How to Make Better Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

Andrew Huberman 0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science, and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Michael Platt. Dr. Michael Platt is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His laboratory focuses on decision-making, more specifically, how we make decisions, and the impact of power dynamics, such as hierarchies in a given organization or group, as well as hormones on decision-making. We also discuss valuation, that is how we place value on things, on people, and what you'll find is that there are many factors that impact whether or not we think something is good, very good, bad, or very bad that operate below our conscious awareness. In fact, today's discussion will teach you how you make decisions, how to make better decisions in the context of everything from picking out a watch or a pair of shoes, all the way up to something as important as picking a life mate. Indeed, hormones, hierarchies, and specific things that are operating within you and adjacent to, nearby the things that you're evaluating, whether or not those things are people or objects, are powerfully shaping the neural circuits that lead you to make specific decisions. So today you're going to learn how all of that works, and as I mentioned, how to make better decisions. Dr. Platt also explains how we are evaluating the hormone levels of other people, both same sex and opposite sex, and the implications that has for relationships of all kinds. It's an incredibly interesting and unique conversation, certainly unique among the conversations I've had with any of my neuroscience colleagues over the decades, and I know that the information you're going to learn today is going to be both fascinating to you, it certainly was to me, and that it will impact the way that you think about all decisions at every level in everyday life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Michael Platt.

Andrew Huberman 2:12 Dr. Michael Platt, welcome.

Michael Platt 2:14 Thanks. It's awesome to be here.

Andrew Huberman 2:16 I've been following your work since I was a graduate student, and it's really interesting. You're an anthropologist by training, turned neuroscientist, turned practical applications of neuroscience and related fields to everybody as it relates to business, decision-making, social interactions, hormones. You've worked on a lot of different things. The first question I have is, let's all agree we're old world primates.

Michael Platt 2:47 Yes.

Andrew Huberman 2:48 Right? Most people don't even think of us as old world primates, but we are all old world primates, and we share many similarities in terms of the neural circuits that we have in our skulls with some of the other old world primates like macaque monkeys-

Michael Platt 3:02 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 3:02 ... for instance. When you step back and look at a process like decision-making or marketing out in the world, or how people interact with one another, engage value of objects, relationships, or even their own value-

Michael Platt 3:19 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 3:20 ... if, if I may, how much of what you see in human old world primates do you think is reflected by the interactions of old world primates like rhesus macaque monkeys and vice versa? I mean, in other words, how primitive are we and/or how sophisticated are the other old world primates?

Michael Platt 3:40 That's a great way of putting it, 'cause I think it's both.

Andrew Huberman 3:43 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 3:43 I always like to say there's a little monkey in all of us, right? And I believed that going in, you know, having spent actually my, my formative years, uh, you know, study- just watching monkeys, and I worked at the Cleveland Zoo, you know, when I was in college, and I took every opportunity I could get to go, you know, I went to the field, you know, I watched monkeys in South America and in Mexico. And I think we all get that, but over the course of my career, I'm astonished at how deep that goes. And, um, basically, for every behavioral, cognitive, emotional phenomenon that we have been a- that we've trained our lens on, uh, it looks almost exactly the same in people and monkeys. Now obviously we're not just monkeys and, you know, we can talk and we're doing this, and that's a, that's a big, big difference. But all the things that you talked about, decision-making, social interaction, our, the, the way that we explore the world, um, the, the fountain of creativity, uh, not only the neural circuits but the actual expression, uh, is so, so similar. We have monkeys and people do the exact same things in the lab, and if I didn't label (laughs) the, the videos, the outputs of, like, the avatars and whatnot in games, you couldn't tell the difference.

Andrew Huberman 5:01 Hmm. Um, what's striking about what you just said is that I recall, uh, I guess at that time it was called a tweet, um-

Michael Platt 5:09 (laughs) .

Andrew Huberman 5:09 ... and I think it was from Elon, that said that we're basically a species that got a supercomputer placed on top of a monkey brain. So in thinking about it the other way, what aspects of being human, this old world primate-

Michael Platt 5:27 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 5:27 ... that we are, do you think is distinctly different than, say, a macaque monkey, aside from language?

Michael Platt 5:34 I don't know that anything really is. I mean, so actually it's, it's an interesting time to have you ask me that question, 'cause this spring semester I teach a seminar for the psychology department, uh, at Penn called Being Human, and the whole idea of that, we, each week we tackle a, an aspect of who we are that has at one point or another been considered to be uniquely human or close to, right? And that could be something like art and creativity or, um, or theory of mind, right? Or, um, you know, economics and markets and things like that.

Andrew Huberman 6:09 And when you take it, take a look at these things through the lenses of neuroscience and anthropology, this is how we do it, economics, psychology, neurology, and on and on and on, um, you start to really see that, um, there's a lot more continuity than discontinuity. And, uh, that's kind of pretty shocking. And I want to go back to that Elon, um, tweet. (laughs)

Michael Platt 6:32 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 6:32 If I may. Uh, because I think that's where we go a little bit astray too in thinking about the, the brain as a computer, right? So it's, well, obviously it's not built on silica, right? It's, it's, um, it's made of meat and fat and it's subject to all of the constraints that, um, that go along, that go along with that. And what I think instead is a better metaphor is that we've got a 30-million-year-old Swiss Army knife in our heads, right? So yes, you can learn, uh, do all kinds of different things, but you've got a, a brain that's got essentially specific tools in it. You know, you'll have, you know, it's like having a knife and a corkscrew, which is the most important one, uh, you know, nail file, saw, et cetera, and monkey's got those too. Now ours might be a little bigger, you know, and sharper. Um, but they, they look and, and they look pretty similar and they do the job in a very, um, similar way. And I think once we appreciate that, then, uh, that opens up a lot of territory for, for applications, not, you know, not just trying to understand how some of the tools might get broken or dull as a result of, um, you know, illness or injury or, or disorders, et cetera, but also how we can measure them and how we can develop them better because some of those are, you know, we use all the time, say in business.

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Andrew Huberman 11:01 So if we were to start at what us neuroscientists would call kind of more low level functioning, even though it's pretty high level, uh, with something like attention-

Michael Platt 11:12 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 11:13 ... you know, we are very visual creatures for those of us that are sighted. Most humans are sighted.

Michael Platt 11:17 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 11:18 Um, we rely on vision to assess the world around us, to assess emotions of others, et cetera. And so are the other old world primates.

Michael Platt 11:27 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 11:27 Right? Um, how do we allocate attention? Like, like what grabs our attention? And maybe in this discussion we could also touch on, 'cause I know you've worked on this, what underlies some deficits in attention.

Michael Platt 11:40 Mm, mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 11:42 So yeah, if you could, if we could just explore this from the perspective of, okay, you go into an en-, uh, an environment, let's say it's a familiar environment. You wake up in the room you wake up in each day.

Michael Platt 11:52 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 11:52 What grabs your attention? What keeps your attention? And if we do in fact have control over our attention, which we do to some extent, why is it so difficult for many of us to decide, "You know what? I'm just gonna put everything away and I'm just gonna focus on this task for the next hour." Why is that so challenging for so many people-... regardless of whether they have a diagnosis of attention deficit-

Michael Platt 12:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 12:18 ... hyperactivity disorder?

Michael Platt 12:20 Okay, there's a lot in that question.

Andrew Huberman 12:21 Mm-hmm. (laughs)

Michael Platt 12:22 (laughs) Many questions in there. And let's talk about what attention is, right? It is a prioritization, right, or an amplification of, of what you're focusing on, right? And we do that by where we point our eyes, right, and then that gets turned up in the brain with a lot of consequences. And, and really, why, why do we have attention? Because you can't do everything at once, right? So, so it's, it's in the name of efficiency. Um, what we attend to is a product of two things. It's what we're looking for and what the world looks like, right? And that kind of what the world looks like part is importantly shaped by what our ancestors experienced and also what we experienced when we were developing or growing up. So things that are bright or shiny or moving fast, right, or loud or whatever, that grabs our attention, things that stand out, that are different. Um, and for us as primates, one thing that's super important and kind of really deeply baked in is, uh, other people. So if there are faces, if there are people in the environment doing something, then that naturally just grabs our attention, unless we happen to be an individual who's sort of wired a little bit differently, like folks on the autism spectrum disorder or, you know, schizophrenia, things like that, um, where that prioritization is not quite, um, the same. So, so, so that's kind of how our experience as primates, you know, and just the, the design principles of, of the way our brains work to overcome some of these limitations, uh, in this- in the name of efficiency, uh, come about. And then, as you mentioned, what we can control our attention to a certain degree. And that's super important for a lot of, uh, I think overcoming a lot of the, the challenges that we have. And we can talk about that, like, in decision-making, for example, because you- or, or learning, because you- because you can't control what you're attending to, that gets turned up in the brain, right? And that affects what we choose and, and it affects what we learn, it affects what we remember, um, as well. So now, I'm trying to kind of go back-

Andrew Huberman 14:38 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 14:38 ... to, like, then the, the end part of your question. Oh, so that had to do with multitasking or just things in the environment. And that gets at this question, uh, or topic of, uh, in my view, of foraging, right?

Andrew Huberman 14:53 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 14:53 And so, uh, I think that attention, this is the argument we've made, uh, operates according to essentially the same rules and principles that, um, our bodies do when we are searching the environment for resources. So all mobile animals, uh, search for food, search for mates, search for, search for water, you know, for the resources that they need to survive and to reproduce, and, um, as it turns out, that kind of decision, do- you know, it- that, that The Clash, you know, made, you know, very memorable, should I stay or should I go, uh, that's the key thing. So when you encounter something, like, the question is, like, "Do I take it? Do I stick with it even though it might be depleting, getting worse, or should I take a risk and invest time and energy and go look for something else?" Um, all animals have to do that. It turns out there's an optimal solution to that, which was written out by the- one of the great mathematical ecologists, uh, Eric Chernoff, in a paper in 1976. And so he, he wrote this out, and it's- what's cool about it is it's very simple. It's basically you leave, you abandon the, the thing that you're, um, harvesting when, uh, what you're getting from it falls below the average for the environment. It just makes sense, the marginal returns, right? Um, 'cause, uh-

Andrew Huberman 16:16 And this could be a social interaction-

Michael Platt 16:17 Could be a social interaction, it could be-

Andrew Huberman 16:19 Could be.

Michael Platt 16:19 ... food, could be water, could be the money that you're making in the moment (laughs) , could be the information that you're getting from, uh, a book or from a website or whatnot. So, uh, and we, from studies done over the last, whatever that is now, 50 years, have shown that every animal that's ever been observed behaves as if they're performing that computation.

Andrew Huberman 16:39 Could you

Andrew Huberman 16:40 give an example in the context of, let's say, social media? And as we, um, were walking in to record today, we were comparing and contrasting X-

Michael Platt 16:48 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 16:48 ... as a platform versus, uh, Instagram, and it occurred to me now, based on what you said a few moments ago, that Instagram is very visual, so you see faces.

Michael Platt 16:57 Mm-hmm, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 16:57 Many accounts on X, either the icon is so small-

Michael Platt 17:00 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 17:01 ... or, uh, people even just have cartoons or whatever avatars there that aren't really faces in many cases.

Michael Platt 17:07 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 17:07 And it does seem that on X, there's a, um, kind of a, a elevated level of emotionality to what people write. That's what-

Michael Platt 17:15 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 17:15 ... tends to grab attention. And I wonder whether or not that's because of the absence of faces. I mean, when somebody's on an Instagram post and they're kind of ranting a bit, in fact, I saw this yesterday, um, uh, Tim Ferriss, another podcaster-

Michael Platt 17:27 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 17:27 ... had the investor Chris Sacca on, um, and Chris was talking about environmentalism and the fires, and he had opinions about AI. He's a very, very smart, very opinionated guy. But people were commenting, I don't know how he felt, how could I?

Michael Platt 17:41 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 17:41 Um, but people were commenting, "He's so angry, he's so angry." And, and he was just, uh, being passionate and emphatic. Maybe he was angry, I don't know, but he was clearly very, very, very alert, leaning forward into the camera. And people were paying ... Most of th- their comments were paying attention to the emotion behind what he was saying. And whereas on X, I feel, I feel like if you ch- just took the text of what he was saying and you put it there, it would be kind of, uh, below the average emotionality on X.

Michael Platt 18:08 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 18:09 And so, um, when you say that we are, uh, drawn to faces or that faces are, uh, we naturally forge towards faces versus other things, um-... that feels very true. And do you feel like elevated levels of emotion in faces are what harness the most attention? And by parallel, if you get a bunch of monkeys together and one of them is really upset, do they all look at that monkey?

Michael Platt 18:34 Speculating a little bit here-

Andrew Huberman 18:36 Yeah.

Michael Platt 18:36 ... since I have not thought about it in the context of, say, you know, X versus Instagram.

Andrew Huberman 18:40 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 18:40 But I think you're, I think you're, you're right on. I mean, I think that's spot on. Um, you're just combining, like you're turning, the volume gets turned up because there are faces there and if they're more emotional, they're just gonna be much more salient and grab your attention, and that's something that's really important to pay attention to because somebody who's very aroused, right, uh, that's activation, that's, you know, that's sort of pre-activation before they do something, like they-

Andrew Huberman 19:03 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 19:04 ... they might attack you or they might, you know, take something from you. Who knows, right? Something, something could happen there. But I wanna take this back a little bit. I, I'm older, (laughs) than you, and I wanna take this, uh, this idea of, of, um, different sources, like where you could place your attention, take it back a little bit more in time. Because what's been shown, and it's interesting, computer science picked up on this marginal value, um, theorem from mathematical ecology, uh, around 2000 or so, and began to investigate how people search the web. And it turned out people would leave a website the moment their information intake rate fell below the average for sort of all the websites that they, uh, were encountering.

Andrew Huberman 19:48 The average is determined by your behavior in, what, the preceding ba-bin of time, like 10 minutes until you arrive at a site or within sight? Um-

Michael Platt 19:57 So that, that's less well-known, but, uh, we're now learning that it is, it is pretty short term, right?

Andrew Huberman 20:02 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 20:02 So, and it seems to be, uh, driven by reinforcement learning processes that kind of are telling you how rich that environment is. And so one, one of the things about the marginal value theorem that I think is really, really, um, profound for, for understanding our current predicament is that it says that if you're in a really poor environment, like you, let's say you forage for apples, right? And there's one apple tree for the next 10 miles, you stay at that apple tree until you've picked every apple, rotten or not rotten, not ripe, right, before you move on. If you are in an orchard with apple trees everywhere, you just pick the ones that are easiest to get and then you move on. So now think about it in the context of, um, web surfing, the web. Like when you were, you know, if you're coming up when I did, uh, you know, I was in graduate school or, or, you know, I was an undergraduate, the way I accessed the internet was through a dial-up modem. So it was very slow. It was a very poor environment. You're sitting there waiting for the information to load up, right? And it might take 30 seconds or longer. Um, you don't abandon that. You read the whole thing. You might print it out, put it in your file cabinet, right? Now you get, like super high-speed internet.

Andrew Huberman 21:17 Yeah, you can have 12 tabs open, 50 tabs open.

Michael Platt 21:18 And you're like, you just, so you spend like, you know, half a second or a couple seconds on any one. You don't, you certainly don't scroll down beneath the fold, right? So it, it totally makes sense. Now think about all the devices you might have, or it could be tabs, it could be ... Most people are sitting around with a TV on, you know, their phone, a tablet, a laptop, whatnot.

Andrew Huberman 21:37 I'm guilty of having many-

Michael Platt 21:37 And so what do you do? You, you-

Andrew Huberman 21:38 I have three pho- I have three phones and a laptop.

Michael Platt 21:40 Yeah, so you're just cycling.

Andrew Huberman 21:41 Yeah.

Michael Platt 21:41 You, you are doing exactly what you're designed to do, right? Which is to move between these resources, um, quickly and easily because it's so easy. So, and sometimes s- going back to your question about, like, why is it so hard, it's gonna be really, really deliberate. You have to either reduce, you know, uh, make it a harder environment, I guess, is the idea. You would have to actually put things away or make the return rate that you're getting from any of them much worse. Like, for example, if you turn your phone monochrome, some ... which we know works, right? It, it helps you to stop checking your phone and spend less time on it because what y- y- it's just not as good of a source.

Andrew Huberman 22:22 Yeah, the, the information feels really depleted. Uh, you reposted a, a paper result recently, and I did as well after I saw it on your X account, um, that if you look at working memory, the ability to keep information online in real time and work with it, um, it seems that working memory is worst when your phone is right next to you.

Michael Platt 22:47 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 22:48 If it's somewhere else in the room that you're working, then, uh, or trying to do real work of some sort, um, your performance is slightly better than if it's right next to you. But if the phone is completely outside of the room, improvements in working memory are statistically significant. In other words, get the phone completely out of the room. It's not sufficient to have it next to you turned face down or even in your backpack behind you. It needs to be in a completely separate environment in order to maximize this effect.

Michael Platt 23:18 Yeah, I mean, it's com- completely consistent with what we're, what we're saying here with regard to foraging.

Andrew Huberman 23:22 But if I take my phone and I put it ... I don't have my phone here under the chair-

Michael Platt 23:26 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 23:26 ... but let's say I did. And this result suggests that some component of our neural circuitry is operating in the background thinking, "Well, I guess something could be on there. Maybe I got a text or maybe there's a, a tweet I should look at or an Instagram post." Um, it suggests that we are multitasking even when we think we are not multitasking.

Michael Platt 23:46 Yeah, it's, I, I think you're absolutely right. It's beneath our awareness, right? So that's ... And, and that, that's where I think the kind of comparative psychology, comparative neurobiology is really important here, because I don't necessarily, um, you know, impute conscious awareness to all these critters that are out there doing these things, behaving exactly the same way we are. And so to me, that just indicates that, you know, all that hardware, those same routines are just running under the hood-

Andrew Huberman 24:17 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 24:17 ... running under the surface, and we're not aware of it. So when your phone is somewhere within the sphere-... that could be accessed, brain's aware of that and it's including that in the, in the calculations about, um, that about what to do next. And it actually, um, reminds me now of, uh, sub, there's actually a couple of papers that we published some time ago on foraging, and one of the things that's really interesting about it is that, uh, an- i- is that as you are considering your options and you're, you're experiencing sort of these depleting, um, rewards or whatnot, you see this urgency signal kind of building up in part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex that we know is important for moving on, for switching, for, for, for, for searching for something new. And it, it does, you know, I, I don't know what the emotional component of that is, we never explored that, but it seems reasonable to imagine that that's tied to, you know, the sense of like, "Uh, uh, uh, I really, (laughs) you know, I really wanna turn my phone over and check what's going on there."

Andrew Huberman 25:22 Are there any data

Andrew Huberman 25:23 that suggest that just being able to maintain a thought train independent of visual input can help us get better at maintaining attention? So for instance, this morning, I woke up very early, unusually early for me 'cause I went to bed unusually early for me, and I decided to try something, uh, which is, uh, something that actually our, uh, colleague in neuroscience, Karl Deisseroth, had mentioned he does and a previous guest on this podcast, Josh Waitzkin, who's a former, uh, chess grandmaster champion, has described something like this, I decided to try it, which was to, uh, keep my eyes closed and just try and think in complete sentences, not let my mind drift off-topic for a while, have a conversation with myself in my head, but with the constant redirect of trying to stay in a thought train. And it's, it's actually much more difficult than I thought it would be, right? There's no other input. My eyes are closed. I was comfortable at the temperature of the room was, et cetera. I was well-rested, no phone, no input, and, you know, you get one sentence of thought out, then the next. It's a bit like writing, except here, no visual input, so I would've thought it's a lot, it's a lot easier because you don't have a, you know, a, a set of tabs across the top or even a Word doc with a, like, "Do you wanna change it to bold?" et cetera, like, no other input competing for one's attention. And I found that after about 10 minutes, it became pretty easy, but it took me about 10 minutes to get into this redirect of focus, and then at one point, I thought, "I better stop this 'cause this is seeming kind of weird." But that was, um, very different, I would say, than sitting down to say, um, meditate and think about my breath, which is a physical phenomenon that's tangible at the level of feeling one's breath. So w- how do you feel about practices that teach us to maintain attention and redirect our attention that are very deprived of visual input as a kind of training ground for being able to harness and maintain visual input when we need to get work done, work on problem sets, write, um, do, like, real, what I call real work or Cal Newport would call deep work?

Michael Platt 27:32 So I've never tried that, and it sounds fascinating and I, I'm gonna try to give it a shot, (laughs) you know, tomorrow morning. Um, at first, I was thinking, "This sounds a lot like meditation," right? But there are a whole varie- I'm no, no expert on meditation, but there are a whole variety of different kinds of meditation. Some, as you mentioned, you know, you're focusing on, on breath work, physical stimulus, but, um, but there are others that, that are not and that are much more, um, kind of cognitively focused. So, um, for example, like, uh, loving-kindness meditation-

Andrew Huberman 28:07 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 28:08 ... is, is one where you're, you're kind of thinking about a particular person, you're imagining them and you're imagining something, uh, really good happening to them, right? So it's sort of one of these, um, you know, self-transcendent ty- types of meditation, which are not, I don't think, really tied to any external input coming in, although it's an internal input, right, that, that, that, that's based on your, on your memory or, or, um, awe-based, uh, meditation. So maybe it's more similar to those-

Andrew Huberman 28:36 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 28:37 ... but I, but I-

Andrew Huberman 28:37 But it's, like, thematically anchored.

Michael Platt 28:39 The- the- exactly.

Andrew Huberman 28:40 Yeah.

Michael Platt 28:40 Exactly.

Andrew Huberman 28:40 As opposed to visually anchored, like staring at a flame or concentrating on one's breath.

Michael Platt 28:44 Staring at a flame, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 28:44 Yeah, I, I didn't have a, it was like free, in terms of putting in language of foraging, it was like I didn't have a plan. I wasn't writing a paragraph. It was just, can I stay in a conversation with myself that's, um, where there's no moment that some external voice or input or thought about something else in the room, you know, just, can I just kind of stay in there? Can I just stay in there? That, that was really the question.

Michael Platt 29:12 Yeah, I think that that makes complete sense because it, it's kind of like you're foraging for apples in that tree that's, uh, you know, on, on the middle of the Serengeti somewhere, right, and there's nothing anywhere around you and so you're gonna stick with that and just keep mining it until there's nothing left.

Andrew Huberman 29:29 One of the reasons that I brought up this example was, um, I noticed that anything that has to do with attention, whether or not it's visual attention or, you know, being able to write or, um, or cognitive attention and redirecting attention, unless there's some high level of, as you call it, arousal or emotionality, I find there's always a kind of warmup period required, and that this isn't taught to us in school, and that so many people who think that they have a hard time maintaining attention, uh, I have this hypothesis that they are training, uh, non-attention or brief attention by, you know, scrolling through movies on a, you know, social media platform, is basically training, um, redirecting your attention every couple seconds or, or maybe every few minutes, um, so you get good at that. You get good at scrolling. You get good at what you, at what you do. Um, but also, I think it was always the case that-... sitting down to do something difficult or learn or write or p- careful auditory attention, maybe even to a podcast, that there's a kind of a warming up period. What is the evidence that neural circuits in the brain are kind of, um... here I'm using very top contour language, uh, in front of a- a, you know-

Michael Platt 30:42 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 30:42 ... another card-carrying neuroscientist, but that- that neural circuits are kind of, um, more dispersed in their, um, in their activation patterns, but that over time, we kind of drop into a trench, not just of attention, but that then the signal to noise of that circuit required for attention and the other components of the task gets much greater compared to the background noise. Do- is there evidence for that? In the same way that warming up to work out-

Michael Platt 31:06 Right.

Andrew Huberman 31:06 ... no one expects to walk in and- and train with their work weight or to run at the speed that they would in mile three, right? You know, they- you warm up. It's like- it's like, but this notion of warming up the brain for specific cognitive activities doesn't seem, um, a- as abundant out there, and I think part of the reason might be, and I'd like your thoughts on this, that we are all familiar with something super exciting or scary grabbing our attention and this... but then I would say, well, you can sprint into the street to save your kid from getting hit by a car. You didn't warm up for that. But that's not how you exercise, because there isn't the same level of urgency.

Michael Platt 31:45 That's a deep question. I think, um... and I, you know, it's funny to me too because it- it... I don't warm up often before I work out, and that's (laughs) like, so it's-

Andrew Huberman 31:56 You seem to be in great shape.

Michael Platt 31:57 No, but it's like-

Andrew Huberman 31:57 You know?

Michael Platt 31:57 ... it's funny, you know, I've been doing CrossFit for, like, 17 years. Okay.

Andrew Huberman 32:00 Oh, wow. And you're still uninjured? You're one of the few that don't.

Michael Platt 32:02 Oh, no, I've got plenty of injuries.

Andrew Huberman 32:03 Okay, gotcha.

Michael Platt 32:04 I, you know, I've had a- a, you know, couple hernia surgeries and, um-

Andrew Huberman 32:08 Maybe- maybe just, like-

Michael Platt 32:09 ... I might need another one. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 32:09 ... five or six minutes of- of mobility work, you know?

Michael Platt 32:11 So... (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 32:11 We have a lot of episodes on this with experts.

Michael Platt 32:12 No, the- the mobility is really good.

Andrew Huberman 32:14 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 32:14 And I- I actually, what I- what I ha- you know, periodically, it's like take, like, you know, many months off to do just purely mobility-

Andrew Huberman 32:20 Great.

Michael Platt 32:21 ... PT because, um... and like, I did Pilates intensively for a year and a half after, um, after one injury and- and I loved it and it-

Andrew Huberman 32:29 Oh, it's great.

Michael Platt 32:29 ... it's cool to see what it does to your body 'cause it totally refashioned it. I was... 'cause I've always been, like, big guy up here and then you do Pilates for or yoga for a long time, went through- through yoga period too, and suddenly, it's all core, you know?

Andrew Huberman 32:41 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 32:41 You become, like, a very different, um, very different human.

Andrew Huberman 32:45 Yeah, so this issue of warming up-

Michael Platt 32:46 Oh, warming up. So, no, no, I li- I like warming up.

Andrew Huberman 32:46 ... you don't like warming up, which explains your injuries. (laughs)

Michael Platt 32:49 I just, it's more a question of time.

Andrew Huberman 32:50 Yeah.

Michael Platt 32:50 The reason why, and that's why-

Andrew Huberman 32:52 Sure.

Michael Platt 32:52 ... I got into CrossFit in the first place-

Andrew Huberman 32:53 Yeah.

Michael Platt 32:53 ... was because I could do a workout in 10 minutes or under that, um, left me, you know, dead on the floor-

Andrew Huberman 32:59 I'm telling you-

Michael Platt 32:59 ... and it was, like, super awesome, but-

Andrew Huberman 33:00 I'm telling you, f- 100 jumping jacks, just like in PE class-

Michael Platt 33:04 Yep, yep.

Andrew Huberman 33:04 ... is still the best warmup I'm aware of.

Michael Platt 33:05 It's- it's amazing, yeah, it- it-

Andrew Huberman 33:06 I, like, people laugh at me, you know, it's like so old school, but you do 100 jumping jacks before you do any kind of-

Michael Platt 33:11 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 33:12 ... cardiovascular resistance training and I- I don't... I haven't run a study on this, but you greatly diminish your chance of, uh-

Michael Platt 33:19 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 33:19 ... of injury, probably because of just raising core body temperature.

Michael Platt 33:22 Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 33:22 But, so the question is what... okay, well then let's pose it in this parallel fashion. What is the equivalent of the hum- 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work? Right? For me, it's, like, internally going like, "What's wrong with you, Andrew? Why is it so hard for you to, like, punch out these 10 paragraphs?" Um, but if someone on my team says, "Hey, we need this in eight minutes," I could do that anywhere. Uh- uh, unless I'm actually driving a vehicle, I can work anywhere anytime.

Michael Platt 33:50 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 33:51 But I would say we don't have the- the equivalent of 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work, but we need a... we need that. I think people need that and they need the understanding that it can help them get into that trench of attention.

Michael Platt 34:03 I have a bunch of disconnected thoughts on this.

Andrew Huberman 34:05 Please.

Michael Platt 34:05 (laughs) So one would be the converse of that, which is the o- the- which- which you kind of alluded to earlier, which is the not warming up, but the opposite of warming up, like the distraction. So- so there have been some really interesting studies done in, uh, in sort of more business-y settings, management settings, um, about, uh, that- that looked at foraging, okay? And, uh, think of it this way, it- it was more like a measure of creativity, your- your proclivity to explore, to try new things, to go to, you know, to- to be the opposite of focused. Okay? So, um, and you can measure that, uh, for example, like- like a- an anagram task. So you get a bunch of letters, make as many words as you can. At some point, you gotta... you decide to dump them and get new letters, right? And so that's sort of an... you know, you're taking a risk and you're exploring and you're- you're getting a new- a new set. You don't know what's gonna happen, right? Um, and really cool studies showed that, uh, if you precede that task with a task where people are foraging for points on a screen, there's- there's hidden... it's like a visual kinda thing and you're- you're just looking for stuff. If the, uh, if the points are really dispersed and spread out, then people... we don't know how long that kind of aftereffect lasts, but then people are way more kind of hyper explorers.

Andrew Huberman 35:26 With the words in the subsequent-

Michael Platt 35:27 With the word thing later, and if they're doing a... if they have to, like, decide... if they're playing virtual fishing and the number of, you know, the rate at which you catch fish in a pond is declining and you can press a button and take a timeout to travel to another pond, people are much more willing to- to move on, okay, when- when they do that, whereas if you put all the points kind of together, which is essentially related to what you're saying, um, cognitively warming up by focusing, literally instead of having your, uh, your filter, you know, your aperture, your lens like this, it's now like this, even though it's a different task that you're going to do.

Andrew Huberman 36:04 Oh, I love this.

Michael Platt 36:06 Right?

Andrew Huberman 36:06 I-

Michael Platt 36:06 Then-

Andrew Huberman 36:06 Yeah.

Michael Platt 36:07 ... you- you're much more focused on that.

Andrew Huberman 36:11 I- I- okay, I- I have sat here and done many, many podcasts and I have to say it's rare that I say I love this. It's probably the first time. I absolutely love this 'cause as a person who's worked on a variety of topics in neuroscience, but visual neuroscience has really been my first home, um, and continues to be the way that I think about a lot of this, you know, there...... are a couple of really interesting papers, um, that have led to some practices mainly in China where students focus on a fixation point before they sit down to do cognitive work. Um, and it improves their attention and performance on cognitive work. And it sounds so silly to people. People think, "Oh, okay, I'm gonna stare at a dot? I mean, you're gonna, like, stare at a dot at a given distance? I'm gonna do my work, how lame is that?" Well, I think it, it's incredible because what you just said fully supports this idea that we're... Well, we all agree here, and there's two of us, that we're mainly visual. Even those of us that like to listen to music and things like that, and we're very sematic, or you know, very visual creatures. And that where we place our visual attention and th- the size of the aperture of that a- attention, whether or not we're looking at a small box or a big box, not metaphorically but literally, determines the aperture of our attention going forward. In other words, I think this is such an important thing because when we look at a horizon or we walk through a city, you know, there's information flowing past us. You know, and all kinds of, you know, um, without us placing our, our, uh, our eyes on any one particular point, and that, uh, people don't notice until they do this and they hear this, but that's very relaxing. We look at a horizon, it relaxes us, and that's because panoramic vision, non-foveated vision is, um, it- it's associated with a decrease in autonomic arousal. So, has this been leveraged toward teaching kids and adults how to attend better? Um, because I think this is immensely valuable. I mean, this is, uh, behavioral, behaviorally driven pharmacology as I like to call it, because clearly there's a change in our chemistry when we do this sort of thing.

Michael Platt 38:09 I mean, other than what you just said about the, the work that's done in, you know, what- what they're doing in China which m- is entirely consistent with what I just said, I'm unaware, uh, of any, any utilization, and I think, um, it could be. I mean, I- I love that phrase that you just used, right? Which is, we understand the underlying, um, neurochemistry let's say. Uh, that's great but you- you're not gonna go in and directly (laughs) manipulate people's neurochemistry.

Andrew Huberman 38:36 No.

Michael Platt 38:36 But if you can change the environment they're in or you can change, uh, the state that they're in-

Andrew Huberman 38:42 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 38:42 ... behavioral state, cognitive state, emotional state-

Andrew Huberman 38:45 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 38:45 ... then, um, that's an effective, potentially effective practical, ethical, right? Way of, of having this kind of same or similar impact.

Andrew Huberman 38:57 I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor AG1. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still take AG1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement. What that means is that AG1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health. AG1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status, your metabolic health, your hormone health, and much more. So I've consistently found that when I take AG1 daily, my digestion is improved, my immune system is more robust, and my mood and mental focus are at their best. In fact, if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2 with your order of AG1. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim this special offer.

Andrew Huberman 40:14 Yeah, I think that so many people, including myself, think, "Okay, what's a way that I can increase my level of alertness and attention?" Well, I have this gallery of caffeine. Actually, the middle one's water-

Michael Platt 40:25 Yep.

Andrew Huberman 40:25 ... for those that are just listening. I've got a latte gourd here, plenty of caffeine in there.

Michael Platt 40:28 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 40:28 I had a cold brew latte, plenty of caffeine in there. I had, uh, several actually, and then water in the center. But, um, caffeine raises our level of alertness and thereby atten- our attentional capabilities. But I think that most people are not familiar with using behavior as a way to increase their endogenous release of the neurochemicals that increase arousal and attention. And, um, we just tend to over-rely on pharmacology, and I'm not against that. I use it obviously. Um, but w- what do you think it is? I mean, now I'm asking you to be a bit of a, of a cultural anthropologist.

Michael Platt 41:02 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 41:02 Um, what do you think it is that, uh, has led p- people in the United States and, and, you know, Europe to mainly focus on this idea that if you can't attend easily that it's a pharmacologic issue? That behavioral tools are not as useful. Because what y- the experiment you described is so cool, right? Look at dots that are close together. Your then cognitive space becomes kind of, um, more bundled into a tighter bundle. Um, look at dots that are more dispersed, and you tend to, you know, kind of disperse your cognition. It becomes almost like more of a creative exploration. All right? Maybe this is why my, my friend Rick Rubin, whose name is sort of synonymous with creativity, 'cause he wrote that amazing book The Creative Act, is so into sky and clouds and sunsets and space. Open space. Rarely have I ever heard Rick say, "Hey, you know, you should stare into a little, you know-"

Michael Platt 41:56 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 41:56 "... soda straw." Um, I'd love to, for you to just kind of riff on, on what you think some of the better tools are for, um, improving attention and focus. Um, and whether or not you think we're really as challenged in that as many people assume?

Michael Platt 42:11 Well, I- I- I don't think we're that challenged. I think, as I mentioned earlier, our brains are just performing the computations that they have been endowed with by millions of years of evolution, which is to allocate attention, to allocate behavior, to allocate focus, uh, according to how-... rich, I'll call it rich-

Andrew Huberman 42:33 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 42:34 ... uh, or poor the environment is. How many different sources are there? (clears throat) And so, uh, that's, those are the rules your brain lives by, and you're not really going to change those. I mean, you could kind of modulate up and down a little bit, whether that's through neurochemistry or other kinds of things, but ultimately, it's, in this case, the brain in the environment that it's in.

Andrew Huberman 42:54 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 42:54 So from my perspective, the best thing you could do is just change the environment, put those devices away, (laughs) you know, make-

Andrew Huberman 43:02 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 43:02 ... to, to enable you to focus, right? And, um, so anyway, I don't know if I'm, if I had that much more to say (laughs) on that topic.

Andrew Huberman 43:09 Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I think, I think what's, what's great about this is that you're essentially pointing to the fact that we have control. We're not somehow, um, deficient or messed up if we find ourselves having a hard time directing our attention because we've been training ourselves to, uh, to scroll, we've been training ourselves to redirect our attention constantly to new things. I mean, I, as you can probably tell, I'm a big fan of, um, intervening in that process so that one has the ability to drop into focused work. I do feel as if progress in life i- you know, scales fairly directly with the ability to focus on one thing for some period of time, um, for sake of, you know, learning in school, for sake of sport, for sake of relationships, the ability to have, like, a real connection to somebody, um, y- you know, and we're gonna get into a discussion about social interactions i- in a bit. Um,

Andrew Huberman 44:07 but when it comes to foraging, do you find that people, uh, fall out into different kind of clusters of how they forage for information, and what are some of the themes of, of that, uh, that, or, or kind of signatures of the different groups?

Michael Platt 44:22 Yeah, that's a great question. We, I, I haven't really approached it with the idea that there are clusters, but rather that, um, there's, let's say, a continuum-

Andrew Huberman 44:30 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 44:31 ... uh, and of being either, you know, most people are somewhere in the middle, of course, but some folks, hyper-focused, all right? And you might just metaphorically imagine them at the, the extreme and, like, the, like, obsessive-compulsive almost, right? You can't get unstuck from a routine. And then the other end would be folks who explore too readily, right? So folks who we would say have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And so folks fall somewhere along that distribution. Now, we've seen that there are, uh, differences between species in terms of where they are on that. Difference is a function of, uh, age, uh, in humans, so, uh, you kind of move from being more hyper exploratory toward more focused as you get older.

Andrew Huberman 45:18 Oh, good.

Michael Platt 45:18 (laughs) Um, and that also one of the things that we've, um, talked about a lot is that that variation, where you're on that continu- continuum, might make you more or less suited to different types of careers, different types of jobs. It's not to say that people can't change, but think of it this way. Uh, for, th- you've got a dial that goes from super focused to a major explorer, and that, and creativity goes along with that.

Andrew Huberman 45:46 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 45:47 Uh, one person might come with their dial set at three, another person at seven, and you could help that person at a three maybe turn theirs to five, but probably not to ten, right? The person who's a seven, you could turn them up to nine, right? So through, through various kinds of practices, 'cause I think that's really important to just recognize that people do vary, um, and that variation, uh, we pick up on in the sort of, um, mm, neurological context of, of, like, issues, problems that people, you know, experience, like with focus in school, et cetera, like, that-

Andrew Huberman 46:23 People are p- are-

Michael Platt 46:24 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 46:24 ... uh, no doubt wondering, "Well, if I am good at dropping into a trench and focusing my attention for, for long periods of time," uh, maybe it's more obvious what types of careers would le- uh, that person would, um, be better at, you know, maybe it's programming or writing or, who knows, painting. Um, but when you have somebody whose attention tends to flit between different things, uh, what sorts of professions, uh, do they align well with?

Michael Platt 46:48 Yeah, that aligns with creative professions.

Andrew Huberman 46:50 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 46:50 So, and also being entrepreneurs. Actually, if you look at the data on, um, entrepreneurs, uh, the rate of a- a- attention problems is two, three, four X. Uh-

Andrew Huberman 47:03 Hmm.

Michael Platt 47:04 ... the, the general population, you also see that, um, it's often comorbid with other issues related to, uh, anxiety, bipolar, et cetera, so they've kind of, like, all, all clustered there with a, with a, a real issue, um, on that sort of focus. And, uh, we work with, um, with a, with a team out in Berkeley actually that provides support to entrepreneurs so that, um, so, so that they can do their best, do their thing, which is to be, like, wildly creative, right? And to, y- and innovate, I should say, um, but when they need that focus so they can have it. And we have, we have a, a big research project going on right now looking at entrepreneurs in California and also MBA students at Wharton to just kind of try to identify, you know, the prevalence of these issues and then to potentially provide support for them, and that support could take any number of different forms. It could be true psychiatric support in the sense of, like, maybe, um, you know, attention-focusing, uh, uh, pharmaceuticals, drugs like, like Ritalin, Adderall, which can be used appropriately, um, but that doesn't rob those individuals of their mojo. But in other cases, it's gonna be more like changing their, you know, providing an ecosystem, right? So where they can learn, uh, focusing practices, as we've, we've already talked about, uh, where when they build their teams, they can, um, build complementary strengths-

Andrew Huberman 48:32 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 48:32 ... in the people that, uh, surround them so that they're much more likely to be successful.... and our economy depends on those people being successful, right? So that's where the vast majority of economic activity is coming from, is people who start small businesses, who are entrepreneurs, and who are, who are innovators. So it makes all the sense in the world, um, to do that, but I think we've been neglecting all this. Now, uh, th- th- actually, the thing I wanted to kind of say earlier about this, and that, where I think neuroscience gives us a new tool to approach a lot of these business questions, is that, uh, let's imagine you're hiring, right? And you're hiring, you know, well, we need a creative type, okay? So you, you put an ad out, and, uh, you get, you know, resumes and responses, and people come in for interviews. How do you measure that creativity typically? What are you gonna say, "Oh, how creative are you?" And you're like, "You really want the job," so you're like, "Yeah, I'm super creative." (laughs) You know? Or like, or you give them a personality test, for example, or, you know, like Myers-Briggs or something like that. And, um, we know those are, mm, not particularly accurate, and self-report can be not only, uh, inaccurate, but, but biased, and biased by th- the context. Why am I here? Who's asking me a question? How is that question asked? Whereas the neuroscience, neuroscience gives us tools to kind of measure those things directly.

Andrew Huberman 49:58 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 49:59 And in some cases, you could measure it directly from the brain, and we do that, but that's not going to be practical, not gonna be scalable, right? Um, not gonna be something a lot of people want to, uh, you know, embrace, let's say, as, as applicants. But find ways to interrogate the brain that are not asking people to assess themselves.

Andrew Huberman 50:21 For instance, what, what would, uh, a small number of questions be that, um, progress-

Michael Platt 50:26 Well, not even questions. One of the things that we've done is develop games, like brief little very engaging games, that are based on specific tasks that we know interrogate specific circuits in the brain, like foraging, for example.

Andrew Huberman 50:41 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 50:42 Uh, where, you know, people are, th- they're literally harvesting berries, let's say, okay? And they're, and th- and they're going along, and the goal is to kind of get as m- as many as you can. And from their behavior, we can figure out exactly where they are on that continuum-

Andrew Huberman 50:58 Hmm.

Michael Platt 50:58 ... uh, mathematically.

Andrew Huberman 51:00 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 51:00 And say, "Okay, well," in the dashboard that we create, and like, "Okay, you are a little, you are pitched a bit more toward, uh, being an innovator and creative type, explorer, and, and less..." So less likely to be, say, a good manager who would need to be, you know, sort of have a, have a higher degree of focus. And we do that for, um, for a number of different aspects of, of, you know, of, of cognitive emotional performance, so things like, uh, uh, like for, in terms of social competence, for example. And so we have little, actually a little game. It, it, it's mimic soccer, and we've had monkeys play it, humans play it. We know exactly what it, (laughs) what it kind of, uh, elicits from the brain, and what circuits it relies on.

Andrew Huberman 51:43 Wow.

Michael Platt 51:43 And that allows us to numerically, you know, identify, like, your strategic planning abilities, or your something like theory of mind, getting in the head, uh, of an opponent. And those games, we found, it, it's, it's really, uh, been very gratifying to, uh, demonstrate that those predict performance in, you know, a number of different jobs, in high-performance jobs like soccer play, actual soccer players. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 52:12 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 52:12 But also in the military, in, um, in cyber operations. Um, and so we're now exploring, and, and we're helping, we helped to stand up a startup company, uh, in Philadelphia that is actually, you know, that's, that's their mission, is to go out, uh, and, and try to use those tools to see if they can do better than basically a whole bunch of questions.

Andrew Huberman 52:34 Yeah, it certainly goes way beyond, um, kind of typical Myers-Briggs or Enneagram-type personality tests-

Michael Platt 52:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:41 ... which I think has certain value. If nothing else, they, uh, you know, people like to know about themselves, and, um, I, I do think categorizing oneself a little bit going to, like, "Are you a three on the Enneagram or a four or an eight?" or, you know, what, um, certainly gives you a, a, a frame of reference. But it, yeah, it doesn't seem very useful for the kinds of, uh, work environments that, that you're describing, whereas what you're describing sounds much more sophisticated.

Andrew Huberman 53:06 Um, you mentioned theory of mind.

Michael Platt 53:08 Hmm.

Andrew Huberman 53:08 We should talk about theory of mind because, uh, here we are back to visual neuroscience, but, uh, I have the understanding, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, that as old world primates, one of the more impressive features that, uh, we've developed is the ability to attend to a location with our eyes, but pay attention to something else in the periphery. People used to refer to this as the, uh, uh, the other cocktail party effect. The r- the cocktail party effect is the ability to pay attention to a conversation while there's stuff in the background, but this is the other cocktail party effect that, uh, sort of, uh, with sometimes chuckles, um, gets described as, you know, you're out to dinner with somebody and you're listening to them and you're paying attention to them, but you're also paying attention to the conversation next to you or maybe someone else at the bar. Um, you know, you can fill in the blanks there. Um, this is an amazing ability, regardless of what it's used for, that a lot of other primate species don't have.

Michael Platt 54:10 I mean, as far as I know, uh, no other species have. So this is, this seems to be... I mean, we know macaques can do this, for example, and humans do this routinely, and we, we assume all apes do this. Um, and the adaptive explanation is, is I think exactly what you're alluding to, which is the fact that, like, when you live in a complex, multi-level society with differentiated relationships, where the things that matter to you are, like, your family, uh, your rank, your status, right? Your friends, your enemies, all those kinds of things.... that then creates a really, uh, complex, (laughs) you know, environment for, as you said, devoting your attention, because, uh, you know, where we look, right, is the focus of our, typically, that's the focus of your attention and what's turned up. And other brains know that.

Andrew Huberman 55:01 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 55:01 Right? And so now, let's imagine you're a baboon, right? And you're, you're not the highest ranking baboon.

Andrew Huberman 55:08 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 55:09 And the high ranking, you know, the alpha is over there, and so you train your gaze on that alpha baboon, but there's a really attractive female over here that you want to know where she's heading, because, you know, that's a good mating opportunity later.

Andrew Huberman 55:22 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 55:22 So it's that ability to kind of split attention from, um, your overt attention, what your-

Andrew Huberman 55:27 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 55:28 ... gaze is pointed at, and covertly, what you're amplifying, uh, and tracking-

Andrew Huberman 55:33 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 55:33 ... um, in the environment. And there's this, you know, to tie this back to theory of mind, um, there's, I think, i- it's reasonable and, and, and consistent with some of the data that theory of mind, which is a sense of being able to infer what somebody else knows, um, what they can see, right, what they, what they want, their state of mind, which might be different from yours, that it develops through th- the way that as, as infants and young children, our experience of first, um, gazing at a caregiver, maintaining attention with them, and then learning to follow their gaze. When they look somewhere and they say, "Hey, that's a, you know, that's an apple," or whatever, that you do the same thing, and that gaze following then is a precursor to joint attention.

Andrew Huberman 56:24 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 56:25 And joint attention being really important for the development of this, uh, of the theory of mind, which is our, our sense of being able to understand, make predictions, make inferences about what's going on in somebody else's head.

Andrew Huberman 56:38 I feel like the, the, uh, overlap of covert attention and theory of mind as you described, um, comes from this assumption that I have, which is that we have effectively two spotlights of attention, and that we can merge them. So I can place all my attention on you and what we're talking about and your face, et cetera. I can spl- split my attention between you and, you know, something over there in the corner. Or I can take that second spotlight of attention and place it on myself like, oh, you know, like, I'm, uh, I need to move to the side 'cause I've got a little, you know, you know, maybe an itch on my thigh or something like that. S- but I don't think we have three spotlights that we can work with very easily anyway. Maybe we could train that up, but that we don't naturally have more than two spotlights of attention. We can merge these two spotlights of attention, and I feel like, and I've done some practice at this just 'cause I'm a neuroscientist and I like to try things, of ramping up my level of focus, just trying to really like, uh, like I'm doing it right now. I'm looking at you and, like, the contour of, of your, your shape against the background. Like, I can really decide to emphasize those borders. I'm not really doing anything behaviorally that's different than I was a few moments ago, but then I could also bring that spotlight of attention kind of down a little bit in intensity. So I feel like we have two spotlights of attention that we can ramp up in intensity, and we don't normally do this, so consciously. Normally, we're more in stimulus response, and I think about this a lot nowadays because, and forgive me for referencing previous podcasts, but we had this brilliant, absolutely brilliant 84-year-old psychoanalyst, Jungian analyst named, um, James, uh, Hollis on the podcast. Mm-hmm. And he talked about, you know, what it is to be human and to create a life, and it boiled down basically to two things, which was to acknowledge that we're in stimulus response a lot of the day and how to be functional in that domain was a lot of that conversation. But that there's this essential aspect to life, which is to get out of stimulus response and bring that, those spotlights of attention inward and to think and to reflect, and then go back into stimulus response. And when we just sleep, wake up, and go into stimulus response all day, or if we go meditate all day and are not in stimulus response, neither is good. So it's that balance. And so this notion of two spotlights of attention, I'd, I'd love for you to tell me this is like complete BS or that it works. I, I don't need to be validated here. I- I'm just more putting it out there as a hypothesis because it feels true to me, but that's obviously just a feeling.

Michael Platt 59:05 Well, I think that feeling is, as far as I know, is consistent with what we understand about how attention can, you know, how it amplifies the visual signals or other signals that are coming into our brains and the ways in which we can kind of, I don't know, if it's divided purely or if it sort of bleeds over, you know?

Andrew Huberman 59:25 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 59:25 What that really, you know, e- exactly looks like. But the landscape, let's imagine it's a landscape of neural activity, and you can kind of raise up two humps or just-

Andrew Huberman 59:34 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 59:34 ... one hump, and it doesn't feel like you can go beyond that. Uh, that's really, really hard to measure.

Andrew Huberman 59:43 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 59:43 Um, and I think, you know, our, our best data on that comes from, you know, recording the activity of neurons in macaques and monkeys while they are, uh, doing attention, you know, these sort of visual discrimination tasks, and I, I f- I think that'd be really, really hard (laughs) to like-

Andrew Huberman 59:59 (laughs)

Michael Platt 59:59 ... actually, uh, elicit that kind of, um, of behavior from them.

Andrew Huberman 1:00:05 Well, we both agree, I know because we were talking before we started recording, that, um, certain types of stimuli really grab our attention and influence our decisions and our evaluation of things out there in the world. So talk to me about monkey porn.

Michael Platt 1:00:23 (laughs) Okay. We never called it monkey porn, but-

Andrew Huberman 1:00:26 Hmm.

Michael Platt 1:00:26 ... a lot of people-

Andrew Huberman 1:00:27 We're calling it monkey porn here.

Michael Platt 1:00:28 A lot of people have said that, uh, you know, essentially, you know, no matter what else I do in my career, that's gonna be on my tombstone. Um-

Andrew Huberman 1:00:35 This man worked on mon-

Michael Platt 1:00:36 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:00:37 This man, uh, unpacked the neurobiology of monkey porn.

Michael Platt 1:00:39 So, okay. So let's go back in, you know, way back machine, you know, and, and so back when I was an anthropologist and I'm going out, I'm watching monkeys and, and, um, it's, it's very clear that there are certain, uh-... things in the world that are important to them, that they prioritize, and those, they're very s- sim- they're the same things that, that we do. So they pay attention to each other, to their faces, um, but also to other cues, and these cues, um, seem to make adaptive significance, right? That they're, they're relevant for your ability to survive and reproduce, which is the name of the game for evolution. That's all that, that really counts. Okay, and what are those things? Well, they're cues to status, like so who's dominant, who's subordinate? Who can take my stuff? Who do I gotta watch out for? Who can I, you know, dominate and take stuff from? And cues to how, you know, to sort of mate quality, mating opportunities. And if you look at non-human primates, they display those things very conspicuously, right? So, uh, you know, males have these big canines, and they have sort of, you know, physical dominant features, very square jaw, all that kind of stuff. And, um, and, and females, for example, in macaques, display their state, uh, their, their hormonal state, how receptive they are to mating and, and likelihood of, of ovulating at that time through the, sort of the swelling and coloration on their perineum. Here's a good, here's a good word for your listeners-

Andrew Huberman 1:02:09 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 1:02:09 ... perineum-

Andrew Huberman 1:02:09 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 1:02:09 ... which we, we introduced, I think, into the neuroscience literature.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:12 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 1:02:12 Um, and that's just the, the sort of anogenital region, so that's where they're-

Andrew Huberman 1:02:15 The taint.

Michael Platt 1:02:16 ... putting a lot of- (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:02:17 Someone else on here, um, is-

Michael Platt 1:02:18 Signaling taint, okay, great.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:19 Listen, another, another card-carrying researcher-

Michael Platt 1:02:22 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:23 ... um, Dr. Shanna S- uh, Shana Swan, Shanna Swan, excuse me, came on here to talk about, um, phthalates and microplastics and endocrine disruptors.

Michael Platt 1:02:31 Uh-huh. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:31 She's spent a career working on this. She's a serious scientist, and she talked about how taint sizes are diminishing in males by virtue of endocrine disruptors accessing the fetus during pregnancy. This is a statistically very robust effect. I know we're gonna get into a discussion about fertility later-

Michael Platt 1:02:52 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:52 ... um, because you've worked on this issue as well. So we can say the perineum taint, and now everyone knows what we're talking about. So, um, the females display their perineum region-

Michael Platt 1:03:03 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:04 ... um, differently when they're ovulating.

Michael Platt 1:03:06 Yeah, so it becomes redder, fuller, et cetera.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:09 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 1:03:09 So if you g- you know, go to the zoo, and you just, you could say, you, you see the monkeys with the red butt, big red butts, they're the ones-

Andrew Huberman 1:03:14 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 1:03:14 ... who are the females who are mo- It turns out the males do that too, so, uh, males, um, signal kind of their circulating testosterone levels by how red their taint is, and actually even you can just see the physical size of their testes is, is a, is a pretty good proxy and a cue. And then in, in rhesus macaques, there's also kind of these signals around the eyes that, um, they get a little bit darker.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:38 Hmm.

Michael Platt 1:03:39 Uh, the theory is that, um, humans, so for a long time people said, "Oh, humans don't display their, their, anything about their, (laughs) you know, their hormonal biological state, uh, you know, to promote monogamy," and all kinds of stuff like that, even though it seems that monogamy is not the, uh, p- monogamy does not seem, monogamy in terms of mating does not seem to be the dominant, um, strategy in humans. Let's s- let's call it that.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:07 Yeah, j- but just to make sure, uh, that I'm clear on this, it used to be said, y- you are saying that it used to be said that humans don't signal their ho- hormonal status, and the reason people were saying that is because it was a promotion of monogamous behavior, which is actually not true in humans?

Michael Platt 1:04:26 Well, so, um, this goes back to Darwin, really, who, who, who sort of theorized that, that humans, during human evolution, that, um, as monogamy became more adaptive for whatever reason, they're, you know, it's all speculation, right? That, uh, that these sort of cues were hidden, um, so that, you know, indi- even males couldn't mono, you know, m- you wouldn't be encouraged to find other (laughs) mating opportunities outside-

Andrew Huberman 1:04:54 I see.

Michael Platt 1:04:55 ... your monogamous relationship, um, and so it would kinda keep the focus, to get back to that, you know, on, on your, uh, partner, but, you know, all the data that's out there both from, you know, like when societies were encountered by Western scientists, like whether polygyny was practiced or not, um, to just what we understand about extra, you know, extra-pair matings, like in offspring, et cetera, that, that, that, you know, strict monogamy does not seem to be the, the d- (laughs) you know, to have been the dominant, um, strategy. Now, that's also consistent with the observation that, you know, we are, we are a sexually dimorphic species. So if, you know, i- when you look at the animal kingdom, uh, uh, or in primates in particular, uh, those that are obligate, pair-bonded, monogamous primates, the males and females don't really differ much. Like if you look at marmosets or tamarins-

Andrew Huberman 1:05:51 In terms of body size.

Michael Platt 1:05:52 ... body size, coloration, you know, conspicuous sexual, um, characteristics.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:57 Brain structure as well.

Michael Platt 1:05:59 That's another interesting point which we can circle back to. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:06:02 Yeah.

Michael Platt 1:06:02 But even if you just look at, well, we can, even if you just look at brain size, relative bra- brain size relative to body size, um, that, uh, is, (laughs) is smallest in, um, pair-bonded, uh, monogamous species.

Andrew Huberman 1:06:17 The difference in brain size between males and fem-

Michael Platt 1:06:18 Not between males and females, but just overall, and it sort of, uh, scales up with, um, with group size and group, um, complexity. It's slightly different, but there's a point there which is that, well, pair-bonded monogamous species look very, very different, right? It's, it, it-

Andrew Huberman 1:06:35 Different, sorry, I'm, I'm, uh, different than us?

Michael Platt 1:06:36 It's very unusual, let's just say this. So it's, it's very unusual, right? Um, in mammals overall, it's very unusual in primates. There's only a few, you know, I, I im-

Andrew Huberman 1:06:45 Monogamous primates.

Michael Platt 1:06:46 Monogamous, obligate, pair-bonded primates. Um, and in general, their behavior is not as complicated or complex-

Andrew Huberman 1:06:55 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 1:06:56 ... as individuals that live in societies where there's a lot more...... going on in terms of strategizing to attain mating opportunities through, um, you know, either through sort of physical challenge or through, um, you know, being sneaky or, you know, or making friends, et cetera, et cetera. There's a, there's a- a- there's this sort of proliferation of different strategies that requires a lot more mental calculation apparently that, um, that goes hand-in-hand with an increase in brain size, cortex size, uh, et cetera.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:33 Which makes sense from the standpoint of, like, more prefrontal cortex, more context-dependent strategy setting and decision-making. And it could be based on, it- it seems that with more prefrontal cortex, one can, um, a species can incorporate, uh, different valuations of mates. It's- it can be about hormonal status, and I wanna make sure we get back to that, how humans signal hormonal status-

Michael Platt 1:07:56 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:56 ... um, but it could also be about, uh, you know, uh, reproductive potential as it relates to resource allocation or, um, whether or not they'll be a good caretaker. I mean, and a lot of additional factors can be incorporated, um, in, and working with more va- variables flexibly requires more neural real estate, m- mostly in prefrontal cortex, right? You know?

Michael Platt 1:08:19 Uh, absolutely, although I will, I will, uh, based on a paper we published last year in Nature, I would say that our notions of sort of the breakdowns of, like, where stuff is in the brain and how it's encoded I think is going to change a lot, and there are a number of other studies that have come out in the last year or so that, that echo this. And so this was a paper in which we did something unthinkable, I think, (laughs) you know, in the sort of history of neuroscience, which is all about reduction. Let's- let's make the- this- the- the, uh, the- the experiment as simple as possible, only vary one thing, right?

Andrew Huberman 1:08:53 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 1:08:53 And we're gonna find where that one thing is in the brain, and that's the tradition going back to Hubel and Wiesel, right?

Andrew Huberman 1:08:59 Hubel and Wiesel folks are-

Michael Platt 1:09:00 (laughs) Sorry.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:00 ... my scientific great-grandparents. No, we were bound to do it sooner or later.

Michael Platt 1:09:03 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:09:03 They won the Nobel Prize for their understanding-

Michael Platt 1:09:05 Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:06 ... for their d- their parsing of the, of the neural basis of vision, neuroplasticity, et cetera. Um, Torsten's still alive. I think he's, like, 100 now. Last time I saw him, he was 96, and he was still jogging and doing art. David passed away, amazing. You can look it up, H and W, we call them, Hubel and Wiesel. They're- they're among our, um, uh, they're on the Mount Rushmore of neuroscience, and we'll get back to this. So,

Andrew Huberman 1:09:31 um, please, yeah, e- explain to us, um, what this paper showed, and then, uh, we will then talk about how h- humans signal their hormonal status.

Michael Platt 1:09:42 And we'll go all the way back to monkey porn, I hope, because-

Andrew Huberman 1:09:44 Oh, we won't, we won't leave monkey porn-

Michael Platt 1:09:45 ... it's- it's really, it's really near and dear to-

Andrew Huberman 1:09:46 We won't leave monkey porn in the past.

Michael Platt 1:09:48 ... really near and dear to my-

Andrew Huberman 1:09:48 No.

Michael Platt 1:09:48 ... so near and dear to my heart. Um, okay, so Hubel and Wiesel, you know, let's- let's... We're gonna really simplify because, you know, that's- that's- that's how we figure out exactly how it works. But it's not what our brains do. That's not the environment our brains are in. I mean, when you're out there in the world, you've got this well-tur- this- this- this just incredibly complex visual environment, social environment, and what you do in any moment depends on what you experienced recently, what you think might happen next, what might have happened last week in a similar circumstance. It's super complicated, and it reflects all these different competing interests and values, and that's true for monkeys too, okay? And so we did the dream- my dream experiment from back when I was an anthropologist, which was to get rid of the lab, okay? And instead, we, uh, recorded wirelessly from thousands of neurons in the brain, uh, in prefrontal cortex, which you mentioned, and we- we tend to think of as being, you know, important for decision-making and kind of setting goals and- and context, and also the- the sort of high-level visual area, uh, in the temporal lobe that's important for sensing objects and- and, um, you know, maybe faces and things like that. So seemingly, you know, one at, like, an input level and one at, like, a higher order level. And we did this mostly because it- uh, some of technological limitations, but it turned out to be really, like, a good thing (laughs) in the end 'cause it- it- it told us something really unusual. So what we did then is we let monkeys just be monkeys with each other, okay? So, uh, they- we'd have a male, uh, with his female, uh, friend, uh, or alone with a female friend, uh, on the other side of a, you know, a- a sort of plexiglass divider, and then there could be other monkeys present, like, as observers, like, who are, like, watching what they're doing or not. And then we also introduced challenges to them, like, so basically, my- my graduate student would come in and, like, you know, threaten one of the monkeys, and this elicits a lot of agitation, uh, and arousal because monkeys-

Andrew Huberman 1:11:56 We're gonna have to say how you threaten a monkey.

Michael Platt 1:11:58 Monkeys, you know, look, we're just, like, big, kind of not-as-hairy monkeys, um, to them, and- and, you know, that- that makes-

Andrew Huberman 1:12:05 To threaten them, you look at them directly in the eye.

Michael Platt 1:12:06 (laughs) You look at them, and you open your mouth.

Andrew Huberman 1:12:07 Yeah, so if you go to the zoo, folks, and you look directly at a monkey and you smile, that's a threat. If you wanna be friendly with the monkeys, lip smack.

Michael Platt 1:12:18 (smacks lips) That's ...

Narrator 1:12:18 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:12:18 ... an affiliation thing.

Michael Platt 1:12:19 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:12:19 It almost looked like we were blowing kisses at one another. You noticed we both looked away.

Michael Platt 1:12:22 (laughs) Probably where it comes from.

Andrew Huberman 1:12:23 That's right.

Michael Platt 1:12:24 That's probably where it comes from.

Andrew Huberman 1:12:25 The, uh... So this- so you got a naturalistic experiment.

Michael Platt 1:12:27 So we got a natural experiment.

Andrew Huberman 1:12:29 Yeah.

Michael Platt 1:12:29 And so rather than having one, you know, varying one thing, these monkeys engaged in, like, 27, 28 different kinds of behaviors, okay? They've- they s- you know, they- they would forage, they'd scratch, they'd groom each other, they'd threaten, they'd mount, they'd do everything that monkeys do, right? And then we also, you know, so we were varying the context as well. And so that's, like, blows the lid off of the typical- the complexity in a typical experiment. And what did we find? We found that neurons in both these areas, they were indistinguishable. Uh, were modulated. They were affected. Their firing rates, their activity was affected by the behaviors that the animals engaged in.... and what the other animal is engaged in too. Also, who's around, who's watching me? Is it, like, male-

Andrew Huberman 1:13:12 Hmm.

Michael Platt 1:13:12 ... you know, X or female Y? And that, and what, what was really surprising, so first of all you see these signals, they're basically the same, these two parts of the brain are supposed to be very, very different, and, um, the average neuron, uh, cared about, you know, something like seven things rather than, you know, like one or two. Okay? Like a grandmother cell, you know, which was kind of one idea for how the brain encoded things, like there's one neuron and it only responds to your grandmother, right? Something like that.

Andrew Huberman 1:13:42 Jennifer Aniston cells.

Michael Platt 1:13:43 Jennifer Aniston cells, very famous, uh-

Andrew Huberman 1:13:46 Barack Obama cells.

Michael Platt 1:13:47 ... study of Barack Obama cells.

Andrew Huberman 1:13:48 And now there's this question about whether or not they're in a relationship, so that's why I brought-

Michael Platt 1:13:51 Yes. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:13:51 But that was actually in the paper. There were, there were neurons in the cortex-

Michael Platt 1:13:55 Yes.

Andrew Huberman 1:13:56 ... that responded to Jennifer Aniston specifically, Jennifer Aniston cells, Barack Obama specifically. I'm guessing there are Donald Trump neurons.

Michael Platt 1:14:06 There's probably quite a few.

Andrew Huberman 1:14:07 Right.

Michael Platt 1:14:08 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:14:08 And there, I'm guessing there were Biden neurons. So-

Michael Platt 1:14:12 Hmm, maybe.

Andrew Huberman 1:14:13 Maybe.

Michael Platt 1:14:14 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:14:14 So th- it's, uh, you're saying that two very distinct brain areas can respond very similarly to the same things and that, so that's one interest- interesting finding. And the second interesting finding, as I understand, is that neurons are paying attention not just to what you're looking at or the monkey is looking at, but also who's looking at them, um, who else is around, what the goal is. So individual neurons are multitasking.

Michael Platt 1:14:45 They're, they're multitasking.

Andrew Huberman 1:14:46 Got it.

Michael Platt 1:14:46 And, and, or as we say, multiplexing, but it's really the same thing as, as multitasking, and that raises a lot of really interesting questions. Why? Why, why are these signals all over the place? Um, which it seems to be the case, right? Uh, and one idea that's out there is that because the, you know, if you, let's say it's a visual area, those visual neurons might need to know the context in which something is happening in order to, um, appropriately, like, encode that stimulus, right? 'Cause it matters, the meaning of that stimulus, it's another monkey, like re- when I'm looking at you, it matters that we're in this setting here in California and I flew out here yesterday and all that stuff. Might be really, really important for what my brain does with that information, like what I, how I, how I encode it, what, what I put into memory, et cetera. So that's sort of one, um, hypothesis that, that, that I think that we're all entertaining, 'cause it would be, I mean, it would be heresy to say that, like, actually it's a, more like another name drop, Karl Lashley kind of view of the brain that it's just one big mush-

Andrew Huberman 1:15:54 Yeah, so-

Michael Platt 1:15:54 ... that all sort of do. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 1:15:55 So in 30 seconds, Karl Lashley ran a really critical experiment where, uh, it was the equipotentiality of cortex experiment where basically, uh, there'd been a decades of experiments with, um, people lesioning a given area of the brain and seeing a s- some deficit in behavior. Lashley decided to do the same experiment and found that regardless of which area of the cortex, this is important that it was the cortex specifically that he scooped out, lesioned, got rid of, set it in dish next to the, th- his case I think it was rats, um, he didn't observe deficits in that behavior, at least that persisted. But you see this in the monkey and human data. You can lesion a brain area, see a, a huge deficit- I know I'm telling you what you already know, Michael, but, um, I think most people don't realize this, a b- a brain lesion can lead to a huge deficit in behavior that is recovered later over time through plasticity unless you start digging into the deeper stuff of the brain-

Michael Platt 1:16:50 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:16:50 ... where lesions lead to permanent deficits-

Michael Platt 1:16:53 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:16:53 ... unless some intervention is provided.

Michael Platt 1:16:55 Yeah, the cortex seems to be maybe a little bit, I don't wanna say equipotential, but it's-

Andrew Huberman 1:16:59 Mm-hmm.

Michael Platt 1:16:59 ... it's very plastic. It's very flexible, uh, and very adaptive. So, um, th- this was a really cool finding, I thought, and, you know, we could decode from the population o- of, of neurons exactly what each of the animals was doing and who was around and who's watching, right? I mean, which, I mean, to me, it was very gratifying. But the thing that was most exciting to me, the most exciting find, th- I think that finding is really cool for neuroscientists, but for the primatologist and anthropologist in me, the finding that was most exciting was that we discovered the account, the mental account for our social relationships. Okay? So, um, for monkeys, this, a l- a large fraction of their, the way that they build and maintain relationships is through grooming each other, so when they go and they pick through each other's fur and, um, that's how you make friends, okay? That's how you make allies. And the, um, what has been observed going back to when monkeys were, f- you know, first being watched is that, uh, they tend to be really equitable, right? They're like, "If I invest two minutes in you, you will eventually invest two minutes back in me. It might not happen right away, but we're gonna balance out. It's gonna come even." And that raised the idea which most people thought was, like, ridiculous that, well, they're actually tracking and, and keeping notes on all this. They've got a ledger for their investments and withdrawals in this social relationship. So to make it more, more, uh, salient for the listeners, like think of it as like when you're texting and you text a friend and they text you back and then you text them and you text them again and you text them again and you're like, "Am I getting ghosted? What the heck's going on here? Why are you not text..." You start to feel that sense of, like, urgency, betrayal, like, you know, "Well, I'm not gonna text you now. I'm gonna wait. I'm gonna wait until (laughs) you text me back." It's the same kind of thing. We have this sense of... And in fact when we think about now all the stuff that's going on sociopolitically, you know, in terms of equitable relationships, I think that, that, this, this bears on that. So-We did something that had never been done before, which is we tracked every single grooming interaction that ever happened between these monkeys over months, 'cause we could. We had cameras on them and we, we used computer vision to, to, to do all that tracking. And yeah, they were perfectly equitable. But sometimes it, you know, sometimes it would take minutes to balance it, sometimes it took weeks. Like, "You owe me, you owe me," and then it would come back. What we found is that in the brain (laughs) the brain, in these two, both of these brain areas, were carrying that mental account that precisely tracked who owed whom what.

Andrew Huberman 1:19:53 Amazing.

Michael Platt 1:19:54 How much grooming they, you know, uh, that blew thing, I mean, that blew my mind. It's like, 'cause we all feel that, right? We, it's, like, the, one of the most salient things there is in our lives.

Andrew Huberman 1:20:05 I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist, carried out entirely online. Now, I personally have been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice, it was a condition of being allowed to stay in school, but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to one's overall health. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all,