How Your Thoughts Are Built & How You Can Shape Them

00:00:00.040 | - What goes on in our brains when we think

00:00:02.200 | might be that we're running simulations

00:00:05.200 | related to the thought,

00:00:06.640 | using that sensory motor infrastructure of the brain.

00:00:11.400 | - Could you elaborate?

00:00:12.360 | - So the theory is that,

00:00:13.680 | like maybe when you think about a cat, for example,

00:00:16.000 | or you think the concept of a cat,

00:00:18.100 | that the mental instantiation of that,

00:00:21.040 | or the brain mechanism instantiation of having that thought

00:00:25.300 | is to run a little simulation in visual cortex

00:00:28.140 | that kind of includes what a cat looks like,

00:00:31.400 | a simulation in auditory cortex,

00:00:33.180 | that what does the cat sound like?

00:00:35.600 | And as I'm telling you this,

00:00:37.180 | I'm, you know, I've used the word cat.

00:00:39.260 | What color cat are you thinking?

00:00:41.900 | - I'm thinking of a gray cat,

00:00:43.200 | but I keep smelling kitty litter.

00:00:44.940 | - Okay. - 'Cause my sister had cats

00:00:46.280 | and it drove me, the smell of kitty litter

00:00:48.040 | is just so aversive to me.

00:00:49.700 | - Right.

00:00:50.540 | And so you had no hesitation in telling me the color

00:00:54.080 | and adding an additional sensory quality.

00:00:56.440 | It provides an explanation for why you might, you know,

00:01:00.240 | be driving on the freeway

00:01:02.900 | and having to merge into difficult traffic

00:01:05.120 | and telling your passenger,

00:01:07.600 | "Okay, be quiet.

00:01:08.440 | I've got to pay attention now."

00:01:10.700 | Like, why would speech impair you from visual motor

00:01:15.700 | if it wasn't all part of a kind of cognitive system

00:01:20.100 | that's in operation?

00:01:21.840 | And maybe you need to shift some resources away

00:01:24.040 | from processing the conversation

00:01:26.520 | and towards some, you know,

00:01:28.520 | actually dealing with the here and now sensory motor task.

00:01:32.860 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:01:34.760 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:01:37.420 | for everyday life.

00:01:38.340 | - I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology

00:01:44.800 | and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:01:47.980 | My guest today is Dr. Jennifer Groh.

00:01:50.400 | Dr. Jennifer Groh is a professor of psychology

00:01:52.780 | and neuroscience at Duke University.

00:01:55.180 | Her laboratory studies how our brain represents

00:01:57.320 | the world around us.

00:01:58.640 | In particular, how our different senses are merged

00:02:01.340 | in the brain so that we can focus

00:02:02.840 | and learn more effectively,

00:02:04.440 | including how our eye movements fundamentally shape

00:02:07.140 | not just what we pay attention to,

00:02:09.000 | but how they dynamically control

00:02:10.320 | what our brain is capable of.

00:02:11.820 | What she shares is fundamental

00:02:13.180 | to understanding how your brain works

00:02:15.280 | and also how best to focus on

00:02:17.260 | and learn different types of information,

00:02:19.320 | not just information that you might read on a page,

00:02:21.460 | although including that,

00:02:22.980 | but also what you hear, what you remember,

00:02:25.440 | and the very thoughts you have

00:02:26.840 | about your life experiences.

00:02:28.520 | We also discuss thinking itself.

00:02:30.500 | In fact, we discuss what thoughts really are.

00:02:33.100 | And there, Dr. Groh shares with us

00:02:34.820 | what is perhaps the clearest and most useful definition

00:02:37.660 | of what thoughts are and how you can control them.

00:02:40.420 | As someone who has been in the field of neuroscience

00:02:42.060 | for nearly three decades,

00:02:43.560 | I must say that her explanation of what thinking is

00:02:46.140 | at the neural level, at the psychological level,

00:02:48.320 | and at the experiential level is the most compelling

00:02:50.940 | and useful one I've ever come across.

00:02:53.040 | Today, Dr. Groh explains how to use your experiences,

00:02:56.040 | the information you encounter,

00:02:57.560 | and knowledge of how thoughts are built up in the brain

00:03:00.200 | to become a better thinker and indeed smarter.

00:03:02.860 | I'm certain that the information you'll learn

00:03:04.320 | from Dr. Groh today is not like any other discussion

00:03:06.840 | you've heard about the brain or psychology.

00:03:08.920 | I'm also certain that it will be extremely useful

00:03:11.220 | for anyone wishing to better understand how the brain works,

00:03:14.040 | how their thoughts and emotions arise,

00:03:15.920 | and anyone who wants to get better at learning,

00:03:18.140 | thinking more deeply,

00:03:19.140 | or simply experiencing life with more richness.

00:03:21.860 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:03:24.560 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:03:27.240 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:03:29.140 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:03:31.780 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:03:34.460 | In keeping with that theme,

00:03:35.500 | today's episode does include sponsors.

00:03:38.000 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Jennifer Groh.

00:03:41.120 | Dr. Jennifer Groh, welcome.

00:03:42.900 | Dr. Jennifer Groh: Thank you.

00:03:43.740 | It's great to be here.

00:03:44.560 | We've never had a proper conversation on this podcast

00:03:47.780 | about sensory integration.

00:03:51.160 | We've talked about vision, talked a little bit about hearing,

00:03:54.420 | a little bit about touch, smell, taste,

00:03:57.840 | but we've never talked about how the senses come together,

00:04:00.660 | and that's critical to everyday life, critical to perception.

00:04:03.740 | Dr. Jennifer Groh: Absolutely.

00:04:04.620 | I know you focused perhaps mainly on the auditory system,

00:04:08.540 | but you really are a auditory visual integration person.

00:04:12.960 | I know this because I've followed your work for a number of years.

00:04:16.040 | So where in the brain do our eyes and our ears first come together

00:04:22.180 | to impact our perception of life?

00:04:24.460 | Dr. Jennifer Groh: The tea kettle is whistling or we hear a knock on the door.

00:04:30.500 | We know where the door is, we know where the tea kettle ought to be,

00:04:33.060 | but where do these things first collide?

00:04:35.520 | Dr. Jennifer Groh: The story that is triggered by that question is a little bit long,

00:04:38.900 | so maybe I can start at the beginning of when I first got interested in this question.

00:04:44.400 | And so I was a college student.

00:04:46.860 | I was interested in neuroscience, but we didn't have a neuroscience major,

00:04:52.140 | so a couple of us talked a professor into offering a seminar in neuroethology

00:04:59.700 | and kind of like what he thought were sort of the coolest findings in neuroscience.

00:05:04.320 | And in that class, I learned about a study showing that,

00:05:11.320 | and I'm going to begin with the neuroscience nerdy lingo and then we'll unpack it,

00:05:17.680 | that there is a brain structure called the superior colliculus

00:05:21.960 | that's responsive to both visual and auditory stimuli,

00:05:26.000 | and that the responses to auditory stimuli depended on where the eyes were looking.

00:05:32.520 | If you move the eyes, the neurons' receptive field, the region in space where they were responsive to,

00:05:38.140 | would shift as the eyes moved.

00:05:41.520 | And that blew my mind.

00:05:43.360 | I could not get that out of my head.

00:05:46.520 | And it kind of set me on the track that I've been on ever since then.

00:05:50.560 | One of the things that was really interesting to me about it is that figuring out where a sound is with respect to where the eyes are looking is something that would be easy for us to do with a pencil and paper.

00:06:03.120 | You know, it's very simple math.

00:06:05.160 | If you know that the sound is located, say, you know, 10 degrees to the right and your eyes are looking 10 degrees to the left,

00:06:13.680 | and that tells you that the sound is 20 degrees to the right of where your eyes are, really not that hard to do.

00:06:20.040 | But from what I knew at that point about how the brain represents this kind of spatial information,

00:06:27.240 | it seemed a big puzzle for how the brain might actually create these kind of moving representations of where the sound is located.

00:06:36.080 | Yeah, because what you're talking about are dynamic maps.

00:06:39.800 | Yeah.

00:06:40.800 | I think most people probably appreciate that we have a map of our body's surface, the so-called homunculus.

00:06:45.800 | Yep.

00:06:46.800 | And so if one were to stimulate in a given region of the brain, you'd have the illusion of being touched at that location on the body.

00:06:55.880 | You'll perhaps have seen the more sensitive an area of the body, like the fingertips or lips or face or feet,

00:07:03.640 | the larger the representation in the brain.

00:07:05.640 | But what you're talking about is shifting maps depending on where the eyes move, and the eyes move quite a lot.

00:07:12.320 | They move quite a lot, exactly, and mostly we're not aware of this, right?

00:07:17.680 | But if you think about it, every time your eyes move, the visual scene is shifting massively on the retina,

00:07:25.440 | but we don't even notice this.

00:07:27.200 | Mm-hmm.

00:07:27.200 | And this is an indication that the brain is doing a ton of computation under the hood to give us that perceptual experience.

00:07:33.200 | Mm-hmm.

00:07:34.200 | Because if we were just representing reality, the reality would be these massively shifting, smeared visual scenes.

00:07:42.200 | One thing that's so intriguing to me about the auditory system is, and the visual system, is the extent to which they can contract and dilate so fast.

00:07:51.200 | Mm-hmm.

00:07:52.960 | If I'm, like, walking to get on public transportation of some sort, like a light rail or a subway, I'm walking, you know, there's sound going by me, may or may not be relevant, but at some point I sit down.

00:08:08.720 | Right.

00:08:09.720 | And then, you know, these are, I open up a book or a computer, or these days people go into their phone.

00:08:13.480 | And we say into the phone because there's a lot of sensory information there, but our visual world and our auditory world just goes into, you know, a small box.

00:08:24.480 | And we expect whatever we're looking at to relate to the sounds that we're hearing in that small box.

00:08:32.240 | Right.

00:08:32.240 | But if somebody says, "Excuse me, do you have a ticket," you know to look up.

00:08:37.240 | Right.

00:08:37.240 | We take this for granted.

00:08:39.240 | Mm-hmm.

00:08:39.240 | Like, most people might think, "Of course you look up, like, the sound is coming from over there. It's now a person."

00:08:43.240 | But we, all of a sudden, we can remap our visual auditory world and all the context in, like, milliseconds.

00:08:51.000 | Right.

00:08:52.000 | So is that all happening, and we've been talking about superior colliculus in this structure, the superior colliculus, below our neocortex, meaning is it below our kind of conscious awareness?

00:09:05.000 | You know, gosh, I wish we knew where conscious awareness was.

00:09:08.000 | Mm-hmm.

00:09:08.000 | I think that's an open question.

00:09:10.000 | And, you know, the superior colliculus is important in this story because that's where the research began.

00:09:16.760 | It's not that that's where the binding of visual and auditory space, you know, is necessarily fully contained there and only there.

00:09:26.760 | Mm-hmm.

00:09:26.760 | I think it's a much bigger problem, and I think what you're describing is kind of, you know, another version of this kind of capturing

00:09:37.760 | of or integrating or connecting the information from one sensory system to another.

00:09:46.520 | That kind of shifting your resources around is something that happens in a few different contexts, like what you're describing.

00:09:53.520 | Mm-hmm.

00:09:54.520 | And I think one of the things that's really interesting about the phone or really any screen where you're watching a video is that the sound was never coming directly from the screen where you're looking at the visual image.

00:10:05.280 | Mm-hmm.

00:10:05.280 | You know, it's coming from somewhere else.

00:10:08.040 | Maybe you've got earbuds in and it's coming from the earbuds.

00:10:11.040 | Maybe the earbud signal is simulating what the location should be if it was really coming from the screen, but it's a simulation.

00:10:19.040 | It's not actually reality.

00:10:21.040 | Oh, yeah.

00:10:22.040 | That's so interesting.

00:10:23.040 | So, yeah, let's unpack this a bit.

00:10:25.040 | So, we merge what we see with what we hear.

00:10:29.800 | Yep.

00:10:30.200 | If it makes sense to merge them.

00:10:31.800 | Right.

00:10:31.800 | Like, lips are moving.

00:10:32.800 | Lips are moving.

00:10:33.800 | And that's in our hand, about a foot in front of us.

00:10:36.800 | Mm-hmm.

00:10:37.800 | But the sounds are coming in elsewhere.

00:10:40.280 | Right.

00:10:40.720 | This is very different than, say, like, if somebody's mouth were moving and the sounds coming out of it were offset by even the tiniest bit of time.

00:10:53.000 | It looks weird.

00:10:53.880 | It looks totally weird.

00:10:54.680 | It looks totally weird.

00:10:55.640 | Yeah.

00:10:56.040 | Like, like, like this video.

00:10:57.080 | It's uncomfortable.

00:10:57.640 | Yeah, somebody, somebody grabbed this, like, like ripped this video from the Internet and there's a time delay.

00:11:03.240 | Right.

00:11:03.680 | But we easily merge what we see with sounds.

00:11:07.680 | That's right.

00:11:08.040 | And maybe talk about this because I, now I'm realizing, like, if I sit and watch a movie.

00:11:12.440 | Yeah.

00:11:12.960 | Or movie theater or on a big screen or my computer.

00:11:16.840 | Right.

00:11:17.120 | The sound is not coming from the screen.

00:11:18.720 | It's coming from a speaker, which is like projecting vertically.

00:11:21.680 | Yes.

00:11:22.240 | How does that work?

00:11:23.120 | Well, not only that, but like, the sound is jumping around in your perception as different people on the screen from different locations on the screen are speaking.

00:11:32.840 | Right.

00:11:33.640 | And they're both coming in through your ears or through the speak, well, through the speaker.

00:11:37.240 | Whatever means the sound is being delivered to you is not changing as the different people are speaking.

00:11:43.000 | Right, so let's say a dialogue on a screen between two characters and then maybe there's an explosion in the background.

00:11:47.760 | Right.

00:11:47.760 | Or another character walks in the room, that the source of the sound for us, whether it's computers, speakers in the room, or movie theater, or earbuds, is always constant.

00:11:59.760 | But we can quickly move the sound with our eyes or our eyes moving the sound with our ears.

00:12:07.520 | Yeah.

00:12:07.520 | Let me amend a little bit here because, you know, it depends a lot on like how the sound is mixed.

00:12:14.520 | They can put in some spatial cues, but if they haven't done that, then what we just said applies.

00:12:21.280 | And I think one of some of my favorite videos for, you know, for really appreciating this is our videos of actual ventriloquists working with their puppets.

00:12:29.280 | Because there they are, you know, the puppeteer is speaking and they're making it seem like the puppet is speaking, and they're making our perception switch back and forth from their own face to the puppet face back and forth depending on what they're actually saying.

00:12:48.040 | So this is a ventriloquist that says like, hey, Cornelius, how are you?

00:12:51.960 | And then Cornelius says, but the same person says, I'm doing great.

00:12:56.240 | Yeah.

00:12:56.600 | And they probably move their lips a little less when they do that.

00:13:00.400 | Yeah.

00:13:00.800 | They try to speak like this without moving their lips too much, and they sometimes will do a trick of like, there are certain sounds that you just cannot make without closing your lips in front, and that's really hard to fool people about.

00:13:15.120 | So for example, if it's a word that begins with a B or has a B in it, they might subtly just cover their mouth a little bit while they're making that B sound so that it's a kind of misdirection like a magician would do to sort of keep you from attending too much to the ventriloquist and throw your attention over to the puppet.

00:13:34.520 | So our perception can switch back and forth between where our brains are telling us this is the most likely candidate for the source of this sound.

00:13:45.440 | So I'm going to override what my ears are telling me to perceive the sound as coming from here versus here.

00:13:52.360 | Is this something we learn during development?

00:13:54.360 | Partly, yes.

00:13:55.360 | Like do kids come into the world understanding how to merge sight and sound or is that a learned phenomenon?

00:14:00.880 | It has to be learned and it has to be continuously updated during the course of development until you reach your adult body size.

00:14:08.360 | So let me back up a little bit and talk about how do we localize sound, especially when we're not talking about, you know, screens and video and movies and whatnot, but just like out there in the real world.

00:14:21.080 | The way we tell where sound is coming from is by the physics of the world causing differential delays for the sound to arrive at one ear versus the other.

00:14:31.800 | So sound takes a certain amount of time, you know, sound coming from over here will get to this ear before it gets to this ear and it'll be slightly louder in this ear than in this one.

00:14:41.800 | Because it's just closer to that ear.

00:14:43.560 | It's closer, but also there's a kind of acoustic shadow cast by the head.

00:14:48.280 | So the sound wave has to kind of come and then go around and there's a little, you know, there's a little sort of dip in the sound intensity cast by the shadow of the head.

00:14:59.400 | I like to think about the timing cues because they're really easy to calculate.

00:15:03.440 | So if you know how far apart your ears are and you know what the speed of sound is, then you can figure out what's the delay for the sound, for sound to get to reach this ear after this ear.

00:15:14.960 | I often take off my glasses to measure the distance between my two ears that way.

00:15:19.840 | And it's something like about a half a millisecond is the largest delay you can experience.

00:15:25.200 | Half a millisecond.

00:15:26.480 | Half a millisecond.

00:15:28.640 | So this is tiny.

00:15:30.720 | And that is for the difference between a sound here versus a sound here.

00:15:35.120 | So something from your right versus from your left.

00:15:37.200 | Exactly.

00:15:38.320 | We can obviously detect much smaller sound separations than just totally left versus totally right.

00:15:45.360 | So there's, you know, it's an incredible feat of computational power by the brain.

00:15:51.840 | I think maybe we should tell the audience why, you know, your brow is furrowed and I'm excited

00:15:58.400 | about this because half a millisecond is less than the duration of a single action potential.

00:16:04.560 | Right.

00:16:05.600 | And we should just remind people action potentials are the electrical signals that neurons use to

00:16:09.280 | communicate with one another.

00:16:10.720 | These are the fundamental way in which our brain works.

00:16:17.200 | Without these, we're dead.

00:16:18.400 | It's the fundamental medium of communication in the nervous system, as you say.

00:16:23.760 | So it would seem totally weird for us to be able to process sensory information that is

00:16:30.000 | faster than the duration of that minimum increment of firing.

00:16:34.880 | You know, there's some research about how exactly this can be done.

00:16:38.560 | And it involves things like lots of neurons firing together and really precise synapses that

00:16:45.120 | cause minimal delay and very high temporal precision as the signals are going from one neuron to the next.

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00:19:50.720 | So, you know, if my finger snaps up with my right hand, which is what I just did,

00:19:56.160 | you know, intuitively I know that it's my right hand because I did it.

00:20:00.560 | But my brain expects that sound to arrive more quickly to my right ear than my left ear.

00:20:05.280 | Right.

00:20:06.000 | And yet for things directly in front of me, right at my nose,

00:20:11.520 | the idea that it's right in front of me, let's say with my eyes closed,

00:20:16.560 | I know to look in front of me.

00:20:18.560 | I know to expect it in front of me once I open my eyes.

00:20:20.960 | Right, right.

00:20:21.440 | Are there conditions where we think we hear something from one location,

00:20:24.640 | but it's actually arising from another location that's outside an experimental context?

00:20:29.360 | Absolutely.

00:20:30.000 | So if you have hearing loss in one ear and one ear only, then it's very difficult to localize sound.

00:20:37.520 | It's not completely impossible.

00:20:40.240 | You would imagine that it would be completely impossible if the hearing loss was complete

00:20:44.400 | and if this timing difference and level difference were the only cues that we use.

00:20:50.560 | But actually, the ear has these little folds in them, and the folds filter the sound as it comes in.

00:20:57.200 | And in particular, it alters the frequency content of the sound.

00:21:01.760 | Really? So these little dimples inside my ears are useful for something?

00:21:05.440 | They're useful, and your ears are different than my ears.

00:21:07.680 | And so you are going to be expecting a slightly different kind of fingerprint

00:21:12.720 | of what the sound sounds like as a function of location than I would be.

00:21:18.160 | Do people with damage to their ears have issues hearing?

00:21:22.800 | Have issues with that?

00:21:23.360 | I mean, it sounds like sort of a they must, but like the people I know that roll jiu-jitsu,

00:21:30.880 | the wrestlers, their ears are always beat up.

00:21:32.640 | Oh, they're meshed?

00:21:33.200 | Okay.

00:21:33.520 | They basically don't have these folds.

00:21:34.960 | It's just kind of...

00:21:35.600 | Flatten?

00:21:36.160 | Yeah.

00:21:37.200 | Interesting.

00:21:37.680 | I don't know of any studies, but I think we can predict from first principles

00:21:42.400 | that they would have an initial deficit, and that very likely they would learn to adapt,

00:21:48.320 | and they would kind of learn their new set of ears,

00:21:52.480 | and what particular frequency pattern to expect from that.

00:21:55.760 | If the auditory system is so sensitive, why is it that I don't really hear my own voice?

00:22:02.560 | Or if I talk out one side of my mouth, I sort of know what I'm doing,

00:22:06.320 | but it doesn't throw me off.

00:22:07.840 | It doesn't sound quite right.

00:22:08.320 | It doesn't throw me off.

00:22:09.120 | And yet, most people have the experience of watching themselves or hearing themselves speak,

00:22:16.160 | and it feels awkward.

00:22:17.520 | Yeah.

00:22:17.680 | If we don't really like...

00:22:19.520 | Yeah.

00:22:19.520 | I suppose there are some people on the planet that like to hear themselves speak,

00:22:22.320 | but most people don't.

00:22:23.280 | Yeah.

00:22:23.680 | Most people are not.

00:22:24.320 | Right.

00:22:24.480 | It sounds...

00:22:25.680 | Say we cancel ourselves out while we speak.

00:22:28.480 | Yeah.

00:22:28.880 | But then when it's coming at us from the front, it's like...

00:22:32.000 | It's weird.

00:22:32.880 | It's odd.

00:22:33.120 | Do you like listening to this podcast, or do you...

00:22:35.760 | Well, I listen to all the podcasts to see ways that I can improve.

00:22:38.800 | Yeah.

00:22:39.280 | And I like the content that my guests bring on, and I like the topics.

00:22:44.320 | But it's an awkward feeling, isn't it?

00:22:45.600 | Oh, it's always awkward.

00:22:45.600 | To listen to yourself is very awkward.

00:22:47.360 | Yeah, it's uncomfortable.

00:22:48.320 | It's uncomfortable.

00:22:49.120 | Yeah, yeah.

00:22:49.440 | It's uncomfortable.

00:22:50.160 | Before I answer that question, which is a really interesting question, I want to loop

00:22:53.280 | back to the do we have to learn this.

00:22:55.280 | The other thing to say about learning, learning how to interpret these, the timing difference

00:23:02.080 | cues and the level difference cues, is that a baby's head is about half the width of an

00:23:07.440 | adult's head.

00:23:08.080 | Mm-hmm.

00:23:08.720 | So that means that that, you know, half millisecond for me is, you know, a quarter

00:23:13.040 | of a millisecond for a baby, and it's going to change as they grow.

00:23:17.760 | So that's why you have to do all this learning.

00:23:19.920 | With respect to the question you just asked about, like, why our voices sound weird, I could say more

00:23:26.400 | about why they sound weird and less about why we experience it as kind of unpleasant.

00:23:31.360 | Maybe that the weird and unpleasant connection is because we're just so used to the way it actually,

00:23:39.440 | the way we experience it, that to hear it recorded is going to be unfamiliar and strange.

00:23:45.440 | I think there's going to be three things.

00:23:48.240 | Number one, the recording is not going to capture the full spectrum of frequency content of your voice.

00:23:54.080 | Number two, your brain has an active mechanism for manipulating the transduction of sound in your ears.

00:24:04.240 | That is to say, the conversion of sound into a neural signal that's going to go into the brain.

00:24:10.160 | So your brain actually controls that process.

00:24:12.400 | And there's some thinking that it's, you know, turning down the volume just before you speak

00:24:19.360 | so that you don't get blasted by the sound of your own voice.

00:24:23.600 | If you think about it, like if I were speaking at this volume with my mouth this far away from my

00:24:29.200 | ear, like if I was speaking at this volume from here or somebody else was speaking at this volume

00:24:33.440 | from here, it'd be too loud.

00:24:35.600 | Got it.

00:24:35.840 | So for those just listening, so Jenny's referring to, so the distance between your mouth and your

00:24:41.920 | ear is a very short one.

00:24:43.280 | And if someone were to speak into your ear at that distance, I suppose, unless they were telling

00:24:51.120 | you something you really wanted to hear, you'd probably feel like, "Hey, get out of my personal

00:24:56.560 | space."

00:24:56.720 | You'd want somebody to speak a little more softly.

00:24:59.680 | Yeah, and yet we're doing it all the time.

00:25:01.360 | All the time.

00:25:02.240 | It's just that we're projecting it outward.

00:25:03.920 | Well, we're projecting it outward and our brain is turning down the volume

00:25:08.480 | in anticipation of what we're saying.

00:25:10.800 | So it's a very, you know, potentially it could be a very precisely timed volume knob that is going

00:25:18.240 | with each little word that I say.

00:25:20.160 | So when the psychologists say that we can't speak and hear at the same time, they're 100% accurate.

00:25:27.520 | Probably.

00:25:28.160 | We can't speak in here correctly.

00:25:29.520 | We cannot.

00:25:30.240 | And then the third thing is that this maybe goes back to the first point about the recording

00:25:34.480 | doesn't capture all of it, is that some of what we are picking up is actually through bone

00:25:39.440 | conduction.

00:25:40.000 | You may have bone conduction headphones.

00:25:43.760 | I certainly do.

00:25:44.560 | These are headphones that they don't go over the ears.

00:25:48.640 | They don't go in the ears.

00:25:49.760 | They're usually positioned right in front of the ears, delivering the vibration signals to the bone

00:25:55.840 | right in front of your ear.

00:25:57.840 | And that can get transmitted into your ears as well.

00:26:01.680 | You have these headphones?

00:26:02.480 | I have these.

00:26:03.120 | I have these.

00:26:04.000 | Why do you use these instead of in-ear?

00:26:06.160 | In-ear?

00:26:06.960 | Yeah.

00:26:07.280 | Because it leaves my ears open so I can hear something else.

00:26:09.840 | So it's safer if you're out exercising somewhere where there might be traffic or something like that.

00:26:15.520 | I get a lot of questions about headphones and safety.

00:26:18.960 | And one thing that we resolved recently on the podcast, we had a guest on who's our chair of

00:26:26.400 | autolanguology at Stanford.

00:26:28.080 | And she said that if your headphones are loud enough that somebody besides you can hear that

00:26:35.920 | there is a sound, not even the specific sounds, you are inflicting hearing damage.

00:26:41.120 | Right.

00:26:41.280 | Probably permanent hearing loss at some level.

00:26:44.240 | That she sets a pretty low threshold for kind of like be careful.

00:26:49.120 | But it seems important given that we now know hearing loss is correlated with dementia.

00:26:54.800 | Right.

00:26:55.040 | It makes sense.

00:26:56.240 | Less sensory information comes in.

00:26:58.160 | The brain probably says, well, there's less stuff coming in and starts turning off circuits.

00:27:02.000 | And then memory goes and attention goes.

00:27:05.520 | And there are other things obviously that can impact dementia.

00:27:08.400 | But so it's interesting.

00:27:10.400 | The other question I get a lot is about the Bluetooth earphones.

00:27:17.200 | People want to know, are they safe?

00:27:18.480 | Is it safe to have this like Bluetooth arc, you know, in your ears?

00:27:22.720 | In your ears.

00:27:23.600 | And we had a guest on here, Matt McDougall, who's the neurosurgeon at Neuralink.

00:27:28.880 | Mm-hmm.

00:27:29.280 | They're big on Bluetooth.

00:27:30.240 | Mm-hmm.

00:27:30.640 | They're at Neuralink.

00:27:31.120 | But he said that the amount of radiation coming from those Bluetooth headphones is considerably lower than

00:27:38.400 | the sort of radiation that you're exposed to all day, every day.

00:27:41.280 | So he wasn't concerned.

00:27:42.400 | Are you aware of any impact of heat?

00:27:45.520 | I'm not looking to go after EMF here if there isn't anything there.

00:27:49.920 | But of heat or of just having EMF around your ears, given the sensitivity of the bone.

00:27:58.080 | I mean, I'm just amazed that you can pick up sound from the bone vibrations.

00:28:01.200 | I mean, this is a very sensitive neural sensory space is what I'm realizing.

00:28:06.480 | Right.

00:28:06.720 | I do think that there's concerns about just how much sound exposure people are accumulating.

00:28:14.480 | If we live long enough, 80% of us will get hearing loss at some point in our lives.

00:28:20.720 | Bummer.

00:28:21.440 | So it's a big problem.

00:28:24.720 | There's certainly concerns that young people are farther along on that trajectory to hearing loss

00:28:33.200 | than people from older generations were at a comparable age.

00:28:36.240 | Just because there's, you know, the earbuds are in from morning to night and volume turned up

00:28:44.160 | loud enough to block out surrounding sound.

00:28:46.720 | You know, if you're in a loud environment, I would encourage people to give some consideration

00:28:52.640 | to noise canceling headphones and to not having the volume be turned up too loud.

00:28:56.800 | I'd like to talk about the experience of listening to something, music, let's say, through headphones

00:29:03.440 | versus in the room.

00:29:04.640 | We don't think about it too often, but it's a totally different experience.

00:29:09.040 | In one case, you're hearing the sound in your head.

00:29:11.680 | Yeah, right.

00:29:12.400 | Or even, you know, like your phone on speaker versus wearing your earphones.

00:29:18.160 | Right.

00:29:19.040 | The person's voice or the music is in your head.

00:29:22.160 | Right.

00:29:22.640 | As opposed to in the room.

00:29:23.760 | Right.

00:29:23.920 | Right.

00:29:24.480 | And once you think about this difference, I simply can't go back.

00:29:28.080 | It's like a...

00:29:29.280 | You like the full actual speakers?

00:29:31.520 | No.

00:29:31.920 | Well, now I try to listen to music in the room.

00:29:34.960 | Yeah.

00:29:34.960 | I find that to be a better experience for me.

00:29:38.720 | But when I hear things with headphones, I now feel like, oh, like the sound is coming from inside

00:29:45.840 | my head.

00:29:46.720 | And it's a little weird.

00:29:48.240 | Yeah.

00:29:48.320 | I don't like it so much.

00:29:49.520 | Right.

00:29:50.080 | It is possible to make sound that is coming from headphones sound like it is coming from outside.

00:29:55.760 | But to do that, you have to use all three of these sound localization cues.

00:29:59.280 | Things have to be, you know, to have an appropriate timing difference, an appropriate

00:30:05.680 | level difference across the two ears, and to use the frequency filtering properties of the ear.

00:30:13.360 | And since everybody's ears are a little bit different, that last step is really hard.

00:30:18.080 | But there is 3D sound, right?

00:30:20.400 | Yeah.

00:30:20.960 | Like, we think about, like, three-dimensional vision is simple for people to think about.

00:30:25.200 | As long as they're sighted, you understand that, you know, you expect things that are

00:30:28.880 | closer to you to be larger than if they were far away.

00:30:33.120 | That we can't...

00:30:34.000 | We learned this without...

00:30:35.040 | You got so many wonderful cues to distance in vision, right?

00:30:38.000 | Yeah.

00:30:38.240 | Things in the distance are harder to resolve as opposed to things up close, which you can

00:30:41.600 | see all the detail, and there are all these cues, right, that we could talk about.

00:30:45.840 | But since we're talking about hearing, the sounds that we hear at a given level, we

00:30:53.120 | know are close, are coming from objects that are actually close or far away, usually based on what

00:30:59.040 | we see.

00:30:59.360 | Mm-hmm.

00:31:00.160 | Yeah.

00:31:00.480 | Right?

00:31:00.800 | So what is 3D sound?

00:31:02.640 | How do I know the difference between a sound that's right in front of my face versus far

00:31:06.720 | away with my eyes closed?

00:31:08.080 | How do I know?

00:31:08.720 | This is a computational process in the brain that we don't fully understand.

00:31:12.160 | And it's worth thinking about what are the available pieces of information that you can use.

00:31:17.680 | Sound is much more bendy than light is.

00:31:21.120 | Bendy.

00:31:22.080 | Bendy.

00:31:22.560 | Like it bends, right?

00:31:23.280 | Goes around things.

00:31:24.000 | Goes around things.

00:31:24.960 | It goes around things.

00:31:24.960 | Whereas light is just kind of like a straight shot, you know.

00:31:28.320 | You don't have the opportunity to use the same kind of information for sound depth that you do for

00:31:33.840 | vision.

00:31:34.300 | Even though you have two ears, you can't form an image and check to see whether or not the images

00:31:40.240 | line up, which is what stereo vision is.

00:31:42.800 | You don't have occlusion cues.

00:31:45.520 | That is to say, one thing being in front of the other blocks your ability to see the thing that's

00:31:51.040 | behind.

00:31:51.520 | Mm-hmm.

00:31:51.520 | So, you know, the sound can go around objects.

00:31:54.400 | So, there's a few different cues that we can use.

00:31:58.080 | One is simply how loud is the sound.

00:32:01.040 | Things that are farther away are going to sound quieter.

00:32:06.320 | But you have to know what the sound volume was out there in the world in order to interpret

00:32:14.480 | whether or not that is quiet or loud.

00:32:16.560 | Let's use thunder as an example because thunder sounding very loud predicts lightning that might hit

00:32:21.840 | you.

00:32:22.000 | Right.

00:32:22.480 | Thunder that sounds way off in the distance, if you have an understanding of thunder and lightning,

00:32:26.640 | predicts a lower probability of you getting hit by lightning.

00:32:31.360 | Right.

00:32:31.680 | I had this experience recently.

00:32:32.960 | I got caught in a sudden lightning storm, thunder lightning storm in Austin, Texas.

00:32:38.000 | And it was coming down in sheets.

00:32:40.400 | And then, you know, and the thunder gets louder and louder.

00:32:43.120 | And you're like, wow.

00:32:43.920 | And then the lightning gets brighter and brighter.

00:32:46.640 | And you think, I could get electrocuted.

00:32:48.720 | And it seems like a low probability event.

00:32:52.240 | Right.

00:32:52.560 | Depending on where you grew up.

00:32:53.760 | You might have learned as a child, like, some basics of how to tell.

00:32:59.040 | like when it's good idea to you know get to shelter um so you know for example i was taught

00:33:04.560 | growing up you know you count one one thousand two one thousand whatever as long as you can count to

00:33:09.360 | like five seconds you're probably okay but once you're getting to that level you should you know

00:33:15.600 | maybe go inside there let's take that yeah take that one in folks from somebody who grew up with

00:33:20.000 | them you see the flash of lightning one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand four

00:33:25.200 | one thousand five one thousand and if it takes longer than that before you hear the thunder you're

00:33:29.600 | okay but at that point i would go inside you may have saved some lives yeah growing up in california

00:33:36.480 | we didn't learn anything about it you didn't get that and people who grew up in cities wouldn't have

00:33:40.320 | gotten this i think in cities it's actually very hard to see the connection between the light lightning

00:33:45.680 | and the thunder um but i grew up in rural vermont and it was like very obvious i grew up in the san

00:33:53.120 | francisco bay area and i've been through so many earthquakes and one of the things that

00:33:56.880 | uh people don't realize if they've never been in a major earthquake is that it's extremely loud

00:34:04.160 | it starts with sound not shaking you don't you know so this is people always saying california

00:34:10.480 | earthquakes and you know and with a nine quake and the freeway pancaked and the bay bridge actually a

00:34:16.480 | segment fell out yeah forget this during the world series that happened now there would be so many

00:34:21.280 | casualties but it was a lot less busy in the bay area back then yeah the first thing that happens

00:34:27.520 | in an earthquake is it sounds like a train is about to come through the room yeah sure

00:34:31.600 | and then the shaking starts shortly thereafter uh-huh but the sound always comes first huh i always tell

00:34:39.280 | people this when they're afraid of earthquakes like you'll hear it before you'll feel it before you see

00:34:43.280 | it so if it sounds like a train is going to come through the the room you're probably about to have an

00:34:49.440 | earthquake right i think elephants use um sound to communicate over long distances i so that's cool

00:34:58.000 | they stomp yeah i think so or they can hear yeah they can hear things i think they have sensors in

00:35:04.320 | their feet that can pick up these vibrations that we might call sound oh that's cool yeah that's like

00:35:09.200 | that scene in stand by me yeah where they're crossing the train tracks on a bridge yeah and all the

00:35:15.760 | kids are just kind of moving along and then uh gordy who's the yeah arguably one of the smarter in the

00:35:20.880 | bunch yeah he's like he's reaching down and holding the traction he feels the track shakes before he

00:35:27.840 | hears that the yeah the um yeah the horn and then of course the smoke rounds the corner train rounds the

00:35:33.920 | corner interesting interesting yeah and with the elephants i'm not sure i think maybe it's not sensors in

00:35:39.440 | the feet but bone conduction from the feet to the ear and that's where it's where it's being picked up so

00:35:47.040 | okay so your question was if i can go back to your question it was about distance and how do we know

00:35:51.120 | how far away a sound is coming from so the the loudness cue requires you to know something about how loud

00:35:59.920 | the original stimulus at the source is and so thunder is a wonderful example of this because we do have

00:36:06.000 | quite a bit of experience with thunder so we can kind of use how loud it is as a good cue and it also

00:36:12.160 | works great because we're talking about really long distances right there's another pretty cool cue that

00:36:19.600 | you and i are probably using right now and that is that the sound in this room is bouncing off of all the

00:36:26.320 | different surfaces so the shortest path copy of the sound is coming straight from your mouth to my ears

00:36:32.080 | but in addition there's a copy that's bouncing off of the table that's between us

00:36:36.240 | that will have a has a longer path length so it'll be slightly delayed there'll be another copy that's

00:36:42.400 | you know hitting the ceiling and and coming down to my ears oh this is weird and that is going to have

00:36:47.280 | an even longer delay i'm completely unaware of this but my brain is probably using the slight differences

00:36:55.680 | and the kind of pattern of slight differences to figure out you know that you're about seven feet

00:37:02.400 | away from me if we were closer to to each other the difference between that straight path copy and

00:37:09.440 | the copy bouncing off of the table would be greater than it is right now because at this angle with this

00:37:15.920 | you know geometry there's really not that much difference so the bounced off copy and the straight path

00:37:21.280 | copy are pretty similar i never thought about this it's incredible right this is a way that vision

00:37:27.440 | is so different yeah i came up through vision science mostly yeah so did i and right i mean there

00:37:33.920 | are certain wavelengths of light that can pass through our body like long wavelength light that's relatively

00:37:38.640 | new findings i think it's really interesting and it's very healthy for us it turns out yeah mitochondrial

00:37:43.120 | health etc but like in general we're not used to thinking about light and wavelengths of light going through

00:37:49.760 | things unless they're translucent or transparent like a window sound is constantly bouncing off

00:37:56.720 | everything we're in a hall of mirrors for sound all the time but you experience me and i experience you

00:38:02.800 | during this conversation as one coherent sound even though we are biologically poised to detect

00:38:10.880 | half a millisecond differences in the arrival time of the two ears there are much greater differences in

00:38:16.960 | the arrival time of my voice bouncing off the table versus the walls versus the ceiling versus direct

00:38:21.360 | path but you integrate them and i don't hear you as saying the same thing you know five different

00:38:27.600 | times right you know it's one integrated whole and closing one's eyes doesn't change that if i close

00:38:33.280 | my eyes and you speak i can register to the direct path i infer that you're right in front of me of course

00:38:39.440 | i know that because my eyes were open a second ago but all the versions of your voice arriving bouncing

00:38:45.600 | off to different surfaces are arriving at my ears and i don't it doesn't it's not confusing and it's not

00:38:50.320 | jarring right like if somebody came over and touched my arm and i felt it on my arm but also a little bit on

00:38:57.120 | the back of my neck and a little bit on my knee that would be weird that would that would be odd you know

00:39:02.320 | and we can get these sensations there are certain places on the back for instance that you can feel a

00:39:06.480 | subtle kind of phantom touch in your foot because of the way the neural circuits are organized and with

00:39:10.880 | pain we talk about this as like referenced pain you know for internal organs there's there are branches

00:39:16.240 | of nerves such that you know and this shows up in you know eastern medicine but also western medicine

00:39:23.440 | like someone with a with like liver pain will register that in their shoulder you know and yeah and we

00:39:28.800 | think oh this is crazy no it's not crazy that there's actually branches that that support that

00:39:33.440 | referenced pain but we don't do this with hearing yeah we shut it all down and we just collect the the

00:39:41.040 | we make we draw a conclusion right wild it's wild isn't it it's totally wild uh are you about to tell

00:39:50.080 | me that our voices are also causing vibrations in the objects around us and that we just can't detect them

00:39:54.800 | why are we not like the elephants how come maybe we are like the elephants i don't know

00:39:59.520 | is it the case that low frequency sounds can travel further with respect to our ability to detect them

00:40:09.680 | so i you know i don't want to get into a conversation about frequency of sound and

00:40:13.600 | yeah intensity and versus high versus low frequency because that's that's really about the physics of

00:40:18.560 | sound right right but ultimately we filter the physics of sound through our nervous system so

00:40:25.760 | if i want to signal to somebody far away i would probably want like a big bass drum or a gong

00:40:34.800 | i would not try to whistle to them far away or if i could pick a horn that was a a deep like

00:40:43.680 | versus like i'd want bass so there's a few things wrapped up here one is that the lower frequencies

00:40:52.320 | bend more bend more easily so they they can go around these objects better so if you're talking

00:40:58.480 | really long distances you know the odds that there's something in the path that you want to

00:41:04.080 | the sound to go around or are go up another thing that's wrapped up here is that we tend to lose

00:41:12.160 | high frequency hearing before we lose low frequency hearing and so the lower frequencies are audible to

00:41:21.040 | more people and are louder to people than the higher frequencies so you're saying it's because it can bend

00:41:27.120 | around objects well i don't really know what the choices that are being made are by the people whose

00:41:33.360 | job it is to figure these kinds of things out but i'm sure that there's some thought being given to

00:41:38.640 | the receiver you know the the people and what they can what they can perceive so let's take a couple

00:41:45.760 | other examples of warning systems that that humans use the gas in a gas stove doesn't have an intrinsic

00:41:53.840 | odor to it there's an odorant that's been added that rotten egg sulfur that rotten egg yeah exactly and

00:42:01.120 | so you know that was chosen a long time ago to be added and you know turns out to be a good thing

00:42:07.360 | because it doesn't doesn't really smell like anything else it's not pleasant but everybody can detect it

00:42:13.280 | i don't know of any cases of people that can't smell that unless they have a generalized uh and knows me

00:42:18.800 | where they can't smell anything traffic lights are maybe a little bit of a less of a win because you've

00:42:25.520 | got red versus green and six percent of the population is red green colorblind which operationally means

00:42:34.480 | not that you can't see a red stimulus or a green stimulus but that you can't tell the difference um you

00:42:40.640 | know whether or not something is red or green yeah i should just say that um that most red green colorblind

00:42:46.480 | people tend to be males just because of where the the gene mutation is in the in the genome and

00:42:52.800 | they don't see people always want to know what what does red look like to them

00:42:57.520 | red and green look kind of more orangish burnt brown orange color and dogs see the world that way

00:43:05.920 | all the time right so if you do a color matching experiment my understanding is something along the

00:43:10.160 | lines of people with red green color blindness will map both red and green onto yellow and not and not

00:43:17.360 | be able to tell the difference it's not the kind of cartoon view of like it looks black and white there

00:43:23.840 | are people who are completely monochromatic but it's very rare very rare very very very rare and there are

00:43:28.720 | other forms of color blindness that are more subtle and colorblind people should we'll put a link to this uh

00:43:33.440 | jane maureen knights up at the university of washington of a terrific um they run a color

00:43:38.640 | vision lab she's a molecular biologist he's more of a psychophysicist and they have some really great

00:43:43.600 | color vision tests there that people can take and many people find that they have subtle color vision

00:43:49.200 | deficits yeah yeah exactly but but they don't consider themselves fully colorblind but every once in a

00:43:54.160 | while uh monochromats usually know yeah that they're seeing the world of black and white and a lot of

00:43:59.920 | what you know is under this heading is is really more an anomaly than a complete absence of an ability

00:44:06.240 | to distinguish red from green but back to our traffic lights so you got your red versus green signaling

00:44:11.360 | something very different and most places have those lights oriented vertically which gives you a second cue

00:44:20.640 | to what's what needs to be conveyed here so not the same light switching right it's not the same

00:44:25.680 | light switching um and one is on top and the other is on the bottom it's more of a problem when uh in

00:44:31.280 | some intersections the the the set of three lights is oriented horizontally we've known for a long time

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00:47:34.560 | ourplace.com slash huberman to get up to 35 off so really what we're talking about it that i'd like to

00:47:42.160 | drill into even deeper across senses but primarily with sound is you know how space how the physical

00:47:49.920 | environment shapes our our perception of things yeah yeah um and i'm also very interested in the vi the

00:47:57.040 | relationship between vibration and sound given that our ears contain the apparatus to detect sound

00:48:04.240 | frequency but also uh have to do with you know balance and and vibration most of us have had the

00:48:11.920 | experience of someone pulling up next to us in a car blasting bass really loud and our windows start

00:48:17.680 | shaking and their windows start shaking right can we talk just about how objects have a a resonant

00:48:22.880 | frequency right i think this is pretty interesting and then people will inevitably want to know about

00:48:27.360 | how humans have a resonant frequency and we do i believe that certain frequencies of sound can shape

00:48:32.320 | our emotional state oh sure i mean that's music right for example for example it just for some reason

00:48:39.280 | when we break it down to one frequency and it's not um packaged in music people somehow think it's like

00:48:46.480 | woo or mysticism and it's it's not i mean the i'm fascinated by this like the gong like gongs as an

00:48:52.880 | ancient tool for we're trying to orient people's emotional state or signal like if we hear

00:48:58.720 | boom boom boom boom it sounds ominous right if we hear chirping of birds yeah we know they're birds

00:49:06.880 | but if we hear light um you know in the disney movies that you know it's been a long time since i've seen

00:49:11.440 | disney move but the the kind of the the the the stuff of fluttering is high frequency high frequency

00:49:18.720 | movement tends to be high frequency sound so how do you think about the relationship between frequency

00:49:26.240 | and emotion and resonant frequency i mean it's a vast landscape but i'd love your thoughts on this

00:49:30.560 | so can we can we go into the music realm to talk about this please i think that's intuitive for many

00:49:36.560 | people okay good so one of the things that i think is fascinating about music is that it's universal and

00:49:45.680 | nobody really knows what it's for like it's pretty clear that language is useful to us right it you

00:49:53.680 | know helps us exchange information so pretty obvious that language is is a benefit a survival benefit for

00:50:01.120 | individuals and for the species as a whole we don't really have as clear a view of why music you know

00:50:10.640 | what role did music play in our um success uh in evolution natural selection you know music is it

00:50:22.560 | really is universal um every human culture has it um there is some variation as to whether or not um

00:50:29.840 | a culture embraces melody embraces harmony but every culture has rhythm you can't have melody or harmony

00:50:37.760 | without rhythm it doesn't make any sense right like imagine imagine a familiar tune like happy birthday

00:50:44.640 | but the duration of the notes was completely arbitrary you know crazy it would sound crazy it would not be

00:50:51.360 | recognizable to us as happy birthday but you can um you can play it fast you can play it slow you can

00:50:57.520 | play it you know pitch shifted up or pitch shifted down musical terms in a different key and we would

00:51:04.240 | recognize that as like a particular you know song um so that's what i mean about rhythm being uh

00:51:12.000 | really critical um and the criticality of rhythm offers up the following kind of wild uh theory this is

00:51:21.920 | not my theory um i wish i could quote whose ever theory it is but it is that perhaps what rhythm what music and rhythm is for

00:51:30.720 | is to help us act in concert with one another and be louder than any of us could be by ourselves

00:51:40.240 | and to scare off predators and competitors so for example imagine a pack of hyenas are surrounding a

00:51:51.600 | kill from you know a lion the lion is long since sated and has gone away but now a bunch of scrawny humans

00:51:59.920 | want to scare off uh the hyenas if they go after the hyenas all stomping their feet together and shouting

00:52:08.480 | together it's going to be a lot louder than any one person could do by themselves well i like this

00:52:14.960 | theory it's kind of nice right i'll tell you why in a moment but please continue and then that kind of

00:52:20.240 | concerted working together as a group and you could sort of see that like once you had the the basics of

00:52:26.480 | like and here i'm talking when i say once you have i'm really imagining on an evolutionary scale

00:52:33.280 | that any for anything to come about and endure requires that it increase our fitness

00:52:40.960 | at every stage at every stage of the way so initially you might get that rhythm thing going on but then

00:52:49.200 | that would be satisfying to people like if you had a mutation that made acting together feel good for

00:52:56.160 | for some reason and then it would come along with this benefit of of competing with the hyenas for the

00:53:03.760 | lion kill and then it would kind of potentially feed on itself of like well even more cooperative action

00:53:13.040 | feeling good feeling good together allows us to then do other things together that we can't do individually

00:53:21.360 | have you ever seen the uh it's a a song and a um i don't exactly know what to call it uh the chanting

00:53:31.760 | and the song of of maori in new zealand yeah they'll do this before rugby games oh right because the all

00:53:38.480 | blacks are one of the best rugby teams in the world there's an incredible video um that a friend of

00:53:44.480 | mine she always sends this to me when um uh when i'll say something like oh you know what do you think

00:53:50.240 | of something that was on the news or something and she'll and she'll send there's an incredible case of

00:53:55.200 | in the government in new zealand i think it's a i don't know if they use parliament or what there's an

00:54:01.040 | example of um so okay i'll just say how it is there yeah some white politician reads out some

00:54:07.200 | you know proclamation maybe like that's up for a vote and then all of a sudden it will start in one

00:54:12.720 | corner of this uh very majestic like government building um looks sort of like our congress but it's

00:54:20.800 | different uh and she'll start chanting and then and it's like wide eyes there's no blinking it's very

00:54:25.920 | interesting and they're stomping and there's clapping and then all of a sudden it starts other people start

00:54:30.160 | joining in with her right and and it gets really loud when they're together they're a you know you

00:54:36.240 | know a number of things immediately a they're pissed two they're not going to stand for this three there

00:54:41.840 | are a lot of them and four like they're not to be messed with they're united they're united yeah

00:54:47.840 | admittedly i had to have someone look this up it's called haka uh and it's incredible because you

00:54:53.520 | immediately understand how these people feel and it's a no we're not going to take that kind of stance

00:55:00.400 | at least in the context of this government example in terms of pre-rugby match it's really a display

00:55:08.320 | of vigor uh and we are primates after all right all we are old world primates um and vigor displays run

00:55:18.640 | through all the old world primate species yeah including us yeah um i think it's definitely a

00:55:24.400 | vigor display like stomping making one big and the lack of blinking is something that you know as a vision

00:55:30.400 | scientist i caught on to earlier like no one's doing this and blinking a lot they're they're showing that

00:55:35.200 | they will not break their attention until this is complete and somebody not blinking while staring

00:55:41.920 | directly at you is a command for your attention as well and it's even in our language isn't it so

00:55:48.400 | and so didn't blink that's right they don't blink they're not afraid they're right you know these days

00:55:53.680 | because of the craziness of the political socio landscape assassinations and very strong personalities

00:56:02.480 | and government and online and because i'm you know i'm in media now to at least some extent different

00:56:08.400 | form of media not politics but you know i'm so um intrigued by the idea that some people are

00:56:14.880 | capturing people's attention and loyalty not just by virtue of what they say but the certainty with

00:56:22.880 | which they say it now that's not a new theme but also the timbre of their voice yeah the refusal to

00:56:30.240 | entertain dissenting voices but also how a lot of voices are just not the right timbre and frequency

00:56:39.680 | and delivered in the way that these people have obviously mastered their ability to command other

00:56:44.560 | people's attention like it's a it's a because this stuff hits at a primitive level right people aren't

00:56:50.640 | necessarily just voting on issues yeah they're voting on feeling we've known this right so in any case the

00:56:55.840 | the the haka is a beautiful example of what you're describing well and the other thing is that music plays

00:57:02.320 | a role in um in say the military and in war i read somewhere that the military is the largest employer of

00:57:11.120 | musicians in this country interesting yeah makes sense well you know i thought it was a surprise to me

00:57:17.440 | when i first yeah first heard it yeah surprising to me but it makes i mean somebody's got to play taps

00:57:22.000 | usually that's one that's one one right right so and i think the other you know possible angle for all of

00:57:28.080 | this is you know there are things in many species that are not obviously beneficial take the peacock for

00:57:35.440 | example that the that enormous investment in plumage in very colorful tail feathers is not something that

00:57:43.760 | is directly adding to the survival skills of the male peacock but rather it's something the female peacocks

00:57:51.280 | like um and so that tends to feed on itself too so that's another way that music could get into our you know

00:57:59.600 | panoply of human characteristics without necessarily directly leading to something like being able to

00:58:06.080 | get more food like the rhythm thing gives us more food people who are good at music might end up um

00:58:12.000 | with more offspring than people who um weren't good at music that would be that would be the sort of

00:58:18.560 | uh general idea behind that that part of the theory in many now older movies um typically it was a man

00:58:28.400 | singing to a woman or in the movie say anything john cusack simply used a boom box right um uh or um

00:58:38.560 | poetry creative works but expressed out loud were the way that um courtship took place um eric jarvis was

00:58:50.560 | on this podcast i don't know if you know eric at the rockefeller and he's a very um accomplished dancer

00:58:57.120 | i don't know if you know this but he was supposed to be in the alvin ailey dance company he decided to

00:59:00.640 | become a neuroscientist instead but as i understand he's still a good dancer yeah um and he was saying that

00:59:05.360 | he thought that perhaps primitive vocalizations evolved first so vocalizations of disgust or

00:59:12.560 | pleasure or fear or excitement then he thought perhaps came song and dance so song and body movement

00:59:21.040 | to signal what one was feeling what their intention was and then perhaps spoken language came after that

00:59:28.560 | makes sense i just think we don't know yeah we don't know and i think it's kind of interesting

00:59:34.400 | there's there are maybe sort of two um like i think with the songbird they are signaling things like

00:59:43.440 | vigor and fitness and territoriality um and things like that they're not conveying something symbolic

00:59:50.960 | whereas the you know vocalizations in the primate tend to mean something specific

00:59:56.400 | you know sometimes i wish i you know could have a time machine and i could go back and you know look at

01:00:03.840 | what what happened in earlier stages of evolution and just kind of see well what is the lineage that

01:00:10.080 | what is the sequence of events that led us to to have language that led us to have music

01:00:15.200 | did it come from the same process as birds you know songbirds or did it come from a completely

01:00:20.480 | parallel process i mean i think we do see that

01:00:25.840 | evolution can arrive at similar characteristics through different means in different places in

01:00:34.400 | different times so you know it could be you know kind of convergent parallel process or it could be

01:00:40.240 | something different i feel like music conveys intention music can tell a story and music because of the way that it

01:00:51.200 | organizes language provided there's lyrics um into like riffs and motifs and melodies and choruses that

01:01:00.400 | it makes it very easy to remember things i'd like to talk a little bit about the possible neural

01:01:05.680 | underpinnings of this uh two things come to mind first of all you mentioned uh the abcs you know abc

01:01:12.000 | almost everybody knows that um that melody and it's probably easier to remember all those letters

01:01:21.600 | in that form as opposed to a b c d e f g h i sure you know because you break it up and and i i'm almost

01:01:30.640 | certain this is true because i have a good friend and he's a very accomplished musician and he's an

01:01:34.960 | incredible songwriter and lyricist he's written lyrics for a number of other artists not just

01:01:40.000 | himself and he has like several bands he writes a song a day it's crazy he writes a song a day during

01:01:45.840 | the pandemic whoa great songs and occasionally because i'm such a fan of his music i'll say

01:01:50.400 | there's that one song like what's that what's the lyric you know and and he'll say

01:01:55.920 | oh yeah no i i don't remember you go and then he'll start and then he'll remember it

01:02:03.120 | and he's got thousands of songs in his in his library of songs he's written and sings i said

01:02:09.440 | so when you're on stage how's it work he said as long as i can remember the first two words or three

01:02:12.960 | words yeah of a verse the rest just kind of spills out yes i think that's how song organizes language

01:02:20.240 | because it's very hard to memorize like a speech but you can memorize a song no problem yeah and that's

01:02:28.800 | my experience too that if i know the first couple of words of a verse i've got the rest of the verse

01:02:35.360 | yeah it it's so interesting i so in the brain uh we haven't talked too much about brain structures

01:02:42.880 | yet but maybe we do that yeah um and not to fill people's minds with names of things because i always

01:02:47.840 | say like it doesn't matter if it's called the superior colliculus or the superior schminiculus it

01:02:52.480 | doesn't matter it doesn't matter it what but what's interesting are the properties of these

01:02:56.640 | different brain structures so um i think about the ears as you know separating different frequencies

01:03:02.320 | of sound and then there's a bunch of other important stuff no disrespect to the auditory neuroscientists

01:03:06.560 | but but as you said that in the superior colliculus is where hearing and vision and the other senses

01:03:12.720 | come together they're mapped onto one another it turns out that the story is more complicated and more

01:03:18.960 | interesting than that i got hooked on that particular study that i mentioned at the beginning so this was

01:03:25.440 | auditory signals in the superior colliculus being affected by the position of the eyes at the time

01:03:31.360 | the sound was presented and now our audience knows about how sound is localized we haven't talked that

01:03:38.320 | much about how visual information is localized i think because mostly that's fairly obvious that your your eye is

01:03:44.800 | kind of a little camera and light hits a particular location on the retina and that retinal location

01:03:51.840 | tells us what the location of the visual stimulus is but it tells us the location of the visual stimulus

01:03:57.600 | with respect to the direction the eyes are pointing but our sound localization cues are with respect to

01:04:03.680 | where's the sound with respect to the head so this finding that neurons were responsive to sound but

01:04:11.840 | cared very much about the position of the eyes was really you know a startling finding when it first

01:04:17.760 | came about when i set up my own lab i basically set out to find out well where's where does this

01:04:23.920 | computation happen where is the brain um incorporating information about eye movements into the processing of

01:04:32.000 | of sound you know we we knew from the literature was okay the superior colliculus is one of the places but

01:04:37.840 | you know does it does it happen in the superior colliculus or does it happen in a different brain area

01:04:42.800 | and so we kind of marched along the auditory pathway in brain areas that i call them part of the auditory

01:04:51.520 | pathway because they're much more closely connected to the ear than to anything else

01:04:56.480 | um and because at the time nobody thought they were visual signals in these areas we thought it was

01:05:00.960 | just auditory that too turned out not to be true but they're definitely much more auditory than visual

01:05:07.520 | and what we found within each of these areas eye movements affect the auditory signals there too

01:05:12.480 | even though they weren't in this convergent structure uh the superior colliculus

01:05:20.080 | so we we decided that it would take a long time to march through every brain area and that it might

01:05:28.640 | be worth sort of jumping over a few brain areas and looking in the ear itself so i need to give the

01:05:35.280 | audience a little bit more information about what you know what is possible in the ear and why that

01:05:40.960 | seemed like a reasonable thing to do it has some little muscles in it there are two muscles that control

01:05:47.040 | the bones of the middle ear uh and then inside the cochlea there are uh cells called outer hair

01:05:53.600 | cells that can actually expand and contract just the way a little muscle could we should explain the

01:05:59.120 | cochlea is a snail-shaped structure that has the essentially the we call them neurons but these

01:06:04.640 | sensory cells that that vibrate according to the frequency the sound and this is critical for our

01:06:10.720 | perception of sound exactly and you have one on each side you have one on each side it's snail

01:06:14.240 | shaped and it's connected uh the vestibular your balance structures are also connected to this as

01:06:20.400 | well and to just describe the flow of information you have you've got your outer ear you've got your

01:06:26.960 | ear canal you have your eardrum you've got these little bones that connect the eardrum to the cochlea

01:06:33.280 | and so there's muscles that um that affect the motion of those little bones and then there's cells

01:06:38.560 | inside the cochlea that can also act like muscles these structures um get input from the brain so we

01:06:46.160 | thought well if they're getting top-down input from the brain are they getting a top-down input from the

01:06:52.960 | brain that carries information about about the position of the eyes you know that it seemed like

01:06:59.920 | it seemed kind of like a wild possibility but not completely out of left field like there was a

01:07:05.680 | possible mechanism here that we could imagine and the neat thing about this is that um we didn't have to

01:07:14.400 | do something like stick an electrode into these muscles because they're attached to the bones and

01:07:20.800 | attached to the eardrum and so if they were being manipulated by a top-down signal from the brain

01:07:27.680 | they would tug these bones and that that would tug the eardrum and when the eardrum moves normally it

01:07:35.680 | moves in response to sound but if it moves in the absence of sound it's going to make a sound so you

01:07:41.840 | could put a microphone in the ear canal to see whether or not anything was happening in connection with eye

01:07:47.680 | movements and this too wasn't out in left field to do this because um there's already kind of known

01:07:54.400 | signals generated by these kinds of structures that are measured by clinicians by audiologists and and

01:08:01.440 | otolaryngologists um you can put a microphone in the ear and you can measure things called otoacoustic

01:08:06.720 | emissions basically your ears are making sounds your ears are making sounds folks i know it's kind of

01:08:13.040 | wild some people make more of them than others some people make more of them than others exactly

01:08:17.840 | so we wanted to know if any of these little sounds were being generated with eye movements and i

01:08:21.520 | wouldn't be here telling you this story if it didn't turn out that yes they do so we were able to measure

01:08:27.120 | that the eardrum is is basically moving in connection with with every eye movement every saccadic eye

01:08:33.840 | movement these are the fast jerky eye movements there's other kinds of eye movements and we haven't

01:08:38.880 | yet tested them the signal is very precisely time locked to the onset of the eye movement

01:08:44.880 | and the effect is different in the two ears so that if your eyes are moving to the left

01:08:54.080 | the eardrum on the right is going to kind of uh bulge inward then outward then inward i might have

01:08:59.600 | this backwards um but whatever the right ear is doing the left ear is doing the opposite so that the

01:09:06.720 | eardrums are going to be moving in the same direction one is going to be inward when the other is going

01:09:11.520 | outward like a wave like a wave exactly like a wave not like a not like flapping not like flapping exactly

01:09:19.520 | you know we're still actually a pretty early days in understanding this process and and what it's for

01:09:26.400 | but it's very precise signal it turns out to carry information about how far the eyes are moving to the

01:09:32.720 | left or to the right as well as a a bit less but some information about vertical movements as well

01:09:38.480 | and we think that this may be kind of the first step in that integration of visual and auditory information

01:09:47.120 | which would be the critical first step if the major goal of this integration of visual and auditory is for

01:09:54.800 | localization of sounds right because the you know in um as a neuroscientist you know there's so many

01:10:03.040 | different areas of neuroscience like that i used to marvel at you you go to a meeting you've got people

01:10:08.160 | saying consciousness and working on consciousness you have people trying to figure out how a single

01:10:12.880 | photoreceptor works or a single hair cell works and so when i think about a sensory system i think about

01:10:18.320 | layers of sophistication and how they likely evolved like very briefly i mean the visual system

01:10:24.640 | first evolved to detect light and dark on the order of 24 hours so you know the difference between

01:10:31.520 | nighttime and daytime which means even with the total inability to see objects you are safer if you

01:10:41.520 | know when to stay in and when to go out and then at some point we evolved the ability to um probably

01:10:47.600 | motion detection came before the ability to send to see detail because it's way more important to know some

01:10:54.000 | things yeah big and coming at you big and moving away right or help you stay oriented like with respect to

01:11:00.880 | like knowing what's up and what's down right and staying upright that's right yeah and just

01:11:05.200 | like uh the falling uh reflex is probably the most important reflex in the vestibular system

01:11:09.840 | to embrace yourself so you don't you have a lesser chance of dying if you fall right everyone

01:11:14.960 | you know uh if your visual world suddenly goes up very quick you know you're falling right and then

01:11:20.880 | comes you know additional layers of sophistication like like fine detail color vision color vision

01:11:26.240 | probably evolved last at least trichromatic color vision but and then so in the auditory system i

01:11:32.320 | think like the same thing you need to be able to know probably um which direction a sound is coming from

01:11:40.080 | is it low or high frequency um and then and on and on right you know and so i think about that

01:11:46.240 | like in the motor system that the oldest we know the the evolutionary history of the genes that that

01:11:53.120 | are expressed in like the motor neurons that move the trunk are the same ones that undulating uh fish

01:11:59.920 | fish use and actually this will get us back to sound i promise and then there's a these additional

01:12:05.120 | layers of motor neurons that have been added through evolution the ones that flap the fins and then the

01:12:10.080 | final addition are the motor neurons that control fine movement of the fingers so i have this kind

01:12:17.200 | of obsession with this because if you look at music that's very um primitive right like you just look

01:12:26.960 | historically speaking i'm not casting judgment on music just historically um it's rich in bass tones

01:12:33.600 | relative to high frequency tones and dance that we assign as primitive tends to involve a lot of movement

01:12:42.080 | of the of the trunk you're not people aren't just like flapping their fingers and toes out there right

01:12:46.480 | yeah now so as you go from low to high frequency there's a body map of low to high frequency and

01:12:53.680 | actually if when people are making a very detailed point they'll often like like point with their

01:12:58.480 | fingers they'll move their fingers but when we want to emphasize a big point we use our whole body

01:13:03.760 | we put our whole body into it so i actually believe that all the sensory systems are mapped to one

01:13:08.800 | another in a way that goes from low frequency to high frequency yeah intensity is important right and

01:13:14.000 | direction is important right me pointing at you which i even feels funny to do because we're on

01:13:18.400 | good terms as far as i as far as i'm concerned we're on good terms you know um it's very different than

01:13:24.320 | than uh me standing back and if i come at you with my whole body it's very different than if i point a

01:13:30.000 | finger for instance right so i feel like these things probably evolved from this in parallel and and as you

01:13:37.840 | point out before they serve an adaptive role right so the fact that position of the eyes can change the

01:13:44.640 | way i hear seems wild and that's a wild thing um is the inverse also true is is where i listen affecting

01:13:53.600 | um how my eye yeah where i hear something typically directs my head movement and my eye movement so this

01:14:00.000 | is just the same thing in reverse i think it's all part of an integrative system um you know we talked

01:14:07.200 | about the top-down control over the ear but there's a lot of top-down control over vision too and some of

01:14:13.280 | it is a little easier to understand than what i just described because blinking is top-down control over

01:14:18.960 | vision uh eye movements top-down control over vision focusing the lens of your eye right that's also top-down

01:14:27.040 | um there are descending connections from the brain to the retina itself that nobody understands

01:14:33.440 | apologies to the people working on this i really want you to keep working on this but i feel like

01:14:38.400 | there isn't a clear theory yet about what exactly these descending connections might be doing from what

01:14:45.840 | i know about it they are you know pretty diffuse connections the pretty broad branching of of neurons

01:14:53.360 | uh throughout the retina or not throughout the whole retina but but probably not well suited to

01:14:59.040 | manipulating fine spatial detail but could very well be suited to incorporating some kind of circadian

01:15:07.680 | influence to the retina itself or something else that that you want the same signal to be broadly

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01:16:44.800 | i want to talk a little bit about physical spaces yeah recently i was in new york and someone took me to

01:16:52.880 | grand central where there are these incredible um arches in one of the hallways there um people

01:17:01.200 | should check this out it's really really cool it is beautiful it's beautiful i mean you have this high

01:17:06.160 | ceiling main kind of chamber room of the of grand central um and there's also a hallway off to one side

01:17:16.560 | where you can go into a corner do you know about this uh and you can face into the corner like you

01:17:24.640 | were going to you know like you're facing the corner in shame but you're not and whoever you're with can

01:17:31.040 | go to the opposite diagonal corner yeah the ceiling is shaped like a somewhat of a dome it's contoured but

01:17:38.800 | it's more or less a small a small dome but you are easily 25 feet away from this person that you're

01:17:47.840 | there with again diagonal corner and if you speak at a very very low volume they can hear you on the

01:18:00.720 | opposite side yeah and if they speak you can hear them and what's wild is there's a lot of noise in

01:18:07.200 | the environment this is grand central station yeah yeah and we played with this a little bit like if

01:18:12.160 | high frequency sounds do seem to travel a little bit a little bit better okay in this uh in that

01:18:17.920 | environment because if one person laughs you can hear it very clearly uh-huh um but you can whisper

01:18:24.320 | and they'll hear you and they're 25 feet away in a major city with a ton of city noise right and so

01:18:31.360 | obviously the sound waves are traveling along the ceiling on that parabola yeah and it's just it's a

01:18:37.840 | it's a no pun intended it's a mind bend to experience sound yeah coming from some from a distance far away

01:18:47.280 | not through a device that is clearly being spoken at a low level like a whisper but you can hear it

01:18:55.680 | in the same way that it always weirds me out when i'm in san diego in the winter and the days are short

01:19:03.040 | but it's like 80 degrees like when days are short it's supposed to be colder yes love san diego yes great

01:19:10.240 | tacos great people but um they're always talking about tacos down there but um

01:19:16.240 | it's so strange to be in a short day where it's hot yes because even if i go visit my relatives in

01:19:22.640 | argentina who experience christmas in the summer the days are long and it's hot and it's christmas

01:19:29.840 | and santa claus is supposed to be in a sleigh in the snow but that's a whole different thing okay yeah

01:19:34.480 | but there's something about the way our nervous system is mapped where we expect

01:19:38.000 | soft sounds to not travel very far sure sure the opposite would be like shouting and your voice just

01:19:44.960 | disappears even though the person's right in front of you it is so weird and i feel like

01:19:49.600 | people should experience this natural naturally occurring experiment yeah because it it you walk

01:19:54.720 | away from that understanding sound intensity and frequency and localization completely differently

01:20:01.360 | changed the way i think about this and it has nothing to do with being a neuroscientist like that's

01:20:05.440 | crazy i can hear a whisper from 25 feet away and i wondered is this what it's like to be a wolf

01:20:12.320 | that would be really cool it would also be really irritating because you don't want to hear all the

01:20:16.720 | things that people are saying right time right i mean this is one of the problems with hearing aids

01:20:20.240 | to amplify everything it's not replacing what your brain does it's not replacing what your ear normally

01:20:26.000 | does yeah it's such a mind bend um and it's so cool and it if you provide you're in new york it costs

01:20:34.080 | nothing to do it you just have to wait your turn people are catching on to this or it's been known

01:20:38.320 | for a while i'd like to get your thoughts on the opposite example where if you go into a like a high

01:20:44.400 | ceiling cathedral church yeah um what do high ceilings do for our perception of sound given that

01:20:51.760 | there's a lot of space for the sound to travel i'm not sure that i can add something that's really

01:20:56.080 | specific to that particular circumstance but to say more generally that you know the sounds that we

01:21:02.720 | experience in a particular setting are really the combination of all of the reflective surfaces

01:21:10.000 | that are in that setting and so like if you have a carpeted room that's going to absorb sound from

01:21:16.880 | on the floor and so you're going to it's going to take out one part of what um what you would be

01:21:22.640 | hearing in a room that is not carpeted um and the high ceilings i would imagine that would kind of

01:21:29.280 | depends on what the surfaces are on the ceiling um one thing that'll happen in that kind of setting

01:21:35.360 | is that the sounds that go up that way if it's a hard surface they'll probably bounce off and come

01:21:42.720 | back down but with a long delay and once the delays get pretty long then you do start to hear it as a

01:21:51.360 | whole separate sound almost like an echo not even almost like an echo but actually an echo do you think

01:21:57.280 | this is used to amplify aspects of the music yeah maybe that's why some of the

01:22:04.240 | older genres of music can be a little slower like gregorian chants yeah longer sustained notes because

01:22:15.040 | you don't want to have too many transitions from one note to the next gregorian chant is a wonderful

01:22:20.800 | example really kind of long slow sustained um many different voices blending together versus a much

01:22:28.480 | faster like mozart um minuet or something like that like those notes would just jumble together with the

01:22:34.800 | kind of delay that we're talking about yeah it's i mean i think that um the ability to to um localize

01:22:42.480 | sound we talked about we talked about quality of sound based on high and low frequency and i i confess i'm

01:22:48.400 | i'm a little fixated um on this idea that when people join together in sound that you're communicating

01:22:58.000 | something very important that that that's the most effective way to communicate a feeling and people

01:23:05.120 | say well of course you go to a concert and you feel something but in the concert right you have the

01:23:09.840 | performers but the audience is often singing with them right i know which is one of the most wonderful

01:23:14.800 | things i recently wondered if i was trying to think back to like the 90s and what what created effective

01:23:20.640 | movements um and i thought maybe what we need in america right now is we need um like music that

01:23:28.400 | actually brings people together it sounds really corny but i really believe this no i do think that would

01:23:34.480 | be helpful maybe there's just too many different musical tastes now so we should start by telling

01:23:40.320 | people you can't have that taste well or there should be a new one right yeah and maybe it should be very

01:23:44.720 | very uh very primitive i mean the haka thing that we talked about earlier is is a kind it's an angry

01:23:50.800 | intention right but um and this is i guess where people will think like like my east coast relatives

01:23:56.080 | would be like oh so you want us all the kumbaya i have relatives from jersey so they're like we're i know

01:24:00.880 | out there in california you're all kumbaya but i think that they we're sort of half joking here so

01:24:07.360 | given the links between the emotion system and sound and and joining in in in sound i mean maybe

01:24:13.920 | this isn't too crazy an idea maybe it's crazy but who cares we have some advantages in science that

01:24:20.480 | we have a comfort with have with argumentation you know with disagreeing about things but agreeing

01:24:29.760 | fundamentally that that we're gonna go where the facts lead us do you know what i mean so the

01:24:35.200 | disagreement is about what the facts are but we agree that if we can come to agreement about facts

01:24:39.360 | then we can proceed from there but there's a feeling that i have come to appreciate maybe

01:24:44.720 | isn't present in other domains other kind of you know academic domains or areas of the occupations that

01:24:56.240 | people have that you know may be a little different from what um what we have in science

01:25:01.920 | you know and i don't want to make science seem all perfect in all regards but i think there's a

01:25:09.520 | there's a sense of like well you may not want to hear that i think you're wrong

01:25:16.000 | but we know that you know those kinds of things have to be said that that you're gonna have to defend

01:25:22.400 | your work in a peer review when you try to get your your work published you're gonna have to deal with

01:25:28.000 | you know peer review comments that you may not you know i certainly have had my moments where i've been

01:25:34.880 | like i cannot believe somebody thought that when i wrote this you know what i mean you know but you

01:25:40.640 | go through that emotional period of of time and you're like oh well actually it's kind of i can see

01:25:46.480 | how it's actually my fault for how i wrote it you know that it didn't actually say what i wanted or it

01:25:51.520 | didn't say didn't set up the reader to understand the point i was making so i need to fix this and yes

01:25:57.680 | you're right that there is a hole in the in the data here that it doesn't fully support

01:26:03.440 | the hypothesis the way i thought it did and it's oh and that's okay like it's okay not to have the

01:26:12.000 | story complete it's okay not to have every detail of it right just acknowledge that you don't you know

01:26:19.280 | acknowledge what you think the weaknesses are and i i kind of don't see people acknowledging weakness

01:26:26.320 | in let's say the political domain right now like to acknowledge well you know i'd like i'd like such

01:26:33.760 | and such a thing but i can see that there's that there's a counter argument to that how can i address

01:26:39.280 | that or should i change my mind yeah i think in science we have agreements on how to evaluate strength

01:26:46.240 | of evidence and um like we can't just have one data point and draw a conclusion from that um we won't

01:26:54.480 | convince anyone even if right we're convinced and if we are we should check ourselves right right um i do

01:27:00.640 | have a question about the auditory system yes uh again um which is a number of people including myself

01:27:07.440 | are obsessed with trying to find what is the optimal thing to listen to perhaps it's nothing in order to

01:27:15.120 | be able to be able to focus and the data as i see them are basically pointing to silence

01:27:22.080 | is best and so i have a question about silence yeah and the voice in our head uh-huh i have a question

01:27:28.080 | about that yeah but also it's very clear based on what we've discussed up until now that certain

01:27:32.960 | frequencies of sound actually play a role in our emotion and cognition i will sometimes listen to white

01:27:39.920 | noise there are a number of companies now that put out free content um of it's not necessarily

01:27:46.160 | binaural beats but different frequencies that oscillate could be totally placebo but i don't think

01:27:52.960 | so because they reference a number of studies it looks like you can get some cognitive enhancement or

01:27:56.960 | focus enhancement and i use these there's some great you know study with me uh channels online where you

01:28:03.760 | sit there and you you work while they work what are your thoughts on how on the use of sound as a way

01:28:09.120 | to change brain state okay so i want to back up on this question because i think you're asking a pretty

01:28:14.320 | deep question one might wonder why would that matter like what is our what what is actually going on in

01:28:20.160 | our brain that that kind of pairing would have an effect regardless of what might turn out to be sort

01:28:26.640 | of the best option and so one theory that i like to think about a lot it's a theory of thought and what is

01:28:34.720 | actually going on in our brains when we think and this theory is that what goes on in our brains when we

01:28:41.360 | think might be that we're running simulations related to the thought using that sensory sensory motor

01:28:49.120 | infrastructure of the brain could you elaborate so the theory is that like maybe when you think about a cat

01:28:55.040 | for example or you think the concept of a cat that the mental instantiation of that or the the brain

01:29:01.840 | mechanism instantiation of having that thought is to run a little simulation in visual cortex that

01:29:08.400 | kind of includes what a cat looks like a simulation in auditory cortex that what does the cat sound like

01:29:14.240 | and as i'm telling you this i'm you know i've used the word cat what color cat are you thinking i think

01:29:21.760 | of a gray cat but i keep smelling kitty litter because my sister had cats and it drove me the

01:29:26.640 | smell kitty litter is just so aversive to me right and so so you had no hesitation in telling me the color

01:29:33.600 | and adding an additional sensory quality so that's a you know it's a bit of a just so story but i think

01:29:39.760 | that it's a plausible possibility that that's in fact what's happening when we think and you know some of

01:29:46.880 | what um kind of uh tangentially supports this is that we have many more sensory sensory areas of the brain

01:29:56.080 | than than monkeys do than you know more distant mammalian uh relatives do as if what might have

01:30:04.160 | happened to allow us to become so smart is to you know make extra copies of some of these sensory

01:30:11.040 | areas of the brain and then when you have an extra copy you're no longer so constrained right we don't

01:30:17.040 | really see or hear any better than monkeys do so what's this extra tissue doing for us

01:30:23.360 | possibility is that that we're using it to to generate these simulations and that that running

01:30:29.520 | these simulations is kind of what thought is interesting is it um helpful is it adaptive

01:30:36.960 | well it might just be the only game in town it provides an explanation for why you might you know

01:30:43.440 | be driving on the freeway and having to merge into difficult traffic and telling your your passenger

01:30:50.800 | okay be quiet i've gotta i gotta pay attention now like why would speech impair you from visual motor

01:30:59.760 | if it wasn't all part of a kind of cognitive system that's that's in operation and maybe you need to

01:31:05.760 | shift some resources away from processing the conversation and towards some you know actually

01:31:12.240 | dealing with the here and now sensory motor task i like this a lot and i want to continue down this

01:31:17.840 | thread because we've never talked about what thought is on this podcast yeah and i've wondered

01:31:23.840 | like why is it that so many of our thoughts are incomplete sentences they're so fractured

01:31:28.720 | and if you really just track your thoughts for a moment you realize they jump around yeah even if

01:31:37.040 | they're around some coherent framework or subject it's predictable like you can see the train of

01:31:44.480 | thought sometimes like they rarely jump completely in some totally new sorry i'm laughing for some people

01:31:51.680 | they really do do they really they do they do sort of like the liminal state between awake and sleep

01:31:57.440 | i like to lie there right as i'm waking up and things just and try and stay on a thought yeah and then

01:32:03.360 | i'll just chuckle to myself like 30 seconds later it's someplace gone somewhere because in that liminal

01:32:08.400 | state you're still in a pseudo dream uh state one time in my class one of my undergraduate classes i um i

01:32:15.760 | asked people to try to um without thinking too much come up with a word that was totally and completely

01:32:23.280 | unrelated to anything that we had just been talking about i'm going to give you a moment but not too long

01:32:29.840 | okay it's really tough isn't it hard the first word that leapt to mind was cacophony and it's like no

01:32:39.760 | that's directly in the framework of what we're talking about i'm like damn it i and i looked at

01:32:44.800 | the the paneling on the wall and i thought maybe it's something about and like now i could do it like

01:32:49.280 | i'd say like lacquer or something like that but again it's going to be related yeah it's really really

01:32:54.400 | tough and and you know these are these are uh kids that probably have a 30 000 word vocabulary right

01:33:00.640 | that's a typical side vocabulary young brains and i had like 15 students in the class interesting

01:33:08.160 | i think two of them came up with the word elephant and three of them came up with the word banana

01:33:14.400 | you know like they were clearly not random words so i think uh we're talking about something extremely

01:33:20.240 | important now that i i like your thoughts on because this is really about how the brain works

01:33:24.560 | yeah right and i love the auditory system and and we'll get back to it but it's part of this larger

01:33:29.760 | question of how our brains work yeah i'm asking about binaural beats or white noise or pink noise or brown

01:33:35.360 | noise um in order to enhance focus there's a lot of interest in that right but what we're really

01:33:41.040 | talking about is how what our thoughts how we think right and how to anchor our thinking and align it with

01:33:48.080 | action and so i'm obsessed with this notion of attractor states and the way i think about this tell me

01:33:55.200 | tell me if i have this wrong is i think about brain states as very context dependent especially nowadays

01:34:02.000 | with the amount of information we're being bombarded with through our phones and because a walk to the

01:34:07.680 | from the car to your desk or a walk from the car to your first meeting is a very different experience

01:34:12.320 | with a phone than it was like 20 years ago oh totally and people who are younger than me won't know what

01:34:19.600 | we're talking about they're like what are you talking about the you were always in community no

01:34:23.040 | that's not how it was right but the the way i think about the brain is that my thinking is more

01:34:30.400 | or less like a ball bearing on a flat surface and the more fatigued i am and the more unbalanced that

01:34:36.720 | surface is but assuming i've slept well and i'm hydrating caffeinated and satisfied i don't have some

01:34:42.240 | like basic need like having to go to the bathroom or or gnawing hunger or need for a coffee i'm like a

01:34:48.640 | ball bearing on a flat surface and that flat surface is relatively stable now as i move into something

01:34:54.160 | like a discussion of this podcast or um or i'm reading something the the dimples start to form on

01:35:02.880 | that surface and so that ball bearing can rest but you can still nudge it out pretty easily but that as i

01:35:08.560 | go further and further into an activity it becomes a a trench and that ball bearing sinks to the bottom

01:35:14.240 | of that trench and um christoph cock who was here recently said you know that the flow state that

01:35:20.160 | that we all want so badly is where we actually forget about ourselves because we're so deeply in

01:35:24.400 | that state of doing i think he's right and i think that many people think that they have adhd many people

01:35:31.040 | think that they can't concentrate i actually believe there are some people with clinically diagnosable

01:35:38.160 | adhd but that most people are just not allowing themselves a narrow enough set of sensory inputs and

01:35:46.400 | context to drop into that trench and yet it's the thing that feels so good when we're in it and when

01:35:53.440 | we emerge from it we're like like that's what we're supposed to do and so what you described in the

01:35:58.560 | classroom where they where your students can't even come up with a word unrelated to the conversation

01:36:02.640 | is one of these attractor states yeah is that is i mean where does that sit with you yeah i think that

01:36:08.400 | i think that sounds good to me and i think um i too share an interest in like how to get myself into that

01:36:14.080 | flow state and what to do when i have sort of bottomed out in like one particular like i get i might be in

01:36:24.160 | flow and making good progress on something and then i get stuck and i stop and i find that changing my

01:36:32.080 | immediate environment is a good way to get out of that little rut um so for example if i'm working on

01:36:40.000 | a difficult piece of writing i might get to the end of what i can achieve in one particular cafe but if i go

01:36:48.000 | to another cafe you know this is a very smart strategy actually uh uh neuroscientist whose work

01:36:54.960 | i i really admire and uh and i also really enjoy as a person is uh marla feller at uc berkeley and yeah

01:37:01.840 | i think she was the one that told me that it at scientific conferences which can go on for two or

01:37:05.520 | three days and sometimes the sessions are very long you have morning afternoon evening sessions it's like

01:37:10.000 | it's a lot it's a lot lots to pay attention to a lot of sitting she would move seats around the

01:37:16.080 | i do that too around the auditorium because she swore that it i think it was marla marla if it wasn't you forgive me

01:37:22.640 | um but i think it was marla could she would move seats so that she could always anchor her attention

01:37:28.240 | uh for each talk or set of talks not necessarily

01:37:32.640 | you know moving every moment but every every hour or so um i think is absolutely right and so

01:37:38.160 | i wonder whether or not some of these effects of binaural beats or other frequencies improving focus

01:37:42.960 | has to do with just needing to fill the auditory sensory space that could be like if i go i have

01:37:49.920 | this i work in my basement now i've set up my basement it's like the ideal work environment no phones

01:37:54.880 | no internet don't allow it when i go down there it's just me and my thoughts yeah i do allow some music

01:38:02.320 | but when i get down there the first 10 15 minutes are excruciating like you can hear every distracting

01:38:09.920 | thought i can think of a million things that i would just pop to mind but after about 10 15 minutes

01:38:17.520 | that all fades away and i can work down there for hours like no one can find me down there i love it

01:38:25.040 | i've had to create this physical space because nowadays there's just so much infiltration right through

01:38:30.640 | devices so i wonder you know for some people they they think they can't focus but that there's a

01:38:36.960 | there's a sensory space that needs filling yeah they haven't maybe haven't figured out how how they need

01:38:41.520 | to hack themselves like it i and i think that the one reason why i haven't specifically answered your

01:38:46.720 | question yet is because i think the answer may be specific to the individual so for me for music

01:38:54.960 | i like to listen to music while i work but i i do it sometimes but not other times but as a musician

01:39:01.680 | myself the music can't be too interesting to me like it has to be either stuff i know really well

01:39:08.480 | already so that it's not like grabbing my attention to actually listen to the song or it should be

01:39:16.560 | classical music or something that doesn't have lyrics so i don't have that language intrusion to my thoughts

01:39:22.000 | sometimes i find it useful to make a playlist for a particular project so that those songs start to

01:39:30.000 | become a cue for working on that project so i don't think there's going to be one answer that fits all

01:39:37.440 | circumstances but to maybe have that understanding of what works for the particular person the particular

01:39:43.760 | project there's some very interesting data coming out of mark desposito's lab okay we've had him on

01:39:48.800 | the podcast before about about uh dementia okay ways to improve working memory um which seems to be more

01:39:56.720 | of a dopamine thing um but if you can augment acetylcholine you can improve attention it's just it's just so

01:40:05.440 | clear like that these four brain structures like nucleus basalis that are releasing acetylcholine they're

01:40:12.160 | necessary but not sufficient to us to establish an attentional spotlight um the reason i was going to

01:40:18.320 | you know mention in this context is you know the the cortex is you know rich with the the nerve endings

01:40:25.360 | of these acetylcholine releasing neurons the colliculus has acetylcholine input and it seems like

01:40:30.800 | any sensor multi-sensory area of the brain where you need to integrate vision and sound and context and

01:40:37.440 | thinking and all this stuff and intention and action you have norepinephrine to raise overall alertness

01:40:43.040 | in the brain and body that seems to be its general function dopamine does many different things in

01:40:48.080 | different areas as you know but it seems like acetylcholine is the thing that really creates this

01:40:52.640 | this ability for attentional spotlighting that being able to anchor one's thoughts and actions towards a

01:40:59.440 | specific set of sensory combinations and so when we talk about listening to music or not listening to music

01:41:05.440 | or um one particular space or another space that one works in i think um so much of it is trying to uh

01:41:13.440 | you know we're trying to create these these spheres of attention that are very compact um and i don't think

01:41:20.320 | that people really appreciate just how hard that problem becomes when you take a device i'm not

01:41:26.400 | anti-phones and and you're you're bringing in another sphere of what 25 000 different spheres of attention

01:41:35.040 | that you can scroll through it makes perfect sense why we wouldn't be able to focus because acetylcholine

01:41:41.280 | is like a resource that we spend out and it can be replenished in sleep you said you'll hit a flow

01:41:46.800 | state or a focus state and then it's a switch or you hit a wall yeah and it's it i feel like it's a

01:41:52.480 | currency it's not something that we should be able to just use you know infinitum so i think a theme of

01:42:01.520 | some of your podcast episodes involves you know um physical exercise and workouts and you know what's the

01:42:08.160 | best routine for this that or the other aspect of of the workout um and generally interval training i think

01:42:14.960 | comes up as a pretty effective strategy i sometimes think about that in the context of of more mental

01:42:22.160 | work because i have not had good luck screening out all the distractions to get going on deep writing

01:42:33.760 | for me it's more like

01:42:35.200 | i can push out a sentence and that's so effortful that then i need to take a break oh well i feel much better

01:42:43.600 | better now because um well i think this is where you're going you may find comfort in the fact that

01:42:50.560 | we've had some just phenomenal uh physical coaches on here i mean people are degreed in um physiology and

01:42:58.720 | and teach super high level athletes and more than one of them has said that the attention span of the

01:43:07.040 | athlete in terms of ability to focus on cognitive information tutorial and learning even conversation

01:43:15.840 | directly maps onto the duration of their event like the sprinters can pay attention for about the duration

01:43:23.280 | about 10 seconds okay well for the hundred meter right you know um but they can repeat that uh-huh

01:43:29.440 | because the sprinter will sprint and then sprint again repeat exactly so it's so it's it's like i'll

01:43:34.480 | write a sentence then i'll check one new site then i'll write another sentence and i'll check another

01:43:38.320 | new site love it and if i try to just write one sentence and then another sentence and then another

01:43:42.880 | sentence i get frustrated with myself it seems like it's i don't know i can't i can't necessarily do it

01:43:50.000 | sometimes i can but i've let go of working efficiently as a goal in and of itself was it always the case

01:43:58.800 | or do you think the advent of of uh phones has made it such that you have this this sort of um step

01:44:04.080 | function i've always had a problem with the internet the phone is just the way in but um uh the phone

01:44:11.920 | actually can be helpful to me because i can i can close all the tabs on my laptop and just have my

01:44:20.560 | phone be the way that i access the internet for example and that allows for like a kind of a mental

01:44:28.080 | and physical separation where i can kind of be like okay now i'm doing this okay now i'm doing that

01:44:33.360 | um and keep them keep them kind of separated i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our

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01:45:49.280 | huberman to claim a free element sample pack with any purchase again that's drink element dot com slash huberman

01:45:55.840 | to claim a free sample pack i love that you're sharing this many people will um find comfort

01:46:02.080 | in hearing that you know my podcast producer uh rob moore he's done multiple triathlons and he's an

01:46:08.720 | endurance guy um at one point in his past he was like really he had carried a lot more muscle he's still

01:46:14.560 | very like fit and strong but he shifted over to endurance events and this guy can work like nobody's

01:46:20.880 | business can work for hours and hours and hours and hours and i feel like that's how i was in graduate

01:46:25.680 | school and as a postdoc and i suppose i'm more of an endurance athlete with my mental work i think

01:46:32.560 | maybe we should start thinking about cognition in these terms um because after all we're not just two

01:46:37.840 | people talking about work habits um you're a neuroscientist you study sensory integration and brain

01:46:43.040 | states and i i still consider myself a neuroscientist even though i haven't got my hands dirty in the lab in a

01:46:47.760 | while um i think this is very important because i think people uh flagellate themselves over the fact

01:46:57.200 | that they couldn't pay attention to write one paragraph um and they think that therefore that

01:47:04.080 | means they shouldn't write or that they can't write more than one paragraph but they may need to

01:47:09.120 | sounds like they need to create a system i come out of the little the little mini internet break

01:47:13.840 | knowing what the next sentence needs to say interesting so you're really an like an interval

01:47:19.120 | athlete when it comes to mental work with the hard stuff with the easy stuff i can just you know do it

01:47:25.680 | right but it's the it's the sense of effortful cognition that that takes its own time and it just takes its time

01:47:36.800 | and i don't control that i do try to set myself up to allow the mental work to happen when i'm in the

01:47:44.640 | shower or in the car or whatever so for example if i'm going to work on a grant application with somebody

01:47:51.440 | and we're sharing you know the writing and i know i can't start until i've had a conversation with the

01:47:57.600 | collaborator about who's doing what and what we think this grant is going to be about you know i might

01:48:03.440 | let that you know set up that meeting when there's going to be downtime afterwards i did this just

01:48:10.160 | yesterday i had a meeting yesterday morning knowing that then i was going to be on an airplane for quite

01:48:15.760 | a while knowing that without my having to do anything about it the ideas are going to marinate

01:48:22.960 | they're gonna stuff is going to be happening that i'm not aware of and that when i come out of that

01:48:28.800 | i'll probably know what i want at least the first couple of sentences to say yeah you trust the uh

01:48:34.480 | the sort of um the process of a brain state shifting back and forth you don't you don't fight it you

01:48:42.000 | trust it yeah i have to i mean i don't see any other way to be it to do it but i think it's a little

01:48:47.200 | like you know you need rest and recovery for physical exercise and honestly it's not like the brain and

01:48:54.320 | the and muscles are all that different from each other right well i always think of all nerve action

01:49:00.240 | as motor and uh we could talk about that i mean sharrington said right the final common path the

01:49:06.320 | nobel prize we're sharing today the final combat is movement i mean that's what we evolved to do first

01:49:10.480 | and right and thinking is a form of movement it is hard for people to grasp sometimes right but um and

01:49:16.960 | people perhaps can grasp it more easily in the context of songs certain songs sound like they're moving

01:49:22.160 | forward like it feels like a physical progression they make you want to move right they actually

01:49:26.640 | inspire movement um actually there are very few sounds that inspire stillness there they tend to be

01:49:32.480 | the you know slow oscillatory sounds ocean waves things that don't have a structure right they're very

01:49:38.400 | fractal and then but like to the point where you don't see that fractal structure it just kind of

01:49:42.800 | breaks up and then your mind just goes into drift that the only other person i've ever met who um has

01:49:47.920 | described embracing their mental process the same way that you have as uh my good friend and the you

01:49:54.240 | know he's this like world-renowned producer rick rubin who um he just trusts that there are certain times

01:50:01.200 | a day when things are going to come to him that certain things aren't ready and they just need to

01:50:04.640 | marinate in sleep or in dreams and he doesn't even really trying to sign it to sleep and dreams just

01:50:09.680 | understands the the process it eventually is going to emerge he's not like why can't i get this thing out

01:50:16.400 | and so he's very very much in flow with his own you know peaks and valleys and attention being blocked

01:50:22.800 | can mean you don't know yet what needs to come next mm-hmm yeah so important for people to hear

01:50:29.040 | because i think most everyone is trying to drop into that deep trench attractor state as quickly as

01:50:34.560 | possible right and yet there are ways that we can do that maybe we talk about that for a few moments i um

01:50:42.320 | i'd be remiss if i didn't um ask about your experience as a musician what instrument do you

01:50:48.000 | play well i started off with fluce um you know starting at fifth grade uh now i play the banjo and

01:50:53.760 | i sing nice when you're doing that do you find that you can your attention is anchored for the duration of

01:50:59.040 | the performance or practice especially when performing there's a certain um like i feel that the singing in

01:51:07.280 | particular can come out better in performance than it does in practice not always unfortunately

01:51:13.040 | the more technically challenging you know playing of the banjo is a little hard you know that the

01:51:18.960 | the adrenaline helps with the singing and hurts with the banjo let's put it that way interesting

01:51:24.080 | yeah because adrenaline it what it's what this like inverted u-shape thing like at very low levels we

01:51:30.080 | can't focus at higher levels we can focus and it gets too high we're discombobulated right right right

01:51:35.520 | yeah right i mean it's just the shaking of the fingers that can be problematic but the other problem

01:51:40.480 | is you know from an attention music performance standpoint i would much prefer to sing a given song

01:51:46.800 | only once in a rehearsal than to go over it more than once because i can't remember the words the second

01:51:53.520 | time through interesting and i think it's this mental checklist of i already did i already sing that i

01:52:00.160 | remember saying i remember singing that but no wait a second but now i have to sing it again you know

01:52:05.440 | and just kind of keeping track of where i'm at um gets harder the second time through pressure is an

01:52:12.480 | interesting um thing to explore in this context of brain states because uh it sounds like you've embraced

01:52:20.160 | this kind of oscillatory flow of your attention like in one context it works this way and you're not

01:52:25.520 | pressuring yourself to do something there was a really interesting paper recently about the neural

01:52:30.320 | basis of of choking and not uh not physically choking but when um something really critical is on the line

01:52:38.240 | what happens did you see that paper i thought i have not but like yeah it's it's

01:52:42.320 | really cool they they record from motor cortex and and a bunch of other areas but the basic

01:52:47.440 | finding is that um if there's the potential for a low payoff if you get something right let's just

01:52:54.640 | say it's like throwing darts which the analogous experiment would be like throwing darts you say

01:52:58.240 | well let's say if you get on the dartboard you get a dollar right um if you get close within a

01:53:03.040 | certain distance of the bullseye you get i don't know a thousand dollars pretty good um if you bullseye

01:53:10.480 | you get 10 million dollars what ends up happening is that the performance on the high stakes

01:53:17.280 | condition is always worse but just in terms of just even the basic mechanics yeah and so choking

01:53:25.120 | turns out to be a recruitment of too many motor units you basically you over invest motor effort

01:53:31.360 | as opposed to staying chill and staying in the zone where you try too hard you still might not bullseye

01:53:36.960 | this wasn't the exact experiment but again it's analogous to what they really did it but you stand

01:53:42.160 | a much greater chance if you stay within the your ability you already know how to do this thing um

01:53:48.160 | and subjects choke when the stakes go way up because they just over invest too much motor activity

01:53:54.320 | perfectionism it's a trap you have to almost mentally convince yourself that the stakes are lower but you

01:54:00.640 | can't really lie to yourself anyway it's pretty interesting it's pretty interesting i i i love that

01:54:07.440 | we're talking about brain states and sensory inputs in this case it's knowledge about outcomes uh potential

01:54:14.320 | outcomes i want to talk about chickens yes you have chickens i do and so first i'll ask you about chickens and

01:54:21.840 | what you find so interesting about them and then i i want your thoughts about a really wild wild

01:54:28.960 | finding about chickens and vision and attention okay that anyone who's ever raised chickens on a farm

01:54:36.960 | probably knows but only a couple of neuroscientists know you'll probably know it but anyway

01:54:43.040 | what kind of chickens do you have i have bantam meal fleurs so bantamese little guys they're

01:54:47.360 | little guys yeah meal fleurs meal fleur how big are the eggs uh they're half the size of a standard

01:54:54.480 | grade a large egg from the supermarket are they tasty very tasty okay how many does it take to make

01:55:00.240 | a decent size omelet um well double the number that you would normally put in and okay so for me it'd be like

01:55:06.480 | eight yeah okay yeah so when did you start raising chickens so i had i had bantams when i was a kid

01:55:12.400 | i live in chapel hill and around 2012 or so maybe 2011 the town changed its zoning laws to allow uh

01:55:24.080 | chickens in the kind of neighborhood that i live in so i'm like okay this is this is what we're gonna do

01:55:28.880 | my husband's allergic to um dogs and cats and anything with fur so you know chickens were kind

01:55:34.800 | of the option i suppose we could have gotten rabbits and kept them outside you know i won't say that we

01:55:40.320 | didn't have that discussion but it didn't go anywhere you know i got a friend they're sweet

01:55:45.840 | they're like little monkeys they're always crawling up people well they really i do know have met a

01:55:50.640 | hairless cat and i do think that they have lovely personalities you know extrapolating from this end of

01:55:55.600 | one um you know because they don't look so great so they can't get by on their looks oh my goodness

01:56:02.160 | this is funny oh dear no no no it's i i totally i buy it yeah yeah so they're very you know very pleasant

01:56:08.480 | personality i think um and the warmth of them because you can you really feel the warmth of their skin

01:56:13.600 | but anyway so chickens chickens it was um and is and um i like the bantams because they really have

01:56:22.400 | a lot of personality you know they haven't been bred to be egg layers they've been bred to be pets

01:56:27.360 | um and say they have a certain you know pleasing uh personality and interest in interacting with people

01:56:36.000 | that i think might be different from uh standard kind of farm chickens well i have a uh non-invasive

01:56:42.640 | experiment for you to try okay some years ago i got very interested in the relationship between vision

01:56:48.160 | and brain states and there's some interesting literature about the fact that when we view horizons

01:56:53.920 | uh especially from a vista um that it relaxes our autonomic nervous system we go into a more

01:57:03.600 | parasympathetic mode and it turns out when we view horizons our eyes naturally go into panoramic vision

01:57:10.560 | we're not foveating to one that's nerd speak by the way neuroscience nerd speak to look we're not

01:57:15.360 | focusing on one particular point right if you track one particular point you obviously do a smooth pursuit

01:57:20.800 | of that point with your eyes but um that you just go to a vista you look at a uh horizon you just your

01:57:27.600 | eyes naturally just dilate um as we say right but it's panoramic vision whereas when we um do a virgin's

01:57:34.800 | eye movement bring our eyes together a particular point there's this really interesting increase in the output of

01:57:40.240 | areas like locus coeruleus that are involved in attention norepinephrine i thought this is really

01:57:45.280 | wild and you know i was interested in respiration and brain states and like oh cool like maybe we're

01:57:49.760 | just staring into little boxes too much and that's why we feel like so attentionally um exhausted depleted

01:57:56.960 | makes sense attention's a resource okay i think there's some evidence now to support every one of

01:58:01.360 | those statements although we need more brain recordings from humans to really get to the

01:58:05.920 | nitty-gritty but then my graduate advisor who unfortunately has passed away um had told me

01:58:14.960 | some time ago she said you know you can hypnotize chickens and i said um really because that's a lyric

01:58:21.920 | in an iggy pop song uh hypnotizing chickens and i thought wait what and she said yeah you can hypnotize

01:58:30.480 | chickens but they're not really hypnotized they're just hyper focused and i was like isn't that what

01:58:35.680 | hypnosis is and she's like yeah i guess i thought we always thought hypnosis was like a dream hypnosis

01:58:40.240 | is a state of hyper focus i have a colleague who does clinical hypnosis david spiegel it's a

01:58:45.360 | approved by the american psychiatric association hyper focus here's what you do and you can find this

01:58:52.080 | people who grew up on farms do this they'll and their videos of this on youtube they take a chicken

01:58:56.720 | and they'll hold the chicken and they'll draw a line in the dirt and they'll place the chicken's beak

01:59:02.080 | on the line and the chicken will just stay there for many many many minutes you actually have to pick

01:59:11.760 | them up and kind of get them to orient to the rest of their visual field turns out that any birds that

01:59:17.200 | eat off the ground have a very complex like sensory motor challenge that my colleague the late

01:59:23.120 | he died of old age so harvey carton told me about which is you know they got this tiny beak and the

01:59:28.640 | seed is small and they you know you and i could pick up things off a table and and and pretty quickly but

01:59:35.600 | they're doing this with this tiny beak but their eyes are on the side of their head yeah yeah yeah so

01:59:39.120 | in order to do that as their head descends really fast in order to not smash their beak into the

01:59:43.920 | surface right and make an accurate uh pickup yeah of the seed or whatever it is yeah they or bug

01:59:50.000 | their eyes undergo a virgin's eye movement they shift their eyes inward and they get a little cone of

01:59:55.440 | attention so when you draw a line and you focus them down they're literally they're stuck in that cone of

02:00:01.440 | attention and then i started looking at the literature on behavioral treatments for adhd

02:00:06.960 | and or just for attention and not in this country but in china many schoolroom classrooms begin before

02:00:14.640 | the lesson with the kids literally focusing on a single spot which seems a little bit like yeah kind

02:00:20.000 | of uh military um but they have embraced this relationship between visual attention and overall

02:00:28.880 | kind of ability to cognitively focus and chickens do it kids in china are doing it and it actually

02:00:36.800 | has been shown to work pretty well for improving attention in you know the the subsequent you

02:00:41.520 | know 40 minutes to an hour that's really interesting the so our attention tends to follow our vision

02:00:47.200 | not necessarily the other way around so i've seen some of these chicken youtube videos

02:00:53.920 | um but i haven't i haven't dug into it yet to um try it with my own chickens but now you're motivating

02:01:00.480 | me to to try it yeah let me know what you find as far as you know is the drawing of the line an important

02:01:06.480 | part of this yeah it is you can't just put a line down and then bring the chicken over yeah so i have

02:01:11.680 | to look at these videos again it's been a little while but what they do is they they place the chicken

02:01:16.240 | the kind of beak facing down but they're not like pushing the bird down and then they they they draw

02:01:23.120 | the line starting from the beginning no starting i can't remember if it's starting from the beak outward

02:01:30.400 | or outward toward the beak okay what it does is it harvey was the one okay but harvey the the late

02:01:35.920 | great harvey card and i should just mention he's uh i'll put a link to an obit he was one of the

02:01:41.360 | history and histories and the world's most incredible comparative yeah neuroscientists he also was a

02:01:48.800 | fire hose of information he used to walk into my lab and just start talking about diving birds and

02:01:53.680 | yeah he was one of those but uh he made me seem quiet and he explained that they when the birds

02:02:03.360 | which have eyes on the side of their head do this virgins eye movement yeah they get locked there so

02:02:08.800 | maybe it has to be away from the beak towards the beak probably yeah um and it's funny because i mentioned

02:02:15.840 | this a few times um places before i had a podcast and people grew up on farms were like oh yeah we

02:02:21.600 | would do that you can actually interesting you can actually then take the bird and flip it over yeah

02:02:25.680 | aggressive roosters become very calm you could or you can work with the manageable and so the the vision

02:02:33.200 | drives our brain states yeah and i think about this a lot in the context of the phone where our vision

02:02:37.840 | is brought into this little box sure but the number of different contexts within that box yeah yeah it's an

02:02:45.200 | infinite i mean do you find i mean diving into the phone thing um definitely gonna try the chicken

02:02:52.240 | thing um yeah let me know yeah maybe i'll make a video i mean blinders like they put on horses yeah

02:02:58.160 | yeah or they put on focused yeah i mean our own fal falconers use these right the idea is you you're

02:03:05.520 | trying to physically make you focus on one thing that's right yeah and there's some funny pictures um that

02:03:11.440 | you can find on x every once in a while of focusing tools from the 1930s where they would literally

02:03:17.120 | put kids in these helmets with just two little eye portals and it was supposed to keep the kids that

02:03:22.080 | couldn't pay attention focused on their work so they wouldn't see any other kids we think about it so it

02:03:26.160 | seems so silly and so barbaric well i think too it could be helpful to ponder why one's attention is being

02:03:34.400 | drawn to other things because i think that um like the most relaxed i can get these days is if i know

02:03:45.440 | someone else is monitoring the state of the world and will let me know if there's some major disaster

02:03:50.080 | i've had to do some of that outsourcing too right but having that outsourced yeah it's super helpful

02:03:55.600 | because it satisfies the need to have a warning system going on at all times and it allows me to

02:04:03.920 | kind of you know then focus in on you know what's in front of me right at them at the moment i'll give

02:04:09.520 | you an example that's not really about attention but it's about like what's the best way for me to

02:04:13.840 | achieve a state of relaxation so i went on a lovely rafting trip in idaho this past summer i have a

02:04:21.520 | zolio satellite communicator this is basically a thing that interacts with your phone and interacts

02:04:26.720 | with a satellite um you can you can't make phone calls but you can send and receive text messages

02:04:33.040 | and i brought that along because i felt that i would probably be more relaxed knowing that if

02:04:40.320 | something really bad happened people could reach me than being completely out of touch so for me that

02:04:48.320 | sort of middle middle space of like some contact otherwise i'm gonna be you know a heightened state

02:04:57.200 | of arousal when i come back out from the you know from the remote wilderness you know i think about

02:05:04.320 | people like my niece's generation she's you know late teens about to hit her 20s and to completely remove

02:05:10.480 | oneself from uh smartphone technology in that age bracket um sets up a kind of a return to

02:05:20.240 | return to communication with others that probably involves a lot of stress yeah like what are you

02:05:26.480 | gonna get it's like opening your email after a two-month vacation exactly you just can't do that when you're

02:05:31.040 | running a lab and then the the re-entry is so painful of that sort of onslaught of of things and um you

02:05:40.320 | know even emotional messages from people that if you read them in order you know and it's five or six

02:05:46.720 | days ago and you're like then you see follow-up messages and things got resolved without you

02:05:51.920 | usually fingers crossed usually that's what happens it so rapidly wipes out that state of calm

02:05:58.960 | that you can get from being out in the wilderness yeah i i will um periodically go into the wilderness

02:06:04.800 | i did this recently and i i didn't notify enough people but i notified the critical ones and people

02:06:11.520 | don't like it no well i wish we could set up an auto reply for text messaging that would make me feel

02:06:18.400 | more calm what i'm hearing from you is that you embrace the natural you know peaks and valleys in your

02:06:25.200 | attention you've figured out what works for you in different contexts it's not like it's always one

02:06:30.240 | sentence a break one sentence it really depends and i think you know we we hear a lot about how

02:06:36.000 | phones are the problem we had jonathan hate on this podcast he's the most vocal out there and i really

02:06:40.480 | support his message um so i want to be clear about that but for many people it's just not feasible

02:06:46.240 | people with kids people with with jobs people you know right um you know outside the elementary and

02:06:53.200 | high school classroom people need to be accessible if something critical comes through and i

02:07:00.160 | think that's really the thing is it's it's just very unfiltered and and that's what just leading

02:07:04.960 | to so many challenges with getting real work done i think the movement to get them out of schools is

02:07:09.440 | good um you know we i felt like we as parents we had no choice that the that our children were being

02:07:16.560 | it was required part of of what they had to do in the classroom was to have access to the internet on

02:07:23.280 | something you know at least recognizing that problem and being a little more thoughtful about it and you know the

02:07:30.080 | of cases where schools have decided to keep the phones all the way out of the classroom i think

02:07:34.880 | are um certainly that's worth trying and let's see how it goes so i try to be aware what am i

02:07:41.760 | getting from the phone at any particular moment in time or for any particular purpose so i feel pretty

02:07:48.400 | good about texting with my friends and family i feel great about using it to um have access to public

02:07:55.760 | transit in a city that i'm not familiar with love that love it as a travel tool love it for you know

02:08:03.280 | booking plane flights and things like that so convenient that i can do that it frees up time that

02:08:09.280 | i would otherwise be at my computer doing some deeper work you know okay now i can do that on my phone

02:08:14.960 | somewhere when i just have a free moment so i love that i think it's useful for me to try to be aware

02:08:21.360 | of what do i want to get out of my phone right now and am i just bored you know if i'm using it because

02:08:28.800 | i'm just bored that's the thing that okay let me see if i can swap it out for something that might

02:08:37.360 | be a little health healthier like listening to a podcast or listening to an audio book or reading a

02:08:42.800 | book on my phone or reading a book actually a book um that can be good i've tried to set myself up with

02:08:51.440 | some exit paths from being on my phone like okay yes i will admit it's one of the first things i do

02:08:57.120 | in the morning i know i should go outside and touch grass and get some sunlight i know i know that

02:09:02.880 | circadian rhythm well i often wake up before it's light out so i have to wait for that anyway so for

02:09:09.360 | example i'll do my one or two hits on duolingo and one or two other language apps i'll do a couple of

02:09:16.800 | my favorite games on the you know new york times games site but those are usually things that like

02:09:23.440 | there's a sense of satiety there's a sense of being finished like it's not an endless scroll

02:09:30.640 | i have completed one lesson so there's a moment to get off the phone i'd love to have an app that

02:09:40.160 | limited the endless scroll on social media like an interface to social media that that sort of served

02:09:47.600 | me um maybe some designated number of posts and then i would have to take some explicit action to get

02:09:55.120 | more and that might help me get off yeah based on the the uh dopamine literature and um everything i know

02:10:05.040 | about the brain i decided that um any activity that has a seamless on-ramp to full attention

02:10:15.280 | and that has no end point you mentioned endpoint is the thing to be really careful of yeah yeah so the

02:10:24.000 | seamless on-ramp to grabbing it full attention it's like from flats or it's like ball bearing from flat

02:10:29.280 | service into the trench there's no work involved right and then you're there and you can stay there as long

02:10:34.480 | as you want yeah doesn't kick you out you have to kick yourself out or life kicks you out because

02:10:40.000 | you didn't go do something or something happens so that's key um so that's the slot the slot machine

02:10:46.880 | analogy very easy to play a slot machine and it's very easy to spend out all your money on a slot machine

02:10:52.400 | and so they created this thing like where you can go get more money out of a machine right so you can

02:10:55.760 | continue playing on the other machine and that's the same thing but it's it's how seamless it is like

02:11:00.640 | you don't even need to learn the card game to gamble you just have to know how to pull a lever

02:11:04.240 | or press a button social media is a bit the same my solution to the social media thing is

02:11:08.880 | i took an old phone i put x and instagram on that phone those are the only two social media platforms

02:11:14.560 | i use and it's somebody sends me something on my phone like it's social media i don't i can't go to

02:11:19.760 | it so my i i have to segregate social media i have a social media phone and i only get a certain amount

02:11:27.120 | of time with it you can't get into your social media from a browser uh no okay no i so like if someone sends

02:11:33.680 | me an instagram post i click on i can't see it i get that error signal sign in and i i'm not signed

02:11:38.480 | in it's like i don't even know my password okay it's written someplace yeah but i have a password

02:11:43.360 | generator updates all the time anyway so yeah yeah so so the solution was to create to log out

02:11:49.280 | and then have a phone that just had those i don't even have the apps on my that phone i would have to

02:11:54.000 | install the apps i'd have to sign in i'd have to i'd have to find my password which my team knows i'm

02:11:58.880 | never gonna happen right i'd have to log in so i just too many keystrokes i just don't have access

02:12:05.440 | to it yeah i it unless i'm on that phone so that's great i think that's perfect that i mean works for

02:12:10.720 | me works for you yeah great but i think having systems like this is like gonna be required for

02:12:15.440 | most people because i yeah i don't think anyone's gonna create the app right you're looking for i hope

02:12:20.560 | they do but i don't think they're going to yeah so your lab is still super productive so when you're

02:12:26.320 | in the lab presumably and interacting with students and writing grants and stuff all this stuff falls

02:12:31.760 | away right it's because inside the lab context it's like your workshop i'm guessing that makes

02:12:36.320 | it that's true that's true yeah when i'm interacting with people at work or i'm in the actual lab

02:12:42.240 | um it does it all falls away yeah yeah the the cues to stay focused are very strong i knew we were going

02:12:48.960 | to talk about the auditory system and we did i knew we were going to talk about the visual system and we

02:12:53.920 | did and i knew we were going to talk about their integration what i did not expect what i'm so

02:12:57.920 | delighted happened is that you brought us into the realm of of true multi-sensory integration and the

02:13:03.600 | extent to which our physical environment shapes the way that our brain works and our brain is also

02:13:10.400 | creating its own internal environment and that we have a lot more control over that than perhaps we

02:13:16.000 | think unless we just leave it to circumstances which is really the the takeaway that i at least i pulled

02:13:23.680 | from this last portion of our conversation so thank you so much for coming here and explaining this we've

02:13:28.160 | not um talked about multi-sensory integration before i started off by saying that and now we have

02:13:33.840 | and um i'm so glad that you were the one to introduce it to us because it's a fascinating

02:13:38.560 | aspect of how we work and it's really like the core mechanics of how we work when we talk about

02:13:42.480 | thinking or you know or working or focus we're not just talking about vision or hearing we're talking

02:13:48.080 | about their verge so exactly thank you it's really wonderful and let me know how the experiment with

02:13:52.400 | the chickens go yeah thank you so much this has been great oh i really enjoyed it thank you thank you

02:13:57.920 | thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr jennifer grow to learn more about her

02:14:02.400 | laboratory's work and to find a link to her excellent book entitled making space how the

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How Your Thoughts Are Built & How You Can Shape Them | Dr. Jennifer Groh

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