LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Moore Theatre in Seattle
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discussed science and science space tools for everyday life. I am Andrew huberman and am a professor of newbie logy in optometry gy at stanford school of medicine.

Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting two live events, one in seattle, wash ton, in one important organ, both entitled the brain body contract, where I discussed science and science related tools from mental health, physical health and performance. My favor part of evening, however, was the question and answer period that follow the lecture. I love the question and answer period, because he gives me an opportunity here directly from the audience.

So what they want to know most, and indeed to get into a bit of dialogue. So we really clarify what are the underlying mechanisms of particular tools, how best to use the tools for things like focus and sleep. We also touch on something really to mental health and physical health.

IT was a delight for me, and I like to think that the audience learned a lot. I know that many of you weren't able to attend those events, but we want to make the information available to you. So what follows? This is a recording of the question answer period from the lecture in seattle, washington. I hope you'll find IT to be both interesting and informative.

I'd also like to think our sponsors of these live events, the first is momentous supplements, which is our partner with the huberman la podcast, providing supplements that are of the very high quality that ship international and that are arranged in dosages and single ingredient formulations that make IT possible for you to develop the optimal supplement strategy for you. And I also like to think our other sponsor, which is inside tracker, which provides blood test and DNA tests, so you can monitor your immediate and long term health progress. I'd also like to announce that there are two new live events scheduled.

The first one is going to take place sunday, october sixteenth, and the wiltern theater in los Angeles. The other event will take place wednesday, november, knife at the beacon thear in new york city. Tickets to both of those events are now available online at huberman lab dot com slash tour.

That huberman lab dot com slash tour. I do hope that you learn from and enjoy the recording of the question and answer period that follows this. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

What is what your most use protocol? I'm assuming that you mean the protocol that I use the most. I'd genuinely do the morning sunlight viewing this evening. I went and looked at the sunset every single evening. And I absolutely do ten to thirty minutes of some non sleep deep rest protocol every single day, every single day.

The reason I called IT non sleeve depressed is because while I love the classic traditions of and thinks like organ edra, my fear was that if I call things organ edra, that people would get spooked. But I also have to say that I rather love the fact that scientists use so many fancy terms that IT also volts information from the very people that fund in the work. So I have a kind of, externally, with the scientific community tools.

Non sleeve deep breast was my attempt to and put my arms around a number of different things, like yoga edra, which I have great reverence for, and other tools like that. I do that usually in the early afternoon, or if I wake up first thing in the morning and I haven't slept enough or not that well, i'll do thirty minutes of organ edra. And I feel terrific.

After that, i'll just mention a brief anette. I learned about yoga edra while researching a book that I never wrote, that mayor may not never be published. I wouldn't spent a week in a trauma center and addiction treatment center in florida and saw some amazing work of some amazing people and in some amazing transformations.

And IT was a big part of their daily routine for these people to do yoga, edra and non sleeped breast. And I thought they're really on to something here so almost religious ly for me every day ten and thirty minutes not that that matters, but the CEO of google is really into nsd. R I don't know him um but there's he's written about that a number of times.

In seattle, sunrise varies from four thirty am to nine, depending on season. Are you recommending to very your wake up outside time with the seasons somewhat? You know you don't need to see the sun across the horizon.

That would be great. But not everyone can wake up with the sun. You want to get so called low solar angle sunlight.

why? Because of that yellow, blue contrast that we talked about before. Many people wake up before the sun is out. If that case, if you want to be awake, turn on as many bright lights as you can up here. I don't. Does anyone here you don't have to admit IT this if you don't want to, but maybe not to raise your hand if you're comfortable to mean that in the winter you feel less well or typically in the transition yet huge up here, it's really it's amazing.

And then when you're on campus or that's what have to one time and you see rain here and it's like the blossoms outing, you feel almost high because that's dopamine, you know, animals that have White pellets in the winter and then IT turns dark in the summer and spring months. That pathway, the mellin in pathway, is from tyros ene, which is the precursor to doping and also to melanin production in the fur. So the whole system is linked.

It's not rigged. It's linked. So what do I suggest? I suggest in the winter months, getting thirty minutes of sunlight viewing. I know it's a lot, but it's it's much Better than feeling lousy all day. And then the real key in the winter is to try and catch some sunlight before IT goes down.

If you're indoors and IT goes down, and then you go outside in its dark, your brain and body don't really know where they are in time. And then you flip on ozark and you're watching ozark, and then you really don't know where you are in time. I have one more episodes.

Tell me what happened that shows when I was a postdoc, I used to recommend the wire to my competitors. true. I go to sleep, fired up, really excited to do whatever IT takes when I wake up, that drive is depleted.

Why and what can I do? interesting. Haven't heard that one before. But if I were a venture, I guess, you know, we didn't spend much time, and I talking about the automobile nervous system, this kind of sea saw that takes us from very alert, potentially panic, but to very, very deep sleep even.

You know, got forbid we've going to a comment because the paris sympathetic nervous system is overactive relative to the sympathetic persis the sea of automatic function. You may be sleeping very, very deeply. And when you are in deep, deeper rest, the last thing you want to do is get into that forward center of mass thinking, planning, predicting right again in yogananda, again, non sleep depressed.

There's a common theme in the script of going from thinking and doing and predicting to being in feeling. They say, and i'm not making fun of them as the moment I hear that go, it's just going to be and feel, what are you doing? You're actually just moving into sensation, but no planning, right?

There's nothing mysterious about IT sensation, but no planning now in sleep, a very deeply per sympathetic sleep state. What's happening? You actually that visual appeal ure is actually so big, right?

You're not in panoramic c vision. Your eyes are actually closed. Space and time are from past, present and future, invited into your thinking. You're in a deep, deep state of relaxation and IT may be dust in that when you're waking up, you are having a hard time transitioning out that because you're sleeping so deeply, you may be waking up a mid sleep cycle.

Many people find IT useful to set alarms that they wake up at the end of a ninety minute so called all tradition cycle. There are some sleep apps that do this on the phone. I can't recall their names.

But so rather than sleeping seven hours, you might be Better off sleeping six or seven and a half hours, right waking up at the end of one of these ninety minute cycles. Try that. That would be consistent with what we know about the biology.

But I think it's common to if you sleep very deeply, to wake up and not necessarily wants to spring out of bed. I heard of these people that want to spring out of bed and attack the day. Jack, a willing four thirty in the morning as cassio phone of watch.

I'm seeing as watching. It's like eight for me and like, oh, like, again, these people are amazing. I must be doing something wrong.

But these, I don't wake up that way. You know, like tiger, I like, I want water. I want sunlight ninety months later, I want caffeine.

yeah. What are some of your favorite books that i've had the biggest impact on you? kal? G, thank you.

Ka, gosh. H, so many, you know, for non fiction. Well, all of her sexes, autobiography on the move had a profound impact on me.

People hated him. The scientific community tried to kick him out. They said horrible things about him, created all sorts of scandals.

IT wasn't until awakenings became a black west movie that suddenly he got appointments at N. Y, U. In columbia.

Then, now they wanted him back. And the revered neurologist, like, incredible, right? But he was also a real seeker and the cuttle fish thing.

And yet a lot of internal struggles to some of which I relate to, some of which I don't actually been in touch with this former partner, because I actually moved to topanga canyon for a short while. I just because Oliver lived there, I thought if I go there, i'll actually finish this book. Guess what? Just moving some place doesn't allow you to finish your book.

He lived into panga. That's the key. IT didn't work. And people wondering why I was a hanging around their house all the time because he was all of his former home.

So that's an amazing book and tells you my obsessive nature. The other books that have had a profound influence on me, I would say, in the nonfiction realm. Well, I learned how to make a decent stake and a few other simple recipes, not well from ten fairs.

Book the four hour chef because I really needed help. That was a fun one. I like Robert Greene's book mastery, because i've had amazing mentors. And that book is all about finding mentors and assigning mentors to you, even if you don't know them.

And as you can tell from my stories about all of her who I never met and and a few other folks that i've just decided, they don't know IT, but i'm mentor them. They are mentor me. Excuse me, that book was was really important for me.

And that mental mente relationships always involve a break up. I they're by death or by decision or by consequence your circumstances ther there's something happens and they're supposed to break. You're not supposed to a prentice with somebody forever.

That was an interesting book for me, I would say, in the fiction alm. Say, in the fiction realm, it's all childhood books because it's been a long time since I i've read fiction. I read lot of poetry in a big window berry fan.

I like poetry because poetry to me is is like the subconscious. The structure is all messed up and you think you understand what they're talking about, but you don't really know. And so IT always feels important and consequential even though you know it's your own interpretation.

And then I love the psychologist, I love Young, I love erik, and I love. Love the psychologist and could read endlessly about the early days of attachment theory and things like that, because i've find that stuff to be fascinating. So those books have been a lot of fun.

And I love picture of books with the animals. And so if you can get a hold of geo r tories instagram account, the photo ark, he decided to take picture of every animal in the planet, especially the ones that are endangered, is an amazing photographer. But his books are even Better.

So if you like animal books, what excites you most about the future research of mental health treatment, particularly anxiety and depression? Wei Michael, thank you, Michael. Well, there, I think that we're an exciting time. I am i'll just reveal my biases. I'm quite pessimistic, the idea that we're going to have Better medication soon for most things.

What I do think we are starting to approach as a time in which we understand how broad categories of drugs impact, broad categories of chemicals, which kind of shift our mind, and broad categories of directions. What is all that mean? I think we're starting to realize that because there are different receptor ors for all these chemicals all over the brain and body, that that side effect less drug is unlikely to exist for mental health.

But that the combination of maybe some form ecology, but especially behavioral tools, people actually learning how to drive this thing that we call our nervous system, is potentially helpful, maybe very helpful. Now, in cases like schizophrenia, a autism, and I didn't put those next to one another for any reason, by the way, ocd, eating disorders. And i'm very mindful the fact that you antacid I is the most lethal of all the psychiatric disorders, right? Amazing and sad fact.

I think for those conditions, we are soon going enter a time in which is going to be combination behavioral drug therapy. And yes, brain machine interface. I don't mean putting chips down below the skull.

I think there's going to be and there are things happening now of people using devices like virtual reality as well as transcranial magnetic estime lation, placing a magnet on particular location, the head combined with a particular maybe drug, maybe psychiatry ics, maybe not to enhance plasticity. I urge a vote for psychiatric s and I want to make a serious point. About psychodeviant five years ago, when I was four years ago, when I started doing a bit of public facing self, I was absolutely terrified to say that word.

Terrified I thought I lose my job. I really did. I thought downs cycles, and i'll be very honest for me. I think that the clinical data on m dma on salicylate are very interesting, very interesting.

I don't think they are the first and only pass at rewiring the brain, but IT is clear that the brain can enter a state of heighten learning capacity. But IT needs to be directed towards something. The goal of opening plasticity, just IT opens plasticity.

That's not the goal. It's like running. The goal is in running. The goal is to running in a particular direction. So what I think is really needed is to drive that plasticity in particular directions.

And I would love to see more directed use of those in, of course, of safe clinical setting where it's appropriate. And a guest on the podcast, Matthew Johnson, whose that john's hopkins, I asked him, what's the deal with the microdot and you know what his answer was? I was very surprised. He said, macro .

dose and I .

thought, okay, i'm not a guy who would you? I'm not into. I'm not. I'm not a pushing this. I'm not a purpose I said, you're kidding me.

why? why? Why would you say this? That runs an nh funded lab at john's hopkinson school of medicine. why? And he said, because that one session with a train professional that trigger ing rearing plastics y that's guided IT as as far as they know from the data, you can go back and listen that these are his words, not mine, but I peace.

The expert in this area are encouraging plasticity in a particular direction, and he thinks that that's far more useful than just kind of nudging the system a little bit without any particular goal outcome. Very interesting and very surprising. And again, a trained academic at one of the most delete institutions in the world.

I think we're in very exciting times for those compounds. And there like there are studies at stanford and elsewhere on kadee and other things. But it's early days. Young people should be very cautious.

Young, Young people and adults should be cautious, especially people with preexisting psychiatric issues and people who have have the pencils for addiction, although some of those compounds are being used to treat addiction. So i'd be an idiot and I would be lying if I didn't say that IT is very exciting times for psychiatric therapies. 嗯。

Where do you see the biggest area? And i've done only one clinical trial. true.

I was part I took part in one clinical trial. I don't speak from a lot of experience. There are just a little bit.

I was a subject in that trip, where do you see the biggest area for performance enhancement within the allied athletes and Operators that already hit Marks, a proper sleep and nutrition mag. Young, thanks for your question. Mag, yeah, I think that, well, first of all, very few of them hit Marks for proper sleep.

But for those that do so, once you have your sleep died in and you got your nutrition died in, and the motivational component is there, I think where there's a lot of work still to be done and where people can really get outsize effects is in this weird little cavern of human existence that we call creativity. And I didn't have time to talk about IT tonight, but there is a very unique brain state that we call creativity, which is taking preexisting neural maps and starting to combine them in unique ways to create new ways of performance. Performance can be basically summarized in any domain as essentially four stages.

You have unskilled, skilled mastery, which is when the brain can generate movements or cognitive computations that are create very predictable outcomes. And then there's this fourth tier, this fourth layer, which is virtuosity. And virtuosity, by definition, means inviting back in a component of uncertainty.

What this looks like in terms of Operators of this looks like in terms of athletes, or even, we can say, musicians or people who are in the cognitive fields are poets or writers, is what IT means is introducing that uncertainty about what's going to happen next. And the way to do that is to destabilize the system, in other words, to create states of mind in which there are literally sensory disruptions. It's like what I would like to see is more training in a kind of fun house of mirrors type environment.

That's when you start to see incredible performances emerge and virtuosos invite in uncertainty. They actually don't know what they're going to do next. And so this becomes a little bit of a vague concept.

And what i'm about about to tell you next might see a little silly, but one of the best ways to access creative states is, to no surprise, use your visual system to view things that are highly unstable and uncertain. I don't just love fish tanks. I love staring at videos of aquarium in tokyo and actually watching the fish because it's completely unpredictable.

There's some evidence that doing things like that, people would say, oh, I was in the shower. I took a walk in nature, and then I had this idea. Actually, don't think IT was the walk or the shower is that nature is filled with unpredictable visual stimuli diti.

When you can predict what's going to happen next, you have very little opportunity to up level your game, so to speak. It's only by way of unpredictable sensory input that you can do that. So if you're a coach or you're working with people who are a very high level performers, do you want them to stand on one leg and spin around and then do what they are? Not necessarily.

What you want to do is try and get them into brain states that are different than the brain states that there are in when they Normally entered their practice. The liminal state between sleep and waking, excuse me, the liminal state between sleep and waking is a very powerful one for accessing creativity. Many people access ideas as they're waking up in the morning.

They have great insights. Other people, while strolling in nature, I don't think it's the strolling or the waking up. I think it's the lack of, as we call IT top down regulation on rules.

You are able to access combinations of neural maps that are unusual so you can play with the silver bit. A lot of people throughout history have used compounds, drugs to do this right. Great writers would get drunk and then try and right to wake up, and they would.

The amount of self abuse that people, including athletes and creators, put themselves through to try and capture these windows of cognitive ability is pretty intense. And I I don't think that's a good idea. I think one should be an explore and try and find these cognitive states in ways that are non destructive.

Starting to sound like my mother with all this. Heel flips on lock, no kick flips. Next question. Because some of skateboarders in the audience, my first nonbiological family, there are some amazing skate's borders in this audience.

And i'm not gonna the one doing and kick up paying time soon, but they're great to have one of the reasons we built the podcast with the help of the great might play back is because I learned a long time ago that if you want things done right and you want to do them outside the lane lines, you want to have control over how things come across IT. You do that who was skateboards because what didn't come from a community where know I didn't have parents at my sports games and things like that. So thanks to the skates, waters and the misfits and the those folks, do you have any tips on how to improve memory? yes.

Ron read, yes. Okay, this is a wild literature, and I love IT, and it's changing the way that I do things. I thought that to remember things, you just was to get really, really excited, really focused and remember them.

And guess what? That's not how you do IT. Is there are data and there are stories going back to medieval times that they used to teach kids things and then throw them in the river. There's a beautiful annual review of neuroscience written by the late James mega brilliant researcher, who taught me that in this review. And IT turns out that if you want to remember something, you want to Spike a journey after you acquire that information after that means the double is spread.

So and the ice bat after you study for math immediately after, and you think about this and how that makes perfect sense, right? Think about the one trial learning that nobody wants to experience, which is car accident or some traumatic thing. You didn't get the Spike of a drennen first.

You got the sport of a journal after. So again, I discourage the use of excessive stimulants or you know anything like that, but if you're going to try and remember information, you need to get your brain and body into a high automation ic rosal state little. You need to deploy a journal and into your system after you have made the attempt to learn some information, so much so that if you give people a beta blocker after learning emotional information, they don't learn IT as well.

Incredible, just incredible. Dat, in animals and humans, is the beautiful work of Larry k. Hill at U.

C. Irvine and James mega. So that's how I would focus on remembering things Better. And it's also true that if you tell yourself that something's really important, you, you, you'll be able to learn IT Better. If you meet people and they tell you their name and you forget two seconds later, well, you should probably be thinking, and now I do this, I meet people, and I think, okay, what terrible thing to this person do, just trying to Spike my adrenal and or something like that, it's a terrible trick. I haven't figured out a Better way, but that's actually one that data supported way to do that easily a dozen or more studies in humans on that very topic.

How do you manage social media addiction, paul? Oh, well, we should be careful with the use of the word addiction because here I think it's entirely appropriate when you are engaging in a behavior over and over and over again and you're thinking to yourself, this isn't even that interesting. You're officially addicted.

That's the lipomas test for addiction. Not this feels so good. People talk about the dobin hits of social media. Those only come at the beginning.

But then when you find yourself scrolling and like what am I doing? Maybe it's that narrow visual appeal or your horizons chicken. But maybe also you are seeking more dopamine hits because, guess what, that dopamine wave pool is depleted, at least for that activity.

IT is true that dopamine, you have a baseline and then you have peaks on that ride on that baseline. I do think that we can have dopamine for one behavior, not for another, but it's a generalized phenomenon. So how do you manage IT? You have to stop seeking within social media.

And so i've taken on the practice of turning off my phone for a couple hours each day. It's incredibly hard. People get really upset too.

By the way, you have been noticed these tethers that people expect. We recorded a podcast recently and so I don't want to go into too much debt now about attachment and grief. And you know, we all have a map now. You assume what the maps are of space time, and a dimension called closest to everyone that we know, space where they are, time when they are dead, alive.

When will I see them again at sea closely? And the phone has allowed us to tap into space time in this closeness map, which define on all our attachments on a very regular basis, so you can understand why it's so valuable to people. You know, the plane lands in, everyone's texting.

The plane take off, everyone's texting and say, where are you with the planes in the air? There's this thing called flight track, or no one cares about that more you wants to hear from the person. So I do think that I used to do in every odd hour of the day, my phone was off and like half the relationships in my life, disappeared.

They could not, they couldn't tolerate IT. I loved IT, but I loved them too. So I would say take breaks, and I would say at least an hour.

And if you find yourself excited to get back on the phone, that excitement, that is the dopamine in system, so you can kind of learn where IT is for you. But if you find yourself scoring mindlessly and it's not doing anything for you, you're driving that wave pool down, down, down, down, down. So hopefully analogy will help to where to call myself doctor.

He women in my business, if you referred to yourself in the third person, that means you're officially and arousal. So i'm just going to start with, where are you nervous tonight? So what did you do to prepare brand? You saw my nervous and then you I asked myself that question.

I was excited and I think i'm good at line of myself and telling myself that automated ic arousal that might be nervous as as excitement. But in in truth, I wasn't. I was was I am really excited to tell you all these stories and about biology.

I know this might sound like a little bit of a lion, but actually don't feel myself as as a like a person when I do the pod caster, I do this stuff. I took a walk before I got here. And I have to be careful.

They're only two topics that make me cry. One is talking about my bulldog gy, the others talking about my graduate advisor. So I have to be very careful.

But I took a walk and I imagined that they were here. And I know, I know. Don't make me cry. Lex freeman make me cry on a podcast.

And he was really unfair and he was like digging, digging there are few people in the audience that no codel and it's like, you know and I just keep thinking of myself before coming in here like, you know, I love them and miss them and I costolo would be entirely bored with this whole thing. So I distracted myself a bit and not so nervous. I do get nervous about things.

Sure, i'm human. But when IT comes to biology, I think I still feel like that located just wants to tell you all the stuff, you know, so can help IT. As learning from failure equal to learning from success is one more efficient than the other.

Rachel, thanks for your question. Well, on a trial by trial basis, we know that when you fail at an attempt on the next attempt, your forebrain is in a position to engage Better. And this makes total sense, right? You feel that frustration.

You want to get the next one right? Well, you're harboring, or I should say, funding more neural resources. You're focus that apache tightens.

Now you have to be mindful of that too, because when you have a failure and then you're like you're gonna hit the balls i'm talking about a dark work as i'm terrible at darts, you know, sober. I'm terrible at darts. I don't even drink.

So that next trial part of the promise is that focus can narrow so much that you can start to lose access to information that might help you if you are just to relax a little bit and dilate that focus a bit. But in general, on a trial by trial basis focuses the queue that your nervous system is going to be positioned to learn Better on the next trial. Now in terms of life experiences, gosh, I wish for everyone fewer failures and more successes.

But you know, failures keep you humble. And i've had a lot of them. I mean, if people ever wanted, and you know, i'd be happy to tell you about, I mean, made autonomy stakes in life, a ton of mistakes.

Some of those were mistakes of persistence, like dumb decisions. I like it's going to change. It's gonna and it's clearly never gna change. And then some were failures of misjudgment about other people are situations and a lot of them, we're just playing failures like the experiment in work or the he just wasn't the right thing and you trying to reframe those.

I do think that we owe IT to ourselves, into the people that we know to try and generate some winds here and there and try and help other people generate winds, you know, in running a lab over the years. And I still do you realize that you want your students to publish a paper and feel that success pretty early so that they can experience, a, how much work IT is. So they picked problems wisely.

But b, so they can feel that, like, I can do this. And I think that, you know, this gets into the psychological as well. I think that, yes, failures help, but success is help. And there, I think I functions best in a team.

And I think that for those of you that are feel like you're fighting some chAllenge alone, I do think that there are great resources to be had in trying to access other, other people as sources of support. I think that that's a great tool. There's this whole literature, scientific literature around social connection and how that can help us reframe motivation and goals anyway, may be it's a topic to expand on another time, but failure is important on a trial, trial by basis.

People who don't experience enough wins for a long period of time. The brain is a prediction machine after all, and they started to predict failure. So takes a bit more work to wedge oneself out of that when you're going to start training you.

Jiu, lex made me ask rayford. Okay, here's the story with that. Lex said, do you want to try jujitsu? I said, sure.

Lex said, okay, it'll be great to show people beginners mind. Said, sure, we went ended a jugi zhou class. He was very nice, nice, nice russian, nice.

Like then he puts IT on the internet with me in a real naked, him putting me in a real naked choke. IT was actually like freedom en choking out under huberman there. I just talked about myself in the third person demand.

嗯， edit that one. I have not at the time for judicio. I like my ears the way they are.

You know, have you ever seen these people that do judicial, their ears literally look like stones. Now, I I should do IT. IT looks like a great sport.

And unlike the other sports i've been involved in mind in my life, boxing, please don't do IT, it's not healthy. Skateboarding, all as you. You don't really damage your head doing judit.

So no, i'm going to get you back for that one likes, okay, can you go through home? Wow, john Edwards, there's a joke that my friends used to tell about the supplements I take. Used to say someone would say, what supplements do you take? And they would just go all of them.

I don't take all of them, but I have been very systematic for about thirty years. I've been interested in compounds that changed the nervous system. And I do think that the the events of the last few years have changed the way that people view supplements.

I think that more people are starting to think about how to take Better care of their health. And their people are realizing that obviously, greatly mindsets, social connection, exercise, nutrition and so forth are very important. But I I actually don't know anybody.

Granted, I run with a strange crowd, but I don't know anybody that doesn't take something now to is, you know, I could go through the whole list. But I would say the most fundamental things, and there's no product pitcher here, the most fundamental things are the things that are going to support your kind of foundation tional health. So for that's going to mean mainly getting either by food sources or supplements, is going to be getting the sufficient amounts of these essential fatty acids.

So important um for some people that's taking liquid fish oil, for some people it's capital from you is eating fish. I don't like the way fish taste e unless i'm in seattle, by the way, the seafood here is amazing. Not so much in california. So I think the essential fatty acids and then i'm big on the data there.

I say out of stanford, Justin sun burgs lab and Chris gardeners lab, that these fermented foods, of which all these cultures have interesting fermented foods, key for an sour crowd, and kim chi and, you know, pick, pick for mental food, that those seems are really encourage health of the gut microbiome. So I started eating a lot of those in taking no probiotics except in you a few of the supplements that I was already taking. So I am not trying to dodged the question, but I think by and large, if you're eating well and doing the other foundational behavioral as well, you can get a way with a minimum of supplements.

D three is seems to be a lot of people division d three but not everybody. So I think um that those are the main ones. However, I do think that nutrition should be the primary and trip on again.

IT should be the behaviors first, then nutrition and then supplements, then prescription drugs only if you need them. And then, you know, for some people, there are bring machine interface like tms and things like that are going to be useful. But behavior is change.

Your nervous system, no supplement actually requires you or changes your nervous system behaviors do that. Hope I didn't dodged that question and telling I do take some of the things that we talk about on the podcast to do some focused work, sometimes alpha gpc. But lately i've been doing this whole thing of cold water exposure to Spike minor journal, because I hate IT and IT Spikes my a journal.

After learning, based on the Megan k. Hill data, what would be your best winner to piece of advice, recommend for protocols for improving learning and retention of a graduate students and science and medicine? We try to sleep sometimes.

Thank you. Jd, oh, great. you. U, W, J, D, so, you know, I used to teach this chorus at culturing ing harbor on career development for scientists. And there's a lot in there. But the two things that are most important are I advancers ing? This question I would say, or find non destructive ways to reset your dopamine e and your energy levels, and do those at least every three days.

So for me, I was kind of A A tough thing to take a long walk or to spend acid work really hard on mondays, really hard on tuesdays, and I would not go in until the on wednesday, and sometimes not at all. And then I go in thursday, friday and work really, really hard, and then not at all on saturday, and then maybe do a little bit of work from home on sunday. And I was very productive that way that those breaks are absolutely key and that's not encouraged so much in academic or tech or maybe anything.

Now I hear about so much stress and overwork. I say you'd just do IT and define the culture and let the results in your focus be the the thing that defines you, not how many hours you're in there. But I realized there is a huge cognitive load and energetic load.

And for that, I do think these non sleeve deep breast protocols are where IT comes in. Really handy there. At least two faculty I know it's stanford, one who's a so called Howard whose investigator who is big is those are big deal appointments. They get tons of money and set IT set and they do amazing science most of the time. Um these individuals certainly do and they take two twenty minute naps per day in their office.

When this guy came and visited me years ago, when I was at different university, he took the time that we were supposed to meet in my office and talk about data yesterday we could take a nap and he gave a great talk that afternoon. So there you go. I do think you have to take control of your schedule and do those things.

I hope that helps. And then of course, for some people, exercise and someone um is the way they reset. What research of work are you doing or that your colleagues are doing that you're most excited about lately? Gund, yeah, one project in particular, I hope this paper has, is accepted soon.

It's been out for a view forever. If the viewers are in the audience, please just tell us one way or the other. You know, we did a very large scale study during the pandemic.

We meaning David speel and I, and an amazing PHD name, malasia SHE now was two last names, excuse me, borbon, elma's, bobin. And alas, we essentially equip people with remote mooring devices and measure sleep and heart rate variability and a bunch of stress and bunch of other things. And we gave them a very brief set of a breathing protocols.

And IT turns out that this thing that i'm talking about a lot on the podcast these days of this double in hl long x hae, that so called physiological sigh, was the most effective breathing practice for allowing people to control their heart rate variability, reduced over overall heart rate, access Better sleep. And these were extremely short protocols. I'm very excited about this.

I didn't discover physiological size. I love the idea that people can do a very brief protocol once a day, maybe even just while walking down the street or in the moment, and actually learn to control that automation ic sea sap. I'm very excited about that.

And then we are gearing up to do some studies on people who have more severe forms of anxian panic attack, using mainly respiration, but also looking at some of these eye vision related ways of controlling the nervous system. I love that stuff. If I keep talking about IT, I am going to give you a data presentation.

So i'm going to turn around how does still permeating factor into neuroplasticity IT? All call in great question, is a very strong trigger of plasticity. So much so, in fact, that there's some work that shows, if you stimulate with an lecture, the brain area that releases doping, and you pair that with anything, anything even just like an killer hurts tone the brain remap since, like, I love that a killer hurts stone.

Remember, dopamine is dumb and is just dum and it's just, you know, it's like costell when he this dog, I could hang a rope from a this dog was so lazy, won't cross a room for a stake. You had to give the stake to him, but IT would run across the field. He would run and jump on and hold on to that rope, and he would sound like bite through his lid, like blood dripping down, as like, oh my god, like breaking my heart.

He loved every thing that stop at me, turns us into idiots. He was, he was a smart about what you need to be smart about dopamine. So if you trigger dopamine released with riddle and ador, all, to a lesser extent, alter racy and certainly please don't do this.

But cocaine and fed to mean whatever you're doing, this seems super interesting. It's true and that's why it's such a slippery, slow IT makes anything you're doing seem interesting and important. And actually, i'd use this as an opportunity.

Say something about the psychiatric thing earlier. One of the issues with m dma, it's a very unusual brain state, is high dopa mean high serotonin, completely synthetic compound. There are other things in that IT does as well. One of the promise with people, I see with the promise people taking md ma just at a basic level, is that if you're not pushing that towards some therapeutic outcome, music sounds amazing. Everything feels and sounds amazing, but it's a very neurochemicals severe state. So that's why I think if people are going to explore those things, do IT, as part of one of the university supported clinical trials, one of the those drugs make everything seem interesting, even stuff that's not terribly interesting. Now they also have the .

potential for trauma .

healing capacity. These are the map studies and so on. So you have to be very careful with what you pair with dopamine and what you pair dopamine with.

And for those of you that are high sensation seeking, novelty seeking and everything's interesting to you and you want more and more and more experiences, I you basically have a cylinder car in you, and you need to be very careful how you drive that thing. Like any high performance automobiles, it's going to spend more time in the shop, so learn to drive appropriately. What advice can you offered a future scientists who want to make an impact like you have rhino boil, get ten years first? No, i'm kidding.

the. So I have this weird history and science, and i'm not looking for some of the year, but my graduate advisor who I adored is like a father to me. My graduate advisor and my post stock advisor, who I also adored, all three of them died, suicide, cancer, cancer really Young.

So the joke in my field is, you don't want me to work for you. But in all serious, all three of them had a really more bit sense, humor, all amazing people. But IT is this kind of weird curse that i've had.

So what scientists, what advice you? Well, ben barrs, the late then barrs dyed of pancreatic tic cancer, amazing individual, actually making a commentary about ben's life. He is transgender.

He was a totally irreverent. He said, whatever he thought, he offended everybody. He was awesome.

Brilliant too. ben. And I had a conversation as he was dying. I recorded a lot of conversations with him, and I told him I was interested in doing public racing education.

And he said, well, you're tenured now and people are going to be upset and they're going like IT and your colleagues probably gonna te IT. So whatever you do, you can Better make IT good and I was like, a lot that doesn't really help much ban. And he said, you know, you seem to have a compulsion for IT.

So he was right. I think that if you are excited about science, are and sharing what you know, then do that. And even if IT seems super nerdy, I mean, are these, I think they call themselves antioch, that the insect people, I mean, they make insects seem really, really cool.

And if you are excited about spindle cannex or whatever tell people about IT, I really mean that I think that the one cov is that I do think it's important to get a formal, rigorous training in at first. I think that you will go further and faster in the long run. And there's some amazing people out there.

There's a post pocket stanford. I think his name is ben rine. I think you've shorten IT up on instagram.

It's actually brain beat brain because he works. He talked about brain science. So that's why it's we're B R E I N.

He does a great job and he's a really good example, someone who's still on the accent with his career, doing serious science and doing science communication. But we yet to be careful. It's time consuming.

Look at, the people will dislike you for whatever. I made the mistake once of saying that I eat butter. Apparently that's a sin on the internet.

I like little bits of, actually like a lot of butter by trying little bits of butter somehow it's like there's this idea that I sticks of butters so yet to be careful, like, I mean, of the things i've heard, I know I was dead that was cool. So you ought to be careful. And remember, everything is stamped into the the cloud now and the metaverse or whatever it's called.

So I would say here are the rules that we have at the podcast and answer, here's the rules that I created for myself. I truly don't do IT for me. I do IT because I think people want to hear about IT.

But i've been telling me myself that in our six years old, the other thing is never, ever, ever do IT just for your own gratification. You should really try and think, is anyone going to get anything useful out of this potentially? That's the goal.

If you're doing that, it'll work out for you. If you are thinking about how to get followers or something like that and then going to work out, that's my advice is eight, sixty six, two old for neural plastic? No, no.

else. Cut myself off to begin learning a sundaes are no. Did I process that right? Thank you, sandro.

no. Richard fine men, the great Richard fineman taught himself to draw, went later in life. He was also really into flotation tanks.

Did you know that he's also ended bongo dam naked on the roof? Caltech, Richard firmin did so many things that would get most people fired nowadays. He's just lucky he was alive when he was.

You can absolutely learn at sixty six n way beyond, there's an amazing study from rust gages lab at this all constitute years ago, showing that even people who are very late in life, terminally ill, in fact, are still producing neurons in the dentist charge of the hip campus. These people were gracious enough to allow researchers to inject them with dies that would label these neurons for analysis post more than after they died. absolutely.

You can learn what's harder is focus. Often times what's harder is sleep as well. But the same mechanism supply, there is no evidence what's ever that neural plasticity disappears at any stage, despite what you won't be also told the BBC, how do you tackle reading research papers?

You have a specific strategy. And yes, I do. I do.

I take notice on everything. I try. I try. There's four questions that we teach students and that I think that I use. The first one is what's the question they're asking, major and more specific.

Second is what did they do? Whatever ver them like methods wise, what do they do? You don't want to all the details in the methods necessarily, but be versed in those methods.

But you have to kind of understand, like, are they looking at mice? So they looking humans as this? Did they have people in two different conditions, or just one alternatives? What did they do? Then you ask, what did they find? And then the last question is the most important one, and you should write down the answer to this is, what did they conclude? And then you look back at the first question you go to, they actually answer the act question is something unrelated.

And those four questions are are essentially the way that I pass each paper. Learning to past papers is tRicky for the podcast eight, use the telephone I call people. And I badgered them, and I asked them, like, who's doing the really good work in this area? And I spent a lot of hours doing IT.

And then the best way to remember science is to tell someone about IT. So before you age, pocket or call someone, you know, I hate, did you know that they used to throw kids in the river after I do this? And my sister, my poor sister, and she's like my sister, by the way, does not watch the podcast.

She's a and she's like egg I learned this amazing breathing technique. I was like, oh yeah, really tell me about and just like someone else sister and like, you know, have a podcast is like, I don't like your podcast. Older sister, older sister, she's not lying.

What is your favorite sauce comment? Seasoning sauce is one in every audience. I like the spicy stuff we've been for mending our own food at home.

It's kind of call, you would put the the cabinet, that stuff in the low ceramic c thing outside and then IT IT goes up. That makes this amazing sound. And then you can eat, make your own soco and with peppers and like fermenting that stuff, it's really good.

Okay, they're telling me one more questions we will do to what's most work from your ads. Uh, here, bro, have a lot of questions about add. For people on medication or not on medication. So i'll do all answer both for people on medication, I think work with somebody really good who's willing to work with .

you to allow you .

to find that minimal effective dose and also timing that dose. One of the key things that we know now is that from that waking up point in your morning until about eight or or nine hours later, we've sort of named that face one of the day. For lack of a Better naming protocol, the systems that released cortisol doping and epanchin are essential, more effective at producing those than they are in the later periods of the day, which makes sense if you think about the way that the automation ics nervous system, where it's exeter.

So there's an important question that I can answer for you, but you can answer for you, which is if you're using riddle and atter ol vivants, these things that enhance dopamine gic transmission model or model, by the way, for the people in the audience like me who didn't go to college when these things were all in use, the numbers of people that use these compounds on and off prescription is astronomical. It's incredible. I didn't realize that.

I think something, eighty percent of college students use these at some point, incredible. Because they put you into a narrow appeal tunnel of concentration. So you want to, with a physician support, of course, to help get permission or not, to figure out what time of day to take your medication.

Now for people who are not on medication, i'll just go right back to what I said earlier, which is that you can train focus, but IT feels terrible to train IT. IT is hard again there. These large scale studies in china and elsewhere are people literally teaching themselves.

And yes, they blink also less often to focus their vision on a narrow appeared, and to really battle through that agitation stress and learn how to keep their focus. Now focus will drift, right? Focus is not a constant.

Focus will drift. And you pop out of focus states and then refocus and pop out and refocus. That's something that you can train up of you for many people, events to train themselves off medication or to lower doses of medication.

And look, some people can do that. They absolutely have to maintain their standard medication protocols. This is a larger discussion.

Obviously, as IT relates to adage, we're going to do another episode on because the data are coming out so so fast. What future episodes are in White line? David win, okay.

Thank you for that question. We have one on grief. We have an amazing episode with a guy from the rock foo university on the this is my last states gonna, my favorite episode.

I love all the guests, but this episode just blew me away on the relationship between language, speech, dance and music. And I have no musical talent, and i'm not a very good dancer, so and that's being generous. Amazing interplay between those things, exercise in the brain, ocd, bOlivia bingeing disorder.

Peter teas coming on, held teachers about everything, medicine, good and longevity. And i'm kind of blanking at the moment David Anderson from caltech on aggression and emotional states. amazing.

And then there are a number of people, lisa feldman, barrett or barret fellman man, how was getting back? Words, sorry, liso on emotions in the brain. And really, we do take suggestions about who to bring on the podcast very seriously.

What I we're mostly looking for, we're mostly looking for the people that no one else has heard, that people haven't heard of who are not going on podcast every week and that people should absolutely hear from. And then I will tell you they're onna kill me for saying this, but i'm going to do IT anyway. We have some short series coming up with expert professionals.

I've going to do a short series on trauma, and my hope for this series is that you'll actually get to see an exquisitely skilled traumatic, eric s, take someone through. Look, excuse me, I seem so excited. I'm spitting on the audience.

Excuse me. So to take someone through actual trauma therapy, this isn't stage. This is somebody was actually in a point of near suicidal grief and trauma, taking them through IT in the course of the podcasts as people can see what this process actually entails.

That's A, A very meaningful project to me for a number of reasons. So we're really excited about that. And to be honest, I feel like there's just such a treasure trove of information earth there. Just want to grab IT all and tell you all about IT until I always say, if nothing else, OCR insomnia. so.

但 就 退学 了。

Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate everyone coming out on the weekday, and i'd be remissions. I didn't say thank you for your interest in science.