LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at The Wiltern in Los Angeles
01:03:37 Share

Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. Recently, the huberman lab podcast hosted a live event at the wiltern theater in law s. Angeles. IT was entitled the brain body contract. The first part of the evening was a lecture about science and science space tools for mental health, physical health and performance.

The second half was a question and answer period in which the audience asked me questions from the podcast or related to their own interests or things that they have glean from social media. We're just general questions about mental health, physical health and performance, and I answered those questions for them. 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 wiltern theater brain 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 sweeping on an eight sleep matters cover about eight months ago, and IT is completely transformed by sleep. I sleep so much deeper. I wake up far less during the middle the night, if at all, and I wake up feeling far Better than I ever have, even after the same amount of sleep.

In fact, I love my eight sleep so much that when I travel, i'm quite bothered that airbnb, es and hotels don't have a sleep mattress covers on them. 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 dotcoms slash huberman to save up to four hundred dollars off their sleep fit holiday bundle, which includes their new pod three, cover eight.

Three currently ships in the U. S, A, canada, united kingdom, select countries in the E, U, N, australia. Again, that's a 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 momentous stock com slash huberman. And now without further a do the question answer period from the huberman lab live event in los Angeles.

What occurs in the mind body when you have A D, H D? Are there ways to address IT without medication? Thank you for this question.

So attention deficit hyperactivity disorder used to be called A D D. Um the hyperactivity part is a little misleading. And again, i'm not a clinician here.

Here's what we know works for some people and yet there are always going to be side effective any kind of chemical manipulation, which is that we know that people, kids and adults with add actually have a tremendous capacity to focus, if they like what they're focusing on. You take a kid with A D H D who can't focus, and you give them their favorite video game, and they are a laser. The threshold to access the dopamine in system is higher.

And dopamine has this incredible ability to focus the brain and other aspects of the nerve system. You certainly, if people require medication, i'm not going to tell you to stop taking that medication. But the focus training exercises that have been explored mainly in china, but they're starting to be explored in over here as well, do seem to be of benefit.

And these are, as they sound, they use them in schools in china now, which are literally visual focus. Exercise is your mental focus, that is, your ability to focus on cognitive ly follows your visual focus. And of course, your stress will anchor your you essentially put you in a soda straw w of you at the world.

So yes, there are non medication based treatments by medication. And assuming you in prescription medication, of course supplement based medications that will increase dopa, mainly altera acy. Um again, this is something that think carefully about before you start tempering ing with your dopamine system. But IT is the the alternation y is the precursor to dopamine.

So IT will raise your dopamine and levels but I believe, and you'll hear me say this as many times as necessary, that one should if you can rely on behavioral tools first then of course sleep and nutrition and that are prerequisite again for all mental health YSL health performance. You simply can't neglect those and then and only then um if those all of that is into working to rely on supplement bed tools or on prescription medication. So it's clear that vivants ata all riddler at set to work for ADC, but some people choose to rely on more subtle forms of pharmacology manipulation like altiera y and this focusing exercise essentially consists of spending one to three minutes trying to maintain visual focus.

And yes, you are allowed to blink. I don't know why we tend to start something. We don't blink but don't arise, dry out.

And that can increase your ability to focus cognitively and IT works. And keep in mind that focusing always involves a refocusing. We'd covered a beautiful data set not collected by my lab, by Wendy suzuki rabbit.

And why you that at roughly ten minute, it's actually thirteen minutes a day meditation of the sort where you just focus on your breathing has been shown to improve focus significantly. Why don't we hear about this more? Well, she's now dean of arts and sciences and why you and all the students are hearing about IT, hopefully they're doing IT.

But IT takes a little bit of discipline for some reason. Ten minute a type meditation is something that very few people follow consistently. But if you're looking for non medication based treatment at hd or your somebody who just struggles with focus, the focusing exercise or the meditation I just described can be very useful.

So say the data. Yeah, thanks for bringing up spacetime bridging. Are people familiar with what space time bridging is? Haven't talked a lot about IT. Okay, this is thanks for bringing that up. We actually have an episode on meditation coming up sooner.

I cover IT and I talked about IT long ago and then I kind of abandoned IT because, well, we wanted a more data and and it's a pretty interesting technique. Know if you think about now the nervous system in vision in particular, but if you're not a cited person, your low vision or no vision, you could do this with your hearing. But I assume most people here are are cited.

If not, just translate this to the oratory system. You have this incredible ability to close your eyes and focus for instinct on people. Tell about the third eye center, you know, focusing right behind your forehead.

Do you know why people do that when they meditate? The reason is that you actually have no sensation in your brain. It's the one place to focus your attention for you.

Abandoned sensation, right? If I think about any portion of my body or my breathing, I, me, i'm going to sense what's happening. I'm going to perceive my inner landscape, so called the interaction tion, or my outer.

If I look out into the world, it's extra action. When you focus your attention with your eyes, clothes, just, you do have to close your eyes just behind your forehead. You are focusing on your thinking, right? Sort of obvious.

But I don't, at least to me, had never been stated that clearly again, one of the problems with some of the more traditional practices, but also the problem with science, is that there's a shrouding of everything, a very complex language, which sucks. Why is that sucks? Because it's a separator.

You eliminate the number of people that could be brought to potential useful practices. And I don't like IT when people, including myself, over use mechanism and descriptions of you fancy phrases to mask basic principles. So simplest language I think is is a uh IT tends to unify people around the practices.

So when you focus on this so called third dii center right or a spot right behind your forehead or on your breath, it's a little tRicky with the breath. But when you focus in on your frontal cortex, there's nothing to sense because there's no sensory neurons there, there's no touch, there's no pain, nothing. That's why in these glory movies, you know, you can take the skull off and we're in newer surgeries that are poking around in there.

The person's playing of violin like no anesthetic, no anesthetic doesn't require anesthetic. There's no sensory neurons can send anything there. So spacetime bridging involves it's essentially of meditation. It's really a perceptual exercise. I think that's where we're going with this is IT starts by closing your eyes and focusing on that location for which there is no sensation, there's only thought, and then opening your eyes and focusing on a location, be about the distance of your hand, and you focus also on your breathing. So you sort of imagine that kind of a tether.

Or between that, you can split your attention to these two locations, you thinking about your body and you're thinking about a location outside, and then you, while continuing to think about your body, so called the interaction tion, focus on your breathing. You focus further out and then further out and then further out and then ultimately be, you know, the little cartoon or mean where they are. Like we're just a little blue dot floating in a big and like it's want to make all your problems go away.

Like IT kind of IT works because what you've done as you've expanded your perception, he go only like this stuff is happening in here is really important when i'm focused on what's happening in here, but when i'm focused on what's going on and kind of the vastness ss, of all this, and we're just a little, you know, pale blue dot, know that IT changes your perception, not just your visual perception. Obviously, changing your visual perception changes your ordinary perception, which changes your emotional experience. So the space time bridging is a is a perceptual exercise where you step from focusing internally to focusing externally at a short distance than a further distance, further distance, further distance, and then trying to imagine yourself in this larger landscape.

That sounds very missed, cal, but is actually very neurobiological and IT capture something really amazing. Why is the tea in there? The time, space, time bridging, because this is space, but time is in there.

Because when you focus in close, your slicing of time is finer. You notice the subbed fluctuations in your breathing and things that are happening up close. We're as when you focus further out, your perception of time actually changes, which is why in panoramic c vision we are calm.

And when you think about we're just a pale blue dot and we most only only live to about eighty five, maybe hundred years old, and then like what's happening right now, boston and church and all, that doesn't really matter because, you know, like the earth is spinning and all that kind of stuff, which is all true and is the stuff of philosophy in mindfulness, and I think is beautiful. What you're really doing is you're changing your time perception by changing your space perception. So space time bridging is very useful because most people get locked at one step one of these stations, especially under conditions of stress and people who have a trouble focusing.

Glad you brought this up. In this context of adhd, people have a hard time focusing, whether not they have A D H D or not, tend to skip back and forth between different space time domains, as we call them in science. So this is a simple exercise that you can do focusing internally and stepping out externally, then stepping back in all the while paying attention to your inner and landscape just simply by focusing on your breathing.

It's a tool that we're still collecting data in terms of its utility, but people are already using IT. And um I don't think of as a meditation, I think of IT as a perceptual exercise. Thanks for asking that.

okay. As a teenager, what are five things you would recommend? A physically feel my best on my fifty year old who attends high school and place soccer.

Well, sounds like you're doing a lot of things, right? To physically feel your best. okay. So i'm in a grasped some context here that i'm not that's not within reach. Um i'm assuming ing if you are doing all these things, you're hopefully in a unch of other things too, and they're going to be demands on you that you by some of them, you don't want to do school on things like that um are going to have varying levels of like joy and delight and demand um of things you don't want to do.

I don't want to default always to the simplest of tools， but I I certainly think that even as a fifteen year old, if you're not already getting a lots and lots of sleep, that's going to be great. Tell your parents that I said you should get lots and lots of sleep. You not sleeping through classes, I am a professor after all, I can tell you otherwise. Um you know I would say if I could travel back in time as a fifteen year old, I would encourage you to cultivate some sort of mindfulness practice know this sounds a little clean, but having some awareness of your thinking about your thinking is good. But i'm actually not going to say sit down and meditate for ten minutes today or do n sdr.

I'm actually not going to tell you that I think given how plastic your brain is, how much is changing at fifteen, I would encourage you and maybe would set a timer for this to actually develop just a really keen awareness of what stresses you out, what relaxes you, what delights you at sara, and just to simply develop an awareness of that, because those are you on ten ni. And I certainly had a meditation practice as a youth mostly given to me because I was a little haywire and I needed IT um and IT worked pretty well but I think in retrospect CT, what I wish I developed was more of a sense of you know how I navigated stress or things and things I enjoy IT and things I didn't enjoy. And I would just encourage you to have a general awareness trying detect and learn about what raises your gentleman, what raises your dopamine, what raises your serotonin and and then start thinking about tools um but again, the awareness is going to be very valuable.

And gosh, as a fifteen year old, you are in this, you know, amazing, blessed, the period of hate neural plasticity. Should we all be so lucky? So enjoy IT. Next question, please clarity on a journey regarding cold water.

Should we wait to feel the rise of a journal in that get me out of here feeling in the fall of IT before bAiling? Yes, provide IT doesn't kill you. You know I don't want to say the cold water.

It's hard to kill yourself with cold water um provide your heads above in your breathing. But the um it's sorry, my podcast producers always like I can't help that anyway. It's it's a great tool and different days it'll feel different.

So for doing called any kind of a journey and deliberate called exposure or a journal in increasing activity early in the day, you might find that you are more, quote, quote, resilient than later. In other words, of the wall, like, I really don't want to do this. This is actually interesting, for I think IT extends beyond cold water.

Let's say, you really don't want to do something. Pay pay attention to the fact that maybe it's not the right thing to do, but assuming it's something that you know you should do but you don't want to do, you are already in the first wall of a gene. You don't experience IT necessarily as heightened levels of stress.

You might experience IT as heighten levels of fatigue or a hard time of shifting on that kind of activation state that's required to move through the thing. But I do encourage you to take advantage of that, of course. And we have an episode coming out tomorrow actually that answers questions like should you train if you're sick and you know what if you travel in? And you know, there is context always, but I think that you do want to experience if you want to get the most out of the cold water exposure.

And to be more specific, the address inal in, then you want to get to that point of I really want to get out here, but I know I can stay and safely, but I really want to get out of here. And it's the little hard to explain, but there's just so much learning in those short moments about where your mind goes. And this sounds very kind of, again, subjective and maybe a little wish he wash.

But you can realize great things about yourself in those moments. You can find insight in those moments. Also, keep in mind that the degree of discomfort, not just physical but mental discomfort, is direct predictive of the pain to pleasure wave that you will experience afterwards.

The reason feels so good when you get to out of the ice bat and you showered off, I was you, the warm shower, after I don't do this end on cold thing, I don't know, IT just seems, well, too painful. And then take a warm shower and then you feel great. And that's the surge of dopamine that we know, based on a paper published in europe, journal of physiology, last many hours.

And it's a one hundred to two hundred percent increase in doping is not a subber effect. And then people say, what wait is that dopamine gna crash my dopamine system? No, because it's a nice slow rise.

In fact, I am actually not aware of many things besides love and delight that can create this long, slow art of dopamine lasting many hours. Maybe you're aware of other things, if you are, let me know. But IT turns out that long arc is a true anti depression.

And my colleague gets stanford doctor on olympic y, who's ahead of our dual diagnosis diction clinic, has talked about in her amazing booked openminded about patients of her that have really helped themselves along and out of the more depressive phases of you working through addiction and in just depression in general, through directed cold water therapy. So I all you see a fanatic about IT in the sense that it's a powerful, relatively safe if done properly, safe if done properly. Way to module your internal dope.

Me, hopefully I answered your question. Next question, please. Sorry, I caught IT raised when off the fall as well.

Yes, I think you should get out once you, once you, you accomplish something. Don't get out when you are panic unless it's dangerous. sorry.

How can you train your brain to feel more confident in moments where you tend to feel intimidated? okay. These are hard question because context is tRicky here because I don't know what the context is.

And you know, confidence on short time scales and the long time scales. So confidence in school, confidence in career, those those are long, long ark. Things were as confidence to be able to you know do something in the short term is different.

But remember, those action sequences that trigger the release of dopamine. dopamine. I've i've mainly talked about the dark side of dopamine, but I hopefully also talked about the upward spiral that dopamine can cause, mainly by thinking about delight and things that you really enjoy the that Carries over. And I would say that you want you want to microsoft the demands of what maybe got you back on your heels a bit.

Um actually a good friend of mine who's here tonight I think all of my friend pat you know he has a great way of of concept zing this which is for most all endeavors we either fill back on our heels flat footed or forward center of mass like we can really do something were flat photo. We're back on our heels and sometimes getting from back on our heels let's call that lack of confidence to just on two feet and confident enough to move forward, at least stay in the in the game. That's going to require you could lean on different tools.

I can't say which would be ideal for the circumstance here you have in mind, but I do think that having a way to calm yourself will give you access to more resources, internal resources. We know this. This was something I meant to bring up during the discussion about fear versus love, at a trying to access delight and love when we are in a state of fear, or stress or anxiety, the rule set, the options available to us, and indeed, our creativity is greatly diminished.

And this has to do with the way that the prefrontal cortex interact with an area the brain called the insoo, which relates to our internal landscape. And there's S A weird phenomenon, which is IT. Normally our brain, our thinking brain and our rule setting brain can IT leads our the brain parts that control and pay attention to how we feel internally.

And that's why, for instance, ince, if you feel all nervous, you can still do something. At some point, you get stressed enough. And we know this from work by my colleague, David speaker IT reverses. And these areas of the brain that are paying attention to, like how flushed my faces or way, and i'm sweating or my breathing, actually started to shut down. Creative decision making.

So I would say the way to have more confidence, to learn, to control that stress and keep the part of your brain, the preference of cortex, is that part that can come up with new rules that can be funny, that can be creative, that keeps that brain part leading. The way you think about this is the prevent to court, to accessory, like the coach. And the rescue brain are like the players.

And if you get too stressed, the players start to lead the game, and the coach follows encounter rugs and along. So I would encourage you to focus on the real time stress modulation and to raise your stress reshot using the sort of to us we talked about and to register your wins. You know, I didn't get into this in too much detail, but one of the amazing things about the domain system is that it's highly subject to your interpretation.

If you tell yourself that a fail was a win, and you can see or conceptualize some way in which that actually true, you get to tap into the dopamine e system, you might think that's crazy. You can cheat your own brain. You can cheat your own neurochemistry.

And indeed, you can, you can change the time, space, time referencing. We see this with examples like Nelson mandela, Victor Frankl. You know, you read their stories, right? Trapped in little cells, right? Confined imprisons.

And they come up with new ways to access the dopamine in system by now, not thinking about what they are not getting, but thinking about what they can control in their immediate experience. Many, many examples of this throughout literature and history. And the dopamine in system is the life for system.

I don't say that in any loose way. Dopamine is life force. It's the vision, the desire to continue. It's persistence. And so if you can think about what might seem like a failure and really spend some time thinking about. Not the potential wins on the outside, but how you can conceptualize that is a potential win internally.

You really do get to achieve an internal chemical win, and that chemical win sets you up for more real wins for that make sense. It's incredible how contextualized the doome in system is, but if IT weren't, why would IT matter if we're talking about money or mates or food or job or school? You don't get fifty reward systems and motivation systems.

You get one, and that's the document system. Next question, please. What is the competing mechanism behind bilateral eve movement emd r that helps resolve psychological trauma? The competing mechanism? Well, let me let me try and answer as best I can. I'm not sure I understand the full extent of the question.

Let me um emd r moving your eyes from side to side right then then recounting a traumas, a very common and actually one of the four approved treatments that are behavioral for trauma um so it's taken seriously in the psychiatric and psychological community for a good reason. IT tends to work best for single event traumas as opposed to like, entire childhoods. No joke there.

Like me, some people have their entire childhood was traumatic. Other people, they they experience a trauma, single event trauma, or repeated periods of the same or similar type of trauma. Eye movements from side to side have been shown in a number of studies to very potently reduce the activity of a brain structure called the amiga, which most people are familiar with because of the character from the star wars movie and dollar.

Um there's a neuroscientist somewhere that team um IT is indeed a threat detection center. And when you move through space, not outer space, but when you walk like this, your eyes actually generate these subtle side aside shifts, unless you're focusing on a specific target. And my lab and other laboratories have found that that leads to a very potent quieting of the threat detection system.

And then E, M, D, R is essentially a process appearing that common state with no threat detection system activated with the recount of something that Normally would be quite triggering. So it's you've heard a pologies and conditioning like a bell rings, and the anal gets fed and animal celebrates eventually just about television you're doing the reverse of that is so called behavior. Desensitization has an underlying mechanism that that but the ideas to pair a calm state with recount of something that has been shown to be successful, there are people who think that the side decide ye movements, and the recount of trauma may actually be invoking some form of his nosis.

My colleague, David speakers, no expert, clinical hip nosis. He appeared on my podcast, rituals podcast. A few other podcasting talks about this. This is not state chip nosis, its clinical nosis. So there maybe something going on there emd r again, some people get great relief from the other people don't.

What's kind of nice is that this eye movements from side to side, or simply taking walk as long you're not looking at your phone and not allowing your eyes to move from side decide, is a very good way to shut down the fear and stress system. So taking a walk, I think, is relaxing for obvious reasons. And there are all data showing that, you know, part of the reason why animals at the door or want to go for a walk may not actually be the exercise.

There's kind of an anxiety, and then an anxiety relief that occurs. Course, they really have to go the bathroom to. One of custos great joys in life was just panning on everything outdoors, thankfully. So the psychological trauma return, unfortunate. There haven't been a lot of brain imaging studies long looking at this long term of how while emd r works.

What I think is going to happen in the next few years, by the way, is IT is not going to be a discussion around should you do mdr, should you do train screening magnetics stimulation, should you do behavioral therapy going to be combination ation therapies, combination therapies, including pharmacologic manipulations, to essentially give a boost to the systems that encourage moral plasticity, like top mean serotonin in and generalin, and then also then perform emd r and if you want to talk about what's happening in the landscape of clinical trials on some of the psychiatrically and happy to talk about IT, they're still illegal um but they are being used in clinical trials and very interesting stuff is happening there. okay. Next question, please.

One to research her interventions we most excited about in the realm of health and wellness. So what I think is going to be very interesting in the next few years really reflects my obsession that you ve seen a little bit of tonight. But the thing that I think is going to be most useful, and i've seen this in science before, and I think we're going to see IT in health and wellness, is that there are all these tools and all these people, and he's saying this and she's saying that.

And what we're going to start paying attention to is what are the common themes, right? If IT and a broader and more important theme is going to be one of modulation versus mediation, what do I mean? Well, if someone were to pull a fire alarm right now, please don't.

That will shift our attention and make IT hard to focus on what i'm saying. And knowing me, I could just stay up. You're talking, do we think that fire alarms mediate attention? No, they modulate IT right.

If they were very, very cold in this room, like IT was when we first got here tonight, arctic cold. Hopefully it's warmed up a bit. IT hasn't.

I'm so sorry, so sorry. Yeah, I attempted. yeah. I almost thought, may we all just do a bunch of breathing to heat up like a journal release? But these days, getting groups of people will breathe on each other is not exactly I can see that might go the wrong way in terms of White people interpret.

So the idea here is that certain things directly mediate something like a physico logical side. Directly comes you down quickly IT mediates the coming response. Getting good sleep makes you less easily triggered IT modulates stress.

But is sleeping directly immediate stress control? no. And I think this is really important. This brings up the topic of the got brain access.

The gut is rich with these little bug's bacteria, trillions of them, which is an area thought to me, but also the surface of your skin, the surface of your eyes. You have a skin microbial and nasal microbial. Every mucosal lining has a microban e in fact, think about this is, this is a crazy but worthwhile attention.

Have you ever bitten the inside of your mouth? That sucks, right? And you get a caught, hurt.

But guess what? The inside of your mouth, heels without a scar about that weird, right? You cut anywhere else on your body.

And depending on how well you heal and your age and your immune status, you get a score. Your mouth is filled with bacteria and it's open to the world. But the gut microbiome, provided its healthy, provides an incredible ability to heal quickly.

And you know, i'm not somebody who's done a lot of acupuncture. I went a few times and other's interesting science happening on a bunch. What's the first thing they do when you walk in there and then they go, ah yeah and they have this cool intuition that's not based on western mechanistic science. It's more of an intuition based on millions, if not billions of data points that have been put into these charts.

It's pretty cool, right? And what they are looking at, I believe, and from what my colleagues who work on microban, I M tell me as they can look at the power of your tongue in particular in the back, and get a sense of whether not the microbes on there is of the appropriate stuff. But they don't go lack bilas.

Remember the things that they all under, they, oh, you're just biotic. Instead, they get a sense. Now, parents of small babies learn to detect all sorts of things coming out of, essentially every or office of the child as a read out of health, because the child does not have lying and a dog ownership.

And unfortunate, you learn to do this too, for Better, for worse, right? For Better, right? So we have this intuition about good health.

But god, health would be another example where it's very clear now that fiber can be helpful, but it's mostly consuming. These fermented foods have been used in for ages, but low sugar for mental foods. Of the nato kim chee shower crowd comes like all these things, depending on which culture you're in.

They come in different forms, certain yoga that that allow the got to be healthy and IT modulates a huge number of systems. So I don't think that you are going to cure depression by adJusting your got microbial. But if you cut microbiota are not well and you improve that IT will indeed shift the new transmitter systems of your brain and give you a elevated mood that shouldn't come as a surprise anymore.

But I think that the whole world, things like, gosh, I must be the serotonin in the gut. No, it's actually not. So are tonally got? Is that the scot? My gravitt a create chemicals that actually become serotonin in the brain or become dopamine in the brain.

And so I think that the gut microbiome I would put in the same category, although not quite as important, I would put IT in the category of, like sleep IT modulates. A huge number of other processes. IT doesn't mediate them.

So sunlight, sleep, healthy, got microbiome, exercise, good nutrition, social connection, these things all create this general menu or environment of health. I would like to see more distinction between modulating and mediating effects and tools out there because I I also see a lot of unnecessary argument. People like there's no example that improving you got microban cures.

Depressions, of course, is not. But there are really good examples. If you've got microbiome is off, that improving IT can improve mood, which is depending on where you are on that spectrum. Depression can really relieve things.

So I think that the future of health, you know, we hear so much about personalized medicine and matched your genome, but we don't even have the basic, most people don't even have the basics right. And if you watch or listen to the podcast long enough, hopefully certain things started to kind of repeat themselves. But a key theme that you learn in science, you teach your students, you know, does IT modulator doesn't mediate IT.

You need to be careful with your language there. And there's great information. And or as we say, interpretations power there.

If you understand the difference, then I think we can go a long way by making that distinction modulating versus mediating. There are probably other things that modulate health that i'm overlooking now just because of the flow that i'm in. The cool MIT yeah the cool MIT.

Palmer cooling. Okay, I promise to talk about cop palmer cooling. Well, i'll do IT now palmer cooling.

They change the human a format. I said, this is like teaching in the classroom. All right, very briefly. The palmer cooling, which is essentially placing you can cool the core of the body most quickly by placing cold objects on the hands, the bottom of of the feet or on the top of the face because of the arrangements of vasculature.

Normally you've got this arteries capitaine things, but in at those locations in the body, you skip the capitalists and you can basic you're not really passing cool into the body, but you're cooling off the core of the body more quickly if you do that in between sets of exercise or during a run or cycling, you can dramatically increase your ability to continue. I actually use the cool MIT for cognitive work, but you don't need to call IT, sorry, call IT guys. You can just get A, A, A thing of ice water or just very cold water.

And you I know that sounds trivial ly easy, but you're actually just cooling your core by putting your hands, or even one hands, on a relatively cold thing of water or ice, but not so cold that IT constricts the vasculature there. This is the incredible work of my colleagues, stanford doctor crack heller. Why wouldn't more people do this? If you can double the amount of endpoint, believe in or not, or double the number of sets of exercise you can do, or feel more alert and do more cognitive? Why won't more people do IT? Because people just don't do IT and IT sounds crazy.

IT really sounds crazy, but it's a real thing. And I wh more people do IT. The athletes, stanford do IT people.

The military do IT so people who know no and they and they use IT enjoy IT. It's just it's a it's it's almost like seems too off target from them. What you're trying to accomplish, I don't know.

For some reason, people are finally on board breathing like in a specific way as a useful two a few years ago and was into that. I just think of how far we've come. It's incredible people are talking about psychedelics, meditation, breathing.

I think the 3 endemic for all its pains， and you know what a chAllenging period for all sorts of reasons did wake people up to the idea that you have to take control over your health because there is no magic fairy coming to do IT for you. And with all do respect, there's no government agency. There's going to drop off the kit at your front door of like here's how you take a care yourself.

So it's it's just not gonna happen and IT wouldn't happen under any circumstances. So it's a personal responsibility issue. Alright, what lessons escape? Warning the failure apart. You know, a failure, failure, failure. I mean, for me, you can work. Never was a good scape boards, still have close friends in that community and our photographer and the guy who does all the visuals and the other guys that do the visuals, for our part cast might play backing Chris, Martina, all of that community.

You know I think that for me that community was really as a Michael sometimes say a skate boarders hate everything um meaning they have a very high threshold for what they consider acceptable is not just what you do, is how you do IT super important. And I think in neuroscience, there are a lot there's a lot of stuff. In science in general, there are a lot.

There are so many papers and there are so many experiments, like how do you navigate that landscape? I think IT IT helped me develop a sense of taste, but the taste that i'm referring to is not necessary, a taste of which science is cool or not cool that to. But IT came through a few times tonight when I talking about my mentors, you know, I picked back then slatee boarding because I really like to the people.

And also, you didn't need your parents to go to a game. And so that worked for me, and you kind of make your own schedule. And I do think it's very important to the extent that you can, in science and in everything, to surround yourself with the kinds of people that you just really enjoys being around.

And so to me, the podcast running a lab feels a lot like skateboarding. It's the same energy, it's the same neurochemical systems firing. So that's a yeah that one next favorite.

fine. Oh, oh, I know that's an appropriate I do have a fineman story, but it's inappropriate. Dit, maybe sometime is why don't drink? Good decision making.

Well, I read all of finance books, so I had the pleasure. I never met him. He was dead before I was born, but my dad did.

And he had good fineman stories. And they're an appropriate. So the cool thing about fine men, right, was that he didn't really care if people understood the specifics of what he was talking about.

He just wanted people to get turned on to how amazing physics was. And he loved general principles. And one of the things, you know, the example that sometimes given out, how many are familiar with the finance books.

But surely you're joking. mr. R, fine. Or what do you care? What are other people think all of that of? It's wonderful.

He picked locks, know he worked at, lost almost most labs. They are working on the bomb. And he basically well there and elsewhere.

And every morning the officers used to come in, and he would spread all the top secret papers out on the floor. He would break into the safe at at night. And then they were per flex who could do this.

And he like safe cracking, literally like national security secrets, just for fun prancer. He also bongo drum naked on the roof, cal tech, and he did most of his writing of themes in strip clubs. fact. Learn to draw late life was really into flotation tanks um and very curious about what never did psychologically that's as I understand but one of the the cool fineman fact oids is that when he was a kid he he talked about when he was a child that his dad used to take a bird watching and he say all that's a whatever scrub j and that's a whatever whatever rush and that's the and his dads said, no. Don't cloud your mind with naming and taxonomy that's not meaningful because then what if it's the different you to pick me through us?

The lesser this or that, the more important thing is to start to identify principles of why certain birds behave one way and certain birds behave another and to start finding the the commonalities and the regularities. And that's a theme that I obviously tonight have tried to impose. And it's actually something that I can't do in podcast necessarily because I can't thread across forty episodes or something like that in the same way that I could in an evening like this.

So that's an appropriate finance story. Also, IT just seemed like a delightful guy, and he's kind of cool is a little bit street radio, the thick accent he was from far rock away. But he didn't really care much what people thought or he did.

And he pretended he didn't careful when people tell you they don't care what people think. I think he did, to the extent that is still allow him to get the message out there. Okay, next question, please. My horse. I. Love this.

I delight in all things animals, but especially horses because my high school girlfriend had horse and um I you know they do that thing where people oh you know horses can detect how they know more about you than you know and then I get into the horse. And the horse like you is like, it's like a little test, test. Having a girl end with the horse was very intimidating for me.

actually. I felt like I had to compete with the horse. SHE spent all this time with the horse is very large, really, like, know, anyway, eventually I broke the horse.

Okay, my horse does the double in hell. Long x hal, often he's a bit of a stressing guy. Warm blood.

Yeah, warm blood. I used to work at the barn. I used a shovel menu and work at the barn.

SHE brought her horse to college. I SHE followed her after coach never were gone to college. SHE had gone to college.

Um and the horses are interesting animals. They do tell you a lot. The horses, the double in hill long x so often, is a bit of a stressing guide.

You suppose this theological stress, regular trends? Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, I mention warm blood.

So i'd have a colleague at stanford. She's amazing. Name is sumer condo and he is an expert dog genetics. So you can imagine i'm always asking her questions.

Um and we talk about dogs and we talk about horses because he also think SHE raises warm blood and you hear about hot bloods and warm bloods and you also, if you have any familiar with dogs, there are dogs like costolo or like a nuclear bomb could go off and costal might open an eye. That's the bulldog economy of effort. They're not going to get activated unless there's a reason to do IT.

They are very, as we call parasympathetic, dominant that sea saw of automation ic arsa is just really, really relaxed. Getting them into action is more of a more of an effort. There are other animals like that with IT, right, or the italian and greyhound, like they do sit like you're always cold that are very sympathetic, dominant.

And then of course, within a breeder, within a species, there's a range. And humans also out within a range. I think anyone who's had children will tell you, you know, he or SHE has been like this is birth come easy going or like really easily stressed?

I think that sea saw we get into tonight too much, but there's a concept with the automatic regulation of a hinge. So don't think so much about being really stressed out or really relaxed, but certain animals, the hinges tighten so that the sea saw just kind of till to mellow. Like costolo, a bulldog is almost seems like a different animal than a whip.

There are so very different. And within the the category, horses, and i'm not an expert in horse genetics, but they are selected for not just for their physical attributes, but for their psychological or temperament attributes. And you see this in dogs too.

In fact, the reason I picked hostel and Elvis can verify the stories I read. I wanted a dog for so many years, and I went there, and there were all these puppies, and I was, I heard, you need to take them in the other room, a one by one. And if IT barks for its siblings and you like puppy, so I walking in, all the dogs are running around like crazy is right around Christmas time, right?

All of us and they're running around and then there's one in the back and he's taking advantage of the fact all the other ones are when he's just eating out of all of their balls. And I like, I want that one. So I took that chevy faster in the next room, and I thought, okay, he's going to bark for his siblings and lay down.

He took him out. And I was like, this one, I want this one. Why did I want that one? Will this completes the the principle, which is, I wanted a dog like that because i'm not like that and was very interested in a dog I could take care of, but also a dog that would help regulate minerva system.

And so for me, having a dog like that, as opposed to a wipp or something that was going to know like consultant's around, is very calm effect. And to this day, memory of his snoring still puts me to sleep. So I think that your horse probably has a kind of idols.

A little bit higher. Think about the rpm. You know, there was a little bit higher to give in speed, higher, more R, P, M at a given speed.

That's why I think about the automobile system. How do you reset that? Well, this is why a lot of exercise is good, right? Instantly my girlfriends course was crazy.

IT was guilded late and IT was crazy. I was said nuts, but that likely bad on so right? IT was not nuts, but IT was crazy. IT was guilty late. Um next question. Is there any science behind staying motivated or developing discipline? Oh, so this represents kind of the higher tier of where I think things are gonna in the next few years, where we're going to start seeing this conversion of psychology and biology where we can get to these harder concepts.

You know, I like to think that we can stay motivated through a simple process that now will make sense to you, because the last thing I covered was toggling back and forth between our ability to be greedy and lean in kind of in friction, maybe in a law, anger, fear, competitiveness at that, a that kind of grinding in, but that the more sustaining ly fuel, the sort of hybrid version, right? Hybrid fuel model would be one in which you can access that. But that's a deplete able and not so renewable resource without a lot of rest.

Meaning working hard out of anger, determination and kind of grit will work. But when you are depleted, you have to stop for a long while. Whether if you can access this delete system, which is really one of depine and serotonin, both, in other words, and I want to think of a not of a different way to put this, but to try and think about what sorts of things and tools allow you to be and feel most loving.

I know this sounds weak, but it's anything but weak to be most loving in the verb sense of the world toward what you're doing. Actually used to use this trick. And college, when I encounter a topic I hated, I would tell itself, i'm really, i'm just onna fall in love with this by trying to find the gems within IT.

Sometimes IT work, sometimes I didn't, but they wish to do IT that way. I supposed to, okay, i'm just gonna in this out, at least for me at the time, was a powerful tool. So motivation and discipline is a tRicky one.

That's sort of, they just do IT thing. You need tools to module your stress and to get your sleep. Do all the basic things is right.

Set the right context for you to be in your best chance of being disciplined. And that itself as its own form of discipline. But in terms of continual motivation, you not gonna manage to go against the grain for very long.

People have managed to go against chAllenge for very long time, for very long time. In fact, I was reading recently about the psychology of people being kidnapped. And they have this odd trick that they used.

If you heard about this is sort like stocking syndrome, but they actually convinced themselves to fall in love with their capture and then they come up with new ways to escape them. Just kind of cool. So there's something about mentally feeling like you're trying to go from back on your heels to flag footed that does that very energetically costly.

So again, the these systems are very suspect to the what we call context or top down regulation. Hopefully that helps. I know it's a little bit abstract.

I wish I could give you one minute exercise that make you motivated but but we to talk about tools like to get a journalist going on things like that, but spend some time thinking about what would allow you to sustain effort through positive feelings. It's not a light concept at all. Okay, next question, please.

What would be your biggest piece of advice for achieving one's dreams or that's a tough one? Again, this is giving me a little abstract you know i'm a believer in this idea of a kind of a seed message um Robert Green has talked a lot about this um that we can all kind of think back to a event or stage of our life. Typically it's um before puberty for other reasons that are kind of interesting.

But where we we delighted something right so for me was fish. And obviously now I don't need to work on fish. IT wasn't about the fish.

I hope that came through. I mean, a query a are really cool, but it's not about the fish IT was something about the way they moved. There was something about the way that IT tickled my excitement and you to get dropped off the little pet shop in california avenue.

Petal of the money is pet shop. P my mom uses his child care. You drop me off there and at this book, and I would log all the tropical fish, and which ones could be with which ones? And then I would.

I was obsessed, right? But for me was something about organizing and being able to make reliable predictions. IT was about parcel y.

IT was about principles as opposed to. And the colors delighted me, and all that kind of stuff, the equipment delighted me. But then I am puberty.

And then like, IT was something else. And and then I went to college in IT was something else, and I got grow over, and IT was something else. So IT changes over time.

But this is why I recommended that Young, fifteen year old person that they learned to tap into that sense of, like, this is cool. Like, this feels good. I know not everyone else thinks it's cool.

Maybe they do. Like, this feels good. I actually have a dramatic experience. So this i'm not a very smar ally oriented personal more or here, but I actually can't know if I get on to something.

If this left ARM just kind of start figuring like it's like I want to move or or like some people, you can start to identify ways in which you suddenly have this. Positive energy is not a fear energy. It's almost like a magnetism to things.

And just don't be confused and or misdirected in thinking that is that thing. It's that, again, energy or that attraction to something that feels right. That is your, you know, I wish we had these divine rod.

Define water. That's your tool. It's like on ten, you wanna grow your and ten, I so how do you follow your dreams? Well, I never thought I do a podcast and never thought become a neuroscientist. You have to be willing course to take risks and and to iterate quickly, but not so quickly that you you know you fail out of the game is set if you do get back in and set a but it's really about developing an awareness.

Now the key thing is you're not going to find this by going up a mountain and sitting there or waiting for your passion to just kind of rock, you know, disease or piano fall onto your head. It's not gonna en that way. You have to interact with the sensory world and different kinds of people, and you have to be a little bit of an adventure in a safe way, of course, an adventure and learn to recognize the signals.

And some people are very tune with this. Um there's an amazing podcast with rick rubin recently on the rogan podcast, really talks about the creative processes kind of this like IT seems like whatever going on in that beer to his connects to the world and he can just like there, like that's where you need to go and that you know but that's part of the magic is you don't really know. And because it's it's all energetic.

It's all energetic. And when I say energetic, I don't mean in the mystic science. I mean you have to learn to send those fluctuations in energy.

Some people can sense them very easily because they're very mellow and something gets really excited. They notice as a big delta, we say in big change, other people they ride kind of hide all the time. And so everything is exciting to them.

And they miss a lot of the subtle fluctuations in what's really special and right for in fact, mania is characterised by hyper elevated levels of dopamine. And everything's a good idea, right? And depression is the opposite thing's a good idea.

Nothing's gonna work, right? And those are the extremes, and those are rough conditions, obviously. But for most people, it's about learning to detect those subtle fluctuations in every time, every single time, you find somebody who is exceptional at their craft and doing well in life.

Okay, there a lot of people are exceptional at their craft, but not necessarily doing well on the hall. Those people have a kind of intuition about what feels good to them. This year's nobel prize winner in chemistry is my colleague, car ebert sy, and all I know of her accept the fact that she's amazing chemist is they did this interview with her, and he said that White, everyone would go out in college.

He was finding excuses to stay home and read again at chemistry that to me, something like a bad night. But for her, IT was pure delight. And she's wired for that.

And I think her work is going to be vitally important and transformer for humanity. I really do. So how do you succeed in in get chasing your dreams? You succeed in identifying what they are, but you don't know what the outset.

You want to find the energy to find the right path and continually course correct when you will undoubted be off your path. That's essentially what i've done. I still look for the feeling of delighting in costolo or the cuttle fish.

That's what i'm looking for. It's not a template I have to match. But that sound like, oh yeah, I know what that feels like. It's like a texture. It's like if you think about a bunch of different textures of sandpaper, it's like this one that just feels good.

And so you're comparing everything to that because the system that involves all these chemicals, you will find IT if you learn to pay attention to IT, but you won't find IT sitting, staring at your belly button or look going up amount. You have to be in sensory experience in order to find IT. Reflection is good, but you need to get into action.

Okay, all right. Well, um okay. So i'm sulfide an opinion of the psychiatric s generally. We just had an episode with my colleague, knowen Williams. He's a triple board certified neurologist.

Is a fun thing that work at stanford is also very humbling because you're like, well, who are these people? Three board certifications, the slicer ban, first, while not for everybody, people with psychology is IT is still illegal, decriminalized certain places. You so obviously cautionary notes.

People who have drug addiction issues or other kinds of addiction issues need to be thoughtful about diving into a neurochemical landscape like that. But IT does appear that that the clinical trials on one maco dose, this is what's interesting to me. A lot of people talk about microdot Sullivan, but the data, at least according to Matthew Johnson, who is also on the podcast, the data for microdot in are not really there.

Frankly, the data on single session macro dos, the sort of heroic doses that have been talked about in the the psych community for depression and to some extent P T S D and for eating disorders and for an up and um sort of end of life preparation are quite encouraging. In fact, the current data suggested about two thirds of people achieve lasting relief from one session. Now keep in mind, those are guided sessions with physicians in the room and set A I do think there's a potential hazard of all psychodeviant s, which is they alter.

This includes M, D, M, A, or especially md ma. They altered the chemical landscape. I knew such that a lot of things can serve as a tractors in that state, meaning you can get really into the sound of music in an M D M A session if you connected to that, and waste the opportunity for some more meaningful, transformative rewiring.

And I do think that that's worth paying attention to. So that's the the usefulness of having a therapist guy there is they can continually steer you back to what, at least for you, is the more meaningful work. But it's very encouraging.

And knowing Williams, who I trust again, tribal board certified md. So in the studies of lifetime, perceived individual societal risk of all the compounds out there, except for caffeine, Sullivan is at the bottom of the list. Where's things like, you know, heroin, cocaine, alcohol? Matthee headmen said at the top of the list, actually alcohol quite high on that list at certain amounts of consumption.

So I am very excited um about what's happening in the landscape of Sullivan but i'm not so excited about the microbes a very excited about the single heroe do data. One interesting thing there perhaps what to be the unifying feature of a successful so silly's excuse me session is that the at some point the person feels as if it's like too much of an automated ic thing they get to this point and then they are encouraged to court in court, let go and unfashioned by this concept of letting go. Because you have a neuroscientists, we don't know what that means.

But IT seems like being able to ride the wave of of automated ic alisal from top to bottom seems to be very powerful for trauma and depression treatment. And this is interesting. A lot of people think that one of the major issues in humans nowadays, we're stressed about a lot of things, but we never actually get to go into the full stress response.

Then let IT relaxed again um and catharsis was big hit one point you know scream therapy is Steve jobs. The scream therapies whether not cathartic is healthy or not has been debated but um the data kind of pointing the fact that IT may be that the catharsis not obviously someone damaging themselves for somebody else so maybe shall all be screaming a lot more um why does my desire to eat disappear after I used the sa about interesting. I can go in hungry and get out with no desire to eat.

I can only speculate you know, the sona or any kind of deliberate heat exposure that's uncomfortable releases this molecule. Dine morphin is actually the same molecule that's released in a under conditions of alcohol with roll makes you feel agitated and not good. And then there's there's a rebound.

What the way that feels good is later, IT causes this up regulation in the so called new opioid receptors. So you're the chemicals that you have. Your so called induction is opie is not the opioid that are related to the opioid crisis, but the ones that you naturally make are able to have a more robust effect after sona dye.

Morphin is an appetite suppression and for reasons related to kind of central this comfort in the body so that the only reason I can speculate, there are a number of other things that saw that does, including massive increases. In growth horon, provided you don't saw that too much. So if you do at once a week for four twenty minute sessions based five minutes apart, you get these enormous increases in growth hormones.

If you start doing IT more often, you get still significant but smaller increases in gross for me and my team. This is how the podcast goes to. At some point, rob just goes, it's enough.

So if you think that the episodes are long now, the'd be a lot longer. Listen, I just wanted before we part, I know it's a sunday night and people to go. I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight.

I know that at least for me, i'm still sort of baffled, but pleasant so that people interesting investing time to come out in here a hours of a nerd like me talk about science and tools. And i'm delighted that people are hopefully cleaning some useful information. Please do pass along the information.

I didn't invent this stuff. As I mentioned before, I was not consulted to the design phase. I have no domain over IT. This is the stuff of the mother nature and whatever other beliefs you have, they're here. And of course, i'd be remiss if I didn't finish by saying have a wonderful night and thank you for your interest in science.