EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,329 words- 0:00 – 2:12
Dr. Michael Platt
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- 2:12 – 7:52
Humans, Old World Primates & Decision-Making; Swiss Army Knife Analogy
- AHAndrew Huberman
Dr. Michael Platt, welcome.
- MPMichael Platt
Thanks. It's awesome to be here.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
Yes.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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-
- MPMichael Platt
Mm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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?
- MPMichael Platt
That's a great way of putting it, 'cause I think it's both.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs) .
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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-
- MPMichael Platt
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... that we are, do you think is distinctly different than, say, a macaque monkey, aside from language?
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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)
- MPMichael Platt
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- 7:52 – 11:01
Sponsors: Our Place & Wealthfront
- AHAndrew Huberman
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- 11:01 – 16:40
Attention Allocation, Resource Foraging
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
Mm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... you know, we are very visual creatures for those of us that are sighted. Most humans are sighted.
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
Mm, mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... hyperactivity disorder?
- MPMichael Platt
Okay, there's a lot in that question.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm. (laughs)
- MPMichael Platt
(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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
And this could be a social interaction-
- MPMichael Platt
Could be a social interaction, it could be-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Could be.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Could you
- 16:40 – 22:22
Social Media; Marginal Value Theorem, Distraction
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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.
- MPMichael Platt
Mm-hmm, yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Many accounts on X, either the icon is so small-
- MPMichael Platt
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... or, uh, people even just have cartoons or whatever avatars there that aren't really faces in many cases.
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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-
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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?
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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?
- MPMichael Platt
Speculating a little bit here-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- MPMichael Platt
... since I have not thought about it in the context of, say, you know, X versus Instagram.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
So that, that's less well-known, but, uh, we're now learning that it is, it is pretty short term, right?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah, you can have 12 tabs open, 50 tabs open.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- 22:22 – 25:23
Tool: Remove Phone from Room; Attention & Urgency
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah, I mean, it's com- completely consistent with what we're, what we're saying here with regard to foraging.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But if I take my phone and I put it ... I don't have my phone here under the chair-
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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."
- AHAndrew Huberman
Are there any data
- 25:23 – 29:29
Tool: Self Conversation; Visual Input, Attention as a Skill
- AHAndrew Huberman
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?
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... but I, but I-
- AHAndrew Huberman
But it's, like, thematically anchored.
- MPMichael Platt
The- the- exactly.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- MPMichael Platt
Exactly.
- AHAndrew Huberman
As opposed to visually anchored, like staring at a flame or concentrating on one's breath.
- MPMichael Platt
Staring at a flame, yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- 29:29 – 38:57
Warming-Up Focus, Tool: Visual Aperture & Attention
- MPMichael Platt
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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-
- MPMichael Platt
Right.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
You seem to be in great shape.
- MPMichael Platt
No, but it's like-
- AHAndrew Huberman
You know?
- MPMichael Platt
... it's funny, you know, I've been doing CrossFit for, like, 17 years. Okay.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Oh, wow. And you're still uninjured? You're one of the few that don't.
- MPMichael Platt
Oh, no, I've got plenty of injuries.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay, gotcha.
- MPMichael Platt
I, you know, I've had a- a, you know, couple hernia surgeries and, um-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Maybe- maybe just, like-
- MPMichael Platt
... I might need another one. (laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
... five or six minutes of- of mobility work, you know?
- MPMichael Platt
So... (laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
We have a lot of episodes on this with experts.
- MPMichael Platt
No, the- the mobility is really good.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Great.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Oh, it's great.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
You become, like, a very different, um, very different human.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah, so this issue of warming up-
- 38:57 – 40:13
Sponsor: AG1
- MPMichael Platt
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- 40:13 – 44:07
Control of Attention, Tool: Changing Environment
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
Yep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... for those that are just listening. I've got a latte gourd here, plenty of caffeine in there.
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
Mm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-"
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
"... 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?
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
So from my perspective, the best thing you could do is just change the environment, put those devices away, (laughs) you know, make-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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,
- 44:07 – 53:06
Attention Continuum, Professions, Measuring Business Skill with Neuroscience
- AHAndrew Huberman
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?
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Oh, good.
- MPMichael Platt
(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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
People are p- are-
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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?
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah, that aligns with creative professions.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
For instance, what, what would, uh, a small number of questions be that, um, progress-
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... uh, mathematically.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Wow.
- MPMichael Platt
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)
- 53:06 – 1:00:05
Theory of Mind, Covert Attention, Attentional Spotlights
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, you mentioned theory of mind.
- MPMichael Platt
Hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
Right? And so now, let's imagine you're a baboon, right? And you're, you're not the highest ranking baboon.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
So it's that ability to kind of split attention from, um, your overt attention, what your-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... gaze is pointed at, and covertly, what you're amplifying, uh, and tracking-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
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?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... one hump, and it doesn't feel like you can go beyond that. Uh, that's really, really hard to measure.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
(laughs)
- MPMichael Platt
... actually, uh, elicit that kind of, um, of behavior from them.
- 1:00:05 – 1:09:31
Primates, Hormone Status, Brain Size, Monogamy
- MPMichael Platt
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs) Okay. We never called it monkey porn, but-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... a lot of people-
- AHAndrew Huberman
We're calling it monkey porn here.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
This man worked on mon-
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
This man, uh, unpacked the neurobiology of monkey porn.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... perineum-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... which we, we introduced, I think, into the neuroscience literature.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
Um, and that's just the, the sort of anogenital region, so that's where they're-
- AHAndrew Huberman
The taint.
- MPMichael Platt
... putting a lot of- (laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
Someone else on here, um, is-
- MPMichael Platt
Signaling taint, okay, great.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Listen, another, another card-carrying researcher-
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... um, Dr. Shanna S- uh, Shana Swan, Shanna Swan, excuse me, came on here to talk about, um, phthalates and microplastics and endocrine disruptors.
- MPMichael Platt
Uh-huh. Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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-
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... 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-
- MPMichael Platt
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... um, differently when they're ovulating.
- 1:09:31 – 1:20:05
Monkeys, Neuronal Multiplexing & Context; Equitable Relationships
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
And we'll go all the way back to monkey porn, I hope, because-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Oh, we won't, we won't leave monkey porn-
- MPMichael Platt
... it's- it's really, it's really near and dear to-
- AHAndrew Huberman
We won't leave monkey porn in the past.
- MPMichael Platt
... really near and dear to my-
- AHAndrew Huberman
No.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
We're gonna have to say how you threaten a monkey.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
To threaten them, you look at them directly in the eye.
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs) You look at them, and you open your mouth.
- AHAndrew Huberman
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.
- MPMichael Platt
(smacks lips) That's ...
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
... an affiliation thing.
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
It almost looked like we were blowing kisses at one another. You noticed we both looked away.
- MPMichael Platt
(laughs) Probably where it comes from.
- AHAndrew Huberman
That's right.
- MPMichael Platt
That's probably where it comes from.
- AHAndrew Huberman
The, uh... So this- so you got a naturalistic experiment.
- MPMichael Platt
So we got a natural experiment.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- MPMichael Platt
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-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm.
- MPMichael Platt
... 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.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Jennifer Aniston cells.
- MPMichael Platt
Jennifer Aniston cells, very famous, uh-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Barack Obama cells.
- 1:20:05 – 1:21:11
Sponsor: BetterHelp
- MPMichael Platt
- AHAndrew Huberman
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, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. BetterHelp makes it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and that can provide you those three benefits that come from effective therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's super time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. There's no commuting to a therapist's office or sitting in a waiting room, no traffic, no parking issues, et cetera. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman.
- 1:21:11 – 1:29:34
Relationships, Power Dynamics, Neuroethology
- AHAndrew Huberman
This explains, um, occasionally I'll get a text from a friend that says, "Nice conversation," w- which means they texted me a bunch before and I didn't respond.
Episode duration: 3:48:51
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