LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at Beacon Theatre in New York
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and am a professor neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Recently, the huberman lab hosted a live event at the bean theory in new york city.

The event was entitled the brain body contract and IT consisted of a lecture followed by a question and answer session with the audience. We wanted to make the recorded version of that question and answer session available to everybody, regardless of who could attend. So what follows is the question answer period from the rain body contract live huberman lab event.

Want to be sure to thank the sponsors from that event. There were eight sleep, which makes smart mattress covers with heating and cooling capacity. I started sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover about eight months ago, and this is completely transformed by sleep.

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And i've even shipped my eight lake matters cover out to meet me in the location that I arrived to so that I get the best possible sleep. If you want to try a sleeping, go to eight sleep dog com slash huberman to save up to four hundred dollars off their sleep fit holiday bundle, which includes their new pod recover. Eight sleep currently ships in the U.

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And australia. Again, that eight sleep dot com slash huberman. I'd like to also thank our supplement partner momentous. They make the very highest quality supplements they ship internationally, and they're formulated supplements as single ingredient formulations that match what is discussed on the huberman lab podcast. If you're interested in any of those supplements, please go to live moments stock com slash huberman and now without further a do the question and answer session from the live event held at the became theater in new york city. And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

You've said before that stress can be good for us, but how do we know when it's too much? That's a good question. And I should profess that by saying that there's some incredible work that was done by a colleague of mine, doctor allia chrome.

Ally is how SHE goes bike. Doctor ali chrome, who is a SHE, was a division when athlete SHE, as she's a tenure professor, psychology at stanford, she's a licensed clinical psychologist like everyone is. When I look around of my college, I went gdss know where these people, very humbling place to be, but she's made some important discoveries.

And I want IT just highlight one, which is the notion of mindset, and know these are not placido effects. But let me just tell you, when you think about stress, how you think about stress is really important. First, what you can't lie yourself, but if for instance, you watch a one or three minute video as she's given subjects in her lab about stress and IT tells you all the terrible things that stressed as your immune system and sleep, then you experience those things increases in blood pressure, its Better.

However, if you watch a one to three minute video, that's also true about the fact that stress can sharp in your decision making for certain kinds of things, actually can, essentially your immune system. I wish someone could help me get this narrative right out there. Stress does not delete your immune system unless IT goes on a long, long time.

We will talk about what long means in a moment. Why would IT think about IT if you had to fast and move with family, or whether a storm of any kind, emotional or physical and you got sick, that would make any sense. It's usually after your stressed, you've ever when go, go, go or taking care of a loved one, studying or working hard, and then you finally go on vacation.

You rest arrival y get sick. It's because your immune stem shut down, its stopped. Your immune system is mobilized by that alertness side of your automation ic nervous system.

But you do need sleep. You do need sleep. And it's actually, we think, the slowing of circulation. And this is why it's probably not a good idea to exercise if you're already sick and if you're wearing towards sick, probably limit the intensity of any kind of interaction as best you can and just steal yourself.

Well, allayed lab has clearly shown us over and over again that what we know, our knowledge base really does shape the physiology of those outcomes. Now you know that stress is both bad and good. So which one is that is average to nothing? no.

IT turns out that you can buy as this in one direction or the other, depending on which information you're listening to more often. I think this is really important. I still am trying to get my head in my mind around what's happened over the last few years and where it's place to us.

Like where did IT land us? Are we more resilient now or we just really beat up? I don't know, I really don't know.

But I think how we interpret the last few years is going to make a big difference in terms of how IT impact us. How do we know if we are? thanks.

yeah. What we're missing out there, I think, is a narrative from somebody that people listen to and are not saying that person should be me. In fact, IT shouldn't be me, but somebody that can help us frame what's just happened to as much like a good.

I think that the world needs a good therapy, basically into a very good therapy. So I would call short term stress, which is very beneficial for us, is the kind of stress that happens on the order of a day, two or three days, not a problem, even if you feel torn apart, provided you can get rest afterwards. Long term stress is the kind of stress that really starts to impede your sleep wake cycle, make your dreams more stressful and more like nightmares.

They're not going away. And I can promise you that for those of you that have chAllenges with things sort of a accumulation of stress from the past, that's now compound by what's happening now. It's said a, the solution does seem to be to get yourself into a supported environment of some kind that will allow you to go through a fork of farces.

Again, IT doesn't after require psychodeviant s that can take you through the full ride of automation ic intensity, cathartic of some sort and then relaxation. That does seem to be what snap people out of we will call a longer term stress and historical stress. There's even the question of whether or not focusing directly on the trauma.

And the story is so critical, I think IT is obviously that something that should be done with a clinic, but stress that impedes are sleep for three nights or more. That shifts the pattern of dreams to more anxious dreams. That is more long term stress.

And for that, you need to take IT seriously. And it's the kind of thing where if you don't take IT seriously, you can start degrading things like your immune system at sara. And I would say that under those conditions, use sleep as a good marker.

In fact, i'm sure they're some clinicians in the room. I mean, one of the questions that is used as a diagnostic for whether not people are depressed or aniseed depressed as whether not they're sleeping well or not, right? Again, language is not very good at parsing what's going on inside.

We have to look to behaviors and regulatory of sleep wake cycles at ta. Hopefully that was at least a partial answer. I I try to be accurate, but if I were exhaustive, I would, I might actually cure in salmonia someday with these podcasts, if nothing else.

How is hip no impacting my life? I'm in hip nosis now. Now actually spent mostly the afternoon in hip nosis.

Before I do this, I spent A A good hour in hip nosis, again in self directed hit nosis. It's so unfortunate. Keep talking to David. Speak about this again. His his dad was one of the originals of her nosis as a valid psychiatric treatment.

There's even the idea that things like em, D, R, the scanning of ice back and forth while reporting a narrative may actually be capturing some of the elements of hit nosis again. And this is why, at least for me, I appreciate the opportunity. Come together tonight to talk about principles.

I would hope that after tonight you could look at any practice, anything, any compound, any breathing exercise, and just be able to frame up which continuum, where on the continuum, what is really designed to do, move you up towards alertness, are down towards calm. And in fact, as I can help myself, I just tell you, for all the breathing stuff, IT can be made very simple. If your x sales are longer and more vigorous ous than your inhales, you're going to get calm down.

If your in hills are longer and more vigorous than your ex sales, you're going to become more alert. If you hold your breath, just eventually just start breathing again. The physiology maps perfectly to that.

That maps perfectly to the physiology. And if you have, for instance, you do box breathing in, hal holds x hal holding this kind of thing, well, you're going to stay right where you at. You're going to be on an even plane more or less.

Okay, so that's of hopefully captures all of breath work in one sentence. Now answer the question you are asking me nosis. It's impact in my life in a couple of ways.

One way is more from a practical, scientific weight, which is that my laboratory works on vision, and we work on stress. And in some ways those might seem divorce. Although now with the cuttle fish, in the fact that your eyes narrow their field of you when your stress that that should become obvious.

Why that is. But hypnosis also takes advantage of this really weird kind of cool feature, which is, in this way, when you do a group exercise. But I can't really see you all that well, I certainly see your eyes well enough to know this.

But David speel, there's actually something in the this is a valid thing called the speaker ee role test. And it's not that the teenage arrow that when you look up with while not moving your head, when you look up, you actually are engaging circuits in your brain stem. They're involved in generating alertness.

And when you look down in your eyes, close the opposite to your engaging circuits in the brain that are taking into a commerce state. Now, when to be wonderful, of all you have to do is look down and you've come and look up and you'd be alert. That doesn't quite work that way.

But to inducive nosis, what they do is they have people look up, and then, while looking up, close their eyes, which is actually kind of hard to do. Some people can't do IT. Their eyes roll forward, hence the speak eye le to some people, their eyes get, you see the Whites of their eyes, and they looks really spooky.

They're looking up with their eyes, clothes. Those people are very prone to hip nosis. Why will help? Nosis is a state of deeper relaxation with alertness and focus.

It's a contextual nar narrowing, excuse me. So it's like being early stage sleep and that's why stage chip nosis works with people telling people to do certain things. It's not that they don't care.

They're under the control of the hn test so they forget what's around them. why? Because their mind is focused internally and on the dialogue with the hima test and is not paying attention to context. So it's narrowing of context.

But he notices, for me has been very useful because a validated the relationship between vision and states of mind, IT also checks off this box again, which is that to access in your plans, to see what you need, focus, plus you need a state of deeper relaxation. Usually first focus, then sleep or non sleep, depressed. But speed.

And his daddy figured out, because their way smarter than I am, that you can get people into that perfect state of neuroplasticity by combining them both in real time through this, a typical thing we call him nosis. So I do a daily years, maybe every other day, hip, nosy scripts about itself directed hip nose script of about five to fifteen minutes, usually trying to get myself to be less pissed off about something that i'm really pissed off about. Frankly, I imagine the stuff i'm really pissed off about in the screen, on the left side, I think about all the things that make me feel good.

And then I keep talking about how angry I am. This is really how IT goes. And then over the time i've noticed, well, you're coupling that bodily state of calm to the anger thing.

This is all very hard to do in talk therapy. Notice respect to talk therapy. There's a tremendous advantage to talk therapy that I myself have benefit from IT, although according to certain people in my life, not enough. But hypnosis works because it's it's capturing neuroplasticity processes. Thank you for that question.

One of the .

most effective protocols for boosting the microbial oh, well, here i'm very fortunate because my upstairs neighbor at stanford is the great justice Sonia berg. And he and his wife erica, run this amazing lab defining all the principles of the gut microbial. And I have a really cool idea.

I don't be serious about this, but I can't help but chickle when I think that this might actually be true. We all know that this is definitely true, that we all Carry around trillions of little microbes, tera, not just in our gut, that goes from one end, diverse through to the other. Any mucosal lining eyes, gene italia knows we have microbes.

Es in our nose at sea. This is why we're hegg ing into the winter months being an asal breather. That sounds like crazy new ag stuff be an asal breather was actually a book written by paul lick and SAndra on at stanford with a forward by Jerry diamond and robbert sa pulk y the book jaws.

So these is some heavy hitters, and there's a very good evidence that people who mouth breathe are making themselves more prone to illness when nail breathe them because of the microbial. It's just a Better filter for germs. So this winter and always really try to be a nasal breathing, all the one of the best ways to do that. If you're not into the mouth taping thing, which people do is to try and do some of your exercise with just nazar breathing articular a while to get used to. But i'm not good the nasal bring thing because i'm always .

talking the microbial is .

all over us and in as its on our skin were actually exchanging IT when we meet and we shake hands. Do you know what happens? Usually the first ten fifteen seconds data from norm sobs lab.

But the wiseman has shown that we wipe our eyes. We wipe other people's molecules on us. We're really good at that. Just watch these interaction now around and we do in the germ free shand hand check y're going to this bump.

But there is this idea that maybe we are the house cats, right? Maybe we're not just transporting all these microbiota because it's good for us would if we're just the vehicles and they're running the planet and they're like, oh, we're running out of some stuff like we should figure out somebody to take us to mars and then we will take over mars. I mean, maybe it's all of them.

And Justin was the one that told me, the analyst, that's kind of early, if you think about IT, but there might be these other intelligence that are hy jacking us. And that's kind of scary because we like to think that we're in charge. And who knows what's good for your microbiome or what's good for them?

That is, well, prebiotic fiber seems to be very important, but the studies of fiber, at least is IT relates to the microbiome are somewhat controversial. There was a study done on humans at standard by Chris gardener and Justin and songs g that shows that people who eat one to four, they sort yet to ramp up savings of low sugar fermented foods. This will be your kim cheese, your noos, your shower crowds, your key fers, your can buchers.

That said, at a per day develop a very robust microbiome. And fiber did not do that. In fact, fiber increase, this so called in flam atone, which is the mark markers for inflation tion.

But that doesn't mean fibers bad. Fiber actually is getting enough. Fiber is correlated with a number of other things that are great, like reduced Carter vascular disease for instance, cancers of the coin, for instance.

So fiber n got microbiota prebiotics, probiotics. Probably only necessary if you have a this BIOS is if you've been taking antibiotics s or for some reason you're depleted of the microbes. On one of the great way to delete your microban one is, is just highly processed oos, but hopefully most people aren't doing that.

So prebiotic fiber and these low sugar for mental foods. And then someone always says beer, right? So and always, yes, yes, beer will support your microbiome, but you might do other things too.

So in general, low alcohol, low share fermented foods reduce the number of inflated on markers that's very, very clear from the sun and bird data. And then there are other ways, of course, the microbiome actually interacts with temperatures. So the cold exposure thing is actually good for your microbiome.

But, and I want to really emphasize this, if you hear about studies that such and such improve, such and such, keep in mind that anything that improves your sleep, your microbiome or your social interactions will improve a basically everything else. And those are what we call me modulating, excuse me, effects, not mediating effects. This is really important in we teach first year graduate students and medical students about this.

Like, for instance, if there were a fire alarm polar right now, god forbid IT would module all of your attention. But would you say that fire alarms mediate attention? No, it's not directly in the line of mechanism, but I can adjust an existing mechanism.

So great sleep is great for everything, but he doesn't control IT directly. And so things like getting great sleep, keeping your microbial healthy, getting enough sunlight at that, are they provide a kind of boy ency to all the organs and systems of your body. But they aren't necessarily the thing that cures add.

But of course, if you have adha issues with focus, getting enough sleep will help. does. Is nutrition the way to cure your ad, you know? But if you improve your gut microbiome, it's very likely that your new transmitter or systems will improve.

Limiting sugar will help at SAT, sara. So there's a reason to think that great sleep, solid nutrition, microbial social interactions, exercise, this kind of the big five. There are others too.

Of course, with those, you set a good boy seat to all the other systems, and then we get into the things of how to directly increase focus or module dopamine e and so on and so forth. oh. Well, I realized some people are afraid of dogs.

We actually have a dog stimulus in our fear lab. We get people, they are terrified of dogs. We hired this dog trainer guy as these pit balls that will attack you while you're in VR.

By the end, people are a little more comfortable with dogs in general for you and me. If you're not afraid of dogs, that's not terribly terrifying. But if you are, even the thought of that can be pretty terrifying.

Um a couple of things. People thought about the eye contact thing. They make an eye contact.

We're big on eye contact. Humans to um eye contact is meaningful in terms of oxytocin release. That's all real. Those data are more and more data that come out with from Better study's eye contact is a big deal. I think it's also that just the dogs are always game to show up exactly where you want to meet them, and they always show up in their most loving possible state for them. It's a pretty simple equation if you get IT right and they need proper care.

But I mean, costal o was unique because the bulldog also, you don't anna, get me going on dog breeds, but the bulldog also looks disappointed all the time and then you do something IT likes and then IT looks delighted. And pretty soon you're working for their approval. And we were like the oddie couple me in him and I realized he's got me trained really, really well to do my best to please him and delight him, which he delighted me.

And there I was on the hook. So that's one reason. I think there's also another reason which is super nerdy, which is this sea tactile fiber thing, which is of these little nervous ings in your skin.

And we know, of course, that oxytocin is released from parent and child. We know this from no imaging. IT said that we know oxytocin is released from romantic interact, non sexual, romantic touch.

One of the things that is very powerful for the release of oxytocin, powerful, is nonsexual glooming touch among members of a species, or even across species of pictures of monkeys you picking around in each other, or people who are insist on popping things on one another, or people who go to the hair, dress or the barber, and they like torture. He does not even have to be massage, massive oxytocin, release those data, don't get as much play as all the data on oxytocin. And love is called the love horn, but it's basically a neurochemical signaling system for this interaction feels good and is very much of the present.

And I think that's an important distinction to make more broadly, is that dopa mean is really about the pursuit of all things beyond the confines es of our skin. I'm going to get that thing. I want that because it's all about anticipation.

And when you have some distance between yourself and the thing that you think will deliver whatever is you want, usually pleasure in some former another, or excitement whatever your pleasure is or combined, then you actually have to mobilize. And dopamine in is the precursor to a gentle. And lot of people don't know that a journey is made from dopamine.

IT gets you into motion. Then you have the reward systems that are more about what you have from your skin surface inward. So this is gentle touch, holding hands and indeed, stroking your dog probably does that for you'd activates the sea fibers, as they're called in your skin, which feeds right into these tone in an oxytocin stems of the brain.

Sounds a little pop psychology ish, but it's a real thing. And IT exists in essentially all a million species. So I think a lot of us just like dogs, because they will let us just pet them all day.

Some people like to be touched, but more or less, even when they trust is all. And I would know it's consensual, age appropriate, context appropriate, in this case species appropriate. Those of the conditions are important.

Um when I was a kid that I had, you know I don't know why my sisters in the eyes, I don't know why you had decided to this in the first place, but I love to having my face kind of like done like pet like that. I still like IT, but don't try IT because that she's the only one you can do IT anymore. Even so, we all of these things that feel feel good and I think IT feels good because IT releases these these chemicals and these are ancient systems, ancient, ancient systems that we all have.

And I think dogs let us do that, and cats toy with us with this one, because there are those cats that let you pet them. But most of the time they're doing IT to you and then they withdraw. And I don't know many dogs that do that.

So I think people have to answer the question finally. I think dogs, we love them so much because they let us put them as much as we want. And cats play this very diabolical game.

That's a lot more like human relationships. How can night all the best function in a society made for morning birds? Can you change your chronic pe? Or do us nine hours just have to suffer? okay. Well, as a former night hall, I used to work long hours in the lab. I still work long hours, but less than the lab.

Just so happens as the way that the career goes to put in foil on the windows, I would locked the doors, I blast the music, and I would stay there over the holidays until I had to go home just for the holiday events and my clock kwh drift. So I became a night out, and then my clock wood flip and everyone was gone. Your mind gets really tweet when you're not interacting with anybody, by the way, seeing faces in the morning and seeing faces at some point during the day once you're ready to face the day.

Very important for mental health. This is something I wish more people about IT also. And here i'm not trying to vote any kind of sentimentality, but know when you think about people who just start clearly not doing well, whether not there have shelter or not.

It's how often do we actually make direct eye contact now is it's not very often um so eye contact is important but i've also shifted to being a morning person. And so here's the thing, if you are a true night out, that means that your circon clock mean the genes that control the area of your brain in your hypothalamus that controls wake sleep cycles is fundamentally different. Very unlikely you'll become a morning person without being out of angry morning person.

So you can use that argument. You can cite me, however, as we get older, IT is true that the amount of slow wave sleep to rem sleep ten to change, and we can do Better on shorter bouts of sleep, mostly because we're getting less rapid eye movement sleep. And even if we try, we can't.

Those people would probably be Better off sticking to a limited amount of sleep at night and then getting a short nap. The rule and naps is nap if you want to do, if you don't want, but not if IT interference with your nighttime sleep. And if you can't nap, do some sort of non sleep debris or nsd ever for to non sleep debris.

So you can probably shift your clock by anywhere from two to eight hours. And that's true for jet lag as well. Light is going to be the best way.

But if you really want to shift, you're going to have to stack the big three or four light. So get light when you want to be awake. Temperature, you have to increase your body temperature to wake up.

You have to decrease body temperature to go to sleep. Keep in mind, you get into a nice bath or cold shower. You get very, very cold.

But then what happens? It's like putting an ice pack on the thermal stat. Your body tempera goes out. Member thermo genesis, that's the warming of the body in response to cold. Of course, if we stay in a long time, you you'll get Christy called you turn to pop ico.

But the idea is, is that if you take a cold shower and you you get some bright light and you get some exercises and you drink some caffeine, you can train your system to expect that at a certain time of day, and you will want to go to sleep a little bit earlier or much earlier, and you'd want to wake up when you stack those things. But that also means not taking caffeine and cold showers and doing exercises late at night. So it's going to take some work, but those are the big four.

It's going to be light is the most powerful way to shift. More light awake, less light asleep. Temperature increase awake. Temperature decrease asleep, right? Food is the other one, eating and force yourself to eat breakfast, even if you're not a breakfast either.

This works when you travel to just get under the local meal schedule because you have a clock system in your gut. Believe IT or not, you want to signalize that with your brain and then activity, getting some sort of exercise. But IT takes a little bit of work, but you can do IT, you can definitely do IT if you're not internal.

That's weird unless it's because of your work, in which case there are tools for shift work that we've put out there on on the podcast, your podcast even well, success, how do you see IT growing over the next years? I honestly, I trying to live in the tunnel of lack of understanding and awareness about what's happening with all this. I really do like suggested we do the podcast.

That's a true story doing IT. I'd still really do feel very much like I did. One was a locate.

I'm just going to keep trying to learn and share. I'd love for people to share the tools. I don't want credit for them if people credit is great.

But if you think about most of what we talk about are not things that you buy. These are tools that, again, work the first time every time. I always say behavioral tools first, then nutrition supplementation.

And then for some people, prescription drugs or some of these more experimental drugs make sense for some people. Doesn't prince. And I don't think kids should should be doing psychiatric. S I think childhood is enough of a psychiatric experience and of itself. But I had a an amazing triple board certified psychic, st.

Neurologist sanford WLAN Williams, on the podcast, and he talked about even the use of, I begin an M D M A even in some Younger populations but again with therapeutic c oversight um blew my mind. I don't know. I also didn't know this that M D M A I thought was toxic.

Please don't just take IT off the street. But if you're interesting, clinical trials are great clinical trials happening through maps. And you can look at knowledge website as well.

You know most of the knowledge about the effects of m dma is from um the L D S community because they volunteered for these studies because it's on it's not on the ban substance list. Um and so there's a lot of knowledge and they don't tend to or they don't use other substances like alcohol and marijuana, cocaine. So they much of what we know about the effects of md ma on the body and rainer is from that community other communities to as well.

So what are we going to do with the podcast? Well, every monday, i'm going to keep putting out episodes until they put me in that grave with the thing. Thank you. IT is a labor love, and it's a lot of fun, and we're just always trying to make them Better clear somehow they're not getting shorter.

I was told, rob, this it's game ninety minutes and he's like, how believe IT when I see IT, I think for me, one thing that I IT has brought that's really wonderful is the opportunity to learn from people in other domains that are far Better at putting information and things into the world. So i've been hope he doesn't mind me saying this. I've been very blessed and become really good friends with rick rubin, who's been really helpful to me, is as an amazing book on creativity coming out.

That's not a plug for the book, although I guess I just kind of accidentally did IT. But rick, of course, is like producing, created all this amazing music, everything from like run dmc, bc boy, slater, john y. Cash, just amazing.

And one of the things that he's been impressing on me is that um it's very important to stay focused on the process of what you're doing and to really not get into too much of what that's how that's landing. So I do like to hear when things are not clear. That's really helpful to me.

I do you like to hear suggestions about great people to bring on the podcast. I love criticism most of the time. I try my bet.

It's hard sometimes, but I really try to suborn a bit for what IT is. But I love that aspect of interacting in this, even though this is very fairly unit directional. Hopefully it'll be more opportunities for a dialogue ging and learning what's out there.

My real hope is that practitioners will start to incorporate things. And again, it's not about me. I'm cleaning from fields in the work and discoveries of other people and trying to thread across field.

So that's why I see the podcast going just more the same, more the same, more of the same um but a lot more and more topics as best we can. Lots of guests and we are have an episode with coming out at some point about creativity, which I think is one of the more interesting aspects of our being. So you watch for that.

What is the stress inoculation protocol for the workplace? Anxiety speaking? Does the principle stand? Commander hydrolysis, yeah, definitely.

I think if you were to pick some sort of practice that you could do privately and safely again, how cold should you make the water cold enough that it's really uncomfortable, you really, really want to get out, you can safely stay in. And that's why we never say forty degrees because, you know, you can kill yourself with cold water. Just hard to do.

You have to get really, really cold before you kill yourself. And open bodies of water aren't good. Actually, I told my friend sammer hadar.

He's the director of corrosion ology unit at the national do to mental healthy kim on the podcast, getting really excited. He's great about all the stuff on light and sleep taught me a lot of that over the years. We're good friends.

I told him him about the cold water thing, and he got into some river in bahasa and almost around the summer. Now is this story about how he almost drowned in what he was any thought about a paper he wants to write while he was almost drowning? So just be careful, open bodies of water, that kind of thing.

But I think you can quickly see within about a week or so of doing some sort of deliberate adjournment release, IT could be sick, like hypertension, twenty five, hyper vent at, breathed a short breath, hold, repeat, done two or three times. We have good data to support that in the lab. You see massive shifts in people's baseline level.

You become a little bit more like hostel, you really do. And i'm the way to think about is if you are more on a sea saw, then on the continuum, you get Better at loosening that hinge and controlling that hinge. Or you can imagine moving up and down that sea saw a little bit more easily.

And then, of course, if you have to place yourself into the environment, you have to test yourself in that environment. And some people will do toast masters and things like that. I can work my my way.

I don't know. IT works very, but my way is just start talking and don't stop. Can feel the stress.

What do you think we'll be the next hot topic, new trend in the field in the of science behavioral therapist? Uh, I like that because I have a lot of opinions about that. First of all, I do not think it's gonna brain machine interface.

My good friend andy chene, who have known since we are nine, he came on the pog gazi works on epl PC of your surgery. We had a bird club when we are kids at two members. You had to know the names of all the, all the talking birds, and then you had to know which one was the best talker, is the minor bird.

And of course, no one wanted join. No one even took the test. But he became A A surgeon and does brain machine interface.

He's doing truly incredible work, getting people with locked in syndrome to speak through a device and planted under the skull. They just think what they want to say. These are people haven't moved or or shared a word with anybody, and they're now communicating, but here's what's really cool.

And that he has also realized, ed, that facial expression is allowed. One thing to see on a screen what somebody in a chair or a hospital bed is thinking, that's wonderful. But facial expression is such a rich part of this.

So this is a really good use of AI. He is now created very realistic ipad images of that person face. And so they're actually speaking the words and people form a deep relationship to the person who's right next to their avatar.

That's a positive use, I think, of avatar s and edy's doing amazing work, that kind of work of brain machine in interface neural linker sa. I think it's going to be very useful and popular in the realm of therapeutics for parkinson's movement disorder ters epileptic locked in syndrome, said. I think we are many, many, many decades from chip implantation into the brain for things like enhancing memory.

And Frankly, I wouldn't want IT, not because I wouldn't want to enhances my memory, but because of what I said early, the nervous system has a certain amount of real estate, and you don't want to make that real estate very lopsided. And so I think we're going to see something very different in the next ten, twenty years. And I hope, hope, hope this Carries over to Younger populations.

I think we're going to hopefully start learning about our nervous system and what you can do and the fact that we have these preexisting circuits in us, that we can learn to leverage that work first time, every time. I'm strongly biased in my answer, but I think that is still remains an open question, for instance, whether not people could require less perhaps, or no medication for certain things. And I say certain things because for conditions like swizzle, hania, bipolar in particular, medication ocd has proved very effective.

But then there are whole other set of conditions like depression and anxious for which behavioral tools really work, but most people just don't even know they exist. So that's my hope. And again, I love the therapeutic community could try and expand their tool.

kid. I also think we're starting to see a blurring of the lines between different fields of psychology. So it's no longer psychoanalytic versus causing your behavior versus dialectic versus and edr versus hippos is that it's all going to be governed by some central principles.

All those camps is is just silly, Frankly, to me that makes sense academically why there was going to be. But in newer science, we had the same thing you used after to pick IT was like a john, whose film from the eighties are going to be joker, a punky, a popular kid. Now it's not like that.

And half this audience is looking at me, like, what are you talking about? That's exactly the point, which is, i'll never forget. I group in the skateboard thing.

First time I saw someone wearing skateboard shoes. They escape and they like, no, they just people just wearing this stuff, right? So what you start to realize, all blended together, which is great.

And in the field of neuroscience, you used to have to pick or you an anatomist or physiologist, are you into neural computation? And now your love has to do at all, or you collaborate with people. Those divisions are really melt IT because people are interested in questions and they're interested in answers.

And don't get me started, but the careers m of the requirement for everyone to have their own independent laboratory and say this is my mission. That is one of the worst things about science because everything we know says that collaboration, collaboration, collaboration leads to faster progress. And you know, i'm not going to taken on the whole academic system.

It's been very good to me, but i'd like to see a blurry of the boundaries. IT used to be that labs weren't here. I'm really guilty huberman labs, but IT used to be that labs we're named after the problem.

They worked on vision lab, stress lab, happiness lab. I like that quite a bit more, but I screwed up and called this whole thing the huberman lab. You had a number you have had a number of performance interest in fitness experts on and show what changes if you made your fitness protocol include nutrition.

Oh yeah, well, i'm an omen of war. So I like those things they call carbo hydrates, and I eat them in moderation. And so i've never really been too extreme about any of this or the fasting thing, although I do just, I not very ungry in the morning.

That's also because I like to eat a lot at night. I wake up not that hungry. So what if I changed well, in terms of the fitness stuff? You've definitely start to incorporate more nasal breathing when I do cardiovascular work, because IT has eliminated any sleep open I had.

And sleep opening is very, very bad, very, very bad. I wish I could say snoring was no big deal, but we know, based on work at the stanford sleep lab, pin sleeve blab, other sleep labs, that people who have sleep OpenAI are really in for trouble for a number of reasons. So you want to learn to be a nasal breathing.

And if some people tape their mouth shut with medical tape when they go to sleep, other people will just start doing. Cardiff asked lar were keeping their mouth closed. And that requires that you not go too intensely, but IT create a dilation of the of the nasal passages those scientists can dilates.

So i've definite done that at the end of training, I try to do a one minute or three minute decompression and not immediately look at my phone to cut, learn, to shift from high intensity kind of thinking, and to lower intensity thinking, and shift throughout the day. Tasks watching, I think, is going to be a big area of science and neuroscience in general. We still don't know how to task switch, had to shift the mine from focus to defocus them back again.

That's something that is, by the way, this is, I think, of a rich opportunity for people to develop tools. We don't know a lot about that. We got to caught up on consciousness, flow and free will.

And that stuff is great. But I like, as you can tell, I like tools. I like physiology.

I like the things that work in my lifetime and we can figure out and agree upon in my lifetime. Let's see. Got IT.

And i'm told that .

is the final question. When they put the clock up your years two, they said they were going to run IT for sixty months. My first question was, where is the snooze button? Keep going, but I think they are going to hold me to IT.

I know people. This is new york. After all, there are other fun things to do for things that take a long time.

Career, pursuing a degree is a right way to know they were on the right path, is a way to know on the right path. Thank you for that question. I get asked this a lot.

And gosh, there's so much information out there, so much information about this, we don't yet have a gage of whether not we're in too much stress or not. But there is one tool that's used in the free diving community and in other communities that you can use as a kind of thermal ter of you a bit how well you're functioning. And some of you may know IT already, if you do, forgive me as this carbon dioxide de tolerance test.

Um so why am I answering this question this way? Well, I like to start with actionable tools. If, for instance, you were to just take three or four breath and then take a big deep breath and then do a very slow control, x sale could be through your nose or through your mouth, ideally through your nose, and you're trying to make that excels as long as possible until you're longs are empty and you've time that that's the called the carbon oxi discard rate or discard rate or the ex xie discard rate.

And IT tells you how well you're controlling your diagram using something called the phonic nerve. IT also tells you how well you're managing common oxide and how well you're managing stress. And if you're very stress, that number will be very, very short.

I'm not talking about how long you can sit with. Long is empty. I'm talking about an honest a appraisal of how long you can control that excel for. And if it's anywhere from a zero to twenty seconds, your stress level is high.

And if it's from twenty to forty seconds, it's moderate and longer than forty seconds means you have good control over your carbon oxide system or less. Now these are averages. And guess what? Has nothing do with fitness? And also IT has nothing to do with you persue.

Because if you do this, when you first wake up after a good night sleep, you'll have a long discard rate. If you do this after running, you have a short dear to rate. You're not out of breath.

You're just not managing the system very well. So you can touch into this. Everyone's in a while is sort of a blood pressure reading type. Think this is very back at the enelow. It's not perfect.

But IT works well enough that alongside things like resting heart rate, hearts rate variability at sada, you can get a window into how well you're managing stress. Why am I answering this question this way? Well, this is something I recommend doing.

Everyone's in a while, especially if you are in a period of a career or any kind of pursuit where you are feeling like you're grinding. I think once your carmona oxide discards rate starts to really get shorter and shorter, you're having trouble sleeping. I think it's time to focus on establishing that boy and cdr nervous system because then and only then can you make good judgments about whether or not you're in the right trajectory for you.

Now in terms of the larger psychological teams, are you doing something that brings you meaning or not that gets into some complicated territory? We're very good at assigning meaning retrospectively and saying, well, that was a good experience because we had IT and we learned from at that. But I think most people like to avoid things that they can only look back on and say, I was useful because I learned something from IT.

And for that, i'll just give the default. But I think, at least to me, accurate answer, which is the more often that you can tap into that feeling of excitement and delight in your work, even if from small things or from surprising things, or from the social interactions that you're able to clean from that work, the longer and Better you're going to be able to pursue. That line of work for me is in graduate school.

I was very isolated. I worked alone in the lab, maybe was because of the ten I put on the walls or the windows. I don't know.

In fact, my graduate advisors, one complaint was that i'd seemed done friendly. I wasn't done friendly. I was busy, but I got to be very good friends with the genital al staff because they were the only one around at the time.

I was working for a few other people. And those small interactions actually became very significant to me and became sources of brief, but to me, at least at the time, meaningful social exchange. And of course, eventually I made friends and you know had relationships of other kinds and things that were healthy as well.

But I think learning to tap into this love of what you're doing is sometimes hard, but you have to look for it's an active process and i'll default to to the work in the podcast is coming with rick rubin and know he is a lot of what he talks about in terms of creativity is about accessing what, you know he and others have talked about as the source. If that is an abstract, I don't know what is, but the source is this ability to see yourself as more of a portal for getting certain things done in the world, then being so career st and focused on whether not outcomes are really matching what you need. IT involves some mental flexibility, of course, O A pivot back and forth, but we can only access this feeling of delight and joy and this feeling that were somehow connected to some larger theme AK.

Meaning I think when we are able to be calm enough and not so focused, but in order and anything done, we have to be hyper focused. And that brings me back to the basic principle of the today's the whole discussion, which is that it's not about landing yourself in a state of focus, motivation and drive or in a state of deep sleep, certainly not in a coma. It's about being able to move up and down the various continues that allow you to access focus and real gas peddle down to the floor, kind of thinking and action, but then also deliberately back off, transition to periods of rest.

And the real key is for you to feel like you're in the driver seat if we know anything from the last hundred plus years of psychology and neuroscience literature is that if an animal or a person feels that they are in control of the physiological process within them, and they know they can get themselves out some way, somehow at some point, and back in to a state that they want somehow, somewhere at some point, well then all the language around meaning and happiness and delight starts to emerge. So learn to move around along. Those continues.

Learn to do IT deliberately. And I wish you the very best of luck. And and I know IT works.

Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks so much for coming out. I really appreciate IT and. Grateful to our sponsors. Of course. Thank you to all of you for your time. I know there's a lot to do in the city, and I hope one enjoys IT. And of course, I be remiss if I didn't say thank you for your interest in science.