Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation| Dr. Ralph Adolphs

1. 0:00 – 2:54

   Ralph Adolphs

   1. RADr. Ralph Adolphs0:00

      I see somebody come up behind me. They can see I'm trying to park. They can move over. No. They come right up behind me, go on the horn, ee. And, you know, you immediately feel just an immediate anger response, right?

   2. AHAndrew Huberman0:13

      Mm-hmm.

   3. RADr. Ralph Adolphs0:13

      Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So there was an immediate automatic downregulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor-

   4. AHAndrew Huberman0:23

      Mm-hmm

   5. RADr. Ralph Adolphs0:23

      ... to somebody honking at me, that was trained and generalized from the ice bath. This is an experiment of one. I'm not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there's a, there's a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions, that they can become kind of automatically regulated. You don't have to overthink it. It becomes smooth and effortless to some extent, and that's, that's the place where you, where you, where you wanna get.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman0:53

      Hey, everyone. To celebrate the launch of my new book entitled Protocols, I'm pleased to share that I'll be hosting three live events very soon. The first live event is in New York City at Radio City Music Hall on September 17th. The second event is in Los Angeles at the Dolby Theater on October 8th, and the third live event is in San Francisco at The Masonic on October 28th. At each of these events, I'll be discussing topics from the book, and my favorite part, taking questions directly from you, the audience. To get tickets, you can go to hubermanlab.com/events and use the code PROTOCOLS to get early access. Again, that's hubermanlab.com/events, and use the code PROTOCOLS to get early access to tickets. [upbeat music] 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. Ralph Adolphs. Dr. Ralph Adolphs is a professor of psychology, neuroscience, and biology at Caltech University, and a world expert in the neurobiology of emotions. Today, we discuss what emotions are, how they grow and shrink in our brain and body, and why some emotions seem to recruit our behavior and decision-making and some simply don't. We also discuss where and how emotions are mapped in the body, and we dispel common myths about the brain-body storage of emotions from our past, which is a very commonly discussed topic that, frankly, as you'll learn today, many, if not most people, get wrong. We also discuss why some people are able to observe but not react to their emotions, and what tools may assist in helping you build better emotion regulation. As you'll soon realize, Dr. Adolphs is uniquely positioned to explain the real neuroscience and psychology of emotions and how to put that information to use. Today's conversation, therefore, ought to be valuable for people of every age and profession, and for anyone interested in improving their emotional life and understanding of others. And now for my conversation with Dr. Ralph

2. 2:54 – 10:00

   Emotions; Qualities of Emotions: Priority, Valence

   1. AHAndrew Huberman2:54

      Adolphs. Dr. Ralph Adolphs, welcome.

   2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs2:57

      Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure to be here.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman2:59

      Longtime admirer of your work because you're one of the few people who has studied these things we call emotions, brain states, cognition, and much more in humans. There have been others in the field of neuroscience, of course, but I would argue few people have combined a real grounding in neural circuits with an interest in what most people think of as a psychological set of issues in a way that also takes into account the animal data and really the broadest picture of this thing that we call emotions. I'm just gonna start with a statement of gratitude. Thank you for doing that because it's so easy for people to stimulate a brain area, see, uh, an animal or a human behave or speak in a certain way and say, "Oh, this is the brain region for this," and you've long been pushing back on that.

   4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs3:38

      It's, it's a tall order, you know, and one impetus for the work that I've been doing and the book that I co-wrote with David Anderson, the book, uh, that I have forthcoming with Princeton University Press, is precisely to do what you just said. It's to kind of integrate and pull together, uh, findings on emotion from animal studies, findings from social psychology. Typically, those people in those fields don't talk to one another. They do very different studies, have very different methodologies, and so trying to integrate across disciplines that are that far apart to really try and get a, get a sense for what are emotions in a sense that would satisfy psychologists and laypeople about human emotions, but that would also speak to the mechanisms that you can study in mice, for example, or flies, as David Anderson does.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman4:22

      So how do you think about emotions, and how do they relate to brain and bodily states?

   6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs4:28

      The basic answer is that I think of emotions as functional states of a particular type. They should be understood by what they do, their function, rather than how they happen to be constituted in the human brain or differently in an octopus nervous system or in an AI, which we should talk about. Um, and so the way to situate them is to think of control of behavior in response to particular types of environmental challenges. So at the sort of simplest level, you would have reflexes. You know, I put my hand out on a hot stove, or you tap the patellar tendon in my knee, and there's, like, a very rigid behavior that's adaptive, that's very rigid, but just for that particular circumstance. I withdraw my hand, that's a reflex. At the opposite end, you would have, you know, goal-directed general volition and planning, everything, you know, stuff we do all the time that's extremely flexible. And so if you have a bear or, or a tiger, you know, something charging at you, that challenge requires a control of behavior that's intermediate between those two extremes. I can't have a reflex for a bear if it's far away or if it's close or if it's a rattlesnake or, or, or a tiger or all the different kinds of potential threats out there. Instead, I need something that's more flexible, which emotions are. So that's the sort of big picture, that em- emotions are functional states that have particular features or operating characteristics for dealing with certain types of environmental challenges, like running away from a bear. I mean, first of all, I think the question, what is an emotion, is a good and a valid question. It's not an ill-posed question. You occasionally run into the view that Well, emotions don't really exist, or we don't really-- you can't really say anything about them. The question is just ill-posed or meaningless. I don't think that's the case. Paul Griffiths, a philosopher, wrote a book some years ago, I think '97 or so, What Emotions Really Are, uh, where he first kind of made the claim that, well, they don't really exist, you know. And you could see how people come to that conclusion if you survey all the different theories that are out there. Joe LeDoux or Lisa Feldman Barrett or Paul Ekman, they look pretty different. And so you might come away with the impression, look, even the experts can't agree on what emotions are. The words we have for emotions predate modern science, so it's just a confused concept. I don't think that's the case. I think, I mean, there's room for revision, but I think everybody kinda knows what emotions are, and I think it deserves a straight answer that science should provide. I think the question is well-posed enough to admit of an answer. And then how could you start getting to an answer? So let, let's just start sort of from the simplest case would be to list some examples. So you could say, well, you know, emotions are anger, fear, disgust. You could list specific examples that are uncontentious, I would hope, where pretty much everybody agrees, okay, these are examples of emotions, right? You could do the same if I asked you, what, what's a car, right? And you would say, "Well, you know, it's a Mercedes and a Honda and a Toyota." Or if I asked you, "What's a bird?" And you would say, "It's a robin and a hummingbird and an eagle." So you could list examples. That's not an answer yet. What you would then want to say is, well, what is it in virtue of which these examples, what makes them all instances of an emotion? What do fear, anger, et cetera share in common? What features do they have that makes them emotions? Just like what the cars or the bird species have in common that makes them cars or birds. And so David Anderson and I did that in our book a decade ago or so, now The Neuroscience of Emotion, where we listed some features of emotions that helps to answer the question and sort of get a handle on wh-what is it that these all share in common. I elaborate on that and have a longer list and really go into detail on, okay, so what are the features of emotions in my forthcoming book. Maybe I'll just list a couple to go through them quickly. So one feature of emotions is priority, which is that they can take over your behavior. That they share in common with reflexes. If I put my head on a hot stove, you know, I can't help but withdraw it. And if you're suddenly confronted by the bear, you can't help but run away or crawl into a ball or whatever your adaptive behavior is. So they have priority and interrupt your behavior, which is something that the, the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon already pointed out in a paper back in the '50s or '60s, that they're interrupt mechanisms of a certain kind. If you're just going about your business and normal goal-directed behavior, you always need to be monitoring for the bear or the tiger, the predator that's out there. And if you detect that, emotions have to take over or you're dead. So priority is sort of one. That doesn't distinguish emotions from reflexes or fixed action patterns. They, they share that. Another one is valence that psychologists ubiquitously mention, which is sort of the simplest dimension along which you can organize emotions in terms of their similarity. So anger, disgust, fear, you might say are more similar to one another than either of those is with, say, happiness. There's some similarity structure. Some emotions cluster together, some are further apart. And the simplest dimension, which is one that Charles Darwin already mentioned in his book, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, he called it the principle of antithesis, is valence, which is approach or avoid, pleasant or unpleasant, this basic valence dimension.

3. 10:00 – 15:25

   Qualities of Emotions: Scalability, Persistence

   1. AHAndrew Huberman10:00

      Are there any neutral emotions? I, I ask this because your colleague at Caltech who I-

   2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs10:05

      Yeah

   3. AHAndrew Huberman10:05

      ... respect tremendously, Marcus Meister, uh, once wrote a review where he said, you know, a w-- a good way to think about sensory systems and maybe neural systems of all kind is that they're encoding for yum, yuck, or meh.

   4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs10:17

      [laughs]

   5. AHAndrew Huberman10:17

      And the meh is a very interesting one.

   6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs10:19

      Yeah.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman10:19

      Just like an animal or-

   8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs10:20

      Right, right

   9. AHAndrew Huberman10:20

      ... including us can go forward, backward, or stay put. Now we can go side to side too, of course. Those are just different versions of forward in, in this context. And I sometimes wonder, because algorithms are repurposed across different neural systems, if there is indeed a meh emotion or maybe the emotion is meh. I don't want to take us down a philosophical path, but-

   10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs10:40

       Right

   11. AHAndrew Huberman10:40

       ... does that make sense? 'Cause as long-

   12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs10:42

       It makes sense

   13. AHAndrew Huberman10:42

       ... as we're talking about valence-

   14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs10:43

       Sure

   15. AHAndrew Huberman10:43

       ... anger and happiness, clearly, you know, sad and happy, okay, opposite ends of the spectrum. But what was it, apathy? Is there a state of prioritization of doing nothing?

   16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs10:54

       It's a really good question. I mean, I think, you know, when you list these features, um, like priority, valence, uh, I should-- I'll, I'll get to some others. One question is, which of these are necessary? Um, you know, is it like a package of, uh, all of these features, uh, that emotions have? Do you need all of them or can-- are some of them sufficient? And I think the answer is some of them are sufficient, but there's some that are necessary. I think priority is necessary. I think valence may be not, as you were alluding to. I could imagine there's still valence, but it's at a neutral region of the, of the spectrum. But then there's other ones which are the ones that David Anderson has studied in particular in the hypothalamus in mice, and I think goes into great detail in the podcast that you had with him, which are scalability and temporal persistence.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman11:41

       Mm-hmm.

   18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs11:41

       And so scalability would be that an emotion can scale in intensity. Uh, one of the best examples of that has been, is, is for the case of fear and the bear coming at you. So typically, it would scale from anxiety and monitoring, you know, there's the bear sort of out there, to fear, where you might run away or hide, to panic.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman12:02

       Mm-hmm.

   20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs12:02

       So that's your threat imminence scalability. And that's something where emotions are different now from reflexes, because reflexes are binary. It's all or nothing. I either pull my hand away or nothing. The knee jerks or not. It's not, there's not, like, some scalable package in there. And then temporal persistence is even more something that's essential to emotions and speaks to their function, which is you have this internal state, let's say of aggression or of fear, that has to last some time because the, the bear might be around for some time. So you might be running away or you might be attacking in anger. Those are phasic little bouts, but the actual internal state that is motivating those persists for quite a long time. So temporal persistence is really important, and it allows the person or the animal to incorporate lots and lots of information that's coming in and to have a motivational state that would be suited for that kind of environmental challenge. It's not like a hot plate where if you pull your hand away, you're done. The bear is out there and it might, might come back, it might still be lurking in the forest, so you better be afraid for some period of time. David Anderson has studied this a lot in terms of what neural circuits, what properties of neurotransmitters in the brain could actually implement persistence. Would you have really slow neurotransmitters like neuropeptides, for instance, which is what he studied. But my colleagues at the University of Iowa actually did a really cool study in humans that showed the temporal persistence of emotions independent of memory. So here's the study. They took patients with amnesia, so these were like four or five people who had medial temporal lobe hippocampal damage. They live in a time window of maybe a minute or so. I used to study these patients when I first started as a postdoc at the University of Iowa with, with Damasio. And, you know, you can talk to them, you c- they can, uh, process information, but if you go to the toilet and you come back five minutes later, they would stand up and shake your hand, introduce themselves to you because they would have no recollection of having met you before. So just no memory. Very strong anterograde amnesia, as it's called. So they had those end controls. They showed them really sad movie clips in all cases. The patients can understand and watch the movie clip. They get really sad and weepy. Right after watching these sad movie clips, everybody rates how sad do you feel. The amnesic patients feel really sad. The controls feel really sad. You wait five minutes. You then ask the controls, "Well, how do you f-- how sad do you feel?" And they say, "Yeah, I still feel a little bit of sad, sadness in me because I remember having seen the movie." And if you ask them, "Why do you feel sad?" They say, "Well, because you showed me the sad movie five minutes ago." The amnesic patients, you ask, "How do you feel?" They say, "I feel really sad, and I don't know why. I have no idea." And you ask them, "Do you remember seeing a movie?" They say, "Nope." There's like no declarative memory of the movie, but there's still the temporal persistence of the sadness. It lasts some time.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman14:56

       Mm-hmm.

   22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs14:57

       So I thought this was a really cool study because it showed very clearly that there is temporal persistence in emotions, and sadness probably has one of the longest time constants as we know from personal experience, but it's separate from just declarative memory. It's not that you're remembering that the bear is there. That's going on too. But independently of that, the emotion state has its own temporal persistence. The state has to last some time, and again, that's something that reflexes don't have.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman15:22

       Right.

   24. RADr. Ralph Adolphs15:22

       It just goes straight through. There's, there's no temporal persistence.

4. 15:25 – 18:17

   Sponsors: Helix Sleep & Rorra

   1. AHAndrew Huberman15:26

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5. 18:17 – 22:58

   Do Animals Have Emotions?, Conscious Experience

   1. RADr. Ralph Adolphs18:17

      It is striking to me that maybe thirty years or

   2. AHAndrew Huberman18:20

      ago or so, there was discussion about whether animals have emotions. Based on these criteria, priority, valence, scalability, and persistence, is it generally agreed upon that animals have emotions? I believe they do because I love my dog and other animals, and I-

   3. RADr. Ralph Adolphs18:35

      Yeah

   4. AHAndrew Huberman18:35

      ... want to believe that. But as scientists, if we step back, do they meet the criteria for emotions that you're setting up here for us?

   5. RADr. Ralph Adolphs18:41

      Absolutely. Yes. So if you have those criteria, those functional criteria, and you would add one or two others, many states in animals, and certainly the states that we would ordinarily interpret as emotions in our pets, in our dogs, cats, by the way, I, I loved your dog-

   6. AHAndrew Huberman18:58

      Oh, Strummer

   7. RADr. Ralph Adolphs18:58

      ... just out in the, in the waiting room there.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman18:59

      Yeah, he was just hanging out. Yeah.

   9. RADr. Ralph Adolphs19:00

      They would meet those criteria, and they would have functional emotions. Uh, we should talk more about this. There's also the, the claim now from Anthropic that large language models have functional emotions as well.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman19:11

       That's so wild.

   11. RADr. Ralph Adolphs19:12

       Um-

   12. AHAndrew Huberman19:12

       We have to return to that because I think it, it kind of boggles the mind. You know, how could a machine have emotions? But, um-

   13. RADr. Ralph Adolphs19:17

       Right. Well, but again, these are functionally defined emotions, and there's, like, I think there's no problem assigning to AI to some extent, and certainly to m- many animals, uh, those functional emotions. Where it gets complicated is that in us and also by assumption in animals, I have no doubt they also have conscious experiences of emotions.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman19:39

       Mm-hmm.

   15. RADr. Ralph Adolphs19:39

       And most people f- take the conscious experience of the emotion as the ground truth for the emotion. Emotions without conscious experiences of emotion sound like an oxymoron. It's like you can't have that. They, the conscious experience is the emotion.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman19:54

       Mm-hmm.

   17. RADr. Ralph Adolphs19:54

       Which is what William James said, which is what Joe LeDoux says, and I think it's implicitly there across essentially every psychological theory, is the assumption that emotions really are types of conscious experiences, which I think is the intuition. That if I ask you, "How do you know?" What's the ground truth, right? How do you know you're having an emotion? You would say, "Because it's a certain type of conscious experience because of how it feels." And if I asked you more specifically, "How do you know it's sadness versus anger versus fear?" You would say, "Because of how they feel. They feel different."

   18. AHAndrew Huberman20:26

       Mm-hmm.

   19. RADr. Ralph Adolphs20:26

       And so we take the conscious experience, our own introspective access to the conscious experience, as the ground truth. That has a lot of problems associated with it, deep philosophical problems, but just practically, it has two big problems that I think science should avoid. One is it gets really problematic to know whether or not animals have emotions because we don't know how to test whether or not they have conscious experiences. I have no doubt that they do, it's just that there's no scientific way to test currently, so we should have different criteria. And the other question is if you tie emotion to the, the conscious experience of emotion, that is, you equate, you conflate emotions with feelings, well, then you're not studying emotions, you're studying consciousness. We spoke about Christof Koch earlier. Great respect for people that are studying consciousness, but I don't want to study consciousness. That's too hard.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman21:20

       Mm-hmm.

   21. RADr. Ralph Adolphs21:20

       And there's lots and lots of debates and disagreements. So if we can avoid that and study emotions in the absence of needing to study conscious experiences of emotions, we can move forward with the science, which is what every other discipline does. So if you're a vision researcher, right, so you study vision. You study consciousness? No, you don't, you don't need to. I mean, you can, but there's a huge amount of work that people do studying vision and how that works in the brain, studying memory, you know, any other cognitive process without needing to study conscious experiences. They're typically accompanied in humans, and if you, if you talk to the lay person on the street and just say, "I'm a vision researcher," they take you to be studying the conscious experience of seeing perhaps. Or if you say, "I'm a memory researcher," they take you to be studying the conscious experience of recollection. But scientifically, most people working in those fields don't study consciousness.

   22. AHAndrew Huberman22:15

       Mm-hmm.

   23. RADr. Ralph Adolphs22:16

       And it's perfectly valid to study vision and memory, you know, in, in, in horseshoe crabs or aplysia, where nobody has any claims about consciousness. We should do the same thing with emotion, and then we can have an integrated science across species that can move forward without needing to tackle the difficult problem of consciousness. Again, yes, for sure, we and other animals have conscious experiences of emotions, and that's very important, but we also have conscious experiences of seeing and memory. As a scientific discipline, we should separate the conscious experience from the process, from the emotion, and that's the way we make progress. That's the, one of the main arguments that David and I had in our book and that I reiterate in the forthcoming

6. 22:58 – 31:22

   Monitoring & Regulating Emotions; Emotional Granularity

   1. RADr. Ralph Adolphs22:58

      book.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman22:59

      At risk of taking us in a philosophical direction, I'd like to actually ask a biological, psychological question. Given these criteria, you know, priority, valence, scalability, and persistence, but really focusing mainly on priority, I think all of us have had the experience of an emotion coming on, but not in its kind of overtaking maximal form. Like, okay, we feel ourselves getting annoyed, and we can observe the emotion growing. The arousal state is familiar to us. We understand. Let's assume in this example that we understand why it's happening. Maybe you're in line at the store, and the person ahead of you is taking everybody's time by doing something that's really unnecessary and kind of obnoxious to us in that moment, and so our frustration is, is rising, and we are observing the emotion even though the emotion is us, right? It's within us. And then at some point, we might blurt something out or we might feel compelled that we have to just say, "Excuse me, like, could this maybe be taken care of so-"

   3. RADr. Ralph Adolphs23:53

      But you have some control over it.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman23:54

      But you have some control, and the-

   5. RADr. Ralph Adolphs23:55

      Yeah

   6. AHAndrew Huberman23:55

      ... and there's this almost, like, running together of two consciousnesses. Like, there's like-

   7. RADr. Ralph Adolphs24:00

      Yeah

   8. AHAndrew Huberman24:00

      ... two of us in there at the same time, observing self, observing the outside world, and then at some point, the prioritization gets to the ... point where, like, we just do something. And sometimes it's a decision, and sometimes it overtakes us. Now, at the opposite extreme, we've all observed, and you can just go on X, the social media platform, and for some reason the algorithm likes to serve up a lot of examples of people, like, on planes losing it, people get- going unhinged. Like, you know, like, people just, like, completely melting down, and it's, and it's very, uh, in our language hy- hypothalamic, right? And so people are, are drawn to that. It's very-

   9. RADr. Ralph Adolphs24:31

      I have an antidote to those people.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman24:33

       Hmm.

   11. RADr. Ralph Adolphs24:34

       They should take ice baths. I can tell you more.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman24:35

       Oh, well listen-

   13. RADr. Ralph Adolphs24:36

       They should take ice baths.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman24:36

       Um-

   15. RADr. Ralph Adolphs24:36

       I think this helps.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman24:37

       [laughs]

   17. RADr. Ralph Adolphs24:37

       Seriously.

   18. AHAndrew Huberman24:38

       Yeah, well, ice baths, yeah. Let's definitely talk about ice baths, and ultra, um, ultra races, because, uh, you, you are training for one.

   19. RADr. Ralph Adolphs24:44

       No, but I think, I th- think what you said is exactly right and extremely important for humans, and probably unique to humans as opposed to other animals, which is that we can be conscious of and monitor our own emotions, and by doing so, we can regulate them to some extent. So emotion regulation and control, and monitoring emotion, being aware of what emotion you have, those two go hand in hand. And your Stanford colleague, you know, James Gross, star- spawned this huge field in the '90s, I guess, when it started, of emotion regulation that is now huge. Um, I just finished my term as co-editor of this journal, Affective Science, and I would say about a quarter or so or a third of the submissions are about emotion regulation. It is so important in, in, in humans, and most of pathologies and difficulties about emotions are not about the emotion per se, it's about our ability or disability to c- control them, to regulate them.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman25:42

       Mm-hmm. If you don't mind, um, because of your understanding of emotions and states and, and neuroscience, but also your experience as a human in the world, has anything you've learned changed the way that you watch your emotions grow, decide when to step in, when not to step in? You don't seem like an impulsive person, so we're not-- But most people aren't. We're not talking about, uh, pathology here. And I'll cede this question by saying, you know, I have a few friends who were in Tier One Special Operations, and, you know, that's high-risk, high-consequence work. We've had Alex Honnold on the podcast, high-risk, high-consequence endeavors.

   21. RADr. Ralph Adolphs26:14

       [laughs]

   22. AHAndrew Huberman26:14

       Um, and they all say the same thing, which are that emotions cloud logical judgment. So they're somehow far from emotions or their emotions don't get prioritized. But of course these are the s- all of these people that come to mind have, you know, healthy marriages now, you know, healthy families. They're, they're loving people. They have anger. They have-

   23. RADr. Ralph Adolphs26:34

       Yeah

   24. AHAndrew Huberman26:34

       ... they have emotions, but they, they've sort of categorized emotions as cloud judgment in the professional or, you know, pe- performance context. Therefore, they don't allow them to be prioritized. Sounds a little bit robotic, sounds a little bit mechanical, quote unquote, "On the spectrum." People, like, will say these things, right? But in some ways, provided they're allowed to allow themselves to be emotion- emotional and let emotions, quote unquote, "Take over" in the right context, that's kind of the ideal circumstance, right?

   25. RADr. Ralph Adolphs27:03

       Yeah.

   26. AHAndrew Huberman27:03

       So, so what do you know that allow-- that has impacted the way that you think about emotion regulation that perhaps people could consider, if not benefit from?

   27. RADr. Ralph Adolphs27:12

       Yeah. I think it's, you know, it's a mixture. On the one hand, you absolutely need emotions. If you have no emotions, as we know from Antonio Damasio's original work in his book Descartes' Error, uh, which he put out just as I was starting as a postdoc in Iowa in 1994, I think, you know, if you have massive frontal lobe lesions that make it the case that you're no longer emotionally responding to stimuli, the consequences are devastating, which is that you cannot make decisions, complex decisions in your life. You can't organize your life. You're not motivated to take the right path through life because you don't feel one way or the other about the different options that are available. So there, it's clear that not having emotions is very bad. And certainly if you were out facing the bear, which may not happen to too many people these days, that would be very bad. On the other hand, being able to regulate them and control them, um, is definitely a human skill that's very important and that helps you a lot. The first part is what you were talking about first, uh, e- earlier, which is the ability to, uh, monitor your emotions, to identify your emotions. I think Lisa Feldman Barrett actually first did the main work on this. It's a topic called emotional granularity.

   28. AHAndrew Huberman28:22

       Mm-hmm.

   29. RADr. Ralph Adolphs28:22

       It's like at what f- how fine a grain can you conceptualize and be aware of your own emotions?

   30. AHAndrew Huberman28:29

       Mm-hmm.
7. 31:22 – 37:11

   Emotional Regulation, Tools: Situational Avoidance, Ice Baths

   1. RADr. Ralph Adolphs31:22

      right

   2. AHAndrew Huberman31:22

      ... maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about, um, sort of dynamic attractor states, which is ... And, uh, I don't throw out that language to confuse people with. The, but there is this idea in neuroscience, right? Like, if we, if you and I both, you know, talk about this cup, and I slide it forward, and then we start looking at, and you know, more and more brain, brain circuits are gonna be devoted to it. We could spend-

   3. RADr. Ralph Adolphs31:40

      Right

   4. AHAndrew Huberman31:40

      ... several hours. It's not a very interesting conversation. But we- if we do that about an emotion we feel because of something somebody said to us at work or online, I think we're all familiar with the idea that we can go down these rabbit holes within our own mind.

   5. RADr. Ralph Adolphs31:51

      Absolutely, yes.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman31:52

      And it's, it's a very dangerous way to live.

   7. RADr. Ralph Adolphs31:55

      It is.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman31:55

      And just knowing that it exists perhaps can be helpful.

   9. RADr. Ralph Adolphs31:58

      Yeah.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman31:58

       But because it's almost like if you go far enough down a path, it's like a horror movie. If you go far enough down a path, it's very hard to extract yourself.

   11. RADr. Ralph Adolphs32:05

       No, absolutely. Absolutely. I think, I mean, cognitive reappraisal or any other sort of complex reappraisal strategy for emotions, it is a double-edged sword, and it, it's trainable. It's as you say. If I really focus on, okay, now, you know, I'm starting to feel sad. I really don't wanna feel sad. I really don't wanna feel sad. I really don't wanna feel sad. Well, the more I think about it, the sadder I get, right?

   12. AHAndrew Huberman32:26

       Mm-hmm.

   13. RADr. Ralph Adolphs32:26

       Um, or same with anxiety. Some emotions are probably more prone to going down this rabbit hole than others. But again, it's a trainable skill that there are other ways of dealing with it where you can kind of just stop that process from going down at all. You wanna stop it at the earliest front end. I mean, one quick answer to the question of what's the most successful strategy is the earlier you can stop that process, the better. And so in the first place, don't get yourself into a situation where you're gonna be anxious or guilty or sad or whatever emotion you wanna avoid. So situational avoidance, just in terms of structuring your environment, would be one strategy. And then once you're in it, I think it's idiosyncratic to a large extent, so you would have to figure out what works for you, but it's definitely trainable. Two parts are trainable. One is the specific strategy, so you can do cognitive reappraisal without overthinking it and going down the rabbit hole and actually-

   14. AHAndrew Huberman33:17

       Mm-hmm

   15. RADr. Ralph Adolphs33:17

       ... feeling the emotion even more, and the other one is just the strength and automaticity of control that you have, which brings me to the ice baths. Shall I-

   16. AHAndrew Huberman33:26

       Yeah

   17. RADr. Ralph Adolphs33:26

       ... briefly talk about the ice baths?

   18. AHAndrew Huberman33:27

       Please.

   19. RADr. Ralph Adolphs33:27

       Because this is relevant, actually.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman33:29

       Please.

   21. RADr. Ralph Adolphs33:29

       So I, I started doing these a while back. One of my former colleagues, Justin Feinstein, who now runs a, a float clinic on Maui, um, I forget how it came about, but we were talking about floating, ice baths, and he mentioned you, and he mentioned Wim Hof. He said, "You know, take a look at these guys." And I saw, you know, Wim swimming in some frozen lake. Looked kind of interesting. Anyway, so I started doing ice baths some time ago. They weren't that popular yet back then. And now my wife bought on Amazon, like, a horse watering trough or some big thing.

   22. AHAndrew Huberman34:00

       That works.

   23. RADr. Ralph Adolphs34:00

       Insulated it.

   24. AHAndrew Huberman34:01

       Yep.

   25. RADr. Ralph Adolphs34:01

       Put it on the porch.

   26. AHAndrew Huberman34:02

       It's a lot safer than being out on a lake, too.

   27. RADr. Ralph Adolphs34:04

       [laughs] Put it on the porch.

   28. AHAndrew Huberman34:04

       But we'll, we'll talk about that later. Yeah, yeah.

   29. RADr. Ralph Adolphs34:05

       And I get, you know, these 40-pound ice bags-

   30. AHAndrew Huberman34:07

       Uh-huh
8. 37:11 – 45:04

   Ultramarathons, Perseverance, Adversity; Awe

   1. AHAndrew Huberman37:11

      Before we went on mic, we were talking about a different type of stressor, which is the ultramarathons that you're currently training for, a hundred mile race, which is, by the way, super impressive, even just to shoot for it. I know you've done others, not quite-

   2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs37:23

      Well, trying is the operative word here.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman37:25

      Trying.

   4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs37:25

      I'm trying. [laughs]

   5. AHAndrew Huberman37:25

      Okay. Well, I have, I have confidence in you. Uh-

   6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs37:27

      Talk to me in two months-

   7. AHAndrew Huberman37:28

      Yes, I will

   8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs37:28

      ... and then we'll tell you if it worked or not

   9. AHAndrew Huberman37:28

      ... I have confidence in you. You're gonna finish this hundred mile race. But we were talking about something that I think is relevant to bring up now, which is, uh, you were describing how, you know, at some points during the, these races, you just feel like complete garbage, but then you start to feel better. And so then the next time you feel like complete garbage, you have the cognitive knowledge-

   10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs37:50

       Yeah

   11. AHAndrew Huberman37:50

       ... that you felt terrible, then better again, and so you're starting to integrate over longer periods of time. So here's another example of emotion regulation, but over much longer timescales.

   12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs38:00

       Yeah.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman38:00

       It's a little bit harder to access for most people than a cold shower.

   14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs38:03

       No, but I think this is one thing, one, one reason, there are many reasons, but if there's one reasons that I, that I love these ultramarathons and sort of identify as an, as an ultrarunner, uh, even though I didn't do it for decades and I'm just now getting back into it, because of that nonlinearity. You have these major ups and downs. And, you know, the sort of mantra that ultrarunning has co-opted is, you know, relentless forward momentum, but the sort of psychological equivalent is just relentless optimism. Like optimism in the face of adversity. You have to just keep that mindset, and everybody there is like that. You know, you, you come around like mile 40, mile 50, mile 60, you come around some curve and you look and feel like crap. People go, "Looking good." [laughs]

   15. AHAndrew Huberman38:42

       [laughs]

   16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs38:42

       Like no- nobody says, "Oh, looks like you're not gonna make it." No- nobody says that, right? So everybody is super positive. You're hanging in there, and it is really hard, and, you know, you've just been going downhill. Your knees are shot. You have blisters. You've been vomiting. Super tired. And you extrapolate, and you think this, this is not gonna work. But if you refuse to give up, doesn't always work, but about half the time or so, it levels out and it starts going back up again, and you keep going. I mean, you feel wrecked at mile 50. I feel wrecked or earlier, mile 30.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman39:16

       I wouldn't know. I've never run 50 miles.

   18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs39:16

       And so trying to think forward and say, "Well, I have to do this over again?"

   19. AHAndrew Huberman39:19

       Yeah.

   20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs39:19

       This is like not fathomable. Uh, so it's a really interesting exercise in not giving up and being able to do something that you think is impossible to do. For that matter, all of your listeners would think it's impo- if any, any of your listeners went running with me, they would conclude two things. One is, they're faster than I am, and two, I'm not gonna be able to do 100 miles, which means if I actually finish the 100 miles, all of you would be able to do so as well, which I think is true. I think anybody can do it, anybody who's basically healthy, if they only wanted to, which is the key, could actually do it. So it's just a really interesting exercise. You know, it's only 30 hours. Well, only, but it's only 30 hours. It's not like, you know, years. How hard can it be? How ba- Well, it's, it's hard, but it's doable. It's definitely doable. And so it's just in that sweet spot of something that seems impossible and is just unbelievably hard, but doable, and that's attractive somehow. One, if, if you can do it, which of course doesn't happen all the time.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman40:22

       Yeah. And I don't know if there are any data on this, but there, for people that have lived through really hard things and come out better or have pushed themselves to deliberately do h- hard things of the sort that you're describing, I do think that the memory of that can recall our b- body and brain's ability to lean into other hard things.

   22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs40:42

       I think so.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman40:42

       I mean, I mean, it must be the case.

   24. RADr. Ralph Adolphs40:44

       Yeah.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman40:44

       I don't know of any good experiments on that, but, you know, what's that, post-traumatic resilience, I guess they call it? You know, I mean, some people come out of very difficult circumstances-

   26. RADr. Ralph Adolphs40:52

       Yeah, yeah

   27. AHAndrew Huberman40:52

       ... maybe they do, quote-unquote, the work they need to or not, and, and they just say, "Okay," like, "I'm better for life 'cause I'm out of it." Other people carry the wounds of that forward in a way that, that their, you know, their psychological and sometimes their physical health is a downward trajectory. It's a very interesting thing about like how do, how should we conceptualize pain and pain ending? Like some people seem to live-

   28. RADr. Ralph Adolphs41:12

       Right

   29. AHAndrew Huberman41:12

       ... in the discomfort of the pain having even happened.

   30. RADr. Ralph Adolphs41:16

       Yeah. You can certainly persevere and overcome, you know, severe adversity if it's time-limited, and I think just your own sort of belief in yourself and your capability to overcome adversity, as you were saying, is one important component. Another one is something like gratitude or awe.
9. 45:04 – 46:17

   Sponsor: AG1

   1. RADr. Ralph Adolphs45:04

      to you.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman45:05

      I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients, creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB, and zinc carnosine. Each serving has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, as well as brain health, calcium HMB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown, and zinc carnosine to support and improve the lining of your gut. All three of these ingredients have compelling science to support them, and therefore, I love seeing them added to the existing AG1 formula. As most of you know, I've been taking AG1 every day for nearly fourteen years now. I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was. It's a great product, and it's now made even better with the new AG1 Pro formula. If you would like to try AG1 Pro, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. AG1 is giving away a free bottle of Omega-3 Coenzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of Omega-3 Coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1

10. 46:17 – 51:59

    Perception of Emotions, Amygdala & Fear, Facial Expressions

    1. AHAndrew Huberman46:17

       subscription. As long as we're talking about assessing the emotions or the perspective of another, what are some favorite experiments, either yours or, uh, others in the field, about perception and assessment of emotions? You know, I've seen a number of studies like, "Oh, you know, people with lesions here or there see scary faces as not that scary." What, what's, what's the sort of general conclusions about those studies now in twenty twenty-six? Because I have a feeling a lot of what was in the textbooks when I was a graduate student may, may not still hold up.

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs46:45

       When I started as a postdoc in the early '90s with Damasio, I, I started my career on that topic by studying this, uh, this famous patient, SM, who had selective bilateral amygdala lesions, and the finding was that she's unable to perceive fear in emotional facial expressions. And her sub-

    3. AHAndrew Huberman47:02

       Perceive fear. Could she feel fear?

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs47:04

       Subsequently, we also did that. It took, for some reason, because it's just harder to do, it took some years. Um, Justin Feinstein, who has the floats, uh, clinic in Maui, was the first author on that paper. So some years later, we took that same patient to haunted houses. We took her to an exotic pet store where there were snakes and spiders. We showed her horror movies, a whole bunch of things, and found also she doesn't seem to consciously experience fear either. So there seemed to be this very specific deficit for fear tied to the amygdala from one patient. So that's a big caveat. Does this generalize? Well, yes, the amygdala is important for fear, but just saying it's a center for fear is overly simplistic. It's em- it's embedded in a big network of structures. There's individual differences and so on and so forth. The perception of emotions has been s- has been studied a lot and probably has been the topic of the most acrimonious debates to some extent. So Paul Ekman back in the '70s, uh, famous-- By the way, I dedicate my forthcoming book to him because he probably had the biggest impact on modern emotion science of any single person. But his claim to fame was he went to New Guinea and, you know, these non-Western cultures and claimed that universally across all cultures, people recognize these so-called basic emotions from facial expressions. If you Google this now, you know, emotional facial expressions, you will find pictures of emotional facial expressions. Lots of AI companies and computer algorithms are predicated on the idea that you can read out the emotion from somebody's facial expression. He had six of them, happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, sometimes contempt, um, added in there. Well, it turns out it's more complicated than that, and actually Lisa Feldman Barrett of all people co-authored a paper with me and three other people a couple of years back that, uh, the title was something like Emotional Facial Expressions Reconsidered. We took stock of the whole literature and asked, "Is this really true? Is Ekman's claim really true? Can you tell how someone feels from their facial expression?" And the answer is, well, not nearly as well as you would think, and in general not. And the reasons are methodological, and once you think about it, they make a lot of sense, which is that the emotional facial expressions that Ekman pioneered I used them in the first, a 1994 Nature paper with this amygdala lesion patient. Those aren't actually what you normally see walking around the world. People don't have those facial expressions. They are posed facial expressions-

    5. AHAndrew Huberman49:32

       By actors

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs49:32

       ... by actors.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman49:33

       Right.

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs49:33

       Yeah, they're very extreme. And then the task is, like, well, here's a list of emotion words: happiness, fear, anger, disgust, et cetera. Pick the one that matches the face. That's the typical task.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman49:43

       So it's multiple choice.

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs49:44

        Look, if I gave you a bunch of emoticons and a bunch of emotion words and asked you to match them, you could do that very easily. Wouldn't show you anything about emotions. It shows you that there's, by convention, there's some association between these things and these things.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman49:59

        Mm-hmm.

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs49:59

        That's it.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman50:00

        Mm.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs50:00

        So when you actually see real-world facial expressions, and when instead of giving a list, you just ask people, "Just generate freely a word that describes that," you get something that's much, has much more variation, much more heterogeneity, which then was part of the ingredient for Lisa's whole claim that variation is the norm, and that in fact, emotions are in some sense constructed rather than packages to be found in nature, which I disagree with that part. But for the emotional facial expressions, for the perception of emotions in others and in animals, um, I was just talking before coming in here to one of your colleagues about your cute dog, and they've done studies, there's several studies now where dog owners, if you ask them, "Can you tell if your dog feels guilty when you come home 'cause it did something bad?" Dog owners are pretty convinced they can tell. Well, if you do a controlled experiment, they're a chance. They think they can tell, so our conviction that we can tell something about people or animals, their, their emotion states just from looking at the facial expressions, our conviction vastly outstrips our accuracy. We're pretty convinced we can do it, we're mostly not so accurate. Which makes sense because ordinarily it's not the, it's not just some facial ex- you know, if I see you now and you look sad, I wouldn't stop there and I s- and I would say, "Andrew Huberman's is sad." I would ask you, "How are you feeling? What's going on?" I would probe you and get a lot more information, and maybe you would say, "Oh, no, I'm just, this drink I had tasted bad," or something, you know, "That caused me to make a certain facial expression." So in general, these artificial lab situations where all you see is a picture of a face and asked for the emotion, we don't do that in the real world anyway.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman51:42

        Right.

    16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs51:42

        We would probe further, we would take into account the whole circumstances, we would ask the person, and then you can disambiguate these emotions. So it's not that we cannot tell what emotions people or animals feel, but we don't do so normally just from a single slice like a facial expression.

11. 51:59 – 57:52

    Interpreting Others' Emotions, Prediction

    1. AHAndrew Huberman51:59

       I feel like at least in the context of ro- romantic partnership, s- so much more of our assessment of another person and their assessment of us is actually a mathematical integration of noticing when frequency o- of speech or frequency of text is heading in a negative direction relative to the mean, right?

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs52:19

       Yep, absolutely.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman52:19

       At a particular time of day, and I think the brain is really good at saying, like, like, normally somebody's pretty communicative in the morning, but less at night, for sake of example. But suddenly they're, like, a little more terse with us in the morning, but maybe not even harshness, there's just fewer words exchanged, and then the, the, the brain doesn't think, oh, like, they, they looked angry or they looked frustrated. They, you go, "Oh, like, they were, like, it's a little, little quieter this morning than th- than usual."

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs52:43

       Absolutely.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman52:43

       And if it's a very quiet person, you have, you have fewer data points to work from, but we become exquisitely tuned to this.

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs52:49

       Absolutely. I, yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman52:50

       Um, much more than like, oh, they're, they're carrying their shoulders differently. At the extremes I think we see this. Somebody walks in the door and you can tell-

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs52:56

       Yeah

    9. AHAndrew Huberman52:56

       ... like they're sad, they're defeated.

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs52:57

        But in general, we're looking for change, like what you said.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman52:58

        You're looking for change.

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs52:59

        It's, it's a time series.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman53:00

        Right.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:00

        It's dynamic.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman53:00

        And the, and the number of times-

    16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:02

        Yeah

    17. AHAndrew Huberman53:02

        ... or even just, like if, you've probably had this experience, like in an email with a colleague, let's re- move it to a different domain. There's a certain kind of language that's used in an email that's different than the usual language. Like, they've never really used these words before.

    18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:14

        No.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman53:14

        You don't even identify which words those are.

    20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:16

        Yeah.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman53:16

        Years ago, there was this chart that some graduate student or postdoc put out that if the director of a lab signs off with their name, it means one thing. If they punctuate their email, it means, like, let's meet, you know, like you're in trouble.

    22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:29

        [laughs]

    23. AHAndrew Huberman53:29

        You know, if there's just a dash with a first initial, you know? There's all this, and you kind of, I laugh too, and then you realize, you go, wow, like they're really paying attention to all these subtle cues. But those seem like the kind of cues that we rely on-

    24. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:41

        Absolutely

    25. AHAndrew Huberman53:41

        ... much more than, than like, do they look sad? Do they sound happy?

    26. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:46

        Yes.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman53:46

        And, and I think we vastly underestimate this. I don't know if there are any good studies of this, but this feels-

    28. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:50

        Yeah, yeah, there-

    29. AHAndrew Huberman53:50

        ... like the more relevant in the real world

    30. RADr. Ralph Adolphs53:51

        No, absolutely. There are a bunch of, yeah, we just-
12. 57:52 – 1:00:13

    Emotions as Adaptations to the Environment, Types of Fear

    1. AHAndrew Huberman57:52

       now." This patient, SM, who had bilateral amygdala lesions, could she experience autonomic arousal? Could she experience stress? Could she experience anxiety under any conditions?

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs58:03

       She could. Um, and that, and that's really important. So it's, you might think that, you know, it's just like all the whole emotion system is gone. You just sort of denervated the entire autonomic nervous system, and that's why you don't have emotions. But it's much more specific than that and fits with thinking about emotions as evolved functional modules for dealing with particular types of statistically recurring environmental challenges that share some, some challenging feature in common. So she doesn't have fear to external stressors. Like, we went with her into a haunted house. She poked the monsters and wanted to touch things. Same with the, um, the snakes and the spiders in the pet store. But we did a study, again, Justin Feinstein, uh, I think was the first author on this one as well, with her and with a couple, two maybe or three patients who had similar lesions in collaboration with Renee, um, Hurlimann from Germany, where we put a mask on them and in- have, had them inhale carbon dioxide. If you do that, you get a panic attack in about half the population because it makes you feel like you're suffocating. So as soon as you get that carbon dioxide in, it changes the pH in your blood. That's detected by the brain, and it, you get this massive air hunger, like you suddenly can't breathe. That's what your, so your brain goes into this alarm mode of some suffocation, like a panic, and she and the other amygdala patients had a full-blown panic attack when they inhaled the carbon dioxide. So this interoceptive signal seems not to depend on the amygdala and to depend on other brain stem circuits. Uh, so we had a, a very important association between different types of fear, which is, I think, a, a bottom-line story for the way that the science is informing our folk psychology, which is these categories we have, like anger or fear or disgust. There are many varieties. It's much more finely differentiated than that once you look at the science and once you look at the brain systems. There are distinct brain systems in this instance for fear to something out there in the world versus panic of something happening inside you, like having a heart attack or not getting enough air.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:12

       I see.

13. 1:00:13 – 1:08:05

    Feeling Emotions in the Body, Pain, Insula

    1. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:00:13

       Yeah.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:13

       Maybe we could talk a little bit about the bodily representation of these things we're calling emotions. Uh, years ago, I posted on social media a picture of a figure from your paper with, uh, from your book, excuse me, with David Anderson, which was describing a study where people self-described, so it's purely subjective record- reporting as I recall, where in their body they felt different emotions.

    3. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:00:36

       Oh, the bodily maps of emotions, yeah.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:37

       So it's kind of like a heat map in the forehead for certain, um, emotions and in the whole body for others and, and there were a wide range of emotions, and admittedly it's subjective report, but does this hold up? Like, I think to myself, like, where do I feel sadness, like heartache? Well, I tend to feel it around my heart, but maybe that's because it's called heartache. Where do I feel anger? Well, extreme anger I'm gonna feel as a whole body experience. Same thing with-

    5. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:00:59

       Yeah

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:59

       ... awe. So what, if anything, is important about the regularity And or the variation in kind of where in our body we feel emotions. Some people would say this is like their whole experience of life. They feel things in their body all the time.

    7. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:01:16

       Oh.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:16

       Some people feel, I think are more cerebral. They, they kind of think things more than they feel things.

    9. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:01:22

       You know, I think it's a great, it's a great question. I mean, that figure that you're alluding to came from a paper, I think in PNAS by Lauri Nummenmaa and colleagues in Finland. And he and his colleague, Heini Sarri마ki, they've done some of the great, uh, great recent studies also on, uh, experience of emotions in humans using functional MRI. But what you mentioned, so the experiment is I just give you a word, right? I'm not actually making you feel the emotion.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:49

        Mm-hmm.

    11. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:01:49

        I'm asking you sadness, draw, you know, where on the body you think you would feel that emotion. So if you think about it, it's certainly not about actual physiological changes in the body. Not- nothing's measured in the body. They don't have electrodes on the body, whatever. There's people just drawing on a little mannequin where they think they would feel the emotion. It's also not about conscious experiences of emotion. I'm not making-- I'm not showing you sad movie clips or anything like that. I'm giving you a word, a single word. So it's about concepts. It's about where in the body people's concept of sadness or happiness or fear, where that corresponds to changes in the body. Now, that's an interesting question, but you have to narrow it down to that which is a, a fundamental problem with most emotion study, including that one.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:34

        Mm-hmm.

    13. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:02:34

        I think the title, I forget what the title is, but it's something like Bodily Maps of Emotions or Bodily Maps of Subjective Experience maybe even. It should be something like People's Concept of Where in the Body Emotion Words Are Associated With Changes or something [chuckles] like that. What's interesting about that study is that Lauri has gone on to look at it in different cultures. He's looked at it developmentally across children and asked how these concepts and where in the body you would feel emotion develop. So it's super interesting work, but it's ultimately about people's concepts of how emotions correspond to changes in the body, not the real actual changes in the body. But then as, as you were saying, of course, there are real changes in the body when you really feel an emotion as well, and that's harder to study, but people have studied it quite a bit with a focus on the part of the brain that gets a lot of input from the body, which is a part of cortex called the insula. And so there's lots and lots of work on the insula. It gets input from all the organs in your body, everywhere in your body. So, you know from your heart, from your liver, from your kidney. I had a kidney stone not too long ago, we should talk about the kid-- Have you had a kidney stone?

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:45

        Mm.

    15. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:03:45

        Don't. [laughs] It's really interesting.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:48

        You have to pass it.

    17. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:03:49

        Eventually it's passed, but it's, uh, it evokes very interesting adaptive behaviors. Well, just as an aside, uh, before I forget it, so normally for pain, exteroceptive pain, like we were talking about the hot plate before-

    18. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:01

        Mm-hmm

    19. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:04:01

        ... you know, you pull your hand away or there's some kind of reflex. For the kidney stone, that's not adaptive. There's nothing to pull away. So my wife, this was in Switzerland, we're in a remote little town. In the middle of the night, my wife sees me curled up into a ball, right, on the floor, just kind of breathing loudly and kind of curled up and making rocking motions. And goes, "What's wrong?" And I tell her, "Well, I have a kidney stone." And then she asked me, "Can't you just stop that behavior? Can we get on a plane and fly to the U.S. so you can get ultrasound, maybe get treated for the kidney stone? Can you stop curling up into a ball and, you know, making rocking motions?" And I was kind of thinking about that through my haze of pain and said, "Well, no. It's kind of like the hot plate and pulling away."

    20. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:43

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    21. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:04:43

        It's a really strongly motivated behavior to just kind of withdraw, basically. So it was a very interesting adaptive behavior. And she called, you know, the equivalent of nine one one, and in the middle of the guy-- of, of the night, some guy came down and, uh, you know, uh, put a bunch of opiates into me, and he kept having the scale of, you know, on a scale from zero to ten, how painful is it? And I would sort of go from ten to nine point five, and it was extremely painful. But eventually, they got me to a clinic there. I passed the stone, and uh, it was an interesting experience. I mean, it's pain, but just like what we were talking about for emotions, pain is not pain. If you have a pain in your eye or you have a pain from a hot stove, this is a very different type of pain, and one that's, I would say, worse than the hot stove. It's like because you can't escape.

    22. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:32

        When you can't rub it.

    23. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:05:33

        You can't do anything.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:34

        Yeah.

    25. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:05:34

        You just curl up into a ball and pray. I mean, it, it was horrible. At any rate, so at that moment, had I been in an MRI study, my insula would have been strongly activated. So this, you know, this is a region of the brain that according to theorists, Bud Craig was the first, Antonio Damasio has, has theories in a similar vein, this would be the substrate for the conscious experience of the emotion or of pain in your body. So it's getting all this input from your body and representing the changes in your body as a conscious experience. This was the original theory that William James had back in eighteen eighty-four. He wrote this paper in mind, what is an emotion? And his theory was that you see the bear, you run away, your heart rate goes up, and then you feel the emotion, which is a consequence of you perceiving all the changes in your body that happened first. Now that's, I think, the conscious experience of emotion, yes, and a lot of that depends on representing, perceiving everything that changes in, in our body. But to my mind, that leaves the question of what the emotion is. That's still antecedent to that. You first have to trigger all the changes in your body and run away.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman1:06:44

        Right.

    27. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:06:44

        What's doing that?

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:06:45

        Right.

    29. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:06:45

        That's the emotion. The conscious experience may well come later and unfold over some time, but the emotion state, separate from the conscious experience, as I've emphasized, would be the one that actually motivates all the behaviors and all the different changes in your body. So long answer to your question, there's, there are these two different ways of talking about the role of the body. The one that you alluded to in this figure from Lauri Nummenmaa and colleagues that we reproduced in our book is about people's concepts of emotions, and they're certainly tied to changes in the body. Whether or not those are accurate, I think we just don't know. So is it the case that those drawings that they have, uh, in the, in, in the figure that we were speaking about, if you put electrodes on and you measured blood flow changes, that's actually where things change when you have awe or anger? I think we just don't know. I think that's a set of studies that remains to be done.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:36

        Mm-hmm.
14. 1:08:05 – 1:12:34

    Brain & Body Connection; Marketing & Emotion

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:05

       Because in Eastern medicine, there's strong beliefs about different organs being associated with different emotional states. Even like-

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:08:12

       Yeah

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:12

       ... gall, you know, someone has a lot of gall, the gallbladder, you know? And but then again, I, I, I always have to remind people that a key feature of schizophrenia and psychosis of other kinds is clang associations, two words sound alike and some-- and people link them.

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:08:27

       Sure.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:27

       And so we also are subject to this in a much milder way in the world of, of health and science, and especially in the public discourse. People will say, "Oh, you know, a, a walnut looks like a brain. Walnuts are good for your brain." Well, they have some fatty acids that are probably good for, for neurons, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the shape of the walnut. It's amazing how these ideas can kinda perpetuate.

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:08:46

       Well, and I think there is some truth to them. I think it just has-- the, the honest answer is it has not been tested.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:51

       Mm-hmm.

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:08:52

       So if you ask someone like Lisa Feldman Barrett has, has, has made this point repeatedly that there really is no systematic association between specific emotions and specific changes in your body. Well, if you look at those studies, people put a few electrodes on and they measure, you know, heart rate changes, blood pressure changes, et cetera. It is extremely crude. You're looking at a tiny, tiny slice-

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:14

       Right

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:09:14

        ... of what's going on in your body. What you would want to do is have a detailed, high-dimensional readout of, okay, your, your gallbladder and your liver and your kidney and your heart and changes all over your body and look at that and ask, "Is there, is there some kind of association between specific emotion states and changes, some kind of complex change in your body?"

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:36

        Mm-hmm.

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:09:36

        And I would bet that there is-

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:38

        Mm-hmm

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:09:38

        ... but we just don't have those data yet.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:40

        Right.

    16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:09:40

        So those studies remain to be done.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:41

        Yeah, they really should be done because I could make up a story where if someone or an animal feels extreme anger, like of the sort that they would have right before they f- were in a fight, that certain immune organs would deploy a bunch of things that prepare for-

    18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:09:57

        Sure

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:57

        ... wound healing or prepare-

    20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:09:58

        Right

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:58

        ... for resilience in the, in the aftermath. That, that just stands to reason. I, of course, I have-

    22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:10:03

        Yeah

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:10:03

        ... no data for that, but-

    24. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:10:04

        Well, and the link between the brain and the body, I mean, we now understand that that is so detailed and so intricate that really brain and body are very, very tightly coupled. And we do know that there are signatures, they're distributed, they're complicated, but Lisa Feldman Barrett herself, in collaboration with Tor Wager, has published, uh, neuroimaging studies showing that for basic emotions like anger and fear and sadness and so on, there are reliable signatures of brain activation. They're distributed, they're spread out, they're complicated, they're not just like in one place. But given that, given that association between emotions and patterns of the brain and the fact that the brain and the body are so intimately tied together, I think it's a completely reasonable hypothesis that you would find a similar high-dimensional signature of changes throughout your body that are systematically associated with certain types of emotions.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:10:56

        I had a thought spring to mind based on our earlier discussion. From the perspective of media and advertising, it makes perfect sense why all media and advertising is incentivized to get you to prioritize an emotion to the point where it takes over behavior, to go click and buy something or to vote a certain way or to hate a certain group or to like a certain group. And so really what they're fighting for is this prioritization thing. Like, like the-

    26. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:11:23

        Yeah

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:23

        ... the path to behavior is through the prioritization of an emotion.

    28. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:11:26

        It's basically an, an attentional capture.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:27

        Mm-hmm.

    30. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:11:27

        It captures your attention-
15. 1:12:34 – 1:14:11

    Sponsor: Function

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:34

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16. 1:14:11 – 1:17:43

    Art, Music & Emotion

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:14:12

       At the opposite extreme, what happens when I go to, like, the MoMA and I see a piece of art that just for some reason makes me feel a certain way, maybe sadness, maybe happiness? Do you think that art of that sort is, is able to capture the circuitry related to particular emotions across people? So not just about my unique experience. And pe- and art is, uh, subjective, right? So there's-

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:14:38

       Sure

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:14:38

       ... things related to taste.

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:14:39

       Sure.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:14:39

       But let's assume this is abstract art, so there's no apparent faces or animals or not-- no depictions of scenes, but l- let's say, uh, out of 100 people, you know, more than half say, "Yeah, I look at that and I just feel peace." Is it the case that some art can tap into neural circuits or some music can tap into neural circuits-

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:14:58

       Absolutely, yes

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:14:58

       ... independent of the lyrics? I mean, we don't have the brain imaging presumably, but there is a kind of a more sophisticated example. We're not regressing to the hypothalamus.

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:15:08

       Yes, absolutely.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:09

       But this is the stuff that, like, the richness of life is also about that.

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:15:13

        Sure.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:13

        Right?

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:15:13

        And so the interesting question is which particular features in the music or in the abstract art is it that are driving those generalizable emotion responses, and they're certainly there. One of the earliest studies on emotion actually was done by Anne Blood and, uh, Robert Zatorre in the mid-'90s or something, I believe using-- uh, I'm pretty sure using positron emission tomography, PET, rather than fMRI at the time. And what they did was they played music to people, and I think they set it up so that you and I could hear the same piece of music. In your case, the, the music really does something for you, and the particular measure was does it send shivers down your spine?

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:50

        Mm.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:15:50

        Do you get, like, chills, goosebumps from listening to the music? And it does that for you but not for me. And in your case, so same auditory stimulus, different emotion, and from the imaging, they show that the insula, the structure we're just talking about, the amygdala, several of these emotion-related structures are indeed activated when you have sh- shivers, chills down your spine listening to music. For abstract art, my Caltech colleague John O'Doherty had a paper a little while ago where again, he found something generalizable. He decomposed abstract art into the constituent sort of visual features. Uh, you can feed it into a neural network and get a representation of all the different, you know, shades and colors and the basic visual composition, basic visual features that constitute that. And from that, you can reconstitute whether or not it is liked or not liked, whether it's a pleasant-- whether people find it, uh, pleasant or unpleasant. So it doesn't come out of nowhere. Yes, there's something about even if it's abstract, even if it's abstract music or if it's abstract art, there's some auditory or visual features there that are generalizable and that can be used to evoke emotions. And the big question then is can we link that back? Obviously, the emotions didn't evolve in order to appreciate abstract art, but they evolved to detect tigers and bears and other things. Well, are there similar kinds of visual features? Presumably, there are. So there's some visual features in the real world that for which particular emotions evolved that can also then find, find a place again in abstract art and evoke similar emotions. That's the basic story. But the answer to your question is yes, even for these very uniquely human sort of abstract kinds of stimuli, uh, people have done work and found particular features in those stimuli that will trigger emotion states in humans, and, and they're great stimuli to

17. 1:17:43 – 1:25:11

    Interpreting Facial Expressions, Developing Emotions, Flexibility vs Reflexes

    1. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:17:43

       use.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:17:44

       Talk a little bit about, um, hardwiring versus, uh, learned emotional states at the brain level. We know there are brain areas that process faces, just the organization of two dots and a vertical line and a horizontal line below it. There are neurons that like that organization of features. And I should know the answer to the next question [chuckles] but I don't. Are there neurons that are tuned to a smiling face versus a frowning face at the level of like almost like, like very sparse emoji-like level? We call them units in the brain. Are there-

    3. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:18:16

       Right

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:16

       ... units that are tuned to s- frowning faces or smiling faces? And of course, you'd love to be able to do the experiment in somebody who has com-- you know, had never been exposed to them for the first time, but that's impossible to do, so-

    5. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:18:27

       Right. Right

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:27

       ... I have to assume the experiment has been at least thought about, if not done.

    7. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:18:32

       Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I mean, you know, with respect to face processing in general, the sort of consensus is it's both hardwired and innate in some sense that there's something there in the brain already at birth that's e- that's experience-independent. Uh, but then it also depends on normal maturation and development and experience. And so people like Rebecca Saxe at MIT, for instance-

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:18:54

       Mm-hmm

    9. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:18:55

       ... has done functional neuroimaging studies on, on babies and shown them faces and asked the question, how does this whole system develop? It's always a mixture. People tend to think in terms of black and white. It's, you know, it's hardwired and innate or it's learned. Nothing is either/or. It, there-- it's always bo-- A good example is the visual word form area. So there's regions in the brain that, like, like the ones that my former Caltech colleague Doris Tsao studied that are specialized for faces, but there's also a region in the brain typically on the left in most people that's for recognizing words, letters. Now that- couldn't have evolved because, uh, you know, we, we had a long history of brain evolution before language, written language was, was ever there. So the question is, how does it come about? It can't be hardwired or innate because there wasn't long enough evolutionary time to evolve a region of the brain for figuring out words. But if you take a look in pre-verbal infants at the connectivity of this region that's gonna become specialized for processing words once the infant can read, it's already wired up in a way to other brain regions that predisposes it to be able to do those computations that with experience it can later be used in order to recognize words.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:10

        I see.

    11. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:20:10

        So there's certain preset innate-

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:12

        Mm-hmm

    13. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:20:12

        ... uh, systems. Coming back to your question, smiling versus frowning faces, there are two parts to it. The first part is I can find you a single neuron in the brain that responds selectively for anything you like. [laughs] There's like no shortage of them. But those, in general, those single neurons don't do anything. They're real- or aren't, aren't important to understand how the brain works because the rest of the brain that is getting its input from all these neurons and all the downstream processing is not like a reflex. It's not listening to only that one neuron. It's getting input from tens of thousands of neurons.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:47

        Mm-hmm.

    15. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:20:48

        So at the population level, if we record from thousands of neurons and we ask from that, is there information in 1,000 neurons from which the rest of the brain listening to those thousand neurons or we as the scientist could decode smiles versus frowns? The answer is yes. We've done that in collaboration with Ueli Rutishauser and Shuo Wang and, and, uh, colleagues, where we can record from epilepsy patients, like what Eddie Chang does, same, same kind of work. And so you c- you have information, and of course, if you think about it, there has to be information in the brain neurons that would distinguish frowns from smiles because you can distinguish them. So where else would it come from? It has to be there in the brain. But it's not there mechanistically at the level of single neurons. They're very noisy. Uh, they typically respond to many different types of cues. So you always have to think about hundreds or thousands, a large ensemble of neurons-

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:43

        Mm-hmm

    17. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:21:44

        ... 'cause that's really the kind of unit of relevant information because that's what the rest of the brain listens to.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:48

        Yeah. I was thinking about how, you know, in a hierarchical system like the visual system, like we have neurons that are tuned to circles more or less, you know, center surround, we, we talk about the-

    19. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:21:58

        Yeah

    20. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:58

        ... circles, then bars, then oriented bars of a particular angle, then moving bars, et cetera, et cetera. And it's sort of built up from, from simple stuff-

    21. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:22:05

        Yeah

    22. AHAndrew Huberman1:22:05

        ... to more complex stuff, so you can build feature detectors for lots of different things. I, I guess I was wondering when we come into the world, are there cells in the fusiform area that not just like faces, but that are prepared to respond to two dots, the eyes, a vertical thing, the nose, and then a bar that is either, you know, bent up at the edges-

    23. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:22:26

        Right, right

    24. AHAndrew Huberman1:22:26

        ... or bent down at the edges, and then we build on that scaffold. I don't know that anyone's done these experiments, but-

    25. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:22:31

        Not that exact experiment, but I think that in broad strokes the answer would be that at birth it's, it's crude, and it becomes more, much more refined and more granular-

    26. AHAndrew Huberman1:22:41

        Mm-hmm

    27. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:22:41

        ... through experience.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:22:42

        Mm-hmm.

    29. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:22:42

        And then indeed, exactly what you said happens, you know. And coming back to emotions, if you think about, so how does the state of fear come about in the brain from seeing the, the, seeing the bear or the, or the tiger? Well, at the level of the retina, it's just a bunch of pixels. It's some br- you know, blobby black shape that is looming and coming closer, et cetera. But then progressively, you have to construct more and more abstract representations, and y- you well know how this works in the visual system, and artificial systems, deep convolutional neural networks that do object classification do exactly that. They take just, you know, pixel wise input, but then build something abstract. Like right now, I recognize Andrew Huberman there. If I look over here, you know, I can still recognize you. Whether you're on the left or the right, whether you're close or far away, I would be able to recognize you invariantly with respect to those details, even though at the level of the retina, like, like a camera taking a picture, the detailed pixels can be vastly different. You can be left or right or close or lit in different ways, and you need to abstract from that an invariant representation regardless of the details. Same thing for emotions. Regardless of whether, whether it's a bear or a tiger or a big-armed pickup truck coming at you or lots of other kinds of stimuli, they all need to funnel in to a central abstract representation. That's another key feature of emotions. They require abstraction.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:24:06

        Mm-hmm.
18. 1:25:11 – 1:33:31

    Emotional Intelligence, Context-Dependent Social Intelligence; Autism

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:25:11

       Yeah, the fan in, fan out, uh, visual is very, very useful, and it gets to the next topic I'd like to ask you about, which is building, uh, social intelligence and emotional intelligence, 'cause we define that different ways. People who seem unable to read the room, so to speak, versus people who are hypersensitive to other people's emotions, not necessarily responding to them, but they're really in tune. I'll go out on a limb and say that some of the happiest Most functional, and when I say functional, I also include in that they take great care of the people around them, their families, their coworkers. People that I know and have observed are not super emotionally in tune with the emotions of others, meaning it doesn't seem like they're clocking every little nuance. And some of the more, I'm generalizing here, less functional, more labile people that I've known are really in tune with, like, what everyone in the room is feeling, who did this, who didn't do that. And going back to our, our earlier conversation, that so much of how we gauge other people's emotions is an integration over, you know, how, how often they tend to acknowledge us when they, when we walk down the hall. If the first time I met you, you walked right by me, which who knows what would have happened, and the second time, and the third time, and then the fourth time you say, "Good morning," I'd say, "Oh, like, this is a really delightful person."

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:26:26

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:26

       If you did the opposite, said hello, hello, hello three days in a row-

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:26:28

       And then stopped

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:29

       ... and the fourth time-

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:26:29

       Yeah

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:29

       ... just like-

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:26:30

       Yeah, yeah

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:30

       ... looked, looked at me and brushed right by, I'd probably think like, "Uh, that's weird," you know? So there's some advantage actually to not being in tune with all the subtle cues of everyone around us. What in the brain is known about, a social awareness about reading the room? We talk it up these days because indeed empathy's important, but-

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:26:52

        Yeah

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:53

        ... this is a tricky one. I'm gonna get some heat for saying this, but there's also a lot to be said for, like, walking into a room, acknowledging, okay, great, and then, like, getting your work done. You don't wanna be wrapped up into people's emotional states because unnecessarily, because they're labile. They're all over the place. It's, there's a cost.

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:27:10

        Right. What I think is extremely heterogeneous, and so it's, it's not sort of one size fits all and there's not one type of s- sort of emotional intelligence skill that fits all occasions. And many different kinds can work. They depend on the context. It depend on the circumstances. Initially, when James Gross had emotion regulation, it was sort of focused on some basic mechanisms like suppression, reappraisal, acceptance. And now the big two topics in emotion regulation are variability and flexibility.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:27:41

        Mm-hmm.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:27:41

        So there's not just one way, but you need to be able to have many, many different options, and y- you can vary, vary your emotion regulation responses. But the other big part of emotion regulation, which is obvious once you think about it, for, for any, any parent would think about it, is it's interpersonal. It's between people.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:27:58

        Mm-hmm.

    16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:27:59

        You regulate other people's emotions.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:28:01

        Mm.

    18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:28:01

        And you have to pick up on other people's emotions, and you influence other people's emotions. It's a bidirectional interaction. And so I think a big part of emotional intelligence comes from being able to read that probably in a fairly automatic way and in a context-dependent way. And depending on the context, it can be the case that what's most adaptive is if you really get involved with other people and you really talk to them a lot, you're very empathic, or you just take over, and that can work, too, depending on the circumstances. So th- there are multiple strategies, and I think for any of these social intelligence, emotion regulation, any of these sort of metacognitive skills, the most successful skill is if you don't just have one, but you have variety, and you can switch between them, and you can use context to switch between those. Just like physiological heart rate variability, you don't wanna train to just be able to have a low heart rate. You wanna be able to train to have a variable, a big range. Same thing with emotions. What's most adaptive is being able to have a big range of emotions and being able to switch adaptively, depending on the context between them. And I think that's where in a real long-term, context-dependent social intelligence for people that really come out ahead. It's not one tiny slice where they do well and they don't do well in lots of other circumstances. It's the ability to be really adaptive and flexible and switch around.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:22

        Which requires a, a, a keen sense of oneself, like where we are in our internal state-

    20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:29:29

        Yeah

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:29

        ... and a keen sense of, of context. In fact, I observed a really impressive physician recently, like, moving through the hospital environment. I mean, he was just, like, all agency to, to, to... But then with the patient, it was as if he dropped into a bubble. You know, the patient was understandably a little nervous about what was to come, and, and it was remarkable. I was like, "Okay, that is superb bedside manner." But then it comes time to do the actual work, and that's not a time for emotion. It's just, like, 100-

    22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:29:56

        You have to be able to switch

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:57

        ... 100%.

    24. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:29:58

        Yeah.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:58

        Like, I mean-

    26. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:29:59

        Yes

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:59

        ... the, the life and well-being of the patient relies on being absolutely focused on the task at hand.

    28. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:30:05

        I mean, it's, it's related again to the presumptive, um, association between emotional granularity, what Lisa Feldman Barrett pioneered decades ago, the ability to differentiate and be aware of all the variety of emotions in you, and emotion regulation flexibility, that you're able to adopt many different emotion regulation strategies. But in order to do so, you need the emotional granularity to be able to be aware of all the different emotions that are going on in the first place.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:35

        Mm-hmm.

    30. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:30:35

        It's pretty two things. One is an ability to differentiate at a very fine grain, and the other one is to step back and have some kind of metacognitive oversight and control, so you can say, "Okay, here's this full spectrum of things I could do," and you can take a look at all of those, incorporate the context, and pick one, the one path amongst many that you could take that's the most adaptive.
19. 1:33:31 – 1:34:51

    Sponsor: LMNT

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:33:31

       I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an LMNT packet dissolved in it. I also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. LMNT has a bunch of great-tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack.

20. 1:34:51 – 1:42:01

    Autism & Social Dynamics, Eye Contact

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:34:51

       Let's talk about autism, and I'll just put the mention up front because this is a topic that sometimes gets people triggered. Let's leave out for the time being, not because it isn't important, it is important, let's leave out severe cases of autism where people need lifelong care, they can't care for themselves.

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:35:08

       No.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:08

       And let's talk about the rest of the spectrum. Already in that statement, I'm sure I violated some of the n- newer nomenclature, but l- let's just liberate ourselves a little bit, um, come at this from a place of benevolence and trying to understand social dynamics, social processing in the brain. So we're not talking about people with severe stereotypies who just need lifelong care even, et cetera. We're talking about the rest of the category. So someone like this former colleague of mine in San Diego, a little bit on the spectrum.

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:35:33

       For all I know, he might have been one of our participants-

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:36

       Maybe

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:35:36

       ... uh, in, in some of our studies.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:37

       And he's a, I mean, a delightful person, happy marriage, happy family.

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:35:40

       Right, right, right.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:40

       Everyone in his lab adored him-

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:35:42

        Yeah

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:43

        ... and brilliant scientist, and, um, by my read, a highly functional in all aspects of life, but definitely not tuned in to what other people are thinking or doing, and, and context mattered.

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:35:56

        Yeah, yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:56

        Right? I mean, c- he understood what not to do in a, in a broad sense, but, you know, he was free of this burden that you describe. So there's a lot of emphasis nowadays on kids who have autism of the sort that we're describing, and the need, we're told, to train them to make eye contact and read faces. So this lands square in your work. W- maybe you could just fill out a bit of what's now known, what's thought, what's not known.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:36:23

        It's a great topic. I mean, the way that I personally have approached it is not with a primary interest in autism. I don't have a family member who has autism. I'm not, you know, have any personal experience. It's really been, um, just like with the amygdala lesion patient, it's, the, my main motivation has been to just understand the mind, cognition, emotion in general, and with respect to autism, by understanding individual differences. Everybody's different from everybody else, and autism is one particular dimension that we just have a lot of tools to look at that is, you know, social interaction, social awareness, ability to read other people's emotions. And so that dimension of social variability maps onto one of the facets of, of autism spectrum disorder, and so that's why we've looked at both people who do not have any diagnosis of autism. There's still, there's a range of autistic-like traits that you can quantify with questionnaires that are well-regarded. And then once you get to a DSM-5 diagnosis, you have more and more severe cases of autism with respect to social functioning that, again, you can quantify using tools like the ADOS, et cetera. But it's a spectrum that I personally look at as a particularly interesting and important dimension of individual differences in social interactions. And other people in my lab that have different motivations, they have family members with autism, for instance, so they're personally interested in autism as a, as a psychiatric category. But Coming to your question, there's a lot of really interesting work and a lot of opportunities now that we've been actually using in our lab as well to look at the question of processing about faces, eye contact, et cetera. I mean, right now, how much eye contact are you making with me? How much eye contact am I making with you? It is extremely variable. I mean, the eyes move around. They carry a lot of information. This is, you know, socially, there's a, a gigantic range there. It's data that are now fairly easy to quantify and collect in hundreds or thousands of people using their webcams. And so we have a study going on where people watch, for example, a Zoom video, other people interacting, talking, and we use the webcam on their laptop to record where they are looking on the screen when they have that Zoom video going on. So we can quantify a lo- across large numbers of people, and the basic finding has been that people who are further along have high-- score higher on this dimension of the autism spectrum of social interaction with just questionnaire-based measures or a psychiatric diagnosis make less eye contact and as well as other features. So we're looking at contact with the person who's talking, distraction to other things. We have experimental features where there's a person talking, they're making eye contact. There's, like, TV or something that goes on in the background, and we can quantify to what extent is your visual attention, your gaze, that we can quantify from the webcam, captured by somebody looking, somebody talking, somebody smiling or laughing, the TV going on in the background as a distracter. And we can put all of that into a big model and ask what is it that normally drives visual attention, and what is it that distinguishes people with autism and where they would look. And the basic answer is that the social features like eyes or who's talking have less of a weight on where autistic people would look than the distractors. They tend to be more distracted, and that that is-- We've been doing this study every month now for a year. That seems to be a temporally stable personality trait-like feature of autism spectrum disorder. So it fluctuates to some extent, and we're trying to quantify does it interact with whether you've slept badly the night before or you're stressed or other things that can change. Those do have an effect. But the answer seems to be it's fairly temporally stable, and it's almost like a signature for individuals. There's some people that are real face lookers, and they look at faces a lot, and there's some people that look at faces hardly at all, and that seems to be stable across time and like a basic personality trait.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:40:34

        In this population of people diagnosed with autism.

    16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:40:36

        Across the board. For everybody.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:40:38

        I see.

    18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:40:38

        If I just take the general population-

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:40:40

        Uh-huh

    20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:40:41

        ... on average, it's the case that those people who would have a diagnosis of autism or who score higher on autistic traits, even if they don't have a diagnosis, look less at faces. But across everybody, it's the case that some people look a lot at faces, some people don't, and that that's temporally stable. So in general, right now, if you quantified from this podcast how often do I make eye contact or look at you, and then you ask, you know, like in a classroom or in a lab meeting, how often do I make eye contact, it would be similar proportion that I'm just, like, not a face looker or eye looker, and you might be. It's like a stable personality trait, and it's associated coarsely with this dimension in the autism spectrum disorder. But of course, the million-dollar question is what else is it associated with? Is it predictive of career success? Is it predictive of anything else? And so we don't know. We're measuring everything else and getting lots of questionnaires on these people to ask what, what are the associations, and is there any causal hypothesis that we would come up with that if you don't look at faces a lot, there's some consequences. If you look at faces a lot, there are other consequences. If that were the case, we're not there yet, that would make very interesting predictions, which may-- Well, maybe I should be looking at your face all the time.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:41:55

        No, no, you, you just-

    22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:41:57

        The podcast would get a million hits or who, who knows what.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:41:59

        Just be you is, as we

21. 1:42:01 – 1:47:18

    Change Your Personality?, Body Movement & Thought, Social Interaction

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:42:01

       say.

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:42:01

       Well, that's, I mean, that, that's another big question which, which we're looking at in these longitudinal studies, which is a question of to what extent can you change who you are. And, you know, your emo-- We were talking about emotion regulation. You can regulate your emotions. You can have this metacognitive insight. You can have some control. Can you change if you're extrovert or neurotic? Can you change your personality? And the answer seems to be to some extent, uh, s- for some variables more than others, but we're trying to quantify that, so we have this big longitudinal data set where we give people tons and tons of questionnaires about their personality, about their mood, about lots of things, and are asking to what extent over time do they get pushed around and that can change, and which ones stay constant and constitutes sort of the core of their personality that's unchangeable. But I think it's a super, super interesting question. What parts of you can change and what parts of you cannot?

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:42:54

       Yeah, I think about this all the time. I feel like some people, this is pseudoscientific what I'm about to describe, they seem to have very high autonomic, what I call, like, R-RPM. I have a, it's more of a former colleague 'cause I haven't been working in that field for a while, but, um, if you ever h- see Botond Rosca-

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:43:09

       Mm-hmm

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:10

       ... from Basel give a talk, like, he moves a lot. He's very electric. He's also very thin, and he moves, and, and his brain, he's exceedingly smart.

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:43:18

       He has a high basal metabolic rate.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:19

       But h- high basal metabolic rate and he-

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:43:21

       Like a, like a hummingbird.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:22

       Yeah, but he moves a lot, right?

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:43:23

        Right, right.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:24

        And then other people, they move less. I think about this all the time because I'm fascinated by and I love dogs. I go to this AKC Meet the Breeds thing every year. I don't go every year. They do it every year, but I highly recommend people go, even if you don't want a dog, because you get to see all the different genetic variation Which of course relates to body size, but also temperament and, and if you just look at a m-

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:43:43

        Yeah, I mean, bull- bulldogs are probably more on the, on the slow, mellow side compared to Yorkshire Terriers that are more-

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:48

        Very little spontaneous movement.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:43:50

        [laughs]

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:51

        I think it's one of the reasons why people feel comfortable approaching a bulldog, whereas like a, you know, pit bulls are always kinda like winding around and moving. But some dogs, it may relate to other things, cuteness and whatnot, but some people just seem to have a lot of spontaneous movement. Other people-

    16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:44:04

        Right

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:44:05

        ... are more stable in their bodily movements. And it does seem to relate to kind of how excitable they are or not excitable they are. So you can imagine, like if you're, if you're humming at a higher RPM, you can like more prone to action or speech.

    18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:44:16

        No, but it's a super interesting observation because the question, of course, is to what extent does it relate to how their mind is working, right? I mean, as we're talking now, and as you were just talking, you're, you know, we're moving our hands, we're moving our body, we're moving our face. You know, we're not, not, not just sitting there speaking. So to some extent, all of these bodily movements are interfaced with thought.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:44:34

        Mm-hmm.

    20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:44:34

        If I had to sit completely still and not, you know, move, it would be pretty hard to have this conversation, right? So to some extent, bodily movements actually help us structure our thoughts. It's not just like a large language model. It's not just language going on.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:44:48

        Right.

    22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:44:48

        It interfaces with the body.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:44:50

        Mm-hmm.

    24. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:44:51

        And it punctuates thoughts to some extent. So I think it's super interesting, and it's, it's certainly the case that the way that somebody moves their body does say something about how they're thinking as well.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:45:02

        Yeah, I've been reading my audiobook, and I asked them, uh, the sound technicians, to allow me to stand while I read it. Much easier to read an audiobook and to put inflection. You actually can lean in when you wanna emphasize something, and you can, you know, point to the words for a moment, but then when you need to work through a passage that needs to be very finely structured with little emotion, 'cause that happens too, if you clasp your hands and do it. So our friend Eddie Cheng tells me that, um, the hand representations in the brain are very close to the language center.

    26. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:45:32

        Mm-hmm.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:45:32

        So these were probably our first tools of language, or at least they co-evolved.

    28. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:45:36

        Well, your mouth and your hands are the most dexterous and over-represented in the brain.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:45:40

        Right.

    30. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:45:40

        You, you can, you know, control the world with them, and you can move them the most. Yeah, when, you know, when the COVID pandemic started 2020, we weren't allowed to, to go on campus at all. So we sat around in our apartments. I sat at home. We had lab meetings on Zoom, only Zoom, and lectures. All the classes were on Zoom prior to that p- and then, then Zoom took off, and now it's, most meetings are hybrid. But before that point, everything was face-to-face. I would stand up and lecture. We would talk face-to-face. And suddenly switching to just seeing a bunch of often little just black squares, right [laughs] for the, for the whole classroom there on Zoom, that was a hard switch. That lack of an interactive nature, which is something that we're looking at now. I think it's gonna be super cool. I have a graduate student just starting this. The experiment is this. I would see your face on a screen, and that's it. I would see a video of you. I would Zoom with you right now, and we could be having this podcast over Zoom. I actually thought we were gonna have this over Zoom, so I'm very happy it's not over Zoom. We're actually-
22. 1:47:18 – 1:53:46

    Emotion Regulation, Tool: Training Mental Stillness

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:47:18

       The way I described the kind of higher or lower RPM before made it, uh, perhaps made it sound like one or the other was better. But I think sometimes about, like, Alex Honnold, who, again, who was a guest on this podcast, and there have been claims that his amygdala doesn't react as much.

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:47:32

       [laughs] Right.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:47:32

       Anyway, we could, we could talk about that. I think Alex kind of, like, maybe chuckles a little bit at those studies, 'cause he does experience anxiety and fear, just not in the context of this, like, highly trained situation he's put himself in every single day for so long.

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:47:45

       Yeah.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:47:45

       But I do have to wonder whether people who go out on long runs, for instance, where there's not a lot of talking going on, or Alex, he's devoting his physical and mental energetic resources toward climbing and figuring out these, how to navigate high-risk, high-consequence situations.

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:48:01

       I mean, there you're probably just in flow. You're just, like, totally absorbed in what you're doing.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:48:04

       Yeah.

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:48:04

       If you're doing Alex Honnold-type climbing.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:48:06

       Once he, he's got it, but, like, to work out the puzzle of, like, with ropes first of how to maneuver-

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:48:11

        Yeah

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:48:11

        ... so that he can actually free solo it is, is a remarkable thing. But I almost get the impression that if people speak less, that they're able to devote more mental and physical resources to the thing they're doing. I never ran ultras, but I recall, like, running, you know, I used to run for, like, a long eight to 10-mile run on Sundays used to be a thing. Now it's getting shorter and shorter run. I have to go get it back. But come back from those, and there's a fatigue component that confounds what I'm about to say, but one is a lot less reactive when you've spent a bunch of time just in your own head, and you've learned to tolerate the voice in your own head. I find that I'm much calmer after I've spent a bunch of time alone because I've, I've gone through that kind of initial stage of the mind fluttering, and then you wanna communicate with people, and I'll lock up my phone in a box these days to do real work.

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:48:56

        Right, right, right.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:48:56

        And I come out of it, and things come my way, and they're sort of out there and over there, and unless they really demand my attention, they kinda just don't grab me. Whereas I think when we're highly engaged with, in, in our own mental dialogue, it's almost like we're trying to converse with the world. So I think there's real value to doing these solo treks and to devoting time to getting past that need to engage with the world. I think it's very, very useful.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:49:21

        Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's idiosyncratic. It'll vary, but I think That particular aspect that you mentioned, that you can just be comfortable in your own mind and that that's beneficial, uh, I think that's a big part. And it's a big part of lots of training techniques and big part of lots of meditative techniques that you just ... But again, it's very individual. It's not just sort of one size fits all. But the ability to not just be driven by sensory input and be comfortable with your own mind. It's not like you're doing nothing at all.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:49:49

        Mm-hmm.

    16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:49:49

        You're training.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:49:50

        Mm-hmm.

    18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:49:50

        You're training your own mind to be comfortable, and I think the consequence of that is then subsequently when you encounter challenges in the world, you're actually better equipped-

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:49:58

        Mm-hmm

    20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:49:59

        ... to deal with those and better equipped to regulate your emotion. But when you're just at peace with yourself, if you're not doing nothing, your brain is being trained all the time, and it's being trained in a useful way. And I think the ability to detach and decouple from the constant challenges and sensory information that's normally coming in, it's like sleep, allows the brain to actually train itself and focus on particular internal regulation strategies-

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:50:25

        Mm-hmm

    22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:50:25

        ... that are then subsequently useful for dealing with the world later.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:50:29

        Could we say that one form of potentially useful emotional intelligence or social, uh, intelligence training is to just spend some time in your own head, either moving or not moving? You could do it meditating, or you could do it-

    24. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:50:41

        Yes

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:50:41

        ... running, but to just resist the temptation to get pulled out into the world and just get good at just sitting with these things that we call emotions and thoughts.

    26. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:50:49

        I think so, especially ... It's, again, it's gonna be individual, um, and it's gonna vary, but I think so, especially if you can get some kind of metacognitive or reflective awareness and work on what is going on in your mind. And ultimately, it's training control. It's training control of your emotions and cont- and training control of your thoughts. And if you're constantly bombarded and just dealing with stuff coming in, you don't have time to do that. So if you're just-

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:51:15

        It's called social media. [laughs]

    28. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:51:16

        Exactly, yes, of which I have none. Um, and so if you're just by yourself, you know, if you're running or if you're meditating or if you're trained up, if you're in an ice bath, uh, I think you actually get a particular type of internal training that you just don't have the leisure to get if you're bombarded by social media, for instance.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:51:35

        Mm-hmm.

    30. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:51:35

        Yes. You know, every beginning of my lab meeting now, people have their laptops open and their phones out. We put them down, and we actually have five minutes of silence, a sort of meditative silence for, to people to clear their minds at the beginning of-
23. 1:53:46 – 2:02:07

    Task Switching, Tool: Meditation, Breathing Techniques

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:53:46

       to all that. I'd like to actually stay on this meditation thing for a moment. Rick Rubin, famed music producer, came on this podcast. He also happens to be a friend of mine. And right as we sat down, he said, "Um, can we do some coherence breathing first?" He plays it. It's like a tone. You do some-

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:01

       Okay

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:01

       ... inhale, exhale.

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:02

       Yeah.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:02

       You know, he, he likes these transition tools.

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:05

       Breathing exercises are great. Yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:06

       Yeah, these transition tools-

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:08

       Very

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:08

       ... and, and they will increase your heart rate variability and these kinds of things. Um-

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:11

        Right, right

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:12

        ... but I think that one of the most in- interesting and understudied things in our field is task switching, whether it's emotional-

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:19

        Oh, yeah

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:19

        ... task switching or cognitive task switching.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:21

        Right, right, right.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:21

        Like we assume the brain operates in step functions. Like, oh, I'm out on the street, I navigate traffic, I park my car, and I come in and I podcast.

    16. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:28

        Yeah, yeah.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:28

        And what you're doing at the beginning of this lab meeting in, on the one hand, is a meditation, but it- it's a, you're pivoting the brain circuits toward what comes next.

    18. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:37

        Yeah.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:37

        I don't think we talk enough as neuroscientists about the fact that the brain doesn't just immediately switch over, that you're carrying residual activity from whatever you were doing before.

    20. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:47

        Yes, yes.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:47

        And I think-

    22. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:48

        There's a, there's a cost to that, a well-known cost.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:50

        Yeah.

    24. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:50

        So as soon as you switch into something-

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:51

        Mm-hmm

    26. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:52

        ... there's a cost carried over from the previous task, and you're much slower, and it's more difficult-

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:54:56

        Mm

    28. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:54:56

        ... for the couple of next trials on the new task. So there's always a switching cost-

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:55:00

        Mm-hmm

    30. RADr. Ralph Adolphs1:55:01

        ... which shows you that switching Is hard. And some, for some reason, and there's a couple of theories for why it should be hard. There's some residue, some sort of inertia being carried over previously. There's some reconfiguration be- in the brain required between what you were doing in the previous task and the new task. But all of those would seem to require some effort, and it's definitely a skill and something that people are looking at a lot in brain recordings in humans and thinking a lot about how to design into AI. That ability to switch quickly and knowing how to switch, anticipating when to switch, is a hugely important skill.
24. 2:02:07 – 2:06:52

    Illness, Diagnosis & Emotions, Gratitude & Awe

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:07

       I can't take the mental noise. Before we started recording, you mentioned that you fortunately successfully overcame a bout of illness.

    2. RADr. Ralph Adolphs2:02:15

       Yes.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:15

       I'm curious whether the process of going through that, the diagnosis, the treatment, and then emerging from it, thank goodness, healthy, had you at times thinking about the science of emotions. I mean, that's an emotional experience to say the least. You don't have to share with us exactly what it was, but were there times when the, what your knowledge of the brain's ability to process emotions for better or worse was a useful tool to you in that context?

    4. RADr. Ralph Adolphs2:02:40

       I guess so. I mean, you know, only in the most indirect sense, but, uh, I guess it's about emotion regulation. Well, it's about two things. I think it's about emotion regulation. So, you know, you know, initially when you get a diagnosis that reminds you of your mortality, it's sort of a mixture of, you know, fear, sadness, worry, you know, all these negative emotions, and so you're regulating that, and it's interpersonal for sure. So interpersonal emotion regulation between me and my wife, us talking about it, so that's like a huge part of the process. If you're not regulating those negative emotions anymore, but you're, um, you're g- buying into, you're getting more other emotions like awe, gratitude, acceptance, all of these emotions we were talking about before that I think are largely uniquely human, uh, that really make you appreciate and be th- just grateful for what you have. So that whole process of regulating the sort of, you know, immediate stressors and then coming to, um, having more gratitude and awe in everyday life. Uh, and then, you know, also th- I mean, I think one big consequence of anything like that is that you, uh, you have this metacognitive perspective on your, your lifeline and, you know, where you are, how much time you have left, and how to value that and what to do and what to plan, uh, and how to allocate your time to things that are worthwhile. And so in my case, one of those components was, you know, signing up for this 100-mile ultramarathon, starting to train for it, and then just pushing through all of that. So, you know, one of the consequences of the, of the therapy for this was I had lots of joint pain and lots of fatigue, so I tell my doctor about that and he says, "That's, that's great. That means it's working." [laughs] It's just like, "Yes, but the side effects are preventing me from training for a 100-mile race." And so pushing through that, I think it just, it makes you grateful for what you have and makes you just be in awe of the fact that, you know, we were briefly talking about consciousness before, that there's a world there at all. You tend to have this perspective that physics gives us of the way the world works, that, you know, the world is going on, and when you die, you get plucked out of that and everything else goes on. But from a neuroscience perspective, it's kind of the opposite. You get this sense that the whole world is actually a construction of stuff in your brain, and as you get older, little things drop out and various people die and you're unable to do things, and eventually you lose the whole world. So rather than thinking of death as we normally do, as the world loses you, the neuroscience perspective is the inverse, which is you lose the world. So I mean, you have like, you know, a couple of decades left and then you're gonna lose everything, and that's coming, so live it up.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman2:05:27

       I love it, and thank you so much for being willing to answer that question. I-

    6. RADr. Ralph Adolphs2:05:31

       Sure

    7. AHAndrew Huberman2:05:31

       ... um, throughout today's conversation, I, I'm struck by the fact that your work plays such a prominent role in your life and your life and your work, even if, uh, we weren't necessarily connecting the dots in that way, that the fact that you do practices specifically to, um, tap into your autonomic nervous system emotion regulation, and at the same time, the fact that you look at neural circuits and, and do extremely well-controlled studies to explore the, the mechanics that translate to everybody. Like, it, this is a, um, in case anyone hasn't told you, um, and because I sit at a unique vantage point both having done academic research and now in public health communication, people need to hear this and see and experience scientists like you. So thank you so much for coming here today, for, um, being willing to open up about some of this, and frankly, for doing the work that you do for so many years in such, at such a high level, and I'm so grateful that you're writing yet another book. Um, if it's not out yet, we can't put a link to it just yet, but when it comes out, I'll surely get a copy, and even though you're not on social media, uh, I'll be sure to, uh, to talk about it after I've read it, 'cause as I did the, the prior book that you wrote with David, so yeah.

    8. RADr. Ralph Adolphs2:06:37

       Thank you very much, Andrew.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman2:06:37

       Yeah, yeah.

    10. RADr. Ralph Adolphs2:06:37

        It was a pleasure being here. We'll stay in touch, and maybe at some point I can tell you that I finished a 100-mile race and the book got published.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman2:06:43

        Excellent.

    12. RADr. Ralph Adolphs2:06:44

        Thank you.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman2:06:44

        I'm, I have no doubt that you will. Uh, whether I join you for that 100-mile race is a completely different story, but thank you so much, Ralph. Appreciate you.

    14. RADr. Ralph Adolphs2:06:51

        Thanks. It was a pleasure.

25. 2:06:52 – 2:09:30

    Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:06:52

       Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Ralph Adolphs. To learn more about his work and to find links to his previous and forthcoming books, please see the link in the show note caption. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience, and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Ralph Adolphs. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. [outro music]

Episode duration: 2:09:30