The Science of Emotions & Relationships

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials,

00:00:02.320 | where we revisit past episodes

00:00:04.380 | for the most potent and actionable science-based tools

00:00:07.560 | for mental health, physical health, and performance.

00:00:10.320 | My name is Andrew Huberman,

00:00:14.720 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:17.800 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:19.520 | So let's talk about emotions.

00:00:21.340 | Emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect

00:00:24.000 | of our life experience.

00:00:25.860 | It's fair to say that emotions make up most

00:00:28.240 | of what we think of as our experience of life.

00:00:31.400 | Even the things we do,

00:00:32.760 | our behaviors, and the places we go,

00:00:34.720 | and the people we end up encountering in our life,

00:00:37.260 | all of that really funnels into our emotional perception

00:00:41.880 | of what those things mean,

00:00:43.600 | whether or not they made us happy, or sad,

00:00:45.640 | or depressed, or lonely, or were awe-inspiring.

00:00:50.120 | Now, one thing that is absolutely true

00:00:52.080 | is that everyone's perception

00:00:53.720 | of emotion is slightly different,

00:00:55.800 | meaning your idea of happy is very likely different

00:00:59.720 | than my idea of what a state of happiness is.

00:01:03.480 | And we know this also for color vision, for instance.

00:01:07.160 | Even though the cells in your eye and my eye

00:01:10.020 | that perceive the color red are identical

00:01:13.080 | right down to the genes that they express,

00:01:15.820 | we can be certain, based on experimental evidence,

00:01:18.880 | what are called psychophysical studies,

00:01:21.480 | that your idea of the most intense red

00:01:24.960 | is going to be very different than my idea

00:01:27.100 | of the most intense red

00:01:28.280 | if we were given a selection of 10 different reds

00:01:30.480 | and asked which one is most intense,

00:01:32.140 | which one looks most red.

00:01:34.520 | And that seems crazy.

00:01:35.940 | You would think that something as simple as color

00:01:38.220 | would be universal, and yet it's not.

00:01:40.880 | And so we need to agree at the outset

00:01:43.200 | that emotions are complicated,

00:01:45.080 | and yet they are tractable, they can be understood.

00:01:48.080 | And today we're going to talk about a lot of tools

00:01:50.920 | to understand what emotions are

00:01:53.360 | for you to understand what your emotional states mean

00:01:56.200 | and what they don't mean.

00:01:57.680 | And in doing that, that will allow you to place a value

00:02:00.080 | on whether or not you should hold an emotional state

00:02:03.120 | as true or not true,

00:02:05.200 | whether or not it has meaning or it doesn't,

00:02:07.620 | as well as whether or not the emotions of others

00:02:09.480 | are important to you in a given context.

00:02:11.980 | We're going to talk a lot about development.

00:02:14.840 | In fact, we're going to center a lot of our discussion today

00:02:17.160 | around infancy and puberty.

00:02:19.640 | We're also going to talk about tools

00:02:21.280 | for enhancing one's emotional range

00:02:24.120 | and for navigating difficult emotional situations.

00:02:27.920 | I am not a clinical psychologist, I'm not a therapist,

00:02:30.960 | but I do have some background in psychology.

00:02:33.440 | And today I'm going to be drawing

00:02:35.520 | from the psychology greats, not me,

00:02:37.640 | but from the greats of psychology who studied emotion,

00:02:40.680 | who studied emotional development,

00:02:42.680 | and linking that to the neuroscience of emotion,

00:02:45.480 | because nowadays we understand a lot about the chemicals

00:02:48.160 | and the hormones and the neural circuits

00:02:50.100 | in the brain and body that underlie emotion.

00:02:52.700 | So while there's no one single universally true theory

00:02:56.100 | of emotion, at the intersection

00:02:58.320 | of many of the existing theories,

00:03:00.100 | there are really some ground truths.

00:03:01.560 | If we want to understand emotions,

00:03:03.820 | we have to look at where emotions first develop.

00:03:06.600 | And the rule that every good neuroanatomist knows

00:03:09.560 | is that if you want to understand

00:03:11.160 | what a part of the brain does,

00:03:13.160 | you have to address two questions.

00:03:14.720 | You have to know what connections does that brain area make?

00:03:18.100 | And you need to know what's called the developmental origin

00:03:22.360 | of that structure.

00:03:23.200 | What are the brain areas for emotion?

00:03:24.800 | And nowadays there's a lot of debate about this.

00:03:27.080 | For years, it was thought that there might be circuits,

00:03:30.320 | meaning connections in the brain

00:03:31.560 | that generate the feeling of being happy,

00:03:33.280 | or circuits that generate the feeling of being sad, et cetera.

00:03:37.280 | That's been challenged.

00:03:38.560 | And yet I think there's good evidence

00:03:40.780 | for circuits in the brain,

00:03:42.240 | such as limbic circuits and other circuits,

00:03:44.900 | that shift our overall states

00:03:47.680 | or our overall level of alertness or calmness,

00:03:50.260 | or whether or not they bias us

00:03:51.840 | toward viewing the outside world

00:03:53.640 | or paying more attention

00:03:54.880 | to what's going on inside our bodies.

00:03:57.280 | But the important thing to understand

00:03:58.580 | is that emotions do arise in the brain and body.

00:04:02.600 | And if we want to understand how emotions work,

00:04:06.020 | we have to look how emotions are built.

00:04:09.080 | And they are built during infancy, adolescence, and puberty.

00:04:15.080 | And then it continues into adulthood,

00:04:16.860 | but the groundwork is laid down early in development

00:04:19.800 | when we are small children.

00:04:21.540 | You were born into this world

00:04:23.240 | without really any understanding of the things around you.

00:04:27.500 | Now, there are two ways

00:04:28.380 | that you can interact with the world,

00:04:29.820 | and you're always doing them more or less

00:04:31.980 | to some degree at the same time.

00:04:34.220 | Those are interoception,

00:04:36.940 | paying attention to what's going on inside you,

00:04:39.500 | what you feel internally,

00:04:40.860 | and exteroception,

00:04:41.900 | paying attention to what's going on outside you.

00:04:44.600 | Hold that in mind, please,

00:04:45.900 | because the fact that you're both interocepting

00:04:49.020 | and exterocepting is true for your entire life,

00:04:52.080 | and it sets the foundation for understanding emotions.

00:04:55.380 | It's absolutely critical.

00:04:57.080 | As an infant,

00:04:58.060 | you didn't have any knowledge of what you needed.

00:05:01.700 | You didn't understand hunger.

00:05:03.160 | You didn't understand cold or heat or any of that.

00:05:06.560 | When you needed something,

00:05:08.280 | you experienced that as anxiety.

00:05:11.180 | You would feel an increase in alertness

00:05:13.120 | if you had to use the bathroom.

00:05:15.400 | You would feel an increase in alertness if you were hungry,

00:05:18.680 | and you would vocalize.

00:05:19.920 | You would cry out.

00:05:21.480 | You would act agitated.

00:05:23.380 | You might coo.

00:05:24.320 | You might do a number of different things,

00:05:25.920 | and then your caregiver, whoever that might've been,

00:05:28.460 | would respond to that.

00:05:29.680 | So this is actually really important to understand

00:05:31.760 | that a baby,

00:05:33.140 | when you were a baby and when I was a baby,

00:05:35.040 | we didn't have any sense of the outside world

00:05:37.600 | except that it responded to our acts of anxiety essentially.

00:05:42.600 | All developmental psychologists agree

00:05:44.580 | that babies lack the ability

00:05:46.600 | to make cognitive sense of the outside world.

00:05:49.220 | But in this feeling of anxiety

00:05:51.680 | and registering one's own internal state

00:05:53.780 | and then crying out to the outside world,

00:05:55.820 | either through crying or subtle vocalizations

00:05:59.260 | or even just cooing, making some noise,

00:06:01.740 | we start to develop a relationship with the outside world

00:06:04.800 | in which our internal states, our shifts in anxiety,

00:06:08.400 | start to drive requests

00:06:10.500 | and people come and respond to those requests.

00:06:13.740 | And this gets to the basis of what emotions are about,

00:06:18.740 | which are emotions are really about forming bonds

00:06:22.860 | and being able to predict things in the world.

00:06:25.640 | And at this point, I actually just want to pause

00:06:27.820 | and mention a really interesting tool

00:06:30.780 | that is trying to address this question

00:06:32.840 | of what are emotions and what do they consist of

00:06:35.520 | that you can use if you like.

00:06:37.060 | This is an app, I didn't develop it,

00:06:38.540 | I don't have any relationship to them,

00:06:40.280 | but the app was developed by people at Yale

00:06:43.060 | and it's called Mood Meter.

00:06:44.580 | What they're trying to do is put more nuance,

00:06:47.740 | more subtlety on our words and our language for emotions

00:06:52.580 | and be able to allow you to predict

00:06:55.020 | how you're going to feel in the future.

00:06:56.980 | I'm on the app right now and I know you can't see this,

00:06:59.020 | but it's called Mood Meter.

00:07:01.300 | You know, it says to me, hi, Andrew, how are you right now?

00:07:04.240 | And I click the little tab that says, I feel,

00:07:07.240 | and I can either pick high energy and unpleasant,

00:07:11.400 | high energy and pleasant, low energy unpleasant,

00:07:15.320 | or low energy pleasant.

00:07:16.720 | And I would say right now, I feel high energy pleasant.

00:07:19.640 | So I just revealed to you how I feel.

00:07:21.220 | So I click on that and then it gives you a gallery of colors

00:07:25.400 | and you just move your finger to the location

00:07:27.800 | where you think it matches most.

00:07:29.700 | And as you do that, little words pop up.

00:07:31.660 | So say motivated, cheerful, inspired.

00:07:33.720 | I would say I'm feeling right now, cheerful.

00:07:35.800 | So you click that and then you just go to the next window

00:07:38.520 | and it just says, what are you doing?

00:07:39.720 | And this feels like play to me,

00:07:41.680 | but I'm going to call it work and then that's it.

00:07:44.280 | And then what it does is it basically starts

00:07:47.520 | to collect data on you.

00:07:49.040 | You're giving it information and it starts to link that

00:07:51.520 | to other features that you allow it access to if you like.

00:07:54.480 | And it starts helping you be able to predict

00:07:56.880 | how you're going to feel at different times a day.

00:07:59.120 | And it points to a couple of really interesting features,

00:08:02.640 | which is that we don't really have enough language

00:08:05.280 | to describe all the emotional states.

00:08:07.720 | And yet there's some core truths

00:08:10.220 | to what makes up an emotion.

00:08:12.100 | This can really help people, kids and adults,

00:08:15.240 | understand better what they're feeling and why,

00:08:18.780 | and when best to engage in certain activities

00:08:21.640 | and thankfully when best to avoid certain activities too.

00:08:25.080 | So the way this works is the following.

00:08:28.440 | You need to ask yourself at any point,

00:08:31.100 | you could do this right now if you like,

00:08:32.600 | what's your level of autonomic arousal?

00:08:35.120 | Autonomic arousal is just the continuum,

00:08:37.920 | the range of alert to calm.

00:08:41.600 | So if you're in a panic right now,

00:08:43.600 | you are like 10 out of 10 on the arousal scale.

00:08:48.000 | If you're asleep,

00:08:49.520 | you're probably not comprehending what I'm saying,

00:08:52.480 | although maybe a little bit,

00:08:53.760 | but let's say you're very drowsy,

00:08:55.200 | you might be at a one or a two.

00:08:57.880 | And then there's this other axis, this other question,

00:09:02.880 | which is what we call valence.

00:09:04.720 | Now, valence is a value.

00:09:06.200 | Do you feel good or bad?

00:09:07.800 | I would say I feel pretty good right now

00:09:09.100 | on a scale of one to 10.

00:09:10.400 | I'm like, I don't know, I feel like a seven.

00:09:12.680 | So I'm alert and I feel pretty good.

00:09:15.100 | And then there's a third thing,

00:09:17.280 | which is how much we are interocepting

00:09:20.840 | and how much we are exterocepting, all right?

00:09:23.320 | So how much our attention is focused internally

00:09:26.640 | on what we're feeling and how much it's focused externally.

00:09:30.320 | And this is always going to be in a dynamic balance.

00:09:33.640 | So for instance, if you're really, really stressed,

00:09:36.800 | oftentimes that puts you in a position

00:09:38.840 | to be really in touch with what's going on in your body.

00:09:41.040 | If you start having a lot of somatic,

00:09:42.860 | a lot of bodily sensations,

00:09:44.240 | like your heart is beating so fast that you can't ignore it,

00:09:47.300 | then you're really strongly interoceptive.

00:09:50.200 | So there's three things, how alert or sleepy you are,

00:09:53.060 | that's one, how good or bad you feel, that's two.

00:09:56.480 | And then whether or not most of your attention

00:09:58.080 | is directed outward or whether or not it's directed inward.

00:10:01.520 | And much of what we call emotions

00:10:03.580 | are made up by those three things.

00:10:06.280 | Let's return to the infant.

00:10:07.840 | There's the baby in the crib.

00:10:09.760 | It's mostly interocepting.

00:10:12.000 | As caregivers bring it what it needs, you hope,

00:10:15.500 | milk, diaper changes, et cetera,

00:10:18.320 | a warm blanket if it's cold,

00:10:20.400 | pull off the blanket when the baby's fussing

00:10:22.500 | and it's too warm 'cause babies get too warm also,

00:10:25.000 | it starts to exterocept.

00:10:27.320 | The baby starts to look into the outside world

00:10:29.920 | and start making predictions.

00:10:31.960 | It starts wondering how much it needs to cry

00:10:35.800 | or predicting, well, if I cry like a little bit,

00:10:39.760 | then mom comes over and I get my milk.

00:10:43.480 | Babies are starting to evaluate and do all this,

00:10:46.740 | but they're not doing it consciously.

00:10:48.420 | They're doing this in order to relieve anxiety.

00:10:51.120 | As a young creature, an infant and young toddler,

00:10:55.460 | you were mainly focused inward

00:10:57.040 | and you started to understand what was going on outward

00:10:59.460 | as a way of predicting what would bring you relief,

00:11:02.920 | what would remove your anxiety.

00:11:04.600 | And that's where the fundamental rules of your experience,

00:11:07.720 | your emotional experience were laid down.

00:11:09.960 | So now let's talk about what kind of baby you were

00:11:13.720 | because that actually informs your emotionality now.

00:11:17.820 | These are classic, they're actually famous experiments

00:11:20.660 | done by Bowlby and Ainsworth.

00:11:22.600 | This is this classic experiment

00:11:24.960 | of what was called the strange situation task in which,

00:11:29.920 | and I'm describing it very coarsely here, I realize,

00:11:32.320 | but a mother and child come into the laboratory.

00:11:36.600 | The baby and the mother or father play together for a bit.

00:11:43.200 | And then the mother leaves.

00:11:44.640 | The mother leaves for some period of time

00:11:47.680 | and then comes back.

00:11:49.600 | And the research is devoted to understanding

00:11:54.180 | the response of the child when the caretaker,

00:11:57.140 | the mother or the father returns.

00:11:59.600 | Bowlby and Ainsworth and many of their scientific offspring

00:12:03.360 | and colleagues identified at least four patterns

00:12:08.360 | that babies display when their caretaker returns.

00:12:12.640 | And they group these into group A, B, C, D,

00:12:16.020 | so much so that the kids were referred to as A babies,

00:12:19.900 | B babies, C babies, or D babies.

00:12:22.320 | The first babies are the A babies.

00:12:24.800 | When their caretaker would return,

00:12:27.660 | the infant would respond with happiness,

00:12:29.940 | with what looked like delight.

00:12:31.300 | They would go to the caretaker, they seemed happy.

00:12:33.620 | These are referred to as secure attached kids.

00:12:37.140 | The B babies, as they're called,

00:12:39.620 | were less likely to seek comfort from their caregiver

00:12:44.140 | when the caregiver would return.

00:12:46.000 | So they would sometimes continue to play with their toys

00:12:48.660 | or they would be with the,

00:12:50.740 | they had an adult in the room while the parent was gone,

00:12:52.980 | they would stay with them.

00:12:54.200 | These were referred to as avoidant babies.

00:12:56.700 | The C babies would respond to the return of the caregiver

00:13:02.620 | with acts of annoyance.

00:13:05.020 | They seemed kind of angry.

00:13:07.060 | And those were referred to as ambivalent babies.

00:13:09.620 | And then the third category, the D babies,

00:13:11.540 | were the disorganized babies.

00:13:13.460 | The child avoided interactions with everyone

00:13:16.820 | and their behavior didn't really change

00:13:18.860 | whether or not the caregiver was there or not.

00:13:20.860 | This work, this classic work,

00:13:23.100 | opened up a huge set of important questions

00:13:26.740 | that related to what is the reestablishment

00:13:29.300 | of the bond really about?

00:13:30.700 | I mean, what's actually being figured out here

00:13:33.340 | is not whether or not there are four categories of babies.

00:13:35.620 | That's interesting.

00:13:36.680 | But it presumably is more interesting to focus on

00:13:41.140 | what is it that defines a really good bond,

00:13:44.260 | a secure attachment or an insecure attachment

00:13:46.860 | or an avoidant attachment.

00:13:48.920 | And the four things are gaze,

00:13:52.760 | literally eye contact, vocalizations,

00:13:57.780 | so what we say and how we say it,

00:14:00.820 | affect or emotion,

00:14:02.740 | so the way that we express, you know,

00:14:04.460 | crying, smiling, et cetera, and touch.

00:14:08.740 | But gaze, vocalization, affect and touch

00:14:12.300 | are really the core of this thing

00:14:14.940 | that we call social bonds and emotionality.

00:14:18.420 | And it's clear from most all of the theories

00:14:21.220 | of emotional health that an ability to recognize

00:14:25.920 | when your own internal state is being driven primarily

00:14:29.320 | by external events as important

00:14:32.700 | for being able to emotionally regulate, right?

00:14:35.700 | People who are constantly being yanked around

00:14:37.780 | by the external happenings in the world,

00:14:39.960 | you would say are emotionally labile.

00:14:42.140 | They are not in control of their emotions.

00:14:45.360 | Even if they're calm all the time,

00:14:47.340 | if that calmness only arrives

00:14:48.860 | because they're in a placid environment

00:14:50.540 | and then you put, you know,

00:14:51.540 | a cracker in that environment and they freak out,

00:14:53.940 | well, then they're not really calm.

00:14:56.220 | So how much the outside environment

00:14:58.140 | disrupts your internal environment

00:15:00.140 | has everything to do with this balance

00:15:01.440 | of interoception and exteroception.

00:15:03.220 | And it very likely has roots

00:15:04.660 | in whether or not you were secure attached

00:15:07.540 | or insecure attached, disorganized,

00:15:09.660 | or ambivalent as a baby.

00:15:12.060 | So while we can't travel back in time,

00:15:14.380 | there is an exercise that you can do

00:15:16.900 | to address at least in this moment,

00:15:19.580 | whether or not you have a bias for exteroception

00:15:22.500 | or a bias for interoception.

00:15:24.280 | If you close your eyes right now

00:15:27.580 | and concentrate on the contact of any portion of your body

00:15:32.820 | and trying to bring as much of your attention

00:15:36.020 | to that point of contact as possible.

00:15:39.740 | And then from there,

00:15:40.900 | you're going to move your attention even more deeply

00:15:42.940 | into say the sensation of what's going on in your gut.

00:15:46.260 | Are you full?

00:15:47.080 | Are you empty?

00:15:47.920 | Are you hungry?

00:15:48.740 | Are you not?

00:15:49.860 | Is your heart beating at what rate?

00:15:51.620 | What's the cadence of your breathing?

00:15:53.100 | Basically bringing your focus and attention

00:15:55.800 | to everything at the surface of your skin and inward.

00:15:58.660 | So I'm going to do a rare thing

00:16:00.480 | on the Huberman Lab Podcast.

00:16:01.580 | I'm going to introduce about five to eight seconds of silence

00:16:04.620 | in order to allow you to do that a little bit.

00:16:06.860 | Now try and do something

00:16:17.660 | that for most people actually is a little bit harder,

00:16:19.860 | which is to purely exterocept.

00:16:22.580 | Put your eyes or your ears or both

00:16:26.300 | on anything in your immediate space.

00:16:28.700 | I would say, look across the room,

00:16:30.140 | pick a panel on the wall or a leg of a table or something

00:16:34.740 | and try and bring as much of your attention

00:16:37.180 | to that as possible.

00:16:39.480 | And again, I'll take about five seconds of silence

00:16:42.380 | to allow you to exterocept.

00:16:44.540 | Okay, so what you probably found

00:16:53.940 | is that you were able to do that,

00:16:55.060 | but that some degree of interoception is maintained.

00:16:58.780 | It's hard to place 100% of your attention

00:17:01.060 | on something externally,

00:17:02.500 | unless it's really exciting, really novel.

00:17:05.580 | If you've ever watched a really great movie,

00:17:07.960 | presumably you're exterocepting

00:17:10.540 | more than you're interocepting

00:17:11.780 | until something exciting happens

00:17:13.180 | and then you feel something.

00:17:14.360 | You're actually tethering your emotional experience

00:17:16.940 | to something external.

00:17:18.500 | And now you can also do this dynamically.

00:17:22.260 | You can decide to focus internally and then externally.

00:17:25.020 | You can decide to split it 50%, 50% or 70, 30.

00:17:29.180 | One can develop,

00:17:31.220 | you can develop a heightened ability to do this.

00:17:36.220 | And the power of doing that is actually

00:17:38.900 | that when you are in environments

00:17:40.500 | where you feel like you're focused too much internally

00:17:43.220 | and you'd like to be focused more externally,

00:17:45.820 | you can actually do that deliberately.

00:17:47.340 | But as you notice, it takes work.

00:17:49.420 | These exercises are really what are at the core

00:17:53.520 | of these development of emotional bonds.

00:17:55.780 | Because as we mentioned before,

00:17:57.500 | these four things, the gaze, vocalization, touch and affect,

00:18:02.500 | those are happening very dynamically.

00:18:05.140 | So if somebody winks at you,

00:18:06.560 | you're paying attention to their wink,

00:18:07.920 | but then you also notice how you feel.

00:18:10.180 | This is very dynamic.

00:18:11.520 | So if it seems overwhelming to try and interocept

00:18:14.260 | and exterocept and then shift the balance,

00:18:16.260 | you do that all the time.

00:18:17.400 | Your brain and nervous system are fantastic at doing this.

00:18:20.380 | Now, some people have a very hard time breaking

00:18:23.600 | out of a very strongly interoceptive mode.

00:18:26.820 | Some people have a harder time breaking

00:18:28.980 | out of their exteroceptive mode.

00:18:31.540 | It's very interesting to note the extent

00:18:34.540 | to which we have biases in how interoceptive

00:18:37.540 | or exteroceptive we are.

00:18:39.140 | Remember those three axes that we talked about earlier.

00:18:41.840 | You have valence, good or bad.

00:18:43.720 | You have alertness, alert or calm,

00:18:46.120 | and you have interoceptive or exteroceptive bias.

00:18:50.440 | Early in development,

00:18:51.680 | you start off with this interoceptive bias.

00:18:54.480 | You are starting to develop expectations,

00:18:57.200 | predictions about how the outside world is going to work.

00:19:00.640 | And you are trying to figure out the reliability

00:19:04.200 | of outside events and people and where things are reliable.

00:19:08.920 | When people are reliable,

00:19:11.180 | we are able to give up more of our interoception.

00:19:14.280 | There's literally trust that our interoceptive needs,

00:19:17.960 | our internal needs,

00:19:18.800 | will be met through bonds and actions of others.

00:19:22.400 | This starts to veer toward the discussion

00:19:25.440 | about neglect and trauma.

00:19:26.620 | We are going to devote entire episodes,

00:19:28.680 | probably an entire month, to trauma and PTSD,

00:19:32.000 | but those have roots in what we're talking about now.

00:19:35.920 | And it's important to internalize

00:19:37.440 | and understand what we're talking about now

00:19:38.800 | in order to get the most out of those future conversations.

00:19:42.020 | So now I want to just pause,

00:19:44.860 | just shelve the discussion about interoception,

00:19:47.300 | exteroception for a moment.

00:19:48.600 | And I want to talk about what is arguably the second most,

00:19:52.400 | if not equally important, aspect of your development

00:19:57.400 | as it relates to emotionality

00:19:59.800 | and as it relates to this, what I call trust,

00:20:02.360 | but this ability to predict

00:20:03.960 | whether or not things in the outside world are reliable

00:20:06.760 | or not reliable in terms of their ability

00:20:10.000 | to help you meet your interoceptive needs.

00:20:12.420 | And that period is puberty.

00:20:15.820 | So up until now, we've been talking mainly about psychology,

00:20:18.380 | not a lot of biology, not a lot of mechanism.

00:20:20.480 | And now we're going to transition

00:20:21.940 | into talking about mechanism, hormones, receptors, et cetera.

00:20:26.220 | Puberty is a absolute biological event.

00:20:30.100 | It has a beginning and it has a specific definition,

00:20:34.340 | which is the transition into reproductive maturity.

00:20:37.660 | So there are a lot of hormonal changes.

00:20:39.180 | Yes, there are also a lot of brain changes

00:20:40.940 | and most people don't realize it,

00:20:42.140 | but the brain changes occur first.

00:20:44.400 | The brain turns on the hormone systems

00:20:46.980 | that allow puberty to occur.

00:20:49.380 | One of the more interesting molecules

00:20:51.220 | that triggers puberty in all individuals

00:20:54.300 | is something called Kispeptin, K-I-S-S-P-E-P-T-I-N,

00:20:59.300 | Kispeptin.

00:21:02.660 | Kispeptin is made by the brain

00:21:04.700 | and it stimulates large amounts of a different hormone

00:21:08.900 | called GNRH, gonadotropin-releasing hormone, to be released.

00:21:13.900 | Gonadotropin-releasing hormone

00:21:15.500 | then causes the release of another hormone,

00:21:17.340 | something called luteinizing hormone or LH,

00:21:21.080 | which travels in the bloodstream

00:21:23.220 | and stimulates the ovaries of females to produce estrogen

00:21:26.620 | and the testes of males to produce testosterone.

00:21:29.660 | Now, this is interesting because at this point,

00:21:33.580 | the testes in males start churning out tons of testosterone

00:21:37.240 | in order to trigger the development

00:21:39.220 | of secondary sexual characteristics,

00:21:41.620 | body hair and all the others, deepening of voice, et cetera.

00:21:44.220 | And in females, estrogen is doing various other things,

00:21:48.180 | breast development, et cetera.

00:21:49.940 | So that's how puberty happens at the biological level,

00:21:53.220 | gets triggered by leptin and Kispeptin.

00:21:55.180 | And then this young child

00:21:58.620 | is now a different creature to some extent,

00:22:02.420 | not just because they're reproductively competent,

00:22:05.340 | of course, but because there's a shift

00:22:07.840 | in a number of the things that underlie these social bonds.

00:22:12.000 | There's a market shift in a number of the things

00:22:15.620 | that allow children and adults to engage

00:22:20.120 | in predictive behavior about each other.

00:22:22.520 | And most of what consumes the minds

00:22:25.720 | and waking hours of adolescents

00:22:28.840 | and children who've gone through puberty

00:22:30.480 | and going through puberty is questions

00:22:33.120 | about how they relate to social structures,

00:22:36.500 | who they can rely on

00:22:38.180 | and how they can make reliable predictions in the world

00:22:40.780 | now that they have more agency,

00:22:42.360 | that they are physically changed.

00:22:44.980 | In fact, you could argue that puberty

00:22:47.260 | is the fastest rate of maturation

00:22:48.940 | that you'll go through at any point in your life.

00:22:51.100 | It's the largest change that you'll go through

00:22:53.020 | at any point in your life in terms of who you are,

00:22:56.380 | because your biology is fundamentally changed

00:22:58.420 | at the level of your brain and your bodily organs,

00:23:01.900 | all your organs from the skin inward.

00:23:05.000 | So I want to visit a little bit of the research

00:23:08.260 | about some of the core needs

00:23:11.080 | that occur during puberty and adolescence.

00:23:14.000 | So there's a terrific review article

00:23:16.300 | that was published in the journal "Nature"

00:23:18.300 | about the biology of adolescence and puberty,

00:23:23.020 | as well as some of the core needs and demands

00:23:26.940 | that have to be met for successful emotional maturation

00:23:30.200 | during that time.

00:23:31.700 | We will provide a link to that,

00:23:33.460 | but I just want to highlight a few of the things

00:23:36.380 | that they place in the final table.

00:23:38.580 | I don't want to go through all the results right now

00:23:40.500 | because you could do that on your own if you like.

00:23:42.840 | They mainly highlight a lot of the changes

00:23:45.940 | in neurons and neural circuits.

00:23:47.880 | For instance, I'll just highlight one.

00:23:49.900 | There's a connection between the dopamine centers

00:23:52.580 | in the brain and an area of the brain

00:23:54.380 | that's involved in emotion and dispersal.

00:23:58.020 | Dispersal is very interesting.

00:23:59.620 | What you observe in animals and humans

00:24:02.140 | is that around the end of adolescence

00:24:05.800 | and during the transition to puberty,

00:24:07.980 | both because of changes in the brain

00:24:09.940 | and changes in hormones,

00:24:11.720 | there's an intense desire on the part of the child

00:24:17.380 | to get further and further away from primary caregivers.

00:24:21.760 | Mostly there's a desire to start spending more time

00:24:24.380 | with friends, more time with peers,

00:24:25.860 | and less time with adults.

00:24:28.260 | So there's something about these hormones

00:24:30.340 | that don't just allow sexual reproduction.

00:24:33.700 | They don't just change the brain and bodily organs

00:24:35.740 | and the shape of us.

00:24:37.640 | They also bias us towards dispersal,

00:24:41.140 | getting further and further away

00:24:42.460 | from primary caregivers in particular.

00:24:44.660 | And what's interesting is during puberty,

00:24:48.120 | there's increased connection, connectivity as we call it,

00:24:52.020 | between the prefrontal cortex,

00:24:53.340 | which is involved in motivation and decision-making,

00:24:56.280 | being able to suppress action

00:24:58.020 | for making long-term goals possible,

00:25:02.180 | as well as dopamine centers and the amygdala.

00:25:05.180 | So there's this really broad integration and testing.

00:25:08.580 | I think this is the key element here,

00:25:10.220 | testing of circuits for emotions and reward

00:25:13.420 | as they relate to decisions.

00:25:15.180 | And I think that's useful

00:25:17.180 | because when you look at the behavior

00:25:18.460 | of adolescents and teens,

00:25:19.740 | they are testing social interactions.

00:25:21.500 | They are testing physical interactions with the world.

00:25:24.580 | Oftentimes they're engaging in unsafe behavior

00:25:27.080 | and I would never try and justify that

00:25:31.640 | with the underlying neurology,

00:25:33.680 | but the neuroscience points to increased connectivity

00:25:37.540 | between areas of the brain that are related to emotionality

00:25:40.840 | and to threat detection like the amygdala, but also reward.

00:25:45.440 | So it's a time of testing behaviorally

00:25:47.880 | how different behaviors lead to success or not.

00:25:51.520 | It's how different behaviors lead to fear states or not.

00:25:55.360 | You can start to map the neurology

00:25:56.920 | onto some of this emotional exploration.

00:25:59.460 | I do realize that this episode is about emotions.

00:26:01.700 | Puberty is a time in which the internal state

00:26:05.080 | of the person or the animal is being sampled

00:26:08.760 | and tested against different extra receptive events.

00:26:11.680 | Only now they are able to guide those events

00:26:14.920 | with more agency.

00:26:16.640 | The child or the adolescent is now able,

00:26:20.000 | the teen really is able to now sample many,

00:26:23.360 | many more extra receptive events through behavior.

00:26:26.880 | And so adolescence and puberty is really seen

00:26:30.620 | as the period of development in which one self-samples

00:26:34.200 | for these two elements that we talked about

00:26:36.000 | at the beginning, which are how do I form bonds

00:26:40.160 | and how do I make predictions

00:26:41.640 | about what will make me feel good

00:26:43.400 | at a level of interoception.

00:26:46.240 | But in terms of the biology,

00:26:47.920 | it's clear that there's this stage of development

00:26:50.220 | where more autonomy, more physical capability

00:26:54.360 | is triggered by these hormone changes in the brain

00:26:57.000 | and these peptide changes in the brain and body.

00:26:59.440 | And that nonetheless brings us back to the exact same model

00:27:04.160 | that we started with an infancy of alert or calm,

00:27:08.220 | feel good or feel bad,

00:27:10.720 | primarily exterocepting, primarily interocepting.

00:27:14.080 | So I keep going back to this.

00:27:15.480 | I'm sort of like a repeating record on that

00:27:17.600 | because the same core algorithm,

00:27:20.000 | the same core function is at play throughout the lifespan.

00:27:23.840 | And that's a useful framework in my opinion,

00:27:26.440 | because it allows you to sort through all the data

00:27:29.520 | and information that's out there about,

00:27:30.880 | well, this area, the stria terminalis is active

00:27:33.120 | or the basal lateral amygdala is active

00:27:34.800 | or gray matter thickening or this hormone or that hormone

00:27:37.680 | and return to a kind of kernel

00:27:40.480 | of certainly not exhaustive truth.

00:27:42.920 | It doesn't cover all aspects of emotionality,

00:27:45.240 | but at least establishes some groundwork

00:27:48.260 | from which you can start to evaluate

00:27:49.980 | how different behaviors might or might not make sense,

00:27:53.880 | how certain emotional responses

00:27:55.680 | might or might not make sense,

00:27:57.440 | regardless of the age of the person or the organism.

00:28:00.640 | There's a theory of emotional development

00:28:02.840 | that I find particularly interesting,

00:28:05.460 | which is from Alan Shore at UCLA,

00:28:07.540 | that talks about how most of our testing of bonds

00:28:10.540 | and relationships is this seesawing back and forth

00:28:13.740 | between very dopaminergic, so driven by dopamine,

00:28:16.940 | or serotonergic, driven by serotonin states.

00:28:20.220 | And this starts with infant and mother

00:28:22.440 | or infant and father.

00:28:23.620 | Healthy emotional development clearly begins

00:28:27.380 | with an ability for the caretaker and child

00:28:30.300 | to be in calm, peaceful, soothing, touch oriented,

00:28:33.860 | eye gazing type of behaviors.

00:28:36.380 | Those really drive serotonin,

00:28:38.700 | the endogenous opioid system, oxytocin,

00:28:43.340 | things that are very calming

00:28:44.540 | and are centered around pleasure with the here and now,

00:28:47.640 | as well as excited states of what we're going to do next.

00:28:50.700 | There's actually a kind of characteristic sign

00:28:53.220 | of the dopaminergic interaction

00:28:55.900 | where both caretaker and child are wide-eyed,

00:29:00.020 | the pupils dilate, that's a signature of arousal.

00:29:02.500 | They get really excited.

00:29:03.440 | Oftentimes the baby will look away

00:29:04.980 | if it gets really excited.

00:29:06.500 | Those are signatures of dopamine release in the body.

00:29:09.260 | And in adolescence, these same things carry forward,

00:29:12.420 | where their good bonds are achieved

00:29:15.300 | through hanging around, watching TV,

00:29:18.020 | just kind of playing video games

00:29:21.140 | or texting together or talking,

00:29:23.060 | whatever it is that the soothing local activity

00:29:26.000 | happens to be, as well as adventure

00:29:28.340 | and things that are exciting.

00:29:29.740 | And so this kind of seesawing back and forth

00:29:31.580 | between their different reward systems

00:29:33.660 | seems to be the basis

00:29:36.380 | from which healthy emotional bonds are created.

00:29:39.060 | We can't have a complete conversation

00:29:40.960 | about emotions and bonds and social connection

00:29:44.460 | without talking about oxytocin.

00:29:46.580 | Oxytocin has come to such prominence

00:29:48.580 | in the last decade or so,

00:29:50.380 | and seems to be everywhere.

00:29:51.660 | Anytime you hear a discussion

00:29:53.060 | about neuroscience in the brain or hormones in the brain,

00:29:57.340 | oxytocin is released in response to lactation in females.

00:30:03.700 | It is released in response to sexual interactions.

00:30:08.500 | It is released in response to non-sexual touch.

00:30:13.000 | It's released in males and females.

00:30:16.080 | And indeed it's involved in pair bonding

00:30:19.260 | and the establishment of social bonds in general.

00:30:22.340 | How it does that seems to be by matching internal state.

00:30:29.040 | It seems to both increase synchrony

00:30:32.540 | of internal states somehow.

00:30:34.720 | Maybe it sets a level of calmness or alertness.

00:30:37.320 | That seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

00:30:39.480 | As well as raising people's awareness

00:30:43.500 | for the emotional state of their partner.

00:30:47.120 | And again, this brings us back

00:30:48.860 | to this alertness calmness axis

00:30:51.580 | and this interoceptive, exteroceptive axis.

00:30:54.480 | In order to form good bonds,

00:30:56.960 | we can't just be thinking about how we feel.

00:31:00.100 | We also need to be paying attention to how others feel

00:31:02.740 | and we're evaluating a match.

00:31:05.120 | We're trying to see whether or not

00:31:06.560 | there seems to be some sort of synchrony between states.

00:31:10.320 | And oxytocin both seems to increase that synchrony

00:31:14.080 | and increase the awareness

00:31:16.240 | for the emotional state of others.

00:31:18.800 | So here are some experiments

00:31:21.360 | that involve the administration of intranasal oxytocin.

00:31:24.920 | What's been reported

00:31:25.840 | is increased positive communication among couples.

00:31:29.300 | That study, just for those of you like,

00:31:31.400 | was published in Biological Psychiatry,

00:31:32.940 | which my psychiatry colleagues tell me is a fine journal.

00:31:36.440 | And the title is intranasal oxytocin

00:31:38.520 | increases positive communication

00:31:40.320 | and reduces the stress hormone cortisol levels

00:31:42.800 | during couple conflict.

00:31:44.280 | They have them fight with and without oxytocin.

00:31:48.200 | So interesting, very much in line with the idea

00:31:51.240 | that oxytocin is the quote unquote trust hormone.

00:31:53.960 | The other molecule that we make that's extremely important

00:31:56.880 | for social bonds and emotionality

00:31:59.200 | is one that we're going to talk about more

00:32:00.600 | in the month on hormones, and that's vasopressin.

00:32:03.720 | Vasopressin has effects on the brain directly.

00:32:07.100 | It actually creates feelings of giddy love.

00:32:10.980 | It also has very interesting effects

00:32:12.540 | on monogamous or non-monogamous behavior.

00:32:15.900 | This, again, we will revisit in the future,

00:32:18.040 | but there's a beautiful set of experiments

00:32:20.940 | that have been done in a little rodent species

00:32:23.040 | called a prairie vole.

00:32:24.480 | It turns out there are two different populations

00:32:26.040 | of prairie voles.

00:32:26.880 | Some are monogamous.

00:32:27.720 | They always mate with the same other prairie vole.

00:32:31.320 | And some are very robustly non-monogamous.

00:32:34.880 | They mate with as many other prairie voles as they can.

00:32:37.240 | And it turns out that levels of vasopressin

00:32:39.360 | and/or vasopressin receptor

00:32:41.200 | dictate whether or not they're monogamous or not.

00:32:43.480 | And there's actually some interesting evidence in humans

00:32:46.120 | when people report their behavior,

00:32:48.080 | assuming they're reporting accurately,

00:32:50.100 | that vasopressin and vasopressin levels

00:32:52.600 | can relate to monogamy or non-monogamy in humans as well.

00:32:55.980 | We're going to talk about this in the month on hormones.

00:32:58.920 | If we're talking about the neuroscience of emotions,

00:33:00.740 | we have to talk about the vagus nerve.

00:33:03.120 | I described what the vagus nerve is in a previous episode.

00:33:06.120 | That's these connections between the body and the viscera,

00:33:09.480 | including the gut, the heart, the lungs,

00:33:11.040 | and the immune system, and the brain,

00:33:12.960 | and that the brain is also controlling these organs.

00:33:15.480 | So it's a two-way street.

00:33:16.900 | There's this big myth out there that I mentioned before

00:33:20.440 | that stimulating the vagus in various ways

00:33:23.720 | leads to calmness, that it's always going to calm you down.

00:33:26.960 | And that is false.

00:33:28.600 | Now, this is interesting in light of emotionality

00:33:31.280 | because of work that's been done by many groups,

00:33:35.920 | but in particular, I'm going to focus on the work

00:33:38.180 | of a colleague of mine, Karl Deisseroth at Stanford,

00:33:40.760 | who's a psychiatrist, but has also developed a lot of tools

00:33:43.920 | to adjust the activity of neurons in real time

00:33:47.440 | using light and electrical stimulation and so forth.

00:33:50.880 | I'll refer you to an article in "The New Yorker"

00:33:52.920 | that was published about this a few years ago.

00:33:54.480 | I'm going to read a brief excerpt,

00:33:55.920 | but I'll put the link in the caption as well.

00:33:59.080 | He's talking to an extremely depressed,

00:34:01.120 | suicidally depressed patient

00:34:03.680 | who has a small device implanted

00:34:06.680 | that allows her to adjust her vagus nerve activity.

00:34:09.520 | They're in his office and they're talking,

00:34:12.040 | and he asks her how she's doing.

00:34:14.160 | And she describes how she's been doing previously

00:34:18.520 | as "going pancake,"

00:34:20.320 | which for her just means totally laid out flat,

00:34:23.220 | not much going on.

00:34:24.800 | She talks about how she doesn't want to pursue a job.

00:34:27.860 | She's really depressed.

00:34:29.420 | And he says in typical good psychiatrist fashion,

00:34:33.800 | well, that's a lot to think about.

00:34:35.100 | That's actually the quote.

00:34:36.400 | And they talk about her blood pressure, et cetera.

00:34:40.920 | And then she says, mood's been down, just spiraling down.

00:34:45.560 | Talks about insomnia, bad dreams, low appetite.

00:34:48.760 | So this is severe depression.

00:34:50.560 | This is what we call major depression.

00:34:52.720 | And then she requests,

00:34:54.000 | can we please go up to 1.5 on vagus stimulation?

00:34:57.880 | She'd been receiving 1.2 milliamps of stimulation

00:35:01.480 | every five minutes to 30 seconds,

00:35:03.480 | but was no longer able to feel the effects.

00:35:05.720 | So he says, okay, I think we can go up a little.

00:35:07.800 | You're tolerating things well.

00:35:09.300 | They start the stimulation and quote,

00:35:15.200 | "In the course of the next few minutes,"

00:35:17.480 | her name was Sally, "underwent a remarkable change.

00:35:19.560 | Her frown disappeared.

00:35:20.800 | She became cheerful, describing the pleasure she had had

00:35:23.560 | during the Christmas holiday and recounting

00:35:25.080 | how she'd recently watched some YouTube videos of Dyseroth.

00:35:28.080 | She was still smiling and talking when the session ended

00:35:32.480 | and they walked out to the reception area."

00:35:34.180 | So this is just by stimulating and activating the vagus.

00:35:36.720 | Now, why am I bringing this up?

00:35:37.960 | Well, for several reasons.

00:35:40.160 | One is the vagus is fascinating

00:35:42.440 | in terms of the brain-body connection.

00:35:43.920 | Two, I'd like to keep trying to dispel the myth

00:35:48.260 | that vagus stimulation is all about being calm.

00:35:50.740 | It's really about being alert.

00:35:52.440 | I don't know how that originally got going backwards,

00:35:54.600 | but it's about being alert.

00:35:57.200 | And once again, level of alertness or level of calmness

00:36:00.920 | is impacting emotion.

00:36:02.600 | That this access of alertness and calmness

00:36:05.280 | is one primary access in emotion.

00:36:09.200 | It's not the only one

00:36:10.320 | because there's also this valence component of good or bad.

00:36:13.360 | And those two aren't the only ones

00:36:15.200 | because there's also this component of interoceptive,

00:36:17.320 | exteroceptive that we talked about earlier.

00:36:18.960 | And there will be others too.

00:36:20.480 | Again, it's not exhaustive, but I find it fascinating.

00:36:23.260 | And it really brings us back to where we started,

00:36:25.960 | which is what are the core elements of emotion?

00:36:28.300 | And what can you do about them?

00:36:30.140 | This business of how you conceptualize emotions

00:36:32.520 | is really the most powerful tool you can ever have

00:36:36.540 | in terms of understanding

00:36:37.660 | and regulating your emotional state.

00:36:39.320 | If you're willing to try and wrap your head around it,

00:36:42.220 | I realize it's not the simplest thing to do,

00:36:44.580 | but rather than think of emotions as just these labels,

00:36:47.460 | happy, sad, awe, depressed,

00:36:50.360 | thinking about emotions, excuse me,

00:36:53.880 | as elements of the brain and body

00:36:58.680 | that encompass levels of alertness,

00:37:00.800 | that include a dynamic with the outside world

00:37:03.360 | and your perception of your internal state.

00:37:05.680 | And starting to really think about emotions

00:37:08.120 | in a structured way

00:37:09.720 | can not only allow you to understand some of the pathology

00:37:13.260 | of when you might feel depressed or anxious

00:37:16.000 | or others are depressed and anxious,

00:37:17.520 | but also to develop a richer emotional experience

00:37:20.700 | to anything.

00:37:21.580 | So I offer it to you as a source of knowledge

00:37:25.180 | from which you can start to think about

00:37:27.440 | your emotional life differently, I hope,

00:37:30.640 | as well as others in a way that builds more richness

00:37:33.440 | into that experience, not that detracts from it.

00:37:36.380 | I want to thank you for your time and attention

00:37:38.660 | and thank you for your interest in science.

00:37:40.860 | [upbeat music]

00:37:43.440 | (upbeat music)

The Science of Emotions & Relationships | Huberman Lab Essentials

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