 | of what was called the strange situation task in which,

00:28:20.520 | and I'm describing it very coarsely here, I realize,

00:28:22.880 | but a mother and child come into the laboratory.

00:28:27.580 | Yes, this has now also been done with fathers.

00:28:31.480 | The baby and the mother or father play together for a bit

00:28:36.160 | and then the mother leaves.

00:28:37.600 | The mother leaves for some period of time

00:28:40.640 | and then comes back.

00:28:42.580 | And the research is devoted

00:28:45.680 | to understanding the response of the child

00:28:48.720 | when the caretaker, the mother or the father returns.

00:28:53.100 | Most all children, not every child,

00:28:55.640 | but most children will cry

00:28:58.520 | when their primary caretaker leaves.

00:29:00.300 | They don't like that.

00:29:02.020 | And there are good reasons for that.

00:29:03.700 | They formed a bond and an attachment.

00:29:05.440 | And we will talk about

00:29:06.280 | some of the deeper chemical reasons for those bonds.

00:29:09.660 | However, the experiment is focused

00:29:12.880 | on the return of the caregiver

00:29:15.160 | because Bowlby and Ainsworth

00:29:17.540 | and many of their scientific offspring and colleagues

00:29:21.000 | identified at least four patterns

00:29:25.160 | that babies display when their caretaker returns.

00:29:29.420 | And they group these into group A, B, C, D,

00:29:32.800 | so much so that the kids were referred to as A babies,

00:29:36.680 | B babies, C babies, or D babies.

00:29:39.160 | You may know which one you were,

00:29:42.120 | but the categories are really interesting.

00:29:44.000 | The first babies are the A babies.

00:29:46.480 | So these were kids that would get upset

00:29:48.100 | when their caretaker would leave,

00:29:49.720 | but when their caretaker would return,

00:29:53.000 | the infant would respond with happiness,

00:29:55.280 | with what looked like delight.

00:29:56.640 | They would go to the caretaker.

00:29:57.880 | They seemed happy if they had been fussy before or sad,

00:30:01.100 | they felt relieved.

00:30:02.440 | These are referred to as secure attached kids.

00:30:07.380 | So they have a healthy response to separation

00:30:10.100 | and they have a healthy response

00:30:11.760 | to re-engaging with the caretaker.

00:30:14.760 | The B babies, as they're called,

00:30:17.260 | were less likely to seek comfort from their caregiver

00:30:21.740 | when the caregiver would return.

00:30:23.600 | So they would sometimes continue to play with their toys

00:30:26.280 | or they would be with the,

00:30:28.360 | they had an adult in the room while the parent was gone,

00:30:30.600 | they would stay with them.

00:30:31.920 | It was sometimes complicated and nuanced,

00:30:34.640 | but these were referred to as avoidant babies.

00:30:37.480 | Don't run away with any conclusions

00:30:40.160 | about the language here just yet.

00:30:41.800 | It's not clear that avoidant babies become avoidant adults,

00:30:46.160 | but bear with me.

00:30:47.460 | The C babies would respond to the return of the caregiver

00:30:52.460 | with acts of annoyance.

00:30:54.880 | They seemed kind of angry, right?

00:30:56.920 | So it wasn't that they ignored them,

00:30:58.600 | they seemed kind of angry.

00:31:00.300 | And those were referred to as ambivalent babies.

00:31:02.860 | Not to be confused with A babies,

00:31:04.240 | these are the C babies were the ambivalent babies.

00:31:07.200 | So the infant's reaction to the returning caregiver

00:31:10.600 | were inconsistent.

00:31:11.920 | It seemed like they wanted to bond with them again,

00:31:15.280 | but that they seemed kind of annoyed.

00:31:17.800 | I think we've all felt this way before

00:31:19.620 | with people that we care very much about,

00:31:21.080 | especially people we care very much about.

00:31:23.400 | And then the third category, the D babies

00:31:25.400 | were the disorganized babies.

00:31:27.120 | That's what they call them.

00:31:27.960 | They weren't disorganized in that they were messy.

00:31:30.000 | The child avoided interactions with everyone

00:31:33.360 | and acted fearful when the caregiver returned.

00:31:36.140 | And their behavior didn't really change

00:31:38.160 | whether or not the caregiver was there or not.

00:31:40.040 | And that fourth category was actually added rather late

00:31:42.720 | in the course of this research.

00:31:44.640 | I should mention these experiments have been repeated

00:31:47.760 | with a huge variety of different contexts.

00:31:51.180 | There was work done by Mary Main at UC Berkeley

00:31:54.740 | and many others looking at all sorts of variations

00:31:57.780 | on this theme.

00:31:58.860 | But over time, it made it clear that certain babies

00:32:03.260 | are able to feel secure upon re-engaging

00:32:07.680 | with their caregiver and others don't,

00:32:10.080 | or they're confused about it.

00:32:11.980 | So we probably don't know whether or not

00:32:15.580 | you were an A, a B or a C, D baby,

00:32:17.900 | unless you were in these experiments

00:32:19.220 | and somehow you had that knowledge.

00:32:21.020 | But this work, this classic work opened up a huge set

00:32:25.980 | of important questions that relate to

00:32:28.560 | what is the re-establishment of the bond really about?

00:32:31.540 | I mean, what's actually being figured out here

00:32:34.180 | is not whether or not there are four categories of babies.

00:32:36.460 | That's interesting.

00:32:37.540 | But it presumably is more interesting to focus on

00:32:41.980 | what is it that defines a really good bond,

00:32:45.100 | a secure attachment or an insecure attachment

00:32:47.700 | or an avoidant attachment.

00:32:49.780 | And the four things are gaze, literally eye contact,

00:32:54.780 | and doesn't have to be direct beaming eye contact

00:32:58.900 | with no blinks like people accused me of before.

00:33:00.900 | It can just be gaze that people look at each other.

00:33:03.120 | You see couples, they look at each other.

00:33:04.500 | They don't always stare at each other long periods of time.

00:33:06.460 | Sometimes they do.

00:33:07.420 | Vocalizations, so what we say and how we say it.

00:33:13.260 | Affect or emotion, so the way that we express crying,

00:33:17.620 | smiling, et cetera, and touch, those four things.

00:33:21.960 | And you probably could add a fifth dimension

00:33:24.500 | once language and written language develops,

00:33:27.280 | which is written word, exchange of letters,

00:33:29.740 | exchange of texts, exchange of things of that sort,

00:33:31.980 | emails are another way in which people can bond.

00:33:35.360 | But gaze, vocalization, affect and touch

00:33:38.900 | are really the core of this thing

00:33:41.540 | that we call social bonds and emotionality.

00:33:44.340 | Now that's important.

00:33:46.140 | We know, for instance, that there are brain areas

00:33:48.500 | like the fusiform face area, which is deep in the brain,

00:33:51.760 | that is responsible for the processing of faces.

00:33:54.940 | Children's recognition of their parents' faces and voices

00:33:58.020 | is extremely accurate and strong.

00:34:01.120 | Likewise, parents' recognition of their child's vocalizations

00:34:05.700 | not just voices, but cries are remarkable.

00:34:08.780 | If you've ever had the experience of being at a party

00:34:11.160 | with somebody who has small children

00:34:12.460 | and you're talking to them and all of a sudden

00:34:14.060 | they hear something but you don't,

00:34:15.720 | it's as if they've got wolf hearing

00:34:18.020 | and all of a sudden they go running into the other room

00:34:19.660 | and indeed, the kid is like, I don't know,

00:34:22.340 | some kid is beating up their kid

00:34:23.840 | or their kid's beating up some other kid

00:34:25.540 | or the kid has done injured themselves

00:34:27.700 | or feels emotionally injured.

00:34:29.220 | This perception of voices,

00:34:30.940 | there's very good evidence to support the fact

00:34:33.300 | that we are tuned to the frequencies of voices

00:34:36.740 | and vocalizations of people that we care about.

00:34:38.740 | It's not just true in rodents and in birds and other mammals,

00:34:41.620 | it's definitely true in humans as well.

00:34:43.320 | And babies are very tuned in to the sound

00:34:46.140 | of their mother's voice.

00:34:46.980 | Even yes, while they're in the womb,

00:34:49.500 | there's this whole world of what's called mother ease

00:34:52.940 | which is the particular style of speech that mothers

00:34:56.820 | and other caretakers now we know use with children.

00:35:00.220 | So those are the core elements, right?

00:35:01.860 | How you look at somebody and how they look at you,

00:35:04.340 | what you say, what they say, what they seem to be feeling

00:35:08.620 | and how that makes you feel, smiles, frowns.

00:35:11.180 | If you know someone really well,

00:35:12.580 | you can read inflections in like even little subtle things

00:35:15.660 | like they don't really believe me

00:35:18.420 | or they're really excited by this

00:35:21.640 | or now I know what they're thinking.

00:35:25.280 | That kind of processing,

00:35:27.380 | some people are better at it than others

00:35:29.540 | but everyone's better at doing that

00:35:30.960 | with people that we recognize and know.

00:35:32.820 | In fact, couples come to know each other exceedingly well,

00:35:36.240 | so much so that it can both benefit

00:35:38.660 | and injure their relationship

00:35:40.400 | to constantly be making these perceptions.

00:35:42.720 | But there's a range,

00:35:43.560 | some people are more tuned into this than others.

00:35:46.000 | And that probably has roots in the sorts of attachments

00:35:49.520 | that you form early on.

00:35:50.780 | So Boulby and colleagues developed these ABCD thing

00:35:55.580 | and it has a lot to do with face processing

00:35:57.720 | and gaze and vocalizations and touch.

00:36:00.560 | All of those happened on return with the mother

00:36:02.780 | but they weren't parsing those,

00:36:03.960 | they weren't looking at them individually.

00:36:05.920 | So this raises a really interesting question

00:36:09.360 | which is what is it when we feel something?

00:36:13.680 | Is it because of something that happens spontaneously in us,

00:36:17.340 | it's a memory or it's something that we realize

00:36:19.620 | we saw on the internet or we got news about somebody.

00:36:22.620 | Nowadays, people get so much information

00:36:24.260 | about the people they know,

00:36:25.460 | both the people they like and dislike

00:36:26.940 | by way of viewing online activities, right?

00:36:30.420 | So they're extra accepting

00:36:31.740 | and then it's impacting your internal state.

00:36:33.980 | And it's clear from most all of the theories

00:36:36.760 | of emotional health that an ability to recognize

00:36:41.460 | when your own internal state is being driven primarily

00:36:44.860 | by external events as important

00:36:48.220 | for being able to emotionally regulate, right?

00:36:51.220 | People who are constantly being yanked around

00:36:53.340 | by the external happenings in the world,

00:36:55.500 | you would say are emotionally labile.

00:36:57.700 | They are not in control of their emotions.

00:37:00.900 | Even if they're calm all the time,

00:37:02.880 | if that calmness only arrives

00:37:04.420 | because they're in a placid environment

00:37:06.100 | and then you put a cracker in that environment

00:37:08.400 | and they freak out, well, then they're not really calm.

00:37:11.720 | They're calm in so far

00:37:13.900 | as there isn't something disturbing in the environment.

00:37:16.260 | So how much the outside environment

00:37:18.200 | disrupts your internal environment

00:37:20.200 | has everything to do with this balance

00:37:21.500 | of interoception and exteroception.

00:37:23.280 | And it very likely has roots in whether or not

00:37:25.740 | you were secure attached or insecure attached,

00:37:28.800 | disorganized or ambivalent as a baby.

00:37:32.160 | Of course, you can't travel back in time and know,

00:37:34.300 | but there are some hints as to what kind of emotionality

00:37:37.300 | each of us has by examining two periods of development.

00:37:41.580 | One is adolescence and puberty, and the other is adulthood.

00:37:45.620 | So while we can't travel back in time,

00:37:47.940 | there is an exercise that you can do

00:37:50.460 | to address at least in this moment,

00:37:53.140 | whether or not you have a bias for exteroception

00:37:56.060 | or a bias for interoception.

00:37:58.240 | Whether or not you are better, at least in this moment,

00:38:01.600 | at paying attention to what's going on internally

00:38:04.260 | or externally.

00:38:05.100 | And of course, this will vary with circumstance.

00:38:07.780 | I think we all know people that maybe it's you,

00:38:10.300 | you go to a party and you get there

00:38:13.300 | and everyone seems to be talking

00:38:14.680 | and having a really good time.

00:38:16.120 | And you're wondering whether or not

00:38:17.700 | you have any food in your teeth

00:38:19.340 | or whether or not there's something on your face

00:38:20.820 | or whether or not your hair is right,

00:38:22.700 | or whether or not you said something the wrong way,

00:38:25.580 | whether or not you're turning red.

00:38:27.380 | People also experienced this a lot with public speaking.

00:38:29.860 | It's not just about learning to clamp your level of stress.

00:38:33.940 | It's also about how much you're exterocepting,

00:38:35.980 | how much you're out of your head, they call it,

00:38:38.200 | but how much you're focused on the events around you

00:38:41.140 | versus the events inside you.

00:38:43.880 | Actually, it's interesting when you talk to people

00:38:46.200 | who are very effective athletes

00:38:49.680 | or they have very high stress, high consequence jobs,

00:38:52.320 | they talk about this notion of getting out of your head.

00:38:55.160 | You only have so much attentional resource

00:38:57.540 | and it can be split between two things.

00:38:59.900 | You'll see that in a moment.

00:39:01.180 | They can be anchored to one thing.

00:39:02.900 | It can be fully focused on what's going on internally,

00:39:06.100 | or it can be fully focused on what's going on externally.

00:39:08.220 | And if you want to be effective in the world,

00:39:10.500 | effective being in quotes,

00:39:12.340 | it is useful when in very dynamic environments,

00:39:16.640 | especially social environments,

00:39:18.180 | to have a lot of your attention focused outward

00:39:21.040 | as opposed to trying to pay attention

00:39:23.500 | to whether or not you're saying things correctly

00:39:25.020 | or the timbre of your own voice.

00:39:26.340 | That is more or less destructive

00:39:28.740 | for the ability to engage socially.

00:39:31.980 | So here's the exercise.

00:39:34.180 | You can do this, please don't do this if you're driving,

00:39:38.260 | but let's just try and illustrate

00:39:41.260 | or allow you to experience

00:39:43.320 | this interoceptive, exteroceptive balance

00:39:45.740 | and the extent to which you can move interoception

00:39:49.180 | and exteroception deliberately.

00:39:51.000 | If you close your eyes right now

00:39:55.380 | and concentrate on the contact of any portion of your body

00:39:59.740 | with say the chair or your car seat,

00:40:01.800 | although please again, don't do this while you're driving,

00:40:04.600 | anywhere that you are,

00:40:05.440 | even if you're just standing up or you're in the kitchen,

00:40:07.680 | you're lying on the couch

00:40:08.800 | and trying to bring as much of your attention

00:40:12.120 | to that point of contact as possible.

00:40:15.860 | And then from there,

00:40:17.020 | you're going to move your attention even more deeply

00:40:19.060 | into say the sensation of what's going on in your gut.

00:40:22.360 | Are you full?

00:40:23.200 | Are you empty?

00:40:24.020 | Are you hungry?

00:40:24.860 | Are you not?

00:40:25.960 | Is your heart beating?

00:40:27.000 | At what rate?

00:40:27.840 | What's the cadence of your breathing?

00:40:29.220 | Basically bringing your focus and attention

00:40:31.920 | to everything at the surface of your skin and inward.

00:40:34.800 | So I'm going to do a rare thing

00:40:36.600 | on the Huberman Lab Podcast.

00:40:37.700 | I'm going to introduce about five to eight seconds

00:40:39.460 | of silence in order to allow you to do that a little bit.

00:40:42.540 | Okay.

00:40:55.460 | Now, this is an exercise that you can continue afterward

00:40:58.820 | if you want to extend how long you do this.

00:41:01.000 | But now try and do something that for most people

00:41:03.900 | actually is a little bit harder,

00:41:05.220 | which is to purely extero set.

00:41:07.180 | Put your eyes or your ears or both

00:41:11.660 | on anything in your immediate space.

00:41:14.040 | One thing.

00:41:14.880 | And I would restrict that thing to something small enough

00:41:18.920 | that at least in your field of view,

00:41:20.660 | it would occupy 20% of your field of view.

00:41:24.040 | So it doesn't have to be a pinpoint

00:41:25.480 | unless the pin is right in front of you

00:41:27.080 | and you're holding it real close.

00:41:28.560 | I would say, look across the room,

00:41:29.980 | pick a panel on the wall or a leg of a table or something

00:41:34.600 | and try and bring as much of your attention

00:41:37.000 | to that as possible.

00:41:39.320 | And again, I'll take about five seconds of silence

00:41:42.220 | to allow you to extero sept.

00:41:44.400 | Okay, so what you probably found

00:41:53.800 | is that you were able to do that,

00:41:54.880 | but that some degree of interoception is maintained.

00:41:58.600 | It's hard to place 100% of your attention

00:42:00.900 | on something externally,

00:42:02.360 | unless it's really exciting, really novel.

00:42:05.440 | If you've ever watched a really great movie,

00:42:07.820 | presumably you're extero septing

00:42:10.400 | more than you're intero septing

00:42:11.640 | until something exciting happens

00:42:13.040 | and then you feel something.

00:42:14.200 | You're actually tethering your emotional experience

00:42:16.800 | to something external.

00:42:18.240 | And now you can also do this dynamically.

00:42:22.120 | You can decide to focus internally and then externally.

00:42:24.880 | You can decide to split it 50%, 50% or 70, 30.

00:42:29.040 | One can develop, you can develop

00:42:32.760 | a heightened ability to do this.

00:42:36.160 | And the power of doing that

00:42:38.240 | is actually that when you are in environments

00:42:40.360 | where you feel like you're focused too much internally

00:42:43.080 | and you'd like to be focused more externally,

00:42:45.680 | you can actually do that deliberately.

00:42:47.200 | But as you've noticed, it takes work.

00:42:49.200 | It involves taking your attentional spotlight.

00:42:51.800 | And what we call the aperture of your attention

00:42:54.360 | and narrowing that aperture to either the self

00:42:57.820 | or something externally or splitting the two.

00:43:01.040 | And yet there are practices that have been developed

00:43:04.880 | that center on moving interoception and exteroception

00:43:09.660 | from one being more heavily weighted than the other,

00:43:13.440 | more focused outward or more focused inward.

00:43:16.000 | And it's dynamic.

00:43:17.240 | And the circuits in the brain

00:43:18.440 | that underlie intero and exteroception

00:43:21.060 | aren't exactly known,

00:43:22.120 | but they are anchored in the areas of the brain

00:43:24.400 | they're involved in attention,

00:43:25.420 | like the frontal eye fields

00:43:26.640 | and areas that when you third person yourself,

00:43:29.800 | when you can see yourself doing something,

00:43:31.640 | like if you put your hand out in your environment

00:43:33.480 | and you focus on your hand,

00:43:35.020 | you know that that's your hand

00:43:36.340 | as opposed to some random object.

00:43:37.700 | There are areas of the brain

00:43:38.800 | they're involved in that in recognizing location of self

00:43:42.980 | relative to the rest of your body.

00:43:44.680 | These exercises are really what are at the core

00:43:50.520 | of these development of emotional bonds,

00:43:52.780 | because as we mentioned before,

00:43:54.500 | these four things, the gaze, vocalization, touch and affect,

00:43:59.500 | those are happening very dynamically.

00:44:02.140 | So if somebody winks at you,

00:44:03.560 | you're paying attention to their wink,

00:44:04.920 | but then you also notice how you feel,

00:44:07.280 | then they might say something, then you might say something.

00:44:09.000 | This is very dynamic.

00:44:10.260 | So if it seems overwhelming to try and interocept

00:44:13.000 | and exterocept and then shift the balance,

00:44:15.000 | you do that all the time.

00:44:16.120 | Your brain and nervous system are fantastic at doing this.

00:44:19.120 | Now, some people have a very hard time

00:44:21.780 | breaking out of a very strongly interoceptive mode.

00:44:25.560 | Some people have a harder time

00:44:27.240 | breaking out of their exteroceptive mode.

00:44:30.280 | It's very interesting to note

00:44:32.320 | the extent to which we have biases

00:44:35.080 | in how interoceptive or exteroceptive we are.

00:44:37.880 | Remember those three axes that we talked about earlier,

00:44:40.580 | you have valence, good or bad,

00:44:42.440 | you have alertness, alert or calm,

00:44:44.860 | and you have interoceptive or exteroceptive bias, right?

00:44:49.320 | And it's going to differ across the day,

00:44:51.920 | it's going to differ across the lifetime,

00:44:53.860 | it's certainly going to differ

00:44:55.120 | according to whatever it is that you're engaged in.

00:44:57.500 | But early in development,

00:44:59.560 | you start off with this interoceptive bias,

00:45:02.380 | you are starting to develop expectations,

00:45:05.100 | predictions about how the outside world is going to work,

00:45:08.520 | and you are trying to figure out

00:45:10.900 | the reliability of outside events in people

00:45:14.080 | and where things are reliable.

00:45:16.800 | When people are reliable,

00:45:19.060 | we are able to give up more of our interoception.

00:45:22.160 | There's literally trust that our interoceptive needs,

00:45:25.840 | our internal needs will be met

00:45:27.560 | through bonds and actions of others.

00:45:30.280 | This starts to veer toward

00:45:32.440 | the discussion about neglect and trauma.

00:45:34.500 | We are going to devote entire episodes,

00:45:36.580 | probably an entire month, to trauma and PTSD,

00:45:39.880 | but those have roots in what we're talking about now,

00:45:43.800 | and it's important to internalize and understand

00:45:45.760 | what we're talking about now

00:45:46.680 | in order to get the most out of those future conversations.

00:45:49.760 | So if all of this seems like a lot of information

00:45:53.140 | and very complicated,

00:45:54.800 | I just invite you to pay attention from time to time

00:45:57.360 | how much you happen to be interocepting or exterocepting,

00:46:00.640 | because emotions and the intensity of those emotions

00:46:04.600 | will grow or shrink

00:46:06.120 | depending on how much we're interocepting.

00:46:07.880 | If we are feeling extremely sad

00:46:10.780 | and there is an outside event that made us sad,

00:46:15.580 | chances are there's going to be a balance,

00:46:17.860 | but that the extreme grief, the extreme sadness

00:46:20.980 | is going to lead us to mostly interocept.

00:46:24.080 | Whereas when we're feeling extremely happy,

00:46:27.180 | the same is true.

00:46:28.700 | Something great happens in the world

00:46:30.540 | and we're just going to feel it.

00:46:31.680 | Most of our perception, most of our awareness

00:46:33.900 | is going to be on an internal state.

00:46:35.780 | So we are always tethered to the outside world

00:46:38.460 | to some degree or another.

00:46:40.300 | That was true when you were an infant

00:46:42.120 | and it was true when you were an adolescent

00:46:44.100 | and it's true as an adult.

00:46:46.660 | So now I want to just pause,

00:46:48.560 | just shelve the discussion

00:46:50.980 | about interoception, exteroception for a moment.

00:46:53.220 | And I want to talk about what is arguably the second most,

00:46:57.020 | if not equally important aspect of your development

00:47:02.020 | as it relates to emotionality.

00:47:04.460 | And as it relates to this, what I call trust,

00:47:06.980 | but this ability to predict

00:47:08.600 | whether or not things in the outside world are reliable

00:47:11.420 | or not reliable in terms of their ability

00:47:14.660 | to help you meet your interoceptive needs.

00:47:17.140 | And that period is puberty.

00:47:20.840 | So up until now, we've been talking mainly about psychology,

00:47:23.400 | not a lot of biology, not a lot of mechanism.

00:47:25.480 | And now we're going to transition

00:47:26.940 | into talking about mechanism,

00:47:28.460 | hormones, receptors, et cetera.

00:47:31.240 | Puberty is a absolute biological event.

00:47:35.100 | It has a beginning and it has a specific definition,

00:47:39.340 | which is the transition into reproductive maturity.

00:47:42.660 | So there are a lot of hormonal changes.

00:47:44.200 | Yes, there are also a lot of brain changes

00:47:45.940 | and most people don't realize it,

00:47:47.140 | but the brain changes occur first.

00:47:49.400 | The brain turns on the hormone systems

00:47:51.980 | that allow puberty to occur.

00:47:53.840 | Puberty is occurring earlier nowadays

00:47:58.440 | than it did in the past.

00:48:00.280 | The current numbers that I was able to find

00:48:03.620 | is that in females and girls,

00:48:06.940 | the transition is starting around age 10,

00:48:09.580 | whereas in boys, it's about age 12.

00:48:11.940 | That's going to differ by way

00:48:13.700 | of a number of different factors.

00:48:14.860 | Those are averages.

00:48:16.300 | So it depends on where you are in the world,

00:48:18.580 | depends on all sorts of things.

00:48:20.020 | One of the primary triggers for puberty

00:48:23.380 | is actually body fat.

00:48:24.820 | This is interesting.

00:48:27.300 | The peptide hormone leptin,

00:48:30.200 | some people call it a peptide,

00:48:32.180 | some people call it a hormone,

00:48:33.220 | but it meets both definitions,

00:48:34.880 | depending on how you look at it,

00:48:36.480 | is made by fat.

00:48:38.460 | So leptin had a lot of popularity in the '90s

00:48:42.740 | because it was discovered as being produced by fat

00:48:46.700 | and it was seen in animal studies

00:48:48.420 | that it could promote leanness.

00:48:50.300 | It actually communicates to the brain

00:48:52.300 | that there's enough body fat

00:48:53.820 | in order to allow the metabolic factors

00:48:57.300 | and processes to occur to liberate more fat.

00:48:59.720 | This is why people have trouble losing that last five pounds

00:49:02.700 | is because leptin levels are very low.

00:49:04.740 | This was actually the basis

00:49:05.800 | for the whole cheat day refeed thing,

00:49:07.980 | that the idea was if you eat a lot for one day a week

00:49:12.020 | while dieting hard,

00:49:13.420 | that you can signal to the brain that there's enough leptin.

00:49:16.580 | I don't know if that's the reason

00:49:18.100 | or whether or not the cheat days

00:49:19.300 | just provided some psychological relief, probably both.

00:49:22.840 | But in any case, leptin is made by body fat

00:49:25.840 | and when there's enough leptin,

00:49:27.260 | it signals the brain to trigger puberty.

00:49:30.580 | There was a paper published in the mid '90s

00:49:33.360 | in the journal Science, excellent journal,

00:49:35.580 | showing that leptin could be injected into younger females

00:49:40.580 | that would not have yet gone into puberty

00:49:44.380 | and you could accelerate the onset of puberty with leptin.

00:49:47.860 | So the more body fat, the earlier puberty, that's true.

00:49:50.820 | Leptin is also involved

00:49:52.420 | in various growth effects in the body generally.

00:49:55.260 | And it's interesting, very obese children

00:49:58.400 | don't necessarily undergo puberty earlier.

00:50:00.780 | Sometimes they do, but they do tend to be larger boned.

00:50:04.160 | Their bones actually grow more quickly

00:50:05.740 | and they tend to have higher bone density

00:50:07.500 | because leptin is also involved in bone density.

00:50:09.900 | The whole issue of onset of puberty

00:50:14.420 | also has some really interesting social effects.

00:50:17.540 | And I want to really highlight that most of these effects

00:50:21.340 | are so-called pheromone effects.

00:50:22.740 | Remember, a hormone is a substance

00:50:24.440 | secreted from one area of the body,

00:50:25.760 | travels and impacts tissues and cells elsewhere in the body.

00:50:29.280 | A pheromone is a chemical that's released

00:50:32.080 | by one member of a species that goes and acts on

00:50:35.580 | and impacts other members of that species

00:50:37.780 | or even other species.

00:50:39.780 | So for instance, rodents are very good at detecting

00:50:43.540 | the urine and the scent markings of large carnivores

00:50:48.420 | that want to eat them.

00:50:49.420 | So that's a pheromonal interaction.

00:50:51.600 | Whether or not there are pheromonal effects in humans

00:50:54.940 | is very debated.

00:50:56.160 | I did a post on this on Instagram a little while ago

00:50:58.440 | about some pheromone effects that were reported in humans.

00:51:00.620 | And I had a couple of people come at me saying,

00:51:04.140 | look, it's never really been shown in humans

00:51:06.600 | that there's a pheromonal,

00:51:08.280 | what's called the vomeronasal organ.

00:51:09.740 | There's something called Jacobson's organ.

00:51:11.580 | It's rudimentary.

00:51:13.120 | Some people have it, some people don't.

00:51:15.500 | Very controversial.

00:51:16.560 | So I want to point out that human pheromone effects

00:51:18.880 | are controversial.

00:51:19.820 | Although I think there's, in my opinion,

00:51:22.380 | there's ample evidence for them.

00:51:24.080 | Synchronization of menstrual cycles.

00:51:26.060 | For many people report, then people say,

00:51:29.200 | there's some studies that show that it's not true.

00:51:31.700 | Then there've been some data showing very impressive

00:51:35.540 | pheromonal effects of female partners

00:51:40.320 | being able to detect the odor of their significant others

00:51:43.700 | on t-shirts that were washed several times.

00:51:45.780 | So they can't consciously perceive it,

00:51:47.220 | but they say, this one smells like them.

00:51:49.440 | This one smells like my partner.

00:51:50.980 | And indeed the match was way above chance.

00:51:55.660 | So there does seem to be weak pheromonal effects,

00:51:58.560 | at least in my opinion, when I look at the data,

00:52:00.500 | but much more needs to be done.

00:52:02.240 | So one of the more interesting pheromone effects

00:52:05.240 | that impacts puberty, at least in animal models,

00:52:09.020 | is the so-called Vandenberg effect,

00:52:10.620 | which is if you take a pre-pubertal female,

00:52:14.380 | so a female that has not undergone sexual maturation,

00:52:18.580 | and you introduce a novel male that is not the father

00:52:22.700 | or a brother, not a sibling,

00:52:24.540 | she will undergo puberty almost immediately.

00:52:29.420 | So this is really striking.

00:52:30.580 | For years, this was thought not to occur in primate species,

00:52:33.500 | but there was a paper published last year

00:52:35.860 | in Current Biology Cell Press Journal, excellent journal,

00:52:38.780 | showing that mandrills, a particular type of primate,

00:52:42.980 | they exhibit this Vandenberg effect.

00:52:46.620 | There are also all sorts of other pheromone effects.

00:52:49.900 | There's the most infamous one is called the Bruce effect,

00:52:53.820 | where the introduction of a novel male

00:52:57.500 | to a pregnant female animal causes spontaneous miscarriage.

00:53:02.500 | And that effect seems to be protected against

00:53:07.000 | by the presence of the father.

00:53:08.640 | So another, you know, the interpretation of this,

00:53:12.260 | and I want to really highlight that these are animal studies,

00:53:16.480 | but the way this works is that if a pregnant female

00:53:21.480 | is in the company of the male that impregnated her,

00:53:25.720 | then her young are protected by his scent presence

00:53:30.560 | or his pheromone presence.

00:53:31.740 | But if he's gone and a novel male shows up,

00:53:36.100 | there's a tendency for her to spontaneously miscarry

00:53:40.020 | and essentially for the fetus to be lost.

00:53:43.800 | Now, whether or not this occurs in humans

00:53:45.440 | is still very controversial,

00:53:47.880 | but nonetheless, these pheromone effects exist.

00:53:50.900 | And that one is called the Bruce effect

00:53:54.140 | named after Hilda Bruce,

00:53:56.380 | who is the scientist that discovered it.

00:53:59.140 | The one that's relevant to the puberty discussion

00:54:01.580 | is the Vandenberg effect,

00:54:02.960 | which I mentioned a few minutes ago,

00:54:04.820 | which is a novel male showing up,

00:54:08.460 | has to be a sexually competent male.

00:54:10.000 | So he has to have already passed through puberty

00:54:12.980 | and his presence triggers activation of puberty

00:54:17.400 | in a female that otherwise would have remained

00:54:20.080 | pre-pubertal for longer.

00:54:21.680 | Again, whether or not this happens in humans, unclear.

00:54:25.000 | Well, what can we be sure about when we think about puberty?

00:54:30.000 | Puberty is triggered by a number of different factors.

00:54:33.020 | There are changes in GABA expression in the brain

00:54:35.200 | and inhibitory transmitter.

00:54:36.680 | One of the more interesting molecules that triggers puberty

00:54:40.040 | in all individuals is something called kisspeptin.

00:54:43.600 | K-I-S-S-P-E-P-T-I-N, kisspeptin.

00:54:48.600 | Kisspeptin is made by the brain

00:54:52.020 | and it stimulates large amounts of a different hormone

00:54:56.200 | called GnRH, gonadotropin-releasing hormone to be released.

00:55:01.080 | Gonadotropin-releasing hormone

00:55:02.800 | then causes the release of another hormone

00:55:04.480 | called something called luteinizing hormone or LH,

00:55:08.380 | which travels in the bloodstream

00:55:10.500 | and stimulates the ovaries of females to produce estrogen

00:55:13.920 | and the testes of males to produce testosterone.

00:55:16.960 | Kisspeptin has other effects as well,

00:55:20.500 | but those are some of the main ones

00:55:23.760 | as they relate to puberty.

00:55:25.760 | This is interesting because at this point,

00:55:28.640 | the testes in males start churning out tons of testosterone

00:55:32.280 | in order to trigger the development

00:55:34.280 | of secondary sexual characteristics,

00:55:36.660 | body hair and all the others, deepening of voice, et cetera.

00:55:39.280 | And in females, estrogen is doing various other things,

00:55:43.240 | breast development, et cetera.

00:55:44.740 | Normally in an adult, somebody who has passed puberty,

00:55:51.000 | a big increase in gonadotropin-releasing hormone

00:55:53.940 | and luteinizing hormone would eventually be shut down

00:55:56.880 | because the way that the brain works,

00:55:59.120 | the hypothalamus and the pituitary

00:56:01.000 | are actually measuring how much hormone is in the blood.

00:56:03.680 | And if testosterone or estrogen

00:56:05.520 | or any other hormone goes too high,

00:56:07.540 | they shut down the release of things

00:56:09.740 | like luteinizing hormone.

00:56:10.880 | It's called a negative feedback loop.

00:56:13.040 | It basically is like a thermostat in a house.

00:56:15.060 | It's more complicated than that,

00:56:16.180 | but once levels get too high in the bloodstream,

00:56:19.360 | it shuts down.

00:56:20.380 | But kisspeptin is able to drive very high levels

00:56:23.820 | of these hormones in an ongoing way

00:56:25.580 | so that puberty can commence and can continue.

00:56:28.320 | And incidentally, kisspeptin has now become

00:56:31.960 | yet another of the panoply of hormones and peptides

00:56:36.960 | and cocktails that athletes take

00:56:39.240 | in order to try and stimulate natural hormone production,

00:56:42.480 | essentially to create their own

00:56:44.000 | performance-enhancing drugs endogenously.

00:56:47.220 | No judgment there, but that's a fact.

00:56:48.900 | There's a lot of kisspeptin use.

00:56:50.680 | I'm truly not suggesting anyone do this,

00:56:53.520 | but people are buying and injecting kisspeptin

00:56:56.760 | for the specific reason that even past puberty

00:57:00.160 | can stimulate the large increases in things like estrogen,

00:57:04.720 | large increases in testosterone, and things of that sort.

00:57:07.820 | Has a number of psychological effects too.

00:57:10.220 | Seems to have big effects on libido, et cetera.

00:57:13.240 | All these things, of course, are subject to feedback loops,

00:57:16.400 | so they don't work indefinitely.

00:57:18.000 | And I'm going to highlight, again,

00:57:19.000 | I'm not suggesting anyone do it,

00:57:20.260 | but I do like to pay attention to what's out there.

00:57:23.000 | And kisspeptin, because it wasn't discovered that long ago,

00:57:26.120 | is one of the things that you don't often hear about

00:57:28.860 | when people talk about performance-enhancing drugs

00:57:31.760 | or therapeutic endocrinology.

00:57:33.960 | These things also have therapeutic uses

00:57:36.300 | in the endocrine setting.

00:57:39.260 | So for instance, kids that don't undergo puberty

00:57:41.360 | or kids that are hypogonadal or adults that are hypogonadal,

00:57:44.300 | they're not making enough hormone,

00:57:45.640 | will take things like kisspeptin, among other things.

00:57:49.740 | So that's how puberty happens at the biological level,

00:57:53.000 | gets triggered by leptin and kisspeptin.

00:57:54.960 | And then this young child is now a different creature

00:57:59.960 | to some extent.

00:58:02.240 | Not just because they're reproductively competent, of course,

00:58:05.580 | but because there's a shift in a number of the things

00:58:08.920 | that underlie these social bonds.

00:58:11.620 | There's a marked shift in a number of the things

00:58:15.440 | that allow children and adults

00:58:19.000 | to engage in predictive behavior about each other.

00:58:22.280 | And the whole nature of adolescence and puberty

00:58:26.120 | is to take a child that was a generalist

00:58:30.360 | and to make them a specialist.

00:58:31.900 | And this is very important

00:58:33.360 | as it relates to the conversation about emotionality.

00:58:36.540 | But it's important in terms of all aspects

00:58:40.000 | of brain function and in terms of learning

00:58:41.840 | and in terms of who each and every one of us

00:58:44.420 | will and has become.

00:58:45.920 | In adolescence and in childhood,

00:58:49.760 | sure, there are some genetic biases,

00:58:52.160 | hair color, eye color, height, and things like that.

00:58:54.760 | A lot of that's programmed into the genome.

00:58:56.960 | There are other genetic biases too, of course,

00:59:01.660 | that we inherit.

00:59:03.160 | But it's in adolescence and puberty

00:59:06.600 | that we go from essentially being somewhat good

00:59:09.480 | at a bunch of things or somewhat poor at a bunch of things

00:59:13.600 | to becoming very good at a few things

00:59:16.240 | and very poor at a lot of other things.

00:59:18.600 | And that's because of the relationship

00:59:20.000 | to puberty and neuroplasticity.

00:59:22.560 | This ability to change the brain in response to experience

00:59:25.120 | is starting to taper off such that by our early 20s,

00:59:29.320 | it's harder to achieve.

00:59:31.220 | Now, the transition from generalist to specialist

00:59:34.360 | is one aspect of adolescence and puberty,

00:59:36.780 | but the other is the formation of social

00:59:39.740 | and emotional bonds.

00:59:40.760 | And most of what consumes the minds

00:59:43.960 | and waking hours of adolescents and children

00:59:47.720 | who have gone through puberty and going through puberty

00:59:50.060 | is questions about how they relate to social structures,

00:59:54.720 | who they can rely on,

00:59:56.420 | and how they can make reliable predictions in the world

00:59:59.000 | now that they have more agency,

01:00:00.600 | that they are physically changed.

01:00:03.240 | In fact, you could argue that puberty

01:00:05.520 | is the fastest rate of maturation

01:00:07.200 | that you'll go through at any point in your life.

01:00:09.360 | It's the largest change that you'll go through

01:00:11.240 | at any point in your life in terms of who you are

01:00:14.640 | because your biology is fundamentally changed

01:00:16.680 | at the level of your brain and your bodily organs,

01:00:20.120 | all your organs from the skin inward.

01:00:23.240 | So I want to visit a little bit of the research

01:00:26.520 | about some of the core needs

01:00:29.320 | that occur during puberty and adolescence,

01:00:32.160 | not just for parents or for the people

01:00:33.740 | that might be in puberty and adolescence,

01:00:36.240 | but also so that people can reflect

01:00:38.440 | on which of these sort of boxes were checked off for them

01:00:42.800 | as they approached emotional maturity.

01:00:46.720 | So there's a terrific review article

01:00:49.040 | that was published in the journal "Nature,"

01:00:51.040 | which is, if not the premier,

01:00:53.520 | then certainly among the top three premier journals

01:00:56.520 | in the field of science

01:00:57.920 | about the biology of adolescence and puberty,

01:01:02.620 | as well as some of the core needs and demands

01:01:06.520 | that have to be met for successful emotional maturation

01:01:09.800 | during that time.

01:01:11.320 | We will provide a link to that,

01:01:13.060 | but I just want to highlight a few of the things

01:01:15.980 | that they place in the final table.

01:01:18.200 | I don't want to go through all the results right now

01:01:20.100 | because you could do that on your own if you like.

01:01:22.440 | They mainly highlight a lot of the changes in neurons

01:01:26.240 | and neural circuits.

01:01:27.480 | For instance, I'll just highlight one.

01:01:29.500 | There's a connection between the dopamine centers

01:01:32.180 | in the brain and an area of the brain

01:01:33.980 | that's involved in emotion and dispersal.

01:01:37.640 | Dispersal is very interesting.

01:01:39.240 | What you observe in animals and humans

01:01:41.760 | is that around the end of adolescence

01:01:45.400 | and during the transition to puberty,

01:01:47.580 | both because of changes in the brain

01:01:49.560 | and changes in hormones,

01:01:51.320 | there's an intense desire on the part of the child

01:01:57.000 | to get further and further away from primary caregivers.

01:02:02.000 | Not permanently, they always return,

01:02:04.040 | similar to a child that walks off and then looks back

01:02:06.760 | and sees if everything's safe and then continues on.

01:02:09.980 | During adolescence and puberty,

01:02:12.040 | both in animals and in kids,

01:02:14.480 | it almost seems like there's a bias for action

01:02:16.760 | and the action is always in a direction away

01:02:19.520 | from the primary caregiver.

01:02:21.120 | Now, as soon as I say that,

01:02:22.780 | I can just imagine in my mind

01:02:24.120 | that somebody out there saying,

01:02:25.080 | "Well, no, my kid, as soon as they hit puberty,

01:02:27.400 | they just want to stay home with us all the time."

01:02:29.640 | That's not typical.

01:02:30.800 | It happens, but it's not typical.

01:02:32.540 | Mostly there's a desire to start spending

01:02:34.600 | more time with friends, more time with peers,

01:02:36.640 | and less time with adults.

01:02:39.080 | And I find it extremely interesting to note

01:02:41.200 | that that's not just true in humans,

01:02:42.740 | that's true in other primate species,

01:02:44.960 | that's true in rodents,

01:02:46.320 | that's true in almost every other mammalian species.

01:02:50.180 | So there's something about these hormones

01:02:52.300 | that don't just allow sexual reproduction.

01:02:55.660 | They don't just change the brain and bodily organs

01:02:57.680 | and the shape of us.

01:02:59.580 | They also bias us towards dispersal,

01:03:03.080 | getting further and further away

01:03:04.400 | from primary caregivers in particular.

01:03:06.240 | So parents of teenagers or future teenagers,

01:03:08.980 | it is not just normal,

01:03:10.840 | it is baked in to the biology of humans

01:03:14.240 | to disperse around adolescents and in the teen years.

01:03:18.160 | So again, I just want to highlight a few of these,

01:03:20.700 | what were listed as intervention strategies

01:03:24.680 | to promote healthy adolescence and puberty.

01:03:27.760 | And it's very interesting because the entire article,

01:03:31.000 | I should mention who wrote this article, apologies,

01:03:35.880 | one of them is a friend of mine.

01:03:37.480 | So the first author is Ronald Dahl,

01:03:40.400 | not the children's book author, I'm assuming.

01:03:43.020 | No, from the School of Public Health

01:03:45.800 | at University of California, Berkeley.

01:03:48.460 | And Nicholas Allen, Linda Wilbrecht,

01:03:51.800 | and Anna Ballenhof-Suleman,

01:03:54.520 | forgive me for the pronunciation of the last one.

01:03:56.160 | I know Dr. Wilbrecht quite well,

01:03:58.840 | she's done the work on dispersal,

01:04:01.300 | is quite well known for that work.

01:04:04.320 | And it's a very extensive review,

01:04:07.400 | but I think you'll find it accessible.

01:04:10.320 | Lot of changes in thickness of the brain

01:04:12.840 | at different stages, et cetera.

01:04:14.200 | But I think most people will be interested

01:04:15.800 | in what that translates to in the real world.

01:04:20.640 | And what's interesting is during puberty,

01:04:24.120 | there's increased connection, connectivity as we call it,

01:04:28.000 | between the prefrontal cortex,

01:04:29.340 | which is involved in motivation and decision-making,

01:04:32.260 | being able to suppress action for making long-term goals

01:04:36.740 | possible, as well as dopamine centers and the amygdala.

01:04:41.160 | So there's this really broad integration and testing,

01:04:44.580 | I think this is the key element here,

01:04:46.180 | testing of circuits for emotions and reward

01:04:49.400 | as they relate to decisions.

01:04:51.140 | And I think that's useful because when you look

01:04:53.880 | at the behavior of adolescents and teens,

01:04:55.700 | they are testing social interactions,

01:04:57.480 | they are testing physical interactions with the world.

01:05:00.540 | Oftentimes they're engaging in unsafe behavior

01:05:03.080 | and you can't just, I would never try and justify that

01:05:07.620 | with the underlying neurology,

01:05:09.680 | but the neuroscience points to increased connectivity

01:05:13.520 | between areas of the brain that are related to emotionality

01:05:16.880 | and to threat detection like the amygdala, but also reward.

01:05:21.440 | So it's a time of testing behaviorally

01:05:23.880 | how different behaviors lead to success or not.

01:05:27.500 | It's how different behaviors lead to fear states or not.

01:05:31.200 | Now, of course you could say that of any stage

01:05:32.640 | of development, but it seems like puberty

01:05:34.320 | is a very, very heightened stage in which testing

01:05:37.920 | of contingencies, good or bad, is taking place.

01:05:41.240 | And of course this is happening,

01:05:42.800 | it's operating in a body that's now more capable

01:05:45.620 | than the infant.

01:05:46.760 | So an infant can damage themselves through error,

01:05:50.120 | but it's harder for them to damage themselves

01:05:52.700 | through deliberate planning.

01:05:54.660 | That's why it's important, of course,

01:05:55.720 | to lock up all the medications in the house,

01:05:57.760 | make sure infants can't get to them,

01:05:59.640 | but it's not likely that the infant is going to devise

01:06:03.780 | an extremely diabolical plan to get into the cabinet

01:06:07.060 | to get a certain substance, whereas a teenager might, right?

01:06:12.000 | So you can start to map the neurology

01:06:14.440 | onto some of this emotional exploration.

01:06:16.980 | I do realize that this episode is about emotions.

01:06:19.240 | Puberty is a time in which the internal state

01:06:22.620 | of the person or the animal is being sampled

01:06:26.280 | and tested against different extra receptive events,

01:06:29.200 | only now they are able to guide those events

01:06:32.440 | with more agency, right?

01:06:34.520 | It's no longer just about whether or not the caregiver

01:06:36.900 | is bringing you milk or bringing you food.

01:06:39.280 | Now, of course, the parents will all say,

01:06:40.740 | "Yeah, but I'm paying for everything that they're doing.

01:06:42.520 | I'm paying for the car and I'm paying for the food."

01:06:44.560 | Ah, true, but the biology doesn't care about the source.

01:06:49.020 | The child or the adolescent is now able,

01:06:52.360 | the teen really, is able to now sample many,

01:06:55.720 | many more extra receptive events through behavior.

01:06:59.440 | So some of these recommendations are interesting.

01:07:01.800 | The theory is that one of the motivations

01:07:04.880 | is to learn to mitigate the risk of famine and malnutrition.

01:07:08.400 | As teenagers get older, they start questioning

01:07:10.920 | whether or not their parents

01:07:12.660 | are everything they thought they were,

01:07:14.280 | whether or not they're the greatest thing that ever was

01:07:17.080 | or the worst thing that ever was perhaps,

01:07:20.360 | including whether or not they will be able to provide them

01:07:22.620 | resources so they test whether or not

01:07:24.400 | they can actually feed themselves,

01:07:26.100 | whether or not they can support themselves.

01:07:28.960 | Although rarely, not certainly it happens,

01:07:32.480 | but rarely are they really taking care of themselves.

01:07:35.360 | Although some teens are forced to take care of themselves,

01:07:37.520 | of course, because parents and other caretakers

01:07:39.940 | aren't available.

01:07:41.320 | The recommendations that map to the biology include later,

01:07:45.300 | there's been a big push for later start times in schools

01:07:48.160 | to match their shifts in circadian rhythms

01:07:50.680 | and the need for extended sleep,

01:07:51.960 | something we talked about during the sleep episodes,

01:07:54.560 | to insist on sleep interventions for youth

01:08:00.080 | who are at increased risk for mental health problems.

01:08:02.900 | Almost every mental health issue is supported

01:08:06.160 | by getting regular quality sleep of sufficient duration.

01:08:10.400 | Sufficient duration is going to vary from person to person.

01:08:13.080 | Leveraging different kinds of social relationships

01:08:16.480 | that reinforce positive behavior.

01:08:18.400 | This is starting to sound like kind of a boilerplate stuff.

01:08:21.480 | And yet, really the goal is during puberty

01:08:24.440 | to encourage as many safe forms of interaction

01:08:28.200 | that allow children, teens really, and adolescents,

01:08:32.220 | I keep calling them children,

01:08:33.180 | but what I mean are children going through puberty,

01:08:36.160 | that allow them to test this thing of autonomy

01:08:39.360 | so that they can start to make good assessments

01:08:43.440 | about their extra receptive events that they are selecting

01:08:47.760 | and how those make them feel internally.

01:08:49.440 | So they're essentially doing a buffet.

01:08:51.280 | The buffet has now broadened

01:08:53.000 | to not just include the events and experiences

01:08:56.280 | that their parents and other caretakers bring them,

01:08:58.540 | but they can now expand the buffet

01:09:00.520 | into things that they can provide themselves.

01:09:03.080 | And so adolescence and puberty

01:09:05.800 | is really seen as the period of development

01:09:08.280 | in which one self samples for these two elements

01:09:11.520 | that we talked about at the beginning,

01:09:12.960 | which are how do I form bonds

01:09:16.360 | and how do I make predictions

01:09:17.840 | about what will make me feel good

01:09:19.600 | at a level of interoception?

01:09:22.600 | Some of that might sound a little transactional,

01:09:25.520 | that all we're trying to do is figure out

01:09:27.440 | how we can bond with people so we can get what we need

01:09:30.640 | so we can feel how we need.

01:09:32.720 | I think that's true to some extent.

01:09:34.320 | Of course, there's a richer,

01:09:35.840 | more abstract aspect to relationships too,

01:09:40.560 | which are in relationships

01:09:42.040 | you can access things you couldn't do before,

01:09:43.960 | you can cooperate, there's things like teamwork,

01:09:46.280 | you can do all sorts of things.

01:09:48.140 | But in terms of the biology,

01:09:49.820 | it's clear that there's this stage of development

01:09:52.120 | where more autonomy, more physical capability

01:09:56.240 | is triggered by these hormone changes in the brain

01:09:58.880 | and these peptide changes in the brain and body.

01:10:01.320 | And that nonetheless brings us back

01:10:04.280 | to the exact same model that we started with in infancy

01:10:07.780 | of alert or calm, feel good or feel bad,

01:10:12.400 | primarily exterocepting, primarily interocepting.

01:10:16.980 | So I keep going back to this.

01:10:18.380 | I'm sort of like a repeating record on that

01:10:20.500 | because the same core algorithm,

01:10:22.900 | the same core function is at play throughout the lifespan.

01:10:26.740 | And that's a useful framework in my opinion,

01:10:29.340 | because it allows you to sort through

01:10:31.620 | all the data and information that's out there about,

01:10:33.780 | well, this area, the stria terminalis is active

01:10:36.020 | or the basolateral amygdala is active

01:10:37.700 | or gray matter thickening or this hormone or that hormone

01:10:40.580 | and return to a kind of kernel

01:10:43.360 | of certainly not exhaustive truth.

01:10:45.820 | It doesn't cover all aspects of emotionality,

01:10:48.140 | but at least establishes some groundwork

01:10:51.140 | from which you can start to evaluate

01:10:52.860 | how different behaviors might or might not make sense,

01:10:56.780 | how certain emotional responses

01:10:58.580 | might or might not make sense,

01:11:00.340 | regardless of the age of the person or the organism.

01:11:03.620 | A discussion about emotions would not be complete

01:11:06.760 | without talking about the right brain, left brain stuff.

01:11:11.760 | And this is a very interesting aspect of sociology,

01:11:17.100 | psychology, and neuroscience.

01:11:19.040 | There's a theory of emotional development

01:11:22.220 | that I find particularly interesting,

01:11:24.840 | which is from Alan Shore at UCLA,

01:11:26.940 | that talks about how most of our testing of bonds

01:11:29.920 | and relationships is this seesawing back and forth

01:11:33.120 | between very dopaminergic, so driven by dopamine

01:11:36.320 | or serotonergic, driven by serotonin states.

01:11:39.620 | And this starts with infant and mother

01:11:41.820 | or infant and father.

01:11:43.200 | I talked a little bit about this in the previous episode,

01:11:45.200 | but just to remind you or for anyone

01:11:47.300 | that didn't hear about it, that during development,

01:11:50.040 | healthy emotional development clearly begins

01:11:53.780 | with an ability for the caretaker and child

01:11:56.680 | to be in calm, peaceful, soothing, touch-oriented,

01:12:00.280 | eye-gazing type of behaviors.

01:12:02.780 | Those really drive serotonin,

01:12:05.080 | the endogenous opioid system, oxytocin,

01:12:09.720 | things that are very calming

01:12:10.920 | and are centered around pleasure with the here and now,

01:12:14.020 | as well as excited states of what we're going to do next.

01:12:17.080 | There's actually a kind of characteristic sign

01:12:19.600 | of the dopaminergic interaction

01:12:22.300 | where both caretaker and child are wide-eyed,

01:12:26.400 | the pupils dilate, that's a signature of arousal.

01:12:28.880 | They get really excited.

01:12:29.820 | Oftentimes the baby will look away

01:12:31.360 | if it gets really excited.

01:12:32.600 | Those are signatures of dopamine release in the body.

01:12:35.620 | And in adolescence, these same things carry forward

01:12:38.800 | where their good bonds are achieved

01:12:41.680 | through hanging around, watching TV,

01:12:44.400 | just kind of being there, playing video games

01:12:47.500 | or texting together or talking,

01:12:49.460 | whatever it is that the soothing local activity

01:12:52.380 | happens to be, as well as adventure

01:12:54.740 | and things that are exciting.

01:12:56.040 | So it could be sports, it could be shopping,

01:12:57.820 | it could be a summer adventure,

01:12:59.840 | it could be the next big thing.

01:13:01.720 | And so this kind of seesawing back and forth

01:13:03.560 | between the different reward systems

01:13:05.640 | seems to be the basis

01:13:08.360 | from which healthy emotional bonds are created.

01:13:10.780 | And I invite anyone who's interested in this

01:13:12.460 | to look up some of Dr. Schor's work.

01:13:16.100 | I think I misspoke on the last episode.

01:13:18.660 | He's not a psychiatrist.

01:13:19.600 | He's a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst,

01:13:22.220 | but has deep rootings in neuroscience.

01:13:24.160 | So it's, I think, a fascinating aspect.

01:13:27.080 | But the way it's framed in that book and in his book

01:13:31.180 | and in some of the language around that

01:13:32.340 | is around right brain, left brain.

01:13:34.380 | And we've all heard this stuff before

01:13:35.880 | that the right brain is thought to be the emotional side.

01:13:39.240 | This is the characteristic thing that you hear out there,

01:13:41.780 | that the right brain is holistic, that it's emotive,

01:13:45.020 | and that the left brain is logical,

01:13:46.660 | sequential, and analytic.

01:13:48.380 | And that's not what Schor was proposing.

01:13:52.500 | There are some right brain, left brain differences,

01:13:54.760 | but the idea that the right brain is synthetic,

01:13:58.260 | holistic, and emotive,

01:13:59.740 | and that the left brain is logical,

01:14:01.140 | sequential, and analytic is false.

01:14:04.420 | There is zero neuroscience evidence for that whatsoever.

01:14:08.220 | We're going to address this in more detail

01:14:11.460 | during a month talking about learning and memory

01:14:13.540 | and dementia, but let's talk about some truths,

01:14:16.860 | some differences between the left brain and right brain,

01:14:19.000 | because we can't have a discussion about emotion

01:14:20.740 | without doing that.

01:14:21.700 | The left brain, at least for people who are right-handed,

01:14:27.300 | is linguistically dominant,

01:14:29.100 | meaning most of language is centered

01:14:31.780 | in the left side of the brain for right-handed people.

01:14:35.680 | If you were a left-hander

01:14:38.140 | and you were forced to become right-handed,

01:14:41.140 | chances are this is still true

01:14:43.900 | because of when language gets laid down in the brain.

01:14:47.760 | For left-handers, people that naturally write

01:14:51.060 | with their left hand and always did,

01:14:53.600 | language is still mostly in the left side of the brain,

01:14:57.580 | but it's also found more often

01:15:01.180 | in the right side of the brain,

01:15:02.480 | so it's not as lateralized as we say,

01:15:04.780 | it's kind of distributed between both, okay?

01:15:06.800 | So right-handers, most of your language

01:15:08.860 | is coming from the left side of your brain.

01:15:10.960 | Left-handers, it's probably

01:15:12.140 | a little bit more evenly distributed.

01:15:13.900 | And there are some variations,

01:15:15.060 | whether or not you're a hook righty or a hook lefty,

01:15:17.740 | there's all sorts of nuance to this,

01:15:19.240 | but that's the general aspect.

01:15:22.020 | So language tends to be centered

01:15:23.780 | in the left side of the brain,

01:15:24.940 | and that includes lexicon, grammar, syntax, all of it,

01:15:28.720 | except for one.

01:15:29.780 | And we'll talk about one aspect of language

01:15:31.500 | that seems to be more right brain that's very interesting.

01:15:35.920 | There does seem to be some arithmetic advantage,

01:15:40.100 | so ability in math, in the left side of the brain.

01:15:43.660 | And I'm going to talk about

01:15:44.500 | how all this was discovered in a minute.

01:15:46.940 | The right brain, however, is linguistically primitive.

01:15:51.020 | Most people don't realize this

01:15:52.060 | because the right brain is always described

01:15:53.660 | as the emotive side, it's super emotional and holistic,

01:15:56.820 | but it's actually linguistically primitive.

01:15:59.140 | And there's a way that that's been teased out

01:16:01.620 | through experiment.

01:16:03.240 | It's very good at manipulating spatial things

01:16:06.640 | and visual spatial tasks.

01:16:08.960 | It's primarily handling that stuff,

01:16:10.940 | but it's sort of non-language, except one aspect.

01:16:15.000 | And there isn't a ton of evidence for this,

01:16:16.620 | but the evidence is strong, which is prosody.

01:16:19.580 | Prosody is the lilting and falling of language.

01:16:23.920 | So a good example would be Italian.

01:16:26.940 | I don't speak Italian.

01:16:27.860 | I only know a little bit of Italian,

01:16:29.660 | but most of the Italian I know

01:16:31.260 | is when my Italian colleagues have said to me,

01:16:34.280 | [speaking in foreign language]

01:16:35.120 | which means like, what are you trying to say?

01:16:36.540 | Or what are you saying?

01:16:37.380 | I think I'm getting that right.

01:16:39.100 | Basically, they're saying I don't speak Italian,

01:16:40.560 | which is true.

01:16:41.540 | Or because one of them knows and loves Costello very much,

01:16:45.500 | they always say, [speaking in foreign language]

01:16:47.460 | which means big lazy guy,

01:16:49.220 | which accurately captures Costello.

01:16:51.500 | So even those few examples, right?

01:16:54.780 | [speaking in foreign language]

01:16:57.420 | There's a lot of lilt and fall in Italian.

01:16:59.980 | Other languages, not so much, and it varies by language.

01:17:02.520 | One of the reasons I find Italian so beautiful,

01:17:04.580 | not the Italian I speak,

01:17:05.660 | but the Italian that other people speak,

01:17:07.640 | so beautiful to listen to is that prosody

01:17:10.180 | and the shifts in intonation are really quite remarkable.

01:17:13.980 | It's almost like a sing song, listening to them speak.

01:17:17.320 | And I used to like to go to scientific meetings

01:17:19.000 | and I always hang out with the Italians

01:17:20.700 | 'cause I have some good friends in Italian labs,

01:17:22.680 | but also 'cause they always knew where the best food was.

01:17:24.400 | Their standards for food are incredible.

01:17:26.620 | They would rather starve than eat terrible pasta.

01:17:29.300 | And the pasta they do find

01:17:30.660 | and that they're willing to eat is always fantastic.

01:17:33.080 | But in addition to that, they always brought a guitar.

01:17:35.420 | They were a lot more fun than a lot of my other colleagues

01:17:37.900 | to hang out with at meetings.

01:17:39.300 | So in any event, the right brain is doing things

01:17:42.300 | that are more about manipulating spatial information.

01:17:45.220 | And I'll talk about this more in a future episode,

01:17:47.340 | but this was discovered in split brain patients,

01:17:50.800 | so people that lack connection

01:17:52.060 | between the two sides of the brain.

01:17:53.940 | And this had to be teased out

01:17:55.500 | through very complicated experiments.

01:17:56.860 | People like Roger Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize for this,

01:17:59.340 | who was at Caltech, Mike Gazzaniga and others,

01:18:02.340 | figured out these lateralized differences.

01:18:05.780 | But let's just try and demolish the myth

01:18:09.240 | that the right side is synthetic and holistic and emotive

01:18:13.620 | and that the left side is logical, sequential and analytic,

01:18:15.900 | that you're a left brain person or a right brain person.

01:18:18.340 | Nothing could be further from the truth.

01:18:19.780 | There's no scientific evidence to support that.

01:18:21.820 | And there's a few lesion studies that can tease out effects

01:18:25.280 | that make you think that's what's happening,

01:18:27.560 | but the really careful work

01:18:29.100 | points in a totally different direction.

01:18:31.180 | We can't have a complete conversation about emotions

01:18:34.780 | and bonds and social connection

01:18:36.580 | without talking about oxytocin.

01:18:38.700 | Oxytocin has come to such prominence

01:18:40.700 | in the last decade or so, and seems to be everywhere.

01:18:43.800 | Anytime you hear a discussion about neuroscience

01:18:46.560 | in the brain or hormones in the brain,

01:18:49.480 | oxytocin is released in response to lactation in females.

01:18:55.840 | It is released in response to sexual interactions.

01:19:00.640 | It is released in response to non-sexual touch.

01:19:05.140 | It's released in males and females.

01:19:08.220 | And indeed it's involved in pair bonding

01:19:11.380 | and the establishment of social bonds in general.

01:19:14.480 | How it does that seems to be by matching internal state.

01:19:21.180 | It seems to both increase synchrony

01:19:24.680 | of internal state somehow.

01:19:26.860 | Maybe it sets a level of calmness or alertness.

01:19:29.460 | That seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

01:19:31.640 | As well as raising people's awareness

01:19:35.640 | for the emotional state of their partner.

01:19:39.260 | And again, this brings us back to this alertness

01:19:42.300 | calmness axis and this interoceptive, exteroceptive axis.

01:19:46.620 | In order to form good bonds,

01:19:49.100 | we can't just be thinking about how we feel.

01:19:52.260 | We also need to be paying attention to how others feel.

01:19:54.880 | And we're evaluating a match.

01:19:57.260 | We're trying to see whether or not there seems

01:19:59.340 | to be some sort of synchrony between states.

01:20:02.460 | And oxytocin both seems to increase that synchrony

01:20:06.220 | and increase the awareness for the emotional state of others.

01:20:10.400 | Now, I know many of you are probably screaming

01:20:13.220 | mirror neurons, mirror neurons.

01:20:15.520 | Mirror neurons, as some of you may know

01:20:17.540 | and some of you perhaps may not,

01:20:19.580 | are neurons that were discovered in animals and humans

01:20:22.780 | for their ability to respond

01:20:26.460 | when people engaged in certain physical actions

01:20:29.780 | like lifting of a pen.

01:20:31.200 | But the same neurons would respond

01:20:33.600 | when somebody watched someone else lift a pen.

01:20:37.100 | So they were really mirrors of,

01:20:39.580 | or representing mirrors of behavior

01:20:43.000 | both in self and in others.

01:20:44.860 | Mirror neurons are very controversial.

01:20:49.000 | There are many neuroscientists who I respect a lot

01:20:51.160 | who don't think they exist

01:20:53.440 | because they look at the data and the data,

01:20:56.900 | at least in their mind,

01:20:57.740 | were over-interpreted in the realm of empathy

01:21:01.460 | and in assigning value to the emotional states of others.

01:21:05.340 | And when I look at the literature,

01:21:06.880 | my opinion is that indeed there are neurons in the brain

01:21:11.880 | that clearly represent the actions of others,

01:21:15.360 | but it's not clear that they're wired into the emotion

01:21:17.580 | and empathy system in any direct way.

01:21:19.840 | And I think the growing consensus is that mirror neurons,

01:21:22.620 | while the name is terrific, is so catchy

01:21:27.200 | and encompasses so much of what you would love for it

01:21:29.220 | to encompass, but that the data don't really support that.

01:21:32.060 | But this is controversial

01:21:33.100 | and I'm perfectly happy to get experts on here

01:21:35.920 | that could debate it better than I could.

01:21:38.940 | There are, however, neurons in the brain

01:21:42.220 | that were discovered by my colleague, Karen Harush

01:21:45.340 | at Stanford when she was working in Noam Ziv's lab

01:21:49.460 | that clearly point to the fact that primate species

01:21:56.840 | are making assumptions and are trying to predict

01:22:00.880 | the behavior of other members of their species.

01:22:03.860 | It's an experiment I don't have time

01:22:05.020 | to go into in real detail,

01:22:06.140 | which probably just get Karen on here.

01:22:07.940 | For those of you that are familiar

01:22:09.120 | with the prisoner's dilemma,

01:22:10.260 | which is really a model of cooperation,

01:22:13.120 | you can either cooperate

01:22:14.500 | or one member of a given interaction can cooperate

01:22:18.860 | and the other one won't, or you can both not cooperate.

01:22:22.460 | There are ways in which you can solve

01:22:24.820 | this so-called prisoner's dilemma by looking

01:22:27.400 | at previous behavior and making predictions

01:22:29.940 | about the likely next behavior

01:22:32.840 | that the other individual will engage in.

01:22:35.560 | And there do seem to be neurons

01:22:36.960 | that are doing these sorts of predictions or computations.

01:22:40.800 | And again, I'll go into this in more detail in the future.

01:22:44.660 | So rather than think about mirror neurons,

01:22:46.480 | like neurons for empathy, I think it's more correct

01:22:50.620 | to think about neurons that are trying

01:22:52.340 | to predict the behavior of others.

01:22:54.260 | And that's, as we said, one of the core features

01:22:57.020 | of emotions, which are to establish bonds

01:23:01.420 | and through those bonds to be able to predict behavior.

01:23:03.980 | So oxytocin is one component of this ability

01:23:07.580 | to predict others' behavior and to guide our own behavior.

01:23:11.420 | So here's some experiments that involve the administration

01:23:15.620 | of intranasal oxytocin.

01:23:17.460 | This is actually, people now,

01:23:19.220 | I think you need a prescription,

01:23:20.420 | although in some places you don't.

01:23:21.640 | There are people who are taking intranasal oxytocin

01:23:24.440 | in order to try and increase the depth of bonding.

01:23:27.360 | And I don't recommend you do that.

01:23:29.560 | I've never tried that.

01:23:31.000 | Whatever oxytocin I've released,

01:23:32.480 | I've made without an intranasal exogenous application.

01:23:37.200 | But what's been reported

01:23:39.520 | is increased positive communication among couples.

01:23:43.040 | So people have taken intranasal oxytocin in studies.

01:23:46.600 | So that study, just for those of you who like,

01:23:48.920 | was published in biological psychiatry,

01:23:50.460 | which my psychiatry colleagues tell me is a fine journal.

01:23:53.940 | And the title is intranasal oxytocin

01:23:56.040 | increases positive communication

01:23:57.820 | and reduces the stress hormone cortisol levels

01:24:00.300 | during couple conflict.

01:24:01.780 | They have them fight,

01:24:04.460 | or they have them fight with and without oxytocin.

01:24:07.880 | So interesting.

01:24:08.720 | Very much in line with the idea that oxytocin

01:24:12.300 | is the quote unquote trust hormone.

01:24:14.820 | That's in keeping with that.

01:24:16.880 | That was a 2009 paper.

01:24:19.580 | There's other evidence, for instance,

01:24:21.240 | that men report a greater sense of connection

01:24:24.600 | and intimacy with their partners during sex

01:24:27.360 | after taking intranasal oxytocin.

01:24:30.040 | There are studies in autistic children

01:24:32.640 | giving them intranasal oxytocin

01:24:34.500 | as a way to try and help them

01:24:36.660 | establish better social connection

01:24:39.200 | and quote unquote empathy or theory of mind.

01:24:42.780 | I've talked about theory of mind before,

01:24:44.440 | where understanding of what other children

01:24:48.260 | or adults are experiencing.

01:24:50.180 | So oxytocin does seem to create these general effects

01:24:54.740 | and how nuanced they are in one situation or another,

01:24:58.820 | I don't know.

01:24:59.820 | I'm aware and I was told,

01:25:01.400 | and I'm definitely not recommending this,

01:25:02.900 | that there's a marketed oxytocin ketamine nasal spray.

01:25:07.340 | Now I have no idea.

01:25:08.920 | Maybe someone can put in the comments

01:25:10.800 | why you'd want to combine oxytocin and ketamine.

01:25:14.200 | I can't imagine why.

01:25:15.960 | Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic

01:25:18.220 | that's used for the treatment of PTSD,

01:25:20.520 | used to be used as a recreational drug.

01:25:23.340 | It's very similar to PCP, seems quite dangerous in fact.

01:25:27.720 | I don't know why those two things would be combined,

01:25:32.700 | why one would want to combine them,

01:25:34.620 | but there are products out there

01:25:36.980 | that seem to combine those two things.

01:25:38.560 | And I'm not certain why one would do that,

01:25:41.560 | but it's interesting to note that it's happening.

01:25:45.180 | A particularly interesting study about oxytocin

01:25:47.420 | is that that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience,

01:25:49.620 | which is a good journal,

01:25:50.820 | that oxytocin modulates social distance

01:25:54.220 | between males and females.

01:25:56.500 | So this is interesting.

01:25:57.480 | What they did is they gave oxytocin

01:26:00.140 | to people that were in monogamous relationships,

01:26:03.460 | and then they evaluated the extent to which the,

01:26:06.620 | in this case, the males in those relationships

01:26:08.420 | would pay attention to,

01:26:10.020 | visual attention to attractive other potential partners.

01:26:14.080 | And it seemed like that the general takeaway from the study

01:26:16.820 | is that oxytocin administration

01:26:18.580 | seemed to promote monogamous behavior.

01:26:20.900 | So behavior that was in line with monogamy

01:26:22.900 | of the relationship that they were in,

01:26:24.420 | as opposed to foraging for potentially new mates.

01:26:28.000 | Now, of course, these are somewhat artificial experiments

01:26:30.240 | or very artificial experiments,

01:26:31.580 | depending on how you interpret them.

01:26:33.360 | But the general theme is that oxytocin

01:26:36.900 | is promoting monogamy, it's promoting pair bonding,

01:26:41.460 | it's promoting a understanding

01:26:44.260 | of the internal state of others,

01:26:46.820 | which requires enhanced exteroception

01:26:49.300 | for those particular others.

01:26:50.840 | So not just generally having them look everywhere

01:26:54.020 | and see what's going on in the world,

01:26:55.220 | but particularly paying attention

01:26:57.220 | to the emotional states of others.

01:26:59.680 | I'm sure several of you will be asking,

01:27:01.220 | well, what can I do to increase oxytocin,

01:27:03.540 | if that's your goal?

01:27:04.700 | There's some evidence,

01:27:05.680 | and I invite you again to go to examine.com

01:27:08.460 | or another such site like PubMed,

01:27:11.140 | if you want to forge PubMed,

01:27:12.740 | that vitamin D is required for proper production,

01:27:16.300 | and in some cases can increase levels of oxytocin

01:27:19.660 | when supplemented, which is interesting.

01:27:21.820 | And that, believe it or not, melatonin,

01:27:23.860 | our old friend melatonin,

01:27:24.900 | which I have pushed back against as a supplement for sleep

01:27:29.340 | because of some of what I view

01:27:32.160 | as untoward side effects of melatonin in most cases.

01:27:35.320 | But it seems like melatonin, in some cases,

01:27:38.220 | can prime the system for slightly increased

01:27:43.100 | oxytocin release.

01:27:44.660 | There's even one report,

01:27:45.840 | although it didn't look that strong to me,

01:27:48.220 | that low doses of caffeine could increase oxytocin release,

01:27:51.820 | but that to me falls under the category

01:27:54.500 | of what was once described as a drug

01:27:57.900 | when injected into a person or animal

01:28:00.060 | is always effective at producing a scientific paper,

01:28:02.760 | meaning that you can get a result,

01:28:04.180 | but the result isn't always so robust.

01:28:06.160 | So you always want to read past the titles and the abstracts

01:28:08.480 | and get into the meat of the paper.

01:28:10.260 | And when I did that,

01:28:11.420 | the effects were pretty negligible with caffeine on oxytocin.

01:28:14.520 | But it's interesting that vitamin D and melatonin

01:28:16.880 | may have some positive effects on oxytocin release.

01:28:19.600 | But like I said, many people are just taking oxytocin

01:28:22.360 | directly through these intranasal sprays.

01:28:24.700 | I'm pretty sure it's prescription in most places, but check.

01:28:28.220 | And again, I'm not recommending anybody do that.

01:28:30.320 | I've never tried it.

01:28:31.520 | I don't know that I will.

01:28:32.360 | I think I'm going to stick with the oxytocin that I've got.

01:28:35.280 | The other molecule that we make that's extremely important

01:28:38.180 | for social bonds and emotionality

01:28:40.520 | is one that we're going to talk about more

01:28:41.900 | in the month on hormones, and that's vasopressin.

01:28:45.560 | Vasopressin suppresses urination.

01:28:48.540 | It was actually developed, it's made by the body,

01:28:51.960 | but it was developed as a treatment

01:28:53.920 | for something called diabetes insipidus

01:28:55.840 | where people urinate excessively

01:28:58.120 | and they actually risk dehydration

01:28:59.840 | and they can lose a lot of electrolytes, et cetera.

01:29:02.000 | So it causes water retention.

01:29:03.900 | Alcohol consumption inhibits vasopressin.

01:29:06.920 | So large amounts of alcohol,

01:29:08.360 | made people excrete a lot of fluid and so forth.

01:29:11.900 | Vasopressin has effects on the brain directly.

01:29:15.260 | It actually creates feelings of giddy love.

01:29:18.920 | It also increases memory in very potent ways.

01:29:22.660 | There's a whole biohacking community

01:29:24.900 | that has been dabbling with vasopressin for some time.

01:29:29.180 | I have never tried it.

01:29:30.060 | I certainly don't recommend it.

01:29:31.100 | It is prescription and it is a pretty serious compound

01:29:35.680 | to start messing with

01:29:39.400 | because it has so many different effects in the body.

01:29:42.000 | It's interesting because it creates the sense of giddy love.

01:29:46.460 | It's also used somewhat as an aphrodisiac.

01:29:49.960 | So it's similar to oxytocin.

01:29:52.380 | It also has very interesting effects on monogamous

01:29:55.160 | or non-monogamous behavior.

01:29:57.320 | This, again, we will revisit in the future,

01:29:59.440 | but there's a beautiful set of experiments

01:30:02.360 | that have been done in a little rodent species

01:30:04.460 | called a prairie vole.

01:30:05.880 | It turns out there are two different populations

01:30:07.440 | of prairie voles.

01:30:08.280 | Some are monogamous.

01:30:09.120 | They always mate with the same other prairie vole

01:30:12.720 | and some are very robustly non-monogamous.

01:30:16.280 | They mate with as many other prairie voles as they can.

01:30:18.640 | And it turns out that levels of vasopressin

01:30:20.800 | and/or vasopressin receptor dictate

01:30:23.040 | whether or not they're monogamous or not.

01:30:24.920 | And there's actually some interesting evidence in humans

01:30:27.560 | when people report their behavior,

01:30:29.480 | assuming they're reporting it accurately,

01:30:31.520 | that vasopressin and vasopressin levels

01:30:34.000 | can relate to monogamy or non-monogamy in humans as well.

01:30:37.400 | We're going to talk about this in the month on hormones.

01:30:40.960 | If we're talking about the neuroscience of emotions,

01:30:42.780 | we have to talk about the vagus nerve.

01:30:45.160 | I described what the vagus nerve is in a previous episode.

01:30:48.160 | That's these connections between the body and the viscera,

01:30:51.520 | including the gut, the heart, the lungs,

01:30:53.060 | and the immune system, and the brain,

01:30:55.000 | and that the brain is also controlling these organs

01:30:57.520 | so it's a two-way street.

01:30:58.940 | There's this big myth out there that I mentioned before

01:31:02.480 | that stimulating the vagus in various ways leads to calmness,

01:31:07.000 | that it's always going to calm you down.

01:31:09.000 | And that is false.

01:31:10.640 | I just want to repeat, that is completely false.

01:31:12.360 | In fact, there was just a paper,

01:31:14.120 | yet another paper published the other day,

01:31:16.160 | which is fantastic,

01:31:17.140 | which is from David McCormick's lab

01:31:18.760 | up at the University of Oregon.

01:31:20.000 | It's published in Current Biology, excellent journal,

01:31:23.040 | showing, I'm just reading the title,

01:31:25.060 | "Vagus nerve stimulation induces widespread cortical,"

01:31:28.660 | the neocortex, "and behavioral activation."

01:31:31.300 | I've read the paper, it's fantastic.

01:31:33.220 | It illustrates, yet again,

01:31:35.600 | stimulation of the vagus increases dopamine release,

01:31:38.440 | increases activation of the brain alertness.

01:31:42.520 | It is a stimulant of alertness.

01:31:45.220 | It is not calming people down.

01:31:48.300 | Now, this is interesting in light of emotionality

01:31:52.260 | because of work that's been done by many groups,

01:31:55.640 | but in particular, I'm going to focus on the work

01:31:57.900 | of a colleague of mine, Carl Deisseroth at Stanford,

01:32:00.460 | who's a psychiatrist, but has also developed a lot of tools

01:32:03.620 | to adjust the activity of neurons in real time

01:32:07.140 | using light and electrical stimulation and so forth.

01:32:10.600 | I'll refer you to an article in "The New Yorker"

01:32:12.640 | that was published about this a few years ago.

01:32:14.200 | I'm going to read a brief excerpt,

01:32:15.920 | I'll put the link in the caption as well.

01:32:18.760 | He's talking to an extremely depressed,

01:32:20.840 | suicidally depressed patient

01:32:23.420 | who has a small device implanted

01:32:26.400 | that allows her to adjust her vagus nerve activity.

01:32:29.040 | Now, vagus stimulation was originally developed

01:32:31.700 | for the treatment of epilepsy.

01:32:33.340 | It's now being used for various other purposes.

01:32:36.400 | Vagus stimulation can even increase plasticity, it seems.

01:32:40.980 | So again, increasing activity of the vagus

01:32:43.420 | increases alertness, and it's just incredible

01:32:46.520 | to see what happens in real time to emotionality

01:32:49.280 | when the vagus is stimulated.

01:32:51.180 | Again, not calming, but activating alertness.

01:32:54.720 | They're in his office and they're talking

01:32:57.260 | and he asks her how she's doing.

01:32:59.360 | And she describes how she's been doing

01:33:01.520 | as previously as quote unquote going pancake,

01:33:05.520 | which for her just means totally laid out flat,

01:33:08.420 | not much going on.

01:33:10.000 | She talks about how she doesn't want to pursue a job,

01:33:13.060 | she's really depressed.

01:33:14.620 | And he says in typical good psychiatrist fashion,

01:33:18.980 | well, that's a lot to think about.

01:33:20.300 | That's actually the quote.

01:33:21.600 | And they talk about her blood pressure, et cetera.

01:33:26.100 | And then she says mood's been down, just spiraling down,

01:33:30.740 | talks about insomnia, bad dreams, low appetite.

01:33:33.980 | So this is severe depression.

01:33:35.760 | This is what we call major depression.

01:33:37.900 | And then she requests,

01:33:39.200 | can we please go up to 1.5 on vagus stimulation?

01:33:43.060 | She'd been receiving 1.2 milliamps of stimulation

01:33:46.700 | every five minutes to 30 seconds,

01:33:48.700 | but was no longer able to feel the effects.

01:33:50.920 | So he says, okay, I think we can go up a little,

01:33:52.980 | you're tolerating things well.

01:33:54.480 | They start the stimulation and quote,

01:34:00.500 | in the course of the next few minutes,

01:34:02.680 | her name was Sally, underwent a remarkable change.

01:34:04.740 | Her frown disappeared, she became cheerful,

01:34:07.360 | describing the pleasure she'd had

01:34:08.740 | during the Christmas holiday

01:34:09.780 | and recounting how she'd recently watched

01:34:11.180 | some YouTube videos of Diceroth.

01:34:13.220 | She was still smiling and talking when the session ended

01:34:17.680 | and they walked out to the reception area.

01:34:19.380 | So this is just by stimulating and activating the vagus.

01:34:21.920 | Now, why am I bringing this up?

01:34:23.160 | Well, for several reasons.

01:34:25.360 | One is the vagus is fascinating

01:34:27.640 | in terms of the brain-body connection.

01:34:29.120 | Two, I'd like to keep trying to dispel the myth

01:34:33.460 | that vagus stimulation is all about being calm.

01:34:35.940 | It's really about being alert.

01:34:37.660 | I don't know how that originally got going backwards,

01:34:39.780 | but it's about being alert.

01:34:42.420 | And once again, level of alertness

01:34:44.980 | or level of calmness is impacting emotion.

01:34:47.780 | That this access of alertness and calmness

01:34:50.460 | is one primary access in emotion.

01:34:54.400 | It's not the only one

01:34:55.520 | because there's also this valence component of good or bad.

01:34:58.560 | And those two aren't the only ones

01:35:00.380 | because there's also this component

01:35:01.620 | of interoceptive, exteroceptive

01:35:03.300 | that we talked about earlier.

01:35:04.140 | And there will be others too.

01:35:05.660 | Again, it's not exhaustive.

01:35:07.180 | But I find it fascinating

01:35:08.460 | and it really brings us back to where we started,

01:35:11.160 | which is what are the core elements of emotion

01:35:13.500 | and what can you do about them?

01:35:15.180 | And before we close up today,

01:35:17.340 | I just want to make sure

01:35:18.500 | that even though I've mentioned some tools,

01:35:20.320 | I talked about the Mood Meter app,

01:35:22.780 | I talked about oxytocin

01:35:25.320 | and some of the things that impact oxytocin.

01:35:28.060 | I talked about some of the ways

01:35:29.780 | that you can conceptualize emotions.

01:35:32.300 | This business of how you conceptualize emotions

01:35:34.660 | is really the most powerful tool you can ever have

01:35:38.700 | in terms of understanding and regulating your emotional state

01:35:41.460 | if you're willing to try and wrap your head around it.

01:35:44.380 | I realize it's not the simplest thing to do,

01:35:46.740 | but rather than think of emotions

01:35:48.620 | as just these labels, happy, sad, awe, depressed,

01:35:52.540 | thinking about emotions, excuse me,

01:35:56.020 | as elements of the brain and body

01:36:00.820 | that encompass levels of alertness,

01:36:02.940 | that include a dynamic with the outside world

01:36:05.540 | and your perception of your internal state,

01:36:07.820 | and starting to really think about emotions

01:36:10.260 | in a structured way

01:36:11.900 | can not only allow you to understand some of the pathology

01:36:15.420 | of when you might feel depressed or anxious

01:36:18.140 | or others are depressed and anxious,

01:36:19.680 | but also to develop a richer emotional experience

01:36:22.860 | to anything.

01:36:23.760 | Now, of course, I don't expect that

01:36:25.140 | as you're out there interacting with friends

01:36:27.580 | and you're watching TV and experiencing life,

01:36:29.480 | that you should be parsing every bit of your experience

01:36:32.540 | in some sort of reductionist and mechanistic way.

01:36:34.820 | That's not the goal here.

01:36:36.260 | But for those of you that are practitioners,

01:36:38.600 | teachers of any kind,

01:36:39.700 | for those of you that are kids,

01:36:40.940 | for those of you that are trying to understand

01:36:43.940 | what your emotional life and your consciousness,

01:36:46.160 | dare I say the word, really consists of,

01:36:49.020 | I do believe that these are fundamental elements

01:36:52.340 | that are well supported by the science

01:36:54.380 | across a variety of researchers

01:36:56.400 | doing things from a variety of different perspectives

01:36:59.780 | and some of whom agree with one another

01:37:01.460 | and some of whom don't.

01:37:03.300 | So I offer it to you as a source of knowledge

01:37:06.900 | from which you can start to think about your emotional life

01:37:10.880 | differently, I hope, as well as others

01:37:13.660 | in a way that builds more richness into that experience,

01:37:16.320 | not that detracts from it.

01:37:18.460 | One last point as it relates to that,

01:37:21.280 | many of you have asked me about psychedelic therapies

01:37:24.560 | that are now emerging, things like psilocybin and MDMA.

01:37:28.480 | We are, of course, going to dive into that topic deeply.

01:37:32.260 | We have an expert guest coming on to discuss that topic.

01:37:36.080 | Those compounds clearly affect the aspects of emotionality

01:37:41.080 | that we were talking about today,

01:37:43.580 | calmness, alertness, valence, good or bad,

01:37:47.540 | interoceptive, exteroceptive positioning.

01:37:50.820 | And so rather than just do a kind of cursory exploration

01:37:55.360 | of those compounds and what the therapeutic

01:37:57.360 | and scientific community is thinking about them

01:37:59.940 | and how they function, I think it's more important

01:38:02.660 | to embed that framework in our thinking

01:38:05.280 | so that when we address psychedelics

01:38:07.460 | and we address other sorts of therapies,

01:38:09.320 | cognitive behavioral therapy,

01:38:11.000 | different types of emotive therapies

01:38:12.920 | that relate to individuals and couples, et cetera,

01:38:16.460 | that we are able to think about them

01:38:18.900 | with some sort of structure and rigor

01:38:20.940 | rather than just talk about them as a bunch of chemicals

01:38:24.040 | that produce these amazing experiences

01:38:26.520 | that people need to tell you about.

01:38:28.080 | Because if there's one truth,

01:38:29.780 | it seems that psychedelics seem to promote activity

01:38:32.800 | of storytelling about psychedelic experience.

01:38:35.200 | But that itself is not really what the therapeutic community

01:38:38.700 | and the academic communities are interested in.

01:38:41.740 | They're interested in trying to understand

01:38:43.880 | the universal truths, the universal biological shifts

01:38:47.660 | and psychological shifts that occur

01:38:49.880 | in the clinical use of those compounds.

01:38:51.800 | And so we're going to hold off for now,

01:38:53.520 | but we will get to them.

01:38:54.960 | Once again, we've covered

01:38:56.000 | an enormous amount of material today.

01:38:57.800 | It's really the equivalent of two, if not three,

01:38:59.720 | university lectures in one podcast episode.

01:39:03.580 | I want to thank those of you that have supported the podcast

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01:40:50.880 | And last, but certainly not least,

01:40:52.720 | I want to thank you for your time and attention

01:40:54.980 | and thank you for your interest in science.

01:40:57.280 | (upbeat music)

01:40:59.860 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

The Science of Emotions & Relationships

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