Tools to Enhance Working Memory & Attention
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neutral logy and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today, we are discussing working memory. Working memory is a special category of memory in which we are able to hold small amounts of information in our mind for short periods of time.

Working memory is also very closely related to attention, so for an a view that are interested in how to develop Better focus and attention, understanding what working memory is and some of the things that you can do to improve your working memory can be very beneficial. Today i'm going to talk about what working memory is, including some of the underlying biology. Although I promise, irrespective of whether not you know any biology or you are an expert in biology, i'll make the conversation accessible to you.

In addition, I will talk about tools to improve working memory, and i'll also compare working memory to other forms of like long term memory and short term memory. And through that understanding, i'm confident that you'll be able to develop Better focus as well as be able to commit certain forms of information to your short and long term memory stores. Before we begin, i'd like emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I like to thank sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Martina Martino.

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I love the taste of brude loose leaf Martina iba marti. And I particularly love the taste of Martina's new can cold blue zero sugar year by moto, which I personally help them develop. If you'd like to try mattina, go to drink Martina dot com slash huberman.

Right now, matti na is offering a free one pound bag of loose leaf iba A T and free shipping with the purchase of two cases of their cold blue year bom. Again, that's a drink, Martina a duck com slash huberman to get the free bag of europe te loose leaf tea and free shipping. Today's episode is also brought to us by Better help.

Better help offers professional therapy with a license therapies Carried out online. I've been going to therapy for well over thirty years. Initially, I didn't have a choice.

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Again, that's a Better help 到 com slash huberman。 Today's epo de is also brought to us by huic sleep. He likes sleep, makes metrics and pillows that are of the absolute highest quality. I was spoken many times before on this another podcast about the fact that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. One of the key things to getting a great night sleep is to make sure that your matches matches your sleep requirements.

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And let's start off this discussion by comparing working memory to other forms of memory that most people are more familiar, whether at least when most people hear the word memory, they typically are thinking about long term memory, like one's ability to remember the capitals of states or countries, the different continents, directions from one location to another, even one's name. All of those things are examples of long term memory. Now I want to emphasize that long term memory really has two components.

There are what we call declaration long term memories. So these are the things that we can declare, things like facts about ourselves, of the world or others. And then there are procedural long term memories procedure. Long term memories, as the name suggests, are aspects of our memory that allow us to perform a certain procedures. They are literally action steps that we take to, for instance, ride a bicycle or drive a car, which, by the way, we might not be conscious of ourselves doing after we learn, that is, after we pass information into our procedural long term memory. But even once those things become reflective, they are stored in our long term memory.

Now, a discussion of long term memory is not the focus today, but me being a neuroscientist, and I like to think you all generally being interested in the underlying biology, or just mention that there is a key structure within the brain that is part of a larger neural network, that is a collection of structures which is absolutely essential for the formation and storage of long term memories. And that's the hippo campus, which in lattin means sea horse. And IT does look a little bit like a sea horse, but we actually have won on each side of your brain.

So we say, hippo camp, plural. And so what we know is that if people have damage to their hip campus of any kind, that people have trouble accessing or forming a long term memory, sometimes both. And there's a lot more that we could say about long term memory.

Indeed, I didn't entire episode of human man in lab pocket about the formation and storage of long term memories, including some tools to improve long term memory, will touch on a few of those tools later today. But you can access that episode if you go to huberman lab dom and just put memory into the search function and you'll find IT there. In the meantime, if we want to understand working memory, we not only have to understand how it's different from a long term memory, but also how it's different from short term memories.

Short term memory is a capacity that we all have. That, as the name suggests, represents a short term memory bank for information that may or may not get passed into long term memory. So for instance, if you learned anything, and of course, you have, if you can understand what i'm saying, you learn english language. If you can write, you learn how to right eat a well in order to learn those things and to commit them to long term memory.

The information required to do those things and to have that knowledge needed to be held in short term memory and short term memories are the sorts of memories that we maintain for somewhere between a few minutes and potentially a few hours may be a little bit longer, but only a certain percentage of that is passed a long term memory. So for instance, if you listen to this podcast or you go to a course lecture, uh, whether not that lecture is about cognitive material or whether not it's about learning a new physical skill, regardless of what you learn. You're only going to learn a certain amount of that information.

But were we to examine how much of the information you just heard or that you're hearing now you remember immediately after this podcast episode as compared to, say, a week later, we know based on, gosh, only millions of scientific papers and studies, that you are going to have more information in your short term memory stores shortly after being exposed to new information than you will later. In other words, only a small percentage of what we perceive, what we see, what we hear. IT said, a gets passed into short term memory, and then only a fraction of that gets passed into long term memory.

Now, the neurotic circuits for short term memory and the passage of shorter memory, long term memory, involve a lot of different brain structures. But here again, we can implicate the hip campus, because the actual passage of short term memories and to long term memories occurs in part within the hip campus. And then a lot of people don't know this.

Some of the memories that we think of as long term memories are actually distributed into the new cortex, which is the outer portion of the brain. Now the point here is less to fill your mind with different names of things in naming creature, but rather to get you thinking about what's involved in creating short and long term memories. And equally important, that even though the hypo campus is critically involved in the formation of short and long term memories, that the formation of short, long term memories is really a network phenomenon.

In fact, among the more important themes that comes up again and again on this podcast, any time that we're talking about neuroscience, actually, biology, in any case, is that rarely, if ever, is there one location in the brain where something happens. Typically, it's a network phenomenon, meaning it's the collaboration of a bunch of different brain areas, passing information from one location to the next and storing IT in a kind of distributed way. now.

Other key things understand about working memory and how IT is different from short and long term memory is that the formation of short and long term memories almost always involves neuroplasticity neuroplasticity is the nervous system's ability need to change in response to experience. Now there are different types of moral plasticity. So often when we hear about neuroplasticity in the popular sphere, people don't emphasize that there are different types of neural plastic tics.

And it's worth paying a little bit of attention to what those different types are. There is, for instance, what we call long term potential. Long term potential, or L, T, P, as the acronym goes, is the strengthening of connections between neurons as a consequence of their repeated firing very closely together in time.

Okay, there's a lot more to IT, but if you've ever heard the free fire together, fire together sometimes that is misattributed to Donald heb, who did talk about nea plasticity. By the way, Donald heb was a psychologist up in canada who talked about your plastics in the context of lots of different forms of learning. But that fire together, wired together phrase was not actually stated by Donald head.

IT was stated by Carlos shots, my colleague at stanford, and he was referring to ldp. But other forms of neuroplasticity that occur mainly development when neurons fire very closely in time, and thereby strength in those connections, which can include L, T, P. Okay, so for now, think of L, T, P as any time that some small group of neurons could be two neurons, could be two thousand neurons are very active closely together in time, and they have access to one another physically.

And the consequence is often, not always, but is often L T, P. That is, the strengthening of those connection, such that after that barge of activity subsides, those neurons can speak to each other. They can communicate through electrical activity and chemical activity much more easily.

The communication is more robust, is like removing a war between a conversation such that the conversation can take place more fluidly. Now there are other forms of neural plasticity, including L, T, D, long term depression, which unfortunate. The name often calls to mind ideas about depression as a psychiatric or a psychological symptom, but has nothing to do with that.

Long term. Depression is simply the inverse of lt. p.

Is actually the weakening of the removal of connections that we call synapse is between neurons. I want to emphasize that both lt. p. And ltd. Are both critically involved in lots of different kinds of learning, and both of them tend to be involved in the formation of both short term memories and long term memories.

And this is very important in the removal of short term memories and long term memories, literally forgetting of certain things, because, as we all know, there are many things that we will never forget, and there are also things that we almost always forget. Now there's a third form of neuroplasticity that's involved in the formation of short and long term memories. It's important for us to discuss just briefly, but I do want to opposites that there are not just three forms of neural plasticity.

There are many other forms, dozens, if not more, things like spicy, timing dependent, plastically paid pulse facilitation on and on. But the third type of neuroplasticity that i'd like to mention now is neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is the formation of new neurons.

Now neurogenesis is robust in the developing nervous system. We know this is robust in the developing nervous system of animals and humans. However, neurogenesis, the literal formation of new neurons in the brain is a very exciting idea. And IT does occur. And it's very exciting in a way that has motivated lots of popular press outlets to talk about or to discuss papers that have discovered neurogenesis in the adult brain because, let's be honest, what's more exciting than the idea that your brain can add new brain cells later in life. And indeed, that has been shown even in people well into their eighties and nineties.

However, it's very important to know that the total amount of neurogenesis that occurs in the adult human brain is in fantastic vely small as a mechanism for neuroplasticity and learning as compared to the other forms of neuroplasticity that we discuss, such as long term potential and long term depression. So I don't want to you throw cold water on the topic of neurogenesis. It's incredibly interesting and important topic, but all too often they tend to eclipse the much more common mechanism for the formation of short and long term memories, which are those other forms we just talk about.

L, T, P, L, T, D. ta. So the point here is that, yes, indeed, there are new neurons that can be added in the adult brain, maybe even in the adult human brain.

And there is some evidence that some of those new neurons are added to the hip campus. In fact, a particular region of the hippocampus called the dentist gift s of the hip campus. And there's been a lot of controversy about how much neurogenesis occurs or doesn't occur and whether not occurs after puberty or not.

There's all fuel of people battling over this now for several decades. But one thing is very clear. Neurogenesis, while it's very exciting and intriguing, is not the main mechanism by which the formation of short and long term memories occurs when you learn new information. As you are right now, the storage of that information in your short term memory networks, which is then passed on to your long term memory networks, and that can be recalled, that allows you to state certain facts about, for instance, existence of this in color hippo campus.

Holly, you will remember that going forward, or your ability to perform any kind of motor movement that you learn now or way back in childhood, most of that is the consequence of the strengthening of particular connections in the weakening of other types of connections. Those are the two major forms of neuroplasticity. okay? So I don't want you to get the impression that there's something wrong with my memory and that I forgot that this episode is not about shorter, a long term memory, but it's about working memory.

And indeed, I have not forgotten. So now is where I tell you why I ve been talking about short and long term memory and the mechanisms of those because I want them to provide a stark contrast for what we call working memory. Working memory, as far as we know, does not involve neuroplasticity.

Or at least if IT does, it's not a particularly robust aspect of working memory. Rather, working memory is the reflection of a particular neural circuit running an algorithm over and over and over for different types of information. But the information isn't stored, is actually intentionally discarded.

Now, what sorts of daily activities and life activities would require working memory? The answer to that is basically everything that you need to do, but that you don't want to remember. Now, what types of things would those be? Well, let's think about IT.

Most all of us learned at some point in our life to tire own shoes. Presumably, you know how to tie your own shoes. If you don't, perhaps you should learn.

Or where? Well, crown or slippers, I don't know, but assume you can try your own, choose that, something that you know how to do. And you can do IT as a procedural, long term memory. You can do that action. You don't have to think about IT.

Too much working memory would come into play when, say, you wake up in the morning and you know that you need to head out for a job, but you also need to make a cup of coffee first, and you need to remember where the coffee is, where your shoes are, and perhaps you're making a phone call, you're having a conversation while you need to tie your shoes and so on and so forth. Working memory is basically the taking in of information that's critical for you to sequence your actions over a short period of time and then forget that sequence. For instance, i'm willing to bet that you put your shoes on to go running before you go running that sort of a and if you're like me, you drink your water, your coffee your year on monday before you go running.

The point here is that if you wake up in the morning and you like caffy before you go for a run, there are a certain series of action steps that you need to Carry out to hydrate, make that cup of coffee or tea, drink IT, put on your shoes, head out the door, you need to sequence things properly. But you don't want to commit your long term or even your short term memory stores to Carry out that sequence. You simply want to be able to Carry out that sequence and then discard that information about the sequence and focus your attention on, for instance, what trajectory you're going to run through the park or around your nights or hood.

Then you want to discard that information and you want to lean into the next portion of your day, and so on and so on. In fact, working memory is involved in essentially every activity, both cognitive and motor, from the point you wake up in the morning until the time go to sleep at night for every single day of your life. And we know this because there are in d people who have diminished working memory, or even lack working memory entirely.

Although the latter is somewhat rare, IT has happened. And as you can imagine, they have a complete failure of ability to sequence activities, and their lives are extremely difficult. They need a tone of assistance from other people, even more assistance than do people who have minimal or no long term memory.

okay. So this is really highlighting just how important work memory is. Working memory is basically the way that you navigate any immediate environment. And as I mentioned earlier, it's a very closely tied to attention because in order to know what to do now and then, what to do subsequently and then subsequently to that, you need to be able to hold your attention to the things you need to do.

So working memory and attention collaborate literally at a neural circuit level and at a neurochemical level in order to allow you to move through your day in an adaptive functional way. And people who have chAllenges with attention or focus or working memory, sometimes that can be hard to associate which one they're having chAllenges with really have a hard time moving through life as compared to people whose attention in working memory is more robust. Now the good news is today we're going to talk about working memory, some of the neural circuits involved and some of the neo chemicals involved that can augment or improve working memory.

And we're also going to talk about what one can do to directly increase the amount of neural transmission of those particular chemicals within the circuits, the control working memory, in other words, to improve your working memory. Now I can talk about working memory in the mechanisms that set up all day long, but as is often the case, sometimes it's Better to not just learn about concepts, but actually to experience them in a real time. So what we're going to do now is i'm actually going to give you a working memory test.

This is the sort of working memory test that you would take if you were to go into a psychology laboratory or neuroscience laboratory and they were studying working memory in humans. Now there's another advantage just doing this in real time right here as you're listening or as you're listening and watching. And that's because you're going to get data.

You're going to get information about what you're baseline working memory capacity is, and you're going to want to keep those data in your short term memory stores, maybe even your long term memory stores, but certainly in your short term memory stores because shortly later in this episode, i'm going to a talk about different ways to improve your working memory depending on where your baseline working memory start, which, by the way, turns out to be a pretty good proxy for the levels of a Normative alia called doping within the neural circuit that control working memory. So right now, let's take a working memory task. We're gona do this purely through audio form because I realized some people are watching and listening to this on youtube and others are just listening to this episode.

So they are not going to be any visual slides that I present. And that perhaps what distinguish what we're about to do most from what would happen in a laboratory. Typically in a laboratory, there would be some visual presentation of what i'm about to say.

But here, because of the format that most of you are consuming this information by, we're going to do this purely by audio. So the first test of your working memory is very simple. I'm going to read off a series of letters, and your task is to remember as many of those letters as you can.

The first string of letters is J, K, Z, P. I go. Just to make this really easy, i'm going to say IT twice, although typically in a working memory task, you would just be said once.

But i'm going to make this extra easy. J, K, Z, P, I. Okay, now you in your own head can try to recite back those letters, if you like.

Okay, second string letters, R, O, M, K, L, E. I am going to make this extra simple and do IT again, not typical for a working memory task, but there are some working memory task where that happens. R, O, N, K, L, E.

Now, a third string of letters just want to, can be a little bit longer. So queue up that working memory and attention. W, A C, Q V D N, I repeat that again.

W, A C, Q, V, D N, how many of the letters I just read can you remember? IT, okay. So depending on how many letters, as you can remember, perhaps you have a low, moderate or high degree of working memory.

Keep in mind that some of you are perhaps doing other things you are attending to driving or other tasks within your home or your office. And so perhaps you were able to pay full attention. So they'll be some variation there, but none. There's after reading each of those strings of letters, you were asked to recall those letters in your mind. And if you wrote them down and you rereading them, yes, that's cheating.

But how about this? What if I were to ask you now about the simplest first string of letters, the one that consisted only, only five letters? How many of you can remember any of those five letters? Now I I can't hear you if you're shouting them out.

I can't see you if you're raising your hand. But chances are most of you have forgotten the first series of letters, even though he was quite short. And you could remember IT early on that ability to remember that spring of letters when you first heard them.

And indeed, I read them twice. So i'd be very surprised if any of you couldn't remember that string of letters after hearing them twice. But I also read, use some other letters in the interview.

Okay, so that now, just couple minutes later, i'm asking you to remember that first string of five letters. And assuming that you didn't write IT down, you are not cheating. Chances are you remember anywhere from two to zero of those letters in that first word, which is a perfect example of your working memory.

Nothing got committed to short term, much less long term memory. Rather, your working memory was able to work with that information holding in mind for just as long as you thought you need to know that information. But then, thank goodness that information was discarded.

You didn't know that I was going to ask you for that first string of letters again after reading you the longer string of letters, but I did that deliberately to show you how your working memory works. So in some sense, the working memory task is a bit unusual. That is a test of, yes, memory in the very, very short term, but also a test of your ability to forget to discard information that's not critical.

And that gets us back to the original definition of working memory, which is our ability to attend to specific small batches of information. Remember, IT for just as long as we think we need to, and then to discard that information. And by the way, if you want to know what those first five letters were, they were J, K, Z, P, I.

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Now in reality is a distribution, in fact, is what we call a Normal distribution. So IT really isn't two bins. But during today's discussion, and in fact, in a lot of laboratory studies, we can actually ban people into these two groups.

The neural circuitry underlying working memory involves a lot of different brain locations, that is, a lot of different neural networks collaborating to create this thing we call working memory. However, there are a couple of key hubs, that is, locations within the brain that are especially important for working memory. The ones that i'd like to focus on today involve the prefrontal cortex.

So this is neural real state that results just behind the forehead and the neurons in the brain stem so further back in the brain that manufactured dupine, and that send their little wires that we call axons up to the preferences cortex to release dopa. Dopamine is in a modulator. Many people are familiar with doping and familiar with that in the context of motivation and drive.

Sometimes people mistaken ly think it's only involved in pleasure, but dopamine is involved in motivation and drive. When doping systems go arry, that is, if their levels too high, that can create manic states, that can create addictive states. When open, my levels are too low.

You can get movement chAllenges, such as in parkinson's, which is a deficit or a literal destruction of the neurons that manufacturer top me. There are bunch of different areas of the brain that those dopamine irons in the brain and project to. But for right now, we're going to focus almost entirely on the dopamine projections from the brain them to the prefrontal test, which is called the missing cortical circuitry.

I'm not going to get into the origins or the meaning of the missing critical versus other dopamine projection systems. I did that in a couple of episodes about A D H D and attention and dopamine in particularly in you can find those that huberman lab, that com just put domain and circuits into the search function. And IT will take you to those particular times, times I described that.

But since we want to keep things fairly top down towards the level of neurosis, citi here just know that there are bunch of neurons that manufactured dopa mean back in the brain stem that send their x on so so low wires up to the profondo core tex, and that the amount of dopamine released per unit time, so in a certain amount of time, strongly dictate the extent to which working memory capacity is going to be high, medium or law. Now I want to be very clear because i'm onna. Come back to this a little bit later.

Again and again, IT is the case that when dopamine levels are lower, that is, either there fewer names that have the potential to released open in the frontal cortex or for whatever reason, less is being released in the frontal cortex, that working memory performance tends to be lower as compared to conditions where dopamine release, where the availability of dopamine is higher. However, IT is not the case that more dopamine is always going to equate to improved working memory. This is so important that i'm going to say that, again, IT is not always the case that increasing the amount of dopamine E E transmission in the frontal cortex leads to improvements in working memory.

There is a specific criteria that allows us to predict whether not IT will improve or maintain or actually degrade working memory performance. So before you head to the end of the pod test to transfigure out ways to increase dopamine to improve working memory, please keep that fact in mind. Don't just committed to your working memory committee to your short and long term memory because it's very important if your goal is to improve your working memory.

With that said, I do want to describe just a little bit of research showing the relationship between having a low working memory span, as it's called the ability to only remember a few letters or numbers or short batches of information, as compared to a high working memory span, meaning longer strings of letters, longer strings of numbers, which, of course, in the real world translates to being able to Carry out shorter versus longer action sequences, as described earlier. In the scenario where you're getting up in the morning, you're making coffee and you're heading out for run and set at, people do differ in terms of their working memory capacity. And there is a classic study done by cools and despair to and colleagues.

This is publishing two thousand and eight where they had a way to label the amount of doping that is available for released in the frontal cortex in human subjects. They did this by the injection of a specific die that diets taken up specifically by the neurons in the brain that manufactured dopamine. Then they were able to image the brains of those people while those people were right awake using something called positron emission tomography.

Again, the specific tool is necessarily important. But since some of you like to know, and what they found is that for people that had a high working memory span, that is, could remember long strings of numbers or letters or other information, they tended to be the people that had more dopamine available for release in the frontal cortex, either because they had more of the dopamine neurons themselves, or similar number of neurons. But those neurons had more dopamine to release.

okay. And they also found the converse individuals that had a low working memory span and ability had less open available for release. So that establishes a correlation, but it's not caught.

A different study, which is also a classic, was Carried out by brazos I Brown, roseville and goldmine. And this is a really important study, because in this study they were able to introduce small amount of dopamine directly into the cortex and evaluate working memory capacity. Now any time a working memory test is done, the same pattern always is.

This is regardless of any dopamine being infused into the brain, which is, people and animals, for that matter, are very good at remembering short Spencer of numbers, letters or other types of information. So if you tell them one thing like the letter a, then you ask them. To remember letter, almost everybody remembers that.

But if you give them a string of ten letters, they remember a fewer of those ten letters. That's sort of obvious, but it's important point emphasized nonetheless. And so there is a end of a dropping off curve of performance as one progresses from fewer to greater number of items to be remembered.

In this study, when dopamine was introduced to the frontal cortex, the number of things that individuals could remember simply increased. IT was a very straightforward result. More dopamine introduced allowed longer letter number and information strings to be remembered, and of course, forgotten, because that's what working memory involves, remembering and then discarding information shortly thereafter.

Now, the findings that I just described compliment what I said before, which is the naturally occurring experiment, bring people to lab measures of their working memory spin. Look at how much doping they make, higher dopamine, Better working memory. Lower dopamine, lower working memory.

The experiment I just described was wanting which doping is introduced, showing that doping is very likely the rate limitation or the capacity limiting spite, the Better way to put IT the capacity limiting neuromodulator for improving working m. That's a fantin erd speak way of saying more dopamine allows for Better working memory. But a critical feature of this experiment is that they did a number of experiments where they didn't introduce to pine, but instead they introduced other neuromodulators to the prefrontal cortex, such as nor up in a or serotonin.

And the interesting finding is that the addition of north aneurin or serotonin, which, of course, are other neuromodulators that can change the firing patterns of neurons in the prefrontal cortex, but elsewhere as well, just that in this case, they were out of the prefrontal cortex, had no effect on working memory IT, neither improved nor degraded working memory when those neuromodulators were introduced. In other words, dopamine, and perhaps only doping, seems to be the dominant neuromodulation for regulating the degree, that is, whether not you have small, medium or large amounts of working memory capacity in the preferences cortex. And of course, there have been a bunch of other experiments that are worth spending once briefly in this context, such as taking people that have a high working memory capacity and indeed have their brain image.

And one sees that they have high levels of baseline doping, especially the doping projecting to the prefrontal cortex. And then they're given a drug that depletes dopamine within the prefrontal cortex and their performance drops. And so it's so nice about the literature around working memory.

Is that, well, i'm not covering all of that literal, exhaustively IT. All tends to job at all point in a direction whereby the levels of dopamine being released in the preferences cortex during working memory tasks, corporates very strongly with capacity to perform working memory task. Lord opa mean lower working memory span, as it's called hired opi mean higher working memory span.

okay. So next, we're going to do another working memory test different than one we did earlier. And we're going to do that with a specific purpose mine, which is for you to be able to determine what your working memory capacity is and by extension, your baseline levels of doped, or at least the levels of dopamine that are likely being released into your prefrontal cortex while you do these working memory tasks.

And other is we're going to try and figure out whether or not you are of the low, medium or high work in memory capacity. And of course, we're doing that in part to try and to establish whether or not you likely have low, medium or high amount of dopa amine available for release in the prefrontal tal cortex. Of course, we're not putting you into a positive ona mission torode phy scanning device.

We are unable to do that for obvious reasons. But keep in mind that what we are about to do is very similar and in some cases, identical to laboratory studies where the researchers were trying to determine what people's levels of dopamine within these, particularly neural networks we have been discussing. The musical tico pathway are likely to be.

In other words, is performance on the working memory test that we are about to do is a decent indication of what the dopamine levels that are available for released in your pronto cortex. Perhaps might be now, I say perhaps might be because I don't want to cause any unnecessary alarm if, for instance, you fall into the low working memory span group. In fact, if you fall into the low working memory span group, there are actually some terrific tools that you can use to improve demean transmission in those pathways and improve your working memory.

I also don't want people to get the impression that somehow performance on this working memory task is reflective of some larger dopamine issue in the brain. And certainly IT is not. I repeat, this is not diagnostic of parkinson or any kind of new general condition.

And I will say that deficits in working memory are common in patients with partisans for obvious reasons. Those patients have deficits and dopamine neurons, not only production but the number of dopamine neurons. It's one of the hallmark features of parkinsons, but also in things like traumatic brain injury at set up. But the working memory test that you're about to take when given to a general population or group of undergraduates or so called Normal are typical control subjects, which all of you are okay.

So unless you're dealing with a traumatic brain injury or you know you have parkinson's, we know that the data that you're gna get back right now is very similar to the data that people get back when they do these sorts of studies in a laboratory that is, is typical for some people have a short working memory span. Some people have a medium working memory span, and some people have a high working memory span. And today we're actually just going to divide into two bins, short working memory span and high working memory span.

And we can have some degree of confidence that correlates with the amount of dopa available for release in the frontal cortex. But and this is a very important point, as we progress along this discussion of working memory, the neural circuits dopa mean at sea. I want to make clear something that I said earlier, which is that IT is not the case that increasing the amount of doping that's available always increases working memory spent.

In fact, there's a common circumstance whereby people with a relatively high degree of working memory capacity increase their dopamine levels even further using pharmacology or other methods that will discuss and their performance actually can degrade. okay. So if any of us confusing now, we'll make IT all very simple going forward so that if you decide to implement any any of the protocols discussing this episode, you are aware of what you can expect and whether not you are in the category people that should or perhaps should not incorporate those protocols.

Okay, let's test your working memory again. This time, the working memory task is going to be a little bit different than the one you did previously. This working memory task involves me reading six different sentences to you, and your job is to pay attention to the six sentences because you're going to be asked some information about these sentences in a few moments.

The first sentence is real estate costs are going up. The second sentence is the atlantic ocean is warm in summer. The third sentence is there's a lot of interest now in electric cars.

The fourth sentence is some reptiles eat only once a year. The fifth sentence is kids nowadays look at screens more than sixty percent of their waking life. And the sixth and final sentence is football can mean different sports depending on the country.

Okay, so I reduce six sentences. They were moderately long. I confess your job for the working memory task is now to recall as many of the final words of each of those sentences as you can.

I'll give you a few moments to do that. Now before I tell you what the final word of each of those sentences actually is, I want to remind everybody that working memory capacity follows a Normal distribution. So some of you will be able to remember the final word of perhaps five or even six of those sentences, although I must say that is exceedingly rare.

Some of you are going to be able to remember three to four of the final words of those sentences. And that's more typical. That actually represents the average or the mean, as we call IT. And then fewer people, although still many of you will only be able to remember one or two of the final words of those sentences. okay.

So now I am assuming that most of you have tried to call a memory the final word of as many of those six sentences as you can and maybe written them down or you've typed them into your phone, or you have some record of what you recall those final words of those sentences are. Now i'm going to tell you the actual final word of each of those sentences, the no word that the first sentence was up, because, as you may recall, the sentence was real. Al, estate costs are going up.

The final word of the second sentence was summer, because the sentence was, the atlantic ocean is warm in summer. The final word of the third sentence was cars, because the sentence was, there is a lot of interest in elector cars. The final word of the fourth sentence was year, because the sentence was some reptiles eat only once a year.

The final word of the fifth sentence was life, because the sentence was, kids nowadays look at screens more than sixty percent of their waking life in the final word of the six sentence was country, because the sentence was, football can mean different sports depending on the country. Okay, so be honest with yourself and tell yourself and you don't have to tell anyone else if you don't want to. How many of the final words of those six sentences you could remember correctly? Important that you remember them correctly? Again, the number words that you can recall, that is, your working memory span is going to vary from person to person.

But we can take the Normal distribution of those scores and draw line down the middle and say that if you could remember three to six of the final words of those sentences correctly, you are going to fall into the high working memory span group. Whereas if you could only remember one or two or maybe zero of the final words of those six sentences, then you're going to be in the low working memory span group. Again, I don't want to alarm anybody.

This doesn't mean that you have any global memory deficits or dopamine deficits, but IT is important, especially if you plan to apply any of the protocols to improve working memory that you fatefully. That is, you accurately report your working memory performance, at least to yourself. Now as you recall, whether not you have low or high.

And here we are just binning into low and high. There's no medium we've divided right at that line. We're saying, if you remember three to six, we're calling that high work in memory span, at least for this discussion.

And if you remember, fewer than three, even down to zero of the final words of those sentences, that low working memory spent. We're divided into, we divided you into two groups. And we do know when this has been done in large numbers of human subjects.

And some in some cases, all of those subjects have their brains image for the amount of dopa amine available for release in their preferences. Cortex, that short working memory span correlates with lower amounts of dopamine were as higher working memory span or longer working memory span with everyone to call IT correlates with more dopa available for released in the profondo cortex. Now this is where things get really interesting and Frankly, really exciting for everybody, especially the folks in the low working memory span group.

Work from martis, pieto and colleagues at U. C. Berkeley as well as other laboratories, have explored the consequences of increasing dopamine levels in the brain of typical populations of individuals.

So these are not people with parkinson or tbi, but undergraduate students, which we do realize is not completely represented of the and Normal population outside the university, but also people from the community. So people are not university students and so on. And the ways that they've increased opening in those individuals have tended to rely on pharmacology.

So these are prescription drugs that most often have been developed for the treatment of parkinson's in order to increase open mine levels. But for some other purposes as well, drugs like bromo cyp, in which we know are so called dopamine, agonies and agony, is a drug that has the consequence of increasing the amount of a given neo chemical, in this case, doping. Where is an antagonist is a drug that either blocks or prevents or somehow lowers the total available amount of a certain chemical, such as the opening or setanta.

So rama cyp team is a drug that increases dba, mean, so when human subjects came into a laboratory, didn't take any drug, no berm crip tine yet. And of course, they were being evaluated for whether not they were taking any means for A D. H. D, the caffeine consumption and set up. There were certain rulings and rule outs for that study.

But certainly people that were taking any kind of prescription medication for A D H C were not included in the study or we're eliminated from the study because those drugs can indeed increase dopamine as well as some other no modulator such as nor an f, an f, an effort. I covered all that in the two adhd episodes that I did, which, again, you can find that he would lab that com, just go to the search function, put in A D H. In any event, in these studies, they took people that had not taken any drugs to increase all, I mean, had their working memory measured very similarly to the way that you measured your working memory a few minutes ago with the six sentence business that we did.

And then they took promote ript n and they either took a low, a moderate or hydas a boma cyp team. And ninety minutes later, they took a working memory task. And what was observed was very interesting.

You can probably predict what IT is based on everything i've set up until now, individuals that initially had low baseline levels of doped and therefore shorter working memory. So they only remembered zero to about three of the final words of that six sentence series. Their performance significantly improved.

They were able to remember four, and in some cases, up to six. The final words of those sentences. Now that is in complete agreement with everything we set up until now, simply says that dopamine is important working memory. If you start off at lower dopamine stores or dopamine availability for released in the promoter cortex, lower working memory performance increased dopamine through insua, a cyp team, which is, is that mean agonist all of the circuit changes that we want and would expect to improve working memory occur and indeed, working memory improves very straight forward. That's interesting.

But the even more interesting part of the study is that individuals that already had high working memory span when they took from a cyp team at a low or a moderate dose, their working memory did not increase further. Now if somebody was already getting six of the final words of those six sentences, well then of course, they couldn't improve their performance anymore. But many of the people in the high working memory, being in group, of course, only remembered four.

In some cases, three typically will be four, five or six of the final words of those sentences. When they took boma cyp ti at low or moderate doses, their working memory did not improve significantly. There was either no change or in very modest change.

And here's where things get really interesting. When individuals who already had a high work in memory span took the highest to summer crip tine. And by the way, studies verified that the amount of dopa available indeed increased.

So that was important to do. And they did that well. There are more working memory performance actually decreased such that now they had a short or a low working memory span.

So what this tells us is that the relationship between doping and working memory follows an inverted u shape functions to imagine a you and then just flip IT over. Meaning, if you have a low dopa availability in the prefrontal cortex, working memory span is short. As you increase that amount, working memory becomes greater. But if you increase the number of dopa in the prefrontal cortex, too much working memory span actually drops significantly below the baseline that you started with. Now this is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the known relationship between working memory and attention.

Now this is very important understanding the context of adhd, but also for people who don't have adhd and are struggling to maintain, focus on attention and Carry out working memory tasks throughout their Normal everyday life, not in the laboratory, but just moving through life, because these days we hear a lot, a lot, a lot about people struggling with focus on attention. Perhaps we don't know, perhaps in part due to overuse of smart phone social media setter, although there's not yet a direct cause of relationship that's been establish, the data that are emerging suggested, indeed, overuse of those things can cause problems. But regardless of the source, there does seem to be more add both in kids and an adult and sub clinical chAllenges in focus on attention.

And here's where things get really interesting. As IT relates to the neutral circuitry, work from despair, doo and colleagues and other labat's ies as well have shown using the similar paradise that I described before, giving people drugs to increase their baseline levels of the opening above the initial starting point of short or long term memory span capacity. And then had people can perform different types of working memory tasks that happened at two different aspects of attention in working memory.

Right up until now, we've been talking about working memory one thing, but working memory actually involves two things, or at least two things. The first is that in order to Carry out a working memory task, to attend to something to really focus, we need the ability to rule out distractors. We need to be able to not pay attention to things that would otherwise distracted us.

In addition to that, we need to be able to switch from one context to the next right, making the cup of coffee to putting on one shoes and heading out the door, and in some cases, lawing different context together, talking on the phone, while time, when, shoes and so on and so forth. What this work shows us is that the ability to tasks which and context witch that is to shift around what IT is that we're paying attention to an interleaved different things that we're paying attention to something is so critical for moving through our daily lives is largely dependent on the dopamine projections to a structure. The brain called the basal ganglia, which is a structure i've talked about before in this podcast.

But if you didn't hear about IT, we can just broadly define the structure as being involved in movement generation and stopping movement generation. In fact, it's often discussed as the neural circuitry that generates go as in do command and no go don't do command. So the basel ganger are involved in task switching, and they are involved in task switching in part by sending certain commands to go do certain things and no, go to not do other things, okay, tasks watching, stop doing this.

Start doing that, start doing that, stop doing this. And sometimes, to varying extent, right? I mean, could take any real worlds scenario time when shoes while talking on the phone.

And we could micro analyze IT in the context of this. But I think if you think about IT just a little bit, you understand that in order to perform daily task, we need to be able to task switch. And that's not always a start one task end, start a new task, and often times were interleaving different task of varying degrees.

Now the other aspect of working memory and attention is to eliminate distractions, to not pay attention to the irrelevant stuff in one's environment, or even the irrelevant stuff on your own body, like you can get to act by, know a button that you might not be only partially button, or maybe little something on your sleeve if you're trying to do something else at that moment. Again, people with A D H, D in people who have sub clinical chAllenges and focus really have a hard time with this, right? You know, the sort of stereotype is, you know, the outlook of squirl, that whole thing.

But really, this typically exists as a more subtle and chAllenging phenomenon for people where they either can't remember what they were doing, or they are simply drawn down different trajectories, different thought trajectories or action trajectories, and then they have a hard time making IT back to the original thing that they were trying to focus on. And we know, based on these studies of dopamine and their imaging, that eliminating distractors is largely the consequence of doome neurons projecting to the prefrontal cortex. Okay, now why I telling you all this neural circuitry stuff? Well, yes, there are a bunch of study you showing if you selectively activate the neurons that send dobin into the basel ganglia, you improve test switching ability without an improved ability to rule out distractors.

Or if you selectively increase the amount doping from neurons projecting the proof cortex that are able to selectively improve the elimination of distractors without improving test switching ability for practical purposes. In this discussion, we want to pay careful attention to whether or not the data tell us that those particular protocols, that is, particular approaches, are globally increasing dupine, that is, increasing the activity of dopamine neurons project into the base of gangling and the prefrontal to cortex, or selectively to the basel gangly, or selectively to the prefrontal cortex. And what I can tell you now is that, fortunately, there are several protocol, some of which are behavioral, some of which involved specific over the counter supplements and some of which involve prescription for ecology, that can tap into each of these systems independently as well as globally increased opening to improve focus working memory at large.

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okay. So let's talk about protocols to improve working memory, specifically by way of changing levels of dopamine in the brain. Now i've discussed dopamine many times before in this podcast. In fact, we have entire episodes devoted to optimizing and regulating dopamine. And of course, depine comes up within the context of the hd episodes and other episodes as well.

And again, if you have specific questions about dopamine or any other topic for that matter, if you go to huberman lab dot com, that website has been engineered so that you can put one word, such as dopamine, but also multiple keywords. So perhaps dopamine exercises or dopamine cold plunge at set up into the search function and IT will take you to the specific timestamps of multiple episode where those topics were discussed as well as news letters where some of that information has been condensed ed into short PDF form at seta. So we certainly are going to cover some material about improving dopamine for sake of improving working memory now.

But if you're generally interested in the science and former ology of dopamine and protocols to module doping levels, all of that can be found at human lab docotor. okay. So let's say you have a short working memory span or a moderate working memory span, and you want to experiment with increasing levels of dopamine for sake of improving working memory.

Now there are a lot of different ways that one could imagine doing that. Lets start with the behavioral tools known to increase dopamine stores that is shown in p reviewed studies to increase dopamine stores within certain circuits of the brain that are relevant for working memory performance. And the protocol that immediately leaps to mind is the use of certain non sleeve deep pressed protocols.

Now, non sleeped ep rest or n sdr is actually a term that icon in, because there is a practice that's been established for many hundreds of years called yoga edra, which actually means yoga sleep. Thereby, individuals, potentially you, if you decide to do them, lie down, listen to a script, that is, listen to an audio script which generally instruct you to do long excel breathing to liberates, relax your musculature of your face and of your body. And yoga ea typically also involves doing certain intentions.

And the instruction always given at the beginning of organiser is that you should try to not fall asleep. Now, some people sometimes fall asleep. Some people don't fall left. But the idea and the rotated support that yoga eja puts people into and of a shallow pattern of sleep, certainly not deeper sleep and not rapid di movement sleep, but is a very interesting in unusual brain state, for which we're starting to understand more and actually have some plans and then not to just in future to collaborate with Matthew Walker, the author of the book, why we sleep in some other colleagues, to trying figure out what exact patterns of neural activity are taking place in the brain and rest of nervous system during yoga ea. And this similar protocol, which I call non sleep depressed.

The difference between yoga ea and non sleep depressed is that non sleep deep pressed doesn't include any of the intentions and removes a lot of the kind of OPEC, or sometimes called mystic language from the protocol. Now, a great thing is that yoga edroy scripts or protocols, as well as n sdr scripts or protocols, are available totally, zero costs. You can find them certainly on apps like waking up, but also on youtube, for instance, if you put N S, D, R and my last name, there's a ten minute sdr scrip there.

There are a lot of yoga re. scripts. If you prefer a female voice. There are a lot of different excEllent female voices out there. One in particular that I like very much is Kelly boys.

First in Kelly lasting bos SHE has both the organizer in its the r scripts of various durations of anywhere from eight minutes all the way out to, I believe, forty five minutes. Why am I telling you all as well? They're been several studies, but in particular one.

And I do realized we're talking about only one study, but the results are really intriguing as IT relates to what we're talking about today in this study, they had individuals do effectively in n sdr protocol they call IT yoga edra. And the protocol that used was essentially a yoga eager script. They had people lie down and listen to a yoga eja to perform organiser.

And they evaluated the amount of dopamine available within the brain, both prior two and after performing this yoga ea script. And what they discovered was that after performing a yoga edra protocol, the baseline levels of dopamine, that is, the amount of dopamine available in the basel ganga and a few other structures of the human brain course of these are humans, was increased by as much as sixty percent as comparing individuals that did a different protocol, not organ ega, not n sdr. Now, did that study evaluate lots of different durations of A K N S yard? No, they looked at fairly long our plus yoga eja sessions.

However, there's some other data that have explored yoga eja A K N str in the context of cognitive performance and a few other circumstances, all of which point to the fact that cognitive performance, and in particular cognitive forming task that have a working memory element to them. So they weren't exact working memory test that you did earlier, but they have a working memory element to them that is, subject how to keeps certain small batches of information in mind and then discard that information in order to be able to perform the task well. All those show significant improvements in task performance.

So while something like nsd r yoga eo might sound kind of mystical or you know, wish you were here, I guess says, uh, the kids say weak sauce. Uh, to some of you, IT is anything but weak sauce. IT is really powerful stuff. And it's powerful stuff as IT relates to the very neural chemicals and neural circuits that are involved in working memory.

So if I were ready to take a step back and just say, okay, what are some zero cost, very low, if any, risk protocols that one could perform in order to improve dopamine levels without having to ingest anything, take anything, really do much of anything at all except lie. There are, do this progressive muscle relaxation. There are a few other things involved in a str as well.

Would you will learn if you decide to to try them and improve or increase the levels of dooming availability in the brain significantly? Well then nsd r in organization really are the first line tools. If one wants to do that, I think it's reasonable to say that as I mentioned before, there's no reason think that there's any risk of doing nsd r yogananda, you know provide that you're lying down in a safe place and is opposed like in the middle road or something.

But assuming you do IT in a safe location, I would encourage you to try IT for really for twenty to thirty minutes. When you first explore IT, perhaps you do longer, although I personally have a hard time doing long yogananda scripts regularly at full hours as a big commitment, I don't generally have that much time. I often will do a ten minute n sdr.

Have there been brain imaging experiments done for each and all of these yoga eja scripts to determine the amount or if there's any dopamine increase within the brain? no. But I think that we can safely extrapolate from that wonderful study out of skin and avia that showed that when human do this yoga ea protocol, that there is a significant increase in baseline dopamine levels within gineral structures that relate to working memory.

Now, many of you perhaps heard that getting in a cold lunch or taking a cold shower, or provided you can do IT safely, getting into a cold ocean or cold lake, can significantly, maybe even double, or even triple, your circulating dopamine e levels. And indeed, that is true. IT has been shown that when people get into cold water, typically up to their neck, and that cold water, by the way, can range in temperate anywhere from low forties to low sixties, depending on how long you stay in, that there is a significant increase in the so called circulating cata coomes.

What are the cat coomans? The categories are depine nor and afnan happen. If on now, the evidence for the category in increase in response to cold water mainly stems from two studies, and in particular one.

And in that particular study, they had people get into, I would say, super cold water was in the low sixty degrees, by the way I speak, fairing high hair. And they had those human subjects emerge in water up to their neck. I think they actually had them sitting in long chairs on the bottom of pool.

But again, their heads were about water so they could breathe, and they stayed for quite a long while, forty five minutes or longer. And IT was observed that there was a big, big, statistically significant increase in epinephrine, epinephrine dopamine that lasted several hours or more. This is one of the reasons why if if you've ever done deliberate called exposure, as it's called IT, often is uncomfortable when you get in.

But then when you get out, you feel different, you feel really good in most cases, provided if you're me, you take a warm shower afterwards. Yes, i'd like to do that. I realized if you want to increase your metabolite, perhaps it's Better.

Do not warm up afterwards. I like a nice warm shower to get in the song afterwards. That's just me.

but. Deliberate code exposure clearly induces a state shift of mind and body that most people provided. They do IT correctly, and they don't go to water that far too cold for them for too long. They report as pleasant.

And I think it's reasonable to assume that some of that is the consequence of these increases in catalogues, which is why many people opt for a cold shower, which, if you me, cold shower, followed by a warmer, hot shower, where a cold plunge in the morning, or maybe even just once or twice a week. Many people like them. Typically people like getting out of them in the feeling that they have after they do them. Although some of you sickle s really like the feeling of getting in and being in IT, but not me.

The point here is that if we were to take a look at the landscape of zero cost behavioral tools, in fact, behavioral tools that could potentially save you money, meaning reduce your heating bill, that are known to increase the very newer chemicals, A K dopamine, that are involved in improving working memory, I think it's reasonable to assume that a cold shower about thirty, sixty minutes prior to doing any kind of working memory task or any kind of activity that would require increased focus could be okay. We don't know that specific studies have not been done, but could be in theory IT makes sense mechanistically, it's logically sound, could be done after deliberate cold exposure. And indeed, many people report not just feeling a bit of you know, mild eufor or feeling good after deliberate cold exposure, but also an increased capacity to focus, in fact, so much so that a lot of people who do deliberate color exposure say that they don't require as much caffeine in order to maintain their alertness and energy, which shouldn't be surprising to us at all.

right? I mean, the increasing categories, we know this. So that's another protocol that you could explore as well. Is there an important difference or not between deliberate cold exposure done by cold shower or deliberate cold exposure in a cold plunge or the ocean? Frankly, there haven't been a lot of studies comparing those. But I think IT stands to reason that if you have access to a cold plunger, cold body of water, that you can safely get into up to your neck for thirty seconds to a minute, if it's fifty degrees or less, right?

If you get in colder water, we know, for instance, if you get into a safe forty five degrees water and you only get in for thirty seconds, you're going to get a big increase in the category means, perhaps as big as the category means, increase that you would get from being in sixty degree water for forty five minutes. Most people don't have forty five minutes to sit around and water up to their neck, so most people opt for thirty seconds to as much as three minutes. Deliberate cold exposure in a shower or coal plant.

Other body of water can only do this. If you can do IT safely. Never, ever, please, for the love of god, please, never, ever do any kind of hyperventilation breathing or breath holding while doing deliberate cold exposure, because you can pass out, you can die.

Don't combine breath work and deliberate cold exposure, just don't separate those two things completely. okay? But deliberate all exposure, we know, is a very reliable way to increase the category means, which includes dopamine. So if you want to explore deliberate cold exposure protocols, get into the new ones of temperature duration and set a, you can find that completely.

Zero costco, a huberman and lab dot com, go to the menu taps, scroll down a news letter and go to the cold exposure newsletter, where IT details all of that, in short, PDF form. Now, some of you are probably asking, hey, what if I was in the high or long working memory spend group? I ought to have high baseline levels of doping.

Should I not do yogananda or ndr? Should I not do deliver cold exposure? Well, there, you're just going to have to experiment again. There's essentially zero risk to doing yoga edia nsd r as I mentioned before, the liberate cold exposure, there's always some risk getting into water.

Cold water, people always want to know how cold well, the newsletter gets to this, but i'll just tell you right now as well, the ideal temperature is the temperature that you can safely get into and stay in for a duration of thirty seconds to three minutes before getting out. Some people have to go longer, but I think thirty seconds to three minutes is a good duration to work with for most people, especially if you're going to do IT frequently so that temperatures should be safe, free to stay in for that duration. But uncomfortable enough that there are some impulse to want to get out, that you have to work to stay in there.

You have to kind of overcome that a journal and release and the impulse to get out. So for some people, that's going to be forty five degree. For some people, be forty degrees depends on how cold adapted you are, depends on how rested you are.

There is no specific temperature you have to really gage for yourself. And so air on the side of caution, and you can experiment provided to experiment within the margins of safety. So if you found during the working memory test that you took today that you have a very good working memory, I don't think there's any reason to avoid yoga is your nsd r and deliberate cold exposure.

In fact, there maybe reasons to increase your dopamine e and other category ans by way of nsr yoga edra deliberate cold exposure, perhaps for working memory performance. Maybe I could increase further. Perhaps IT would decrease performance.

In which case there you got your answer. You don't have to do those protocols again, and you certainly wouldn't. To do them before anything involves a lot of working memory and attention. But of course, those protocols have other benefits as well. So there's no reason to avoid them entirely, perhaps avoid the move in the context of trying to improve working memory.

However, if you're somebody that has chAllenges with working memory, chAllenges with attention, chAllenges with focus, well, then I think that the protocols we've been talking about up until now would be an excEllent first for a into the sorts of things that you could do to increase dopamine and of course, those other category ans as a way to see whether not IT augments your focus on attention and working memory capacity. Now some of you are probably shouting, shouting, shouting. What about exercise? Does an exercise increased of IT? does.

Yes, there are other things that increased, of me, is not exercise. There are activities that increased, dooming. Some people are probably in weight.

Doesn't playing video games increased dopamine. Sex increases dopamine. Chocolate increases.

doping? E. S, yes, indeed. Those things can increase. Open me what's interesting and important about the protocols i've been talking about.

However, ncr yoga ea deliberate called exposure is not just that they increase dopamine, but the duration over which they increase dopamine OK. This is very important. If you won't understand more about the relationship between dopamine Spike is are called in doping baseline.

And why am emphasizing these tools that cause large, long lasting increases in baseline dobin? Check out the episodes I did on optimizing dopamine. We've got a link to them in the show. Note captions now before I talk about other ways to increase dopamine for the sake of improving working memory, things like over the counter, supplements, like a terrine mcparland, things like that I do briefly want to mention. And I promise briefly, I know sometimes I say briefly, and then I spent twenty minutes telling you about something, but very brief.

Ly, I just want to spend two minutes telling you about protocols that we do not yet know whether not they increase doping levels, but we do know that they improve working memory, because, after all, this episode is about working memory, not just about dopamine and working memory. IT has been shown that the use of mineral beats, okay, by arab eats being the presentation or the listening to sounds of different frequencies in the two years, typically by headphones that's been shown to work best. And there's a subtraction between the two frequencies, such as the brain tends to in train or start to follow a particular frequency within, not the entire brain, but certain neural circuits.

So if you've heard of, say, fifteen hurts beat or forty hurts by narrow beat, that doesn't mean that you listen to a fifteen heart sound or forty hurt sound. You listen to two different frequency of the sound that hurts is just a measured of sound frequency in each of the two years. And then the difference between them is forty hurts or fifteen hurts.

And there are several studies that show not enormous. Okay, I want to be clear. Small to moderate improvements in working memory performance, but in some cases, significant improvement.

And i'll provide a link to these newspapers in the shown up captions, but i'll just briefly described them, by way, the title and their major conclusions. The first is a study entitled the effects of bio and monaro beats stimulation on cognitive functioning in subjects with different levels of emotionality. A really interesting study published in twenty fifty.

There was a relatively small number of subjects, only twenty four participants, sixty miles eight males between one thousand and one years old. Listen to these forty hurts by moral beats and by the way, it's very easy to find apps and other sources of forty hurts by narrow beats at zero cost or nominal cost out there. Um you simply look for forty hurts by narrow beats and looked at performance on working memory tasks as well as some other cognitive asm found in some cases a small to moderate but significant improvement in code new performance on working memory task.

The aspect of the study looking at emotionality did not find a significant effects. So IT doesn't seem that emotionality impact things there. But none the less.

That study, plus the other one entitled the affected by neural beat on visual spatial working memory and critical connectivity. This was a study portion twenty sixteen found generally something similar. In this case, they're using fifteen hurts by neural beats.

And here I am. Paraphrase produced network activity characteristic of high information transfer with consistent connection trains. What they are really talking about is changes in neural activity patterns within the brain that LED to, or at least were correlated with, improvements on visual spatial working memory.

Visual spatial working memory tests are different than the working memory test that you, your visual spatial working memory task involve the cognitive generation that is within your head of the so called visual spatial sketched pads. So it's this idea that you see something and then you sketched IT out in your mind. You have to know the relationships between things in space, intention of what they are.

Keep those in mind again, because it's working memory just as long as as necessary to perform a task. That's what visual spatial working memory is. As you can imagine, IT translates to an enormous number of everyday activities required for focus and attention and learning and performance.

And indeed, fifteen hurts by nor robes was able to produce a small but significant. Improvement in that sort of working memory task. So I want to ea size again, we don't know the relationship between by neal beat and dopamine, at least not from these studies.

But I felt that would be remiss if I didn't mention these two studies that show that forty hurts by neural beats, fifteen hurt by neural beats, can indeed improve working memory performance. And in these sorts of scenarios, individuals are listening to the final while they are doing the working memory task. And in some cases, before they are doing the working memory task, either seems to work IT depends on the study, the bunch of other studies.

But I thought i'd mention by neural beds because I know a number of people are interested in them. Again, non for maccoll gic, zero cost because you can find tools for mineral beach generation zero cost out there. Approaches to improving working memory.

Okay, what about over the counter compounds that are known to increase circulating dopamine that can potentially improve working memory? And that indeed have been shown imperio reviewed studies to improve working memory by way of increasing circulating, presumably, brain levels of doping. Well, I can think of two specific categories of supplements that is over the counter compounds that, at least at this point time, or legal in the united states, that can increase doping levels.

Those two are l tyros ine, which is in a mino acid precor to dopamine, and mca print, which is a believer or not, it's the a vvd bean, or the outer component of this velvet bean that contains, or is equivalent to ninety nine percent l dopa. L dopa is a key component in the biochemical casket, leading to the production of doping. In fact, l dopa is often prescribed for parkinson's patients as a means to increase the dopamine levels.

There at least three studies that I am aware of of the use of machine appears to increase doping, forward the treatment of parkinson's. In other words, mca print increases dopamine levels. And yes, IT has been shown to improve some of those symptoms of parkinson's patients.

We're not talking about treating of parkinson today. I want to caution people against any sort of use of supplements to treat parkinson's or other conditions without consulting your doctor or that's very, very critical to point out. We're talking about ways to increase depine for sake of improving working memory by way of supplementation.

And then we should start with alterations acy. Because l terracing, unlike my, is a bit further up, actually is a way further up the biochemical casket leading to doping production. However, IT has been shown in several studies that alternate y supplementation can indeed increase dopamine.

And moreover, and here i'm quoting the title of a study published in one thousand and ninety nine, which I realizes a few years back. But course, there are some excEllent studies from a few years back or more terracing improves working memory in a multitasking environment. Now this particular study from Thomas at all had some interesting aspects and some aspects that made me go a little bit wide ed, but not necessarily wide ed, because the results are so dramatic.

In fact, when one looks at all of the data in this paper, what you find is that supplementing without terraces, as they did in this study, did indeed lead to improvements in working memory under multitask conditions. As the title suggests, those improvements were significant, but they weren't enormous. Okay, there were statistically significant, but they were not enormous increases.

Now what was enormous, and the reason I got wide, wide and still get wide eed, is that the dosages of havel tyring used in the study are really big. They had subjects take one hundred and fifty milligrams per kilogram of alchymy an terracing, I had the ticket in apple sauce for whatever reason, or placable. And they did a number of different control conditions to make sure that whatever effects of altiera y they observed were in fact, to to alter racy supplementation.

Why am I going wide? I de, when I see this one hundred fifty milligrams per kilogram tyre, see, well, eyewear to enter in twenty pounds. That's about one hundred kilograms.

So if I weight one hundred kilograms and is one hundred and fifty milgram for every kilogram, that means that if I were a subject in the study that they would give me fifteen thousand milligrams, that is fifteen grams of alternation prior to doing these cognitive ask. Now, fifteen grams of tyrants, to me, seems like a very, very high dose. And I Frankly can't in good conscience recommend that.

why? Well, maybe i'm just hypersensitive to alter racine, but i've taken one thousand or fifteen hundred milligrams of altera sine, and I definitely experiencing increase in alertness from taking one point five grams, not fifteen one point five grams of. And in fact, at a subjective level, I can feel a meaningful increase and alertness and focus from five hundred milligrams of altera acy. So I can't in good conscience suggest that people replicate the exact dose protocols within the study.

Nonetheless, the study, as the title suggests, shows that supplementing with altera acy can indeed increase working memory capacity, especially in a multi tic environment, which in many ways Carries over to the sorts of requirements for working memory and attention capacity to get through life in a very focus for a lack of a Better word way, in a very regimented, do this, do that task, which multiple things interleaf. That's what moving through one's day, at least work day, or anything that requires cognition and focus in tails. So first of all, i'll just say what I always say when discussing any kind of compound or prescription drug, never add or remove any supplement from your supplement regiment.

If you have one without consulting with your health provider first to make sure that you are safe to take that particular supplement. Now many physicians m are not familiar with most supplements so you probably need to bring some literature um to the phone color to the visit. But of course there are many health care providers, including some mds that are open to supplementation, especially these days um as supplements have become um I would say generally more accepted.

I'm in there are certain ones like vami d three that and visuals and things like that there are more common than alternating y but there are many physicians who are open to discussions about supplements such as altera acy. If you know that you can supplement without terracing safely and you up to do so, what dosages would you potentially take? Well, here we have to look at the dosages using these studies.

I think it's only fair, it's only safe that we acknowledge these. Those just are really, really high. And I think the logical, the safe thing to do would be to start with the minimal effective dose. So if you weigh fifty kilograms, rather than start right off with, you know, the equivalent dosage to this study, maybe you start with two hundred and fifty milligrams of altera acy.

If you wait IT more like me, your hundred kilograms or seventy five kilograms, maybe you take five hundred million grams of altera acy and see whether not you experience a significant effect on working memory, attention and performance. So the idea here is to establish the minimal effective dose. I should also point out that some people, not all, but some people, experience a bit of a crash after altrosen supplementation, such that they feel more, more focused, Better ability to perform working memory task, move about their day, but then three, four hours later experiences kind of a drop.

So you need to be mindful of that. In fact, you need to be mindful of any kind of pharma ecology where you're increasing dopamine. This is one of the reasons why I like the behavioral protocols that we talked about IT earlier because they're known to create big but long lasting and slowly tapering off increases in dopamine and other categories.

Now for those who are curious about and perhaps even want to try the appeals, please absolutely talk your doctor first. And appearance is essentially the equivalent of aldobrand. Aldobrand is a prescription drug, as I mentioned before, and men print potentially increases dobin.

What dosages of mcintyre int can increase dopamine? Well, typically in studies of parkinson's patients, but also studies expLoring typical people who don't have parkinson's in cognitive task and sports performance, have explored anywhere from one to five grams of meco prance micco appearance, again, is a very poor way to increase dopamine. And here, if your health care provider approves IT and you decide to try IT, I would suggest starting with a very, very low dose again, to find the minimal effective though.

So maybe even just five hundred, milgram, not even going to the one gram dose, maybe even two hundred and fifty milligrams, and really evaluating how much merriments can produce a meaningful of impact on working memory and attention for you. So mache appearance is kind of a bridge between over the counter supplements and prescription drugs. I say it's a bridge because IT also similar to that prescription drug, although pa, and of course, there is a long list of prescription drugs that are known to be dopamine, several of which, many of which, in fact, have been shown to improve working memory.

You already learned about one of those before, which is boma crypt. Now you need a prescription from a physician to get boma cyp ting. But boma cyp ting, we know, based on that word from disparate and colleagues that I talked about earlier, increases dopa minute that does so in about ninety minutes.

IT achieves peak levels of dopamine about ninety minutes and improves working memory in individuals that start off with a low working memory span. And we know from the imaging, those are the individuals with lower baseline levels of dopamine. So should you run out and ask your doctor for boma cyp, tn? Maybe most doctors won't prescribed broom cyp tine for that reason.

I should mention that worked from disposal lab and other laboratories that shown that one of the hallmark features of traumatic brain injury, especially frontal low injury, as well as certain neural general conditions like parkinson, but other forms of dementia, as well as A D H D, involve deficits in working memory and detention, which makes sense, given what we know about the symptoms of those conditions. And that promote protein has been prescribed ed, off label for the treatment of those conditions to some degree of success. However, those are off label circumstances right now.

As far as I know, roman crip tine is not proscribed specifically for those conditions at a kind of whole population level. It's not one of the drugs on the look up table for adhd or tbi, but certain well informed neurologist and positions do prescribed IT for that reason. There are other dopamine agents that are relevant in this context, the ones that I think most of you will be familiar with are the drugs that increased dopamine and north penetrant for the treatment of A D.

H D. And I did an entire episode of the other podcast about those compound, things like adorable, things like riddle, which, by the way, is quite different than out of all in terms of how much dopamine relative in where penetrant IT causes the increase of. I cover all that in those episodes, and you can simply go to human and la B2Compute ADH D a t all, or A D H D riddle.

And I talk about other things as well. I also talk a little bit about more, which is a entirely different category of drug known to improve cognitive forming, in some cases in adhd, but in everybody. So there are a lot of different drugs that can improve working memory.

Most of those do so by increasing transmission of dopamine or availability of dopamine, somehow changing dopamine in levels in the brain by increasing them. So if you're somebody that has chAllenges with working memory, focus on attention. Please see those episodes and please talk to your doctor about potentially using pharm macos gy to increase the open mean. However, and this is very important, many people who have chAllenges with focus, attention in working memory and fall under the category of sub clinical levels of eight, and even some individuals of a Young and old manage their symptoms and in some cases, improve their focus through the use of behavioral tools, nutritional tools, supplement and based tools in ways that either allow them to reduce their total prescription drug dosages and in some cases, come off them entirely. Now, I am definitely not saying that people should come off those drugs entirely.

And in fact, I want to take a really firm stand here because I know this is a bit controversial, but i'm just going to tell you, having evaluated the whole literature several times over now, I do think I personally believe that there is a strong case for certain children and adult to take these compounds, increase dopamine and apple. Apple, yes, those compounds are different forms of ephedrine, but those compounds, we know can increase neural plastic, the rewiring L T P L T D eta, within the neural circuits that control, focus attention in a working memory. And so they do have their place for certain individuals.

We don't want to rule those out, are they overprescribed? My feeling is that, yes, they are probably overprescribed. However, there are a number of individuals that strongly benefit from them as well. So if you are going to explore the use of those compounds for sake of improving working memory, certainly, if you're going to explore them for sake of improving working memory and focus on Young kids, please, please, please talk to your physician, because their prescription drug that you would need to talk to your physician anyway.

But regardless of whether are you trying to improve focus on working memory in a child, in an adult, someone with T B I, someone with parkinson, I think IT stands to reason that you would arrive to that conversation with some knowledge of not just the prescription drugs that are potentially available, but also some of the supplement based tools, some of the behavioral tools. Because, as we know, and as a good friend of mine who is an excEllent physician says, Better living through chemistry still requires Better living, meaning, yes, prescription drugs can have a positive impact on these spects of brain function in a way that can really improve lives. But that behavioral tools also, where in fact, they can collaborate in a very synthetic way to increase the amount of neuroplasticity in the relevant circuit.

So i'm of the mind, and I think more and more people out there, I like to thinker of the mind that behaviors, nutrition supplement based tools and prescription drugs all can have their place to varying degrees, depending on the circumstances and the individual. Okay, so today we talk about working memory, this incredible capacity of our brain. In fact, a specific set of brain circuits design for us to absorb information that is perceived in our environment, use the relevant parts, and then chuck IT, just get rid of IT.

Forget IT. So very different than short in long term memory, which we also discuss. And we talked about a few the mechanism since, well, I think you will agree that working memory is one of the more incredible aspects to bring function to me.

If you think about this is a set of general circuits that engage the same algorithm and over in different context in order for us to be able to navigate new environments, familiar environments to interleaved, different activities, different strategies, to test switch, to rule out distracters. It's also critical to every aspect of our waking life and fortunate. There are also zero cost and low cost behavioral supplement based and prescription drug approaches to improving this incredible thing we call working memory.

So he was a pleasure to share some of those with you today as well. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

In addition, please subscribed to the podcast on both spotify and apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me, your comments about the podcast or guess or topics that you like me to host on the huberman lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on youtube. I do read all the comments during today's episode and are many previous episodes of the huberman lab podcast.

We discussed supplements, while supplements are necessary for everybody, many people, to have a tremendous benefit from them, for things like improving sleep, for hormonal support and for focus to learn more about the supplements. Disgust on the human life podcast, you can go to live momentous spelt O U S. So that live momentous dot com slash huberman.

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The neural network news letter is a completely zero cost newsletter that provides podcast summaries, es and protocols in the form of brief pdfs of one to three pages in which I detailed things like how to do deliver IT cold exposure and some of the science behind IT, how to regulate your doomy levels, how to improve your sleep and on and on everything from focus neuroplasticity and all, which is available, again, completely zero costs by going to huber and lab dot com, go to the menu tabs, grow down a news letter and simply sign up by providing your email. And I want to ever size that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about working memory and ways to improve your working memory. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.